Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  The huge white domes of the Sacré Coeur glowed in the distance on a hill in front of a deep blue sky complete with stars and a sickle moon. It could have been the backdrop in a provincial theatre. The train edged respectfully towards this surreal vision in a giant curve as the sky bleached and turned pink. The stars and the moon gave way to an early morning jet; and the man in the black hat watched me with the amused smile of a fairy godmother.

  I know it sounds hackneyed, but I felt an uncanny sense of recognition as I watched the approaching city, jerkily framed by the train window that early October morning. Everything in my whole life fell away in the face of it, like the sound cutting out during the intense denouement of a film, leaving only the protagonist’s heartbeat. We pulled into the Gare du Nord and as the doors opened the last English dust particle dissolved in the hot rubbery breath of the Parisian station. I walked down the platform with Vernon, who asked me if I knew where I was going. I was about to answer when a tall handsome woman in a fur coat waved from the buffers. It was Mme Feuillatte. We kissed hello, although we had never met before, and I was about to introduce her to Vernon, but when I turned around he was gone. A moment later I could see his departing figure sliding down an escalator, waving like Sally Bowles at the end of Cabaret. We left the station and got into her car.

  Mme Feuillatte drove me across Paris in her Citroën; the noise of the car on cobbles was more confusing to me than driving on the wrong side of the road. We beeped our way across the Arc de Triomphe and over the other side to Neuilly where the Feuillattes lived. In those days Neuilly was the exclusive nest of the grande bourgeoisie. It was feathered by industrialists and property developers with political connections, and they were making a lot of money. Mitterrand’s socialist agenda was no deterrent. This was the heyday of the offshore company. Chirac was their man and they lived like princes. Boulevard Maurice Barrés was quite simply the best address, a quiet road running along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The large honey-coloured buildings stood back from the street in their own private gardens and the park stretched out in front as far as the eye could see.

  Looking at Madame as we chatted for the last time in English, she could have been a photograph by Helmut Newton come to life. She had a handsome pampered face, beautifully made up under a tight blonde chignon, and the expressionless regard of someone who had recently committed murder and was simply going through the motions. Huge emerald and diamond clips clung to her ears. She wore a priceless fur coat with quite possibly nothing underneath but the sheer silk stockings on her beautiful legs.

  Inside the house, we stood side by side in silence as the antique lift with its double doors and windows wobbled awkwardly to the first floor. Up close she smelt delicious, from another planet. She stalked ahead of me through the large apartment, now speaking in French, her heels leaving their mark on the deep rust-coloured carpets. Huge windows looked out over the Bois; cartoons by Raphael hung on the oak-panelled walls between them. A series of double doors connected the hall, the drawing room, Madame’s bedroom and the dining room. Thus, her large fur-covered bed could be seen from every room, the unattainable high altar that Monsieur’s guests could glance at sideways as Madame herself served them another glass of “Feuillatte” champagne.

  A delicious smell of coffee wafted through a swing door that led to the other side of the apartment where the children lived and Monsieur had his office. Two pretty Indonesian girls in starched aprons worked in a tiny kitchen; their grey nylon dresses sparkled and snapped with electricity if you passed too close (probably Madame’s deterrent).

  I was to sleep in Monsieur’s office, which was decorated like one of the tunnels at Charles de Gaulle airport. A huge black and white photograph of Monsieur presided over the desk. He was very Chirac, a bull of a man with dyed black hair and big murderer’s hands. I could imagine Madame dropping her coat on the floor and walking obediently to the bedroom, nude on her heels, as Monsieur followed, with his big fat cock sticking out of his suit.

  This industrial French bourgeoisie made our own rationing-obsessed middle class look positively downtrodden. Partly because they were overtly sexual, whereas we were covertly sexual. They prepared for days in advance for lavish “at home” evenings of échangisme; we groped the wives of our friends on the dance floor at Annabel’s, and possibly had a quick rabbity fling in a taxi on the way home. They looked for perfection in everything and were not afraid to spend. We shopped at Peter Jones and drowned in cheap wine. They were tremendous show-offs: food, furniture, clothes, hair, cars and holidays had to be perfect. And it was. I have still to taste a better cup of coffee than that served by the electrical maids in Neuilly, or to eat a better-cooked piece of “rosbif” than Madame’s.

