Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
all that mattered.
However, one subject he excelled at was history. For, besides taking him to see explicit adult movies, Connie had also made Quentin see a lot of historical dramas, like Nicholas and Alexandra, and the young boy was able to use that knowledge in school. Quentin had an extraordinary appetite for any movie that contained a good story. So he was getting A grades in history and reading, and failing miserably at everything else.
Connie frequently, though unintentionally, encouraged her young son’s independence. She would often come home and announce to the young Quentin that she needed to be alone and would he please go to a separate part of the house so she could enjoy some solitude.
‘I don’t want to be bothered tonight, Quentin,’ was about all she would say, and that would be a signal for him to disappear to his room where he would soak up the adventures of one of his superheroes, or perhaps direct a mock battle between GI Joe and Spiderman.
Because he spent so much time in a fantasy world, Quentin began creating new identities for himself. His own surname had already changed from Tarantino to Zastoupil at Connie’s insistence. Now he would announce to Connie that he wanted to be known for the following week by a completely different name. It seemed to help him escape from reality. New identities meant new adventures and a chance to recreate the past.
Quentin’s favourite new name was Quint Jerome. ‘Forget the Zastoupil bit,’ he insisted. He was forever asking Connie if she thought it was a cool name. She did.
On other occasions, Quentin would imagine himself to be one of the characters in his favourite TV action cartoon show of the time, Clutch Cargo. Quentin became particularly wrapped up in certain TV shows because, unlike children from larger families, he had no distractions. He would sit up close to the small screen for hours on end, losing himself in whatever he was watching. Sometimes he wished he could climb inside that TV set and join his favourite characters.
Twenty-five years later, Quentin perfectly reconstructed this scene in Pulp Fiction. The sequence opens with boxer Butch, aged five, sitting up close to the television in a world of his own watching Clutch Cargo cartoons. That was Quentin.
At this time, Curt – with his cool goatee beard – and his brother Cliff tended to pick Quentin up from school, as Connie had started working hard as a health industry executive.
Quentin’s schoolfriend Joe Carabello recalls, ‘Curt and his brother looked kinda interesting with long hair and dressed in hipster jeans, T-shirts and vests.’
Curt was most definitely a vest-and-ruffled-shirt-kind-of-guy and he drove a very cool Volkswagen Karmann Ghia coupe with a tiny backseat area where Quentin would crouch after being picked up from school. Quentin even emulated his trendy stepfather by insisting on wearing rugged biker boots to school. The little boy would noticeably change character the moment he got in the back of Curt’s car. Joe recalled one occasion when they shot right past him as he walked along the sidewalk. Quentin either didn’t see or didn’t acknowledge his friend. He was too busy acting like a cool dude.
The young Quentin rarely invited any of his school friends back to his house. He did not explain why. Some of his classmates later theorised that he was in some way ashamed of his oddball home, while others reckoned he simply did not wish to have any other children on his territory.
Occasionally, on her days off, Connie would be seen at the school collecting Quentin. Former pupils only recall one thing about her – her long black hair. ‘It was almost down to her butt,’ remarks Joe Carabello.
Movies were all Quentin talked about. Curt contributed to his film education by taking young Quint to a cinema every Monday evening. It didn’t matter what was on. Quentin demanded to be taken each week, like clockwork.
Curt liked the classic Californian biker movies of the late 1960s that starred renegades like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, so Quentin’s tastes started to broaden out. One of his particular favourites was the 1968 film The Savage Seven, directed by Richard Rush and starring Adam Roarke and Larry Bishop. The young Quentin was so intrigued by this movie that he has watched it at least a dozen times since.
More than 20 years later he explained, ‘What’s cool about it is that you can’t figure out what or who the bad guys are. The Adam Roarke character is good in one scene, bad in another. It makes him complex.’
Joe Carabello remembers being shocked that Quentin was allowed to see movies that most other kids’ parents deemed highly unsuitable. ‘We all thought he was a lucky son of a gun because we wouldn’t have dared even ask our folks to let us see such movies.’
Quentin’s young friends were particularly envious of him when he told them with great relish that he had been allowed to watch Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. But they were all a little confused, because here was a kid who didn’t even learn how to ride a bicycle until the fifth grade.
Not surprisingly, Quentin decided he wanted to try his hand at creating his own films. He soon got Joe Carabello, plus two other friends called Dave Strom and Mike Gallo, to make some home movies together using an old camera that belonged to one of the boys’ fathers.
‘They were about goofy things like annoying people’s sisters,’ explained Joe Carabello. Although he didn’t have any brothers or sisters of his own, Quentin was clearly fascinated by other people’s families. He always made sure he starred in and directed each of the movies they made.
When Quentin was nine years old, his life was turned upside down by two traumatic events.
First, Curt and Connie split up following six seemingly happy years together, soon after the family had moved to a rented house in the South Bay beachside community of El Segundo. Quentin never got a full explanation of what went wrong between the couple and Connie is not prepared to discuss the details to this day.
The youngster just came home from school one afternoon to find that Curt had left the house. Connie didn’t want to talk about it and Quentin didn’t want to ask. They both retreated into separate corners of the house and buried themselves in their favourite fantasy worlds of television and comic books.
‘Curt and I just went off in different directions,’ Connie says. ‘I was very career-orientated at the time and I just did not want to be married any more.’
After their divorce, Curt – who had been the nearest thing Quentin had had to a father – moved up to an isolated farming community in northern California and rarely visited the South Bay area. ‘Curt remarried and his new wife did not want any reminders of me and Quentin around,’ adds Connie, who gradually got back on speaking terms with Curt and is still in contact with him. She even refers to Curt’s new partner as her ‘wife-in-law’.
Within a few months of Connie’s marriage break-up, she started suffering from appalling stomach pains and sought medical advice. The diagnosis was grim. Doctors said they suspected Hodgkin’s disease and warned she might only have a few months to live.
Connie was understandably panicked. She was told to get her life in order and prepare for the worst. A long and painful course of treatment was recommended. The doctors warned that the after-effects would be very debilitating and it might prove very difficult to look after her young son.
Connie was especially worried because she had nowhere for her child to go. In desperation, she contacted her mother, back in Tennessee. (A number of relatives had already assured Connie that her mother was no longer boozing at the same rate as she had been a few years previously.) Reluctantly, but with nowhere else to turn, Connie sent Quentin to her mother. ‘I wasn’t real thrilled about it, but it seemed as if I was about to die so you do what you have to do,’ is how Connie explains it today.
She decided not to tell her son what was happening. Quentin just thought he was going on an extended vacation to his grandmother’s mobile home in Hicksville.
But that five-month stay was to be the most disturbing period in Quentin’s entire childhood. Connie’s mother was off the booze when the young boy showed up alone at Nashville airport,