Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  “Will someone pour a bucket of water over that slit!” he screamed from behind the monitor. Tom nudged me, delighted.

  At about the same time, somebody began a website called Lourdes’ Diary where details of the day’s events on our set were described in minute detail. It was really funny. Madonna accused me of being the leak. I wasn’t, actually. But everyone became suspicious of everyone else, as the diary kept on coming, and we all raced home at night to guiltily read what Uncle John and Uncle Rupy had done to poor Mommy that day. Personally I always suspected Old Mother Childers, John’s boyfriend since the dawn of time.

  The film cranked along, however. My bedroom scene had been reinstated in the script, but John chose me a fifty-year-old boyfriend. He had reached that age when anyone under sixty seemed young. I was furious. If I was going to have a boyfriend in a movie, one thing was for sure: he was going to be young and cute. “But, dear, not everyone is like you and obsessed with dangerous Latinos,” shrieked John.

  “Yes they are!” I screamed back. “And anyway, they don’t have to be Latino. Just young and sexy!”

  “You said you didn’t want anyone cute.”

  “No, John! I said I didn’t want anyone that cute.”

  I won, eventually, but only after pleading with Tom and Paramount.

  One day, her Nibs and I were filming some shot. We got to the end of the scene but no one said, “Cut.” We improvised for a moment, and then there was a loud snore. John was asleep behind the monitor. There was an awkward silence. Nobody moved. Somebody nudged him gently and he said, “Action,” as if nothing had happened and we all lurched into the scene again like a spin-dryer. It was funny and sad at the same time because John had turned into the creaky old Latin teacher at school. It wouldn’t be long before people began to balance books on doors as he came in and put whoopee cushions under his chair.

  He had bitten off more than he could chew.

  By now he and Madonna were at war. He pushed her too hard and didn’t realise when she was being good. Mel, in her new role as Mata Hari (she was born to spy), was caught in the middle, endlessly reworking the tiredest scene of the movie, when Madonna meets Ben. I sometimes saw her slinking around the periphery of the set like a rat, looking right and left before darting into Madonna’s or John’s trailer. The production designer and John wanted to shoot the scene in L’Orangerie, a stuffy old-school restaurant in Hollywood. This was the last straw. It was symptomatic of the total disaster in the tone and design of the film. We were looking like a miniseries, added to which Mel came up with a scene of startling banality.

  The wind was beginning to change and a very weird thing happened. I was approached about taking part in a certain film that shall remain nameless. Suffice to say it achieved a great deal of success when it came out. The director came to see me on the set. Here was exactly the opportunity I was looking for. It was about a man who fell in love with a woman who had a child. A top shark agent, who I shall just call Major Lady, wanted the movie for his client. In a meeting with the producers, he went armed with a copy of the paperback upon which the film was based. On the cover was a little boy standing between the legs of a man.

  “If Rupert does the movie, you won’t be able to have a poster like that,” said Major Lady, a gay father himself. I found out because an intern in the office was so disgusted that he called my agent and told him. He was fired and I lost the job. Major Lady is a great agent. Things were not going to be as easy as I thought.

  My birthday came, and I got more presents than I have ever received. The whole house was full of them. Complete strangers sent me gifts: huge baskets wrapped in Cellophane containing a jar of honey, some pâté and a lot of polystyrene balls. I had a birthday cake on the set, and Madonna gave a party for me and Ingrid Casares, whose birthday it was too. Martin left halfway through to go to a circuit party.

  On the last day of the shoot, we filmed the final scene of the movie. We were back on that hill in Elysian Fields, but everything had changed. It felt as if a hundred years had passed. John looked exhausted. We sat together in the shade as the crew set up the shot. We tried to chat, but it didn’t really work. He thought I’d betrayed him, and probably I had.

  “We really fucked up, didn’t we?” said Madonna later in the scene (one of her best).

  Another understatement. We wrapped and the film went briefly into remission.

  CHAPTER 40

  Unconditional Love

  The only other film that I “green-lit” was Unconditional Love. After that it would be all red lights. The shoot was in Chicago so I gave up the house in the Hollywood hills and moved a reluctant and sulky Martin back to New York where the only hard-on seemed to be the rigor mortis of our relationship.

