Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  “There you are,” he said. “I thought you were in Sydney. Julie Andrews is making Duet for One. They want you for the role of her protégé but you’ve got to get over here soon.”

  I nearly fell off my bar stool. Could it be true? All those years pretending Julie was my mother, and now art was finally imitating life, or rather fantasy life, which was better.

  I was on the next flight back to London.

  Duet for One had originally been a play. It was based on the true story of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré and her battle with multiple sclerosis. For some reason, in the play the character became a violinist but the role was a tour de force. The movie was being made by a freaky couple of producers, a pair of overweight and dishevelled Israelis famous in the eighties: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Their company, Golan Globus, sounded like the name of some kind of shot for hepatitis, but they made hundreds of films a year. And even though their cheapness was legendary, and people turned their noses up at them, they were a famous couple on the Croisette at Cannes, and everyone ended up going to them for a deal at some time or other. Some of their films were good. Some never made it any further than a gaudy full-page ad in the Cannes edition of Variety.

  Andrei Konchalovsky was one of their stable of directors, a handsome, talented Russian in his fifties who didn’t look a day older than thirty. His father had written the Soviet national anthem and had been on intimate terms with Stalin. He and his brother, a concert pianist, led privileged lives in the Soviet Union, or rather out of it, in Andrei’s case. He had just completed another film for Gamma Globulin that got quite a lot of attention: Runaway Train with Eric Roberts and Jon Voight.

  It had been arranged that I was to come back a month early to have violin lessons with Julie. After almost a year of failing to get anywhere in Hollywood, I decided to try the “method” approach. I borrowed a jacket from Adam Ant and modelled my character on the latest prodigy on the violin scene, a rockabilly called Nigel Kennedy. I developed a quiff hairstyle and a nasal Bromley twang, wore my costume at home and at work, and never came out of character, even when going to confession at the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row. My fake London accent couldn’t have been that successful because the priest peeked out from behind the curtain. “I thought it was you,” he said, before disappearing back inside.

  Even though I had in fact studied the violin for years as a child, I lied and told everyone involved in the film that I was an absolute beginner; I had visions of Julie being overcome by how deeply I was embroiled in the character, so much so that I had miraculously mastered the instrument in two lessons.

  Rehearsals took place in the Oliver Messel Suite at the Dorchester Hotel. It was all extremely old school. Julie’s assistant opened the door, and I sat around tuning up with the violin teacher for about five minutes, waiting for my mother to finally arrive and claim me for her own. Would she recognise me in character?

  She came gliding in, wearing a pair of tight beige trousers and a woolly jersey. I could hardly stand up. She hadn’t changed since Mary Poppins, still looking remarkably young, beautiful and frosty with a kind of wartime no-nonsense cheer.

  “Wotcha!” I said.

  “Do you normally talk like that?” she asked.

  I had to keep reminding myself not to call her my pet secret name that I had invented all those years ago, sitting in the wardrobe in my mother’s red tweed skirt.

  “No, spit spot. Normally I talk like you,” I wanted to say, but instead I said, “I’m in character.”

  “Ah . . .” she said, disapprovingly, thoroughly unimpressed by the method.

  For Julie and me it was one-and-two-and-three-and-turn-and-bow and look cheeky and say the line and hope for the best. We were to play the Bach Double Violin Concerto. It was not too hard, and we were going to mime to playback, but it was still pretty difficult to master the bowing and the fingering. We rehearsed every day for two weeks. I was in heaven, even though I had still not managed to conquer Julie. She was a hard nut, and I could tell she didn’t approve of my interpretation of the role.

  Rehearsals began, and many of the usual suspects were wheeled out. Being in a movie in England was rather like going to a camp prison. The studios all looked a bit like prisons—long cold corridors with shiny, painted brick walls—and inside were the same old criminals, time after time, happy to be home.

  Liam Neeson played Julie’s cockney lover, Alan Bates played her husband, and Cathryn Harrison the demure secretary. They all knew about my secret obsession and goaded me to tell her. What was I going to say? “Miss Andrews, I just want to say that because of you I was taken to a child psychologist”?

