Not My Father's Son (4 page)

“That’s me away!”

But he would be gone before the words had left his mouth, his eyes not even seeing us. It was like he was saying good night to a pet, and eventually he stopped saying it altogether.

I didn’t understand what had happened, but of course I assumed it must have been something I had done. I was always being told by him how much of a disappointment I was, both in my appearance—my hair, of course, but also my posture, my weight, my nose, my moles—as well as my inability to perform the simplest of tasks, though his lack of detail in explaining what he wanted me to do or the physical enormity of what was entailed guaranteed I would fail. Once he actually demanded I drive a tractor, though I had never done so before nor had any coaching on how to do so by him or anyone else. I tried to reason with him. Often he gave me tasks that were huge and would take till nightfall and beyond, but this was another level. Now he was asking me to actually endanger my life by operating heavy machinery and I became very, very scared. My father began to shout at me and I knew I had to meet his demand. I clambered up on the high seat. My feet didn’t even reach the pedals. Of course I made a mess of it and the tractor lurched into a hedge and stalled. I was hit, and perhaps that was the first time I was relieved by the violence, because it meant the conclusion of an impossibly difficult and stressful experience.

One night, as he popped his head round the door and lobbed his customary “That’s me away,” I asked him, “Where are you going?”

My mum looked up from her knitting; my father stopped in his tracks. There was no malice in what I had asked. I was genuinely curious. But nobody ever questioned my father, and I could see I was on stony ground.

“D’you want to come with me?” my father replied, defensively.

“But where are you going?” I asked again.

“You tell me if you want to come and I’ll tell you where I’m going.”

I considered this for a moment. I knew my father was going
out
. He was dressed up a bit and he smelled of Old Spice and his hair was Brylcreemed. If he was going to the pub I wouldn’t be allowed in and would have to spend the evening in his van, something I did not want. But I sensed that perhaps there was more to it than that, and I think my parents could tell.

My mum said nothing.

“So are you coming or not?” my father said after a few moments, knowing he had won.

“No,” I replied, meekly.

I can’t remember how I came to know, whether it was kids gossiping at school or something I overheard at home, but soon I understood that the change in my father’s behavior was because he was seeing another woman, and that Tom and I were a constant reminder of the life that trapped him.

Soon after, one sunny Sunday afternoon, we all went to the beach at Carnoustie. As I’ve said, it was rare we did anything together, let alone anything as carefree and exciting as a trip to the seaside. Summers are short in Scotland and we tend to take advantage of the slightest hint of sun, and that day was no exception. Every time the sun peeped out from behind the clouds we raced over the sand into the freezing North Sea, ducking under the waves for a few moments before rushing back up the beach again to the shelter of our striped windbreak, an essential component of any Scottish beach excursion.

My mum opened the Tupperware box of sandwiches she’d made and we tucked in. Just then, a woman and her son appeared. We knew them locally and they greeted my father very cordially, but I could see that the woman avoided my mother’s eyes. They were invited to sit down and eat with us and they did so. Conversation was stilted, and I did my boyish best to smooth things along. But I knew. This woman was having an affair with my father. That’s why we had taken this rare family outing to the beach. And not only did he have the audacity to arrange this encounter and walk them to their car, leaving Mum and me to finish our sandwiches in shameful silence, but when he came back he pretended that their appearance was a total coincidence. Even worse, he actually documented that sad day, that day when he stepped over the line of respect and made us complicit witnesses to his transgression, by taking this photograph.

B
y next lunchtime I had left Cannes and was back in Nice airport, slurping down a Bloody Mary (a mandatory preflight ritual for me) and checking out the reports of the previous night’s event online. I was happily shocked to read that, although not very forthcoming with their attention, the audience certainly coughed up the cash, as seven million dollars had been raised for AIDS research! Patti and Mary J. must have
nailed
it.

Mary Darling had left another message earlier that morning. She told me there had been a reporter from the
Sunday Mail
at her door. This wasn’t unusual. Over the years my mum had encountered several tabloid reporters on her doorstep, trying to get a comment from her about something (or someone!) I had been rumored to have done or said. Now she was quite an old hand at it. She said that this time the reporter was asking about my father, wanting to find out where he lived so they could ask him for a comment about something I had said in a recent interview for the
Times
.

My father had been estranged from his family for many years by this point. The British press, particularly the Scottish branch, was fascinated by this estrangement from his celebrity son and had made several attempts over the decades to goad Mr. Cumming senior into “having his say” about his lack of relationship with me. This was the usual pattern: a quote from an article I’d done for some other publication would be pounced and elaborated on, and then a suitably hysterical reaction quote would be sought, encouraged, or fabricated.

I knew immediately which comments from the
Times
piece they would have latched on to. I had done an interview in support of
The Good Wife,
the television show I had recently joined the cast of, originally planned as a feature in the Relationships and Health supplement of the paper. During the course of a very wide-ranging and honest chat, the reporter had asked if it saddened me that I had no relationship with my father.

“Of course,” I had said. “It’s the saddest thing in my life.” And it was. I explained a little of how my brother and I were still waiting for our father to take up our offer to continue a relationship with us.

But I went on to talk of my belief that the way things were now was preferable to the situation that had existed previously, and that my mother and my brother and I were happier now than when there had been contact with my father, and presumably he was happier too.