  Pat and Meinir had fallen out, and Meinir became a chat-show hostess in Wales. I had to reshuffle my entourage, which now included my new überassistant Jay, and Jamie, a scally with an aquiline nose and solemn blue eyes who became my hair hag. Together we marched the last leg of my Hollywood year. With them at my side, like Dolly Levi I returned to Chicago in September 1999.

  P. J. Hogan and his wife Jocelyn had written a brilliant script for Unconditional Love. It was a highly improbable story of three freaks who track down a serial killer in the maze of underground streets and railway tracks that lie beneath the Windy City. It was one of the best movies I have ever done, but remains unreleased to this day.

  Back then, however, the stage was still set for a momentous second coming. PJ was the hottest director of comedy, and I was his muse. Or at least I thought I was. His latest discovery, who would upstage us all, was a little person called Meredith Eaton.

  “Can’t you say dwarf?” I asked her casually, during one of the first long cold nights in the bowels of the city.

  “No,” snapped Merrylegs. She was also a Long Island Jewish princess, and she didn’t mess around. “It’s derogatory. You wouldn’t like to be called fag.”

  “Yes, I would, actually,” I said. “Anything rather than ‘gay’ or ‘little.’”

  “Okay, faggot,” she said. “Let’s get a coffee.” And she clambered off her chair. We wandered towards the craft service table that stood like a mirage in that grimy underworld, with its toaster, its jelly doughnuts and its diet sodas.

  Merrylegs was a genius, and if I thought it was complicated being gay in show business, she made me think again. Her entourage included her stand-in, Lila, and her boyfriend Michael, who did her stunts, which was a bit weird. She wore a red plastic mackintosh with a hood in the movie, like the little person from Don’t Look Now, and Michael was identically dressed, with a tiny Clara Bow wig and red gumboots. The three of them sat in a row on director’s chairs in their red coats like targets at a fairground shooting range.

  We began filming in October. The wind howled off the frozen lake, and Lakeshore Drive was majestic under a blanket of snow. Mo was ecstatic. I lived with him and Jay on the top floor of a hotel off North Wacker Drive. Tom Rosenberg was from Chicago and he looked after us, even to the point of giving me the number of the Chief of Police in case I got into a scrape. (He was momentarily ashen-faced when I said I’d called him asking whether there were any cute gay cops.)

  Chicago was a far cry from that summer inferno of just four years ago. Everything was different. This time Kathy Bates was the leading lady. Every night she stepped from her trailer on North Wacker in a floor-length mink coat and marched grimly with her team to a hole in the sidewalk through which she disappeared. My trailer was behind hers, so I would often follow her as the snow swirled around while this flotilla of ladies sailed towards a piss-stained stairway and descended into the bowels of the earth.

  It was a dripping and desolate world under the Windy City, and soon the temperature plummeted to minus ten. The homeless huddled in dark corners watching. I sat on a director’s chair in a pool of tungsten wearing a suit made of blue sequins. Night after night we all sat there in a silent face-off, the hopelessly poor and the hopefully rich (after this
movie), although when I pointed this out to PJ, he swung round on me from inside his hood with a vicious gleam in his eye. “You’re the only person here making any money, and tomorrow you’re going on holiday for three weeks!”

  PJ was a different animal on Unconditional Love. He looked like an elf on the run in his parka with its fur hood. He was under a lot of pressure from the studio and needed his wife Jocelyn to be around at all times. She was Susan Strasberg to his Marilyn. Kathy and he didn’t really get along. PJ was a pernickety director, one of those men who can do thirty takes on one shot, which actors hate. After three takes I could tell that all Kathy really wanted to do, as he came over and huddled too close, whispering more last-minute instructions, was to tear off one of his limbs and eat it. One day we would find her standing there guiltily with his feet sticking out of her mouth.

