Yesterday began with breakfast of cakes and coffee at Maison Bertaud on Greek Street with Tania who showed off her occasional gallery – very crowded with nondescript paintings by Noel Fielding.
The great find at the show was the animated video art piece tucked in the back of the cellar and REALLY worth checking out or indeed buying.
We had lunch at Patisserie Valerie and looked at the parade of boys and freaks.
Yesterday evening took taxi from Chelsea to Serpentine Gallery Pavilion opening at the behest of architect Tom Croft. Saw many people from the past who all seemed delighted to see me. The pavilion, designed by Jean Nouvel, was very red and surrounded by soggy turf. There was some consternation about his eligibility – apparently the point of this yearly event is to commission emerging architects not those in the twilight of their career.
We were invited to Richard Rogers house after the Serpantine event but I really couldn’t be bothered so we caught the bus back to Soho where we met Matt who pushed us into a cab and over the river to Vauxhall.
Toured sad, empty Vauxhall gay bars ending up in Balans back on Old Compton St eating DISGUSTING burger. I am going to pop in there after I have written this and complain about how bad it all was.
This morning I sat in BlueBird with, of all people, Manolo Blahnik who is looking very doddery and frail. He has a stick and his hair is all awry. Within the space of just one month Manolo and Christian Louboutin! These two great..the greatest grandees of ladies shoes. Christian is, of course, the young buck.
I have been away from London for the best part of a decade. My contemporaries all look a bit worse for wear. Worn out. Thank God I have been sober for so long!
Spoke to Tim briefly today. He admitted to having had botox. He looks amazing. Amazing.
On the bus to Soho I met Juanita Carberry who was a child in Africa at the time of the Happy Valley murder. She wrote a book called Child of the Happy Valley. Holly Aird played her in the film adaptation. So, I know Holly and Issie’s grandfather was the murderer…weird eh? What is even odder..Lavinia, Issie’s sister stayed at the house last night.
Lunch at Soho house with Sharon Marshall who is getting married in less than 8 weeks and is all of a quiver about flowers, bridesmaids dresses and who will photograph the event.
Things change between some people and some things never change.
Back at home in Chelsea after two glorious days in Whitstable. The train to London was filled with fat women with no teeth from Ramsgate. The Little Dog sat on his lap all the way here. They are my strange family of travelling souls.
The house in Chelsea is neat and cool. We are sleeping in a huge room painted a dirty rose color. Phil bought us new toothbrushes. The cupboards are filled with boxes marked BOOKS AND PLATES. Knowing that I love them Phil found two gilded (ormolu I think) stork shaped candlesticks for the dining room table. In our room she filled a vase of my favorite pink peonies. I moved them into the kitchen so I can look at them whilst I write. Phil has a lanky, 11 month old, wolf-like lurcher called William who irritates both of us by leaping all over our bed. Her 15-year-old daughter Moffy is going to be a model and this morning there are other very elegant girls sleeping on the drawing room sofas, their handbags overflowing with cigarettes, condoms and tampons.
The companion is in bed moaning at Phil’s dog that wants to be his friend. “Out, out!” William skulks away, unwanted.
We arrived in London yesterday, the hottest day here so far this year. It was still 88 degrees at midnight when we sat on the steps in front of the house, drinking tea, explaining to the travelling companion what coal holes were and how they worked.
The house is much bigger than I remembered it.
After a lovely lunch at La Famiglia (I ate ham and figs) we walked up the Kings Road to the Designer’s Guild summer sale and hankered after a beautiful chair and a bulbous teapot.
Last night we drove to Battersea Park and walked for two hours. The Little Dog is happier in London than anywhere else we visit. He is free to run and leap and now he has a new friend to play with-even though their new friendship started off with growls and snapping.
Nobody knows how to access the wifi so neither of us automatically reaches for our phones or laptops as soon as our eyes open. It is very therapeutic not having the Internet so freely available.
Less eager to check my emails, more of an event to do so. We have to walk to the Starbucks on the Kings Road and drink warm iced coffee.
I really shouldn’t be so eager to placate myself with the soothing, addictive page after page of regular web sites I open every morning.
Even though we are only half way through our adventure I am already dreading having to deal with LA and the eventual closing down of my life in the USA.
I didn’t mention that the travelling companion bumped into (of all people) Cary Fukunaga in Wheelers the Oyster Bar in Whitststable. He is here directing Jane Eyre. He was with the actress playing Jane Eyre – Mia Wasikowska who was Tim Burton‘s Alice. Even before I knew who he was he had an air about him that reeked of unbridled entitlement. It came as no surprise to hear that he directs-we are all the same. All directors have that air about them that may indicate that he is indeed the real deal. Time will tell. He wanted a table in the back room but Anita refused to give him one. If only he had been a little softer, more charming, he would have gotten what he wanted.
