Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  I think lips are more telling than eyes, and Paula’s were as expressive as a cardiogram. They were small and pointed at the top, and however sultry she was hell-bent on being—and sometimes she was hell-bent—the lips could never quite control the mirth inside her, while there was still mirth. And they hid her sweet uneven teeth. When the lips and teeth carried the rest of her away, her voice could become lower and boyish. Half Mata Hari and half Marti Caine (an old-school Northern music-hall comic), she moved between the two states as guilelessly as a child, and it was easy to fall in love with her.

  The next day we began our interview. She had a curious technique. She began by undressing me like a doll. In those days I was so thin I wore five of everything—socks, tracksuits, T-shirts—and in the name of research, they all came off, one by one.

  “What have you got here?” she squeaked.

  “Another pair of socks?”

  Pretty soon I was down to my underwear and she was sitting on top of me. Her skirts and petticoats were like an overflowing bubble bath, snapping with electricity, and at some point the interview ended and a strange love affair of utter misfits began.

  She was married. I was gay. These constraints operated like a kind of safety net and there were no obstacles between us. We were released from the endless struggle to “become” something, and the result was that we found a freedom in each other’s company that was missing in the rest of our lives. We were both narcissists. We both loved to act up, and we adored being looked at. Our secret was safe with everyone.

  During those early days she would come to my dressing room between shows, and everyone around the theatre craned their heads out of their doors to see her go past. Her arrival down the stairs was announced by the rustle of petticoats, the click of Manolo heels and the odd little gasp. She loved a dramatic entrance and had invented her own brand. She would stand in the doorway to the dressing room like a vision from some bygone production: Tinkerbell, perhaps, on the way to the stage. She always had flowers. The references for her life were all cinematic: Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter or Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun.

  I remember watching that incredible film with her one Sunday afternoon in my little basement. Everywhere was closed. London was the most depressing city on the planet on a Sunday and people like Paula and me, whose lives were about getting ready and going out, were liable to crash. So we watched the film, and at the end, when Taylor comes to see Montgomery Clift on death row and she says, “It seems like we’re always saying goodbye,” I looked over at Paula. She was silently mouthing the words. She was like one of those hairless cats with a tuft. Motionless. Mouth half open. Almost purring. Drinking in the film. This was the kind of emotion she liked and responded to; abandonment and tearful farewells made her feel cosy. She wanted every moment to be the last. And that’s how she entered a dressing room. She bit her lip. She loved to bite her lip. Then, in a breathy voice borrowed from Marilyn, but infused with all the drama of Elizabeth dropping in to say goodbye to Monty on his way to the electric chair, she would say, “Hi, big boy . . .” It was pure genius.

  Sometimes she came with her current sidekick, Hazel O’Connor. Then she wore construction boots under the couture. They reminded me of a pair of cartoon cats from a Disney film, spilling out of the stage door and preening onto the streets of Soho. Everyone would stop and stare as they rubbed themselves against lamp-posts and legs on our way for tea at Patisserie Valerie’s, where in those days one might find Derek Jarman in a creative huddle with Tilda Swinton, or John Maybury recovering from a suicide attempt.

  Just as the summers of childhood were hot, in my mind it was always autumn in the Soho of before. Old Compton Street was the hookers’ high street, under a blustery sky, and full of shops selling cheese and coffee and wine. The smell of ground beans merged with the taxi fumes and was particular to that street. In the mornings, retired ladies of the night walked blind poodles for their sleeping protégées. In the surrounding streets, the front doors of the houses were studded with buzzers advertising the various talents of the models who lived upstairs, and at night the proverbial red lights glowed in the upper windows like sanctuary lamps shrouded by makeshift curtains. In the early evening anxious men in mackintoshes came and went. Later Soho was silent. The red lights went out one by one. Groups of drunks staggered through the spitting rain from the French pub to the Colony Room, and a lady called Elena closed the restaurant on Greek Street where Ossie Clark’s sister, Auntie Kay, sang “Gloomy Sunday” to a piano. All that was left by one o’clock were the lights of the empty theatres, endless forgotten names in reds and blues reflected in puddles on rainy Shaftesbury Avenue.

