Читать книгу Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 14

PIANO BAR, MONROVIA, SAN GABRIEL VALLEY, NEAR LOS ANGELES. SUMMER 1965

Curtis Arnold Zastoupil – 23 years old, prematurely balding, five foot ten, with a penchant for goatee beards and archery – charmed his way into the lives of Connie and Quentin like a latter-day Robin Hood. Zastoupil was a versatile musician who played regularly at small clubs and Ramada Inns. Connie first set eyes on him when he performed a solo gig at My Old Kentucky Home, a piano bar in Monrovia. With his laid-back attitude and warm smile, Curt reassured Connie – now 19 – that good men actually did exist in the real world.

Connie had travelled to California earlier that summer after she’d qualified as a registered nurse. Tennessee had proved a depressing place to try and bring up a child single-handed and she genuinely felt that Los Angeles might provide more opportunities.

Connie left Quentin with her mother and, once in California, had even briefly linked up again with Quentin’s father, Tony Tarantino, who had returned to the state to work. They dated a couple of times after she told him he had a child back in Tennessee. But the romance did not re-ignite and both rapidly decided it would be better if they went their separate ways. Connie never once asked Tarantino to play the role of father and he showed little or no interest in the child. She was used to coping on her own, so what difference did it make?

Curt Zastoupil and Connie fell in love within weeks of being introduced at the piano bar and she decided it was time to make a life for herself in California and bring little Quentin back from Tennessee. Connie was so taken by Curt’s close family that she even recruited his brother Cliff to drive with her back to Knoxville to collect the child and their belongings.

On the three-day drive back from Tennessee, two-and-a-half-year-old Quentin tried to read every billboard and advertisement they passed. ‘He even recognised logos. It was a real pain, but I guess it showed what way he was heading,’ explains Connie. The drive was also her first chance to get to know her young child. She soon discovered that Quentin would not eat anything except hamburgers and hot dogs, and she had to call every item of food by those two names in order to get him to eat.

Once they arrived in California, Curt Zastoupil took the young Quentin under his wing and provided the boy with a genuine father figure for the first time.

Connie and Curt married later that same year. It seemed like the beginning of a real life for Connie. Curt introduced her to a world that was a million miles from Tennessee. He took her to jazz and folk clubs and restaurants in the racially mixed downtown area of Los Angeles. He brought her out of her private world that had – until that point – revolved around Elvis, comic books and Gunsmoke.

The couple purchased their own hunting falcons and went horse-riding in the nearby San Bernadino mountains with their birds, which were kept at a friend’s ranch. Other weekends they would find deserted, open spaces, set up their archery targets and play Robin Hood and Maid Marian for hours. They even took up fencing, but ended up being kicked out of their first apartment when they decided to have a sword fight on the balcony.

For a short time Connie worked as a fully qualified nurse, but then decided to seek a more traditional nine-to-five career as a manager in the healthcare industry. She was still so young that she got her first management job by lying about her age on the application form.

Curt was Cool with a capital C. Nothing bothered him. When the family moved to a larger rented house in Alhambra (a bedroom community on the edge of the South Bay in the San Gabriel Valley), Connie announced that her kid brother Roger was going to come and live with them because their mother had taken to the bottle once more. Curt’s only response was, ‘Sure. No problem.’ He was that kind of guy.

Roger was 13 at the time and seemed destined to end up home-hopping just as his sister had done before him. But for Quentin, Uncle Roger’s appearance was a marvellous development. In the space of a few months he had gone from having no father to gaining a father and a big brother. Roger was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere in the house that he told his sister that living with her and her family was like growing up at Disneyland.

Curt even officially adopted Quentin just before his fourth birthday and the boy was called Quentin Zastoupil for the rest of his childhood. His birth certificate was legally changed and has remained that way ever since.

The next few years were the happiest in Quentin’s childhood.

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; – ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths…

Connie watched the excitement in Quentin’s eyes as she read him the climax of Moby Dick. To make it more exciting for the four-year-old, she would imitate the sound of the waves hitting the side of the boat, then the huge splash as the giant whale crashed down into the surf.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Moby Dick, first published in the 1840s, completely captured young Quentin’s imagination. The story of the cunning whale, which becomes the focus of hatred and superstition, appealed to the young boy. Quentin became obsessed with the fearsome yet courageous whale winning out against the loathsome Captain Ahab.

Connie could not stand ‘all the sugary nonsense’ that most people tended to read to their children. The realities of life had hit her hard between the eyes and she couldn’t help passing on that gritty approach to her beloved son.

‘I read him hard, real stories that came alive on the page, not some crap about stupid fluffy toy animals,’ she recalls. Other books read to Quentin included Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island.

