This party is for a thousand careful Cinderellas and even if their coaches don’t turn to taxis at midnight, their serene fascinated faces revert to witches’ grimaces if the evening’s longevity exceeds by a minute the schedule prescribed by their publicist, which has been mapped out with military precision – from the time they are to be picked up, to the moment of the satellite link up with the E! channel studios in Burbank, to the time they will be getting back home and can get on with their real lives of screaming and throwing things and torturing assistants and complaining about the schedule of their next movie to various vassals in offices still open on the coast. Witchlike, they will kiss their overindulged progeny in bedrooms equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of whim and as midnight strikes they will be creamed and chinstrapped, perusing a script, and if they aren’t – heads are going to roll.
Yes, this is the bleak reality of tonight in a world that has lost all sense of humour, let alone proportion. Tonight is an important night, because under the orange firmament whose only stars are the tail lights of aircraft coming and going from the many airports surrounding the city, the life is finally draining out of New York City, like the colour from a snapshot taken on the best day of your life. Things will never be like this again and anyway even this is not like this, or that, rather. This is just Versailles without the style. The only thing that could be described as – what, touching? – is that none of us knows what’s in store. I certainly have no idea. As far as I’m concerned I should be a national treasure by this time next year.
And so I prance around, one eye on Madonna and another on the line for the restroom, because pretty soon I am off my face on booze and powder, nipping off to the loo with all the usual suspects as soon as Madge looks the other way, shovelling coke up my nose, contorted, five to a portaloo, giggling and chopping and sniffing and rolling up those damp disease-trap dollar bills and really if I’m looking at me now, I should already be knowing better, because first of all whatever gland produces saliva has gone on strike inside my mouth and it feels like a dry paper bag and I am obliged to constantly lube it by bucketing alcohol down my throat. My eyes are on stalks. I stumble around.
Soon I am part of a dangerous posse that to anyone in the know is overlit and exaggeratedly drunk, but to those who aren’t, we are just bright middle-aged things with red cheeks and drippy noses in a cloud of smoke. We get louder and louder. Then the fireworks start but we don’t watch. One firework is much like another, and all we’re interested in is screaming and drinking and going to the loo for another line. But the fireworks crack on.
Classical music wafts across the island and then suddenly everyone in the entire party is struck with the same thought: let’s get an early boat and not get stuck. So a thousand people rush for the jetty. We’re too late and wait for hours, no more drinks or cigarettes, and tempers fray, but finally I find myself on a boat with one of the nicer couples – Julianne Moore and her husband Bart Freundlich. They can see that I am totally wiped out. My mouth is so dry now that I can hardly talk. My eyes are wide and unseeing. My hair looks as though I have just stuck my finger in an electric plug. Bart and Julianne are well mannered but I can tell that they are grossed out. The boat trip takes for ever and feels like a scene from Titanic. Hundreds of people squashed onto life-rafts in evening dress on the black water. Liberty looks at her watch and says, ‘Goodness, is that the time?’ and the lights go out. I end up in some restaurant with Kate Moss and Liam Neeson and Baillie Walsh and a few other people.
Liam says, ‘Rupert, I’m really happy about your career.’
And someone else says the only true thing of the night: ‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to last!’
At dawn we are back at my house where my dog Mo is sitting by the front door with a disapproving look.
So I put on a pair of dark glasses and take him for a walk, weaving down the street, looking busy as only drunks and junkies can. Bending over to shovel up Mo’s shit, I lose my balance and my shades slip from my nose and land splat in the middle of Mo’s little present! Mo laughs. I look around to see if anyone is watching and then we hotfoot it round the corner, leaving my Dolce & Gabbana shades stuck jauntily in Mo’s shit like a Flake in a Mr Whippy. It looks quite artistic, actually, an apt final ‘installation’ of the evening, so when we get home I get my camera and race back to take a picture. The shit remains but the glasses have gone. All hail to whosoever had the stomach to take them. Faint heart never fucked a pig.
Now I am on a private plane with Tina and a group of VIBrits on the way to dinner at the British Embassy in Washington. Presumably my behaviour at the party wasn’t that bad because here I am. Tina is still talking to me and the world marches on, cloudless like the evening.