Travelling companion and I are having a lovely time. Not without consternation but actually and mostly we laugh and try to make sense of our odd friendship.
There was something inevitable about this I suppose. Though there is an emotional imbalance and sexual disparity that is more revealed as we spend time together. I understand – who wouldn’t? It’s just the way things are.
We may know each other a little too well.
I have never, ever thought of love as anything other than fleeting. Being here in London has filled the hole, the gaping, yearning hole that rots my life from the inside out. London! Look around you! The art, the architecture, the color and movement inspire and nourish.
Phil is off to a woman’s Buddhist retreat for the day.
Is this Sunday? I think so. We are thinking about extending our trip. Staying in London longer, maybe going to Berlin.
Anyway, another day has passed since I wrote the above and even though we are in the very heart of London there is something oddly bucolic about this house.
Saturday morning we walked up the Kings Road toward Sloane Square. Where the Duke of York’s Barracks used to be, there is now a food market that sells delicious looking food from all over the world, Caribbean, Mediterranean, British (of course), Indian etc. etc. We ate curried goat and rice. Delicious.
(We were going to have lunch at the Blue Bird restaurant but who ever now owns it is not taking much care. The staff were rude and unhelpful. The tables dirty, the food uninspiring. It used to be so elegant.)
Bought ourselves Oyster cards and after a long walk through Eton Square and the back of Belgravia we caught a bus to Piccadilly Circus and hung out in Soho House. He drank champagne and I coffee and fizzy water. The staff brought the little dog a plastic box of water and a chicken breast.
After ‘lunch’ we walked back toward Bond St stopping in at Richard James which used to be so glorious but now looks a bit sad, the staff all puffed up and arrogant.
Popped into the new Louis Vuitton store, which is, I am very sad to say, TOTALLY VILE! Packed with retail-obsessed tourists this monstrous, badly conceived, gaudily decorated ‘shop’ was also swarming with London’s boys in blue. Policemen and women who I assume had been called to deal with a shoplifting incident. It was almost Dickensian, the rich and the poor come to the emporium to either buy or steal.
We popped into APC and he bought a jacket that he is desperate to wear because he looks incredibly chic in it. We are teaching him how to buy beautiful things. Every gay man needs a style mentor. He is so lucky to be a small to medium. The summer sales here are stuffed with small to medium bargains. 50%/70% off everything with plenty of room for negotiation..one can easily get a further 10% off of everything.
I bought a teapot and six cups and a milk jug for my new life in London.
Anyway, we wended our way home. It was incredibly hot. We lay down and slept for a little while.
At 8ish Phil stuffed us in her car and drove to Hampstead where we saw Diana Krall then after..believe it or not..we went to Cary Fukunaga’s birthday party. My opinion of him did not alter much. We are both quite awkward but he gets to drink. We are both quite competitive but he is 32. We are both talented but John Lyons wants to suck his cock and not mine.
Is Cary Fukunaga gay? Probably.
We met a delightful lesbian and an odd gay boy who started craving shots and drugs and became so very dull. We sat in the most beautiful garden and smoked cigarettes. The gay boy told us about all the thrilling gay club/bar opportunities that we could have in East London.
On the way home he sleepily laid his head on my shoulder and drunkenly told me all manner of charming things but I am acutely aware that I am still on guard. I know that if just one person says just one cruel word about these two men together I would kill them. Too many men in big cities are killed by homophobes and I am not going to be one of them. Consequently, whenever it may be apparent that we are gay in public my fist is clenched just in case some fool wants to try killing us.
I left LA last week (July 2nd) though it actually feels like months ago, so much has happened. I flew into JFK with bags and dog and chaos. He was waiting for me and whisked me off to a beautiful house set in perfect woodland and rolling lawns.
We ate and walked and talked. I never tire of listening to him. We have done our fair share of soul-searching these past few months and now it is time to have a few laughs. I know that at the back of his mind he worries, that he is not truly free.
I loved the countryside and delightful clapboard houses on the border of New York and Connecticut.
In distant, very white upstate town Katonah there were two very black gay men from the Caribbean eating a light lunch. They were the only black people for miles around.
Two days later we were in a taxi back to JFK and onto one of Air France’s spectacular Airbus A380. The huge plane was almost empty! Deciding to fly on July 4th was a great idea. Taking off over a million 4th July firework parties. Fireworks exploding all around us.
The first part of the journey was not without drama as we managed to get delayed for 3 hours by a bomb scare at JFK. The entire airport emptied out just minutes before we were about to fly. We were herded outside and sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking water. After a couple of hours in the sun we stampeded back into the building directly onto our planes and landed in France 6 hours later.
It is delicious to be back in Europe. Away from the tangled life I have left behind in the USA. Once in Paris we checked into Mama Shelter in the 20th, seconds from the cemetery Pere Lachaise. We loved it!
