Doublings
1
He knew he wasn’t quite as good-looking as the film star, but also knew that when someone would make a passing comment about how he resembled him, he took it as a compliment, of course, and on occasion as an opportunity. He supposed there were women he slept with who did so as a drunken tease: in the dark and from an inebriated perspective, they were sleeping with a celebrity. But he told me that he never quite took such assignations seriously, and believed none of the people who slept with him did so either. Certainly, no one woke up next to him and was surprised the sheets weren’t silk, that the apartment didn’t have several bedrooms, and there was no cook waiting to make them breakfast.
He enjoyed his twenties being himself, and thinking little about the presence of this star except as a useful way to augment his own love life. Yet, in his thirties, the star became more famous, and the remarks about how similar they looked became more frequent. When he turned thirty, he had also become fed up doing casual jobs, usually waiting or bar work, and when somebody said he could earn far more as a lookalike, he couldn’t find a good enough reason to turn the work down. There may have been a very good reason for saying no, but it would take him several years to realise this.
Brian owned a quirky cafe here in Glasgow and, though I’d been in several times, I never directly made the connection between him and the star. This might have seemed a little odd, I suppose, given how film-themed the cafe happened to be. Instead, I believed he was somebody I must have known but couldn’t recall. I assumed he was someone from school, a person whose looks change and often for the better, yet isn’t quite recognisable. When I said to him, about the fourth time I went to the cafe, that I believed I might know him from somewhere, he sighed. Yet, when I added, I was sure he was a person from my primary or secondary school; he grinned. He said if only far more people would claim they vaguely recognised him from life rather than from the screen, he might have dodged a few years of misery.
2
He didn’t say much more that day, but as I made it my regular place for a morning coffee, we became acquainted, and I eventually asked him to say more about how celebrity caused so much unhappiness.
Brian said the unhappiness took quite a while to manifest itself, but he supposed he should say a bit about its original cause, adding that he contacted an agency when he was living in London that found employment for lookalikes. He said that sometimes it was a bit like a stand-in or a body double, but rather than a rough likeness demanded for a shoot, this required both a higher degree of physical similarity and, at the same time, a clear recognition that this wasn’t the star themselves. He had always loved cinema, liked nothing more than losing himself in a story, and feeling he could identify with a given character on screen. He liked the variety of roles he could imagine himself performing as an action star, a western hero, a puzzled figure in a sci-fi, a person watching it all go wrong in a gangster film. He felt this most strikingly as a child, but still felt it as an adult. It assuaged him, thinking of the many lives he had in him as he watched stories being played out on the screen. After signing up with the agency, he bought himself four clothes options, two based on items he had seen the star wear at premieres, two based on a film series he had been in. One was a light grey suit the actor had worn in a film series, with an open-neck white shirt. The other was a dinner suit the actor had worn at the Oscars, complete with a white shirt and bow-tie. The other costume options he purchased were a red leather jacket, red-tinted sunglasses, a shirt mainly of red and purple, with checked trousers. His final costume was a navy blue blazer, faded jeans and a light blue T-shirt. The only attire he would generally wear himself.
He would often wear the more casual attire for hen nights and film screenings, where people occasionally with more money than sense would invite him along to introduce a screening of one of the two or three of the actor’s best-known films, and they would ask him to introduce and talk about it after the screening. They would have hired the cinema, invited friends, spent hundreds of pounds on the evening, and Brian spoke about the film afterwards, often with the host, about what it was like working with the director and the other stars. For the Q and A, he spent hours researching materials, reading and watching interviews with the actor, and watching everything on the DVD extras. He supposed on such occasions he was as much a critic as he was a doppelganger, and enjoyed mastering the material as an actor would be expected to master a script. In such moments, he wanted to prove he was more than a pretty face, he joked, adding that, above all else, he wanted to avoid getting egg on that mug of his as he tried to stay in character and remember more details of the production than he suspected the actor or director could recall so long after making the film.
He said that, in the first few years, he took great pride in his job, but at the same time, he became increasingly aware that it was one without much dignity. He was sure that, often as people would meet him, there was a vague feeling of disappointment. This took various forms, including that he was plainer than they expected, didn’t look enough like the star he claimed to resemble, or that the youthfulness of the star that they knew from some films he’d been in a decade earlier wasn’t matched by the lines on Brian’s own face. He reckoned those lines were increasingly on the actor’s as well, but that wasn’t what they were getting to see. They were viewing the film on screen and him in person, and he couldn’t help but disappoint. He obviously wondered if the same happened to the star – he would turn up to an event, and fans saw an older version than they expected. But at least the actor was the actor, and was rich and adulated. He was poor and tolerated, a stand-in because even those daft enough to spend their money on hiring a cinema and him couldn’t have afforded to invite the actor himself. Given the choice between Brian and the star, who was going to pick Brian?
