Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  I loved to sit there in the afternoons during the run-up to the show. Rose’s little son, dressed in his grey shorts from school, played pool with the big lads. People drifted in and out in various stages of undress or disguise. Trains rattled by outside. A cardinal in deep red robes and caked in white foundation might be sprawled on the black leather couch lost in conversation with a rockabilly stagehand. Uncle Derek, who played the piano during the panto and was the living expert on Liszt, invariably arrived late “coming thru” from Edinburgh.

  By seven o’clock the place was jammed and only quietened down as the strains of Coronation Street cut through the din, at which point we turned as one towards the screen. But the start of the Street unfortunately coincided with the Act One beginners’ call for the play. With groans and lingering looks, ladies in evening gowns and men in white tie and tails left for the stage, leaving Philip, David and Rose wrapped up in the Rovers Return as though they were in a box at Bayreuth.

  CHAPTER 13

  The West End

  At some point during the second run of the Proust play in Glasgow, Lindy, my recently acquired agent in London, sent me a script called Another Country, about an English public school in the thirties. The leading role was seventeen-year-old Guy, a thinly disguised schoolboy version of the famous British spy Guy Burgess, who had dismayed the whole of Britain in the fifties by defecting to Russia. In those days, no one in stuffy England understood why someone who had everything—class, looks, and position—could betray their country. Julian Mitchell’s play offers a compelling formula for treason: when Guy Bennet is found out to be gay, and therefore barred from joining the exclusive school fraternity—a governing elite of older boys—he turns against the world that has turned against him and plans a life of revenge. It is a compelling theme, full of haunting parallels, and a beautifully written play. As I turned the pages, sitting in the mayhem of the afternoon canteen at Glasgow, everything drained away as I saw with a rather scary clarity how my whole life might unfold were I to land the leading role.

  I took the night train to London after the show on a Saturday night; leaning out of the window as we clanked over the Clyde, Glasgow felt like mine now. I was a part of it—and I had an overwhelming desire to jump off. We passed slowly behind the theatre, through the Gorbals, looking impossibly romantic, bathed in that ghostly orange glow of the Glasgow street lights. As we picked up speed ruined warehouses flashed past, close to the tracks, suddenly bouncing the roar of the train back into the open window, while the floodlit sky-rises rolled back into the distance, giving way to motorways and ring roads swathed in pools of mist on the horizon. We hurled through Motherwell and plunged into the cold damp air of the Scottish lowlands. Unable to get comfortable on the tiny bunk, exhausted but wired, I felt as if I was being swept along, going in the wrong direction; that something more complicated and dangerous was taking place than simply another audition for another play. I didn’t sleep all night.

  Julian Mitchell and Stuart Burge (the play’s director) were an odd couple and the Greenwich Theatre was an odd place. Seagulls squawked around the rigging of the Cutty Sark down by the river; its masts could be seen from the theatre, sticking out over the rooftops. It felt a bit like Jane Austen’s Portsmouth. Genteel village architecture ran down the hill towards the water. Teashops with bow windows swarmed with tourists who clambered around the area all day, but at night Greenwich was reclaimed by its gangs of Teddy boys, and you had to take care on the way to the station.

  The theatre was a Grade One listless building run by Alan Strachan, a timid fellow in glasses. Julian Mitchell was a big man with an orange beard and an explosion of hair from his nose and ears, as if a bomb had gone off inside his head. He was extremely charming, always laughing, and had mischievous blue eyes. Beside him, Stuart Burge seemed to be dwarfed by the energy of his scribe and sat next to Julian rather like a tree that had been bent from years in a howling wind. He was small with a lazy eye under a mop of grey hair. He was also very sweet, quite shy and an extremely good director. I read some scenes from the play. Julian played the other parts. Stuart gave me some direction and that was it. I took the shuttle back to Glasgow in time for the evening show. Lindy called me the next day to tell me I had got the part.

