Vanished Years

by Rupert Everett

  Some days I can hardly face going into the theatre so I cut into Sardi’s and head straight for the bar where I order a vodka martini with a twist. I settle on a stool in the window and observe the comings and goings over the road at the Shubert.

  Many of our audience members have been fans of Angela’s since Gaslight. They are fork-lifted from buses in knots of Zimmer frames and walking sticks. They are absolutely charming and are going to love the show. I think theatre should be banned for the under-sixties.

  Our poster, as high as the theatre itself, covers the side wall on Shubert Alley. We are all looking into the crystal ball, but I don’t need to be a clairvoyant to know that this job is not going to be the stepping stone back to the West Coast as I had planned it to be. I didn’t even get a Tony nomination. As if reading my gloomy thoughts, Charlie joins me at the window.

  ‘You gotta be a fool to be in this business,’ he says.

  ‘Mine or yours, Charlie?’

  ‘Both. Too much bending over.’ Charlie rubs his back, winking.

  ‘Certainly not backwards, in your case,’ I reply.

  And there we leave it. My own caricature now hangs in Sardi’s. That’s something.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Tasha

  Tonight the lights are all out on Broadway because Natasha Richardson is dead. She falls on a ski slope in Canada, gets up, goes back to her hotel, has a headache and then goes into a coma. Brain-dead, she is flown back to New York, while her family rush from all corners of the world to her bedside. Finally gathered, the decision is made to turn off her life support system. Her organs are removed – someone is looking through her forget-me-not eyes right now – and she is pronounced dead in the late afternoon three days after the accident. Tonight her mother Vanessa, and her two sisters, Joely and Katharine, lead a vigil in Shubert Alley as the lights are turned out and everybody pauses for thought.

  I watch this spectacle on the television in my dressing room, getting ready for the play. On the little screen Vanessa, Joely and Katharine are bundled up against the cold just yards away from where I’m sitting. Mr Geoffrey is ironing in the background. The cartoon voice of the Eyewitness News presenter talks about shock and death and bewilderment, and the tannoy announces show time. Life has taken a virtual turn. I am watching on TV something that is actually happening on the other side of the wall, to people I have known very well, and, for a second, time literally stands still.

  Last Tuesday I am running out of the theatre and, in that little vestibule between the stage door and the interior, I find Natasha with an older lady in tow, in the middle of a spirited confrontation with Rose and the no-neck redneck who operates as a bouncer at the stage door after the show. Natasha’s voice is raised and she is stabbing at the bouncer with her finger. Her friend confirms everything Natasha is saying, like a back-up singer in little bursts between Natasha’s belted-out melodies. Rose, who knows who Natasha is but is trapped inside her cubicle, two hands on the glass, looks desperately round for help. It’s a small space, a lot of people coming in and out, and a hungry public are crammed against the stage door, ready with their cameras flashing each time the golden gate is opened. Natasha has been made to stand in line by the loathsome bouncer.

  ‘No Richardson here.’ He frowns, checking his list. The name rings no bells and he shakes his head.

  She has told him she is my friend, but he doesn’t care. Someone in the crowd says, ‘Hey! That’s Na-tah-sha Richardson.’

  ‘No Richardson here,’ he chants, waving his clipboard.

  ‘Tasha,’ I say.

  She turns to me, eyes wide, half laughing, half crying, a coiled spring. ‘Rupsy, there you are!’

  We hug and she is trembling like a leaf.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘You’ll never believe it.’

  I take her out of the throng to the staircase that leads underneath the stage. Her friend comes with her. Natasha explains and dabs her eyes with the corner of a tissue.

  ‘He just shouted out Richardson! Richardson! Like a piece of meat.’

  The bouncer himself appears, with some guests for one of the cast. ‘There he is!’ accuses Tasha.

  He turns around. ‘I gotta have names. It don’t matter who the party is,’ he declares, red-faced and blunt.

  ‘But I’m a friend of the leading actor.’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ says the pig, evenly.

  ‘Yes you do. I told you.’

