Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  The tollbooth girl was played by a newcomer named Fiona. She was a mixture of Stevie Nicks and Natasha Richardson. She had a great scratchy voice, long brown hair and a blond, muscle-hunk, music-producer boyfriend called Beau. He was her heavy metal Svengali, and probably should have played my part in the movie.

  None of this was of much interest to me. Fiona was sweet, if irritating; Beau was sexy and phobic. Yet even when the poor terrified girl jumped out of the bed during our sex scene, and ran screaming to her dressing room, I was strangely unperturbed.

  “She says Rupert lives with a gay guy in LA,” the assistant said, returning from trying to coax her out. If only I did.

  Meinir sidled up to the bed, as the producer, the director and the lighting cameraman stood around my naked body, deciding what they could shoot instead. She winked as she opened her little Aladdin’s cave of a kit. Inside gleamed a bottle of vodka. Well, if one couldn’t get legless after one’s leading lady had fled the lovemaking scene, when could one? I settled down on the floor in the corner of the set and drank the whole bottle with the help of hair and make-up; when the powers that be finally decided on the next scene, I could barely walk.

  The reason I was there, apart from the pay cheque and the gamble—because you never knew, the movie could have been one of those freak runaway hits; many a wooden clog turned into Cinderella’s slipper at the box office—was that the part of the has-been was played by none other than Bob Dylan, my hero.

  Bob looked as though someone had sucked all the fluids out of him. He was hunched and crumpled under a wistful afro. His skin was parchment, and the famous nose seemed to stretch his face to breaking point. What was he doing here? He knew he was taking part in a piece of unmitigated rubbish. His hangdog eyes said it all, as Richard the director clambered onto the make-up bus in the morning and regaled him with ideas for the scene, peppered with all the words he thought Bob would appreciate.

  “Great idea, man!” he would say, and heartily slap Bob on the back, nearly winding him. Bob listened, as solemnly as a condemned man. He nodded his head and stumbled back to his trailer, where he often fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be woken. Bob lived in a parallel universe. He was with us, but not with us. He didn’t go to bed like a normal person. He slept for a few hours and then pottered and then slept again. The twenty-four-hour structure that the rest of us timed our lives by had been left behind years ago, which meant that he might just have gone to bed at the time of his morning call. If so, it would be hard to move him. He would come into the trailer and collapse into the make-up chair, like a wild animal that had been shot with a tranquilliser.

  But we all adored him. He was like a pixie, scrunched up, his matchstick legs crossed, tendrils of smoke snaking from his mouth through the afro, like mist rising off the top of a jungle. It was a cold autumn and so he often wore a huge fur-trimmed parka, his head peeking out from the shadowy interior of the hood, his drainpipe trousers and cowboy boots clip-clopping like a puppet’s legs underneath. He had beautiful hands, twenty years younger than the rest of his body. Maybe he was there because he needed to keep connecting, and being on a movie set was the easiest place to do it. Getting locked inside a celebrity stronghold, an ivory tower, is the death of creativity, and the unhappy lot of the rich and famous. They lose themselves in the quest for security, but Dylan was the real thing. I think he lived to create. At the same time he was also desperately retiring. On the film set he could interact and somehow keep himself from calcifying.

  He never said a bad word about anyone. Actually he never said a word. But he listened and watched and nothing escaped him. On the odd occasions when he did talk, it sounded like a lyric. He spoke just as he sang, and “Where’s the toilet?” sounded as interesting as “Lay across my big brass bed.” But he had a hard time remembering his lines, and it was touching to be with him during a scene.

  It is hard to describe to a civilian the weird pressure of living inside the bubble of a film crew. They sit right there on top of you. Your every move is scrutinised. If you want to have secret thoughts, then they must be really secret, because you are wired for sound and someone is always looking at you through a lens. Once the clapper slams and the director shouts “Action!” there is a strange electric atmosphere that contracts your chest ever so slightly and shoots adrenaline around your body. If you begin to forget your lines, there is no escape, no moment to collect yourself, and you are liable to be carried off by a wave of panic.

