Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  “Who’s playing Ruth Ellis?” asked Philip finally.

  “A girl called Miranda Richardson.”

  “Not one of those frightful Redgrave girls?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s something. Who’s directing?”

  “Mike Newell.”

  “Aha,” said Philip knowingly and began to laugh.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “My dear, it sounds too grim for words, but if that’s what you want to do . . .” he trailed off and let me hang awkwardly for a moment, surveying my discomfort with ill-concealed pleasure, before launching into a story of how Mike Newell’s girlfriend, Bernice, had once tried to kill him by putting broken glass in some avocado dip. And that was the end of that. A great actor called Bob Gwilym replaced me, and sadly I never got the chance to play Konstantin to Johanna’s brilliant Nina.

  By the time I came across Mike Newell and Dance with a Stranger in that May I had become a fully fledged diva in a frosty land where that crazy bird had become extinct. A real diva is a bundle of contradictions. On the one hand she feels beautiful, but on an “off” day she can be staggered by her own ugliness. This makes her wildly unpredictable. My face was good, but it sat on top of a squeaky skeleton. I had grown too fast, too late. Fifteen inches in seven years and still growing. The result was that I walked with a tremendous stoop and had no arse or arms or chest or shoulders. Luckily I found a pair of queens in the Holloway Road who made intricate body stockings that could turn a stick insect into a Greek god. Barry and his boyfriend made me special underpants with sexy buttocks, padded vests with broad shoulders, and stockings with huge calves and thick knees. I would visit them secretly in the dead of night and come away with huge Harrods bags with arms and legs sticking out.

  A real diva is split between utter conviction of her brilliance and secret crashing panic. This only adds to her signature unpredictability. I knew what I could achieve, and actually I was not unrealistic. I was a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I had no depth. Hey-ho. I learnt how well my face worked with the camera, but I wasn’t sure how long my life would last under Barry’s padding.

  The face of AIDS grew clearer by the minute: first in newspapers and magazines, then on the street, and finally up close in the terrified eyes of friends. I remember sitting with Ian Charleson in his car one rainy December night around that time. We were part of a large group going from someone’s house to a restaurant. We sat in his car waiting for the others to arrive. He had those haunted eyes, but had never mentioned anything was wrong. How could it be? He was starring in movies. Everybody loved him. He was one of my heroes. And yet, as the rain tapped on the roof, he told me how he had received a letter a couple of months before (agonisingly, while his parents had been staying with him) from an ex who had become ill and was dying, and now he was paralysed with fear. So was I.

  Mike Newell was as English as Yorkshire pudding. He was caught in the middle of that awkward identity shift from Old Labour to New. Socialism was fine when you earned £200 a week at the BBC, but the idea of 98 per cent tax paled with the Thatcherite sunrise. At the same time, compared to Marek, he was still very old school. It wasn’t that he wanted to be called “sir,” but he definitely needed a master/pupil dynamic with his actors. Miranda Richardson had cleverly disguised her ego as an endlessly bubbling spring of neuroses, and she fed them into her part like meat into a grinder. Mike could channel this towards the camera without feeling that the “special relationship” was compromised. But I was a tornado, a Force Ten twister. I didn’t want a guru. As far as I was concerned, I knew what to do with my role; it wasn’t that complicated after all. But Mike wanted blood and control. In rehearsals he would claw at his face with his giant hands. “I want to see the agony,” he said.

  “What agony?” I replied. Yes. It was agony for us all that Ruth Ellis was hanged. That I understood; that was our film. But Mike wanted to take a line on the character of David Blakeley that couldn’t or shouldn’t be shared with the actor. He was confusing my job with his job and me with my role.

  Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? Soon I was called in for special sessions. It was like school. We would rehearse tiny little three-second sequences, over and over again. Mike wanted proof that “we were on the same page.”

  “But, Mike,” I’d say, “it’s obvious I can play the role.”

  “Yes, but you’ve got to work at it!”

