Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  It was all quite eighteenth century in a way; except instead of a vicar and a tutor, John had a decorator and a trader. He enjoyed it all thoroughly and presided over the group of rakes and junkies like a mafia boss niggling and dividing them. On an evening excursion to dinner, whole restaurants could come to a standstill as drunken arguments broke out among the group, normally started by a girl called Clarissa. Everyone in the court had a taste for live performance. Waiters would be insulted or asked to join the party; and when other guests in the restaurant complained, John would infuriate them further by instructing the waiters to offer them pay-offs. (“Give them a couple of hundred quid and tell them to fuck off.”) Sometimes everyone would disappear to the bathroom, leaving a table of steaming uneaten plates, but John would pay for all damage at the end of the evening in rolls of fifty-pound notes. The clientele would regard him icily as the group left the room. He was not a popular man in London.

  Somerville brought me to John’s house during my first year in drama school; John had just split up with his first boyfriend, Robin, whose pastel portrait hung in the bedroom at Brompton Square. This room was like the deathbed scene from Camille. Mrs. Renwick had outdone herself: a towering four-poster bed swathed in layers of thick brocaded curtains stood in a pool of light. A coat of arms was set into the upholstered bedhead, reminding you whom you were sleeping with (in case you ever forgot), and plumes and a coronet tickled the ceiling from the top of the canopy. John would topple like a giggly beached whale onto the bed while Robin’s rather ghastly portrait stared accusingly down. The whole house was like the set for an opera or the home of a poofie Arab. Mrs. Renwick had gone to town. Newly restored family portraits shone on walls of shot silk; curtains and bell ropes, blinds and lace had to be waded through to get to a window; polished antique furniture and sensational silver were cunningly lit by Mrs. Renwick in seductive pools of shimmering light. (This was the first time I came across a dimmer switch.)

  But the house gave one the same feeling of unease that Victorians must have felt on entering the home of Oscar Wilde in Tite Street. The ruby opulence was stifling. It was like an over-ripe fruit about to flop off the tree and splatter on the ground. Actually, there were many parallels between John and Wilde. Of course, John wasn’t brilliant; actually, he was barely educated, but like Oscar he was a gaudy show-off, a parody of himself. Once you got to know him, though, underneath the pompous self-indulgence there was a pathos that was enormously touching. He was like one of those ne’er-do-well characters in a Restoration play. You understand from the beginning that they are going to get their come-uppance, but they make you smile with affection as they prance around the stage. Their exuberance is addictive and the vanity that blinds them is an exaggerated version of our own so that we cannot help but be moved by their defeat.

  John wore pale suits, pink shirts and thick ties from “Mrs.” Nutter, with diamond and ruby cufflinks. His hair was blow-dried like a poodle, and his pointed nose was the only feature that still remained sharp in a face that had grown over itself with excess. He had sweet naughty eyes and was always clean-shaven, no matter how grave the night before had been. In short he was a curious, compelling mixture of order and debauchery. His conversation was a similarly eccentric mélange of upper-class camp and country-house slang. There were words he adored (“twinkie,” for example; as in “He is the most frightful twinkie” or “I think you’re being a bit of a twinkie”). Everyone was given female status, and almost all adjectives began with the words “Mrs. Most”; thus each man in John’s world was a woman with a double-barrelled name (“You’re Mrs. Most Moody today”).

  Sometimes at the weekends, if I was rehearsing late on a Friday night, John’s chauffeur, Foley, dressed in full livery, would arrive at Central with an enormous custom-made Bristol sedan. He would park it in front of the school, then march in and give the keys to its bewildered registrar, Vinkie Gray. Later, I would drive down to Ickworth in this giant car; but I was blind as a bat and had a pair of glasses with only one lens. These were dangerous times.

  Weekends at Ickworth were always a source of fascination, where lucky (or unlucky) members of the local gentry rubbed shoulders with London junkies. Extraordinary stories circulated round the drawing rooms of Suffolk (projectile vomiting at dinner; John passing out at the table). Some colonel’s wife had somehow got locked into a bedroom with a young couple who began to have sex in front of her and then tried to make her join in.

