Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  When Béatrice arrived she was naturally nonplussed to find herself more or less living on a gay beach, but she put her best foot forward and made the most of it. She was not the seaside type. There was no question that she was going to jump into a bathing suit. It was simply not her style, particularly since we were stalked by paparazzi who hid in the dunes behind the Aqua. Yet Béa had a natural talent to be at ease wherever she was, listening to us on the banquette during our rehearsals, chatting with Frank and Thomas at the bar or with Gerard and Linda at their table. Everybody worshipped her. Thomas wanted her, and Frank wanted to be her, and sometimes we stayed with them in the tiny cabin by the water. Watching her gossip away as if she had known everyone all her life, all of us sitting in bed in our underwear, passing around joints as the waves crashed outside, I knew that I would never find another girl as good as Béa. She was perfect. When she was with you, she was with you. It didn’t matter what you did, she went along. She had faith, and you could do no wrong: until the moment when she decided that enough was enough. Then that attention would be switched off, like an electric light, and the situation would be plunged into a darkness that could never be relit. It had happened to her husband. It would happen to me. No one left Béa. But that was for later. For now she left to be a weather forecaster in the Dordogne and I left to be a hermit in Calvados. We were the French show business couple du jour.

  Then Béa thought she was pregnant. Endless telephone calls late into the night between Alençon and Bordeaux brought things to a head. What would we do if she were? The dice were rolling on our future. I spent my days in the forest, hiding in the high branches as the autumn leaves fell around me, while Pierre-Henri screamed through a megaphone from a scaffolding tower near by, all the while wondering just how it would be. Béa, baby and me. Sometimes I felt deep waves of joy. At other times I wanted to throw myself out of the tree. At night I stared out the window at St Thérèse’s bedroom, wishing for a sign. And then one night Béa called and said in a quiet voice that she wasn’t pregnant after all. We were both silent.

  “I’m really sad,” I said finally, and I was. A door had just closed.

  “Moi aussi,” she replied. And somehow, that was it.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Vortex

  The following March, in 1988, I was back in the West End in a play by Noël Coward, The Vortex. The story was about a young man who went to Paris and came back a junkie. Philip directed the play in Glasgow first of all. It was an unqualified success. Maria Aitken played the mother, and the rest of the cast was a group of Glasgow regulars. Uncle Derek played a mad pianist. Fidelis Morgan (who had been a brilliant André in the Proust play ten years before) played a neurotic soprano. Anne Lambton was a jaded society leech and her gay husband, Pawnie, was played by Tristram Jellinek. My love interest was a lovely Spanish girl, Yolanda Vasquez, and I was Nicky the concert pianist. Apart from Maria, we had all started our careers at Glasgow and were as thrilled as St. Trinian’s schoolgirls to be with each other, back in line at Rose’s canteen. Philip turned fifty during rehearsals. Maria and I stayed in his flat on Sauchiehall Street, over a hairdresser’s called Forgotten Dreams, and Hob Nob the coffee shop. Joe McKenna and I used to hang out in these establishments all those years ago when I first went to Glasgow in the hope of bumping into Philip. We would sit there for hours, looking out over the street, dreaming of starring one day at the theatre. Finally, it had all come true.

  On Hogmanay the whole cast came round. At midnight we opened all the windows to let the spirits out, and then we launched ourselves upon the city for “first footing.” Tall people bring good luck and I was kissed by the whole of Bennets, the gay disco. In retrospect, and even then, it was one of the best times. Philip was relaxed. The cast adored one another. We took the work seriously but we were there to have fun, and that was the unique thing about the Citizens.

  But the transfer to the West End tore several friendships apart, including mine with Philip. Maria had been a sweet, docile gang member while we had been up in Glasgow; as soon as we came into the West End, she transformed into a terrible head girl figure, and she took Philip along with her. Under the new regime, what had once been a living thing on a Glasgow stage turned quickly into a dead body on the West End slab, drained of its blood and filled with theatrical formaldehyde to sustain its waxy lifeless form through eight open-coffined funerals a week.

