UK GQ Magazine – February, 2003

By Richard E Grant

I remember people’s feet like other people remember facial features. I grew up in Africa, so bare feet were what I saw first before looking aloft to the physiog, the sub-tropical climate ensuring maximum exposure of, and to, the naked foot. The regular colonial arrivals from Blighty’s idea of tropical chic was the open-toed sandal with socks. The wisdom of this foible escapes me, other than as a sure-fire antidote for sex – which for clergymen is marginally understandable.

I often prayed for socks though, having been assaulted regularly by the tyrannosaurus toenails of an overzealous Sunday school teacher. An especially sadistic maths master tortured me, fraction by fraction, by wearing the trademark “out of England” socks and sandals combo. The only maths I could hope to master would involve subtracting his legs from his feet.

The indelible scarring brought by prolonged exposure to “hammerheads” and bunions provoked a lifelong appreciation for shoes. For me, new shoes signaled the start of a new term and with it the pain of “wearing them in”. Which can be translated simply as: three weeks of blistering and bleeding, limping around in hobnailed torture chambers, while being bawled at to “Take it like a man!”

The Seventies swung their way south of the equator, along with my little bollocks, my voice choosing to crack rather violently mid-history lesson as I was reading out my treatise on Mussolini and the rise of his Blackshirts. I took refuge in staring at my Clark’s shoes, willing them to dissolve into the floor and take me with them.

Platform for boys followed, but were scorned as poncy till we realized the instantaneous sexual advantage of being four inches taller, our new hooves fashionably hidden by galleons of bell-bottomed denim. Cosmopolitan warned that just when you thought you were safely steering yourself into seductive waters, the wrong shoes were tantamount to bad breath.

Within an historical nanosecond, anyone still stomping about in Scandinavian clogs to Abba or wearing Cuban heels and a white Travolta three-piece got punked by the Sex Pistols. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee flick dictated boiler suits, stove pipes and bovver boots.

The worst shoes I ever encountered belonged to my uni roommate: a pair of old trainers which he left “cheesing” on the windowsill; they had a flavour not even a nuclear odour-eater could quell. It’s hard to believe that one night these rubberized stink-bombs accidentally threw themselves to their death four floors below.

There’s a great moment in An Englishman Abroad when the traitorous Guy Burgess entreats a friend to go into John Lobb to order a custom-made pair – shoes being a luxury more longed for than a Paxton cheese, the Sunday Times or Floris cologne behind the Iron Curtain. I promised myself that one day I might go into John Lobb and order a pair, knowing that credit card meltdown would surely follow.

By chance, while organizing a charity clay pigeon shoot to raise bursary funds for academically gifted by cash-strapped kids wanting to go to my old school in Swaziland, Waterford-Kamhlaba, I came into contact with the PR for Laurent-Perrier (which supplied the bubbly). In passing she asked if I had ever bought shoes from John Lobb. When I detailed my shoe obsession, she organized for me to meet top Lobb-ster, Mark Kernick, who not only offered me a pair, but also had the idea of doing a charity Lobb-link. “How about you co-design a shoe,” he said. “We’ll call it the ‘Richard’, and donate a percentage from the sale of each pair to your charity.” Done!

Fast forward to a meeting with the John Lobb designer, Helen Botterill. I worked with her to develop a design for the ‘Richard’, which is based on the Chelsea boot, before Eurostarring off to Paris for a fitting at Lobb’s Paris workshop. This involved every inch of my feet being measured and made into a wooden last for a millimeter-perfect fit. The factory, just off the Bastille, is real The Elves and The Shoemaker territory; and having taken a step into the world of haute couture ‘shodding’, I am reminded that Prince Charming found love when matching up a pair. What more could a boy ask for, other than to get Nancy Sinatra to play us out with a rendition of “These Boots Were Made For Walking”? Boom boom.

Sue has sent me some new pics from Monsieur N which you can see here.

Djoeke has also sent me a pdf file on the film from this year’s Berlinale (very big film festival in Berlin) which I’ll then turn into a web page soonish.