  Julie was extraordinary to watch and her performance was brilliant. There were some moments during the shoot that were hysterically funny but at the same time really uncanny. The most unsettling (for me, at least) was a scene when Julie came back from the hospital. While she was away, a lift had been installed on the staircase because she could no longer walk. She struggled onto it as we all stood around, Alan, Liam, Cathryn, and—for good measure—Max von Sydow, as she rode up the stairs looking sadly down at us all. I thought I was going to explode. It was all getting too weird. In the old days Mary Poppins had effortlessly slid up the shiny oak banister of Cherry Tree Lane and now she was being hoisted up to her deathbed.

  But the scene that was most astonishing for me happened towards the end of the shoot, and probably I should have retired immediately after it. No psychiatrist could have hoped for a more perfect resolution to a childhood obsession. It brought a whole new meaning to that funny word “closure.”

  Julie and I were filmed performing the Bach Double Violin Concerto live at the Albert Hall. Arriving that morning at dawn, there were posters of the two of us all over the walls of the huge round concert hall. I nearly fainted. As a child I had the record cover of Mary Poppins pinned to one side of my bed, and The Sound of Music on the other. We had never heard of posters then; but now I was in the poster.

  Andrei had filled the Albert Hall for the scene. Queens with Julie obsessions jostled dangerously for seats. There were a couple of full-on scraps in the stalls; tempers were frayed—people had been lining up since dawn. These fans, some of them quite freaky in wigs and flashers’ macs, watched me with undisguised hatred from the stalls as we rehearsed. I played them to the hilt, chatting with Julie, sharing jokes, generally acting as if I ruled the roost. One friend of mine, Stewart Grimshaw, looked positively green with envy at the front of the stalls.

  After the rehearsals, the scene was to be shot in one long hand-held camera move. In my white tie and tails, I knocked on Julie’s dressing room door, deep down in the bowels of the Albert Hall. She answered wearing a beautiful dress.

  “Good luck, darling. I love you,” she said. This was better than tripping.

  We began the long walk through the sloping backstage corridors up towards the stage. Andrei had told the crowds to chant and so we could hear them pounding on the floors above us. The camera crew were in front of us, walking backwards up the wide curving passage, with their lamps, their squares of polystyrene, their microphones, their total attention trained on our every move. I can’t remember what we said but it was one long orgasm. The corridor led right up into the middle of the stage and as Julie and I arrived, the whole audience stood up and screamed. I knew I was living the best moment of my career. We stood there bathing in the applause, the orchestra behind us, the conductor beaming in front. Julie looked at me and winked. We put our violins up to our shoulders. The conductor tapped his stand with his baton. There was that moment of silence, like just before you jump off a high diving board.

  Then we played the entire first movement of the concerto.

  Actually, the scene was a dream sequence so at a certain point Julie’s character began to freak out. Her hand was not working. She stopped playing but I continued with the orchestra smiling maniacally at her. She began to shout, “Stop! Stop!” But we went on playing. Two nurses in white coats arrived from
the wings and forced her into a wheelchair. They pulled her off the stage screaming. It was chilling.

  Afterwards, Julie came up to me, and said, “You’ve done a great job. I love the way you’re playing the role.”

  I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, the film got terrible reviews, but it is memorable for Julie’s performance (if not mine).

  CHAPTER 24

  Colombia

  I made my Italian debut in a film called Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It was shot on location in the small village of Mompos on one of the great South American rivers, the Magdalena. I took a friend with me, a girl called Frances.

  There is nothing quite like an Italian film crew at work. The noise, the chaos, the dramatic confrontations. You are permitted to scream at other people on an Italian film, whereas if you ever raise your voice anywhere else in the world on a movie set, it is like a misdemeanour on a driver’s licence and takes ten years to delete.

