Some people come into your life and teach you just what you need to know just when you need it.
Some people take what they need and leave like thieves in the night and one must be willing to sacrifice all that one has for those who have very little.
They would not steal unless they really needed it.
Friends come and go. Those you have loved with such great passion eventually fade away. Old friends die, but remain eternally in one’s heart.
I am grateful that I have had a life enriched by so many. Each and every one of you, whether you like me or not continue to add new dimension and colour to a life less ordinary.
I tread water so that others may not drown.
Can you help me please? Can you show me the way? Can you be wise for me?
Occasionally my Wikipedia page is vandalized. They always do the same thing. They take down all my achievements leaving only the acts for which I am notorious. They underline every cruel adjective ever tossed my way. They remove every kind word or deed.
They want you to believe that I am only bad. That I am only capable of cruelty, vileness and loathing.
I wonder what sort of fool does that? I know some of you have found it very hard to forgive me for merely surviving against the odds. I know that you would like me to end up like Sebastian Horsley: alone and dead and cold. Frankly, when the time comes..who cares?
Chatting with Toby Mott yesterday we concluded that Sebastian maybe more interesting dead than alive. We agreed that the British art establishment ignored his life but will embrace his death.
However I may be rewritten on the pages of Wikipedia the truth is I am all the things I have been described, good and bad. Yet, in my eyes, neither as good or bad as the next man. Why is it so impossible for those who seek to devalue me to own that this might be true?
We are all made of devil and angel.
I may have made errors of judgement, lost my temper occasionally, owed some people some money but I have never raped or murdered anyone. I have never committed treason, nor have I been part of any radical conspiracy.
I have been a bit of a cunt but who the fuck isn’t?
I have no desire for legacy. When I am dead and gone the sand will cover the place where my footprints once were. The tide will wash away any evidence that I even existed.
God save me from mediocrity, from suburban thinking. God help me stay curious about everything forever and sensitive to those I love.
You know, I have never understood why people treat love so casually. When I first feel a connection with someone, when I feel that love is in the offing I am not only inspired but convinced that new love must be treated like a precious thing, as fragile as a Ming vase. If we are truly capable of romantic love then we must treat it with respect. As relationships grow the vase morphs into an old leather football that can be tossed around if needs be.
Time, familiarity, endurance, perseverance all serve to strengthen love.
I have prayed these past few months to be delivered from the worst that love has caused in me.
Have my words far outweighed my actions? It is easy to say that you love someone but maybe the word should never be spoken. Love should be like a silent film. If I truly love you, if my love is pure then you will know it and honor it.
Long chat with my mother yesterday. She sounded happy. The Women’s Institute keeping her busy. My brother’s baby will be christened on August 1st.
Not sad about Sebastian. Not sad about anything. Loads of messages from friends re. Sebastian. I had long chat with PH this morning about the trip home and how amazing it is that we survived at all.
I have been miserable about turning 50 in three weeks but better to be turning 50 than turning in my grave.
It was such a tonic chatting with my darling PH, she has always been there for me. Always. Anyway, that’s just the way I need to start my day with a bit of loving validation. Suddenly I feel like I can cope with ANYTHING.
Held here in sunny LA aspic. Suspended in solid jelly. I can see out and they can see in but I’m waiting for the jelly to melt around me.
Last night’s dinner with friends was delicious. We played a few games of backgammon after. When John realized he wasn’t going to beat me he ran off leaving his wife to try her luck. Nope, she didn’t win.
My diet means that I can wear clothes I have not worn for a few years. Last night I wore a pair of crisply pressed silk Prada pants and my Comme cardi. Lovely.
From the 26th floor I stared out over LA as dusk fell. The car lights on Sunset Blvd snaking for miles East, white and red. A huge black cloud from the west hastening the night.
Really making an effort to get out of the house. I am not sitting indoors for 12 days. Interminably long days. Perhaps I should just take the car and drive across the USA? Actually, that isn’t such a bad idea.
I could stop off in Nashville and see Joan! How about it Joan?
Very exciting European prospects ahead. I am particularly looking forward to seeing my friends and walking the streets. July is always such a glorious month in London. Did I tell you that I ran into Orlando Bloom at breakfast the other day? Now, he is a sweetheart. Sat next to Alanis Morrisette at Cholada on PCH. That’s the extent of my starry life here in LA.
Sebastian Horsley my dear friend this past twenty five years has been found dead in his Soho apartment. Heroin overdose. Good God. How many more friends will I lose this year to the disease of addiction?
He struggled so hard to stay clean and sober. Endlessly failing, endlessly trying again. He had the sweetest soul.
Too many friends found dead on their own. A ghastly yet familiar story.
The truth is, he should have died years ago. He cheated death a million times. I will miss him but somehow this particular ending for Sebastian was inevitable.
From an earlier post:
Sebastian lives on Meard Street in Soho. On his front door are the words, THIS IS NOT A BROTHAL, THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES HERE which is total lie. There are always prostitutes there..in Sebastian’s bed.
