Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
Page 31
His next fatal mistake was to use his son to design the film. He simply wasn’t capable and, since the story was largely about style, the fact that the final product had the look of a Jackie Collins miniseries was the petard by which Bob was eventually hoisted.
Inside the exotic squawking jungle of fashion, a thick silence fell as Bob entered the forest with his camera. Anna Wintour stared icily from her front-row perch, her enormous black glasses reflecting Bob’s tungsten like the blind eyes of some underground rodent in a nature documentary. André Léon Talley sat in a high branch chattering, “It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s evocative, it’s clean, it’s Lagerfeld,” before staring open-mouthed into the camera. These were the people Bob should have pursued. Anna held the magic wand that controlled the destinies of all the players who strutted and fretted their fifteen minutes upon the stage, and Sonia Rykiel wasn’t one of them. Suzy Menkes watched Tracey Ullman pretending to be her, like a clever fish unfooled by a garish piece of bait. She went on typing as usual. On the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, buyers and stylists chattered like monkeys screeching and throwing bananas.
The fashion press clenched, and the designers shrank, leaving only the supermodels, always open for business, to shimmy back and forth on jungle twine from fitting to show to after-party, repeating their impromptu entrances with unusual bonhomie if they had swung too fast in front of Bob’s camera.
And then the actors . . . What a funny bunch we were. We each had little tents backstage, like stalls in some trade fair, and we sat there in our costumes waiting to be called onto the set. Groups sat around chatting. Once Kim Basinger was telling a story to a few of us sitting at her feet. Richard E. Grant interrupted. She held a hand out like a traffic cop. “I’m talking,” she said, and went on. I could see righteous indignation bubbling up under Richard’s heavily powdered face, but he got his own back on camera, when Kim, who played a Southern fashion journalist, was interviewing him. In two-foot heels and a wide-brimmed hat made for him by Vivienne Westwood he was on a roll, in one of his funniest performances. When Kim asked him a question, he put out his hand. “I’m talking,” he said and looked at her with a twinkle.
We never knew when the camera was going to be upon us. We all worked hard preparing improvisations, huddling in groups, writing notes, rehearsing little asides. (I recently found a scrap of paper covered with mad spidery ideas and the following bits of dialogue: “Bitch. You copied my collection.” “You’re being paranoid. I never copy. Everyone knows that!” “Hell-oo! Roman sandals! I did Roman sandals for spring couture!” “Those sandals came from the fall collection two years ago. Look in the archives.”)
Danny Aiello had a different idea of improvisation. He simply ran through the A to Z of reaction as soon as the camera came near him. One time he would laugh hysterically. (Me: “Interesting what he’s done with hemlines this season, non?” Danny: “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.”) The next time he would be snoring and wake with a jolt. He was very good at all these states but it was deeply frustrating for the actors who had to play alongside him. The only people he had time for were Sophia and Marcello. He would sit in their tent acting Italian, talking about pasta, reminiscing about places he had been in his childhood, as they listened politely.
I pointed this out to Betty Bacall and she fixed me with those piercing blue eyes. “You are the wickedest woman in Paris,” she replied.
One day we were shooting a scene in a huge long room. The whole cast were at one end, enjoying some fashion show after-party, when Sophia arrived at the other end, saw Marcello for the first time in twenty years and fainted. “When she faints,” said Bob as we set up the shot, “I want you all to run down to that end of the room and surround her. Remember, she is a very important woman.”
As we stood around waiting for action, Richard E. Grant, Tracey Ullman and I made a bet that Danny would arrive first at Sophia’s side. Bob shouted “Action!” and we all rushed towards Sophia, like some mad end-of-term egg and spoon race. She collapsed gracefully on the floor and we all crowded around her. Danny Aiello barged through the group, shouting, “Let me through. Let me through. I’m a doctor.”
This was a new one. I nudged Betty, and Richard began to laugh.