To access the broader picture, if I may: in England Tony Blair is still a national hero, flushed and hungry from Kosovo, as it transpires. (We didn’t notice. How could we?) England is still in the full throes of Cool Britannia. Clinton is going to leave America with credit in the bank. Tina is at the zenith of her career and the future looks as creamy as the dusk falling on the country as we roar over. It twinkles in the summer haze, a patchwork quilt of fields and woods – the hedgerows dividing them the last whisper of eighteenth-century Maryland.
It’s funny how America obliterates the past. You can only see it from the air. Mile upon mile of green woody hills roll into the distance. Thick brown rivers coil through them, with amazing tributaries like the branches of lungs. Strange square towns are superimposed upon this fairy kingdom, their avenues and streets rudely etched into endless tree-lined cubes. Spaghetti junctions and freeways carve across the country, veins and arteries pumping cars and trucks and cheap petrol into the marvellous American mist. It is an enchanted evening.
The interior of the plane is upholstered in beige leather. It’s a padded cell for the super rich. Tina sits on a banquette wearing a black dress and pearls, dictating last-minute revisions for the next edition of Talk to her secretaries, pretty girls also in black, frozen with attention. The rest of us drink champagne and talk to the guest of honour, Simon Schama, Tina’s pet historian. Tina is featuring him in the next edition of the magazine and this trip is one of the last grandiose promotional junkets a magazine will ever take.
Schama doesn’t stop talking. He has recently achieved Sufi status in the glare of Tina’s sunshine and everyone sits enraptured at his feet. Is he a queen? Actually he isn’t. He’s one of those peculiar fey straights, a male lesbian, more dangerous even than the lesbian herself. (When riled.) He is impassioned by the surrounding clutch of adoring women and sprays them with words and champagne saliva. He is a great performer, I note sourly, unable to rein myself into the team mindset, and ogle him as if he were Visconti.
(I remember thinking, any minute now she’s going to be made a knight. And I was right. Already he is one of the ‘artistes’ of the Cameron Coalition and has been commissioned by ‘Sir’ to bring schoolchildren back into the classroom. Good luck. Lollipops and a net are going to be the only way. Bang, Bang, Chitty Chitty Bang, Bang. But I digress. All this is yet to come.)
For the time being he has a gigantic mouth and huge flapping hands and ears, and looks a little like Ian McKellen, and speaks with flat northern drawl. His hands twirl like propellers as he takes off with enthusiasm at some historical yarn. He is very good. Humorous and brimming over with what the Americans call personality, but others would just call blind ambition. He is part of Cool Britannia. Tina looks over at him fondly and I feel a pang of jealousy. I want to be Tina’s pet.
More limos are waiting as we touch down. Black whales in impressive rows boiling on the tarmac and our plane comes to a screaming standstill beside the first one. We’re at a private airport outside Washington. As the door opens a palpable vibration of power bursts in with the local atmosphere. Dorothy must have felt like this approaching the emerald city. It is claustrophobic and exhilarating.
The airport building itself is quite modest and totall
y dwarfed by the rows of huge white jets parked around it. They look evil and incongruous against the explosion of summer green that surrounds them. This forest smoulders with heat, livid and threatening, kept at bay by wire fences through which its tendrils creep, clinging to the boiling tarmac, pushing against the fence with all its force. It feels for a chilling moment, as we squawk and clatter to our cars in the setting sun, that nature actually hates us and is seeing us quite clearly for what we are – a line of killer ants in black dresses and patent-leather bags, all set to chomp our way through Washington. The engines of our jet cut out and there is an ear-splitting silence. All life is stunned, but after a second every cicada in the forest rediscovers its voice. Birds begin to chatter and the giant Lyme ticks crackle as they lick their lips and hang from the gently waving branches, scanning the horizon for a passing blood bag to infect. Our shrieks and giggles join this deafening cacophony as we climb into our phalanx of limousines, clunk clunk clunk, and drive into the city.