Although I smuggled the dog into the hotel-actually we had no need as dogs, we later found out, are allowed. The food and service were excellent. The only vaguely irritating thing was the Internet wi-fi connection which was linked to their rather modern but baffling Apple TV. Apart from finding it impossible to get on-line their sophisticated interconnected system meant that the TV remote would also remotely control our lap tops..hmmm.
It is so easy to concentrate on what is wrong in life or in others without noticing how beautiful things are. The staff at the hotel were gorgeous and we drooled over them everyday.
First day of Couture shows in Paris. We had lunch with William Stoddart at Hotel d’Amour near Pigalle. Gosh that area has changed so much! When I lived there with Claire Sant it was ghastly. Last week it was wonderful. The weather has been gorgeous everywhere we have been.
The beautiful Edouard joined us afterwards for coffee. We had dinner with him the night before and 6 others at Italian restaurant. Very pretty German model who was obviously rooting for Germany in the World Cup..she was tall and womanly and intelligent. We talked France’s ignominious exit from the competition and sneered at the British teams pathetic attempt to get into the last 8.
Three days in Paris followed by a train ride to Calais and a ferry to Dover after a short taxi ride home to Whitstable we were sitting on the beach eating venison burgers and the travelling companion couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was and complained that I had underplayed how Whitstable really is.
Today there are warnings that old people may overheat. We are going to take a train to London.
I am sitting writing this from my room overlooking the sea in Georgina’s home in Whitstable. It was my birthday yesterday. The day started well enough with coffee at Dave’s deli catching up on gossip and drinking his perfect latte. I left the companion in bed. He is not really a morning person. We met my mother for lunch at Wheelers where Mark Stubbs the chef there continues to surpass himself-this time with delicately spiced soft shell crab.
I really had no desire to see anyone other than who was at that table. I am certainly not interested in tangoing in front of 500 people like an eastern European gypsy. My mum and Georgina bonded over their hatred of Asylum Seekers. My mother pointed out that some asylum seekers were pretending to be gay so that they could stay in the country. If it’s not the Mexican’s it’s the Eastern Europeans..there always someone to blame for never having enough.
I thought that the fear of others getting something for nothing was an American phenomena but no! It’s British too.
After lunch Adam took my picture as part of his photographic Whitstable project and his lovely mum cut my hair. We sat in their lush garden drinking lemonade and lusting after his gorgeous, recently tattooed, diver brother. After the pictures were taken we walked the couple of miles home up the beach. I have never been so happy.
When we got home the companion had a drama unfold which he needed to deal with. When he finally tore himself away from the Internet we sat in the garden and ate dinner with Georgina. We ate huge organic pork chops that I managed to burn on the bbq. After dinner we sat outside the Neptune pub with Barry and other drunksters. The dog was tired and lay on the beach and fell asleep. The night was balmy and the sea lapped lazily over the shingle.
This morning I woke at 6am and walked the dog up to the harbor. He loves it here. The Greens who own the Oyster Company scrawl unfortunate notes on black boards all over their property. Don’t do this and don’t do that. Those black boards used to be charming now they just look vicious.
Some people like to get their own way..I am one of them. When you finally meet your match, as I seem to, it can be less than comfortable. I am trying to be sensitive to the needs of others but I am a stubborn old fool.
As for him..the traveling companion..he’s finding his feet and I am finding mine.
Is it possible to believe in God and still take drugs and drink? Is it possible to believe in God and sleep with hookers? Is any of this possible? Obviously it is.
Sebastian will be buried on Thursday, July 1st 2010. There’ll be a horse-drawn cortege from Meard Street to St James’s Piccadilly where the service will be held. Stephen Fry will be speaking, as are others. Stephen very kindly offered to say a few words on my behalf.
Rachel Campbell-Johnstone wrote to me yesterday inviting me to the funeral, she said, “We are mountaineers roped together heading for the summit of beauty.” She warned us that the funeral will be filmed.
Remember, I was 23 when I met Sebastian. That was 27 years ago. He was still a teenager working for Jimmy Boyle in Edinburgh. Our show, Pornography, a spectacle, invited by the Richard Demarco Gallery would play in Jimmy’s cold performance space where Sebastian and I met for the first time.
I would later work for the Demarco Gallery and meet Joseph Beuys, the greatest conceptual artist of our age. There was a fascinating dialogue between Beuys and Boyle..then styled one of the most dangerous men in the United Kingdom.
The dialogue was initiated by Richard Demarco whilst Jimmy Boyle was serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Barlinnie Prison for murder. Beuys went on hunger strike because of Jimmy Boyle’s removal from the Special Unit, Barlinnie to Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison where he was no longer able to continue making art.
Sebastian claimed in his book Dandy in the Underworld that he was sleeping with Jimmy and I have no reason to doubt him. I would have too if I had had my chance. There was something wildly attractive to me about ex cons and hard men and dangerous criminals. Remember I had been in prison the year before I met Sebastian and developed a nasty habit for sex with brutal straight men.
