Vanished Years (34 page)

‘I’ve just seen a picture of your latest facelift,’ teases Angela, waving a gossip rag that features a double-page before and after spread.

‘Don’t.’

An editor I vexed has launched a viral attack, sending out a bloated mugshot of my so-called botched facelift.

‘Well, at least they’re talking about you!’

Angela is charming and reserved, with a flint-sharp ambition under the cape and galoshes. She has the eyes of an owl and the tenacity of a mountain goat. She is old from the old school. Outwardly very friendly, ultimately detached. (She is what I would call a Frosty Two. Really nice and chatty and interested … but frosty. If you are Frosty Four, for example, you are not even nice or chatty or interested. Actually, Four can be the easiest to deal with.) Old-fashioned descriptions suit her best. She is a good sport. A lady. But she is also eighty-three years old, and as any seasoned Broadway star knows, she must divide her energies judiciously. Most of hers goes into her performance. Then her fans.

Troops of pasty, wild-eyed freaks gather in lines outside her door after each show, proffering autograph books with shaky hands. They want their pound of flesh, however self-effacing they are. She receives them like a headmistress preparing for bed, in her doorway, clutching their hands but pushing them firmly out at the same time. On stage she takes no prisoners, grabbing all the reviews and a Tony, leaving the rest of us slightly dazed and confused in her undertow, but I don’t mind. She is a fascinating creation and I have loved her since
Gaslight
.

I leave Angela’s dressing room with a bit more spring in my step and surge onto the stage. The Shubert is a musical theatre so the stage is wide enough for thirty chorus boys to high-kick in a row.
Blithe Spirit
is a drawing-room comedy, normally staged in an intimate house where the spectator can observe the whole cast in one glance. Our production is a tennis match where the dialogue is lobbed between characters on opposite sides of the stage. Timing a laugh across this wide space has all the precision of throwing a sausage up Oxford Street. The circle is far away and wide. The stalls are deep. We must scream the show eight times a week. Any subtlety we may have discovered in the roles during rehearsals – and some of us didn’t – is quickly ironed out by the sheer size of the house, and soon we are all belting out Noël Coward as if we are Ethel Merman.

The theatre is quiet and empty now, and as cold as the grave. In that medium’s half-light – of wonky sconces and a dusty chandelier – the two circles and the stalls look like a big gaping mouth with two dangerous jaws bristling with rows of faded coral teeth into which I spit a few quaint British vocal exercises, flapping my arms like a penguin, chanting g-g-g-g-g-g-d-d-d-d-d-d-g-g-g-g-g-g-d-d-d-d-d-d, and wishing I could be transported into the past and come off stage to find myself in
A Chorus Line
, which opened here in 1974. My dressing room is the old chorus boys’ room. It’s been closed for years. My six-degrees-of-separation from that amazing musical is that I had a three-night stand with a boy from the show in the summer of 1978. I have hardly given him a second thought since that week, until getting this job. Now I think about him all the time, and I can’t even remember his name. But as I begin to get my bearings in the modern city, trying to come to terms with all the change, I see him everywhere. He is the ghost leaning at all the street corners this freezing February in 2009, in a New York City that has disappeared without trace.

One. Singular. Sensation is the defining anthem of New York in the seventies. I belt it out and the past echoes faintly back from the empty boxes and balconies, but the Broadway of Michael Bennett, A Chorus Line’s creator (one of my show-business pin-ups), is quite simply another world. In his day you could nip up to 42nd Street for a blow job during the coffee break at rehearsals. Now you can just get fucked up the arse by Mickey Mouse Incorporated.

My crazy bird dancer has blond curly hair, matching brows and lashes, blue eyes and big pink lips. He is the all-American boy, cornfed but catty. I meet him late one night on Second Avenue. He is wearing satin hot pants and football socks. He has a vial of that cocaine you get only in the seventies, and rockets go off in my head after the first hit, liberally piled onto an attached spatula in the relative shade of a bush. He has been dancing and fucking his way across the city – still up in that pre-dawn magenta light of another blistering day, cruising the park on Second Avenue. I am on my way back to Catherine Oxenberg’s flat in Tudor City. He lives in a gangsterish
walk-up in the East Village. We go there. Tangled and spent, we sleep all day, and hit the street again, on point, fresh as cucumber, at that magic hour when the light begins to soften, and the reds and greens of the stop signs glow fiercely in the battle for the night. I walk with him through Union Square into Hell’s Kitchen. People are already sitting on the stoops, smoking and talking and waving at him as he pirouettes and soft-shoe shuffles towards Broadway.

