Читать книгу Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 16

TARZANA 6 MOVIE THEATRE, HARBOR CITY, SUMMER 1971

Quentin’s movie consumption as a small child continued to be rather unusual. By the age of eight he had developed a liking for grisly horror flicks. He adored Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which was shown regularly at the one-dollar Saturday morning matinees and starred Lon Chaney Junior and Bela Lugosi (as the monster).

Quentin liked it even better when his horror heroes appeared with madcap comics in mixed-genre movies. Years later, he reflected on his early taste in typically Tarantino terms. ‘My first understanding of genre distinction in films came when I got real attached to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I loved that movie. It’s not like the way they do comedy films now. The fact is that the monster in that movie actually killed people.’

One particular scene, when the monster picked up an innocent nurse and killed her by throwing her out of the window, has stayed with Quentin his entire life. Seconds earlier he had been laughing helplessly at the antics of Abbott and Costello, then suddenly a murder was committed.

‘I remember thinking wow, because the scary parts are scary and the funny parts are really funny,’ he recalls.

Meanwhile Connie’s appetite for superhero comics was still outstripping her young son’s. She had grown particularly fond of the X-Men and, as Quentin grew up, their love of comics formed a useful bond between mother and son. They would spend hours discussing the relative virtues of the superheroes.

Connie also often found herself playing with Quentin’s toys rather than clearing them up in the evenings. Her son was contributing to her life in every way. She was still very much the child mother.

When Quentin was seven or eight years old, Connie regularly took him to nearby Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm for days out. But the solitary child would wander amongst the crowds, not particularly interested in any of the rides, apart from Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Nemo’s Submarines. These fantasy rides appealed more to the young Quentin than roller-coasters or river rapids.

The first time Connie took her young son on the Pirates, he seemed mesmerised from the moment they got into the tiny boat and it skimmed over the first steep waterfall down into the murky depths. Throughout the ten-minute ride in pitch blackness, Quentin did not utter a word, but when they emerged back into the glaring sunlight at the end Connie noticed that the little boy had wet himself with fear. ‘But he loved it and pleaded with me to take him back on it almost immediately,’ recalls Connie.

However, after a few more trips to the theme parks, Quentin abruptly asked Connie to stop taking him. He told her he was more interested in seeing the latest movies and eating fast food at the nearest McDonald’s or, if Connie felt like splashing out, at Denny’s.

This was a little odd but Connie was more concerned by Quentin’s performance at school. He showed little or no enthusiasm in the classroom, and he was extremely hyperactive. He was always rushing around waving his arms and shouting in class. Some of his teachers recognised this as a sign of superior intelligence, while others just found him tedious to deal with. These teachers tended to give up on him very quickly because he did not conform to the normal standards of behaviour. Today, Connie explains this hyperactivity by saying, ‘We are both pacers who tangle up the cords when we are on the phone. I was very hyper as a child and so was Quentin.’

But there were some very worrying reactions to Quentin’s hyperactivity at school. At first, his teachers questioned Connie closely about her son’s home life because they were convinced that something was happening there to make him behave so strangely. Once they were satisfied that this was not the case, Connie was advised at that time to get a doctor to put her son on a course of tranquillisers to ‘calm him down’, as some believed he was about to reach some kind of mental boiling point.

‘I refused point blank. How dare they suggest doping Quentin just because he was too damn intelligent for them to handle?’ is how Connie remembers her response.

At around this time, Quentin even took an IQ test and scored an exceptionally high mark of 160. The school examiners insisted that he take the test again because they could not believe the result. He scored another 160.

Quentin had major problems at school as he would not put any effort into anything he wasn’t totally interested in. His spelling was appalling because he could not see why it was important. As long as the words were on the page as they sounded, that was all that mattered.

However, one subject he excelled at was history. For, besides taking him to see explicit adult movies, Connie had also made Quentin see a lot of historical dramas, like Nicholas and Alexandra, and the young boy was able to use that knowledge in school. Quentin had an extraordinary appetite for any movie that contained a good story. So he was getting A grades in history and reading, and failing miserably at everything else.

Connie frequently, though unintentionally, encouraged her young son’s independence. She would often come home and announce to the young Quentin that she needed to be alone and would he please go to a separate part of the house so she could enjoy some solitude.

‘I don’t want to be bothered tonight, Quentin,’ was about all she would say, and that would be a signal for him to disappear to his room where he would soak up the adventures of one of his superheroes, or perhaps direct a mock battle between GI Joe and Spiderman.

