Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  The shoot of My Best Friend’s Wedding was one of those enchanted times for me, where the prevailing winds were in my favour. They blew me along and everything fell into place around me. On a whim I decided to move to New York and found a pretty little house in the West Village. It was hidden down an alleyway in the gardens behind three streets. Leaving there one morning for Chicago, who should I see coming out of the next-door house but Joe McKenna from dressing room D at the Aldwych. We had not talked for over ten years. After being fired from the theatre he had become a pop singer and then a fashion stylist. One of his early shoots was with me for the Tatler magazine in 1985. The day began pleasantly enough but none of the clothes fitted and soon the two of us had a blazing row. The magazine published a picture of me with some snot on my nose. War was declared, and we hadn’t spoken since. Seeing him now, I shrank back into my alleyway. I wasn’t quite ready to make up. Now he was the world’s most successful stylist, a different animal in a simple white shirt and black jeans from the child star dancing with his tin lunch box down the Aldwych twenty years before. As he disappeared around the corner, I made a dash for the car and left for the summer in the Windy City.

  The heat was unbearable that summer of 1997. Downtown Chicago was a dramatic fortress of mirrored towers clustered together on the shore of Lake Michigan, appearing out of the haze of the lake like a modern Emerald City as the plane banked towards the airport. That vast expanse of water shimmered in the heat and millions of little silver fish lay dead on the shore. The crew (and me) stayed in the Marriott Residence Inn, a weird new kind of American hotel with absolutely no character. Complimentary coffee, creamer and sweetener were laid on a table in reception, and strangely shaped travellers lumbered past with paper cups full of this watery concoction to the elevator where we all looked jaundiced in the neon glare. The hotel was a stump in the forest of skyscrapers, constantly in shadow, but for odd splashes of light reflected by the mirrored towers. The street was airless. The tarmac was melting and smelt delicious. Every squeaking brake bounced dramatically off the walls of our glass canyon, an uncanny melody accompanied by the drone of a million air-conditioners and the hum of North Wacker Drive.

  PJ was as good as his word and the part of George had grown into a scene-stealer on every page. On the first day we shot a scene in a taxi between Julia, Dermot Mulroney and myself, in which Julia pretended to Dermot that I was her fiancé. The next day the powers that be at Sony called PJ. They were ecstatic. It was clear that Julia and I had a strange on-screen chemistry. Just as in real life you click with someone for no apparent reason, similarly on screen sometimes a vivid relationship effortlessly materialises. It can’t be bought, and there’s no technique to get to it, but when it happens work becomes a party and already you are a better actor. Dialogue trips off the tongue. Eye contact is charged with a strange glitter. It feels so great not to be straining for once that you fall a little in love with that other person, and the film turns into a delightful mountain of virgin powder snow across which the two of you slalom, looking beautiful and radiant, and everything feels like the first time.

  Julia was beautiful and tinged with madness, that obligatory ingredient for a legendary star. Most of the time she was a calm, practical earth mother, curled up on a director’s chair in a Marilyn cardigan with her knitting needles and a bag of wool. But sometimes she would rear up like an untamed filly, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at some invisible lasso. She had a vein on her forehead that occasionally stood out. That was a sign not to make any fast moves. She could buck you, or kick out. She would have been perfect as Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night, that funny, beautiful, capable thoroughbred, suddenly prone to screaming breakdowns in the bathroom.

  Sometimes on a Friday night at the end of work, she would give me a ride back to New York on the Sony jet. Then I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B. With a cocktail in a cut glass, wearing a towelling robe, she would hop barefoot with wet hair from the trailer to the car. The only baggage was the key to her apartment and her newly acquired gay confidant. Chatting intensely on subjects that a girl could only discuss with a man who was not nursing a hidden erection, we huddled in the back of the limo and sipped our drinks as we sped through the suburbs towards the private airport. Gates opened as if by magic and we drove towards a huge jet in the middle of an empty airfield. A carpet stretched across that brief yard of the real world; she tiptoed across it and jumped on board. The doors were shut and the jet moved simultaneously. We sat on the large double bed with drinks and delicious snacks served by sympathetic girls in uniform, and time flew. America passed by. It seemed impossibly far away now. We lay back for touchdown. Standing by the open door of another car was a bodyguard with a large bouquet of flowers in his arms. Before getting out at her place, she put on a pair of grandmother’s slippers to bridge the only gap that Hollywood could not control—the sidewalk between the car and her front door. A star never really had to touch the ground.

