Categories
art Auto Biography Fashion Gay prison

Always There. Never Present

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.

I saw my first proper play on a high school outing to Stoke on Trent.  Bertolt Brecht‘s, The Caucasian Chalk Circle with Bob Hoskins.  1975.  I was hooked.

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeP220xx7Bs]

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.

 

Duncan 19

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:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnA3MICxFqs]

 

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEB2jmYHVsA&feature=related]

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…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FExauuV3acA]

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.
Categories
Rant

Why Are The Brits So Damned Bawdy?

 

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsEZHURWHlI]

Related Articles
Categories
Auto Biography Death Hollywood

Bastard

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?

Categories
Hollywood Rant

Schadenfreude

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.

Elton John, might be hard to forgive for performing at Rush Limbaugh‘s wedding.

A despicable act of treason.

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.

There is plenty of research to support this.   The consumption of bleached, enriched white flour has also been linked to neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

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.

Categories
Rant

Derrick Bird

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.

Categories
Gay

Oscar Wilde

Duncan Roy and Wendy Asher

Oscar Wilde enjoyed the extravagant promises of the Victorian Age, capturing the imagination of London’s aesthetic elite. However, beyond the enlightened few, everything about the man provoked consternation to the prudish, hypocritical Victorians—from the green carnation in his buttonhole to his sensational novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Like his suits, Wilde, a tireless self-promoter and purveyor of the unforgettable bon mot, was exquisitely tailored. While young, he was best dressed in bold plaid, plus fours, starched shirts with high, tight collars or gabardine suits cut short above the hip. Wilde traded his own slender, youthful visage (French
pleated hair and Cupid lips) for a bloated middle age rife with extravagant capes and voluminous fur-lined coats.

In his revisionist biography of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, Neil Bartlett describes how Wilde became a huge man with a penchant for young, willowy boys. He was an intriguing mass of contradictions: The love letters he sent to his wife, Constance, are as beautiful as the letters he sent to the dark-hearted “Bosie,” his lover. The innocent stories he wrote for his beloved children were a counterpoint to the pornographic tales he created from his forays into London’s dank underworld.

The pornography attributed to Wilde in the British Library, under the pseudonym “Teleny,” reveals his sado-pedophilic fantasies. Young boys figure highly in these violent, disturbing texts. The virginal youths are deflowered by older, cruel men, their innocence torn from them.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is the reworking of these same themes that lead Wilde to his pessimistic and wholly modern conclusions about our shared horror of the loss of youth and how we might reclaim it.

When casting for a perfect Dorian, I was not interested in hiring a great beauty, but rather, a young boy. After all, beauty is subjective, youth indisputable.

For the movie’s Dorian Gray, it was imperative that our actor, David Gallagher, look effortlessly chic. David is very much the stick-thin look of right now and Dior Homme (as reinvented by our costume designer, Hedi Slimane). Dressing the literary youth icon of our age was a perfect solution for us and Dior: Slimane set his homoerotic boy-man aesthetic against the new Puritanism of American mainstream culture.

It is Lord Henry Wotton who appeals to the youthful Dorian Gray and speaks for the moisturized 40-plus generation, when he says to Dorian: “I wish that I could change places with you. To get back my youth; I’d do anything in the world. You are the type that the age is searching for and is afraid that it has already found. The world has always worshipped you—and it always will.”

If Wilde’s sensational sodomy trial had happened today, would the acclaimed wit have ended up in prison? Given that we find it hard to throw celebrities in jail, perhaps not. But Wilde’s predilection for sex with underage boys? I am sure that his hard drive would have been littered with unsavory images of children.

Once in prison, Wilde was given a thin gray cotton shirt and pants. Issey Miyake—or Kim Jong Il—might have gotten a kick out of this minimal Bauhaus look, but Wilde loathed it and woefully described his prison uniform in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A couple of years later, he was dead. (“It’s either me or the wallpaper.”) But as hard as I look, I cannot discover what he was buried in. Except, of course, shame.

This article was edited by Black Book for whom the piece was originally written.  It has been pointed out to me that Hedi lent us the clothes for Dorian rather than designing them for the film.   I have also been asked what happened to the film.  How did it do?  Well, in my own estimation it did OK.  It closed the London Lesbian and Gay film Festival, opened the Miami G&L film festival and opened the New York G&L film festival amongst others.   It had a small life and then vanished.

Categories
Hollywood Love Rant

Drug of Choice

Dream:  weirdly compelling dream, I am in a beautiful country house in South America, there is an anaconda, I am guarding the little dog, then we are on a train to a small village, lots of people..then on my own.

I am on a high protein diet so I can lose a few pounds before I get to England rather than work it off whilst I am there.      The upshot is I am feeling aggressively horny.   Need..want..love.