  She sat me down to breakfast that first day and then I hardly saw her again for the next three months. As for Dominique, she was my brother’s age and we hardly ever met either. So from then on I was more or less left to my own devices, which suited me perfectly. I had been enrolled by my mother at the Alliance Française, a school in the Latin quarter. I went there once.

  That first afternoon Madame suggested that I went for a walk in the Bois de Boulogne. The Bois was not like an English park. There were few lawns edged with herbaceous borders; no bandstands; just miles and miles of tall spindly trees in the muddy ground under the low Parisian sky. The whole area had a run-down feeling to it that was not unpleasant. And even if it had never really recovered from the Impressionist era, the Bois was still in many ways the pumping heart of Paris. Wide alleys were the arteries that carved through it and fed the Parisians to the woods. The glorious restaurants and pavilions of the nineteenth century stood crumbling beside them, their lakeside terraces still laced with Chinese lanterns in a hopeless attempt to retain their Proustian ambience. Veins of sandy bridle paths wound off into the woods, and the deeper you went inside, the muddier and rougher were the tracks, turning finally into webs of barely perceptible goat paths, the capillaries that delivered one into secret bowers of dripping rhododendrons. Here, fantasy could become reality; all of Paris knew the Bois and had been transported, at some time or other, by the flow of lust from the lights of the grands boulevards into the dark heart of the night-time woods.

  That afternoon I passed a small truck. It was rocking slightly to a muffled Brazilian samba coming from within. As I approached, the back door opened. Out hopped a small bald man in a green loden coat. He looked about and then strode purposefully into the thicket as if he were late for a meeting. The door slammed behind him and pretty soon some curtains that covered the windscreen were thrown open to reveal a woman of gigantic proportions at the wheel. She started the engine and the truck moved off, but only fifty yards down the road, before it stopped. The door opened again and out came a pair of legs in shiny black boots with stiletto heels.

  Delphine was well over six foot. A tiger-skin bikini top barely contained her enormous breasts that looked ready to explode. These giant constructions seemed to overwhelm her body, which was as thin as a rake and bent comically under the load. She had a jungle of black hair, and as she teetered around the outside of the truck with a cigarette in her mouth, she was trying to negotiate herself into a floor-length fur coat, which wasn’t easy. Her arms could hardly stretch away from the breasts and the breasts seemed to want to go down the sleeves as well. With one hand she held a breast back as the other prodded and pushed its way down the sleeve. The long sinewy muscles of a mountain goat strained across her armpits and up her neck like an anatomical drawing. She craned forward so that her hair didn’t get caught in the coat, and then up so that her cigarette did not burn or burst the boobs. And all this while walking through mud, balanced on six-inch heels. Finally in the coat, which was riddled with cigarette burns the size of bullet holes, she threw open the back doors of the truck. This girl had class. Inside was a boudoir with pink satin walls, a glitter ball suspended from the ceiling and a mattress covered in leopard skin on the floor. This was my first look at the Brazilian she-man
in all the glory of her unnatural habitat. It was also the first time I heard Jobim. The song was “Desafinado.”

  “Love is like a never-ending melody . . .” You bet, Delphine seemed to be saying, as she settled seductively against the side of the truck.

  “Tu as envie, chou?” she asked in a thick Brazilian French that I did not understand.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “Ahh, English baby. You wanna get fucked by Delphine?”

  “Who’s Delphine?”

  “This.” And she opened the coat and revealed, straining against the same tiger-skin bikini, an enormous cock. “And baby, don’t ever forget. I got sugar too,” she added, turning around to reveal a thin flat bum.