  The Mistresses of the Universe often end up with their trainers, and Julia was going out with hers, a man called Patrick. I was fascinated by these powerful women. Instead of being the escorts of presidents, they ended up marrying their hairdressers. They were the fairy princesses trapped inside ivory towers. They only met co-stars and staff.

  Like Madonna, Julia smelt vaguely of sweat, which I thought was very sexy. There is a male quality to the female superstar. There has to be. If a girl is going to survive in Hollywood on that journey from the broken eggshell to the sea, she must develop special “people skills.” Flocks of executive seagulls will try to take her and drop her onto the rocks. The casting couch is not the solution for a young hopeful. She must learn to fuck them before they fuck her if she is to survive, so she becomes a kind of she-man, a beautiful woman with invisible balls. In her personal relationships, after sex with a man, she quite possibly fights the desire to eat him. For him, all of the hims, the smell of a superstar is a strange and powerful reminder, attractive and terrifying, of who is wearing the trousers. It marks him as her territory.

  And this film was her territory. But there was another embryonic superstar taking her first tentative steps across the beach to the sea. Cameron Diaz was the antithesis of Julia. She was gangly and exuberant, a tomboy with gazelle’s legs, and good in high heels, which Julia wasn’t. She loved greasy burgers, didn’t care that they made her spotty, and she wiped her hands on her jeans after she ate. She went out with Matt Dillon.

  “Why can’t Cameron relax around me?” asked Julia one day. Actually Julia couldn’t relax around Cameron. It requires a strong nerve for a superstar to take a part where she loses the guy to a younger girl. It meant that Julia was no longer an ingénue. Already she was listed as Hollywood’s thirty-third most powerful person. She had survived the crash of Mary Reilly. My Best Friend’s Wedding was her comeback film. Suddenly here was this gorgeous kitten whom everybody loved, who talked about “window treatments” instead of curtains, so natural as to seem unnatural. It must have been unnerving.

  Cameron came of age before our very eyes. From the brilliant scene in the karaoke bar to the confrontation in a station toilet, she staked a claim for Julia’s crown. She might not have known she was doing it, but Julia did.

  But nothing matters when the job is well done. If the girls didn’t hit it off, so what? The scenes between them were charged with the dangerous energy that money can’t buy, when art flirts with life. Julia was never better. She couldn’t afford to be anything else. She put everything into her performance, and in my opinion it was a yardstick for romantic comedy that no one has surpassed. Her perfect timing and flawless beauty were offset by a vulnerability that was really touching and turned the film into something deeper than the usual tinny sitcoms served up by the studios.

  Martin left Miami and moved into my house in the West Village, and that summer was the best time of the sketchy years we spent together. Life was all col
oured lights. Drunk on success, in love with everything, on weekends with Martin and Mo I discovered New York. It was unrecognisable as the city I had known before. Now it was safe, corporate and middle class. The danger had evaporated. Your heart no longer lived in your mouth and “Native New Yorker” was no longer the song. Now it was Junior Vasquez and the DJ culture. A world of remixes and remakes. Trashy old TV series were suddenly art and movie stars had turned their wily eyes to advertising. The only hookers left on 42nd Street were Minnie and Mickey Mouse.

  But I loved it more than before.

  On Sunday night the car would arrive, I would jump in and the reverse journey would take me back to Julia’s front door and on to the Marriott Residence Inn, dropping her off at the Four Seasons on the way.

  Sometimes I went for dinner with PJ and Cameron, or Dermot and his wife Catherine, but otherwise it was also quite a lonely summer. I hardly worked but I had to stay in Chicago in case it rained, when one of my new scenes would be squeezed into the schedule. So I sat around the Marriott Residence Inn, watching the comings and goings and dreaming of my meteoric rise to stardom during the long blistering afternoons. There was only one problem. My character ducked out halfway through the movie. I had to find a way to muscle in on the end.