  When I finished the run of Another Country I went straight into another play with Gordon Jackson at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith (it was about two priests and was called Mass Appeal). Gordon was a lovely man, and so was his wife Rona. They had no idea who Paula was or that she was with Bob, whoever he was, or that I was gay for that matter, but they saw us together a lot, and so assumed that we were an item. They would ask us out for dinner, and Rona would tell Paula about the pitfalls of being married to an actor, and Gordon would advise me about when it was the right time to take out a mortgage. (Never.) One night, when we had both been feeling fairly suicidal, Rona asked us when we were going to tie the knot. It was typical of our shared sense of drama that our immediate reactions were to think that she was talking about making a noose. Gordon threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Will ye hark on these young?” he said to Rona.

  “Soon,” screeched Paula, back-pedalling. She liked the way we looked to Gordon and Rona, and so did I. They thought we were a lovely couple, and we thought they were as well, and during our various encounters—when we were sometimes joined by a painfully shy Kenneth Williams, Gordon’s best friend—the potential for living according to the norm was certainly not lost on me. It was effortless being one of the guys.

  “She’s quite sensitive, isn’t she?” broached Rona evenly once while Paula was in the loo.

  “She’s just high strung, Rona,” admonished Gordon. “So were you at that age.”

  Rona’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly, her face retired into her neck and her cheeks puffed for a moment.

  Yet Paula was desperately fragile, and with any kind of confrontation she was channelled back before your very eyes into a nine-year-old child. She turned red, her voice stuck in her throat beneath the bitten lip, and her eyes sparkled with tears. It was then that her neck and shoulders looked their loveliest. But she was unbreakable at the same time. In the tradition of the great fragile rocks—Marilyn, Lady Diana, Frances Farmer—this combination was likely to drive a man mad. Already fragility has the aroma for some men that poppers have for others. They see it, they want it, they think they can ride it, but when they find it is unbreakable, that’s when the murder starts.

  But no man was going to break Paula. It had been done before any of us knew her, probably on the set of Opportunity Knocks or some afternoon quiz show. She had picked herself up and stuck the bits together on her own. But some bits were in the wrong place.

  Considering the bluntness of my ambition, and the strength of my desire to succeed at any cost, it is puzzling how strangely I behaved once I had made it onto the West End stage. My name was in lights. Actually it wasn’t, but my face (or one of them) surveyed Shaftesbury Avenue with a haughty regard. You could see it sneering from Cambridge Circus. Like in the movies, my address was Dressing Room A, although this came not without a struggle. Robert had wanted it to be a green room. I was apoplectic. Finally, after studiously arriving late from a series of quick changes in my original upstairs dressing room, panting onto the stage during the technical rehearsal, mouthing to some unseen authority in the auditorium that I would never make it to the stage in time, he succumbed and I moved into the star suite for the duration of the run. I was ecstatic. For about five minutes. Then I got bored. Suddenly the six months of the run turned into an endless tunnel. On pap
er, eight shows a week seemed like a cakewalk. The reality was much tougher.

  The midweek matinée was my Achilles heel, that hangover from the days of Empire when trains steamed into the metropolis spilling out ladies from the country for a morning’s shopping at the Army and Navy, followed by lunch and a matinée. In those glorious days, tea trays were served and the afternoon’s performance was accompanied by the clatter of cups and saucers. Matinées were packed to the rafters. But that was then. For some reason this terrible tradition still exists even though for the most part there are rarely more than fifty or sixty people at a midweek matinée, and of those that are there, not all of them are all there.

