AIDS had arrived in London, like a hurricane from across the sea. We had heard the odd story from New York, or San Francisco, but information was always cluttered and chaotic, and anyone who had contracted AIDS in the States had been terrorised into hiding.
“Don’t sleep with any Americans, whatever you do,” we said to each other rather half-heartedly, but the wind got stronger as the eye approached. Now it was here, facing me in the sitting room at Blakes. John talked simply and with dignity. I remembered his smile the first time we met. Now his lips were stretched across his mouth in an anguished grin as he patiently explained his situation to the woman who was interviewing him. She turned to the viewers and listed all the many ways of contracting the illness. John and I had done them all; so had I and a lot of others. I turned the TV off and sat for a moment, frozen. Nothing that mattered before was relevant now: the opulence of Blakes, or my career. All that remained was fear. I heard myself casually shout to Amy that I was going out for a little while, and I called John Creightmore.
John was an old-school theatrical GP. He lived in a high thin house on Cadogan Place that had been given to him for his lifetime by the old Lord Cadogan, one of his patients. It had not been redecorated since the war, and John saw his patients in the drawing room on the first floor. It was a mixture of Pygmalion and Sunday Bloody Sunday and John was not unlike Peter Finch.
We sat for an hour as a spring dusk fell on the gardens outside and the traffic rumbled in the distance. Every so often the house shook as the underground train passed beneath and the little crystal sconces jingled on the mantelpiece. I cried and shook and was inconsolable, but John was a soothing doctor, almost like a vet with a frightened animal, and soon I had calmed down and was facing the facts. It seemed to me to be pretty clear that I would have the disease, but as John explained, as yet there was no real way of telling. Reliable testing had not been pioneered. Then the telephone rang.
“Stephen Beagley from the Royal Ballet has a temperature. Come with me,” John suggested. He packed his stethoscope into his briefcase and we got into his car and drove to Covent Garden. I sat in the stage door while John went to nurse his dancer. Fairies and bluebirds passed by on their way to the stage. The old stage doorman made announcements into a microphone that echoed through the building. “Miss Taphouse. You have a phone call at the stage door.” Far away, the orchestra struck up, the timpani sounding hollow through the PA. Two ballerinas smoked cigarettes and complained about one of the male dancers. Their feet were in fifth position. John came back up with Stephen behind him in tights and glittering make-up. He was a coiled spring of male energy. A god. We chatted for a moment, then Stephen was called to the stage.
John and I walked through Soho and had dinner at Chez Victor’s before driving home. It was after eleven o’clock when I got back to Blakes. Amy was still getting into her bath and talking on the phone. She waved. I went to my room, got into bed and took the sleeping pill given to me by John.
“Hon. The car is coming for us at five-forty-five. Do you want to come with?” she shouted.
“Yes, please,” I shouted back.
“How was your day?”
“Uneventful,” I replied. My first AIDS-related lie, I thought wryly, turned over and fell into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 17
Another Country
Another Country was shot in a huge old stately home that had been converted into a reformatory. It was a beautiful seventeenth-century house built around a courtyard, surrounded by the flat ripe cornfields of Northamptonshire; a strange house with some beautiful staterooms and others full of urinals. It retained a repressed prison energy, smelling of floor polish and toilets, and to my overexcitable mind it still rang with the time-locked screams of male rape. In short, it was the perfect location for our film.
It was the hot July of 1983, Mrs. Thatcher was on her throne, and I was climbing onto mine, for the most productive year of my career. I moved into a pub in a nearby village. My room had a creaky four-poster bed with a moth-eaten canopy. Old flowery wallpaper buckled and peeled off the walls. It looked over a pretty garden and miles of waving corn. In another room down the hall lived the costume designer, Penny Rose, an eccentric no-nonsense lady with a very old dog. The rest of the cast were stuck in a motel on the motorway. Robert and Celestia rented a house near the location and we made the film in six weeks for a budget of £1.5 million. Robert’s co-producer was Alan Marshall. He was the last of the old school, and had been Alan Parker’s partner for twenty years. He looked and sounded like a south London wide boy, but in fact he was a bearded huggable bear. He was straightforward; his background was in editing, and he brought with him the whole Parker world, if not the maestro himself, in Peter Biziou, the cinematographer, and the production designer Brian Morris. Between them and Penny Rose, the tone of the film was firmly etched in that English school of directors that came from advertising in the early seventies: Parker, Scott, Lyne and Hudson. Theirs was the golden-brown look of the Hovis bread commercial, and Marshall artfully set the stage for a young and talented, but nevertheless inexperienced, director, Marek Kanievska.
