Three Empty Seats

11pm

Tuesday 9th December 1980

Booth Theatre, 222W 45th Street, New York

A horrible day. One of those days where so much seems to happen, when the world seems bigger, noisier and even messier than it usually is. Some days (most days, in fact) are ordinary, normal. Each one kinda’ follows the same pattern, you almost know what’s going to happen before it does. There’s a comfort in that. For me, for the last few months, that’s been even more true than usual. It’s like that when you get a major part in a show. No, not a show, this was a proper play, the most proper play I’ve done so far. A Tony-winning play, no less. It’s an incredibly sad story, and a true one, too. This man, John who was born deformed, very severely deformed, he was so hard to look at, his face was all big and lumpy, and people treated him just awfully. The Elephant Man, that’s what they called him, I guess ‘cos his face sort of looked like elephant skin, kinda big and rough, kinda like old leather.

But underneath all of that was just a really sweet, gentle man. He just wanted to be treated kindly and not gawked at or prodded or teased. This was back in the Victorian times in England – back in the times when freak shows were still a thing. Well, I bagged the part of Mrs Kendall, a famous West End actress who visits him in the hospital where he lives, and becomes his friend. She’s one of the few people in the world who show him any sort of kindness, who can see through the outside surface to the man beneath. Everyone else in his life is trying to use him, to make money out of him, or to study him, like he’s a chimp in a cage. But me, Mrs Kendal, she sits with him, ‘takes tea with him’ and they talk about art, culture, love. They recite Shakespeare together. “You’re not an Elephant Man at all...you’re Romeo” is the favourite line my character says, when she sees the real man. It’s a great role, and it’s the biggest role of my career so far – by far.

The best bit? The totally crazy bit. When Jack told me who was going to be playing John Merrick. I could hardly believe my ears when he told me, I was so excited. David Bowie. THE actual Ziggy Stardust. I think I must have asked Jack a half a dozen times if he meant the actual singer, the actual guy, and not just some actor with the same name! I mean, I was so excited but so scared too, when it dawned on me I’d be acting alongside him, not just in the same cast but really acting with him, touching him, even holding him in this scene where he is crying and shuddering, and I take him into my arms, and  I kiss his cheek. It’s a really great part.

And those first weeks I was so nervous. You’re already nervous, maybe apprehensive when a new play begins, you don’t have a clue how it’s gonna be received, if anyone is going to buy a ticket or turn up to watch. Or if you’re going to last 2 weeks, or 2 months or 2 years even. The movie had just come out too, a couple of months before, but did that mean people were sick of the story, or did that mean that people were more interested? You just didn’t know.

Being nervous, having your nerves on the edge is pretty much your normal when you’re acting. And then to throw on top of that that you’re sharing a stage with ‘The Duke’ was enough to make me wanna hurl. Yeah those first few weeks were crazy. Jack had told me that David had never acted before, whereas I’d be doing this for over 6 years now, 8 years if you included acting school. So, he told me, you’re the old pro here, not him. You’re the pro and he’s the nervous debutante. That made me laugh, calling him that. The Thin White Duke, Ziggy, Halloween Jack – The Debutante. Another nickname to add to his growing list. That’s another thing Jack told me, he said don’t think of him as the star, the singer, the artist. He’s just David now, he’s David, the actor, in our play. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I appreciated what he was trying to do, trying to put me at ease, relax me. After all, Jack was only 3 years older than me, he actually had his 30^th a couple of months back, we got him a cake and surprised him after the show that night. It was a kinda double celebration, Jack’s birthday and us bringing the show to Broadway.

But he was right, David wasn’t all those things, all those characters that I had seen and listened to and idolised for the past decade. He was quiet, sort of reserved those first few weeks. At first I thought he was kinda stuck up. He didn’t mix with the rest of the cast much - he’d come to rehearsals, he’d work his scenes, he was totally a professional, but he’d sort of keep himself to himself when he wasn’t in a scene. You couldn’t say it was rude exactly, when I told my pals what he was like, when I tried to explain it to them I could never really find the words to say what he was like. Kinda distant I guess, as if he was there but his mind was somewhere else.

 That’s how he was those first few weeks – first couple of months I guess. But then once we’d all come to Broadway, once we’d moved to the city, things started to change. I guess I noticed it even more due to the fact we had a week off, a whole 7 days, to give us the time to get settled and adjust from Denver to New York. I didn’t see David at all that whole week – didn't see anyone at all from the show in fact. It was a complete break from all of that. It’s an odd thing – when you go from spending your whole life, your every day with the same pretty small group of people, and you’re doing these real intense, real emotional scenes. And then bang, you don’t see any of them for a whole 7 days. So I really noticed the difference in him when we came back in after that week. He later told me a bit about that. He said he could be more himself in Manhattan – more so than in Denver, sure, but also he said more so than in England. He said that he’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be normal, just to be able to walk down the street and not have people gawp or stare at him. I found that so interesting. I couldn’t imagine a place in the world where David Bowie could walk down a street and not be stared at, but he said in New York he could. Especially when it started getting colder, he told me, he would throw on this big fur coat he’d picked up in a thrift store in the Village, and his trilby pulled down so you couldn’t really make out it was him. It got me thinking how he was the perfect guy to play John – of all people in the world, he knew what it meant to be stared and gawped at. Maybe that’s why he invented all those personas. People had forgotten or maybe didn’t care that there was just a young guy under it all – a pretty shy one, at that. I did though. I saw it. I saw David. And I think he noticed that I did.

