Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  ‘It seems like we’re always saying goodbye,’ she says with eyes like slits and a Monroe pout.

  ‘Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun!’ I reply without thinking.

  ‘Aiee,’ she screams and rushes back in. ‘I love that film.’

  I quickly discover that much of what she says is lifted from the movies, but there is something enormously warm and true about her, even though she is, as she says herself, ‘a fake. But a yeal fake.’ (Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) Now, two years later, she is my first visitor when I arrive in LA. She swings into the hotel driveway in an old white Rolls-Royce, which she manoeuvres like a bumper car.

  ‘Aiee!’ Crash. ‘Sorry,’ she shrieks to the boy who parks the car. ‘I am a poor yeff-you-hee’ (refugee).

  ‘Way to go, Corky.’ He laughs.

  ‘I been a long way,’ she answers, winking.

  Normally we meet in the coffee shop but sometimes she whisks me off to her bungalow in Beverly Glen where she lives with three dogs and ‘the Gringo’, a large cockatoo who does a brilliant impersonation of his mistress’s answering machine: ‘Hellooo. Leeve your mesaage, please.’ This bungalow is a throwback to a humbler Hollywood long gone. Built in the sixties, custard coloured, it has dog-eared plastic awnings over all the windows. They stick out like old yellow teeth, and the windows beneath them are dark open mouths covered with ripped mosquito nets. The house is shrouded in shadow on the side of a hill under a roof of towering eucalyptus trees. There is an empty liver-shaped pool in the garden. One of Corky’s dogs once drowned in it and it has never been refilled, although there are always plans.

  She has a coterie of ancient girlfriends – other refugees from all the various South American coups and counter-coups that exploded across that continent after the war. These ladies gather at her house in the evenings for prayer and plantains. They are all deeply religious and superstitious. Corky is a Madrina (from her days as a croupier in Havana), which in Cuban voodoo, called Brouharia, is a kind of witch doctor. Her spirit guide, the Gypsy, speaks through her and sometimes sends her out of control.

  ‘The Yipsy is drivin’ me cazy today. Oy, Roopi!’

  On these days Corky nibbles a Xanex and puts her feet up.

  ‘We would like to clean you,’ she tells me, climbing off her bar stool.

  ‘Clean me? Why? Am I dirty?’

  ‘Veery slightly.’ She smiles, batting her raisin eyes. ‘So that everything yun smoothy for Señor Ambassador! Miguelina – you hear me mention her – is over wisitin’ her cousin. She is vey good! Come to my place tonight.’

  It is one of those wet Februarys, and water gushes down the steep streets, tumbling into the drains and dragging the odd tiny old lady into the sewers. There is a cold front and the rain beats down on the deserted streets as I park outside Corky’s house. Lights twinkle inside and Corky’s shadow – conical tits and curvaceous hips – crosses behind a blinded window. The trees groan in the wind. In the kitchen a little round Indian lady in a tracksuit sits at the table reading the cards for Gladys, who is crying.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘Hey, baby. Miguelina says Maudy can’t last much longer.’

  ‘It’s better that way,’ says Corky.

  Miguelina looks at me guiltily and breaks into a large toothless smile. She rattles off in Spanish to Elsa and the two of them laugh and high-five each other. It’s slightly disconcerting. I can tell the Gypsy is around because Corky is acting weird and wild like Marlene in A Touch of Evil. Gladys looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

  Miguelina – who has come all the way from the Dominican Republic – strips me to my underwear, observed by Corky and Gladys, and submerges me in a bath full of flowers and herbs, standing over me, humming and singing. It’s quite a tight squeeze in the tiny bathroom, lit by candles. The three women lean over me and I start to get the giggles. The wind rattles on the windows. ‘I feel as if I’m in Rosemary’s Baby.’

  ‘Except that we are good witches, baby,’ laughs Gladys.

