Ruper Everett: Madonna - before she became the Material Girl
Last updated at 21:33pm on 4th September 2006

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Rupert Everett is an actor who knows all the leading ladies of showbusiness — and now he’s written a deliciously witty and mischievous autobiography, laying bare his riotous life as their confidant.

Yesterday, in our first extract, he painted outrageous but affectionate portraits of Sharon Stone, Paula Yates and Julia Roberts. Here, he turns his attention to one of the greatest superstars of all...

As ayoung man, I met many stars. At 17 I sat with David Bowie and was lectured on the mystical potential of the number seven.

• Rupert Everett: My life with the divas


At 18 I sniffed poppers with Hardy Amies, danced at a nightclub with Rudolf Nureyev and dined in Paris with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. I knew what it was to be drunk on fame by association. Yet everything was a pale imitation of the impact Madonna made on me. We met by chance.

One morning in Los Angeles, I was with Mel, a scriptwriter friend, in a car at traffic lights on Sunset Boulevard. We were on our way home from breakfast in some faraway dive where I was told Jimi Hendrix wrote Are You Experienced. I was out of work and with few prospects.

It was 1985, the time of the brat pack in Hollywood, and there wasn’t much around for a tall, thin English freak. Walking in the footsteps of tragic heroes like Hendrix was the sort of thing I did to pass the time.

'Omigod,' Mel suddenly whispered, nudging me hard in the ribs. 'Sean Penn is in the next car and he's waving. Wave back.' While the light was red, we volleyed compliments from car to car and swopped numbers.

The next day he called and asked us to come over for dinner. The place was on Mulholland Drive, the road of stars' homes that winds along the ridge of the Hollywood hills.

We rang the buzzer, and electric gates swung open. A Chinaman in a white coat and gloves led us through to the kitchen where Warren Beatty, Twiggy and Sean were having coffee.

Warren handed round cookies. 'These are made by Molly Ringwald’s mother,' he said. 'Mmm,' said everyone, except for Twiggy, Hollywood's Eliza Doolittle.

'Gawd. I don't like this one.'

'Then try these,' said Warren, proffering another tin. ‘These are Mrs Field’s.’ ‘Sally Field’s mother?’ I asked, amazed by the notion that everyone’s mother baked for Warren. ‘Mrs Fields is a brand,’ he replied.

A couple of days later Sean called again. He had a new girlfriend and wanted me to meet her. ‘Let’s go for dinner tomorrow.’

At the restaurant, Sean and I were sitting waiting. Outside there was a flurry as she walked from her car. Two people bumped against the window, like leaves in a strong gust of wind. The door blew open, and the Immaculate Conception was among us.

She was not yet the Material Girl, nowhere near the peak of her fame. There was no bodyguard. She had parked the car herself (God help the others). But still there was an energy field around her, like a wave, that swept everyone up as it crashed into the room.

She was tiny and luscious with long auburn hair, slightly curled. She sat down. Sean’s forget-me-not eyes watered with adoration.

Hers were the palest blue, strangely wide-set, any further and she would look insane, or inbred. When they looked in your direction, you froze.

In no way was she conventionally beautiful. She was a bit like a Picasso. When she fixed you with her regard, there was a tenderness and warmth that made your skin bump, but when she looked away, it was like sunbathing on a cold day and suddenly a cloud comes.

She was raucous but poised, elegant but common. She had the cupid-bow lips of a silent screen star, and it was obvious that she was playing with Sean underneath the table throughout the meal.

She was mesmerising. She oozed sex and demanded a sexual response from everyone. It didn’t matter if you were gay. You were swept up all the same. In those early years there was no male who would not want to bed her.

At some point during the dinner she got up to go to the bathroom. ‘Come with me, Sean,’ she said. Her voice was high and whiny.

‘You’ll be OK, baby,’ replied Sean, who was clearly going to have his hands full in this relationship.

‘No, I’m scared. C’mon, baby.’ She stamped her foot in a sexy pastiche of exasperation.

Sean got up. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said. Twenty minutes later Mel and I were still eating breadsticks. Mel snapped hers in fury. But time stands still for a superstar.

When Sean and Madonna eventually returned to the table, neither of them made the vaguest reference to their lengthy absence as they settled back to their cold plates.

