Making Priscilla (14 page)

The first hurdle in keeping our group together for the night is overcome at twilight when we are taken by bus to the villa like a football team before an important fixture, or the members of a jury in an unusually sensitive trial.

After dinner we drive down to the American Pavilion, where far too many people have already assembled for what will be a chronically under-rehearsed show on a makeshift stage with rudimentary lighting. As we await the arrival of the drag queens, who are being escorted to the venue by Grant — relieved, no doubt, not to have been asked to perform again this year — we drink tepid white wine out of plastic beakers and smile tentatively at each other in the melee. Finally the trio are outlined behind the gossamer curtains, and, in a climate of complete chaos, begin the performance, in which each of them mimes to a song. Stryker — in a black and white dress embroidered with eyes — does a riveting burlesque variation on ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ and makes me blush a little by electing me as his front-row stooge, addressing the entire song at my forehead. Its fragmented, hit-and-miss nature would hardly qualify as a show at all in some circles, but this is precisely what distinguishes drag from more orthodox performance arts.

Television crews are wandering around talking to anyone slightly resembling, or related to, a celebrity. A British television presenter, Richard Jobson, whom I used to know when he was a young trainee rock star with Peter O’Toole affectations, interviews
me. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he deadpans to camera, ‘this man taught me everything I know about drugs and alcohol.’

Someone gathers us together, and we make our way around the rear of the Palais, our arrival at the bottom of the steps which lead to the Salle Debussy being timed to coincide with the opening of the doors. When we reach the steps — drag queens in tow, the lights bouncing off their sequins on to Terence’s immaculate white dinner jacket — the doors are still closed, and we are left standing in the street with hundreds of people just
staring
at us, instead of catching the fleeting, waving glimpse that they do with real celebrities.

We shuffle uneasily, telling jokes and looking back at a crowd now spellbound by the drag queens. Then it happens. Everybody who has been kept waiting begins a simultaneous rush on the staircase. Suddenly we are a mob in fleshy collision as we attempt to find a path through the stampeding bodies to the Palais door. Her temperament well equipped to deal with riots, Catriona Hughes takes my hand and pulls me through the affray.

Although there is some laughter and applause during the screening, we are by now sufficiently spoiled by the response to the film in Los Angeles and San Francisco to find the audience a little muted. At the end, however, it reveals itself to be quite a different story. The ovation is so long, so resonant and so plainly
felt
that I look over to see Stephan becoming a little teary. Everybody is on their feet applauding and, scanning the crowd for familiar faces, I see Alan Finney recording it all with his video camera. Forgetting that reporters check their watches during standing ovations, modesty prevails over self-indulgence and we leave the theatre after a few minutes.

At a party across the road at the Majestic Hotel we hear that well over a thousand people are officially estimated to have
been locked out of the Palais earlier. Charged by the success of the film, PolyGram executives glide around the room making introductions. While I would appreciate an unprompted acknowledgement from one of them that my decision to pursue an official selection midnight screening was the right one, instead I find myself shaking hands with Ted Field, one of the principals of Interscope, which produced
Three
Men
and
a
Baby
and epitomises a certain kind of confident middle-of-the-road Hollywood sensibility. He tells me he feels the picture could play anywhere in the United States. The challenge will be to get reluctant rednecks into the theatres in the first place. If we can do that, he says, word of mouth will take care of the rest. Across the room, Rupert Everett is being genuinely, awkwardly gracious about how much he enjoyed the movie he declined to be in a year earlier, and he particularly praises all the performances.

It has been an extraordinary night, and a long one. By the time it is over, nausea is setting in.

The distributors’ gala screening the following day — the word ‘gala’ has a forebodingly starchy overtone — is the toughest so far. Stephan disappears during it, but some force field mysteriously prevents me from leaving the cinema. Although it will eventually become a form of addiction, I am still fascinated to see which jokes work with what audiences. By now, it is evident that if people laugh during the main titles sequence, the film will always take off from there, and the more noise there is during Guy Pearce’s first appearance (his mincing desert-holiday limerick over the tune of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’) the more hardcore-gay the crowd is likely to be.

