Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  Eli was, and continues to be, quite a revelatory influence in my life, though. He is the first character I have played over a period of years, for starters. Initially I had been reticent about going into a long-running show. I had always done films or theatre, and the little TV I had done was either for a guest spot or for a short season so I always knew what the end of the story was. And now here I was in a situation where my character could suddenly be given a new job, family member, or interest with the advent of the next script. It freaked me out a little at first, but now I have come to enjoy the unknown, partly because I have become more comfortable with the concept, and mostly because the writing on the show is so good so I relish any new developments in Eli’s world.

  It’s also exciting when you make a suggestion about your character and very shortly you find yourself acting it out. In the third season I told the show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King, that I found it very difficult to imagine being someone who never had sex. There were even mentions in the script by Eli about his lack of action in the bedroom. Lo and behold, mere weeks later I was doing a postcoital scene with the hilarious Amy Sedaris.

  When I was offered The Runaway, I had only done a few episodes as Eli, but already he was effecting some big changes in me. First of all regarding my hair. As detailed in the first chapter of this book, I have had some issues to overcome in the follicle department, and successfully reclaiming control of my tresses has been achieved via a constantly revolving and eclectic range of haircuts throughout my adulthood. All that was about to stop. Since 2010 I have basically had the same do. I can’t actually believe it. It gets a little more edgy in the summer hiatus, the sides a little more clipped perhaps, but nothing really radical since I will be back in that suit by summer’s end. Also, and much more significant, it is now gray!!

  {Still from The Good Wife courtesy of CBS Television Studios/photo by Justin Stephens.}

  When I started on the show, it was only for one episode and I was shooting during a break from the movie Burlesque. My hair had been dyed black for Burlesque, and indeed it was colored regularly for various different projects and often touched up by my hairstylist to keep those pesky gray roots at bay. On the first day of shooting on The Good Wife, I spent a long time in the makeup chair having strands of my locks laboriously streaked with gray to give me a more distinguished and, yes, older countenance. After a few episodes, and when I knew I was going to return as a series regular, I told the hairstylist that we could really cut out the middleman. I would just let the color grow out and embrace my natural salt-and-pepper state. And so I did. Going gray is very interesting because it changes people’s attitudes towards you much more than if you’d gone blond or ginger. In some way it means you are embracing middle age or accepting your mortality and owning it. Suddenly I was being called “daddy,” and included in fawning magazine articles with other noted salt-and-pepper–locked men. In some way it was assumed I was doing it as a political gesture, embracing my middle age as well as my inner child and trouncing the notion that gray couldn’t be sexy. Actually I was not meaning to do any of those things, I just didn’t want to have to get up half an hour earlier every day and be poked with gray mascara brushes.

  It’s also interesting to note that each summer during the hiatus of The Good Wife, I have rushed from the relative calm of our studios in Brooklyn to start work on projects that could not be more different in tone or content from Eli’s trajectory as a political wheeler and dealer in contemporary Chicago: year one to South Africa to be Desrae; year two to L.A. to shoot Any Day Now, in which I play a 1970s drag queen who with his attorney boyfriend attempts to adopt a child with Down syndrome; year three to Scotland to play a man who is admitted to a psychiatric unit and then proceeds to act out the entire play of Macbeth; year four mercifully still in New York City, but remounting the crazy that is Macbeth on Broadway.

  I guess I am not quite at peace with playing middle-aged guys in suits!

  As soon as I landed I was plunged back into my life in Cape Town. I was picked up at the airport by my driver, Hodges, a huge African man whose laugh was so bassy and reverberating that the entire car shook when I said something that set him off. It reminded me of my old habit of standing up against a speaker in a club to feel the beat. When Hodges laughed, I really felt it. I went straight to the set for a makeup test, then a wardrobe fitting, then back home to the downtown apartment building where most of the cast were barracked, where a lovely manicurist (or nail technician as she preferred to be called) was waiting to reattach the acrylic nails that Desrae sported and I had relinquished before I left for Cannes.

  Another thing I relinquished was my body hair. Desrae would not have entertained a hairy arm, and therefore neither did I. Before the first day of filming this series, I had spent an evening in the company of a product called Veet, which, though well known to the female species by other names such as Nair, had hardly ever entered my mental periphery. It is now, however, forever seared into my brain. Do you know what Veet/Nair does? It dissolves the hair off your body. Surely this was an invention of the Nazis? You rub it on, sometimes to very sensitive parts of your anatomy, and very soon the hair just dissolves. It is not a pretty procedure, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell pretty either. But because of Desrae, Veet became a part of my toilette, and I would have to have another application this evening as the stubble on my arms was becoming noticeable. When my Who Do You Think You Are? episode was eventually broadcast I was really shocked to see my plucked chicken appearance due to the lack of body hair. It’s not a good look for me, believe me.

