Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  We all gathered outside the house the day they left. Mrs. Cheatham came running down her little goat path, swathed in deepest purple. “You must come back very soon,” she said, passing bibles and biscuits into my mother’s arms, having forgiven her over the rent discussion.

  “Oh dear,” said my mum. “It’s just like school all over again, but this time it’s me leaving.” She got into the car and suddenly there we were again: the same image but everything had been reversed. Tears glittered in her eyes.

  Aunt K gave me a knowing wink. “Thank you again, Ru,” she said. “We’ve had a wonderful time.”

  “When shall we see you?” said my mother, putting on her brave face. “You’re going to Uruguay for Christmas, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I think so. But I’ll come over to visit you in January.”

  “Well, we’ll pretend that’s half-term. I’ll send your love to your father.” And off they drove.

  Inspector Gadget wrapped and bad things began to happen. Madonna left for New York to plan her tour, and Mel nearly killed John Schlesinger.

  We had been having a script meeting one afternoon; by the time it had finished, John’s driver had gone away to run some errands so Mel offered to take him home. She came back an hour later in floods of tears. We could hardly get a word out of her but finally, through her sobs, a terrible tale began to unfold.

  When she and John had arrived at his front gate, it turned out that Michael, his boyfriend, had gone out, and John couldn’t get the gate open. Mel said, “Don’t worry, John. I’ll drive the car right up to the gate and you can get on the bonnet and climb over.” The gate was about five feet high. What was she thinking? John was seventy years old with a heart condition and a big straw hat. But he was jaunty and reckless. The universe froze in horror as Mel and he suddenly became the worst possible combination. John clambered onto the bonnet. “Then what happened?” I asked, but the question produced renewed floods of tears. Finally, punctuated by moans and heaves and hands through the hair, Mel said, “I just thought he’d swing one leg over the gate, then the other and lower himself down.” But what actually happened was that John somehow managed to end up standing with both feet on the gate and then jumped like a wild thing, a crazy bird crashing onto the concrete below. He fractured both ankles and lay there screaming in agony while Mel stood speechless on the other side. She called 911 and eventually an ambulance arrived to take John to the emergency room. It was the beginning of the end for him, and for our film The Next Best Thing.

  CHAPTER 39

  Goodbye, Roddy

  One night the phone rang. It was Roddy McDowall. “I just wanted you to know I’m afraid I’m on the way out,” he said. “I have cancer and they’ve given me three months to live.” He was very calm, very matter of fact.

  “But Roddy,” I blundered. “What about our film? You have to be in our film!”

  “Not this season, dear,” he replied. “Come over and see me. Bring Mel.” And he hung up.

  We drove over Laurel Canyon towards the valley with heavy hearts; both of us loved Roddy. We were early so we went to a nearby restaurant and had something to eat. It was here that the crafty Mel let on that she had been suffering from writer’s block and had not written a thing.

  “But Mel, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, aghast.

  “I was scared you’d scream at me. And anyway, I thought it would pass.”

  “But we’re meant to deliver the script next week.”

  “I know.” And she began to heave with sobs. But it didn’t seem to matter much all of a sudden.

  We walked into Roddy’s house. He was sitting in his red drawing room in a pool of light from the reading lamp by his side, busy writing farewell cards; impeccably mannered till the end.

  “Hello, dears,” he said, looking up at us from his work. He was stoned on morphine and looked tiny, though his eyes were huge through his glasses. We sat down and began to chat about this and that. His voice was delicate and disembodied; sometimes he would stop what he was saying and stare for a long moment before collecting himself and pushing on. There was a strange stillness in him, perched on the edge of some faraway abyss. He was neither here nor there, and the room around him, which had always been filled with people and smoke and gossip, had somehow turned in on itself and seemed to be watching. The grandfather clock in the hall kept time with a slow ponderous thud. The rosy-faced Toby jugs on the mantelpiece had turned into gargoyles of frozen jollity. Outside, the huge statue he had rescued from Planet of the Apes stared mournfully into the house. A little further up the hill, doubtless out of sight now for ever, was the bench from Lassie.

