Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  Gianni had presided over South Beach like a household god in his mausoleum. He was given free rein by the city and allowed to tear down a listed Deco building next to his house. “Art Deco. So démodé!” he said.

  But each year Deco Drive got rowdier and cheaper around the Versace mansion. First, rows of high trees were planted, and then a secondary interior wall was built to shield the family from the crashing waves of progress. There was a feeling that the outside world was a bit too close for comfort. When Gianni bought the house, after all, Deco Drive was still a sleepy row of rest homes. The only noise you heard at night was from the odd ambulance that came to rush some ancient to intensive care. Now the house was the sore thumb on a strip of cheap flashing bars on eternal happy hour.

  In those early days, dinners would be large affairs in the dining room made of seashells. Then we all wore our Versace finery, and the flickering dream became a brief reality. Gianni was polished and lively at the head of the table. Antonio was the perfect consort at the other end. The room, the china, the linen, the stars, the staff, and of course, the young men, were all the Versace ideal. Those meals were hysterical romps that would stretch out until we all jumped into limousines and danced together in The Warsaw until dawn. Later, when Gianni had met everyone and they all looked like the same person over and over again, he got bored and begged off after dinner, waving us off into the night. Later still, those dinners were shorter and ended abruptly, like an evening in Hollywood when you are just thinking of having a second cup of coffee and suddenly everyone has got up to leave.

  Once, a few months before he died, I walked over to the house for a quiet evening, just the three of us. It was a holiday weekend, and America was out on Deco Drive. But as the thick oak door clunked shut behind me, the real world receded into a muffled thud and the sound of the fountain in the courtyard tickled the senses into the Versace bubble. The table was set on the terrace in front of the beautiful pool. Mo headed straight for it and jumped in with a splash, casting an amazing shadow through the water onto the glittering face of the mosaic Medusa beneath.

  “Ma, guarda!” said Gianni, distractedly.

  That night screams and broken bottles, demonic laughter and screeching brakes, accompanied a polite conversation that bordered on the macabre. Gianni was there but not there in the candlelight, visibly bored in black, an orthodox priest drained from an exorcism. Antonio, by now a polished diplomat, the Cardinal Richelieu of the house of Versace, guided us through a dinner-party conversation that could have been lifted from a post-war drawing room comedy.

  It was incredible how Gianni had changed since the first time I met him at the Versace headquarters in Via Gesù all those years ago. Then, he was a timid humble dreamer with a shock of frizzy black hair and a gentle reedy voice that only spoke Italian with the very slightest Calabrian lilt. Such was his ability to concentrate that within a year he had learnt a fluent flexible English, and was already a different man. But fifteen years of power and accolade would turn a nun into a frenzied dictator, and by now Gianni had a reputation for flinging girls from the catwalk during rehearsals and screaming at all and sundry. Ironically, cancer found its way into his throat. Trying to find a point of contact with him, sitting at dinner all those years later, I remembered out loud a September long ago when he and I had met at the Edinburgh Festival. He was returning from a solitary trip around Scotland and had called out of the blue. We had dinner together and I remembered him talking about his trip in a sweet faltering English.

  For a moment the recollection brought life to his eyes. “What a beautiful place is Skye, and Eigg . . .” he said and described to a surprised Antonio his adventures round the Western Isles. The image of him alone on deck, wrapped in a cashmere sweater, eating a solitary meal in some island port, or ploughing through a slate-coloured ocean towards a craggy green rock surrounded by screaming seagulls, made us all laugh and then fall silent. The gulf between then and now was huge and poignant. Hip hop suddenly blared from a passing car. Gianni got up from his chair.

