Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  Our regiments had been called back to defend the White House. Yeltsin had deposed Gorbachev in a military coup. Communism was dead. We drove back to Moscow, and I collected Bruno, Tom and Mo, and we went to explore the city centre. Barricades had been erected everywhere, but thanks to the official nature of our car we were waved through and arrived at the White House just before lunch. All our army friends were standing in their tanks. “Grigor!” they shouted. We clambered on board and toasted the new Russia with the boys, who seemed to have an endless supply of vodka. Dame Edna took our pictures, and then we went for tea at the gay coffee shop behind the Bolshoi where Tom got lucky and stayed out after the curfew.

  The coup went on for four or five days. It was strange to be in the place the whole of the world was watching, and we sat around Mosfilm, kind of hoping for civil war so that the project would be abandoned and we could all go back to our comfortable homes. Fuck bankruptcy, I thought. Anything rather than this. But the coup ended peacefully and we were back in the field within a week. Meanwhile Tom and Bruno had found a pair of flats and we moved into the centre of town.

  Smolenskaya was a large boulevard that ran all the way from the Ministry of (dis)Information to the river and Gorky Park on the other side. Dilapidated eighteenth-century villas stood beside large Soviet apartment blocks and the ministry, which was one of Stalin’s fantasy towers, its gothic spires, topped with hammers and sickles, dominating the skyline. When the sun set, it turned into a jagged black crag and its shadow swamped the street. Our new flat was in a typical apartment building. There was an archway into a large interior courtyard, and four different blocks backed onto it. Hidden among the trees in the middle was another tumbling remnant of pre-revolution Moscow that someone had forgotten to knock down.

  We lived up four flights of stone stairs past front doors of black upholstered leather, like the entrances to kinky fetish clubs. We hardly ever met anyone on the staircase. Muscovites kept to themselves, but nonetheless one always had a feeling of being watched. During the first week our neighbour burnt to death in his bed. At about four o’clock in the morning I was woken by the howling of sirens and footsteps running up the stairs. I opened the front door. The hallway was filled with smoke. Firemen emerged from next door with the charred body of the neighbour and carried him downstairs. In the morning the door was shut as if nothing had happened. It might have been a dream but outside the front door was a burnt mattress, a standard lamp with its singed shade, an armchair, and various books and magazines. They were never moved. Autumn leaves made a pretty blanket for the mattress. Then the snow came, and icicles formed on the lampshade. In spring the whole sad mess was revealed again. The burnt patch was black and boggy, and in summer weeds and thistles were happily growing where once a poor drunk had snored.

  I settled in at Mosfilm. We were one of those lugubrious international productions, a film about Russians in English where only two from a cast of hundreds could speak it. F. Murray Abraham played my father. The cinematographer thought I was useless but was enraptured by F, although to my mind his performance was more Fiddler on the Roof than Quiet Flows the Don. A frosty French girl called Delphine Forest played the sexpot Aksinia. When I had to throw her into the snow and ravage her, she screamed, and when we kissed her face puckered up like a child taking its medicine. The other actors were brilliant Russians who were taught their English text phonetically by poor long-suffering Leila. They made little or no sense. Their accents seemed almost vaudevillian and pretty soon I was speaking the same incomprehensible patois. But nobody seemed to notice. It is virtually impossible to act in a foreign language, though the Russians got on with it. They needed to eat.

  Sergei was on a rollercoaster. First communism had fallen, and then he discovered that his beloved Grigor was being played by a goluboi. His world had crashed. But he was philosophical. He was still working. His wife and daughter were in the film, and he soldiered on with only the occasional blistering outburst, mostly directed at the women, thank God, but otherwise he was quite a laugh.

  The Italian crew lived at the Intourist Hotel. The most beautiful hookers in the world were in Moscow that year, to be had for nothing, and some of the Italians had two or three under permanent contract. They rushed back to their harems after work, and were spent by the time they got to the studio in the morning. Being gay provided less opportunity. Gays were still criminals in Russia. If you dared to be one, you were a total outcast, and all the boys we saw in the coffee shop at the Bolshoi seemed to be shrieking pickpockets. It didn’t look like much fun. There was the toilet at the Kremlin and the Centralna bathhouse, where midgets and amputees hovered in the steamy shadows brandishing birch twigs. I was taken there once by a Russian priest and given a severe whipping. Then Father handed me the twigs.

