Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  But the reviews were good. The production was okay. An extraordinary crowd of mediums and dressers to silent-movie stars collected every night to see the show. Stephanie was deaf in one ear so if you said your line from the wrong angle she acted as though nothing had happened. There were some amusing star wars as Suzanne found her feet. First she declared war on the prison warden, goading her in the wings before the show, but she never got very far. The poor girl just pursed her lips and turned a beetroot colour. “That is very inappropriate,” was as much of a retort she could muster, after some venomous aside from Suzanne as she breezed onto the stage. Suzanne needed blood to get through. How well I understood her. She needed someone who could at least lob the ball back over the net. She didn’t have to look very far.

  Stephanie was by turns very starry and very vulnerable. Sometimes she was deaf and sometimes she could hear a pin drop in the back of the stalls. She had just left the Dynasty spin-off, The Colbys, that bubbling marsh of old-school swamp bitches who took no prisoners and ate people whole, and so she was probably spoiling for bit of fisticuffs herself. She and Suzanne had met their match and, after an initial spell as best friends, fell upon one another as only best friends can. Suzanne had all the ammunition. Act Three of the play begins with a bitter confrontation in which Suzanne’s character tries to ram some sense into Stephanie’s character. Suzanne played it to the hilt. “Pull yourself together, Florence. You are spoilt and unreasonable,” she would scream. It was exciting theatre. One night she was so tough that as the curtain came down, Stephanie collapsed howling on the floor. Then the curtain flew up again and the applause revived her. She bravely staggered to her feet, smiled wanly and the public adored her. The exhausted curtain call is one of the oldest crowd pleasers. Then she crumpled again and stumbled wailing to her dressing room.

  That was the only fun. The run went on for ten weeks and, needless to say, I didn’t have another job. Movie folk had to be drugged senseless to get them to the theatre in LA.

  At dinner one night after the show with Tony Richardson and Candy Bergen, both expressed enormous curiosity about Madonna and asked whether I could arrange a meeting. Tony had seen her in a David Mamet play in New York and had loved her. I was an inexperienced host, but I invited them all to dinner at my house. Alicia from downstairs was going to cook.

  It was one of the most disastrous nights on record.

  Before dinner we lit the fire in the sitting room. Then a sudden freak storm began to howl around the house, the upstairs terrace collapsed into the garden and the wind blew the smoke from the fire back down the chimney into the room. By the time Tony and Candy arrived you could hardly see. Finally Madonna appeared with Alek Keshishian and they both ignored Tony and Candy. Actually, to be fair, they could hardly see each other at this point in the smoke-filled room. But there was no chemistry, as we say in Hollywood. Madonna was approaching the dizzy pinnacle of fame, and at those heights you don’t bother to disguise your feelings. If she was bored, she let you know. Manners were something she had discarded at base camp. She didn’t seem comfortable with the older generation, just as she didn’t seem to like the countryside. She knew how everyone her own age reacted to her. And she knew the laws of the asphalt jungle. The older generation were looking at her from another angle and that scared her. Added to this Mo, my puppy, already a sex maniac, took one look at the material girl and was entranced. He started to lick her, sniffing her crotch and nipping at her dress before pinning her into a chair and humping her leg, leaving weird secretions on her stockings. This she didn’t mind so much. Any form of sexual adulation was an affirmation to the material girl and she looked down with a mixture of horror and delight at Mo’s lolloping tongue as he pounded away at her.

  Finally we sat down to dinner. I wished the ground would swallow me up and vowed never to entertain again. (I haven’t.) Alicia served up some undercooked vegetables and bloody chicken legs. It was freezing cold, because we had to open all the doors to let the smoke out. During a lull in the sticky conversation, the remainder of the upstairs terrace came crashing down into the garden. Madonna and Alek were only interested in each other. They were in the middle of their triumphant collaboration, Truth or Dare, and after dinner they huddled in a corner talking to Harvey Weinstein on their cellphones, making high-flying Hollywood plans. The party was over before nine o’clock; the post-mortem went on until two.

