Midge was gorgeous and gregarious, but like many young women she was worried about her weight, worried about her hair and worried about her skin. Ironically, despite her looks and her sense of humour, she had trouble fitting in and never had any real friends of her own – that is, except for me. I realize now that this should have been my first clue to her troubles, but I was young and away from home and stretching my proverbial wings – and I do mean stretching. As I’ve said, I’ve undoubtedly inherited my parents’ party gene.
The more I got to know Midge, the more I witnessed her using her insecurities to manipulate those around her, especially her family. After experiencing years of Midge’s unpredictability, it seemed to me as if they’d taken to throwing money at her, giving in to her every whim in an attempt to keep her consoled and out of range of their lives. Midge rarely tried to manipulate me and so our friendship survived, despite her occasional bitchy tendencies. Her behaviour was actually a symptom of something much more serious, but no one was really paying attention.
Because Midge had a difficult time making friends, I often included her when I had plans with mine. I even set her up with one of my friends from university, Thorsten Kaye, who is now a well-established television actor in America, most recently to be seen in the soap opera All My Children, and father to two daughters. Their first few dates went fine, but soon Midge began to rant about their relationship, in a manner that I thought verged on paranoia.
It was at that time that I learned from another friend that Midge’s reasons for leaving her last university had to do with her destructive, obsessive behaviour with an ex-boyfriend. I pulled Thorsten aside one night, when he and Midge returned to the flat, and I told him to back away. Thankfully, he did.
Midge was both naive and world-worn at the same time, so she was easy prey for scams. Once, she was persuaded to sign up for modelling classes that most of us knew were not legit, but Midge wouldn’t listen, and the modelling agency had just enough legality to stay in business without raising too many red flags. The agency published its own so-called magazine and the deal was that after taking the required make-up, hair and wardrobe classes, the sucker, erm, I mean model, could purchase an ad in the magazine to promote herself. The company guaranteed dissemination of the magazine to all the biggest agencies and fashion designers in the country. Midge attended the necessary classes and at the end of the course she was given the option to buy either a quarter-, half- or full-page ad. Midge insisted on a full page, and so Midge got a full page. The tab for the entire experience was $10,000. In the mid eighties, that was a hell of a lot of money. It still is.
She charged it to her American Express card without telling her parents, and when they did find out, they never acknowledged the outrageousness of the cost nor the stupidity of the decision to participate in the first place, which I believe was what Midge had really wanted. She was desperate for a reaction, and if she couldn’t get a positive one, negative would have been fine, too. Even if it meant that her parents cut off her credit card, flew her home and screamed at her for a month. My parents would’ve dragged me home by the scruff of my neck and fed me tripe for weeks.
It was right after this incident that Midge’s behaviour became even more erratic. She’d disappear for days at a time, and when she did come home, she’d bring a stray cat or two with her or an expensive dog that she’d bought on her dad’s credit card. I love animals as much as the next guy, but the flat was beginning to look and smell a bit like Pets R Us. One day, Midge would eat anything that wasn’t moving, and the next day she’d refuse to drink anything wet. Her bedroom started filling up with dirty clothes because she’d stopped doing the laundry. Eventually, the pile would get so high that she’d run out of clean underwear or T-shirts. Rather than get some detergent, she’d go out and buy new knickers. When she wasn’t wandering the streets, she’d stay in bed for days on end, lost in her hopelessness and despair.
Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but foresight is worth so much more. When I look back on that time with Midge, I realize her actions were not just personality quirks. Sadly, those who’d known Midge for years, and witnessed these same patterns again and again, appeared to demonstrate no foresight in trying to get Midge any meaningful help to stop her descent into full psychosis.
I was twenty years old and just beginning to figure out who I was, yet even I could eventually see that Midge was heading for trouble. I watched her self-destruct before my eyes. In my young mind, I thought I was helping when I physically dragged her out of bed and gave her personal ultimatums, but all I was really doing was putting plasters on deep wounds. I’d yell, ‘You may not go into your room until you’ve cleaned up the mess you made in the kitchen,’ and then I’d block her bedroom door. She’d glare at me, but she’d clear up her clutter. I did my best to drag her from her slumps and restrain her during her highs, but what she really needed was intervention from a parent, not pity from a peer.
At times, when Midge was at her most manic, I resented the fact that I was the one taking care of her. Despite knowing about her deteriorating mental health, her family never insisted she be brought home. I think they were paralyzed by their perception that Midge’s psychological state was somehow a reflection on their parenting, when, in fact, it was their neglect of her mental condition that was the real mark of it. I mean, this was the 1980s, not the Middle Ages. Midge could and should have been saved.
A few days before I was due to head to England to spend the semester abroad with USIU’s theatre programme, Midge returned from a three-day bender insisting that a cult had kidnapped her. Her highs were getting higher and her lows were scraping rock bottom by now. The night before I left California for London, we laughed, drank champagne, and toasted each other’s futures. Sadly, Midge didn’t have a very long one ahead of her, and our evening together turned out to be the last time I ever saw her.