He believed that increasingly there were rich people paying to have the very stars themselves turning up for birthdays, weddings and anniversaries, and he’d read recently of the wealthy spending millions on making sure that a favourite singer would perform for their child’s eighteenth birthday. That combination of being the star and also possessing a specific talent needn’t have left them feeling humiliated, even if they had been bought. Doing a gig for fifty thousand paying customers, though the tickets may have cost hundreds of pounds, was at least democratic adulation. To perform for one person chiefly and be paid a million was more aristocratic laudation, but oddly could be seen as more equal. Both the star and the rich person were figures of immense success, and if the latter could buy the former, they were also probably equally well-regarded in their field.
When Brian proposed that some people have more money than sense, he thought it so partly because they didn’t have that much money, yet there they were trying to gain a bit of credence by hiring him. It seemed often an impoverished encounter, and a charade, even if initially it was more a ruse and a gag on the notion of luxury. In those first couple of years, as he would sometimes go to a bar after the event, still wearing his costume, people looked at him surreptitiously and occasionally asked if he was who they thought he was. He always said no, and sometimes those asking were easily convinced that he couldn’t be. But this was less, they said, because he didn’t look at all like him, but the absence of an entourage indicated he was merely a lookalike. Initially, he took it well and could laugh about hiring half a dozen bodyguards to add to the impression he was who he wasn’t. But by the time he gave up impersonating the star, he took the absence of that entourage as a sign of his loneliness and failure.
3
I asked him if this was a slow realisation or if anything instigated it. He said yes, one thing in particular created this awareness, and he should have stopped working in the field after it.
Occasionally, he worked with other star impersonators, with lookalike actors who were seen to have on-screen chemistry with the star. Often, these were two or three male actors the star had worked with several times, as he was well-known for his on-screen buddy-buddy roles, and also for his off-screen male friendships. With only one or two women did he share a similar on-screen chemistry, and it was one of these star lookalikes that Brian found himself working alongside at a private screening of the films they made together.
The screenings were part of a weekend wedding celebration on a small Scottish Island, and the employer on this occasion may just about have had enough money to hire the stars themselves. While Brian made his way by train, going from London to Glasgow, and from Glasgow to the coast, where he took a ferry across to the island, some of the more prestigious guests arrived by helicopter, which landed on the regal lawn, took off again and returned a couple of hours later, decanting more special people onto the lawn. The events started on Friday evening and continued till Monday morning, and he was involved in two of them that required him to stay for the full period: a screening on Friday, and another on Sunday night. They were the two films the actor made with this particular actress, and both were romantic comedies, though Brian never thought the actor had much of a sense of humour, and was also always better suited to shooting people than to kissing them. But romantic comedies they were deemed to be, and it seemed the bride and groom had their first date watching the earlier film and, after the second, an unofficial sequel, he supposed, the groom proposed to the bride. These films mattered a lot to this couple, though they mattered little to Brian, and he regarded them as amongst the star’s worst films, reckoning they only made money not because of any great on-screen chemistry between the stars, but because they were both at the peek of their careers. The films came out within two years of each other. Had they been a decade apart, that would have made for a very long engagement indeed.
4
He did wonder whether, since he was supposed to be impersonating a major star, they could have flown Brian up as well, especially when he saw the state of some of the dishevelled guests, people who looked like they had money to burn, but dressed as if they’d have been better off putting the clothes on a bonfire. He knew that they would dress up properly the next day, but it also occurred to him that there was a certain social class in Britain that didn’t quite know what to do with themselves outside special events. They could wear attire for weddings, OBE award ceremonies and horse-racing days, but had no idea what to wear beyond them, as he saw clashing colours and outfits too baggy or too tight. He noticed this when, at six O’clock, and only an hour before the screening, Dana arrived, casually attired but impeccably dressed, as he recognised the items from an interview the two stars did together promoting the first film. That was one of the things he liked about the star he impersonated, and he realised that he liked this in the co-star as well. Both balanced well a fashion sense that was timely and timeless simultaneously: they weren’t victims of fashion, but consistently their masters. He supposed this was partly why Brian’s appearances at various events never had a comedic assumption behind them. It wasn’t just that the actor was hardly a deft comedian – he was also someone whose style didn’t invite mockery. Some did, as he thought of Elvis impersonators, who were often expected to imitate the music legend at his most absurd.
As they chatted for a few minutes while they were both dressed in gear that was informal but imitative, she asked if he thought she should change into something else. She had quite a few options in her capacious suitcase that she admitted had been consistently carried by others, when she gave them half a chance, on the various trains she had taken from Bristol, where she lived. Brian said he only had four and would wear one for each day he was there. Part of the contract they signed stipulated that at no time, over the four days, would they be allowed to wear attire that wasn’t consistent with the stars’ clothing. They were to be in character, at least physically, at all times. Another stipulation was that if anyone addressed them as the star, they would respond as if they were. Brian said to me this was probably his most difficult gig, and certainly his longest. Most of the time, he would appear for two or three hours; occasionally a day. But there he was acting the part for a long weekend, and he wondered if this was all part of the confusion, and one of the reasons why Dana and he fell in love with each other.
