Charlie Chaplin

JACK Nicholson didn’t fancy hob-nobbing with film luvvies. He was in London for the premiere of the Stanley Kubrick horror movie, The Shining, and he had his heart set on exploring a certain area he had heard all about.

Nicholson had invited novelist and screen writer Patrice Chaplin on a break to Colorado. She turned him down, saying she preferred to head back to her Lady Margaret Road home than head off on a romantic mis-adventure with one of the most eligible heartthrobs.

But when Jack landed in town, he called Patrice and invited her over.

“Jack was at the Savoy Hotel, and he opened up his hotel window and asked me which way was north,” she recalls.

“I asked why and he said he wanted to find out about this Kentish Town, find out what made it so special.”
Patrice decided to show him in person. Her family home at the time included her oldest son and his many friends, who had monopolised the top floor as a base for their gang. Nicholson was enchanted.

Lauren Bacall

“He loved it,” she says. “All these kids were around. They had all this gear out – all these drugs. He said he had fallen for the place, it was special. He showed up in a long limo and got stoned with my son.”

Nicholson was enchanted by the natural bohemian feel of an NW5 home in 1980. It was enough of a draw for him to want to return.

“Later, I went to a party in Sloane Square with Jack and Warren Beatty. He turned round and he didn’t like it half as much as Kentish. He just said to me: ‘Let’s do the room and then leave to go back up north’. He wanted to listen to the North London kids talk and hear about what happened to them.”

Sophia Loren

Patrice uses this autobiographical work to flow from memory to memory. There is no chronological path to follow that explains where she was born or brought up. We are not told how she wrote a series of best-selling novels, was given screenplays to work on, met and befriended some of Hollywood’s biggest names – including being able to call Charlie Chaplin her father-in-law – and how she got to where she is today.

Her stories rush through hanging out with Orson Welles, Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren and other household names, juxtaposed with domestic life in London.

She recalls how she mistook Marlon Brando for a scavenging raccoon. He lived next door to her and did not stand on ceremony.

Orson Welles

“He would jump over my garden fence to look in my fridge. I thought it was an animal at first – he’d climb right in and steal food.”

Such tales have entertained her friends for many years – and they persuaded her she should be writing such yarns down.

“At first I could not do it. I did not want to revisit everything – and I felt I might not get it right. But then it wrote itself,” she says. “And if I’d written this in a straight, chronological way, I would not have enjoyed writing it, I would have worried about getting facts wrong and what to leave out. It would have ended up in the bin. But with this, the book basically felt like it wrote itself.”

Marlon Brando

Born in Sidcup, Kent, in 1940, she says Hollywood glamour was a permanent fixture in her childhood.

Evacuated to stay with her Aunt Amy in Portsmouth, who already had 18 children to look after, she found a kindred spirit.

“My aunt loved the movies. She would take me four times a week. We went dancing on the pier and she took me to the theatre. She was just marvellous – life-loving. It took away the worry of the war.”

Warren Beatty

After leaving Dartford grammar, she travelled to northern Spain before returning to study at Rada.

“I was an actress but wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be, so I started writing,” she says.

“I had always wanted to go to Hollywood, and my books took me there. I met Lauren Bacall because she liked a book I had written about Ava Gardner disappearing in Spain.

“Bacall was told the writer ‘lives in a place called Kentish Town’ and she contacted me to take up the option.”

Patrice Chaplin

She remembers how Charlie Chaplin told her how he saw brilliant people wrecked by pressure of celebrity.

“Charlie said people were terrified of losing their fame, and terrified of getting old. The moment they joined the studio world, they knew real fear,” she says.

“I saw that years later with Jack. That was something I had never associated with Jack – fear.

“I recall this fear he had before he made The Shining. He was furiously scared – he said make one bad film and that’s it – you’re finished. It reminded me of the stories I heard from Charlie.”

Jack Nicholson

Nicholson was unimpressed that Patrice did not fancy becoming further involved after turning down his offer of a holiday.

“I said no thanks, I’m going to London. He wasn’t good at dealing with rejection – he got very annoyed at me,” she remembers.

“He said: ‘Why not write me a long treatise as to why you are turning me down in favour of Kentish Town? What makes it so special? Write me that book, tell me why you chose Kentish Town over me.’”

• Hollywood To Kentish Town. By Patrice Chaplin. Quadrant Books, £9.99