  The only thing that cheered us up was Fred, the stage door man, who had been at the Garrick Theatre for thirty-five years. He was very tall, slightly backward and had a bit of a shake. He shuffled about at a snail’s pace and couldn’t master the new (fifteen-year-old) switchboard, so if there was a phone call he would creep downstairs to your room and knock on the door, but by the time he had got back upstairs to put you through, the person had long ago hung up. He lived in the house where he was born, in north London, and he had a lovely quavery voice. He called us all “Mr.” and “Miss,” and he gave scarabs that he had bought in the British Museum to his favourites in the cast. He had seen some comings and goings, but was possibly unprepared for some of the fireworks that took place while we were there.

  One night Fidelis threw a fire extinguisher at the company manager and had to be restrained by Anne Lambton. There was a terrible tussle on the stairs. The girls were a magnificent sight, dressed only in hats, earrings, bras, tights and high heels; Fidelis was screaming as Anne tried to pull her back into the safety of their dressing room. Maria emerged from the bowels of the earth, like Matron, except she was dressed for Act Three in a torn tangerine negligee with a mascara-streaked face. She stormed up the stairs. “This has got to stop,” she commanded.

  “Shut up, you old cunt,” screamed Fid, as she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall and threw it down the stairs, spurting foam.

  “Miss Morgan. Miss Morgan. Telephone call at the stage door,” sang the querulous voice of Fred over the PA.

  “I’m not fucking available,” screamed Fid as Anne dragged her kicking into the dressing room and slammed the door. Fidelis’ muffled screams could still be heard as we fixed our smiles back into place and made our way to the stage.

  When we decided to do the show in the West End, I told Philip and Maria that I would be taking some time off, and at Easter I decided to take a little holiday, so on the Friday night after the show I presented the company manager with my doctor’s note saying that I had a relaxed throat.

  As she took it, an actor called Nickolas Grace came into my dressing room. We had a drink. Sean Mathias came by to pick me up. We were going to a club called Troll. When Maria was informed of my relaxed throat, Nickolas was by this time in her room, sipping pink champagne.

  “Where is he?” snarled Maria.

  “He’s gone home to bed,” repeated the company manager bravely.

  “Nonsense!” said Nickolas Grace. “He’s gone to Heaven with Sean Mathias.”

  Maria jumped into her car and went straight to Heaven to find me. She scoured every corner of the club but actually I was in Troll. Then she sped over to Earl’s Court to the Coleherne, of all places, and poked around there. Finally she gave up, but the next morning she called my mother.

  “He said he was ill, but actually he was in a gay club all night,” she ranted.

  “I don’t think you’ll find that’s true, Maria,” replied my dear old mum stiffly. (As you may recall, there was already bad blood between our two families.)

  By this point I was relaxing my throat at the Lancaster in Paris, having a marvellous reunion with Lychee and the colleagues, and came back fully refreshed for the performance on Monday evening. Maria and I hardly spoke again, and there were still three months to go.

  During the most intense scene of the play I spoke very quietly, and people who were used to the trilling gargoyles of yesteryear could not or would not hear. Indeed, sometimes members of the audience shouted up at me, “Speak up, Nicky!”

  Even one of Noël Coward’s only surviving girlfriends, a doddery old actre
ss who came to the first night, accosted me with a message from beyond the grave. “Noël came into the auditorium during the second act,” she croaked.

  “Really, how fascinating,” I oiled.

  She stared over my shoulder for a second as if the master himself was perched there, and then grasped my hand. “You must speak up, dear. You really must.” And she turned around and left.

  It was after my trip to Paris that the “pubic hair scandal” erupted. I was deeply hung-over from a Tuesday night at the Fridge in Brixton, when I opened a really irritating letter from Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood. They complained about the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms. I replied to the letter saying that I was “so sorry for the audibility problem and would they please accept my heartfelt apologies.” I then cut a clump of my pubic hair from my groin and sellotaped it to the letter. “And these few pubic hairs, in the hope that they may make up for any inconvenience. Ever yours, Trudie Trumpeter.”

