Actually it feels quite stunning to be naked. There are no defences left. The communists should have declared permanent nudity rather than revolution, because everyone is the same; not even the proudest beauty can withstand the test of total scrutiny. There is always some wobble or curve or lumpy vein exposed. All the personality endowed by clothes, money and position is simply stripped away, and the result is a palpable release of tension here tonight. Even the man who has laid the gigantic tool of his trade on the bar stool next to him is panting and winking like a chummy old Labrador. He has a pacemaker. It is just the kind of mixed crowd I love – Golden Gays and autumn leaves and one soiled Adonis, a weird beauty hell-bent on slavery. A couple of men in gas masks are deep in conversation, leaning on the pinball machine. Their compressed voices are coming out through the ends of long tubes attached to their masks, which sit like trunks on the flashing glass surface.
I sit on a stool at the bar, order a gin and tonic, and settle down to watch some porno on the TV. The red light blinks and in no time the place is full. I would class it as a fair to middling evening. Certainly no one here to dress up for. Pretty soon I am feeling the energy of someone’s eyes boring into the back of my head and turn to see an elephant of a man standing a little way off. He has a giant stomach overflowing two long thin piano legs. He is looking at me intently and I look away but it’s too late. One glance is enough for a voracious, dangerously drunk fairy. He flops from his stool like a porpoise splashing into the waves, and swims through the crowd to resurface, spluttering, on the stool next to me. He has a shaved head, large watery eyes and a ping-pong bat in his hand.
‘Johnny Cochrane Patrick. I met you with Joan Golfer.’ He has a high breathy voice and offers a fleshy hand.
‘She’s dead,’ is all I can think of to say.
‘I know!’ he moans, eyeballs briefly disappearing. ‘I miss her every day. Such energy! She loved you.’
‘Did she?’
‘Oh yes. By the way, loved the book.’
I strain every nerve on my face to look pleasantly surprised. ‘Oh, thanks.’
‘I simply adored the chapter on Roddy McDowall. What was he like?’
‘Very nice, really.’
‘Really?’
The great big eyes are close to mine now, beckoning for more details. I study my drink. I am not going to enlarge.
‘I loved what you said about his cock,’ he coaxes.
‘Oh, good.’
‘Fancy having a look downstairs?’
‘Not right now. Thanks.’
‘You’re quite frosty, aren’t you? Joan said you were!’
There doesn’t seem to be any point in denying it. ‘Yes. Very.’
Pause. He scrutinises me closely for some moments, then gets up and suddenly thwacks me hard on the bum with the ping-pong bat.
‘Ow!’ I scream.
‘Yah!’ He laughs as if he knows something that I don’t. ‘Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.’
He swims back off into the bar, his head moving above the crowd like a lady trying to keep her perm dry in a choppy sea. I last see him disappearing downstairs into the dungeon, gripping the handrail for dear life.
I decide to call it a day. I go back to the myopic queen and give him my raffle ticket. He gives me a bag. I open it.
‘These aren’t mine!’
The world stands still. A line of about five men has formed behind me. Two of them are from Lancashire and are quite drunk, talking loudly.
What?’ asked the myopic queen.
I repeat myself – slightly louder.
He studies my ticket and the ticket on the bag. ‘This is yours,’ he insists.
‘No. It isn’t.’
‘That poor bugger lost his ticket,’ says one of the Lancashire bears.
Now everybody is looking at me. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, I suddenly feel my nudity and try to make myself as small as possible, which is not easy at six foot four. Only one thing is getting as small as possible and the myopic queen regards it disdainfully before pushing me to one side as he starts to give the others their bags. When the two bears get to the head of the queue, I shrink into the shadows but they recognise me anyway.
‘It’s that guy from the TV. What’s your name?’ one of them bellows.
Luckily I am still in possession of my wits. ‘Jeremy. Jeremy Irons.’
After a few good-humoured jokes about lending me their underwear, they say how cheap and easy it is to get to Berlin – and I joke back that it’s quite easy to be cheap as well – and they say, ‘That’s true,’ taking their clothes, and now there’s nobody left so I become completely hysterical. It’s a bad move because the myopic queen freezes over with indignation.