Recently, I took a genuinely normal boy to meet Sebastian-my very sweet friend Chris Parker the TV actor from Eastenders. Chris is utterly charming. Previously I had taken him to The Colony in an attempt to delight him with a glimpse of an alternative London. My experiment failed. Chris thought that the Colony, the great beating bohemian heart of London was horrible. He didn’t like it. He looked scared. He was not interested in the art or the characters dressed in huge jewels or zoot suits. Those people in that tiny room shocked him, he was unaware of the history of that room. In that room the greatest art dramas had been played out, that Francis Bacon held court there, destroyed the confidence of his boyfriend publicly in that room. Go see the film: Love is the Devil if you want to know more about The Colony.
So, Chris and I are shopping in John Pearse on Meard Street. I bought a pink linen shirt. You know who John is? He made The Sargent Pepper uniforms for the Beatles. John owned a shop on the Kings Road called Granny Takes a Trip in the 1960′s. As we were on the same street, on the spur of the moment I wickedly decided to introduce cautious Chris to Sebastian. Chris is 5’10″. When Chris met Sebastian, 6’5″ tall wearing a lurid cerise tie, his raven black hair swept into a huge bouffant in his rooms in Soho, he was struck dumb.
Chris looked at the pictures of the crucifixion, the limbless woman and the sharks. He was visibly distressed when he saw the nails that been nailed into Sebastian’s hands during the crucifixion. He was appalled when I told him that Sebastian had fallen off the cross. Chris noticed the gun by Sebastian’s bed. “What is that for? Is it real? Why do you have it by your bed?” Sebastian, picking it up to show us the real bullets said, “I don’t believe in unprotected sex.”
In his own words:
“When I was young I thought the recipe for happiness was devastating good looks, a blazing talent and a colossal income. I was right. As for love? The rich think that the most important thing in life is love. The poor know it is money. It is the only thing poor people do know. Given that money is the root of all evil, they should be very virtuous. But they’re not. No, they just moan, groan and drone, looking for a loan. Why don’t they just get rid of such luxuries as food, clothing and shelter, and give us all some peace? Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessities. Fancy a fuck?”
I found a book of photography called Chaos by Josef Koudelka at my house in Malibu that Kristian gave me for my birthday some years ago. In it he wrote:
“I thought this book was very apt. Life is never black and white yet always flowing with chaos. I feel this book goes some small way to prove that even in chaos there is beauty.”
It was lovely to find his note. A message from Kristian, from the past. The past, where we must leave him.
I had to make some huge and grown up decisions today. Decisions and about romance and finance. The two are unconnected yet have been hideously intertwined as I grappled with one or the other for the past few months.
As my fear of financial ruin overwhelmed me I turned to him to deliver me from the truth. Today, I just had to face my unfortunate situation head on.
My financial insecurity is undoubtedly connected to uncomfortable feelings of self-worth, prestige and power. The romance I want but cannot have. Some things are just not meant to be. It is challenging to come to terms with these sorts of truths but as I have written here in this blog on many occasions when I do make decisions they are swift and sure. Something, actually, Drew Pinsky taught me whilst I was on the sex rehab show.
I have deliberately avoided talking about either the romance or the finance on this blog but more importantly I have kept it secret to those who love me best. Fuck, it is exhausting keeping secrets. I really hate it. I have no intention of going into any specific detail about the romance or the finance right now. All you need to know is that I sat with John after the cake was cut and the presents were opened and told him everything I had been hiding for the past few months. Phew.
As we all know: the truth will set you free.
I let go of a secret I was determined to keep. Everything I have ever let go of has been relinquished unwillingly. With claw marks all over what ever was finally gone.
Deep down I am as sure as I ever was that everything will turn out just the way it was meant to be. I believe in my fate.
My relationships burn like super novae in the cosmos then shrink and die. I have an opportunity right now to make a different set of choices: taking contrary action, living in acceptance and handing over what ever gives me pain to my higher power.
Just a few days away from my trip to Europe where I will celebrate a hefty milestone. I have chosen to travel with a close friend. Someone I love but not a lover. We (and The Little Dog) will explore London and Paris. For the sake of The Little Dog we will once again visit the wallabies in the Jardin des Plantes that my darling, loyal pet found utterly spell binding when we visited Paris last Autumn. I am sure he must have thought that they were the biggest squirrels he had ever seen.
Am I prepared to walk away with dignity? From people, places and things?
What I own is not who I am. Who I love cannot define me. Of course I would love to be in love with a man who loved me as much as I loved him.
I have come a very long way this past year. The road to serenity, self-love, sexual sobriety is littered with the corpses of those who could not.
I must have buried 30 people during the last 12 years, killed by addiction. Overdose, suicide, etc. Every one my hero for keeping me sober. Each and every one.
This evening I celebrated my friend’s daughter’s 5th birthday. I sat with his family and watched his happy little girl blow out the candles on her cake. After supper I wandered into Soho House on my own and found people I knew to take my mind off of the grueling aloneness. I am not lonely, I just can’t be bothered to make the effort to accept the invitation nor get in the car and drive to people who genuinely love me.
On my way home, as if by magic, friends called me. Emails arrived, text messages appeared on the screen of the iPhone and I was wrenched away from the promise of a night of self-pity. I can be such a pig at that particular trough.
I said to him the other night that what I found so hard to let go of was the promise of enduring love. The door had been opened then slammed shut. I am the wise uncle, asexual, decrepit yet ultimately willing to be of service to those who need me.
Without the crutches of objectification, intrigue and seduction I can some times flounder. I can sometimes fall. Late at night, when all hope is gone I wonder who will catch me? Who will catch me when I fall?