  It was difficult to imagine the life going out of this man, because he had been so full of it. It was as if just minutes ago he was sailing through the house, immaculate in a black velvet suit and a jungle-red polo neck, the perfect host administering to his friends, the assorted heartbreakers of the twentieth century—Mae West, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor and other less luminary characters like Mel and me. He mixed the A list with the B list and was equally attentive to all. I had spent some of the most memorable of my Hollywood nights there. But it would all soon be done, a link broken between people who would never hear about each other any more. One would never again be able to say, “Please remember me to Louise Brooks.”

  After about half an hour he said, “Now you really are going to have to excuse me. I must have my rest.” And we left. That was it. The end. Simple and straightforward, like Roddy.

  I gave him a hug, and he said, “You’re angels for coming by. Keep in touch.” He died the following week.

  After the funeral (which I was not invited to) Elizabeth Taylor gave a party. I went with Greg Gorman, the photographer. Her home was a modest affair, just a small ranch house tucked away in the far reaches of Bel Air. The garden was full of white flowers; the house was full of Impressionist paintings. A Van Gogh hung next to a portrait of Elizabeth from Raintree County, which stared haughtily at a Degas across the room. All the familiar faces from Roddy’s dinner table were there, standing round the pool and saying their last goodbyes, to each other as much as to him: Gregory Peck, John Waters, Sybil Burton (Richard’s first wife), John Schlesinger, Bruce Weber and Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) among others. For a long while there was no sign of Elizabeth. She was notoriously late, even for her own parties. Sometimes she never showed at all. But when all the guests were assembled, the last of the living legends hobbled down the stairs with silver hair and a kaftan from under which peeked a comfy pair of bedroom slippers. The famous diamond was on her hand, and a galaxy of rocks hung round her neck and clung to her ears like glittering squids. Her lower lip hung slightly and she walked with some difficulty to a podium by the pool and made a beautiful speech.

  “I hope you’re all having a good time,” she said. “I can’t, because I’ve been a naughty girl.”

  She knew Roddy as well as anyone. The had met, after all, during the filming of Lassie. Both were far away from home, two of the biggest child stars of their time; one could only imagine the enormous bond that was forged between them as they acted together and were educated together in those bizarre schoolrooms set up by the Hollywood studios. As they sat on that old bench waiting for shots to be lined up, they must have watched a lot of plotting from the studio monsters and swamp bitches around them, and grown canny together. It was that quality, the old head on young shoulders, that was so mesmerising. It all meant such a lot. These people were the symbols I adored, everything I loved about my job, and Roddy’s death felt like the beginning of the end.

  As Elizabeth finished her speech a piper could be heard playing a lonely air from the end of the garden. Everyone turned as he walked, fully kilted, up to the pool. We all stood frozen with our glasses in our hands as he passed among us, around the pool, like the grim reaper, into the house and out the front door. It was a chilling moment and nobody moved a muscle, straining to hear the last lamenting wail evaporate into the low distant hum of Los An
geles. Elizabeth had certainly learnt about scoring. The party picked up again, but Roddy was definitely gone with the piper. However, the grim reaper would be coming back for another couple of laps; some others in the room were not going to be there “next season” either, among them Gregory Peck and John Schlesinger.

  One hot afternoon, John and I ventured out to explore east LA for possible locations for the movie. The screenplay had originally been set in San Francisco, but we felt that city was too head-on for the story, and successfully managed to persuade Tom Rosenberg that LA would be better suited. But would we be able to pull the movie away from the streets of West Hollywood and the lush estates of Beverly Hills? Despite LA being such an extraordinary city, film often seems to place it somewhere between Rodeo Drive and the Sunset Strip.