At the decorous dinner which follows, a number of distributors tell me how much they enjoyed the movie. Afterwards, the drag show held on the same lawn where Grant once entertained us is more elaborately staged than the performance at the American Pavilion and has much greater impact. Stryker performs a Laurie Anderson song in a leather
bustier
and dramatically tears off his blood orange wig to reveal shaved temples, while Cindy skips around the grass uneasily and Portia flirts with the PolyGram executives standing near the food table. When one of them begins pelvic-thrusting at her, I take it as a signal that the night is about to deteriorate.

Back at the hotel, stories from Monday’s Australian papers have already been faxed through. ‘Priscilla drags Cannes to its feet’ is the headline in the
Sydney
Morning
Herald,
whose report clocks in the standing ovation at three minutes while the other newspapers claim five, as if rival timings had been commissioned. The overall tone is highly enthusiastic, and I remember Alan Finney’s perfect aphorism that while Australians may be notoriously ill-disposed to ‘tall poppies’, they love
grow
ing
poppies. My favourite is a syndicated piece which ends by saying that ‘director Stephan Elliott was not immediately available for comment as he was swallowed up in the late-night Croisette crowd’.

To develop a sense of proportion about all this — the film, after all, has only played to one preview and three festival audiences — I have breakfast with Alex Proyas, whose success is a little easier to quantify. His picture
The
Crow
has just opened in America and has taken nearly twelve million dollars in its first weekend. The film’s producer Ed Pressman, who does not drive, is being chauffeured around Los Angeles so that he can survey the lines outside the cinemas.

Alex’s short film
Welcome
to
Crateland
is in competition here, making it the first time Cannes has hosted a director in this section who at the same moment is breaking U.S. box of
fice records. The advantage of all this is that, as a result, there is already a message at the desk for him from the soon-to-walk Mouseketeer Jeffrey Katzenberg. (The message reads: ‘Chairman of Walt Disney Studios’, as if that in itself were a message.) The disadvantage is that he is being offered projects with titles like
Baseball
Frankenstein.
Alex and I once tried to set up a movie with an even more ghastly title. It was called
Dial M
for
Monster,
a pastiche of those cheap ’50s science fiction pictures which had
noir
lighting only because they could not afford much
lumière.
The dialogue was particularly unsavoury: a foul-mouthed alien said things like ‘Suck the snotty end of my fuckstick’ and ‘Kiss my dead dog’s ruby red asshole’, which makes the grubby abuse of
Priscilla
seem anodyne by comparison.

Alex has a real hit movie. Although our film has been sold everywhere apart from places where they cut off the hands of cross-dressers, for the time being it is no more than a festival favourite, but at least we get to eat with interesting people. The director Alan Rudolph is here with his picture
Mrs
Parker
and
the
Vicious
Circle,
financed by two rival companies — a situation he describes as ‘like forced sex’. Rudolph is an unusual figure in the contemporary film business because he speaks in complete sentences, a quality as archaic these days as cabin trunks and long courtships. He entertains us with stories about an executive so pathologically unable to do his own reading that he insisted on seeing ‘coverage’ of a three-page treatment.

I am halfway through a mouthful of sole when the building shakes, and for a moment Stephan and I feel that we are back in the Los Angeles earthquake. A glass awning above the main door has collapsed after being hit by a padlock and chain that fell from the roof of the building.

Later we meet John Waters who, with the sleeping caterpillar over his top lip which masquerades as a moustache, radiates
mischief as he tells Liberace stories. I tell him my own favourite: that by his last few years Liberace’s innumerable face lifts caused the skin around his eyes to become so taut that he was unable to close his eyes to sleep. Waters cannot eclipse it.

In the evening the drag queens are being filmed in various settings for the documentary, so I escort Portia from the Martinez Hotel to a nearby beach. In her pink swimsuit and Medusa wig, walking on heels so tall that she totters, she leans on my shoulder as we wander along together through the crowd. A middle-aged man in a tweed jacket holding up a giant drag queen: we are quite a sight.