  I don’t know whether Bob learnt the lines beforehand. Possibly it never occurred to him. They always look so simple there on the clean white page at home. Probably he thought he could wing it once he got onto the set. But actually he just drowned in front of the camera, floundering on the open sea of one short line. This genius, one of the only authentic American heroes, was sitting there in a pool of light like a frying egg, trying to focus his splintering brain on Joe’s inane rock-star banter. But it constantly eluded him. The camera boys thrust tape measures at him. The sound boys asked him to speak up. Richard asked for more energy, and there he sat, like a crushed mutt on an operating table or a rabbit frozen in the headlights, and we were all moved. Even the grips and sparks—a hardened lot—were silent. They didn’t want him to see them watching him, so they walked about with their heads bowed in respect, like men at a funeral.

  “It’s that bloody bitch Joan Baez. She stole all his money,” concluded Meinir.

  She adored him and always gave him a drink from her portable bar; Jim Beam was his favourite tipple. One day Meinir was walking across the lot at Shepperton when a bottle broke inside her kit and began to leak, leaving an incriminating and odorous trail in her wake. The producer was following behind. Pat and I were behind him. We watched in horror as he bent down and sniffed.

  “Meinir, what have you got in your kit?” he asked. Meinir gasped slightly as she observed the stream of whisky dripping from Aladdin’s cave. But this girl was quick on her feet.

  “I’m washing my brushes. It’s alcohol. Must have spilt! Oh dear, I’d better nip back to the truck, hadn’t I?” And she beat a retreat before our producer could move on to the next question.

  The production moved to Toronto in November to film all the big concert scenes. Winter had set in and it began to snow. We worked in the Maple Leaf Stadium, and played to the sixty thousand fans of some other band who let us shoot for an hour each night. There is nothing more exciting than filming in a real environment; you are acting, but everything else is true. It gives the actor a chance to inhabit his role without even thinking twice, blurring the division between reality and art. We were flanked by platoons of bodyguards. Roadies ran around the stage like mice at our feet. Our trailers were parked at the back of the stadium and anyone who came into them needed a sheaf of passes. The baying crowd literally shook your bones to the marrow. It was like living in a volcano. Suddenly Bob was in his element, unruffled like a duck in a thunderstorm. “You gotta stand up to them when you get on stage,” he advised, “otherwise they just wash over you.”

  We all piled into his trailer before the show and got incredibly drunk. Bob strummed on his guitar. Assistants came and went. Richard dropped in. By the time we got to the wings we were in extremely high spirits, but Bob was too wobbly to make it up the very steep steps onto the stage. We all held our breath as we watched him trying to do it. Our tiny pixie teetered on the third step before half climbing, half falling backwards to the ground, then steeling himself for a second try. He turned around to see us all laughing and, shrugging his shoulders, beckoned for the girls to go and join him. Pat and Meinir pointed at themselves with question marks written across their faces. Bob nodded. They gingerly crept into the no man’s land between the stage and the wings, and he put an arm around each girl’s shoulders, and so Pat Hay and Meinir Brock made an entrance with Bob Dylan onto the stage of a gigantic stadium. As the three of them lurched into the limelight, like three drunks leaving a pub, a roar went up from the crowd. I don’t think I
have ever laughed so much. The girls stood there like shy three-year-olds at a birthday party and then began to shuffle backwards into the shadows where they belonged.

  By now Richard was on a short fuse. He had already developed a crippling pain in his left leg that made him limp and forced him to walk with a stick. When he saw Pat and Meinir on stage in front of sixty thousand fans he threw the stick to the ground in fury. It hit the continuity lady in the back. He stormed over to Bob between takes. His face was purple. All his habitual tact and diplomacy evaporated and months of frustration poured out into the deaf ears of our star. Now he may have been crumpled and hunched, but no one raised their voice to Bob Dylan. “I always have girls take me on to the stage,” he said. And that was the end of that. The girls were called back—they knew the shit was going to hit the fan, but what could they do?—and on take after take they had to push Bob up the stairs and give him a comical final shove onto the stage.

