Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  “Baby Jesus is very worried about you at the moment,” he would say solemnly, apropos of nothing.

  “Really, Tony? He told me he was having kittens about you!”

  “Immaculate kittens?” he’d reply.

  His best friend was an inventor called Jeremy Fry, and together they travelled to the furthest reaches of the world. They both owned villages in the hills of southern France. Tony’s was called Le Nid de Duc—the owl’s nest—and was lost down an impenetrable dirt track in the middle of the forest north of St. Tropez. It was a cluster of ruined cottages over a pool that had been made famous by Hockney. It had a strange feverish atmosphere, and people were liable to go off the rails there, encouraged, needless to say, by Tony. He fed on drama.

  “You look absolutely miserable today,” he would tell a downtrodden guest at breakfast, and usually by dinnertime that guest would be in floods of tears. It was Heartbreak House, and he was Captain Shotover. Huge dinners were cooked by his dutiful daughters at a trestle table under a string of coloured lights. I loved him and them and it, and my heart always jumped as I drove down that track towards Le Nid de Duc. It was an idyllic spot although Tony always seemed anxious to return to Los Angeles.

  “LA is simply the best place in the world,” he’d say stubbornly.

  It was a long dry winter, that Hollywood winter of 1985, and I never got a job. It was the day of the brat pack, and there wasn’t much around for a tall thin English freak. I was offered a vampire movie called Fright Night but on the day I was about to sign the contract, I went for lunch with Tony and he persuaded me against it.

  “Why would you do something like that?” he asked.

  “I thought it could be a good move,” I replied.

  “A good move? Oh dear!” he said, and then added, “Poor Rupsie-poopsie. You’re a bit of a floozie, aren’t you?”

  Soon afterwards, I called up Michael Black and told him to pass on the movie. “Babe,” he said, “don’t lose any sleep. You know who they got for the role of the vampire killer?”

  “No, who?”

  “Well, listen to this. They wanted Laurence Olivier. They would have accepted Christopher Plummer. But they got Roddy McDowall!”

  Roddy was as good as his word. I called him one afternoon after a particularly awkward lunch with Orson. I had been brought up in that post-war dinner party world where conversation began with a gruesome swapping of names in order to find common ground. (“Did you come across the Cheveleys in Delhi?” “My dear, I absolutely worship Ronnie Cheveley. Tony, Rupert knows the Cheveleys!”) Thus bonds are forged, and insider dealing may begin.

  Reduced by sheer terror to my colonial roots, I tried this approach at lunch that day with Hollywood’s Genghis Khan. “Do you know Roddy McDowall?” I asked carelessly.

  Orson looked at me with a cruel sneer. “It depends what you mean by ‘know,’” he said. “It’s a rather charged word.” I giggled like a vicar’s wife. “After all,” he continued, “the acolytes of Sodom wanted to “know” the angel of the Lord, and they got zapped.”

  “Right,” I said, and that was the end of that.

  “My dear, you’re here,” said Roddy when I called later. “Can you come to dinner this Friday?”

  “I should absolutely love to.” At last I was back on home ground.

  I took Mel with me. Roddy’s house was a long stone bungalow in a street of creaking eucalyptus trees. It was on the unfashionable side of Laurel Canyon, but then Roddy was famously careful with his money. Actually, it was a pretty street that wound up a small hill. A stream, a rarity in LA, ran across the road in front of his house, just a dribble of water, but it gave the place the feeling of somewhere much further north. Roddy opened the door in a black velvet suit and a white polo neck jersey. Behind him the house was crimson. Pictures of Bette Davis by Hurrell hung on the wall of the loo. Toby jugs with their jolly gargoyle faces stood in rows above the wide stone chimney that crackled with a cheerful fire. It was spring but there was a feeling of Christmas in that house.

  Twelve people sat around the crimson lounge. Gregory and Veronique Peck were the staggeringly perfect older couple on a sofa. Facing them in a wing armchair, with her Cabaret hair and Clockwork Orange eyes, was Liza Minnelli. She was talking animatedly and waving her arms. Gregory and Veronique watched her with surprised smiles fixed to their faces. You knew the first thing they were going to say in the safety of the car on the way home would be, “Well, what about Liza?” (Life was a cabaret whether you liked it or not when Liza was around.) Luise Rainer, the only woman to win an Oscar twice in a row, was perched like a little old featherless lovebird wrapped in a beautiful black cocktail dress with a pageboy haircut. She had escaped Hollywood and lived in Switzerland with a fabulously wealthy man. She stared into her cocktail as if it was feeding her lines. Mel and I looked at each other across the room. This was it. A couple of frisky queens giggled at a secret joke. Roddy wagged his finger. “Now, you two!” he laughed. “Come on everyone. Grub’s up!”

  I sat between Luise Rainer and Veronique Peck. Candles fluttered. Mel looked at me meaningfully from the other side of the table. We were in heaven. A teacup and saucer stood next to the wineglasses, and modest helpings of nursery food were served. Roddy’s culinary sense had not developed much from the studio schoolroom. He held forth at one end of the table and Liza talked about her mother to the two giggly queens at the other end. It was epic. Roddy was a great host, with a sincere curiosity about everyone, and his eyes twinkled at us all from behind his glasses. Later, as we filed into the screening room to watch one of his collection of forgotten movies, Liza grabbed my arm. “May I talk to Andrew Lloyd Webber about you?” she asked, almost desperately.

  “Certainly, I would love you to,” I replied.

  “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed me. This was the kind of absurd conversation that flourished in the lubed desert.

  A few days later I took Roddy up on his offer to go and “lie out” by his pool. This time he answered the door in a pair of Speedos, confirming the legend that along with Milton Burrell he was the best-hung man in Hollywood. His garden was astonishing. There was a huge twenty-foot statue from Planet of the Apes outside the back door, surrounded by tall waving bamboo, and at the top of the hill, with a spectacular view over the valley and the San Fernando mountains, was the bench from Lassie.

  Lying by the pool that afternoon I told Roddy all my tales of woe. He listened patiently. He must have heard it all a thousand times before. “Don’t worry, dear,” he soothed. “One always thinks it’s the end and then something always comes up.” And we toasted each other with that strange hideous drink, iced tea.

  One morning I was with Mel at the traffic lights on Sunset and La Cienega. We were on our way home from breakfast in some faraway dive where Mel swore Jimi Hendrix wrote “Are You Experienced.” Mel loved this sort of sightseeing, walking in the footsteps of her tragic Hollywood heroes. She spent days scoping out disaster scenes, the Sharon Tate house, the Ramon Navarro house, the spot where Montgomery Clift crashed his car. Suffering and torture were a must. We didn’t like anyone who ended up well. They were cop-outs as far as we were concerned: the Bings and the Bobs. You had to be destroyed by Hollywood to count; that was the whole point, it redeemed you. We fully expected, indeed hoped, to be destroyed ourselves by it and were prepared to throw ourselves into the flames. Mel’s patron saint du jour was Frances Farmer, whom Louella Parsons described as “crashing off a liquor-slicked highway,” and to whom Mel bore more than a passing resemblance. Roddy, of course, had known Frances Farmer. (“Utterly deranged, dear. Came at me once with a carving knife.”) Mine was Monty, tortured, terrified Princess Tiny Meat, patron saint of all closeted queens.

  There was a tumbledown Deco tower on Sunset, now renovated and called The Argyle, where, according to one of his potboiler biographies, Monty was once trapped in a darkened penthouse drinking vodka laced with barbiturates. The building was boarded up, but I had recently discovered a hole t
hrough which to squeeze into the basement. You could climb to the top of the tower, past the dingy remnants of apartments, with their peeling wallpaper and damp half-eaten carpets, the odd rotting armchair, and the smell of piss. Now there was only a soiled mattress and some old newspapers in Monty’s penthouse. The view over the city was stunning. It was the perfect spot to sit and dream about the freaks, the overdoses and the murders, and, of course, what fabulous tragic turn my own career might take. I wanted to take Mel there, but she was unsure (or just lazy, as far as I was concerned).

  “Omigod, Sean Penn is in the next car and he’s waving,” she whispered at the lights, and then nudged me hard in the ribs. “Wave back, asshole.”

  He was with a director called James Foley. We volleyed compliments from car to car while the light was red, and swapped numbers before they sped off and we groaned on in my old red-velvet-upholstered rental car. Plans for the Monty tour were put on hold as we raced back to the Harris house to tell everyone about Sean.

  The next day he called and asked me to come over to a friend’s house for dinner. The place was on Mulholland Drive, the road that winds along the ridge of the Hollywood hills. You can see the valley on one side and Hollywood right down to the ocean on the other. Needless to say, Mel was beside me as we drove up and down it that evening, looking for a ludicrous number like 973. Eventually, we found it, rang the buzzer, and electric gates swung open. A Chinaman in a white coat and gloves answered the door and led us through a large empty house to a kitchen where Warren Beatty, Twiggy and Sean were having coffee and cookies.

  Hollywood was amazing. You never knew where you were going to end up. Far from being an impregnable fortress, in those days you could get to know everyone within a couple of weeks. (It was losing them that took for ever.)

  Warren handed round cookies. “These are made by Molly Ringwold’s mother,” he said.

  “Mmm,” said everyone, except for Twiggy, Hollywood’s Eliza Doolittle.

  “Gawd. I don’t like this one.”

  “Then try these,” said Warren, proffering another tin of cookies.

  “Oo maid thays?” asked the Twig.

  “These are Mrs. Fields’.”

  “Sally Fields’ mother?” I asked, amazed by the notion that everyone’s mother baked cookies for Warren.

  “Mrs. Fields is a brand,” he replied.

  Sean had a new girlfriend, though we didn’t meet her that night. A couple of days later he called me. “I told my girlfriend about you and she went really quiet,” he said. “I’d like you to meet her. Let’s go for dinner tomorrow.”

  I had met many stars. At seventeen I had sat with David Bowie downstairs at the Embassy Club and been lectured on the mystical potential hidden in the number seven. At eighteen I had dined at La Coupole in Paris with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. I had sniffed poppers with Hardy Amies on the dance floor of Munkberrys. I had done blow with Steve Rubell and Halston at Studio 54. I was spoilt for excitement and I knew what it was to be drunk on fame by association, how it felt to be a part of “the gang,” the cluster of small gems around the large canary diamond, the obligatory whirlwind dancing dangerously about the eye of the storm. It was intoxicating to be around stars. People smiled at you and even if that smile was for someone else, the queen bee nestled in the middle of the banquette, it didn’t matter, because you were a part of that queen bee’s hive. People talked to you, but really it was a campaign. If it was a good one, or helped you with yours, then you passed it on. Nights under the stars were feeding frenzies of self-interest, and in the mirage of the celebrity world you were who you knew, and who you knew could change your life and wash you up anywhere. Exotic shores. Behind bars. Or just behind the bar.

  Yet everything was a pale imitation of the impact Madonna had as she walked from a car across a sidewalk and into a restaurant. Even before she arrived, as I was still sitting there waiting with Sean and Mel, there was a flurry outside. Two people knocked against the window of the restaurant, like leaves in a strong gust of wind that blew open the door, and the Immaculate Conception was among us. She was not yet the material girl, nowhere near the peak of her fame. There was no bodyguard. She had parked the car herself (God help the others). But still there was an energy field around her, like a wave, that swept everyone up as it crashed into the room.

  She was tiny and pulpeuse with long auburn hair, slightly curled. She sat down. Sean’s beautiful forget-me-not eyes watered with adoration. Hers were the palest blue, strangely wide set; any further and she would look insane, or inbred. When they looked in your direction, you froze. In no way was she conventionally beautiful. She was a bit like a Picasso. When she fixed you with her regard, there was a tenderness and warmth that made your skin bump, but when she looked away, it was like sunbathing on a cold day and suddenly a cloud comes. She was raucous but poised, elegant but common. She had the cupid-bow lips of a silent screen star, and it was obvious that she was playing with Sean’s cock throughout the meal. She was mesmerising. She oozed sex and demanded a sexual response from everyone. It didn’t matter if you were gay. You were swept up all the same. In those early years there was no male who would not fuck her.