  When we got there, they were shooting the arrival of a huge old steamer on the banks of the river. It was 1952. Canoes flew back and forth in the background. Little naked kids jumped into the water. The river was swift, brown and wide, the far bank no more than a thin green line dividing it from the vast creamy sky. The paddles of the steamer ploughed majestically through the water and its horn throbbed and echoed across the sound. Between each take the various screaming matches took up where they had left off. Arms gyrated and hands prayed in that secondary vocabulary of gesture only understood by Latins. The director, the legendary Francesco Rosi, sat calmly in the shade wearing a straw hat, surveying the chaos with a benevolent smile. He was talking to the cinematographer, Pasqualino de Santis—another legend. The two men were a music-hall double act. Rosi, who came from Naples, was a huge sturdy communist with a big nose; Pasqualino was a tiny skeletal diabetic in a sun visor and white shorts. They were both brilliant. Nobody remembers now, of course, but the films of Francesco Rosi are among the greatest to come out of Italy in that extremely fertile period of the sixties and seventies. Hands over the City, Salvatore Giuliano and Three Brothers are just some of his films that were enormously influential around the world, particularly to men like Scorsese, Cimino and Coppola.

  In the story, Ornella Muti plays Angela Viccario, whose family agree to marry her to a handsome stranger (me) who has been travelling around the country looking for a wife. On the wedding night he discovers that she is not a virgin, and returns her to her family, who beat her until she provides the name of her deflowerer. To protect someone, her father probably, she says the first name that comes into her head—Santiago Nasar (Anthony Delon). Then her twin brothers set out to avenge their family honour with butcher’s knives. All this takes place on the morning the bishop is coming to bless the town, and by breakfast time everyone knows except for Santiago himself that he is about to be killed. Several people try to warn him, but for some reason each attempt fails, though finally his mother (Lucia Bosé) is informed. Thinking her son is inside the house she locks the front door, just as he is being chased towards it. As he bangs on the door the brothers kill him. The whole story is told in a series of flashbacks twenty years later by the legendary actor Gian Maria Volonté who has come back to the town, which has fallen down. Allegedly, it is a true story and without doubt it is the most beautifully crafted film I was ever in although I was wildly miscast.

  Ornella Muti was stunningly beautiful. She had one of those weird leech husbands that Italian divas feel naked without and two gorgeous little daughters. She was not haughty like most of the great beauties because she had a pair of the largest ankles that kept her feet firmly on the ground. God had given her two bodies, and that kept her sane. Her eyes were pale green and almond shaped. People dismissed her as an actress, but I thought she was excellent. Her real name was Francesca, but when she was fourteen she chose to be called Ornella. Now she had to live with that doll’s name and everything it implied. She was funny, with a touching humility, and we adored each other. She was followed wherever she went by Divo, her own personal photographer, a balding, sleazy-looking man with long hair and an unkempt handlebar moustache, who recorded everything she did.

  We stayed in a lovely house on the main street. There was a courtyard with a mango tree in the middle. A tame green bird with a red beak lived in it, and spent the day delicately peeling mangoes. A black boy of quite staggering beauty worked in the house and slept on a hammock in the hallway, and the cook, a little Indian woman, slept on the kitchen floor. When the moon was full, it shone into the courtyard and bathed the tips of the mango leaves, the sleeping parrot and the sprawled body in the hammock in fine silver lines. Coming out of my room, during sleepless nights I could hear cook’s little snores from the kitchen, deeper ones from the hammock, and the muffled voice of Frances talking in her sleep to her sister Boom.

  “Really, Boom? You can’t be serious. Boom? Boom! Where are you?”

  I stood in the moonlight with my long shadow, listening to the snores and the whispers and the cries of faraway dogs, and I felt lost from my own life, and, looking back, that was my endless quest. Not acting. Not fame. Not love. Just losing myself.

  But I couldn’t. In the part of Bayardo San Roman, the very name confronted me with myself, and in scene after scene I was always conscious of trying to throw myself off, like a schoolboy trying to get rid of last term’s best friend. Everyone else acted so effortlessly in the film—they were all Latin—but for me every step required supervision. I was anxious and twisted throughout my stay in beautiful Colombia, so that when I rose for the last time before dawn one morning to sail to Cartagena, I left that enchanted house, the red-beaked bird, the beautiful boy, the dusty village street, in a trance of anxiety.

