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LIZA AND ME by Alan Cumming

The first thing Liza Minnelli ever said to me was “Alan, I want to be your friend forever”. I never thought it would actually come true.  She had just come backstage to see me after ‘Cabaret’, and I was so overwhelmed by her.  Meeting Liza is like watching a hot spring bubbling out of the earth, her huge eyes open impossibly wide to take in all the wonder she sees in the world around her.  She is all the things you might expect, yes - a star, a whirlwind, a legend, a flirt, a great storyteller - but the thing that I always think  about Liza is this: there isn’t a bad bone in her body.  She has no malice, even for those who have wronged her.  Of course this is also what makes you worry for her.  Sometimes I look at her and marvel at how she has managed to survive in the big bad old world of showbiz, especially with a heritage as rocky as hers.  But she has, and she does, and as recent events have proved once again, Liza Minnelli is the comeback queen.

On the day we recorded “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for the CD “Home for the Holidays”, I woke up to watch Liza singing “New York, New York” on Rosie O’Donnell’s show.   I met her at the recording studio an hour or so later.  She arrived still in full make-up, looking fabulous. I looked a little hungover and as though I’d just got out of my bed. (I had).  There was some press there to record this historic event, and as we shared a cigarette in the fire escape before our first interview Liza said to me “Darling, what is all this for?  And do we get paid?”  I told her no, there was no cash, but it was in aid of Broadway cares/Equity fights Aids and also the World Trade Center relief fund. Minutes later, Liza was holding forth in front of the cameras talking of the work the charities had done (including statistics) and her anger over the recent events of September 11th.  She even burst into “New York, New York” to finish.  I said not very much except “hmm, hmm” and when someone saw the piece on Entertainment Tonight they said I looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on her knee. 

But that is Liza, unsure of what is going on one minute, giving a press conference to several major TV shows with great élan the next; saying she never wants the pressure of performing again one month, the next stealing the show at Michael Jackson’s concert at Madison Square Garden. 

But the biggest contradiction of all is this: last spring I went to a subdued birthday party in Liza’s hospital room.  She was about to go into surgery for a second hip replacement, having recently recovered from her ‘death thing’ as she referred to a particularly nasty bout of encephalitis.  It was a strange night - Liza joking and laughing and saying it was the best birthday she’d ever had, and me saying how she must have planned to get ill just to have the view from the hospital room as the venue for her party.  When we were alone, we joked about how we could procure her hip bone after the operation, sell it on e bay and go shopping.  Then I asked her how she was really feeling. “Scared, Alan.  I’m really, really scared”. 

Cut to six months later. Liza is dancing every day, she has lost more weight than she probably once weighed.  She is singing at the Garden, on Rosie, on a record with me, and oh yes, now she is getting married in St Patrick’s cathedral, walking down the aisle while Whitney Houston, ah yes, Whitney Houston, sings ‘the Greatest Love of All’.

How this happened doesn’t seem surprising to me. I have come to accept and expect it of her.  After all, at the party after her first night  of  “Minnelli on Minnelli” at the Palace theatre in New York two years ago, Liza said she’d been thinking of me a lot during the show. 

“Really, Liza?”  I said, thinking she probably had enough to think about in the opening show of  yet another comeback without her mind wandering to me.

“Oh yes”, she went on. “Well, we knew each other in a previous life, my darling, didn’t we?”

Contents Magazine article

I met this issue of Contents’ cover boy, Charlie Hunnam, one rainy morning last May on the set of the about-to-be-released Nicholas  Nickleby, in which I star and Charlie has a cameo role as the eponymous hero.

It’s a funny thing meeting other actors on film sets.  Usually, unless they are very young or new, you will have seen them in one or more of their previous movies.  Perhaps you have a friend in common.  Sometimes that friend may have slept with them.  And so, as you shake the hand of this new co-worker and near stranger, all of you can think of is the vivid description of their genitals or some lewd act they enjoy partaking in which was described to you with great relish by the said friend.  And all this whilst making bleary small talk about how the film is going/the director/the bloody weather/the standard of the on-set caterers, etc.

