I usually went there with my friend David and we could sit for hours and the world stood still. We were both blind as bats and everyone looked good enough to eat, until we went in for the kill and soon came flying back like boomerangs.
‘That backpack turned out to be a hunchback.’
There were two barmen. One, Luis, from Panama, an illegal, was really handsome, with a glass eye that twinkled in the gloom, and the other was a big old slut from Argentina with work papers and gigantic overtugged nipples. Well, to make a short story long, one night during a cold front I was the only person there and – yes – I started making out with the Panama Canal. Just to keep warm really. After a little while things got a bit more serious and so he sweetly suggested that we adjoin to the nearby store cupboard, which we did, leaving the bar in the hands of the Argentinean slut.
‘Was there a surveillance camera in that storeroom?’ quizzed Barry.
‘I don’t know, Barry. I wasn’t really looking.’ I was getting tetchy.
‘You do realise that if this comes out, your deal with NBC will fall apart?’ said Barry.
My heart was ready to explode. The NBC deal. Oh, no. That was my last stand. My Chappaquiddick. (Was that where Custer was cornered or where Teddy Kennedy’s secretary was drowned? Check facts.)
After I got off the phone with Barry – my world caving in – I called David in Miami. There seemed to be a party going on and David was playing to the gallery. I explained the situation and he relayed it to the group of layabouts around his pool.
‘If there’s any film of me having sex we need to get it.’
‘Then we can put it out ourselves and you can be the new Paris Hilton.’
‘I don’t have her legs. With me it would backfire.’
‘Ryan is here and says maybe you got caught on their penis cam.’ I could hear muffled shrieks from around the pool.
‘David. This is serious.’
‘So is Ryan. They installed cameras in the urinals and your dick comes up on screen in the bar while you’re pissing.’
‘Or whatever!’ screamed a familiar voice. More laughter.
‘What’s Gingi doing there? I thought she was in prison.’
‘She’s out. Good behaviour-can-you-believe-it?’
There was an impenetrable mood of sloshed frivolity in Miami and there was no use trying to lance it with shafts of gloom from the outside world. That’s why people were there. It was going to be tough masterminding a sting or whatever one called it – a pincer movement – to bring these video-dealing queens to justice. I was Charlie, going round and round on a leather wing armchair in some glamorous undisclosed location while David was my Farrah-Force-It-Major-Blind-Nelly.
A couple of days later he called with an update. ‘You’ll never guess what I wore to go there.’ He giggled.
‘What?’
‘A deerstalker! Someone left it in our house. Genius, non?’
David was on a new mystery medication and could never be serious. It was getting quite irritating. Having been in a terrible mood for the last twelve years, he had suddenly become a jolly Buddha and would crack a joke as soon as you said ‘hello’.
‘Wouldn’t a pair of glasses be more appropriate?’
‘Boys don’t make passes at girls wearing glasses and I needed all the leads I could get.’
‘Well?’
‘Yes. A reporter has been sniffing around the bar. Several times. He said he knew you went there and that apparently you had committed lewd acts in public. That’s not really fair, I said. After all, some of your films aren’t that bad.’
‘Were there any cameras?’
‘He offered money to the barmen. The Panama Canal said no way, but the Argentinean slut said yes. He thought he could get famous. By the way, you didn’t tell me you had him too.’
‘Not on camera.’
‘You’re screaming.’
‘You would be screaming too if your whole career was about to go down the drain.’
‘OK. Keep your hair on! Anyway PC persuaded AS not to talk, and the penis cam has been broken for two years – typical Miami – so it looks like you’re safe. Incidentally, the reporter is the same one that busted Britney Spears for doing coke in the loo of the Delano. So in one sense you’ve really made it.’
‘Who is this journalist?’
‘A dwarf living in Kendall. I got his address – 433 West 110th Street.’
‘We should go there and break his legs.’
I reported all this to Barry who immediately dispatched a thousand-page letter to the Enquirer, saying that if they published the story they would have to pay me the money I would lose from NBC, which could run into millions of dollars, and anyway there was no film. So the story was never printed, but I was completely drained. On the other hand at least the NBC deal was still in place.
