Anything Goes (14 page)

‘Oh my God, John, look at you,’ exclaimed Peter.

‘I’m in town for
The Producers,
‘ I informed him.

‘I am too,’ he said. ‘I’m here all week.’

At that instant, my own personal Jiminy Cricket jumped on to my shoulder, his soft little voice saying, ‘Tell him the truth, John. Tell him you’ve already been here a week working on the big finale. Tell him you have your own dressing room right next to Uma Thurman’s. Tell him you’ve been chatting with Will Ferrell. Tell him, John. Be a real boy.’

Ah, hell. I flicked the cricket to the ground.

‘I’m here all week too,’ I said.

A couple of days later, I was up in my dressing room having my hair tinted, which they had to do every day so my dark roots would not show on camera. Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane and Mel Brooks were with me, when Mel suddenly let out an almighty howl and sprinted from the room.

Through the window, we could see over a hundred supporting actors in Nazi uniforms gathering in the parking lot of the warehouse
where we were filming – and may I just interject here and note how fabulous all those gorgeous men looked in their costumes; did you know that the designer Hugo Boss was the original creator of the Nazi’s SS uniforms? The supporting cast of ‘Nazis’ were rehearsing these big, stomping, Busby Berkeley-like routines, ‘heiling’ this way and ‘sig heiling’ that way, when all of a sudden Mel darted out into the parking lot, screaming at an assistant, ‘Get them fucking in here now or we’re all gonna get shot!’

The warehouse was in the heart of an Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and from the vantage point of my dressing room, Mel had seen small groups of bearded dark-clothed men gathering around the fences.

After some subtlety was returned to the parking lot and I’d rehearsed the first part of the ‘Springtime’ number, I decided to go outside to do a bit of flirting, to see a few folks I recognized from other shows and, of course, to check in with Peter, who I knew was out there.

I spotted him and made my way through the crowd of gay Nazis to where he was sitting. Peter looked at me, shocked. ‘Where the hell have you been, John? You’re really late. We’ve been rehearsing all morning.’

I couldn’t resist. This ‘one-hit wonder’ took out his knife. It may have been a butter knife, but I really wanted to savour the moment.

‘Oh,’ I said, prolonging my explanation, ‘I’ve been inside rehearsing with Uma. I’m fronting the “Springtime for Hitler” number.’

He looked as if I’d whacked him with my nightstick. He recovered quickly and we said our goodbyes. I went back inside, humming to the tune of ‘Springtime’: ‘Payback for John in the parking lot / Barrowman is happy and gay!’

‘No One is Alone’

M
y friend Midge was twenty-nine when she died. There was no public funeral, no memorial service, no flowers, no obituary – in fact, no overt acknowledgement of her death of any kind. Even today, ten years later, I’m angry and incredibly sad about what happened to her. Midge was a friend during my high-school days – not an especially close one at that time, but still a friend – and later, at the United States International University in San Diego, we were flatmates. Midge’s life mattered to me and, despite her problems, I think it should have been far more important to those closer to her. I’ve thought about Midge a lot over the intervening years and given what happened to her, Midge’s story deserves to be told.

In my opinion, Midge was not so much her family’s black sheep as she was its wild mare. To her family, she seemed hard to contain, difficult to control, and she jumped their fences whenever she could. To her friends, Midge partied with gusto, played with heart, and had a passion for animals that was boundless. And did I mention she was gorgeous?
¹    

Midge’s family was part of the professional aristocracy in Joliet,
and since my dad at that time was the plant manager of one of the biggest employers in the area, I guess the Barrowmans had moved into those heady ranks too. Of course, none of us ‘shites scented soap’, as Murn used to say, and my family never forgot that. After all, it wasn’t too many decades ago that my dad was filling cream cakes at a bakery in Tollcross, and my mum was making ends meet at the end of the month by serving tripe and mashed potatoes for dinner.