And lastly Denise informs me that finally IMDB has listed Richard as Hudson Lowe – NOT Stephen Fry as had previously been listed there!

The Independent – 16th February, 2003

By John Lichfield in Paris.

Did Napoleon Bonaparte spend the last 16 years of his life living with an Englishwoman called Betsy, keeping bees on a plantation in Louisiana?

Did the British government do away with Napoleon for budgetary reasons? (The Gordon Browns of the day apparently begrudged the exorbitant cost of guarding him on a rock in the Atlantic.) Is the body inside the giant coffin in Les Invalides, Paris, visited by tens of thousands of people each year, really that of l’Empereur? Or is that of his valet, childhood friend and (alleged) illegitimate brother, Jean-Baptiste Cipriani?

From these intriguing questions – all of which have been posed by historians or conspiracy theorists at one time or another – Antoine de Caunes, actor, sometime presenter of Eurotrash and now film director, has woven a mystery film which opened in French cinemas and at the Berlin film festival last week.

Monsieur N, made with an exquisite attention to period detail, and a fine cast of French and British actors, is the latest contribution to one of France’s occasional Napoleonmania bouts. It follows a four-part, mini-series on the life of Napoleon shown last year which was the most costly production ever made for French TV.

Although M de Caunes, 49, is best known in Britain and France as a mordant TV presenter and comic actor, his second full-length film is not a comedy.

Nor is it a historic drama or a conspiracy film.

It is a thriller and a detective story, closely based on the real events and real characters in the last six years of Napoleon’s life (or what are generally assumed to have been the last six years of his life) on the island of St Helena. Although the film refuses to offer a firm conclusion, it plays with the idea that Napoleon may have fallen in love with a young Englishwoman, Betsy Balcombe, faked his death in 1821 and escaped to live in idyllic obscurity on a plantation in Louisiana until around 1837.

M de Caunes says that the film sticks to historical reality in the detail and the bitchy interplay of characters, in Napoleon’s “imperial court” at Longwood House in St Helena and his “last battle”, against the humourless and rigid British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe (superbly played by Richard E Grant). But the story which the film spins from these truths is “pure imagination”, M de Caunes says.

Or maybe not.

A young woman called Betsy Balcombe (played in the film by Siobhan Hewlett) did indeed live on St Helena from 1815-18. And she was indeed befriended by Napoleon (played in the film by Philippe Torreton).

Napoleon’s valet, Jean-Baptiste Cipriani, who resembled him closely, died on the island in 1818. When his tomb was opened at the same time as Napoleon’s in 1840, it was empty.

Some evidence suggests that Napoleon was poisoned, although it is far from clear that the British government was involved in the plot. Accusations have long circulated that the British stole Napoleon’s body and buried it in Westminster Abbey, as a final act of pique.

M de Caunes’ film follows the investigations of a fictional British lieutenant (played by Jay Rodan) who uncovers, 20 years later, evidence that Napoleon may have faked his own death by poisoning. The lieutenant concludes that Cipriani’s body was substituted for that of the emperor, who had bribed the British governor to look the other way. Why and what happened next is left partly to the imagination of the film-goer.

Not entirely coincidentally, France’s foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, who has written 40 books on the subject, has just published a new volume on the St Helena years: Napoléon et les mystères de Saint-Hélène.

M Tulard has praised the film for its convincing portrait of the characters, of Longwood House and its precise attention to detail of British and French uniforms. However, his book concludes, rather unromantically, that Napoleon did indeed die in St Helena on 5 May 1821, of stomach cancer, just as the official autopsy reported.

REG heads the of celebrities who have signed the peace petition against the war on Iraq. The list includes such people as Dame Judy Dench, Dustin Hoffman and Jeremy Irons and appeared in the Evening Standard. The page is headed “Stars’ anti-war message may boost rally turnout”.

It’s not sure at this stage whether Richard will be in the rally itself.

Pat also informs me that How to Get Ahead in Advertising is coming out on DVD in April.

The fifth REGimental Exclusive Interview is now up on the site. To read it just go to the Interviews section or, alternatively, click here.