  Needless to say, they were furious and sent the letter to the Evening Standard. I was asked for a statement, which I gave through Duncan, my agent.

  “Rupert gets between five hundred and a thousand letters a week, and as you know some fans do ask for some rather strange things. I spoke to Rupert this morning but he doesn’t recollect having any requests for pubic hair from Northwood.”

  The story made the cover of The Stage and Television Today.

  And then one night Laurence Olivier died. Without warning, at the curtain call, Maria stepped forward in her peach negligee and all that running mascara, and motioned for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, the head girl addressing the school assembly. “Tonight Laurence Olivier died.”

  It could have been a very dramatic moment, except that a man in the stalls said to his friend, “Who’s he?” I could already feel my stomach tense as a fit of giggles began to tingle deep inside my pelvis. I looked down at the floor. I knew that if I caught either Anne’s or Fidelis’ eyes, the game would be up. All of us knew that we would never work again if we started laughing on the night Larry popped his clogs.

  “We will now observe a three-minute silence,” continued Maria.

  Three minutes? After one, I was aware that Anne’s body was shaking like a spin-dryer next to me. I glanced up and she glanced at me, a frightening eye outlined in thick black with a red dot on the inside overflowing with tears. Soon I was shaking, too. I tried to concentrate on Larry in Rebecca, Larry and Vivien, Larry in The Betsy, anything, but it was no good. We both tried looking up at the spotlights. Sometimes they could stun one. Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said, “Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.” That our mirth had been mistaken for grief had never occurred to us, and I’m afraid we began to howl with laughter. The audience watched us with deep sympathy. Maria stared ahead with a pained expression, and mercifully the three minutes came to an end as the lights faded dramatically in the entire theatre to pitch black. Anne and I were crying so much we couldn’t find our way off the stage, so that when the lights came back up we were still there, arms outstretched, banging into the furniture, wailing like Russian women around a grave.

  Looking back, I was a terrible monster. Poor Maria was simply trying to do her job. I was far too grand to attempt anything so mundane and that was my problem. Trying was beneath me, so I manipulated everyone I could and enjoyed the state of siege much more than the performance.

  If going into the dusty gloom of the theatre every day felt like live incarceration in some giant tomb, then outside that endlessly shaking edifice was an explosion of life and colour. The wet spring turned into a beautiful summer. House music filled the airwaves. Gyms had appeared all over the city. I made friends with an ex-ballet dancer turned trainer, Hugh Craig (Huge Crack to his inner circle), and together we started renovations on my skeletal frame (twenty years later, I am still a work in progress—Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day).

  In the aftershock of AIDS, our collective gay aura was a question mark. Everywhere we went there was never more than six degrees of separation between us and some recent death, but we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives worrying. We either had it or we didn’t, and most of us weren’t going to find out. So that season, at the Fridge in Brixton, or Kinky Galinky’s, or Troll, rushing on ecstasy, dancing to the summer hits (“Brothers, Sisters, Take Us to the Promised Land”), the tension and uncertainty of the last few years evaporated and there was a kind of strange camaraderie, an honour among thieves that coloured every kiss. With the gyms came a new silhouette. The Pet Shop Boys were the pied pipers who led the new muscle-bound queer (gay was not a good word that year) from the back room to the ballroom. This new identity attached itself to the prevailing winds of upward mobility and soon people were talking about the pink pound. In the lull between Thatcherism and New Labour, you could still play Monopoly with London property. Some queens who rented a sandwich shop on Old Compton Street soon owned the whole block, and that year Soho was claimed by the queens. There was a restless unruly feeling in the city. It was the second summer of love and the ecstasy generation were like woodland elves that appeared out of the blue at vast raves in the countryside or on the commons of London. The police were always two steps behind, arriving just when it was too late. I moved into a small hotel in Soho, a converted seventeenth-century house near the square, and gave myself up to the pleasures of the West End.