For a moment back then, I thought it might be you. I thought, foolishly, that it might be YOU. I thought it was you when I was 20, 30, 40 and now. Being in love with Richard in my twenties. I was heartbroken when he would flirt with girls. At my birthday party on Island Wall, Whitstable my Mother saw the pain I was in and tried to reach out to me but shame got in the way.
The legacy of shame.
Love has always been my goal. To be loved. I crave love the way most men crave sex.
I told him: I’m really scared that I will never love again. That I will never be loved. How could I have got this so wrong? To believe that love was possible, enduring and could be one day mine?
From out of the chaos comes beauty. It will give me succour when all else fails. I am going to Europe to fill my heart and soul with art and architecture. To walk the streets and parks of two great cities. To explore what it might have been like to be loved. I know that when I get back he will be gone. It is our swan song, our last hurrah. But before I write the end I must enjoy the journey. I must not fear the future nor have unrealistic expectations, I must set aside my shame and feel the sun on my face, in my heart.
Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe. The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil. The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil. It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.
Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it. Until now. Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it. I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing. Nothing.
It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.
Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea. I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.
Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA. I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued. I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.
Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut. I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself. It simply isn’t worth it. I am tired of being the uppity gay.
I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared. Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.
My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community. My plays and films aimed at men like me. I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community. They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles. If I had gone ‘mainstream’.
All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives. I am proud to have done so. I am proud to have served my community thus.
I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen? How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?
What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence? What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am? How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?
How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?
Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.
How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man? What does it mean when two men say that they love each other? Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it? That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we? But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered. My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love. That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.
We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs. By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution. By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have. On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures. When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off. It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?
It seems so..undignified.
In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly. At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year. Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.
It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest. The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.
I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more. It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.
The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived. I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men. I don’t know what they look like. I have never seen them, been introduced to them. If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.
The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path. If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it. But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man. I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins. I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.
Whitstable, that’s where we grew up. The High Street, a shingle beach, abandoned oyster beds, abandoned boat yards.
I knew I wanted to make something. I never knew quite what. Writing, knitting, print-making, drawing, theatre, acting, fashion. Good… but never good enough. Wanting to be included but unwilling to participate. Confident to be part of what was going on but seldom sure. Always there, never present.
Had I been allowed, as planned, to go to St Martin’s College of Art to study fashion I would have become a fashion designer. I still have note books crammed with crude fashion drawings and swatches of hideous fabric made when I was 8 years old. Each ‘season’ I would design a new collection and between ‘collections’ I would write and illustrate articles about the history of fashion.
An avid fashion commentator who had unwelcome, prepubescent opinions about everything. My damning critique of Princess Anne’s ‘boring’ ivory duchess satin wedding dress in 1973 irritated my short-tempered, royalist Grandmother. “Look at those ghastly sleeves…”
I was an industrious child. At boarding school I excelled.
When I wasn’t busily designing imaginary runway collections I worked hard remaking my life, a life I could control. A life reimagined included: a 30 page illustrated story about a happy family of mice. A precocious teenager at boarding school I spent months writing and rewriting rambling plays about unrequited love with other boys.
Theatre! I must make theatre. The lights, the tension, the smell of the theatre. The warmth and silence of the audience, laughter erupting around me, muffled crying from the red velvet stalls.
Oddly, I had absolutely no great passion for film or television. Of course, I had seen many films but it wasn’t a world that piqued my interest. I had a fondness for black and white Hollywood films from the 1940’s (particularly musicals) that I would either watch on the television on my own or walk up Whitstable High Street to the cavernous Oxford Cinema.
I was inspired. Stealing an idea for my ‘new collection’, a sleeve or muff. I watched the credits roll: costume designer Edith Head… Funny Face. Adrian, who designed the costumes for The Wizard of Oz.
I’m 12 years old. I discover Marilyn Monroe without ever knowing she is already an established gay icon. The following year I insist that my parents buy me Norman Mailer’s illustrated biography for Christmas.
Theatre and fashion people referenced film but nobody I knew would ever have thought about making one.
The years after I left Shotton Hall School in 1976, before I went to prison in 1983 were culturally the richest of my life. I scraped into Medway College of Art and Design with one ‘O’ level. I befriended punk rocker Billy Childish. I learned how to etch and screen print and draw. Punk was determining music fashion and graphics but scarcely impacted the institutionalized, established, sewn up world of British contemporary art. Britain would have to wait until 1989 until Michael Clark, Tilda Swinton and Leigh Bowery performed in the Anthony d’Offay Gallery.
Whilst at Medway, I saw a very ordinary man wearing a badly cut suit his tie askew commuting from London to Thanet holding a copy of The Sex Pistol‘s single God Save The Queen and nearly fainted in fear. I was wearing a pair of my mother’s bottle green woolen tights. I wonder what he must have thought about me? He alighted at Rainham.
Unable to study fashion at St Martin’s College as my garrulous stepfather refused to let me. I had to get a job. The job I was offered, selling clothes at Yves Saint Laurent on Bond Street, London became the beginning of what would turn out to be a great, although misguided, adventure. An adventure that would shape the rest of my life.
I met Lady Clare Rendlesham and within a few months I was in Paris pretending to be her son.