‘You’re going to have to wait till the end of the night.’
‘I can’t. I have to work.’
‘You should have thinking of this when you are coming!’
‘But I didn’t give me the wrong ticket. You did.’
‘What you want me do? Take down alls bags and looking for?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ach!’ he says simply and turns away.
I am cowed again, and go back to the bar and sit there fuming for twenty minutes until I spy the English queen staggering up from the underworld. I can’t face another conversation about Joan Golfer so I go to the bar and ask for the manager. The venomous skull appears. I explain the situation – sotto voce. He has long thin lips and a suppressed smile plays across them like a cardiogram. I want to slap him. He returns with me to the coat check, where the myopic queen starts to shout in German and stab at the air with his finger. His glasses have steamed up. He takes them off, revealing two large wet jellied eggs, which look at me blindly. I feel slightly reassured and so I barge my way through the door into the coat-check room.
‘We have got to go through all the bags,’ I scream.
I am trying to remain calm but there’s very little point. I have already lost all dignity. The myopic queen puts her glasses back on and looks to the skull for approval. Germans don’t like having their routine changed and I can tell I am about to be here until the end of the night. There are three hundred bags, after all.
The skull sighs. ‘We look.’
MQ begins to grab bags from the shelves, throwing them to the ground, undoing the knots he has so painstakingly tied, pulling the clothes out and waving them at me. They look weird, like dead people’s clothes, dirty and tragic. None of them are mine. He shoves them back indiscriminately, but I don’t care. Each queen for herself at this stage. Now I am on all fours, clambering over the piles of bags, ripping them open and looking inside. Occasionally I look over my shoulder and see a couple of fairies standing there on the other side of the hatch, looking at my naked arse, happily waving their raffle tickets, laughing as I flounder in this sea of plastic. Finally the English queen arrives.
‘God. Poor you, darling,’ he says, leaning over the hatch as he is given his bag. ‘Have you tried rimming yourself?’
‘Fuck off. I’m not in the mood for jokes,’ I snap.
He begins to talk in a flawless German to the manager.
‘Good idea. Is your phone in there?’ asks the skull.
‘Yes.’
‘So let’s ring it,’ huffs the English queen. ‘What’s your number?’
I tell him. He dials. We all listen. Nothing.
Why did I get that new ringtone? It is nothing more than the chirrup of a little cricket. How am I going to hear it above the din of the bar?
He tries again. Nothing again.
He tries once more and this time I hear it. Brrrup brrrup brrrup brrrup brrrup brrrup. It’s coming from an unmarked bag on the floor. I lunge for it, and there they are – my clothes, my wallet, my shoes. I have rarely felt so elated and I cradle them, glaring at the others manically, hoping that this little episode is going to be quickly forgotten. It has been too revealing in more ways than one. But no one seems to want to elongate the moment. The myopic queen
sniffs regally and picks her way through the debris, trying to create some order. The skull disappears with the English queen, and I fall over myself, dressing too fast. I want to get out of this place and never come back.
At the door the skull is back in his hatch – on the telephone – and as I tumble from the inferno I can hear him laughing. Doubtless he is recounting to some other skull, in some other hatch, in some other special-needs fetish club, the hysterical scoop of the evening.
While I have been imprisoned naked, a blizzard has raged over Berlin and the whole city is covered in a thick sparkling blanket of snow. It is still falling. Bright around the street lights, thick as wedding cakes on all the cars; balanced delicately two inches high on every branch and twig, unsullied by footprints and tyres, drifting silently from the pink night sky onto the deserted street. Light spills from the windows of the sex shops. Faceless mannequins in full leather look out blindly. It is unbelievably beautiful and I walk all the way to the restaurant, feeling the warmth of my poor clothes as if they were long-lost friends. My nudity hides within them, seeking out the familiar corners and swearing never to desert them again. I am reborn, like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol.