5
The guests were scattered around properties near the house, and Dana and Brian were in a cottage a couple of hundred metres away. There were two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a small lounge, and of course Brian wondered whether this aided the rapid intimacy they shared. Sleeping with someone before you know the person, that is one thing, but sleeping and living with a person you don’t know, all the while as you are performing as another person altogether, was an odd combination indeed. That combo can play with your head, he announced. I didn’t doubt it.
Nothing happened that first evening. After Brian initially accompanied Dana back to the chalet after meeting her at the main house, he took a prompt shower and changed back into the clothes he was wearing before it, and Dana did the same, except he assumed a change of underwear. It was a thought he admitted created in him a hint of arousal, and he wasn’t sure if this was because of the simple notion of the sexualisation of undies generally, or if it was erotic, since this was the one aspect of clothing that she could call her own, just as his boxers were his choice too. He thought about stars who were famous for advertising various brands of undergarments, and he supposed that when the person appeared in public, they would strip down to their pants or at least be aware of their possible exposure. He thought of one model famous for a particular brand and supposed his lookalike’s image could be ruined by wearing Calvin Klein, when it should be Dolce and Gabbana.
Once ready, they carried back on over to the house, met someone from the wedding committee, and were shown the cinema room where they would be introduced before the film started, saying only a few words, and would return later to discuss aspects of the production, while of course performing their roles as the stars.
People started to drift in ten minutes before the film began, and when the forty seats were full, Brian and Dana said a few words about it, added they would be back at the end, and exited the cinema as the credits began. They took a drink at the main bar, and both agreed that they should stay in character until the film finished, so that they could all the better convince the guests when they returned. Brian asked Dana what she liked best about the production, and she said it was so exciting to spend eight weeks working with a dedicated group of people on a location that was so exotic.
The film was shot mainly in a coastal Argentinean town, with the actor playing a recovering drunk who lost a buddy when they were working on a case. The case was indeed a case: after the friend was killed, he left a note explaining where the central character could find a case with five million dollars in it. The drug dealers who stored it in a Mexican bus station locker were lying dead near the buddy’s dying body, and before he himself passed away, saying where the star could find it, and added he would find the key in the pocket of one of these dead dealers. The star could have handed it in to the police, but the film makes clear the police force is corrupt, that they might even have been in cahoots with the dealers, and at the very least didn’t provide backup when the buddy needed it, with the star finding out too late to save his life. All this was conveyed in a twelve-minute opening sequence before the credits, and I watched the film after Brian talked about it. The information is slickly and clearly presented as the star picks up the cash from the bus station and continues down to Argentina on various rickety buses. The film properly starts when six months later the female lead arrives in the town, and a developing romance combines with other tensions as the star believes she may be working for the cops or the gangsters to recoup the money.
6
At the bar, while the film was screening, they swapped stories in character, discussing the size of their mosquito bites and how the makeup team joked that they should be paid overtime as they dabbed patches of skin with flesh-covered concealer. The mosquito repellent wasn’t working, and the assistant cinematographer announced he could lend them some citronella – he had taken with him a dozen small bottles of the essential oil, and they mixed them with olive oil, and that was that. As long as they applied it diligently, the mosquitoes stayed away. Some might say they were amongst the most desirable stars in the world, but not anymore. The mosquitoes were repelled. Dana asked Brian if they were the most attractive movie stars, and it had the frisson of the most direct of statements and the most objective of claims, as though she was asking simultaneously, are they so desirable, and are we so desirable? Brian wondered if they were breaking character and offering advances, making sexual claims on each other, rather than claims about the stars’ beauty. Flirtation, Brian supposed, is often about creating a world of suggestive intimacy, but there they were already in that suggestiveness and getting paid to convey it at a random couple’s wedding. When they returned to the screening, as the film ended, the guests may have noticed that there was more chemistry in the room than they might have found had the actual stars been there.
Brian and Dana talked for an hour, and could have spoken for far longer, recalling so many details from their research that they didn’t doubt the stars themselves had probably half-forgotten. At the end, the audience clapped, and Brian and Dana weren’t sure whether they were clapping because they were playing the audience who were applauding the stars, or if the audience was clapping over Brian and Dana’s performance as them.
Afterwards, at the bar, people kept asking them questions, and it wasn’t until after midnight that they went up to their rooms, giddy and exhausted, excited and frayed. The giddy excitement alone would have probably led them to sleep together that night, but Brian knew that what he wanted to do was fall into drowsy rest and think about the evening, and look forward to seeing Dana the next day. He believed Dana felt the same. As they hugged and then went into their respective bedrooms, there seemed to be no sense that he had rejected her, and no sense she had rejected him.