A year or so later David and I stalked the Kendall dwarf to his clapped-out bungalow in the Everglades. It was a hot sticky afternoon in a tumbledown street carved into the edge of the swamp. Weeds grew out of the cracked sidewalk and biblical swarms of mosquitoes hovered in clouds ready to attack.
We found the dwarf’s residence and rang the bell. A little dog barked in the house next door, which had a for sale sign on a pole that had snapped in half. And then the door opened and there was the dwarf, only he wasn’t a dwarf, just a small roundish man with thinning ginger hair and thick glasses. His eyes jumped out on stalks when he saw us and he visibly recoiled as if I was going to hit him, but I breezed in like Matron, pretending not to notice, asking about the house next door: did it get the sun – sure; how was the neighbourhood – OK; was there a gay bar near by – yeah, maybe for alligators. That was quite funny and I was rather warming to him but David, who was hell-bent on retribution, produced the big round cake we had purchased on the way and threw it at his face. It missed, needless to say, and landed at the dwarf’s feet. There was a pause. I think we were all shocked.
‘That’s for Britney,’ David finally screamed and ran off to get the car, leaving the dwarf and me in a face-off during which I was meant to squirt him with the washing-up liquid I was hiding behind my back. It all seemed rather pointless now. This innocuous blob blinked and sighed, bracing himself for whatever was coming next, and it was rather touching. I was lost for words.
‘Would you mind awfully not writing stories about me for the National Enquirer?’ I asked finally.
‘OK,’ he replied, looking at me with owlish eyes.
‘You have no idea just how much these things can fuck one up.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Thanks.’
Another pause. The sun was sinking over the vast green swamp and it suddenly tinged the dwarf’s head with radiance as if he were a saint. He was instantly surrounded by a cloud of leggy mosquitoes and the effect was rather mesmerising. The for sale sign, the long blades of grass on the ratty lawn, the windows of the bungalow, were all momentarily lined in gold and the whole thing looked heavenly.
‘Oh look …’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a lovely evening.’
The dwarf looked up and agreed as David screeched around the corner in the car.
‘Quick. Get in!’ he screamed.
I looked at the dwarf and aimed my Mr Dazzle at his face, pulling the trigger a couple of times before jumping in the car. As we shot off I looked back and he was still standing there, no longer bathed in radiance. Just a sad little snitch in the long shadows, living comfortably on the edge of a swamp.
We turned a corner and David said, ‘That was West 110th Street, right?’
I craned to look at the street sign.
‘No, 109th.’
‘Oh dear,’ said David and kept on driving.
CHAPTER FIVE
Faint Heart Never Fucked a Pig
The NBC deal took a long time to come off. It all began one night at the end of the last century.
It was a beautiful July evening in 1999, the perfect night for the last great American party, and the day I
hit my peak. Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown were launching a new magazine called Talk. It was going to be the most successful magazine the world had ever seen. People still talked – thought – like that in those heady last days of the American Raj.
Harvey was cinema’s most enigmatic producer, a New York hoodlum, the essence of that town, as tall and wide as its streets, as dangerous too on occasion. In appearance he was like a vast manatee recently emerged from the sea. Dripping and scarred, addicted to cigarettes, with flapping shirt-tails. In short, he was a brilliant slob, larger than life, Hollywood style. He had a round face with shrewd eyes and a flat boxer’s nose. People said he was ugly – he always came up in those Hollywood games that were played during commercial breaks at Oscar parties: who would you rather fuck, Wienstein or Fierstein? – but actually I think he was attractive. He had an enormous energy, a great voice, and the secret of his charm was that somewhere under that blunt exterior you could still glimpse the face of the ten-year-old Harvey, an erased innocence submerged under the bumpy surface of his moon-shaped head. When he wanted you, as he did me once and never again, his onslaught was irresistible, unbelievable. He made great films and great turkeys. He interfered with every aspect of a film and his terrible tantrums were legendary. In other words, he was exactly the type of character that made it all worthwhile, a throwback to the Hollywood autocracy.