  For my entrance, I arrived down a staircase from the back. Searchlights slashed across me, and the crowd went berserk. They were paid to, but I didn’t care. I’ve never been fussy about paying and I got an erection. I began to sing my set to playback. Fans jumped up onto the stage and tried to rape me. I just stood there as roadies beat them to a pulp at my feet and dragged them off. I was nearing orgasm. I finished the first number. “Good evening, Chicago!” I shouted, and my voice bounced around the arena, as flashlights exploded like stars. I had come a long way since that other live performance in Camberwell. I introduced Bob, he came on and we played a song together. We must have been an odd couple. He was tiny and I was a giant, but I didn’t care, even though I had to bend double to sing along with him at his mike. It was the most fun I have ever had filming.

  The next morning there was hell to pay. The studio had seen the rushes, and could tell that Bob was having difficulty getting onto the stage. When they heard that his girlfriends were none other than the make-up lady and the hairdresser, they had a meltdown. They threatened to fire the girls, and Bob and I were given headmasterly lectures by Richard and the producer. We reshot the offending scene, and Bob mounted the scaffold alone this time.

  In a way Bob reminded me of Andy Warhol. You could never be certain whether he was really vacant or just playing vacant. Like Andy, he had perfected the art of being the still centre of a raging storm. Whether it was a contrivance or not, who knew? Probably not even him, at this stage.

  On the last day, we shot a scene in a limo. The car was parked in the dark studio. Bob and I sat inside. A burly grip stood at each corner and bumped the car up and down to simulate movement. Others swept the beams of hand-held lamps across the windows to look like traffic. Someone else ran in with traffic lights, red, yellow and green, and another man stood on a ladder with a hose and made rain. (This is often how car interiors are shot in the movies and it is an eccentric sight: portly men running around a parked car with lamps, being hosed down by another man up a ladder.)

  Bob was his usual self in the car. Squeezed into the jump seat were Richard, the camera operator and the soundman. It was fairly crowded. We played the scene over and over. We chatted between takes. We had drinks in the scene and they were constantly refilled—the real thing, needless to say. The props guys who were in charge of administering drinks didn’t even ask. Apple juice was for babies. Bob dozed off, sinking into himself like a parrot. We must have been there for a couple of hours. When we finished the first assistant opened the car door. Bob climbed out. He looked around, squinting. “Where’s the hotel?” he said, apparently confused, thinking he had been driven home. Or did he? Either way, the whole set exploded with mirth. Bob shrugged his shoulders and shuffled off into the gloom wrapped in the giant parka.

  That night he made a rare exception and came out to dinner in a restaurant. His assistant was a lovely Australian girl who always walked beside him with her hand in front of his face if there was a camera around. She was our bridge to Bob. We toasted and reminisced, knowing that we would probably never see him again. We all longed to say how much we had loved being with him, but of course none of us did. But I think he knew. After the meal we awkwardly hugged, and he shuffled off back to some undisclosed location and that was that.

  On the plane trip back to London, Pat and I somehow ended up sitting next to each other for take-off, and we were all given official warnings by the airline when we got off the plane the next morning. Our whole crew was on the flight and we sat around drinking and laughing all night, infuriating the other travellers. We were still at it as the exhausted air hostess glumly announced, “Doors to manual,” the next morning.

  I never saw Bob again. He didn’t attend the bloodbath of a première in London. The film brought my career to a standstill, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I had played the Maple Leaf Stadium with Bob Dylan, and the Albert Hall with Julie Andrews, all in the same year. Things were never going to be any better. It was time to get out.