  I saw a lot of Tony during that trip, and we hatched a plan to do a world tour of Hamlet and The Cherry Orchard with Vanessa Redgrave. Calls were made all over the world, from the Odéon in Paris, to the Opera House in Sydney. Robert Fox was roped in; Tony set his mind to it, and so did we, although at the same time I think we all knew it was a dream. Unfortunately, Tony’s health was fading. He never talked about it, although sometimes he would carelessly say he had been to the hospital, at the same time challenging one with that sunken pale-eyed gaze not to enquire further. His neck had shrunk and his head with its giant brain looked more than ever as if it had recently stepped off a spacecraft. His hands were covered in blue marks, which he valiantly covered with make-up. Such was his control over his friends that we were mesmerised into dumb acquiescence. He wanted to go on as if nothing was happening. He had no time for self-pity or the pity of others; nor was he hindered by fear. At dinner in Spago’s one night during that hideous holiday season, somebody was going around the tables with a video camera asking people what they were hoping for in the New Year.

  “Death,” said Tony bluntly. He got it.

  On Christmas Day I drove out to Malibu to Herb Ritts’ house where Madonna, her sexy boyfriend Tony Ward, and a famous beauty, now dead, Anthony Daniels, were playing Truth or Dare. Madonna made me snog her boyfriend, which I must say was the highlight of a wrist-slitting Christmas. Herb’s house was beautiful, unlived in and looked out over that mournful sea. After lunch, we watched a video of Pasolini’s Salò (otherwise known as The 120 Days of Sodom). At about six o’clock we all got into our cars and drove back in the dark to Hollywood. I felt that numb exhaustion one has at the end of one’s best friend’s funeral.

  Antony Price came to stay with me; meanwhile, Baillie and John, Alan and Fritz were camped out on the other side of the canyon at Paul Fortune’s house (Baillie was making a Massive Attack video). Paul threw a party on New Year’s Eve, but I left before midnight, and went home and sat quietly with Mo. Together we watched random fireworks explode across the canyon. Their pops sounded like gunshots as they ricocheted across the hills.

  The best thing in LA is the walking. With Mo at my side, I discovered the trails that threaded through the Hollywood hills all the way down to the sea. Right in the middle of those vast godless suburbs were hidden valleys of giant eucalyptus trees. Tiny paths overgrown with wild flowers cut into the side of the hill and zigzagged past the rusting shells of cars that had shot off Mulholland Drive long ago and now hung in the clutches of nature. At the bottom of the gulley we lay on the ground and watched the trees sway and creak over our heads. The only other noise was the trickle of a stream and the faraway murmur of a car passing on the road high above. The anguish of making it or not making it was replaced by the simple fact of being a young man with his dog in an enchanted wood, and the endless quest to be someone more than one was briefly evaporated in the heavy scent of eucalyptus and rosemary and skunk.

  But the peace I found there was short-lived. Driving to work at the Doolittle Theater one evening, Madonna’s “Justify My Love” was playing on the radio. It was the perfect song for that sleazy strip of old Hollywood where the Doolittle’s marquee winked sadly at a disinterested world. Hookers in hot pants and halter necks looked vulnerable in the orange glare of the street lights, standing in stilettos on the name of some forgotten star. Car after car after car drove by; their heads turned with each one, with a promising glance glued to their faces. These were the little seeds of desire from which the vast heads on the billboards blossomed. Ambition was the currency in Hollywood although it was justifie
d as love: love for the craft of cocksucking. The song ended and the DJ chimed in with some very disturbing news.

  “This is coast one-oh-one and you’re listening to X. Now, if you play that last track backwards, apparently there is a message to Satan. Just listen to this.”

  A weird noise groaned over the radio as the track babbled backwards and then a deep voice said, “I. Love. You. Satan.”

  My blood went cold. This was it. Madonna was Satan. I had been sent to kill her. It all made sense. My fascination with her . . . Salò . . . everything! “Some of you will be chosen . . .” I could hear the abbey bells ringing. But then the feeling subsided. My bigoted Catholic superstitions receded back into the deep sludge, but I was quite shocked by my reaction. I only had to be two or three degrees more bitter and neurotic, and there could have been an explosion. And I suddenly saw Madonna in a different light. Her life was full of people who could turn at any minute. How dangerous it was to tickle the world’s fantasy. And how vulnerable you were at the dizzy summit . . .

