By the time I reach Columbus Circus I have plunged into a terrible depression but it’s too late. Suddenly I see the fiasco at the stage door in a new light. Tasha was holding out an olive branch, and it all went wrong. It’s quite an effort, after all, to come and see someone in a show. Why didn’t I ask her to dinner that night after the play? It was strange that the last show she saw was mine and a play about death. She could have been in it, actually, and still be here.
Life’s too short to bear a grudge. But I did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Death Threats
I am crossing Eighth Avenue on the afternoon Michael Jackson dies. You don’t need to see it on the TV or read about it in the news. It is passed mouth to mouth along the street, like a cold.
‘No shit,’ says a Puerto Rican boy with cornrows. He turns to me – a complete stranger. ‘Michael Jackson’s dead!’
‘You’re kidding?’
My heart races as we cross the street. Coming towards us like a wave, the crowd on the other side have already been hit with the news. In the middle of the road a big fat girl bursts into tears. She stands there as the lights change and the traffic swarms around her. ‘Michael!’ she wails. Somebody guides her to the other side.
It is matinée day in theatre land. There are queues around the block, and they are falling over with the news like skittles or playing cards, passing the tragedy down the line to the poor person at the end who screams it to the street. I rush into the theatre.
‘Have you heard?’ asks Rose, glued to her transistor TV set.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘I can’t believe it!’ she stammers. We are friends now, Rose and I.
In the dressing room Mr Geoffrey is ironing in front of the TV and crying – very Cage aux Folles – but this is no time for jokes. Life carries on mechanically, one eye trained on the TV, where the tribute biographies are already running. Again and again we hear the 911 phone call, set against footage of the ambulance arriving at the hospital, the aerial shot of the house, the tour rehearsals, all the highlights and lowlights of Michael’s incredible life. Sitting with Bubbles, going to court in pyjamas, dancing cartwheels on stage as a little boy, sitting in the branches of a tree aged forty, giving the fatal interview to the vile Mr Bashir. (I wonder how he is sleeping tonight.) The images of Michael’s face, one superimposed upon another, from the beautiful black youth to the chalk-white child-catcher, are a kind of postmodern Dorian Gray, a portrait of the Afro-American struggle that has turned from The Slae into The Scream. Weaving through the scandal, the same image returns. A little black boy singing and dancing cartwheels.
Connie (my PR) has organised for me to do an interview with the Daily Mirror in London. I have been putting it off but finally the date is set with their US showbiz correspondent for an early dinner before the show.
The journalist is a fabulous Fleet Street slapper, middle-aged, from Middlesex, living in Manhattan. She has big round Liza Minnelli eyes and of course we talk a lot about Michael Jackson. She has just got back from LA where she was sent as soon as the news broke, and where she managed to get the cellphone number of Michael’s bodyguard (the famous 911 call), and she was driving around LA on the day of the death, trying to talk to him, while all the other hacks were following the same fabulous lead.
‘Very Wacky Races,’ I say and she laughs.
I have nothing against journalists. We’re all trying to make a living, after all, and the pressure on writers is enormous. Being an occasional journalist myself, I am sympathetic to the struggle. Getting an interview out of a cagey celebrity – who is unwilling to enjoy or see the fact that he or she is either a cunt or a sex maniac or broke or on drugs or whatever – can be like getting blood out of a stone. From our point of view – the people who need to promote – these monsters are surely some of the hazards we must cheerfully embrace, and generally I try to give my best. Plus I adore the ingenuity of some of the sleuthing. This lady actually slips into Michael’s wake, just three rows away from the golden coffin. I am impressed.
We talk about other things of course during the interview, but one thing is absolutely clear and we return to it many times. We both adore Michael and are miserable that he has died.
Imagine my surprise and horror, then, when Connie calls me up at about six o’clock one morning.
‘Darling, London calling. What’s going on? Have you gone mad?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Darling, the press are going crazy after what you said about Michael Jackson.’
Now I wake up. ‘What did I say?’
‘I’ll read it to you.’
I groan. I hate Connie reading. It takes for ever. She clears her throat.
‘This is the headline, darling. It’s quite bad actually. “Why Michael Jackson deserved to die.”’
‘Whaaat?’
‘Yes! I don’t know what to do.’
She reads me the entire interview and I nearly faint. Everything I have said has been completely reorganised. It is unbelievable.
‘Did you call Michael a freak?’ asks Connie.
‘Yes. Of course. He is. But I didn’t say it rudely. She understood precisely my tone.’
‘Did you say he deserved to die?’
‘No. I said––’
‘Darling, you don’t have to scream at me. I’m only your poor PR. I spoke to the editor and she said it’s all on the tape.’
Very artfully, this hag – or one of her swamp bitch colleagues – has strung my actual words into something completely contrary to the spirit of our discussion. I am apoplectic with rage. I immediately ring the editor of the Mirror – who is a friend – I have, after all, been a 3 a.m. girl in my time. He promises to look into it and says that he will print whatever I want to say, but the damage is done. Connie tries to field the press but one explosive interview in the Inverness Herald turns global if the wind is in the wrong direction, and pretty soon I am the lead story on Perez Hilton. Mr Geoffrey isn’t talking to me. (Again.) I feel miserable. On the other hand the ingenuity of the press is impressive. Having more or less engineered Michael’s death by their relentless smears, they must now change their tune in order not to look guilty. They need to find other people to shovel the shit for them. I am today’s scapegoat.
