Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read Free Page A

themselves over and over again.
    What did I expect to see when the car drew level with, then passed, the small and heroic figure that stumped between the elongated legs of the shoppers who
font du lèche-vitrines
along the King’s Road? Had that jacket been purchased in the boys’ outfitting department of Peter Jones by a parent or the personwho wore it? Was this a child, a dwarf – or Sherman, who, until I had the courage to confront him, would remain both for me?
    When I eventually met up with Sherman Oaks again he was nothing but charm itself. His eldest sister, Prima, had a share in a Bond Street gallery. I’d seen her about town – she was in her fifties now, but not showing it. She’d been sending me her pasteboards for a while before she began personalizing them. Then one day she sent an invitation to an opening that was emphatic: ‘Please come. Sherman will definitely be there, he so wants to see you again. Please.’
    I went, and stood on the fringes of the openeers, a representative sample from the Venn intersection of Taste and Money that exhibited not much of either. The works themselves weren’t too bad: they looked like enormous drinks coasters attached to the hessian walls, and bore the curved stains that had, presumably, been left there by enormous glasses. I couldn’t identify the artist, but assumed he must be at the epicentre of a particularly dense thicket of tastefulness – assumed, until trunks parted and I spied Sherman holding forth.
    I had seen photographs and television pictures of the great man; still, I was shocked. Sherman had always had the large head and short limbs associated with achondroplastic dwarfism. (I defer from using the term ‘disproportionate’; after all, who is to say which body form represents the human mean?) As a child, on his broad face the precise nose, etched cheekbones and petaline lips he shared with his sisters had seemed a little lost – morsels on a fleshy plate. Now the blue eyes weren’t just fierce but commanding, while the cultivation of neat moustachios and a stroke of beard accented his strongerfeatures. He had, I realized, based his look on the Velázquez portrait of a court dwarf, Don Sebastián de Morro. This was typically Shermanesque chutzpah, then, as he came towards me, round-housing one leg then the other, I took in the well-cut dark clothes that allowed his face to float, as if disembodied, within its aureole of white-blond hair.
    He came right up to me before saying hello. Sherman had always done this: tucked his short body inside the personal space of others, so challenging us to refute the idea that it was he who was the measure of all things. We talked easily and unaffectedly, although of what exactly I have no recall. Probably there was a deal of cynicism about the drinks coasters; I do remember laughing in a full-bellied way that I hadn’t since I’d last heard his devastating wit. He drew you in, Sherman, and so drew you down. You began by bending your neck, but, as he continued rubbishing reputations and lisping shibboleths, you’d find yourself bending over, then hunching, then hunkering down, until finally you were squatting or even kneeling in front of him, mesmerized both by what he said and by his unusual intonation – a trifle old-fashioned – as he barked, ‘Jolly good!’ or affirmed ‘Quite right!’ about something he himself had just said.
    After that initial meeting we fell readily enough into a pattern of regular contact, meeting up at a Chinese restaurant in Baker Street near his flat for long – and, on his part, bibulous – suppers. We reassumed the easy commerce of our teenage friendship, and it made me wonder if this was true for all men: that it was impossible to attain such proximity to another man, unless you had known him before the hardening of that deceptively transparent carapace: the ego.

    There was more. At an experimental play we attended in a warehouse theatre – Sherman was friends with the