After I got the part in Anything Goes, I moved to London permanently. Since I’d only packed for a semester away from the States when I’d originally left, my parents had to drive out to California and, with my brother Andrew’s help, pack up my belongings and haul them back to storage in Illinois.
They reported back to Midge’s parents that Midge was a wreck and they didn’t think she could continue living by herself. The flat was a mess and so was she. But instead of bringing her home immediately, her parents opted to send one of her brothers to take care of her. When her brother got there, the condo was a zoo. Literally. There were strays crawling on the furniture, filth and faeces everywhere. Midge had even thrown stuff over the balcony and just left it where it landed in the woods behind the building.
When Midge was finally brought home, she was diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic with multiple personalities. I’d met all of them. Seriously, I had, and so through all of this, the diagnosis, treatment and care, Midge kept calling me. I’d come out of a matinee and Midge would call. I’d finish an evening performance, and Midge would call. I’d remind her that she needed to stay on her meds, and that maybe in the future she could be the old Midge again.
Time passed, and I moved on to other performances. Only days after I’d had a long talk with Midge, I heard from my mum that she’d been hospitalized in a serious condition and diagnosed with leukaemia. Not a mental illness, but a physical one. Where had that come from?
Just a few weeks later, my mum called to tell me that Midge had died. I was devastated. For ages, I struggled to come to terms with how someone so young with so much life left to live could be gone, and in such a tragic way. To this day, I believe Midge committed suicide.
Her funeral was private and happened quickly. There was no obituary and no service of any kind. As far as I was concerned, this was Midge’s final indignity. Her parents appeared to me to treat Midge in death the way they’d treated her in life, with as little fuss as possible. Friends and neighbours who were close to Midge’s family and who had known her well – like my mum and dad, like me – wanted to remember her and grieve for her w
ith some kind of public ceremony. It wasn’t to be. At the very least, I wanted to send flowers, but I was discouraged from doing so. I was not alone in this. Close friends, even members of Midge’s family, were shut down and shut out.
Not too long after Midge’s death, my parents gathered with her parents and some other friends from Joliet for a weekend party at Midge’s parents’ lake house. The conversation in the room suddenly took a turn that set Midge’s father off on a vitriolic rant about minorities and gays. After a couple of minutes, my parents put their glasses on the table, stood up and said to him: ‘You’re a bigot and a homophobe. You know John is gay and yet you can stand there and spout that poison. We’re leaving. We’ll not stay under the same roof as you anymore.’
Midge’s mum tried to stop them, pleading that her husband hadn’t meant what he’d said, but he had, and my parents knew it immediately, because sometimes the true measure of a person is revealed in their most unguarded moments.
My mum and dad went up to their bedroom, packed their suitcase, and within a half-hour they were driving through the unknown countryside in the middle of the night, in search of a hotel room. They called Carole to tell her what had happened. Kevin went on his computer in Milwaukee and quickly directed them to a nearby motel. Then my parents called me in London. I stayed on the line with them until I knew they weren’t going to go careening off the road into a ditch, given their emotional state.
Since that night, my parents have had nothing to do with Midge’s family. When I think of Midge, which I do often, I can’t help wondering how different her life might have been if she’d had the kind of parents who were willing to storm off into the dark night in her defence. Midge was generous and gorgeous, and we had lots of good laughs together. She was twenty-nine when she died and I still really miss her.
‘High Flying Adored’
Following my brief summer fling at Opryland, my first serious gay relationship was with a Spanish flamenco dancer from Cordoba called Paco Perez-Arevelo. When I met him, Paco was a dancer and the assistant to the dance captain in Matador, a musical that tells the fictionalized tale of a real-life bullfighter, Manuel Benitez, whom I portrayed in the same production. Rafael Aguilar, one of the world’s most famous flamenco choreographers, composed the dancing in the show, using six flamenco dancers to dramatize the bull.1 Paco danced as the head of the bull (and that is not a metaphor – I’m so not going there).
Matador originally opened in 1991 at the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a runaway success in terms of ticket sales, despite receiving critical acclaim. It’s my contention that the musical fell victim to a serious slump in tourism that occurred that year due, in part, to the war in the Gulf. As a result, it ran for only three months, regardless of the good reviews (that’s the show, not the war).
My relationship with Paco began as a clandestine one, at least in my mind, because technically I still had a girlfriend (remember Marilyn?). However, my dresser John Fahey – whom I worked with for the first time during Matador and have always requested thereafter whenever I work in the West End – Stefanie Powers, my co-star in the show, most of the rest of the company and, frankly, a good deal of the West End knew I was having an affair with Paco, so I guess it wasn’t that secret after all.
When my peers from USIU had returned to finish their university year in San Diego in 1989, Marilyn and I had continued to talk to each other regularly. Somehow, though, we’d managed never to confront the realities of our relationship, until one afternoon when she paid an unexpected visit to the theatre.
At about noon on that fateful day, Paco and I drove into central London from my flat in Bow for a matinee performance. I’d just turned on to Wardour Street when John Fahey came bounding out the stage door and stopped my car on the corner.
‘Marilyn just landed at Heathrow,’ John announced breathlessly. ‘She’s on her way to surprise you.’