  In a bittersweet finale Julia loses Dermot to Cameron and in the first cut of the film she finishes up dancing at the wedding party with a blobby frat boy and the movie ends. But when the studio looked at the “scores” from the test screenings, the results were unanimous. Middle America wanted their sweetheart to end up with “the gay guy.” Why? Because he was funny.

  PJ wrote a new ending and we shot it on the Sony lot at Easter the following year. My prayers had been answered. George was all set to score.

  There is nothing like the head-trip when Hollywood’s giant eye turns its attention on you. When the movie hit $100 million at the box office I was summoned to meet the heads of all the studios on a kind of Evita victory tour. Being a complete slut, I loved these meetings. Walking through the hive of offices to the queen bee’s headquarters was an intoxicating catwalk, bathed in the surreptitious glances of interns and assistants, flanked by agent and manager, and greeted at the end by glossy powerful men in starched white shirts and ties. Sitting down in an office, graciously accepting coffee and compliments, while being sized up, measured and compared, was enormous fun. I had two ideas. I wanted to make a gay James Bond story, and a comedy with Julia about a pair of superstars who were married but he was gay. I sold them both.

  CHAPTER 37

  Sea Crest Apartments

  Just after the 1997 shoot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, Albert found me an apartment in a crumbling old building on Ocean Drive and 2nd Street called Sea Crest. It was just one room, with a tiny bathroom, but it was right on the water. A crippled palm tree grew sideways in the garden. Next to it lay an old catamaran half submerged in the sand and a path led through the dunes onto the beach. My neighbour was a German chef called Michael, and above lived a boy who played a piano late at night. The previous tenant had died in my apartment, from AIDS, and people would come by and suddenly go white. “Oh my God,” they’d say. “This is where John Jacobus lived.”

  There was a strange trace of him about the place, and over the years I felt I came to know him through a collage of gossip and legend. In his heyday he had owned the famous Torpedo Club, but he had a date with the grim reaper and first his puggish face and exceptional body were splattered, as if by a paintbrush, with small black dots: Kaposi’s sarcoma. More and more they clung to him like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, so that by the time he died he was so disfigured that the Latinos who hung around the bodega on Collins called him the Elephant Man. The apartment had been his travelling companion, witness to his terrible loneliness and fear on the road to death, and there was definitely a strange atmosphere there. Mo felt it, and sometimes in the night I would wake and see him looking intently in the air, his eyes a liquid black, ears slightly raised and his shiny nose flexing in silent dialogue.

  For all that, it was an enchanted place. Lying in bed with the windows open, between Martin and Mo, were some of the happiest times of my life. It was like being on a raft on the high seas. The breeze swept through the apartment, sometimes wailing, sometimes just flapping the blinds, carrying on it the crash of the waves, the benediction of John Jacobus, and all the mystery of death and love.

  There was one other dog at Sea Crest, a Doberman called Midnight who was very ancient and could hardly walk. Her owner Cathy and I would chat as Mo watched Midnight wobble across the yard and shakily squat, like Marie Antoinette on the way to the tumbril. On the night she died everyone helped to bury her under the palm tree. In those days I never locked my door. Our neighbourhood was a community.

  I rediscovered housework; I could clean that place from top to toe in forty-five minutes. Mo had never seen me clean before and was initially confused. He would stand in the doorway to our room and bark as I scurried around with my mop. But soon he accustomed himself to my new role and lay on the porch, baking himself in the sun so that the tips of his coat turned bronze. As Michael, our neighbour, came back from the store and began to cook, he would look up and sniff, before lumbering off to help with the preparations.

  Next door was a fleapit hotel, the Villa Luisa. Luisa Pigg was a tiny old lady with a penchant for sailor hats and naval regalia. She ran a brothel in the early days, and she made her own cheese out of milk and vinegar in a bit of muslin. She pretended to be Italian and spent the mornings sitting in front of her hotel with crones from the neighbourhood, legs and arms akimbo.

  “Tutto bene,” she said each morning as Mo and I passed by.

  “Tutto bene, Luisa.”

