Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

by Rupert Everett

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “Wonderfully worldly,” said Gavin. “I once went to one of his lectures in a new pair of shoes, and afterwards Krishnaji said: ‘I very much liked your shoes. Are they new?’”

  “Do you think he could have been the Messiah?” I asked.

  “Oh, if anyone was, it was he,” replied Gavin.

  Peter Finch had his fatal heart attack on the red carpet leading from the valet parking to the foyer at the same hotel. Every time I checked in, I said a silent prayer for that brilliant actor who gasped his last breath as excited guests came and went. It was not often you got the chance to watch a Hollywood legend croak and this was one of the roadside stupas in front of which we made the sign of the very cross and kissed our fingers; there but for the grace of God . . .

  I wanted a change so I moved into the penthouse suite at the Argyle with a very motivating deal brokered by Paul. Things had come full circle. It was funny to finally return to the top of that old tower. The dank smell of piss, the boarded-up windows, the peeling walls and the split mattress had vanished beneath a thousand coats of paint, the smell of new fitted carpet and a king-sized orthopaedic bed. Shiny glass glistened in the sun’s rays, and the city fell about beneath like the huge encrusted skirts of a giantess. The terrace wrapped around the entire building. Truman Capote, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn and, of course, Montgomery Clift, had all stood there and watched a thousand dusks fall. According to legend John Wayne kept a cow out there, but everything had been painted over now, in thick layers of Paul’s signature oatmeal. The Hollywood hills rose sharply behind, with their mad houses perched on stilts, roads like razor slashes cut into the crumbling sand, and below the cities of the plain stretched into the haze.

  Twenty years ago I wanted to own this view, although I knew I never would. My heart raced just to stand above it. My imagination summoned Monty from the grave, and we stood there together looking at the city, him behind, leaning his chin on my shoulder. Like the little boy in the bedroom cupboard, I hid in a fantasy world. With a joint in one hand and a can in the other, lying in a dusty ray of light on the old mattress, I pretended I was shooting a film with Elia Kazan, living with Monty, and leaving for dinner with Elizabeth and Roddy, and maybe James Dean. I was so successful in this dream that I was on the very verge of breakdown, drinking vodka and painkillers with Monty just to keep sane.

  “Monty,” I’d say. “Sometimes I just want to run away. Be a traffic controller at some little airstrip on the Keys.” Monty would look at me, with his vacant dilated eyes.

  “Old chum,” he’d say. “You’ve got to get back out there. You’re the best actor we’ve got.”

  Monty wasn’t the only ghost I knew in LA. Years later, in another momentary embrace with Hollywood in 1994, I was starring in a kids’ movie Dunston Checks In. My co-star was a brilliant young orangutan called Sammy. He was my favourite scene partner and acted to hand signals. (If only some of the others had!) I was renting Tony Perkins’ house from his widow, my friend Berry Berenson. It was hidden in the hills off Woodrow Wilson Drive. The family hadn’t lived in it since Tony had died of Aids, and there was a tomblike atmosphere along the long corridor flanked with framed family snapshots that led past the bedrooms to the room where he died. The family dog, Charlie, a sweet old collie, had been left in the house, and became slightly demented with loneliness, but he loved us and we loved him. Sometimes he would career from Tony’s bedroom up the corridor to the large barn of a sitting room, running round and round some unseen thing, jumping up and nipping at thin air. Mo watched with his head to one side, and once the french windows burst open. It was very weird, but not scary. I slept in the bed in which Tony died and soon I was possessed. Actually it was quite magical. A family of possums lived underneath the floor and played tag at night: above an owl stood guard on the roof and hooted until dawn. Mo and I lay on the bed with our ears pricked. When the moon was full it literally flooded into the room, and my dog was a silver ghost and Tony Perkins was there. Soon I would find myself talking to him, or else I was going mad. Anything was possible in the Hollywood hills.

  Tony was practical and quite tough. “You’re not going to get it,” he said, as I leafed through a new script sent by ICM.

  “Shut up, Tony!” I replied to an empty room.

  “They’re just sending it to keep you quiet and they know you’re not a very fast reader. Did you ever see so many long scripts?”

  He had a point.

