Vanished Years (7 page)

There is a strong breeze, metallic and rancid. It is a beautiful evening at the end of another blistering summer day. Everything, the people, the buildings, the trees even, are visibly relieved that it is over, and there is always a huge collective sigh of relief, a lazy groan that comes with dusk over Manhattan in July. The sky and the sea are milky blue. A giant American sun hangs low over the horizon under a broken ceiling of fluffy clouds that stretch towards the Wild West and the rest of the interior. The sun’s rays hurtle down this tunnel between the measurable and the immeasurable, spilling like blood over the marble sea, and turning the clouds into little rashers of pink and grey bacon disappearing into infinity.

Behind us the Manhattan skyline curves into the distance – a gigantic fortress in a blur of exhaust, its billion windows glinting in the setting sun, its Twin Towers flying high above the ramparts. Little
red lights blink on pins at their summits, a weird, innocent warning to any low-flying planes in the vicinity. The city is strangely silent. The mad traffic within is only a murmur from the end of this jetty as I stand holding hands with the world’s undisputed Most Famous Woman. Before us the Long Island Sound stretches out towards Liberty, Brooklyn and, somewhere out there, Old Europe. Liberty is little more than a red dwarf with cataracts in the setting sun. She has been reduced! The scale of the modern skyline has cut off her balls.

A speedboat carrying Tina, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson ploughs across the Sound towards her like a comet with a swirling tail of phosphorescence. (Natasha, the Towers – gone, and that’s what’s so spooky about this story.) They are on their way to the party, which is taking place at Liberty’s sandalled feet. Standing there with Madonna, who is on crutches (she pulled a muscle doing the splits), looking out at all this, I am completely unaware that I have got about as far as I will ever go. And that the whole world is about to collapse.

Harvey is extremely courteous. Madonna leans on my arm. She needs me tonight just to get from A to B. I am her ‘
ami nécessaire
’ and if I’m developing skin cancer from too much basking in her reflected glory, I don’t care. (None of those scorched by the nuclear waste that stars exude wears enough protection.) Our film, which in a few short months will tear my career to shreds, is still in that ideal phase, made but not seen, and if our friendship is approaching its sell-by date we don’t know it yet. Or at least I don’t. (She probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm.) For the time being the world is fascinated by us and so are we. Tina is even thinking of putting us on the first cover of
Talk
. (She doesn’t in the end.)

Has it all gone to my head? Or do I still feel out of place? Both. It’s a befuddled drunken feeling. We climb aboard a cigarette boat, swerve flirtatiously past the phalanx of cameras and roar off towards the island in a wall of spray. The cameras flash like a fabulous firework as we pass by and the screams and shouts of those hysterical freaks blow at us in the breeze, violent and barbaric, so that even when we are arriving at the island their voices are still close. Madahhh-nna! Ruperrrrt! We
ignore them, knowing that it will be a great photo op and Madonna has never looked prettier. She too is in the last days of her prime, perched on the edge of a new and delicate reinvention as spiritual leader and offshore earth mother. Harvey and Tina may be launching a magazine. Madonna is launching a new religion. It’s the only thing left when you’ve had it all. Becoming God (or Goop, in Gwyneth Paltrow’s case).

We arrive at the party at exactly the right time. Henry Kissinger is already there and I am by Madonna’s side as he is introduced. Omygod, I think, this is the man who dragged Cambodia into the Vietnam War, but of course I say nothing even when a waitress comes by to ask us what we want to eat.

‘What’s on the menu?’ asks Kissinger and I can barely restrain myself from shrieking, ‘What’s on the
menu
, Henry? Would that be
Operation Menu
?’

Instead I obsequiously offer to go and fetch some nibbles. With success comes compromise, and it’s amazingly easy to forget two million massacred Cambodians as one is passing around the cheese straws. There is a bit of a hiccough as Tina searches for the right way of introducing Madonna to Henry.

‘Miss Ciccone? Mrs Lopez? The queen of pop?’ She giggles awkwardly, her face a question mark.

‘Madonna,’ I say firmly. ‘Would you like a cheese straw, Henry?’

‘Rupert,’ says Tina as we are about to wander onto the next gaggle, ‘I want you to come with me to Washington next week. Are you free?’

