Lauren Bacall battled to get into his dressing room, and his nipples were discussed in the newspapers – Cabaret made British actor Alan Cumming a sex symbol. Now he's written a brilliantly gossipy memoir. He talks to Will Pavia about intimacy coaches, being friends with Monica Lewinsky – and the club he owns where anything goes …
It's not easy being a sex symbol, or at least, it can take a while for a man to get used to it. For the most part, Alan Cumming found that he could manage quite well. "I did feel sexy, and I was having a lot of sex," he writes in his new memoir. "What was harder to contend with was that, at 33, I was being objectified in this way for the first time in my life."
It is apparently quite discombobulating to find that your nipples and your armpits have become subjects of national interest. They were discussed in the American press. Even Terry Gross of National Public Radio, the high priestess of highbrow interviews, felt obliged to focus on them.
"I had to say, 'Terry, let's move on to something else apart from my armpits,'" Cumming tells me. "Imagine seeing that in an interview, not just any interview, but on NPR, their most vaunted, probing interviewer. I realised she gets sort of stuck on things."
I must admit I do this myself. Once, interviewing the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he asked me not to talk about his time at the Burning Man event. After that, it was all I could think about. Schmidt kept saying that no one talks about Burning Man.
"I beg to differ," Cumming says. "People who go to Burning Man talk about it all the f***ing time. They never stop talking about it. I had a friend who went. I said, 'How was Burning Man? You have two minutes.'"
We're in the back of an Indian restaurant in the East Village of New York. It is empty but for a small party of tourists at a table on the far wall. Cumming, 56, lives nearby and co-owns a bar down the street called Club Cumming, but he's been away for a while at his place in a gorgeous part of the Catskills that lacks Indian restaurants.
"I've been fantasising about this meal for ages," he says. He orders some deep-fried balls of spicy potato and a soup with chapatis.
He's wearing a black jumper with horizontal pinstripes. With his long, wavy grey hair, it gives him a faintly nautical air. On the table he sets down his glasses, with their thick round frames, like the goggles of an early aviator. They're modelled after a $10 pair he found on Venice Beach in 1996, which "gave me my look", he says. The look was "Where's Wally meets European arthouse director or avant-garde musician", he says. "Geeky but sexy."
This was before he became a sex symbol. Sex symbol-hood happened in 1998 when he arrived on Broadway as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret. The show offered astonished American audiences an altogether raunchier vision of Weimar, and Cumming, almost in the altogether, was hailed as a new prince of Broadway. The character was bisexual and he was bisexual too. People went nuts. Every photographer he worked with wanted him to undress, and Cumming's semi-naked form was splashed across buses, billboards and magazine spreads.
The only other person who seemed to be getting the same treatment that year was Monica Lewinsky, and he began to feel a sort of kinship with her. He felt their cases were parallel "in the way sexuality is viewed", he says. The chief difference, as he saw it, was that he was being celebrated for his sexuality while she was being denigrated for hers.
Then they met at a party and became friends. "Going out with her was nuts," he says. "I met her at that crazy time in her life, and then she was sort of a recluse. She couldn't go out. You'd have to go to her house. I felt so protective of her. I still do."
He was outraged by President Clinton's declaration that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman". In his book he offers a list of all the things that Clinton's definition of sex leaves out. "I still have this debate with people here," Cumming says. "You and I could go and do any of those things on that list and I could go to my friends and say, 'Oh, I didn't have sex with him.' And I find that terrible … It doesn't exist. So there's no shame, no guilt. There's also no tenderness."
Cumming complains that Americans tend to lump all those things into "the quaint but very telling American umbrella of 'fooling around'. It says a lot about a culture when it correlates sexual contact with foolishness."
Even Gore Vidal, the giant of American letters, would talk that way about the boyhood friend who was supposedly the great love of his life. Vidal had Cumming and his boyfriend to stay at his villa in Ravello in the early noughties. "He couldn't admit that he loved. He couldn't," Cumming says. Vidal told him that, "You Brits are more prone to affection in sex," Cumming says. "He made that sound like a bad thing." Vidal told him that he understood what President Clinton meant. "He said it's sort of this Southern thing," Cumming says.
