Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  The strange thing was that I became a kind of buffoon. That was the power of peer pressure. You either had to get down on all fours and change everything about yourself or you bowed to the prevailing winds and became what people thought you were anyway.

  For the time being, I got myself an evening job tearing tickets in the Donmar Warehouse theatre in Covent Garden. The play was Macbeth, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench; Trevor Nunn was the director, and the production was brilliant. The actors sat in a circle on orange boxes. There was no set, just a naked light bulb and an old metal sheet hanging from the roof that made thunder when shaken. Ian and Judi were spine chilling as the Macbeths and working at the Donmar was another of the high points of my career. I loved that job; I couldn’t wait to get there every night. I tore the tickets, sold the programmes and was thoroughly smug with the punters. As soon as the three-minute buzzer rang, I herded them unceremoniously into the makeshift theatre and closed the black felt curtains behind them with a self-important swish. Any latecomers were subjected to my withering disapproval and, depending on my mood, I would either let them go in during the scene change, or not. Sometimes I just sent them home. I was drunk on being part of the group. I stole half the money I made selling the programmes and learnt more about acting than any number of whoosh-kas could ever teach me.

  But it was not all plain sailing. By the end of the first week I received a complaint via the house manager from the leading actor that I was putting him off. I used to look, perhaps a shade too intensely, through the crack in those felt curtains, like an imprisoned wife in purdah, making eyes at Ian McKellen on the stage as his clothes were torn from him by the little witches in their dirty lace mittens.

  I suppose I was a kind of modern-day Eve Harrington (the aspiring actress in All About Eve). Like Eve, I lied about everything. My age. My name. My background. I was a real number. I’d already seen this production of Macbeth a year earlier, during the blistering summer of 1976 while I was on a student course at Stratford-on-Avon, and for the first time in my life I became an obsessive fan. It was fun, but it was a full-time job. I hung around the stage door at night with all the other freaks. We huddled in a pool of light like lost souls. They were almost inevitably women. Some, the amateurs, washed in and out on the tide, but hidden among them were the fabulous diehards, eccentric ladies whose lives had been changed by seeing the play. Being a fan meant that you could utterly abandon your own life. You were “born again.” Your whole existence became the play and the brief contact you had with your saviour at the stage door. The star was a flickering mirage that meant everything to you and nothing to him. You blinked and he was gone. He blinked but you were still there. It was a long high mass with a short moment of communion.

  When Ian appeared, the ladies whined and snivelled, arms outstretched for the miracle of physical contact. In the brief moment of climax, cards, cakes and keepsakes fell on him like a plague of locusts and then it was over. My technique was more menacing. I positioned myself to full advantage, stood back and stared. I never asked him to sign anything. (I learnt, much later, just how effective this tactic could be.) Ian disappeared into the night and the ladies shuffled off, clucking. When they were all gone I dived after him into the darkness, darting in and out of the shadows like the hero in an Enid Blyton novel as I tracked my star on the walk home or to the pub. Sometimes, if I woke early enough (I had ripped a copy of the rehearsal schedule off the wall backstage so I knew his every move), I even waited for him to leave his house in the mornings and tracked him to the rehearsal room. If he spotted me, I pretended I had lost something in the rubbish. I was quite macabre. Then six months later I was passing by the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden and saw a poster announcing Macbeth as part of the coming season. I couldn’t believe my luck. I dashed inside and got the job tearing tickets.

  Pretty soon I had manoeuvred my way into a backstage position where I got to kneel by the side of the stage and take the three little voodoo dolls from Judi Dench’s hands as she rushed into the wings after the mad scene. Then I had to take the dolls into the dressing rooms during the interval and set them by her place ready for the next scene. I acted very businesslike on these trips, but still managed to look sultry as I passed through the men’s dressing room where Ian inevitably sat half naked and smoking in front of the mirror. The stalker was in the house! I think he was initially quite freaked out, but I kept my head down and bided my time. After all, there was a whole season ahead.

