For the time being I was well hooked up at the Raleigh. My friend Robert Forrest, Joyce to his intimate circle, had made my reservation, and so I was met on arrival by the owner Kenny Zirilli and his silver-haired lieutenant Jay Coyle. They were an incongruous pair. Kenny looked like a homeless person. His skin was dark and parched as though he had been sleeping rough for a couple of years. His eyes were possessed, two glowing coals sunk into a gaunt face. He shuffled around, speaking in a voice that was barely understandable, and rather sweetly offered me a line of coke as I was checking in. So this was how they did things in Miami. I was surprised but the bumptious receptionist just rolled his eyes and said, “Kenny!” Jay stepped forward and smoothed things over, laughing like an old drunken sailor, and with impeccable manners diverted Kenny’s attention while I was taken up to my room.
Jay met me in the foyer later. “Don’t worry about Kenny,” he said. “He’s quite crazy.”
The garden at the Raleigh was beautiful, and Jay doubled as head gardener. It was dominated by a large ornate pool shaped like a barrel with a waterfall at one end, and surrounded by palm trees with branches like fans. The tips of their fronds were burnt by the salty wind and they rustled seductively. At the end of the pool was a round custard-coloured pool bar that could have been a set for the musical Anything Goes. Inside it stood a lazy Latin boy leafing through a magazine and chatting idly to an old crustacean perched on a stool. Unbeknown to me, I was going to spend the next eight years with this character. (The boy, not the crustacean.) Meanwhile, Jay and I walked over the dunes and onto the beach. It was dusk and the moon was rising over the sea. Large cargo ships with pretty lights moved across the horizon, like spaceships circling a planet. The wide beach stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. People jogged and biked along it. Kites flew in the air. Dogs careered towards the ocean. Ugly weather-beaten condominiums stood in blank rows facing the beach just like the postcards. It was the last stand of a crumbling old America that we Europeans adored.
I fell in love with the Raleigh, its intrigues and eccentrics. It was hopelessly disorganised and the staff were completely anarchic, but it was a strangely classless place and the room-service waiter who brought you a snack before your disco nap could easily be meeting you later in Twist (bar), to take you to Warsaw (club). But then Kenny was no ordinary boss. They were constantly hiding the strongbox with the petty cash from his midnight raids, and were always trying to cajole him away from the foyer where he liked to lie on the red leather couch in a pair of shorts and provide a hysterical running commentary on all his guests.
These were the days when all the movie stars and fashion models stayed at the Raleigh. They had to. There was almost nowhere else. They could be found complaining at all hours to the albino queen with the great ass on reception. She didn’t much care, and nodded sympathetically before getting back on the phone to organise her night. When bills arrived all hell could break loose, but the Raleigh was full of glamour. Mickey Rourke lived in the penthouse with a pair of chihuahuas. Anna Nicole Smith paraded naked through the foyer. She had a Finnish boyfriend, a model called Bieren. They fought all the time, and when she finally dumped him she wrote, “Fuck you Bieren,” in lipstick on the mirror of their room before leaving for the airport. A girl called Suzy took it down and kept it. Kate Moss and Johnny Depp were there in the prime of their affair, little identical budgies grooming each other on a high perch. I once came out of my room to find Klaus von Bülow stalking down the barely lit corridor. Even Anna Wintour made the mistake of coming one weekend. She looked puzzled on Friday and was furious by Sunday afternoon.
People came and went throughout the night. You might come back at four in the morning to find Kenny in his shorts making out with some unsavoury gangster in the foyer, while in the background Mickey Rourke sat at a table in the dining room surrounded by gangsters in a cloud of smoke. Kenny was a genius, the Miami version of Basil Fawlty. He was famous up and down the beach. On a recent trip to Cuba he had bought a big black Cadillac, and the second time I stayed there, I was checking in with the albino (Junior) as Kenny screeched to a halt in the Cadillac at the front of the hotel. He jumped out, ran through the lobby and disappeared into the men’s toilet. Everyone froze for a polite moment, then went on with what they were doing. But ten seconds later, with a wailing of police sirens and a flashing of lights, three armed cops ran into the building and followed Kenny into the loo.