Adnan is my favourite restaurant in Berlin. It is a long high cream room with tables in rows, crowded with overdressed women glittering in the candlelight, served by waiters in linen aprons, and cajoled and flirted with by the owner: the Turkish giant Adnan, who has hands as big as your head – and we all know what that means – and hair like Anna Wintour. One wall of the entire restaurant is glass, so the interior glows tonight like a Christmas card, or an upmarket crib framed by the dark snowy night.
Bruce’s party is still going. It is a Last Supper of fashion. Bruce sits in the middle, a psychedelic rabbi in a rainbow shawl and a skullcap, surrounded by disciples, beautiful, vacant models, make-up artists and hairdressers, the holders of the light meter, the reflector, the nuncios from the magazine. Nan and the agent sit together at the end. Which one is Judas, I wonder? Maybe it’s me.
I sit down next to Nan and tell her the story of my night. She listens with a faraway smile, but eyes twinkling.
‘That’s so crazy,’ is all she says but I know she thinks it’s funny.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mr Geoffrey
Situated on 44th Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, the Shubert Theatre is an ugly theatre on an unprepossessing block. Sardi’s is across the road, and none of it lives up to the old songs. One simply cannot imagine Lillian Hellman or Noël Coward stalking across this urban sprawl, or reading their rave reviews at midnight under the wonky scrutiny of Sardi’s famous caricatures. New York covers its tracks like no other city, and the past can be glimpsed only through the taxi window crossing the tumbledown bridges. Otherwise it is a city enslaved to the moment, which is why old people always look like the homeless here. They are not. They are the past. The stage door of the theatre is located around the corner in Shubert Alley. It is made of gold, like the entrance to a vault. Above it, across the whole flank of the building, is a gigantic poster of me (and the others).
Directly inside, partitioned off in a cardboard cubicle, is Rose, the stage doorkeeper and also the black widow of a TV career that died in the seventies. Rose used to be the star of a daytime soap. She is a formidable show-business creature with jet-black hair scraped into a ponytail, dressed for a jazz class – all in black – with conical breasts. She is a no-nonsense hag and we fall out on day one.
‘Are you gonna sign in?’ she asks with ever increasing sharpness every time I come through the stage door.
‘Signing in doesn’t rhyme with Broadway star. I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘You gotta sign in.’
‘What is the point of being in the theatre if you have to sign in?’
‘I don’t know but you gotta sign in.’
‘Well, I refuse. So have me fired.’
Rose shakes with fury and I stomp through a door into the tomb-like gloom of the backstage area.
I am performing eight times a week for six long months in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. I last appeared in this play at Ampleforth, the Catholic seminary where I was originally bitten by the acting bug (among other things). In that production, I played the vampish Elvira, the role originally played by the divine Kay Kendall. (Who?) I stole the show. And the costumes. Now thirty-five short – or long: I can’t decide which, so elastic seems time – years later, I have graduated to male parts. Tonight I am playing the thankless lead, Charles Condomine, a writer of crime novels who – for the purposes of researching a book – invites a batty clairvoyant to hold a seance in his house during which, by mistake, she conjures up his dead ex-wife. Charles’s theatrical role is to feed the three women in the show. The funniest lines are said by Madame Arcati, the clairvoyant, originally played by Dame Margaret Rutherford and now by Angela Lansbury – whose entrance round sometimes extends for five whole minutes while the rest of us stand around extending our ghastly smiles into malicious grimaces of welcome and she beams star quality across the footlights, ostensibly at us, but really at her public, nodding modestly and waving them on with subtle movements of encouragement and various oeillades.
The Broadway public are the most enthusiastic theatregoers in the world. In fact they are the only thing left in this shell of a city that reminds one of the America one fell in love with. They are warm, wacky, generous, cigar-smoking, wig-wearing, facelifted, golf-playing, caddy-driving, old-school out-of-towners. They arrive in coaches and wait in droves at the stage door after the show. They are peppered with actual New Yorkers, actors, directors, various queens, their mothers and other fag hags, and together make up the most generous reception in the world. Even I receive an entrance round – nothing in length to that of La Bedknobs, but a round nonetheless. At the Shubert Theatre.