  As for poor Richard Marquand: a few months later, he was getting out of his car at Heathrow airport, where he was meeting his daughter. He had a massive heart attack and died on the way to the hospital. The movie business is a strange affair, demanding total dedication from its lovers, although it gives none in return. Health, home and humanity often fly out the window during the making of a film. There are no days off for a director. When his strength fails, he often finds himself with only blind ambition as fuel; or passion, if he’s lucky (it’s less corrosive to the system). Richard was a big handsome Welshman, built like a rugby player. He probably thought he could wing it, but Hearts of Fire earned him his worst reviews and cost him his life.

  CHAPTER 26

  Rock Follies

  My rock and roll descent into hell was just beginning. Early the next year, in 1987, I got a record deal, a manager and some more crippling press. My first single shot up to number 115 in the charts. My manager was a man called Simon Napier-Bell, a self-proclaimed legend, who lived in a ground-floor flat in one of those damp gloomy squares north of the Bayswater Road. It was a brilliant mirage. There was a huge entrance hall with a grand old oak staircase that swept upstairs, although around its first corner was a brick wall. The front door would be opened by one of Simon’s Asian ingénues, and as you came into the hall, thinking to yourself how successful Simon must be, the man himself walked nonchalantly down the staircase as if he were just coming from another part of the mansion. Actually, as far as I could tell, the flat only consisted of the hall and a small room off it. But it gave a marvellous impression of opulence, and Simon was the unparalleled master of fakery and hype. He was a great salesman, who never listened to a word anyone else said, but steamrollered on with his latest point of view, which might be the complete opposite of the one he was airing yesterday. I thought he was utterly delightful, like a campish sergeant major from one of those entertainment platoons during the war, his “boys” a gang of Thai twinkies who seemed to come up through a trapdoor from the basement.

  After he’d got me a record deal, he told me I needed a publicist and introduced me to Connie Filipello, who was another of Simon’s inventions. She had been a telephonist at a record company, and Simon decided on a whim that she should PR his new discovery, Wham. It was one of his hunches that paid off, as she proved to be a demon of a PR. But now she had the challenge of turning my record into a number one hit.

  Unfortunately, on the week of the release of my record, both she and Simon disappeared to China on a PR tour with Simon’s hairdresser boyfriend, a sweet man from Singapore called Alan Soh, who, according to Connie, had revolutionised hairdressing with his all natural “chopstick perm,” which he was now going to launch upon the Chinese.

  “But what about me?” I whined to Connie, to whom Simon had forced me to pay an enormous salary.

  “Don’t worry, darling, you’ll be in the papers every day,” she said.

  It all seemed a bit “Your dinner’s in the oven” to me, but, true to her word, I was in the papers every day. The problem
was that each article was more blisteringly vile than the last. By the time she and Simon got back from a triumphant trip where Alan Soh had been recognised as a genius, I was on the verge of nervous collapse and my record had slipped from its position in the top two hundred. But after a pep talk from “Sarge” (Simon), I set off to conquer the rest of the world.

  And despite the assassination I received at the hands of the British press, I managed to enjoy myself on the promotional trail, playing festivals across Europe. The usual spoilt suspects would meet at Heathrow on a Saturday morning, us “artistes” sticking out from the crowds in our funny clothes, bolshy and belligerent, sitting stiffly in the departure lounge, no longer real people, but not quite unreal either. Around them flurried their managers, their record company reps and sometimes, depending on how much they were selling, their PRs. Little girls and queen fans would be kept at arm’s length by these enablers, some of whom would lay down their lives to get their artist a cappuccino. Occasionally the flight was delayed and some eager beaver manager would bring out Trivial Pursuit.

  Once, somebody asked one of the Spandau Ballet brothers, “Where’s the coccyx?”

  “Don’t tell me! Off the coast of Cornwall!” was the delightful reply.

  My record company had another band doing the rounds at the same time as me. They were called Living in a Box and we travelled everywhere together. We hit it off, sharing dressing rooms at all the festivals, and when we were at San Remo, the boys had agreed to back me during my set so that the record company wouldn’t have to pay to bring my band out. In return I played bongos during theirs.