Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  Lychee and the colleagues came and went, causing a stir wherever they set foot. They bundled noisily out of a taxi in front of the chateau just as we were shooting. They were refused entry to St. Thérèse’s house and complained at the police station. Terrible arguments would blow up in the local restaurant and Lychee would send the offending colleague home. I had two double beds in my room and there was a steady flow of guests. Sometimes, arriving late from work, I didn’t know whom I was sleeping with.

  But despite the disturbances, the chateau was a deeply romantic place of honey-coloured stone, with turrets and steep slate roofs, surrounded by a moat. The lumpy remains of formal gardens stretched out on all sides towards beautiful woods full of pheasants. An ancient geometric pattern of overgrown avenues carved through them and sometimes Madame could be seen toddling along one of them with her little old dog by her side. I think she was on her last financial legs, which was why we were there, but she cheerfully lived in a tiny corner of the immense palace, where Lychee and I went often for drinks after work. She called Lychee “Mademoiselle” and Lychee called her “Madame” and their rapport was a film all of its own.

  It was, of course, delightful to be on the other side of the colleagues’ lies. Lychee loved weaving her web, her eyes glittering at the beauty of her fabrications, although sometimes she got tangled up in them. One day she was a concert pianist; the next day she worked in a bank. Her fantasy pastime very much depended on her mood, and as with all ladies of her slightly modified nature, those moods changed with the wind. I don’t know whether anyone believed a word she said, or even listened. Mostly they just stared at her tits and her arse. All men wanted to have sex with Lychee in those days, when she was still fresh. It was a wave you could feel as she walked past. She considered setting herself up in a little tent in the woods, but luckily she soon tired of the country life, and one day she disappeared without a word back to Paris.

  The film, when it was eventually finished, was a disaster at the box office. This was a shame because it could have been great but Pierre-Henri needed to be guided. Although extremely talented, he wasn’t a technician, and this is where movies often fell short in that haughty marriage between French socialism and its cinéma philosophe. Everything was constructed around the auteur, resulting in hundreds of aimless meandering films financed by the state. Some of them were good—a few were excellent—but most of them were aborted schemes with potential.

  CHAPTER 28

  Béatrice

  This was also the year of my final heterosexual love tryst. At the Cannes Film Festival, I met Béatrice Dalle and we immediately became inseparable. We were totally unsuited to one another, quite aside from the fact that I was gay, but incompatibility is the agonising driving force behind many dangerous liaisons. We were two strange boats colliding in the night and, mesmerised, we held onto each other as the current gently but firmly moved us along. She was a wild, unpredictable beauty, tinged with the sparkle of madness; the latest in a long tradition of French sirens. Although she was quite scornful about her country, she was as French as Joan of Arc—the suicide bomber version. Her kind of beauty was definitely pre-Botox, much deeper than the cash-and-carry bargains of today. Its origins were the gaslit barmaids of Manet, and the Parisian demi-monde between the wars. She was jolie laide—pretty and ugly. If you pulled back her hair, her head was the shape of a woodland elf’s. Her mouth was large and she outlined it with a brown pencil. She had a gap between her teeth and a mole on her cheek; her brown eyes held yours with a warmth and a purity in their regard that destabilised everyone she looked at. (Unless you happened to be Franco Zeffirelli. “She looks like a gargoyle,” he said one day when we went to lunch at his house outside Rome.) Her body was as full and ripe as a delicious peach. She was in many ways the negative image of Madonna, the black virgin of France.

  Béatrice had a dangerous sidekick, Sophie, who worked for the couturier Azzedine Alaia. Sophie was from the South and quite wild in her protection of her friend, ready to tip a full champagne bucket over the head of anyone who insulted “Béa.” Both girls dressed identically and smelt deliciously of vanilla. They wore large gold hoops in their ears under their thick jet-black hair and buttoned tight little cardigans around their voluptuous breasts. There was always trouble when they were around; I called them “the French Resistance.”