  Playing Desrae made me think of women in a completely different way, and certainly to have a whole new level of respect for them. Aside from the obvious things like the pain of wearing those shoes, I encountered a whole range of new experiences, most of them utterly unpleasant. Bras are not comfortable, for one thing. They are itchy and restricting and have weird wires and springs, making you feel as if you are wearing some sort of cantilever system rather than an article of clothing, which of course you are. Also, I was wearing silicone breasts, or chicken cutlets as they are also known and closely resemble. Silicone crammed against your skin by a bra was a double discomfort whammy, and it was a whole new experience for me to get undressed and find I had a sweaty chest. And dresses and skirts generally don’t allow you to open your legs very far. Guys, have you tried getting out of a car without opening your legs recently? You have to sort of scooch along the seat, one buttock at a time, then try and push yourself up on your spindly high heels and hope that you’re on a smooth surface when you make contact with the ground.

  And nails are another issue. When they’re long they clank and catch on things, and even the nail polish made me feel like my nails couldn’t breathe. You should have seen the anemic, soft mess that was left underneath when my acrylic nails were eventually removed (by soaking my fingers in some form of carcinogenic chemical mixture, of course).

  Yes, wearing high heels makes your legs look better and your ass look amazing, but I still couldn’t help but worry that they were making me more vulnerable at the same time. My ass and my boobs were not just more prominently displayed; it was almost as though the only way I could balance at all was to thrust them out to the world. And what if I wanted to run? Forget about it. If I could have maneuvered even a light trot in my heels before plunging to the deck, the pain of trying to run in such unnatural and uncomfortable footwear would have laid me up for weeks.

  For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.

  And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.

  Just saying. I was feeling especially vulnerable,
for a multitude of reasons, you see.

  That night I went to bed duly plucked. Tomorrow I would be up at the crack of dawn and back to work. Tommy Darling’s odyssey to Malaysia and the mystery of the final months of his life would remain a mystery for the next month, and the question of whether or not Alex Cumming was my birth father would not be answered for a few days either. I carefully pulled up the blankets with my reattached talons and fell into a deep and grateful sleep.

  THEN

  I woke up happy in my brother’s spare room, and then suddenly remembered what I had to do that day—the scariest thing I would ever do in my life.

  I could hear Tom making breakfast downstairs.

  The night before we had talked it all through and I had written it all down in case I got so nervous that I couldn’t remember anything. I was really worried I wasn’t going to be able to get through it. As soon as I had started to have the flashbacks, I knew in my heart that the only way I was going to be able to get better, to truly exorcise the pain and move on, was to one day talk to my father about it all.

  They had started in my dreams, dark dispatches dropped into my sleep that I began to realize were nightmares that had actually happened. Soon after, I didn’t need to be asleep. My stomach would knot up and I could see my father’s face coiled in rage as though it was yesterday. I could hear the dull ringing in my ears that was left after he made contact with my head. The sting, the dizziness, the inability to breathe, the humiliation, the shame, the despair that had been recorded in my mind so many years before now played back for the first time.

  I had cut myself off from my life. I was now in a cocoon with no responsibilities of work or marriage. I left the little flat mostly to eat or to go to therapy. The rest of the time I was free to just feel, to remember, and mourn. I realized I had never just stopped like this in my entire life. Finally now I was ready to go where I needed to go. What started as a trickle soon turned into a flood. I spent days just gazing at the ceiling of my little flat, remembering and reliving pieces of my childhood that I could now fully access. It was truly horrifying, but it was also incredibly liberating because in accessing these horrible memories I was beginning to understand who I really was. Such a huge part of my psyche had been closed off for so long, and now I was embracing the fullness of my life experience for the first time.

  It’s hard to express how fragile I felt in those early days. To begin with, I was terrified to tell anyone what I was experiencing. Partly because the memories were so raw and painful that it was difficult to talk about it at all without collapsing, and partly because I had a great fear of not being believed. And then I felt anxious about the prospect of talking about all of this with Tom and Mum. What if they weren’t ready and I was forcing them to confront a morass of pain and shame that they never wanted to revisit? Worse, what if they couldn’t deal with it at all? What if they didn’t believe me?

  I needn’t have worried. I talked to Mum first. My domestic situation had obviously changed and she was naturally worried about why. We spoke on the phone one night and I told her what had been happening, how I had begun to remember so many awful things that Dad had done and was now beginning to understand the vastness of how much I had been damaged by him. She couldn’t have been more loving and understanding. She told me she’d always worried that this part of my past was going to come back and haunt me. We spoke as two survivors, now finally able to acknowledge our shared past.

  A couple of days later I saw Tom, and over a long dinner we talked quite calmly and precisely about many, many instances of our father’s madness and violence. It was good to do so in such a rational, unemotional way. It made it all real and valid. We walked through the streets of London deep in conversation, both of us feeding each other forgotten nuggets of memory. We expressed to each other for the first time how we had felt in many, many instances of shame and violence we had endured. When we arrived at where Tom was staying, we hugged good night and suddenly we both began weeping uncontrollably, our chests heaving with grief for the two little scared boys we had been for so long.