  Yet despite appearances to the contrary, John was still very much an eligible bachelor, and many a young lady and her mother were prepared to overlook a few “eccentricities” in order to become the mistress of Ickworth. The all-out favourite among John’s friends was an American heiress called Marianne Hinton. She was a large girl who towered over John, but she had a sense of humour and was smart enough not to try to cut him off from his friends. She mounted a spirited campaign for several years and it was generally assumed she had been booked, but John could never make up his mind. Finally he upped and left for a life of tax exile.

  John moved to Paris. He rented a beautiful apartment on the rue de Bellechasse in St. Germain. Mrs. Renwick constructed another belle époque mirage around John and he seemed more like Oscar Wilde than ever. He was lonely in Paris, and had only the faithful Foley for company; and although friends would visit for weekends, they were growing older and had to look to their own livelihoods. I went over a lot, and we would drive around in his huge car, like a Range Rover but bigger, with a megaphone on the roof, so that John could talk into a little mike in the car and terrorise the passers-by. If there was too much traffic he would shout, “Fucking collaborators. Get a fucking move on.” Needless to say the French were not impressed.

  One night we came back late from the Club Sept with a boy and a girl. John had fancied the “twinkie” for a while, who finally agreed to accompany us to the apartment, but there was a catch. He was bringing his sister; she had arrived last night from Montpellier. John, as usual, had lost all his brash bravado in the grip of a crush, and became like a big dog that had been taken to the vet for an injection. We all piled into the giant four-poster and pretty soon passed out. A little later John nudged me awake; the brother and sister were hard at it.

  “Meet me down in the kitchen in five minutes,” he whispered and lumbered off the bed.

  Ten minutes later I found him naked but for a fur coat, decanting a bottle of port in the kitchen. He was furious. “This is the absolute limit,” he said. “These people have no manners.”

  “Do you want me to get rid of them?” I said.

  “No. Foley can do that. I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get out of this hellhole.”

  I put on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt; John stayed in his fur coat. We let ourselves quietly out of the front door. Things were getting pretty heated with the family in the bedroom. “I hope they don’t steal everything,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s insured. And anyway, it’s all fake.”

  We jumped into John’s Ferrari that was parked in the yard and drove at breakneck speed through the deserted streets towards the périphérique. Finally we quit Paris and were on the autoroute going east. “Where are we going?” I said, as the first streaks of pink appeared in the sky and mountains stood in the distance.

  “Did you know that dawn is when you can tell the world goes round?” John replied solemnly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look!”

  Long thin clouds were scattered across the sky, black with pink edges. The horizon was a bumpy line; as we drove towards it the clouds got pinker, the sky got whiter, and suddenly the sun appeared straight ahead and began to rise. It was true! You could feel the earth rolling towards it. The sun rose and the earth fell away. We were driving round a spinning rock. I turned to John, laughing. And that’s the image I will always carry of him. Furiously driving, who knew where, in a fur coat and dark glasses; his face bathed in that weird liquid orange light that sunbeams splash onto the ridges
of mountains first thing in the morning. Beautiful and sad, it lasts a moment before flattening out into the reality of another day.

  He turned to me, earnestly, and said, “You see, I’m not just a pretty face. It’s all a question of mindset.”

  We drove all the way to Florence, through the snow-covered Alps, speeding through the Mont Blanc tunnel at 130 miles per hour. Finally, we sat in an Italian autostop, drinking coffee and laughing about the night’s events, but I could tell he was still upset about the boy. “I must admit,” he said, “I’m Mrs. Most Miffed.”