Clare Rendlesham and others
Along with changing my identity, in Paris I threw myself head long into the very accommodating worlds of fashion, performance art and theatre.
The land of sublime artifice.
During the pret-a-porter I would run with my friends through the streets of Paris from show to show. Although my time in Paris seems less, in retrospect, about theatre and more about fashion and art, I was introduced to Robert Wilson and members of his company, traveled to Holland to see Lucinda Childs in Dance with music by Phillip Glass and travelled more to see beautiful work by Pina Bausch.
Pina Bausch died this year.
I was one of the first people in Paris to wear a Walkman. I think I may still own that original item. Some rich friend of a rich friend left it at my place. He had bought it from Tokyo where he’d been modeling and never asked for it back. Suddenly I had my very own soundtrack. My life scored by Super Tramp. The optimistic opening bars of Take The Long Way Home soaring over the controversial rebuilding of Les Halles that seems only recently to have settled into its surroundings. Music altered my perception of where I was and how I experienced it. Paris was never so beautiful.
It was during this time in 1978, as a willowy teenager, I chanced upon Fred Hughes at John Jermyn’s Rue de Bellechasse home. That beautifully, wonderfully decorated house… rococo monkeys fucking on the drawing-room walls painted by Harry Gromelion and acres of Fortuny silk.
Fred had been, the year I met him, diagnosed with MS and had become nihilistic and surly.
“When Fred got sick, he had to go to the American Hospital, and I decorated his room. I went to visit him, and brought pictures he liked, from his house and flowers…” Julian Schnabel
Fred, so reviled, cut a sad and lonely path through his own life ending up incapacitated and angry. At the end, surrounded in his Lexington Avenue home by the most beautiful things, nothing could placate him. His terrible Texan mother moved in to help, firing his loyal assistant. We never saw him again.
When I met Fred he had slicked back black hair and tailored suits, he lived in an apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi and was, to a provincial teenager, incredibly glamorous… a true dandy.
“It was I who found Fred Hughes his Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where Warhol would stay.” Pierre Berger
He liked me because he thought I was a British aristocrat. He was a terrible snob. Later, when he knew the truth, he would laugh and mock the moment we met and feign outrage. He only ever called me Anthony.
Fred took me to New York, bought me Vetiver and appropriate underwear, gave me drugs at Studio 54, lent me shirts that belonged to Farouk, the last King of Egypt. He wrapped me up in linen sheets and laughed at my jokes. Fred introduced me to Yves St-Laurent and his muse LouLou de la Falaise, Baron Eric De Rothschild, flame haired owner of Egoiste magazine Nicole Wisniak. I sat entranced by these people. Wearing clothes Fred had bought for me, a brand new name. Sloughing off the past… a past for which I had no need.
Perhaps we understood each other because we had both abandoned our past for a far more thrilling present. After his death he was described as ‘a consummate liar, social climber, and a bespoke SOB who grew to total ghoulishness because of his connection to Andy Warhol.’
Isn’t everyone a social climber of some kind… and why the hell not? It’s galling to have Fred’s memory so maligned. From what I saw he managed or rather… baby sat Andy Warhol, pulling him out of relative poverty, protecting him from the unworthiest.
Was that a lie? I really don’t have a clue. As a teenager I thought he was just swell.
It is so sad to see him like this, stricken with MS:
This photograph is amusing. Tim Hunt, Princess Anne of Bavaria, Me and Alexis de Toqueville at Anne’s apartment in Paris. Like so many beautiful young men from that time, Alexis would die of AIDS. Hid family refused to acknowledge his life as a gay man and his death as a gay man.
Samia Saouma’s Gallery (another social hub as great galleries tend to be) I was introduced to the work of The Baron de Meyer, Man Ray and Joseph Kosuth. I followed the crowd and applauded the sparse and mannered work of Robert Wilson. We saw I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating and Death Destruction and Detroit.
In Paris I learned about artists and their power and prestige. Most of these men and women, invited to Europe during the late 70’s early 80’s, were American. Flooding the world with new ideas; polemical and challenging.
What happened to the arts? Even though British theatre seems to have maintained it’s edge, British art has become increasingly bland and decorative. Says nothing of the war or the bloody peace.
Paris was just how Paris is meant to be: an education for a young man.
Before we leave Paris there was one sublime moment. It was a moment. We all need them. Romantic. I had been invited to the house of some elderly Duke. On an orange velvet wall hung a huge sunset by Turner. Surrounded by furniture, a light supper served in front of it. This is how art should be enjoyed. Domestically.
Turner
Returning to England I was given the telephone number of Erica Bolton by The Princess Anne of Bavaria. I met Erica at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London, where she worked as a publicist. My great love affair with the theatre began in earnest.
David Gothard Riverside Studios
Erica Bolton, in turn, introduced me to a community of successful writers and directors. Men and women who inspired me to make my own theatre, my own films, my own art.
I listened and learned.
Erica sneaks me into the theatre to see Kantor’s sold out show Wielopole, Wielopole. I sit in the Gods looking down at syphilitic soldiers marching, wax figures strapped to the living, a monochrome set with Kantor in the middle of it all tweaking his memories and watching sadly as the dead come back to life.