Tina Brown was his unlikely sidekick in those drunken days, as small and thin as he was tall and wide. She dressed carefully, a Princess of Wales in clumpy shoes, often in white to set off her short blonde hair and her ice-block eyes, and next to her, Harvey looked like a giant old couch that had been left on the street. Tina was perched perfectly on the edge, knees crossed, a journalistic falcon, looking, watching, ready to dive-bomb from a great height at any sign of a scoop.
Together they were a strange combination, a Vaudeville double act. He pushed the barrel organ, while she held the hoops and we all jumped through. They had the makings of the great business marriage à la mode. Tina’s pedigree was faultless. First she had breathed new life into Tatler magazine in England. Then she moved to America and created Vanity Fair, and just as that magazine hit its peak she abandoned ship for The New Yorker, the jewel in the Condé Nast crown, and made a great success of that. She was vastly intelligent, extremely well read and, along with Anna Wintour, the legendary editor of American Vogue, was one of the unlikely British bookends that more or less held the boys’ club of Condé Nast together.
Those two fascinating figurines, so physically smashable, you would think, were as tough as nails under their china veneers and didn’t seem to care for each other much, giving one another a wide berth. Where one was, the other rarely appeared. Possibly they were the same person. Both women were petite, attractive and frosty with sharp tight voices of extraordinary dialect, peculiar to them and to others like them (Joan and Jackie Collins, Grace Coddington, and all the other various British dominatrices who threw their lots in with Liberty during the seventies and eighties). They are regular treasure troves, vocal collages, replete with all the submerged twangs of north London, the British rag trade, red-brick universities and the Rank charm school, all frosted over with the hilarious compromise an English speaker arrives at with the American dialect.
Now I am standing with Madonna at the end of a jetty at Battery Park, on the eastern tip of Manhattan. Harvey is with us. A thousand paparazzi are crammed on another jetty, a giant porcupine bristling lenses and booms. A thin channel of water divides us from them, the colour of weak tea, slapping against the concrete bollards and jumping up at all those other half-submerged skeletons of ancient wooden piers, which for some reason have never been removed and stick up out of the water like black rotting teeth up and down the Hudson. (These teeth, incidentally, once supported the vast collapsing hangars appropriated by the queen world for crucifixions and cluster fucks. But that faraway Sodom was sucked beneath the waves of Reaganite America. It seems strangely innocent compared with tonight.)
There is a strong breeze, metallic and rancid. It is a beautiful evening at the end of another blistering summer day. Everything, the people, the buildings, the trees even, are visibly relieved that it is over, and there is always a huge collective sigh of relief, a lazy groan that comes with dusk over Manhattan in July. The sky and the sea are milky blue. A giant American sun hangs low over the horizon under a broken ceiling of fluffy clouds that stretch towards the Wild West and the rest of the interior. The sun’s rays hurtle down this tunnel between the measurable and the immeasurable, spilling like blood over the marble sea, and turning the clouds into little rashers of pink and grey bacon disappearing into infinity.
Behind us the Manhattan skyline curves into the distance – a gigantic fortress in a blur of exhaust, its billion windows glinting in the setting sun, its Twin Towers flying high above the ramparts. Little red lights blink on pins at their summits, a weird, innocent warning to any low-flying planes in the vicinity. The city is strangely silent. The mad traffic within is only a murmur from the end of this jetty as I stand holding hands with the world’s undisputed Most Famous Woman. Before us the Long Island Sound stretches out towards Liberty, Brooklyn and, somewhere out there, Old Europe. Liberty is little more than a red dwarf with cataracts in the setting sun. She has been reduced! The scale of the modern skyline has cut off her balls.
A speedboat carrying Tina, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson ploughs across the Sound towards her like a comet with a swirling tail of phosphorescence. (Natasha, the Towers – gone, and that’s what’s so spooky about this story.) They are on their way to the party, which is taking place at Liberty’s sandalled feet. Standing there with Madonna, who is on crutches (she pulled a muscle doing the splits), looking out at all this, I am completely unaware that I have got about as far as I will ever go. And that the whole world is about to collapse.