  John’s boat Braemar was tied up for a while in Nassau, and the first holiday I ever really went on that was not with my family or an exchange trip to France was to visit him in the Bahamas in August 1977. At the airport in Nassau I bumped into an old school acquaintance, Damian Harris, whose family lived on Paradise Island, the little spit in front of Nassau harbour. He gave me a lift to John’s boat, moored in the exclusive bay of Lyford Cay on the western tip of the island. It was, and is, one of the stuffiest enclaves on the planet, yet entering its gates was like going into a work camp. Double fences topped with coils of evil-looking barbed wire encircled the whole estate, which included a golf course, a private port, a clubhouse and a hospital. John’s boat lay alone that summer in the dock, looking very out of place; like her owner, she was from a different world. Prussia had still been Prussia when Braemar left Bremen. Her natural habitat was the flat grey Baltic sea, and even though she had been given a thorough “tweaking” by Mrs. Renwick, nobody had re-upholstered the engine, and as Braemar left the port to cruise she blew up. We were towed back in and spent the rest of the trip making journeys in our heads instead.

  Nassau was a very different place in those days. It was the essence of James Bond. An air of mystery had hung over the Bahamas since the days when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been banished there during the war. The big fish on the island at the time was a man called Sir Harry Oakes. He befriended the Windsors and drew them into some questionable business ventures before being murdered in 1943. Nothing much had changed since then. It still had the lazy colonial feel of a forgotten backwater. Little whitewashed stones marked the sides of the roads and red pillar-boxes stood guard on the street corners. The town rose up from the port in a gentle slope of brightly coloured wooden houses. Huge liners stopped by a couple of times a week. Their horns made the air throb, and their funnels towered above the town. On the other side of the harbour was Paradise Island where Braemar finally managed to limp. We anchored in front of the Harrises’ house to take part in their big summer party.

  Damian’s father was the famous hell-raiser movie star Richard Harris. That year he was at the peak of his career, and married to one of the It girls of the time, Ann Turkel, a leggy Californian babe who always looked as though she had stepped off the set of a Tarzan movie. The Harris house was one of the most romantic places I have ever been. You could only get to it by boat. From Nassau harbour you could just make out its pale blue gables, but otherwise it was shrouded from general scrutiny by its own jungle that grew right up and into the house, huge palm fronds leaning nosily into the verandas and scratching against the upstairs windows. A coral stone path made a tunnel from the house through the trees to the pretty white wooden pontoon at the water’s edge where Richard’s powerful speedboats were moored, like the private navy of a James Bond villain.

  It was one of those houses you could see right through as you walked towards it, from the veranda through the large panelled drawing room to the garden and the ocean on the other side. From the cool darkness of the house the lawn and the sea were a shimmering mirage of emerald and turquoise. In the evenings lamps twinkled on the jetty, lighting the way up to the house, and to speed across the harbour towards it on a clear evening, in a trail of phosphorescence, in that curious-smelling breeze around a port—salty and rancid at the same time—was a near-perfect experience. As the boat wheeled around and came alongside the dock, the house shone out from the trees like an open doll’s house.

  Richard was mesmerising. There was no point competing with him for attention. His performance ran 24/7. Even when he wasn’t performing, as in sleeping, it was still a performance. I remember coming into the drawing room at Nassau one afternoon while he was napping on the big sofa. It was great theatre. His huge toes wiggled. The nails were regular foot fangs. The hands and feet were mannerist like Michelangelo’s David (although unlike David, so were other parts) but there was also an older medieval quality, a stone jouster knight that had slipped off his tomb. In repose his face was slack; the jaw had fallen open. His large mouth was stretched wide. Straggly blond hair stood up and waved to the overhead ceiling fan. Loud snores from the depths of that huge ribcage caused his lips to vibrate. It looked as if he had a semi hard-on. I watched spellbound for ages until a voice said, “Have you lost something, Rupert?” It was Richard. As he opened his eyes, I mumbled some excuse and rushed from the room, mortified. But he loved it, and recounted to all and sundry how I had watched him enraptured for a full half-hour. “You were probably studying me for some acting tips,” he said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Glasgow

  I had been at Central for two years and things had gone from bad to worse. I always got the parts of old men. My teachers said it was so that I could come to terms with my enormous height; but actually, this was bullshit. They just gave me the dud roles so that they could concentrate their interests on the richer talent. So I slogged my way through the grandfather in The Night of the Iguana, the father in Hobson’s Choice and some old family retainer in Cymbeline. But it seemed like a waste of time; I became a troublemaker, and then stopped showing up altogether. Eventually, I was thrown out. “We are not saying that there isn’t some corner of the theatre that you might fit into,” said George Hall, after each of the teaching staff had had their five minutes tearing apart my performance and attitude. “We just don’t see your future here next year.”

