Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and settled down to write that hopeless novel which they could never finish before. Those film projects were more alluring — more necessary — than the lingering novels because they at least held out the prospect of one day bringing them, the openly despised writers, to the kind of fantasy scenarios towards which they have worked all their life. For some, a timbered Elizabethan priory in Sussex; for others a tropical villa perched on a headland with a constant blue bar of sea to make the approach of death feel philosophical. (I’m in the latter category.) It’s a dream both childish and rooted in childhood. It’s a fantasy of safe harbor, you could say, after the storms of anxious careers.
But where would this hypothetical villa be exactly, if the studio bosses ever see reason? Since I live in Thailand, this resting place of splendor and reclusive aloofness can only be in Phuket. But there are many Phukets. I don’t want my last days to be spent with half-naked Aussies on choppers partying with fire eaters on a beach littered with stoned bar girls. I don’t want the infamous Kingdom of Lights installation on Kamala beach suddenly ruining my silent nights with son-et-lumière searchlights and Harry Styles songs. I want my villa to be East Egg all the way, a distant lighthouse and a green light only. But with the strike, the money has come to a standstill. I stand in solidarity and all that, but the prospect of a villa has suddenly receded and this is a critical disappointment. It’s back to the desk in Bangkok, the air pollution, arguments with the landlady and election protests. Real life. This is the point of course: to remind writers that they will never earn $240 million a year. They will never really earn anything.
One night I got a call from a Frenchman in his seventies who claimed to be a close friend of a boy I’d played rugby with at Cambridge. They were now both hedge-fund millionaires in Singapore. Bernard suggested dinner at “JP,” my local French joint, owned by the former nightclub owner of that name, a man of vast proportions known as a former national rugby player. We got pretty high on the Côtes du Rhône. As I staggered out the door at last to find my motorbike, exhausted by French rugby lore, Bernard cried: “Wait! I have a villa in Phuket you can stay in if you like. It’s empty in July. Qu’est ce que tu dis, toi? Gratis pour un écrivain.”
I pretended to decline — rugby honor — but this week I was impatiently on the plane to find the villa located on Phuket’s Millionaire’s Mile, which winds its way south of that same Kamala Beach. The plane ride had been alarming. A new typhoon, this one named “Talim,” was on its way from the South China Seas. By the time I arrived at the villa Talim’s sullen rains and gusts of violent wind were shaking the silver trumpet trees.
But first the villa. I was expecting a room in the usual Phuket mansion popular with Russian oil magnates, British criminals and, well, hedge-fund masters in Singapore. A staff of eight awaited me in traditional Thai uniforms. They wai-ed in unison. It was already night and the braziers were lit. A garden of looming palms was in song. Writers’ strike be damned, I thought. My friend Joan Juliet Buck recently wrote that writers in Hollywood earned on average $12.50 an hour. Could it be? In that case I had better seize the current opportunity.
I was shown into a property that was not a villa per se, but a whole headland built along a series of bluffs bristling with agaves. There were several pools. Houses with Thai-style eaves, or chofahs, open air sala, ornamental ponds. A whole complex of rooms filled with antique Buddhas. From their terraces, the cliffs plunged down to a raging sea. At the end of a flight of steps cut into them there lay a private beach.
Thai architecture is specifically intended to complement Buddhist themes. It is designed to calm and assuage. I took the master suite and set up a desk with a view of the sea — waves whipping in slow motion against black rocks for miles. There I sat on the first day, unable to think of anything to write. At night I sat alone by the pool while the staff barbecued sea bass and made me anchan blue pea cocktails. I wondered if millionaire lives ended like this, in the exact way that I had always imagined. Butlers, mosquitoes, the calm of long-unused pools. Somerset Maugham and J.K. Rowling too.
The days passed. I wrote nothing. Gradually all the voices in my head went dead. It was blissful. The storm came and the headland became the house in Rebecca, but with no inhabitants except me. One night when the storm had abated a little and the geckos had stopped going crazy, the Kingdom of Lights came on behind Kamala Beach and giant searchlights struck the low clouds above Millionaire’s Mile. I rejoiced. It was something new to look at. The staff apologized and I joked that at least there was no Harry Styles. Their faces fell. They were all girls: what was wrong with Harry Styles booming into the lonely nights? I never heard him, the winds were too loud.
But I began to miss the white wall behind my desk in Bangkok and the view of skyscrapers shrouded in yellow dust. As Raymond Chandler once wrote in a letter from Lake Tahoe: “There was nothing to do, and I did it.”
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
