She didn’t agree. She thought this would be taking realism too far. Personally, I don’t think you can take anything too far on the stage.

  Perhaps one day I will have my own name in lights on Broadway. Not for my one-man show, of course, I would never be able to fill the theatre, but for my very own musical. You see, I know a famous composer called Mr. Adler.99 He’s a very serious composer. Nevertheless, he has set some of my poems to music so I think there is a chance I can convert him to jollity.

  My plan is to write with him a musical version of Tarzan, called “My Man, Tarzan” because Tarzan is the great American myth. I have planned it all. There will even be a chorus of pygmies, who will sing, “Do you dig me, Mrs. Pygmy?” Various songs are already planned. I don’t think anything really has to happen plot-wise, so long as the whole thing takes place in the jungle. Jane comes along and meets Tarzan. The real Lord Greystoke appears because he’s in the book100 and he sings a song which says, “Is he a decent chap? If ever we get back to a smart racetrack, will he wear a topper like your papa, or will he wear a palm leaf cap? Will he do a handstand in the grandstand? Is he a decent chap?”

  In the book, of course, Jane does not stay in the jungle. She goes back to Maryland. My musical will have a song where she sings, “I dream of my fairyland, Maryland, home.” In my version she will stay in the jungle and she and Tarzan will be lovers and everyone will be happy.

  I did start writing an opera once when I lived in London. It was the Trojan legend from the point of view of Cassandra who as you know was a vestal virgin. When the Spartans came to Troy, she went to the Temple of Minerva and she prayed, but it was to no avail. She was raped by Ajax and of course, it was the insult to Minerva that frightened Agamemnon.

  I wrote a lot of the opera and then Mr. Bridemore,101 the composer with whom I wished to work, read what I had written and said to me, “There seems to be a lot of standing about in your opera.”

  To which I explained, “It’s all standing about.”

  And he said, “I don’t want that.” Which made no sense to me.

  To me, all opera singers do is stand about. You can’t sing like that and do anything.

  There is a singer102 in America who wears horn-rimmed spectacles and stands almost perfectly still when she performs. A man who was with me when I saw her on my television set said, “I can’t stand people like that. They don’t do anything for the numbers.”

  I corrected him. “Yes, they do.” I said, “They sing them.” You can’t sing and jump up and down and break your guitar. You can only shout and do that.

  I should think I left the manuscript for my great Trojan musical in a drawer in Beaufort Street. I imagine it was subsequently destroyed when someone took over my room. It’s probably for the best. There’s quite enough rubbish on Broadway these days as it is.

  * * *

  74 Sean O’Casey, Irish dramatist, 1880-1964

  75 George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, 1856-1950

  76 Sybil Thorndike, English actress, 1882-1976

  77 Dame Edith Evans, English actress, 1888-1976

  78 A play by George Farquhar, Irish dramatist, 1677-1707

  79 Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, novelist and essayist, 1854-1900

  80 Quentin performed in the play with the Mercer Street Theatre (NYC), directed by Evan Thompson, in August and September 1982.

  81 A play by Richard Sheridan, Irish satirist, playwright and poet, 1751-1816

  82 Lilly Langtry, an initially beautiful young woman who established a reputation as an actress and producer, 1853-1929

  83 Music by Frederic Norton, 1869-1946, book by Oscar Asche, 1871-1936

  84 Music by George Gershwin, 1898-1937, libretto by DuBose Heyward, 1885-1940, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, 1896-1983

  85 Norman Mailer, American novelist, playwright, film-maker and political activist, 1923-2007, in 1980 spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott’s bid for parole. Abbott was released in June 1981 only to stab 22-year-old waiter Richard Adan to death on July 18

  86 Luciano Pavarotti, Italian operatic tenor, 1935-2007

  87 A three-act opera by Giuseppe Verdi, 1813-1901

  88 Il trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi

  89 Tennessee Williams, American playwright, 1911-1983

  90 Joe Orton, British playwright, 1933-1967

  91 Loot, a play by Joe Orton

  92 Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, b. 1948, with lyrics by T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965, Trevor Nunn, b. 1940, and Richard Stilgoe, b. 1943