  “Now you!” he said and bent over.

  I was celibate for the whole year.

  Gangs of Turks posing as queers hung out in the little park in front of the Bolshoi, as Bruno found to his cost one drunken night. Mid-embrace, his lover’s friends leapt out from behind trees and stole all his clothes, leaving him in his underpants in minus ten degrees, jumping up and down while trying to hitch a ride home.

  It was a tough city, but soon I was in love with it. The resilience of the people, physically and emotionally, made our whiny life feel desperately shallow. That sudden change between tears and laughter that eludes Western actors playing Chekhov was the secret of their charm. Life was a tragicomedy. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the rouble began its terrible skydive. When we arrived there were thirty to the dollar; by the time we left there were three hundred. The people met this challenge with a proud stoicism and dignity, even when it came to selling their bodies to the Italian crew. They were used to suffering. Babushkas sat on freezing street corners selling everything they had. Every car was a taxi, and you paid what you wanted. The only food for sale was for dollars. In the Russian shops the shelves were empty. In the hard-currency supermarkets, where you met the smoothies from the diplomatic corps with laden trolleys, everything was available, but a loaf of bread cost a month’s wages.

  At weekends I took Mo for walks in Gorky Park and we became wrapped up in the drama of the changing seasons. The summer ended and the trees turned red and gold. The first gusts of winter, blowing at Moscow from the southern steppe, stripped everything bare. Mo chased whirlpools of leaves. One day the white pregnant sky suddenly turned into snow. As the winter set in, holes were made in the ice on the ponds, and nude men and women stood around chatting in minus twenty degrees before jumping into the freezing water, still chatting, their talking heads sticking out of the snow. One man managed to do this and sustain a massive erection.

  My Russian entourage included a new interpreter, Tania Bubenkova, a beautiful blonde who was endlessly shocked by us. She lived in a tiny room with her daughter on the outskirts of the city, and she loved America. We nicknamed her Malibuvitch. I had a chauffeur called Valodir (soon to be known as Car-Valodir), and my own Cossack, also called Valodir (or Horse-Valodir), who had been in the circus. He was incredibly strong and sexy, and taught me how to jump on a horse like a Cossack, which was very difficult, though it became much easier when I secretly hid a mini-trampoline under some leaves next to my horse.

  There were two long-haired boys in the crew, Igor and Ilya. Igor was a beauty, and he knew it; Ilya, on the other hand, looked like a hag stirring a cauldron. They were best friends and lived in an amazing squat with several other kids in an abandoned nuclear fallout shelter, with a coffee table made out of an old bronze of Stalin’s head. They knew where to get grass, or anacha, and we used to sit in the maze of bridges high up over the stage, smoking and watching the Italian-Russian battle for supremacy below.

  I was definitely on the Russian side, although I adored some of the Italians. The producers paid the Russians next to nothing and gave them different food from us. (“They prefer it,” they said.) As the rouble tumbled, the Italians made no effort to help the floun
dering crew. Soon, giggly on anacha and blurry on the endless swigs of vodka proffered by my friends on the Russian crew, I turned into the tipsy Vanessa Redgrave of the set and led the crew on a disastrous strike.

  When the snow began to fall Moscow was an enchanted place. The river froze. The Kremlin looked like an iced cake and the snow fluttered silently past our windows day and night. As we filmed the winter scenes of the First World War, there was a strange silence in the snow, but it made you feel sick and drowsy.

  One morning at about 3 a.m. the telephone rang. It was the Richardson family calling from LA to say that Tony had died. I spoke to everyone: Natasha, Joely, Katherine, Grizelda, Vanessa, and Robert. They were having a party and were exuberant and grief-stricken at the same time. I put the phone down and Mo came in. Tony used to call him Movies. “Come here, Movies,” I said and we sat watching the snow fall outside the window.

