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

by Alan Cumming

  Shona and Kerry were West Highland terriers and my constant companions on the long traipses I took though the woods each night. Because of my dad, the mood at home was dark and fearful, so the forest was where I found freedom, and freedom of expression. I would make up stories, mostly about being a spy thwarting crimes in the middle of a forest, aided by his two super-intelligent dogs, and barring the tantalizing appearance of a rabbit, Shona and Kerry would play along and were pretty convincing.

  One of the pictures I took was a particular favorite of my father’s (see this page). Shona and Kerry were sitting on a pile of logs in the evening sunlight. He liked it so much that after Shona and Kerry died he took my only copy of it and had it made into an oil painting by a local artist. For years I missed that photograph, but eventually, as I’ve found life has a tendency of doing, what I missed came back to me in another form.

  My mum had somehow procured the painting when she and my father split up and many years later I realized it was in her attic. It now hangs above my bath in the house I have in the Catskill Mountains, and it seems appropriate for it to be there, as I now understand my country retreat means so much more to me than just a respite from the hurly-burly of my life in New York City: it helped me come to terms with my childhood. Indeed, when my brother first came to see my place, he stood with me on the deck, looked up at the trees and out at the roaming hills, listened to the sounds of them all for a minute, then said, “You’ve bought your childhood, Alan.”

  And I suppose I had, in a way. I had reclaimed, or inadvertently attempted to re-create, all the good parts of growing up: the peace, the solitude, the proximity to nature. But I’d done it on my terms, with none of the negatives. Without my father, basically.

  And I still get to say good-night to Shona and Kerry as I climb the stairs to bed.

  LEON

  WHEN GRANT came into my life, so did Leon. He was a medium-haired Chihuahua that Grant had adopted as a puppy.

  Initially, Leon did not take too kindly to the idea of sharing his dad with me, and certainly not to the idea of sharing a bed with us along with his new, bigger sister, Honey. The first time all four of us slept together was in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan. There was some snarling.

  Leon was an alpha male, one of those dogs (or people) whose braggadocio is so out of whack with his or her actual power, or, in Leon’s case, his size. In the park, he would lunge at pit bulls, sometimes trying to leap from our arms to do so.

  We gave him an imaginary voice that sounded like Elmer Fudd, if Elmer had grown up in Brooklyn. But he had his softer sides too. He was famous in the East Village for bursting into howling song every time he heard a siren, and on the streets of New York City, that happens a lot! He grew to accept and love me and Honey. When she died, he too was bereft; for the first time in ten years, he was alone in our apartment when Grant and I went out.

  But Leon’s blue-collar-guy persona was all a sham. Once, I came home from work and Grant told me that in a bout of spring-cleaning in his studio he’d found Leon’s birth certificate. Although technically Leon had been rescued by Grant, the version I had in my head was a little grittier than the actual truth.

  First of all, he came from a famous pedigree breeder—not, as I’d imagined, the result of some late-night liaison on the mean streets of Gotham. Second, his mum was called Diamonds and his dad Shilo Care Bear! Worst of all, his first home was an apartment in Trump Tower!

  But his struggle was real. He was a gift to his first owner, she of the Trump Tower apartment, but she didn’t want him and gave him to her decorator, who used to play the piano in his antique shop downtown and Leon would howl along as a little pup. That’s where Grant first saw him and fell in love. Soon after, the world was righted and Leon and Grant were together.

  So just as his provenance was a little more frilly than I had imagined, his tough-guy act was really just that. He was a softie and a lover—just a little complex. Leon is short for Napoleon, after all.

  Here he is in his national costume.

  LIFE IS A GAME

  ONCE I MADE the mistake of leaving a pile of games under the piano at my house in the country. I’m a big fan of games. I think they are a healthy means of expunging aggression and corralling our competitive urges into an arena where they are called for, instead of—as I’m afraid I have observed happening with rampant regularity in my adopted homeland of America—making everything a competition.

  How fast can you get there? How long can you breathe underwater? How many drinks can you have? What weights do you lift? How many likes did you get? How thin can you be? How tanned? How pale? How rich? How young? How different to who you actually want to be?!

  I think everyone in America would be a lot happier, and certainly a lot healthier, if once a week they gathered together and had a game of Taboo or something equally fun and silly. Those are the occasions when you’re supposed to be a seething mass of tribal rivalry. It shouldn’t be a national pastime.

  Anyway, in the midst of a boisterous singsong, I kicked the pile of games over and they fell down the stairs. This was the scene that greeted me when I peered down, and I thought the universe was sending me a message.

  Sometimes in life I fall to pieces. But when I’m at the very bottom, I know in my heart I’ll be able to scrabble things together and start my journey upward again.

  To paraphrase Auntie Mame, life is a game and most poor suckers don’t know how to play it.

  SELF-PORTRAIT, MARRAKECH

  WHENEVER I LOOK at this picture I think of nearly dying.

  I took it in my hotel room on a vacation I went on with my husband, Grant, in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2011.

  On the day we arrived we had dinner in the Café Argana in the old town square. It’s a very famous, old-school sort of spot where visiting Westerners convene and sip cocktails and look out over the balcony at the spice stalls and snake charmers below.

