"My Dinner With Herve" (2018)

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live and God, I've done a whole week of these without interruption. That's great. You'll notice in the background the yoga mat on the portable yoga board. We just got finished Tanadariv and I just got finished doing yoga together. That's a ritual that we really enjoy. And heading into the weekend now, so what I wanted to do was to talk about. It's the same thing. It's like, you know, what is what I'm writing about that day and what I'm talking about are going to mirror each other. I think, you know, we'll see how that goes. I'm looking to find some kind of way to communicate with you more smoothly and efficiently over time today. So we're going to talk about My Dinner With Herve. It's an HBO film produced by and starring the amazing Peter Dinklage playing Herve Duplaine, Des Plaine Villaches and Jamie Dorman as Danny Tate. It's an amazing companion piece to Becoming Bond, the documentary about George Lazenby that I just talked about a few days ago. It's almost spooky how much connection there is between these movies. First of all, My Dinner with Herve is terrific and funny and heartbreaking. De Lache, if you don't remember, became the most famous dwarf in the world and then blew it all. Just blew his entire life up. The story of his interview by Tate, standing in for writer Sasha Gervasi, to whom much of this actually happened, is devastating if you surrender to the cosmic absurdity of the entire piece. The real Villaches was in terrible physical pain much of his life, apparently all of his organs, despite the fact that he was only 3 foot 11. All of his organs were normal sized, as he rather saucily tells us at one body point in the in the story. And the pain of those organs crowding that tiny little body was horrible. But the filmmakers chose to minimalize the physical, physical pain and focus on the psychic, the emotional, the existential, as it were. And I think that was a damned fine decision. And it really finds its groove going there because it becomes universal in that sense. His life story is teased out over an extended night with a disgraced English journalist sent to America to interview Gore Vidal and incidentally, do a 500 word piece on this funny little man, Herve Villaches. But the two of these two men, sort of hanging on to different ends of the same existential rope, find an unexpected Bond. Herve's existential journey is pretty well known by the public. He was Born with extreme dwarfism in France and subjected to horrific bullying, the sensitive child took solace in the arts and became something of a prodigy, actually. This gave him a taste for fame and acceptance, especially by normal sized women, and sparked a hunger for success that led him to America, where he learned to watch English by watching television. His eventual casting, his knick knack in the man with the Golden Gun was, according to co star Christopher Lee, probably the happiest time in his life. Opportunity did not come knocking again for several years, but eventually a homeless Villaches was given the chance to to play the character tattoo in Fantasy island. And that changed his life completely. And here, as with George Lazenby and Honor Majesty's Secret Service, something went very, very wrong. The detailing of what went wrong is brilliant and unsettling and as I said, heartbreaking. I'll leave the details of that to those ready to actually watch the movie. But it reminds me of the way other marginalized peoples have dealt with unusual opportunity, unusual success when they find themselves in a new world without allies, without allies who genuinely love and care for them, or without people they can believe genuinely actually love and care for them. In the end, there isn't much difference. If you don't believe it, they aren't there. Emotional. There's a scene in the movie where this proud, talented, funny little man, sad little man, is making a few dollars the only way he can, being the professional laughingstock at a trade show. He's wearing his Fantasy island tuxedo and he's carried aloft by a pair of showgirls. And then he's fawned over by a laughing, drunken crowd in a scene which is terrifying once you consider how vulnerable that little man was, the expression on his face. And as he tries to play his role, simultaneously frightened for his physical safety and chagrined at the depths that he has fallen to. It's just shattering. It's beautifully played, beautifully played. And later that night, crying and shaking, he pours lighter fluid on his tuxedo, that beautiful white tuxedo. And while his adoring, full sized girlfriend watches in horror, he sets fire to it. When we dig in deeply, what we have is a human being who just wants that love and acceptance we all want that support of a nurturing tribe. And he found that all he had to do to get it was debase himself, become a laughingstock in the emotional pain of realizing they didn't want him. They wanted a simplified, cartoonish simulacrum and he couldn't play that role anymore. Once, long, long ago, Uhura Nichelle Nichols, who apparently lived up the street from me, by the way, when I was a kid, up on the hill where the rich people live and I never even knew it. Nichelle Nichols and I spent an evening together and she gave me a piece of advice I've never forgotten, more