7
Brian woke from a six-hour sleep that was deep enough for him to feel he had slept for ten, and having heard there was a swimming pool in the hotel, traipsed over to the building in his flip flops that doubled up as slippers, carrying a towel, and wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He asked at reception if it was true there was a swimming pool in the basement, and would it be okay to use it. They said, of course, and, as he arrived, putting his towel on a lounger, took off his T-shirt and stepped out of his flip-flops, he saw Dana already there, doing lengths in the 15-metre swimming pool. She was the only one in the water, and he recalled that the star had said in interviews she would swim every morning at the pool in the home she was in (Los Angeles, New York or the South of France), or at the hotel where she was staying. If she were by the sea (as they were when shooting the film Dana and Brian discussed), she would swim there. He wondered as he watched her if this was Dana in character, swimming while she was here for the weekend, if she stayed in character generally and swam every day, or if this was part of her character. He realised too that he was at that moment acting out of character. The star never much liked swimming, and while they were making the two films together, she would swim in the morning, and he would go for a run. Brian liked swimming and tolerated running, often doing the latter when he didn’t have access to a swimming pool. But he did wonder whether he should flip-flop back to the apartment, put on a pair of running shoes he took with him, and be seen by the guests jogging around the grounds.
However, he was there now and, as he joined her, she offered a complicit smile, a look that suggested he wasn’t getting into the water but getting under the sheets. As she proved the stronger swimmer, he assumed this was as much part of her exercise routine as it was the star’s, and they chatted about this over breakfast, which they took in the main hotel with most of the guests, even though the cottage was equipped with basic breakfast items and had a kettle, a toaster and so on.
He asked her about the swimming. She said she was relieved she looked like a star whose exercise routines were similar to hers, and strict but not especially so. Can you imagine, she proposed, having a face like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and feeling obliged to bulk up to have a matching body? To do otherwise would be to court constant disappointment, and Brian knew there was more than enough as it was, even if you did have a similar physique. As they ate, he wondered, as she had a breakfast of eggs, avocado and sourdough bread, a fruit salad with yoghurt, whether this would be what her star would have in the morning. He didn’t ask her, but knew that as he consumed first a bowl of muesli, then a couple of slices of wholemeal bread, and followed with scrambled eggs, veggie sausages, grilled tomatoes, beans and hash brownies, that he was consuming whatever was available at the buffet. He knew the actor was more given to protein than he was, and probably would have had more eggs and a few rashers of bacon. Brian believed that renege on years of vegetarianism to match the star’s diet was a commitment too far.
8
Later, alone in his room, preparing to get ready for the wedding, while Dana was elsewhere, he saw that Dana’s star did indeed usually have for breakfast after a swim exactly what Dana had. This was a level of duplicative perfectionism he couldn’t help but admire, even if he also found the notion quite frightening. He started to wonder if there are two types of doubles, just as there are usually seen to be two main forms of acting. In the approach he took, you turned up, in costume, and remembered your lines. You went home and were yourself once again. Then there were actors who, for the length of a film shoot, would stay in character week after week. There were also many actors who would find in the character they were playing an equivalent emotion from their own life, so they could play the role more authentically. If someone is playing a character beaten by a parent, they would find in their past a moment when they were mistreated. Would Dana do this? He suspected she might, though he was relieved to note there had been occasions the previous night where she distinguished between the star and herself, when, for example, she talked about looking like a star rather than being one.
He hadn’t previously thought too much about the potential mise en abyme of impersonating a star who was given to pretending to be other people, and not at all to the notion that if stars often insist on getting so inside the role that they rely on their own deepest emotions to play them, and stay in character for weeks at a time, should the impersonator of the star also take their role equally seriously? That day, thinking about it, Brian would have proposed this was nonsense, though he would also have admitted to feeling he was a little insecure next to Dana, who embodied her star so much more than he embodied his, and wondered if the guests would see that he was a half-hearted impersonator who wasn’t quite giving them their money’s worth.
After an hour, Dana still hadn’t returned, and while in other instances he would probably have felt that there he was, the consummate professional, dressed and ready to go, that morning, he instead wondered if he was prematurely prepared, as though turning up on time at a conference, but without a well-researched paper to read. This feeling was exacerbated when Dana did arrive, still casually dressed in the jeans and T-shirt the star had been seen wearing once or twice in paparazzi shots, but with her hair freshly done to resemble, Dana said, the hairstyle she had when nominated for an Oscar. Dana went to her room and grabbed the dress that was a no-doubt less expensive, but remarkably similar one, to the star’s dress that year at the Academy Awards. Brian was impressed and depressed as he asked her who styled her hair. She said that a week earlier she found out who the stylist at the wedding happened to be, and asked if she could slot her in just before the bride or in conjunction with her, and also contacted the bride, saying that she wanted on this woman’s wedding day, to look as much like the star as she could, to make the occasion all the more memorable. Both the stylist and the bride agreed. The stylist worked on both of them that morning, working on Dana’s while the bride’s hair was drying, as Dana thanked her profusely for fitting her in.