The NBC deal is born quite suddenly as I walk through the front door of our elegant British Embassy built by Lutyens. It is a sitcom. The ambassador, good looking, sleek in black tie, greets us at the door with his wife standing by – a pretty, slightly wild-eyed lady with a vaguely German accent. Behind them a vista of dove-grey rooms under glittering chandeliers. Mr Ambassador, or Sir Christopher as this one is called, is full of swishy ‘bons mots’ and presents us to the ghastly Jack Straw, who grins like a ferret and flings in a few laid-back drolleries himself. They are Blair people, better looking, sharper cut, with their bright engaging smiles of even fluorescent teeth, than their Conservative (smelly retriever) predecessors. Sir Christopher is magnetic, debonair, genuinely interested – or a great diplomat. I look at him and the world falls away. In a blinding flash I see dollars and the future. I must make a sitcom about the British Embassy and play a charming British diplomat installing myself for ever in the minds of America as Mr Ambassador. I can’t believe it. I can hardly breathe.
My idea broadens and deepens with every turn around the polished grey rooms where le tout Washington congregates. The Queen observes, busty and distant, from above the fireplace. Canapés are served by cheeky young boys in livery with tufty hairdos and forget-me-not eyes. They have fabulous accents from home and I can’t help exploding briefly with patriotic fervour, so I drop a Percocet and have a couple of vodka and tonics, and pretty soon, as far as I am concerned, I am the British Ambassador. I breeze around the room charming everyone to death.
‘Would you like me to get you another drink?’
‘Let me light that for you.’
I elbow my way into a Simon Schama huddle of six breathless, strapless, Washington hags. Simon is a gigantic hummingbird flapping above them. Their faces gape, fascinated and slightly terrified, hanging on his every word. How does he do it? I am extremely jealous by now. Well, readers, he has a strange technique. First he confuses them with his hands. These giant paddles bat around his face, which contorts and thrusts, and all this has the same effect as hypnosis. The women sway, numbed by the golden elixir of his repartee. Once they are hypnotised, he does what all stars do and sucks out their energy, and soon he’s flapping off to the next cluster of glistening hymens for cross-pollination.
One of the recently sucked-dry hags of our group turns to me. She has a thin rust bouffant, mascara-caked lashes and a turkey’s powdered gizzard throttled by aquamarines. She looks drained and clutches my arm.
‘Oh my God!’ she croaks. ‘He knows everything!’
‘Isn’t it ghastly?’ I reply, suave, debonair, feeling very cosy by now on the Percocet. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his next series is called History of the Universe, part one.’
The embassy is a brilliant reflection of our British sense of ownership. It is a Queen Anne mansion on one side and a Southern plantation house on the other. You walk through the British Empire into its American backyard. Now I am standing under the columns of this Southern porch, watching the pageant unfold inside the house. It is about half past nine and the light is going. The gardens are fairy lit behind me. Huge lanterns shine dimly under the colonnade. Crammed behind the windows, the party explodes with colour and noise, the men in black and white crushed against the rainbow of colour worn by the fascinating females of Washington. Smokers observe from the shadows outside, the orange dots of their cigarettes hovering around them like personal fairies as they talk.
Inside, above the crowd, a towering beauty with a long neck and short honey-coloured curls makes her way across the room towards the garden. A path is cleared for her as people recoil and whisper as she moves by. She throbs with an invisible energy, an alien in an empire-line dress. She stops only once – to talk to an ancient man in a chair. He is Alan Greenspan, the keeper of the American purse, and he rises like a failing erection, gloating as she stoops to hug him, his glasses squashed comically against her collarbone. She holds him to her, and then thrusts him away, grasping his shoulders in her manicured hands as if he is a favourite shih tzu scooped up from its basket. Alan’s glasses are lopsided as he glares at her beatifically, sustained by the energy of her interest and little else. As soon as the towering beauty moves on, he collapses back into his seat, drained but radiant, and the lady comes out onto the terrace trailed by a small man in spectacles holding a jewel-encrusted handbag.
‘Give me my bag,’ she orders.
‘Her husband,’ whispers a horsy voice beside me, as if reading my thoughts.
I turn around. A jolly woman in a sensible black dress has materialised from the gloom.