  It was one of the most exciting jobs I have ever had. Creeping around in the wings of a theatre while the show was on, listening for the changing nuances of performance, feeling the disparate audience being drawn slowly together, was like being on drugs for me. My heart lived in my mouth and so it was a tight squeeze when I finally managed to manoeuvre my way on to the back of Ian McKellen’s scooter and sped off towards a late-night tête-à-tête in Camberwell. I remember the look of fury on the face of his other most persistent fan, Sue. I had tortured this girl since my elevation to ticket-tearer. She was tall, slightly hunched, with pebble glasses, a high forehead, and long scarves that wound around her neck and dragged behind her on the floor. She was actually quite sweet, although sometimes she lashed out at Ian and had to be restrained. I will never forget the look of utter disbelief on her face as I nonchalantly strapped on Ian’s spare helmet, a tartan Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and put my hands around his waist before riding off into the night. You could have knocked her over with a feather.

  But she needn’t have worried. There is an unbridgeable gulf between the fan and the friend. The fan cannot live without the framework of the play, and outside the security of tickets and programmes and latecomers I was a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car (or a scooter, in this case). I was a different person around him, and however valiantly he tried to cajole me out of my speechless state, I was stuck in a relationship that was divided by footlights.

  Once, a year or so later, we were at his house and he was sorting out his make-up for some show he was preparing. The actor’s paint palette is (or was) a scuffed suitcase full of smeared greasepaint sticks, beard glue, nose putty, hairpins and make-up remover. Its smell is the essential eau de théâtre. On the last night of a play, in the weird rush to get out of the theatre and back to ordinary life, these tools of disguise are thrown back into the box, along with telegrams and good luck cards ripped from the mirror, only to resurface later on another table in another town for another disguise. During a rummage through a make-up box, old times are briefly recalled as the cards and telegrams are reread with a smile, and then thrown out as the make-up is cleaned and reorganised. This was one of those times. The Macbeth season had ended. It was a Saturday afternoon. We drank a bottle of wine. I rearranged the make-up sticks and he sorted out his beards and sideburns. I loved greasepaint. Every colour had a number: 5 was an ivory foundation; 9 was a clay-coloured highlight; Carmine Lake was a dark burgundy for wrinkles and eye bags. Soon, we drunkenly began to make ourselves up. I painted on a Ziggy Stardust look with a lightning bolt across my face. He was a chalk-white geisha. We sprayed ourselves with fixative and then Ian suggested we play rock stars and fans. Unfortunately, improvisation was not proving to be my strongest suit at Central, let alone in my hero’s flat, and this latest reversal of roles, far from freeing me up, as Ian had perhaps imagined, made me feel incredibly self-conscious. Suddenly, I was standing there on the sofa with a stringless guitar over a painted body, while Ian was writhing about on the floor screaming. This man could certainly improvise! After a moment he stopped.

  “Go on then. Say something!” he said, but my mind was a blank.

  Finally I put one arm out, struck an imaginary chord and lamely whimpered, “Good evening, Camberwell!” before bursting into floods of tears.

  Meanwhile the Macbeth season ended, and I became a dresser at the Aldwych Theatre, the other Royal Shakespeare Company venue in London. I dressed Charles Dance, John Nettles and, for a brief moment, Alan Howard. It was no
t a very savoury job. The play was Coriolanus and there was a lot of fighting. I had to pick up my artiste’s sweaty underwear each night and take it upstairs to the wardrobe to be washed. It felt like a bit of a comedown after picking up Judi’s voodoo dolls, but I still had an inane thrill just being inside a theatre.

  In the dressing room next door to me worked another dresser, Joe McKenna, a tiny thin boy from Glasgow, a child star who was growing up. He was seventeen but still looked twelve, and he was trying to get into a drama school in London. The first time I saw him he was dancing down the Strand, on his way to the theatre, wearing a pair of beige shorts, a white short-sleeved shirt with a bow tie, knee-length socks and sandals. In his hand was a tin lunchbox, and he was literally swinging around a lamp-post.