  After the sophistication of the Glasgow company, the first day of rehearsal for Another Country required a bit of an adjustment. The other actors in the play were mostly people who had come from TV as kids. There is something quite alarming about a child actor; but there is something even more alarming about them when he or she is no longer a child. Where do they go next? How do they make the leap? How do they shrug off their stage mums, who have lived and breathed through every tap rehearsal, every sprouting of a pube? The child wants to grow up but at the same time his subconscious is trying to freeze-dry him as it holds onto the elusive image of departing youth by its fingernails. The result, I concluded (erroneously) that first morning, was that an ageing child star had a quality about him not unlike an egg in aspic, or in the worst case a foetus staring glumly out from a bottle of alcohol. They still looked sixteen but were in fact thirty-four. There was an extraordinary boy called Gary playing a character named Wharton who was supposed to be thirteen. Gary was older than me, but tiny. Actually, he turned out to be quite brilliant. He was from the North, more of a stand-up comedian than an actor, a regular Tommy Cooper, cracking impenetrable jokes. But when he stepped out onto the stage he became a delicate little upper-class weed. Unfortunately for him, as we all morphed into our schoolboy personae, he was the obvious candidate for bullying. But it was pretty difficult bullying a Northern comic, and Gary endlessly bounced back with another joke.

  Menzies, the part of the arch-diplomat of the school, was played by another child star actor, David Parfitt. He was a legend at the age of fourteen as the son of Wendy Craig on the hit TV show, And Mother Makes Three. Now he was ageless, like Tintin. As the play took its grip, he became his character and was always the mediator in the star wars that were to follow. He stopped acting after Another Country and became an extremely successful and sharkish producer.

  Needless to say, I felt myself to be entirely superior to all these mere children, but not nearly as superior as another of the actors in the play seemed to be, a young man called Piers Flint-Shipman. He played the third member of our “study,” a typical empire ruler called Devenish. In the journey that Another Country took from out of town, through the West End to the silver screen, Piers and I were the only actors who managed to keep our grip on the swerving juggernaut that swung everyone else off during the drive from can’t to Cannes. We became very close friends. He had recently left Eton, lived on Park Lane, and had a thin handsome face that blushed easily and seemed to be almost entirely immobile. During the first weeks of rehearsal he kept very much to himself, haughty and detached. Then one afternoon in rehearsal someone was humming a jingle from a popular TV commercial. “It’s tasty, tasty, very very tasty. It’s ve-ry ta-sty.” Suddenly Piers lit up. After that he was the life and soul of the party, and his thawing out was the cue for us all to drop our various gimmicks, games and agendas, and come together as a company. All at once, to Stuart and Julian’s delight, we became a class of schoolboys. The danger was that in the year that followed we became quite unmanageable (obviously, me in particular).

  When you rehearse a play you quite often lose the plot—its plot. You become so wrapped up in the construction of your character, the production that is you, that you forget the play is meant to be a comedy, or a tragedy, or whatever it is, and sometimes when the audience comes in for the first time you are overwhelmed by their reaction and you fall to pieces. Thus, we had all forgotten that Another Country was primarily a comedy. It had begun to seem unutterably dreary to us as we slogged our way through it time after time. Stuart was a very thorough director, and he knew that our success relied on being drilled so that we did not fall apart when the audience took over.

  However, no amount of rehearsal could have prepared us
for the reaction we got on the first preview. From the very beginning the audience were swept away by the play. It was a curious feeling. We couldn’t believe it. They laughed at almost every line. I remember looking at Piers out of the corner of my eye as a huge round of applause crashed over him after one of his lines during the first scene. He went pink with pleasure. We all watched from the wings during scenes we weren’t in like children around a blazing campfire. It was utterly intoxicating. The audience were entranced, and the first night of the play was a riotous success. This was partly due to the fact that Piers’ mother was best friends with the Daily Mail critic Jack Tinker, and his review was a giant full-page rave, but so were all the others. Success has its own momentum and life turned into a Hollywood movie from the forties (the sort when newspaper articles spin around on a black screen, as the show moves from out of town onto Broadway). We were a hit, the theatrical version of a boy band.