If anybody was going to fuck me he was going to be a man who deserved me. He was going to be a man who knew what he wanted and how to take it.
My cell mate Tommy Cowling, married with two children from Hoxton, East London was the most beautiful man who ever lived. When the lights went out in our cell he said, “I’m asleep now, you can do what you want to me.” For nine long months we did exactly that, everything we wanted when the lights were out. He could make me cum by just rubbing his stubble over my soft face.
Perhaps this is another reason why I spurned the soppy men that I met in gay bars and gay clubs? Perhaps this is why I would rather have my head buried in a squaddies (soldiers) groin, the smell of wet pussy on his cock than a nice boy from The Abbey. Prison spoiled more than my reputation. It proved, if any proof were needed, that straight men with furious urges, hard and hairy bodies and urgent desires were far more interesting than living in the half-light of shameful, gay London, Paris or New York.
This is all a matter of taste of course. My desires cannot be compared to yours.
Yesterday something a little untoward happened. At Anna’s birthday party she rolled me a fag and it had a few crumbs of weed in it. I was as high as a kite for a good few hours. Everything was totally wonderful. I had that gorgeous feeling of euphoria and masterful abandon. I hadn’t felt that feeling for nigh on 14 years. I demanded to speak to Jake because I wanted to know how the experience of me being high would affect what I thought of him.
He was complaining that it was late and he wanted to go to sleep…he was blithering on about how people might think he was some sort of man whore if I compared his experience of being gay with men who died of AIDS in the 1980’s. Obviously, I didn’t mean that. I was trying to be nice.
Fuck it! Go and be a man whore. All of you! Go and be whores. It doesn’t matter to me. I was sucking squaddie cock and getting fucked in the back of cars by East End builders. LUSH. I didn’t wait around to have a gay life. I emerged from the womb searching for the most perfect penis to suckle on.
Anyway, as I did not deliberately get high I am not going to reset my sobriety time. I still believe in God but I’m not going to be so fucking pious.
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?”
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.
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.
The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.
A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog. Thanks friend. The fact is: I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had. Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness. Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David. Bad idea. Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice. Bad idea. My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.
I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression. It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations. After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast. You guys were all so sweet to support and love me. The reason I write this blog? Because you are all there to read it. To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.
After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply. The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere. I can’t say I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people. Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.
Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy. I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit. When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet. Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.
They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident. As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems. On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up. I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then. I was embarrassed for him.
When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it. The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog. Well, blog on this bitch! I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.
My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.
I walked briskly down Sunset. I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys. A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun. This may be my future!
Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.
Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligentBritish friend. Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA. My new theory? That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’. That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own. The threat, real or imagined was always there.
Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY. White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.
After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops. Handsome but dull. We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric. The full can hit me squarely in the chest. I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum. At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.
‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand. I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’. These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.
Nothing. Nothing to say, write or comment on. In my own head. Do you know that feeling? When life is so overwhelming? I could not sleep last night. Perhaps it was the cheese again. Must stop eating cheese before bedtime.
It is easy to look over ones life and just remember the things one has lost rather than what one has found.
I am going to New York this weekend. Staying on 10th street again. Comfortable.
It seems like for the past few months I have made one bad decision after another. If only I could tear myself away from the self-loathing. To love myself enough to give the man I see occasionally in the mirror..a break. Do you think that is possible?
I just made a huge pot of black coffee and drank it all. Friends arriving from London today. Dinner with Toby last night. Saw Please Give with Katherine Keener. It was a lovely film. Very New York, very sad. I shed a tear at the end.
Did I ever tell you that for a short time I was friendly with Katherine Keener? She has a lovely house in Santa Monica, beautifully decorated with really well-chosen furniture. She has the most amazing taste.
I tell you what is happening in my head. I feel as if I am in some terrible competition. A competition that I can never win because it’s not my game. I am not like ‘them’ so I can’t win. I feel very unsafe. Not like I was going to die because that would be easy. To know for sure the time and place of ones own death.
Unsafe, because I want something so badly knowing that it can never ever happen. That something is not a person or a thing or a place but the peace of mind that has eluded me for so long. I have learned that nothing can fix me. Nothing can make it better. Maybe a more complete relationship with God but to have that relationship with God I must remove the lead cap I am wearing that keeps me in the dark.
I sat in a room yesterday morning with 70 men who all looked so fucking miserable. Every man in there just trying to make sense of what and who he was. today, I have no idea what the answer is.
To wake up with no answers is a terrible thing.
The little dog is sleeping. He is waiting for me to pull on my pants and take him for a long walk. I used to think that if I could just keep on going, keep the momentum then everything would be ok but I have nothing to look forward to right now.
