Tom Sizemore, the character actor who recently died near-penniless at sixty-one, was one hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s conveying things subliminally, which is what Sizemore did. I never met him but he once rang me from LA with a question.
It was back in the mid-1990s, the Cadogan Square days, and I had had a late one. The telephone rang at about 6 a.m. and an American voice came on.
“Taki, this is Tom Sizemore.”
“Good morning, Mr .Sizemore. Do you know what time it is?”
“Ah, it’s around ten in the evening.”
The reason my sudden NBF Tom Sizemore was ringing was that he had recently become engaged to one Linda Evans — no, not the actress but a much younger Brit blonde whom I had previously taken out rather a lot. They were having a hell of a fight, because I could hear it 6,000 miles away. I won’t go into details because they were quite private, but what Tom Sizemore needed to know from me was a matter of principle. He and Linda had obviously agreed that what I said went. My answer to him was similar to the one Rupert Murdoch gave to some self-important hack who challenged him when he took over the Times of London back in the early 1980s: “He who pays the bills calls the tune.”
“Thank you. Thanks a lot,”said Sizemore, and it’s a pity I cannot repeat what la Evans screamed at me from the background. What is far sadder and more pathetic is the fact that among myriad very rich Hollywood moguls, no one lent him a hand when he was sleeping rough and penniless.
Otherwise, I’m back in plaster, elbow and knee gone. The last time I was encased was in 2016 and on my way to Coronis for some fun and games. Needless to say, I missed that particular shindig, having fallen out of my bedroom window — dead drunk and in magnificent style — and broken my right arm and left leg. I sent my Livanos hostess a picture and I was told that Pug’s members had a very cheap laugh over it. This time there was nothing ridiculous about it. While shadow boxing, I heard the right elbow snap and the left kneecap pop. The irony is how unromantic the injuries were. I was dead sober. It’s a far, far better thing to fall out of a window drunk and in a dinner jacket than to be put in plaster as a result of throwing kicks and punches at imaginary enemies à la Don Quixote.
Never mind, everything passes, and this will too. At least I hope so. Not for the first time, the cast that they put on my arm in hospital started to feel like a plaster python during the first night. It squeezed and squeezed and soon the pain became unbearable. I woke Alexandra up and told her this was a lefty plot by the doctors and nurses in the nearby hospital. She somehow managed to cut open the cast and suddenly everything felt wonderful, like being on a desert island, sex-starved and alone, and seeing a small boat arrive carrying an ethereal, half-naked Lily James. Bliss! But no Lily; instead the knee popped out again, throbbing, swollen and extremely painful to the touch. All I could think of that ghastly night was I’d take double the pain if I could at least have Lily. But there was no cigar. What I should do is move in with my buddy Jeremy, High and Low Life going down the tubes together.
Mind you, life’s still fun. Reading Charles Moore on the impartiality of civil servants, or lack of it, nearly made me laugh. Bureaucrats and journalists are almost always on the left, the latter even if they work for a conservative paper or TV station. I remember watching the dawn come up long ago with Vere Rothermere, both in our cups at, I think, a Liza Campbell ball. “One can own a conservative paper,” said the Daily Mail owner, “but it doesn’t mean those who write for it are of the same opinion.”
We all know the name of the game by now: if you believe in Palestinian rights and a homeland — which was theirs to begin with — you’re a virulent antisemite. If you are against liberating identity from biology, you are a vicious anti trans. But if you describe a football game played by people without a cervix, you’re in like Flynn.
Worst of all, if you dare say that twenty-two-year-old Albanian men posing as twelve-year-olds and jumping the line should be sent back, you’re Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler rolled into one. Get with it, readers; go woke and the media will love you.
In the meantime, I missed the greatest party of this year, one that was planned — or so it seems — to coincide with my Waterloo against a makiwara. Marcel Bach flew in two orchestras from Monaco, invited all the swells, and even had his girl Friday ring and ask who I wanted to sit next to. The proper answer would have been a nurse or a mortician, but I simply declined owing to a medical emergency and hoped for an invitation next year.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