  Now Mr Geoffrey appears, with Rose behind. Gale Natasha has swept us all up into a hurricane and everybody stops and turns.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asks Mr Geoffrey nervously, and I swirl into action like a cyclone. I am incapable, in such electric surroundings, of anything else.

  ‘This arsehole refused to let my friend come into the theatre.’

  ‘I did not refuse. I just need names and then I need to check the names.’

  ‘Oh, did you need to check Peter O’Toole last night? Did you make him tell you his name? What are you afraid of? This dangerous crowd?’ As if by magic the stage door opens and a hundred jolly old ladies wave and blow kisses. The door slams shut again. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t need to listen to this,’ shouts the pig.

  ‘No, you don’t. Leave.’

  ‘Calma, calma,’ tries Rose, while Mr Geoffrey hustles the bouncer back to his post outside the theatre.

  Now Natasha laughs. She puts her hand to her chest, changes gear and ploughs right on. ‘Sorry, darling. Anyway, you were great. Michael Blakemore said he had no idea you were such a good comedian. I said, we all know that! But what about that sofa?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s awful. What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m just running out for dinner. Robert’s here. Did you know?’ Robert is her ex-husband and one of my closest friends.

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘Are you going in to see Angela?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I guide her there.

  ‘We must meet up,’ we say in unison, laughing and hugging. I knock on Angela’s door and pass the two ladies into the room.

  I blow a kiss and escape.

  A week later.

  ‘Blithe Spirit was the last play she saw,’ Vanessa says in a strange musical voice, as if she is trying to work something out.

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that odd?’ I reply.

  She turns to me, those blue-diamond eyes dead with disappointment. ‘Very.’

  She leads me and Robert by the hand towards the open casket, in which Natasha lies, cocooned in white satin on a lacy pillow for eternity, in virginal white with rust-coloured make-up on her gaunt lifeless cheeks. Vanessa, like a seasoned undertaker, or an actress who has mastered a difficult prop, neatly lifts the bottom half of the casket lid to reveal a blue woollen blanket covering Tasha’s legs.

  ‘She loved this,’ mouths the matriarch, stroking the body and kissing the hands of her dead daughter.

  We must have terrified faces, because she looks up at Robert, with a classic Vanessa half-smile – biting her lip, boring into him with her burning eyes.

  ‘You can kiss her,’ she says.

  ‘I will,’ says Robert, but he doesn’t. He touches her hands instead.

  They are beautiful. I never really noticed them when she was alive. Her long sensitive fingers are crossed over her belly and for a moment they seem to be rising and falling as she breathes. One hallucinates when confronted with death. We all look down into the coffin, searching for life, but it only whispers round the rigid features in the thousand memories of the living. Every past action has a new colour now, matched against the intractable black of death. It is quite overwhelming and makes me giddy.

  As if sharing this sentiment, Vanessa briefly grips the side of the coffin with the same expressive hands and fingers as her daughter. For a moment she looks as if she is going to fall but she gathers herself and sets off towards the other room.

  ‘Come and see her!’ she chan
ts, arms wide, to the group hanging back.

  Robert and I stand on either side of the coffin, lost in thought, searching the face for some recognisable trace, but death has sucked all the character away. It’s unimaginable that Tasha’s great big china-blue eyes are seeing for someone else right now. Her lashes lie against her cheek and tremble slightly at the hum of the outside world, the traffic, the brakes, horns and wailing sirens that she will never hear again. I look up at Robert. He changed his entire life for this woman.

  Natasha and Robert get married during a cold grey weekend in February and we are all staying at the Wyndham just behind the Plaza, a shivering group of refugees from each corner of the globe. The Wyndham is a tall thin hotel favoured by writers and theatre folk, the last of the great theatrical B and Bs. Jessica Tandy and Hugh Cronin have a permanent suite there. Maria St Just supervises (terrorises) New York productions of Tennessee Williams’s plays from Suite 43. It is dusty and overdecorated with vast swooshing curtains lined with plastic, complicated wallpapers (peeling) and lampshades dripping with tassles. Each room or suite has its own theme, and the lift trembles and groans up the building, driven by a series of sweet doddery lift boys. Somebody once said that to spend a night at the Wyndham is like waking up inside your grandmother’s knickers. This fantastical hotel is perhaps not the best place from which to make a new start in life.