I’d said this many times before. It was true, but it was also my way of moving the conversation away from “Alan’s pain” and into a more sanguine and healthy admittance that sometimes people do you a favor when they drop out of your life.

And when the discussion turned to health, and I was asked about family illness, I told the reporter that recently when I’d had my first physical with a new doctor he’d asked if cancer ran in my immediate family, and I realized that, as I’d had so little contact with my father as an adult, I didn’t know. I actually knew nothing about him or his health. Then, out of the blue, in the spring of 2010, my father contacted my brother Tom to tell him he was battling cancer, and Tom and I suddenly discovered which strain of that disease’s odds were genetically stacked against us.

As we were finishing, the reporter asked if I thought I would ever see my father again. I said I had thought about this a lot and imagined that the only way we might have any contact would be if he reached out as he was dying.

However, the in-depth interview was scrapped in favor of one of those shorter, pithier “What I’ve Learned” pieces, and a collection of my words was assembled randomly under topic headings that bore little relation to the context in which they were uttered.

“My life is so much better now that my father is not in it. He does have cancer, which apparently runs in the family. Maybe next time I see him he’ll be really ill, or he’ll be dying and I may not see him” is how the
Times
mash-up ran.

No wonder the
Sunday Mail
was sniffing about.

Every person in the public
eye will have stories of media invasion and misrepresentation. As, sadly, there were no classes at drama school for dealing with these sorts of things, I, like many before me, fumbled my way through the years and finally developed my own way of coping with this part of my job (and my life), mostly by trying to be open and honest. I had tried to be guarded about parts of my personal life in the past, but realized the hard way that doing so came over as coyness and invited speculation.

In 1999 the
News of the World,
the most vicious of tabloids in both its disdain for facts and its methods of accruing them, ran a story implying that I was accusing my father of sexually abusing me as a child. This was completely false. I had done no such thing, nor had my father.

But again, a comment I’d made about the aftermath of playing Hamlet, in an interview with the American magazine
Out
a few months prior, had been seized upon, misquoted, sensationalized, and then deemed irrefutable evidence of an accusation of sexual molestation.

Here’s what I actually said:

After Hamlet I just suddenly changed my life. I was not divorced but separated, and I also confronted my dad, with my brother’s help. We went and talked to my father about the things he’d done to us in our childhood. Hamlet was probably not totally the cause of that, but it unlocked boxes in my mind that were locked away in the attic. And they all came out and I had to deal with them. It caused a lot of pain to many people, including myself.

The next day, the
Daily Record,
sister paper to the
Sunday Mail,
ran a story with the headline “Father of Bisexual Star Alan Hits Back” in which my father angrily denied my nonexistent accusations.

As you might imagine, all hell broke loose.

I was in New York at the time, about to attend the premiere of a film I was in—a remake of
Annie (
talk about the universe throwing you a curveball!
)—
when I got a call from Mary Darling, who’d just had her irate ex-husband on the phone. He was understandably furious: every single person he knew would have seen the story. It transpired that the
News of the World
had been camped outside his house, and now other publications were ringing his doorbell.

I felt sick. My father had terrorized me, Tom, and Mary Darling throughout our lives and was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive but he was no sexual molester. I was horrified. But my horror was not just about how awful it must be for my father to be falsely accused of such a terrible act, but also that his rage was, right now, directed once more at me. The same fear and anxiety I had lived with as a child suddenly reconsumed my life. I could hear it in my voice as I spoke to my mother. I could hear it in hers. I could feel it within myself.

But worst of all was the fact that my father might think I actually
had
accused him of these things. My father did not really know me. He had no way of contacting me, as we hadn’t spoken in years at that point. He also had no experience of dealing with the press or understanding of their disregard for reason in pursuit of a scandal.

In New York City, Cumming junior was smiling for the cameras in an Alexander McQueen ensemble between frantic phone calls to see what could be done to calm his father, comfort his mother, take the tabloids to task, and demand an apology for this slander. Cumming senior, at home in Scotland, also did what he felt was right: he talked. To his credit he said he didn’t want to carry on a conversation with his son via the pages of a national newspaper, but of course he
was
saying that in the pages of a national newspaper.

Eventually I was able to secure an apology from the
Daily Record
. My publicist had told me that there was no way I could take on the
News of the World,
which had a renowned huge legal fund purely for quashing lawsuits from the aggrieved subjects of its stories, as well as the knowledge that anyone who wanted to pursue them had to countenance an already painful story being raked through the papers all over again should they go to court.

And although the few contrite lines at the bottom of the
Daily Record
’s Letters page a few weeks later were a far cry from the screaming headlines of the original story, it was important to me for my father to know I had done all I could to right the wrong. I wanted to show him that I cared about such an intrusion to his private life, that I was doing what I could to protect him.

Of course at the same time I was reminded that my father had never shown those kindnesses towards me, and I wondered how different such an intrusion would have felt if he had known immediately that he could pick up the phone, tell me there were reporters outside his door, and hear my advice and my reassuring words.

So now, back in the
lounge at Nice airport, I listened to Mary Darling’s lilting Highland tones and knew what to expect. Probably a gossipy, needling piece in that Sunday’s
Mail,
no big deal compared with what had come before, but able to churn up old sadness nonetheless.