  Nothing could be done effortlessly in those days. You had to be seen to be sweating bullets. “I don’t feel like we’ve fucked,” he said one morning, as my hair was being cut for the film, and he rearranged it with those giant hands in its most unflattering way. Looking back, I’m sure I looked fine, but that day it was as though a black hole opened up in the mirror and everything was being sucked inside. The twister took a taxi straight to Smile, a trendy salon in the King’s Road, ripping up anyone who got in the way, and Derek my hairdresser totally restyled my hair. It was an open declaration of war and, of course, the stupidest and most irritating thing I could do (although two years later, working with Julie Andrews, I noticed that she did the same thing. She arrived for the first day of filming with a totally new hairstyle and colour. It must run in the family!).

  The next day I showed up for a photo shoot with my new look and Mike went through the roof. “You look like a fucking GI!” he screamed.

  Things got worse when we started shooting. One day we were doing a scene in the countryside. I was driving Miranda in a sports car across a beautiful valley in Oxfordshire. Mike was standing with half the crew on the top of a hill. The road wound down across the fields and up towards the other side. It was a two-mile ride from side to side. We were just about to go. The car was in gear. But Mike lumbered up, leant in and recited the usual creed. He wasn’t seeing the pain, he wanted to see the character’s flesh crawling; and as he was talking, I ran over his foot.

  “Ahhhh!” he bellowed right into my ear, like a bear in a trap. I quickly reversed and ran it over again. Another roar. I had not done it on purpose, but later, as we were being towed across the valley by a truck with the other half of the crew on it, I regaled them with the story. I cruelly mimicked Mike’s bearlike howl, at which point the entire crew broke into hysterical laughter. The noise of the truck was really loud, so we had no idea that our voices were crystal clear across the valley to Mike, alone on the hill with the camera. When we got to the end of the scene, he came up to the car, and said, “I just want to tell you, I have never felt so lonely in my life.”

  “Why, Mike?”

  “I heard everything.” And he walked away.

  Twister was momentarily mortified.

  For all the problems during shooting—and I was a cunt—Dance with a Stranger was a great film. It was almost entirely lit with fairy lights by Peter Hannan, a brilliant DP. It looked beautiful, and Mike directed with style. Michael Storey wrote one of his best scores. Pat and Meinir made Miranda look incredible as Ruth Ellis, and of course she was mesmerising in the film. I was good too. My first two movies were classics. I should probably have died in a crash if I had been at all serious about my career. However, I didn’t die, even though, in the crash of egos that marked my encounter with Mike Newell, he had the last word, and I didn’t work again in England for ten years.

  I was sitting in my house one afternoon catching up with Simon Callow when the telephone rang. I never answered these days, and we went on chatting. The Pink Pussycat had just closed down and we were lost. (We were obsessed by a pair of blond twins that went there every Thursday night. We would never see them again. They both died from the big disease with the little name.) A static hiss from the answering machine announced an international call—still a relative novelty—and I stopped talking. “Hello, Rupert,” said a voice we both recognised but couldn’t place. “This is Orson Welles.” Simon froze. Orson was his god. “I stole your number from a mutual f
riend. Please forgive me.” Me, forgive Orson? It was beginning to sound suspicious.

  “Pick up!” bellowed Simon, but I didn’t.

  “I have recently seen Another Country, one of the best films of the last few years,” continued the voice on the answering machine.

  “This is a wind-up,” I groaned.

  “I would like to talk to you about a new movie I am preparing.” He left a number in LA, and the line went dead.

  I had recently been the victim of a brilliant hoax. I had received a series of letters from a man who said he was dying. He had watched me in the theatre on several occasions and wanted to leave me all his money. His letters were long and detailed. He sent pictures of himself, and his home, a rather lush castle in Germany that caught my imagination. He said he had over £20 million and he wanted to arrange meetings with his lawyers in London to begin making it over to me. I was over the moon and fell for it hook, line and sinker, answering the letters with rather half-hearted protests. Of course, it turned out to be an elaborate game. Whoever played it had managed to get hold of some headed writing paper from a large firm of attorneys and had forged the promised letter of introduction, but when I called the lawyer in question he had never heard of my dear benefactor. To this day I have no idea who conceived this brilliant plan, although for a long time I suspected my own partner in hoaxes, a formidable lady called Min Hogg.