The first death threat arrives at the theatre a few days later. At first I suspect Mr Geoffrey, but I can see that he is as surprised as I am to read it. Its message is simple and to the point.
‘You are going to die. Make peace with your God.’
Actually, I am rather chuffed. A death threat? Moi? The idea of being gunned down during a performance of Blithe Spirit is of course thrilling. On the other hand when the second one comes I wonder if I should call Interpol.
‘Not Interpol, you silly fairy. You are locked in the sixties!’ snips Mr Geoffrey, swishing from the room.
And then I think, fuck it. I can’t be bothered. Blogsville seethes with hatred, and actually I feel quite deflated because I loved Michael Jackson. Luckily nobody remembers anything these days, and my killers think better of murdering me, but I will not talk to the Daily Mirror again. They have become too slutty. Even for me.
It is the last Sunday of July, and one of the first beautiful days. Spring has been wet and cold and a strange tropical summer has settled on New York. It has rained ceaselessly, and the city swelters in a sticky mist. But today there is a light breeze and a clear blue sky as I leave my key under the mat, listen out for one last subway train rattling beneath the street and set off for the Shubert Theatre one last time. As Angela said last week at our farewell lunch, ‘You see. You did it. You thought you would never make it but you did. You gave a hundred per cent in every show.’
I should really take a full page in Variety for the quote.
We are waiting in the wings for the last time in our usual huddle. The hum of the audience becomes denser and denser on the other side of the curtain as various announcements call them to prayer and suddenly it’s e
xciting again. Please take your seats. The performance is about to begin.
‘For the last time!’ we all chant in a chorus.
The whole event is about to tumble into oblivion. A play exists only in the moment, remembered in conversation and a few faded photographs, but when the curtain comes down for the last time, a play is dead. In show business we die again and again and again. Everything suddenly has a new intensity. Jayne, my wife in the play, picks up her bunch of flowers to take on stage. We hug. I have exhausted her, driven her mad, but it’s all in the past now. I climb the scaffold to my little perch above the stage for the last time and get ready for my Act One walkdown. I have a great entrance in this show. I surge onto the stage from a large sweeping staircase to rapturous applause (sort of). Up here I can survey the whole machine in action. Stagehands whisper into their headsets. The front of house manager comes through the pass door with the all-clear. Standing on the other side of the stage, waiting to go on, Dr and Mrs Bradman greet me in mime. Simon Jones bows elaborately. Tooly curtseys. We are all ready.
The lights and the chatter fade to a buzz and black. The curtain goes up and Jayne strides into the light with her flowers. Her voice sounds heightened and disembodied from here – like an old recording – thrown as it is into the vast auditorium, while in the gloom of the backstage area Mr Geoffrey prowls about, organising the clothes for my first (and last) quick change, and Ara gets on with her knitting.
One last glass of champagne at the back of the stage with Christine, my dead wife. It has become our little tradition. We have sat here day after day, huddled against the back of the set, whispering and laughing, and we have come to know each other very well. We have given one another careful notes, suggestions – ‘Do you have to clear your throat before every joke?’ – and aired ancient grievances – ‘Are you ever going to forgive me for not learning my lines?’
Christine has delicious butterscotch throat lozenges and we both have one. She is an extraordinary show creature – unrecognisable as herself. As Elvira she is a Hollywood goddess from the fifties, a nightclub hostess from paradise – with a peroxide wig and Marilyn make-up. In real life I have hardly ever seen her since rehearsals. (One day a German housewife waves at me from across the street. She is pulling a case on wheels, and I wave blankly back. It is Christine. We walk towards the theatre – strangers almost in our civvies.) We meet each night behind the stage, strapped up, covered in glue and slap. Christine comes from musicals so knows all the tricks of the trade. Tonight she looks about eighteen as she surveys me through those gigantic lashes for one last home truth, and I answer back through painted lips.
We are not ourselves and so have revealed everything to each other in these stolen moments before Act Two. We each found the other bossy – my word – and controlling – her word, during rehearsals, but we adore each other by the end of the run and she is the only one – apart from Mr G – with whom one can have a constructive and insightful bitch about the rest of the cast. She is also a conspiracy theorist and, looking back on this season of Obamania on Broadway, everything she says about ‘that man’ in our secret moments has more or less come true.
‘Never again,’ we both say at least three nights a week of the Broadway experience, but we say it with that rueful smile that knows. Until the next time.
During the final interval I sit in my empty dressing room with Mr Geoffrey. He is packing one last bag. I am smoking a joint. We are in high spirits but we know that it is quite likely we will never meet again – or even if we do it won’t be the same.
‘Listen, babe, I’m going to shoot right off after the show,’ he explains as he folds.
‘Me too. We’re not going to say goodbye now, are we?’
‘No, but in case we don’t catch each other later …’
And we both burst into tears.
