Call sheets came by fax. We photocopied them, marked them up, and passed them around backstage. This was pre-email, pre-smartphone. Practically speaking, it was pre-internet. The world ran at the speed of paper, of physical objects moving between hands, of decisions made face to face because there wasn’t another way.
Eugene and I had been working together for about eighteen months by then. The London-based team took multiple trips a year to Paris. It was a working rhythm I’d grown into and enjoyed.
One afternoon I went to his room at Hotel Costes to tell him that I had decided to move to Paris.
I hadn’t planned the conversation. I just knew I needed to say it before I caught the evening Eurostar back to London. I knocked on his door. He let me in and I told him the news.
His response was immediate and calm. He pointed out that his is a London-based team. If I moved to Paris, that would mean I could no longer be on his team. He said it without weight, without accusation. Just a fact.
I think my exact words were something like:
“Yeah, but… Paris!”
That was my whole argument. That was everything I had to say for myself. Paris. As if the word alone explained the decision, the pull, the inevitability of it. Maybe it did.
He didn’t try to stop me. No argument, no persuasion, no friction. He respected me and my decision completely. He said to call back in before catching my evening Eurostar.
I understand his response more now than I did then. At nineteen, I just took it as Eugene being Eugene. Easy, unflustered, ungrudging. It’s only with distance that I see the full shape of what he did. He was losing a team member. He’d invested time in me, brought me to Paris repeatedly, he’d given me a place inside something that obviously matters deeply to him: his team. And when I told him I was walking away from it all, his response was to respect the choice and let me go cleanly.
There was no manipulation. No “are you sure?” No quiet reminder of what he’d done for me. No Devil Wears Prada attitude, just cool calm acceptance.
I know now that this was a kindness most people are just not capable of. Most people, faced with someone leaving, find ways to make the leaver feel the weight of it. Guilt, pressure, the soft suggestion that they might be making a mistake. Eugene gave me none of that. He gave me permission, even though I hadn’t asked for it.
When I came back that afternoon, he came down from his room with a copy of the first Hotel Costes CD in his hand. Mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac. He gave it to me as a parting gift and wished me well.
I played that CD to my friends as soon as I got back to London, I transferred it to my MiniDisc player and listened to it for years afterwards. Listening back to it now, it has become one of those albums that’s so completely of its time it almost stops being music and becomes a portal into the past. Lounge, downtempo, the late nineties / early noughties in audio form. I still have it at home somewhere, in a box with all my old stuff at my parents’ place.
Years passed, decades in fact. Then, recently, I came across a copy in my local Oxfam bookshop. Of course I bought it without hesitation.
I put a note inside it. More than a note really, a message, and quite an intense one at that. The kind of thing you can only write when enough time has passed to allow you to say what needs to be said. I told him about what that exchange meant, about what his response taught me, about the shape of his kindness, which I only fully understood years later.
The CD and note sat in my kit bag at the salon for at least a month, waiting.
When Eugene finally came in to the salon to prep for a big shoot recently, I gave it to him.
I couldn’t see his expression properly as he opened it. I was in the middle of a haircut, but I’m sure I caught the corner of a smile as I turned back to my client.
He kind of just stuffed the note into one of his unpredictable pockets.