It was triumphant, breathtaking theatre and in sharp contrast to the very British, academic work of Peter Gill (Cherry Orchard) who I met that year (1978) and his then assistant David Levaux the now hugely respected Broadway director.
There were so many exciting people to hang out with at The Riverside like the precocious Hanif Kureishi fresh from his triumphant stint at The Royal Court.
Pioneering David Gothard, the artistic director, the genius at the very heart of the Riverside Studios. Responsible for bringing Tadeusz Kantor, Miro, Shuji Tereyama and many others not only to Hammersmith but to the UK. Night after night we sat in the canteen drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I loved every moment.
In 1979 I made my way to Paris to see Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord. To Paris by boat and train to see Brook’s Conference of the Birds. The raw brick walls and magnificent arches quite unlike any other performance space. I can’t remember where I stayed that night. I was in heaven. I remember the Persian rugs on the floor, the chirping of the cast as they imitated different birds..a chorus… the dawn chorus.
I wanted to make theatre so badly. When I finally got around to it I made just one good work The Host. The other works (as it turned out) a preamble for my later film making and really not that good.
In 1981 I moved into a small flat in Furlong Road, Islington. The home of director Michael Darlow. The flat came with a job: nanny to their wayward 13-year-old adopted son. Wandering the streets I discovered the derelict Almeida Theatre where I would end up having my 22nd Birthday thrown by designer Scott Crolla. Furniture Designer Tom Dixon was our doorman. William Burroughs came.
‘Come Dressed at Duncan Roy’ the invitation demanded.
Here are Kadir Guirey and Tom Dixon in their band Funkapolitan…
The Almeida Theatre, bought and renovated (Bouffe de Nord style) by Lebanese born Pierre Audi. I managed, by chance, to witness the birth of an institution. Even when derelict, Pierre used the space as a theatre. Amongst many, early notable Almeida productions I saw A Dybbuk For Two People with Bruce Myers and in 1982, at Saint James’s Church, Chillingworth Road at the Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music, John Cage at 70. Stunning.
Early 1983 I was arrested and imprisoned for running up a huge bill on my credit card. I spent the next ten months starved of theatre and art but found another altogether unexpected beauty.
I was 23. Prison, as I have said before, was beautiful.
People like Erica bid their adieu and I would never really see them again.
1983, months after I left Wormwood Scrubbs Prison I answered an advertisement in Time Out Magazine. Neil Bartlett was looking for performers to open his show PORNOGRAPHY, a Spectacle at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was a gruelling process, one I found particularly hard to get to grips with. Acting, as you may know, requires the performer to be real and at this time in my life I really had no idea how to do that at all.
As with my appearance in the ‘A’ list thirty years later, people mocked my decision to be in a gay play about sex and sexuality. Life is for the experience… isn’t it? One grand adventure after another.
Theatre
Pornography: A Spectacle. 1983/84 Actor
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 6 city UK tour, Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto, Canada
Devised with Ivan Cartwright, Neil Bartlett and Robin Whitmore
Robin, Ivan and Duncan in ‘Pornography, a Spectacle’
“Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert
The Critic by Sheridan: 1984 Actor – Mr. Puff
Edinburgh Festival
The Host: 1987 Writer/Director
Institute of Contemporary Art London and National Review of Live Art Glasgow with Georgia Byng and Tatiana Strauss
October Gallery
Bad Baby: 1989 Writer/Director
The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent, Hen and Chickens Theatre, Islington North London
Using a cast of local Kent performers this play examined issues of child abuse using Beatrix Campbell’s Unofficial Secrets as the basis of the text.
Marrianne Fearnside in Bad Baby
The Baron in the Trees: 1990 Writer/Director
Adapted from the Italo Calvino novel of the same name for The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent
Copper’s Bottom: 1991 Writer/Director
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, starring Aiden Shaw
Call me Susan: 1993 Co-writer
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Festival Fringe;
Call Me Susan explored issues surrounding prostitution across Europe. A dramatized discussion between two prostitutes interspersed with real-life recorded testimonies and pictures of prostitutes working in six European cities.
It was a piss poor, irritating day yesterday. Nothing, it seemed, was going to rescue me from the thankless groaning of harassing renters and the yearning I have to get home.. and quickly. I left my card in the ATM and have mislaid my beastly driving license.
All in all it was pretty ghastly until I went to therapy at 8pm where I sat with my peers and bathed in our shared misery. Suddenly I felt a whole heap better! There really isn’t anything more exhilarating than listening to those who have had a worse day than you.
Look, I could sit here and write about my financial woes. I could entertain you with the menopausal ranting of Irene from Hawaii or I could just let it go. The worse a person complains and harasses the less likely I am to deal with a situation. It’s just the way I am wired.
Many years ago I made a very bad film in Romania called The Method starring Elizabeth Hurley. It was not the best experience of my life (probably one I would rather forget) but it seems I am not going to be afforded that luxury.
The chaotic making of The Method has inspired the Producer of The Method to write and direct a film about the chaotic making of The Method. The premise is thinly disguised. I was prepared to be irritated but after having had a look at the trailer it all looks rather fun. Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing it and am sure that the press will come knocking once they realize that his film is based on our experience of creating what must be one of the worst films ever made.
It heartens me to think that out of strife and stress art can be made. I am not at all worried by how I may/may not be portrayed. I am merely flattered that the very enterprising director/writer moved a mountain to make a film based on our shared experience. We know how difficult that can be, don’t we?