  After the bath Miguelina leads me in to the middle of the sitting room, dripping, half naked, and stares at me while the other ladies light more candles and hang giant oversized rosaries around their necks. We all stand there in silence for a long moment. The only noise is the rain and my racing heart. Gladys and Corky begin to move slowly around the room, murmuring and swatting at the air, as if unseen energies have arrived from another dimension. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. It suddenly feels really scary. The rain beats down on the roof and the eucalyptus trees groan outside and it is suddenly cold. Then Miguelina, who has been looking daggers at me now for at least ten minutes, shrieks and lunges at me. I nearly scream but she puts her hand over my mouth and thrusts her head up close to mine. Her eyes are bulbous and bloodshot.

  ‘Sshh,’ she whispers and starts rubbing me all over with her hands, grunting and wailing, throwing back her head and laughing maniacally, going through the A to Z of gesture and expression. I think I might get the giggles again because she puts her hand inside my underwear and grabs my cock and tugs at it. My God, she’s going to pull it off. Then she puts her hands right up my bum. After that she places them on my chest, fingers outstretched, nails long and red and gleaming. The other two approach and also put their hands on me. Their moans intensify. They wave and sway. They wield their crucifixes at my face. It is all quite deranged. Miguelina’s eyes disappear in their sockets, she emits a blood-curdling scream and is literally thrown across the room, landing on the sofa.

  Corky turns on the lights.

  ‘That was a good one,’ she says.

  ‘Hellooo,’ sings the Gringo. ‘Please – leeve – your – mesaage.’

  ‘Now the sky’s the limit. That’s the message, you silly bird!’ shrieks Corky.

  The old ladies make Miguelina comfortable on the sofa and she begins to snore.

  Every day I plough over the hill with a heavy heart to the auditions, where endless girls and boys parade their wares for us on tape. It is a cattle market and, as you’ll know if you’ve ever done an audition yourself, it makes you want to jump out of the window. One holds one’s whole life in one’s hands at an audition, offering it up, clothed by the Bard, or Beckett, or by Victor in our case, to the barbarians on the other side of the table. You’ve learnt the scene. You’ve rehearsed it obsessively in class with your scene partner or with your steering wheel as you crawl along in the traffic on the freeway, and now – for five minutes – it is looked at, laughed at and rejected, as often as not, in a process that never gets easier, no matter how good or bad you are. It is the hideous hunger state of being a young actor in Hollywood, from which only a lucky few will ever set sail towards the puffy pink sunset of fame, leaving the rest of them – us – staring out to sea, trapped in that infamous circle of the inferno – the Circle of Auditioning – and going down on … not dick, just tape.

  All the girls who come to see us are good. Proficient. Believable, even. But they have no originality. They are all clones of someone else. Their life experience is nil and their emotional language is braille. Some girls do bubbly. Others do neurotic. Some do sultry, but it is Tupperware sex, neatly packed up in clingfilm for a light snack. Many of the girls seem to be fanatically Christian and talk about things like ‘my church’, which everyone on our side of the table seems to be really thrilled about, while I am literally holding my head so that it doesn’t do a three-sixty-degree turn and shriek, ‘Your father sucks cocks in hell!’

  ‘She’s just not that sexy,’ I whine at one point about a particular seminarian.

  ‘What do you want? To be raped in the audition?’ snaps Glynn, the casting lady.

  ‘Some chance! That girl is saving herself for the rapture party.’

  ‘Don’t you have any beliefs at all?’

  ‘Belief is very Windows 3,’ I snigger.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, dear Cindy, that I have more important things to do with my time than conjure up
little fantasies about the future when the present is a big gaping hole because we can’t find an actress!’

  Or an actor.

  Casting a black actor who is as edgy as, say, Snoop Dogg proves to be impossible. They just don’t exist like that in TV and movies. Despite the fact that there are now some big black stars, America still views black people with some trepidation, and pretty much all the black actors on the scene, from the top to the bottom, strain every nerve to present the wholesome side of being Afro-American. In other words there are no fabulous rough diamonds for hire unless you want to cast the role from the back pages of Frontiers magazine (which I would). When one of the guys talking to us says, ‘Oh my golly!’ I nearly fall off my chair. I’ve accepted that we can’t say ‘God’ any more but ‘golly’ is going too far. Besides, they seem to have forgotten that traditionally at the end of ‘golly’ comes ‘wog’. I want to crawl into a hole and die.

