by Alan Cumming
Blooming love, Glimmerglass, 2004.
Family portrait the morning after Grant and I got married in New York City, 2012, on the fifth anniversary of our wedding in London.
New Zealand, 2015. We went on a helicopter ride and landed on a glacier!
Sydney, Australia, 2015. Doing impersonations of each other in photographs.
LA, 2000. Happy.
Rescue puppy love, New York City, 2011.
Honey and me, 2011.
New York City, 2013, with Phyllis the raven, my co-star in Macbeth.
New York City, 2013. TV boss.
Eli unleashed, just wrapped after a day of filming on The Good Wife, Brooklyn, New York, 2012.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2014, with my TV daughter Sarah Steele.
New York City, 2014. Last day of filming season six of The Good Wife.
Carmine has been looking after me for many years and through many hairstyles.
Every time I do a show on Broadway, Carmine is part of my deal. It’s non-negotiable. We have worked together for sixteen years, and our friendship and love for each other is as strong and lasting as it is initially confusing to people from the outside. And I get it. He is a straight Italian guy from the Bronx who loves football and poker, and I’m me.
Carmine and I came into each other’s lives at a time that was full of change for both of us. It was 1999. I had come back to New York to continue the run of Cabaret after making a film in Rome. Before I’d gone things were getting a little intense. The show had become a sensation and I was unprepared for the furore my performance was causing. Leaving the stage door after the show was getting more and more overwhelming and even scary. People sometimes followed me home. Going off to Rome and being anonymous for a few months was a very welcome respite.
Just before I left Rome, I called my apartment back in New York to check my messages and heard someone telling me they knew where I lived and then listed in great detail what they were planning to do to me. They were also obviously masturbating as they did so. There were several messages like it. The backlog of mail waiting for me at the theatre contained several notes in a similar vein.
My return to Cabaret was heralded with an ad in the New York Times with a semi-clad me, looking over my shoulder at the camera with the words “He’s Back” emblazoned across it. The experience was all the more overwhelming having been a virtual recluse in Italy, and one day soon after the producers told me they felt it was time for me to have security protection. I burst into tears. Sometimes in life you feel scared and out of control but are in denial, and it’s only when other people acknowledge the situation that you really have to face up to it. “I don’t want to have someone who looks like a bodyguard,” I sobbed, embarrassed to be even having a conversation like this, but slowly realizing that the producers were not just being kind, they were protecting their investment. Suddenly I remembered one of the doormen at the theatre who I’d chatted with and who had helped me to a cab a few times when the crowds were getting unruly. “Can I have Carmine?” I asked.
Suddenly Carmine and I were constant companions. He was the first person I’d see when I left home and got into his car, and he’d be within arm’s length all day until he dropped me off there again at night. Everywhere I went, to press events, to the doctor, out to clubs after the show, Carmine was with me. In the first few weeks he’d even check the closets and under the bed in my apartment. We were both fish out of water, thrown together into a new and unknown phase of our lives. All we had was each other and we came to love each other like brothers. He made me feel safe. He still does. I joked that I was Whitney and he was Kevin, but I knew he really would take that bullet for me.
Since then, we’ve had years of laughs and japes and scrapes, and I look forward to so many more. Each time I am offered a new show on Broadway, part of the allure is that Carmine will be back in my life every day.
Club Cumming, aka my dressing room at Studio 54, 2014.
Backstage at Broadway Bares, New York City, 1999.
The Tonys after-party at the Carlyle Hotel, New York City, 2013.
Club Cumming, 2015.
Celebrating not having died during my Tonys hosting duties, The Plaza Hotel, 2015.
New York City, 2012, at Hal Prince’s holiday party. I wish I had had pearls.
New York City, 2015, with my goddaughter Gigi and her mom, Cynthia Rowley, at the latter’s fashion show.
Golden Globes, LA, 2014, with Grant and Monica.
New York City, Saturday Night Live 40th celebration elevator selfie, 2015.
New York City, 2013. I was a stamp once!
Sesame Street, 2014. Dreams do come true!
One of the times I didn’t win the Emmy but just grabbed one at a party and took this picture anyway, 2015.
Vermont, 2015. Lost.
YES!
THIS PICTURE was taken seconds after I had come offstage from making a speech at the launch of the “Yes” campaign for Scottish independence in 2012. There were a hundred paparazzi sitting in front of me screaming and blinding with me with their flashes. The reason for their fervor was that I had sat down right next to Alex Salmond, at the time the leader of the Scottish National Party and the architect of the entire process that led to the referendum Scots would eventually vote in, eighteen months later.
As I tend to do when I am trying to have a personable, and even intimate, moment with someone but at the same time am overwhelmed with self-consciousness at the sheer mass of people observing and recording said moment, I tried to take something back for myself and so took a selfie. #selfiepioneer
The morning had started very nicely. I was in Scotland rehearsing Macbeth for the National Theatre, and a few hours later was to embark on a long weekend’s train trip on the Flying Scotsman, around the Western Highlands of my country—in utter luxury I might add—with my husband, Grant, who had just flown in from the States the night before. But before we did that, I had to speak at the launch of the biggest and most important political campaign there had ever been in my country. You know how you do.
