Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  One night, as he popped his head round the door and lobbed his customary “That’s me away,” I asked him, “Where are you going?”

  My mum looked up from her knitting; my father stopped in his tracks. There was no malice in what I had asked. I was genuinely curious. But nobody ever questioned my father, and I could see I was on stony ground.

  “D’you want to come with me?” my father replied, defensively.

  “But where are you going?” I asked again.

  “You tell me if you want to come and I’ll tell you where I’m going.”

  I considered this for a moment. I knew my father was going out. He was dressed up a bit and he smelled of Old Spice and his hair was Brylcreemed. If he was going to the pub I wouldn’t be allowed in and would have to spend the evening in his van, something I did not want. But I sensed that perhaps there was more to it than that, and I think my parents could tell.

  My mum said nothing.

  “So are you coming or not?” my father said after a few moments, knowing he had won.

  “No,” I replied, meekly.

  I can’t remember how I came to know, whether it was kids gossiping at school or something I overheard at home, but soon I understood that the change in my father’s behavior was because he was seeing another woman, and that Tom and I were a constant reminder of the life that trapped him.

  Soon after, one sunny Sunday afternoon, we all went to the beach at Carnoustie. As I’ve said, it was rare we did anything together, let alone anything as carefree and exciting as a trip to the seaside. Summers are short in Scotland and we tend to take advantage of the slightest hint of sun, and that day was no exception. Every time the sun peeped out from behind the clouds we raced over the sand into the freezing North Sea, ducking under the waves for a few moments before rushing back up the beach again to the shelter of our striped windbreak, an essential component of any Scottish beach excursion.

  My mum opened the Tupperware box of sandwiches she’d made and we tucked in. Just then, a woman and her son appeared. We knew them locally and they greeted my father very cordially, but I could see that the woman avoided my mother’s eyes. They were invited to sit down and eat with us and they did so. Conversation was stilted, and I did my boyish best to smooth things along. But I knew. This woman was having an affair with my father. That’s why we had taken this rare family outing to the beach. And not only did he have the audacity to arrange this encounter and walk them to their car, leaving Mum and me to finish our sandwiches in shameful silence, but when he came back he pretended that their appearance was a total coincidence. Even worse, he actually documented that sad day, that day when he stepped over the line of respect and made us complicit witnesses to his transgression, by taking this photograph.

  FRIDAY 21ST MAY 2010, NOON

  By next lunchtime I had left Cannes and was back in Nice airport, slurping down a Bloody Mary (a mandatory preflight ritual for me) and checking out the reports of the previous night’s event online. I was happily shocked to read that, although not very forthcoming with their attention, the audience certainly coughed up the cash, as seven million dollars had been raised for AIDS research! Patti and Mary J. must have nailed it.

  Mary Darling had left another message earlier that morning. She told me there had been a reporter from the Sunday Mail at her door. This wasn’t unusual. Over the years my mum had encountered several tabloid reporters on her doorstep, trying to get a comment from her about something (or someone!) I had been rumored to have done or said. Now she was quite an old hand at it. She said that this time the reporter was asking about my father, wanting to find out where he lived so they could ask him for a comment about something I had said in a recent interview for the Times.

  My father had been estranged from his family for many years by this point. The British press, particularly the Scottish branch, was fascinated by this estrangement from his celebrity son and had made several attempts over the decades to goad Mr. Cumming senior into “having his say” about his lack of relationship with me. This was the usual pattern: a quote from an article I’d done for some other publication would be pounced and elaborated on, and then a suitably hysterical reaction quote would be sought, encouraged, or fabricated.

  I knew immediately which comments from the Times piece they would have latched on to. I had done an interview in support of The Good Wife, the television show I had recently joined the cast of, originally planned as a feature in the Relationships and Health supplement of the paper. During the course of a very wide-ranging and honest chat, the reporter had asked if it saddened me that I had no relationship with my father.

  “Of course,” I had said. “It’s the saddest thing in my life.” And it was. I explained a little of how my brother and I were still waiting for our father to take up our offer to continue a relationship with us.

  But I went on to talk of my belief that the way things were now was preferable to the situation that had existed previously, and that my mother and my brother and I were happier now than when there had been contact with my father, and presumably he was happier too.

  I’d said this many times before. It was true, but it was also my way of moving the conversation away from “Alan’s pain” and into a more sanguine and healthy admittance that sometimes people do you a favor when they drop out of your life.

  And when the discussion turned to health, and I was asked about family illness, I told the reporter that recently when I’d had my first physical with a new doctor he’d asked if cancer ran in my immediate family, and I realized that, as I’d had so little contact with my father as an adult, I didn’t know. I actually knew nothing about him or his health. Then, out of the blue, in the spring of 2010, my father contacted my brother Tom to tell him he was battling cancer, and Tom and I suddenly discovered which strain of that disease’s odds were genetically stacked against us.

