You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures

by Alan Cumming

  Cut to six months later. Liza is dancing every day, she had lost more weight than she probably once weighed. She was singing at the Garden, on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, on a record with me, and oh yes, shortly after she was getting married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, walking down the aisle as Natalie Cole, ah yes, actually her, sang “Unforgettable.” Of course, none of us could have imagined just how unforgettable—for all the wrong reasons—this union would be. Still, you can’t fault a girl for trying.

  Liza and I have come from very different backgrounds but I think we recognize a kindred spirit in each other. We are an oddball pair, but onstage we have an amazing chemistry, I think because we are both open and prepared to be vulnerable and people can see that we genuinely really love each other. But maybe there’s something more than that …

  In 1999, at the party after her first night of Minnelli on Minnelli at the Palace Theatre in New York, I was having a drink with my date wondering if I’d actually get a chance to speak to Liza. Those first-night parties are always insane, always still work, and the stars’ time is never their known, and also our friendship was relatively new at the time. I looked across the room and saw a sort of human whirlpool approaching. It was Liza, being encircled by a constant stream of admirers and well-wishers, all wanting to tell her how happy they’d been to be present at such a legendary night. Each one was thanked and touched and spat out back into the shallows of the party, happy to have been in her glow for just a second. For Liza was not stopping to bask in their glory, she was on the move, she was looking … for me!

  Finally the whirlpool abated and I realized it was because I was inside it, with her. “Oh Alan, there you are!” she gurgled, and kissed me. “I was thinking about you so much during the show tonight!”

  “You were, Liza? Really?!” I said, incredulous, and also thinking she’d probably had enough on her plate what with the pressure of opening yet another comeback show without her mind wandering to little old me.

  “Oh yes,” she went on. “Well, I think we know each other from a previous life, don’t you?”

  I was stunned, and also kind of honored, yet very speechless, all at the same time. How do you respond in this situation?

  “Maybe,” I eventually stammered. “I hope so!”

  Some flash bulbs went off; Liza kissed me, whispered, “Call me,” into my ear, and she was off.

  This picture just begged to be taken.

  Liza had a birthday party at her apartment and everyone sang a song round the piano. It was one of those nights when I felt I was living in the movie of my life at the same time as actually living the real thing. Being around Liza kind of always feels like that, though.

  Then there was a cake with this mini Liza on the top of it. Perhaps due to sugar high or cake lust, someone knocked her off and she fell amid the monogrammed cupcakes, a little dented but still sparkly and with arms open to life—just like the real-life Liza herself.

  WELCOME TO ACTION MOVIES

  ONCE I MADE a film with Sylvester Stallone. He told me he took sixty vitamin pills a day, and he chided Woody Allen for not having plastic surgery. I liked him.

  One night we were shooting in a forest. His character had taken me into the woods and threatened to kill me in order to get me to confess to something that I didn’t do. I cried a lot and there was a lot of snot continuity to contend with.

  Sly pretended to push me around and, as my hands were tied behind my back, I kept banging myself into various trees and stumps as I threw myself around, despite the fact that the forest floor was springy from all the fallen pine needles.

  In between setups we sat in chairs with our names along the back and sipped cups of tea in polystyrene cups the PAs brought us. I wiggled my shoulder around and rubbed the back of my head where a nice egg-sized bump was forming.

  “Gosh, I really hurt myself that time,” I murmured.

  Sly, neither missing a beat nor looking up from the newspaper he was perusing, said, “Welcome to action movies.”

  My heart skipped several beats. I felt I had been anointed into a sacred sect by the swami himself.

  I ONCE SANG AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

  WELL, I ACTUALLY sang there three times, but the same songs each night.

  The Bowl has a summer concert series where they invite a random selection of celebrity musical types to sing a few numbers with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for three nights over a weekend. Eighteen thousand people come along and picnic and listen, and then much to everyone’s delight (and my relief), they let off a load of fireworks and the night is done.

  That was in 1999. I had a phobia about singing in public in those days. The fact that I had just finished a yearlong run of Cabaret on Broadway might make that phobia seem rather perverse, but let me explain …

  I had always sung a bit. Early on in my career, as the latter part of the comedy duo Victor and Barry, I had sung plenty—the whole Victor-and-Barry setup was two men, a piano, funny chat, and a lot of songs that my friend Forbes and I had written. We’d made an album, and we’d toured all over the place. Later I sang in some plays and bits and pieces, and then came Cabaret, first in London and then in New York City.

  It was there that it all began. You have to remember that the musical is an American medium, in that Americans sort of invented it and they do it best. So, suddenly being flung into the middle of the Broadway scene and being a leading actor in the hit musical of the season meant that I was perceived in a way that I had hitherto never countenanced: I was in musicals therefore I could sing therefore I could be asked to come along and sing a few numbers at a gala and I would be great. Not.

  For me, singing was always what a character did. I wasn’t doing it. The confidence I had in using my voice in this way was manufactured by the fact that I was never, ever singing as me. So to be viewed as someone who had the moxie, let alone the ability (or even just the plain knowledge of songs from any musicals!) to stand up anywhere and burst into song at the drop of a hat was a little galling. I felt like a fraud. I was an actor who sang a bit, who had been plucked from London and dropped conveniently in the middle of New York City’s Theater District to be wicked and provocative and, yes, sing a bit. But it was always the Emcee doing the singing, never Alan.