  And so I made my first friend in France. Delphine ruled the Bois, or at least her part of it, with a rod of iron. Literally. Hers was a famous erection. She was hysterically funny in her makeshift English. She came from a town in Brazil called Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon). Now she lived in Pigalle in a chambre de bonne with the tiniest window you had ever seen. I called it “limited horizons,” and as she laughed you could see her father, the chubby butcher with twinkly eyes whose picture was on the wall. She possessed the innate wisdom of the semi-literate hooker, but she was reckless and dangerously vulnerable. In short, she was a mess. Sometimes I would spend the afternoon in the cab of the truck and listen to her spanking businessmen; she would insult them in Portuguese, but she had a terrible cough and sometimes when she got carried away, the whole thing would turn into a tubercular fit and she would have to call off the show. She loved to chase the dragon: smoke heroin on a piece of silver foil. I would prepare it for her while she was working, ready for whenever she would stick her head through the little hatch.

  “God, give me strength,” she would rasp, and I would hand her the foil and a little makeshift pipe, then light a match underneath, and she would suck the heavy smoke deep into her lungs. In the brief moment of silence while she held her breath, the noise of the woods bled in. Her poor victim shuffled about in the back of the truck. A car drove past. She would look at me solemnly through a caked thatch of lashes, and then exhale in a Marilyn kiss pose, like the exhaust pipe of an old car, before shutting the hatch door and getting on with the job. Sometimes there were flecks of blood on the tinfoil pipe. When I pointed this out, she replied, “I’m very Camille, darling, didn’t you know?”

  Once, a man left without paying, and ran off into the night. She jumped into the driving seat of the camion and tried to run him over. I had rarely laughed so much in my life because she was serious. It was terrifying. The man had a head start, but she soon found him. He dodged left and right in front of the headlights. Delphine was screaming blue murder. Finally he escaped into the trees, but only after a tussle between her and me over the steering wheel. She stopped the car and slapped me so hard that I bled.

  “Now who’s Camille?” I muttered.

  “Never interfere!” she screamed. Her face was suddenly the butcher’s, but the eyes weren’t twinkling. She was unrecognisable and demonic; she shook me and spat insults in three languages before pushing me out of the truck and driving off.

  But we made up, and with Delphine at the wheel I learnt all about the Bois. Whatever you wanted, you could get it in those woods. Sometimes when she was too stoned or it was raining too hard, we would drive around, listening to Brazilian love songs and watch the people at play (or work, depending on your perspective). Like many hookers Delphine was constantly fascinated by her job. Sometimes we parked the truck on the corner of Avenue Foch and ate chocolate as we observed the wife swappers at work. Or we cruised the homos for rent at Porte Dauphine. She knew them all, and sometimes if I liked one she would call him over, tell him I was her little brother from Beautiful Horizons, and we would make out in the back of the camion while she drove around and Jobim sang.

  Once she took me to a tree stump deep in the woods where the ancient tarts congregated round a small bonfire. She was delivering smack. These witches sat around all night laughing and smoking, six or seven of them, old girls keeping their hands in. According to Delphine, they had a surprising degree of success. Groups of kids would seek them out for a dare; the old girls were philosophical and played along. After all, it beat “ashtray work.” Twenty years later, when my best friend was murdered in the Bois, it was the old girls who were the last to see her. But that’s another story.

  For now, it was the forest from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Heaven and hell; boys and girls; transsexuals and she-men; dealers, mobsters and policemen. Everyone had their own little bit of turf. The Feuillattes lent me a bicycle and I would beetle around the Bois as the season changed, the leaves fell, and all the love nests and hideaways were exposed. The cold weather arrived, but it didn’t stop anyone. The tenue was décolletée come rain or shine. You could only tell the season by the clouds of breath coming from a girl’s lips.

  Flora McEwen, my friend from MPW, was living in Paris as well, and three times a week we arrived late for life class at an art school in Montparnasse. We did rapid sketches of a strange lady with a hennaed bob, a huge scar right up her stomach and a very unruly bush. I was still a delinquent young hooray on a looting session, and I am ashamed to say I laughed out loud at some of the poses attempted by Madame. She was quite chunky, at least fifty, and entirely uninhibited. One day she arched balletically on all fours, before looking up expectantly through her bob at the naked light bulb hanging high above and her open bottom gave a little sigh of disbelief right in my face.