  93 Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber with lyrics by Richard Stilgoe

  94 Kevin Spacey, American actor and director, b. 1959

  95 A play written by Eugene O’Neill, American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature, 1888-1953

  96 Edward Albee, American playwright, 1928-2016

  97 By Charles Ludlam, American actor, director, and playwright, 1943-1987

  98 Elaine Paige, English singer and actress, b. 1948

  99 James Adler, American pianist and composer, b. 1950

  100 By Edgar Rice Burroughs, American writer, 1875-1950

  101 It’s unclear who Quentin was working with

  102 Lisa Loeb, American singer, b. 1968

  CHAPTER 11

  My So-called Career

  Mr. Warhol,103 whom I bumped into from time to time at the various events we both attended in the eighties, famously said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” I have news for you. With luck, or effort, you can extend those fifteen minutes quite considerably. Even if you are as old and hopelessly untalented as I am.

  In fact, everything I say on stage during my one-man show is to help people extend their fifteen minutes so that it might become a wonderful lifetime. This, of course, assumes that the people seeing my show want to be famous. I’m sure there are some people in the world who don’t but I seldom meet one of them.

  You see, I have lied to you. Not a hurtful lie, but a lie nonetheless. When I talk about how I have never worked and how I have never had a career, I am, of course, negating my so-called career as a celebrity. The reason I don’t really think of it as a career is because it’s been so unpredictable. If I were to write a resume for myself, it would be a horrible mess. For in my time I have been an author, I have appeared on stage, I have written for newspapers and magazines, I have been on television, I have been in films, I have made voice recordings, I have posed for photographs and paintings and I have sung for my supper almost as many times as I have eaten.

  Looking back, I suppose I have to call all of that a career although it never afforded me any kind of security. I never had any colleagues or a workplace that I had to attend. But as a whole I suppose it’s not unimpressive. I know plenty of aspiring actors who would saw off a leg or an arm for the opportunities that have been presented to me. So, it is with the greatest respect to them that I want to walk you through some of the highlights of my so-called career.

  I am not really an actor, but over the years I have appeared in various shows. I have never trained as an actor. I never go to auditions and do all those things that aspiring actors do. I only get into movies by mistake. So, I feel free to criticize them. If you want to live in New York and not appear in films, you have to keep moving because the moment you stand still someone comes up and says, “Would you like to be in our movie?” Of course, I never say no to anything. So frequently, I say yes. As a result I have been in the most extraordinary movies.

  The Bride104 was the first movie I appeared in and I must say how interesting it was to see from the inside just how a film is made. Nobody speaks unless they are wearing a microphone. As such, actors whisper to one another in a windowless room brimming with other people. I didn’t realize that movie sets were so quiet. It took me quite a while to get used to that. I didn’t have many lines. Come to think of it, I might not have had any at all.

  Mr. Sting105 was nice. He played the role of Dr. Frankenstein, since The Bride was a remake of the eponymous legend. He has not had good luck with his films. First of all he was in Quadrophenia.106 Then he was in The Bride which the critics hated. Then he had a tiny part in Plenty,107 alongside Ms. Streep,108 which people overlooked. Then he was in something else, but he’s never had a hit. He even played Mack The Knife on Broadway109 which I would have thought he was ideally cast for, but the show closed after a few weeks and got very poor reviews. I think the people who went to see him wanted to hear him sing more than act.

  One of the things that intrigued me about being on set were the efforts to ensure continuity. What did they do before there was instant photography? Every evening, just as the director said, “Cut. That’s it.” We would all rise up and then someone would shout, “Stay a moment.” And we would all sit down again. Then they would take photographs of the set so that they could put everything back just the way it was and so that everyone in the scene could look exactly the same when filming resumed the next day or possibly later. Before instant photography, I imagine some poor girl having to write down a description of what everyone was wearing, where they stood and what was in the background. Something like “Two books on the second shelf, there are flowers on the side table...”