Because he spent so much time in a fantasy world, Quentin began creating new identities for himself. His own surname had already changed from Tarantino to Zastoupil at Connie’s insistence. Now he would announce to Connie that he wanted to be known for the following week by a completely different name. It seemed to help him escape from reality. New identities meant new adventures and a chance to recreate the past.

Quentin’s favourite new name was Quint Jerome. ‘Forget the Zastoupil bit,’ he insisted. He was forever asking Connie if she thought it was a cool name. She did.

On other occasions, Quentin would imagine himself to be one of the characters in his favourite TV action cartoon show of the time, Clutch Cargo. Quentin became particularly wrapped up in certain TV shows because, unlike children from larger families, he had no distractions. He would sit up close to the small screen for hours on end, losing himself in whatever he was watching. Sometimes he wished he could climb inside that TV set and join his favourite characters.

Twenty-five years later, Quentin perfectly reconstructed this scene in Pulp Fiction. The sequence opens with boxer Butch, aged five, sitting up close to the television in a world of his own watching Clutch Cargo cartoons. That was Quentin.

At this time, Curt – with his cool goatee beard – and his brother Cliff tended to pick Quentin up from school, as Connie had started working hard as a health industry executive.

Quentin’s schoolfriend Joe Carabello recalls, ‘Curt and his brother looked kinda interesting with long hair and dressed in hipster jeans, T-shirts and vests.’

Curt was most definitely a vest-and-ruffled-shirt-kind-of-guy and he drove a very cool Volkswagen Karmann Ghia coupe with a tiny backseat area where Quentin would crouch after being picked up from school. Quentin even emulated his trendy stepfather by insisting on wearing rugged biker boots to school. The little boy would noticeably change character the moment he got in the back of Curt’s car. Joe recalled one occasion when they shot right past him as he walked along the sidewalk. Quentin either didn’t see or didn’t acknowledge his friend. He was too busy acting like a cool dude.

The young Quentin rarely invited any of his school friends back to his house. He did not explain why. Some of his classmates later theorised that he was in some way ashamed of his oddball home, while others reckoned he simply did not wish to have any other children on his territory.

Occasionally, on her days off, Connie would be seen at the school collecting Quentin. Former pupils only recall one thing about her – her long black hair. ‘It was almost down to her butt,’ remarks Joe Carabello.

Movies were all Quentin talked about. Curt contributed to his film education by taking young Quint to a cinema every Monday evening. It didn’t matter what was on. Quentin demanded to be taken each week, like clockwork.

Curt liked the classic Californian biker movies of the late 1960s that starred renegades like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, so Quentin’s tastes started to broaden out. One of his particular favourites was the 1968 film The Savage Seven, directed by Richard Rush and starring Adam Roarke and Larry Bishop. The young Quentin was so intrigued by this movie that he has watched it at least a dozen times since.

More than 20 years later he explained, ‘What’s cool about it is that you can’t figure out what or who the bad guys are. The Adam Roarke character is good in one scene, bad in another. It makes him complex.’

Joe Carabello remembers being shocked that Quentin was allowed to see movies that most other kids’ parents deemed highly unsuitable. ‘We all thought he was a lucky son of a gun because we wouldn’t have dared even ask our folks to let us see such movies.’

Quentin’s young friends were particularly envious of him when he told them with great relish that he had been allowed to watch Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. But they were all a little confused, because here was a kid who didn’t even learn how to ride a bicycle until the fifth grade.

Not surprisingly, Quentin decided he wanted to try his hand at creating his own films. He soon got Joe Carabello, plus two other friends called Dave Strom and Mike Gallo, to make some home movies together using an old camera that belonged to one of the boys’ fathers.

‘They were about goofy things like annoying people’s sisters,’ explained Joe Carabello. Although he didn’t have any brothers or sisters of his own, Quentin was clearly fascinated by other people’s families. He always made sure he starred in and directed each of the movies they made.

When Quentin was nine years old, his life was turned upside down by two traumatic events.

First, Curt and Connie split up following six seemingly happy years together, soon after the family had moved to a rented house in the South Bay beachside community of El Segundo. Quentin never got a full explanation of what went wrong between the couple and Connie is not prepared to discuss the details to this day.

The youngster just came home from school one afternoon to find that Curt had left the house. Connie didn’t want to talk about it and Quentin didn’t want to ask. They both retreated into separate corners of the house and buried themselves in their favourite fantasy worlds of television and comic books.