‘How come everybody knows you?’ I ask.

‘That’s New York,’ he says, tapping to a final halt at the stage door of the Shubert and kissing me goodbye.

He never asks me to the show, but on the night before I leave I buy a ticket and sit high up in the rafters – miles away – and watch entranced at the amazing story of thirty different versions of him, chorus boys and girls stripped like soldiers of their individuality and suppressed into a unified chorus line just in time for opening night. One. Singular. Sensation. If only I could know, right now, that I will be on that stage myself one day and that everything
will
happen – or won’t, but that’s life for you, and I don’t, and I leave the theatre dejected and crushed, wandering into Time Square, doubting that I will ever amount to anything.

I have converted the old chorus boys’ room into a fabulous black penthouse. Compared to all the other dressing rooms in the theatre, which are poky, toiletless and windowless, one on top of the other, mine is completely private and includes two rooms, a loo, a shower and a terrace.
And
a separate exit from the theatre, down a fire escape via the scene dock of another theatre – the Broadmoor – and even hitting a different block. (Jeremy Irons is currently torturing the public there. But not for much longer.) The only downside is that the staircase from the stage is steep and two storeys high. It becomes harder and harder to climb as the run goes on.

Standing at the ironing board in the chorus boys’ room, looking at his watch because I am two and a half minutes later than usual, is the person who is going to get me through the next six months. He is
called Mr Geoffrey. He is an old-school theatrical dresser – tending towards musicals – that invaluable cog in the theatrical machine who can often knock some sense into a stampeding diva when lawsuits, lovers and a treasured director have failed. An hysterical sobbing star may have convinced the management that she can’t go on and desperately needs a rest and is thinking vaguely of suicide, but she still has to stagger to the dressing room and meet the steely gaze of her dresser, that curious creature, often an ex-artiste of sorts herself, but one who has been forced to commit her creative pretensions to an early grave, sacrificing everything to get some tipsy star onto the stage each night. She doesn’t put up with any nonsense.

‘I don’t want to hear that crap!’ Mr Geoffrey says now, as I crawl up that steep chorus boys’ staircase, wailing.

‘God! Mr Geoffrey, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve got no energy. I didn’t sleep a wink again last night.’

‘Don’t burn out on me! Don’t. OK? I am not dressing that flatfooted freak.’ (My understudy.)

‘Not even once? Could you get me a glass of champagne, please, darling?’

‘Not even once. So don’t even go there.’

Mr Geoffrey must be cruel to be kind, but kind he is. He has brought in his iPod, which is crammed with every show tune ever recorded. We kick off the previews with ‘A Chorus Line’ – my current obsession – and soon I have cheered up and am lashing on the slap while Mr Geoffrey sings along and the evening cranks up.

A theatre runs like clockwork on the day of a show. Everything happens at exactly the same time. First Erin arrives from Wigs with a wicker basket full of decapitated heads. A civilian may be forgiven for thinking that Erin has just murdered Angela, but in fact she is just making her rounds, and here she is, at 7.05, to stick a furry centipede called a front piece to my forehead. Erin is a red-headed giantess in hot pants. She is big and ballsy, in high boots and boob tubes, as if she has just climbed off a float at some carnival. She is having a turbulent affair with a dancer Mr Geoffrey knows. Mr Geoffrey thinks
he has another girl. Gossip is the glue that keeps a company together, and my dresser and I survey the lives of the entire crew every night from our nest, sharing and dissecting the titbits we pick up in the field downstairs. Now we catch each other’s eyes as Erin re-enacts last night’s date. Mr Geoffrey shakes his head.

‘He hasn’t even asked me to his first night. Is that normal?’

‘Perfectly normal. You can’t go anyway. Who’s going to put on my wig?’

‘All I’m saying is I love you and you deserve more,’ reasons Mr Geoffrey.

These angels know that one of their jobs is to cajole me into a good mood from my swamp of self-involved despondency, and little by little they nudge me into a reasonable humour, like two parents with a spoilt child who won’t get on his potty. I attempt to convince them that I am on the edge of collapse. Now it’s their turn to look at each other in the mirror.

