My Life in Pieces (32 page)

She was always alive and full of play. One afternoon, she appeared on stage wearing a hitherto unglimpsed fox stole. Cheekily I said, ‘May I say, madam, how much I admire that animal on your shoulder?’ ‘Oh do you like it?’ Sylvia replied without hesitation: ‘My husband shot it in the Scilly Isles.’

She used to pop down to my dressing room for a quick cig, or a glass of wine, or a vigorous discussion on the merits of the new Proust translation. Her vocabulary was not without the occasional growled four-letter word, which somehow coexisted quite happily with the rest of her impeccable syntax and phrasing.

Bit by bit I picked up details of her life and background. Everything, it seemed, had happened ‘a million years ago – before you were even thought of’. She was born in India, where her father was a general. She came to England when she was twenty, determined to be an actress, knowing no one except Norman Hartnell, who couldn’t help her at all, of course, but who gave her a dozen dresses, and on the strength of those, she never stopped working for the first few years in rep (although, she claimed, she was always being sacked).

Her career was a bit of a mystery. I had seen her in various roles for as long as I could remember, but every time I mentioned one, the eyes would roll, and despair would set in. Nothing, it seemed, had ever been any good. Her acting days were over, she insisted, and every job was the last, but scripts arrived with gratifying regularity. In the last few years, she gave performances as etched and true as anything she had ever done: Mme Pernelle in
Tartuffe
, and the aunt in
Waste
, for the RSC; perhaps best of all was her wonderful performance on television in
Bleak House
.

The last time I saw her for any length of time was last year, when I took her with some friends to Cheltenham, where I was reading some poems of Coleridge. We had often talked about him – he was her ancestor by direct descent. In fact, I had agreed to do the recital because I hoped she’d be able to come. Though quite deaf by now, she followed with the keenest attention and her usual passionate engagement. Afterwards, we wept a little together; and then laughed a great deal as always.

I cannot doubt that in the nirvana to which – as an unofficial Buddhist – she aspired, she is weeping and laughing and delighting her fellow spirits; as always.

Sylvia was even more extraordinary than I was able at the time to write.
She loathed the actress Elspeth March, with whom she was obliged to
share a dressing room in
The Beastly Beatitudes
. They had been girls
together in India, and were great chums. But when they came to England
at more or less the same time, Elspeth, being very pretty, was taken up by
the beau monde, while Sylvia trudged around the provinces with her
Hartnell trousseau; whenever they happened to meet, Elspeth would snub
her. So when we told her with a triumphant flourish that Lally Bowers
was leaving the cast due to ill-health but that her role would be taken
over by Elspeth, she was unable to conceal her dismay. Stoically, however,
she accepted that they must share a dressing room. The once exquisitely
soignée
Elspeth, now the size of a small cottage, brought a small, spiteful
dog with her and a television set, which she watched throughout the show,
while Sylvia struggled to keep half an ear on the play as it was being
relayed over the Tannoy, at the same time working her way through the
new Proust. Her visits to me in my dressing room were mostly to howl with
rage against her portly new room-mate. We kept in touch after the show
closed; our encounters were always rather heightened. Once over supper
she told me that she had a technique for cheering herself up if she was
ever low, and pulled a photograph of me as Beefy from her wallet. Quite
soon after the show closed, she received a phone call from a hospital
casualty department: an elderly gentleman claiming to be her husband
had had an accident, but was now about to be discharged, and had given
her as his next of kin, would she please come and collect him? She had left
him fully forty years before, and they had barely been in touch since, but
she dutifully went to collect him, installing him in her house in Notting
Hill Gate, where she nursed him till his death two years later. They barely
spoke to each other, she said. She herself died not long after. As a
Buddhist, she asked to be cremated and to have her ashes scattered to the
wind. We performed the little ceremony, and as we did so, a great gust of
wind threw the ashes up into the upper leaves of a tree in the garden. We
all went in to raise a glass to her, and as we were remembering her, her
daughter’s boyfriend, who had taken it on himself to hose down the tree
so that the ashes descended, put his head round the door. ‘Kate,’ he said,
‘the dogs are drinking your mother.’ How Sylvia would have relished that
detail.

