Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  We were sitting backstage before the show, having a good whine, when the Italian producers came into our room.

  “Hi, the gangs!” said a tall raven-haired rock chick flanked by two over-caffeinated assistants. “I am Andrea. This is Salvo. We have some leetle sings to talk you with. Is true Rupit is playing drums?”

  “Yes, Andrea. Is true,” I replied, slipping into the vernacular.

  “This is great. Absolute wow! So when Leevin in de Bogs is fineesh, Mike Bongiorno, our presenter, is play leetle jokeen wiz ziz.”

  “Oh yes?” we said, politely, though none of us understood a word.

  “Yeah, toe-tah-lee! Is veree funnee! Ee com an ge you an ee say—in Italian—guess oo eez ziz playing drums? Is good, non?”

  “Great,” we all said, nodding, still completely bemused.

  “It will be total freak out!”

  Unfortunately, somebody had not fixed my bongos onto their stand properly. We all ran onto the stage and the boys went straight into the first number. The crowds went crazy, and I bongoed away, living the dream, until suddenly I felt one of my bongos begin to slip off the stand. These drums were about three feet tall and quite heavy. I managed to hold it against the stand with my leg, but it kept slipping until I couldn’t grip it any longer and as the boys went into the second chorus (“I’m living in a box, living in a cardboard box,” etc.) it fell to the floor. I lunged at it but the stage was steep and it was already rolling off towards the footlights. I chased after it, my eyes blinded by tears of laughter. Gianni Versace had given me a black silk coat for the show with a matching felt hat, and I looked like a deranged Orthodox Jew chasing a sacred scroll. Just as the bongo was about to fly off into the audience, I grabbed it and staggered with it back to my spot. Breathless and sweaty, I fixed it onto its stand but the song was over.

  As the screaming died down, the presenter lumbered onto the stage followed by cameramen, cables and roadies. “There is a very special guest here tonight, playing with the boys,” he said in Italian. “I think he is playing drums. Let’s go and see!”

  I braced myself for my big moment, but instead of coming over to me, the caravan swept past me to the very back of the stage where little Titch sat at the drum kit. Titch didn’t understand a word of Italian, and Mike Bongiorno clearly didn’t know me from Adam. He was, however, a comedian. When he saw Titch, he screamed like a mad fan. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Eez it really you?” he said in English, thrusting the mike in Titch’s confused face.

  “I’m not sure,” said Titch.

  Mike looked to the camera with a big laugh. “I’m not sure?” he mimicked. “Non è sicuro. Che divino, questo inglese!”

  He clapped Titch on the back and dragged him to the front of the stage. The crowd was quite puzzled by now. Unlike Mike Bongiorno, most of them knew who I was. But Mike was enchanted by his own vaudevillian prowess, looking at Titch and then looking into the camera, eyes like saucers, mouth wide open. “It can’t be true. Yes, it is. Oh my God! It’s Rupert Everett!”

  Titch understood the words “Rupert Everett” and started shaking his head, but it was too late. Playback waits for no man and my song began. Titch looked up at me. “What should I do?” he mouthed, but the rest of us were laughing so much it didn’t seem advisable to try to clear up the misunderstanding. All our reps were gesticulating wildly from the wings, but it was too late. I was doomed to play bongos while Titch did a cruel and perceptive impersonation of me, and before we knew it the set was over.

  Andrea was right. It was “total freak out.”

  CHAPTER 27

  France

  A sequence of events had unfolded, a storm, actually, that blew me from a bar stool on Mustique to a violin class at the Dorchester Hotel, where suddenly Bach to playback had rekindled a childhood obsession with music. I was blindly ambitious, too young to be wary, and these elements created hurricane conditions. I had thrown myself like a lemming into Hearts of Fire, despite the warnings of friends and detractors.

  “Go back to the stage,” they wailed.

  “Stop trying to be Tom Cruise,” snapped Philip Prowse.