At that time, Quentin started to develop a talent for mimicry. He also had a remarkably good memory for such a young child. He was forever reciting things around the house. Although Connie recognised this as evidence of some in-built talent, she also found it incredibly irritating. Quentin would drive Connie particularly crazy by memorising both sides of long-playing albums. She had one comedy album by a stand-up called Jose Mendes and the youngster would recite every joke verbatim. It was like having a demented but highly intelligent parrot in the house. Other times Quentin would listen to one particular Fats Domino record over and over again. His taste was already proving eclectic.

There were also musical albums like Dr Doolittle. Quentin knew all the songs and would constantly sing them – out of tune. Unlike most young boys, he wasn’t remotely interested in being a policeman, fireman or pilot when he grew up. His only desire was to be an actor. The bug had already bitten.

One diversion was when Connie bought Quentin a ragged, friendly mongrel puppy, which the little boy immediately named Baron. The spaniel/terrier mix instantly captivated Quentin and he lavished love and attention on the animal.

A few days after getting the dog, Connie had to forcibly drag Quentin away when she found him banging the puppy’s head against a wall in the back yard. Quentin thought he was being playful and had no idea he might be causing brain damage to the animal. Connie reckoned that Baron got ‘real slow’ after the little boy had battered his pet’s head against that concrete.

Quentin gradually started to appreciate that a gentler approach to the dog was preferable and the two became inseparable. Quentin would faithfully take the dog for a walk around the block at least twice a day.

However, after the family moved to the house in Alhambra, which was 15 miles south-east of Los Angeles, Baron became very disorientated and started disappearing with alarming regularity, only to show up in a local dog pound a few days later. It was all extremely distressing for Quentin, who couldn’t understand why the dog he cherished seemed so intent on running away.

A very emotional Quentin would frequently call Connie at work after he got home from school and discovered that Baron had gone missing yet again, and the dog pound had called to say they had him.

‘Baron’s in jail again, Mom,’ Quentin would tell his mother, before collapsing into floods of tears down the phone. Connie would then leave work early, pick Quentin up and rush round to the dog pound, where they’d retrieve Baron once again.

The only other friend Quentin had at this time was a boy called Todd, who lived three houses up from their home on 6th Street in Alhambra. The two little boys would play together in each other’s back yards. But Quentin was very possessive about some of his toys and often found it difficult to share them with other children.

By the age of four, Quentin had developed a virtual obsession with GI Joe dolls. (In Britain, they were called Action Men.) It was slightly ironic that he should take such an interest in these warlike toys, as Connie and Curt had very liberal views on the Vietnam war which was raging at the time.

California was probably the most divided state in the nation when it came to American involvement in Vietnam. Draft-card burnings and peace marches were becoming commonplace; a few American pacifists had even burned themselves to death in sympathy with the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Saigon.

Woodstock was about to happen, and a strong counter-culture – with its roots in the anti-war movement – was growing. In California, hippies were appearing everywhere, from San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district to Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. Tie-dyed T-shirts, sandals, beads and bell-bottomed jeans were the uniform of the day. Both Connie and Curt supported the anti-war effort so strongly that they wore the bracelets of American POWs in memory of servicemen taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. Connie had the bracelet of an army captain who thankfully was eventually released and made it back to the United States. Her brother Roger was even posted to the Cambodian/Laotian border towards the end of the war.

Curt Zastoupil was entranced by anti-war troubadours like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He definitely swung in the direction of jazz, blues and folk music. Peter, Paul and Mary and a band called Scotch and Soda were among his favourites.

Connie had more varied taste in music, ranging from Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Jack Jones and Frankie Avalon to certain Beatles tracks and even Isaac Hayes, Janis Joplin and Curtis Mayfield. Connie also liked some Rolling Stones tracks, despite her overall preference for the sweaty ballad school of singing. Her favourite group was a little-known ensemble called The Crooners. Sometimes she persuaded Curt to play his own version of The Beatles’ Day Tripper, but only when he was in the mood.

A sprinkling of poppier music followed in the early 1970s, including Stealer’s Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle with You. Connie was immensely proud of the fact that she liked everything from opera to country & western to soul to blues to rock ‘n’ roll.

Meanwhile, Quentin and his mini-army of GI Joes fought on in deepest Alhambra and poor Connie spent much of her son’s early childhood on her hands and knees, trying to put the little black plastic combat boots back on his toy soldiers. Her other task was to keep reassembling the dolls after Quentin had torn them limb from limb during particularly gruesome battle scenes. Connie still remembers how aggravated she would get because she and Quentin could never find the tiny black plastic bayonets that were forever going AWOL.

Quentin would set up vicious hand-to-hand combat scenes all over the house, usually after he had seen that evening’s television news containing harrowing footage of the real fighting in south-east Asia. The little boy’s voice could often be heard directing entire battle dramas, making sure that each scene worked in relation to the next.