The manager, a flat-footed queen named Mario, poked her head through the door from the office like a headmistress. “What is all this ruckus?” she asked sternly.
“Kenny’s gone to the bathroom with three cops,” said Junior flatly.
“Three?” said Mario, before turning to me. “Oh hello, dear. Good trip?”
There was no time to reply because now Kenny was being dragged from the bathroom by the three cops with his trousers around his ankles. He was kicking and screaming but still found time to play host for a moment. “Hi, Rupert. Everything okay? Anything you need, just let me know.”
Kenny had a resident Cuban decorator called Albert, a small middle-aged queen with a little tummy and a mischievous face. He had black hair and black-framed glasses but was otherwise swathed in white linen. He would scour the vast second-hand warehouses that abounded in Miami, through all the stained couches upon which the ancient had recently croaked, and find cheap furniture for the hotel that he could sell to Kenny at inflated prices. He was the type of plotting maniacal queen that could only have come from Cuba. Mercifully, they don’t make them like Albert any more. He ripped off everyone, but was hysterically funny and, as he remarked himself, he occasionally “came through.” Over the years he became one of my best friends, and it was through him that I finally got a grasp on Cuba.
His family, the Rosells, left Havana in a hurry in 1959. According to legend, there was an old bell-rope with an ornate handle in the hallway of the house that the little Albert snatched as he was being spirited away. Now it sat on a table by his bed, the only thing left from a life of excess in Batista’s dictatorship. You could never be entirely sure if Albert, or any Cuban, for that matter, was telling the truth. The Cubans in exile have turned the past into a colourful mirage. To start with, even a Cuban taxi driver owned a sugar plantation, according to them. I remember early on in my Miami experience some queen who wore monogrammed velvet slippers told me he came from a noble background. Finding him frankly rather common, I later asked Albert whether this was true. He shrieked, “It means there was a doctor in the family. Maybe.”
Albert was the apple of his mother’s eye. Her name was Sylvia and he milked her as regularly as a dairy cow. When I met him he lived in a white on white on white apartment on Collins Avenue. Over the years of endless evictions and scandals this apartment was identically reproduced in a variety of different locales, so that walking around South Beach today, it is almost impossible to forget Albert because everywhere you look, he lived. On weekends he conducted a sort of virtual open house, sitting on his white couch, doing “bumps” of coke off a key, drinking neat vodka with ice, and going through his rolodex monitoring his world as they migrated through the night from bar to club to after hours. He rarely went out himself, but he received until such time as one of the parking attendants of his acquaintance arrived. Then the phones would be switched off and for twenty dollars Albert would get parked.
His would be the first phone call in the train wreck of a morning after. “Girl, I heard you took a left turn with a negro from Santo Domingo.” And you had to smile as you looked in the tangle of sheets, for sure enough there seemed to be a gentleman of Dominican extraction passed out on the other side of the bed. News travelled fast on South Beach.
The lazy Latin at the pool bar was called Martin, and pretty soon I had joined the old crustacean to sit through the humid afternoons, chatting about this and that and hearing all the gossip of the hotel. Martin had a funny turn of phrase, a curious vocabulary, and spoke in a kind of mumble that was imposs
ible to understand at first. The crustacean and I listened entranced to improbable stories from Martin’s early life and his eventual emigration to America. He was born on the banks of the River Plate in Juan La Casa, a village in Uruguay. He was an only child, raised in the worshipful clutches of two pairs of grandparents and a mother. His father, Juan Daniel, left for the States when Martin was a small boy. According to Martin, his great-grandmother, a certain Frau Schenk, had arrived in Montevideo from Germany, smuggled in a barrel.
“When exactly was this?” I carefully asked. The crustacean and I were thinking the same thing, but Martin couldn’t remember. Instead he told us how his grandmother, Frau Schenk’s daughter Yolanda, broke her jaw opening her mouth too wide one day while singing in the choir.
