You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures

by Alan Cumming

  This time at the Tonys though, I passed my time waiting in the celebrity crush by taking photographs, and this one is a particular favorite. It is of Glenn Close’s totally smoking ripped back.

  IRIS APFEL’S HAND

  ONCE AT A really swanky Fashion Week dinner I was sat next to the legend that is Iris Apfel. Iris had recently turned ninety and was wearing a characteristically colorful and idiosyncratic outfit, but I was most fascinated by her hands, perhaps the only part of her ensemble not to be embellished. Her face was, as usual, dwarfed by her huge round glasses and her little white pixie hairdo was stylishly deshabille.

  Iris has been a style guru for decades and decades and I was really looking forward to our dinner conversation. She amiably agreed to my taking her photo, and soon we were chatting like old chums.

  Shortly, however, a gust of icy wind would blow across our newfound friendship.

  We had been talking about young people, and how so many of them nowadays were having to move back in with their parents after finishing college. I started on my spiel about overpopulation and my theory that very soon it would have to become an issue in political discourse. We just cannot sustain this many people on the planet. Not enough jobs for our young, bright, and hopeful being just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. Iris had another theory.

  “It’s all Obama’s fault,” she said, sourly. “He’s done nothing for young people.”

  Thinking we were just hitting a little road bump in our newfound paldom and not a complete and utter car crash, I replied jovially, “Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Iris. He’s been very good about encouraging young people to stay at school and be educated and helping them financially to get to college. And now with the DREAM Act he’s trying to make changes to the immigration system so that young people who were born in this country will be able …”

  I won’t tell you what Iris said next.

  Now, I don’t know about you, but I have long been guilty of assumption when meeting new people, and by that I mean assuming they think like me, socially and politically. And of course, I am often disappointed. But Iris was one of us, I thought. She was in fashion, she looked like a hippie granny, she was cool. Well, all these things are true, but what I did not bargain for was Iris being a rabid Republican. One of the kind that is incapable of an actual conversation when it comes to politics. There is no exchange of ideas. There is merely an opinion, usually at the pretty extreme end of the sensible—and certainly sensitive—spectrum, followed by the hum of metaphorical tinted windows being raised, enabling no further chance for you to reach them or for them to ever question or justify whatever mean, prejudiced belief that has just been expounded. It’s the equivalent of a wasp stinging you and then flying away: it has moved on to be bitter and mean in pastures new and you are left frustrated, angry, and wounded.

  And then of course came the perennial riposte that adds to the injury: “Let’s stop talking about it,” said Iris crossly.

  “Okay, Iris,” I acquiesced.

  The good thing is that the picture I took retains the Iris I had imagined before our conversation that evening. The kooky, weathered, and beautiful creation that she undoubtedly is.

  BODY PARTS

  BUT NOW, in honor of Iris’s hand, here are pictures of other body parts that have caught my eyes over the years.

  And I’m going to assume they’re all lefties. Actually some of them I know are for sure, because they’re me.

  A barman at a party in the Hollywood Hills, 2011.

  Honey and me, at home, 2014.

  A lady in the bar of the Ritz Carlton, Boston, 2012.

  Andrew, Sue, and me in a hotel room somewhere between Toulouse and St. Tropez, 1997.

  Grant and Leon, Montauk, 2012.

  My legs, Cabaret costume fitting, 2014.

  Me, backstage at Cabaret, 2014.

  Backstage at Broadway Bares, New York City, 2014.

  A burn on a waiter’s arm, New York City, 2012.

  A barman at Flaming Saddles, New York City, 2014.

  Connie Nielson and Donna Karan at the CFDA after-party, New York City, 2005.

  Me and Rob, Skye, 2003.

  My hand just before a performance of Macbeth on Broadway, 2013.

  Mike Furey at Don Hill’s, New York City, 2011.

  Me doing an impersonation of Danny Burstein, Cabaret, New York City, 2014.

  Will, backstage at Cabaret, 2014.

  Unknown boy, unknown location, sometime this century.

  Reed, New York City, 2011.

  Jared in Sammy Jo’s bathroom, New York City, 2012.

  Eva Mendes’ boobs, Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles, 2005.

  FLESHBOT

  IN 2011, Fleshbot, the sex blog, decided to give me their Sexy Fashion Award, for I suppose my sexy fashion choices, but also for my sex positivity, particularly in the campaign for my fragrance line, Cumming.

  Yes, I had a fragrance and it was called Cumming, and I was shot re-creating various iconic fragrance advertisements of the past and I got naked for the commercial and lolled around in a bed with eyeliner on and talked about shame not being sexy. If you really want to know, I also had a body lotion called Cumming All Over, a body scrub called Cumming Off Buff, and a body wash called Cumming Clean. But my particular favorite was the soap—Cumming in a Bar. Thank you.

  (I actually have a second fragrance that is still available and it’s called … can you guess? 2nd Cumming!)

