Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

Author:Rupert Everett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780759571396
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Bob Dylan

Nineteen-eighty-six. I killed my first director. Richard Marquand was making a rock and roll film called Hearts of Fire with a script by a famous writer from Rolling Stone magazine, Joe Eszterhas. The story was extremely improbable. A young girl works at a tollbooth on the freeway at the entrance to some nameless steel town in the USA. She lives for her idol, an English rocker named James Colt. (Yes. Even the name sends shivers down the spine.) She is picked up one day by an old has-been rocker from the dawn of time. He sees a spark in her and takes her with him on the road in the band he is forming. They arrive in the UK, where they meet the thoroughly obnoxious James Colt, who is already a big fan of the has-been, but becomes a bigger fan of the tollbooth girl; so much so that he offers her a record deal and they go to bed, leaving the has-been to make his own way back to the US. She becomes a star. She splits with the English rocker, but they all get together at the end in a big stadium jamming session, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I suppose I should have known better. But Celestia was casting, and I had an idea to morph my friend John Taylor from Duran Duran into James Colt. So I got some long black hair, some show suits from Antony Price, a fabulous stick-on unibrow and some of the most withering reviews of my life, which to my mind were slightly unjustified, seeing as my take-off of John was really quite good. But it wasn’t my time. Sometimes it isn’t, and the best thing is to sit still until it goes away. Anyway, Hearts of Fire was the full-on, no-survivors crash of my career. We started shooting in September at Shepperton. Pat and Meinir were with me, and my friend Suzanne Bertish was playing my manager.

The tollbooth girl was played by a newcomer named Fiona. She was a mixture of Stevie Nicks and Natasha Richardson. She had a great scratchy voice, long brown hair and a blond, muscle-hunk, music-producer boyfriend called Beau. He was her heavy metal Svengali, and probably should have played my part in the movie.

None of this was of much interest to me. Fiona was sweet, if irritating; Beau was sexy and phobic. Yet even when the poor terrified girl jumped out of the bed during our sex scene, and ran screaming to her dressing room, I was strangely unperturbed.

“She says Rupert lives with a gay guy in LA,” the assistant said, returning from trying to coax her out. If only I did.

Meinir sidled up to the bed, as the producer, the director and the lighting cameraman stood around my naked body, deciding what they could shoot instead. She winked as she opened her little Aladdin’s cave of a kit. Inside gleamed a bottle of vodka. Well, if one couldn’t get legless after one’s

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