The thing is, I forgot to tell that part to Grant!
I had been vocal in my support for Alex and the SNP before. I supported him publicly in the previous Scottish parliament elections and Grant and I had become friendly with him and his wife, Moira, over the years.
Prior to Grant’s arrival in Scotland, I had been updating him on the discussions between the first minister’s office (Alex’s) and my office to see if we could all either have coffee together on the morning Grant and I set off from Edinburgh, or perhaps a drink the night before, if we were going to arrive early and spend the evening in a hotel.
However, time marched on, and as I got more and more lost in Macbeth and there were lots of toing and froing and plans changing, it just didn’t happen that I went over with Grant the exact details of the morning we were going to have.
So here’s what did happen: We got up after a lovely night in a hotel and hopped in a car and went to have breakfast with Alex at Centotre on Queen Street. We were joined by a few others, including fellow actor and East Coaster Brian Cox and a couple of the “Yes” campaign staff members. I remember thinking how jovial and relaxed Alex seemed even though he was about to go and face the world media’s glare as the man who wanted to wrench the United Kingdom apart. It was a monumental day for everyone, no matter what your opinion, but for Alex, it was a life’s political work in the making. And we got to have breakfast with him! And it was a great breakfast, jokey and chatty and kind. But as I watched Brian confer with a “Yes” person about his speech, I suddenly began to feel nervous about mine.
It wasn’t very long, my speech. I had taken the brief to say a few words quite literally. But still. It was the launch of the “Yes” campaign for independence of my country, people!
I was also braced for the onslaught from those who felt I should not speak out about my views on Scotland’s future because I was not a resident of the country at that time. I felt, and still do,
that no matter where I live, I will always be Scottish. I am a product of Scotland, but most of all, I am a human being entitled to an opinion! Disagree or ignore it if you want to, but don’t deny me the right to have it! That, more than anything I can think of, is not a Scottish thing to do.
I was planning to say how, fifteen years before, I had come to Edinburgh to campaign for Scottish devolution with Donald Dewar, at the time the secretary of state for Scotland in Tony Blair’s Labour government. Then there had been two questions on the ballot, and I still had a T-shirt with the slogan of the pro-devolution campaign: YES! YES!
Fifteen years later, here I was back in Edinburgh, with the product of that successful campaign, the new Scottish parliament, just a hop, skip, and a jump down the Royal Mile, and I was campaigning again, but this time, for only one YES!
“I believe independence can only add to our potential …” I rehearsed in my head “… and release a whole new wave of creativity, ambition, confidence, and pride. The evidence is clear. In the past fifteen years we’ve become stronger economically, socially, culturally, and globally. The world is waiting for us, and I know Scotland is ready.”
It was short, but (I hoped) rousing. I was going over and over it in the car from the breakfast to the launch venue, when Grant said to me, “So, are we going to the train station now?”
That’s when I realized I hadn’t told him and he had no idea that he was about to be dragged into the center of a huge political event.
He took the news quite well. He had thought the breakfast briefing meeting we’d just had was the equivalent of the coffee we’d been trying to coordinate. And it kind of was, I suppose.
But his face when I walked back to sit down between Alex and him—as literally a hundred human beings with cameras of every shape and hue descended on us, ignoring the next speaker onstage, screaming and also actually blocking our escape should we have needed to get away from the situation—was a picture of massive discomfort mixed with amazement and a great big dollop of jet lag. I can still do a really good impersonation of it.
We were both so delighted to arrive at Waverley station less than an hour later and enter the swanky Flying Scotsman lounge. After the onslaught we’d both just weathered, we were happy to be sequestered and escape the hysteria that the “Yes” launch had engendered.
Good luck with that.
I was on the lounge TV making my speech, very loudly, as we walked in. Everyone was watching it, and everyone saw me arrive.
The next morning we woke up on the train after a beautiful evening traveling through Rannoch Moor and spending the night in Spean Bridge. After a delicious breakfast (and don’t you just love to be sitting eating whilst moving?) we wandered through to the lounge car. Every single one of the far-too-many Scottish and UK daily newspapers was spread out around the carriage for our delectation and enjoyment, and I was featured heavily on the front page of many of them.
In a funny way, though, being involved with such a big news story and then immediately thrust into the company of a bunch of strangers from all over the world was a wonderful thing. People talked to me about it a lot, and in answering their queries I found my belief in and commitment to independence unwavering and pure.
Nearly eighteen months later, this selfie I took for more joyous reasons. I had flown to Glasgow on my day off from Broadway to do a last-minute bit of campaigning with Nicola Sturgeon, who was then the deputy first minister. The crowds were huge and ecstatic, the first poll with the “Yes” campaign in the lead had come out the day before, the little boy Nicola had picked up between us was wearing a Superman costume, and that is how we all felt. We felt it was possible, that we were going to do it, that our self-determination was inevitable. That the power of YES would win. That’s why I took this picture.