Brian could see Dana knew how to get her way, and realised that maybe one reason why he could never quite emulate the star wasn’t only that he couldn’t quite match the looks, but also had no sense of entitlement. Perhaps this was too strong a word to describe Dana, and maybe, too, the stars they were duplicating. But he remembered reading anecdotes about both stars saying they fought for roles early in their careers, believing they were the best person to play them. He discussed playing a famous racing car driver and sent a message to the director, saying that he spent his late teens hoping to be a driver himself, knew everything about the sport, and reckoned, with dyed hair, he could look the part. She said that when she auditioned for a role in an adaptation of a well-known play, she insisted she had played the role at university, was deemed so good in it that national reviewers came to see her performance, and insisted on going five minutes over her allotted time in the film audition as she wished to show just how well she knew and could play the character. They both, he supposed, had chutzpah, and that was what Dana revealed when persuading the stylist to do her hair.
9
These thoughts probably didn’t quite come to him like that on the day, and Brian said to me, as he related them, they no doubt now contained a feeling of despondency, a self-criticism that was at the time masked by what he could only have called elation. As they left the cottage and walked the short distance to the hotel, on a day with no clouds and the lightest of breezes, he believed they made a beautiful couple. No doubt less striking than the stars themselves, but he was confident that nobody else at the wedding would match them in their looks or be so likely to receive attention. He was wearing the only dinner suit he owned, the Oscar one, but it had been dry-cleaned days earlier, and his shirt was new and his shoes carefully polished. He might not have looked a million dollars, but at least worth a hundred thousand. As a monetary contribution, Dana added much to their value by looking like a million-plus in a red dress and matching shoes, with a white scarf and hat. In other circumstances, guests might have thought that her attire was slightly out of place, a little too flamboyant and self-aggrandising when the bride was meant to be the focal point. And yet he and Dana were stand-ins hired to stand out, and nobody could argue that Dana’s dress wouldn’t do that.
As they were about to enter the main building, Dana pinched Brian lightly on the arm and, in a whisper that sounded romantic but was undeniably professional, said: ‘let’s stay in character.’ He suspected Dana needed to say that partly because she was nervous, and the best way to quell it was to pretend it wasn’t her but the star who was walking into a room of more than a hundred people. He suspected he was less nervous as himself, but whatever nerves he did feel couldn’t be countered by believing he was the star. He always knew it was him pretending, and liked it best when there was an ironic acceptance that he was an imposter whom they took seriously enough to play along, but never seriously enough to lose that quizzical look that suggested the whole thing was amusing, though never ridiculous.
So there they were in the main hall, preparing to proceed to the chapel, with the wedding photographer with his long lens snapping moments into longevity, and others on their mobile phones taking photos that Brian supposed they would show a few friends and then delete when they found themselves running out of storage. Did he think such thoughts on the day, or was this retrospective modesty the comedown that reflection often demands when recalling the blissful when the bliss had long since passed?
The chapel stunned with its echo and gave the occasion a magnitude no registrar’s office could match. He always believed that God’s existence was in his physical absence, manifested as acoustical presence. He didn’t know if there was a God, but if there was, he knew it wasn’t in the rantings and ravings of preachers and politicians, but in the sound of a dropped button, a gentle sob, an inhaled breath, a brush of material against a pew. He and Dana stood at the back, accepting that at least for the next hour, the bride should receive not only the priest’s attention. She looked pretty with the effort of makeup and a dutiful hairdresser, but this was a plain woman who would never look better than on this, her wedding day. Her fiance, morphing into her husband as the ring was placed on her finger, had a young face with an older man’s hairline, and the combination made him look oddly younger than his years. The bride was ready to marry, but was the man she was marrying? He would grow into the role he supposed, as his hair would not. Standing there, Brian wondered what he would do if he were to start to lose his locks. It might then be the moment to hang up his Hollywood tux, and retreat back into himself, or he could disappear to Turkey for a hair transplant or purchase a wig, as he wondered if the star had done one or the other. The star was potentially in a battle not just with ageing but his own image, as the figure could potentially become a collapsed star, a diminished, ruined version of himself, aware that each appearance at a film premiere, or award ceremony, might be met by looks of silent bewilderment, a disappointment so great that words couldn’t describe it, even if politeness were abandoned. The actor was fourteen years older than Brian, and still looked great, but how would he look in fourteen years' time, as Brian idly thought that, if he wanted a long-term career in the lookalike business, maybe he should have been blessed with looks that resembled a star who did indeed lose them. Then he could comfortably prepare for a life of ease, with no rigorous exercise routine or carefully balanced diet. But he also wondered if, by masquerading as a star who insisted on such self-maintenance, he was also able to share that discipline without feeling obliged to do it unilaterally.