  As we drove eastwards that afternoon on Sunset, the opulent oasis of West Hollywood—the world’s first gay city—soon evaporated into the sleazy desert scrub of old Hollywood, with its Roosevelt Hotel, Chinese Theater, sex shops, waxworks and Scientology centre. Pock-marked hookers looked glumly into the windows of our car. “Goodness!” exclaimed John as a toothless girl in a pink miniskirt waved from a bus stop. “There’s Pretty Woman!”

  Sunset stuck close to the hills until Las Villas, the original commune from the beginning of time. Above us was the famous sign and below the down-at-heel mansions of the silent stars. “My dear, this is where those terrible leather queen set dressers lived that I told you about,” said John, as we were passing a dilapidated bungalow on a ridge with Greek columns either side of the front door. “I wonder if they’re still alive?”

  We pulled up and rang the doorbell. A thin woman with a beak answered. “Omigod, the gay guy from that movie!” she screamed. This was my only identity now.

  We politely enquired about the set dressers and she let us in to look around. The house smelt of cats. There was an incredible view from the lounge over the skyscrapers of downtown LA. “Of course, they weren’t there in my day,” said John, gesturing towards the towers.

  The lady was horrified. “Not there?” she said.

  John ignored her, looking around the room. “My dear, what didn’t go on in here!” he whispered.

  We sat down on a squeaky leather couch, had iced tea and chatted to the beaky lady. It is strange, but no one can remember anything in LA. Life stands still. There are no seasons to remind you that time is in fact passing and, as far as the beaky lady was concerned, if Downtown was there now, then it must always have been. Five years is a life, the next street is another world. The beaky lady knew her house and the way to work, but little else. She got the place from an old man who had moved to Seattle, and beyond that she knew nothing. “Anyway, what’s a sex dresser?” she asked.

  “Set dressers, dear!” snapped John. “Although they were sex dressers, too, in their way.”

  We chuckled on the way out. “Seattle, with all that rain? Doesn’t sound like our friends!” said John as we got into the car.

  “Say hi to Julia!” waved the lady.

  Now Sunset felt more like herself and swung like a meandering grey river into Silver Lake, Echo Park and Elysian Fields. There was a collapsed romantic feeling down here. Spindly palms rustled with rats. Huge ominous cracks ran across the streets. The big quake felt close in Echo Park. It was always ten degrees hotter, and the heat shimmered over the streets mixed with exhaust that never blew away. One day the crack would open and the whole area would slide into hell. This was where I wanted to shoot our movie.

  We drove past the old house of Tex Ritter, the cowboy star from the thirties. It was an apartment building now, perched on the edge of a crumbling hill, and another possible location. “Too quaint, dear, don’t you think?” said John.

  Then we went to the apartment building John had used in The Day of the Locust. That film (which I loved) began looking through an arch into a pretty grass yard with a little fountain surrounded by white bungalow apartments, where all the protagonists of the story lived. Passing through the same arch thirty-five years later, behind the man who made the film, was another movie. Time had taken its toll on the location and its director. The place was a run-down crack den with broken windows and aluminium foil blinds. An old Mexican lady watched us through a slit in the door. John stood in the middle of the garden, lost in recollection. In his hat, white shirt and stick, he looked as if he had stepped out of another time, the golden age, when refugees in suits and ties braved the California sun and showed us America through the coloured lens of a sad European eye.

  At Echo Park there were three enormous hills. A wide concrete boulevard climbed them—the American way, straight up. Spindly clapboard houses with scorched lawns and dingy palm trees clung to their sides. It felt like being on a rollercoaster, straining to the top and racing over the other side. On the brow of the second hill we got out of the car. The city stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, mile after mile of rolling suburb, barely visible in the smog. In the setting sun it looked like a vast ocean of frozen waves.

  “Oh yes, my dear!” said John, bathed in the magic LA dusk. He looked tired and vulnerable as he wiped his forehead with a big spotted handkerchief. “I hope we’re not biting off more than we can chew.”

  It was the understatement of the year.

