Anything Goes (17 page)

Time to panic.

I looked at the petrol gauge, which was grazing empty. We had no clue where we were, but we needed to make a decision. Either stop and take a chance we wouldn’t freeze to death, or keep moving
and take a chance we might make it to Yosemite on fumes. Either way, we were probably screwed.

We drove on for another hour, turning off the engine on the downhill slopes and letting the SUV cruise in neutral. This seemed like a good idea until I hit a patch of ice on a sharp curve and couldn’t use the engine to break. The SUV careened round the bend, our rear still fishtailing long after I’d straightened the wheel. The road was desolate and dark, and we were terrified because if we crashed, we knew no one would find us until we’d turned into ice lollies.

I was the first man Scott took home to meet his parents, Stirling and Sheelagh Gill. After a lovely Sunday lunch, Stirling set a jar of instant coffee on the table and asked if I’d like a cup. Without really thinking, I blurted out, ‘You’re not going to give company instant coffee, are you?’

Without missing a beat, Stirling replied, ‘Of course not. I can brew you a pot, John.’ This has become a bit of a joke between us, and to this day, when I go for dinner, everyone else at the table gets instant coffee while Stirling makes me my own pot.

A cup of coffee might have helped that night in the mountains if we could have poured it into the tank and used it for fuel. As it was, Scott and I were wired, but the SUV was slowing down, and it was then that it hit me like a hard punch to the gut. What if something happened to Scott? I knew I loved him, he knew I loved him, and we both already knew that we were together for the long road, but in that terrible moment of panic, I realized that as soon as I could, I wanted to make that commitment legal and public and truly forever.

In 1997, Scott’s parents came to see me perform as Che in
Evita
in Norway at the 6,000-seat Oslo Spektrum. They stayed at the Radisson SAS, where Scott and I also had a room. At breakfast one morning, the three Gills decided to eat from the breakfast buffet. In Norway, breakfast usually consists of a variety of meats and fish – no
snap, crackle and pop for the Norwegians. That morning, the Gills chose to have the gravlax, fresh salmon cured with a mixture of salt, sugar and herbs. The three of them sat down to a platter full offish. When I finally made it down to breakfast and reached for the plate, the three of them grinned at me like Cheshire cats.

‘Sorry, John, we’ve eaten it all.’

The next morning, I came down to breakfast ahead of the Gills, but once again there was no salmon. I called the waiter over.

‘Is there any salmon this morning?’

‘No, sir,’ he said, but he leaned in conspiratorially. ‘We’re not putting out the salmon until later, because someone ate the whole platter yesterday and there was none left for anyone else.’

Some couples have in-laws who drink or smoke too much. I have to keep mine away from the salmon.

By about 2 a.m. on that snowy winter night in the mountains, Scott and I were about a second away from full-blown panic when we saw lights off to the side of the road a few hundred yards ahead. Hallelujah! The lights belonged to a breakdown truck. One of us wouldn’t need to make a fricassee with the other after all.

The tow-truck driver had an extra gas container and along with the petrol, he gave us a lecture. He informed us tersely that we were about twenty miles from our destination, but we’d never have made it on fumes. What had we been thinking, driving into the mountains without a full tank?

‘Haven’t you heard of the Donner Party?’ he chided, walking back to his truck.

Apparently, not nearly enough.

On 27 December 2006, Scott and I became civil partners at a late-morning ceremony at the St David’s Hotel and Spa overlooking Cardiff Bay. It was a glorious day, even if the weather was overcast
and cold. I wore my kilt and Scott wore a black Neil Morengo suit with thin red piping on the cuffs and collar. I hired Claire Pritchard-Jones and another artist from
Torchwood to
do hair and make-up for the women in the family, and our three beloved dogs at the time, Penny, Lewis and Tiger, were accessorized with tartan ribbons and sprigs of heather. Scott and I adopted Tiger from Dogs Trust, one of the charities I support, and he was our present to each other in honour of the day.
⁴    

During the ceremony, my dad read the Robert Burns poem ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ and my mum sang (as she had done at Carole and Kevin’s and Andrew and Dot’s weddings). Just as Gavin Barker, my close friend and manager, and his civil partner Stuart Macdonald stood up to be our witnesses, the sun burst out from behind the clouds and three white swans glided across the Bay and into view behind us.