  Flora lived seven storeys up an oval-shaped back staircase that smelt of old apples and polished wood. She had a new camera, and one afternoon, after art class, both of us utterly broke, crouched in her little room—it was tiny and we were giraffes—we hatched a plot that I would become a supermodel. The more we thought about it, the better the idea seemed. The next afternoon we went all over the city, while I posed and Flora clicked away. Luckily for me, given my extravagantly inept posing technique, she hadn’t quite got the hang of how to use the focus, and in most of the pictures that we collected breathlessly a week later, I was no more than an insignificant blur.

  But we were exuberant; drunk on ourselves, each other and living in Paris, we thought the pictures were brilliant. I made them into a little book and, armed with my new portfolio, Flora and I attacked the boutiques of Paris. (We had never heard of model agencies.) Our first stop was the Pierre Cardin Men’s Boutique. We went in and Flora immediately summoned the manager. Although she had not been head girl at her convent, it was a role she could have played with flying colours.

  “Hello, my boyfriend est un lord anglais. He might be able to model for you.”

  “Oh?” replied the manager stiffly.

  “Oui,” continued Flora. “Il est là studying art avec moi à L’école du Louvre, et voilà.”

  Over to me. I rushed forward with my book. The bewildered manager leafed through it.

  “Pas mal, huh?” said Flora persuasively. I tried to look languorous, as I leant against the counter, although things weren’t going according to plan as the manager, obviously amused, asked the rest of the staff for their opinion.

  “J’ai fait ça avec du flash,” explained Flora about a picture in which only a pair of red eyes could be seen on a white haze.

  The manager told us to go up to the head office around the corner, but obviously called to warn them of our imminent arrival, as we never got beyond the concierge. We had no more luck elsewhere. I was turned down by everyone, and the rejections made me feel suicidal; my whole sense of self seemed to slip away.

  “I feel absolutely hideous now,” I confessed to Flora, thoroughly crushed.

  “You’re not hideous,” she said, “you’re just weird looking. Your time will come. Anyway, stop complaining. You’re a bore once you start going on.”

  “Oh, thanks, Flora,” I said, deeply put out. But she was right.

  Flora’s cousin Katie was in Paris too. She had a pet mouse that she kept in he
r pocket, and a boyfriend who worked in the toilets of a discotheque called Le Club Sept. The club was owned by Fabrice Emaer, the king of the Parisian night. There were a string of other establishments on the same street—Le Pimms next door, and across the road Le Piano Bar, run by France’s first air hostess, a tipsy lady named Isolde—but the crowd was always trying to get into Le Sept. They were held at bay by a ferocious black lady by the name of Jenny Bel’Air, the queen of the door people, and you didn’t want to mess with her. Jenny could make or break you with the bat of an eyelid and, like all door people, she had the memory of an elephant.

  Le Sept was a tiny underground place lit by a flashing roof of neon striplights in pinks and blues. The walls were mirrors and so the effect was totally disorienting; you never knew when the club ended and the walls began. There was a bar at one end with a giant bucket of crushed ice in which nestled bottles of champagne and vials of poppers. Katie would sit on the floor by the toilets with her boy, Pascal, and I would head for the dance floor in my white satin Acrobat drainpipes.

  One night, Yves Saint Laurent was sitting with Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, Catherine Deneuve and Betty Catroux. She was Yves’ muse: the woman he wanted to be. Yves and Rudi were whispering intimately in each other’s ears; Deneuve looked listlessly into the crowd; Andy and Betty were laughing at some private joke and pointing at Yves. I yearned to be them, or at least to be with them; they were so near, and yet so far. They shone ethereally above the bobbing heads on the dance floor: polished, beautiful, at the peak of their form, lit for the whole club to worship. The silhouettes of waiters passed in front of them with fresh bottles and ice buckets. Fabrice stood by the table with his arms folded, chatting amiably through a cigarette in his mouth. Betty was his muse too, and when she threw back her famous blonde mane and laughed, the others clapped in adoration. In the middle of all the movement, Deneuve’s sculpted face was jarringly vacant and pulled the focus from the group as she stared at some world unseen by the rest of the club.