  We left at four o’clock in the morning while it was still dark, and we arrived at the coast as night fell at ten o’clock. We took it in turns to lie on the boat’s roof and sunbathe. Otherwise we just sat and watched the river. Sometimes you could only see its banks, small jagged lines of jungle, but at other moments they fell away and you were in the middle of huge still lakes covered with floating islands of lilies, and the clouds and the sky were mirrored in the water. As the sun rose, the river shimmered with silver ripples; as the day progressed it turned from brown to beige to grey to white and then to black as the moon came up. Long taxi canoes filled with ladies holding umbrellas flew past us. We stopped for lunch in a small village, a run-down shanty with a suspicious-looking bar and scrawny chickens. Our bodyguards prowled around as if they were in a war movie. They had packed machine-guns with their sandwiches. As we approached Cartagena the traffic intensified and in the mouth of the river rusty old cargo ships were moored for the night. Passing close we could see into the cabins where dirty sailors in tank tops lay on their bunks or played cards, whole universes anchored against the flow.

  There was a bar near the port where breakfast was known as blanco y nero: a line of coke and a strong cup of coffee. It was open all night, and some of us used to meet there on the way to work in the morning where a crowd of hookers and sailors were in unusually high spirits for the time of day. When I was at lunch there one day with Frances, Francesca and my mother, who had come to visit, some men came in with a baby baboon tied round the waist with string. The string was cutting into its stomach. They wanted to sell it.

  “Don’t buy it, for God’s sake,” warned my ever-practical mother. “It’ll go to the loo everywhere.”

  “But we can’t just leave it,” said Frances. “Look, it’s bleeding.”

  We bought it, and even though Mother is always right, he was the sweetest thing. He was christened Rupi by Francesca’s girls and he immediately adopted Frances and me as Daddy and Mummy baboon, clinging to our necks with his little hands and winding his tail around our larynxes. Sometimes he nibbled our ears, which was sweet. At other times he had a lovely long pee down our backs. And if you were lucky he made a dirty protest. If you removed him he screamed like a little baby and held onto your hair with all his might. He reminded me of
myself going away to school.

  “Don’t bore me, darling,” said my mother. “It wasn’t a bit like that.”

  He was a tragic little thing. We fed him with a bottle and he stared at us with little black abandoned eyes.

  “What are we going to do with him after we leave?” asked Frances, already thinking she was going to have him at home.

  “I should have him put down before you go,” said my mother, and she was probably right.

  But we didn’t. When we left we put him into the vine outside the sitting room. He held onto it and watched us soulfully. It was horrible. We left money and instructions, knowing that the moment we left they would probably be ignored, and a week after we got back to London we received word that he had climbed up the high wall of the courtyard and fallen to his death.

  CHAPTER 25

  Bob Dylan

  Nineteen-eighty-six. I killed my first director. Richard Marquand was making a rock and roll film called Hearts of Fire with a script by a famous writer from Rolling Stone magazine, Joe Eszterhas. The story was extremely improbable. A young girl works at a tollbooth on the freeway at the entrance to some nameless steel town in the USA. She lives for her idol, an English rocker named James Colt. (Yes. Even the name sends shivers down the spine.) She is picked up one day by an old has-been rocker from the dawn of time. He sees a spark in her and takes her with him on the road in the band he is forming. They arrive in the UK, where they meet the thoroughly obnoxious James Colt, who is already a big fan of the has-been, but becomes a bigger fan of the tollbooth girl; so much so that he offers her a record deal and they go to bed, leaving the has-been to make his own way back to the US. She becomes a star. She splits with the English rocker, but they all get together at the end in a big stadium jamming session, and everyone lives happily ever after.

  I suppose I should have known better. But Celestia was casting, and I had an idea to morph my friend John Taylor from Duran Duran into James Colt. So I got some long black hair, some show suits from Antony Price, a fabulous stick-on unibrow and some of the most withering reviews of my life, which to my mind were slightly unjustified, seeing as my take-off of John was really quite good. But it wasn’t my time. Sometimes it isn’t, and the best thing is to sit still until it goes away. Anyway, Hearts of Fire was the full-on, no-survivors crash of my career. We started shooting in September at Shepperton. Pat and Meinir were with me, and my friend Suzanne Bertish was playing my manager.