  I was soon to discover that Joe was more famous than some of the uptight RSC actors he dressed, due to the fact that he had played Ken Barlow’s son on the legendary TV soap Coronation Street. Sometimes, as he was leaving the stage door of the Aldwych, fans would rush up to him instead of the leading actor, and ask for autographs. We became best friends, and every night we took the number 11 bus home, while I regaled him with stories about my life. Some were true and others were not. Joe was very suspicious and never believed a word I told him. I did make up some terrible lies, the most ornate of which was that I was conducting an affair with Rudolf Nureyev, who was performing at that time at the English National Opera. I would rather grandly get off the bus by St. Martin’s Lane and tell Joe I was off to meet Rudolf. One night he followed me. I was stalking with the other fans outside the stage door. Rudolf came out in thigh boots and a pork pie hat. We fans crowded around him as he made his way towards his bright yellow sports car. He winked at me as he got in. I smiled hopelessly. Then he roared off and the fans dissolved back into the real world. Suddenly, who should I see across the road, hiding behind a car, but Joe? We faced each other across the street. There was an awkward moment of silence, and then Joe proceeded to lay into me in a guttural Glaswegian, previously shrink wrapped, and all the more shocking because it bore only a vague similarity to Sing-Song Joe of Dressing Room D. He stormed off towards the Strand.

  “Not a word of the fucking truth comes out of your mouth!” he screamed. I ran to catch up with him. I could hardly breathe. It is, after all, utterly exasperating to be caught out in the face of such a fantastical lie. My voice quavered; I was on the verge of tears.

  “Listen, Joe,” I gasped, “I may have lied about this. But not everything’s a lie.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Joe wheeling around. “What’s true then?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “I am a member of the Embassy Club.”

  “Big fucking deal. You’re a fucking liar.” And he marched through the traffic on the Strand. A number 11 bus was just pulling out from the bus stop. Joe darted through the cars and managed to jump on it as it was moving off.

  “You’re pure shite,” he shouted from the bus, a fairly mad sight it must be said, in his retro child-star garb.

  “Okay, so I’m not having an affair with Rudolf Nureyev,” I said, running to catch up, shouting to be heard, “but I am shagging Ian McKellen, I swear!”

  It was too late. The bus lurched off towards Trafalgar Square, Joe staring glacially down at me, victorious, as they swung around the corner.

  We soon got over that hump, although it turned out to be a preview to the fairly bumpy ride our relationship endured over the following years. But when you’re young you can forget and forgive anything; and as no one in the wardrobe department liked us much (least of all the wardrobe master, a mean queen with a falsetto), we had to stick together. We were probably utterly exhausting to have around. Joe was a T. Rex fan and always had to be told to stop singing.

  One day the child actor who played Coriolanus’ son forgot to show up. Maxine Audley, a famous, now totally forgotten, actress played the grandmother. She was an extraordinary star from a bygone generation: she had played alongside Olivier; she was a kind of legend; she liked a bit of a tipple; and she was fabulous to watch from the wings. She was like Sarah Bernhardt or something out of the nineteenth century. “Oh darling,” she’d rasp at Joe and me as we hung around in the wings during the show. “Could you be a poppet and fetch my fan?”

  So we were very excited when she suggested that Joe play Coriolanus’ child. I could already see him typing it up on his CV. I, of course, dropped everything. None of our actors got any service at all that day; I devoted myself to Joe, making sure his costume fitted, running up to the wardrobe to get stockings. I was very supportive, but then I had to be: I was still back-pedalling from Rudolfgate. When Joe went on stage, I took a picture from the wings with a camera that had a flash and the whole company went ballistic; I got my first warning.

  After Joe’s stage triumph, he took two weeks off to be in Coronation Street again and I went up to visit him in Manchester where he was filming. Joe showed me around the set of the Rovers Return, the most famous pub in British television; he pretended to be Marc Bolan coming in for a drink and I played Bet Lynch. Then we adjourned to the green room and rehearsed his lines for the next show in campy American accents. We were just having a laugh, but suddenly Rita Fairclough threw her newspaper down and stormed up to us. “You little piece of shit,” she said to Joe. “You think you’re too good for us. Pay a bit of respect. This is your bread and butter.” And she jabbed at Joe’s chest with her lacquered fingers, as she launched into a five-minute tirade. Elsie Tanner even looked up from her newspaper. Joe went white and then burst into tears but Rita was relentless. Finally we left the room and I thought Joe was about to faint. And then Elsie swayed over to us. “Don’t worry, pet,” she cooed confidentially. “Some stars shine brighter than others.” She winked and moved on; but this was to become our mantra.