Their first interview is on a pier with Ruby Wax, who is particularly fascinated by Cindy’s son Adam. ‘I have two pieces of advice for you,’ she brays at the poor child. ‘First, get yourself an agent. Second, get yourself a therapist.’ Ruby asks Portia what she does when she is not being a drag queen. Portia laughs uproariously. ‘Oh, you mean like in
Flashdance
: am I a welder by day?’

At a restaurant table in the old port, Terence and Hugo are interviewing Cindy and Stryker for the documentary cameras. Terence has just heard of the death of his friend the adventurer-businessman Frederik van Pallandt, whom he refers to as The Baron. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Frederik had several sweet, folky chart hits in Britain with his then-wife Nina. Terence has known him since the ’70s when they both lived in Ibiza, by which time both had retreated from the activities that had made them famous. In the receding light, Terence stares into the middle distance remembering his friend, speaking of him with affection and amusement without for a moment lapsing into the lachrymose. Frederik and his wife were shot on the day following his sixtieth birthday in what was later described as a professional killing.

Returning to the hotel hoarse with encroaching laryngitis, I find that there have been calls from Australian radio stations. Hotel phone rates militate against allowing oneself to be put on hold, so when they know I am in my room the stations ring again. As I wait for my part of the broadcast, I hear several moments of ‘real’ news. It all seems unsettlingly very far away.

Although our film is well known to be a comedy-musical about three drag queens crossing the Australian outback, there is a photo in a trade magazine of a woman resembling the young Faye Dunaway earnestly holding one gun and pointing another; it is not clear at whom or what. The picture is captioned
The
Adventures
of Priscilla,
Queen
of
the
Desert
: perhaps it is the movie we
should
have made.

Stephan has been unsettled by an incident following a party at which his glib, hyperactive frivolity got the better of him. Someone began to introduce him to an Australian film director he already knew well, and Stephan cut it short: ‘Of course I know him,’ he snapped, ‘I used to bonk his wife.’ This fatally careless remark — its absence of truth subordinated to its potential amusement value — opened a Pandora’s box of secrecy and suspicion, culminating in Stephan on his hands and knees the following morning on the Croisette begging the forgiveness of both director and wife.

This cartoon humiliation behind him, he meets me for dinner with an executive from Fox, to whom he proposes the idea of adapting Bret Easton Ellis’s graphically grisly novel
Ameri
can
Psycho
as a musical. (This has become something of a habit with Stephan. When he is unable to think of an original angle or wants to sabotage a prospective work assignment, he invariably suggests turning whatever it is into a musical.) While
he goes to see
Muriel’s
Wedding,
I attend a party for the film
Sex,
Lies
and
Democracy.
Images from the movie — involving various conjunctions of sex and history — are being projected on to a screen behind the dance floor while records are played by the club DJ, an exercise which succeeds in deflating the sex, trivialising the history and neutralising the songs’ own power of suggestion. The absolute nadir comes when Ray Charles’ ‘Hit the Road Jack’ is heard over footage of Jews boarding concentration camp-bound trains.

The next morning’s
Variety
comes out in favour of
Priscilla
over
Muriel’s
Wedding
in its assessment of the latter: ‘With more than a little common ground artistically, musically and in origin (Australia), the film is vulgar to ill effect, while the drag comedy
The
Adventures
of
Priscilla,
Queen
of
the
Desert
cheerfully uses its inherent vulgarity to hilarious ends.’ This is the first critical comparison made between the films and it will not be the last, presaging a rivalry which will escalate from that moment on.

In acknowledgment of Terence’s links with Italy — apart from his well-known work with Fellini and Pasolini he also made pictures there with Dino Risi, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Armenia Balducci and others — our recently contracted Italian distributor has decided to hold a press conference. When I arrive, I realise that I recognise the distributor. By the time I have walked across the room to be introduced, I remember why. His name is Andrea Occhipinti, and he plays the bullfighter who gives Bo Derek her first orgasm in
Bolero
and who, after being gored in the
cojones,
is restored with Bo’s succour to full tumescence. He immediately feels like the right distributor for our movie.