  So I quickly discovered the actor’s worst nightmare: going to the theatre at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. It didn’t matter that I was just starting out. By the fourth week of the run I felt as though I had been in the business since Roman times. Walking down the street towards the theatre, never had the light of day looked more appealing. The descent into musty darkness, to the bowels of the earth, and the dusty smell of the dressing room seemed like live burial. The debris of last night’s high-spirited escape always littered the room. Cigarette ends overflowed off saucers. Rancid dregs lay in unwashed wineglasses. You stared at yourself glumly in the mirror. Only last month those naked light bulbs around the edge were the symbol of everything you loved. Now you wanted to take them out one by one and eat them. Your view of yourself was framed by dusty, curling, stained telegrams that you had stuck on the glass. They accused you of being brilliant, and you believed them.

  At some point the PA system came on, and the stage manager announced the half-hour call and the opening of the house. A feeling of utter hopelessness engulfed you as a solitary cough echoed from the auditorium. Over the next half-hour you heard fifty or sixty people shuffle into the house. The murmur of conversation in an empty theatre was wrist slitting. You couldn’t even lift the make-up stick off the table. Ten cigarettes later you were in the wings, and after some perfunctory greetings with the rest of the cast you had to pull yourself together and bounce onto the stage. All of your nerve endings braced themselves for the big push as you strained to hit the same notes at the same pitch, but it was going to be an emotional cop-out, a dead performance, and you knew it. You looked out over the house beyond the glare of the spotlights and saw row after row of empty seats stretching up into the darkness. A batlike screech or two suggested the presence of the utterly deaf. Then you must pretend that it was the first time you had ever said your line for the eightieth time.

  I began to play elaborate practical jokes. I invented whole new sections of dialogue. I appeared in wigs. I performed in French. What was I thinking? On the day of Yom Kippur, Piers and I dressed up as rabbis, and after our first scene we dashed through the pass door into the theatre, jumped into our beards and hats, and then went into the royal box, and laughed uproariously at every joke made by Wadham. Of course, the whole cast on stage became hysterical and, as anyone will tell you, laughing during a play when you ought not to is more enjoyable than orgasm, scoring a goal, taking communion, or all of them together.

  There was a tea party scene in Another Country that often came to a standstill. An older actor in the show, David William, who played the fey uncle of one of the boys (Piers), was easy to get going on stage, and soon tears of anguish and pleasure would be pouring down his powdered cheeks. Once Piers bought a special lump of sugar from the magic shop in Drury Lane that dissolved into a huge beetle once it hit hot water. We placed it in the sugar bowl during the interval while nobody was looking, and then sure enough, David took the lump and we waited breathlessly as he stirred his tea and sang his lines.

  His was a campy part. He sat with his knees crossed, his cup and saucer in one hand, a teaspoon in the other. He incanted up towards the balcony, eyes wide, and a Swanson grimace. “Thlonk” went the lump of sugar. David stirred archly, always staring up towards the gods (he was old school). Without looking he raised the cup to his lips, only glancing down as the two made contact. Surpassing our wildest expectations, he literally screamed and threw the teacup over his shoulder. Apparently the beetle had jumped out from the bottom of the cup. After that, the scene came to a standstill and we had to start again. At the end of the show a white-faced author came backstage, assembled the cast and gave us a severe dressing down. David William never squeaked about the beetle and we all performed like little nuns that night for the evening show.

  One dreary matinée day, I started hearing voices. For some reason I had arrived early, and the stage and wings were empty. “Yoohoo!” sang an unseen lady. I looked around. “Yoohoo!” she sang again, very close by, but there was no one there. Was I hearing the theatre ghost?

  “He can’t see us. How terribly funny,” said a man’s voice.

  I got quite nervous. Then I saw a hole in the brick wall of the stage. It was about as big as a door handle. The voices seemed to be coming from the other side. I looked through and there was an enormous eye, soon afterwards replaced by a pair of red shiny lips outlined in black.

  “There you are,” they said. “We’ve been trying to get through to you for ages. My name’s Maria.”