10
Though the father’s bride had asked them to stay in character all day, Brian also suspected that he didn’t want Brian or Dana to outshine the bride and the bridegroom. A difficulty perhaps given that stars shine and that is what they were supposed to do, but of course, many a celebrity plays reluctant when it suits them, and Brian had given this some thought. Yet he was also pretending to be someone who did seem to have that side to their character. He was rarely flamboyant, and at the various premieres and awards, he always walked into a room as if a little surprised to see well-wishers, fans and photographers. In contrast. Dana’s star rarely accepted the attention reluctantly; she hogged it, insistently absorbing as much of the limelight as she could, even if it meant leaving other celebrities in the adulatory dark. And so it was at the wedding, with Dana dancing more vivaciously than anyone else, getting photographed more than anyone else, and receiving more flattery than anyone else. Almost everybody was happy, feeling they were in the presence of stars, and Brian was happy as well, because his reluctance to play up his stardom was as in keeping with his own character as the star’s. While Dana was for much of the evening on the dance floor, he was often seated at a table or standing at the bar, as people came over and spoke to him often reverently, sometimes ironically, but always respected that he was in character.
However, he suspected two people weren’t happy: the bride and her father. Dana’s red dress held everybody’s attention, while the bride’s white gown had become a cumbersome accoutrement. Maybe what made it worse was that Dana held people’s attention effortlessly. To have allowed the bride to become the centre of attention would have meant leaving the venue altogether, and it was as though simply by being there, Dana’s appeal kept increasing exponentially: one person wanted a photograph, and then two came up and then four. Someone asked her to dance, and then several others waited for the opportunity. The bride had become a bystander at her own wedding, and on a couple of occasions, earlier in the evening, Brian noted a sympathetic look on the father’s face as he looked across at his forlorn daughter. The daughter looked back as if close to tears. Later on, he saw another exchange: the father’s face dark with anger and irritation, and the bride’s one of exasperated ordinariness. Before the night ended, the bride, the groom and the father were gone, the couple hopefully making the most of their wedding night in the executive suite, and the father perhaps tallying up the cost of this humiliation for his daughter.
It was as though nobody noticed the bride and groom’s absence, had forgotten why they were all gathered there, as Dana went up to the band after they announced there would be one final song, and took the mic. She said she would like the final dance to be with her fellow star, a man, she said, who prefers the shadows to the light, and would someone please turn the lights down low for this final number.
The song was a slow ballad, better than most and longer than many, and Brian joined Dana at the centre of the stage as others initially looked on, before couples slowly started forming around them.
11
They didn’t kiss while they danced, but Brian felt an intimacy he hadn’t for a long time, and he didn’t know if he and Dana didn’t kiss because it would have been scandalous for them to do so, as Brian and Dana, or as the stars, with a kiss tantamount to a scandal. Brian and Dana may have seen single, but the stars were not, and to kiss would have been either to break character or somehow risk ruining the stars’ reputation, even if it had been for one night. Yet after that song, after they were given an enormous round of applause any bride and groom would appreciate, they retreated back to the cottage, and found themselves kissing hungrily at the door, fumbling for keys, while fumbling around, both laughing as lust commingled with practicality.
That night, he didn’t know if she was still in character and the sex was an illicit encounter, or that it was just two single people with no obligations to each other or others, who were away from home, had a great evening as if at a conference or a festival, and just wanted to fornicate. Though Brian went out with Dana for three years after this, he perhaps never quite found an answer to this question. He never quite knew if he was with Dana or living out a fantasy that was Dana, as her star, while compelling Brian to be his.
Though the next morning they were meant to meet the father to receive a cheque and say goodbye, reception said he and his family had left the island earlier that morning. The manager would meet them shortly in the waiting lounge.
The manager was more forthcoming than was probably professionally acceptable, but he said that while the father wasn’t so happy with how the evening went, it was clear many of the guests had a wonderful time. As he handed them the cheque, he said numerous guests had asked him for Dana and Brian’s details, and while the manager suspected few would hire them for a wedding, many would hire them for screenings and parties. The manager didn’t quite say Brian and Dana had ruined the couple’s special day, but he did note that they managed to make many people’s day special. But then, he added, it wasn’t their wedding day. As he handed over the cheque, Brian noticed it was a few hundred pounds more than they’d agreed. He assumed the father, feeling churlish, didn’t want to be mean, and yet Brian felt the man’s generosity was a form of contempt. Dana didn’t seem to see it that way at all and said that the pair of them had put on quite a show. ‘You put on quite a show,’ Brian insisted, realising his tone probably wasn’t that different from the manager’s or the father’s. Yet it also contained admiration, and so it wasn’t surprising that after this wedding, they were often hired together, initially by people who were there that weekend, but over the next three years by numerous others as well.