Despite the bad houses for
Balthazar
, my ten months at the Duke of York’s
had many incidental charms. In a way, it’s like having a pied-à-terre in
the centre of town: the stage door is permanently manned, and one can
drop in with parcels or read a script or, indeed, write one. Inevitably, given
the proximity of the theatres in the West End, one sees a lot of one’s fel
low actors, in coffee shops, on the street, in the theatre restaurants – Joe
Allen and Orso, Le Caprice, Sheekey’s, the Ivy, now (but not then) the
Wolseley. During the run of
Balthazar
, I spent a lot of time with the very
young Rupert Everett. He still is the very young Rupert Everett, though now
fifty. I reviewed his autobiography,
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins,
in the
Guardian
in 2006.

The other day I bumped into Rupert Everett in the street. We had a cordial chat and promised to meet again, but we didn’t. Since the heyday of our friendship we have become those well-known personages, ‘Rupert Everett’ and ‘Simon Callow’. Twenty-something years ago we were Ru and Si, still in the throes of becoming. I am ten years older than he is, and when we first met, I was on the crest of a wave, theatrically speaking, while he barely had his toe in the water. Despite my advantage over him in terms of age and professional experience, he made all the running. He had failed to get the part of Rimbaud in a production of
Total Eclipse
in which I was to play Verlaine (‘too queer,’ the producer somewhat surprisingly said), and I’d run into him later and told him that it was only a matter of time, which was not particularly brilliant of me: he was extravagantly beautiful and possessed of a unique quality, both boyish and regal, which, though scarcely fashionable in the early Eighties, was too striking not to be snatched up somehow, for something, sooner or later.
It happened almost immediately, in fact, and when he triumphantly arrived in the West End with
Another Country
, which might have been written with his DNA in mind, he phoned me in my dressing room at the Duke of York’s, just round the corner from his theatre, and we went out for some tea, and suddenly we were inseparable. It wasn’t sex, though sex was the subject of most of our conversations; it was a very sweet relationship, based on the idea of us as young bloods in the West End, both given to romantic infatuations and excessive behaviour, a love of gossip, some mutual friends, and boundless
joie de vivre
. I realised early on that he was dangerously imperious by nature, and also that for a twenty-five-year-old he had had a rich and varied experience of life that made mine – which had not been without its colourful interludes – seem like a vicar’s tea party.

Well, I didn’t know the half of it. Our friendship arrives on p. 120 of
Red
Carpets
, by which time he has already played Titania and Elvira, walked out of his public school aged sixteen, become a regular on the Earls Court gay scene, received the reasonably well-paid sexual favours of various kerb-crawlers, developed a nice little heroin habit, decamped to Paris where he has become best friends with Delphine the Brazilian transexual ruler of the Bois (‘hers was a famous erection’), bopped with Nureyev, shagged Ian McKellen, been thrown out of Central School of Speech and Drama and found his true theatrical home at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. I knew some of this, as much as he chose to vouchsafe, but Ru was not one for dwelling in the past: it was the future he was focused on – fame, fortune (up to a point), fucking and fun. Above all fun. Laughter was and is the music of his life, even more than applause or the whisk and thud of paparazzi bulbs; he has an almost fanatical loyalty to the concept of enjoyment, to the detriment, it might be argued, of his art, though to the great enrichment of his being; and for Rupert, as he makes clear in this continuously brilliant memoir, the best theatrical autobiography since Noël Coward’s
Present Indicative
, acting is being.