‘You look like you need a top-up. Hi. I’m Amanda Downes. I simply wurship you.’ She takes my glass and snaps her fingers at a passing waiter. ‘I’m the housekeeper here. Barry darling, look sharp and get Mr Everett another drink.’
‘Who is the lady with the tiny man?’ I ask.
‘You don’t know Beth Dozoretz?’ she asks incredulously, eyes bulging. ‘Fancy that! Is this your first time in town?’
‘Yes.’
She leans in close for a theatrical aside. ‘She’s a rahlie close frund of the President’s. Shall I introduce you?’ Without waiting for a reply she strides over to the alien Empress, her hand outstretched.
‘Why, Amanda,’ purrs the beauty. ‘What a wonderful night.’
‘Thank you, Beth. Ronald, have you met Rupert Everett?’ She gestures towards me to join the group. ‘He’s a part of the delegation.’
Amanda reminds me of my mother. Sensible court shoes, a wide stride and a handsome face. Her dark hair is swept back by a gilded Alice band. She has twinkly eyes and humorous lips made for giving orders rather than head. I immediately love her. More importantly, she will be a marvellous character in Mr Ambassador.
We settle on wicker chairs and look out over the garden and Beth quizzes Amanda about the latest drama to unfold at the embassy. The ambassador’s wife has apparently lost her children.
‘How many?’ I ask.
‘Two-can-you-beat-it,’ replies Amanda.
I try – and fail – to adapt an Oscar Wilde quote. ‘Really! To lose one child is unfortunate, et cetera …’
‘It’s a terrible story,’ drawls Beth, unamused. ‘They were kidnapped by her ex-husband. Isn’t that right, Amanda?’
‘No, Beth. They weren’t kidnapped,’ Amanda says firmly. ‘Right after she divorced they went to see him in Germany and he never let them come back.’
‘Maybe they didn’t want to,’ I venture.
‘Oh stop it. They weren’t allowed to,’ scoffs Amanda, getting up. ‘We all want Mummy when we’re tots! Well, heels down, toes up! I must trot on. I’ll see you later, young man!’
Beth and Ronald love me in My Best Friend’s Wedding. We joke around and the conversation drifts to the political situation and the upcoming election, about which I am blissfully ignorant. Many of the faces we will soon learn to hate are already here tonight, being stuffed and roasted on the diplomat barbecue, should Al Gore not win the White Ho
use, and Beth points them all out. She is cool but caged, Washington’s Madame du Barry. Her ascendancy will soon be over and touched by scandal. Is she the mystery figure behind the pardoning of America’s biggest fugitive, Marc Rich? Either way, she will not make it into the camp of the next administration even if Al Gore wins. She is a Clinton woman and has probably, I muse, looking at her strange alien face, lit a few cigars by rubbing her legs together, and that particular talent will probably not be included in the after-dinner party tricks conjured up by either Mrs Gore or poor Mrs Bush next season. She defends her master casually but her eyes are cut glass as she talks.
I throw in a few political scoops I heard on the plane over. This is a technique I like to think I perfected living in Hollywood, where, never having the energy to go to the cinema, I concocted a game with my best friend Mel. When asked what we thought of a latest film, we simply repeated all the views we heard at lunch and dinner that week. As you know, or maybe you don’t, nobody talks about anything else in Hollywood. Just movies. Nothing else exists, to the point that you don’t really need to ever go and see one. It has already been accurately and minutely discussed at those lunches and dinners by the wide-ranging circle – from the wannabes to the had-enoughs – of your acquaintance, those intimate friends and professional handlers (and that includes hookers and housekeepers), so that at dinner you can sound so brilliant and perceptive that, on one occasion, my observations about Dances With Wolves being so thorough and particular, I was offered a job as a critic on the E! channel. Well, Washington is just the same.
Dinner is announced and we get up.
‘You have an extraordinary grasp. You gotta meet the President.’ She says it simply as if it is one of the most important things to do next week. (What she probably means, I realise now, is that I am such a spectacular bullshitter that he and I might possibly get along.)
Vanished Years Page 6