  All that summer sorting myself out in Primrose Hill I had been working up to this day. I’d been seeing a therapist for many months, and early on he had told me that a confrontation would be a necessary part of my recovery. Even Mary Darling had said I should. Tom and I both agreed that we needed to do it, but it was easier said than done. We were effectively going back to the place where it had all happened to confront our abuser about incidents and memories that had just recently appeared back in our psyches and were still incredibly raw and painful.

  But we were now ready, I hoped. I picked up the papers from the bedside table and read over what I had written. It seemed so weird to see the entire thing encapsulated so neatly. Only two pages of A4, but packed with portent:

  Dad

  The way you behaved towards us throughout our childhood has had a huge effect on us, and has caused us many problems. You brutalized and terrorized us. We were made to feel useless, unworthy; we lived in constant fear of you. Not just of being hit but also of being constantly shouted at and brought down and tormented.

  We were never good enough for you. We could never live up to your expectations. We were made to feel we were not capable of doing anything. You would ask us to do tasks for you that we couldn’t possibly achieve, and then you would chastise us and hit us for not doing them well enough. So consequently we’ve gone through life feeling unhappy and unable to acknowledge our achievements because we still feel unworthy—as being told we are useless is so ingrained in us.

  We have made excuses for your behavior all our lives. We were embarrassed because people laughed and didn’t believe us if we told them about the violence, about you stopping us from going to things at the last minute, the way you made us work all the time, and so we started to make up excuses for you, so much so that we all pretended that nothing was really wrong and none of this ever happened, until it exploded out earlier this summer.

  But we also felt it was our fault. We were led to believe that the reason you hit us, the reason you went out nearly every night, the reason you had very obvious affairs, the reason Mum was unhappy was all our fault. Because you told us we were useless, and we believed you and took all the blame for ourselves.

  But we are not useless.

  As children, when we most needed support and encouragement and love, when we were at our most vulnerable and impressionable, we had as a role model a man who hit us and never encouraged us or said a positive thing to us. We felt unloved. You didn’t really like us. Maybe you still don’t.

  You had a problem with violence. We would have been taken into the care of the authorities if they had found out about the extent and regularity of your violence. Hitting an eight-year-old boy so hard that he is thrown across a room is not right. You would have been arrested on many occasions. You had no control over your temper. You totally flipped. You had psychopathic tendencies. We lived in constant fear. We were terrified of our own father, the man who should have been protecting us.

  You never encouraged us to pursue our own interests so we consequently had to keep them secret. You would stop us from leaving the house to go out. We felt no security in our own decisions and skills.

  We want to say all this to you to make you understand how we feel, and how we have been affected by the past. And that not having spoken about it is so wrong and damaging for everyone.

  We want you to somehow acknowledge that you remember some of the things we are talking about.

  In some way talking about it is acknowledging that it happened. And we are releasing the past, letting it go so we can all move forward and on.

  We are giving you back the things you gave us.

  I put the papers down. So many thoughts were whirring through my head. Tom and I had both been through a summer of intense examination and analysis of the events of the past, but I was nervous that suddenly springing all this on our father would alienate him and do the exact opposite of what
we both intended and needed, which was some sort of acknowledgment of his actions and ownership of the past. I didn’t want to scare him away, but I wanted him to hear the truth too.

  But also, I had no choice in the matter. I had to do this. I knew it. Tom knew it. Our whole lives had been leading up to this moment. We were going to give back to our father that which was not ours, and what we never should have been given in the first place.

  Tom had called him earlier in the week to ask if we could come and see him as we needed to talk about some things, so my father must have grasped that this was not merely a pleasant family trip. The very fact that we were visiting at all was a rarity by this point. I hadn’t seen him for several years. Since I’d moved to London in 1988, the visits out of duty had grown more and more sporadic. When I was married, and my wife and I regularly came to stay with my in-laws who lived a few miles away, I often didn’t even let my father know I was coming. And he certainly never visited me. In fact, I realized in the run-up to this monumental meeting that my father had never once called me on the telephone in my entire adult life. He had spoken to me, sure, after the phone was passed to him by my mother, and once my parents separated, I had called him, but he had never once picked up the phone himself and dialed my number.

  I had flown up to Scotland from London the night before, and spent the evening talking and remembering with Tom. We both knew how right this was, how necessary, but it still scared the shit out of us. We’d had a good few drinks to lighten our spirits and gird our loins, and now, here we were, the next day, in his car on our way to Panmure, about to confront our father with our childhood demons.

  As we passed through the gates and the big looming sign that read PRIVATE ESTATE: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED my heart began to pound. Everything seemed to be floating by in slow motion. The head gamekeeper’s house, the cottages where the wife of one of my father’s workers had taught me piano, the little box at the corner that I’d rush to every Saturday morning to collect my comic book. By the time we turned right and could see the sawmill yard, my hands had begun to shake.