  But I always yearned to be able to sing as myself. In fact I think it’s one of the few things I have ever yearned for in my whole life. I am not a yearner per se. I actually think it is a counterproductive thing. When you’re so busy yearning for something you might one day do in the future, you miss out on all the real possibilities of the present.

  But yearn I did. I think because I could tell there was an extra-special connection with the audience that came with revealing you, and I wanted to experience it.

  If, like me, you believe being an artist is all about connecting with people, affecting them, and provoking them, then surely the most effective way to do so is with utter authenticity and no artifice. Being you. That felt like the most pure and simplest thing, but also the most daunting. Up till then, performing had been something that I felt I pulled on top of myself, like a costume. Now here I was considering stripping down to nothing, and I wasn’t trained or ready to get naked yet.

  So I did what I always do in these sorts of situations, and I dived in. I was asked to sing at the Hollywood Bowl and I said yes. It was many months off and it was only three songs and I knew the conductor, John Mauceri, from years ago when he used to run Scottish Opera and I wasn’t topping the bill and it was all going to be okay.

  Of course, it turned out to be the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, at that point in time at any rate. I had rarely performed to audiences of eighteen hundred, let alone eighteen thousand. I had never sung with a symphony orchestra. I had never sung any of the three songs I was to sing in public before.

  But it was an incredible experience for me and I learned a massive lesson: I’m not a singer who has one of those mellifluous, beautiful, otherworldly kinds of voices. My voice is okay. It’s quit
e nice, actually. But what I’m really good at is interpreting a song—acting it. It was Rob Marshall, who’d just co-directed and choreographed Cabaret, and whom I was working with at the time on the TV movie of Annie, who enabled my epiphany.

  When I confessed to him after one of the Bowl shows that I was having such trouble finding my feet with the notion of singing as myself, of being myself, or a version of myself on stage, he said, “Alan, you have to remember, you’re a star. They want to hear you. People want to look at you. They just do!”

  Now, that last section was very difficult to even write because I find it so incredibly difficult to countenance the concept of being a star. To me, I am an actor. Any sort of stardom has been a by-product of my work. But I understood what Rob was saying, and I understood what he was doing. It was the most loving bitch slap I’ve ever had. If I was going to stand up in front of thousands of people and sing someone else’s words, I had to quit all the crap, get over myself, and admit there must be a reason why people want to hear me. So I did! And now I sing all the time. I do concert tours. I’ve sung at the Sydney Opera House, at Carnegie Hall, I’ve released albums! I could actually make my living entirely from singing if I wanted. And if I hadn’t accepted that crazy offer of singing at the Hollywood Bowl, I might never have done any of those things, and I’d still be that person sweating and mumbling to himself at the side of the stage at some gala he’d been emotionally blackmailed into doing for a friend.

  Another thing I’d never have done was get to know someone who really WAS a star: Ann Miller. I’d seen Ann in old MGM musical films like On the Town and Easter Parade and was really intrigued to meet her. At this point she was seventy-six but had just made Mulholland Drive with David Lynch, so she was very much alive and still kicking.

  We first chatted at lunch after the initial sing-through at John the musical director’s house. She knew I was a dear friend of Matthew Bourne, the brilliant English choreographer, who had recently toured his Swan Lake to America and had met many of his dance idols, including Ann, when the show played the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown LA. As we sat down I was a little shocked to see that her head was hovering just above the surface of the table. I worried that she had either dropped to her knees or placed her chair in some sort of hole in the restaurant patio. When I asked her if she was okay and could I help move her seat to higher ground, she laughed and said in that old-school-broad kind of way, “Oh, honey, you’re sweet, but don’t you worry! It’s my legs. Everybody thinks I’ve shrunk when I sit down. I’ve got dancer’s legs! They go on forevuh!”

  And it was true! Her legs were insanely long. They practically started at her sternum. It was actually a bit disturbing once you noticed.

  Each night before the show I’d nip into her dressing room and have a good old chinwag. Ann, I discovered, was quite bawdy and loved to dish the dirty (though never really the dirt) on her old days as queen of the Hollywood musicals. But she also talked fondly of her recent trip “back east” to play Carlotta in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. In fact, she sang Carlotta’s big number “I’m Still Here” as part of the Bowl show and, not surprisingly, brought the house down.

  One night, as I was leaving her room to go and get ready, she called after me in her quavery yet booming voice.

  “Alan, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I loved you in Eyes Wide Shut!”

  I stopped in my tracks. I did indeed have a small role in Stanley Kubrick’s last opus, which had just come out that summer, but I didn’t think it was the kind of film a septuagenarian MGM musical star would rush to see. She was full of surprises.

  “Really, Ann?”

  “Oh yes, honey. I thought you were the best thing in the movie.” She beamed at me encouragingly.

  “But, Ann, I’m only in one little scene, so if you thought I was the best thing in it, does that mean you didn’t really like the film?” I asked.

