in me.
It took Susie Gantry to make me see what I was.
One might suspect that I was drawn to her in the same way I was attracted to Primavera, but one would be wide of the mark. Susie and I started out with a single thing in common, and that was it. She had lost a partner too, in sudden shocking violence, and for a while there was the same anger within each of us. But that's as far as it went.
Now, with the anger dissipated, in most respects we're chalk and cheese. I still keep my feelings locked up, while Susie's as volatile as they come. For all that I'm successful in what I do now, I'd never been into business, until recently. She is, and how; she runs her family construction group and she's won two out of the last four 'Scottish Businesswoman of the Year' awards. I'm tall, dark and enigmatic (back to that New York Times review), she's compact, red-haired, open and fresh faced. Most of all, she is one of life's givers, whereas I fall, with no room for argument, into the taker category.
She took me, sure, I'll admit that… on what was supposed to be my honeymoon, even… but she was still carrying her own anger then, plus she had no reason to love Prim, so I'll allow her that one.
What happened between us wasn't like a lightning strike, as it had been with Prim. We lit a slow-burning fuse when we got it together out in Spain, but what Susie did at the same time was to open my eyes to myself. She made me look in the mirror and see the real Oz, not the happy-go-lucky harmless oaf that I thought I was. I'd been pretending to be him for so long that I'd come to believe it myself. She's the most honest person I've ever known, apart from Jan, and she made me look honestly at myself. When I did, I didn't like what I saw.
For a while, the way I handled the new Oz was by simply dropping the pretence; I released him. I started behaving not as I thought I should, but as I really wanted to inside. A situation developed out in Spain. It was dangerous, as much so in real life as any make-believe I've ever filmed, but I dealt with it so that the good people came through while the bad guy didn't do nearly so well.
Afterwards, I went back to work on my second movie project, and for a while, although with no genuine enthusiasm, on my marriage. There was a complication there, though. Susie was pregnant, and planning to keep the baby. That was fine by me, but I wasn't sure how to handle Prim. I was totally out of love with her by then… especially after finding her with a Spanish guy in a Barcelona hotel… but I had a career to think about. Miles Grayson, the main man in my developing movie career, was still her brother-in-law, and I wasn't prepared to piss him off, not at that stage anyway. As it turned out, Primavera saved me from any trouble by running off to Mexico with a wanker of a B-list actor. As a consolation, Miles gave me a part in a detective movie he was filming in Edinburgh.
The contract was signed when Susie had the baby and the world found out who her father was, so he couldn't have done anything to me, but as it turned out he had no such thoughts. I was bankable in the UK and that came first with him; besides, he'd seen through Prim by then and decided he was on my side come what may.
And then there was Janet. Happily, she looks like her mother now, but in the moment she was born she looked just like they all do, wee and pink and wrinkled and gooey. She wasn't the only one who cried like a baby in that delivery room; I put on a virtuoso performance, but for the first time in a couple of years, I wasn't acting. A lot of stuff flowed out of me with my tears, a lot of the anger that was still inside me. All at once I thought I knew what I wanted. When I dried my eyes I was left with one question: was I brave enough to go for it?
I took it to the Oracle in Anstruther. My Dad, Macintosh Blackstone, Mac the Dentist, in my eyes the greatest man I'd ever met… and at that stage in my travels I'd met three Presidents, four Prime Ministers and seven princes… talked to me and made me believe that he hadn't bred a coward. He showed me also that maybe the ruthlessness within me hadn't always existed, that maybe it had indeed been put there by two unfair, untimely deaths, and that if it had, maybe it could be excised.
So I went to my family; to wee Janet and her mother. I asked Susie if she fancied marrying a movie star. She looked at me as if I was daft, and then she asked me if I thought she was. She laughed out loud, like a ring of bells. 'Marry you? With your track record? You slept with another woman on your honeymoon, remember,' she exclaimed. I can still hear her, still see the look in her eyes.