Mel huffed and puffed through the rest of the meal, but I lost myself in Madonna’s attention and by the end I had fallen in love. Not long afterwards, I was in New York, staying with the wildly eccentric Fred Hughes, once Andy Warhol’s manager and eminence grise.

Fred was an extraordinary invention, a collage of dress codes and mannerisms stolen from the fabulously wealthy. He was obsessed by the Duke of Windsor, but bore more than a passing resemblance to the Duchess. He knew everyone.

One afternoon, I and several other penniless freeloaders from London who used his home as their New York pied a terre were lounging around when the phone rang for the thousandth time. People had been calling non-stop, always for us, and Fred was seething. His lips twitched involuntarily into an anguished scowl.

‘Rupert Everett’s residence,’ he said sarcastically, in an English drawl. ‘No, I’m afraid he’s not in. May I take a message?’ Fred’s eyes bulged for a moment. ‘Would you spell that for me please?

‘M-A-’ he repeated slowly, writing the letters on a pad, ‘D-O-N-N-A. I’ll let him know you called, sir.’

There was a moment of silence, as we braced ourselves for Fred to erupt in anger at yet another call. Instead, he jumped from his chair and ran around the room like a laboratory primate, clutching his face with his hands and rubbing them up and down his body. ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe it!’ he screamed, writhing on the floor. ‘Madonna called my house!’ And his body jerked and shuddered in a parody of orgasm.

Everybody was curious about her. I was in a play in Los Angeles when two of my oldest friends, veteran film director Tony Richardson and actress Candice Bergen, asked me whether I could arrange a meeting.

I invited them to the cottage I was renting off Laurel Canyon. Alicia, a strange spinster who lived in the basement, was going to cook. It was one of the most disastrous nights on record.

Before dinner I lit a fire in the sitting room. Then a sudden freak storm began to howl around the house, the upstairs terrace collapsed into the garden and the wind blew the smoke from the fire back down the chimney into the room.

By the time Tony and Candy arrived you could hardly see. And when Madonna finally appeared with Alek Keshishian, the documentary film-maker, they both ignored Tony and Candy. To be fair, they could hardly see each other in the smoke-filled room. But there was no chemistry, as we say in Hollywood.

Madonna was approaching the dizzy pinnacle of fame, and at those heights you don’t bother to disguise your feelings. If she was bored, she let you know. Manners were something she discarded at base camp.

She didn’t seem comfortable with the older generation, like Tony and Candice. She knew how everyone her own age reacted to her but anyone older looked at her from another angle and that scared her.

Added to this Mo, my puppy, already a sex maniac, took one look at the Material Girl and was entranced. He started to lick her, sniffing her crotch and nipping at her dress before pinning her into a chair and humping her leg, ruining her stockings.

This she didn’t mind so much. Any form of sexual adulation was an affirmation to the material girl, and she looked down with a mixture of horror and delight at Mo’s lolloping tongue as he pounded away at her.

Finally we sat down to dinner. I wished the ground would swallow me up and vowed never to entertain again (I haven’t).

Alicia served up some undercooked vegetables and bloody chicken legs. Everyone was freezing cold, because we had to open all the doors to let the smoke out. During a lull in the sticky conversation, the remainder of the upstairs terrace came crashing down into the garden.

Madonna and Alek were only interested in each other. They were in the middle of their triumphant collaboration, Truth Or Dare, and after dinner they huddled in a corner talking on their cellphones, making high-flying Hollywood plans.

The party was over before 9pm; the post-mortem went on until 2am.

Meanwhile, Hollywood was still not working out for me. I had a part in a stage play but in the land of illusions that was close to being a down and out.

Even playing Truth Or Dare with Madonna at a party Ñ the game this time, not the film and being told by her to snog her new boyfriend, Tony Ward, failed to get me out of my wrist-slitting state of mind.

A few days later I was driving to work at the Doolittle Theatre and her single Justify My Love was playing on the radio. It was the perfect song for that sleazy strip of old Hollywood where the Doolittle’s marquee winked sadly at an uninterested world.

Hookers in hot pants and halter necks looked vulnerable in the orange glare of the street lights, standing in stilettos on the name of some forgotten star. Car after car drove by; their heads turned to each one with a promising glance glued to their faces.