Before the last act we congregate on the stage, exhausted. Angela lies on the sofa. I sit on the end. Christine and Jayne are perched on an armchair. I wiggle Angela’s foot for the last time.
‘How are you, Angela?’
‘Dead. Thank God it’s over,’ she replies and the curtain rises.
Pretty soon I am alone on the stage, doing the final speech. The spotlights glare and a thousand faces hang on my every word. It’s magic.
‘I’m going a long way away,’ I say and the words have a special weight. ‘Somewhere you’ll never find me. Goodbye, my darlings. Parting is such sweet sorrow.’
I always play it bitter-sweet and tonight it is sadder than ever. The two invisible ghosts trash the set. Curtains are torn down. The piano lid slams up and down. Books fly from the shelves and – our own special effect – the tree outside the big bay window crashes into the room. I duck off stage and the whole cast is standing in the wings screaming while the audience applaud and whistle and someone even calls, ‘Encore!’
‘You gotta be kidding,’ laughs Angela.
We fix the glittering smiles on our faces for the last standing ovation. In the waves of applause all the rancour of the last few months evaporates and we all smile fondly at one another. The curtain falls for the last time and it is over. Almost immediately the crew begin dismantling the set. Another show will be on the stage next week.
There are drinks upstairs so no one says goodbye.
The chorus boys’ dressing room is bare now. Mr Geoffrey is nowhere to be seen. My bags are in the car. I sit in front of the mirror and cross off the last date on the calendar I painted in makeup on my first day.
‘Are you coming to the party?’ calls Erin from the bottom of the stairs.
‘In a minute,’ I shout back.
‘One. Singular. Sensation,’ I whisper to myself in the mirror. I take one last look around the room.
Then I steal down the fire escape and through that maze of passages to the stage door of another theatre on another street where the car is waiting to take me to the airport.
It is a creamy and beautiful dusk. The streets are packed. Restaurants overflow onto the sidewalks. Taxis screech to a halt as the lights change and crowds advance like armies from either side of the wide avenues. It is New York at its best. The river twinkles below as I drive over the rusty old Triboro Bridge. Manhattan gleams like a mirage on the other side of the water.
I may not have thrown double sixes in the Monopoly game. I didn’t get rave reviews. I have not been flooded with offers and won’t be going out to the coast like Eve Harrington. But maybe I achieved something better. I never flaked out. My cellphone is in my hand. I chuck it out of the window. Ciao, Manhattan!
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Grim Reaper in Wiltshire
Crouched by the brook in the water meadow of our hidden valley, enclosed within a labyrinth of high brick walls, it looks suddenly like the house of death. That’s the first thought that strikes me when I come through the gate at the top of the garden. A hush falls over a house when the grim reaper approaches. Tonight he is coming across the gloaming, on the crimson fingertips of the sun, gilding the edges of the house as it drags the day behind the ridge. The moon is already a vague smudge and all the scents of summer explode with the oncoming night. A window opens.
‘Is that you, darling? I’m just bringing Daddy downstairs.’
Coming through the back door – the same noisy latch – it has become an old people’s house in the six short months since my last visit. There is an abandoned wheelchair outside in the garage and a faint smell of disinfectant; the loo in the hall has arms while our pièce de résistance, which has shocked many a guest, is a chairlift, which tonight brings my dad – like Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer – crashing through the ceiling into the study from his bedroom above. It’s a great entrance, and my father beams with pleasure as he is transferred from the lift via the wheelchair to his magic armchair, which rises and falls like a slow-motion ejector seat at the touch of a button. Daddy can no longer walk.
We have tea. Death comes in with the familiar noise o
f the trolley clattering through the hall.
My father listens to my mother’s quiz with his ear cocked, laughs occasionally, but says little. My mother wants to know all the details, who was where and what they all said and ‘What an awful bore that you didn’t get a Tony.’
‘What did I do?’ asks Daddy, confused.
‘A Tony, Daddy. It’s an award. Not you!’
Mummy and I laugh and Daddy says, ‘Slow down.’
‘Forget an actual Tony. What about a nomination?’
I am always trying to bring my mother down to earth concerning my career, although there’s little point. As far as she’s concerned, I am the most famous and successful actor in the world and that’s that. That I don’t accept this written-in-stone fact is something to do with self-hatred and all other newfangled weirdnesses we young go on about.
As in all good plays, the conversation at tea never stops, one person’s line drifts seamlessly into the next, with the appropriate pauses for laughter. My mother is lively and funny and happy to bring some high spirits into the room where otherwise there is only the grim reaper and the news for company.
‘Shall we have some news?’ suggests my father casually for the tenth time today.
‘But you’ve just had it, darling,’ my mother quips, pouring us all more tea.
‘Oh, really?’ he asks with deep interest.
‘Yes, really. You’re going to bore me soon if you just watch the news non-stop. It’ll make you gaga.’
‘Thank you,’ he sings, reaching slowly with shaking fingers for a crumpet.
*
Summer wanes, observed by my father in his chair under a rug from his favourite spot in the garden. The first falling leaves are reflected in the one dark glass of his spectacles. It’s the only movement on a face lost in contemplation.
Vanished Years Page 29