Harvey is extremely courteous. Madonna leans on my arm. She needs me tonight just to get from A to B. I am her ‘ami nécessaire’ and if I’m developing skin cancer from too much basking in her reflected glory, I don’t care. (None of those scorched by the nuclear waste that stars exude wears enough protection.) Our film, which in a few short months will tear my career to shreds, is still in that ideal phase, made but not seen, and if our friendship is approaching its sell-by date we don’t know it yet. Or at least I don’t. (She probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm.) For the time being the world is fascinated by us and so are we. Tina is even thinking of putting us on the first cover of Talk. (She doesn’t in the end.)
Has it all gone to my head? Or do I still feel out of place? Both. It’s a befuddled drunken feeling. We climb aboard a cigarette boat, swerve flirtatiously past the phalanx of cameras and roar off towards the island in a wall of spray. The cameras flash like a fabulous firework as we pass by and the screams and shouts of those hysterical freaks blow at us in the breeze, violent and barbaric, so that even when we are arriving at the island their voices are still close. Madahhh-nna! Ruperrrrt! We ignore them, knowing that it will be a great photo op and Madonna has never looked prettier. She too is in the last days of her prime, perched on the edge of a new and delicate reinvention as spiritual leader and offshore earth mother. Harvey and Tina may be launching a magazine. Madonna is launching a new religion. It’s the only thing left when you’ve had it all. Becoming God (or Goop, in Gwyneth Paltrow’s case).
We arrive at the party at exactly the right time. Henry Kissinger is already there and I am by Madonna’s side as he is introduced. Omygod, I think, this is the man who dragged Cambodia into the Vietnam War, but of course I say nothing even when a waitress comes by to ask us what we want to eat.
‘What’s on the menu?’ asks Kissinger and I can barely restrain myself from shrieking, ‘What’s on the menu, Henry? Would that be Operation Menu?’
Instead I obsequiously offer to go and fetch some nibbles. With success comes compromise, and it’s amazingly easy to forget two million massacred Cambodians as one is passi
ng around the cheese straws. There is a bit of a hiccough as Tina searches for the right way of introducing Madonna to Henry.
‘Miss Ciccone? Mrs Lopez? The queen of pop?’ She giggles awkwardly, her face a question mark.
‘Madonna,’ I say firmly. ‘Would you like a cheese straw, Henry?’
‘Rupert,’ says Tina as we are about to wander onto the next gaggle, ‘I want you to come with me to Washington next week. Are you free?’
‘No. He charges by the hour. Didn’t you know?’ answers Madonna, hobbling off.
Chinese lanterns hang in the trees and the beautiful people sit on cushions and chairs on the grass. There are tables, a dance floor with a glitter ball, and a waiter for every star. Queen Latifah gives an address and everyone claps. It’s a hollow vulnerable sound in the vastness of Liberty Island. It’s a hollow vulnerable party actually, even if it looks like the greatest show on earth, not unlike the dazzling pictures of Studio 54 in its heyday. Many of the same characters are here, in bow ties and silk socks, in fabulous diamonds and couture, but much of it is borrowed or bartered now, and each diamond has its own security guard lurking in the bushes. And anyway there are no waiters in satin hot pants or hungry young garage mechanics from Hoboken to sweeten the pill: just the self-congratulatory drone of all these excessively rich people, frazzled and blinded by power and crazy money. Even the disco queens and pop icons have a sheen of respectability about them and look more like careful heiresses than sex sirens.
Madonna is putting on a brave face but I can tell she is frustrated by her crutches. She needs to be able to swoop into downward dog at any given moment, or at least to be a crab, and feels severely compromised if she can’t. She hobbles home after about half an hour, to wrap herself in clingfilm for another sleepless night plotting. She is, as usual, quite sensible and misses the scrum for boats at the end of the party, which isn’t when you might imagine, as dawn rises over the city. No.
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