Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  Back in the garden of the seven dwarves’ cottage, after about an hour the sun went down and the curious little thing appeared through the sliding doors. She was a brunette.

  “My dear,” said John under his breath. “She looks like a vampire!”

  Madonna stalked towards us across the lawn, in her black embroidered cargo pants. This woman was breathtaking and tonight she was in her prime. The original material girl, with her puppy fat and boot-boy legs squeezed into a tutu, was a vague whispering wind around this new alabaster goddess with her swimmer’s shoulders and tiny waist. Just like America, everything about Madonna had changed, and what hadn’t had been carefully wrapped in psychological clingfilm and locked inside an interior fridge. Sometimes, in moments of stress, Madonna had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room. Which was good: I loved Holiday Madge, too. But either way, when she gave you her attention, it was 100 per cent. And it was mesmerising. She was famously late (except for work) but never apologised or explained.

  Dinner was a riot. John was at his very best. At one point Madonna asked him what his favourite pick-up line was and he replied, “My face seats three, and it’s leaving in ten minutes. Be on it!”

  Mel had written the sex scene. I thought it was brilliant. And tonight we had to pitch it to John and Madonna. It went like this: Madonna comes round to my house. It’s the 4th of July. Everybody is at some party except us. It is very hot. We make margaritas in my blender and get really shitfaced by the pool. The day wears on in a moody Shampoo meets Sunday Bloody Sunday montage of a baking hot day in an LA canyon. Silence is broken by the faraway noise of a car. I jump in the pool à la Bigger Splash. Madonna sleeps in the sun. The hot desert wind rustles in the palms; there is the odd snatch of conversation from a nearby house. By now we have passed out in the baking sun. I open my eyes. Look at the sleeping icon. She’s on her front, dribbling a bit. I adore this woman. I ask her to rub some sun cream on my back. Topless, in shades and bikini bottom (some chance, but we put it in anyway because you never know with M), she sits on my bum and rubs the sun cream into my shoulders and then my lower back. At a certain point I start to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?” she whines. I don’t answer. She asks again. She gets off me to fetch her drink, and I turn over. I’ve been sleeping and drinking and lying on my front. I have a massive hard-on under my Speedos. Madonna screams and throws the rest of her drink over it. Laugh laugh laugh. Realising her glass is now empty, she reaches for the blender and the by now lukewarm remnants of the margarita.

  “Fuck. There’s none left,” she says.

  I make a pond in my stomach by tensing my abs. “Here’s some,” I say.

  She laughs and swoops down to lick my tummy. “Waiter, I think there’s some Factor 15 in my margarita.” Her face is a sticky drunken mess. She swoops down again. And the camera pans up to me. Laughing.

  “Waiter,” I say. “ I think there’s a cock in my friend’s mouth.”

  And we cut straight to a shot of Madonna riding me. Charging on me actually. It’s the drunk-fuck-that-should-never-have-happened of a lifetime. Later we have passed out again and are dribbling in the dusk as suddenly a 4th of July firework display explodes in the hills above and the noise bounces around the canyon.

  Larry appeared out of the gloom carrying a flaming candelabra, which he put on the table. John and Madonna looked thrilling in its guttering light. Mel nudged me under the table. They listened silently. John leant his head on his huge hands. Madonna leant back in her chair, lithe and coiled. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes M wrote notes. (Later, in the deteriorating relationship between her and John, John turned to me, purple with rage, and shouted, “If only she’d stop writing those fucking notes . . .”) I loved her black hair. Her eyes shone with Manson girl intent. When I said, with schoolboy relish, “And now you ride me for all you’re worth,” she threw her head back with her little shriek: “Dream on, Muriel!”

  We made it to the end of the pitch as Larry slammed down the pudding (he was in another rage by now, because Mel had been smoking his cigarettes). John said, “Let’s have a moment to think about it, shall we?” We were silent for what seemed an eternity. The gazebo shook a bit. The freeway flowed silently below, a jam of tail lights. Martin and the family could be heard coming back from the Beverly Center.