  However, we do find two great girls and a lovely guy. One of the girls is from Texas and I want her, but the casting ladies think that she is too much like Julia Roberts and so we go for the other who is a sweetheart and good. She is called Megan. The boy we finally land for the role of Trey from the boiler room is really handsome and a very good actor as well, even if he is not genuinely rough.

  Rehearsals begin on Monday. The recording of the show is scheduled to take place in nine days’ time – next Wednesday. Derek arrives on the dot of ten, looking the very picture of a theatrical knight in Hollywood, and my heart briefly leaps. Like Marc he is vaguely dressed for a safari in various shades of biscuit. He is a sweetheart, very warm to everyone, with a little briefcase like a travelling salesman. What must he be thinking, I wonder, as he is taken from group to group around the large trestle table? Everyone bobs and beams. Derek has impeccable manners and chats animatedly to all and sundry. It’s one of the few moments of ‘the process’ I can remember actually enjoying. The fact of Derek actually being there. The joy of watching his English manners – as thorough as a lawn-mower trundling across a garden making hay (nonny no), leaving every blade of grass shorn of all prejudice. Derek is an animated vicar on a prison visit, clutching his script to his chest as he stands over Trey who is sprawled across a chair. I catch his eye and he winks. I can tell exactly what he is thinking. ‘You got me into this. Now get me out!’

  Victor surges forward in a phalanx of comedy scribes to greet the English knight. These laughter stooges are an extraordinary breed in the Hollywood food chain, a strange haunted type of after-dark animal. They are often failed stand-ups, prone to crippling depression and drug addiction. These scribes wander from one TV set to another like a weird desert tribe. They leaf through their books of gags with shaky hands and mumbled complaints, and they are actually fabulous scruffy outsiders in the sharp overdressed world of Hollywood. They settle down around their master, trying out jokes on Derek who throws back his head with glee, even though I bet he probably hasn’t got a clue what they’re on about.

  Suddenly everything goes quiet because Jeff Zucker arrives. He is the head of NBC and has given me my deal. We all stand to attention. He is a small dark stocky man with piercing eyes and a biting tongue, one of the most important men in Hollywood. He is very clever and will make the most sensible comments throughout these last days of ‘the process’. More introductions are made. Meredith, overlooked, or underlooked, watches furiously from between everyone’s legs. Soon we sit down and read the appalling script.

  I would bore you with the tragic details – luckily for the most part I have forgotten them – but, just to give you an idea of how TIRED Mr Ambassador is, in the first scene I am late for work at the embassy and Derek is complaining about me to Megan, the secretary, because I have apparently spent all night at a party with Jennifer Lopez. Yawn.

  ‘How was her bottom?’ asks Derek when I finally arrive.

  ‘Absolutely delightful,’ I reply, launching into a far-fetched yarn about going back to her hotel and ending up in a jacuzzi with her and some other celebrities.

  After the reading Victor disappears with Jeff Zucker, Benny and Marc.

  ‘It isn’t that funny, is it?’ I ask Derek, whose head sinks slightly into his shirt as he eyes me suspiciously.

  ‘But darling, wasn’t it your idea?’ he asks carefully.

  ‘Yes, but then it was hijacked by Victor.’

  ‘Oh!’ sighs Derek, not wanting to get involved. ‘It’s all a little bit over my head.’

  Victor returns after about half an hour. His face is ashen and drawn. Benny takes me aside.

  ‘Jeff Zucker is furious,’ he whispers.

  ‘Oh, good. Why?’

  ‘He says it isn’t funny.’

  ‘Well, hello!’

  ‘We’re going to rehearse anyway and then they are going to do a rewrite tonight after you all go home. Don’t tell the others.’

  ‘Hopefully it won’t be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire,’ I say, looking at Victor now in a huddle with all the gag hags. They don’t look very funny.

  ‘Let’s hope,’ says Benny.

  We start to rehearse. The sets are all marked out in tape on the floor. It is like doing a play. There are yellow lines for doors and some actors like to mime opening them, which I always find hilarious, particularly now when Merrylegs bustles into the room for her first scene. She clomps to the yellow line, stops dead in her tracks and then – on tiptoes – laboriously mimes grasping a big door handle and pushing open a door, peeping through and then clomping on. It’s very Marcel Marceau and totally wasted on Victor, who is biting into a giant overflowing jelly doughnut.