  In the Embassy Club I had become friends with the casting director Celestia Fox. Her husband Robert was a producer and I invited them to come and see the show. The next day Robert decided to take it into the West End. Kenneth Branagh took over the role of Judd, the other lead; and the virgin queen himself, Wadham from Ampleforth got the part of the head boy. I was elated. During the “get-in” at the Queen’s Theatre, an event that goes on all night, he and I hid in the empty upper circle and watched as the set was put onto the stage and the spotlights were trained into their correct positions.

  It was strange and moving to be sitting there together. At school we had written one another letters pretending to be West End producers offering each other contracts, and sent them through the internal mail system. I remember my housemaster, Father Dominic, frowning as he once handed me an envelope with “from the desk of Franco Zefirelly” written in a florid hand (“Zeffirelli with an I” was Father Dominic’s only comment). We had dreamt in Technicolor of a moment like this; but would it, could it, live up to the childish expectations of Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth? Only time would tell.

  On the afternoon before the first night there was a press call; after that we were free until the performance. Piers and I went out and looked at the front of the theatre. There we were in lights; my face was fifteen feet high on the front of the building. We walked down Shaftesbury Avenue to a bar called Phino’s bar underneath the Phoenix Theatre. On the way we picked up some programmes from our show. It was then I noticed, looking at the cast list, that Piers had changed his name. He was now called Freddy Alexander. “God, Piers, you can’t change your name—you die if you change your name after your first job,” I said, referring to one of those countless theatrical superstitions that actors swore by.

  “I don’t care,” said Freddy. “Piers Flint-Shipman just doesn’t say it.”

  “Doesn’t say what?”

  “Doesn’t say screaming fans wet with desire.”

  We drank two or three strong cocktails and walked back to the theatre.

  The play was a triumph, without doubt one of the defining moments of my life, yet strangely enough it’s pretty much a blur. The theatre was packed to the rafters; and when we came on at the end for the curtain calls, the audience stood up and the applause came and came in deafening waves, crashing against us. I looked at Piers. As usual he had turned red. I didn’t dare catch Wadham’s eyes. We might have forgotten ourselves and curtsied to the audience, as was our habit during all the curtain calls of our childhood. I could see Robert and Celestia with huge smiles across their faces. Julian Mitchell and his boyfriend Richard were leading the applause. My father and mother couldn’t believe their eyes. All the grief was suddenly worth while. We were bathed in affection.

  But a successful moment in life is hard to grasp when looking back. On the night, a whole future seems to be sitting in the palm of your hand, there for the taking. But the further away in time you move from the moment of triumph, the hollower it becomes. Soon it seems to be no more than the precursor for the next period of struggle, viewed with caution. When I think of that night now, I first of all remember Piers, Freddy from then on, who did die, less than two years later. Just before the opening of the film of Another Country he was killed on a motorway in France by a suicidal man who drove into the oncoming traffic. And second, more defining to me, or anyway as defining as the success of Another Country could ever be, and definitely sewn into my senses’ memory of that night, with its applause that kept on going all the way through that long summer season on the stage at the Queen’s Theatre: that night marked the end of the carefree, spontaneous way of life for us poor, barely legal queers. With the discovery that sex could kill, and in those days specifically gay sex, a new reflex in society was born. Little things: parents held their children closer when you came into a room; your plate was separately washed in a kitchen after lunch. The Christians and Conservatives began craftily to move the goalposts of public (im)morality. In particular, the Catholic Church surfed the crisis, making the most of fear and ignorance, and calling it conscience. AIDS for them was like North Sea oil for Mrs. Thatcher: the ticket to eternity. All that is wound around Another Country.

  But I can still hear that applause and pan across our young bobbing faces all flushed in the fabulous lunacy of a moment’s success. Was Kenneth already thinking of adapting the entire works of Shakespeare to the screen that night? And David Parfitt, did he know he was going to be Ken’s producer? Piers was certainly not the type to have an inkling about his own death (he would have found that extremely common). The Foxes’ marriage was to last two more years. And me: I thought I had it all down. But actually I didn’t have the first clue what was really going on.