  “Well?” I said, finally.

  “One thing right now!” declared Madonna, looking straight at us. “I’m not fucking on camera!” Mel and I sagged, although caring interested smiles were glued into place.

  “John?” I said.

  “My dear, I told you in London. I prefer the original.”

  Dinner ended. Mel and I arranged to go over to Madonna’s house the next morning at ten to “observe” a yoga session. We were all stuck for a career idea for her character and she wanted to be a yoga instructor.

  “Well, all I can say is not with that hair, dear,” John said at the front door, on his way out. “It’ll be like the Addams family. It really will.”

  “Crisis meeting in my room in ten minutes. Bring two hundred dollars,” said Mel as we shut the door. We locked ourselves in and spent the night tearing the evening to shreds, while at the same time trying to come up with an alternative means of fertilising Madonna. By 3 a.m. we were vague shapes in a thick smog of cigarettes, going over it all for the zillionth time, but as British Sterling pointed out, this was about as much fun as we would ever have.

  “You got Madonna. You got Joel Slenger an’ you got British Sterling. What more could you all want?” reasoned Sterling.

  “A good idea?”

  At 5 a.m. we were back at the gazebo, bleary-eyed, as the sun rose over the mountains and the street lights jerked and cut out across block after block in the valley below. Stubs from a million cigarettes lay on the table. We could hardly speak. Suddenly I remembered our morning appointment. By the time we had to present ourselves in Las Villas, where M lived, for the yoga class, we had hardly slept.

  We just about managed to make sense as Madonna and her instructor began wrapping their ankles behind their heads. Ludicrously, we had both brought little notepads and sat there studiously like two junkie secretaries. But I’m afraid by the time Madonna came to the pièce de résistance where she balanced on one fingernail in a cloud of prana breath, both Mel and I were fast asleep. John’s sleeping sickness must have been catching.

  Work on Inspector Gadget was continuing at a snail’s pace. Each evening we worked late and so the next morning would start later and end later. By Friday we would be going in to work at teatime and finishing at four in the morning. In the Hollywood food chain, the director was the poor browbeaten victim of the producer and the studio. He exuded exhaustion. Behind the scenes lurked a panel of executives, each with their own theory and agenda. A string of writers had written version after version, each adding to our scripts on a different-coloured paper, each one losing the plot a little bit more, so that by the end, or rather the beginning, they had managed between them to render the thing utterly meaningless. This is the lunacy of the studio system. But it could have been a lot worse. I was playing Doctor Claw, the evil inventor; I had a cat called Sniffy; and we shot on a huge sound stage that housed my dungeon laboratory. It was fully equipped with its own electric shock treatment machine, and even an emergency room. But we were a helmless ship and the browbeaten director was never given his day. He was squeezed like an orange from morning to night by our benign, unflappable producer who really should have given us all a break and directed the movie himself. I based my character on Gore Vidal. He should have been Dr. Claw. Lines like, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to torture you now!” would have sounded good coming from him. I was a pale burlesque.

  It was my first time on the Disney lot and I spent many of my free hours searching the endless sound stages for the secret door to the underworld refrigerator where, legend had it, Uncle Walt lay undead. A very unreliable source at a Hollywood dinner party had
described to me a thick metal door with giant handles that led into a kind of nuclear fallout shelter where Walt was taken on his deathbed. My imagination was on fire. Could Walt have been smuggled out of hospital in the dead of night and been met at the studio gates by Goofy and Snow White with a hypodermic? Was he trundled down Mickey Mouse Avenue on a gurney by the seven dwarves? And then, did he disappear in a cloud of dry ice like a disco queen mourned by studio bigwigs and top animators? And does he lie somewhere down there still, like Snow White herself, in a glass coffin of ice, ready and waiting for science to catch up? These were my dreams during the endless hours on the sound stage floor. I crept onto all the stages and shuffled around the outer edges with a little torch, behind the huge cycloramas of pink clouds at dusk or Manhattan skylines at night. But I never had any luck. If there was a secret door, Michael Eisner had probably very sensibly bricked it up by now.

