Big Reads

The Candy man can

By Brooke Lewis

25 May 2008

Luke Davies: imagining a new life in an alternative future.

Luke Davies’ mum says he’s like Britney Spears – airing his dirty laundry in public.

It’s the drugs. She’s sick of hearing about them. But since his drug-fuelled semiautobiographical novel Candy sold more than 35,000 copies and became a popular movie, Davies’ private life has become public property and people have wanted to know about his personal experience of addiction.

“I’m not like Britney Spears in any way. I wear underpants,” says Davies. But he understands the interest in his personal history. “I’m relatively at peace with the fact that, for better or for worse, Candy is the book that kind of launched my career … so the topic of the personal stuff is inevitable. I’ve just had to find a way of navigating that and not being closed off about it,” he says.

“It was a hugely significant part of my life, that thing of addiction. Sure, I’ve got boundaries but I try to be reasonably generous about that – people wanna talk about that. That’s part of the story, I can do that, you know?” His willingness to talk about the past is a good thing because Davies’ latest book, God of Speed, is not likely to discourage more of the same old questions.

The book focuses on one of the world’s most notorious addicts of all, the reclusive billionaire, Howard Hughes: aviator, filmmaker, obsessive-compulsive. During the 15 years – on and off – that he wrote God of Speed, Davies also wrote Candy, adapted it into a screenplay, and completed numerous other projects.

But the amount of time he devoted to the project and his use of the first-person in the book’s narrative raise obvious questions about his fascination and empathy with his subject. Davies makes no secret of the fact his interest in Hughes went beyond the incredible influence he had on American society, flight and film.

“On the personal level, it was that addiction stuff. It was like, ‘Wow, no one’s ever really got this guy, no one really understands’,” he says. At the beginning of his career, Hughes was a successful businessman who also produced some of the biggest films – and dated some of the biggest Hollywood starlets – of his time.

As an aviator, he set multiple world air-speed records. But by the time he reached his 50s, Hughes had developed debilitating behaviour disorders and addictions and became a recluse. By the time he died at the age of 71, Hughes was malnourished, emaciated beyond recognition and X-rays revealed broken-off hypodermic needles still embedded in his arms.

“When I found out that he was a drug addict, a lot of the other behaviour, his obsessive-compulsive stuff made more sense. I just thought, the more that I read everything about him, I thought no-one had ever really understood how your addiction might play out if you had no obstacles to using and you had ultimate power in a sense – what kind of person would you become?”

Hughes was at one point the richest man in America. He had virtually unlimited resources at his disposal as well as people around him who enabled him to live in a completely dysfunctional and unhealthy way.

“He was surrounded by people in whose interest it was to keep him sick,” says Davies. By contrast, Davies says the turning point in his own addiction was a day when, after 10 years as an addict, he couldn’t afford the $12 he needed to buy methadone. “It’s not much money to find but I couldn’t find it. I needed 12 fucking dollars,” he says.

He called all the people he would usually call in such circumstances and, by coincidence, on this particular day they all refused to help. Finally, he rang his ex-girlfriend – the girl who was the inspiration for Candy – thinking that if anyone would give him the money, she would: she’d been through the same thing so she’d understand.

“And I could not believe it,” says Davies. “ ‘Luke, no,’ she said. And I was like: ‘Fuck. Come on’.” But again she refused. “ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No – I’m not gonna do it. You’ve gotta go to detox.’ ”

He said he’d ring and they won’t have a bed because they’re always busy. “So, if I can’t get in, you’ll give me the $12?” he bargained. “Yes, yes, I’ll give you the $12,” she said. He remembers sitting there after he hung up, thinking he’d wait a few minutes, call “Candy” back and lie.

But then it occurred to him that he could actually call the detox centre, be told that there was no bed and be self-righteous when he called “Candy” back to tell her. So he called. “Yep, we’ve got a bed,” they said. “You can come up now if you want.” He did consider calling “Candy” back and lying as he’d planned, Davies recalls, but by this point in his life he had realised he would rather be dead than continue using.

So instead of scamming the $12, he went to the clinic and hasn’t used since. “I just threw like, three shirts and two pairs of underwear and one sock, as it turned out, into a plastic bag and just walked up to this fucking detox and my new life began. It was just astonishing how easy that was all of a sudden, how everything changed,” he says.

In some ways, God of Speed is a moral tale, Davies says. “In a sense, it’s like an alternative future that I imagined for myself My life got horrible enough that in the end something had to be done. It was like, it would’ve been better to be dead or to do something rather than to keep living that kind of living hell. But his life never reached that point and that’s tragic.”

In the beginning, drugs may seem fun and exciting, he says, “but in the end addiction is a radically reactionary and conservative way of [life] because you’re trying to create the same outcomes for everything you do. You’re trying to only maintain one kind of emotional state and at great expense. In Howard Hughes’ case, it was at the expense of his mental health.”

God Of Speed is narrated from the perspective of the 68-year old Hughes, lying in bed, reminiscing on his life and the stories he will tell an old friend in the morning, before he flies an aeroplane for the first time in over 15 years. By this time, Hughes’ mind had deteriorated pretty drastically and he had seen no one for over a decade, except for a Mormon he had hired to look after him.

Hughes wrote detailed memos for his carers, instructing them on how to hang his clothes – coats at least five feet from trousers – and how many tissues to use when touching doorknobs. “In the end he was an absolutely crippled man – afraid of going outside, not willing to have different food on any given day, not willing to have visitors; in other words, not willing to invite change into his life,” says Davies. “The things that make us human are in the end, things that he denied himself from experiencing. That’s what addiction is.”

Davies, Hughes, addiction – it all seems vaguely therapeutic. He says talking about his own past can be a positive experience. “Weirdly, sometimes it processes stuff in your head and I get those rushes of a moment of thinking this is extraordinary. I’m talking about something that people loved that comes out of a place that’s so dark and insular that I shouldn’t have even survived. So I get that reminder that I shouldn’t have survived and I did, and there’s those moments of ‘Wow, I’m a really lucky guy, life’s good.’ ”

Very good, it seems. Living in LA for the past year, he is making film contacts on the back of Candy, which starred the late Heath Ledger, and is well enough known in Hollywood that producers will talk to him. They can see he can write a good script, he says. “Part of the battle for me was trying to say: ‘I don’t just write dark indie drug films. I want you to know that I’m cinema-obsessed and here’s a comedy and here’s a sci-fi thing, lots of things I’ve been working on.’ ”

One of these projects is a film on the making of Candy, Diary of a Milkman, which premiered at the Writers’ Festival on Friday night. Davies has a children’s book coming out next year, a book of poetry that will probably come out next year, and is working on a collection of short stories and a short film.

Davies also has an idea for a new novel that, unlike his previous intensely interior explorations, focuses on “how forces in the world change what’s going on in your interior or impose themselves on your reality and how you respond to that in terms of your actions and your psyche”, he says vaguely, afraid of jinxing it by talking about it too much.

“I think it’s really, really different for the first time. It’s like I’m out of there for a while, all that addiction and obsession stuff, I’m out of there ...” Mrs Davies will be relieved.