Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
of the most popular kids in class. Most afternoons after school, at least three or four of his new best friends would herd into the pool. Conde Azul would go crazy every time the kids dived under the water for fear that they would drown.
When temperatures topped the nineties, Connie had the dog’s shaggy coat shaved off to make him more comfortable.
‘But the result was that he looked a kinda weird dog,’ she explains. ‘His face was still hairy but the rest of him looked like a greyhound.’
Quentin’s mother was also surprised to discover the dog’s sensitive nature. ‘I sat by the side of the pool as Quentin and his friends jumped in and just couldn’t stop laughing at Conde Azul. He looked ridiculous. Suddenly I looked at his face and realised he was mortified. Quentin later told me off about that. “Dogs have feelings too, Mom,” he told me.’
With Quentin’s new-found popularity came a fresh awareness of race and class. He was now 12 years old. He would often bring back a mixed group of friends and he knew that some of his classmates had less money than others.
Later criticism of his attitude towards blacks in his movies brought this response from Connie: ‘Quentin understands racial minorities more than anyone else in Hollywood. He films it as he sees it and he saw it all while growing up.’
But one aspect of life that Quentin could never come to terms with was sport. He was too awkward and gangly to be good at most school sports and, although he had started swimming regularly, he tended to flop and splash all over the place.
Connie even bought season tickets for the LA Lakers basketball games and the Rams football games in a last-ditch attempt to get her son more interested in such activities. But Quentin refused point blank to attend any of the games. Instead, he tried to persuade his mother to give him the cost of a ticket so he could buy himself a hamburger or hot dog and then go to a movie theatre.
Connie often ended up taking her son’s friends to the Lakers and Rams games simply because she couldn’t bear to see such valuable seats going to waste.
Quentin insisted that sport was stupid, boring and brutal. His own theory was that nobody really liked sport. He actually believed that men felt they should adore sport, so they pretended to do so.
Quentin was equally dismissive about some of his mother’s friends, who were forever holding forth about how marvellous The Who rock group were.
‘I don’t think anyone really likes that band,’ he said later. ‘Everyone thinks they are supposed to like The Who, so they just pretend. They’re afraid to say the emperor has no clothes.’
When Quentin reached his early teens, the by-now relatively wealthy and successful Connie decided it was time to travel and see something of the world. Unfortunately she never encouraged her young son to accompany her. Today, Connie insists she had no idea that Quentin was even remotely interested in travelling with her. ‘I would have taken him all over the world with me if I had known.’
Instead, schoolboy Quentin Zastoupil was left alone at the family home in Torrance with a housekeeper, as Connie tried to forget her two disastrous marriages by escaping to exotic places.
While she was away, Quentin would slip out to a nearby movie theatre and watch the latest releases. He actually preferred going on his own because there were fewer distractions and he could really concentrate, memorising the lines and even the credits at the end of each film. Quentin also spent a lot of time in the rougher neighbourhood of Carson, where the Carson Twin Cinema showed kung-fu movies as well as Allied International low-budget specials like The Van, one of the first films ever made by Danny DeVito. Quentin also liked sneaking out to see naughty late-night Roger Corman double bills like The Student Teachers and Night Call Nurses.
At other times he went to the Del Amo Mall Theatre to see the latest Hollywood blockbusters. When he was 13 he fell in love with the horror classic Carrie, directed by Brian de Palma (who later became his directorial hero) and starring John Travolta. A few days after seeing it for the second time in a week, he walked into a Miller’s Outpost with Connie and spotted a redneck puffy vest and a red flannel shirt just like the one worn by Travolta in the movie. Connie reluctantly bought her son the outfit and he wore it for weeks afterwards.
Quentin’s childhood centred on going to those grind houses and the art houses and he loved them both equally. The less commercial movies showed him a world he had never experienced and that he was anxious to learn about, while the Hollywood films proved just how brilliant some blockbusters could be.
Quentin began to list all the movies he had seen, although he would only count the ones he’d watched in a movie theatre, rather than on television. He’d circle the ones he thought were good and eventually built up the list to more than 200.
Meanwhile, between long hours at work and regular trips abroad, Connie finally found time to tell her son about the birds and bees.
Years later, she explains her actions in intriguingly businesslike terms. ‘I have been in management since my early twenties and I don’t have any trouble coping with such issues. I was determined that there should be some measure of control. I was genuinely worried about what effect being a single mother would have on a child in such matters.’
So, one day after school, Connie announced that she had something very important to tell Quentin and would he please join her in the living room. Quentin was mystified. He wondered what on earth he had done wrong this time. He had also got used to running his own life and couldn’t quite cope with the prospect of actually sitting down with his mother and talking to her.
‘It’s time we had a talk,’ muttered Connie.
That was all Quentin needed to hear to know exactly what was coming next. He had been to enough movies to recognise that classic line. He tried to move out of his chair. But Connie would not let him get up. Five minutes later, Quentin was allowed to leave the room after he had heard his mother describe male and female anatomy in such direct terms that it threatened to put him off sex for life.
In fact Quentin already knew all about sex from some of the racier movies he had seen. However, hearing his mother explain it in such graphic detail was enough to dampen his interest for many years. At that time, his only love affair was with the cinema and it was proving a time-consuming and expensive mistress.
Then, out of the blue, Quentin found religion – thanks to his best friend at the time, Kevin Minky. The two boys met at the Hawthorne Christian School on the borders between Torrance and Harbor City. Connie, a strictly non-practising Catholic, had sent 12-year-old Quentin to this private school in preference to the local junior high school where drugs and crime were prevalent, even in a suburban community such as Torrance.
Young Kevin proved a very significant influence on Quentin and the two boys began attending a local Protestant church every Sunday. Connie felt she could not stop Quentin since he was so firm in his own opinions and beliefs. She also tended to go through bouts of guilt about her efforts as a single parent. Quentin was entitled to experiment with different aspects of his life. Why shouldn’t that include going to church, which was hardly in the same league as drinking or taking drugs?
Quentin became hooked on God after spending hours discussing the church with his friend Kevin, who lived in nearby Palos Verdes. He was intrigued by religion because it was something that had never really been tackled throughout his childhood. Quentin believed he had missed out badly and he began to theorise about God, almost as much as the movies. For the next two years, Quentin became an avid churchgoer, even though his mother would never go near a house of God. Quentin was undoubtedly intrigued by the mystical elements of religion and he felt much more secure now that he had discovered God. Christianity was a substitute for certain basic ingredients missing from his home life. At this stage, the church seemed much more real than television or films. However, he eventually started to question the wisdom of God’s words and became less interested in it all in his mid-teens.
Quentin left the Hawthorne Christian School when he was 14, having nagged Connie to let him go to the local high school because he was intrigued