These were the little seeds of desire from which the vast heads on the billboards blossomed. Ambition was the currency in Hollywood although it was justified as love.

The song ended and the DJ chimed in with some very disturbing news. ‘If you play that last track backwards, apparently there is a message to Satan,’ he said. ‘Just listen to this.’ A weird noise groaned over the radio as the track babbled backwards and then a deep voice said: ‘I. Love. You. Satan.’

My blood went cold. This was it. Madonna was Satan. I had been sent to kill her. It all made sense. My fascination with her . . . my Catholic background back in England . . . I could hear the abbey bells at Ampleforth, my old school, ringing in my head. The feeling subsided but I was quite shocked by my reaction. I only had to be two or three degrees more bitter and neurotic about my life, and there could have been an explosion.

And I suddenly saw Madonna in a different light. Her life was full of people who could turn at any minute. How dangerous it was to tickle the world’s fantasy. And how vulnerable you were at the dizzy summit.

That night, I embarked upon a novel, my third. I called it Guilt Without Sex and it was about a man with a failed career who finds religion and falls in love (and hate) with a beautiful transgender superstar.

I told Madonna about it. ‘Don’t you think it would make a great film?’ I said. ‘No,’ she replied.

‘Oh, OK,’ I said, as casual as could be. Now I wanted to kill her again.

And then the wheel turned in my favour. I had a huge hit with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Suddenly everyone wanted to know me. When the movie hit $100 million at the box office I was summoned to see the heads of all the studios.

I loved these meetings. Walking through the hive of offices to the queen bee’s headquarters was an intoxicating catwalk. Sitting down in an office, graciously accepting coffee and compliments, while being sized up, measured and compared, was enormous fun.

I suggested two ideas. I wanted to make a gay James Bond story, and a comedy with Julia about a pair of superstars who were married but he was gay. I sold them both. This was my world at last.

I got a call from Sherry Lansing of Paramount, the producer of huge hits such as Fatal Attraction. She had a film named The Next Best Thing.

It was a sickly script about a nasty humourless woman and her lovely gay best friend, who was funny, supportive, had great dress sense, everything a man was not, and could break into a show tune at any given moment.

He was also that rarity in the homosexual community, a NPB (non-practising b*****) who gave up the awkward matter of sex when all his friends died. By page 23 of the script, these two revolting people decided to have a baby. I turned it down flat. But Lansing said that if I agreed to take part she would green light the movie. What’s more, I could even approve the casting. My agent suggested Madonna for the woman’s part and I was ecstatic.

The studio was less enthusiastic. There was a kiss-of-death theory about Madonna in films. But we pushed for her and Lansing eventually said that if that’s what I wanted, then she’d go with it.

That summer of 1998 I had it all. I rented a dusty, run-down wooden ranch house on a sprawling estate in the Hollywood hills. It was owned by a family of Christian Scientists, the Cheathams. Bob Cheatham had built it with his bare hands. You could tell.

Fergie, the Duchess of York, had rented it before us and had told Mrs Cheatham it was so makeshift it reminded her of the Seven Dwarves’ cottage.

‘Can you imagine?’ an indignant Mrs Cheatham told me. ‘And who’s she? Not Snow White, I’m sure.’

During the course of my year in Hollywood I grew to love Mrs Cheatham; not least because, after a visit from the Material Girl, she popped up from behind a hedge saying: ‘She’s a curious little thing, that Madonna.’ It became our code name; as in, ‘The curious little thing on line one.’

One evening, the curious little thing came over to discuss the script for our new film with the director, John Schlesinger. She was late as usual, though she never apologised or explained. For some reason, she was now a brunette. ‘My dear,’ said John under his breath. ‘She looks like a vampire.’

Madonna stalked towards us across the lawn, in her black embroidered cargo pants. This woman was breathtaking and tonight she was in her prime.

The original Material Girl, with her puppy fat and boot-boy legs squeezed into a tutu, was a vague whispering wind around this new alabaster goddess with her swimmer’s shoulders and tiny waist. Everything about her had changed, and what hadn’t had been carefully wrapped in psychological Clingfilm and locked inside an interior fridge.

Sometimes, in moments of stress, she had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room. Which was good: I loved holiday Madge, too.

