Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  Thus he was a controversial figure in the backstabbing, spot-lit world of the Factory, partly because right up until the day Andy died, the Factory was the unchallenged epicentre of New York, the adaptor through which all the disparate live wires in that extraordinary place were channelled, creating the electric shock that made New York the city of cities. It was also partly because, by the middle of the eighties, Fred’s drunken behaviour had become wildly eccentric. He was gripped by frenzy. Actually it wasn’t just drunkenness; it was the disease leaving its calling card. His wrath was often unleashed on the English hangers-on who, like myself, used his home as their New York pied-à-terre: Sabrina and Miranda Guinness, Sarah Giles, Anne Lambton and Natasha Grenfell, to name but a few. Some of these girls rather half-heartedly went out with Fred, but Fred was not essentially a sexual man. His detractors claimed him for a closet queen, but his passions were not really sexual at all. He loved Europe, history, aristocracy and art.

  At times he was exasperated by his entourage of penniless English roses. We ran in and out of the house, slamming the front door, monopolising the phone. Fred had to shout from the bottom of the house every time it rang for us. His good-natured call gradually degraded into a maniacal scream as the old school bell rang again and again on all the antique handsets scattered about the dark house. His maid, a formidable black lady named Hazel, was seventy years old, tall and thin, and wore a wonderful wig under a beret. She didn’t have much time for any of Fred’s guests and would fill him in on our comings and goings in the afternoon when he came back from the Factory. He sat at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves and suspenders. The tiny old TV set blared and Hazel stood grimly by the stove making fried chicken wings and trouble.

  One such afternoon, when Fred was half seething, half amused—always a dangerous combination, which we wary hoorays knew could lead to internal combustion at any moment—Sabrina Guinness, Natasha Grenfell and I were put on trial at the kitchen table. Fred was our demented judge and Hazel was witness for the prosecution. The case: overflowing ashtrays, too many lights left on, not locking the front door properly. We three accused sat in a row, chain-smoking and looking repentant as the phone rang for the thousandth time. Fred’s lips twitched involuntarily into an anguished scowl.

  “Rupert Everett’s residence,” he said, in an English drawl. We glanced nervously at each other. Immediate evacuation was imperative. “No, I’m afraid he’s not in. May I take a message?” Fred’s eyes bulged for a moment.

  “Would you spell that for me please,” he said with a demonic grin. “M–A—” he repeated slowly, writing the letters on the yellow legal pad beside him. “D–O–N–N–A. I’ll let him know you called, sir.”

  There was a dark moment of silence, as we all braced ourselves for whichever direction the rollercoaster was going to take us. Then Fred jumped from his chair and ran around the room like a laboratory primate, clutching his face with his hands and rubbing them up and down his body. “Oh my God! I can’t believe it!” he screamed, writhing on the floor. “Madonna called my house!” And his body jerked and shuddered in a parody of orgasm. It was funny and frightening. The pent-up courtroom exploded with laughter. Even Hazel nodded grimly as she laid her chicken wings carefully on a piece of kitchen towel.

  Fred and Andy were perfect foils for one another. Andy was dishevelled, still very much a Pittsburgh Warhola trudging home from the foundry. He wore cheap clothes and carried a brown paper bag wherever he went that housed his tape recorder and camera. His wig was studiously plonked wonky and his face underneath was an unrecognisable landscape of pink mounds. His lashless eyes were surprised raisins hidden behind dirty glasses. The only thing that gave one an inkling of the minute observation machine that lay underneath was his cranky half-smile that lit the raisins briefly and was inevitably accompanied by a signature inanity. (“Aww, gee! That’s great!”)

  By his side, Fred was the perfectly groomed attaché, the Southern aristocrat who brought in endless commissions for work, much of which has now been officially discredited. Women adored Fred, but soon his behaviour began to make people weary. He discovered his oncoming MS sometime in the early eighties, when he consulted doctors in Switzerland about the strange sensations he was having in those tiny extremities, but courageously he never told a soul. Soon he began to use a stick. Sometimes on a Saturday night at Nell’s the rage would grip him and he would knock the entire contents of a table onto the floor with his stick.