  As we were finishing, the reporter asked if I thought I would ever see my father again. I said I had thought about this a lot and imagined that the only way we might have any contact would be if he reached out as he was dying.

  However, the in-depth interview was scrapped in favor of one of those shorter, pithier “What I’ve Learned” pieces, and a collection of my words was assembled randomly under topic headings that bore little relation to the context in which they were uttered.

  “My life is so much better now that my father is not in it. He does have cancer, which apparently runs in the family. Maybe next time I see him he’ll be really ill, or he’ll be dying and I may not see him” is how the Times mash-up ran.

  No wonder the Sunday Mail was sniffing about.

  Every person in the public eye will have stories of media invasion and misrepresentation. As, sadly, there were no classes at drama school for dealing with these sorts of things, I, like many before me, fumbled my way through the years and finally developed my own way of coping with this part of my job (and my life), mostly by trying to be open and honest. I had tried to be guarded about parts of my personal life in the past, but realized the hard way that doing so came over as coyness and invited speculation.

  In 1999 the News of the World, the most vicious of tabloids in both its disdain for facts and its methods of accruing them, ran a story implying that I was accusing my father of sexually abusing me as a child. This was completely false. I had done no such thing, nor had my father.

  But again, a comment I’d made about the aftermath of playing Hamlet, in an interview with the American magazine Out a few months prior, had been seized upon, misquoted, sensationalized, and then deemed irrefutable evidence of an accusation of sexual molestation.

  Here’s what I actually said:

  After Hamlet I just suddenly changed my life. I was not divorced but separated, and I also confronted my dad, with my brother’s help. We went and talked to my father about the things he’d done to us in our childhood. Hamlet was probably not totally the cause of that, but it unlocked boxes in my mind that were locked away in the attic. And they all came out
and I had to deal with them. It caused a lot of pain to many people, including myself.

  The next day, the Daily Record, sister paper to the Sunday Mail, ran a story with the headline “Father of Bisexual Star Alan Hits Back” in which my father angrily denied my nonexistent accusations.

  As you might imagine, all hell broke loose.

  I was in New York at the time, about to attend the premiere of a film I was in—a remake of Annie (talk about the universe throwing you a curveball!)—when I got a call from Mary Darling, who’d just had her irate ex-husband on the phone. He was understandably furious: every single person he knew would have seen the story. It transpired that the News of the World had been camped outside his house, and now other publications were ringing his doorbell.

  I felt sick. My father had terrorized me, Tom, and Mary Darling throughout our lives and was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive but he was no sexual molester. I was horrified. But my horror was not just about how awful it must be for my father to be falsely accused of such a terrible act, but also that his rage was, right now, directed once more at me. The same fear and anxiety I had lived with as a child suddenly reconsumed my life. I could hear it in my voice as I spoke to my mother. I could hear it in hers. I could feel it within myself.

  But worst of all was the fact that my father might think I actually had accused him of these things. My father did not really know me. He had no way of contacting me, as we hadn’t spoken in years at that point. He also had no experience of dealing with the press or understanding of their disregard for reason in pursuit of a scandal.

  In New York City, Cumming junior was smiling for the cameras in an Alexander McQueen ensemble between frantic phone calls to see what could be done to calm his father, comfort his mother, take the tabloids to task, and demand an apology for this slander. Cumming senior, at home in Scotland, also did what he felt was right: he talked. To his credit he said he didn’t want to carry on a conversation with his son via the pages of a national newspaper, but of course he was saying that in the pages of a national newspaper.

  Eventually I was able to secure an apology from the Daily Record. My publicist had told me that there was no way I could take on the News of the World, which had a renowned huge legal fund purely for quashing lawsuits from the aggrieved subjects of its stories, as well as the knowledge that anyone who wanted to pursue them had to countenance an already painful story being raked through the papers all over again should they go to court.

  And although the few contrite lines at the bottom of the Daily Record’s Letters page a few weeks later were a far cry from the screaming headlines of the original story, it was important to me for my father to know I had done all I could to right the wrong. I wanted to show him that I cared about such an intrusion to his private life, that I was doing what I could to protect him.

  Of course at the same time I was reminded that my father had never shown those kindnesses towards me, and I wondered how different such an intrusion would have felt if he had known immediately that he could pick up the phone, tell me there were reporters outside his door, and hear my advice and my reassuring words.

  So now, back in the lounge at Nice airport, I listened to Mary Darling’s lilting Highland tones and knew what to expect. Probably a gossipy, needling piece in that Sunday’s Mail, no big deal compared with what had come before, but able to churn up old sadness nonetheless.

  “But don’t you worry, pet,” she said reassuringly. “I just said I couldn’t help them, had no comment, and smiled and shut the door.”

