Anything Goes (22 page)

‘Listen, there’s no point me being here anymore if all I’m getting is one or two segments. But you could at least have had the balls to tell me you don’t want to use me anymore. I’m an adult and a professional. Treat me like one.’ The following season, I was gone.

I later heard from a friend on the production staff that the show’s producers essentially had no clue what to do with me. They didn’t know what I was able to give and no one took the time to take me under their wing to give me any kind of training or help. I thought I did okay under the circumstances, but the producers were certainly not much help in that area.

What I disliked most about the experience was that the producers didn’t respect me enough to be honest with me. Thankfully, on
The Movie Game,
which I continued presenting after I left
Live and Kicking,
the production team recognized my potential and gave me more artistic freedom.

The Movie Game
treated its audience as smart, interesting and funny individuals without condescension or pandering. Once, though, we almost credited the teams of children with just a bit too much maturity. A skit we were about to shoot required me and the children to dress up as shepherds and herd inflatable sheep into a pen. What the folks in the props department didn’t realize was that the sheep had been ordered from an adult shop – and they all had anatomically correct arseholes and vaginas. Needless to say, those all had to be taped up completely before we could film.

The Movie Game
ran right before
Blue Peter
and, like
Live and Kicking,
got great viewing figures. Even today, I get a kick from their popularity as grown-ups regularly stop me in the street because they remember me from one or other of the shows. In 1995, I left
The Movie Game
to film the drama
Central Park West
for American television.

Both
Central Park West
and
Titans,
my two US TV shows, were dramas about rich and powerful families, and I played a son in each family. Both programmes were clones of the
Dallas
prototype, by which I mean they centred on beautiful people conniving, manipulating and back-stabbing their friends, family and, well, pretty much everyone else. The variations on the theme were that
Titans
was about a fabulously rich and incredibly dysfunctional family in the aviation business in California, while
Central Park West
was about a fabulously rich and incredibly dysfunctional family in the publishing business in New York City.

Another element both of these shows had in common was that in each one I had a terrific TV mother. In
Central Park West,
my mother was played by Lauren Hutton, and in
Titans,
as I’ve mentioned, it was Victoria Principal. Lauren was a bit of a loony
⁷    
and she confirmed a conclusion that I was already formulating at that point in my career, which was that all leading ladies are mildly off-kilter.
⁸    
From Elaine Paige to Betty Buckley, Lauren to Victoria, they were all tough, quirky broads and I think that’s why I’ve always got along with my leading ladies so well.

I did have one weird experience while working on the set of
Central Park West,
though, and that was the producers kept telling me not to smile on camera. You’ve seen me on television. Why
would you not want me to smile? I thought about this edict a lot and could never figure out the reason, until one day when I was called into the production office for a chat.

I must add here that producers rarely ask you into their office for something good. In fact, it’s one of the most irritating things about producers because, as my mum always told me, you get so much more out of people when you praise rather than disparage. However, no matter how many things an actor may do well on set, or out in public with fans, or even schmoozing with network execs, a producer only ever invites an actor into his or her office to chide or berate.

So there I was sitting in the production office of
Central Park West.
Although the producers didn’t say it quite this bluntly, the message was loud and clear: do not let the public know that you’re gay and stop being seen in public with your partner.

I suddenly thought, ‘Was that why they didn’t want me to smile? Because only gay men smile and look happy, and since my character was straight, he couldn’t smile?’

Who knew? Regardless, the request was outrageous and pissed me off.

As it turned out, it wasn’t something I had to worry about for very long, which was just as well. The series was cancelled after a brief half-season run, by which time my character had already been shipped off to South America for reconstructive surgery after a terrible accident.
⁹    
As you can probably judge from that plot twist alone, the scripts had gone from okay to pretty weak to utter shite: thus the cancellation.

And speaking of shite, as I’ve told you once before, ‘everything comes down to poo.’ In television in particular and in show business
in general, sometimes a performance is reduced to the most base of our human instincts. Think about this. A scene in
Doctor Who
opens with Captain Jack, Martha and the Doctor stepping out of the TARDIS. To achieve this, all three actors are crammed inside a prop box like sardines for what can be some of the longest minutes of the day, because I have to tell you, between David Tennant and I, we can create an enormous amount of methane from our arses. Freema Agyeman,
¹⁰    
like Naoko on
Torchwood,
never farts. Naoko claims that folks of Japanese heritage take pills so they don’t fart.
¹¹    
I’ve never asked Freema her excuse.

After
Central Park West,
my next series television show was Aaron Spelling’s night-time soap
Titans.
As much as I adored working with Victoria and the rest of the
Titans
’ cast, Yasmine Bleeth’s drug addiction marred the entire experience. Yasmine played my character’s stepmother Heather, who was secretly in love with my character’s brother Chandler, played by Casper Van Dien, and if I remember correctly, she was pregnant with Chandler’s baby: you know, typical family dynamics.

In the end, the family dynamics weren’t enough to save the show:
Titans
was cancelled in early 2001 after eleven episodes had aired.

It has been a pattern in my life, one for which I’m always thankful, that new friends arrive with each new stage of my life and they stay with me for the long road. As I adjusted to a schedule without a regular gig, my West Hollywood friends Javier Ramos and Bret Vinovich took care of me while I got back on my feet.