  She considered this for a second, then, without missing a beat and like the vaudeville star she once was, retorted, “Well, I’d like to see the European version, because I hear there’s more pussy in it!”

  JET LAG

  A FEW YEARS AGO I took my mum on a cruise across the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary 2. I had been in Los Angeles for a while shooting the film Any Day Now then flew to the UK and got on the ship, so now was sailing back through a different time zone every other day and my body clock was in utter turmoil.

  On the morning I took this picture I was wide awake at 4:00 a.m., so I got up and started to wander around the ship alone. It was magical. No one, but no one, was around. I walked through the ballrooms, their chandeliers clinking as the boat gently pitched through the early morning Atlantic swell.

  I felt like a cat burglar, creeping through the restaurants and bars, even down to the lower decks where the crew slept. I saw absolutely nobody.

  I felt like I had chanced upon the Marie Celeste yet I myself was a passenger, and then I came upon this abandoned jigsaw puzzle and knew I had found the perfect visual embodiment of my experience.

  I went back to my cabin sleepy but happy. Sometimes jet lag is wonderful because it lets you see life as you never normally could.

  FIRST CLASS DREAM

  Seriously, if I was flying first class, this would be my dream.

  AWARDS

  WHEN I FIRST WENT to Los Angeles, I found it all very daunting. I actually still do. I suppose the biggest problem is that it’s not really a city, at least not in the way I think of how a city functions. It’s really lots of suburbs. It has a downtown, but nobody showbizzy actually works there so it remains a sort of Oz-like mystery on the horizon.

  It’s a very disassociating city, but the thing I’ve come to learn about LA is that you have to stop feeling as though you’re missing the party and accept that there isn’t going to be any party unless you make it yourself.

  Except, of course, when awards season comes around. Then you can’t bend over to tie your shoelace without tripping over a party. The picture on this page is of Ruth Wilson, taken very late, at an after-party at the Chateau Marmont for the Golden Globe Awards in 2015. Ruth had won a Globe for The Affair. I had not for The Good Wife. She let me have a fondle of hers to make up for it, then tucked it back under her arm so she could continue drinking.

  The pinnacle of awards season is, of course, the Oscars. Oscar time to Hollywood is like Christmas to the rest of us. People who normally don’t exchange two words to each other all year gather together in uncomfortable clothes and new hairdos—and often, new faces—to share spirits and good will. Though instead of around a Christmas tree, in LA it’s more likely to be around the boarded-over swimming pool of Hollywood’s latest designated chichi hotel or an elaborate, cavernous series of opulent tents erected over what is usually a parking lot.

  Where I grew up, the only awards ceremony parties I ever knew were sausage sizzles after the presentation of proficiency badges to the local Cub Scouts, and I always thought—correctly as it transpires—that the Academy Awards hullabaloo would be a bit too surreal for me to handle. However, once you’ve done a few Oscar weekends, it’s like falling off a bike.

  Just like the first time having sex or the first death of anyone close to you, popping my Academy Awards cherry is something I will never forget. It was in 2002. I was in town shooting a pilot for a TV series (that was never picked up) and so was invited along and initiated in the bizarre rituals of Oscar weekend.

  First of all, I will attempt to paint a picture for you of what we are dealing with here. Imagine a little neighborhood near you being suddenly invaded for a few days by a group of, say, travel agents on a yearly work outing. Except instead of travel agents, think famous people, and think every living famous person you have ever known (and even some you thought were no longer living). What it boils down to is a famous people’s convention, all of them emerging from the safety of their gated homes blinking and uneasy, bereft of the customary buffering of a publicist or assistant, and havin
g to partake in the no-doubt leveling but utterly unusual experience of attending a series of parties where everyone else in the room is as famous as they are. Can you imagine?

  Oscar night, or Christmas Day if you will, is on Sunday, and in the week preceding, a series of lavish parties is thrown by the big studios, the big designers, and the big magazines. Think of these as rehearsals for the main event—a chance for celebs to practice walking, eating, drinking, and pressing the flesh with others of their breed who are equally unused to such complicated social interactions. By Friday, the town is buzzing with who is here, where they were, where they are going, and, most importantly, what they are going to wear.

  That year, the ceremony was staged for the first time in the then-spanking-new Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard (“Oscar has come home” was a popular sound bite) instead of the hellish-to-get-to, way-way-downtown Shrine Auditorium or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But the easier commute also brought with it a downside—the Kodak Theatre was much smaller, and a brutal selection process was initiated by the Academy to determine who was in and who was out. Never, even in this, the capital of faddiness, had the Hollywood food chain been so mercilessly displayed. And as if that weren’t enough for a fragile celebrity ego to bear, a mood of restraint was pervading the normally opulent party scene, both in respect for the recent tragedies of September 11 as well as a clenching of the purse strings due to the prevailing recession, and that meant that some of the standard Oscar-week shindigs were being scaled down or cancelled entirely, leaving many regulars with the prospect of watching the whole thing from their living rooms, with only a cup of nonfat cocoa to look forward to as their aftershow drink of choice. And no goodie bags. Can you imagine?