Not My Father's Son (19 page)

I
landed in Cape Town early after flying through the night from London. It was such a relief to be back at work, to have something else to think about.

The previous afternoon I had called my mum and told her the news about her parents having separated and her brother Raymond not being Tommy Darling’s son. She admitted that she was not entirely shocked by the news, which gave me some comfort, I suppose. Over the years she had entertained many possibilities of why her father hadn’t been around, and rumors had long circulated within the family about her brother.

“It’s just good to know the truth, though, isn’t it, Alan?” she said. “To have everything cleared up.”

“Yes, I really think it is, Mum,” I replied. There was another truth that I knew would be good for me to hear. The results of the DNA test were due in a few days. The wait was killing me. Going back to work and having a complete change of scene was probably the best thing for me. After I spoke to Mum, and said my good-byes to Grant, who was returning to New York, I left for Heathrow and my next few weeks in South Africa.

I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in. It’s a little contrary to think that I look forward to careering through the skies in a metal-fatigued box in order to gain some feeling of inner calm, but that’s the way I roll.

But there are other ways my emotions are thrown into flux at thirty-nine thousand feet. Films I would never otherwise have watched suddenly seem very alluring and then render me a weeping wreck. Around that time I remember they all tended to have Sandra Bullock in them. I cry a lot on planes. This flight was no exception.

I was returning to South Africa because I was in the middle of shooting a miniseries for British television called
The Runaway,
based on the novel by Martina Cole. It was set in London’s seedy Soho streets in the sixties and seventies, and I played Desrae, a transvestite who runs the Peppermint nightclub, and who takes in the eponymous runaway and becomes her matriarchal figure. Desrae was a survivor, literally, for there were more than a few gangland shoot-outs peppered throughout the six episodes (including one that ended with my Italian gangster boyfriend being gunned down, and dying in my arms!) and she also was a really kind, dignified person. In sharp contrast to the way most trans people are depicted on-screen, Desrae was a very positive role model. That was what made me want to do the series, as well as the fact that I had just joined the cast of
The Good Wife
and had spent the previous few months in a suit playing an uptight politico named Eli Gold. Desrae seemed a nice contrast. I traded the suit for stilettos, happily.

Eli was, and continues to be, quite a revelatory influence in my life, though. He is the first character I have played over a period of years, for starters. Initially I had been reticent about going into a long-running show. I had always done films or theatre, and the little TV I had done was either for a guest spot or for a short season so I always knew what the end of the story was. And now here I was in a situation where my character could suddenly be given a new job, family member, or interest with the advent of the next script. It freaked me out a little at first, but now I have come to enjoy the unknown, partly because I have become more comfortable with the concept, and mostly because the writing on the show is so good so I relish any new developments in Eli’s world.

It’s also exciting when you make a suggestion about your character and very shortly you find yourself acting it out. In the third season I told the show’s creators, Robert and Michelle King, that I found it very difficult to imagine being someone who never had sex. There were even mentions in the script by Eli about his lack of action in the bedroom. Lo and behold, mere weeks later I was doing a postcoital scene with the hilarious Amy Sedaris.

When I was offered
The Runaway,
I had only done a few episodes as Eli, but already he was effecting some big changes in me. First of all regarding my hair. As detailed in the first chapter of this book, I have had some issues to overcome in the follicle department, and successfully reclaiming control of my tresses has been achieved via a constantly revolving and eclectic range of haircuts throughout my adulthood. All that was about to stop. Since 2010 I have basically had the same do. I can’t actually believe it. It gets a little more edgy in the summer hiatus, the sides a little more clipped perhaps, but nothing really radical since I will be back in that suit by summer’s end. Also, and much more significant, it is now
gray!!

{Still from
The Good Wife
courtesy of CBS Television Studios/photo by Justin Stephens.}

When I started on the show, it was only for one episode and I was shooting during a break from the movie
Burlesque.
My hair had been dyed black for
Burlesque,
and indeed it was colored regularly for various different projects and often touched up by my hairstylist to keep those pesky gray roots at bay. On the first day of shooting on
The Good Wife,
I spent a long time in the makeup chair having strands of my locks laboriously streaked with gray to give me a more distinguished and, yes, older countenance. After a few episodes, and when I knew I was going to return as a series regular, I told the hairstylist that we could really cut out the middleman. I would just let the color grow out and embrace my natural salt-and-pepper state. And so I did. Going gray is very interesting because it changes people’s attitudes towards you much more than if you’d gone blond or ginger. In some way it means you are embracing middle age or accepting your mortality and owning it. Suddenly I was being called “daddy,” and included in fawning magazine articles with other noted salt-and-pepper–locked men. In some way it was assumed I was doing it as a political gesture, embracing my middle age as well as my inner child and trouncing the notion that gray couldn’t be sexy. Actually I was not meaning to do any of those things, I just didn’t want to have to get up half an hour earlier every day and be poked with gray mascara brushes.