  The evening we dined there I remember a Scandinavian family sitting nearby, the mum and dad trying to placate their jet-lagged brood with ice cream. The waiters were so lovely and patient, explaining the idiosyncrasies of the menu to us in broken English. The food was pretty unremarkable to be honest, but we were just glad of some sustenance after a long day of traveling, and we stumbled back to our hotel full and happy.

  The next morning we woke up late, groggy and hungry, and because of our jet-lagged haze and having missed breakfast in the hotel, decided to make things easy and just go back to the Argana again for lunch.

  But as we reached the square we realized something was wrong. The night before it had been busy and bustling, but now, although full of thousands of people, the whole place had ground to a halt. Everyone was staring at the wreckage of the Café Argana. It had been bombed just a short time before we woke up—perhaps the blast was what jolted us from our slumbers. The only movement was the frantic toing and froing of ambulances and police cars, their blinding, flashing lights unable to break the horrified gaze of the shocked multitudes. Grant and I joined them and were immediately similarly paralyzed.

  There was the terrace we had dined on the night before, blood spattered across the wall the Scandinavian kids had been sitting against, sheets covering broken bodies that could easily have been ours. The wreckage was intense. It was like a doll’s house had been stamped on.

  We wandered round the city aimlessly, sporadically gleaning more information about the bombing from café television sets that would be blaring the minutiae of the tragedy for many days to come. There was no doubt the attack was against people like us. The Argana was the very hub of Western-ness and an attack on it was so pointed that, as we tried to block out what had happened and take in the wonders of a city whose sensibility had so dramatically changed for us, we nonetheless felt incredibly vulnerable and exposed.

  When we got back to the hotel, the Internet and TV were awash with the bombing and suddenly I realized I should let people know we were okay. I emailed my family and then spoke to my assistant. The
reason we were on this vacation at all was because I had hosted an event for the Moroccan National Tourist Office with Angelica Huston back in New York City, and this trip was the prize in return for that task. So it came as no surprise, although it still was a little depressing, to hear that the first two people to contact my office to see if we were all right (i.e., not murdered while on a trip paid for by the Moroccan National Tourist Office) were, ahem, the Moroccan National Tourist Office and then my publicist. Showbiz, people. You gotta love it.

  Perhaps to take my mind off what had just happened, and how narrowly we had dodged death, I decided to take some pictures. I started playing with reflections in the stained-glass panels of the balcony door. My eyes give it away though.

  I like the fact that this picture is quite colorful and jolly and kind of exotic but it exists because of something really awful.

  I like making lemonade.

  CAITLIN’S KITCHEN

  ABOUT A MONTH before this picture was taken, a very close friend committed suicide. It was shocking, but, as is often the case with shocking things, not altogether surprising. Sometimes the shock is that you almost forgot it might be possible.

  It was ugly and messy and unresolved for a time, and the friends left behind had a visceral need to be together, like a wounded pack or a tribe re-communing to make sense of this waste of life.

  So we would all gather at Caitlin’s flat in Brooklyn. It was at the height of a New York summer, and we spent a lot of boozy nights in her garden-floor apartment, talking and remembering and mourning and healing.

  I took this picture very quickly when I was getting a drink and then didn’t look at it for a long time. But when I did it took me right back to those evenings.

  Although not much tea was imbibed, there was a lot of sympathy, and plenty was smoked. I didn’t remember the fly in the champagne glass when I took it, and at first it gave me the chills, but now I think it’s perfect. Like everything in life, death completes the picture.

  MANDATORY SELFIES

  I DON’T WANT to be that guy, but I have been taking selfies since the 1980s, people. Not that that’s really a big deal because, let’s face it, they are not a great achievement in the grand scheme of things, and all I was doing was turning a camera and eventually a phone around so the lens faced me and whoever else was in the picture rather than pointing it out to the world, and that does not require a degree in brain surgery, BUT …

  I’m just saying. I was having to accurately self-frame long before the selfie button was around. Okay, kids?

  1999, South of France. Showing off my new swimming trunks.

  On second attempt.

  I had mirrors attached to my garden fence in London in 1994. Suddenly the garden seemed enormous!

  Before there were selfie sticks, there were self-timers.

  This moment of nonchalant, moody repose was captured after many attempts, rushing back and forth between my camera and the table in my friend Caroline’s guest house in 1999 in Ojai, where I had gone to work on my novel, Tommy’s Tale. Then, as now, I was a prevaricating scribe, and achieving the perfect selfie (or “selftimie,” I suppose we should really call it) could take up a sizable part of my writing hours. Here I even have the audacity to look pissed off at being interrupted in my literary efforts! #acting

  Connecticut, 2012. I am ironing a shirt in my swimming trunks for an event at which I will present and receive an award for Kristin Chenoweth, who couldn’t come as she had a neck injury from filming The Good Wife!

  Doing a self-timer tumble in Rome, bored, on a day off from the movie Titus, 1998. (And I know, self-timers are not, strictly speaking, selfies, but screw you!)

  1994, Scotland, with my nephew Gary.