  The evening before the wedding we have drinks in Robert’s suite. The curtain is hanging off the rail in one corner and the tightly packed, blue-squiggle wallpaper has a damp patch over the bed. Natasha and her girlfriends briefly entertain us before leaving for their hen night, while we go for a grim bachelors’ dinner at Elaine’s. It is a drunken affair in that dismal eatery and nobody quite knows what’s going on, but we all know something is. As it happens, last night the couple had a blinding fight and – unbeknown to the rest of us – are thinking of calling the whole thing off. But for the time being, Elaine hobbles about like the little clairvoyant from Poltergeist. Robert is a coiled spring and we have an early night but are nonetheless worn out by jet lag on the morning of the ceremony.

  I am at breakfast downstairs in a nearby diner with Tony Richardson, Natasha’s father, his best friend Jeremy Fry the inventor, and Annabelle Brooks, the beautiful gazelle who finally manages to snare my evasive friend Damian (Chapter 8) into marriage. She is everyone’s mutual friend at the table. She used to go out with Jeremy’s son Cosmo, and met Tony at a dinner party years ago where she caught fire, lighting a cigarette from a candelabra. A whole table of young county folk screamed with laughter that night – no one more than Annabelle, who didn’t realise she was in flames until somebody doused her with Perrier. Dripping and smoking like a peat field, she turned back to her dinner companion and continued with the conversation they had been having. Tony falls in love. Annabelle is his kind of girl.

  ‘Have you written your speech, Tony?’ she asks now.

  ‘A gloomy peace this morning with it brings, the sun for sorrow will not show his head … You know the rest.’

  Tony recites from Romeo and Juliet in the voice that many people have tried – and failed – to impersonate. It is a famous voice: gloomy, deliberate, slightly breathless and utterly compelling. The winter sun shines on his face through the window. He looks ancient in it, as though he is made of dust, the crumbling statue of a Roman emperor. Any minute now a strong wind will blow him away. But not just yet.

  He is still a strange magic character, like a magnet. Some things (us) cling to him. Other people can’t get away fast enough. He is a director on set and off, quietly manipulating the present company – be they civilians or pros – into confrontations and reconciliations, prodding them with a well-placed niggle, an innocent enquiry, so that lunches and dinners become explosive theatrical events. Everyone loses their heads around Tony, and are drawn – against their wishes sometimes – into the fantastical dramas he weaves, a twentieth-century Prospero. This latest one, the compact between Robert and Natasha, has not been of his making, and right up until today he has doggedly aired his reservations.

  ‘I don’t see why they can’t just keep on as usual,’ he says for the thousandth time.

  ‘But they’re in love,’ pleads Annabelle.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be together. Just not marriage. It never works.’

  ‘You’re always telling me and Annabelle to get married,’ I remind him.

  ‘That’s completely different. You and Annabella need one another.’ At which point, looking fiercely at me through his eagle’s eyes, he begins to chuckle. ‘Oh, Roopsi Doopsie! What are we going to do with you? You’re such a floozie.’

  ‘I think they make a good couple, T,’ says Jeremy Fry.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, J. Look at you. Imagine if you got married to Medieval Garb, how sorry we’d all be?’

  (Medieval Garb is Jeremy’s boyfriend, a rather flighty opera director, who has long been the butt of Tony’s humour. According to legend, he once came down to breakfast in a kimono and someone described it as Medieval Garb. The name stuck. He has since become the director of the Paris Opera.)

  Jeremy sits next to Tony on the banquette. If Tony is white and gaunt, then Jeremy’s face is the shape and colour of a beetroot. They are both craggy eccentric geniuses although Jeremy is at present flummoxed by his new invention – ‘a revolving wheelchair’, according to Tony. ‘Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous?’

  Tony has been overlooked by Hollywood and reduced to TV movies. He is too clever for the new managerial LA. They have casually written off his vast talent.

  Today they are both dressed scruffily – they never take luggage on a trip. They address one another by their initials. Like T, J is a dangerous enemy, particularly when drunk, but a great friend. (He will be sitting by Tony’s bed the night he dies.)

