Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins – Rupert Everett

What fun!

I’ll open my comments on this uproarious movie memoir with a representative paragraph. Here is Everett on the night of Charles & Di’s wedding:

It is not in the queer DNA to take part in public events and national celebrations so we decided instead to visit a louche club in Leicester Square called the Subway. It had once been famous for the Four Hundred, immortalised by Evelyn Waugh and Noel Coward, the smartest nightclub in London for thirty years between the wars. It was christened in the twenties by the Bright Young Things, who manically danced there before ‘sitting the next one out’ at the surrounding tables to watch the slow collapse of the Empire, the destruction of the great aristocratic mansions and finally the Blitz, all playing out in front of them on the dance floor. From a tender romantic kiss as the band played ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ to the desperate embrace of ‘We’ll Meet Again!’ those walls held it all. Now men fucked each other as Gloria Gaynor sang ‘I Will Survive’. Many of them wouldn’t.

It’s a good example; the flamboyant queerness, the veneration for showbiz history, the fast-and-loose chronology and the melancholy undercurrent all suffuse the text. As well as being unfeasibly handsome, privileged, successful and over-sexed, it turns out Everett is a genuinely fine writer too, the bastard. He’s also happy to dish the dirt in a highly enjoyable way.

It occurred to me that his career has been more like that of an A-list actress rather than a C-list actor. Small roles, often set against bigger names (Julia Roberts, Madonna etc) and a life based as much around image as around acting. That’s just the Hollywood stuff – he’s more passionate about the theatrical work, it seems.

He spends a paragraph on an affair with Susan Sarandon and a sentence on witnessing a decapitation. Maybe I’ve lived a quiet life, but I think that if these events had happened to me, they would assume a greater prominence in my memoirs.