Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  Isabella was quite exhausting.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Our Dinner with André

  Eight years later everything had changed. Isabella was a professional (sort of) divorcee living in New York. She and fashion had found their way to each other and the time bomb was set, because now, little by little, life began to overcome her, imperceptibly at first, but her intense high spirits had a new note of strain woven into the frenetic soundtrack of champagne corks flying, taxi brakes screeching, doors slamming and high heels galloping off into the distance. She found a job working for Anna Wintour, the fashion editor at American Vogue.

  Life at Condé Nast was still like something out of a Jacqueline Susann novel, and Nuclear Wintour had not yet emerged from Chrysalis Anna. It would soon become American Psycho, and everything was about to change, but for the time being New York was poised on the edge of the abyss, enjoying the Indian summer of a memorable season that had stretched long and lazy since the sixties. There were still neighbourhoods. Forty-Second Street was a maze of glory-holes and strip shows where dealers and hookers and bent cops happily rubbed shoulder pads on their various beats through the delightful swamp. The East Village was to be penetrated at your own risk. Italian Americans spoke their own dialect, and in the summer months everyone sat on the neighbourhood stoops and actually knew each other. The rules of engagement in society were still those of the belle époque, a constitution laid down at the Factory and on the dance floor of Studio 54.

  But the cracks were showing. Steve Rubell had lost his hair and turned yellow. Thousands of other queens, skin and bone, slunk into the shadows to die. They were terrified to go out because they looked Martian, and people would gather their children to them and shoo the queen away like a rabid dog. The disease was everywhere, contributing to the sinking-ship hysteria of the city. The grim reaper stood above it all, waiting for the moment Andy Warhol’s night nurse went out for a cigarette. Until that precise moment New York was still careering on like a train without brakes, and Isabella was a part of that last hot summer crash.

  One hot dusty afternoon in 1985 I arrived from LA where I was living, jumped into my Condé Nast limo (courtesy of Issie) and drove into the city. I had my own key to the house of Fred Hughes, the business partner of Andy Warhol. I let myself in. The place was empty and cool and smelt of floor polish. I went up to my room and called Isabella.

  ‘Shall I come over?’

  ‘If you have to.’

  ‘All right, I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  ‘God!’ she groaned and hung up.

  There was no point taking Isabella seriously when she said she was too tired. The conversation would always end in the same place.

  ‘I have just had half my insides out, you know!’ And then we went out.

  A taxi journey on a hot New York night was like riding the rapids of a dangerous river. Fred lived uptown on Lexington Avenue. There, the natives were from orderly, non-violent tribes. Families waited politely at the traffic lights. Preppies in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and rich old leather queens with blind poodles (Dangerous Top Sir, a famous sadist, lived on 77th and Lexington) ambled along to the shops. The taxi lurched over potholes, a tugboat on a choppy stretch, narrowly avoiding endless collisions in an intricate screeching ballet. The windows were open, and the metallic breeze had a pinch of sea air and a tiny note of garbage in its famous perfume. It was invigorating and sexy, and made one want to let it all go. No city on earth gave one a craving for drugs more than New York.

  The wide expanse suddenly contracted, and out of nowhere we were in a bottleneck of honking traffic pouring into Times Square. The air billowed with exhaust fumes and jets of white smoke exploded from the ground. Hell was definitely underneath New York, waiting for its moment when the streets would collapse. The swarms on the sidewalk looked undead, ready at a signal to lurch into ‘Thriller’, smash one’s taxi and tear one limb from limb. Heaven was above in the spray of a million lights that between them described the package, as large as an office block, of some household god in Calvin Klein underwear. Leaning back and looking through the rear window was a high of its own. The flashing skyscrapers towered into the pink night, falling away – the turning pages of a pop-out book – as the traffic evaporated as quickly as it had congealed. The driver stepped on the gas, screeching to a standstill only as weirder downtown folk, little old ladies, fat backward freaks, queens and punks, crossed Seventh Avenue as the light turned red and we were finally downtown.

  Isabella lived in a first-floor flat on the leafy corner of Charles Street and West 4th, in the Village. It was next to a miniature synagogue like a doll’s house, and across the road from a down-at-heel Spanish restaurant she adored that served poussin flambé, a flaming chicken on a wooden board that came with a knife like a dagger. It was a step down from the street in a half-basement. If you looked out of the windows you could see up the skirts of the passers-by. Isabella, already obsessed by underwear, loved it.