It is a startling self-portrait – unapologetic but not in the least confessional, not analytical but in-depth – of a man, now middle-aged, who has done exactly what he has wanted when he has wanted to, and to hell with the cost. He asks neither for admiration nor condemnation; he did it his way. In the end, no doubt, it was that that doomed our friendship, his and mine. He did behave so very badly. Up to a point, bad behaviour is exhilarating, though I used to wince when he cast the unwanted cream from
the chilli con carne we used regularly to have on matinee days onto the St Martin’s Lane pavement, causing pedestrians to swerve and slip; it is when the bad behaviour is turned against oneself that it becomes righteously unacceptable: after him begging me to come for breakfast after a long and very late dinner, and as I sat bleary-eyed in his front room at eight in the morning, it was something of a slap in the face to hear him answer the phone ‘No, nothing at all – there’s no one here and I’m bored to death.’ His behaviour brought to mind the admiring comment about Alfred Douglas made to André Gide by Oscar Wilde: ‘
Aoa! Comme il est
terrible!
’ He has brought the same personal ruthlessness to his professional life – ‘I was a terrible monster’, ‘I behaved like a cunt’, ‘I was impossible’ – but he is unrepentant: the film or play in question was no longer fun, or never was fun, and what is the point if it isn’t fun?

Us goody-goodies are inclined to believe that it is the audience’s fun that matters more than the performer’s, but Rupert’s commitment to his position is absolute and principled: in the end, for him, all that matters is that the actor should blaze with unfettered charisma. The moment he saw the film of
Mary Poppins
, a ‘giant and deranged ego was born’, and he knew, he says, that he must find a new personality to express it. Actually, it seems that his personality was fully present at least from the font; his grandmother pronounced him, from her deathbed, to be ‘musical’. Whatever measures his hapless mother might take to counteract his latent tendencies only confirmed them: the Catholic Abbey of Ampleforth introduced him to drugs, sex and acting; a spell in Paris to learn the language led him to Delphine and the delights of the Bois, where he picked up, he says, only a rudimentary French sex vocabulary. Bent on ‘world domination’, he then took himself to the Central School of Speech and Drama, hoping that they would teach him to act like Garbo; finding that he already knew how to do that, he left, and soon found his spiritual home at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, where Philip Prowse conjured up Fellini-like visions in the Gorbals. The screen, however, was where he was inevitably headed, and much of
Red Carpets
is taken up by his adventures in Hollywoodland. But here too, he is ruthlessly uncompromising, refusing to make any of the concessions upon which that place is founded. By the time he came to make the British film
Dance with a
Stranger
he had become ‘a fully fledged diva in a frosty land where that crazy bird had become extinct’. He proceeded as if he were Elizabeth Taylor or Bette Davis. ‘These people,’ he says of a Hollywood funeral,
‘were the symbols I adored, everything I loved about my job.’ He immersed himself in their world and those who created the enchanted spaces in which they could move. For him Andy Warhol embodied ‘the very essence of his time’. So it must have seemed as one bobbed along on the waves of excitement engendered by crystal meth and disco beat.

What no one could possibly have imagined was that this witty, wicked waif apparently off his trolley was observing it all, and remembering everything; nor that when he came to write it all down he would prove to have a dazzling gift for evocation and a witheringly sharp perspective on those lives he so admired and emulated. His two novels revealed a brilliant writer, but there, as he says, he was in Capote mode: here he is in more elegiac vein, with an inexhaustible Proustian fascination with the monstrous minutiae of his chosen universe and a deep nostalgic sense of loss. In perfectly etched vignette after vignette, he conjures up the lives and deaths of those of all ages and persuasions (many of them ‘now forgotten’) to whom he has been drawn,
monstres sacrés
for the most part, whom he bathes in affection and approval. He writes with moving restraint about the great love of his life, his dog, Mo. He is only forty-seven but he writes of a disappearing world of character and classiness; one to which, by implication, he belongs and from which he is now dispossessed. He is an acute social commentator, though politically somewhat conventionally apocalyptic. His idiom is the conscious stylisation of a Firbank; the highest of high camp. As is his life, though he is quite capable of enduring a celibate and hard-working year filming in Russia, or of visiting Africa and seeing through the charity cant to the real horror of what is happening. He is like one of those queens – his word for himself, brandished defiantly – who astonish everyone by fighting fierce and gallant wars: like them, he has lived his life on the front line, albeit in his case a front line awash with poppers and irradiated with glamour.
Red Carpets
is his despatch; shot through with a sense of his own absurdity, it is a superb and unexpectedly inspiring achievement.