It’s also interesting to note that each summer during the hiatus of
The Good Wife,
I have rushed from the relative calm of our studios in Brooklyn to start work on projects that could not be more different in tone or content from Eli’s trajectory as a political wheeler and dealer in contemporary Chicago: year one to South Africa to be Desrae; year two to L.A. to shoot
Any Day Now,
in which I play a 1970s drag queen who with his attorney boyfriend attempts to adopt a child with Down syndrome; year three to Scotland to play a man who is admitted to a psychiatric unit and then proceeds to act out the entire play of
Macbeth;
year four mercifully still in New York City, but remounting the crazy that is
Macbeth
on Broadway.

I guess I am not quite at peace with playing middle-aged guys in suits!

As soon as I landed
I was plunged back into my life in Cape Town. I was picked up at the airport by my driver, Hodges, a huge African man whose laugh was so bassy and reverberating that the entire car shook when I said something that set him off. It reminded me of my old habit of standing up against a speaker in a club to
feel
the beat. When Hodges laughed, I really felt it. I went straight to the set for a makeup test, then a wardrobe fitting, then back home to the downtown apartment building where most of the cast were barracked, where a lovely manicurist (or nail technician as she preferred to be called) was waiting to reattach the acrylic nails that Desrae sported and I had relinquished before I left for Cannes.

Another thing I relinquished was my body hair. Desrae would not have entertained a hairy arm, and therefore neither did I. Before the first day of filming this series, I had spent an evening in the company of a product called Veet, which, though well known to the female species by other names such as Nair, had hardly ever entered my mental periphery. It is now, however, forever seared into my brain. Do you know what Veet/Nair does? It
dissolves
the hair off your body. Surely this was an invention of the Nazis? You rub it on, sometimes to very sensitive parts of your anatomy, and very soon the hair just
dissolves.
It is not a pretty procedure, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell pretty either. But because of Desrae, Veet became a part of my toilette, and I would have to have another application this evening as the stubble on my arms was becoming noticeable. When my
Who Do You Think You Are?
episode was eventually broadcast I was really shocked to see my plucked chicken appearance due to the lack of body hair. It’s not a good look for me, believe me.

Playing Desrae made me think of women in a completely different way, and certainly to have a whole new level of respect for them. Aside from the obvious things like the pain of wearing those shoes, I encountered a whole range of new experiences, most of them utterly unpleasant. Bras are not comfortable, for one thing. They are itchy and restricting and have weird wires and springs, making you feel as if you are wearing some sort of cantilever system rather than an article of clothing, which of course you are. Also, I was wearing silicone breasts, or chicken cutlets as they are also known and closely resemble. Silicone crammed against your skin by a bra was a double discomfort whammy, and it was a whole new experience for me to get undressed and find I had a sweaty chest. And dresses and skirts generally don’t allow you to open your legs very far. Guys, have you tried getting out of a car without opening your legs recently? You have to sort of scooch along the seat, one buttock at a time, then try and push yourself up on your spindly high heels and hope that you’re on a smooth surface when you make contact with the ground.

And nails are another issue. When they’re long they clank and catch on things, and even the nail polish made me feel like my nails couldn’t breathe. You should have seen the anemic, soft mess that was left underneath when my acrylic nails were eventually removed (by soaking my fingers in some form of carcinogenic chemical mixture, of course).

Yes, wearing high heels makes your legs look better and your ass look amazing, but I still couldn’t help but worry that they were making me more vulnerable at the same time. My ass and my boobs were not just more prominently displayed; it was almost as though the only way I could balance at all was to thrust them out to the world. And what if I wanted to run? Forget about it. If I could have maneuvered even a light trot in my heels before plunging to the deck, the pain of trying to run in such unnatural and uncomfortable footwear would have laid me up for weeks.

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.

And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.

Just saying. I was feeling especially vulnerable, for a multitude of reasons, you see.

That night I went to bed duly plucked. Tomorrow I would be up at the crack of dawn and back to work. Tommy Darling’s odyssey to Malaysia and the mystery of the final months of his life would remain a mystery for the next month, and the question of whether or not Alex Cumming was my birth father would not be answered for a few days either. I carefully pulled up the blankets with my reattached talons and fell into a deep and grateful sleep.

I
woke up happy in my brother’s spare room, and then suddenly remembered what I had to do that day—the scariest thing I would ever do in my life.

I could hear Tom making breakfast downstairs.

The night before we had talked it all through and I had written it all down in case I got so nervous that I couldn’t remember anything. I was really worried I wasn’t going to be able to get through it. As soon as I had started to have the flashbacks, I knew in my heart that the only way I was going to be able to get better, to truly exorcise the pain and move on, was to one day talk to my father about it all.