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Rupert Everett: Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
By
Published: Apr 07, 2016
Category:
Memoir
According to their blurbs, show-biz memoirs are all wise, witty and candid — and you don’t discover they’re none of those things until you’re ten pages in. But “Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins,” the first volume of Rupert Everett’s memoirs, is 400 pages of all those things. And it is those things to a degree I’ve never seen in a book by someone who still hopes to work in show business. Witty? I often laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Indiscreet? Lauren Bacall told him, “You are the wickedest woman in Paris.” Wise? He has everybody’s number, starting with his own.
Rupert Everett is not a household name in the United States. He came from a “conventional” English family. This part of the story is a staple of English memoirs. But listen to Everett read the beginning of his book — he writes just a bit better than any actor I know. And most writers.
When he saw his first movie — “Mary Poppins” — “a giant and deranged ego was born.” He dropped out of school at 16 to act. A few years later, he was widely noticed for his film debut, in “Another Country.”
In America, his breakthrough came when he more or less stole “My Best Friend’s Wedding” from Julia Roberts.
His life, like this book, runs on two tracks. On one, he’s the ambitious actor who never pretends not to be gay so he can become a megastar. On the other, he’s the beautiful diva who’s anywhere and everywhere:
At 17 I had sat with David Bowie downstairs at the Embassy Club and been lectured on the mystical potential hidden in the number seven. At 18 I had dined at La Coupole in Paris with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. I had sniffed poppers with Hardy Amies on the dance floor of Munkberrys. I had done blow with Steve Rubell and Halston at Studio 54.
And then there were the sexual and romantic adventures. The little boy who “wanted to be a saint with my own basilica” would come to make “a brief foray into commerce” — that is, as a rent boy. He stalked Ian McKellen for a year until they became lovers. One of his best friends in Paris was the Brazilian transsexual ruler of the Bois. His best friend and greatest love? His dog.
[The book is out of print. To buy a hardcover from Amazon for as little as $.01, click here. To buy a paperback for as little as $.01, click here. To buy the audio book read by the author, which could be a fatal purchase if you’re listening to a funny passage while you’re driving, click here.]
The book soars highest when Everett is telling all about his colleagues. The chapter on a flop of a movie he made with Bob Dylan is, sadly, not online, but be warned, you’ll laugh to the point of tears. Much else is online, so let Everett take center stage and speak for himself:
According to Alan [Parker], Bob Geldof had a cock so big that he needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around in . . . But one didn’t need to have coffee with Alan Parker to know that Bob had a big dick. Everything about him announced the fact: the incredibly thin body, the large pushy nose, the jungle smell of the man and, of course, the delight he evidently felt at the sound of his own voice, this was not the neurotic missionary zeal of a man with a button dick. Oh, no! Bob felt the unbridled joy of a stallion cantering around a field of long grass.
It’s not surprising that he becomes Madonna’s friend. But have you ever read anything by a friend of Madonna’s like this?
Even before Madonna arrived, there was a flurry outside. Two people knocked against the window of the restaurant, like leaves in a strong gust of wind that blew open the door, and the Immaculate Conception was among us. She was raucous but poised, elegant but common. She had the cupid-bow lips of a silent screen star, and it was obvious that she was playing with Sean’s cock throughout the meal.
Julia Robert has been cast in media as “America’s Sweetheart,” but as anyone who’s worked with her knows that’s not quite the truth. Everett comes a lot closer:
Sometimes on a Friday night at the end of work, she would give me a ride back to New York on the Sony jet. Then I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B. With a cocktail in a cut glass, wearing a toweling robe, she would hop barefoot with wet hair from the trailer to the car. The only baggage was the key to her apartment and her newly acquired gay confidant.
But in the very next sentence, he moves the camera back and sees a bigger picture:
The Mistresses of the Universe often end up with their trainers, and Julia was going out with hers, a man called Patrick. I was fascinated by these powerful women. Instead of being the escorts of presidents, they ended up marrying their hairdressers. They were the fairy princesses trapped inside ivory towers. They only met co-stars and staff.
Like Madonna, Julia smelt vaguely of sweat, which I thought was very sexy. There is a male quality to the female superstar. There has to be. She must learn to fuck them before they fuck her if she is to survive, so she becomes a kind of she-man, a beautiful woman with invisible balls. In her personal relationships, after sex with a man, she quite possibly fights the desire to eat him.
Will it shock you to learn that when Everett turns his attention to famines and wars and causes that try to diminish their damage “the girls from Oxfam” tell him he “was the second most difficult celebrity they had ever had.”
We’re a long way here from Act One, the best book ever written about an American life in the theater — Moss Hart was conflicted and closeted. We’re a lot closer to Noel Coward, so it’s correct, in his review of this book, that Simon Callow calls it “the best theatrical autobiography since Noël Coward’s ‘Present Indicative.'” In part because it’s no longer criminal to be gay, Everett’s book more or less defines “transparent.” He’s ashamed of nothing, has nothing to hide. How refreshing.
And now? At 47, a few years after the publication of “Red Carpets,” Everett has his life through a wider lens:
“I am single, yes, but I’m too exhausted for anything else and being gay is a young man’s game. Now no one wants me. Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common, which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42. Who wants a gay 50-year-old? No one, let me tell you. I could set myself on fire in a gay bar, and people would just light their cigarettes from me. I don’t want to be carried out of a club wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and a cap on the wrong way around when I am 70.”
Wise, truthful, funny man. Who writes wise, funny, truthful and very enjoyable words.
——
To read an excerpt that includes a hilarious scene with Colin Firth, click here.
