by Alan Cumming
Everything had been knocked down. The sawmill was just a pillaged skeleton; the tractor shed a concrete square with weeds growing up through it.
I felt the absence of my father. He was order and neatness and spit and polish. This was utterly decrepit. He was gone. And so I felt able to observe my childhood home like I would a box of old photos I chanced upon in a cupboard.
The house was empty, but locked of course. It had apparently recently been purchased. A weekend home for some wealthy family, most likely.
It still felt big. I’d expected to find it less daunting now, but no, it was still bleak and menacing.
We walked round the unkempt garden and looked in the windows. It was just as I remembered it. There was the sink, the kitchen rearranged a bit but much the same, just a kitchen in a big stone house in the Angus countryside.
I saw the wee room off the living room where I’d played the piano.
The Good Room that we literally spent a handful of evenings in all year.
As I turned the corner into the house driveway I caught a glimpse of the silhouette of my father through the net curtain of the office window. My heart skipped a beat and I stopped.
Grant later told me how in the woods I’d run and leapt on stones and over fallen trees, but the closer we got to the house the slower I became, and more measured. Of course the woods meant freedom to me, air and imagination and being unobserved. The house was all darkness and silence and expecting the worst.
My hand was on the doorknob to the shed. I turned it open and walked inside. This was where, more than thirty years before, my irrational and irate father had held me down and clipped my hair with sheep shears.
I took in every crack of the stone floor, every nail banged into the crumbling plaster of the walls, until my gaze rested on what I realized was my reflection through the cobwebs in the window.
I smiled.
If my father had been alive I think he would probably have been quite proud of me right now.
I was wearing a tailored black suit, white shirt, and slim black tie, black brogues, my hair well cut and groomed. Even my glasses were clean.
I think my father would have approved of me. I think I would have finally passed his test.
But I had come back here, dressed like this, out of respect for Jack, not my father.
It didn’t matter what he thought anyway.
I thought I looked just fine.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jason Weinberg completely managed this whole thing, I now realize. Luckily he is my manager. It was he who got me to sit down with Luke Janklow in the café of the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood late one afternoon during a week of night shoots on a movie in the summer of 2011, much against my will, I might add. Then Luke was the one who completely surprised me by not exhorting me to do a “my fabulous celebrity life” type of book but to write about something I really felt passionate about. Luckily Luke is my agent. Through Luke I met Carrie Thornton, who encouraged me to go deeper and darker and to trust that my story was good enough. Luckily Carrie is my editor. I owe such a huge debt to all three.
If my childhood had been pleasant and uneventful, then even if in middle age Tommy Darling’s story had been suddenly sprung on me as it was, I probably wouldn’t have written a book. My family would all have gathered round the parental home’s TV and watched the shocking tale unfold, and then I’d be pulled into the collective bosom and we’d all cry happy tears and that would have been that. Since it wasn’t that way and I did write this book, I suppose the next person I really should thank is my father. Thank you, Alex Cumming, for siring me and ensuring I will always have lots of source material. I forgive you.
Thank you more, though, to Tommy Darling, for your patience, for waiting so many years for us to find you and for your story to be told. I wish I’d known you.
I hope I have demonstrated how much I appreciate and adore my mother, Mary Darling, and my brother Tom with every fiber of my being. And if, as I suspect, Grant Shaffer actually is an alien from the planet Kindness, I will not be surprised. I will willingly give up these earthly delights and accompany him back there on the Mothership.
To all my dear friends who listened to this story or to me telling it to others over the many months, nay years, that it has taken for me to finally feel I am done with it: thank you.
Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable. Writing this book and knowing it will be discussed around the world is in some way insurance for me that my story will never be thought of as commonplace, never acceptable, and for that I thank my publishers and everyone involved with making it happen from the bottom of my heart.
ALAN CUMMING
NYC, 2014
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN CUMMING is an award-winning actor, singer, writer, producer, and director. He starred in an acclaimed one-man staging of Macbeth on Broadway, and plays Eli Gold on the Emmy Award–winning television show The Good Wife. He won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the Emcee in the Broadway musical Cabaret, a role he is reprising in a new staging in 2014. He hosts PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery and has appeared in numerous films, including The Anniversary Party, Spy Kids, X2:X Men United, Titus, Eyes Wide Shut, and Any Day Now. He lives in New York and Edinburgh.
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COPYRIGHT
Cover photograph © by Francis Hills
Author photograph © by Kevin Garcia
Unless otherwise credited, all images courtesy of the author.
NOT MY FATHER’S SON. Copyright © 2014 by Alan Cumming. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cumming, Alan, 1965–
Not my father’s son : a memoir / Alan Cumming. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-222506-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-06-222507-8 (trade pbk.) 1. Cumming, Alan, 1965– 2. Actors—United States—Biography. 3. Singers—United States—Biography. 4. Fathers—Scotland—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.C692A3 2014
792.02'8092—dc23
[B]
2014011087
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EPub Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062225085
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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lan Cumming, Not My Father's Son