Martin and his mother came to Miami when he was thirteen and never returned. All the grandparents waved goodbye at the airport and they didn’t see each other again for years. Little Martin went to school. His parents split up, and mother and son moved to a small studio next to a pair of queers whom Martin spied upon through a crack between the apartments. He scraped through school and made it into that bastion of further education, the University of Miami. I was fascinated to learn about fraternities and what one had to go through to get into one. Apparently you had to eat sachets of mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup, before jumping off a high bridge into the bay. Then you got a big brother, and after that a little brother.
“Next stop you’re a mason,” I said.
“Yeah, or a waiter,” he replied gloomily. You never quite knew whether Martin was being clever or not.
Something clicked in my head, and as I sat listening, or half listening (to another story about the grandmother whose toes were sliced off in a moving elevator), an image began to develop like a photograph in a dark room, grainy and undefined at first, but quickly gathering form in the ghostly red light. It was of me and Martin together, and by the time he was describing the grandmother putting her toes into an envelope and hobbling over to the doctor’s in the vain hope that they could be sewn on, it was there, in focus, a picture of us together that was so real that, as far as I was concerned, there was no room for question.
The first hurdle was Martin’s very good-looking boyfriend, Gonzalo. One night the three of us went out in a group, which unfortunately included Albert, to Salvation, a famous club on the beach. I made my first unlikely move and started getting off with Gonzalo. We were all hopelessly drunk, and for some reason I thought it was a genius plan. Albert danced past me with a look of horror on his face. Later I heard him talking on the phone from a stall in the men’s bathroom. “Girl, she’s blind as a bat. She pounced on the wrong one.”
Martin was furious, dragged Gonzalo into a corner, and didn’t talk to me for three days. Obviously it hadn’t quite worked. Or had it? Because now I noticed a wounded look in his eyes when I went down to the pool.
I left, and it was coming up for Christmas by the time I came back. Miami was a galaxy of fairy lights. On the drive from the airport entire houses were swathed in flashing bulbs and blow-up Santas complete with reindeer landing on the roof. A Christmas tree was a different thing in a hot country. It glimmered with a new intensity and the tinsel waved about in the tropical breeze. At the airport the check-in girls wore sad lopsided red hats and snapped, “Happy holidays,” as they took your tickets. It was no longer PC to say Christmas. You might be trampling on someone else’s dreams. The Haitian taxi driver’s radio was one long sales pitch that would have given Jesus a sacred heart attack had he come down from heaven over Christmas. But I was only coming from LA and my reindeer was my black dog Mo.
He was to be my secret weapon. Anyone who has a dog will tell you. They are brilliant cruising tools and Mo broke whatever ice there was between Martin and me. He liked Martin straightaway. Actually they had a lot in common, even though Martin was to nearly kill poor Mo later on (albeit by mistake). Mo’s relationship with Kenny was more complicated. On his first day at the Raleigh he jumped into the pool as Kenny was shuffling by. “Will someone get that fucking dog out of my pool!” Kenny screamed. But Mo wouldn’t get out so Kenny barred him from the garden.
Gonzalo was away doing a modelling job and so one night Martin and I went out. Thankfully, this time Albert didn’t come. The next morning as the sun rose over the sea, bleary-eyed, dehydrated and wasted, we collected Mo and took him out on the beach. We walked in silence. The water lapped encouragingly against the sand. Seagulls squealed. Mo looked at us expectantly. This was a crucial step. One false move, and it could all go wrong. Finally we got back to the hotel and Martin said, “I’ve got to be at work in four hours.”
I replied, as though it had only just occurred to me: “You might as well stay here then.” We sat looking at the rising sun for what seemed like an eternity as the question hung in the air.
Finally Martin said, “Okay. I’ll meet you up there in ten minutes.”
