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

by Alan Cumming

  “How could I have been?” he snapped. “We were so young. We were just friends fooling around.”

  “You were just infatuated with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve never loved, Gore?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t believe him.

  I suppose I should have been more outraged that he’d just admitted that the central theme of his memoir was a lie, but I wasn’t. A human being in his seventies sitting in front of me asking me to believe he had never been in love was far more outrageous, I thought.

  Just as he had never properly acknowledged the commitment he had made to Howard, I felt he couldn’t admit to being in love.

  I couldn’t understand it. The usual recipe of shame and self-loathing you might attribute to a man of his generation in such a scenario just didn’t wash: he’d been very vocal about his male partners. And his female ones. In fact, let’s face it, Gore has been pretty vocal about everything; his third novel, The Pillar and the City, is very graphic in its description of a gay relationship and caused a sensation when it was first published. So it’s not as if he has a problem with admitting he likes cock. He just has a problem admitting to liking the rest of the person the cock belongs to.

  Over the next couple of days, I began to understand that Gore came from a tradition and a generation where this sort of detached, double-standard behavior was not only tolerated but encouraged.

  He mentioned that, as a Southerner, he could completely understand how President Clinton could tell the world that he had never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky and believe he was telling the truth. To me, this bizarre notion Americans have that no sexual contact has occurred unless someone gets penetrated (and not orally, that doesn’t count) is very dangerous. Firstly because it denigrates, demeans, and discounts any kind of sexual contact that comes before or instead of penetration and secondly, because it encourages Americans to enter into a very dangerous communal lie: that getting naked and having an orgasm with someone else doesn’t mean anything. I think that’s weird. It is not a very healthy culture that doesn’t even have a name for non-penetrative sex—apart from the loose, bland, and curiously childlike “fooling around.”

  It’s just plain stupid. Getting your penis out and having someone else touch it or put it in his or her mouth is having sexual relations in my book.

  Gore did not agree.

  “If I was to come over now and jerk you off, you wouldn’t think that was sex, would you?” he asked.

  I reflected for a second on how surreal it was to be discussing with Gore Vidal the semantic issues involved in him hypothetically wanking me off in front of my boyfriend.

  “Not if you only define the word ‘sex’ as something that involves penetration, no. But I think we would have had sexual contact,” I replied.

  Gore continued without registering my response. “If I were to blow either of you, which I might add is highly unlikely, we would only be fooling around.”

  My boyfriend and I both blanched slightly because Gore had now started to fumble with his fly. But when he got up and walked onto the terrace and proceeded to pee over the cliff into the darkness, we were both relieved and then worried for any unsuspecting Italians who might be downstream of the Vidal flow.

  “You Brits are more prone to affection in sex,” he said over his shoulder.

  “You make that sound like a bad thing,” I replied.

  He carried on peeing; the subject was closed.

  But there it was. In that one comment flung back at me as he pissed quite literally in the wind, I realized what Gore was all about. He had separated love and sex because in his mind the two together were somehow dangerous and wrong. And he may have been right—his recipe had ensured a relationship with Howard that had lasted longer than most marriages, and certainly was superhuman in its longevity in gay terms.

  So maybe I shouldn’t have felt sorry for him. Maybe he had it sussed and I was the one who should be pitied, flailing around in my love and my passion and learning from my mistakes only that I could not stop making them.

  There is one last story from those few days in Ravello that has continued to float around my mind looking for a home, and finally it has. Ironically Gore himself enabled me to do what he instructed me to do, and my final analysis—if this were an exam or if someone’s essence and ethos were as easy to capture—would be this story, suspended in aspic, or like a Damien Hirst cow, dissected and able to be viewed from all sides.

  It takes place in the Everard Baths. Gore had seen a boy he liked the look of and, in that subtle, silent exchange of looks and body movements that is quickly learned in those environs, had let the boy know he wanted to fuck him. Not just fool around, remember. The boy acquiesced. After Gore had finished, the boy turned round and looked up at him and said, “Have you worked out your aggression yet?”

  And Gore could think of nothing to say back.

  “I was cleverer than him but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was fucking him because I wanted to get off. He had recognized there was no joy in it.”

  And strangely, as I returned to my seat in the audience and observed the rest of Gore’s memorial, I too recognized there was no joy in it.

  Gore had left a great legacy, no doubt, a lifetime of provocation and wit, and there was much, much laughter that day, but every laugh was tinged with a sense of meanness. Clever mean mostly, but meanness nonetheless, and definitely no joy.

  I left the theater feeling sadder than I’d thought I would. Gore, it seemed, had forbidden himself joy as well as love. But then I don’t think it’s possible to have one without the other.

  SECRETS AND LIES

  THESE ARE TWO of my oldest friends, Ashtar and Susie. I was over at Susie’s for Sunday lunch and was sitting in the garden looking back at them and suddenly I just got out my camera and caught this moment.

  The thing about this picture is that it has the air of suburban angst that Mike Leigh has catalogued so brilliantly in his films (hence the title) but actually, aside from the fact that we were in the suburbs of London, the situation and the people and the mood of that day could not have been more different.

  Again I realize how much I love the way a photograph can mislead, even when it captures exactly what was happening.

  DIDDY

  I WAS ONCE at a fashion show after-party with my friend Cynthia Rowley and we were playing that game where you look around the room and choose someone you’d like to shag.

  Sean came over and he started to play it too. When it was my turn I had a fruitless gander around the fashionistas and then my eyes returned to Diddy. “I think I’d like to shag you,” I said.

  This is a picture of his reaction to that statement. Truthfully, it is a pale imitation of it, as this is not his original look of feigned horror but a reenactment for my camera half a minute later after I had stopped laughing.

  I’d still do him.

  FASHION FEET FORWARD

  I LOVE going to fashion shows, though I wish more designers would remember they are actually called fashion shows.

  Yet even though I long for—and know there are—more interesting and memorable ways to show off clothes than on the requisite bored-looking childlike models stomping down a runway, I do love the sense of occasion, the social hullabaloo, and the drama that precedes a fashion show.

  But sometimes it can get a little out of hand. For some, where they are seated—or perhaps even if they are seated—is linked to their ongoing sense of self-worth. The clothes and the show are secondary to the feeling of having a foot on the rung of the fashion food-chain ladder.

  And the sad thing is, I don’t think it really matters. Well, it matters, of course. To them. You can see that. It is palpable by the utterly rank levels of rudeness and disrespect for other human beings that emanate around those state-of-the-art tents and hastily styled derelict buildings where fashion shows tend to take place.

  Fashion, sadly, seems to attract people whose de
sire to get into it is inexorably linked to the belief that they are more likely to succeed and be popular if they are mean.

  And why it doesn’t matter: outside of the fashion bubble, no one sensible gives a flying fuck where you were sitting or which after-parties you were invited to. And actually and thankfully, people who are most successful, on the whole, tend to be quite nice.

  And even if they’re not really nice deep down inside—I mean if they’re actually, truly psychotic and mean to the marrow—they understand that it’s easier and more fruitful in life to pretend to be nice, and so they fake it.

  Just saying.

  NATALIE MERCHANT’S SHOES

  ONCE, AT a charity event, I met Natalie Merchant and she was lovely. And so were her shoes. I asked if I could take a picture of them and she agreed.

  Then a few years later, I was directing a film called Suffering Man’s Charity (though later the title was changed to Ghost Writer), and the character I played in it wrote—well, actually stole, so let’s just say published—a novel and we had to find an image for the cover as the book was going to be an actual prop in the movie.

  For some reason this picture of Natalie’s shoes sprung into my mind and would not leave. So I asked her if I could use it, and again she said yes.

  GETTING TO NOMI

  I TOOK THIS picture many years ago in Soho House, London.

  Rather bizarrely I was there meeting directors for a proposed biopic of Klaus Nomi, the amazing German countertenor and performance artist who had several hits in the early 1980s before dying of AIDS, and whom I was to going to play in said biopic. It was a rather unusual experience for an actor to be auditioning directors and not the other way around.

  Sadly the drafts of the script got less and less fascinating just as I became more and more fascinated with this incredible artist, until I felt I would not be honoring his legacy to remain involved.

  This lady worked for the producers and at the end of one of the meetings I asked if I could take a picture of her boots. She obviously thought me a total weirdo for asking but as I was there to inhabit Klaus Nomi, I suppose it only proved their casting was in the right ballpark.

  My friend Joey Arias is the executor of the Nomi estate, and more recently there has been another plan afoot to make a movie. I feel confident that with Joey’s involvement it will have the right sensibility. As I write this, the project is still what you might call “nascent,” so really the only artistic output I have of my involvement with Klaus Nomi is this picture.

  But I am nothing if not an optimist. Many of the projects I am most proud of have taken many years and a very circuitous route to come to fruition, and this one will hopefully fall into that category.

  It had better be soon though. Klaus died when he was thirty-nine. I’m a good actor, and luckily alive, but still.

  YOU GOTTA GET BIGGER DREAMS!

  ONCE, YEARS AGO, at the Vanity Fair Oscars dinner in Los Angeles, I met Oprah Winfrey.

  I don’t know why I even bothered to add “Winfrey” to the end of that sentence. You know who I mean. There is only one Oprah, after all. There are two Madonnas, but only one Oprah. There is only one Cher, of course, but Cher has only ever had one name. She has not risen from mere two-name mortalhood to the pantheon of mono-nameness in the way Oprah has, so I don’t think she counts either.

  Oprah (omfg!!) and I were introduced by Angela Bassett, who said very kind things about me, and Oprah agreed vociferously. A tad too vociferously I sensed, for I think Oprah didn’t have a clue who I was, but nonetheless was very polite and nice to pretend.

  A few hours later the after-party was in full swing and I was a bit squiffy. I noticed there were little glasses full of multicolored Sobranie cigarettes on the bar, and naturally I saw this as a sign from the Party Gods that I should start smoking again immediately. It was in the days when you could still smoke within swatting range of a building or another human being so I grabbed a handful and began to make my way back to my booth.

  Suddenly my ears were filled with people shouting my name, and then I heard, even more loudly, the name “Oprah” being shouted. Flashbulbs began to pop and I realized that I had turned from the bar and bumped into Oprah and now we had become what is euphemistically described as a photo opportunity.

  As is required in these scenarios, Oprah and I clung to each other for a few seconds. Then, when we felt the moment had been suitably cemented in media history, we went about our ways. Or rather, she did. Emerging from the post-Oprah glow, I spotted a photographer I knew and said, “You must send me that picture!” She did. And I still have it, framed on top of my fridge. Oprah looking patient and professional, me beaming drunkenly and clinging on to her with one hand, the other stuffed with newly purloined fancy ciggies.

  MY FRIEND Eddie is a self-confessed Oprah obsessive. His relationship with her verges on that between a supplicant and a god. Really. Now, I think Oprah’s great, but from time to time I have been known to utter a small bit of criticism of her or one of the segments of her shows that I’ve caught. Bad idea. If Eddie were aware, this would invoke a weird coloring to his complexion along with a shrill and menacing tone to his voice, much as I imagine Dr. Mengele would use as he was about to perform one of his experiments. Oprah was Eddie’s God, and he could not countenance her name being taken in vain. Sometimes I would actually replace Oprah’s name in those “Yo mamma” jokes just to see this transmogrification in him. It was eerie.

  But getting that picture with her and telling him how nice she had been was a turning point in our Oprah relationship together. Now somehow Eddie knew that I got it, that I understood the magic. And actually I did.

  A few years later, I was invited to attend an event at which Oprah was going to be honored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation. I knew that I had to go and I knew I had to take Eddie as my date. Grant, my husband, completely understood and so I invited Eddie, and his reaction made me so grateful to the fickle showbiz winds that have blown me hither and yonder, for sometimes they enable me to make another human so very happy.

  As the time for the event grew nearer, all Eddie could think about was getting a photo with Oprah. This began to alarm me, as I knew this meant logically that I would have to take the photo, and more than that, I would probably have to engineer, through shabby and humiliating means, its taking place. I tried to warn him that although we would be in Oprah’s vicinity, it wasn’t a slam dunk that a picture would be possible, and also reminded him of those times when we were out together and how annoyed he got on my behalf when people kept coming up and asking for photos of me when we were trying to have a quiet drink or eat dinner. I also tried to go all Oprah on him, saying how surely the sense memory and sheer joy of Oprah just being near him would be within him forever and transcend any mere photographic evidence.

  “Yes, you’re right, of course,” said Eddie to my great relief. “But,” he added, “I still would love a photo with her though.”

  The evening arrived and Eddie and I met at my apartment, both of us bedecked in black tie. I had borrowed Grant’s swanky camera to document the evening, but just in case Eddie saw that as a sign I was weakening, I reiterated: “There is no way I am going to go up and ask Oprah to take a photo with you, okay?”

  In addition to the main evening event, we had been invited to a super-duper utterly exclusive cocktail party that would take place just prior. Oprah would be there too, the invitation said. Eddie was apoplectic.

  “How many people do you think will be at the cocktail party?” he grilled me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “More than fifty? More than a hundred?”

  “I’m not psychic, Eddie!”

  We were too early, even for the cocktail party. I don’t think I have ever been early for a cocktail party in my life but such was Eddie’s zeal to soak up as much Oprah fairy dust as humanly possible that we found ourselves standing on the street outside the venue, dressed up to the nines, with nowhere to go, yet.

  Perfect, I
thought. I had realized in the cab over that I needed to get Eddie drunk.

  “Let’s go for a martini while we’re waiting,” I said, starting off down the block to a conveniently located bar.

  A large shot of straight liquor took the edge off Eddie’s nerves, and also made me pleasantly woozy. Off we exclusively toddled.

  CONSIDERING THIS WAS an event being thrown by the Elie Wiesel Foundation, named after the writer, political activist, Nobel laureate, and, get this, concentration camp survivor, it was not a surprise to find that Eddie and I were the youngest people in the room by about fifty years. That, added to the hallowed hush of any throng that was expecting a visitation from Oprah, made the cocktail party a little, well, how can I say this without sounding mean? Dull. A lovely Upper East Side lady was chatting to me but I couldn’t focus on anything but the provenance of the animal that was around her neck. Was it a fox? A raccoon? Surely not a favorite pet? I had another gulp of martini and just then heard someone trill, “Alan, darling!”

  I turned round to see Iman waving at me from across the way. And there was her lovely hubby, David Bowie, too. I have known Iman from being at events like this for years and always looked forward to having a gossip with her. And here she was with David to get this party started! I beamed back at their smiling faces and began to cross the room to join them. Suddenly their faces changed from happy-to-see-me to abject horror, and so did everyone’s around them. There were gasps and a bit of commotion and I realized that in my eagerness to get to them, quite possibly combined with the effects of my second martini on an empty stomach, I had kicked away the walking stick that a tiny, frail man next to me had been leaning on, and he was cascading toward the floor and surely a series of broken limbs. This man had quite possibly survived Auschwitz and now I was to be his Angel of Death.