My scriptwriter friend Mel and I had written a new sex scene for the film and tonight we were pitching it to her. Instead of impregnation by turkey baster as in the original script, there was to be a hilarious seduction ending in the couple drunkenly making love. I thought it was brilliant.

Madonna listened, leaning back in her chair, a coiled spring. Sometimes she laughed, sometimes she wrote notes. Her eyes shone with Manson girl intent as I said, with schoolboy relish: ‘And then you ride me for all you’re worth.’

She threw her head back with her little shriek: ‘Dream on, Muriel! Let’s get one thing clear right now. I’m not having sex on camera!’ I glued a caring smile on my face but inside I sagged.

A well-known writer did a rewrite. It was terrible. We all refused to take part in it. Eventually, during an all-day meeting in Madonna’s apartment in New York, we hammered out a compromise. But I knew we were aboard a sinking ship.

Everything went wrong. Madonna and the costume designer were at loggerheads. I was no longer on speaking terms with Mel. I started out as the film’s writer and producer and was swiftly sacked as both.

On the second day of filming, I was rehearsing fainting at Madonna’s feet as John Schlesinger stood above me watching through a viewfinder. I knocked him over.

He fell like a giant redwood with a terrible scream and lay in agony on the floor of the set, before being taken to hospital with a chipped coccyx.

When he came back, things got worse. We had to shoot a scene where Madonna kissed her love interest, played by Benjamin Bratt, Julia Roberts’s boyfriend. Madonna rather sensibly had a cocktail first.

It worked and the curious little thing only needed one drink to become demure and giggly. It raced through that macrobioticised frame of hers to great effect, and after two drinks she began to improvise. I was watching on the monitor and she was right on track but John Schlesinger was furious. ‘Will someone pour a bucket of water over that woman!’ he screamed.

At about the same time, somebody started up a website which described each day’s events on our set in minute detail. It was called Lourdes’ Diary (Lourdes being Madonna’s daughter) and was really funny.

We all raced home at night to guiltily read what Uncle John and Uncle Rupy had done to poor Mommy that day. Madonna accused me of being the leak. I wasn’t, actually. But everyone became suspicious of everyone else.

The film cranked along. One day, Her Nibs and I were filming some shot. We got to the end of the scene but no one said: ‘Cut.’ We improvised for a moment, and then there was a loud snore. John Schlesinger was asleep behind the monitor. There was an awkward silence. Nobody moved. Somebody nudged him gently and he said, ‘Action,’ as if nothing had happened. We all lurched into the scene again like a spin-dryer.

It was funny and sad at the same time because John who was now 70 years old had turned into the creaky old Latin teacher at school. It wouldn’t be long before people began to balance books on doors as he came in and put whoopee cushions under his chair.

During the film’s last scene (one of her best) Madonna had to say the line: ‘We really f****d up, didn’t we?’ It was an understatement. I saw her again on New Year’s Eve, 1999, at Gianni Versace’s house in Miami. It had remained empty since his murder there two-and-a-half years earlier, but his sister Donatella reopened it for the last party of the old century.

I arrived early and found Donatella alone on a couch, wearing a silver dress, wrapped up in a thousand memories, clouded by tragedy. ‘I’m so depressed,’ she said simply. ‘Me too,’ I replied, but mine was cosmetic by comparison.

After supper, a cluster of divas, including Madonna, sat around Donatella in the courtyard. The party moved around us like the sea. Our table was a rock and waves of fruits de mer tried to crash against it and join our group. The undertow on this particular stretch of bitch was strong. Madonna smiled graciously to all and sundry, secure in the knowledge that someone else would do the dirty work and give any unwanted jellyfish ‘the old heave-ho’.

Those not welcome were swept back out to sea by the polite but firm dismissal of Gwyneth Paltrow or the glum monosyllabic reply of Guy Ritchie, Madonna’s new boyfriend.

Unbeknown to most of us, Guy and Madonna were having a baby. Guy’s body curved around his princess in acquiescence, but he was not so accommodating to some of her old chums.

This night marked the beginning of the end for Madonna and her younger brother, Christopher Ciccone. They had been inseparable in childhood and she had taken him with her to the material world, where he had provided a solid raft in the shark-infested waters.

He had a blunt, aggressive manner, and he often looked as though he was laughing at you, particularly when he was drunk, but underneath he was vulnerable and funny. To know her at all you had to know him.