“Stand back. Let me give her mouth to mouth,” said the ingenious Danny, effectively removing us all from the scene.
“You want to kill her?” I asked politely.
“Cut!” shouted Bob. “Fantastic!”
We all began the long walk back to first positions, giggling like schoolgirls, when Danny lumbered up to me. “You gonna say that?” he asked, threateningly.
“Yes, Danny. I thought it was rather funny, didn’t you?”
He stopped me roughly. “No, I don’t think it’s fucking funny,” he said, like an Italian cop in a cheap movie. All eyes were upon us. An electric silence fell as assistants got ready to pull us apart. Bob was watching from the other end of the room, thrilled. This was the meat and gravy to him.
“Listen, Danny, I’m sick of your Italian macho act,” I said, showing off wildly. I’d never had such a captive A-list audience.
“I’m not Italian!” he screamed. “I’m Jewish! Is that a problem for you?”
“It’s not a problem for me, but do Sophia and Marcello know?”
He looked like he might head-butt me. He was fiercely intercepted by Betty Bacall. “Go away, you bully,” she commanded, coming between us.
“Fucking liberals!” screamed Danny. “I’m sick of all you fucking liberals!”
Altman is a brilliant filmmaker. He sets up a scene in the most exciting way for the actors. Three or four different conversations take place at the same time. Bob shoots on long lenses from all four corners of the room and the effect can be dazzling. Actors adore working for him, because he keeps us on our toes. We don’t have time to take a nap, because we are constantly plotting what we can do in the back of the scene to steal the focus. Being “in character” at a Paris fashion party where half my real-life friends were gathered was the most fun I have ever had at work. Acting merged with reality. Sadly, Prêt-à-Porter just misses being a great film. Bob was the perfect man for the job, but the whole circus just got bigger and bigger, and he ended up being swept away.
I was sitting on a staircase during a break, feeling tortured and needy, when Bob walked past me, looking like the Kentucky Fried Chicken man. “How are you doing, Rupert?”
“I feel terrible, Bob.”
“Me too,” he said, and ran off before I could go on.
I sold my house in the South of France and moved into an apartment near the Place de Clichy in Paris. Prêt-à-Porter came out, and I became the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium for Men. I saw myself pass by on buses, in the metro, and in South American airports. All those years after Saint Laurent danced with Nureyev at the Club Sept, I was finally by his side for a moment, surrounded by paparazzi, holding his hand as I was introduced by aides as his latest face. By then, Saint Laurent’s love of Proust had turned him into one of that tome’s characters. Vacant and disorientated, with a faraway smile and thick glasses, he could have been one of those duchesses kept alive by paraffin injections at one of Madame Verdurin’s afternoons. Soon he would sell his name, and be just a body, a vague hologram wandering around the souk of Tangier, where all men who lose their names end up.
Once best friends with Karl Lagerfeld, the two men mysteriously fell out. (The faces of the inner circle still become rigid upon enquiry as to the reason why.) Karl lived in a palace in St. Germain, chubby and alone, mourning the loss of his one great love, Jacques de Bascher, from beneath the mink coverlets of his tiny Empire sleigh bed. Jacques’ precious body, never once possessed by Karl, but possibly by Yves, was now the unlikely bedfellow of the Carnation Queen herself, Karl’s mother. Side by side they lie in the stone vault beneath the family chapel in the Loire waiting for the day that Karl squeezes in between them. (He is so thin now, he will probably be able to slip through the cracks!)
George the lawyer was hit over the head in New York and developed Parkinson’s. He sat in a chair and stared out the window of the apartment where he had lived since the war, looking at the Eiffel Tower and the grey rooftops from which, in the last moments before his mind froze, he had tried to jump.
I had affairs with a volleyball player, an actor and a hooker. My best friend was an English boy called Jerry Stafford, who lived near by and together we went to the tea dance at the Palace on Sundays. Alone I prowled like the Baron de Charlus through the necklace of dark rooms and dungeons that hung around the graceful centre of Paris. Everyone who was anyone seemed to be there, hiding in the shadows.