  I had known John since I was seventeen, when he came into a shop where I was working, because “everyone was talking about you, my dear.” He tried on a pair of shoes, and I was rather cheeky. (“Our feet are too tiny, aren’t they?” I’d said. “We don’t carry shoes for such delicate pixie paws.”) From then on, we were friends, and John was always someone I looked up to. But that afternoon, standing on the brow of that steep hill in Elysian Fields, was really the last day of our friendship. It was downhill from then on.

  Of course, I didn’t realise this at the time. I was riding on the crest of the wave. I was making a big studio movie. I was the star, the producer and the writer. At the most dizzying heights, Tom even suggested that we fire John and that I direct the movie. One by one I was stripped of these titles.

  Mel and I delivered a script in which there was a scene between my character and another man in bed. We considered it an essential element, but Tom went berserk, and in a flurry of phone calls between him, Madonna and me, various conversations were repeated that shouldn’t have been, resulting in my being fired as the producer and the writer.

  “He can act in the film if he wants,” Tom told Elaine my agent.

  He was very clever: he could outmanoeuvre anyone; however, he didn’t understand the nature of what he was trying to achieve. He wanted to cash in on the “gay best friend syndrome” without alienating the female audience. He wanted them to leave the theatre thinking that I “was the greatest fucking dad.” Fair enough. But this was not a dancing and singing story. It was a story with a serious and contentious issue that was actually happening in the world: gay parenting. It was the year 2000. Surely Hollywood could meet this subject head-on? But we were back to square one with the token fag syndrome, the inference being that a real practising homo could not make a proper father.

  I should probably have walked away at that point. Tom certainly gave me the opportunity, but we had gone too far, and anyway I was actually quite enjoying myself. The whole thing was like an out-of-body experience. By now, I could feel the downward pull, like a drowning man, although it was pleasant. Plus, the strangest thing was that through all these ups and downs I really liked Tom. He was a very charming man.

  A well-known writer did a rewrite. It was terrible. We all refused to take part in it. Eventually, during an all-day meeting in Madonna’s apartment in New York, we hammered out a compromise. The film went in to pre-production, and I went back to Europe, leaving poor John in the clutches of Tom and Paramount. I should have stayed with him. He hired all the wrong people.

  “I wish you were here, dear,” he said in a faraway voice on a crackly line one night while I was in London making An Ideal Husband.

  Unusua
lly, the opening sequence of the film was shot on the first day, and if I hadn’t realised it before, I knew then and there that we were aboard a sinking ship. Mel and I had written a glamorous credit sequence in which I am installing a brand-new garden in front of a beautiful deep Southern mansion in Beverly Hills. As the credits roll, a muddy hill morphs into a pristine lawn flanked by palm trees, like the time-release picture of a blooming flower. Borders and flower beds appear. A stream is turned on. At the end of the sequence, dusk is falling and a little old lady comes out of the house to inspect the work as sprinklers are magically activated. On the day itself, one tired old palm tree was dropped by a crane into a manky lawn in front of a worn-out house. The stage was unfortunately set.

  Mel had been fired as well and she moved out of our house after months of guerrilla warfare with my boyfriend. Then, in a magisterial about turn, she managed to claw her way back into Tom’s favour. He rehired her to continue work on the script on the strict understanding that we could not speak. We weren’t speaking anyway, but it was another brilliant stroke on the part of Tom. He divided and ruled us. Madonna and the costume designer were at loggerheads, and the cinematographer was trying to take over. On the second day, I was rehearsing fainting at Madonna’s feet as John stood above me watching through a viewfinder, and I knocked him over. He fell like a giant redwood with a terrible scream and lay in agony on the floor of the set, before being taken to hospital with a chipped coccyx.

  Benjamin Bratt, Julia Roberts’ boyfriend, was playing Madonna’s love interest. In a scene where he had to drop her home after their first date, Madonna rather sensibly drank a cocktail before the kissing scene. It worked; the curious little thing only needed one drink to become demure and giggly. It raced through that macrobioticised frame to great effect, and after two drinks she began to improvise. I was watching on the monitor and she was right on track. But things had already turned sour between her and John, and he was furious.