  We were too big for the Aldwych and in the end we were both fired within a month of each other. Joe’s downfall came as a surprise. One afternoon during the matinée he was walking along towards the wardrobe on the top floor of the theatre. Downstairs Alan Howard was having his famous moment on the stage. Never have I seen an actor milk a scene as much as Alan Howard did in Coriolanus. Basically his mother (Maxine) has inadvertently undone him. She brings his child to the stage (Joe). It is the emotional high point of the evening. The rest is bloodshed. On a good night, you could hear a pin drop.

  “Oh Mother, Mother!” whined Alan Howard in an incredibly strangled stage cry. It was really effective. I loved it. “What have you done?”

  In the silence that followed, the ghostly voice of Joe could be heard, like the Phantom, from somewhere above the chandelier in the middle of the theatre:

  “She’s my woman of gold, and she ain’t very old, uh-uh-uh

  She’s faster than most and she lives by the coast, uh-uh-uh.”

  The audience exploded with mirth and Joe was fired then and there. He had to finish the evening performance and never come back. Between shows we went shopping for balloons and streamers and wine, and Joe gave a party in his dressing room. No one could believe his nerve, but everyone came anyway.

  My own demise happened a week later. The Embassy Club was having a Roman centurion party, and I had my eye on Alan Howard’s Act Two red leather costume, which was a very butch gladiator’s outfit. I slipped into his room and nicked it on the night of the party but forgot all about it the next day when I showed up, still drunk, for work. Needless to say, I left at the end of the week.

  CHAPTER 9

  Suzy

  There was a beautiful girl in the year above me at Central called Suzy. Everyone agreed: she had star quality. She had red hair and an aquiline nose, and had already been trained as an opera singer. We were all in awe of her; she was quite haughty and remote. And yet at some point in the beginning of my second year, at a drama school party, Suzy and I began to kiss. She was the first girl I really slept with. She lived in a freezing ground-floor flat in Belsize Park, with a gas fire fixed into the wall that had to be fed money
to work, and even then there was only a vague halo of warmth around it. Cups of coffee steamed like cauldrons and in the mornings it was almost impossible to force oneself out of Suzy’s bed. The windows would be frozen into crystal patterns and water from the hot tap steamed out of the bathroom in thick white clouds through which Suzy would emerge, naked. She had an eye for drama. She was already going out with another boy, who surprised us one morning in bed when he arrived with a box of chocolates. Suzy was asleep but I woke up as he tiptoed across the room. He made a whispering gesture to me and I snuggled into her back, watching him as he carefully placed the chocolates on the end of the bed and withdrew. I luxuriated for a few moments in the feeling of power, and wiggled my toes against the box so that it crackled like a stocking present at Christmas, and then I guided Suzy’s feet towards them. Sure enough, she said: “Is it Christmas?”

  The second time we had sex, it lasted about three minutes. “Are you all right?” I asked guiltily, trying to gauge her reaction, but Suzy’s face gave little away.

  “That was great,” she said, without a trace of enthusiasm, and leant over to light a cigarette.

  I loved being with her. She was much more sophisticated than the rest of us and made life at drama school exciting. One night at the end of the summer we were drunk in the Swiss Cottage pub, and she suggested that we go swimming in the ponds in the middle of Hampstead Heath. We ran up the hill into the woods. Suzy threw off her clothes and dived into the thick black water, emerging far out in the middle of the pond. “Come on, you weed!” she shouted, but I hesitated. It was dark and deep, but I was drunk and loving Suzy, so I undressed and jumped through a hoop of terror into the freezing water. Spluttering to the surface, in a blind panic, with nothing but depth below, I swam towards the ghostly image of Suzy, as if my life depended on it.