  The first American movie I was in was Aunt Fannie110 in which I played the title role. Unfortunately my character dies before the film begins. It was the first film I made with Mr. Needleman.111 Afterwards I made Red Ribbons112 although I only had a tiny part.

  In Red Ribbons I played a guest at a wake for a man who was gay and had died. The movie is based on the plot of a French novel whose title can be translated as The Revelation in which a woman’s son dies and she looks through his possessions and finds and reads a bundle of his letters. They are love letters from a man and she has to get used to this.

  In our film, a woman, Mrs. Niles, reads her son’s letters and then comes to a wake held for her son by his dubious friends of whom I am one. My character’s name was Horace Nightingale III. Most of the film takes place with us all sitting around in a room in an apartment on Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. I don’t know why we filmed it there. The room we used was as nondescript as any other. It was small and consequently became very crowded. The apartment belonged to a man who had said he would allow us to use it, if in return he was allowed to meet the actress playing Mrs. Niles. It turned out that Ms. Spelvin,113 who played Mrs. Niles, used to appear in adult films before retiring in the early eighties. Despite appearing in his movies, I don’t hear from Mr. Needleman anymore. I should think he has read the reviews for his films in the newspapers and given up filmmaking.

  Later, I was in a film called Barriers114 in which I was a delicatessen owner who gets gunned down in the first few minutes of the film. I was shot by a black man walking through my shop. I don’t think you see me fall to the ground, but I think you hear the shots. That was a very strange movie.

  Then I appeared, or rather I should say I narrated, a short movie that was a black-and-white film about Little Red Riding Hood.115 I confess, I’ve never seen it so I have no idea what it’s like. They showed me just enough for me to fit my voice to it.

  The role for which I’ve received the most praise however, was when I played Queen Elizabeth I in the 1993 film Orlando.116 My involvement was Ms. Potter’s117 idea. She came to New York, I hope not just to see me, but she saw me and asked if I would read some lines for her. So I read them and she asked me, “Will you play the part?” And, of course, I never say no to anything.

  Nevertheless, I have to confess that filming Orlando was absolute hell because I wore a bodice so tight that it blistered my stomach. I had two rolls of fabric tied around my middle with tapes, so I always had to sit forward. Then I wore a taut skirt, a quilted petticoat, an ordinary petticoat and a dress over all of that. Once dressed, I couldn’t make it out of the trailer in which all of these things were put on me without someone lifting up the whole lot and giving me directions. They would say, “Put your foot down. Further. Now the other one. More. Now you’re on level ground.” I never saw my feet during the whole production. Then, of course, I had to heave all that taffeta over the grounds of Hatfield House.118

  Luckily, it only took two weeks for me to finish my part in the film, so really the whole thing was remarkably easy and Ms. Potter was a very good director. When things had to be done again she would say so and tell you exactly why. She never nagged and she never made any unkind comments. In fact, nothing that I expected would happen on a movie set ever took place. Nobody burst into tears, nobody ran off the set and nobody slapped someone else’s face. It all passed in a very calm, civilized way.

  People always ask how I prepared for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Orlando and I never know how to reply. Obviously they expect me to say that I had some ritual or method, but the truth is I didn’t prepare at all. I don’t really know what people mean when they say ‘prepare’. When required to, I simply said the words as though I meant them. I didn’t try to think myself into the part or what it would be like to have lived in those times and to have ruled over England.

  For all I know, Queen Elizabeth I may have spoken English in quite a different way from how we do now, but I didn’t bother with any of that. For me, acting is more innate. It’s true, there’s all this business in America about learning how to act, but I can’t see what it means. If an actor asked me, “How should I prepare myself to play a part?” I would answer, “Don’t prepare yourself. You’ve been chosen by the director because he thinks you are like the person he has in mind. All you have to do is be yourself and say the lines as though you mean them, as though they were you own.” It worked for me and the only thing I can do well, the only thing I know how to do, is be me.