In case you don’t know, tripe is a Scottish delicacy made from a sheep’s stomach – mmm, yummy! – and onions, all of it served – get ready for this – in a warm milky base. The only joy to be found whenever tripe was on my mum’s menu was that Carole, Andrew and I were allowed to eat with trays in front of the television, and we were not required to sit at the table with my parents. Frankly, I think my mum did this not as a reward for eating the tripe, but so that she didn’t have to see the pain she was inflicting on us as we tried to swallow the chewy, tasteless concoction. If William Wallace had served tripe to the English, they’d have turned and fled, and we’d be singing ‘Scotland the Brave’ at coronations.

Midge’s parents, on the other hand, seemed convinced their farts were fragrant. They were neighbours of my mum and dad in Joliet and they quickly became friends. Although my mum and dad were significantly more liberal than Midge’s parents, the four of them shared similar passions for music, theatre, travel, good food, a wee drink, and throwing a hell of a party, which they did regularly.

I must admit that after our move to America, it wasn’t just my family’s social status that improved. My parents’ soirees took a step up from Saturday nights in The Extension. Their parties were now held in a fully kitted-out basement, which included an area for dancing and a full bar that would have made Dean Martin drool (not that he needed any help).

Although the time and place had changed significantly, some
essential things had not. Whether the parties included my dad’s business associates or just friends from the neighbourhood, whenever possible I was the nightly entertainment, and although I wasn’t singing ‘Milly, Molly, Mandy’ anymore, I was still the main event. Thanks to the many high-school performances and Forensic Competitions I was getting under my belt in Joliet, I was a more polished performer. I was even a bit more confident in my dancing ability, which was the part of my repertoire that, back then, I felt was my weakest.

The other big difference was that instead of getting my cheeks pinched by adoring aunties and family friends, I was now getting my bum pinched by someone’s wife or girlfriend who’d occasionally hit on me. Naturally, I’d share these incidents with my mum and Murn, when she was still alive, over toast and tea the next morning, and we’d cat about them for days. I mean, what good’s a grope if you can’t get some decent gossip from it?

Although Midge and I went to different high schools in Joliet, when our parents were socializing together, we would hang out. As was the case with most females when I was growing up, Midge felt as if she could talk to me and I to her, so we, like our parents, became friends.

After high-school graduation, though, Midge and I went our separate ways. I headed off to the University of Iowa for fun and games with the Old Gold Singers and Midge attended college in Florida, but we stayed in touch. She visited me in Nashville a couple of times during those intervening summers, and she continued to call me when she needed someone to talk to.

After two full summers working at Opryland USA, I transferred to USIU in San Diego. When I made my decision to move to California, Midge, who had dropped out of Florida for reasons I didn’t learn until later, insisted that her parents let her move too.

My mum and dad always instilled in Carole, Andrew and me
the value of higher education – and they put their money where their mouths were, funding room, board and tuition for each of us. Even in the late eighties, it was expensive to live in California, and to make it possible for me to study, audition when I wanted to and perform when I needed to, my parents came up with a pragmatic financial solution. They bought a condo in LaJolla, California with Midge’s parents, and while we attended university, Midge and I lived in the apartment. When I left USIU to play Billy Crocker in
Anything Goes
in 1989, Midge’s mum and dad bought my parents out.

The flat had two bedrooms and a balcony. By anyone’s standards, not just a student’s, it was lovely. For a while, living with Midge was a terrific arrangement – until, that is, she began to fall apart.

At first, she and I had a blast. Midge’s sense of humour was both outrageous and ever present. Remind you of anyone else? We also shared a similar taste in cheesy sitcoms and campy dramas. We’d stay up for hours watching reruns of
The Love Boat
or
Happy Days,
or playing drinking games with my friends from university. When we cleaned up after our frequent parties, she and I would act out scenes from our favourite shows. It was during these housework sessions that I began to perfect my Cher impression, an impersonation that has since brought me wild applause, especially once when I performed it while riding the escalator at Munich’s International Airport. Even Germans thought it was funny.

Whenever Midge had any kind of chore to do, she’d do it in style. Sometimes she’d dress up as Snow White, dusting and vacuuming while dancing around the room singing ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’. Sadly, Midge’s never came. In the end, I think it would have taken much more than a kiss to save her if he had.