  Then she shrugged her shoulders. “E cosi!” That seemed to be the extent of her Italian.

  Across the road was the famous Century Hotel, owned by two lunatic queens, David and Willy. They were known as “the Germans,” even though Willy was in fact Austrian and David was English. The Century was the other hotel, along with the Raleigh, in the renaissance of South Beach, a celebrity halfway house with a more hardcore crowd, such as Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Kristen McMenemy, Janice Dickinson, and a famous New York furrier called Larissa, who looked like a mixture of Cruella de Vil and Coco Chanel. It was a low-key, lazy sort of place, even more disorganised than the Raleigh. The whole staff disappeared in the afternoon for a longish nap, or a spot of sunbathing, which could be awkward if you were in a hurry to check out and catch a plane.

  They had a beach club on the other side of the road with a beautiful garden (now Starbucks) where they threw extravagant full-moon parties. Returning from a late-night walk with Mo across the park on Ocean Drive, under a huge Florida moon sailing through the sky, we would sit under the trees and watch unobserved as three hundred freaks in fancy dress were squeezed inside the white wicker fence of Willy and David’s magic garden. They were this year’s bright young things, a frenetic party set caught between two wars. Lit by flaming torches, Cleopatra (Larissa) chatted with Nero (Mugler) and a Cuban hairdresser (Oribe). The real Linda Evangelista gave tips to a drag version of herself. Sometimes Luisa would make a rare appearance in a rubber dress and dance round and round like a spinning witch. The laughter and music could still be heard back at Sea Crest as I slipped into something a bit more comfortable and left my disgruntled dog to join the party.

  When they finally sold the Century to property developer Bobby Stretcher, the death knell began to toll for all of us south of 5th, and the quiet hot days on that crack house street were drawing to a close. Ingrid Casares (Madonna’s friend) and Chris Paciello (also Madonna’s friend until he went to prison charged with murder) opened a snippy A-list restaurant, Joia, that served inedible food. Suddenly the neighbourhood was a traffic jam of limousines carrying Puff Daddy, Donald Trump, Madonna, and J. Lo into our midst. The new glossy world had arrived, and one by one the huge towers of South Point grew up, much like the Kaposis on John Jacobus’ body. T
hey had new names for the tech crowd and the Botox runners who were moving into Miami. No more Surfcomber, South Seas or Coral Reef. The new Miami Beach was christened with more “powerful” names like Continuum, Portofino, Murano, The Icon.

  But the most powerful word of all was Versace. Gianni Versace’s arrival on South Beach in 1991 was a turning point for Miami, as was his death on the steps of his mansion in July 1997. As Andy’s death had been for New York a few years earlier, Gianni’s murder marked the end of an era.

  The Versace man had become the image of South Beach, a brilliant cartoon version of something one could glimpse on a good day through the telescope in the observation tower that sat atop the Versace mansion on Ocean Drive. That telescope had once been trained upon the firmament. Now it was focused on the earthbound stars of the Twelfth Street Beach, unemployed Latino hunks with a feminine streak who stretched out on colourful towels in the afternoon sun. Their legs were shaved and their bodies glistened with sacrificial oil. Occasionally they looked up, out to the sea from whence they came (possibly on a raft), all thick necks, little ears and flat heads, to check whether they were being noticed. Little did they know! These men were aware of themselves in a new way that was totally outside the conventions of masculinity. Gianni translated this into silk shirts made from ladies’ scarves over necklaces heavy with charms and crosses, as if to save the wearer from himself. He squeezed muscular thighs into low-cut white jeans several sizes too small, and he dressed his doll in dangerous metal-tipped boots. The angle of their cuban heels forced the wearer into a room crotch first, and his buttocks followed in a mouth-watering clench. It was an original vision, not stolen, not a reaction, and even though the people who should have worn it didn’t, and many who shouldn’t did (Elton John and David Furnish lounging on a couch behind a velvet rope), nobody seemed to mind. It was converted into virtual reality by a plethora of top photographers and beautiful models on the crumbling streets of South Beach, where those silk shirts fluttered across the body like the clothes on Greek statues that Gianni loved so much.