  It was deep winter by the time we arrived on location in Vioshky, a village in the middle of the steppe, on the banks of the River Don. Rows of coloured doll’s houses with thick white icing lined the street. Their twinkly lights splashed the snow gold, through delicate window frames that looked as if they were made from paper doilies. There were no cars, just carts and horses, and the odd motorbike with a sidecar.

  Dina, our new landlady, welcomed us into her cottage. She was a large lady with conical breasts, similar in build to the dangerous-looking boiler next to the kitchen table that shuddered into gear every fifteen minutes and smelt of paraffin. The hut was like a sauna. The bathroom was in a kind of potting shed. The hot water steamed majestically from the tap but the water in the loo was frozen solid. There was no noise. The dogs were too cold to bark. Snow fluttered endlessly past the windows. Later on, when the winter gales swept across the steppe, the whole house groaned.

  Tradition compelled Dina to hold a wake every month for her recently dead mother. So every fourth Saturday I arrived back from work—by now I never removed my costume—to find a little group of tiny drunk babushkas sitting in the house. These ladies, peasants in the old tradition, were twisted by osteoporosis. Some had nails for teeth. Their knuckles and fingers were tree stumps. (No one over fifty in Vioshky could walk upright.) One night three ladies were so drunk they couldn’t move. Dina tried to pull them up, but they swatted her off, and finally she shrugged her shoulders and left. A cloud of vodka and condensed breath hung over these shelled reptiles, passed out in a row on the sofa, and we all went to bed. In the morning they were gone.

  The Russian crew lived aboard a rusty old destroyer that sat lopsided in a backwater off the River Don. It was a strange place inhabited by ex-cons and bearded ladies. If ever there was an end of the line, this was it. It was far away from town, hidden by trees, and all the cabins leant to one side. You felt drunk just being there. Our crew held tremendous parties every Saturday night and I began to drink as heavily as they did. There seemed to be no alternative to their feverish, drunken exuberance. Some of them dropped cigarette ash into the vodka, and this drove one into a hellish dimension, where suddenly it seemed perfectly normal to chuck a table through a window and start punching everyone while one was dancing. A bloody nose felt like orgasm. The ex-cons and bearded ladies joined in, bathing in the sophistication of their glittering Muscovite guests.

  When the spring of 1991 came, the crew commandeered an old ambulance and would pick us up on our day off to take us for picnics on the steppe. We lay under the blossoming apple trees and ate shashlik prepared by Mama Zoya from the art department. Sometimes one of the Russians would get so drunk that the others would have to tie him up and throw him into the back of the ambulance. On the drive home, Mama Zoya would give a masterclass in Chekhov, laughing and crying with the bumps in the road as she held onto her legs. She had a dislocated hip.

  There was a Cossack restaurant out in the middle of nowhere. A band played and elaborate fights broke out. Chairs were crashed over heads. Hefty women pulled red-faced men from one another’s throats while the rest of us went on dancing. I had my thirty-second birthday party there at the end of May. I danced with all the local ladies, and when, exhausted, I declined an invitation to foxtrot with one delightful matron, she smashed a plate over my head. Apparently it was a compliment. She felt she knew me well enough. I was Grigor to these people by now. They would come to Dina’s hut to ask advice about problems they were having and expect me to solve them. On Easter Day there was literally a line around the block of men coming to pay their respects and ask advice.

  If I was the adults’ hero, then Bruno was the pin-up of the under-tens. He was neither boy nor man, and became their mascot. They waited for him outside the house on their bikes in the morning and followed him wherever he went. They provided him with valuable scoops about vegetables and meat once the spring arrived, and they would knock at the windows at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning if there were tomatoes in the market, or come by in the afternoon if someone was killing their pig.

  With spring the streets of Vioshky turned into tunnels of apple blossom. Horse-Valodir and I rode for miles, leaving early in the morning and coming home after dark. The steppe was endless. The only noise was the wind and the cries of birds high above. We explored ruined villages, uninhabited since the revolution.