Marek was an eccentric Pole, only ten years older than most of the actors and quite unlike the normal British director of those times. He was not class obsessed and did not put himself on a pedestal. He was intrigued by the youthful hysteria of his cast, and encouraged us to play up as much as possible. He was addicted to complicated tracking shots, where the camera is put on a kind of railway and moves around during the action, like a silent voyeur. These shots drove Marshall mad, mostly because they ate hours out of our day. “It won’t cut together, Marek,” he shouted, storming onto the set, as Marek doggedly prepared another meander behind a vase of flowers. “You’ve got a screw loose, you’re not even shooting the action.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not. You’re shooting a vase of blooming flowers. You’re not the full quid, Marek, are you?” Marek feigned deafness. “God! He’s not even listening. What’s Polish for quid?”
“Zloty,” said Robert, who always kept out of the fray.
“You’re not the full zloty,” shouted Marshall, and the whole set cracked up. Even Marshall had to laugh, and from then on Marek was known as Zloty. They fought all the time, but Marshall had Zloty’s best interests at heart. He brought the film in on time, under budget, and Marek directed it beautifully; Another Country was the best-made film of my career.
Piers—or Freddy as he was now known—and I were the only two actors who had ridden the rapids of the stage show of Another Country through to the final event. We were the real-life, self-appointed prefects on the set, swaggering around and torturing the other actors. Freddy was everything the old school abhorred. Unapologetic for his independent wealth, he had recently bought a bright yellow Lamborghini and would arrive for work in front of the house in a cloud of gravel that often brought shooting to a standstill. Marshall banned him from driving but he continued anyway. One Saturday after work he drove me up to London and the journey was one of those times upon which memory hangs an entire era. I was utterly happy. All of life’s strains melted away. “Crime of the Century” played on the stereo, the hooray’s mantra. We sped through country lanes across the cornfields towards the motorway, and into London at a hundred miles an hour.
“You’re right, right, bloody well right, got a bloody right to say,” I shouted into the wind and Freddy threw me a withering glance from underneath his tweed cap. I adored him. The sky was pink. The car was yellow. Tail lights and traffic lights had a romantic intensity in the fading light. They drew us like a magnet into the metropolitan flow: Finchley Road, Swiss Cottage, the Central School. “Fuck you very much!” I screamed as we roared by.
The King’s Road was jammed with people and cars and twinkling lights. The parks in the little squares were literally bursting out of their railings. We were starring in a film and driving through Chelsea in a sports car. Things would never be better. This was Freddy’s
last summer, so it had to be good. He was to die in the same car only nine months later. But that night, and all that summer, we wallowed in our good fortune. We didn’t really have to try very hard. We knew our parts inside out. Pat and Meinir had the fridge in the make-up room stocked with drinks. A boy in the art department dealt coke and marijuana, and we all lay in the sun between scenes in our cricket clothes, or if there was time we walked to the village pub, and we dreamt out loud of the future and how famous we would become, and what we were going to do with everyone once we were. We lazily compiled lists of people who were going to be cut dead as Colin Firth strummed his guitar, pretending not to listen. Colin had been cast in the role Kenneth Branagh had played on stage. At first I quite fancied him, until he produced that guitar and began to sing protest songs between scenes. “There are limits!” said Freddy, when “Lemon Tree, Very Pretty” began. Colin was visibly pained by our superficiality.