  My co-star in Inspector Gadget, Matthew Broderick, was a great mimic and kept us all laughing through the interminably long hot days, but the real discovery for me was the mafia of grumpy make-up ladies and hairdressers who ruled the set with a rod of iron from the make-up trailer. They had all been in the business for years; they earned fortunes, lived in palaces and went from movie to movie like the witches in Macbeth. They were the ones who had the real dialogue with the other great on-set movie mafia, the teamsters. The teamsters are the oddest group of movie folk. They are uniformly huge, living on Diet Coke and jelly doughnuts. They park the trailers, pump out the shit, make the hairdryers work and collect the artistes. These two groups could seriously fuck up a movie if you got on their wrong side. They were the men.

  Christina Smith was the chief of the make-up trailer. She had a little tinkly voice that belied her authority, and had been born in Scotland. You could easily imagine her with a bun in a hairnet behind a lace curtain on a Glaswegian close. I had met her before when I was making Dunston Checks In at Fox, after she was brought on to that picture as a last desperate measure. We had a dangerous legend in the house who was famous for keeping a set waiting for days on end as she applied and reapplied her make-up. Nothing could get her out of the chair, no amount of threatening. But Chris Smith was a legend, too. Instead of guns and grenades her secret weapons included a miraculous eye bag cream that would make a haemorrhoid duck, a paraffin-and-wax bath for ageing hands (unbelievable) and her famous individually laid eyelashes, invented for Liza Minnelli. She used all these weapons to great effect as she stormed the trailer of that impossible but most fabulous of divas, Faye Dunaway (or Done Fadeaway, as she was known in certain circles). The word in the commissary was that the studio was on to poor Faye and she had a stipulation in her contract that she couldn’t spend more than two hours in the make-up chair; but she’d met her Waterloo in Christina. To everyone’s surprise she was ready on set while our lovely star, an orangutan named Sammy, was still under the hairdryer.

  “Chris Smith knows where all the bodies are buried,” someone once told me, but she didn’t know where Uncle Walt was. Barbara Lorenz was my favourite. She did hair and, along with Susie Germaine, whose father was Marilyn’s hairdresser, they marketed a line of extremely expensive hair products called something like Lights, Camera, Action. Their hairspray was called Final Checks, their volumiser, Curtain Call. You could forget your wig if they were working on your film, because they were constantly disappearing to trade fairs and talking on the phone to their stockbrokers, but they were really fun. We used to pretend that I was the spokesman for their brand and make commercials on my Super 8. “I am Rupert Everett and this is my Curtain Call.”

  But they didn’t like it when you made jokes about any of their Hollywood legends. I remember that one day I came into the make-up trailer with an amazing tape of a drunken Judy Garland, talking about a planned comeback with Liza at the Palladium. Broderick was in the chair, and I couldn’t wait to play it—it was very camp, and I knew he’d like it—but soon you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Christina had shrunk to half her size and was sitting in her place like a recently unearthed mummy. The others all looked aghast and stared at me reproachfully. Pretty soon I got the message and took the tape off.

  There was always something going on in the make-up trailer in the hot afternoons when nothing else was happening. The manicurist would come in; Christina would set up her paraffin machine to do everyone’s hands if she was in a good mood, and when my mother and aunt arrived from England they both got a total make-over.

  I met them at the airport. On the deluge of travellers that poured through the sliding door, every shape, size and colour, sailed my mother and her sister in their headscarves and smart coats. My mother was a little dishevelled with a deathly hue and looked as if she were going to be sick at any moment. She hated leaving home and was normally violently ill as soon as she set foot on a plane. I watched them manoeuvre their way through the crowd. In a rare reversal of roles, my aunt was in charge. She was ploughing a path through the sea of colliding trolleys, tacking this way and that as if they were still sailing through the Norfolk creeks onto the North Sea on board the Wayfarer.