  ‘God, darling, I could almost see the skid marks on that one.’

  The restaurant was dark and traditional, with sagging red-leather banquettes, wooden walls, pink tablecloths and low lights. It catered for an older crowd, gentrified beatniks, fubsy now in cardigans and spectacles, and from another planet to the two freaks squeezed into a narrow booth that night. Isabella (tiny) sat with a gigantic black man dressed in what appeared to be a mattress.

  ‘Hi, darling. This is André.’

  The giant extended a huge hand. To be kissed rather than shaken.

  ‘Isabella’s told me so much about you, and we love the shoot you did with Helmut,’ he squealed.

  He was straight out of Gone with the Wind. He had the physical gravitas of Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and the vocal energy of Butterfly McQueen (Prissy). (‘I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!’) You may have to be a queen of a certain age and outlook to grasp the full impact of these particular allusions, but suffice to say his Southern tones stretched across four octaves, although he usually favoured the upper registers (Butterfly) since he seemed to be constantly exasperated (Hattie). He spoke extremely fast. This must be what it was like, I remember thinking, taking dictation, because if you lost a word, you lost the thread.

  ‘Say it again,’ I said for the third time and the big hands came crashing down on the table.

  ‘Oh my God, Isabella? Do we have to use sign language with this child? I know movie stars are meant to be stupid, but this is ridiculous!’

  I probably looked taken aback, because he patted my hand and laughed.

  ‘I’m joking, darling! Tell him I’m joking, Isabella! Oh my God, you English. So sensitive. So correct.’

  He was speaking faster and faster, as if the words just couldn’t stop coming out. His eyes looked down at his lips, wondering, like the rest of us, if they were ever going to stop. They did, and then they laughed again, cracking open like a yawning hippopotamus exposing rows of teeth like sugar lumps. He was utterly fascinating, like a billboard, so much larger than life you didn’t quite know where to look.

  ‘You were saying?’ he concluded like a duchess at a tea party.

  ‘I was saying,’ continued Issie, ‘that André has such a big cock that he has never dared to have sex. Isn’t that true, André?’

  ‘Isabella!’ he screeched, his eyeballs nearly popping out. ‘Don’t talk like that. What will your friend think?’

  ‘He’ll probably want to get under the table and suck you off,’ guffawed Issie. More squealing from André.

  ‘Mrs Vreeland would never tolerate this kind of talk. You would never get away with this.’ He wagged his finger in her face.

  ‘Lucky she’s dead, then! André was found by Diana Vreeland,’ explained Issie.

  ‘I was not found by Mrs Vreeland. I was found by Mr Warhol.’

  ‘Do you think that Issie could be the next Mrs Vreeland, André?’ I asked innocently.

  André nearly choked. ‘No. No. Absolutely not, Isabella! Not at a
ll. You don’t have the style. How could you say such a thing? Shame on you! The poor woman is still warm in her grave. You don’t know what you’re saying. You have no respect, you English. You think you can come here …’

  He flagged momentarily, slumped in his seat, visibly exhausted, disappearing inside the mattress, but then he rallied and concentrated his mind on this sacrilegious comparison.

  ‘You do have style, Isabella. We will admit that. But Mrs Vreeland? Never!’

  The poussin flambé arrived.

  ‘Waiter! Please have a fire extinguisher standing by. This is “Comme” couture.’ André grabbed a bottle of water and poured it over his plate. ‘I love you, Isabella, but this is rayon and it’s highly inflammable.’

  The chicken fizzled in a bubbling pool of Perrier, but André tucked into it with abandon. Now it was his turn to torture.

  ‘How’s Colin?’ He looked at me, winked, then pursed his lips and looked busy.

  ‘Fine. He’s here with his girlfriend,’ sighed Isabella.

  ‘Isabella! This is not right. This is not comme il faut. He’s staying at your place with his girlfriend.’

  ‘Yuh!’

  ‘Rupert! What do you think? You look sane. Should Isabella be receiving this child with his courtesan?’