Time passes and tightly held resentments lose their steam. Fruitless anger, the spirited defense of nothing worthwhile, all this ultimately becomes the secret joke we tell ourselves in later years.
There is June Gloom in LA which makes the light very English, all the colours in my house come alive when the sky is gray. Apart from our gray British skies I miss just how damned rude we can be. All these years of living in polite America! I am looking forward to the bawdiness of my country men. Rapier wit coupled with a good wank joke.
I love that we can both be extremely polite and totally vile within seconds.
The first book I ever bought with my own teenage money was the collected works of Hogarth. Bawdy.
50 years ago this month my Mother, eight months pregnant, was scrubbing floors for nuns at a catholic ‘Mother and Baby’ home in the depths of rural Kent. For 6 months, this teenage girl, had undergone an emotionally disfiguring baptism of shame.
The young girls in this Catholic facility were persuaded that for their acts of fornication and subsequent pregnancies they should be punished before God and their unborn, bastard children maligned.
This penance would not edify my Mother. She would not repent. She had already glimpsed the burgeoning freedoms of post-war Britain. She had met a rich, well-dressed, exotic, Persian boy who drove a sports car and had given herself to him. She was aspirational, a teenage girl with an appetite for the modern world. She wanted what he had, the freedom he had but he wanted less from her than she from him and after moments of unbridled passion she was pregnant and abandoned. One can only imagine how dreadful she felt telling her Edwardian parents that she was carrying me, knowing that her life would never be the same again.
My grandmother, disgusted by her willful daughter’s precocious ambition, spoke to a priest who organized seven long months of incarceration at the Mother and Baby home where she would be forced to abandon her dreams in exchange for shame, resentment and fear.
My grandparents abandoned her to her fate. During the 7 months she was sent away they did not visit her once. After I was born they accepted her home begrudgingly.
Most of the girls would give up their babies. Some of them willingly some, like my mother, unwillingly.
She could not breastfeed me. I refused to suckle. Perhaps I already knew that life was not worth living? The nuns insisted and forced me onto her nipple. My mother left me behind at the Mother and Baby home to be adopted but fate or circumstance or racism intervened. I could not be adopted. My skin was olive toned, my hair curly, my eyes jet black. It was obvious to all the prospective parents who viewed me during the time I was offered up for adoption that I would not fit invisibly into any nice, white family.
By July the 8th 1960 the day of my birth the door had well and truly shut on the promises of the age.
Remember, during the first few months of the 1960’s my mother was unaware that this decade in the United Kingdom would be described variously as ‘swinging’, ‘progressive’ and ‘free’.
What of these nuns now? These Brides of Christ? Where was Jesus when all of this was going on? Where was the love of God?
My Mother was neither free to keep me even though she begged to do so and the home I would eventually end up in, although loving, was certainly not progressive nor swinging.
My Grandmother, in a rare moment of charity, decided to go fetch me and I ended up, once again, with my teenage mother and her mother and her mother in a small, semi-detached house in a genteel seaside town. Besides these three women I lived with my two aunts and my sickly grandfather. Victorian Herne Bay was, was at that time, still enjoying the benefit of the second longest pier in England, a bandstand and the cavernous Kings Hall where polite tea dances were held.
mother
There are photographs of me ensconced in the bosom of this dysfunctional family. I was the son my grandfather never let my grandmother have. She doted on me, walked me through the streets come rain or shine. Then, she let me go.
During the darkest days of my childhood I would try to get back to that house. A house I knew and loved but when I got there it was never the house I remembered. She sent me back again and again.
I lived there for two years until my mother married a local lad and we moved to Whitstable. My Grandmother was thrilled to have her sullied daughter married. It was, in fact, against all the odds. She was ‘taken off my hands’ my Grandmother later told me.
50 years ago. 50 years. I have lied about my age for so long that I am in shock when I type those words. The number has come too soon. I am not prepared to be this old nor was I ever expecting it. Shocking! Why did I never expect to live? On many occasions during my childhood I expected to die at the hands of my angry step-father.
When I finally escaped that man I sought out equally destructive situations.
I have been hankering after the long sleep since I was born.
As I sit at my desk in Los Angeles my greatest triumph, if at all my only triumph, has been to survive. To avoid the catastrophic blow that I expected every day. I may not have fulfilled my potential but I have certainly achieved more than I ever expected, more than I was told to expect. In spite of my temper, my addictions, my desire to take up where my murderous step-father left off I am alive!
It is only recently that I tentatively acknowledged that life must be lived.
For as long as I can remember I have imagined and reimagined my death. For long as I have flown in aeroplanes I have reveled in turbulence. As often as I have picked up strange, beautiful and dangerous men I have wished death come to me.
Shame has cast such a deep shadow over me that all I ever managed to do is struggle blindly down life’s treacherous path. Stumbling into people along the way who could see. Many of those people realizing that I was blind did not help without benefit to themselves. Many of those people, when I understood what monsters they were, were shocked when I ferociously bit their hand off up to the elbow.
Perhaps this is why I stayed close to my family home, a family that did not want me. Even to this day I hanker after Whitstable. There are still elderly parents of friends my age who remember the small boy who escaped his home whenever he could and seek refuge in theirs.