  Me and my granny, Inverness, 1999.

  My adoring and adorable mum, Mary Darling, Inverness, 1999 …

  … and New York City, 1999.

  New York City, 1998.

  Spot the difference!

  Savoy Hotel, 2003.

  Two of my most attractive looks. LA, 1999.

  Australia, 2004.

  LA, with Saffron, 1995.

  2000, Austin, Texas, with Robert Rodriguez on the set of Spy Kids with my prop action figure.

  Just two of my chameleon-like transformations. As the Great Gazoo in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas …

  … and as one of Loki’s disguises in Son of the Mask, 2005.

  Backstage with Lypsinka at Roseland for the 1999 Broadway Bares.

  Fort Lauderdale, 2015. I did a concert with my musical cohorts Lance Horne and Eleanor Norton, and this legend, Dina Martina, opened for us.

  New York City, with Bianca del Rio, 2014.

  They were going for a light smoky-eye look.

  Kenneth Cole fashion show, New York City, 2014.

  The secret of my boyish good looks, 2014.

  Channeling Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at a photo shoot for Vintage magazine, New York City, 2015.

  On the opening night of Cabaret on Broadway in 1998, I was asked if I would allow a photographer from The New Yorker to be in my dressing room as I came offstage, to capture what everyone told me was going to be a momentous night in my life. I said no. I was so stressed out about the show opening and everyone telling me my life was going to change and the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with some stranger and all their equipment in my miniscule dressing room when all I wanted to do was to shut the door and pretend none of it was happening. They asked again. I said no, again. Finally they implored me, implying it was my duty to allow this great moment in theater history to be suitably immortalized. I said yes.

  The photographer turned out to be Amy Arbus, one of the nicest people in the world. She understood how I felt and was as inconspicuous as one can be in a room the size of a shoe box with many, many adults squashed into it. The photo she took was indeed a great condensation of an experience I didn’t even comprehend at the time, but in retrospect, as I look at that photo from time to time, I can completely reconnect to that moment. She put it on the cover of her book The Fourth Wall, and sixteen years later, in 2014, she returned to my dressing room as an old friend, and captured the moment of my opening Cabaret on Broadway again.

  One night at Club Cumming, aka my Cabaret dressing room at Studio 54, 2015. Varying degrees of snarl success.

  New York City, 1998. Life really was a cabaret.

  Seconds after I ended a relationship, New York City, 1999.

  Spice World, London, 1997.

  Post–Spice, LA, 2002.

  Kristin Chenoweth and me in 1999 shooting the TV movie of Annie.

  Sixteen years later, shooting promos for the 2015 Tonys, which we hosted together.

  With Rosario Dawson in the makeup trailer of Josie and the Pussycats, Vancouver, 2000.

  New York City, 2014. Teaching Matt Lauer the closed-lip snarl, not too successfully.

  My friend Andrew and I giving Vietnam chic, Saint-Tropez, 1999.

  Puerto Rico, 1999. I am the whitest actor ever to play Cuban dictator General Batista.

  Upstate New York, 2004, with Bob the builder, the man who built my home.

  Self-portrait with flowers, upstate New York, 2011.

  London, 1999, with my brother in what would become my dream party pad.

  This flat was in Chinatown in London and looked down onto the cinemas of Leicester Square. Once, as I washed the dishes in the kitchen, I could see my face on the marquee of a theater showing a movie I was in.

  There were two terraces and in order to get trees onto them we had to shut the street down to allow a crane to drop off each tree one by one. It was like a UN mercy lift operation. The top terrace had a Jacuzzi and a little bar and speakers in the bushes and so was the scene of much merriment. Once I rented the place out for a year and when I got it back it was trashed. The people who came to redo the floors said they were in worse condition than the dance floors they’d seen in clubs. I couldn’t find the console thing that worked the TV projector anywhere until I felt it un
der my foot in the Jacuzzi, and the cover of said Jacuzzi was also nowhere to be seen, discovered a week later in an alleyway behind a Chinese restaurant far below, obviously chucked there by some high reveler. For years I would meet people, all over the world, who would sidle up to me in some bar and say, “Eh, I think I went to a party once in your apartment in London …” Apparently it got so bad that a drug dealer actually set up a stall in the building’s stairwell to ply his trade. Much as I was appalled at the mess left behind by my bacchanalian tenant, I was secretly happy that the place was being utilized in the spirit it was created.

  Years before, the building had been a hospital for tropical diseases. Once I was doing a movie where I played the god of mischief Loki and the lovely Bob Hoskins played my dad, Odin. At dinner one evening we got chatting and he told a story about how he had once eaten brains at a tribal ceremony in Africa and upon his return to the UK he discovered he had a tapeworm. After many attempts to get rid of it he went to—guess where—the hospital of tropical diseases and had it removed. I asked how such a thing occurred and Bob told me in very graphic detail. It is kind of as you’d imagine, and involves the tapeworm being coaxed out (of Bob’s bum) and then pulled and pulled and, well, you get it, pulled. Back in my London flat, I could never rid myself of the image that Bob may have had a huge parasite wrenched from his backside somewhere near where I was sitting on my sofa.