It took twenty years for Colin and me to become friends. That long and winding river of show business, with its rapids and its stagnant pools, threw us together again in The Importance of Being Earnest. Even though I had done my utmost that he should not be cast at all—I coveted his role for myself, as I wanted to play both brothers and Lady Bracknell—time had worked wonders on us both. He was no longer the grim Guardian reader in sandals; he no longer took the missionary position on everything. (His parents had been in the business of saving souls, despite their son’s image of being an upper-class cad.) And I was perhaps slightly less brash, less nasty, less self-obsessed. So after all that time, I found him to be one of the most delightful actors to work with. We hit it off straightaway and laughed our way through another beautiful English summer. The foundations of our friendship were laid at that pretend school, and so practical jokes and schoolboy pranks were still the order of the day twenty years later. I played one really good one.
As part of my research, I was smoking a lot of pot during The Importance of Being Earnest. Strictly for the role, of course, and I was always trying to persuade Frothy, as I now called him, or Collywobbles, that he would find the day less boring, and Oscar’s bons mots less laborious on the lips, if he had a puff or two. He always refused, until finally, after a long hot afternoon at the end of the shoot, he came into my trailer just as I had constructed a big wind-me-down joint. We settled down for one of those long waits that inevitably punctuate the filming day. Anna Massey walked past the trailer and came in. She had played my mother in Another Country. Now she was Miss Prism. For almost the first time I saw what a laugh it was to be getting older in show business. Our shared experience stretched out behind us. And through the open door of the trailer a beautiful lawn sloped gently towards another country house, another completed film and another crossroads. In the woods on either side, pigeons flapped in the branches and cooed to one another while we chatted and drifted off. I didn’t bother to offer Frothy the joint—his abstemiousness was legendary by then—but he suddenly asked for it and paced around the trailer, smoking. He soon became giggly and unusually animated (in other words, camp). There was a knock on the door, and he opened it with a flourish, exhaling a huge gust of smoke and holding the joint up by his face like a character from a Noël Coward play. Harvey Weinstein clambered aboard with a school of executives. Poor Collywobbles was caught in the act. During the brief explosion of chit-chat that ensued, the mutual compliments, the casual discussion about the marketing strategy, the confirmation of dinner next week, we all looked at Frothy, wondering what he would do next. He was determined not to be shown up, and was quite giddy at the same time, so he defiantly took another couple of puffs, as he chatted to a bemused Harvey, before handing the joint to me.
“Here, Rupert. Do you want this?” he said in his coolest voice.
“Actually, no thanks, Colin,” I replied in my most understanding voice. “I’d love to another time, but I just can’t do it while I’m working. I wish I could. I’m so envious that you can get high and still work.”
Colin was like a cartoon character who had just overshot the edge of a cliff. After Harvey left we laughed until our eyes were red from crying and our stomachs hurt.
But that was still all ahead of us. On the last two days of Another Country we shot the beginning and the end of the film, scenes of Guy Burgess alone in Moscow at the end of his life. After six hours in make-up I had been turned into a blotched skeleton with a huge forehead and hanging eyes. I wasn’t very convinced by myself when I looked into the mirror. You can never disguise the age of an eye.
Suddenly, a strange sprightly man in glasses arrived on the set with a camera. “My name is Roddy McDowall,” he said. “May I take some pictures?” I’m not quite sure how he came to be on the set that day—I think he was a friend of the director of sound, Ken Weston—but he tinkered around with his camera, snapping pictures of me wheeling myself down the narrow corridor of my Moscow flat. His glasses had thick lenses, his eyes were magnified through them, and he looked like a thin owl. He chattered to all and sundry as if he knew us all intimately.
