Everett - Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins: the Autobiography

Copyright 2006 by Rupert Everett

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Native New Yorker Words and Music by Sandy Linzer & Denny Randell

Copyright 1977 Featherbed Music/Denny Randell Music, USA

Peermusic (UK) Limited (50%) Campbell Connelly & Company Limited (50%)

Used by permission of Music Sales Limited

All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Warner Books

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First eBook Edition: January 2007

ISBN: 978-0-7595-7139-6

Also by Rupert Everett

HELLO DARLING, ARE YOU WORKING?

THE HAIRDRESSERS OF ST. TROPEZ

Tales from the Crib

At several times in life one comes to a point of no return. The drama of this moment often escapes us. We walk into it unconcerned, not hearing all the closing doors slam behind us, not aware that suddenly we are cut adrift from the past and are loose on the high seas, charting a new course through undiscovered waters. I must have been six when it first happened to me. I was living with my mother and father, my brother and our nanny in an old pink farmhouse with a moat, surrounded by the cornfields of Essex. The local farmers had finished the harvest and that morning they were burning the stubble. We knew because my mother came charging into the house, after dropping my father off at the station.

Nanny! Mrs. Smithers! Theyre burning the stubble!

Mayhem. I sat on the hall floor as the two women in my life careered around the house slamming doors, closing windows, drawing curtains. Footsteps pounded across the creaky floorboards above, shaking the whole house: my mothers purposeful gait, identifiable to her children a mile off, and Mrs. Smithers, our darling cleaning lady, like a gentle elephant squeezed into my mothers hand-me-down court shoes. Snatches of conversation could be heard from the gablesa peal of laughter from my mother. And then silence. The sun battling through the curtains made the house feel like an aquarium during the burning of the stubble and, since my mother was a stickler for cleanliness, they could stay closed for days until the last fleck of black ash floated off through the sky. I loved it. Darkness made you feel naughty. And outside the inferno raged around us.

It was one of the highlights of our summer and we children were out there, under the gentle scrutiny of the local farmers from beginning to end, looking for hedgehogs and field mice to save from the fire and only leaving as dusk fell on the black glowing embers and the fields around our house had turned into giant tiger-skin rugs.

Meanwhile, inside the house that morning we settled down to the agreeable state of siege, and all sat in the kitchen as Mummy and Mrs. Smithers reminisced about former stubbles, and Nanny made coffee and Ribena. That dratted ash can get through anything, my mother could say a thousand times during the course of the next two weeks and Mrs. Smithers would keep on nodding sagely like a toy bulldog on the back seat of a car.

So it came as quite a surprise that it was decided I should be taken to the cinema. Whats the cinema? I whined, lips a-quiver, ready for a tantrum. But there was no arguing, and no explanation.

Youll see! was the only answer.

So pretty soon we all bundled into our Hillman, Mummy at the wheel, me beside her with my own steering wheel, suction-stuck to the dashboard, and Nanny in the back, as we drove at a snails pace through the howling flames down the chase that led to our house so that I could at least have a good look. I dont think Mummy knew that flames made petrol explode.

Until that year, 1965, we did not possess a television. The only images I saw were happening then and there in front of my very eyes. I had no concept of a world outside, and no desire to find one. When Churchill died my father went out and bought a large cumbersome set so that he and my mother could watch the funeral, and that was the first moving picture I ever saw. Grainy, incomprehensible and utterly boring, I thought, but then I turned around to see the tear-stained, enraptured faces of my parents and must have reconsidered. This television could get a lot of attention.

The Braintree cinema would be getting a lot of attention, too. It was unremarkable, one of those dismal buildings from the fifties with a curved brick front, Crittall windows and a shabby marquee. We parked the car and joined a long line that stretched around the cinema. None of us much liked queuingmy mum always had a million things to do, and I wanted to get back home to the stubbleand we nearly decided to leave. But fate was hell-bent and after half an hour of ranting (Mummy) and whining (me) we arrived at the box office.

And so my mother bought the fateful tickets and unknowingly guided me through a pair of swing doors into the rest of my life. Goodbye, Braintree! Suddenly we were in a magical, half-lit cavern of gigantic proportions. It must have been the hugest room in the world and at the end were the biggest pair of curtains I had ever seen. I loved curtains already, but these were something else. We were guided down the central aisle by a Braintree matron with a torch. What were all these chairs, and how did you sit on them?

Its just like a loo seat, darling, said my mother.

I sat down between Nanny and her, took one of their hands in each of mine and slowly accustomed myself to the light and my racing heart. Looking up through the gloom was a circle, a balcony and, hanging miles over our heads like a tired moon, a huge crusty chandelier half lit as if for a seance. The place smelt of cigarettes and damp with the odd breeze from the toilets of urine and disinfectant. And sex. Even if I didnt know what it was yet, an insalubrious mist hung over the provincial cinemas of yesteryear. This was the place you got to finger your girlfriends quim.

Quim was a word the big yobbos shouted from the circle at the Braintree girls as they waited in line for ice creams down in the stalls.

Show us your quim, Karen! theyd shout, and the girls would giggle coquettishly.

Whats a quim, Mummy? I asked one morning during coffee.

Your little toe, I think, said my mother vaguely. Mrs. Smithers and Nanny nearly choked. I realised right then that poor Mummy was not very much in touch.

But all that was for the evening show. Something much worse could happen at the matine. Even that day, sprinkled among the little children with their mums and nans, was the odd old fossil, motionless and lizard-like in the playground fray of the stalls. (Dont sit too close to Mr. Barnard from Millens & Dawson, theres a good boy, one might be told. But no one cared much in those days.) The kids giggles and screams bounced off the walls of the half-filled theatre. There was endless movement. To the toilets, to the ice cream lady, and finally some child would go too far and be dragged out. All that noise and movement stopped suddenly as the lights dimmed from the tired moon above and the little sconces on the walls jerkily faded to dull embers, and we all turned as one towards this huge billowing curtain that was bigger than our house. It was lit from below and was a bright crimson at the bottom as if the sun were about to rise from the empty orchestra pit.

What was behind it? Where was it all coming from? The films certificate was projected while the curtain was still closed. It seemed as if it were bursting through from the other side, and then those huge curtains silently swished open and