The next day I woke to hear the door quietly close. I stumbled from the bed to the window. It was a beautiful morning. Martin emerged below from the fire exit and walked with a spring—or was that projection?—over to the pool bar and started work. I got back into bed. Mo was looking at me solemnly. He sighed and rolled over with a huff.
CHAPTER 36
My Best Friend’s Wedding
When my agent sent me the script for My Best Friend’s Wedding, I thought I had finally arrived at the end of the road. Actors can leaf through a script faster than a gang of termites can get through a wall. All you have to do is keep an eye out for your name to come up in the first shuffle through. Then back to the top to get a little taste of the material. First few pages; last few pages; a spot check somewhere in the middle, and then your character’s first entrance. How does the writer see him? George, a middle-aged gay man, sits at a table with a flute of champagne. Gag.
Well, maybe he has some sparkly dialogue. Negative. Three lines and then completely ignored as the star launches into a set piece with a pastry chef.
“Is this what it’s come to, Carla?” I said to my agent that night on the phone from London.
“Honey, it’s a great opportunity. This is a Julia Roberts movie. And P. J. Hogan is directing. It’s a big studio picture.”
“But there’s no part. He has three lines.”
“But you’re great casting for it.”
“Why? Because I’m gay? Just being gay doesn’t necessarily mean I should do this part. I’ve been the lead in some great films, Carla. I’ve never played a two-line part. It’s the end of the road.”
“Just take the meeting.”
At the time, April 1996, I was playing an extraterrestrial disguised as a New Zealand journalist at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London. The play, Some Sunny Day, was by my friend Martin Sherman. It was an eccentric story about a household of misfits in Cairo during the Second World War when the Germans were about to take the city. It was a curious script that would have been better suited to film. The director, Roger Mitchell, asked Uri Geller to come and talk to us about spoon bending etc., because there was a scene in the play where I had to throw an extraterrestrial fit and all the spoons in the house bent and the clocks went backwards. Uri was a strange man, as thin as a rake, but very amenable. He bent spoons for us and totally cured my bad knee. We invited him to the first night, and after the show, which in my opinion was pretty cranky, he came backstage.
“I worked on all the critics during the interval,” he said. “The reviews are going to be sensational.” And they were. One unbridled rave after another. Nobody could believe it.
At the end of the show, everybody has fled the city, leaving me on my own for a last moment on earth before returning to my planet. I bid a regretful goodbye to the follies of man as bombs explode and plaster falls from the ceiling. Then I hide behind a cupboard as a big green balloon, the real me, floats jerkily across the stage on wires in a ghostly follow spot and out through an open window. It was an underwhelming moment at the best of times, although once the ball
oon got caught on the windowsill and popped. “Oh dear, Mummy!” piped a child’s voice from the stalls. “Now he’ll never get back to his spaceship.”
Too right! I was miles away from home and just as luck would have it P. J. Hogan was in the audience that night. Afterwards, at dinner, he sat like a pinched nun on the other side of the table. He was one of those people who couldn’t lie, but at the same time was too timid to reveal what he really thought. Clearly he had hated the play, but couldn’t bring himself to say so. We did, on the other hand, talk fairly bluntly about the character of George in the film; and PJ said he was in the middle of rewriting it. Dinner ended, and we both called our agents in LA to say how boring we each thought the other was.
But the next morning he called and asked me to come and meet him for breakfast in his hotel. I went along, and he showed me a scene he had written during the night. It was the famous sequence where George sings “Say a Little Prayer.” It was a brilliant piece of writing. Foolproof. No actor could fail. I became very enthusiastic.
But still PJ was reticent. He went back to LA. He couldn’t decide and asked me to test. I did. Then he wanted me to test again and I said no. You can’t persuade people in show business. They either see you or they don’t. I have rarely got a film I tested for. There was silence for a week or so. Carla and my manager Marc did a magnificent job because it is one thing to persuade a reticent director to use your client, but quite another if you must persuade your reticent client that he wants to be used by the director at the same time.
Finally they got me the part. And for a little while I was De Niro to PJ’s Scorsese.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 32