Читать книгу Charlize - Chris Karsten - Страница 6

Few people are ever completely free of their beginnings, hence the occasional nostalgia for bygone places that fill us with vague, pleasant memories. More often than not we are disappointed when we return, for what awaits us is not always what we have hoped for. In February 1997 Charlize undertook her own pilgrimage to bid farewell to Plot 56, a smallholding at Putfontein, near Benoni in Gauteng. It had been nearly six years since she left the house where she’d been a little princess and where her childhood dreams first took flight. It was also the house where her father had died one terrible winter’s night.

But by 1997 there was hardly any sign left of her innocent childhood world. Only ghosts still frequented the place. It was a sad farewell, but in Hollywood Charlize was “the next big thing” and the distinction between art and life was growing hazy. Perhaps not in her own mind, but it was evident in many of her shared memories of Putfontein.

During those first delirious Hollywood years Charlize often referred nostalgically to her Afrikaner roots, to cow dung between her toes, her pet goat, the stray animals they tended, and children riding to school on donkeys. But in later years certain things she said sounded almost like an amended version of the near-idyllic pastoral scene she had formerly described.

Still, she had retained her childhood spontaneity, and it stood her in good stead, combined with a healthy dose of obstinacy, essential for survival in Hollywood. After the release of Mighty Joe Young in December 1998, an interview published in the fashion magazine Vogue portrayed her as a combination of girlish innocence, Boer toughness and easygoing sexuality, sort of a South African version of Ava Gardner: “Charlize Theron is a Boer, which in Afrikaans means dwelling on the earth. ‘That is what we were.’”

Her own “dwelling on the earth”, that particular patch of earth at Putfontein, could hardly be called a farm; it seems rather like a vague, romanticised attempt to mirror the setting of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. However, Charlize can be forgiven for this misrepresentation, for she was a child, living out her fantasies on a smallholding of two hectares, where she really did live close to the earth and animals. And she does indeed stem from generations of boers (farmers) as well as Boers (Boer soldiers), as she correctly maintains in her American interviews.

Today her dwelling is in Hollywood. She no longer lives out her fantasies on two hectares in Benoni; the entire world is her oyster. After her Oscar, a South African columnist wrote that, just as is the case with the angels, Los Angeles owes its existence to the transmission of messages. “But where the heavenly angels sing around God’s throne, the angels of Los Angeles have established their own holy order: their messages proclaim their own glory. That is why they have to work so hard at their ephemeral appeal. Whether one’s opinion of Los Angeles is favourable or not, fact remains that it is the first city in the history of the world to owe its status to the undisguised and sustained creation of illusions. Charlize, South Africa’s queen of the silver screen, happens to be an excellent perceiver and interpreter of such illusions.”

In August 2008 I paid a visit to Charlize’s new playing fields, Los Angeles, legendary abode of angels, illusions and narcissism. Following her trail when she first arrived in Hollywood, I found myself at 115 South Fairfax Avenue. On a wall is a life-sized image of a country girl in silhouette. It is no illusion; it is real. There she is, a few bus stops south of Hollywood, in one of Tinseltown’s busiest streets that crosses all the world-famous boulevards with their alluring aura of glitz and glamour (Wilshire, Beverly, Santa Monica, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard itself): a girl with braids and a watering can in her hand. Did Charlize feel homesick at the sight of this young girl when she first set foot in this strange town in 1993? Or when she went to the Farmer’s Market diag-onally across Fairfax, where celebrities, without their Guccis and make-up on a Saturday, mingle with ordinary Angelenos amid food stalls and the sounds of jazz and country music?

Charlize has mentioned the convenience of the Farmer’s Market, where she could buy a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for $1.50 before walking until her feet ached, down to the important agencies in Wilshire Boulevard, or up towards Hollywood Boulevard, specifically the section between La Brea and Gower, reminiscent of the myths and legends of Hollywood, where the white Hollywood sign on the hill behind Griffith Park entices and enchants. She was discovered in a bank on Hollywood Boulevard – the stuff fairytales are made of. (The bank has long since been demolished.) On the corner of Hollywood and Vine is a new high-rise complex with upmarket apartments. In due course Charlize would buy an expensive penthouse in the Broadway Hollywood building, with a view of Hollywood Boulevard, just a few hundred metres from her sidewalk star on the Holly-wood Walk of Fame.

The dice have fallen perfectly for Charlize, I thought, my eyes on a waiflike girl of perhaps eleven or twelve – definitely no older than thirteen. She was sitting on a folding chair in front of the Kodak Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a red dress, her skinny legs in purple tricots. She was singing to passers-by and tourists, accompanied by a guitarist of fifteen, perhaps sixteen years old. He could have been her brother. Behind them was a small suitcase. On the ground in front of them people threw coins and one-dollar notes.

I remembered that Charlize used to sing in a Benoni shopping mall to earn pocket money, accompanying herself on her guitar. This girl stared at me without a smile or a sign of any emotion at all when I took her picture, as if she were looking right through me. Perhaps her heart was filled with dreams that her name, too, would one day be immortalised on a star alongside those of Charlize and Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. All those famous names at her feet as she was sitting there. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, this section of the street is also called.