  But the opportunities came, and I grabbed them. With the release of that sorry rock snuff movie, the bad weather intensified. I had always been considered a talentless nob, but now there was proof. Then when my first single came out, the deluge blew everything away. My credibility was shredded, my character was sucked up in the tornado, ripped apart and scattered. And then my acting career hit the doldrums. It was a long squall that only began to die down in August a year later.

  My record was coming out in France and Simon Napier-Bell, everlastingly optimistic, another Don Quixote, towed me, by now a leaking vessel with torn sails, into port, or out to dinner as it happened, one creamy Parisian dusk down the banks of the Seine, looking for a restaurant.

  In those days Paris still closed down for the whole month of August. Shops were boarded up. Restaurants were closed. White shutters shrouded entire buildings into summer tombs. Inside the only movement was dust playing in slashes of light. Outside the streets were empty. The air was close, smelling of the sticky sap that oozed from the chestnuts and plane trees and stained the pavements around their roots. There was a wonderful silence during August in Paris, and the calls of wood pigeons, the distant murmur of traffic or the odd echo of a mobilette straining up some nearby cobbled street, were all a part of it.

  We were staying in L’Hôtel, the establishment where Oscar Wilde had died. I had the fatal room. Simon was leaving the next day, and that night at dinner we gently concluded the business between us. The following morning, he left and I did interviews in the basement of the hotel, an icy stone cave with that peculiar smell of damp and wine. A chubby young queen came to talk to me, and suggested taking me out that night with his friends.

  At about ten o’clock they arrived in a large old American Cadillac driven by a bodybuilder in a tight white T-shirt. A beautiful Asian girl in a white fur coat was spread out on the back seat. Her name was Lychee. On either side sat rare specimens of Parisian youth. I jumped in without a thought.

  We went to the Palace, the famous converted music hall that had been opened by Fabrice Emaer nearly ten years ago. I had been there that first night, not knowing then that it was the last shout of the glittering Paris of the seventies. Now we sat in a large booth in the half-empty club. People came and went; a handsome Algerian boy fell into the banquette.

  “This is my colleague, Pascal,” said Lychee, before bursting into peals of laughter. She laughed so much that she had to cover her mouth with her hand. Pascal put his arm around me. He had dilated pupils and flared nostrils.

  “I want to kiss you, but my boyfriend is coming,” he said.

  “Oh. What a shame,” I replied stiffly.

  They were a good-looking, fast-moving crowd and they never stopped laughing, drinking, smoking and knocking back pills. A pretty little American girl, Polly, sat down. “You shouldn’t take those,” she said, gesturing towards the drugs. “They’re really bad for you.”

  “Honey!” Lychee snapped back. “Your mother is a dealer.”

  Sure enough, a few minutes later a ravaged but handsome Woodstock hippie tottered sideways like a crab across the dance floor towards our banquette.

  “This is my mom,” said Polly.

  “Oh, hi, I’m Meredith,” said her mother.

  Whenever I politely asked anyone what they did, the whole group cracked up, but from what I could gather—I didn’t speak much French in those days—one was a graphic designer, two were art students; and there was also a journalist, a policeman and an attaché de presse.

  “What’s that?” I asked Meredith.

  “It could be anything,” she said and then collapsed into giggles like all the others.

  People weren’t like this in London, I remember thinking. Graphic designers were geeks. Dixon of Dock Green was my idea of a policeman, but this one was a sprawling, lithe piece of trouble who stroked himself distractedly while l
ooking at Lychee’s breasts. In London everyone was moody and cynical; these kids were having too much fun. But then everything about the evening was also a little “off.” I was kissed by everyone (“Quick, my boyfriend is not looking”) and couldn’t help feeling like poor Oscar Wilde, stumbling out of the club as the dawn rose behind the slate roofs, and the overflowing stars wrapped in the summer haze looked like a painting by Van Gogh.

  Lychee followed me. We stood outside waiting for a taxi, and she regarded me with a curious half-smile. “We know each other,” she said, finally. She was unforgettably beautiful leaning against the wall, smoking, but I couldn’t place her. We looked at each other for a long moment. Then she laughed. Again her hand went up to cover her mouth and a bell rang. For a second I was back in the Club Sept. Another face and fingers framed in flashing pink neon. Now the hand and the mouth were painted and manicured, and the beautiful woman before me bore little resemblance to . . . “Kim?”