12
This was precisely the length of their relationship, and they broke up when Dana went off with another lookalike after a wedding in the south of France. When the client approached her, she said she usually worked on her own or with her boyfriend, and mentioned the star he resembled, No, the client insisted, we want you to come with this other lookalike, insisting that the one film she made with this actor was her best, and the one in which she shared more chemistry than with any other actor. She asked Brian what he thought, and Brian agreed, partly to hide the jealousy that saying she shouldn’t do it would have revealed, but also out of exhaustion. People often say a relationship has run its course, yet he saw it less as a stale idiom and more as an image in his mind: he felt he had run many laps, trying to keep up with someone who was probably at least as ambitious as the star herself. Dana almost never turned down an opportunity for work, while the reason he initially liked working as a doppelganger was that he could be paid more than he had been paid employed in a bar, and could subsequently work for far fewer hours. He did the research he needed to convince, within the assumption that anybody employing him knew he wasn’t the real deal, and the deal was thus an ironic contract. It was one where everyone knew this was a ruse.
Dana didn’t see it that way, and knew everything about her star, and could, without difficulty, have written her star’s biography, and correct those who had. She watched many times online interviews with the star, and wouldn’t just read articles and interviews, but reread them, trying to read often in between the lines of what the star was saying to bring out a hidden aspect of her personality. By the end of their three years together, Brian said she rarely left the flat as herself, admitting that when doing so, it was as if going out naked. When they would make love, she increasingly insisted that he remain in character during the act.
He reckoned eventually Dana would have a breakdown, something would happen, revealing to her that she was living an impoverished version of the star’s life, but Brian believed he was going to have one first if he didn’t extricate himself from the situation. His sense of imminent collapse rested on his inability to believe he was the star, while increasingly feeling he wasn’t quite himself either.
13
Those years with Dana were he admitted mostly exhilarating, as long as he didn’t think too much about life and only of living. I proposed that was an interesting distinction, as he admitted he wasn’t one for ideas most of the time, but sometimes you need to sort out what matters, and sometimes these types of distinctions philosophers spend their time thinking about, he would think about for a while, only once. Living was doing two or three gigs a week, travelling all over the UK, and often other parts of Europe, occasionally other parts of the world. It meant keeping up with Dana’s ambitions and enjoying a sex life that he never quite believed was his own. It meant unwinding with alcohol and occasionally a line of cocaine, an MDMA tab, and often a toke. He never took any drugs before meeting Dana; alcohol was his poison, and never in quantities that needed to turn it into one. He didn’t worry about his liver.
But during those three years, he probably did more damage to his health than in the previous dozen, and it was a couple of months before Dana went off to the South of France that an itchy skin rash developed on the inside of his thighs and behind his knees. He bought some cream that alleviated the problem, but didn’t quite eradicate it. Over the next few months, after Dana returned from the South of France, Dana did more gigs with this other star impersonator than with him, and while he suspected an affair, he never asked. He was too concerned by the rash that the cream was no longer alleviating, and, instead, the rash was spreading, including to his face. He needed another cream for that: a concealer initially worked, but when the rash became so severe that it became raised and raw, the concealer both aggravated the skin problem and failed to conceal it. He could no longer pass himself off as the star whose skin always looked unblemished, unless he turned up in character for one role where the actor played a fireman who suffered second-degree burns, and even that was for only twenty minutes. That might have been niche, he supposed – playing the star as he was in one film for about a fifth of its running time. He could only have made so much money from fireman’s balls. He said to his agent he was taking time off, had a few thousand pounds in savings, but he also took a job where he wouldn’t be in the public eye, seeing only a few fellow work colleagues as he worked as a shelf-stacker in a nearby supermarket.
14
It was then that Dana told him she was seeing the other star lookalike, and asked him to move out of the flat. He was technically homeless, but he more than a decade earlier had put his name down on a council house list, and the combination of the points he had accumulated, the skin rash that left the housing officer mildly perturbed when she saw, him, and the homelessness he expressed when he said he had less than a month to find alternative accommodation, meant that he secured a one-bedroom place in Southgate. It was only a few stops from the place he shared with Dana in Finsbury Park, but over five miles away. He always liked walking rather than getting the metro, and would often walk the three miles into the centre from his old flat. He supposed he could have taken a job in a supermarket in Southgate, but he liked his nocturnal colleagues, and so bought a bike and cycled there and back. He also saw a doctor about the skin disorder, and they suggested that they reckoned it was a problem of stress, diet and poor sleep patterns. She gave him a steroid cream that would clear it up, and suspected that if he changed some things in his life, it might not come back. Indeed, it didn’t, and for the next couple of years, he believed he was as happy as he’d ever been before.
Yet while he may have taken the shelf-stacking night job as a way of escaping the eyes of others on his rash, he realised too that he quite liked the absence of eyes upon him, even when he was no longer embarrassed about how he looked. It was as though he needed to cleanse himself of a scrutiny he had invited, and that he recognised had become alienating, exacerbated, he didn’t doubt, by his relationship with Dana. He didn’t wish to blame her, he insisted, though he had been angered by her cheating, and increasingly, while they were together, dismayed by her absorption into her star’s existence. But within six months of their parting, he looked back far more with relief than anger, and while they weren’t in contact for several years, about nine months ago, she contacted him.