or less. She said, the crowd doesn't really want to know who you are. Your pains and disappointments and flaws are not a concern to them. What you have to give them is a simplified version of yourself, something shiny and attention catching. Then they can love you and be inspired by you without being burdened by the actual pain of your existence. I remember that comment and I created a public image of myself that I called the Stevie Simulacrum. Sort of a homunculus that wasn't terribly different from the person that I really am, but simpler, smaller, something that people could know at a convention. Because I created it consciously. It wasn't a lie. It didn't debase me to play that role. But what happens when that public Persona is not you, when the role you play is damaging to your heart? You know that if they knew who I really was, they would not like me, they would reject me. It's a fairly common sense that famous people who've been on self destructive paths have demonstrated. And when they try to fill that gap between the public image and their private Persona, they try to fill it with smiles and laughter and alcohol and drugs and food and meaningless sex and toys. Lots and lots and lots of toys. Anybody thinking about the ancient child here with all the toys we see these people buying? What they needed all along was to either be themselves or play a public role that they put aside when they're in private with family and closest friends. You know you need someplace to put the mask down. Herve had nowhere. And that ultimately unmade him. George Lazenby, the one time 007, couldn't handle it either. He walked away. But unlike Herve, George could find a happy life with love and success and respect a dozen different ways. Wow, do I ever empathize with that? I had a very, very clear sense as a child that if I couldn't make it as a writer, the world would destroy me. My mother was terrified of this possibility to the point that she burned my stories and made me promise to stop writing them. But despite all the problems that we had, she and I together, she somehow convinced me that I was lovable, of worth. God bless her. She gave me those resources, search the world looking for pieces of myself, but to never give away more than I kept to never have to debase myself. I remember many years ago there was a black guy named, we'll call him Jeff, who went to the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, the Lostness. He was very obese. I couldn't help but remember the line from the Hawaiian Huna Masters that the body is like a black bag where you store your unprocessed emotions. He was a smiling, jovial guy, and I remember him at a party once, grinning and cooning as he ate a big slice of watermelon to the hysterical laughter of his friends. I was so funny. Yes, sir. And a noted science fiction writer who was there noticed that I wasn't amused. And he wondered why I was so sensitive. Why couldn't I have fun like that with these people who loved me? Why? Why? Because I looked at Jeff and what I saw was pain and panic. Jeff knew that he needed a tribe, and he found one. And he was clowning for them to prove how harmless he was. Years went by. Jeff's marriage, career and health deteriorated. One night, I saw him at a party, drunk in vino veritas. The racial pain came boiling up on him. He was just raving his anger and fear. He played the game in every way that he could, every way. He'd been told to play it and got nothing in return. He'd been as inoffensive and harmless, and he'd smile and taken all the bullshit and danced for the mocking crowd of his friends. And he was now terrified that he'd built no genuine life for himself. I believe he was homeless at the time. That he chased the fool's gold of asking the wrong people for love and approval. What snarl of tangled emotions lay within him? I really. I don't know. I can't say. But I'll never forget the despair in his eyes. And when, a few years later, I heard he was dead, I was surprised even less. We pay a huge price for not loving ourselves, not being ourselves, not seeking the tribe who will actually see our humanity, feel our pain and our laughter. Jeff's chosen tribe couldn't hear or feel his pain. He had to be a dancing clown for them. Love yourselves, people. Seek the company of people who will see and embrace your humanity. To do that, they have to know who you are. So every lie you tell costs you on both ends. It costs you now as you realize you're selling yourself out for fear that they couldn't handle it. And it costs you later as you realize that you've attracted a group of false friends. People only love you as long as you're dancing and that ultimately you will have nothing, and even if you find love, you won't be able to let it in, and that is lethal. My dinner with Herve is wonderful stuff. I'm so proud of Dinklage for fighting to get it made and doing such a fabulous job at it. He obviously understood clearly that he is standing on the shoulders of munchkins and Billy Barty and Herve Villaches, and that without them there is no Tyrion Lannister. Very, very, very well done. Namaste. If you enjoy this conversation, please share it. It's the only way we know what people are enjoying. And if you'd like to take a little bit better emotional care of yourself over these holidays, Please go to www.the ancientchild.com. all right.