  My flight to London was called. I took a last sip of my Bloody Mary and thought to myself, “Tomorrow’s chip paper!” And it was true: by Monday lunchtime the Sunday Mail would be used for wrapping up greasy bags of fries in chip shops all over Scotland.

  But by then, the damage would have been done. So much more damage than I could ever have countenanced.

  We ascended into a cloudless Mediterranean sky and, as I always tend to do when airborne, I smelled the roses. Maybe it’s the fact that I hurtle through the sky in a metal-fatigued box so regularly and therefore the odds of said box careering to a watery grave must be quite scarily higher than for the average traveler that makes me count my blessings in this way. Or maybe it’s the copious amounts of free booze. Whatever, it’s another inexorable ritual.

  But I smell the roses not just to remind myself of how lucky I am, but also to wonder how on earth it all happened. I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all.

  THEN

  Nobody disliked the rain more than my father. All of a sudden nature would not bend to his will, time would not mold to his form. His meticulous plans would have to be altered. Men would have to be redirected to new, hastily created tasks. The rain brought chaos to his carefully constructed realm. And on this particular day, I would become the unwilling, and as usual ill-informed, brunt of his frustration.

  This day was the first time I truly believed I was going to die. I looked into my father’s eyes and I could see that in the next few moments, I might leave the planet. I was used to rage, I was used to volatility and violence, but here was something that transcended all that I had encountered from him before. This was a man who had nothing to lose. The very elements were raging against him, and what was one puny little son’s worth in the grand scheme of things? I felt like I was my father’s sacrifice to the gods, a wide-eyed, bleating lamb that he was doing a favor in putting out of its misery.

  It was during my summer holidays from high school. I was old enough to be working for him full time by then, but not yet fully grown enough to be sent to aid the men with their tasks. So not only was I feeble and weak and inept, I also, in this current downpour, demanded more time and planning and attention due to my inadequacies. It was always like this with the rain. I longed for it as respite from the backbreaking labor, but as soon as it came, I knew I was doomed.

  We had been working outside in the nursery, separating the one- and two-year-old spruce saplings that were strong enough to be taken to the forests and planted from the runts of the litter. These, much like me, needed to be cast aside. The rain had necessitated that this work be postponed, and instead all the saplings were transported into the old tractor shed in the sawmill yard, where they could be graded and selected in a dry place. This, I was told, was to be my job. I was sent to the shed to await further instructions.

  There was a single bare lightbulb hanging above me. I stood beneath it, surrounded by mounds and mounds of spruce saplings, hearing my father’s voice come wafting through the gale as he ordered his men around.

  Finally the shed door opened and a gust of wind and a clap of thunder heralded his entrance. In the lightbulb’s dim hue, his lumbering frame cast a shadow over me and much of the piles of baby trees. I remember the smell of them, so sweet, fresh, and moist.

  “You go through these,” he said, picking up a handful of saplings, “and you throw away the ones like this . . .”

  He thrust out a hand to me, but it was full of saplings of various lengths and thicknesses. With his shadow looming over me I could barely discern the differences between any of them.

  “And you put the good ones into a pile over here.” He gestured to his right.

  I looked up at him, blinking and windswept.

  “How do I know if they’re good or not?” I asked.

  “Use your common fucking sense,” he said from the shadows. A second later a shaft of eerie gray-blue light filled the shed, thunder vibrated beneath my feet, and he was gone.

  For the next few hours I sifted through the trees like a mole, blinking and wincing in the semidarkness. After a while the saplings began to blur into a prickly procession, spilling through my fingers. I would check myself and go back through the discarded pile at my feet and wonder if I had been too harsh in my judgment. The pile of rejected saplings seemed to be bigger than the successful ones, and I questioned if my criteria was too harsh. Then pragmatism would win over and I’d tell
myself I needed to be ruthless, that this pile had to be shifted and it never would be by prevaricating or becoming sentimental.

  Of course my father had not given me much to go on to make my choices. He was usually vague and generalized in his instructions, but incredibly specific when it came time to inspect my work. But today was different. Perhaps because he was so preoccupied with the challenges the weather had created for him and his workers, he had doled out fewer instructions than usual about how I was to proceed. For instance he gave no indication of what ratio of plants should be kept to those that should be rejected. He gave no clues as to the criteria I should use in filtering them, aside from that shadowy fist he had thrust in my face. I was standing in a freezing, damp, dark room surrounded by thousands of baby trees. I began to panic.

  I did what I could. When my hands began to get numb I pushed them between my thighs and held my legs close together to bring some life back into them. At times I felt I was on a roll, but then the panic would set in. I would glance down at a mound of discarded trees and realize I had been too hasty in my judgment. They seemed too healthy, too thick, too tall. But I couldn’t save them all, could I?

  Every moment of doubt was compounded by the knowledge that I was wasting precious time and before long my father would return. And of course, he did.