  She laughed again. “Maybe. You have my number. Call me. Tomorrow I am in my studio all day. I am an artist, you know.”

  She blew me a kiss and returned to the unnatural night. Her receding silhouette was just recognisable as the gangly boy dancing by himself at the Club Sept. Both of us had vowed to change everything about ourselves. All our dreams were of escape and although becoming a movie star was not quite as complicated as becoming a woman, we both needed good lighting and tons of make-up.

  I got into a taxi and clattered back to the Latin Quarter, as the sky turned to a pale summer blue and another long hot lazy day began in the deserted city. I returned to the room where Oscar died. He must have limped through the same streets, penniless and toothless, after nights spent leering at grooms and footmen in the Moulin Rouge. I shut the curtains and lay on the bed, wondering what the wallpaper had been like that inspired his final recorded witticism. (“Well, one of us had to go . . .”)

  I made a decision. I was going to move to Paris.

  And so two weeks later, I put my house up for sale and left England. I spent the summer in the South of France at Tony Richardson’s house outside St. Tropez. At the end of September I moved into the Hôtel Lancaster on the rue de Berri, behind the Champs Elysées. I planned on staying a few days but ended up living there for three years. It was a beautiful place, small, discreet, lost in a time warp. There was a marble hall, a dining room—always empty—and a bar with a weird mural of monkeys hanging from vines. The stone staircase was carpeted in blue with gold borders and wound around the lift, which was padded with red morocco leather. The manager was a stooping friend of the arts and gave me the deal of the century. I had a suite of white-panelled rooms on the third floor that looked over the garden. The ceilings were high, the carpets were pale blue and old-fashioned curtains covered in garlands of roses hung over the french windows. A little mouse called Seraphim looked after me. He wore a starched apron under a black and red striped jacket. His office was a small pantry down the hall, which he shared with his colleague, a thieving peroxide witch called Maria Christina. They cooked and ironed and gossiped in an impenetrable Portuguese French, and one could always hear them cackling or hoovering as one left one’s room. But when they appeared in public or came across a guest by chance, they adopted a kind of silent-movie pastiche of themselves and shrank against the walls with bowed heads. One day I came into my room to find the two of them poring over my stash of porno magazines, and from then on the ice was broken.

  There was a restaurant across the road called Le Val d’Isère, decorated like a Swiss chalet, but nevertheless a traditional brasserie with an oyster stall outside. It was open until two in the morning, which gave our street a sleazy edge over the rest of that stuffy quartier; after midnight it became the meeting place for all the pimps and dealers and bent policemen of Paris. The waiters had all spent their careers there, and were a crusty old bunch in white jackets, bent from years of leaning forward. Every day I ate lunch and dinner there; my whole life had shrunk and was contained in that one street. I cut myself off from the outside world and lived in virtual seclusion. The past disappeared and I felt like a ghost.

  Being a foreigner is one of the great delights. You are a silent observer. Slowly I learnt French but that first year, at dinner with Lychee and the colleagues, the new “me” was silent and mysterious. Conversation washed over me and I couldn’t have been happier. Lychee was my official spokesperson and I left everything to her. Soon I began to know the colleagues well enough that they no longer tried to translate or to speak slowly. Without words they were romantic and affectionate and so was I. They carried on in their guttural slang across me but put their arms around my shoulder and their hands on my thigh, and that was as much as I really wanted to understand.

  On Sunday mornings, after the clubs had closed, they would follow Lychee and me back to the hotel, trooping through the hall into the lift and up to my room to be served hot chocolate and croissants by a breathless Seraphim. Sometimes these parties lasted for days and I would have to take the adjoining room to accommodate the overflow. Then Lychee and I would nod to one another, slip into the lift and go downstairs to the dining room in fur coats and dark glasses to have breakfast. Little by little my grasp of French improved and it occurred to me that Lychee wasn’t an artist at all, at least not in the conventional sense, and the colleagues were a band of gypsies, tramps and thieves, living wonderfully wicked lives. They were exotic blooms in a jug of water. They lived fast and faded fast. During the twelve years I spent in Paris, one by one they fell away. They jumped, they overdosed, they got sick or were murdered. But that summer, they were still fresh and shiny. They all thought the train they were on would stop at a convenient station and they could get off. One always does.