  Béa was discovered by our mutual agent, Dominique, when he was looking for someone to star in the film Betty Blue. She was married to a beautiful boxer called Jeff at the time and was immersed in her role as a femme au foyer, or housewife. That was quite a performance already; she loved to look after her man and initially resisted the call to the silver screen. When Dominique phoned to ask her to come and audition, she hung up. After three or four abortive attempts to contact her, the movie people were so intrigued that a car was sent round to her apartment with a begging letter. She got in and went shopping, but passed by the audition on her way home. The director, Jean-Jacques Beineix, hired her immediately.

  Although Béatrice had never set out to be an actress, by the time I met her she was not just a star but France’s image for the eighties. It was 1986 and the country was floundering in a crisis of identity, unable and unwilling to move towards the twenty-first century. During one scene in Betty Blue, Béatrice burnt down a pretty wooden beach house, and that was the startling image of the times: a deranged pyromaniac burning down tradition, accompanied by a wailing nostalgic saxophone. (Gabriel Yared wrote one of the scores of the century.)

  “My dear, too ghastly—after she burnt down that lovely beach hut, I left the cinema,” said Philip Prowse, when I told him about her. But whatever Philip thought, Betty Blue was a legendary debut. Béatrice shot like a meteor into the firmament and outshone all the other stars. She didn’t have the faintest interest in rules and regulations, of which there were many in the genteel world of French cinema. She was not remotely educated, but was extremely clever and dangerously forthright; as her fame gathered momentum, it ran away with her marriage. The boxer was wildly jealous of the attention she got. But it was too late to turn back the clock and pretty soon the couple were on the rocks. At this delicate point we met.

  Back in Paris, she came to see me one morning at the Lancaster. She rummaged about in her bag and extracted a large metal crucifix covered with sculpted flowers. “Oh, how lovely, Béa,” I exclaimed. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it with Sophie in the cemetery near my house. It was on a baby’s tomb.”

  “Thanks,” I gulped. (Years later, worrying that the cross was giving us bad luck, I went with Sophie back to the cemetery and we found the grave. A little putto was sitting at the feet of the headstone, with its empty arms outstretched. The cross slid into its hands. It was quite uncanny.)

  But Béatrice was always fascinated by bones and graves and death. At her studio in Montmartre, at the top of five flights of stairs with one of those huge windows overlooking the rooftops of Paris, she kept the skull of a priest over her bed.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked nervously.

  “I found it,” she replied obliquely.

  She was a brilliant girlfriend because all she wanted to do was roll you little joints, or sit around perched on you like a bird on a branch, watching the day pass by, eating crème caramels, or lying in bed watching TV. Time stood still; everything else dropped away, and the world outside became a weird blur. I remember once lying in the bath at the hotel, and she was leaning against the sink, smoking, in a pair of dark glasses. She threw her head back and smoke snaked out of her mouth and I wondered whether I was part of some black magic spell.

  She didn’t want to stay at home after the split-up with her husband, but she didn’t want to stay at the Lancaster either, so we briefly moved into the apartment of a mutual friend, Natacha, in the Place des Vosges. Natacha owned a fashionable restaurant in Montparnasse in the building where Verlaine and Rimbaud had lived. One morning an envelope slipped under the front door. Footsteps reced
ed down the staircase and out into the courtyard while Béatrice lay rigid in the bed. She got up. The letter was from her husband. As she read it she collapsed slowly to the floor. This was a movie I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be in. I watched her from under the covers. The letter was endless. After she finished it she put her head in her hands. She looked over at me. I pretended to sleep.

  Then she got a lighter and set fire to it right there in the middle of the carpet. The flames leapt up, but Béa held the burning missive in her hands with the sang-froid of a pompier, entranced as the words that hurt her were consumed and floated into the air. She threw the whole burning pile into the waste-paper basket. It seemed to be getting a little bit out of control even for her, and she tiptoed out of the room. I lay there, fully prepared to hear the front door slam and more receding footsteps. The waste-paper basket crackled ominously. Just as I was about to jump out of bed, she came back with a bottle of Perrier and calmly emptied the contents into the inferno. She waved the smoke away and got back into bed, but a low black cloud settled above us. Jeff’s hurt could not be burnt that easily.