  I was paralysed. I went home and slept for three days.

  In those days, the theatre was a closed shop; you had to have an Equity card in order to get a job. But you couldn’t have an Equity card unless you had a job. It was a chicken and egg situation. You had to apply to the repertory companies, the provincial theatres around the country. Each of these theatres had two union cards to give out per year. So every September hundreds of students, graduates from the thousand and one drama schools, waddled like little recently hatched turtles, vulnerable and inexperienced, towards this ocean of opportunity, but very few made it to the sea. Some made it as far as Seaford, for one season, but most were undone in the initial struggle. You wrote a thousand letters of application with stamped, addressed envelopes and “head shots” inside. The reps all held auditions in London, but if you had been chucked out of your drama school, as I had, then you found yourself completely off the schedule. And so you travelled up and down the country on draughty trains, rehearsing your Shakespeare piece under your breath. The freezing platform was your stage and you paced back and forth waiting for delayed connections.

  “No deeper wrinkles yet?”

  Inevitably late, you were bustled onto the stage of some gloomy provincial theatre. Sometimes that stage was lit and the auditorium was a black hole. You squinted through a sort of conversation with a disembodied voice. Your heart was pulsing on your neck and you could hardly breathe. These would be some of the loneliest moments of your life. That brave attempt to be king for a moment on a stage; you could barely hear yourself above the din of ambition and the paralysis of fear. Shakespeare’s beautiful music was most definitely lost on your shrill hysterical lips. Sometimes the lights were up in the auditorium, and sitting, like a dream version of one of the “old fossils” from the Braintree cinema, munching on a sandwich, was a director who watched you through jaundiced eyes from the stalls. There was never much reaction. Perhaps, on a particularly bad day, a sandwich would freeze for a moment in a half-opened mouth, but these men were used to us.

&n
bsp; I spent all the money I had on this audition process. It was very demoralising. I remember writing to the director Val May. Naturally, I assumed this “new exciting talent in Derby” was a lady and wrote a very polite letter opening with “Dear Miss May.” I got a snippy reply in my valuable stamped addressed envelope, saying, “Mr. May does not accept applications that are wrongly addressed.” Well, I never! Val was short for Valerie in my book; Val was Valerie Singleton from Blue Peter. I knew that men had sex with each other, but still had no idea that some men were called Val. I learnt the hard way. And what about my poor stamp?

  I was turned down everywhere. It looked as if they were right at Central. However, I consoled myself with the fact that all these theatres were fairly tragic. As far as I was concerned there was only one place with any real individuality in the country, and that was where I wanted to go: the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. For my audition I threw out all my old pieces. No more Richard II, no more Hamlet . . . I would try more of a Sally Bowles approach.

  The Citizens Theatre held open auditions at the Round House theatre in London. A tiny little Glaswegian lady with a squeaky voice showed me into a room, as a large American girl squeezed past us holding a skipping rope. “It’s been a pleasure,” trilled the girl, and the small Scottish lady scowled back. Three aliens, thin as stick insects, sat in a row laughing hysterically as I came in. One of them, the youngest, a good-looking man of about thirty-five, was wiping tears from his eyes. The man in the middle looked considerably older and was not laughing with such abandon as the other two. He had a shock of grey hair and the manner of a deranged army officer’s wife at a tea party. His name was Giles, and he ran the theatre. “My dear,” he said. “How lovely. What have you brought for us?”

  “Nina from The Seagull,” I said, at which point the third man, huge and rather scruffy, who had been getting up to leave, abruptly sat down.