It is quiet and arctic backstage, just the drone of the air-conditioning system and the noise of a faraway Hoover. As in All About Eve, Angela Lansbury’s dressing room is by the side of the stage. The Broadway star can dive right from the make-up chair into the audience – in fifteen seconds. I knock on the door. Angela sits in a coral silk dressing gown, wearing a rust-coloured Princess Leia wig and panda eye make-up, in a tiny pink room with a pink sofa and no natural light. In the corner stands a gangly blonde dresser who doubles as her assistant. She is also the stalker and general weird expert on all concerning la vie en Lansbury. Angela is doing her lips in the mirror. She pecks at my reflection in the glass and goes on with her work. She speaks English or American, depending on her mood or who she’s talking to. With her fans she’s Jessica Fletcher. With me she’s Miss Marple.
‘Good house tonight?’
‘Rather good.’
‘Julie’s in. Drinks in my dressing room after, and then we’ll go for a nibble.’
I should be in heaven. A nibble with Julie Andrews. But I’m not. I am a dead weight, sitting around all day, dreading the moment when I have to come into work. I have never felt so drained and it’s only week five.
‘I’ve just seen a picture of your latest facelift,’ teases Angela, waving a gossip rag that features a double-page before and after spread.
‘Don’t.’
An editor I vexed has launched a viral attack, sending out a bloated mugshot of my so-called botched facelift.
‘Well, at least they’re talking about you!’
Angela is charming and reserved, with a flint-sharp ambition under the cape and galoshes. She has the eyes of an owl and the tenacity of a mountain goat. She is old from the old school. Outwardly very friendly, ultimately detached. (She is what I would call a Frosty Two. Really nice and chatty and interested … but frosty. If you are Frosty Four, for example, you are not even nice or chatty or interested. Actually, Four can be the easiest to deal with.) Old-fashioned descriptions suit her best. She is a good sport. A lady. But she is also eighty-three years old, and as any seasoned Broadway star knows, she must divide her energies judiciously. Most of he
rs goes into her performance. Then her fans.
Troops of pasty, wild-eyed freaks gather in lines outside her door after each show, proffering autograph books with shaky hands. They want their pound of flesh, however self-effacing they are. She receives them like a headmistress preparing for bed, in her doorway, clutching their hands but pushing them firmly out at the same time. On stage she takes no prisoners, grabbing all the reviews and a Tony, leaving the rest of us slightly dazed and confused in her undertow, but I don’t mind. She is a fascinating creation and I have loved her since Gaslight.
I leave Angela’s dressing room with a bit more spring in my step and surge onto the stage. The Shubert is a musical theatre so the stage is wide enough for thirty chorus boys to high-kick in a row. Blithe Spirit is a drawing-room comedy, normally staged in an intimate house where the spectator can observe the whole cast in one glance. Our production is a tennis match where the dialogue is lobbed between characters on opposite sides of the stage. Timing a laugh across this wide space has all the precision of throwing a sausage up Oxford Street. The circle is far away and wide. The stalls are deep. We must scream the show eight times a week. Any subtlety we may have discovered in the roles during rehearsals – and some of us didn’t – is quickly ironed out by the sheer size of the house, and soon we are all belting out Noël Coward as if we are Ethel Merman.
The theatre is quiet and empty now, and as cold as the grave. In that medium’s half-light – of wonky sconces and a dusty chandelier – the two circles and the stalls look like a big gaping mouth with two dangerous jaws bristling with rows of faded coral teeth into which I spit a few quaint British vocal exercises, flapping my arms like a penguin, chanting g-g-g-g-g-g-d-d-d-d-d-d-g-g-g-g-g-g-d-d-d-d-d-d, and wishing I could be transported into the past and come off stage to find myself in A Chorus Line, which opened here in 1974. My dressing room is the old chorus boys’ room. It’s been closed for years. My six-degrees-of-separation from that amazing musical is that I had a three-night stand with a boy from the show in the summer of 1978. I have hardly given him a second thought since that week, until getting this job. Now I think about him all the time, and I can’t even remember his name. But as I begin to get my bearings in the modern city, trying to come to terms with all the change, I see him everywhere. He is the ghost leaning at all the street corners this freezing February in 2009, in a New York City that has disappeared without trace.
Vanished Years Page 26