  ‘Well, he is her best friend’s little brother,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Liza is your best friend. Not mine. Anyway I rather like being a cradle-snatcher. God, he’s good looking, though, you must admit?’

  ‘Once a cradle-snatcher …’ giggled André, wagging the finger.

  Colin was Liza’s eighteen-year-old brother, a shy blond student with thick eyebrows, just out of Eton, and Issie was secretly in love with him. Partly because he was about to inherit one of the most romantic titles in Burke’s Peerage.

  ‘How could I not be in love with him. He’ll be the Thane of Cawdor!’ crowed Issie. She was very medieval.

  ‘Thane of Cawdor? What do you mean, Isabella?’ asked André, eyes wide.

  ‘Macbeth. He is the descendant of Macbeth. Out, damned spot. You know? That one.’

  ‘I know who Macbeth is!’

  This Macbeth (actually his name was Campbell) used Isabella’s flat as his crash pad. He and I both benefited, unbeknown to André and Anna Wintour, from endless Condé Nast limousines, which Isabella ordered whenever we asked.

  ‘Anyway, we’re meeting him later, aren’t we, Rupey?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. You said you were tired.’

  ‘I am. Exhausted!’

  Actually she had never looked better. She was dressed fashionably at this point in her life, not in costume, and she was in her physical prime. Furthermore she had discovered sex in the interval between that faraway frosty tea in Cheshire and this hot New York night. She still had her own style, a personal twist on the boytoy street look of eighties New York. She was an upper-class version of Desperately Seeking Susan. That night she wore an old navy-blue dinner jacket over a corset (Rigby and Peller), fishnet tights and heels, and a scarf around her head tied in a large bow, which drooped over her face like a wilting plant. A rather stately diamond brooch was pinned to her lapel, and her lips were jungle red.

  It was no accident that Isabella ended up in fashion. She had a body that was made for clothes. She had wonderful feet that were to her obsess her later on and, unlike many girls, she knew how to walk in heels. Only her eyes had changed. They had lost the fresh, startled regard of the teenager. They hung ever so slightly now, like a St Bernard’s. They still weren’t smashed plates, just a little tired and disorientated. Real life, with its phone bills, receipts and overdrafts, was already one step ahead of Isabella. Her typical and disastrous reaction was to ignore and spend.

  ‘It’s the only thing I can do to stop myself from screaming,’ she said.

  But she was a great success. André obviously loved her, and she was good at her job. The confines of Condé Nast were possibly similar to the confines of boarding school. A bell rang and you went somewhere.

  Outside the restaurant, two limos on that empire’s account were purring at the kerb.

  ‘Isabella, is that car Condé Nast?’ quizzed André, peering through the window like a detective.

  ‘God, no! It’s Rupert’s. I would never …’

  Luckily André’s attention was soon diverted as he squeezed his mattress into the back of his car.

  ‘Well, it better not be,’ he groaned, ‘because Anna’ – which he pronounced Ahnna – ‘will not be happy. Now don’t be too late. You have work tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m only going out for one drink.’

  And we got into our car.

  *

  Andy Warhol sat on a banquette at a club called Area with his latest protégé, a young black artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat. That season the two men were inseparable. They were well matched. Andy was an arts-seasoned vampire and went out to feed on new blood at night. Jean-Michel, also a hungry opportunist but green, blunt and addicted, was learning the ropes. It was here in the coloured shards of light thrown from the glitter ball, where the rich and famous got messy, that they conducted their business. It was here, and possibly only here, in this corner of that rat-infested isle, that you could sell a printed silk-screen signed by an assistant for a $100,000. They sat motionless, these two household gods, neither talking nor moving, just waiting, a pair of flesh-eating vegetables, for some mosquito with a bladder full of plasma to buzz by.

  Isabella stalked into the club, looking from right to left. Flanked by the beautiful Colin on one side and me on the other, both of us moving instinctively into a sort of flotilla, with Colin’s girlfriend taking (it) up the rear, Isabella ploughed ahead, our wooden figurehead, breasts exposed, a demonic smile fixed on her face, and laughter already gurgling up from inside her like water from faulty drains.

  Andy Warhol acknowledged our arrival with a helpless wave. It was all we needed. Our formation wheeled, banked and dive-bombed onto the banquette next to him. In the game of Snakes and Ladders we had thrown double sixes and were flying up the big ladder right to the jackpot.