  Many people consider my portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I to be the perfect queen. That’s very nice of them. My personal opinion is that Ms. Blanchett119 who played the same role in Elizabeth120 was better. She certainly looked much more like the portraits that were made of England’s Virgin Queen during her lifetime with her long, beautiful, triangular face and her exquisite pallor. In contrast, I don’t think Ms. Dench was anything like Queen Elizabeth. Even though they gave her an Oscar for the role.121

  For the 1998 film Homo Heights,122 I travelled to Minneapolis at the request of Ms. Moore.123 the film’s writer and director. She once worked as a clown. Now she’s a movie director. That’s America for you. Anyway she invited me to play the role of Malcolm.

  Homo Heights was the name given to a fictitious district of Minneapolis where the movie’s principal gay people are supposed to live. In the film, it is ruled by a drag queen called Maria Callous who runs a nightclub called Tosca. She is a despot and tells everyone what to do. Mr. Sorrentino124 played the drag queen and was wonderful. I’ve seen the finished film and he is very, very funny.

  As well as being an actor, Mr. Sorrentino is a famous impressionist. He imitates Elton John in a show in Las Vegas so successfully that he has bought a house in Las Vegas. I imagine he must be very well paid. In Homo Heights, I play his ex-lover, his slave and his tormentor, all wrapped up in one person. Ultimately I escape to outer space. That’s basically the storyline. Every day, Mr. Sorrentino would walk around the set laughing and saying, “I hope my father never sees this film.”

  I actually saw Homo Heights at the Archives125 yesterday with my great nephew. When you see it, you can hardly follow the plot. I first saw it at a screening at the Angelica Theater when it was first released. I saw it again and again and each time I did it seemed more obscure, not clearer. Ms. Moore was not there yesterday because she is apparently busy being a clown in a circus in California. Afterwards, we went to The Bowery Bar with Ms. Lehman126 who was the producer, and another younger woman who had worked on the film and was there with her boyfriend.

  I’ve made several more movies but I can’t remember all their names. None of them can ever be seen. They go straight into video stores. I have never understood videos. They cost $40 dollars. And the video is in a sealed box which you cannot open. So you end up paying $40 for something which you don’t know anything about, what it’s like or if it’s any good. Anyway, that’s what happened with most of my movies.

  If another movie of my life were being filmed today, I don’t know who should portray me. Mr. Hurt127 of course, is now fifty, so it might be difficult for him. He was younger when they originally filmed The Naked Civil Servant.128 Everyone’s very self-conscious about playing homosexual parts though. I never know why. When anyone takes a homosexual part, the press asks, “Have you discussed this with your wife and children?” And the actor always says, “Oh, yes. They’re completely behind me.” If you played the part of a priest or a disgraced politician last week, why should it matter if you play a homosexual this week? The whole thing baffles me.

  In addition to starring in films, I’ve also been lucky enough to be paid to appear in commercials. And the great thing about appearing in commercials is you go on getting paid for them long after you’ve finished filming them, just so long as they’re still being aired.

  People always complain about all the waiting around required for film and TV work, but of course I spent the majority of my early life as a model. All I ever did was sit or stand around waiting, so it makes no difference to me. When asked about the downtime involved in movie making Mr. Mitchum129 said, “It beats working, any day.” And it does.

  The first commercial I did was for Mr. Klein130 and was for a perfume called ck one131 which was said to be suitable for men as well as women. They organized a car to take me to the location where we would be shooting and I remember a limousine drawing up in front of the house, which was as long as the block. Sheepishly, I got into it. The car was so large though, that when it turned the street corner, I fell onto the floor. I quickly got up again. I don’t think the driver saw.