My Father 1960
During the next month I am going to write an abridged memoir. We know the beginning and most of you know where I am right now. So, as I make my way East through New York and Paris back to my old hometown of Whitstable I will let you know what I remember, what I care to remember from the last 50 years.
Today, the little dog is on my bed waiting to walk through the Californian sun to our local coffee shop. There are people there who know me from the television. People who might wave a tentative hello. Tonight I may hear from the man I love and tell him so without shame or expectation. It’s not much to ask is it? To be loved, to love. To be loved..to love?
Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.
Christoper Hitchins tells us that he takes great delight in the misfortune of his enemies and I am sad to admit that I can be prone to the same kind of misanthropic pleasures.
So, it was a bitter-sweet moment yesterday morning when I bumped into two recently sacked talent agents eating their breakfast at Cecconi’s in West Hollywood, one from CAA and the other from William Morris/Endeavour.
One of them had been less than helpful to me when I was actively seeking representation and the other had been less than kind when I lost my representation some years later.
They looked downcast and old. Their verve and arrogance gone. Husks of what they once were. One of them mustering the energy to boast of his young wife’s producing achievements. The young wife that I never see with him in public anymore. The young wife I saw kissing a handsome young actor behind the Coffee Bean on Sunset, caught in the full beam of my F150.
It struck me at that moment in Cecconi in West Hollywood that being an artist of any sort elevates not only ones position in life but elevates morally. An artist will never get the sack. An artist seeks the truth an agent lies for a living.
As as artist I convince myself that I am what I make. I am making very little at the moment, (apart from this little blog) perhaps I am very little?
Do I loathe those two men? Do I derive enjoyment from their demotion? Perhaps, for one adorable moment. Yet, however hard I try hanging onto resentments, there is no one that I can’t forgive.
Resentments are exhausting!
Unsurprisingly I have people who resent moi. Yet, after a few years, a resentment has more to do with them than me. Why are they holding on? What’s in it for them?
A forgiving heart is all one strives for. Surely?
After a couple of years of sobriety I decided that it was time to forgive my violently abusive step father.
I went to see him at his place of work and told him that we both knew what had happened and I wanted him to know that I had forgiven him. He was struck dumb and tried to hug me.
When I reported this to my Mother she said, “Why did you let him off the hook?” I replied, “I didn’t let HIM of the hook, I let ME off the hook.”
If I can forgive him, you can forgive anyone. Including me.
I feel great. Surely this can’t have anything to do with giving up flour based products?
As it turns out…it very well might be. White flour (the enriched and bleached kind) is apparently the worst thing imaginable, causing not only all sorts of intestinal problems but can severely affect our mood…our temperament.
So, I am oddly happy, energised and focused since abandoning all white flour products. No longer taking a nap in the afternoon and last night met Spencer out late at the Coffee Bean and chatted until midnight.
The older one gets perhaps the more careful one has to be with what one puts into ones body.
As much as I love crusty white loaves with marmalade, thick slabs of buttered toast and Marmite this may be the very thing that is compromising my mood day in day out.
The only problem with me being energized is trying to control the ‘high’. I am feeling far too robust.
I vowed to sit at my desk today and deal with all of the practical papers that need dealing with, like paying my road tax etc. Forcing myself to sit down and focus like a naughty child.
After my few moments of Schadenfreude I felt rather sad for those abandoned agents who find themselves at the edge of Hollywood’s universe. It is a cold and lonely place for those who hanker after the life they once had at the very center of the entertainment community.
They miss the endless phone calls, the paid trips to Cannes and Sundance and the kudos bestowed upon them daily for no damned good reason.
It won’t be long before the elder of the two ex agents will get hair plugs and a face lift and like Gustav von Aschenbach from Mann’s Death in Venice will sweat rivulets of black hair dye onto his pallid cheeks. Propped up in a musty deck chair behind The Chateau Marmont, will die of metaphorical typhoid on the beautiful beaches of California.
There is nothing sadder than a clapped out agent. After all, they have nothing to fall back on apart from past glories. An agent’s past glories in Hollywood are not worth the Hollywood Reporter they are printed on.
An artist will always have art no matter what age he/she is. An artist will always have currency.
Finally, there is one particularly nasty agent, the vile and despicable Jeremy Zimmer.
I have had much reason to put him at the top of my list of those whom I loathe most in Hollywood.
Yet, even he will end up on the agent scrap heap…albeit counting his millions, wishing the phone still rang. That he hadn’t made half the enemies he ‘went after’ during his years running UTA.
Agents are never respected, always reviled. Dressed like Mormon missionaries they stalk the lunchtime streets of Beverly Hills. Unlike Mormon missionaries they are bloated with self-congratulation.
Knowing, surely, that one day they will be humbled by obscurity.
I know Jeremy Zimmer very well. We sat in the same AA meeting day after day for nearly three years.
His story never changes, battling with everyone he comes into contact with, his partners at UTA, his wife (in couples therapy) and his poor teenage daughter whose only act of rebellion was to pile on weight like her fat, arrogant father.
Although occasionally amusing one quickly tires of his acerbic assessment of everyone but himself.
I once flew to NYC in the same plane as Jeremy Zimmer. He was in First Class I was in coach. An amazing transformation took place . At LAX he was ‘Jeremy Zimmer, partner at UTA’ demanding special privilege at the check in. On the plane he was ‘Jeremy Zimmer, partner at UTA’ walking up and down the aisle as if he owned the airline.