One evening as she settled down on the settee with Curt to watch The Untouchables, Connie could not believe her ears.

‘KEEP YOUR FUCKING HEAD DOWN, SOLDIER!’

Her young son was swearing like a… trooper.

‘Quentin, come here this instant!’

The shy little boy appeared at his mother’s side.

‘Don’t you let me hear you using that kind of foul language ever again. Do you understand?’

Instead of looking down solemnly at the carpet, Quentin was bursting to explain. ‘I didn’t say that, Mom. GI Joe said it.’

A wry smile appeared on Curt’s face and he nudged his wife. But Connie was in no mood to laugh. The boy had to be taught the difference between right and wrong.

‘You just tell him not to use that kinda language in this house.’

‘But, Mom…’

‘No buts. D’you understand?’

Quentin walked away with his tail only just between his legs. How could he tell a platoon of tough guy soldiers not to swear…

Quentin also had superhero dolls like Superman, Aquaman, Superman and Batman. But Connie noticed that he was reluctant to allow any interaction between his GI Joes and the rest of the figures, apart from Superman. Well aware of his mother’s keen interest in that particular superhero, Quentin occasionally permitted his soldier dolls to get into scraps with Superman, but he had a problem: he did not know who should win.

The only other doll Quentin got attached to was a Sindy doll left at the house by one of his cousins. One day Connie caught Quentin trying to re-enact a love scene from a movie he had just seen. Sindy was banned immediately.

One Halloween, Connie bought Quentin his own GI Joe fancy-dress outfit and he went out trick-or-treating. But as he didn’t have many friends locally, it was a lonely task and he came home less than an hour later with few candies and a sad look on his face. He had already decided he preferred hanging out with grown-ups.

By this time, Connie had filled the house with men. There was Curt, her kid brother Roger, and Curt’s brother Cliff. Quentin was in his element. He got so used to having one or other of the grown-ups to play with that he would get very demanding if none of the three men were around.

One Saturday morning, Connie and her three male residents overslept. At about ten, her brother Roger came rushing into the bedroom.

‘Quentin has gone! I can’t find him anywhere.’

Connie shot out of bed, aware that they lived on a very busy street and fearful that her little boy might have wandered out amongst the roaring traffic. As she ran up and down the road frantically looking for her son, Curt and Roger searched the house from top to bottom. But there was absolutely no sign of Quentin.

A distraught Connie came back into the house and headed towards the phone to call the police. Suddenly a small figure in a Superman outfit leapt out of a clothes hamper in the hall, giggling hysterically. The hamper was Quentin’s changing room. Superman had his phone box; Quentin had his clothes hamper.

Quentin felt he had gained just the right level of attention with his stunt. That would teach them to sleep late on a Saturday morning and not play with him.

Connie was furious. For the first time she hit her child. Neither of them ever forgot the incident, but for entirely different reasons. Connie believed it was the first step in building his sense of self-discipline. Quentin, she believes, saw it as a classic example of injustice.

Connie has never regretted hitting Quentin occasionally as a child. She even used to pretend to have a worse temper than she really had in order to intimidate him whenever she believed he was up to no good.

‘For a while, Quentin was convinced I was insane. He could not quite trust what I was going to do to him if he misbehaved. He felt as if he walked a tightrope with me,’ she explains. Sometimes Connie would scream and yell at Quentin in order to drive home a point. There was a lot of hysteria and it certainly disturbed Quentin at times. But the only consistent characteristic of his upbringing was its unpredictability.

Despite occasional bust-ups, Quentin and his mother remained very close throughout his childhood. There was a remarkable bond between them. They were like two children growing up together.

Connie was too young to impose the usual restrictions on her son. For instance, when Quentin was aged six or seven, she would take him to see movies that most parents would never have considered suitable for their children. One of the first adult films Quentin saw was Carnal Knowledge, starring Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson.

The movie centres around a college student who embarks on an enthusiastic and varied sex life and then becomes bored and disillusioned after reaching middle age. When it was first released, some of the more lurid scenes caused quite an outcry in the press. Young Quentin conveniently got up from his seat and headed for the popcorn stand every time a sex scene came on the screen.

Twenty years later, as Quentin toiled over his script for Natural Born Killers, he came up with a scene that reflected the way he had been affected by seeing explicit sex at an early age. In the original screenplay – much of which was altered drastically by director Oliver Stone after he purchased the script – Quentin tells a story through serial killer Mickey (played in the movie by Woody Harrelson) about how a little boy goes to see an adult-rated movie with his big sister and her boyfriend. The boy’s mother asks the little boy what he saw in the movie theatre and the child plays out every sexual act, from kissing and ‘feeling her up’ to oral sex and masturbation.