  ‘We’re so naughty!’ screamed Isabella over the music, winking at Colin and me as we sat down. There was no room for Colin’s girlfriend and Isabella rolled her eyeballs. She had a short fuse when it came to girlfriends.

  ‘Andy, would you mind moving up a bit,’ she said, and then burst into honks of laughter. ‘I can’t believe I’m telling Andy Warhol to budge up,’ she told the photographer who had appeared out of nowhere. Flash. When we had all settled down she introduced Colin to Andy and Jean-Michel, careful to leave no detail of Colin’s ancestry uncharted.

  ‘Aaaww gee, Jean-Michel. Who knew? We’re sitting with Macbeth,’ said Andy, stony-faced.

  ‘Who’s Macbeth?’ asked Basquiat, also stony-faced.

  Isabella was about to relaunch into Colin’s complicated genealogy but the boy himself interrupted. ‘Issie, please,’ he begged, and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  ‘Oh. God. Sorry.’ She giggled. ‘Am I being a bit over the top?’

  ‘A bit.’

  Momentarily chastised, she listened to the music for a minute, bouncing up and down slightly to the rhythm, lips looking as if they were about to blow a kiss, Marilyn in a wonky mirror. She wiggled her bum on the leather banquette and looked out of the corners of her eyes at Jean-Michel, who was nodding off beside her. She had an animal passion for him that summer, and there was not much room for Colin, once Isabella was under the spell of Basquiat. The world disappeared, and the rest of us were no more than foils to get his attention. She was quite like a queen in this respect. When the cruise was on, don’t try having acute appendicitis.

  ‘God, would you look at Basquiat?’ she said in a deafening aside. ‘I’d really like to get that big black cock in my mouth. Wouldn’t you, Andy?’

  ‘Aaww gee, Isssie,’ said Andy, the tip of his nose turning pink, and his mouth, in response to such an indelicate question, unpeeling into a record smile revealing r
ows of grey shark’s fangs.

  ‘I don’t think you should say things like that,’ said Jean-Michel solemnly through half-closed eyes, leaning in close to Isabella. He was beautiful, cruel and insolent, and off his face on smack.

  ‘Things like what?’

  ‘Things about my cock. It’s inappropriate.’

  ‘This is making me really wet,’ squirmed Issie, ecstatically.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Basquiat.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she replied, imitating his lethargic black accent. ‘It’s not just the big black cock,’ she said, addressing the rest of the table

  ‘Oh, isn’t it?’

  ‘There has to be talent,’ she went on, winking at Andy. ‘I love your work. It really gives me a hard-on.’

  ‘A hard-on, huh?’

  ‘Yeah.’ (The terrible impersonation again.) ‘A big hard-on.’

  ‘Awww, Issie.’

  Through eyes like cracks, Jean-Michel surveyed Isabella from the feet up, lingering first on the thighs, then the cleavage, before coming to rest on the infamous mouth. That mouth snapped shut like an oyster, aware that it was being scrutinised, either with a ‘tongue sandwich’ (hopefully) in view, or more likely, for reproduction at a later date on canvas. (I’m sure if you sift through the Basquiats of this period, you will find various little monsters with Isabella teeth.) Their two faces were very close. It was a moment of drama, and we all leant in. Was he going to snog her, right here, in front of everyone? Just for a second, she was speechless.

  ‘Hi,’ was all she could muster, as those lips she had eulogised for months came within suction radius. Her own lips quivered, straining towards the unattainable goal. Andy got his camera out and flash, another moment was engraved for posterity.

  Clubs are worlds of their own. Shabby black rooms by day, lit by neon, in which a throbbing crowd of third-world cleaners dance to the drone of the vacuum cleaner, clambering over the revellers’ debris, decked out in overalls and rubber gloves, unblocking toilets filled with last night’s various excretions. Little by little the ambience begins to change. Deliveries are made. Bars are stocked. Glasses are polished. Some mafia moll accountant bimbo who knows where the skeletons are buried waddles in with cash and change for the tills. The owner arrives in the afternoon to examine the books. The lights and music are checked, briefly throwing this shanty dwelling into its star-spangled cloak of night.