A Pocketful of Happiness

Product Information

What will surprise audiences most about the show? Hopefully, that you don’t know what will happen, it’s not obvious. I don’t think of what’s going to happen or how it’s going to turn out. That’s the draw of it. Post-Christmas lull and slump. Played Scrabble and the first word Joan puts down is “memorial” and, without missing a beat, quips, “I’m still here, Swaz!” The CT scan has revealed a dark mass on your left lung, Joan, so we need you to go to the Marsden Hospital in Sutton for a PET scan at eight fifteen tomorrow morning.” I ask if he thinks this is because he grew up in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) before moving to London in his 20s, so although he can charm his way into English society – even going to Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding – he is always standing a little to the side, trying to understand it. He smiles kindly at my armchair analysis: “It’s always a little odd to hear oneself defined by someone else, but that makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly.” I’m a retired character actor, and my real name is Peter Grant, but I had to change it in 1929, as there was an actor with that name already.”

I entered into this book under the notion it would be solely focussed on Grant’s experience of losing his wife. Understandably so, given the memoir’s title is the parting advice upon her death, in addition to Grant’s press tours where he continually touted this as a memoir on Joan’s terminal cancer. My father’s advice to me as a teenager was: “What a woman says she wants, and what she actually wants, are two entirely different things.” Summarily dismissed by me as advice from an unevolved olde-school brontosaurus. Until I saw how disappointed Joan was! I can still feel the gigantic Jurassic imprint of putting my foot in it and never tried that ploy ever again. Sorry, should have said, I like to smell everything in sight. Always have done. Ever since I can remember. Can’t understand why everyone doesn’t. You’re a brilliant cook.” Do not read if you have someone very ill in your life just now but for me despite losing many family members and friends in death, two this year, it’s such a wonderful book.In the early days of their relationship, she was the successful one, flying off to coach Mel Gibson on the set of The Bounty, while Grant pined away in London, hopelessly unemployed. But that shifted and Washington, he writes, “had to readjust and accommodate to being my plus-one at premieres and press junkets, which she understandably found uncomfortable”. Brutal to witness Joan telling Oilly that “more tests are required, chemotherapy is likely, as I have an as yet undiagnosed form of lung cancer.” I went to "An Evening with Richard E Grant", in which Grant talked for over an hour about the book's content, answered audience questions for another hour, and sold and signed copies of the book afterwards. This is a review of his performance of the book.

Newly arrived in London, I was waitering at Tuttons brasserie in Covent Garden, and had just secured an acting agent, who suggested getting accent coaching to help me play Northern Irish, as there were so many dramas being made about the Troubles and “you’re dark-haired and blue-eyed, so you could go up for Irish roles.”I was an out-of-work actor from the southern hemisphere, from nowhere, earning a subsistence wage as a waiter, schlepping home after midnight, listening to “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” on my prized Walkman. Not exactly a “catch” of any kind— and pipe-cleaner thin. Joan on the other hand was already a legend in her field. Such was the success of Richard Eyre’s landmark National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in 1982, and Joan’s accent coaching, that Barbra Streisand enquired, “Who are these American actors I’ve never heard of?” Which resulted in Joan being interviewed to coach Mitteleuropean accents for Streisand’s directorial debut movie, Yentl. As I’ve been a Streisand fanatic for half a century, the details she recalled of their first meeting have been imprinted, like a talisman, on my memory ever since. But it’s also possible that he hopes to make the reader understand that it doesn’t matter how many glamorous friends a person has if their true love is dying. Widowed, Grant isn’t particularly articulate. It’s enough for him simply to tell us, over and over, how happy he and Washington were together, that they mated, like swans, for life. Nevertheless, those things that he is able to describe – the sight of her tapestry kit by their bed, the way he still talks to her even though she is no longer in the world – have a universality about them, an ordinariness that resonates. Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone.