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

by Alan Cumming

  Luckily, there were some sprightly octogenarians there and the man was caught, righted, his stick was found, and after I’d profusely apologized, the whole thing was forgotten. At least by me. Cancel, continue, I always say.

  I introduced Eddie to Iman and David but I could see that Eddie’s mind was elsewhere.

  “Oprah’s in the room,” he whispered conspiratorially. “She is actually in this room.”

  “Where?” I asked. And then I saw a sort of whirlwind over by the door and knew she must be at its center. Very Famous People create whirlwinds, you know. People careen into their vision for a second to pay their respects but each Very Famous Person never actually stops moving and the Respecter is spat out into the shallows again before they know what has hit them. I could see Eddie looking longingly at the whirlwind. Just then, Gayle, Oprah’s best friend, appeared to say hello, and I could tell that Eddie was sated for now with just the Oprah osmosis Gayle imparted.

  Very quickly, Eddie, as though via sound waves that only rabid Oprah fans can hear, informed me that she was gone. It had just been a drive-by. I got him another martini to curb his woes and we headed down to the ballroom for the main event.

  The layout of the room was as such: there was a big, long table in the middle, where Oprah and her guests like Steven Spielberg and Kofi Annan and Jesus were sitting (only kidding about Jesus), surrounded by lots and lots of little circular tables. It was as though we were satellites orbiting the sun that is Oprah.

  When we sat down I could sense Eddie was a little anxious about our billing in terms of the table location. We were, admittedly, on the outer reaches of the Oprah universe, but conveniently located for the loos and the kitchens and the exit. We sat down and tucked into our salads, and, as our fellow table guests began to appear, we happily realized we were not on the Siberia table after all.

  The lovely Edie Falco sat down next to us and we immediately started to laugh and have fun. Then Elizabeth Berkley, best known for the iconic Showgirls, appeared with her strapping beau. She was a hoot, and I was particularly impressed when she told me about the website she’d created so young girls could ask her questions about sex education and boys, two topics I feel everyone needs a little help with.

  Before too long the room was hushed, and a ball of glowing peachness walked onstage. It was Barbara Walters. Barbara has the amazing quality of always looking like she is being viewed through a soft-focus lens, in real life! Once when I was on her show The View, she came into my dressing room to talk about some questions she wanted to ask me on air, and I actually gasped. It was as though she was floating in a ball of effervescence. I felt as though I was having a religious vision. Eddie already was amped up, and the appearance of Barbara sent him into a new stratosphere of excitement. He was practically vibrating.

  The ante was further upped by performances by Itzhak Perlman and Jessye Norman, and then Barbara uttered the immortal words, “We’re going to take a little break, and when we return … Oprah!” Eddie turned round and beamed at me. Little did he know that in mere seconds his life was about to change forever.

  Everyone began to stand up and table-hop. The mood of the room was giddy, high on the flowing wine and the inhalation of the very nearness of Oprah, as well as apprehension about what she would say and what new life lessons she would impart in her imminent speech. Just then Gayle, Oprah’s BFF, swept up to our table and asked us if we were enjoying ourselves. We nodded vigorously. Someone tapped Gayle on the shoulder and she turned away. Suddenly I saw my opening. From my point of view, Eddie’s head was right next to Gayle’s bum, and if I couldn’t get a shot of him with Oprah surely a shot of him with Gayle’s ass would be a valiant runner-up?! (Please note I had been drinking.)

  I told Eddie to turn his head toward me and in an instant I knew he got my plan. But just as I had taken the photo I thought would be the talking point of the night, Eddie, with his hawklike gaze, had spotted that Oprah had stood up at the central table.

  “Zoom in on Oprah and I’ll be in the foreground,” he said, giggling and giddy. I started to fiddle with the camera’s buttons in order to do so, but when I looked into the lens again I was shocked to see that Oprah had not merely stood up, she was walking away from her table. And she was not merely walking away from her table, she was totally walking in our direction!

  And then it hit me: Oprah was going to the loo, and her trajectory to do so was going to take her right past our table!!

  “Eddie! She’s coming! She’s coming this way! She’s going to pass right by us!” I was trembling, trying to un-zoom the camera that was still aimed at unattainable, Goddess Oprah, just as real, touchable, just-like-you-and-me, needing-to-pee Oprah was mere feet away!

  I turned the camera off in my panic, but miraculously got it back on just as She was upon us. I lifted it up and aimed it toward her. The screen was a blur and I realized I still hadn’t mastered the zoom. As I frantically pressed buttons and fingered knobs I heard Eddie say, in a very endearing and choirboy-like voice: “Oprah! May I have a picture with you? It would be my dream.”

  My camera fiddling reached fever pitch, and then she said it. She spoke to Eddie. And this is what she said …

  “You gotta get bigger dreams.”

  She paused, much in the way she had paused beside me all those years ago in LA. The room stopped. I held up the camera in my shaking hands. The flash went off. By the time I looked at the image she was gone. My heart was thumping. I turned to Eddie, who still had the beaming grin he’d had through the camera lens. For a second I imagined he would never be able to stop smiling. He would go through life with this Winfrey’s Palsy, forever trapped in the moment when his idol spoke to him.

  “Did Oprah just dis you?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” said Eddie. “Let’s see the picture.”

  This was the picture …

  Not one of my best in terms of conventional composition I’ll admit, but in retrospect I actually think it really captures the moment perfectly: Oprah is perfectly in focus and radiant, but, of course, like any Goddess, she cannot be fully present. Eddie on the other hand cannot be more present. And his perfect blurriness is exactly how I would wish to both describe and remember him in that moment.

  Eddie’s friend Scott is a painter and he did an oil painting of the photo, which now hangs in the hallway of Eddie’s apartment. Eddie is still blurry and Oprah is only half there. It’s beautiful and weird because of its size and I like that it is both a memento and another piece of art born out of our magical moment together.

  And I don’t think Oprah dissed him. I actually think she was being self-deprecating, and even in that moment of dutiful dealing with the public, something she must do with monotonous regularity on a scale none of us can ever imagine, she was still able to impart something wise and true. Eddie did need to get bigger dreams, and by allowing me to capture that half-present, blurry moment, she released Eddie to contemplate those dreams, for one of his biggest dreams had come true.

  KYLIE

  ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES is another snap in the series of pictures I have taken of my friend Eddie with very famous women, though this one was not nearly as stressful for me to take as my previous attempt with Oprah, and is also framed better and more in focus.

  We had all gone to see the gorgeous Kylie Minogue in concert, and she welcomed a whole throng of us into her dressing room after the show at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City.

  Kylie is not only a sensational live performer but also the most darling, kind person. She once sent me an email at two o’clock in the morning with a recipe for vegan key-lime pie. She had just come off a tour and the backstage caterer had made it for her and her dancers every night. I’d said it sounded delicious, so when she got back to her hotel room she looked it up and sent it to me before she went to bed. That’s the kind of gal she is.

  Eddie, I have realized over the years, is like a magpie and has an uncanny radar for sparkly things. He at once zoned in on the exotic head
piece Kylie had been wearing in the show, now stuck on a wig block in the little room packed with well-wishers. Within seconds it was on his head and Kylie was posing with him.

  It wasn’t till later that I noticed the epic photobomb by Rufus Wainwright, wearing yet another headpiece of Kylie’s.

  KITTEN

  FOR THE FIRST half of 2006, I spent most nights of the week with Cyndi Lauper and we painted the town red.

  We were performing together in The Threepenny Opera at Studio 54, but the show really began when the curtain came down and we headed off into the night with our posse. There was even mention in a magazine that the newest drinking game in town was taking a shot every time you saw Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming in a gay bar. Very soon you’d develop a serious drinking problem!

  It was just one of those magical few months when you get to know someone, fall in love with them, they become a weird part of your family forever, and you just have LOADS of fun. We’ll always have a special bond, and she’ll always make me howl with laughter even when she doesn’t mean to at all. That winter/spring she kind of became my evil twin.

  This was taken backstage, just outside the door you’d enter to walk onto the stage, and they’d put a blue gel around the light bulb in case it shone onstage when the door was opened.

  At a certain point in the second act I would be running down the stairs after a quick change and would pass her sitting on the steps, looking gorgeous, bathed in the blue.

  This was her first show on Broadway, and she said later that she felt I led her around like a little kitten, showing her the ropes and such, and so whenever I see her I always greet her with, “Hello, Kitten.”

  IMAN

  IMAN IS THE perfect model. I mean that she is always conscious of the camera and knows exactly how to project any emotion. She is like a silent movie star. She is also totally hilarious.

  I took this picture at a raucous party for the launch of her book The Beauty of Color in Los Angeles. I was in town filming something and she had asked me to be her date. My strongest memory of the evening is that she asked me at one point to look after her purse while she went to do an interview. The look in her eye as she entrusted this task to me left me in no doubt that this was a serious responsibility. She was gone for a while, and I really needed to go to the loo. A close friend of hers said not to worry, she would look after the prized purse in my absence.

  Of course, what I am failing to mention is that this close friend was Janice Dickinson. She and I had been having quite a few drinks and taking funny pictures. I seem to go through phases or themes in my snapping, and at that point it was to do a series of three consecutive double selfies of me and whoever else, portraying happy, angry, and “sad.” Janice couldn’t quite get the hang of it, and each time I looked back on our efforts I felt we needed to do it again as her three emotions did not look very different. I began shouting “Happy! Angry! Sad!” to remind her to change expression. It was only after several fruitless attempts that she grabbed my arm and said, “Alan, my face doesn’t move that much.”

  Anyway, Janice assured me she would guard Iman’s bag so off I tottered to the bathroom. It was in the club at the bottom of the Roosevelt Hotel, full of drunk, beautiful, chatty people. I did my old trick of pretending to be on the phone so I could get to the loo quickly. It really works. You just hold your phone to your ear, maybe putting the index finger of your other hand in the other ear to signal you are really concentrating on your call, and you can also stare at the floor or up in the air in the way people really do when they are listening to someone on the phone, and therefore you can avoid eye contact with people. If anyone does actually grab you to try to engage you in conversation, you just put your hand over the phone’s speaker and whisper in an apologetic way, “Hi! I’m on the phone,” and carry blithely on. I was in the bathroom in no time, but there were loads of people I knew there too, queuing up to get into the cubicles, so I continued to pretend to be on the phone as I peed (not as easy as it sounds, especially when it comes to zipping up) and then back again till I was at our table. Janice was there chatting merrily away to someone and I tapped her arm and said, “I’m back. Where’s the bag?”

  Her face immediately registered deep, deep shock, even for her, and I realized my folly of entrusting her with this most precious item.

  “Holy shit, I don’t know!” she rasped.

  Can you imagine losing Iman’s bag? Her bag that she specifically asked you to take very good care of, and the only task she had given you in this whole evening of joy and laughter and glamour and free booze that was being Iman’s date? Iman’s date! And can you imagine having to tell Iman that the reason you lost her bag was because you needed to go for a pee and you left it in the care of Janice Dickinson?!

  Luckily the bag was sitting in a chair just a few feet away from us, so all was well and I had it safely back in my grasp by the time Iman returned. Later I told her about the drama and she laughed her head off. But wow, that was a close call.

  Iman once came to visit us for lunch in our house in the Catskills. We had a lovely girl named Grace doing up our garden at the time and Grace came to the door and said she needed us to decide where we were going to put the fire pit. So Grant and Iman and I trooped outside with the dogs, and when she saw where I’d planned to put it she began to tut.

  “No, no, no,” she said in her deep voice. “You are crazy! You’re making a big mistake!”

  “What do you mean, Iman?” I asked, fascinated.

  “You must put it over there, so you can see the view of the hills,” she said, pointing to a spot farther away from the house.

  And you know what? She was absolutely right.

  Every time I am sitting around that fire pit, munching my beans and veggie burger, looking out as the purple dusk of sunset sweeps across the Catskills, I smile to myself and silently thank Iman. We even named the fire pit after her.

  HEAD DOWN, EYES UP

  I LOVE THIS picture because Honey is giving me her fiercest supermodel pose. Head down, eyes up, the whole works.

  I rescued her from the jaws of death at the pound, and a year later she was the guest of honor at a cocktail party at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood to celebrate our anniversary.

  She never looked back.

  I have never known a dog to so enjoy being photographed. She would sit and pose for me, and if I missed a candid moment she would actually reenact it. I don’t know where she got it from!

  Honey is still is my longest and most successful adult relationship. The one with my husband will supersede it in a couple of years, and what a bittersweet party that will be.

  I adopted Honey on a total gut whim, if you understand what that means. I had no desire to get a dog. I was newly living with someone in a building that didn’t even allow dogs, yet when my friend Whitney, who was fostering dogs from a rescue organization, told me one night over dinner in early 2001 about this sad, beautiful, exhausted puppy whom she had left sleeping in her apartment, I felt we were meant to be. And I still do.

  Honey is dead now. She had a long and happy life and at age fourteen we had to put her to sleep. On the opening night of Cabaret on Broadway in April 2014, I was having my makeup put on when my phone rang and I saw it was our vet. I answered.

  He told me the little lump Honey had on her groin that I thought was maybe an infected bug bite was actually stage-four cancer, and it was only a matter of months before our darling girl would shuffle off her mortal coil. The vet talked me through the different options for her palliative care, all of which involved potentially hideous changes to her standard of life. He also counseled me that we would know when it was time. When I hung up, half an hour before I was to walk onstage and launch the revival of what is perceived as my greatest theatrical success, I was a weeping mass of sadness and loss, and all I wanted was to hold her and tell her, wordlessly, as I’d done daily since she came to me, scared and skittish and with a swathe of yellow paint along her side, that I loved her so much and
I would always look after her and she never needed to worry.

  We tried the mildest form of chemo for about a week but it made her dazed, lose her whole sense of self and pee all the time. She was absent. When we stopped the pills, she bounced back, still old and creaky and unknowingly pooping all the time, but happy and present.

  The vet had said we would know when it was time, and we did. One night I was filming a late-night web interview thing after a performance of Cabaret, and when I switched my phone on after we wrapped there were a ton of messages from Grant—in one of them I could hear Honey retching in the background. By the time I got home she had gone into a near-comatose state.

  Honey didn’t regain anything that resembled consciousness. She was now truly absent, and I have no doubt we were really doing her a favor when we took her to a nearby animal hospital and she was put to sleep. I can’t explain fully how much I learned from Honey’s death in terms of what I now think about quality of life. I used to associate quality of life with those lists of the best cities to live in, with the least air pollution and the cheapest houses and the tastiest restaurants. Now it means something very different to me.

  And although I am a total atheist, I saw on her last night with us that Honey’s spirit had gone, and it was that time the vet had talked about.

  SHONA AND KERRY

  WHEN I WAS a little older and able to do with my hard-earned cash as I wished, I got out the plastic camera I won in the raffle and gave it another go. And this time, for fear of retribution about my framing skills, I used my dogs as models.