Anything Goes (19 page)

In 2000, Ruthie and I both starred in Stephen Sondheim’s
Putting It Together,
along with Carol Burnett – the queen of physical comedy and a brilliant performer. Carol and I had a ritual before going on stage where we’d hug each other and then say we’d be ‘back in bidness’, using an odd pseudo-southern American accent. Carol would then start the ‘Back in Business’ number. One night, she was looking at me funny through the whole first part of the song. She kept touching her skirt and playing with her waistband. Suddenly, she shouted, ‘Stop!’ and threw her hands into the air. When she did, her skirt dropped right to the floor because the waistband had snapped. I laughed so hard, I actually fell down myself. Hilariously, the entire sequence was caught in the extras of the DVD that was being made of that particular live show.

Later on in
Putting It Together,
Ruthie and I had to do a complex
pas de deux.
Even after all my years of performing, my dancing is still what I worry about most in a show. Nevertheless, while working with the choreographer Bob Avian during this production, I’d asked him to push my dancing abilities, to stretch me into new territory (no pun intended). He did as I asked. During one performance, I gracefully picked Ruthie up … and split my expensive Gucci pants. For the rest of the sequence, everyone could see my white Calvins.

The National Theatre production of
Anything Goes
in 2002–3 had more than its fair share of mishaps, what with the falling rigging
and the crashing cart. In more than one performance, I unwittingly added to the list of calamities when, during the ‘You’re the Top’ dance routine with Sally Ann Triplett, who was playing Reno Sweeney, I’d throw myself into my deckchair – and the chair would shatter beneath me. This happened multiple times. Clearly, they don’t make deckchairs like they used to.

The slapstick chaos didn’t stop when the production transferred to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane later in the year, either. One night, Susan Tracy, who was playing Evangeline Harcourt, Hope Harcourt’s mother, was late for her cue.
¹⁰    
A bit panicked, she came bounding around the set of the liner, carrying her character’s dog Cheeky, a real perky little pup. Susan was moving a little faster than usual to catch up to her mark and she tripped, chucking the poor dog far into the audience and herself into the sixth row of the stalls.

The ensemble was dancing, stalling a little, waiting for her entrance – and then, all of a sudden, Mrs Harcourt wasn’t there anymore. I was backstage waiting for my next number when one of the sailors came running off stage, shouting, ‘Susan’s just thrown herself overboard!’ A quick-thinking sailor on the upper deck grabbed a fake life preserver and actually tossed it into the audience. With great aplomb, Susan carefully climbed back up on to the stage, acting as if she was getting out of the water, which itself was truly hilarious. She was ashen, but ever the professional, she shook herself off. While she was composing herself, a man ran up the aisle from the audience and handed her the dog.

‘Oh, Cheeky!’ she exclaimed, and went right on as if nothing had happened.
¹¹    

In many ways, it was during the 1989 production of
Anything Goes
that I was fully initiated into this glorious thespian
¹²    
world of pranks, pitfalls and unplanned calamities. My co-stars Elaine Paige and Bernard Cribbins introduced me to the rituals, the rules, the drama, the decorum and the general silliness of theatre life, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. I could not have had a more professional, more talented, or more compassionate pair of mentors. I was young and inexperienced when I got my big break, and although I never felt overwhelmed by any of it, I knew I had a lot to learn.

Elaine has the most expressive eyes in theatre and, sometimes, she’d look at me a certain way and I’d crack up – inside my head, of course. Bernard, meanwhile, is credited with the inspiration that became known as the ‘Dick of the Week’ award. Bernard hired an artist friend to sculpt a trophy in the shape of a very large life-like phallus, which, in a grand ceremony backstage at the end of each week, he’d award to the person who had been the biggest ‘Dick of the Week’. We were all presented with it at some point in the show’s run for some blooper, goof, or generally stupid thing we’d done on stage. Directly after our final performance, Bernard could not find the ‘Dick of the Week’ award anywhere. I’ve absolutely no idea who would have had the, erm, balls to have kept such a revered symbol after the close of the show.