  “Call me old-fashioned, but give me beauty,” he said, laughing, and then went upstairs.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Hollywood Year

  That summer of 1998 I had it all. One hot dusk early in July found me looking out of my new bedroom window at the whole of Hollywood. Well, to be precise, the valley. I had rented a sprawling estate in the Hollywood hills. It was a dusty, run-down wooden “ranch house” owned by a family of Christian Scientists called the Cheathams. Bob Cheatham had built it with his bare hands. You could tell. And Mrs. Cheatham was the neighbour from Rosemary’s Baby. She was a tiny little thing with a penchant for purple. She could creep up to the house undetected and would appear without warning at our kitchen door in her striped sun visor bearing little gifts—a pot of honey, or a plate of home-made cookies. Under her sun visor, blue eyes the size of saucers blazed out at you.

  At first, we were disturbed by these sudden apparitions. She seemed to be mysteriously intuitive concerning medication because whenever one was about to gobble an antibiotic or take a swig of Nyquil before going out to work, the sun visor would miraculously pop up from behind the privet hedge by the kitchen window. She was actually very nice but like many Christians she was “firm,” to say the least; and the house was extremely expensive for what it was. Fergie, the Duchess of York, had rented it before us and had rather aptly told an exasperated Mrs. Cheatham that it was like the seven dwarves’ cottage. “Can you imagine?” retorted Mrs. Cheatham. “Bob built this house with his bare hands. And who’s she? Not Snow White, I’m sure.”

  But for all Bob’s hard work, it was a rambling and makeshift rest home for daddy-long-legs, and it smelt of a hundred tenants and their shattered dreams. There was a stable door into the kitchen and Mrs. Cheatham would lean on the lower half and drop her little gifts on the counter, often accompanied by leaflets and books by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, who invented Christian Science.

  “What are you taking there, you rascal?” she would say.

  “Er, it’s called Night Nurse, Mrs. Cheatham.”

  “It won’t do you any good, you know. It’s all in there.” And she would tap her sun visor, before scampering off. During the course of my year in Hollywood I grew to love this woman; not least because much later, after a visit from the material girl, she popped up from behind her hedge saying, “She’s a curious little thing, that Madonna.” It became our code name; as in, “The curious little thing on line one.”

  Anyway, the great thing about the house was the garden and the view. The house was cut into the side of the mountain and the lawn rolled right to the edge of a sort of cliff where an incongruous wrought-iron gazebo was dangerously perched. In hot weather there would be tiny growls from the earth below, miniquakes, our planet’s groans at the weight of Hollywood sitting on its face, and the gazebo would shudder and jangle suddenly, as if for no reason.

  The whole valley spread out beneath it for miles and miles. On one side you could see Warner Brothers Studios and the airport at Burbank, where full-sized jumbos looked like little ice-lollies taking off into the sky. On the far right was the Forest Lawn Cemetery, and beyond that the Disney lot where I was currently employed making the $100 million mess, Inspector Gadget. Through the beautiful poisonous haze, grid after grid of strangely named streets engulfed these landmarks, and freeways cut across them that looked like lava flows at night. Above it all in the distance stood the San Bernardino mountains; everything looked close enough to touch except it wasn’t—the mountains were thirty miles away, a visual reminder that we were living in a land of illusion.

  As another day ended, the street lights below silently twinkled and shimmered into life. My garden was a hive of activity, reflecting every facet of my latest incarnation. Martin, my hyperallergic Uruguayan boyfriend, was shambling across the lawn, just back from work, shedding his shirt and tie and dropping them on the grass as he went. (Who is going to pick them up? I muttered to myself as I inhaled deeply on a giant
spliff; me, I suppose.) Mo gambolled along at his feet. Underneath the plane tree sat the obligatory family that often comes with a Latin American liaison. Martin’s grandparents were Keela and Oswald, a sweet old couple who had moved to Uruguay from Europe. They were visiting for a month. Their daughter, Martin’s mother, Juana—just a couple of years older than me—was married to the only other gringo in the family, Richard. They were playing cards under the tree and chatted softly in Spanish. As their pride and joy arrived they raised their arms as one in cooing adoration. This man could do no wrong, and I must admit he cut a fine figure as he let himself be drawn into the collective embrace. On the other side of the garden, Larry, my psychotic gay chef, was laying the table for dinner in the gazebo. Jay, the silver-haired man from the Raleigh Hotel with the laugh like a sailor, my immaculately brought-up (Yale-educated) lady-in-waiting, was pruning roses with Mrs. Cheatham, and my best friend and resident writing partner Mel was stomping about downstairs in her signature clogs hunting for cigarettes. It was, as usual, that time of the month, so tonight was going to be bumpy.