‘No. He charges by the hour. Didn’t you know?’ answers Madonna, hobbling off.

Chinese lanterns hang in the trees and the beautiful people sit on cushions and chairs on the grass. There are tables, a dance floor with a glitter ball, and a waiter for every star. Queen Latifah gives an address and everyone claps. It’s a hollow vulnerable sound in the vastness of Liberty Island. It’s a hollow vulnerable party actually, even if it looks like the greatest show on earth, not unlike the dazzling pictures of Studio 54 in its heyday. Many of the same
characters are here, in bow ties and silk socks, in fabulous diamonds and couture, but much of it is borrowed or bartered now, and each diamond has its own security guard lurking in the bushes. And anyway there are no waiters in satin hot pants or hungry young garage mechanics from Hoboken to sweeten the pill: just the self-congratulatory drone of all these excessively rich people, frazzled and blinded by power and crazy money. Even the disco queens and pop icons have a sheen of respectability about them and look more like careful heiresses than sex sirens.

Madonna is putting on a brave face but I can tell she is frustrated by her crutches. She needs to be able to swoop into downward dog at any given moment, or at least to be a crab, and feels severely compromised if she can’t. She hobbles home after about half an hour, to wrap herself in clingfilm for another sleepless night plotting. She is, as usual, quite sensible and misses the scrum for boats at the end of the party, which isn’t when you might imagine, as dawn rises over the city. No.

This party is for a thousand careful Cinderellas and even if their coaches don’t turn to taxis at midnight, their serene fascinated faces revert to witches’ grimaces if the evening’s longevity exceeds by a minute the schedule prescribed by their publicist, which has been mapped out with military precision – from the time they are to be picked up, to the moment of the satellite link up with the E! channel studios in Burbank, to the time they will be getting back home and can get on with their real lives of screaming and throwing things and torturing assistants and complaining about the schedule of their next movie to various vassals in offices still open on the coast. Witchlike, they will kiss their overindulged progeny in bedrooms equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of whim and as midnight strikes they will be creamed and chinstrapped, perusing a script, and if they aren’t – heads are going to roll.

Yes, this is the bleak reality of tonight in a world that has lost all sense of humour, let alone proportion. Tonight is an important night, because under the orange firmament whose only stars are the tail
lights of aircraft coming and going from the many airports surrounding the city, the life is finally draining out of New York City, like the colour from a snapshot taken on the best day of your life. Things will never be like this again and anyway even this is not like this, or that, rather.
This
is just Versailles without the style. The only thing that could be described as – what, touching? – is that none of us knows what’s in store. I certainly have no idea. As far as I’m concerned I should be a national treasure by this time next year.

And so I prance around, one eye on Madonna and another on the line for the restroom, because pretty soon I am off my face on booze and powder, nipping off to the loo with all the usual suspects as soon as Madge looks the other way, shovelling coke up my nose, contorted, five to a portaloo, giggling and chopping and sniffing and rolling up those damp disease-trap dollar bills and really if I’m looking at me now, I should already be knowing better, because first of all whatever gland produces saliva has gone on strike inside my mouth and it feels like a dry paper bag and I am obliged to constantly lube it by bucketing alcohol down my throat. My eyes are on stalks. I stumble around.

Soon I am part of a dangerous posse that to anyone in the know is overlit and exaggeratedly drunk, but to those who aren’t, we are just bright middle-aged things with red cheeks and drippy noses in a cloud of smoke. We get louder and louder. Then the fireworks start but we don’t watch. One firework is much like another, and all we’re interested in is screaming and drinking and going to the loo for another line. But the fireworks crack on.

Classical music wafts across the island and then suddenly everyone in the entire party is struck with the same thought: let’s get an early boat and not get stuck. So a thousand people rush for the jetty. We’re too late and wait for hours, no more drinks or cigarettes, and tempers fray, but finally I find myself on a boat with one of the nicer couples – Julianne Moore and her husband Bart Freundlich. They can see that I am totally wiped out. My mouth is so dry now that I can hardly talk. My eyes are wide and unseeing. My hair looks as though I have
just stuck my finger in an electric plug. Bart and Julianne are well mannered but I can tell that they are grossed out. The boat trip takes for ever and feels like a scene from
Titanic
. Hundreds of people squashed onto life-rafts in evening dress on the black water. Liberty looks at her watch and says, ‘Goodness, is that the time?’ and the lights go out. I end up in some restaurant with Kate Moss and Liam Neeson and Baillie Walsh and a few other people.