  In one such tumbledown place we found one of the biggest queens I have ever met. He called himself the cultural attaché. How he had learnt to be so camp was a mystery, because he had no apparent references. He lisped and shimmied and made Marilyn kiss poses, while Valodir shook his head in disbelief. Then he ran into his home and brought out half a pie as a present which we ate while he cavorted before us. When we left he walked alongside singing Cossack songs. After a while, without a word, he turned around and the singing disappeared into the wind.

  Goodbye was goodbye. There was little chance that any of us would ever see each other again. In the final embraces on the windy steppe—I was leaving straight from work—it was as if a whole lifetime had passed, and we had grown old together. Our hair was matted with sand. We all had liverish rings around our bloodshot eyes. Italians and Russians were finally united by exhaustion. Bondarchuk pointed at a kestrel hovering high above in the sky, and Tania translated his final thoughts. It had been a bumpy ride. I fought him in public, and he had never really forgiven me. I was not Grigor and could never be. He forgave me for that. And he saw the affection between me and the Russian crew, between me and his daughter, and after all we were just two men standing together on the vast Russian steppe in a chaotic world. “This kestrel will guide you home,” he said. “Finally I have met an English gentleman. Very dangerous,” and he kissed me on both cheeks.

  There had been five deaths and four weddings during the making of the film, and quite a few girls had become lesbians. The man who operated the wind machine, an old aeroplane propeller, was decapitated by it one morning outside Moscow. We watched his head fly across the sky and land in the snow, which turned crimson around it. The chief electrician from Rome had a heart attack outside the Intourist Hotel and died on the way to hospital. The drunken driver of our cherry picker, the large crane used to floodlight the night, had crashed into a young couple with their baby, and killed them all. Car-Valodir was run over after the film wrapped. Such was the price of a film that was never shown. The footage ended up in a bank vault in Naples, and many of us own a part of it since the producer, a Neapolitan builder, still owes us money. Tania came to the South of France for the summer, but I never saw anyone else ever again.

  The experience killed Bondarchuk but it brought me back to life.

  CHAPTER 34

  Ready to Wear

  A year or so later I was back in Paris.

  Robert Altman was making Prêt-à-Porter, a comedy exposé about the world of fashion. I hustled a meeting with him in Paris and I explained that I’d been a model and there was no excuse for me not to be in the film, so that I would either have to give up acting or move to a different city if I didn’t get a role.

  He regarded
me for a moment. “I can see you’re in quite a predicament,” he said. “The problem is I already have too many actors. Let me think about this.” And he shuffled to another room, leaving me with Scotty, his browbeaten producer.

  “I had no idea how pushy you were,” she said sweetly.

  “Desperation!” I said.

  Fortunately, I got a part playing the son of a fashion designer; Mummy was Anouk Aimée. “You are very old to be my son,” she said testily when we met at the initial get-together. She turned to Sonia Rykiel, sitting next to her, as if I wasn’t there. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” Sonia nodded sagely, like Dougal from The Magic Roundabout.

  Everyone was in the movie: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Richard E. Grant, Lauren Bacall, Rossy de Palma and Kim Basinger. We were shooting the movie during Fashion Week in Paris, at the actual shows, mingling with the real people we were portraying. Unfortunately for Bob, the venue for most of the shows had just been moved to the extremely ugly Carrousel du Louvre, a vast underground concrete complex underneath the Palace.

  As the film crystallised it had all the ingredients for disaster. First of all, unbeknown to us all, Bob was recovering from heart surgery. Added to this, he chose Sonia Rykiel to be his oracle. They had met sometime before, at one of her shows; Bob had been enchanted by it all, the sexiness, the absurd posturing, and the seed of a movie was planted in his mind. Fifteen years later, he thought to look no further than poor Sonia to guide him through a world that had become much more complicated in the interim, and that she was no longer in the thick of. This is not a criticism of Sonia as a designer; Yves Saint Laurent would have been an equally disastrous choice, if Bob had wanted a real insight into just what the fashion world had become.