  This was my world. It was all too good to be true. I sat upstairs, king/queen of all I surveyed. The weed was making me giggly. Thank God for British Sterling, my new Rasta dealer-writer-friend from Jamaica. He made nightly rounds of the hills in his souped-up Lincoln. The weed was strong. I was already feeling weightless and prone to hysteria when a large straw hat entered the garden below. All I could see underneath was a little pair of feet. It was John Schlesinger. Mel came clonking out of the house, red and puffy . She looked as if someone had been holding her under water for too long and had then put her in a tumble-dryer with a pair of trainers. The hat turned and two arms came out to greet her. I tensed to see whether she was going to continue being as moody as she had been all day, but luckily Mel had a smiling public face, like most of the great monsters, and tonight was going to be no exception. After all, Madonna was coming to dinner.

  “Hi, John,” she tinkled. “Have you settled into your new house okay?”

  “It’s really quite ghastly,” sang John in his famous falsetto. “But it’ll do dear. Where is Princess Flat Feet?”

  “Up here, John,” I shouted, and the hat looked up.

  John Schlesinger was back in Hollywood: the mischievous blue eyes, the perfectly groomed beard, the little stomach, the enormous hands. (“You know what they say, dear?”) Fergie might have been forgiven, had she arrived at this moment, for thinking she was still in the seven dwarves’ cottage. John, Mel and I settled down with drinks served by Larry, who was brewing up for a meltdown.

  “Where’s M?”

  “Late.” As usual.

  “Who on earth are all those people?”

  “Martin’s family.”

  “My dear, it’s all very Tennessee Williams. They look as if they might lock you up in a cupboard at any minute. How long are they staying?”

  “A month.”

  “Goodness! Are they having dinner?”

  “No, they’re going out to the Beverly Center.”

  “Good, because we must have a serious discussion. I had that cunt Sherry Lansing on the phone no sooner than I had arrived.”

  Backtrack. The week after the release of My Best Friend’s Wedding, I was in the car with my new agent, Nick Styne, on my Evita tour of victory around the studios when Sherry Lansing called. She had a film named The Next Best Thing. It was a sickly script about a nasty humourless woman and her flubby gay best friend. She (the woman—not Sherry) was such a bitch that no man could tolerate her and, needy cow that she was, she didn’t feel complete without a baby. Enter the flubby queen. Everybody’s favourite person. Funny, supportive, great dress sense, everything a man was not. He was ideal, he could break into a show tune at any given moment and also—an added plus for the studio—he was that rarity in the homosexual community, an NPB (a non-practising bugger). He gave up the awkward subject of sex years ago when all his friends died. His solution to every one of life’s little problems was to go out and buy ready-made whipped cream and spray it into his friends’ mouths.

  These two highly revolting people decided by page twenty-three to go ahead and have a baby. At which point came one of the most distasteful montages I have ever read. It started with Him and Her giggling in bed as he tried to mount her. He was wearing a caveman outfit. They collapsed in peals of laughter and after a couple more futile and unlikely tries they ended up in hospital, unfortunately not with anything serious wrong. This time he was jerking off over a gay porno magazine into a little paper cup (talk about the glamour of cinema!). She was in the stirrups on the other side of a screen and by the end of the montage she had been upped by a turkey baster, and an egg was cracked by a flubby gay sperm. I turned it down flat. But it kept coming back, like a boomerang.

  Sherry Lansing said that if I agreed to take the part she would green-light the movie. Now this is a big deal for an actor. You know that you are getting somewhere when a studio head says they will green-light a movie for you: it immediately gives the script a golden aura; and you, too. What was bad about it becomes something that can be fixed as all your people (agents, managers and lawyers) get on the phone to make the most of the moment. Hopefully by teatime, the news will have spread around the town and they will be able to haul in a shoal of other offers by the end of play. And so, slowly but surely, what was once something that you would never do, first becomes the thing you’re using to get something else, and then suddenly it’s what you are doing. Next week.