Then she said, 'Yes.' (If I'd told her I'd actually slept with two 'other women' on my honeymoon, I don't know how it would have gone, but I'm neither that brave nor that stupid.) We did the deed quietly. We thought about Skibo Castle, but decided that would attract attention, since the press stake out the local registrar for famous names on the public notification board. Instead we settled for the Roxburgh Hotel… not the one in Edinburgh, the one near Kelso… after I had finished work on my fourth movie, set in theory in north California, but filmed in reality in Vancouver, British Columbia. (If it was good enough for Mulder and Scully, it's good enough for me.) That was two years ago. Afterwards, barely a day went by without my pinching myself to make sure I was awake. I'd never imagined being really happy again, and yet I was. I no longer thought about might-have-be ens I found that I was able to forgive most of the rest of the world for Jan's death, and for my mother's. I barely thought about Primavera any more. All I had time for was Susie and Janet, and in the right proportions too, if you get my drift. What I'm saying is that I realised that Susie wasn't just Janet's mother. She had found her own mansion in my heart, one that was alone unto itself, and not reliant on anyone else. I love her, no strings attached: I just love her.
We got on with our lives without either of us asking any sacrifice of the other. Susie continued to run the Gantry Group, and I continued to make my movies, not because we needed the money, but because those were our jobs. She employed people, and so did I, indirectly. I put bums on seats in cinemas, I sold newspapers, I even advertised a very classy range of Scottish designer knitwear.
Then there was Roscoe Brown, my Hollywood agent, who was living up to his reputation as the smartest new guy on the Strip, and earning every dollar of his cut with the work he was lining up for me. The only limits I gave him were a gap of at least a month between projects… many actors would give their back teeth (never their front ones, obviously) for so short a break between engagements… and first class air travel back to Scotland wherever in the world I was and whenever the shooting schedule allowed.
When the Vancouver project, a period piece about early settlers, was over, Skinner's Rules, the Edinburgh cop-flick I'd made for Miles Grayson, was ready for release. It was a smash, world-wide, so big that after two days on release Miles took up his option on the follow-up, Skinner's Festival, and re-signed all the original cast. He didn't blink at all when Roscoe asked for above-title billing for me alongside him and Dawn Phillips, and he agreed to his financial pitch on the spot. I knew why; my character, Chief Inspector Andy Martin, is one of the key figures in the story. The role merited top billing.
We shot it in September… the city would have been just too crowded in August, when the real Edinburgh Festival was on. For me it was great; it meant that I could commute from Glasgow on a virtually daily basis for the six weeks of shooting, bonus quality time with Susie and Janet. From the start I knew how good it was going to be, and how good I was going to be too. It was my seventh movie… after Vancouver I had done one in the South of Italy (in which I had an almost nude scene with an actress whom ten years before I'd fancied like crazy; an odd and slightly scary experience) and another in Hollywood… and there was no hesitancy left in me. I knew what I was doing, I no longer felt out of place on set, and I had an acting coach to rub off my rough edges.
Even before it was released I knew I had made it in my own right as a performer, finally and irreversibly. I knew how good I'd been, especially in Andy's huge emotional scene at the end. I was pretty sure that the old, cold, angry Oz wouldn't have been able to do that.
I'd like to say that there wasn't a trace of him left, but, in my new spirit of honesty, I can't. In a few months he would make a return appearance, angrier, more ruthless and a lot more calculating. But I'll get to that in due course.
Two.
For that time, though, life continued as what passed for Susie and me as normal. I went back to work shooting Skinner's Festival, Miles Grayson in the lead, Dawn typecast as his wife, Scott Steele as the old chief constable, randy Rhona Waitrose as Miles's screen daughter, Alexis, and Liam Matthews, my wrestler buddy, following up his debut in the first Skinner movie, as one of the detective team.
There were a couple of additions, though: the story called for two villains, who turn out at the end to be brother and sister. My character, Andy, was to fall for the girl, while the other would get off with Alexis/ Rhona all