  ‘What are you laughing at, asshole?’ she snaps.

  ‘Your door-opening technique is flawless.’

  She raises a finger. ‘Sit and spin.’

  Victor is snappy and mad-eyed all day, like the nutty professor, and at about five o’clock we call it a day.

  We get back in at ten the next morning. Victor and the scribes have been up all night and look crazed.

  Derek, on the other hand, bounds in looking fresher and jauntier than yesterday.

  ‘Darling, sorry to have been a bit piano yesterday. I was feeling absolutely exhausted.’

  ‘How’s your jet lag?’ I ask.

  ‘I passed out at nine but then of course was sitting bolt upright from three on.’

  ‘Oh God, poor thing. What did you do?’

  ‘Actually it was rather useful. I just sat up and learnt the whole script. So now I feel on top of things.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I reply cautiously.

  As if on cue, Victor arrives with an assistant holding a huge pile of scripts and gives us both one. I make a quick getaway to the other side of the room because I know what’s going to happen next. Derek puts on his glasses and settles down to peruse the new script. It is the last pastoral moment he will know this trip. He leafs through each page, his jaw dropping by degrees, his face turning from pale to pink to purple. He looks as if he is going to faint. He stares out at the room, locates me and rushes over.

  ‘Dear heart. They’ve changed the whole script. Every word!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I just learnt the whole fucking thing.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  Lie.

  Things go from bad to worse and Victor begins to lose his hair. It falls out in clumps on his signature white shirt. Every day we get a new script. The actors are exhausted, verging on hysteria, and Victor looks grim as Derek nearly slams the latest script down on the table. I say nearly, because actually he doesn’t. He is a mild-mannered, gentle creature, but we have pushed him to his limit.

  ‘I don’t really understand this joke. I mean … is it really funny?’ He strains every nerve to sound reasonable. He looks around the table for support. The rest of us regard him mournfully.

  ‘No. It’s not funny,’ says Meredith finally.

  The stooges turn on Derek like a row of hungry dogs, ears cocked and earnest eyes. Will they lick him or
eat him?

  ‘Oh yeah. I mean, I think so. Potentially really funny,’ says one.

  ‘Oh definitely. And with your delivery …’ says another.

  ‘You are sweet, Brandon. It’s just that I really don’t know if I can learn any more.’

  He is almost crying but Victor ploughs on regardless and in a few minutes we are up and rehearsing the latest version, which involves a meeting with some Russian businessmen where Derek has to mime behind their backs the answers to their questions, which I misinterpret. It’s like the word game, and just as ghastly. Derek makes big circles with his arms, tweaks at his ear, and strikes extraordinary poses with bulging eyes. He gives it all he’s got, poor darling, but there’s no denying that it’s a long downhill slalom from I Claudius to this. Everyone watches our antics listlessly from chairs around the room. Benny sits in the corner. He is now size zero, like a balloon that has blown away and finally fizzled out on a chair.

  Suddenly a fight breaks out. Meredith is in a stand-off with Victor. He towers over her, wagging his finger, and she is grabbing at him with one hand and waving her script at his crotch with the other.

  ‘I can’t take any more,’ she screams and bursts into floods of tears.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ I storm up to Victor.

  ‘I just told her to do it a bit faster.’

  ‘No,’ seethes Merrylegs between heaves. ‘You have been patronising to me ever since I arrived.’

  ‘I am just trying to get the show up and running before we move to the studio.’

  ‘If you didn’t keep rewriting the scenes we might be able to get it together.’

  ‘It’s normal. It’s a part of the process,’ screams Victor. I am about to grab him by his starched white collar. Benny and Marc stand up.

  ‘Put the brakes on, sir,’ says Benny evenly.

  ‘I am sick of your fucking process, Victor.’ I am screaming now. Benny and Marc stand either side of me, ready to restrain. ‘I want to learn my part. I want to rehearse it and be sure about what I’m doing. That’s it. I don’t want any new fucking jokes that aren’t funny. I just want to do the job and get out of here.’