  I had imagined myself at the centre of a beautiful Technicolor romance but actually I was hanging onto the edge of someone else’s film noir. I don’t think Béatrice knew it then, but she felt alive when there was drama. She loved it when the elements howled around her. I did not.

  At dinner a few nights later with Lychee in the Val d’Isère, I told her all the latest details of my terrible love triangle. She had not been the same since I had been going out with Béa. She was thoroughly put out, although she pretended not to be. At dinner she was tight-lipped and uninterested. She may not have fancied me, but she certainly considered me her property. She punctuated my tale with irritating little sighs and puffs.

  “And now her husband says he’s going to kill himself!”

  “Ah bon,” said Lychee, deeply bored. She stubbed out her cigarette, smoke snorting from her nose, and looked at me distractedly. I wanted to pull her hair. “Tu vois,” she said.

  “I see what?”

  “You are completely out of your depth.” She had a point.

  “I’m going to St. Tropez next week.”

  “What about Béatrice?”

  “She’s going to come.”

  Another snort from Lychee. “Oh la la!” Now she began to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “How are you going to explain Frank and Thomas?”

  “There’s nothing to explain,” I replied testily.

  Lychee was cheering up. “Honey. You change a lot. I’m scared.”

  This was one of her stock phrases. It meant we were out of the woods and she could now have a good laugh about the whole thing. Lychee’s tragedy was that she could never be serious for very long.

  CHAPTER 29

  St. Tropez

  St. Tropez was half an hour’s drive from Tony Richardson’s house, Le Nid de Duc.

  At breakfast in the mornings, sitting at the long table in the garden, in the shade of the plane tree where Tony’s ashes were soon to be buried, it was sometimes decided that the party would go to the beach for lunch. Then everyone disappeared to perform their various chores, or lie by the pool, and a wonderful silence fell on that magical hamlet buried in the heart of the forest, broken only by the odd splash of someone diving into the pool, or the car straining up the dirt track towards the village, and of course the surround-sound effect of the creaking, invisible crickets. As the sun got hotter their croaks became more insistent, and the whole forest throbbed and cooked. The air became dangerously still, almost liquid, and as one walked from one’s room to the pool, down the little stone steps past a half-ruined house, the various scents of cork, dry earth, jasmine and wild rosemary were like invisible currents in a clear sea.

  We piled into cars with straw bags full of towels and books, and painfully bumped our way to the main road three miles away. It was like a ski run by comparison, the old road from La Garde Freinet down to the seaside. It snaked through the forest, under a canopy of scrub oaks and cork trees, the sun shining through their leaves in a million beams. It passed under a village with a ruined castle on a crag. We flew down that road, all the windows open, Tony in his cowboy hat, Natasha at the wheel, Annabelle and me in the back, or Grizelda, Tony’s ex, and their daughter Katherine, plus Robert Fox, who was now married to Natasha, crammed in together, all talking at once. Sometimes we stopped off at the port to buy newspapers, but mostly we skirted through secret lanes and dirt tracks known only to the Richardsons, avoiding the summer traffic, to the beach at Pampelonne.

  There were a hundred different beach clubs along the three-mile bay. Wattle fences separated them from one another, and every morning the sand was meticulously raked by the lithe, tanned plagistes in brightly coloured shorts. Beach mats were arranged in rows, little tables and umbrellas placed beside them. It was the best part of the day. The sky and the sea were white as the morning humidity slowly evaporated. A speedboat buzzed back and forth, pulling a parachute out of the water into the air. It sounded like a faraway bluebottle battling with a windowpane. The workers lunched early, when the beach was pristine and ready. Everything changed as the holiday crowd began to trickle in. The sea turned a deep Mediterranean blue. The silence was eaten by the screams of the Arab planchistes in the kitchens, the waiters flying around the restaurants, the clatter of plates, the popping of corks, the holiday hysteria and the din of a thousand outboard motors.

  Tony liked a restaurant called the Aqua Club, which was owned by a man called Paul, who often greeted his clientele dressed as the pope, to whom he bore a startling resemblance. Tony’s party lay about on their beach mats, reading their books and swimming. Later, they went inside behind the bar to have lunch where they were ideally positioned to observe the passing circus.