  On my way to auditions, lost on the freeway and late, verging on tears, he was my air traffic controller. “Pull yourself together, queen. Turn left.”

  At dinner one night with Tony’s best friend, the photographer Paul Jasmin, I described what was going on. “That’s Tony,” he said. “I get it too. He was quite tough. Fearless in a way. Once, quite near the end, he asked me: ‘What would you say if the grim reaper arrived now?’ I said I had no idea. ‘What would you do?’ I asked him. He was silent for a moment. Then he replied: ‘I’d say, “Gimme five minutes.”’”

  Now it was all ghosts sitting on the terrace high above the city, and I felt undead as I joined the stream of rush-hour traffic before dawn each morning on my way to Manhattan Beach where Boston Legal was shot. I was reunited with Candy Bergen and James Spader and Boston Legal was another turning point for me. It was strange seeing Jim after all the years. He had been friends with Eric Stoltz and John Philbin in the days when we all lived at Hollywood Boulevard in the early eighties. Jim and I steadfastly refused to go to acting class. We both belonged to the “just do it” school. Now he was at the peak of his form, and Boston Legal was the best show on TV. They filmed eight pages of dialogue a day, whole court cases in one shot. The others were all brilliant at it but I was out of my depth. In one scene Candy was the prosecuting lawyer and I was the defence. It was a far cry from Morgan Le Fay and Lancelot du Lac, although she gave me a second great piece of advice. In a break between takes she sidled up and whispered, “One of your shoulders is all hunched up. It looks weird.” She was right. I was twisted like a tree in a storm. In the next take I managed to lose the hump. Afterwards Candy winked at me from across the courtroom. She won the case, but I was losing the plot. I felt like a silent star making a sound movie, bewildered by the microphone flying through the air. I fluffed my lines, missed my marks and nearly crashed every day on my way to work. Twenty years of experience simply melted away and I was back at the beginning. No technique, no charisma and, worse, no drive to kickstart them all into action. It felt like live burial.

  The night before I returned to Miami, I had dinner with Gore Vidal, Gavin Lambert and Wendy Stark. Here was the Hollywood I loved. We went to an eccentric restaurant on Santa Monica called Dan Tanners. Gore and Gavin were on brilliant form, full of life, deeply anarchic, and of course hysterically funny. The other tables of pimps and working chicks, executives and starlets, were sullen and speechless, lost in anaesthetic by comparison, but ours was raucous, competitive, tipsy and overflowing with affection. It was like eating in hall at a brilliant university. Everyone raised their voice to be heard above the others. Opinions were aired and squashed. (“You do have some terribly silly views, don’t you, dear!”) Entire careers were polished off in a sentence. (“She couldn’t act and she couldn’t fuck.”) Others were enhanced by some extraordinary revelation. (“She had an extended clit that you could chew.”) Gavin and Gore had known them all. It was a magical evening and we closed the restaurant.

  Back at the hotel, I stood, drunk, on the terrace; the ghosts were all out on the streets of West Hollywood, men flitting through the shadows looking for sex, rats watching from palm trees. Somewhere down there the next blockbuster was being written by a lonely tech geek hunched before a computer, the next actress was going through her moves in front of a mirror, and the next dead hairdresser from the sixties was being unloaded into Cunningham O’Grady’s all-night mortuary on Fairfax. Strands of street lights shimmered in the misty desert night, mile after m
ile, as unimaginable as the universe, and all of us up there on that terrace looked down in wonder. Truman, Claudette, the Duke, Errol, Monty, me and the cow . . .

  I felt an explosion of sheer peace as another door slowly closed and I tiptoed to my room.

  CHAPTER 51

  Wilma

  Hurricane Wilma arrived on Miami Beach during the early hours of a Monday morning in late October 2005. She was the biggest storm in history according to the talking heads on American TV. She sat over the Yucatán peninsula for two days while the whole of Florida braced itself for a repeat of the latest episode of America’s skydiving sitcom: The Kiss of Katrina. The first gusts began as dusk fell; little bursts of warm air punched at you in the breeze. In the mauve sky a vast bank of cloud curved high above South Point in a semicircle. On Washington Avenue the Cubans were hammering boards to the windows of their shops. People laden with emergency supplies hurried home. All the bodegas and hardware stores had been cleaned out in the panic that Americans have come to feel empty without. Everyone barricaded themselves into their houses, and as darkness fell the streets were suddenly deserted.