  Theirs was a delicate mission. Now was the time for my mother to officially recognise the fact that I had turned out the wrong way and was married to a man. Poor old thing. From the cradle onwards, through all the ups and downs of school, adolescence, teenage rebellion, surely every mother dreams of that first trip after the wedding bells when she visits her son and his buxom young wife from a lovely family? All the plans she has made over those years, of how she will while away the afternoons with the darling girl, filling her in about their naughty boy’s favourite recipes, shopping together for maternity clothes! At the best of times, the dream is a mirage, but this flight back to reality was going to be a crash landing. (Martin was not much interested in anyone’s favourite dish, let alone getting cosy with his in-laws, although I once overheard him invite them to go with him to a spinning class.) My mother was on uncharted ground, and my heart went out to her. But Aunt K was the perfect companion: she knew what a delicate job lay ahead and she was prepared. Apart from anything else, she had long withstood the endless family jibes at her weekend boyfriends who quite clearly played for the other team.

  “There you are!” she said now, kissing me lightly on both cheeks. “I’m afraid your mother has been rather sick during the flight.”

  Even though I had recently put on several pounds, my mum said, as always, “You look terribly thin, darling. Are you eating? Thanks for shaving.”

  “I did shave!”

  But everything went off very smoothly. The great thing about my mother was that she had been impeccably brought up in the Edwardian style, and nothing was going to unsettle her. She absolutely put her best foot forward and walked into our nest of plotting maniacal queers with the same eager attention she would have given to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Everybody in our house loved the sisters, particularly Larry the cook. Pretty soon they were out shopping together every day and at least my mother taught him my favourite dishes. She went gardening with Mrs. Cheatham, who adored her until my mother suggested that the rent was too high. In no time she had settled in and started to do what all mums do once they get their foot inside the door—take over. She secretly negotiated with Larry on their trips to the supermarket that his wages were too high. When we gave dinner parties I would sometimes arrive late from the studio, to find my mother in charge, in front of a huge log fire, receiving John Schlesinger and Helena Bonham Carter, both of whom she adored.

  “I think Hollywood rather suits me!” she said.

  But like her sister, she had taken an instant dislike to Mel. “She’s a terrible sponge!” Aunt K proclaimed.

  One night I went to see my mother in her room. She was sitting in her bed rubbing in hand cream, in a ritual that I recognised from my very earliest memories (even the pink plastic tube was the same brand). “We think Martin’s awfully nice,” she said in a stage whisper.

  “No need to whisper. He’s miles
away.”

  “Can’t understand everything he says. Can you?”

  “No.”

  “But that can be a plus sometimes. American is funny, isn’t it? ‘You guys’ this and ‘you guys’ that,” said my mum dreamily as she rubbed Ponds cold cream into her face.

  “It’s different.”

  “Now, we’re coming to the studio tomorrow. Christina is going to do my hands, and Barbara might do K’s roots. It’s all been great fun, but I must say I’m glad your father’s not here. He’s much better off driving across China.” My father was on a trip with my brother in a rally car across Asia. My mother settled back into her bed. “Are you happy, darling?” she asked.

  “What’s happiness?” I replied like Prince Charles.

  “John Schlesinger says that you’re much more easygoing now. He’s an awfully nice man. We must have him to stay when he’s back. There!” She settled down into her bed. “I’m absolutely whacked. Goodnight, darling. If I’m awake at half past four I shall come down and have a cup of coffee with you. What fun!”

  They were very popular on the set, where everyone made an enormous fuss of them, and I must say that while they were there I felt a strange feeling of wholeness. I was being accepted on my own terms. Americans love family, and from my pool of tungsten light in the middle of the huge dark sound stage I could watch my old mother and her stoic sister graze through the shadows from group to group, chatting, laughing, pointing at me. God knows what they were saying but our crew was very affectionate to them.

  As a parting present, they gave Martin a cashmere sweater that he valiantly put on, despite the fact that he was hyperallergic to wool. Within half an hour he was purple and oozing snot and almost passed out at the table. “Rather a waste of a good jersey,” said my mother as we pulled it off him. “I think I’ll give it to your father instead. Goodness, what muscles!”