  Min was the editor of the magazine World of Interiors. At a certain point, both unemployed, we had been inseparable, a lethal pair on the circuit, until we got jobs and drifted off into different worlds. But in our heyday, along with Robert Fox, we spent a good deal of time devoted to some extremely elaborate phone games. Our idea of an enjoyable night at home was to get on the phone to as many rich and famous people whose numbers we knew, and ring them up, pretending to be the Water Board, and ask them to turn on all their cold taps because there was a “build-up in pressure” under their house, with a risk of explosion. We discovered that people were extremely gullible, and we would give them the numbers of other celebrities to call back when the taps had run dry.

  One night the game went horribly wrong. We had called the home of famous society hostess Nona Summers. She was having a party for Jack Nicholson to which we were not invited.

  “Do you have any idea how many taps there are in this house?” she piped. The party was in full swing in the background.

  “Er, yes, miss,” I sang with a vague leprechaun lilt. “Let me see now . . .” and I began to count an imaginary list. We were in Robert and Celestia’s house, about ten of us, and everyone in the room craned around the phone, silently exploding with mirth. For some stupid reason, instead of giving Lord Snowdon’s number, as we usually did for the follow-up phone call, I gave theirs.

  A few minutes later the telephone rang and it was Martin, Nona’s suave husband. “Look, we’ve got all the taps going. Have you got hold of everyone else in the street?”

  “Well, actually, sir, we’re having a little bit of difficulty with number 29, number 17 and number 34. Maybe you could knock on their doors for us and warn them.”

  So Martin went out and woke up the whole of Glebe Place in Chelsea where they lived. This back and forth went on for about three-quarters of an hour. We made them flush all the loos. We made them go over to an ancient lesbian club on the corner called The Gateways and evacuate it in readiness for the Water Board’s arrival. By midnight they’d had enough.

  “We can’t go on flushing loos non-stop,” screamed Nona. “We pay enormous bills. Who is this? I want to speak to someone in charge!”

  I burst out laughing and slammed the phone down. The evening went on. Nobody thought much more about it. I shared a taxi back to Chelsea with Min, and was having a nightcap at her flat in Brompton Square when the phone rang.

  “Robert’s been arrested,” gasped Celestia between gut-wrenching sobs. “We were just going to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and pinned Robert to the wall. Now he’s in prison, but I don’t know where. What shall I do?”

  Min and I rushed back to Clapham to console her. The mirror in the hall had been knocked sideways in the scuffle. Celestia looked demented in her nightdress. We couldn’t help laughing. Finally, their lawyer was woken up. Robert was located in Scotland Yard, and the next morning he was released.

  Apparently, Nona Summers was convinced that she was being targeted by the IRA. Either she had spent too much time in the bathroom prior to turning on the taps and had become paranoid or my Irish accent had been chillingly convincing. Either way, in the ensuing panic they evacuated their three hundred guests and called the police. According to legend, a confused Jack Nicholson thought he was going back into the house after the all-clear, but went in the wrong door and ended up dancing the night away with a couple of lesbians at Gateways.

  The trouble with being a prankster is that at a certain point one no longer believes anything. It never crossed my mind that the real Orson Welles had telephoned me. Actually he had. But the misunderstanding was soon cleared up, and our people on the ground arranged another teatime for us to talk.

  Simon Callow came by specially and listened on the phone in the kitchen.

  “Greetings,” said Orson, in the low familiar growl of the Holsten beer commercials. Simon gasped in the kitchen.

  We talked for about five minutes. Even down the phone from thousands of miles away, I felt terrified as I talked to him. He was extremely flattering. He had loved Another Country and told me that he thought I was one of the best actors he had seen. He was rewriting a script by John Houseman about a famous musical, The Cradle Will Rock, which Orson had directed in the early thirties. Orson called Houseman’s script “pompous and long-winded, like John.” I had no idea who John Houseman was. Orson wanted me to play him (Orson) as a young man. I heard Simon gasp again. He wanted me to come out to LA as soon as I could so that we could start talking. Meanwhile he was sending the first twenty pages of the new script that day and would send the rest as and when it was written. I replied in monosyllables. Yes. No. Great. Goodbye.

  Simon staggered upstairs from the kitchen and accused me of being “grand and surly.”

  “Si, I was terrified,” I said. “I couldn’t think of anything to say.”