In NYC, however, he was just another fat Jewish dad at the carousel with his surly, argumentative daughter waiting for their luggage.
Lugging their own bags, cutting a slight and meagre route through the crowd of other travellers.
It was a portent. Eventually the phone stops ringing and those he has treated so shoddily will revel in his eventual fall from grace. He will be replaced by younger, more astute, smarter…more ambitious men and women.
And as he gasps his last breath…will he be remembered like Irving (Shifty) Lazar? Or forgotten and reviled like the capricious Henry Wilson? What will Jeremy Zimmer’s legacy be? Let me guess.
For some unexplained reason I am very happy. No longer in obsession, unable to even remember what that felt like. Relieved from the bondage of self I walk the streets with the little dog unfettered, knowing of course that this too shall pass. For as every bad feeling vanishes every good one does too.
It may have something to do with the fact that I can see an end to the complications, it may have something to do with the fact that I am off to Europe. It may have a great deal to do with my relationship with Venice boy petering out (sexually) or the man in NYC becoming a very good friend with whom I can have a giggle and not a tear.
So, late breakfast with Toby at the Hollywood Farmers Market which feels, on a warm and sunny day, just like a similar market in any part of France. We drank iced coffee and discussed how much joy it gives us to share things we love with people we love. After breakfast I hung with a new friend and this evening Eric and I are going to see Iron Man 2. Will this make any sense if I never saw Iron man 1?
This afternoon, however, I am mostly preoccupied with the British press and their idiotic deductions re. Derrick Bird the Cumbrian taxi driver who shot 12 people dead last week in the UK. Apparently the British press are baffled not by his deplorable actions but that they, in their capacity as psychoanalytic detectives, cannot come up with any plausible motive he may have had on which to hang their hat.
Derrick was, by all accounts, a likeable man. A good father with many friends and rich family life. He was well respected, his friends describe him as polite.
The press, unable to accept that this man had simply gone insane, are rooting around for adjectives to describe Derrick that might make him less like you or me. Unable to use words like isolated and loner they are reduced to using words like quiet. Derrick, apparently, was quiet. Rather than admit to feeling as confused as the rest of us they report that he had squabbled with other taxi drivers for fares. Clues for why Derrick might have gone insane include: once, a passenger ran off without paying his fare and Derrick made a police report and that many years ago he had been assaulted.
I’m assuming that both incidents are common to most taxi drivers.
A passenger running off without paying the fare is hardly motivation for a man to take a shot-gun and kill two people he knew and ten complete strangers in a wholly un British drive by type killing spree.
The press are rooting around for Derricks unknown ‘demons’. The problem is: they cannot get anyone to say one bad word against him. They posit unconvincing similarities between him and the Dunblane murderer Thomas Hamilton who was an isolated, sad man who wrote compulsive indignant letters of complaint.
The inability of the press to just admit that there may not be a familiar motive, that in this evolved society a simple, polite, kind man might just go off the rails is more disturbing than a loner with a gun who had no friends. Derrick is just like so many people that you and I know. To think of any one of them snapping like that without a history of prior infractions, resentments or dodgy relationships is all the more worrying.
Let’s face it, if I randomly shot 12 strangers (no intention by the way-although I know exactly who I would shoot) people would nod sagely and say, ‘I told you so’. Sadly, it would come as no surprise whatsoever to hear that I had gone off the deep end to the majority of people who knew me and millions of people who didn’t.
Tomorrow I might make a list of 12 people I would shoot if I could get away with it.
So, just to update the Derrick Bird story. The tabloid, salacious UK newspapers are claiming that Derrick (ex-nuclear power worker) was obsessed with a Thai stripper. That he had a ‘secret life’ of visiting Thailand and scuba diving. Huh? So, there is still no explanation. If this is indeed true then so what? Many, many men visit Thailand to gawp and fuck Thai women. It’s even more amazing that they use the words ‘nuke’ worker in an attempt to make the man even more sinister.
Like the rest of us the commentators who work for the British Press are struggling to understand how an ordinary man flips from good to bad, from sane to insane, from ordinary to extraordinary. It intrigues me that this is a man who abandoned the fantasy (fantasies we all might share in a frustrating world) of killing those who gave him pain to the reality of picking up a gun and making the world know just how much pain he was in.
The press are terrified of revealing that we are all capable of committing atrocities, that there is a fine line between those of us who don’t and those of us who could. Normal men and women ran the concentration camps, normal men and women took up machete in Rwanda and cut down their neighbours. I am amazed that there are not more incidents like this than there are. From road rage to screaming at the Indian call center worker to Derrick Bird it’s all cut from the same cloth.
Which one of us has not considered taking the lives of others or indeed our own life and make society pay for not understanding our true worth? Derrick felt, as described by family and friends, powerless, frustrated, plagued with resentments..feelings most of us experience every day.
But, there you go, I ended up doing what I loathe most: psycho conjecture. Just my half penny worth.
The Duke of Hamilton died today. A nobleman who was actually noble. I went fishing with him once in Scotland with my friend and dearly departed Dione Henderson.
Some people come into your life and teach you just what you need to know just when you need it.