  “Fred’s off again!” we would say. Everyone turned a blind eye. After all he was a linchpin of a world that didn’t know it was crumbling. When Andy died, Fred was in Los Angeles staying at the Chateau Marmont. Who knows what he felt, although any affection between the two men had long since been spread extremely thin.

  Not much later, on holiday in Guatemala with Sarah Giles and Tim Hunt (now the chairman of the Warhol Foundation), Fred finally lost control of his muscles while crossing a ditch and fell into an open sewer. He had to be pulled out and dragged, covered in shit, and dunked, screaming abuse, into a water tank in a village bar.

  By the time I moved back to New York in 1997 after a twelve-year absence, Fred was bedridden. He had briefly had it all after Andy’s death: recognition, wealth and bad health. I went to see him a couple of times. The house was just a giant tree by now, wisteria branches overflowing onto the rest of the block. Not much had changed inside. The trains still rattled underneath. A hospital bed was poised theatrically in a pool of light in the middle of the library off the main hall, which had been repainted a beautiful emerald green. By the bed, pumps moved silently up and down, keeping Fred breathing. He could only just talk. One word per breath. I brought my second novel along to read to him. I forgot that it was largely about death. I sat by the end of the bed, skipping parts that might upset him, as he lay in front of me, his body jerking up and down mechanically under the blankets. Outside, on a chair in the hall sat one of the Russian bodybuilders who looked after him. In the dim half-light, he could have been a new piece of Soviet reality that Fred had found on his travels.

  “I’m sorry, Fred, this is really boring. Shall I read something else?” I asked, after a while.

  “No,” he said, as the machines contracted his chest into an out breath. “I—love—it,” he gasped, and a large glistening tear ran slowly down his cheek.

  I went back a couple of times, but then I, too, dropped him. I don’t remember how exactly. I went to LA, came back. Things weren’t going well with my boyfriend. Whatever.

  I never finished reading my book to him, and I regret it enormously. He lay there for another four years, alone but for his Russian muscle nurses. One faithful acolyte from the Factory days went to see him, and so did his brother and sister, but otherwise he was more or less abandoned. Nobody could face him. In an agonising slow motion he was stripped of all his faculties. First he went deaf, then blind, all the time aware. He finally died in 2001, the last full stop marking the very end of a time.

  CHAPTER 22

  New Year’s Eve

  My friend Lucy Hellmore had married Bryan Ferry. She invited me and Natasha Grenfell, Sabrina’s brother Hugo Guinness, and Isabella Delves Broughton (soon to become Isabella Blow) to join them for Christmas in a house near Heron Bay on the island of Barbados.

  Bryan might have fallen in love with his frosty upper-class beauty but perhaps he didn’t realise that marriage to her was also marriage to her circle of friends. We all decamped to the house from the various parts of the world where we had been “working” and more or less immediately the tension mounted. Bryan and I had known each other for years, introduced by Nicky Haslam when I was seventeen and fascinating. He had adored me then. Now I was twenty-four and famous, “desperate,” according to his best friend and my ex-lover Antony Price, “to wrestle the steering wheel out of Bryan’s hands and drive the car myself.”

  Antony told me this while we were walking down the beach on the morning after my socks had been found on the sitting-room floor and had prov
ided Bryan with the material for his first major meltdown of the trip. The sea gurgled against the white sand. Sunbathers looked at us aghast. Antony was dressed in a green leather aviator suit complete with peaked cap and goggles.

  It was subsequently decided, during a summit meeting of the hangers-on, that to protect us all from expulsion I should move out of the Big Brother house and into the incredibly expensive Sandy Lane Hotel next door. I was utterly broke but there was no alternative.

  The next day it was agreed that Natasha should move out as well. She was furious, mostly with me. She felt that if I hadn’t come, everything would have been all right. Then Isabella and Hugo delivered a final decree from HQ.

  “Bryan doesn’t want you to go anywhere he goes,” said Izzy, smoking a large reefer and giggling.