PRIESTS TEXTING
LIFE ON TV is just better. I mean, everyone is better looking, their clothes have all just been rubbed over with a lint roller, their hair is nice, their complexions clear, they never have to bother with pleasantries like good-bye at the end of a phone conversation, they never have to go to the coat check. On TV, life just looks better. Believe me, I’ve seen it from both sides.
Once, Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s special adviser, came to do an episode of The Good Wife and I had some scenes with her. In real life she had FBI protection, and so in the show she had actors playing her secret service attachment. The thing is though, these secret service men were TV secret service men, meaning they were bigger, better-looking, better-groomed, better-nourished versions of her real-life secret service men.
That’s how we roll in showbiz. I play a ruthless, middle-aged, Jewish Chicago politico in the show, yet before every take my hair is coiffed, my tie straightened, and chapstick is applied to my lips and eye lashes. (I came up with the latter but now it has become a part of the Eli ritual.)
Valerie’s real secret service men were waiting just out of shot from her hunky fake ones, and I wondered what it must be like for them. We all joke about the people who might play us on TV or in a movie, but they were having to deal with it a little too close for comfort, I thought.
Anyway, about this picture. Once there was a scene at some big political gala and we spent a couple of days filming it at some big house up in Sleepy Hollow. In a break between scenes I had a wander and caught these two background artistes (that’s what we call extras now, btw) going about their normal business, but because they were dressed as priests it just took on such a lot more portent and baggage, and, frankly, weirdness.
Who do you think they’re texting, or which app do you think they might be using? See, it gets weird very quickly, doesn’t it?
SWEET LIZA
THE FIRST THING Liza Minnelli ever said to me was, “Alan, I want to be your friend forever!” She had just come backstage to see me after a preview of Cabaret on Broadway in 1998, and I was utterly overwhelmed by her. Meeting Liza is like watching a hot spring bubbling out of the earth. Her huge eyes open impossibly wide to take in all the wonder she sees in the world around her. She is everything you might expect—a star, a whirlwind, a legend, a flirt, a great storyteller—but the thing above all else I always think about her is this: there isn’t a bad bone in her body. She has no malice, even for those who have wronged her. Of course, this is also what makes you worry for her. Sometimes I look at her and marvel at how she has managed to survive in the big, bad old world of showbiz, but she has, and she does.
I remember when she was sixty, she told me she really never believed she would live that long, and I suppose when you have thought that about yourself, the rest of life is just a bonus extra. And that is kind of how it feels being with Liza. I saw her in LA one morning recently, and she thought we were going to leave her house and go to breakfast, and when I told her that no, I had just popped ’round for a cup of tea and to say hello, her face lit up and she exclaimed in that hiccupy way of speaking when she is happy, “You mean, we don’t have to go anywhere? That’s terrific.”
Another time, when we were performing some concerts on Fire Island, we were in a sort of compound of two houses separated by a shared patio. She mostly stayed inside her house with the AC blasting, watching TV and smoking. But each morning our dogs would be scraping at the door to get out of our place and go and visit Liza next door. Even they knew where the fun was. I suppose I’m saying I think Liza could be happy anywhere.
Years ago we recorded “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for a charity CD called Broadway Cares: Home for the Holidays, though we called it Homo for the Holidays as we thought it must be the gayest record ever made. On the morning we were due to record, I woke up to watch Liza singing “New York, New York” on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show. I met her at the recording studio an hour or so later. She arrived still in full makeup, looking fabulous. I looked a little hungover and as though I’d just got out of bed (I had). There was some press there to record this historic event, and as we shared a cigarette in the fire escape before our first interview Liza s
aid to me, “Darling, what is all this for? And do we get paid?”
I told her no, there was no cash, but it was in aid of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, and also the Twin Towers Fund. Minutes later, Liza was holding forth in front of the cameras talking of the work the charities had done (including statistics) and her anger over the recent events of September 11. She even burst into “New York, New York” again to wrap things up. I held her hand and said not very much except the occasional “Hmm-mm,” and when someone saw the piece on Entertainment Tonight they said I looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on her knee.
But that is Liza, unsure of what is going on one minute, giving a press conference to several major TV shows with great élan the next; saying she never wants the pressure of performing again one month, the next stealing the show at Michael Jackson’s concert at Madison Square Garden.
But the biggest contradiction of all was this: Once I went to a very subdued birthday party in Liza’s hospital room. She was about to go into surgery for a second hip replacement, having recently recovered from her “death thing” as she referred to a particularly nasty bout of encephalitis. It was a strange night—Liza joking and laughing and saying it was the best birthday she’d ever had, and me saying how she must have planned to get ill just to have the view from the hospital room as the venue for her party. When we were alone, we joked about how we could procure her hip bone after the operation, sell it on eBay, and go shopping. Then I asked her how she was really feeling. “Scared, Alan. I’m really, really scared.”