She talked about a difficult year, as she entered her mid-thirties and wondered if she wanted her life back. The star had started getting procedures, and Dana knew that if she wished to continue in the business, she too would probably be expected to get them as well, certainly if she wished to maintain an ongoing lookalike status. She joked in the long email she sent that perhaps she could claim she was a lookalike during a period of the star’s life. She would cover a series of films, but nothing more recently. But that seemed the sort of nitpicking her agent wouldn’t tolerate, and so she fretted for three months over getting a procedure, and instead chose to give up her career. She was retraining as a beautician, and wanted to start an online blog called Being Yourself, helping women resist the lure of the surgeon and an agent’s siren call, believing few people were better placed than she was to warn of the dangers of not being oneself. Brian said he and Dana then exchanged a flurry of emails over a few weeks, which then petered out. Did she have that breakdown, I asked. He suspected she would have if she’d had that surgery, but though he couldn’t say whether those three months where she fretted led to a mild crisis or a major one, he was sure she’d be okay. They had both escaped from destroying their sense of self when dissolving themselves in another’s personality.
15
He stayed in the supermarket job for two years, and left after a long weekend in the city where he now found himself. It was a colleague from work’s stag party, and Brian had never been to the city before, and only to Scotland on one prior occasion: the wedding on the island. He said it was a country where many people seemed to be themselves, and far more than in London. He might have assumed this was just a turn of phrase, but like Dana, he believed he had become an expert on questions of selfhood, and wanted to live somewhere he reckoned he could be his own man. In his mind, he conflated this notion with no longer mimicking the star, but also with an awareness that he wanted to become his own boss. After returning to London, he looked into transferring to a council flat here and into a business loan after he saw that a space was for rent in the Scottish city. He thought he might open his own cafe. He had thirty thousand in savings and could secure a loan. He managed to transfer without much difficulty. Within six months of that stag party, he had moved north, renovated what had previously been an optician's, and there he was running his own establishment.
I knew these details already but before hadn’t before had the context for them, had never before understood why he had decorated the cafe the way he had, and could now comprehend also a detail I am sure I would never have noticed if he hadn’t told me the story of his life, or perhaps even more, the story of somebody else’s. I’d always assumed the cafe was decorated with posters of various films and photographs of numerous film stars, because it was across from an art house cinema, and I would often see customers exiting and crossing the road to the movie house, or making the reverse journey. The cinema’s cafe bar was a little like a hotel foyer: a place to sit for twenty minutes with a quick coffee or drink before going into the cinema, and on the few occasions I’d been, that is exactly what I had done, and noticed many would order their hot or cold beverage in a plastic cup and take it into the screening. It made sense that those who wanted to chew over what they had watched would pop across the road afterwards, and as Brian’s place didn’t close till 1 in the morning, this was the cinema’s default cafe.
Yet he said he would have designed the cafe the way he did even if it had been in another part of the city, though he didn’t doubt much of its success rested on the fortuitousness of finding a venue opposite the cinema. That has proved good for business, but what proved so good for his mind was reminding himself that his love of movies was based on being immersed in the lives of different people and different places for several years, while he instead had immersed himself in the personality of only one. He then exacerbated the problem by going out with someone far more absorbed by her star than he was in his. The cafe was a daily reminder that cinema was much more than suffocating self-absorption. He loved hearing people discuss numerous films, instead of him endlessly discussing a handful all starring the one personality.
When I first said I couldn’t initially place him, believing I must have known him from many years ago and probably from school, maybe I’d have found him less difficult to place had I merely looked around the walls and seen amongst those many faces from Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s, through to recent years, from European cinema in the 60s, from world cinema too, the face of the star he did indeed resemble. But it wouldn’t have helped because I realised this face wasn’t to be found, nor was the face of the star out of whom Dana made her living. Two of the biggest stars of the last twenty years were conspicuous by their absence, but I am not so sure others would have felt that absence. Yet in it, I could now sense Brian’s presence, and while I didn’t doubt he would still get the occasional comment about how he resembled the star, how could he have reasserted himself as his own man were this actor constantly looking down on him from the walls, with people looking from his image to Brian and remarking on the likeness? Many of us accept our mediocrity, but that doesn’t mean we should forgo our individuality, our unique place in the world. Brian may have believed he had escaped that mediocrity as he would have responded to the modest adulation of people at weddings, parties and screenings, all the while losing that uniqueness. It seemed he had it back, and the numerous figures crowding the walls, and the hum of chat I would often hear in the cafe, returned him to that sense of self. Most of us would struggle with the question of who we are, but Brian, more than most, could reply, saying that he knew who he was not.
© Tony McKibbin