After the ceremony, Scott and my immediate families and our close friends joined the happy couple upstairs at the St David’s for a New York-style champagne brunch. Our guests included my
Torchwood
team, Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoko Mori and Gareth David-Lloyd;
⁵    
Torchwood
executive producer Russell T. Davies and his partner Andrew; and my friend Martin Marquez, who plays Gino in
Hotel Babylon,
⁶    
and his wife and children.

Whenever Scott and I travel back to the States, the first morning after our arrival we love to pig out on a huge artery-slamming American breakfast. We order the works: pancakes, waffles, fruit,
bacon, muffins, hash browns, scrambled eggs and sausages. The brunch table at the St David’s on our civil partnership day had all of this and more. The room was decorated with arrangements of green and purple heather, and each place setting had a traditional, individually wrapped Scottish cake for guests. The main cake was also a traditional Scottish fruitcake, with frosted icing sculpted into figures of Scott and me on top. Scott’s back rested against three skyscrapers and he held a set of architectural plans in his hand, while I leaned against a curtained stage and held sheet music in mine. Later that day, as a gift to our families, Scott and I gave each guest a treatment at the spa. After eating my fill and receiving lots of toasts and good cheer, I dashed away to do two shows of
Jack and the Beanstalk
at the New Theatre in Cardiff to pay for it all.

Since that day, I’ve received hundreds of emails and letters of congratulations and goodwill regarding Scott and my commitment to one another. We were especially overwhelmed by the best wishes from the Welsh public. Cardiff is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe – and I’ve travelled to a lot of European cities. I love Cardiff, and its sincere response to Scott and me has only strengthened my good feelings about the city by the Bay. Elderly people, young people, couples of all sorts regularly stop me in the shops or in the city centre to congratulate and thank Scott and me for choosing Cardiff as the setting for our public statement about our relationship. We chose Wales because we wanted to celebrate Cardiff the way Cardiff has celebrated us.

I’ve also had many people, gay and straight, ask me if the civil ceremony has changed our relationship. And I have to say it has. First of all, we both eat more cakes and ice cream. Seriously, we do. Secondly, even though before the ceremony we’d been together for over thirteen years, publicly acknowledging our commitment to each other has strengthened our partnership. We talk even more
about ‘we’ and ‘us’ and even less about T and ‘me’. And we’re less worried that in our future, when we are both tottering old men, someone else will make the important decisions in our lives for us.

Most gay couples I know have lots in common with their non-gay counterparts. They are devoted to each other, concerned for their families and their futures, and are active contributing members to their neighbourhoods and communities. When I stepped across the threshold of the St David’s Hotel that December afternoon to greet the press and well-wishers, the rush of sheer joy I felt was one I wished all gay couples could experience.

In April 2004, my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Carole, Andrew and I threw a surprise party for them at a hotel in Milwaukee. Close friends and family gathered from all over the States, and a few travelled thousands of miles from Scotland and Europe to celebrate my mum and dad and their marriage. Watching my parents wander the tables together, smiling at their friends, laughing with each other, dancing and holding each other with the same passion they’d had fifty years before, made my heart swell. Scott and I want to be able to mark our union with family and friends in a similar celebration when we reach our fiftieth, and in December 2006, we formalized that desire.

In our relationship, I’m a bit like a sailboat. I’m always moving, riding the crest of the waves, letting the wind carry me in lots of directions. Scott’s my keel. He slows me down and gives me stability. He can guide me when I need to be redirected, and when I do on occasion, shall we say, ‘cut loose’, Scott gets me home, gives me two paracetamol and a glass of water, and puts me to bed.

In February 2005, Scott’s sister Sandie died of glioblastoma – a form of brain cancer – at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. One of the terrible ironies of Sandie’s death was that Scott’s brother Steven,
one of the foremost brain surgeons in the world, could do very little to help her. The other was that Sandie’s two oldest children, Iris and Gabriel, had already lost their dad to cancer when they were young. Sandie fought heroically to stay alive because she wanted to make sure her children, including her youngest daughter Eden, were prepared for her death. Steven was able to remove the tumoured section of her brain and this gave her a little more time.