  At the outset all the cards were mine and I could approve the casting. Elaine, my New York agent, called me one day saying, “What if Madonna played the other part?” I was ecstatic. I adored Madonna. Sherry was less enthusiastic, citing the kiss-of-death theory about Madonna in the movies. Elaine, the pushiest agent in the firmament, said that in this case Madonna would be so perfect for the role that the old rules would no longer apply. She could be pretty persuasive; eventually, Sherry said, if that’s what we wanted, then she’d go with it.

  Enter Tom Rosenberg. Handsome. Late forties. Mood swinger. His company, Lakeshore, was making the movie under the Paramount umbrella. He was a very charming man but you could tell at a glance that he could turn. Big time. He had a reputation of being a fairly tricky customer, but actually he was more like one of the old studio heads from the golden years. He ran his company his way. He didn’t much care what anyone else thought, and it was hard to change his mind about things. At the time he didn’t know a great deal about cinema, but he knew what he liked. The problem was, as far as I was concerned, his ideas were very different from mine. However, he was a great businessman and a fabulous manipulator. Pretty soon I thought I had him around my little finger, but actually he had me round his. His expert foreplay lulled me into a false sense of security.

  The first thing I did was to persuade him and his partner that Mel and I should rewrite the script. Our way. That is to say, with two or three major changes. My character would be a real gay man with a real gay life, not some token queen with his weird whipped-cream parallels. He would not be a decorator, and she would get pregnant because the two of them had sex. We wanted the movie to be a slice of life, and to take place in LA where stories like The Next Best Thing were already happening.

  In Hollywood, pitching is an art in itself. Part of the classic formula is to say something like, “You know what? It’s The Matrix meets Mary Poppins,” at which point everyone says, “Oh, I get it!” So we said, “It’s Shampoo meets Sunday Bloody Sunday”—and as if by magic, Duncan, my English agent, called me up and said that John Schlesinger (who had actually made Sunday Bloody Sunday) had heard about the film and was interested in taking part.

  “But Duncan,” I said. “He’s seventy years old!”

  “Yes, but his eye is still very much on the ball.”

  “On balls, you mean!”

  “No, but seriously, Rup . . .”

  John had directed some of the movies that had most turned my head in life: Sunday Blood
y Sunday, The Day of the Locust and Midnight Cowboy were some of my favourite films (quite aside from the fact that we’d been friends for twenty years, and I was very fond of him). But directors are like actors; and a great director is a reflection of his time. John’s best films described their times perfectly, they were his view of the world; but would he be able to cut a real slice of life out of Silver Lake in the late 1990s?

  Unfortunately all the directors we approached had turned the movie down. I discussed all this with Tom and said that if we got the right actors, the right cameraman and the right production designer, we could re-create a classic Schlesinger look and tone to the film. We could guide John. The strange thing was, Tom said yes to everything I asked, even offering me the role of executive producer, which I accepted with drunken alacrity. Producer, writer and star all at once! I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Without delay Mel and I were dispatched to London to meet John, where we came across our first hurdle. John loved the script as it was. And when we started telling him our ideas he very cunningly fell into a deep sleep. Mel and I looked at each other, not knowing whether to stop pitching—we were now getting quite good at it, and rather enjoyed the sound of our own voices—but the trouble was, we were about to get the giggles as John’s head sank deeper and deeper into his shirt. There was a big sweetie bowl in the middle of the table and I began to rummage around in it noisily, saying something inane like, “I’m sure I saw another liquorice allsort in here . . .”

  It did the trick, and he woke up with a little start. Mel smoothly went on as if nothing had happened, but we laughed all the way home.

  Fast forward. So much for the green light: it had taken two years to plough through our deals. Now it was July, and John was finally here to work with us on the script and go into pre-production. It was going to be a bumpy ride.