‘Curt and I just went off in different directions,’ Connie says. ‘I was very career-orientated at the time and I just did not want to be married any more.’

After their divorce, Curt – who had been the nearest thing Quentin had had to a father – moved up to an isolated farming community in northern California and rarely visited the South Bay area. ‘Curt remarried and his new wife did not want any reminders of me and Quentin around,’ adds Connie, who gradually got back on speaking terms with Curt and is still in contact with him. She even refers to Curt’s new partner as her ‘wife-in-law’.

Within a few months of Connie’s marriage break-up, she started suffering from appalling stomach pains and sought medical advice. The diagnosis was grim. Doctors said they suspected Hodgkin’s disease and warned she might only have a few months to live.

Connie was understandably panicked. She was told to get her life in order and prepare for the worst. A long and painful course of treatment was recommended. The doctors warned that the after-effects would be very debilitating and it might prove very difficult to look after her young son.

Connie was especially worried because she had nowhere for her child to go. In desperation, she contacted her mother, back in Tennessee. (A number of relatives had already assured Connie that her mother was no longer boozing at the same rate as she had been a few years previously.) Reluctantly, but with nowhere else to turn, Connie sent Quentin to her mother. ‘I wasn’t real thrilled about it, but it seemed as if I was about to die so you do what you have to do,’ is how Connie explains it today.

She decided not to tell her son what was happening. Quentin just thought he was going on an extended vacation to his grandmother’s mobile home in Hicksville.

But that five-month stay was to be the most disturbing period in Quentin’s entire childhood. Connie’s mother was off the booze when the young boy showed up alone at Nashville airport, but she was hiding a multitude of other problems. She was in severe debt; ex-boyfriends were still circling the trailer park with alarming regularity; and her previous involvement in the manufacture of illicit home brew had exposed her to just about every lowlife character in Knox County.

Quentin’s stay at the flea-pit trailer that Connie’s mother called home soon degenerated into something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was a sharp observer, even at that young age, and it struck him that his grandmother was living the sort of life he had assumed only existed in cops-and-robbers shows. One of his favourites, Dukes of Hazzard, was based on life in a hick town just like the one he was living in with his grandma.

More than 20 years later, Quentin made a guest appearance on the Tonight TV show, hosted by Jay Leno, in Los Angeles, and referred to how his granny regularly beat him up. The issue only came up because Quentin found himself sitting next to another Tennessee resident, country music star Naomi Judd. She was trying to be nostalgic about her old home state, but Quentin did not exactly share her sentiments.

In fact, Quentin’s grandmother started drinking with a vengeance shortly after he showed up, and he spent much of his time sitting in her rusty truck while she hopped around liquor stores in eastern Tennessee. To start with, he would get a swift right-hander whenever he complained about the endless hours he spent in her clapped-out automobile.

But, as the weeks turned into months and Quentin’s grandmother’s consumption of alcohol escalated, so did her violence towards her grandson. Soon she began using a switch on him. Quentin was confused, lonely and very scared. He could not understand why his mother had left him with his awful grandmother for so long. What had he done to deserve this?

Back in California, Connie was too preoccupied with her apparent death sentence to realise what was happening in Tennessee. Whenever she managed to speak to Quentin on the phone he sounded okay. Quentin never actually picked up on the fact that there was something wrong with his mother, but for some reason he did not tell Connie about his grandmother’s abusive behaviour.

One of the few happy times that Quentin had during that nightmare stay was when his great-grandmother – deeply concerned by her daughter’s drinking – took him off her hands for a few days. Quentin’s great-grandmother was a full-blooded, golden-hearted Irish lady. His few days with her were filled with good memories, including his first experience of falling in love – with beautiful movie star Claudia Cardinale.

‘We went to see this John Wayne movie called Circus World. There’s a scene where she’s smooching with some guy in the hay. I actually remember thinking, I wish that was me,’ he recalls. The movies often provided his only escape from that strange environment.

Five months after the original diagnosis, Connie demanded that her doctor have her blood samples re-examined by a specialist in another part of the country. When the results came back, doctors told her it had been a false alarm. She did not have Hodgkin’s disease.

Quentin was understandably relieved when he heard he was going back to California. If he had stayed much longer with his grandmother he would probably have suffered further harm. When Connie later found out what had happened in Tennessee she swore never to speak to her mother again, and has not uttered a word to her since.