Through those long, achingly sad months, I watched Scott help take care of Sandie. He never treated her as if she was sick. He never saw her as a burden. He took time away from his work and sat with her during her stays at the hospital. When she came home, he took her to movies and out on short day trips to visit family and friends. He spent a week with her at the seaside on the Norfolk coast, reading, talking, watching films, living.

The night before Sandie died, she rang everyone in the family. After she talked to Scott, she spoke to me.

‘John,’ she said quietly, ‘remember to look after my brother.’

‘I will,’ I promised.

‘Anything Goes’

I
n many cultures, the magpie is considered to be a harbinger of good fortune, and magpies are everywhere in Cardiff. On any given morning on my way to the
Torchwood
set, I find myself saluting like crazy and saying, ‘Hello, Mr Magpie. How are your wife and kids?’ over and over again, which, in case you didn’t know, is how you greet a magpie in order to benefit from the aforementioned good fortune. If you ever pass me on the motorway or on a city street, don’t panic about all this manic gesticulation. Remember I have a driver, Sean. All my saluting is not the least bit distracting, although he may think otherwise.

Why all this tip o’ the hat stuff, you may ask. Well, it’s because, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I have a few teensy weensy phobias and superstitions. On a scale of one to five – one being slightly superstitious to five being obsessive-compulsive about superstitions – theatre people in general are a six. I’m about an eight and a half.

As the song title from
The Producers
says, ‘It is bad luck to say good luck’ in a theatre – and that’s probably the most rational of all the superstitions I’ve acquired over the years. Theatre folks prefer ‘break a leg’ to ‘good luck’ because during Shakespeare’s day,
or thereabouts,
¹    
actors went down on one knee when taking their bows. Lots of bows meant a risk of falling or wrenching your knee; therefore, ‘break a leg’ implies a performance worthy of many bows.

A theatre is ‘dark’. It is never ‘closed’. Why? Because a closed theatre sounds terribly terminal, while darkness implies that at some point the lights will be turned back on.

Never whistle in a theatre. To purse your lips and blow is bad luck because stage managers didn’t always call ‘thirty minutes, ladies and gentlemen’ over comms systems. Years ago they used real whistles to give cues to the company instead. You can imagine the chaos it might cause if someone whistling for the hell of it sent an over-enthusiastic actor into a scene before his or her cue.

Dark-coloured roses before a performance are bad; red roses after a performance are good. Yellow roses are really bad at any time. A poor dress rehearsal is considered a good omen. Peacock feathers are an ominous sign (which is why real ones are never used in costumes). If you leave something belonging to you, like a bar of soap, somewhere in your dressing room, you’ll be invited back to that theatre in the future.

The mother of all superstitions, of course, is that ‘the Scottish play’ should never ever be mentioned anywhere in a theatre.

Do I really believe all this stuff? I’m the idiot sitting in his car saluting birds, for God’s sake. What do you think?

During my run as Billy Crocker in
Anything Goes
at the National Theatre in 2002–3, a stagehand’s foot was run over by a scenery truck and the show had to stop. You guessed it. Some asshole said, ‘Macbeth.’

Ssshhh!

Another time – same show, different night – a light fell from its
rigging and just missed hitting a gaffer.
²    
You got it. Someone mentioned the M-word. You may be thinking, ‘A load of bollocks, just coincidences,’ but you’ll never convince those of us in theatre that’s all it is. Sometimes people think it’s funny when they find out I really believe these superstitions, and they deliberately mention you-know-what just to be a prick. I once held a curtain
³    
in
Sunset Boulevard
and refused to go on until the person who’d mentioned ‘the Scottish play’ was sent outside the stage door, made to spit twice, turn round three times, and come back inside only once he’d been invited. This is standard procedure in such circumstances. I’ve been told it’s something to do with the fact that ‘the Scottish play’ opens with three witches cursing, ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’ The fates of the theatre are fickle and even those of us who are not particularly religious bow down to them before every performance in one way or another.