  CHAPTER 14

  Paula

  Paula Yates and Bob Geldof came to see Another Country one night early in the run. They were friends of Robert and Celestia. Bob had just performed in Alan Parker’s adaptation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a film cast by Celestia; and, according to Alan, Bob had a cock so big that he needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around in. These are the fragments of conversation upon which whole legends emerge. But one didn’t need to have coffee with Alan Parker to know that Bob had a big dick. Everything about him announced the fact: the incredibly thin body, the large pushy nose, the jungle smell of the man and, of course, the delight he evidently felt at the sound of his own voice, this was not the neurotic missionary zeal of a man with a button dick. Oh, no! Bob felt the unbridled joy of a stallion cantering around a field of long grass. There was an easy dialogue between his loins and his frontal lobe, as he played for his audience the preludes and fugues of his own opinions. He never listened. But this is not a put-down. Actually, it is the recipe for success. Bob was definitely sexy in a good old-fashioned Rimbaud (the poet) kind of a way, and all set to become a legend one way or another. He was dirty, he was mesmerising, he drove into you with the force of an electric screwdriver and he famously liked to be paid in cash.

  Paula was his perfect foil. Or at least that’s how it looked. On the one hand she was a typical English rock chick, the ideal consort for tomorrow’s Che, with her shock of peroxide hair, a white candyfloss quiff hairstyle, and a wardrobe of beautiful clothes made by Antony Price. She had a thin voice with a flat Uni dialect, and she clung to her man like a sweet little cartoon octopus. Literally. Her four extremities were coiled around him. But she was no bimbo, although she loved it if you thought she was. She was intelligent. She was a journalist. And she was the subject of a bizarre urban legend. She was rumoured to be the product of a famous rape.

  The cast of characters from which she sprang was a rather macabre world of quiz hosts and TV preachers in the fifties. It was a kind of Alice in BBC Land where nobody turned out to be what they said they were. Her so-called father, the alleged rapist of the story, was the TV evangelist Jess Yates. Her mother was a fluffy-brained actress called Helene Thornton, who could not act and was not raped. At least, not by her husband. According to her, the story is even more bizarre. She believes that she was drugged by Jess Yates and raped by
his friend Hughie Greene, which gives a whole new meaning to the words “Opportunity Knocks.” It was later revealed by DNA testing (and at a time when Paula’s sense of self was at an all-time low) that her real father was indeed Hughie Greene. If you have not heard of Hughie Greene, it will be almost impossible to explain how depressing it was for a girl like Paula to discover that she was his daughter. (He was a household name in the sixties, a macabre TV monster with the cheery bedside manner of a killer gynaecologist.) Being the product of the “rape” brought with it, at least, a certain glamour, a sense of drama that Paula loved. But discovering that you were the child of Hughie Greene would have made you wonder who you were at the best of times, and it came as a death stroke when Paula’s world was already caving in. But this was all for later.

  That first night when we went out for dinner, to Langan’s Brasserie, everything was still ahead. Paula was going to interview me for Cosmopolitan the next day, so the dinner was to break the ice. She wasn’t classically beautiful, and yet she was startlingly attractive. She had a fragility that was erotic to men. She could break if you squeezed her too hard. She had a tiny waist that you could put your hands around and your fingers would nearly touch. This was her most extraordinary feature, because it gave the man she let hold her a sense of protective power, so that even if you were gay you could not help but feel turned on. Then she had a beautiful neck. It was long and slender and inspired the same head rush—a man could break it with one hand. It rose from lovely boy’s shoulders and the flat chest of a young Bloomsbury lesbian. Her face had the illusion of beauty, but in fact it was wonky all over. Her forehead was round like Tweetie Pie. She had a pretty nose, little girl’s eyes, but her lips gave everything away.