by Horatio Clare
Deep into the film Pom and Tom both fell asleep. I sensed it rather than saw it, but McQ was positioned with a thinner angle which allowed him also to watch us all and tease them both afterwards for dozing off.
We watched a few frames of Cat Ballou after Shane finished, McQ rounding off the seminar. Then movie night was done and we all ruffled ourselves to our feet and made our ways back to the rest of the flat, to the hall and to our departures. I found myself alone with Tom for a moment. He was happy, sleepy, still on duty — as host, boss, tutor, friend and head of this strange family. When he sleeps he must go out like a city of lights. In the corridor it was just us for a few moments and I turned to him.
When you listen to people who work with him, and have for years, a portrait of a fascinating and singular man emerges. If you take your child or your pet to one of his film sets, which the cast are encouraged to do (what French bulldog doesn’t enjoy watching a steam train diving off a cliff?), Tom is said always to focus on the least confident member of a group. Be it a dog or child, Tom will be down there, on his haunches, giving all his attention to welcoming and engaging his guests, as he had engaged me. Unobtrusively, he had really been out of his way for me that evening, and he did it with a sense of fun and panache which was absolutely attractive. His relationships with partners, exes, children and family have been dragged through and draped all over the world’s press. All I heard was that he is a very loving father and I cannot imagine him otherwise. Like many dads, he is obsessed with safety and mitigating risk. The applies especially in the extremely dangerous work he and his casts and crews do.
Firing a gun? You will fire a dozen kinds, and understand them. Flying a plane? First you will learn to jump out of one correctly, in case something goes wrong. Then you will do days and days in the air, being minutely instructed in everything from the aircaft’s engineering to the principles of navigation. Driving a car? Prepare to be trained by the best stunt drivers in the world, intensively, for many long days. Joining an action movie? In a matter of months you will reach competition standard in whatever sport or skill it asks of you, whether that be sky-diving or knife-fighting. He could make those films for a great deal less than he does. He comes under tremendous pressure to cut costs. On exhaustive training, for in this lies safety, he never does.
Tom has as yet no writing credits on IMDB but he might have been a writer; there was this certain something about them all, these megastars and stars, an air I you find among successful actors and theatre people. It crackles about them like flashbulbs but I think it comes from a deep ease founded in their love of their profession, the certainty that there is nothing else they would ever rather do, and an excited and exciting sort of flamboyance, a feeling of buccaneering. It is not roguery exactly, but it does have an air of putting one over The Man, a relish in beating the system somehow. You have the strong sense that their limits are few and set by them alone. Most of all, as this evening, which was so remarkable to me and forgettable to them came to its close, I admired the way they looked after each other. And so I turned to Tom as we left the screening room.
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK: DINNER WITH TOM PART 6 — THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE