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “Yuh, I know,” said Izzy, looking at me sombrely with those huge, mad eyes.

  “Well, then, I might as well leave,” I said, feeling rather crushed and wondering where I could go at this late stage.

  “Yuh, you might as well,” she replied, handing me the joint. And they all burst into fits of laughter.

  Whether or not Bryan and Isabella had been joking, that afternoon I was on the plane to LA, taking drunken, maudlin stock of my life as I ploughed back across the freezing desert towards the end of the year. I was miserable. Nothing seemed to be working out. I had no job and no prospects (and, as it turned out, I wasn’t to work for another year). I was obviously not the golden marauding star of my secret dreams. My conquest of Tinseltown had all the drama and charisma of a silent fart and now I faced the end of the year alone in a shabby hotel room.

  At about nine o’clock that night I was checking into the Chateau—the Harrises were away and Mel was back east. There was a windswept shutdown feeling to the place. I was leaning over the reception desk, wondering what to do with my evening, when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was Michael Roberts, the fashion editor of the Sunday Times, the creative genius behind Tina Brown’s Tatler, the man who pioneered the role of stylist superstar. This was indeed a bit of luck.

  “I’m going to Mr. Chow’s for dinner,” he said. “Come.”

  Tina Chow sat alone in a priceless vintage nightdress (probably Vionnet) at a large round table in the middle of the room. She was staring out to sea, lost in thought. The restaurant was half empty and the diners whispered together, afraid to be overheard. It was a gloomy night of the gloomiest week: that black hole between Christmas and the New Year . . .

  This was the beginning of a long low season for Mr. Chow and it was to be some years before the place was seriously taken up again, first by the agents from the neighbouring Creative Artists Association for lunch, and then, later still, as a kind of canteen for the hip hop community. But Tina would be gone by then.

  That night, an Italian waiter in a starched white apron tapped her gently on the shoulder and she turned round. Something was different. She was imperceptibly dishevelled, which was strange because Tina was always immaculately groomed. I could see Michael screw his eyes up. He was the Sherlock Holmes of fashion, and could solve many a crime by looking at a person’s clothes. Why was she wearing vintage couture on a quiet Wednesday night instead of her usual T-shirt and Kenzo pants? Her face was powdered a mauvish white that made her look like a ghost. She jumped up from the table with a little shriek and ran towards us, her bangled arms outstretched, a geisha on the morning after perhaps, but easily the most beautiful woman we knew.

  We settled down at a table together, three exhausted people in a lonely town, with a huge collective sigh of relief, and soon we were laughing till the tears ran down our faces, drawing the evening out, afraid to leave. Such is the pleasure of seeing a familiar face on the road to hell.

  We had dinner there every night that Christmas of 1984, always the same group: Michael and Tina Chow, Helmut and June Newton, Michael Roberts and me. Michael Roberts was styling for Helmut, and we were all staying at the Chateau.

  Michael and Tina Chow were an enigmatic couple, well mannered, considerate, always interested. They never gave you a hint of what was really going on but there is a photo by Helmut, taken in the restaurant, that probably says it all. Michael leers at the camera in a tuxedo from behind the bar, while Tina, in a long Chanel dress, is tied with huge ropes to the front.

  On New Year’s Eve, I spent the day helping Tina blow up thousands of pale green balloons. We tied little glitter aeroplanes to them on pieces of string and watched them float off towards the ceiling. When we came into the restaurant later that night there was a low bank of little green clouds over the whole room and beneath it flew hundreds of sparkling planes. It was like the Blitz. For that brief season we became a sort of dysfunctional family. Helmut was the father. He fought with Michael, the adopted son. June was mother earth with a shrill streak, her accent straight from the Melbourne Theatre Company, and even when she was being genteel, she had the twinkly eyes of a tomboyish younger sister. Though with her bob and a black pearl necklace, she looked like a picture of Anaïs Nin. (“Anaïs Ninja, you mean!” said Michael later.)

  Tina was the forlorn household goddess, and I was the wounded faun who had been run over taking a short cut across the freeway. Conversation veered towards the past. Helmut told stories of his life in Berlin as a young man, before the war, of swimming in summer in the lakes outside the city, of assignations for sex on the little islands, of meeting June, of driving with her in a car across Europe, and of an apartment they once had in Paris.

  “Haunted!” said June.

  “It was not haunted, Juney!” shouted Helmut.

  “The previous owner committed suicide in the bathroom, Helmy.” June never backed down, although Helmut could be quite ferocious.

  “So what?” said Helmut.

  June turned to me with a sigh. “I had to sit in the little bar downstairs. All day!”

  “God, you exaggerate!”

  At a certain point just after midnight, as streamers were still falling through the air, the music was blaring and everyone had on their paper crown, I passed Tina on the way back from the bathroom.

  “Tina, I’m so depressed,” I said.

  “Me too,” she replied flatly, looking up at me through the cloud of balloons and planes, and suddenly tears burst out of her eyes. She held her hand up to her face, perplexed, like a stunned leaking robot about to short-circuit.

  “Tina! What’s wrong?”

  I put my arms around her and her body convulsed against mine. Behind us, the party whistled and blew their horns. I could see our table, ludicrous in their hats. Helmut talked earnestly with Michael Chow. June, always very connected to Tina, looked around. Just one deep sob and Tina pulled away. It was not in her make-up to expose herself and for a second she surveyed me strangely. Then she wiped her eyes and began to laugh.

  “I’m sorry, Rupi. I guess it’s just that time of year. Come on, let’s go back to the table.”

  None of us knew, but Tina had AIDS. One day we were out shopping in a limo with her children, China and Max, and she was violently ill. We all laughed, thinking that she had drunk too much, but I caught Michael looking out of the window, puzzled. It just wasn’t very Tina. Not long afterwards, she retired from the world and very few people ever saw her again.

  Seven years later, in another Hollywood incarnation, I was in a health food shop on Melrose. A beautiful teenage girl watched me from behind a trolley laden with goods. She began to follow me around the aisles.

  “Are you Rupert?” she asked, finally.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “You’re a friend of my mother’s.”

  “Who’s your mother?”

  The girl looked from side to side as if she was checking that no one was listening. “Tina Chow,” she said. I felt the blood rush up to my head and tears prick my eyes.

  “China?”

  “Yes,” she giggled.


  “My God, you’ve grown. How’s your mother?”

  “She’s okay.”

  We talked for a few minutes. I was gripped by a wave of emotion. This teenage beauty was shopping for her dying mother; just a second ago she was a little child, whining that her mom had been sick in the car. She gave me a phone number and then disappeared around the corner, waving.

  Later, when I called, a man answered. He told me that Tina was busy.

  “Will you send her lots of love, and give her my number?” I said.

  “I certainly will. I’m sure she sends you love, too,” and the line went dead.

  She never called back.

  CHAPTER 23

  Julie Andrews

  One New Year later I was sailing through the night on a yacht belonging to my friends Jan and Jane Wenner towards the island of Mustique in the Caribbean. There was a full moon. Jane, Sabrina, her sister Miranda and I were sitting on the deck. Jan had gone to bed. The sea was quite rough, grey and white in the moonlight. Mustique was a distant mass with a few twinkling lights towards which we ploughed. The wind was strong and hot. It filled our sails and we flew through the water. At midnight we were still far away and fireworks exploded above the island. It was an entrancing end to a desolate year of trailing like a medieval pilgrim around the festival circuit. With little else to do, and not much money to do it with, I went from one grim event to another, spinning all kinds of yarns to explain away the fact that I was never working, a poor player strutting and fretting his hour upon the podium, dropping off my laundry as soon as I checked into the hotel, living on room service and festival dinners, free flights and hot air, before packing up and moving on to the next. From Bratislava to Brisbane, I sponged my way across the planet.

  One evening, early in January 1986, I was having a drink at Basil’s Bar on Mustique when the telephone behind the bar rang and someone called my name. It was Duncan, my agent from London.