  It was Maria Aitken, a noted actress who had just moved into the Globe theatre next door. We exchanged pleasantries, arranged to have tea between the shows, and soon struck up an immediate 24/7 friendship that exasperated everyone else we knew. From then on I was always in the next-door theatre. I even had my own little make-up set in Maria’s room so that I could get changed there. This kind of behaviour was considered sacrilegious in the ritualised world of the theatre, and Betty, Maria’s dresser, hated me on sight. “He’s no good, he’ll get you into trouble,” she moaned, but Maria didn’t need me to get her into trouble. She came from a troublesome family. When I told my mother of our rapport, her face drained of colour. Then she reminded me of the bad blood between our two families.

  One of my father’s great friends was an old soldier, General Alexander. This man lived in Yorkshire, not far from Ampleforth, with his wife Marabel, and my parents would sometimes stay with them during the holiday weekends. They were a typical military couple: out of uniform and out of touch. At some point while I was still at school, General Alexander had the misfortune to meet Jonathan Aitken, Maria’s elder brother. He was an ambitious young journalist, hoping to become a politician; Alexander was an old drunk who made the mistake of talking to him about an official secret of no very great proportion at a dinner party one night. The older man showed the party some documents pertaining to some event in Ghana in the fifties. Aitken saw an opportunity. He asked Alexander whether he could borrow the papers to read at home that night since he was fascinated by the subject. Alexander agreed. A week later the whole thing was in the Sunday Times.

  Over the next five years, Alexander was court-martialled, divorced and ruined, finally ending his life in a little caravan. At one point, driven crazy by the impending scandal, Marabel asked Aitken to tea and bugged the room rather hopelessly, in order to trap Jonathan into saying something with which she could blackmail him afterwards. I remember hearing this story as a child. It was legendary. “Bloody gutsy of old Marabel. Such a shame he never came out with anything,” the officers said over port after lunch at home. The tape recorder was hidden under a few copies of Country Life and clicked loudly when the tape inside ran out. Aitken made political headway out of the story, and you can imagine my family’s pleasure when he received his come-uppance many years later. Unfortunately, Alexander was already dead by then.

  The streets behind Shaftesbury Avenue were a rabbit warren of stage doors through which I could be spotted emerging in my schoolboy costume and my geisha make-up, darting from one to another on my rounds. Philip Prowse had arrived with Glenda Jackson at the Lyric Theatre two doors down; Simon Callow was playing in the Duke of York’s; and Derek Jarman lived at Phoenix House around the corner, so I had a wonderful summer. I swapped box-office banter with my fellow thespians over the p
hone during the half-hour before the show. I learnt all the jargon. Glenda started doing “twofers” pretty quick into the run (two tickets for the price of one) and Maria was papering the house no sooner than she had moved in (freebies). Simon Callow lied insanely and always claimed there to be standing room only for the upper circle. We, on the other hand, went from strength to strength.

  Robert and I fell out over dinner towards the end of the run. He wanted me to renew my contract with the play, and I, by now, was a hungry baby successivore, my first meal digested, baying for my next snack. He told me I was mad to leave a hit show. I told him I didn’t care. Actually it ended up well for Robert, because the next actor who played my role was Daniel Day-Lewis, who received a better review than I had ever got, saying I was basically tinsel by comparison. Robert had it blown up and printed word for word on the front of the theatre and so, for a short time, embassies were closed and diplomatic relations between the two of us were severed. But it was a short-lived falling-out.

  Paula met Michael Hutchence from the band INXS on the set of The Big Breakfast one morning in 1993. People who were there that day said that you could cut the atmosphere with a knife; there wasn’t just sexual tension in the air, but also a feeling of collision. Two runaway trains were crashing into each other. Paula’s life was ready to explode; Michael came along and she exploded onto him. They should probably never have met; the relationship was highly unsuitable for both of them. Michael was with Helena Christensen, and Paula had three children with Bob, and yet they could barely contain themselves. It was a black hole that sucked them both in. They were the Cathy and Heathcliff of the ecstasy generation. The stage was set for the melodrama to unfold.