It can be quite a jolt to the system, especially at the unearthly hour most filming days begin.  There is also the converse worry that this new person will have similar information about you, so during the small talk you quickly, but subtly, suss out who they know, who they have worked with, when, where, and thus build up a profile of the possible dirt this stranger might have.

I have found that the best way to deal with this is to get in there first, and as soon as you are comfortably ensconced in the makeup chair, begin the recite all the people you have ever slept with or are rumoured to have slept with and every sordid detail therein.  This generally breaks the ice and also enables you to jump several stages in the getting-to-know everyone process.

However, with Charlie, things were a little different.  I didn’t know anyone who knew him.  I didn’t know anyone who had slept with him.  Yet.

But the visual that ran through  my mind in that dim and dingy Dickensian car park (if a car park can be Dickensian—I know there may be purists reading) was that I had seen Charlie being rimmed.  Yes, rimmed.  As in having his bum licked by another.  And another man at that.  And what’s more Charlie seemed to be having a jolly nice time during this, his inaugural rimming.

Before your minds begin to race to scenarios involving depraved Hollywood parties with two-way mirrors and the like, I should just point out that nothing could be further from the truth.  Charlie was being rimmed on my television set in an episode of the original, British version of Queer As Folk.

Now, I know that in America there is a school of thought that we Europeans are a dirty bunch of subversives with little knowledge of the joys of orthodontia or depilatory products, but excessive interest in depraved practices that usually involve the anus, but let me tell you little Charlie’s ass adventure was a first for me.  On TV that is.

I don’t suppose though that Charlie really did get much contact from the other actor’s tongue.  The tongue in question belongs to Aiden Gillen.  I do know Aiden a little, having been in a film called Circle of Friends with him, and having run in to him occasionally over the years, but I have never got a rimming-other-boys-especially-when-on-camera sort of vibe off him.

Once in a film, Jessica Lange and I had to be completely naked together, but normal film sex scene etiquette was followed and a little piece of gauze was placed delicately between us so that both sets of our genitals would remain unsullied by the other’s.

So, I am almost certain that there was something that prevented Aiden and Charlie from touching.  A piece of clingwrap?  Or maybe they used the old gauze trick.  Who can tell?  I shall have to wait for the premiere of Nicholas Nickelby to quiz Charlie further.  Watch this space.

Anyway, the important point is that Charlie’s character was utterly delighted by Aiden’s character introducing him to this new pleasure.  And so he should have been.

Charlie’s bum action also caused quite a stir amongst the British media.  The word ‘rimming’ was bandied about with abandon, and conservative middle-aged matrons who would have previously baulked at the mention of any sexual activity in that vicinity of their bodies were now merrily ringing up daytime talk show phone-ins to hear conservative middle-aged matronly TV talk show hosts tell them that as long as the said part of the body was clean and healthy they should have no fear and to plunge ahead with it.  Overnight riming entered common parlance and became a national pastime.  Hoorah!

There is no rimming in Nicholas  Nickelby.  There is no nearly me.  I lied, you see. Charlie is the star and I have the cameo.  And that is why his picture is on the cover of this magazine and I am at the back end rambling on about back ends.

Tommy's Tale

Tommy's Tale is my debut novel, and was published by Harper Collins in the US and Penguin in the UK. The US edition was first, in September 2002, with the UK edition following in April 2003.

Chapter Six of the novel, entitled The Disabled Loo, is included in the anthology Best American Erotica 2004, edited by Susie Bright. To learn more about the erotic anthology series, visit www.susiebright.com.

