LITMIR.BIZ

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Nixon to kick around any more’ – but he could still make a mean pancake: truly, there was no stopping that man. Richard Nixon was certainly an interesting character – you couldn’t take that away from him. Years later I sat near him on a plane and noticed for the first time how huge his head was. I was in the row right behind him at first, but then his security guys pushed me back – I think they needed more room for his head.

      Marching, carrying flags, these are the kinds of things we did in the fifties. The Cold War was very much in everyone’s minds, from the ‘duck and cover’ exercises we had to do at school to ensure that we would be properly prepared for a possible Soviet nuclear attack, to the hysterical witch hunt of the McCarthy hearings. That’s why we were healthy, we were strong and we were good – we weren’t quite America’s Hitler Youth, but there was definitely a militaristic undertow. Our scout troop was a little army in miniature, and if cold-war push ever came to shove, the communists didn’t have a chance: tomorrow belonged to us.

      Or so I thought, until the time came for me to make the inevitable transition from Life to Eagle Scout, the scouting equivalent of a scientologist going ‘clear’. While not necessarily the highest achiever in our troop, I was certainly one of the top two or three, having been awarded approximately fifty-three merit badges in useful disciplines such as cooking, carpentry, safety, firemanship, fishing and animal industry. (What exactly is ‘animal industry’? I guess it’s battery chickens – how to raise poultry in the smallest space imaginable.) And yet for some reason our scout leader wouldn’t accept that I’d earned all my badges in the proper way.

      It wasn’t so much him refusing to make me an Eagle Scout which really pissed me off – though that was bad enough – as the fact that these bureaucratic fuckers were effectively accusing me of lying. Didn’t they know that the lying skills would only come later in life (you can’t make films if you can’t lie), and you certainly don’t get a badge for them?

      At that far-off juncture in my life, the Christian ideals of justice and morality I had been taught in Bible school were still holding firm. So when the scouting bigwigs finally confirmed that they had no intention of admitting their mistake, my response was to say – not in so many words, as such foul-mouthed insubordination would come later, but this was definitely the underlying gist of it: ‘Well, in that case, I am no longer a scout of any kind. Goodbye, and fuck you.’

      It would be stretching a point to describe this moment as the beginning of my life-long struggle against injustice, but I do remember sitting in the scouts’ review board – which is sort of like a military court-martial, except you don’t get shot at the end – with my hands in front of me on the desk, imagining that I was playing the piano. It was an incredibly vivid sensation; related to later flying dreams, but not wholly overlapping, and less an out-of-body than an extended-body experience, as my hands felt like they were a million miles away and yet still connected to my arms.

       It took me twelve hours to get this Phantom look, using the same techniques as Lon Chaney. I’d read up all about Lon and his clever use of Collodion – which had previously been used for sealing wounds – and then built the layers up with cotton.

      A lot of kids my age would have been alarmed by such a strange feeling of bodily alienation, but I found it fascinating. It was probably no coincidence that in later life I would end up marrying a make-up artist, because from an early age I was very intrigued – in a Lon Chaney-esque rather than Liberace-ish way – by the changes in people’s appearance that could be effected cosmetically. Not just for the potential for mischief in putting on a disguise, or for the act of transformation itself, but more for the combination of the two. I suppose it was the idea of what you might get away with on the journey to becoming something different that excited me.

      I wore my creation to a Halloween party with a bag over my head like Lon’s MAN OF MYSTERY. One girl pulled it off and she just screamed and ran… That’s how I seduced women in those days, and to be fair to her (and me), I did look genuinely horrific. I suppose at seventeen years old it’s nice to be confident that you’re only getting that reaction because of the make-up. And thanks to Michael Crawford and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Phantom of the Opera is now recognised as a great romantic lead, so maybe I was just ahead of my time.

      This biblical character took even longer to sort out. I can’t remember if he was meant to be Moses or John the Baptist. Either way, it was a role Charlton Heston would have relished. I know what you’re thinking: ‘How on earth did this fine upstanding young man grow up to be in Monty Python’s Life of Brian?’

      The funny thing was that my single-minded dedication to achieving those effects probably – in terms of mischief at least – closed far more doors than it opened. My mum’s diary captioned her photographic record of my most phantasmagoric transmogrification as follows: ‘This is Terry as the Phantom of the Opera . . . he had all the girls screaming and afraid to get near him.’

      It’s possible that there was subconscious method in my Lon Chaney madness. As keen as I was to extend my as yet woefully limited (come on, this was the 1950s – and as the great reproductive historian Philip Larkin pointed out, sex wasn’t properly invented till 1963) portfolio of erotic experience, my mum’s diary also mentioned me reassuring her that I had no intention of becoming ‘seriously involved with a woman’ for the foreseeable future because I had ‘too much left to accomplish’.

      With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that looks a little pompous, but as high school drew towards its close, there was definitely a sense that nesting time was at hand. Girls were getting themselves knocked up and guys were getting themselves trapped.

      I understand how when you’re eighteen years old and wondering what you’re going to do on leaving school, getting married and having kids (not necessarily in that order) can look like a short-cut to becoming a grown-up, but I saw a lot of really smart people get stuck up that particular cul-de-sac, and I was always adamant that this sorry fate would not be mine. I wouldn’t say that I was actively keeping myself pure, more that girls were helping me to achieve that goal, despite my best efforts.

      Looking at the way me and my friends Met Metcalfe, Richard Lotts and Bob and George McDill, the sons of the minister Rev’d McDill [far right], the man who would eventually help me get a Presbyterian college scholarship, are standing in this photos – in a kind of arrowhead – you might be tempted to think ‘Gillison the Leader!’ I probably was the nominal head of the church youth group we all belonged to, but that didn’t cut too much ice with lois Smith, the girl (standing, appropriately enough, in the centre) we all had the hots for. I wasn’t a sensualist in those days – I think Mel and Richard had made more progress than I had in that direction. They’re both much more tanned than me, and Mel was quite smooth and ended up being a sound mixer in Hollywood. I presume the book we’re all holding might be a prayer guide for young people wanting to know how to keep clean and pure – I certainly needed one.

      Mel and Richard aside, most of my best friends in high school were Jewish. They tended to live up in the slightly more well-to-do town of Sherman Oaks, and their parents were often involved in the film business, either as editors, or working on the accounting side. But much as the voice in my head was honing its heady mantra of ‘Hollywood! Hollywood! Hollywood!’, the question of how my own mundane reality could somehow be made to intersect with that impossibly glamorous realm – so physically close, yet so practically distant – was no closer to finding an answer.

      My dad still stubbornly refused to find work in the movie industry, inexplicably choosing to spend his working life constructing pre-fab movable office partitions. It never once occurred to me that he might find this occupation as tedious as I did – an oversight on

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