  Suddenly South Beach felt like an old-fashioned out-of-season sea resort—I wandered towards the beach, intoxicated by the wind which had now become strong enough that you could lean your whole body against it and not fall to the ground. All the bars on Ocean Drive were open but empty. Their calypsos and salsas could just be heard in snatches as the roar of the wind briefly subsided. Against the coloured lights of these establishments—Johnny Rockets, Wet Willie’s, The Surfcomber—the silhouettes of palm trees were already bent double in the gale. They were loving it. And so was I.

  The best thing about Miami has always been the wind. It blows at you from across a vast expanse of sea. It diffuses the light on the beach with dust and salt. It smells of all the scented flowers of the Caribbean. It wakes you up and empties your head. I walked over the dunes onto the beach and battled my way towards the sea, and stayed there until about half past three when I was nearly killed by a flying coconut. During the walk home the storm suddenly took hold, and knocked me off my feet. For a moment I had to grab onto some railings like one of the nasty old nannies from Mary Poppins. A sheet of metal bounced past me like a feather. A palm tree snapped across the street.

  I finally got home and lay in bed as the windows bent inwards and a weird pressure built up that made my ears pop. It is at moments like this that all the windows in a room can dramatically shatter. Mr. Greenwald, the developer, said mine were hurricane resistant; for once he was right. Wilma moaned, shrieked and hammered at them but they stood their ground. The lights flickered and cut out. Some queen off her face called from New York, but after a few minutes my phone went dead. Now I was all alone.

  Soon after dawn, Wilma reached her peak with a thunderous medley of micro-tornadoes, at which point one of the last old abandoned fleapits on Ocean Drive flew apart, leaving a skeleton of beams under a tumbled roof. The rest of it bounced off towards 5th Street. There was nothing to do but wait. Bizarrely, as I sat there inside my rattling flat, it felt incredibly peaceful. I woke at noon and the storm was over. It was completely silent. No wind. No birds. No air-conditioning. No cars. No voices. It was extraordinary. The sea was calm. I walked out into the dark passage outside my apartment and began the most curious seven-floor descent down a pitch-black staircase.

  Outside, the city was trashed. Trees were all over the roads. Pylons had fallen; wires leant dangerously over the street. Cars had been smashed. Windows were blown out in some of the swanky new high-rises and gaped like missing teeth. People were walking around in a kind of daze. Car alarms and sirens began to whine.

  Night fell and America turned into Guatemala. The surface glamour of South Beach had simply been ripped away, exposing the bare bones of a corrupt city. Only nature had the nerve to hold a mirror up to the rotting face of America. The darkness was impenetrable that night. No street lights. No moon. Crowds stood around the bodega on Washington, which the Cubans couldn’t resist opening. People were allowed in one by one for fear of looting and were held at bay by armed police, all in the ghostly light thrown from a kerosene lamp inside the shop that turned the crowd into a prehistoric tribe, hiding in the trees around the campfire of an imperialist explorer. They were menacingly curious. Only Spanish was spoken. The white folk had stayed at home. Cars drove slowly through the streets, headlights on full beam, catching for a second the mad eyeballs of the wandering mass.

  Only South Beach’s homeless went on with their lives undisturbed and surveyed us blankly from doorways and bus stops. The little old hunchbacked lady who compulsively swept the streets stood under a tree with her broom, wearing a rather smart new raincoat. The black lady covered with tumours was already asleep beside her wheelchair on the corner of Washington and Lincoln. And the Cuban priest who had arrived fifteen years ago on a raft was playing his flute quietly outside the Versace mansion that stood silent and boarded up on Ocean Drive. I sat down on the steps where Gianni had been gunned down and listened to the trills and nursery songs of this homeless Papageno. There had been ten hurricanes since Gianni had been shot and the gilt Medusas on the railings were peeling. Was Gianni stuck for eternity at the door to his palace like a character from a Jacobean tragedy? That would have been punishment indeed. I searched the atmosphere for a trace of him, but there was nothing. I was the one who was stuck, the Brigitte Bardot of South Beach, still there after everyone else had left or died. The Cuban priest stopped playing and shuffled away down the empty boulevard. He had a suitcase on wheels. As he disappeared it looked like a black dog at his heels.