  Over the next few weeks the rest of the script dribbled in. It was utterly brilliant. Whereas Houseman’s had ploughed unimaginatively into rehearsals of the famous musical, Welles began his story at a matinée of Dr. Faustus. Under the stage, men in ghostly shafts of light prepared to unleash the stage effects of hell as a young, unseen Orson could be heard above, performing that astounding speech by Marlowe: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.”

  In a stunning sweep from under the stage to high in the flies (which reminded me of the opera scene in Citizen Kane), Orson disappeared into hell, as trapdoors sprang open, things flew down from above, smoke engulfed the stage and thunder rolled. The faces of stagehands, each counting quietly to himself, perched in various niches above and below the stage, were the picture of working America. Seconds later, Orson jumped into a waiting ambulance outside the stage door, that sped through the New York traffic, removing his make-up in the back, and climbing quickly into a suit. As the wailing ambulance screeched to a halt outside NBC, a suave unruffled Orson stepped onto the street and went into the building to give a radio recital, before rushing back to Broadway for the evening show.

  On every page something extraordinary happened. The dialogue was poetic and funny. The relationship between Orson and his wife was touching, and he managed to make the story of a play into a kind of thriller. Orson had definitely not lost his touch. God only knew how I would manage to play the part, but I would jump over that hurdle later. For now the preliminary contracts were hastily drawn up. Nobody ever moved a muscle in Hollywood without “something on paper,” and soon I was on my way to LA.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Lubed Desert

  It felt like the most important jou
rney of my life. By Cornwall, I was already drunk. I toasted the endless ocean with champagne, red wine and port, and greeted the green fringe of America with a host of exotic liqueurs. Glassy-eyed and reflective, drunker and drunker, yet burning with anticipation, I smoked a thousand cigarettes as the high deserts crept by below, the salt lakes, the snaking dry river beds, the weird isolated farming grids, irrigated green crop circles that looked like signposts for the extraterrestrial community, and mountain ranges like the frozen waves of a primordial ocean, their crests lightly brushed with snow.

  It was late afternoon by the time we arrived out of the violet sky into the Los Angeles basin. Miles of shimmering squares unfolded as far as the eye could see on either side, merging into the blur, red and white rivers of headlights and tail lights carved through them. The Hollywood hills—shrouded in a lacy smog—were like the giant spine of some half-buried, billion-year-old dinosaur with their blinking antennae reaching towards the blackness of space. I had never seen so many houses—so many streets—so many cars—as the plane flew low towards the airport. It was beautiful, hard and cold. A feeling of disease, of panic, invaded me, challenging my sense of self. It was a feeling I would never shake.

  On the drive into town the vastness of the place hit me again. It was nearly dark. The silhouettes of little oil rigs pumping on the surrounding hills reminded me of Brueghel’s paintings of hell. Bedraggled palm trees caked in exhaust fumes lined the road, but not a human being in sight. Finally, the Chateau Marmont, nestled against the Hollywood hills on Sunset Boulevard. From a distance it looked like one of King Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria, tall and white with pointed slate roofs, balconies with striped awnings and a tower. In those days it was still delightfully seedy. Its hallway was like the set from Sunset Boulevard. There was a big baronial fireplace, high gothic arches, and a large, pretty, old Indian rug. Otherwise the furniture was dog-eared and ugly, covered in foam cushions riddled with cigarette burns. There was an old untuned grand piano in the corner, occasionally tinkled by some eager beaver, a newcomer, who would be frowned upon by the nightclub recluses and unsung geniuses that flitted through the hall like ghosts. There were rules in the Chateau, although no one ever told you what they were. The place was a kind of junkie retreat, a backwater. It was watched over by the Marlboro Man, a sixty-foot cut-out of a cowboy with a cigarette that dominated that part of the strip. He was lit up at night, and could be seen through the musty net curtains of your room, like God, always watching, staggeringly beautiful, and as dawn broke over the strip, still lit, he strode towards you, defying his one-dimensional state in that trick light between night and day. His days were numbered, as were those of the cigarette in movies. Indeed, the whole ramshackle shanty of the Sunset Strip was about to be swept away by the tsunami of political correctness that was gathering force to crash over Hollywood.