The lady who ran Saint Laurent, Ariel, looked after me like a prince. I was clothed in crushed velvet, fed at high tables and paid a good deal of money. Jean-Baptiste Mondino took the pictures for the Opium ads; unfortunately during the second campaign he photographed me on an upholstered leather sofa with chalk-white make-up, and the picture looked like a zombie emerging from an open coffin. I lost the job. But until then, I went all over the world with Ariel for four years, and we became close friends. Living in Paris and working for Saint Laurent opened doors that had previously remained closed.
In the January of 1996, ten years after moving to France, and two years after moving from St. Tropez to Paris, I got my second job in French, playing Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Palais de Chaillot, France’s National Theatre. The play was an enormous success. My picture by Pierre et Gilles was on all the Morris columns. (Morris columns are wide round green pillars with posters on them for plays and films, made famous by Proust.)
It had snowed that Christmas, and on New Year’s Eve, Lychee went to the Bois as usual. She never returned. A few days later her distraught mother and I went to the police and for one month we waited for news. Mo and I walked through the snow to the theatre every night in a strange dream. It is a weird feeling, waiting for someone to show up. You become a sort of ghost yourself. Life goes on, but every corner reminds you of their absence, and there is a constant flutter in your stomach.
As we reached the theatre, Mo would gallop ahead down the five flights of stairs to visit various friends around the enormous underground maze. There was a whole world inside that theatre, and we both loved it. The applause washed over me every night, and as I bowed I could feel the dark mass of the Bois near by. Somewhere inside lay Lychee under a snowy blanket. But each day brought no news. Paris never looked more beautiful. A clairvoyant said that Lychee was being held hostage, and someone else said they had seen her in Marrakesh. She was a thread that wove through many different lives, and all sorts of people called to ask for news. It was Pacrète, another lady of the night, who finally told me that the old hookers in the Bois had seen her being bundled into a car by two men in the dead of night on New Year’s Eve. Finally her body was found in a ditch inside the walls of the great park of Versailles, naked but for her white fur coat. Sophie and I went to identify the body. A weird man with a ponytail pulled her out of a drawer. She was frozen and her head was cracked like a nut.
Lychee is buried in the same row as Oscar Wilde in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Buddhist nuns sang chants at the funeral while her poor mother screamed silently. Her friends stood around in the freezing February morning, and then we all went to a bar outside the walls of the cemetery. Nightclub recluses, opium addicts, society sex maniacs and me. It was the last time we would ever see each other. Lychee had been our point of contact. Now that she was gone, there was nothing much to say and we drifted from the bar like seedheads blown from a dandelion.
CHAPTER 35
Miami
On my way to the press junket for Prêt-à-Porter in New York I decided to take a holiday in Miami. People had been raving about South Beach for at least a couple of years. As far as I could tell from their rather exaggerated descriptions it was just a place where old Jews competed for deckchairs with drag queens. I was determined to hate the place. But several hours into the flight I woke to find myself flying over the Caribbean towards Miami. The sea was a deep blue, iced with little waves. Soon it became shallow and pale. Scrubby flat islands barely rose out of it. Waves broke on reefs like lace on a glass table and between us and all this was a pale blue sky tinged with pink as a big red sun went down behind thousands of cotton wool clouds, round and puffy, stretching into the far distance. Suddenly America at dusk was upon us, flat and endless. First the beach where people as big as dots played in the surf, and then mainland Miami spread out in a giant urban sprawl, grid after grid, before finally giving way to the vast swamps of Florida over which we circled. As we touched down, lights were already twinkling in the vast suburb and the clouds turned into long dark fingers on a white sky.