  In the old days Mo would bound ahead and wait expectantly at the gates of the Versace house, wagging his tail. I would laugh, secretly proud, and anyone we were with thought we were unbearably chic. I swear that dog knew he was funny. Sometimes we would bump into Gianni and Antonio on their way to the beach, like a couple of Italian ladies laden down with folding chairs, straw baskets, magazines and books. I laughed out loud remembering that when Naomi Campbell tried to lay a flower on the steps after Gianni’s murder she was nearly arrested.

  There was no food anywhere so I went to the Raleigh. A hopeless candle burnt in the foyer. There was nobody behind the desk. I sat down in an armchair and was engulfed by the darkness. Twenty minutes later I said, “Excuse me,” to a passing waiter, who gave a little shriek of terror before shining a torch at me and asking me to leave.

  “I’m a friend of the hotel,” I said lamely.

  “Only hotel guests can eat,” he said, and stuck rigidly to his guns.

  In the huge lounge that had once been a kosher restaurant for hundreds of elderly Hassidic Jews, two marooned groups of guests sat huddled around candles, their faces caught in the flickering light like portraits by Rembrandt. They briefly looked up. They were eating a gloomy makeshift meal, and I could tell that tempers were frayed. The staff of the hotel sat around another table outside on the terrace with candles and beer. They were having a party . . . Nothing had ever changed in this hotel. It was under new ownership and had been renovated, but it was still as stumbling and useless as it had always been. Once that had been a part of its charm but now the Italian group at the next table were not so sure. They had been clucking away in lowered Venetian about how all the lights were on in the Delano, and soon when the manager arrived, the little white-haired leader of the group jumped up and flashed his torch in the face of the bewildered man.

  “We must have some beautiful candles,” he sang in a voice chillingly like Gianni Versace’s: high pitched, and threatening.

  “I don’t think we have any candles, sir,” came the feeble reply.

  “No candles? Is not possible. Geeeve me now some beautiful candles!”

  “Sir, there has been a hurricane.”

  “I know. Thanks God we are in pieces one. But this one is the hotel. We must have ambient to laugh at this things. We need to laugh. I am dépriment. Dépriment.”

  “We’re doing
everything we can, sir. Everything.” Even though this means fuck off and leave me alone in Floridian, the little white-haired man was appeased. He had said his bit and seemed happier as he huffed back into his chair to translate and exaggerate his confrontation for the benefit of the ladies of his party. As he flashed his torch around the huge dark hotel foyer, I got the giggles. In the old days Kenny would have told him to go fuck himself, which would probably have been the better approach, because now the Italians were never going to be happy. Once you had seen through the appalling amateurishness of South Beach, there was no looking back. You either moved there, or you got the hell out.

  There was something final in the air that night. Leaving the Raleigh, I walked towards Flamingo Park. Police cars with flashing lights roamed the streets. One stopped. A round face with little malicious eyes and thin blond hair peered at me from behind the disco lights of the squad car, entitled and insolent.

  “There’s a curfew. What are you doing?”

  “How do I know there’s a curfew?” I asked.

  “Watch the TV.”

  “But I don’t have electricity. How can I watch TV?”

  The policeman looked at me menacingly. For the purposes of this book, incarceration would have provided a marvellous twist, a stunning finale, and so I stared back knowingly. Plus there might at least be hot water and electricity in the police station.

  “Just go home, okay,” he said and drove on, much to my disappointment.

  Historically, queers can always be counted on to go out as soon as there is a crisis. Riots and wars, power cuts and blizzards are all an excuse for a night out. Disaster makes us feel horny and connected, and anything illegal like a curfew brings out a rebellious streak that lies just below the surface of most of us. One fabulous old Parisian fairy I knew (now dead) once told me that he had had sex in only two periods of his life: the first during the Second World War and then not again until the student riots of 1968.