I was stunned and suddenly flustered: a sight to behold since it doesn’t happen very often. Paco slammed the car door, saying, ‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ or something along those lines. He spoke in Spanish. It sounded much more emphatic and dramatic.
I dashed upstairs to Stefanie’s dressing room, told her what was happening and begged for help. Ever the trooper, she said, ‘John, you’ve got two options. If you need me to, I’ll pretend you’re having a fling with me. I’ll come into your dressing room and throw my weight around a bit. Or you can be a man and tell her the truth.’
I knew the second option was the right one, but knowing that didn’t make what I had to do any easier. Marilyn was a close friend and the last thing I wanted was to hurt her or damage our friendship. When she arrived, I greeted her in mock surprise, and then she watched the show from the house seats. Afterwards, we went out to dinner, followed by a walk along the Thames. We sat on a bench and I sucked it up and spilled my guts.
When I was finished with my confession of sorts, she replied, ‘That’s why I came over, John. I figured you were gay and I knew we had to deal with this face to face.’
I grabbed her and hugged her and thanked her, because it was probably one of the hardest trips she’d had to make. While I was blissfully ignoring the entire situation in Paco’s arms, and had only begun to anguish over seeing Marilyn when my dresser had leapt in front of my car earlier that day, she, on the other hand, had been stewing about this for months. We left the bench overlooking the Thames and met Paco at my flat, where the three of us had a big slumber party, watching movies, telling stories, laughing and singing.
It was not long after I’d resolved my relationship matters with Marilyn and Paco that a whole other bull raised its horns – and this one was not so easy to control.
When a personal phone call comes into a theatre for a performer, it’s usually answered at the stage door, where it’s either immediately forwarded to the actor’s dressing room, or it’s screened and then put through or dismissed. My success in Anything Goes had resulted in my attracting a few, let’s say, exceptionally adoring fans, so I needed to vet my calls. I’ve never had anyone stalk me in any serious way, but even twenty years ago I had one or two female fans who, if they could catch me on my way to my car, would follow me home.
John, my dresser, answered the phone one day while I was changing into my street clothes. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
‘Someone’s calling on behalf of a Mr Garavani, John. Do you want the call put through?’
I’d no clue who that was, but he’d been insistent and convincing to the manager at the stage door, so I accepted the phone call.
An Italian-accented voice said, ‘Mr Garavani saw the show last night and he loved it. He would like a meeting to discuss some possible business with you.’
‘I’m flattered, but I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘who is Mr Garavani?’
‘Mr Garavani is a designer. You may know him by his first name, Valentino.’
Describing Valentino as a ‘designer’ is a bit like saying Sondheim is a songwriter or Shakespeare just dabbled with words. Of course I knew him by his first name, and yes, I said, oh, yes, I’d be happy to meet with him. Over the next couple of weeks, Valentino himself regularly called my dressing room and, finally, he broached the subject of a meeting. He said he thought I’d be perfect to model for a new line of men’s clothing he was designing called ‘Oliver’. Might we meet to discuss this?
Valentino has dressed the rich and famous since the 1960s, including Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow. His name was and still is synonymous with fashion royalty, and he travels in the same circles as the princes and princesses he regularly clothes. In the early 1990s, Valentino was the king of couture, the sovereign of the cognoscenti. I was twenty-four and the ‘boy from nowhere’,2 more than a little in awe of the man and his work.
Paco was not happy about the calls and he wasn’t thrilled about a meeting, but I agreed regardless. I made arrangements to go to Valentino’s house in
central London, a palatial estate in Knightsbridge. I was greeted by his butler and guided to a sitting room that I can only describe as a cross between a room at the Palace of Versailles and a museum gallery. The whole place was far from my taste, which leans more to the modern with clean lines and comfortable textures, but Valentino’s overt lavishness was stunning nonetheless.
When Valentino eventually entered the room, he was immaculately dressed, his light brown hair perfectly coiffed, and his entire affect old world and refined. I was surprised at how much shorter he was in person than in magazine pictures, but his stature defied this first impression. His manner was impeccable, and his poise was suave and debonair. Throughout our conversation I felt as if someone’s father was interviewing me before a prom date or, more accurately, as if an old-fashioned gentleman was vetting me before letting me near his daughter or son. While I sipped water from a crystal glass, he asked me about my life, my future plans and what I hoped to achieve as a performer. Although he took no notes, in time I discovered that he had listened very, very carefully to all my answers.
A few weeks later, after a number of lavish gifts had been sent to my dressing room at the Queens Theatre, Valentino contacted my agent at the time, Jeremy Conway, asking to hire me to model for his new ‘Oliver’ line. Valentino’s representative explained to Jeremy that I would be needed as soon as possible for the photo shoot, which was to be set up on Valentino’s personal yacht, the TM Blue One, while it toured the Mediterranean for two weeks. Did I need to think about this? Jeremy asked me. Oh, maybe for about an entire minute and a half.
Matador was in its final performances, and I’d planned a trip home to the States to visit my family after the show closed, but I agreed to travel to Rome directly after that. I could barely believe what was happening. To be a Valentino model would be no small accomplishment at that point in my career. I was incredibly flattered.
Anything Goes Page 11