  The Aqua was a gay beach, and a brilliant array of queens and fag hags flip-flopped in from foreign climes for a late lunch and an afternoon’s cruising in the forest of bamboo that waved seductively between the beach and the vineyards behind. Glistening with Ambré Solaire, flat-footed flubsters sat at the bar nursing cocktails with umbrellas on sticks. Like hungry babies, they sucked through long stripy straws and surveyed the beach for a possible dinner companion. Hairy stick insects in thongs marched purposefully up and down the shore. George, an American lawyer who fell in love with France during the war and never left, entertained effeminate twinkies for lunch at his regular table. Professional youths danced attendance, and when the summer’s hit song was played at full blast over the stereo, they whooped and gyrated, grabbing the nearest fairy and whirling her around while the whole restaurant applauded. People danced on the tables, and if it was someone’s birthday a cake would be produced by Paul which would then explode in the face of the birthday girl to the general glee of the entire place, who must have seen this stunt a thousand times. France’s first air hostess Isolde lay like a beached whale on her mat, regarding herself in a little shell-encrusted mirror, painting on a thick wobbly gash of lipstick before heaving herself up for lunch. Gay agents from LA sat with Joan Collins. Upper-class English queens and the ladies who loved them stopped by Tony’s table and dinners were arranged. Not everyone was gay. The infamous model agent Gerard Marie sported his new girlfriend, a young gangly Linda Evangelista, and the French rock star Johnny Halliday arrived on a boat with his entourage.

  Paul had two sons, Frankie and Thomas. They were born on the beach and were like a pair of scruffy wild dogs, their hair all matted and salty. Thomas was Cinderella and Frankie the poor ugly sister. They had spent their childhood being adored and ogled by all the aforementioned queens and they had become ruthless teases, but I adored them both. That first year in St. Tropez, the one before I met Béatrice, I hardly left their side all summer. To begin with, I was entranced by the beach. The only holidays I had ever been on were to Scotland, stalking or fishing, and you couldn’t wear a thong and flip-flops or carry a clutch on the hill. During the day I swam to a raft out
in the ocean and lay there for hours. It rose and fell on the swell, and the water gurgled underneath. Other people lay there but on the raft no one talked. At the weekends I helped Thomas in the bar. As dusk fell and the last giggle flew out to sea on the breeze, the beach was reclaimed by the kids who worked there. They picked their way slowly through the debris, putting away the mats and umbrellas. At nights we went out in Thomas’ beat-up car and sat around in one of the little villages, at Gassin on the ramparts, or Ramatuelle at the bar L’Ormeau, or on the port at St. Tropez. Later we crashed Le Bal, the little discotheque over the car park. I felt as if I had fallen off the face of the earth. The boys lived in a tiny whitewashed hut at the edge of the beach. As I returned there at dawn, after a night at Le Bal, the sky streaked with pink and the waves crashing right up to the door, my escape from reality seemed complete.

  That first summer, Tony had lent me Le Nid de Duc until the end of September. Then I went back to the Lancaster for the winter, but the following spring of 1987, I dropped by on my way to the festival at Cannes. When the film Tolerance finally looked as if it was going to happen, I took a little roly-poly dialogue coach with me to the coast, and we stayed for six weeks in a boarding house at St. Tropez owned by an old spinster, Madame Fournier. Each morning we set out for the beach on a scooter, the dialogue coach on the back with her scarves blowing in the wind, clutching the script in one hand and the talent with the other, and we rehearsed together at the Aqua Club, sitting on a banquette staring out to sea. We never moved. Our lunch was brought and cleared; our progress was observed by the entire beach. Queens borrowed the script at night so that they could have a better grasp of what was going on. Thomas and Frank would flop onto the banquette, dripping from the sea. Sometimes we would perform scenes to a selected audience of the flubby and the thonged. They all listened attentively for errors in my French and wagged jewelled fingers at any mistakes. I grew a beard; my hair was long and dirty, and slowly I turned into the hermit.