Our relationship sort of grew once we’d gotten to New York. I’m not sure I could say we were friends exactly – I didn’t presume for one second that once our run was over and he’d gone back to England that we would stay in touch. But it felt, I dunno, easier. More comfortable around each other, I think he felt by then that he’d earned his place  – and I had gotten to know David, the man – not the icon.

It was a horrible, then, to see him how he looked today. I didn’t know if he was friends with John Lennon (or had even met him) but I sort of assumed they must have known each other, at least a little bit. I heard it on the radio when I got up this morning, I was barely listening, it was just habit I guess to turn the radio on whilst I made coffee and pottered around my apartment, still waking up. ‘John Lennon Slain’ stated with such certainty, such clarity, it felt cold, almost uncaring. I wasn’t really a Beatles fan, they were a little too clean cut for me, and anyway, I was too young when they first made it big here. I guess it was more of that JFK moment that my parents had talked about, that feeling that you’d never forget where you where when you heard the news. And how often it’s the most boring, ordinary moment – that is suddenly not ordinary at all, not in the slightest. That’s what it was like for me, this Tuesday morning at 11am, standing alone in my galley kitchen, an empty coffee mug in one hand, just sort of frozen to the spot. But this hadn’t happened on the other side of the world, or in Dallas, this had happened here, right in the city, can’t have been more than 2 miles from where I was standing. And I immediately thought of David, what did he make of this, had he even heard the news yet? Who would tell him? What if they were friends, how would he be able to do the show when something as horrible as that had just happened?

It was a horrible day. I spent it in a sort of daze. I just felt this awful emptiness – a feeling that only got worse as the radio told me more – that he’d been gunned down right outside his apartment, that he was only 40 years old – that his little boy was upstairs waiting for Daddy to come home. I didn’t want to hear it but I also couldn’t bring myself to turn it off and endure the silence, either.

I barely remember the walk to the theatre, I barely remember any details of the day. I felt as if I was experiencing it all through a thick sheet of glass – all my senses felt numbed, fogged up.  I noticed he and Jack speaking together backstage, before the show, sort of huddled together, Jack was talking more than David was, in fact, he may not have said a word.

I don’t think a single person in that theatre wanted to be there, not an actor, not an audience member, no one. It felt pretend. Artificial. I felt we were all just playing make-believe, playing at being normal, as if this horrible thing hadn’t just occurred. As this was just another night, which of course, it wasn’t.

It’s a very physical part, playing John Merrick. Whilst we didn’t have the heavy or hot prosthetics that they had in the movie, it is an emotional, draining part to play. And David is in practically every scene. David was often pretty exhausted when he came off stage, but I’ve never before seen him he looked tonight. It was his eyes. He had these rather intense, piercing eyes, but tonight they were something else. He had a sort of hollowed out look about him – as if he’d been totally emptied, scooped out from the inside.

I was standing stage right, watching that last scene. I didn’t usually watch, not this far into a run, but tonight it felt wrong not to, somehow. I didn’t know where else I would have been. So I was standing right there when he came off, and as he was walking over his eyes caught mine, and as he noticed me his head tilted down and began slowing shaking from side to side. I don’t think the shaking was intentional, it felt more like a reflex of his body than a decision of his brain. The audience were on their feet applauding, as they did every night, and the roar of that wall of sound felt even louder against the silence of David as he neared me. He turned back towards the stage area and with a slight imperceptible movement of his head directed my gaze to the front row. My eyes naturally followed his, again as a reflex more than any decision on my part. They stood out quite clearly with everyone around them standing, three empty seats on the front row, two together, and one apart. Like missing teeth in an otherwise flawless smile.

“Those are their seats” he muttered to me under the din of the crowd, “him, her and him. Fucking him, he was here. He could have done it here. He could have fucking done it right here in the front row”. I’m not sure because they were at the forefront of my mind or those pronouns, the pair and the single, the one female, but instantly I knew exactly who he meant. John and Yoko. And him. Chapman. The victim, his wife, and the man who broke their world.

Three empty seats in the front row of the theatre - our theatre. Two together, one apart. My eyes remained fixed on those empty seats as the revelation of what could have happened here dawned on me. Out the corner of my eye I could still see David, his head still slowly shaking side to side as he walked away to his dressing room, away from the stage, away from me, and into the shadows.