  At some point during the dinner she got up to go to the bathroom. “Come with me, Sean,” she said. Her voice was high and whiny, like Citizen Kane’s wife.

  “You’ll be okay, baby,” replied Sean, who was clearly going to have his hands full. Madonna was no Elizabeth McGovern (Sean’s actress ex).

  “No, I’m scared. C’mon, baby.” She stamped her foot in a sexy pastiche of exasperation.

  Sean got up. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later Mel and I were still eating breadsticks. Mel snapped hers in fury. Madonna had not learnt how to charm the female population. Yet. Time stands still for a superstar. When they eventually returned to the table, neither of them made the vaguest reference to their lengthy absence as they settled back into their cold plates. Mel huffed and puffed through the rest of the meal. Her hair dangled dangerously over her food, but I lost myself in Madonna’s attention and by the end of the meal I had fallen in love.

  CHAPTER 21

  Fred Hughes

  “I’m a friend of Andy.”

  “I’m meeting Andy and Fred.”

  “Fred and Andy told me to come.”

  “I live with Fred.”

  These were the passwords that from 1965 to 1985 opened all the invisible doors in New York.

  Fred lived in a brownstone on Lexington Avenue at 89th Street that Andy had shared with his mother, until she died, at the end of the 1970s, when he moved to 66th Street. The house was built by a famous architect, Stanford White. Inside, the walls were grey and the floors were black. A gloomy light battled through louvred shutters and heavy silk curtains, and Fred’s fabulous mélange of art, his federal furniture and tribal woodwork, waited to be seen, shrouded in the endless dusk. A fifteenth-century portrait of a man covered in pearls hung next to a Warhol of the Prince of Wales, watched from the shadows by an African gargoyle with a dumbstruck expression. Trains rattled underneath, and the traffic on Lexington shook the windowpanes and yet there was a tomblike silence in the house that was at first unsettling. But the more one came to know New York, the later the nights, the more dramatic the big breaks and the heartbreaks, the more one appreciated the dawn returns to the silent screamery, creeping up the squeaky staircase and collapsing onto a huge federal bed in the grey shuttered spare room at the top of the house.

  Outside, Fred planted wisteria that by the time he died had overcome the entire façade, wrapping it with thick tentacles through which the shuttered windows were barely visible. As multiple sclerosis dragged Fred into the ground, the wisteria pulled the house down around him. A solitary light shone through the foliage covering the front door, and driving down that block of Lexington of a night towards the end of the century it was the only confirmation to all the friends that had deserted him that Fred was still alive.

  But in th
e good old days, when New York was still New York, Fred was Andy’s manager, the éminence grise behind the Warhol empire. He was a small thin man with tiny wrists and ankles, slicked-back jet-black hair and sensuous lips. Like his master, he was the very essence of his time. No one quite knew exactly where Fred began. He was discovered by Dominique de Menil a fabulously rich lady from Houston, Texas, either because his acute eye for art caught hers, or because his father had been her chauffeur. There were all sorts of theories. What is certain is that he flew into New York on Dominique’s magic carpet and was taken up by Diana Vreeland, through whom he met everyone.

  Fred was an extraordinary invention, a collage of dress codes and mannerisms, stolen from the wealthy, cut out by a discerning eye and a piercing wit, and stuck onto the relatively blank page of his Houston origins. He wore blazers and breeches and laced bootees. His striped shirts had tiny white collars fixed together with a gold pin and the knots of his ties were tight to the point of strangulation. He wore his watch outside his cuff like Giovanni Agnelli, although if you dared to suggest that such an homage was possible you risked an explosion of wrath. He was Southern, although after a few drinks he affected an alarming English drawl, as unlike the British upper class as Dick Van Dyke’s impressions of a cockney chimney sweep. He was obsessed by the Duke of Windsor, but bore more than a passing resemblance to the Duchess. He was extremely funny, and was kind and generous to his friends.