Roddy was the Hollywood version of Vernon Dobtcheff and he ran one of the last Hollywood salons in his cottage off Laurel Canyon in LA; knowing him was definitely a key into the forbidden city. Bathed in the flickering candles of Roddy’s dinner table shone the whole lifespan of Hollywood. Ancient silent stars and newcomers from Aaron Spelling’s TV soaps mingled gratefully with one another, along with all the usual pimps and users, asteroids and dead stars that glitter in the firmament on a clear night in Hollywood. Tinseltown was a “virtual” community by the beginning of the eighties and suddenly everyone was locked behind electric gates, physically and psychologically. An evening at Roddy’s was an oasis in the desert for all those isolated idols of yesteryear. He was Elizabeth Taylor’s oldest friend, Bette Davis adored him, and he himself was one of the most talented child actors that ever came out of the lubed desert, having starred in Lassie and How Green is My Valley. He was profound and moving and beautiful, but although he was still slightly childlike at fifty, that early intense depth had somehow evaporated for his adult career. Maybe it had all been sucked out by the studio and he was a little bit brittle as an actor in his adult years. But he had an extraordinary talent for friendship, and he was genuinely funny. He knew everyone, though he was never a snob, and for anyone who had loved the dream of ancient Hollywood, Roddy was its patron saint, the keeper of its flame. He pioneered the role of the gay best friend. He lived through the whole drama of Cleopatra and was close to both the women in Richard Burton’s life. He was there when Montgomery Clift crashed his car after dinner at Elizabeth Taylor’s: running with Elizabeth down the canyon towards the wreck, standing by as Elizabeth cradled Monty’s smashed head in her arms. These images were my dreams. And if all this wasn’t enough, according to legend, Roddy was sensationally hung.
But all this I was to discover later. That day on the set of Another Country he left me his card, and so began a long friendship. “Goodbye, dear,” he cooed. “Call me when you come west.” And then he disappeared.
CHAPTER 18
Dance with a Stranger
In January 1984 I started rehearsing for Webster’s The White Devil back at the Greenwich Theatre. My ambition knew no bounds, and I had persuaded Philip Prowse, with a good deal of difficulty, to direct a season of plays there, starring myself, and my two best friends, Maria Aitken and a brilliant actress from Glasgow called Johanna Kirby. But no sooner had we set the whole thing up than I wanted to back out.
I was living in Chelsea with Susan Sarandon. We were having a strange, guilty affair. I’d stolen her from one of my best friends, during a night flight from New York to London. Now, suddenly, she was working at the BBC, I was in the theatre at Greenwich, and we were like a frantic pair of newlywed parents: I was the man(ish) but mostly I was our baby. We gave parties in my house in Bywater Street for our bemused mutual friends, and faced criticism with the dignified defiance of Wallis Simpson (me) and the Prince of Wales (Susan). But guilty kis
ses have their own curious flavour. Our ex always stood between us, and it wasn’t long before our affair evaporated into that strange miasma of a friendship built around a forgotten sparkle.
Meanwhile, Richard Gere, Susan’s neighbour and best friend in New York, was living round the corner (under the assumed name of King David) and we often met for dinner. I was only twenty-four and the whole thing went to my head. I became incredibly grand and hired a huge Daimler limousine to take me to the theatre every night. Johanna lived near by, so we travelled there together, hiding on the floor as we went through Deptford. Once Philip came with us. He must have thought I was insane when a car the size of a boat steamed up in front of the house but he looked seriously worried when we suggested that he hide as we went through Deptford. He refused. Sure enough, at a red light, by a street market, a man began to jeer, and made all kinds of unkind insinuations about Philip, who stared icily ahead like royalty, and then suddenly—thwack—a tomato smashed against the window and slid down the car.
At some point during rehearsals for The White Devil I was offered the role of David Blakeley in a film titled Dance with a Stranger. It was a beautiful script by Shelagh Delaney who had written one of my favourite films, A Taste of Honey. This new script was the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England; David Blakeley was the lover she killed. I knew I had to do it, so with my heart in my mouth I went to see Philip one Sunday afternoon in the restaurant underneath his flat to ask him whether I could drop out of the next two plays.
The extraordinary thing about Philip in those days was that he was never ruffled by anything. He took everything in his stride. He never relied on anyone else, and didn’t expect anyone else to rely on him. He was sitting at a table with his best friend, a thin queen called Thelma. Thelma always wore white, and Philip never veered away from black. They went back a long way to the days when Philip designed for the Royal Ballet and Thelma had been a choreographer, and they sat with straight backs like a couple of bearded Victorian ladies as they ate their meal and listened.
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