  But I loved him. Of all the directors I have worked with, PJ was the one with whom I clicked. He was mischievous, funny and loved crew gossip even more than I did. There is nothing else to do on a movie set but watch the comings and goings of the crew. There is always some mind-boggling scoop waiting to be unearthed. Gangs form; vendettas and sanctions are enforced; embassies are closed and wars declared. Between PJ and Newline the war was time. We were not keeping remotely to schedule.

  The studio very cleverly sent an executive in a wheelchair to whip PJ into shape. He was an enigmatic man with huge biceps, who could accelerate from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. He was nicknamed Ironsides and was a ball breaker, but no match for PJ who could be as slippery as an eel when he wanted to be.

  My trailer became a kind of on-set nightclub. We covered the lights with coloured gels. We put up extravagant Christmas decorations. People dropped by for mulled wine made by Eileen the genius wardrobe assistant and Suzanne the set photographer. Both these fabulous women had been on My Best Friend’s Wedding. We had a special set of stairs made by the props guys for the little girls when they passed by. Mo sat in the trailer until bedtime and we all had a wonderful time.

  At weekends I flew in private planes to different destinations in America to either receive an award or give one. Giving an award is one of the most depressing pastimes known to man. You stand in the wings with another publicity starved celebrity in borrowed jewels. You breeze onto the set to one or other of your famous theme tunes. You josh together at the podium, ploughing through lame banter, looking glassy-eyed, like a somnambulist, as you try to keep up with the teleprompter.

  “And the nominations are . . .” you sing.

  “And the winner is . . .” tweets your companion.

  Then you act surprised and thrilled as a third celebrity bounds to the podium and grabs the award as you stand gracefully back, smiling beatifically with gleaming bleached teeth while someone else thanks a God they wouldn’t recognise if he came up to them at an audition and said, “I’ll see you at the pearly gates.” Then you all sweep off stage and give interviews in the VIP area about vulnerability and becoming a better person (than everyone else), flogging your latest product in between the lies. Your PR stands beside you, listening to every word. They are the nannies of the stars and wag their fingers if you go too far and say something you actually think. After a bit of this you are bundled into the limo and back to the discreet airfield to make that private connection to the movie set you are presently terrorising.

  The job of maintaining a profile in Hollywood is much more draining and demanding than making a film, and it is done at a thousand and one award shows, premières and the magic red carpets that lead to them. If you know how to schmooze at a podium you will probably get picked up for a TV series. These endless backpatting ceremonies, and the publication and obsession with box office receipts, have stripped cinema of most of its remaining mystique.

  I suggested to Paramount that they invite journalists from all the gay contact magazines around the US for a weekend in Miami to present The Next Best Thing. If the twenty million gays and lesbians came out to see the film, I would be made, and the gay culture might move into the mainstream of Hollywood. Paramount was enthusiastic but when the journalists got there they were less so. While they couldn’t believe they had finally been invited into the world of movie junkets, it was clear that they found the picture tame and lame. They wanted Madonna to be as stunning as her greatest hits. Being good was not enough. Actually it was bad.

  Back in Chicago, I had a Christmas party in my trailer and the suspension broke. It had been snowing heavily, and Kathy, Merrylegs and I had spent the last three nights suspended by our legs over Chicago’s freezing river. “I really love PJ,” lied Kathy, sitting under the Christmas tree, “but he can be a little irritating. You always seem so cheery. How do you do it?”

  “Marijuana. Two hits before each set-up,” I counselled.

  So for Christmas, I gave her a see-through negligee, high-heeled slippers and a huge joint. She put the clothes on but did not smoke the joint and the party began. Within half an hour there must have been fifty people in the trailer. Suzanne and Eileen kept the mulled wine flowing. PJ gave me a glass ball with St. Paul’s Cathedral inside. When you shook it, seagulls flew prettily around the dome, and it sang, “Feed the birds.” The stunt co-ordinator was my arch-enemy. He was always busting me for drinking on set, and tonight I had to hang again, so he was furious. He was a huge man and, as he came on board to close down the party, the trailer collapsed on one side, and everyone screamed.

  The next day Jamie and I went to Miami on a private plane provided by Tom Rosenberg. As we were living the dream, the millennium approached; what I didn’t know was that I was about to crash.