I’d met Bret and Javier the day I moved into my West Hollywood condo. They lived in the apartment next door. After I’d tired of unpacking boxes on that first night, I’d knocked on their door and
introduced myself. Although they thought their new neighbour was good-looking (and when they realized he was the ‘hot one’ from
Titans,
one of their favourite shows, they were thrilled), they also thought he might be a bit of a nutcase, because no one in California introduces themselves directly to their neighbours in such an upfront way. They were right, of course, I was a nutcase. Regardless, Bret, Javier and I spent many a night in each other’s company, eating Mexican food, drinking margaritas and becoming fast friends while admiring the West Hollywood view from our balcony.
¹²    

After the cancellation of
Titans,
I admit my professional ego was wounded. Now two TV shows I’d been in had been shelved. But closings, cancellations and rejection are part of this business. You just have to move on. However, at that time, in 2001, my professional horizon seemed a bit too vast and empty for my bank account, so I began working with Bev to create my own cabaret show. Since 2002, I’ve performed that cabaret at Arci’s Place in New York; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Stackner Cabaret in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Lincoln Center, New York; the Feestzaal Stadhuis in Aalst, Belgium; and Pizza on the Park in London.

Sometimes, when life hands you lemons, you put a few in a vodka tonic.

‘Putting It Together’

E
rnest Hemingway wrote that ‘[I]f you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’ In 1995, when I was playing Peter Fairchild in Darren Starr’s
Central Park West,
Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel was my co-star, so I picked up a few of her grandfather’s books to read. If I remember correctly, Hemingway’s memories and tales from Paris in the 1920s were tinged with cynicism, regret, a great deal of homophobia and a lot of booze, but at the heart of Hemingway’s
Moveable Feast
was a memoir about friendships, good and bad, and inspirations for his writing. From the moment I debuted on the West End stage in
Anything Goes
in 1989, London became my ‘moveable feast’ and since then, no matter where I’ve performed, I carry with me all that I’ve learned from the directors and producers I’ve worked with in London over the years.

Sir Trevor Nunn is one of the best directors in the world for interpreting musicals because he always gets the relationships right and he pays attention to the nuances of the characters in those relationships. When I worked opposite Betty Buckley in Trevor’s
Sunset Boulevard,
Trevor wanted my character Joe to be a bit harder,
a bit colder and more obviously a lover to Norma Desmond than had been portrayed in the Broadway production. During a preview performance before opening night, I entered on cue for the scene where Joe meets Norma for the first time. As I opened my mouth, I realized I’d not spat out my chewing gum, so I worked it into the character.

‘Great touch, John. It was just what the character needed,’ Trevor told me afterwards.

I admitted it had been an oversight on my part and had nothing to do with my portrayal of Joe.

‘Don’t care. Leave it in.’

In those situations when Trevor appreciated something you’d done, he’d grab you by the head and squeeze you under his armpit while giving a ‘Nunn noogie’. It was a playful and affirming gesture, but by the middle of a show’s rehearsal period, it could be a bit of a whiffy one. Trevor’s superstitious quirk is that he wears the same shirt and the same jeans and doesn’t cut his hair until after his show opens. By the end of the rehearsals for
Anything Goes
at the National in 2002, his shirt and jeans were hanging off him. When he stripped at night, I’d not have been surprised if they could have stood on their own.

An opening-night tradition in a company is to exchange gifts, with the leads buying presents for each other and sending a bottle of champagne or flowers or food to the dressing rooms of the ensemble players. On the opening night of
Anything Goes,
the company presented Trevor with a new polo shirt and jeans to replace the ones he’d been wearing for weeks. When the show transferred venues in 2003, and the company went into rehearsal at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Trevor wore those same jeans and polo shirt every day until we opened.

Another of Trevor’s quirks on this particular production was that
he refused to let either theatre make any kind of announcement about the prohibition of cameras or recording devices. He believed it would break the illusion of the audience being on a cruise ship.

They paid forty pounds for a ticket. They know they’re not on a goddamn boat.

Now, when I go into Marks and Spencer’s, TK Maxx or even Tesco, I do not put bits and bobs into my pocket or shove a few sweeties in my mouth and leave without paying. That, we all know, would be considered stealing. However, there are still folks who attend the theatre who think it’s perfectly acceptable to slip the performing company’s artistic property into their pockets via their cameras or phones. Even in the years before YouTube, pirated versions of performances from
Anything Goes
were showing up on the Internet.

People weren’t shy about it either, and of course with no announcement from the theatres before each show began, they saw no reason to be. Let me explain. At one performance at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Sally Ann Triplett as Reno Sweeney was singing ‘Blow Gabriel Blow’. It was the big number in Act Two, in which a chorus of sequinned dancers tap-danced its way to the front of the stage. In fact, the whole cast was on set, gathered in the nightclub of the
SS American.
The stage was crowded and every movement precisely timed and choreographed. The slightest change could throw everyone off. One wrong step could sink the ship. Sally Ann was belting out the song in fine Ethel Merman fashion when, all of a sudden, there was a burst of flash photography from the theatre.

I’d like to make an important aside here. When an actor’s on a stage, he or she’s generally well lit,
¹    
whereas the audience, of course, is in the dark. When a flash goes off in said audience, the actor’s eyes
are instinctively drawn to the light and, for a few seconds, the flash is blinding. In the case of ‘Blow, Gabriel Blow’, to be blinded was bloody dangerous. The flash goes off and thirty sequinned dancers are coming at you doing kick ball change … and you’re on your back with your feet in the air.

After the second or third flash, cast members were complaining, whispering during the number, ‘John, there’s a camera out there.’ When I was finally able to look without another burst of blinding light, I could not believe what I saw. A huge video camera was resting on some woman’s shoulder in the front stalls. Seriously, this camera was big enough to film the BBC’s evening news. It even had a fucking spotlight and every time she turned the camera from side to side, the light created a strobe effect like a flash in our eyes.