  The service itself takes place in the apartment of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. In the photo, Robert – one of the best-looking men we all know – seems slightly chubby. (This is his last year of drinking.) Natasha looks beautiful but strained. The service is agnostic, ministered by a jolly dresser. There is no music and we all stand uncertainly, marooned on the slippery parquet of the Dunnes’ drawing room, balancing delicious nibbles and high flutes of champagne, unsure what to do next. We are a group of marvellous eccentrics, yes, but not the youthful crowd one expects to see at a wedding. At a wedding everyone is looking forward. There is no past. Here everyone is looking over their shoulder, except for one guest who has mislaid his false teeth. Life has already crashed against this crowd – including the newlyweds – and the whole thing feels more like the Thanks giving party of everyone’s shrink than a wedding. The walls of the Dunnes’ house are shiny grey, the colour of ghosts, and half the faces in the pictures are dead. Maria St Just, John Gregory Dunne, Tony and Jeremy and, of course, the bride herself.

  The wedding breakfast – or late lunch – takes place in a dark restaurant with raw brick walls on the Upper East Side, where the theme tune from The Godfather plays endlessly. Tony doesn’t recite the end of Romeo and Juliet. He gives a beautiful speech, talking about how he knew Robert’s father and loved him. This means a lot to Robert who, I think, loves Tony more than Tasha.

  Adding to the transitory nature of the event, everyone is leaving directly for the airport after the lunch, so we all have our bags. Annabelle and I are going back to LA. (I am making a film with an orang-utan in the morning.) Tony and Jeremy are leaving for Africa tonight, embarking on one of their legendary trips. No luggage and no medication for Tony, who is terribly unwell. He knows this. No one else does. Not even Robert and Natasha, who are going on their honeymoon in the morning.

  Tony directs the party from a chair, forcing me and Vanessa to make headscarves out of napkins and sing ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria’. It’s a jolly pub wedding out of Dickens. My final image is of Robert and Natasha against the brick wall of the restaurant, laughing, sm
oking and drinking – as Vanessa and I bring the house down, and Tony watches like a wizard, knowing everything.

  On the way to the airport, I have never felt so lost in my life.

  Robert and I move from the coffin. It’s another magnet and we pull ourselves away from it, while others succumb and are slowly enveloped by its field, edging closer and closer, while we struggle back to the living and join Tasha’s half-sister Katharine and her mother Grizelda for a stiff drink. Tasha’s head can be seen now, far away in a pool of light, rising out of the casket at the other end of the room. Now Vanessa and Uma Thurman are leaning over her. Vanessa holds Uma back like a heroine in a nineteenth-century melodrama. It is a theatrical wake for theatricals. We have played scenes like this in rep and on the West End stage. Some of us are better at it than others, but it is a brilliant way to deal with the tragedy. It’s nearly show time for me so I say goodbye and leave.

  Outside, the paparazzi have intensified, and a lady with a microphone runs after me down the icy street.

  ‘Can you talk to CNN?’

  Natasha is flying to heaven on the red carpet. She is more famous today than she has ever been. Too late as usual! I walk over to Broadway across the frozen park in a strange, twisting mood, at once elated and regretful. Dirty snow is piled by the sides of the icy pathways. The lake is frozen. The city towers over the treetops, a galaxy of windows sparkling with life, while the dead whistle round the naked branches in the park below. They are wagging their fingers.

  *

  Tasha and I gave one another a wide berth while she was alive. We knew each other well, but despite many connections and similarities we didn’t get along. Perhaps we were more alike than we cared to admit. Both of us dreamt, after all, of entirely different careers for ourselves than the ones that we ultimately achieved. (She wanted to be Vivien Leigh and I wanted to be Montgomery Clift.) Both of us had a sharp tongue concerning others, oversensitivity about ourselves, equal doses of practicality and hysteria, and a stumped vulnerability on the various crossroads of our private lives. Both of us tried endlessly to remodel ourselves – physically and psychologically – for those elusive conventional careers. The fact is, we were both better character actors than love interests. We both passed through periods of excess. They just didn’t coincide.