Tommy is twenty-nine, lives and loves in London, and has a morbid fear of the "c" word -- commitment, the "b" word -- boyfriend, and the "f" word -- forgetting to call his drug dealer before the weekend. But when he begins to feel the urge to become a father, he starts to wonder if his chosen lifestyle can ever make him happy. His flatmates, the eccentric, maternal Sadie and the stoic, supportive Bobby, encourage Tommy to tone down his lifestyle a wee bit and accept the fact that he's got to grow up sometime. His boyfriend, Charlie (whose son, Finn, is the epitome of childhood charm), wishes that Tommy could make a real commitment to their relationship. But can he? Faced with the choice of maintaining his hedonistic, drugged-out, and admittedly fabulous existence or chucking it all in favor of a far more sensitive, fulfilling, and -- let's face it -- slightly staid lifestyle, Tommy finds himself in a true quandary. Through a series of adventures and misadventures that lead him from London nightspots to New York bedrooms and back, our boy Tommy manages to answer some of life's most pressing questions -- and even some he never thought to ask.

Tommy's Tale took me ages to write.  But it is one of the things that I am most proud of, in terms of sense of achievement.  It is pretty daunting to go into another field and put yourself out there, especially when there is such a disdain of actors turning novelists, and vast intellectual snobbery in the literary world. But I came out of it ok, especially in the UK, where I was really heartened that the book did so well.
Tommy's Tale was begun as an attempt to right an imbalance I felt existed in the stories I read or saw. It is essentially a modern fairy tale: a fairy tale in that fairy tales are usually about someone going on a journey or learning a lesson through a series of adverse circumstances,and ultimately the hero grows up and there's a happy ending; and modern in that in real life people grow up and have sex and take drugs and try to keep it together.

I wanted to write about how I felt the family unit has changed. In my experience, being someone who has traveled far from his homeland, I began to envy people who still had their family nearby. But then I realized that I had made my own family, only now they were a collection of friends and lovers, each of whom gave me something that added up to what we expect and need from our families. So my friends have become my family.

I also wanted to talk about the desire that a man can have to have a child.  We often hear abut a woman's ticking clock and the overwhelming urges to procreate. But I felt really strong urges like that too, though it seemed as if that was a woman's domain and it felt wrong to voice them.  So in this book I do, and I also talk about dealing with those urges if you are neither in a relationship that can produce a child, or indeed if you don't even want to be in a relationship at all.  What do you do with those feelings?

Finally I wanted to combine two realms that I love and that I hope are not mutually exclusive: dirty druggy nights out and fairy tales.

Geeky fact 1: In The Anniversary Party, Joe, the character I play has written a novel called Tommy's Tale, and a copy of it is on the shelves in the house. Jennifer designed the book jacket.  So in a way I was sort of creatively visualizing the future (or more like trying to embarrass myself into finishing it!)
Geeky fact 2: I had the biggest battle with the US publisher about the cover, because originally there were a woman's legs sticking out of the bath too, and I felt that it was a misleading image considering the subject matter of the book.  She even went as far as to offer to add hairs to the woman's legs, but finally she backed down and they were airbrushed out!

About 9 years after the book first came out, I recorded the audiobook of my debut novel.

Elle

In early 2002, I performed The Art Party with my then partner, the British director Nick Philippou.  Elle was The Art Party's inaugural production. Sadly it was also its only production - the company folded in late 2003 (coincidentally so had our relationship!)

Elle was written by Jean Genet, and had never been performed in English before. I wrote a new adaptation of the play from a literal translation by Terri Gordon. Elle was directed by Nick, designed by Tim Hatley, projections were by Peter Negrini, and fashion legend Vivienne Westwood designed the costumes. The cast featured me as the Pope, Stephen Spinella, Anson Mount, Chad L. Coleman and Brian Duguay.

This was an amazing experience. Adapting the text was really intense, as the play is not only a debate about existence, but also has some very contemporary themes about our obsession with celebrity. It's also a sort of love story and a rites of passage...it's an unbelievable play. Performing it was amazing too as I had to be on roller skates and also had to hide from the audience that my costume had no back to it until a moment when it - and by it I mean my arse - was revealed, so that was a bit of a challenge. I played the Pope as a very weary and crabby Eastern European old man. The cast were great, the space at the Zipper was beautiful, the whole thing was really fulfilling, mostly because we had made it all happen ourselves.