Taming the beast.    Look, I have to confide in you:  I have never been interested in second best, making do, half measures not only availed me nothing but I am turned OFF by the avowedly second rate.  I am interested in first class everything and why shouldn’t I be?  I don’t mean huge houses or fancy cars, I don’t want ravishing beauty or perfect bodies all I have ever wanted was something or someone who could tell me the truth.

Again, let me state as boldly and confidently as I know how: AUTHENTICITY.  I am only interested, I have only ever been interested and will always only ever be interested in that that is authentic and true.

This may account for the kind of pornography with which I used to be obsessed.

If I look around my home I can tell you that there is not one fork, spoon, chair or rug that I don’t LOVE.

Selling my art recently has given me the freedom to let everything go.  I may have no option.  Yet, as fast as I let things go I acquire more.   It is an addiction as grave as pornography or drugs.  I used to look around my home in Whitstable and I could tell you to the day how badly I felt by the amount of money I spent on the possessions I owned.

Last night I met some actor from a show called Dollhouse.  I don’t remember his name.  Fran someone or other.   He was/is attractive but because I no longer objectify or intrigue I really didn’t know how to engage with strangers.  The conversation lingered and died.    Is this how things will be from now on?

Fuck.

Before my sexual maturity work in therapy when ever I went out I would flit from table to table intriguing and flirting and having a gay old-time.  Yesterday night I was compelled to chat with people I knew rather than making brand new friends.

Fuck!

I really do not want to lose that motivation.  I love people but how do I love people without them becoming my drug of choice?

Categories
Dogs Hollywood

Sharon Osbourne

Coffee.  6am.  We didn’t get into bed until 3am.  Still, it’s impossible to sleep.   Perhaps coffee after midnight just doesn’t work.   Spent early part of day in Malibu swapping out locks, preparing for visitors.  Trimming the over grown canopy of Bougainvillea leading to the top apartment.    After a week of intensive organization I am making headway with downstairs and this autumn Louis will come and paint everything cream and clean.

It was good to have Andrew help me clean both apartments.  He is incredibly thorough and dependable.   It’s fun hanging out with him.  Yet, saying this I also miss you-know-who who may never call enough for my liking.  It’s odd to have your heart so evenly split between two so very different men.   He is on the East coast making sense of his new him and I am here with Andrew on the West making sense of mine.

The closer we get to going to Europe the more peaceful I become.  I am going home.

So, I had this invitation for the Warhol opening at Jared’s gallery on Sunset.  I really had no intention of leaving the house but Ryan called and insisted that I come join him so I dragged myself into my new Nantucket reds and set sail for the social high seas.

Prism is a huge cave of a gallery that only the son of a billionaire could possible own.   There were very poorly guarded yet beautifully hung Warhol’s and several hundred frantic club kids drinking free wine and beer, not paying the slightest attention to the art.  Very skinny girls and very pretty boys, I am glad I was with Andrew as he was, by far, the prettiest of them all.   He was wearing a pair of lively patterned Comme des Garcons pants and a simple black tee-shirt and looked divine.   The little dog was wearing a wagwear collar.   We chatted with Sharon Osbourne for a little while but when she realized I was British-or perhaps realized who I was-she affected this weird accent and became decidedly odd, testy.

We ate dinner at the Chateau with other friends and ended up at Soho House where I spotted Bryan Singer with a gaggle of frat boys.  Robert Downey Jr and I had the briefest of chats and by midnight I was fully engaged with my old and abandoned social life.   I sat with my Australian friend Peter S for a good hour remembering Sydney leaving Ryan and Andrew at the bar drinking stout.

You know I spent a rainy week on Fire Island with Bryan Singer years ago when I was with Jamie.  I have nothing to report about that week other than to say it was before I got sober.  A blur of interminable drinking.

Duncan. Unknown, Brandon Boyce, Bryan Singer Fire Island

 

Ryan and I discussed just how distracting LA can be.  How one can achieve absolutely nothing yet feel as if one has had a full and accomplished day.

Poor Soho House are having a terrible time placating their near neighbors and the beautiful restaurant has to be cleared at midnight for noise pollution reasons.  I really can’t imagine that you can hear much of Soho House from the street over the traffic or the other noisy clubs/restaurants but people seem compelled to complain and bitch and moan about almost everything and anything all the time.

It was fun going out although I felt incredibly tired by 2.30am and eager for my bed.   I used to live this sort of life every night in LA and I could once again if I could be bothered.  It’s just so tiresome being ‘on’ or being me and since making the show there is the added element that people know rather too much about my life ahead of meeting me.  Too much for comfort.

This morning I have to meet John for breakfast, our Saturday morning pre-therapy ritual.

I heard a great deal of damning gossip about Kay and Amanda but may have to hold off reporting this until another time.

Categories
Malibu Rant

Paris!!