Midge was gorgeous and gregarious, but like many young women she was worried about her weight, worried about her hair and
worried about her skin. Ironically, despite her looks and her sense of humour, she had trouble fitting in and never had any real friends of her own – that is, except for me. I realize now that this should have been my first clue to her troubles, but I was young and away from home and stretching my proverbial wings – and I do mean stretching. As I’ve said, I’ve undoubtedly inherited my parents’ party gene.

The more I got to know Midge, the more I witnessed her using her insecurities to manipulate those around her, especially her family. After experiencing years of Midge’s unpredictability, it seemed to me as if they’d taken to throwing money at her, giving in to her every whim in an attempt to keep her consoled and out of range of their lives. Midge rarely tried to manipulate me and so our friendship survived, despite her occasional bitchy tendencies. Her behaviour was actually a symptom of something much more serious, but no one was really paying attention.

Because Midge had a difficult time making friends, I often included her when I had plans with mine. I even set her up with one of my friends from university, Thorsten Kaye, who is now a well-established television actor in America, most recently to be seen in the soap opera
All My Children,
and father to two daughters. Their first few dates went fine, but soon Midge began to rant about their relationship, in a manner that I thought verged on paranoia.

It was at that time that I learned from another friend that Midge’s reasons for leaving her last university had to do with her destructive, obsessive behaviour with an ex-boyfriend. I pulled Thorsten aside one night, when he and Midge returned to the flat, and I told him to back away. Thankfully, he did.

Midge was both naive and world-worn at the same time, so she was easy prey for scams. Once, she was persuaded to sign up for modelling classes that most of us knew were not legit, but Midge wouldn’t listen, and the modelling agency had just enough legality
to stay in business without raising too many red flags. The agency published its own so-called magazine and the deal was that after taking the required make-up, hair and wardrobe classes, the sucker, erm, I mean model, could purchase an ad in the magazine to promote herself. The company guaranteed dissemination of the magazine to all the biggest agencies and fashion designers in the country. Midge attended the necessary classes and at the end of the course she was given the option to buy either a quarter-, half- or full-page ad. Midge insisted on a full page, and so Midge got a full page. The tab for the entire experience was $10,000. In the mid eighties, that was a hell of a lot of money. It still is.

She charged it to her American Express card without telling her parents, and when they did find out, they never acknowledged the outrageousness of the cost nor the stupidity of the decision to participate in the first place, which I believe was what Midge had really wanted. She was desperate for a reaction, and if she couldn’t get a positive one, negative would have been fine, too. Even if it meant that her parents cut off her credit card, flew her home and screamed at her for a month. My parents would’ve dragged me home by the scruff of my neck and fed me tripe for weeks.

It was right after this incident that Midge’s behaviour became even more erratic. She’d disappear for days at a time, and when she did come home, she’d bring a stray cat or two with her or an expensive dog that she’d bought on her dad’s credit card. I love animals as much as the next guy, but the flat was beginning to look and smell a bit like Pets R Us. One day, Midge would eat anything that wasn’t moving, and the next day she’d refuse to drink anything wet. Her bedroom started filling up with dirty clothes because she’d stopped doing the laundry. Eventually, the pile would get so high that she’d run out of clean underwear or T-shirts. Rather than get some detergent, she’d go out and buy new knickers. When she
wasn’t wandering the streets, she’d stay in bed for days on end, lost in her hopelessness and despair.

Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but foresight is worth so much more. When I look back on that time with Midge, I realize her actions were not just personality quirks. Sadly, those who’d known Midge for years, and witnessed these same patterns again and again, appeared to demonstrate no foresight in trying to get Midge any meaningful help to stop her descent into full psychosis.

I was twenty years old and just beginning to figure out who I was, yet even I could eventually see that Midge was heading for trouble. I watched her self-destruct before my eyes. In my young mind, I thought I was helping when I physically dragged her out of bed and gave her personal ultimatums, but all I was really doing was putting plasters on deep wounds. I’d yell, ‘You may not go into your room until you’ve cleaned up the mess you made in the kitchen,’ and then I’d block her bedroom door. She’d glare at me, but she’d clear up her clutter. I did my best to drag her from her slumps and restrain her during her highs, but what she really needed was intervention from a parent, not pity from a peer.