  Now, I love an awards show at the best of times, but one that celebrates sexuality and sex positivity is even more up my alley. The first thing that delighted me on arrival at the Fleshbot awards was the goodie bag. First of all it was waiting for you on your chair. You didn’t have to do that embarrassing walk by twinky interns clutching handfuls of them as you left the event and silently exhort them to hand one over. It was already there! And in it there was a Fleshlight!!!

  For those of you not in the know, a Fleshlight is a masturbation device. It’s that black thing on the left of the picture. You unscrew the lid at the bottom of it and you discover a latex interpretation of a vagina, an anus, or indeed, as my extensive research for writing this story has uncovered, a mouth. Mine though, was a beautiful pink vagina. You then lube up and insert your penis into the Fleshlight and you experience a very lifelike (some even say better-than-lifelike but I think they need to get out more) re-creation of what it feels like to be penetrating another human. You then pull the Fleshlight up and down and, well … I’m sure you get it.

  I had wanted a Fleshlight forever, and now here it was, free in a goodie bag! I think it rated as my top awards show swag ever, perhaps equal first with an orthopedic bed I once got from the Emmys. And as you can see, they also very kindly included some condoms and lube, and that gleaming silver dildo is the actual award!

  For many reasons, this was a night of firsts. I had never been at an awards show that ended with some of the presenters showing their genitalia before (well, not in public at least). I had never seen my name engraved on a dildo before. And I had never received an award that I could potentially penetrate myself with, safely at least.

  Many years ago when I lived in London, my friend Richard introduced me to a game called “knobbing the bronze.” It was a very English public-schoolboy, repressed-sexuality sort of a wheeze, but nonetheless quite fun. What happened was, if you won an award (the “bronze”), you had to, as soon as was decently possible, hit it with your penis (the knobbing part, see?). That was basically it. I remember once wearing a kilt when I won a big theater award and was able to knob my bronze before I even got back to my seat. But then as the evening wore on, and drinks were imbibed, the game became more daring. You had to go and ask various famous people if they would knob your bronze too, and you’d be surprised how many acquiesced.

  The thing about having a sex toy as your bronze to begin with though, is that there is no need to knob it. It is inherently already knobbed.

  My Fleshbot has pride of place among my awards stash, a
nd it gets handled by the curious way much more than any of the others.

  I AM WRITING THIS BECAUSE GORE VIDAL TOLD ME TO

  I TOOK THIS picture backstage at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City on August 23, 2012.

  I had just been handed a piece of paper with the running order for the memorial of Gore Vidal printed on it. Gore had died just weeks before and his play The Best Man was currently playing on the very stage I—squashed between Cybill Shepherd and a film clip of some of Gore’s most pithy moments—would soon be speaking on.

  I think Gore would have approved of the piece I read. It was an essay of his (so already he’d think it a great idea!) written for Esquire magazine about bisexuality. “We are all bisexual to begin with” was its opening gambit.

  And I know Gore would approve of me writing about him now.

  Once, you see, I made the big mistake of telling him I was having some difficulty in finishing my first novel. Gore wasn’t the commiserating type: “Well, of course!” he snapped. “You’re not a novelist.”

  I remember debating if I should tell him that I had read one of his novels and I didn’t think he was one either, but I quickly told myself that would be wrong, that I’d only be propagating the stereotype that all writers are bitchy and vicious about other writers (especially younger, inexperienced ones who appear to be blithely writing novels from a supine position in their trailers between takes on movie sets).

  And anyway, everyone knows the artists who are the least supportive of their peers’ work are directors.

  However, I hadn’t actually read any of Gore’s novels, only a book of essays and his memoir Palimpsest, which I’d finished just a couple of hours earlier, rushing through the last chapters on the train that afternoon like a guilty schoolboy cramming for a tutorial.

  Gore had told me I should read it, you see, at our last meeting. We had met for breakfast at the Plaza Hotel in New York, supposedly for me to be persuaded by Gore to be in a Broadway revival of his play Visit to a Small Planet, but mostly we just laughed and exchanged lurid gossip, our fun interrupted only when the producer of the ultimately aborted production—the aftermath of September 11 making Gore’s satire of the US military less than likely to be a Broadway crowd pleaser—turned up and we pretended to be talking solemnly about the piece and the various cuts and updates Gore had in mind for it.

  And Gore really needed some fun that Saturday morning, as days later he was scheduled to attend the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. I know, you couldn’t make this up.

  Timothy McVeigh himself had asked Gore to attend. Gore had written (provocatively, natch) about his case a few years before, and they had kept up a correspondence. As we waded through the Plaza Hotel red tape that stood between us and a boiled egg after 11:00 a.m., I remember thinking how awful it must be to be invited to watch someone be killed. How awful, and of course, how impossible an invitation to refuse. But the execution was postponed at the last minute, and soon after Gore returned to Italy, relieved, I imagine, to be so far away when the reprieve ended and McVeigh was finally given his lethal injection.

  So having just finished reading Palimpsest, I was now sitting opposite the man himself, hearing Gore recount many of the anecdotes contained in the book, and it was weird. Like having drinks with an audio book. When he started the one about Klosters and Greta Garbo saying how she wished her genitals got smaller as she got older, it was all I could do to stop myself from chiming in with the punch line.

  “Write about what you know,” Gore continued.

  I wanted to say that I was, I really was, that my novel was more or less a thinly veiled account of a rather debauched time in my life combined with a few half-baked theories on how the inexorable, possibly physical yearnings for fatherhood might be combined with the inexorable, definitely physical yearnings for taking lots of drugs, fucking everything that moves, and accepting no responsibilities whatsoever. But I didn’t have a chance. He was off.

  “You get around the world, you meet interesting people like me, you have ideas. Write them down! And analyze,” he said, with great emphasis.

  Gore, his partner Howard, my then boyfriend, and I were in the rococo study of Gore and Howard’s Italian home. My boyfriend and I had arrived earlier that evening after a perilous moonlit taxi journey along the Amalfi Coast’s cliff tops, followed by a precipitous and spooky walk down the path from the village of Ravello, finally emerging from the gardens’ shadows to see Gore in a shaft of moonlight, propping himself up against the doorway of the villa, citing our tardiness for dinner as the reason for his and Howard’s already quite advanced stage of inebriation. (“I’m floating,” was Howard’s opening gambit.)

  I really liked Howard. I liked Gore too of course, but Howard had fewer chances to get a word in edgewise and make you realize that you liked him, so I like to think that over their years together he had honed his one-liners down to such a degree that practically every one was a gem. Gore, not in Howard’s presence of course, called him “a wisecracker” and smiled fondly—fondness not being one of his biggest traits—and that really describes what Howard was.

  “Write about this weekend, write about two men who have been together for over fifty years and yet have hardly ever had sex. Analyze that.”

  As Gore said this, Howard, he of the over fifty years with hardly any sex, was sitting in a nearby armchair, dwarfed by its size and cushions, the ever-present cigarette dangling elegantly from one hand, the other hand guiding the tongs toward an ice cube from the silver bucket next to him, saying nothing (for now).

  Their relationship did indeed fascinate me. They had been together at that point for fifty-two years and seemed completely dependent on, and loyal, to each other.

  But Gore has written copiously about his other lovers, his fear of commitment, and that he had never been in love except once, briefly, with a fellow schoolboy named Jimmy Trimble, whose death soon after their teenage love affair ended has haunted him and his work—Palimpsest being practically a love letter to Jimmy interspersed with later life episodes. I wondered how Howard felt about all of that.

  Howard and Gore had met in the aptly named Everard Baths on 28th Street in New York City in the late 1940s. It was there that they had had some sexual contact (“mostly in the presence of others” as Gore delicately put it). And it was an envelope from there, one of those you’d leave your valuables in before you set off down the corridors to seek succor in the arms—or at least the hands—of a stranger, that I saw framed in the loo off their villa’s kitchen.

  Gore feigned outrage when I asked him what this envelope was and why it was there, but soon began to talk fondly of those halcyon days when men of all sexualities gathered and where, he said, you could have anyone.

  But soon homosexual became a noun as well as an adjective, and the word “gay” came into being and the ghetto walls were put up and the straight men who’d frequented the baths (“It was cheaper than a hotel and they could get blown”) got scared and began to stay away because they didn’t want to be associated with all that, and the world changed and became the compartmentalized place it is today, where not just your sexuality but details of your preferred role in the sexual act need to be decided upon in advance and offered up early in any conversation or within earshot of a prospective sexual partner.

  It was a long night.

  Gore was swaying now, and beginning to needle me. He could feel I was taking him up on his challenge, that by questioning him about his views and past adventures I was indeed trying to analyze his and Howard’s relationship. So he kept throwing challenges back. At one point he turned to me and said, “Don’t you hate commitment?” Remember that my boyfriend was sitting opposite me.

  “No,” I said, thinking carefully. “I don’t hate it.”

  “But you obviously aren’t that fond of it by the way you responded.”

  “Well …” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Gore could feel it too and I could tell he was enjoying it. �
��When I make a commitment I like it. I don’t like to feel trapped, but I think it depends on the type of commitment you make and the rules therein.”

  In the second that Gore was honing his next salvo I decided to retaliate. The hunted became the hunter: “You seem to be the one with the commitment issues, Gore.”

  There was a pause for a moment. He slurped his whisky. “Oh yes,” he said.

  Gore suddenly reminded me of Tommy, the eponymous hero of my unfinished book, running around shagging everything he could and refusing to be pinned down or defined. But then, unlike Tommy, he had had all that in his life and commitment. Gore had no commitment issues. He had been committed to Howard for more than half a century. What he had a problem with was admitting his commitment.

  He started to talk about never having loved.

  “What about Jimmy Trimble?” I asked.

  “Ah yes.” I could tell he was torn—half pleased I had done my homework and read his memoir, and half pissed off that I was interrupting his lament. “I didn’t realize how much he meant to me,” Gore conceded.

  “But you weren’t really in love with him though, were you?” I asked, knowing the answer already, but needing to make him say it aloud.