  That night, I embarked upon my third novel. I called it Guilt Without Sex: A Jewish Bestseller, a title I borrowed from Michael Black. The story took place in 2020 when actors, like drummers, had to be able to programme performance. A failed programmer finds religion and falls in love and hate with a beautiful transgender superstar. I never got very far with the book, but I told Madonna about it a little later.

  “Don’t you think it would make a great film?” I said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Oh. Okay,” I said, as casual as could be. Now I wanted to kill her again.

  CHAPTER 32

  Windy Ridge

  In November 1987, just before my West End sojourn in The Vortex, I bought Windy Ridge. A fatal mistake. It was a half-finished tip up a steep track above the beach at Pampelonne, outside St. Tropez, owned by a couple in the throes of divorce; he lived in one part and she lived in the garage. It was a large rambling place, three unfinished houses around a yard, no central heating, just naked wires sticking from the walls. But despite all this, it looked over a beautiful vineyard on one side and the pine woods down to the sea on the other, and beyond you could see the lighthouse at Cap Cammerat. I had hardly any money left, and it was expensive, but I bought it and, with the help of my father, managed to raise an 85 per cent mortgage. It would become my prison.

  I moved into my new home one cold afternoon in December. I put a mattress on the floor in the little house at the bottom—Bâtiment 3, it was called on the plan of my new sprawling estate—and spent one of the most agonised nights of my life. How could I have got myself into this mess? The house was huge and horrible. My mortgage compelled me to earn a great deal of money, and yet my career was going into the early stages of rigor mortis. That first Christmas I celebrated with Thomas and Frankie, shivering in bed while eating oysters as we tried to make a fire with damp logs that steamed in the hearth but never caught fire. In the New Year I found a rather surly couple, Monsieur and Madame Petit, to come and live in the house, along with their son Pascal, while I was away.

  Monsieur was a builder. Madame was a lazy housewife with a quivering chin, in the hot flush of life and brilliant at emotional blackmail. They took one look at me and knew they were on to a winner. They moved into Bâtiment 1 (aka the garage) the week before I left for London and seven months in The Vortex. I was so relieved that I had managed to get the house inhabited, and even more relieved to be getting out, that I just left with some vague instructions to them to start rebuilding the house.

  When I returned in September, they had built themselves a luxury home out of the garages. It was beautiful. Monsieur Petit could certainly build, I thought to myself, as I curled up on my foam mattress in Bâtiment 3. Now the Petit family had been there longer than me. I tried to wrestle the reins from them, but they controlled me like a puppet. He half-heartedly began work on the big house, knocking down the whole interior, while I spent the days at the beach, tiptoeing home after dark past the warm glow of their luxury pad to the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling in Bâtiment 3. The summer ended, and the bars were boarded up. The weather cooled, and the sea turned into a grey metal sheet. The inhabitants of the surrounding villages snuggled down for the winter to count their money. It was desolate and beautiful, and I realised that I had completely cut myself off from the rest of the world. I had spent every last penny on this fantasy and couldn’t escape.

  Madame Petit brought me a tray every night and I sat alone in front of a little electric fire. As I lay in the dark, the beam from the lighthouse grazed across my bed and the east wind howled and banged against the shutters.

  I decided to get a dog. Someone gave me the number of an English breeder near Paris called Felicity Leith Ross. She was terribly grand and sounded tipsy when I talked to her.

  “We’re just delivering a litter now. Aren’t we, Susie?” she slurred.

  “Who’s Susie?”

  “My lovely prize-winning black bitch.”

  It was more like applying for adoption, getting a labrador puppy out of this woman, but finally a deal was struck and I was summoned in February to collect my bundle of joy.