  It was quite hard to get work in France. The French cinema is fiercely Francophile, but I managed to make one film in all the years I lived there. Tolerance was written and directed by a brilliant maniac called Pierre-Henri Salfati. He was a Hassidic Jew with all the trimmings: a handsome black beard, dark glasses and a hearty laugh that gradually became more strained as the job progressed. We started filming at the end of the summer of 1987 in Calvados, in north-western France. In September, Pierre-Henri and his whole family moved into a tent and observed a string of Jewish holidays while the rest of us sat twiddling our thumbs in the hotel. My room overlooked the birthplace of the wackiest of Catholic saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, the little flower. She had been one of my favourite saints at school, partly because of her actual physical passion for Christ, and partly because after her death, during the First World War, her ghost was believed to wander through the trenches at night comforting soldiers about to die. She had certainly understood something about trench warfare—at least of the psychological kind, having been incredibly unpopular in her convent at Lisieux. Her career began at the age of twelve in Alençon, opposite our hotel, where for no apparent reason she started to cry and didn’t stop for three months. Afterwards, according to legend, she was unrecognisable as herself. She had been touched by God. Or abused. I could see her bedroom window from mine, and I sat there during the long afternoons of Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and Succoth, wondering at the insanity of it all. Thérèse thought she was married to Jesus, and Pierre-Henri was camping out in a tent hung with fruit and vegetables while he was supposed to be making a film.

  He had written an amazing story about a period in French history after the revolution, the decadent new “high society” that replaced the aristocracy, known as Les Incroyables. A family who live in a lovely chateau are given a hermit, their own family saint, called Assuerus (played by me). He is unpacked from his box and let loose in the forest around the castle. The lady of the house, Tolerance, played by a beautiful French actress called Anne Brochet, develops an unhealthy interest in his spiritual powers, and her husband, a gourmet obsessed by cooking, becomes insanely jealous. He ties poor Assuerus to a stake in his vegetable garden and a miracle occurs. Thousands of butterflies gather and giant asparagus grows around him in th
e garden. Tolerance is convinced that her hermit is a saint.

  To prove he is a fraud, the husband, played by the Italian comedian Ugo Tognazzi (famous for La Cage aux Folles), shaves and washes the poor hermit, dresses him up in all the foppery of the period and passes him off as a visiting dandy gourmet from England, to disastrous effect. The hermit plays his role to the hilt. He becomes the avenging angel to the little court inside the chateau, and everyone gets their just deserts. The wicked mother-in-law falls in love with him and dies of a heart attack while he is kissing her. Finally he prepares a banquet for the Académie de Gastronomie, of which the husband is president, and for the main course cooks his latest victim—Tolerance. Eventually he is guillotined, but we never know whether he was a saint or a sinner, although when his severed head is lifted from the straw it glows with a saintly aura.

  It was a brilliantly eccentric story but would Pierre-Henri have the experience to bring it to the screen? He had made a short film, but otherwise he was a teacher and a religious expert, whatever that means. Filming always began with a delicious lunch. Trestle tables with white paper cloths were set up in the gardens of the beautiful chateau. The chatelaine, a delightful tiny old lady with a little beige wig, hobbled across the unkempt lawn to join us, accompanied by her sexy grandson, Charles Édouard. Lunch on an old-school French film set was an extremely civilised affair. Wine bottles, baguettes and wild flowers decorated the tables. The three-course meal was followed by dripping Camembert and coffee, and slowly the conversation drifted towards work. “And what are we shooting today?” the chatelaine would excitedly ask as she spread Brie onto a biscuit. Pierre-Henri would look up from peeling an apple and describe the scene. “Today Rupert is going to climb a tree.”