8am Malibu.  Cleaning the house.  This is my true vocation.  House cleaner and rent collector.

I rearranged the downstairs apartment so it now looks rather chic.   Loved it.  Love it.  I wish I lived downstairs and out of this huge loft.  The greatest thing and the worst thing about living here is the view.  It is magnificent, consuming and exhausting.  There is no escape from the view.

The days pass uneventfully.  A humming-bird flew into the sitting room yesterday so I gently caught it and let it free.  Lunch with Andrew and the Little Dog in Santa Monica on the beach.   Long conversation with Jake which began as I pulled onto the 10 going west and ended a few meters from Las Flores.  30 miles of conversation.  We are going to have friendly fun in Europe.    Dinner with heavily pregnant Jen and Trevor at café Habana.  I ate a pork chop.  Am cutting out all white flour from my diet this month as a ways and means to look good for my arrival in Paris.  Trevor told me that he lost his temper at some lesbians and their three off leash dogs.

Spoke with Georgina in Whitstable whose daughter Sophie was having a good old laugh in the background.   This time next month I will see them all.  Get to join in on the joke.

I felt vulnerable after speaking with Georgina.

It is hard for me to show how vulnerable I can be to anyone.

I remember eves’ dropping on a conversation my stepfather was having with my mother when I was a small boy.  He was explaining to her that he was finding the written component of some work related conference he was attending very challenging.  It was the first and only time I acknowledged that he was capable of vulnerability.   His slight, whiney voice proof that this monster of a man was anything other than granite tough.

This day next month I will be in NYC.  The following day we will be in Paris.  July in Paris.   Perfect.

What a fucking disaster LA has been for me.  A total waste of time and money.  Against nature in every way possible.  Intellectually bereft.  Creatively barren.  No hope of happiness in this monstrous place.  The only thing going for it:  the weather.  The fucking weather.  Another beautiful fucking day in paradise.

I suppose it would help if I went out more.  Like I used to? Hang out at the Chateau, Soho House etc. or simply called people I know would want to hear from me but I am winding down, getting ready to leave.    Everything is in order.  Bills paid.  Off I go.  Time to leave.  Time to pack my bag and dog.

Categories
Love

Dennis Hopper

I am still not in the UK where I am meant to be.  I am trying to fit the pieces of my life together so when I finally leave I can feel safe things wont fall apart whilst I am away.

I am in the doldrums.   I can’t wait to get home to see friendly faces, hear familiar accents, wash the last few months of indecision, lost love and tales of ordinary madness into the Swale.

No longer in love my cupboards fill with chocolate.  I look at myself in the mirror and realize that I got what I wished for..the invisible man stares back at me.   Yet, saying this, this morning I was full of hope.  I sat in acceptance and said so out loud.

The little dog and I have not climbed Runyon for days and this is partly because my back twinges and I am scared that it will fail me again like it did earlier this year and I will have to sit in bed for a week unable to move without excruciating pain.

There isn’t much to report.  I am not allowed to write about my trip home in case I say/write things that upset the man I am travelling with.  Needless to say there are good times on the horizon though I am not sure if my companion will enjoy the whirlwind exploration of things past.  My past.  I am getting to show someone I care about the locations I love including the place where, in this now half over life, I experienced as a child a moment of total freedom that, strangely, I never really experienced again.  It is this place that I want to visit most and ultimately end up under the elder, hawthorn and the sycamore of my youth.

I linger in depression when I am alone then, when people knock at my door, all at once I am happy and content.  I know that I am going home to very friendly faces, to the great loves and the equally magnificent disappointments of the past half a century.

I am dreaming eager like a ghost through the Sunday drag shows of the Vauxhall Tavern, the streets of London, the parks and moribund locations of my youth.

There are people I must see who are essential to reconnect with if, as I plan, I am to remain at peace with myself.   A smile on my face.

Dennis Hopper died this week.  I spent a few afternoons/evenings with Hopper in Bucharest when I was directing the ill-fated Method..a truly ghastly film.  We were staying in the Marriott and would sit in the marble bar with hookers, actors and gamblers.   The entire cast of the film Modigliani including Andy Garcia, Udo Kier and Miriam Margolyes.

During one odd excursion we sat in a darkened screening room and watched the last few moments of the lives of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena who were executed by firing squad in 1989.  I remember her suburban coat and the way she fell.   Bullets into their bodies.  Hopper was unmoved.  The next time we bumped into each other was at a pre Oscar do at Barry Diller‘s.   He told me that rather than being unmoved he was shocked that the man who showed us the footage (the owner of Media Pro film studios) was so gleeful.

The Ceausescu were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment in 1990.

Louise Bourgeois died this week.  Another colorful character from my past.  The very same week I sold one of the two works I owned by her.  The auction of some of my art collection went very well.

I had, it seems, invested wisely.