January12
The Evening Standard Newspaper – 2000
By Vincent Graff
I’ve been taken to a street corner near Westbourne Grove. With me is Richard E Grant. A scruffy man pedals by on his bike, does a double take and hops off. He raises his arm in the direction of Grant and bellows one word for all the world to hear: “Poof!”
“Poof?” replies Grant. “It’s ponce, actually. Perfumed ponce.”
The distinction is vital. Richard E Grant is nobody’s poof. He is, however, everyone’s favourite ponce. Everyone who is a fan of Grant’s 1987 movie Withnail and I, about two desolate, drugged-up actors attempting to come to terms with the end of the Sixties.
We are in Tavistock Crescent to visit Babushka, a Russian-themed bar. This is a deeply significant place for Grant. For a few days in the summer of 1986, when Withnail was being filmed, this building was transformed into The Mother Black Cap. That was the pub from which, near the start of the movie, Grant and co-star Paul McGann made a rapid exit after a row with a burly Irish thug, who yelled in a drunken rage: “I called him a ponce. And now I’m calling you one.”
This is the first venue in a whistle-stop Withnail tour of London that Grant has arranged for me. He hasn’t seen the ponce pub for 14 years. By rights he should march up to the bar and request “two large gins, two pints of cider, ice in the cider”. Instead, he ruminates on how little things have changed. “It smells the same, all the woodwork is the same,” he says, “although the bar didn’t have all this ladi-da fabric all over the top.” He’s looking for a particular spot by the bar. He gestures majestically with his right arm. “This is where I said: ‘What f***er said that?'” he beams. The re-enactment of this key part of the film is an emotional moment for both of us.
Withnail and I is uppermost in the Swaziland-born actor’s mind at the moment. He is currently organising Withnail for Waterford, with which he aims to raise thousands of pounds to pay for bursaries so that children of poor families can attend his old Swaziland school, Waterford Kamhlaba. Those who turn up will get to see the film and meet Grant, director Bruce Robinson and virtually the whole cast, including McGann, Eddie Tagoe (Presuming Ed) and Ralph Brown (Danny), at a private post-movie party. They will also be able to bid for important pieces of Withnail memorabilia, including the original Camberwell carrot (Danny the drug dealer’s 12-Rizla joint: “I invented it in Camberwell and it looks like a carrot”).
Grant has also recruited some of his pals – Naomi Campbell, David Bowie, Bob Geldof, Posh Spice and Lord Attenborough – to the cause.
Waterford School was a free-thinking place. “It was founded in the Sixties by an Englishman, Michael Stern, as a protest at the apartheid system in South Africa next door,” says Grant. “The education was very broad and they were very strong on tolerance and humanity. When I was there, they had 27 different nationalities. Now there are 52.”
Desmond Tutu and South African President Thabo Mbeki sent their children there – as did an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Indeed, Grant remembers acting in school plays with the ANC leader’s daughters, Zindzi and Zeni, and how once a year they would slip off to visit their father in Robben Island jail – at a time when no one in Africa thought Mandela would ever be released, except in a coffin. “I never asked them about it. It was one of those things: everybody knew but it was like there had been a murder in the family.”
Grant is explaining all this as we make our way to stop number two on the tour. We are driving around looking for the grubby flat Withnail shared with McGann’s character and a life-threatening kitchen. Grant is giving a running commentary. “The house was in Chepstow Place. It was, I think, condemned or about to be gentrified, so that’s how we got in there. But they did make that sink as appalling as it looked in the film.” Sadly, the home in question seems to have disappeared.
We drive on to our next appointment, in Chelsea. It is the London home of Monty, Withnail’s lascivious gay uncle who wears a radish in his lapel, grows parsnips indoors and considers “the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium”. We have very kindly been invited in by the house’s owner, Bernard Nevill. One of Britain’s most important textile designers and former professor at the Royal College of Art, he is justly proud of his pad. (“That carpet you were walking on is one of the largest Zieglers ever made.”)
The extraordinary redbrick Victorian mansion by Philip Webb does not seem to have been rearranged. Drawings by Hockney lean against dust-laden bookshelves. There is scarcely room to walk between the animal rugs, the huge chests and the incredible objets d’art. The sofa is the same, the heavy drapes are the same, even much of the clutter on the fireplace is the same. In short, the house is just as Monty left it.
But who could have thought that almost a decade and a half later, Grant’s bottom would once again be planted on this Chelsea sofa, Zindzi and Zeni’s father would be free – and strangers would still be (mis)quoting Withnail and I in the street?
The REG Temple is the official website for actor, author and director Richard E. Grant.