‘Come on, baby,’ says Erin, rubbing my shoulders. ‘You can do it.’

‘If those – I was going to say girls, but clearly they aren’t – discuss the menopause once more before Act One, I will seriously pass out.’

A gaggle of ladies and me congregate in the wings each night just before the show. Led by Jayne, the lady who plays my wife, all manner of lady issues are discussed, most of which I find fascinating. However, I’m not sure if I want to know who among the stage crew is still having their period, male or female. I’ve got to carry the show!

‘How can I go on stage being bubbly and effervescent when all I can think of are these undead vaginas wandering round in the gloom behind me? It’s too frightening.’ I am in high spirits now.

‘Just ask them not to talk about it,’ laughs Erin.

‘Already Mr Geoffrey has had to put me in thermals because various people insist that the stage is kept at sub-zero temperatures – which God knows must be eating into our profits. I won’t mention any names and I hope I am not unsympathetic …’

‘Wait a minute,’ interrupts Erin. ‘Are you saying you’re not sympathetic?’

‘No, I’m saying I am.’

‘But you’re not,’ says Erin.

Uh-oh! Home truth moment. I get busy with my make-up.

‘You nearly made Jayne cry the other night. There.’

‘Ow!’

She gives one final tug at my wig, picks up her box of tricks and moves on.

‘You haven’t been very nice to Jayne, it’s true,’ confirms Geoffrey a few minutes later.

I haven’t. She drives me mad. Actually she is the best thing in the show, but I just want to slap her.

‘Let’s see what Madonna thinks.’ Mr Geoffrey rolls his eyes and scrolls down the iPod. ‘Forget everyone’s menopause.
This
is putting you in the terrible mood.’

‘Where Do We Go from Here’ is my all-time Madonna favourite. It perfectly suits my mood, and soon Madge is soaring through the chorus boys’ room at full blast.

‘Where do we go from here? Life isn’t what we thought it would be.’ I mouth the words dementedly as I apply more make-up.

‘My God,’ says Mr Geoffrey, ‘are you doing the show kabuki tonight? Ease off on the eyebrows.’

‘Really?’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the house is now open,’ says the tannoy, followed by all the usual apparitions.

At seven-fifteen Bruce Clinger arrives. He is the company manager. He really is a throwback to the old days. He is a giant with a bald pate and a potato nose. He is extremely earnest and shy, a gangly youth imprisoned in a large middle-aged body. He may have started off as a dancer because his huge feet in their beautifully polished shoes often find themselves in fifth position. He speaks Broadway, another echo of lost New York. He is a Jewish show queen who started in the seventies and worked his way up. He speaks humbly and carefully, pitched high and slightly adenoidal, and there are still reminders in his voice of a stubborn Hungarian grandmother who
refused to learn English. I adore him. He weathers my mood swings with humour and patience. We have come through Signing-In Gate and Alcohol Gate. I have a glass of champagne in the interval. I always have. Apparently it’s illegal and the theatre is going to be closed down, but we have reached a compromise. Paper cups.

Tonight I am spitting with fury at our producers. I think they are cheating me.

‘Bruce, I want to see all the return sheets, please. I just don’t understand why we are not making more money.’

‘Oh gosh,’ gasps Bruce. ‘I didn’t know there was a problem. I’ll toyck to the office about it.’

I swivel in my chair towards him. ‘I have a percentage, you know,’ I say grandly.

Bruce steps on his feet and wrings his hands. ‘Oh gosh. I’m really sorry you’re upset.’

‘Yes I am. Plus my back is
agony
. I could hardly get up off that fucking sofa yesterday in Act One.’ Etc.

He is funny and shortly we are laughing. In my egocentric madness I am soon convinced he is falling in love with me and, like one of those old drunken stage hags on the skids who have to suck the lifeblood from anything on three legs to survive, I decide to make him a project. Mr Geoffrey says I must have projects to get me through the run.

‘I’ve decided to make Bruce fall in love with me,’ I say one matinée afternoon.

‘It may not be as easy as you think,’ snips Mr Geoffrey, arranging some flowers. He is still angry with me for stepping on his hand.

Madonna joins in the conversation from the speakers. ‘Where do we go from here?’