Liam says, ‘Rupert, I’m really happy about your career.’

And someone else says the only true thing of the night: ‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to last!’

At dawn we are back at my house where my dog Mo is sitting by the front door with a disapproving look.

So I put on a pair of dark glasses and take him for a walk, weaving down the street, looking busy as only drunks and junkies can. Bending over to shovel up Mo’s shit, I lose my balance and my shades slip from my nose and land splat in the middle of Mo’s little present! Mo laughs. I look around to see if anyone is watching and then we hotfoot it round the corner, leaving my Dolce & Gabbana shades stuck jauntily in Mo’s shit like a Flake in a Mr Whippy. It looks quite artistic, actually, an apt final ‘installation’ of the evening, so when we get home I get my camera and race back to take a picture. The shit remains but the glasses have gone. All hail to whosoever had the stomach to take them. Faint heart never fucked a pig.

Now I am on a private plane with Tina and a group of VIBrits on the way to dinner at the British Embassy in Washington. Presumably my behaviour at the party wasn’t that bad because here I am. Tina is still talking to me and the world marches on, cloudless like the evening.

To access the broader picture, if I may: in England Tony Blair is still a national hero, flushed and hungry from Kosovo, as it transpires. (We didn’t notice. How could we?) England is still in the full throes of Cool Britannia. Clinton is going to leave America with credit in the bank. Tina is at the zenith of her career and the future looks as creamy as the dusk falling on the country as we roar over. It
twinkles in the summer haze, a patchwork quilt of fields and woods – the hedgerows dividing them the last whisper of eighteenth-century Maryland.

It’s funny how America obliterates the past. You can only see it from the air. Mile upon mile of green woody hills roll into the distance. Thick brown rivers coil through them, with amazing tributaries like the branches of lungs. Strange square towns are superimposed upon this fairy kingdom, their avenues and streets rudely etched into endless tree-lined cubes. Spaghetti junctions and freeways carve across the country, veins and arteries pumping cars and trucks and cheap petrol into the marvellous American mist. It is an enchanted evening.

The interior of the plane is upholstered in beige leather. It’s a padded cell for the super rich. Tina sits on a banquette wearing a black dress and pearls, dictating last-minute revisions for the next edition of
Talk
to her secretaries, pretty girls also in black, frozen with attention. The rest of us drink champagne and talk to the guest of honour, Simon Schama, Tina’s pet historian. Tina is featuring him in the next edition of the magazine and this trip is one of the last grandiose promotional junkets a magazine will ever take.

Schama doesn’t stop talking. He has recently achieved Sufi status in the glare of Tina’s sunshine and everyone sits enraptured at his feet. Is he a queen? Actually he isn’t. He’s one of those peculiar fey straights, a male lesbian, more dangerous even than the lesbian herself. (When riled.) He is impassioned by the surrounding clutch of adoring women and sprays them with words and champagne saliva. He is a great performer, I note sourly, unable to rein myself into the team mindset, and ogle him as if he were Visconti.

(I remember thinking, any minute now she’s going to be made a knight. And I was right. Already he is one of the ‘artistes’ of the Cameron Coalition and has been commissioned by ‘Sir’ to bring schoolchildren back into the classroom. Good luck. Lollipops and a net are going to be the only way. Bang, Bang, Chitty Chitty Bang, Bang. But I digress. All this is yet to come.)

For the time being he has a gigantic mouth and huge flapping hands and ears, and looks a little like Ian McKellen, and speaks with flat northern drawl. His hands twirl like propellers as he takes off with enthusiasm at some historical yarn. He is very good. Humorous and brimming over with what the Americans call personality, but others would just call blind ambition. He is part of Cool Britannia. Tina looks over at him fondly and I feel a pang of jealousy. I want to be Tina’s pet.

More limos are waiting as we touch down. Black whales in impressive rows boiling on the tarmac and our plane comes to a screaming standstill beside the first one. We’re at a private airport outside Washington. As the door opens a palpable vibration of power bursts in with the local atmosphere. Dorothy must have felt like this approaching the emerald city. It is claustrophobic and exhilarating.