Miami International has always been one of my favourite airports. I first came across it as a teenager on those faraway trips to John Jermyn’s boat or to the Harris house on Paradise Island. It was the first port of call before catching the Shanks seaplane to Nassau Harbour. As the doors of the plane open the wet scented Florida air rushes into the cabin. It smells of sun cream, air-conditioning and tropical drinks. A light glow breaks out on the brows of the passengers like a golden shower from heaven, an instant feeling of health, and that glorious bucket and spade anticipation of a seaside holiday. Inside the terminal, the smell of damp carpet is the eau de toilette that will follow you around Florida. Rivers of delicious-smelling green fitted carpet guide the traveller past gates to destinations that have only been dreamt of or read about in the pages of Graham Greene and Ian Fleming. Port-au-Prince. Port-of-Spain. Caracas. Montevideo. São Paolo. Miami International is a traveller’s sweet shop and seeing the names of all these places made my heart miss a beat. I wanted to know them all.
The first brush with exiled Cuba is at the airport. They have their fingers in every pie and the best ones (empanadas) are sold in La Carretta, my favourite airport restaurant. There you will notice that even if you are first, while there is a Cuban standing in the line, you will not be served. The unaccustomed traveller can taste racism and an authentic café con leche in the same gulp, and should get used to both. You will always be a gringo in Miami. Little did I know that I would be playing some of the most dramatic scenes of my career at its counter.
I had booked my flight a day early by mistake, and my hotel was full, so I decided to stay for one night in the airport hotel, located right in the middle of the terminal. It is one of the seediest places I have ever been, but nevertheless possessed a special glamour of its own. I got into a shiny stainless-steel elevator from the departure lounge. A pair of Gideons were lurking politely by the door.
“Are you ready for some good news?” one of them said.
“Not really,” I replied and the doors closed.
Upstairs on the twentieth floor was a barely lit restaurant with a panoramic view of the airport. South American cut-throats huddled around tables. The Gideons arrived and joined a hearty group of Bible black belts. They pointed at me, whispered and the whole group fell about laughing. Planes roared through the sky in the background, their tail lights blinking. The effect was magical, lonely and very American. After a “gourmet buffet” I wandered around the airport like a lost soul in purgatory. At one gate was a line for a midnight flight to Asunción. At another people flooded in from Fort Worth. There were shrieks of reunion and waves of regret
as travellers crashed in on the tide and were sucked out on the undertow. I spent a sleepless night on a foam mattress as a couple bonked in the room next door, but after a delicious breakfast at La Carretta I left for the beach in a clunking old taxi with red velvet interiors.
The Raleigh Hotel was located on Collins Avenue and 17th Street. It stood in a row of run-down Art Deco towers on a buckled road. It was a sleazy neighbourhood of fleapits and rest homes, and on the porches of these peeling establishments with their romantic but misleading names—Surfcomber, The South Seas, Coral Reef—were rows of metal chairs upon which the old people sat listlessly watching the traffic bump along Collins. Nothing had changed on South Beach for years. You only went there to die. It was cheap, very Jewish and the weather was good. But things were changing.
Fashion had arrived in the mid-eighties, attracted by the light, the beach and the crumbling Art Deco painted in garish colours, and soon there was a restaurant—the Strand—and a couple of hotels. Queens with AIDS began to migrate south. President Reagan had not so much as mentioned the word AIDS during his eight-year presidency and the queen had become a pariah. You gathered up your children in your arms when one went past. They cashed in their life insurances and came to Miami to die; if not with dignity, at least with a tan. And so they began to trickle in, and with them came an entourage of club freaks and drag queens that were sick of New York and entranced by the dangerous Cubans recently released from Fidel’s prisons who roamed the streets south of 5th. They were gorgeous Latino panthers, a far cry from the bejewelled bitches that sashay through Lincoln Road today. You didn’t know whether they were going to fuck you or shoot you, and so by the beginning of the nineties a scene had been born that was to transform the beach in fifteen tiny years from a clapped-out dinosaurs’ graveyard into the physical manifestation of the whole grab-it world of Baby Doc Bush’s America.