EATING MY WORDS is the book recording my time as Private Chef to Pierce Brosnan, a bulimic model and an arms dealer who shot his last chef. Here’s the 3rd instalment of my Brosnan chapter.
Thursday 6 May 1999
Oliver Reed and Dirk Bogarde are dead.
Pierce called from the studio today to ask if he was allowed to bring some friends back for dinner. He actually asked permission from me! I can’t imagine Peter Soros ever doing that.
As I had no idea of the likes and dislikes of the friends I decided to do a table full of Middle Eastern foods; roast peppers, fried aubergines with pine nuts, falafel, tahina, kibbeh, griddled halloumi cheese, fatoush salad, cous cous, hot, fluffy Arab bread and spiced chicken kebabs.
They all sat down and happily stuffed themselves, then I heard Pierce say, “Oh no I’m not going to have any room left for pudding.”
Oops. Once again I had failed to make a dessert. Once again I started looking for Greek yoghurt. I quickly chopped up a few mangoes and papayas and piled them into a big Moroccan dish, plopped the yoghurt in the middle of it, drizzled it with honey and squeezed passion fruit pulp et voila! They all went barmy. Then Pierce skipped over and said, “Don’t you think it odd that we met all those years ago at L’Escargot and now we are here with me begging you to be our chef.” Bless his little Bondy heart. He had celebrated the end of shooting ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ at L’Escargot when I was waitressing there.
Pierce gave me a big fat cheque which I am desperate to cash but Matthew (the flatmate) refuses to let me bank it until he has taken it to work to show everyone on Monday. He has become hysterically star struck and could hardly sleep last night because Pierce is sending over a key to Sting’s house for me today. The Brossies are all off to Amsterdam for the weekend and I have promised to cook for them when they get back on Sunday whether I decide to take the job or not. Matthew pointed out that we could have a party in Sting’s house over the weekend as we now have a key. Sting is very lucky that we are too honest and too scared to consider it.
Tomorrow is D Day and I have to make my mind up by 12 noon. Peter Soros called my agent to ask how much I wanted if I were to take the position and she told him 50 grand!! I would never have been able to ask for that with a straight face.
Friday 7 May 1999
I have just ‘phoned Keeley (Pierce’s girlfriend) and asked if I could clear £500 a week with them, after tax. She said yes, so I did too. It’s only for a couple of months until filming the new Bond film is finished so is not as scary as signng the rest of my life away to Peter Soros.
The best thing about taking the Brossie job is that I get to watch Richard and Judy in the morning as I will only be working from 6-10pm. I may even find the time to do some writing. AND Pierce and Keeley are both going on diets from tomorrow so there will be no more puds to worry about. Pierce has been told off by the studio for looking porky and the shots of him from the beginning of ‘The World is Not Enough’ are vastly different from the middle bit which he is filming now. He is going to have to lose some weight and then re shoot.
The only problem then was telling Mr Scary Soros of my decision but I thought that as the agency had said I wanted £50 grand he may not be too worried that I had taken the Brossie job. Not so. I called and bravely told him that I had decided to take the Brosnan job as it was closer to where I was living and as it was evenings only I would have more free time to write. He asked what they were paying me and when I told him he said, “So if they are paying you that for 20 hours a week that means you would want £52,000 from me to double those hours.”
I said nothing because as well as being hopeless at maths I would never, ever dream of expecting that much from anyone. When I finally got through to him that I was definitely turning him down he was surprisingly nice and said he would ask me again when the Brosnan job ended.
So everything has turned out okay in the end. Tonight I am going to celebrate by taking Matthew-the-flatmate for a slap up meal and a million bottles of wine.
Saturday 8 May 1999
Slightly sore head this morning after dinner at El Parador. We had morcilla (Spanish black pudding), venison with calabrese, griddled chicken thighs, prawns with garlic and chorizo, salt cod with butter beans and cheese and spinach parcels. All washed down with their lovely house Cava. Yum, yum, yum.
Matthew had to finish an article this morning so I decided to go to Muswell Hill and buy a pet hamster for him. He has been wittering on about wanting a hamster for ages. At least it will keep him company when I go back to Torquay after the Brosnan job. Matt already has a cage that became vacant after his nephew’s gerbil came to a sticky end last summer.
Muswell Hill, despite looking quite close to Tufnell Park on the A-Z, is a very annoying two buses and a tube ride away. Fortunately the shop had Matthew’s dream pet in stock. There it was, running madly around its cage; just what he wanted – a horrid ginger ball with ratty teeth. The assistant popped it into a flimsy cardboard carrying box and off I went to wait for bus number one. Just as the bus approached I felt a nasty nip to my tummy and looked down to find the bloody thing had eaten its way through the box, bitten through my jacket and T shirt and was trying to eat me. I ran back to the shop, screaming like a mad woman with the hideous rodent hanging off me. Trust me to buy a man eating hamster.
The assistant re-housed it in a bigger, sturdier cardboard box and off I went again to wait for another bus. All was well (other than my worry that I could have contracted a dreadful disease from the evil creature’s bite) until I emerged from the tube at Tufnell Park to find rain lashing against the pavements. There was not a cab in sight so I had no choice but to walk to Matthew’s. Within seconds the cardboard box was soaked and becoming floppy so I pushed it inside my jacket and legged it back to the flat before ‘killer pet’ could start eating its way out again.
When Matthew opened the door I let him know just what I had been through to buy him his bloody hamster, showing him the teeth marks to prove it.
“Never mind Gilly, you’ll be fine. Let me see her! Is she ginger?”
I put the crumpled, soggy box on the kitchen table and gingerly (ha) opened it. And she was dead. After all the trouble I had gone to, there she was lying on her side, devoid of any signs of life. I held my make-up mirror to her mouth just to make sure.
”Murderer!”
How ungrateful can you get?
“Poor Bianca. We’ll have to bury her in the garden”.
“Not in this rain we won’t.”
Then in true horror movie style her head swivelled round and she scrambled to her feet, out of the collapsed box, fell off the table with a thud and then she was off. After clutching each other and screaming we then spent a good half hour chasing her about the flat before Matthew managed to throw a towel over her and get her into the cage.
Matthew and Bianca are now sleeping off the trauma of the past few hours while I am writing this and trying to think what I should cook for the Brossies when they get back from Amsterdam tomorrow night.
To be continued tomorrow when preparations are made for Pierce’s 46th birthday bash and I begin to feel that something is going on and it’s not good.
Liked that better! More content and getting to know the characters. Glad the hamster survived!
Cannot wait for tomorrow – i have become addicted to this – will have to rush back home from college