The day John Hurt tried to buy my baby for £100,000
From a woman who knew the star well, a poignant insight into a man whose yearning for a child was once even greater than his thirst for drink
JOHN HURT was dressed in a patterned shirt and rolled chinos. His thick hair was a birds’ nest, and his eyes were glazed. He had a can of beer in one hand and a glass of red in the other. Swigging vigorously at both, he swiped the backs of his fing1 ers across his thin moustache. ‘Have you ever thought what it must be like to have a baby?’ he slurred.
Here we go. I anticipated a tussle with an inebriated roue. But I could not have been more wrong about John, who tragically died of pancreatic cancer 11 days ago at the age of 77.
While he was a gruff, boorish hellraiser by reputation, in the mould of fellow thespians and pals Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed, the John Hurt I encountered was gentle and unthreatening.
Pregnancy was the furthest thing from my mind that summer night in 1985, when one of the most revered actors of our time opened his heart to me on a country estate – at the start of a friendship that would lead to a proposal as unorthodox as it was poignant: that he would buy my baby daughter for £100,000.
At 45, he was almost twice my age. He was also, so I thought, contentedly married. When he proffered his wine glass and beckoned me to join him, something raw and mournful in his guttural voice made me stay. I pulled up a chair.
We were at Quarwood: the 55-room, 42-acre Stow-on-the-Wold home in Gloucestershire of Who bassist John Entwistle. John, his girlfriend Maxene and I had met at the BPI music awards in London and become close friends. House parties were the Entwistles’ forte.
Stepping into their home bar, hung with casts of marlin and shark that John had caught, I was confronted by a colourful crew: actor Robert Powell; drummers Kenney Jones and Zak Starkey (Ringo Starr’s son); Midge Ure; Phil and Jill Collins; singer Jim Diamond; and John Hurt, then famous for the films Midnight Express and The Elephant Man.
It is all there, set down in my diaries from those years.
The house – eccentric pile meets musty museum crammed with skeletons, armour, Nazi memorabilia, Disney china and train sets – was, said Hurt, his kind of place.
‘I’ve never had anywhere I could truly call home,’ he mused. ‘All I’ve ever really wanted is some comfy bolthole, a sweet little wife and a clutch of kids. It’s all any man wants,’ he added, ruefully. ‘I never once thought it would be too much to ask.’
I was confused. I’d met his new wife Donna. They’d married only the year before. The gutsy Texan former waitress could match her husband slug for slug, but was absent that night.
His romantic history, John confessed, had been a ‘litany of heartache’. I listened, agog, as he poured out memories of first wife Annette Robertson, whom he had married at 22 in 1962 because she told him she was pregnant and he had been desperate for a baby.
‘Why? Because I wanted the thing I felt I’d never been: the perfect child. I never felt my family really liked me. My mother (a draughtswoman) or dad (an Anglican clergyman) would tell me that I must have some kind of depressive disorder, but I never thought it was that.
‘I was an unhappy boy, certainly. The youngest of three boys. Suffocated by piety. I did feel ignored and that my parents mostly put their own needs first.
‘I always wanted a wife and to be a father – of a little girl, especially.
‘All I’ve ever wanted was a wife and clutch of kids’
Girls fascinated me. My mother was remote. My elder brother became a Catholic monk, quit, had a family, then went back to being a monk again. Figure that out.
‘My parents adopted a girl, Monica, after the middle brother died. But she and I were not close. I didn’t know much about females, but how I wanted to.
‘When my college girlfriend told me she was pregnant, I jumped for joy. I was desperate to be a father. I needed to put right all the wrongs of my own childhood. I rushed into marriage like a fool. In the end, there was no baby.’
The love of his life, French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, had died in a riding accident two years earlier in 1983. After 16 years together, they were planning a wedding.
‘I married Donna on the rebound after that,’ John admitted. ‘All I knew at the time was that I needed to.’
Poor Donna. Despite having applied themselves assiduously to the cause, conception had eluded them. Now, John’s patience was running out.
‘She drinks too much,’ he blurted. ‘That’s rich coming from me, I know, but it’s not doing her eggs any good. I’ve read enough pregnancy manuals (he quoted the late birth guru Sheila Kitzinger) to know that she needs to stop to get up the duff.’
I saw John frequently in London and at Quarwood over the next two years. His wife was sometimes with him. More often than not, he was alone. Our encounters were mostly social, but from time to time our professional paths did cross.
In April 1987, songwriter and Wombles creator Mike Batt was filming a production of his musical The Hunting Of The Snark at the Royal Albert Hall. As a journalist, I’d been invited to interview the cast. John Hurt, the narrator, was the last of them. He suggested we repair to ‘our drawing room’ to talk.
The Groucho Club had opened in Soho a couple of years before. We were both founder members. When we arrived, he offered me champagne, which I declined, telling him I was five months pregnant.
John fell silent. His lightly tanned face turned mauve. He dropped to his knees, threw his arms around my middle and pressed the side of his head to my melon-shaped bulge.
‘Does it kick?’ he whispered. ‘Can I feel it?’ His eyes were flooded with tears as he stood up. He pulled me into a corner, accepting champagne from a PR lady. John held my hand. All too soon, he was out of his skull.
He had never been shy about his love affair with the bottle. He’d given up more times, he’d say, than I’d had hot Ready Brek. But he was drinking more than ever because he could not have the thing he most craved.
‘It’s a damned unfair world, this,’ he lamented, staring into his empty glass. ‘It’s not easy to have a child. You’re very lucky if you can do it. I say, I could buy your baby, couldn’t I? I know you’ve finished with what’shis-name. I’m sure you can’t manage on your own and I don’t suppose you want to. All I have to offer is money. If it would help...’
His words ran dry. It was a no from me, of course. My daughter, Mia Clementine, was born that August. Although John and Donna dispatched a bouquet, they did not visit. The next time I saw John was in February the following year, on my first outing back to the Groucho Club. He leapt at me as I entered, dragged me off to his corner and demanded to know every gory detail. Did I have pictures? I showed him a few. It was then that he took out his cheque book.
‘A hundred thousand,’ he announced. ‘All yours.’ ‘For what?’ ‘For Mia.’ ‘Oh, John,’ I said, in shock, ‘I told you before. My baby’s not for sale. Besides, we’d get banged up for it.’
He nodded and slumped. Eventually, he tucked the cheque book away, asked for a hug and sobbed in my arms. He told me he and Donna had spent £3,000 on IVF at a private London clinic. They had tried everything, he said, even giving up booze.
‘You see? I can stop any time I like. It’s simply that I like to drink. I suppose Donna and I are fighting a lot these days. But she yells at me for all the right reasons. I’ve always gone on benders. I know a lot of actors never touch the stuff when they’re working but I tend to. It gives me a leg-up into the psyche of the character, I think.
‘When I did Midnight Express, I had to play a man who was in a permanently messed-up state. I was drinking seven bottles of wine a day. During The Naked Civil Servant, I was evenly drunk throughout. But The Elephant Man was a different approach. I didn’t touch a drop.
‘Now they say that I’m too old to be a dad. But I find myself reverting to the childlike state as I get older. I know I could be in tune with kids. I understand what they’re about. I would make a good father. I’d be not half bad at all.
‘I’m not happy,’ he blurted. ‘My wife has thrown me out tonight. She wasn’t impressed by my behaviour. It’s all a mess. We have everything: a beautiful new house in Kenya. A West End flat for when I’m here. And yet, without a child, I really have nothing.’
What about adoption? John scoffed. ‘Old lushes like us? They’d never let us through the door!’
Resorting to a string of expletives and obscenities that in sobriety would have horrified him, John dropped his chin and scowled.
‘I have always been pessimistic,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps it’s why every character I’ve played has been tormented. What does it say about me?’
‘That you have empathy,’ I ventured. ‘To portray suffering with such honesty is your gift.’
I turned to face him, only to find a dishevelled drunk dribbling on to my shoulder pad.
I didn’t see him after that for nearly eight years. He divorced Donna in 1990, immediately married American production assistant Joan Dalton and at last had two longed-for sons: Alexander, known as Sacha, and Nick.
John and Joan’s divorce was almost final when I ran into him in Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair in 1996. He enveloped me like a longlost child and made a fuss of everyone at my table.
‘And who’s this pretty thing?’ I introduced my daughter Mia. John gasped, almost inaudibly. His crinkly eyes flashed recognition. ‘At last, at last.’ He picked her up. ‘My little girl,’ he smiled.
‘Without a child, I really have nothing’