  CHAPTER 41

  Donatella’s New Year’s Eve Party

  The Versace house remained empty after Gianni’s murder until New Year’s Eve 1999, when Donatella made a new entrance in the alleyway at the back and put a sign on the front door with an arrow directing visitors around the corner. That night, she gave the last party of the old century. She left the next day.

  What a feeling of impending doom there was that night. Were the computers going to jam? Was the world going to stop? The TV jumped from Bethlehem to Belgrade and crowds around the world leered dangerously at each other across a billion screens, like too many panting dogs straining at the leash to get into the dog park. Any second now there would be a giant scuffle.

  On the way to the Versace house, I bumped into Luisa on Ocean Drive with a piece of tinsel around her sailor’s hat. She was drunk.

  “Tutto bene?” she asked.

  “Tutto bene, Luisa,” I replied. “Bon anniversaire!” And she disappeared waving into the crowd.

  The walls of the Versace house could no longer hold the outside world at bay. The noise from Ocean Drive was like the storming of the Bastille, exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I found Donatella sitting alone on a couch in the garden, wearing a silver dress, wrapped up in a thousand memories.

  “I’m so depressed,” she said simply.

  “Me too,” I replied, but mine was cosmetic by comparison.

  Donatella was clouded by tragedy that night. It curled around her in wisps and tendrils, obliterating her from time to time. Suddenly she was there for a moment, visible through its icy receding fingers, laughing at a piece of gossip, but otherwise it was always pulling her in deeper. It was touching to see her brace herself and greet the throng of guests that swept into the house, wave after wave, a polished swaying Botoxed crowd baying for pleasure. She moved among them with the politeness and precision of a hardened sleepwalker. Luckily for her, and unluckily, people generally reacted to the way she looked and searched no further. To them she was the brash party diva. People didn’t see the depth or the sadness, though sometimes she offered it, humbly and with dignity, in a conversation, but it was always overlooked. She had built an image for herself that had become a prison. Nobody could see through the peroxide wall. Then she huffed smoke like a dragon, rolled her eyes in frustration and came back to the couch to sit down. Soon, however, s
he was back up on the burning deck, one hand in an endless rotation pushing her hair behind her back, the other, manicured, heavily bejewelled, clutching a pink diamanté lighter and a pack of Marlboro reds. Special packs had been made for these cigarettes in the atelier back in Milan, and “Smoking Kills” was replaced by the letters DV in a gothic scrawl. The tragic cloud could not extinguish that peculiar humour, very Italian, and it broke through the mist that night after Jennifer Lopez made her entrance.

  Dessert was being served. A cluster of divas, some of them stars, others not, sat around Donatella at a corner table in the courtyard. The party moved fast around us, the table was a rock, and waves of fruits de mer crashed against it, swelling our numbers from eight to twelve, and then to sixteen. Chairs peeled off in all directions in a swastika for intimate asides over cigarettes and crossed legs, but the undertow on this particular stretch of bitch was strong and soon, they had been swept back out to sea by the acid tongue of Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, the glum monosyllabic reply of Guy Ritchie, or the polite but firm dismissal of Gwyneth Paltrow. Madonna smiled graciously to all and sundry, secure in the knowledge that someone else would do the dirty work, and give any unwanted jellyfish “the old heave-ho.”

  But Ingrid Casares, Madonna’s mouthpiece and Miami’s mistress of ceremonies, kept the flow coming, watching her saint all the while, but at the same time ignoring the warning signals from the galaxy around her. She had a job to do, after all, but the table wanted to keep to itself, because with us that night, hanging in the air, were the thousand ghosts and skeletons that come with the holly and the mistletoe: our fears and hopes, and these were company enough. A lot of wires were crossed around that table, and some strained connections were going to be cut loose as the old century rang out. Others were being forged right there; locks were being hammered into chains, as the minute hand approached the extraordinary hour. Perhaps the table had one thing, one aim, in common. Nobody, Guy, Madonna, Gwyneth or Donatella, was ever coming back to Miami.