But he and Guy were from different planets, and in a way the one’s success relied on the other not being there.

Others were also on the way out. Guy was not particularly comfortable with queens, and so it was a last call for a lot of the disco bunnies and club-mix queens who made up the fabric of Madonna’s mantle.

It was a surprise, because Madonna came out of the womb blowing a disco whistle. But a whole aspect of her life was about to be hit by the delete button.

Shortly before midnight, Jennifer Lopez swept in. Gwyneth and Madonna gave two snorts of derision and noisily left the courtyard. A few weeks earlier, Jennifer had given a rather startling interview where she had regally dished all and sundry, saying, among other things, that Madonna couldn’t sing and that Gwyneth couldn’t act.

This broke an unwritten Hollywood law. Think it but never say it. I say, let’s have more cat fights. Everyone at the party that night adored the drama. They were visibly shaking with the thrill of it and so were the girls in question.

As a thousand pairs of eyes swivelled between the two groups of divas, they were like ducks during a rainstorm, preening, stretching their wings, and quacking. Jennifer held a beatific smile in place. Gwyneth and Madonna huddled together like bullies from the upper sixth. I locked myself in a bathroom with Donatella, a bodyguard at the door, and informed the rest of the world what was going on outside.

We popped out briefly for midnight and then went back to the bunker like war journalists to phone in the latest explosion.

All the while, The Next Best Thing continued to hang over us. The film was coming out in two months’ time. Madonna and I both knew it could make or break us.

The premiere was the breathless summit of my time in Hollywood. The studio flew me in from London on Concorde, my airbrushed face stared petulantly from the magazine stands and for a brief dazzling moment I was on everybody’s mind.

My relationship with Madonna intrigued America. On the opening night, we walked down the red carpet, Guy and Madonna ahead while I kept one pace behind, like the Duke of Edinburgh. A thousand cameras looked us up and down as I said what I loved about her and she said what she loved about me. When we eventually arrived at our seats, various members of my life waved from different corners of the stalls.

Julia Roberts appeared out of an explosion of flashlight, looking glossy and unruffled. ‘Hi, I’m Julia,’ she said with a huge smile. ‘I know who you are,’ said Madonna icily.

The next morning I was at the Concorde lounge at JFK airport. The first person I saw was Robbie Williams. ‘Oops,’ he said and disappeared to the loo.

On a table were the morning papers. Madonna Lays An Egg said one headline. Rupert’s Mediocre Thing, said another. I nearly fainted.

I have never read such bad reviews. ‘Rupert Everett’s performance has all the energy of a pet rock,’ one critic declared. ‘That’s why I said oops,’ said Robbie, returning from the loo. The Next Best Thing blew my new career out of the water. The vitriol engendered by Madonna’s performance was extraordinary and deeply unfair. But a film has a Picture Of Dorian Gray quality to it. The perception of it ebbs and flows with the years.

In Cambodia three years later, I walked into a bar and it was playing on a TV above a pool table. Madonna was looking sadly at her breasts in a mirror. ‘1989,’ she said, before letting them flop down. ‘1999’. It was the best scene in the movie.

Kids with billiard cues in their hands stood motionless, intrigued and challenged. To them, our film was shocking and avant garde.

I swear that moment in a bar at Phnom Penh was one of the best moments of my career.

Me watching them watching her watch herself was as good as it ever got.

Oh my god that is long!

Havent read it all, but I quite like him, think I will read his book!

Great article ... very easy to read. I think I'm going to have to buy this book rather than wait until I see it on Ebay like I usually do these days.

this and the others are a fun read, but he has really shot himself in the foot career-wise with these.

no one will want to work with him now, as he has basically turned himself into a high profile version of the gossip rag columnist

cborgman said:

True, I wonder why he would want to do that?!

susannah said:

no idea, honestly. he had to have known this would hut his career. maybe he has given up and resolved himself to smaller stuff, and wanted to make money with a book?

cborgman said:

Maybe. He soesnt seem stupid, he'll have a plan. Maybe a film about all the people in the book!


That theyll all veto, of course.

As a writer of such a revealing piece, no WONDER they thought Rupert was behind that Lourdes Diary blog back then. Sorta fits his traits.