Sometimes before the curtain went up for the second act, Bernard or I would run out to a sweet shop not far from the theatre and buy pounds of chewy toffee, which we’d then shove in our mouths just before the brig scene in Act Two. We’d have contests to see who could keep the toffee in his mouth the longest before our cue. Bernard was the master at masticating toffee into submission. No doubt about it.

During the brig scene in
Anything Goes,
Billy Crocker and Moonface Martin are locked up together until the ship’s captain can figure out their true identities. Given how much fun Bernard and I used to have playing this scene, it was inevitable that in the 2002–3 National Theatre revival of
Anything Goes,
the scene would invite some kind of competition again. In the NT production, my good friend Martin Marquez played Moonface Martin, and he and I used to have farting contests during this scene. We’re both pros – at acting and farting – so it was always a fight (or a fart) to the finish. During the scene, when Billy Crocker sings ‘All Through the Night’ and Moonface sings ‘Be Like the Bluebird’, Martin and I would try to get in as many farts as possible during the other’s number. Some nights, we made terrible enemies of the rest of the cast because of the deadly blue cloud that would emanate from the brig.

Enemies and company rifts, I’m proud to say, have never really played a part in my career. I’ve also not thrown many strops – that is, out-and-out tantrums where I could have brought the house down on my own from the upstairs dressing room – but I do remember a vivid one I threw during the run of
Matador
in 1993.
¹³    

In
Matador,
the kind of dance moves I had to do with a thirty-pound cape had demanded that I fly to a real bullfighting school in Madrid to receive tutoring from the experts before the show opened. During one of the dance numbers, I had to swing this heavy cape around my legs, around my waist, up and down and across my sides for what felt like an eternity, while the six dancers playing the bull dodged, weaved and generally avoided being slapped by the huge cape.

Now, there was a dance assistant on this production who one night took it upon herself to make a few changes to the show. She
instructed the dancers to up the tempo on this particular flamenco number. By the end of the number as it stood, I was knackered – and yet she decided to speed up the bloody routine without telling me. Let me repeat, without fucking telling me!

When I left the stage that night, after the bull had quickened its pace, I walked past her and screamed, ‘You! My dressing room.
Now
!’

John Fahey followed directly behind me as I stormed upstairs. I crashed into my dressing room, absolutely livid, practically snorting, steam coming out of my ears like the bull I’d just been pretending to fight.

‘John, calm down. Take some deep breaths. She’s not here yet.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because she’s waiting till you’re calmer and then you won’t have the upper hand.’

‘What should I do?’

John had been a dresser for years and this was my first time as a company leading man. I went to school on his advice.

‘I’ll go get her right now,’ he said. ‘You need to have one of these tantrums now and again. Otherwise, they’ll pull that shit with you all the time.’

The dance assistant stood sheepishly while I yelled at her, and her only defence was that she’d thought she was helping the show by speeding up the number.

‘Helping the show?’ I roared. ‘How does it help the show to make the leading man look like a stupid twat who can’t spin a fucking cape? This show’s not about the bloody bull. It’s about me!’

The changes she made to the choreography were really very dangerous. I could have broken a nail spinning that cape faster and faster. Or, even worse, I could have torn a testicle, and then I’d never have been able to play the piano again.

‘There’s Nothing Wrong With Us’

O
n Clare and Turner’s first trip to the UK in 1998, they travelled with my mum and dad from Milwaukee to London. One weekend during that visit, I took all of them on the Eurostar to Paris. When the train went into the tunnel, Turner was glued to the window for the first ten minutes because I’d told him to watch for fish. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen them either?

While we were in Paris, we ate lunch at a cafe on the Boulevard St Germain, a place where Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway
¹    
are said to have enjoyed a patisserie or two. Well, Wilde may have enjoyed one or two, but I’m thinking Hemingway was more about watching the women strolling down the boulevard. Strolling musicians headed our way that day.

‘Turner, five bucks if you get up and dance.’ He was about eight at the time.

Ten.’