  There was a bent taxi driver in Paris who was often at the taxi stand on the rue de Berri. He haunted Lychee and me. I hailed him one day, we talked until he dropped me off and that was that. A few days later I got into another taxi and there he was again. I thought nothing of it, but when it happened a third time, I realised that he was keeping tabs on me. Not only me, as it happened, but Lychee as well. I was about to freak out but then I remembered how taxis were so hard to come by in Paris, and so I tried to be encouraging. The driver, whose name was Denis, was very handy. He had a network of spies all over the city. At one time he had been a flic. He knew if I had been out and if I’d come home alone. It was through Denis I discovered that Lychee worked in the Bois. He was obsessed by her and tried to collect her every night after work, but Lychee hated him. If we came across him together she turned into a dangerous Vietcong gutter person, shouting and kicking his car while I smiled helplessly, hoping he would still pick me up.

  One afternoon in February 1989, I drove with him to a little village an hour or so outside Paris to collect my dog. I had chosen a little male. Felicity said he was “a really good chap because he always says thank you after his tea.” Propaganda, I thought, as she presented me with the puppy and I presented her with a large cheque, but actually it was true. I christened him Moïse. He had a dumpy body, tiny paws with little jet nails, a salmon-pink tongue inside razor teeth, sweet-smelling breath, raisin-black eyes and triangular ears. His tail was a squiggle that stood up in the air and vibrated with joy. But as soon as we got into the car everything changed. He clawed at the window as the kennels disappeared for the last time and, when he realised he couldn’t escape, he hid on the floor and howled all the way to Paris.

  That evening we took the night train to St. Raphaël, and he still hadn’t forgiven me for abducting him from his family. He sat obstinately in the corner of the wagon-lit as we clattered slowly out of Paris, and I lay on the bed. We stared solemnly at each other for about half an hour, but he was scared of the tunnels and the flashing lights and soon he began to edge closer to the bed. I picked him up and laid him on my chest. He breathed in through his little black nose and then gave a heartbreaking sigh. His tail wagged one last time in defiance and he fell asleep. I woke up later as we were thundering across France and he was looking at me. He stretched himself towards my face and pounced on my nose, and the tail wagged again as for the first time I felt the force of those razor-sharp teeth.

  So Mo and I settled down together in Bâtiment 3. I put a plank between his sleeping quarters outside the bathroom and mine, but he barked all night and shat everywhere he could. Then it occurred to me that there was very little difference between the passage with his mat and the room with my mattress, so I made the fatal mistake of removing the frontier and he galloped around the room in victory before jumping on top
of me and going to sleep.

  In France at that time there was a thing called the minitel, which was like a computer, connected to your telephone. There was a screen and a keyboard and you could cruise online, so in the evenings I would make contact with people all over the region, then Mo and I would set out in the car with our map, to villages in the Alpes Maritimes, or to some suburb of Marseilles, only to find that the young Olympic athlete who had written so disarmingly about his sexual agility was in fact a roly-poly baker who would be hard pushed to touch his toes, let alone anything else. Then Mo and I would look at each other and sigh before starting the long journey back home. Mo sat on the passenger seat and watched me curiously with his raisin eyes. Sometimes I braked too hard and he would fly into the dashboard, but he was a good-natured dog and climbed back into his place. He loved the car and when he was big enough to see through the windscreen, he concentrated on the road, or leant against the window so that his ear fluttered in the wind. Whenever I left for a trip without him and the bags came out, he disappeared. I would look for him to say goodbye, but he would already be sitting in the passenger seat. Staring ahead, very still so that no one would notice he was there.

  “Come on, Mo. You’re not coming,” I’d say, and he would climb out with his tail between his legs and shuffle off towards the house. I don’t think the Petit family were very kind to him when I went away and left him in their charge, because right up until his death if I said the two words, “Monsieur Petit,” Mo’s hackles would go up and he would start to bark.

  Driving back from Toulon one day we saw an old gypsy caravan in a field with a For Sale sign beside it. I parked the car and went to have a look. It stood under an umbrella pine and was covered in needles but underneath it was painted pale blue and white; a little chimney with a dunce’s cap grew out of the roof. A tyre was flat and it leant tragically to one side. There was no one about, and the door was open. Inside was a little kitchen, with wooden cupboards, a sitting room and a bedroom at the end. It was falling to pieces but I had to have it. A week later it limped up the steep driveway and became an annexe for the overflow of guests during the summer.