Just Like Starting Over

www.paulcoia.com

I’ve reluctantly come to realise that I am a disappointment. I’m not thinking of how others perceive me but rather of the many things I thought I might turn out to be, and simply being plain old me wasn’t one of them. Is it too late to think of starting over?

I know I’ll never be a pop star or male model of course, but there are more aspirational things I wish I had achieved; a jeweller creating art from bars of gold, an astronaut collecting moon rocks, or a doctor working as brain surgeon to the Royal Family. However, my fear of dense objects means none of these ambitions will ever be realised so I have settled for just being boring old me.

I think I would have loved, above all, to have turned out to be a “flawed genius” as I just love the term with its promise of prodigious talent and other worldliness, the perfect excuse when people don’t understand you, or you have made a complete pig’s ear out of something. “Don’t worry, he’s a flawed genius” they’d say and we’d carry on as normal with everyone forgiving my flies being undone or drool rolling down my chin. Look at footballer Paul Gascoine, wandering around hotels like an extra from Shaun of the Dead but forgiven because of the talent he had on the soccer pitch.

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Bart, editor of Variety magazine and producer of The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and many other Oscar winning movies, and we spoke about some of the mad people he’s worked with; Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Cat Stevens, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert de Niro, all geniuses with huge flaws. Peter tells me that the great actor Rex Harrison for example, the perfect English gentleman, loved performing with the assistance of illegal substances. Imagine his Doctor Dolittle raiding the medicine cupboard and swigging horse tranquiliser, or his Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady teaching Hepburn to say “The rain, in Spain, stays mainly in your vein”.

If I picked Peter up correctly, director Roman Polanski is borderline Martian too, but all this doesn’t matter when compared to the pleasure these people have given to millions - although in Polanski’s case we’ll try hard to forget about the pleasure he’s given to the young of the parish. Allegedly.

I guess it’s important to draw a distinction between a flawed genius and a genius at having flaws. The former blaze a trail and leave a legacy while the latter, like Rex Harrison’s medicine, just get up your nose. There are any number of flawed people in the movies, in fact one former Bond actress and serial rock star wife showed me this week why she’s no longer making movies and is, instead, currently earning a crust publicising hair loss treatment. In a diva moment she pulled out of our interview on a whim, despite many people working for weeks to fix it up. People like her will, perhaps, leave a trail but only in the way flatulence does.

If History tells us something it’s that the artists we remember as brilliant were all madder than the Hatter that missed Alice’s Anne Summers party. Michaelangelo decorated the Sistine Chapel ceiling beautifully but frequently peed in the paint to leave his mark, Gaugin attempted suicide, Picasso collected mistresses and wives like a kid collects nits, and Van Gogh cut his ear off. He later saw a cute pair of earrings to die for on QVC and committed suicide.

Writers are just as mad. Sylvia Plath admitted to being crazy, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams and Virginia Woolf all spent time in psychiatric care, and I think Joanna Trollope has real problems as she doesn’t even realise that she writes the same book every year. But, again, they’ve enriched many people’s lives over the years. Will anyone say the same about sane old us?

To many John Lennon was a genius, and I love his songs, yet you don’t get much more flawed than thinking you’ll gain world peace by staying under the duvet and inviting The Press in to watch you snooze, belch, and make love to the wife. Some of Lennon’s witterings about giving peace a chance had people asking to be given the chance of peace, and quiet.

One inspiration to me was my former university lecturer, a recognised genius at poetry and making the English language come alive, who used to explain his relentlessly positive outlook by telling us that he woke up in the mornings saying “Every day, in every way, I get better and better”. His genius was later taken from us for a while as he was hospitalised for overdosing on anti depressants. So, perhaps a hint of a flaw there.

But what of my realisation that no one is going to say I’m a flawed genius? Well, it disappoints me greatly to finally realise I’m normal, part of the pack and in no way great, so I’m going to rectify the situation. I have no idea what I could become a genius at – though I’m pretty hot on killing off bindweed – but I’ve already decided on my flaw. Without explanation, I’m going to carry around a chair with a plate of peas on it.

But that’s as mad as I’m prepared to go. There will be no inviting the Press in to watch me sleep with the wife, no rehab, no psychiatric care. I could throw in a cheap gag about giving peas a chance but, instead, I’ll turn to another Lennon song - It’ll Be Just Like Starting Over.