  Across the road from the theatre lived a couple called Baillie Walsh and John Maybury. We had been introduced a couple of years before by a mutual monster, Fiona Russell Powell, but had kept each other at arm’s length. Now Baillie and I became great friends, and soon I was going over the road every night after the show, fascinated by the dangerous set of designers, discaires and dealers who sat on the floor tearing the world to shreds. Smoke from a thousand cigarettes curled around them in the shards of light from a motionless glitter ball. Baillie and John were both extremely handsome, and lay across each other in sequinned T-shirts on the floor. Sometimes the girls from Bananarama were falling down the staircase as I arrived; or clambering up the steps in two-foot heels, with only a slit for his mouth in a latex body suit, Leigh Bowery would appear from the gloom of the passage like a gay Darth Vader. There was a girl who called herself Princess Julia, with a voice like Eliza Doolittle, a DJ by the name of Tallulah, and a pair of gay carpenters called Alan and Fritz. Everyone seemed to have fairground names: Greek Andy, Gary the Cleaner, Space Princess. I was a newcomer in this crowd, and possibly too successful in the wrong way, so I kept my head down, hoping that no one would notice my name winking at them in red neon through the octagonal turret window of the sitting room from the other side of the road. I invited John, Baillie and Alan to the play, and they were suitably underwhelmed. They thought theatre was old hat. They were right. But that night at dinner we discovered one thing in common: we had all gone out with Antony Price.

  Between the matinée and the evening show on the last day of the run, I gave a party on the roof of the theatre. Philip didn’t come, and neither did Maria; but my mother did, and so did Fred the doorman. It was a beautiful afternoon. The view was sad and nostalgic, like a scene from Mary Poppins: roofs and towers and flags under the white summer sky. I stood with Fred, looking out over Trafalgar Square. He gave me a farewell scarab.

  “Oh, Mr. Everett,” he said. “You know, I haven’t been up here since Mr. Novello was in King’s Rhapsody.”

  The next morning I left for Paris. But The Vortex wasn’t yet over for me, unfortunately. A director called Robert Allan Ackerman restaged it with Philip’s original sets and designs at the Doolittle Theater in Los Angeles a year later. Suzanne Bertish, my great friend who had played my manager in Hearts of Fire, took over Anne Lambton’s part and Stephanie Beacham, of Dynasty fame, played Maria’s role.

  CHAPTER 31

  Los Angeles

  There are places you do plays, and places you don’t.
You know you are down and out when you are in a play in LA. But I was out of work and broke, and Suzanne persuaded me that I would get a great job if I went, and so in December 1989 I left for LA with a puppy I had bought in France and moved into a little cottage off Laurel Canyon that was owned by a director from England. It was a sweet house in a maze of winding roads that clung to the crumbling side of the canyon. By the end of our street, the hill had become too steep to develop, and after the last house, a brown clapboard bungalow on stilts, the asphalt became a sandy track, which in its turn was quickly reclaimed by nature: swaying desert grass, wild rosemary and tall flowering cacti. Coyote packs howled at night and came down to our street to eat the garbage, and any small dogs or cats they could find. There was a small oval pool in the shape of a Xanax, and the house was shrouded in a freezing shadow from lunchtime onwards; in the basement lived a curious spinster called Alicia.

  Rehearsals were in the converted morgue where Marilyn had been taken after her death. She had the right idea. The only way to go into that place was feet first. It was the third time I had rehearsed this play and I began to hate it. Rehearsals were like those dreams of trying to run when your legs won’t move. Ackerman had a strange hushed manner and directed like a gynaecologist locating polyps. Everyone adored him and thought he was a genius. I liked him too, but could only imagine what Philip would have said. The stage manager was a huge prison warden of a girl with a Bay City Rollers hairstyle.

  During the dress rehearsal Stephanie Beacham arrived for her first entrance sporting a huge carrot-coloured bouffant upon which perched—like the Sydney Opera House—a “discreet and chic little hat,” as designed by Philip. It looked absurd. “I’ll fight you for this!” she warned, peering into the gloomy auditorium. I buried my head in my hands. This was going to be a long slow death . . .