It is a crude scene, and was changed by Oliver Stone, but it provides a fascinating insight into the way Quentin’s mind works. He never forgot his reaction to being taken to see such adult films. Undoubtedly he gained a vast amount of knowledge, but at the same time he recognises the harm that may have been done.

Not long after seeing Carnal Knowledge, Quentin once more found himself with his mother in a movie theatre – the Tarzana 6 in Harbor City – watching The Wild Bunch. It was a double bill with Deliverance, about a group of men from the city who go on a canoe trip. The expedition turns to horror when the local hillbillies decide to try and kill them.

Connie had been determined to see Deliverance because it starred Burt Reynolds, the actor whose character, Quint, in Gunsmoke, had provided the inspiration for Quentin’s name. She expected a romantic adventure movie, but was stunned by one particularly disturbing scene which has also remained with Quentin ever since. It involved the homosexual rape of one of the canoeists, played in the movie by Ned Beatty.

‘That scared the living shit out of me. Did I understand Ned Beatty being sodomised? No. But I knew he wasn’t having any fun,’ recalled Quentin many years later.

In Pulp Fiction, he recreated the scene by having two rednecks rape a man in the basement of their gun shop. The similarities are clear, with the rednecks even denied the ultimate pleasure of killing their victim. It was almost as if Quentin was trying to rewrite that gruesome scene in Deliverance.

Today, Connie insists that she does not feel at all guilty about taking her young son to see such mature films. ‘I honestly do not think it harmed him in any way.’

Intriguingly, she also took him to see Bambi, but he was so distressed when Bambi’s mother died that he made Connie take him out of the cinema after the first 20 minutes.

At home, Quentin became equally emotional about seemingly harmless cartoons like an episode of The Flintstones in which Bamm-Bamm disappeared and Barney became suicidal as a result. Now that was heavy stuff… Yet back at the local movie theatre, the ultra-violent film Joe was handled with the greatest of ease.

As well as developing his interest in movies, Connie also encouraged Quentin to read from an early age. This gave him a genuine curiosity about the written word. He soon appreciated that television and movie drama was scripted and carefully planned before it was filmed.

At just seven years old, Quentin even understood the importance of structure in the stories he avidly read in comic books and novels. He would read and re-read whole sections to try to work out what was coming next in a particular storyline.

Quentin had the same attitude towards movies. He loved to see them at least four or five times if possible. When Curt took him to see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World they arrived 15 minutes after the film had started, so they stayed to see the first 15 minutes of the next showing. Quentin was amazed to discover that for the same admission price, he could sit and watch a movie over and over again. ‘When I’m an adult and I go to the movies, I’m gonna watch it four times,’ he promised himself.

One bizarre result of this self-education was that in 1972, when he was still just nine, he wrote a moving story dedicated to his mother to celebrate Mother’s Day. Connie was understandably touched as she began to read the two-page essay which featured an adult Quentin reminiscing about his childhood; how strict his mother had been; how much she had nagged him and run the house with a rod of iron. Connie was concerned but understood that it was good for her son to get his feelings off his chest and it was all so well constructed. Connie proudly read on, even though the piece was littered with spelling mistakes.

Then she got to the last section of the story. Quentin revealed that his mother had died. He wrote that he felt very bad about her death but…

Connie was stunned. She sat and read the final passage over and over again just to make sure she had read it correctly. But there was no doubting it. She looked up at her nine-year-old son who was looking sideways at her, almost as if he wanted a reaction.

‘You don’t really mean it, do you, Quentin?’

Quentin shrugged. ‘Of course not, Mom. I feel real bad about it, but that’s just the way the story turned out. You’re still the greatest mom, even if you had to die.’

The following year, on Mother’s Day, Quentin wrote an even more superbly constructed essay, and guess who had to die in the final sentence…

Throughout his childhood, Quentin had an aversion to being in school photos. He would somehow go missing on the day that such pictures were scheduled and Connie does not have a single school photo of her son.

By all accounts he did not enjoy most aspects of his education. However, life at home in those early years was very different and Quentin was delighted to have his picture taken with grown-ups. When posing with other children, he seemed only mildly interested in them, but when posing in a shot with adults, he came alive.

Quentin developed an obsession with passport photo booths and was forever nagging Connie to let him have his picture taken with Roger or Curt. A whole series of photos taken over a period of a couple of years show a happy, confident Quentin – very different from the diffident, solitary child he was at school.

These photo booth pictures show Quentin relaxed and clearly hamming it up for the camera. He was intrigued by the fact that a machine, rather than his own mother, was taking the photos.

Connie didn’t like the pictures because her son’s hair looked so terrible. Quentin actually cut his own hair from the age of five. On the first few occasions, Connie tried to convince her son to go to a barber’s shop. But in the end she gave up. She just wasn’t prepared to stifle a free spirit.