‘Done.’

Turner started out with a few easy bobs of the head, some funny
sliding moves and then he broke into a full breakdance routine, much to the delight of the people at surrounding tables. When the musicians finally wandered to the next cafe, Turner had my ten plus a handful of coins from other diners in his pocket. This event established a significant pattern in my relationship with Turner.

‘Turner, twenty bucks if you eat this dog food.’ He was about nine at the time. We were at my parents’ house in Orlando, Florida for Christmas.
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He looked at the bowl. Picked it up. Waved it slowly under his nose.

‘Just a mouthful?’

‘A mouthful, but you can’t spit it out.’

‘A hundred bucks.’

‘Deal.’

He used a fork and ate dog food.

During a different December in Florida, the heater broke down in my parents’ swimming pool. God, life was tough that year. The air temperature was in the sixties.
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The water temp was about the same. I know that seems balmy to us in the UK, but it was frickin frigid for Florida.
⁴    

‘Turner, ten bucks if you jump into the pool in your underwear.’ He was about eleven at the time. He eased over to the edge, keeping his back to the pool in case Scott or I tried to shove him in without paying for the pleasure. He stuck his toe into the water.

‘It’s freezing!’

‘Twenty bucks, then.’

He jumped for thirty.

When I think about our deals, Turner wasn’t as daft as the incidents themselves might suggest. For a few seconds of freezing his balls off or barfing up Pedigree Chum, over the years Turner has won a fortune from me. Once, when he had gone about two years without a haircut, he accepted a video camera from me just to get his hair sheared. I even sent him to my salon in London to have it done and he still took the bloody camera. Young people today have no shame. I think I’ve primed Turner for a career in arbitrage or at the very least to be a hell of a grifter.

Since they were babies, I’ve been close to all my nieces and nephews, adoring every one of them, but Clare holds a particularly special place in my heart. Clare was born in 1987, just as I was getting ready to leave for San Diego and my first term at USIU. Clare was, and I guess still is, a twin. Her sister Anne was stillborn. Both babies experienced what’s known as a twin-to-twin transfusion, a rare condition that means they share a placenta and many of the same blood vessels, but something goes wrong in the symbiosis of the relationship and one of the twins, in this case Anne, draws more blood than she really needs, putting her twin in jeopardy of not getting enough.

In 1987, the result of a twin-to-twin transfusion was usually the death of both babies, one from anaemia and the other from an enlarged heart. However, due to the work of a superb team of neonatologists, Clare survived the trauma of her birth with no permanent side effects from the condition. Well, maybe one or two little quirks, but we really can’t blame them on her being a preemie.

When I first met Clare, she was in her ‘womb with a view’, an incubator in the neonatal intensive-care ward at St Joseph’s Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Because she had developed jaundice, she was wearing baby eye-shades, like the kind you get on a plane to
block out the light, to protect her eyes. She was the teeniest tiniest baby I’d ever seen, and as I’ve mentioned earlier in these pages, she is still pretty small.

It broke my heart to see her so tiny and so helpless and yet, on that day in August, she was also the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. From that day forward, Clare and I have always had a special bond with each other. Given what she went through in the first weeks of her life, I knew she was going to be a little fighter, and she still is. Even at three or four, if Clare didn’t want to do something I’d asked her to do, she’d scrunch up her nose and snort through it. It became a secret signal between us when she was growing up, and we still snort to each other on occasion. Clare’s more than capable of starting an argument in an empty house – add that to my, shall we say, slightly controlling nature, and the two of us can go at it like siblings sometimes.

I was twenty when Clare was born and in a way we’ve grown up together. As a result, she’s as much a younger sister as she is my niece. Over the years, she’s also been my personal Barbie doll, willingly allowing me to send her all the cute girly stuff I see when I’m shopping. She admits this is a chore, but someone has to do it. When I need to talk to someone about something other than work, Clare is always game for a chat about trashy television shows – we both love programmes like
Desperate Housewives –
and we share a passion for shoes, bargains of any kind, TK Maxx and luggage.