The other thing that amazes him about the impeachment scandal is that it still seems somehow unresolved. When Hillary Clinton was running for the presidency in 2016, her team initially asked Cumming to do events for her. "Then they said, 'Actually, we're a bit worried about you being a [surrogate], officially on the campaign … because of your friendship with Monica.' And I was like, 'Oh my God, how many years later and you still haven't sorted this out?'
"If he'd just said [to Lewinsky], 'I am so sorry. I abused my position. I'm sorry for the damage I've caused you,' " Cumming says. "Just f***ing apologise."
Cumming grew up with a loving mother and a tyrannical and violent father who served as the head forester on a Scottish estate. He still has dreams about the things his father did to him. He escaped to Dundee to work at a youth magazine called Tops and then got into drama school. When they were in their 20s, he and his brother went back to the estate to confront their old man, walking through the woods with him, their father banging a stick against his boots. "I thought he was going to hit me," Cumming says. But, "It was incredibly cathartic, because I stood up to him and … I saw that he was a coward," he says. "I left the door open for him. We both did. We left the door open if he wanted to come back at a later date and talk about it. But no, he never got in contact with me again. The only time he did was 20 years later. He told my brother to tell me I was not his son."
A DNA test proved this was not true. Cumming wrote about all this in his 2014 book, Not My Father's Son. The new memoir, Baggage, is a sort of sequel. It's the story of recovery, of coming to America, of having a fine old time.
Professionally, he's led a charmed life. When students ask him what it's like to be a struggling actor, he has no idea, he says. He started doing film, television and theatre work before he left drama school and he's never been out of work since.
"The first movie I made in America was a Hollywood studio picture," he says. "The first show I did on Broadway was Cabaret, when I won the Tony." More recently, he started giving concerts. "The first one was at the Lincoln Center," he says. Then he played Sydney Opera House. "So it's just balls out, you know what I mean? We're going to go down in flames."
I thought you felt you weren't really a singer. "I've got much better at it," he says. "It's about vulnerability and commitment. I did this thing last week where I sang at the opening of a watch store." He looks up from his soup and adds, "It was Fashion Week."
Cumming was taken to the watch shop in a vintage Rolls-Royce. Then everyone was ferried back, by Rolls, to a concert hall for dinner where he was required to sing three songs and tell watch-related stories. The organisers called the day before the gig to ask if he'd mind doing Willkommen, the opening number from Cabaret. He's been getting the same request for 20 years, he says. " 'Hey, wouldn't it be funny if you came on and sang Willkommen?' I go, 'Maybe for you. But I never want to sing that song again.'" He doesn't mind it in the musical so much, but to sing it anywhere else "would be like someone who is on a TV show singing the theme tune, you know what I mean?"
He said if they wanted Willkommen it would cost them a lot more money. How much?
"We'd have to get into, like, six figures."
There must be something about that show that appeals to New Yorkers. When the city was locked down last March and we were all shut up in our apartments, I found myself playing the main number from Cabaret to my kids, the one that opens with, "What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play."
Cumming says, "Isn't that funny? You needed that passion, I suppose. It's expressed passion. The trouble is, that song, it's sort of [seen as] this big anthem of life, but it's not. It's actually a song someone sings after they've had an abortion and they're basically saying, 'I'm going to drug myself till I'm f***ing dead.'"
Yes, I'd forgotten this. My children were a little puzzled too. There's a whole section about the singer's friend, Elsie, who dies of drink and drugs in a room in Chelsea, and her determination that "when I go, I'm going like Elsie". But it has something of the spirit of New York in it.
"I really like that meaning," Cumming says. "I actually think it's a great thing to make that decision, that this is how I'm going to f***ing go. Like, I think if I reach 80, I'm going to try heroin."
They do say you can manage a heroin addiction if you have enough money.
"Oh, I know, there are people who do it, who've done it for years," Cumming says. "I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in what it feels like. I don't want to do it all the time."
I ask if he's thinking about that description of heroin in Trainspotting: "Take the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it."
"Yeah," he says. "I'd like to give it a go."
Before he got to New York, Cumming had been leading a frantic life in London. He was married to an actress and they tried desperately to have children. The marriage ended as Cumming suffered a nervous breakdown, triggered by the "toxic tendrils of my childhood", he says. She said she didn't believe the stories about his father's abuse and "at that time I had to be believed".
He doesn't blame her now. "The world was a different place," he says. "Also, I think especially during Covid, the idea of checking in with someone and their mental health is one of the positive sides of this awful situation. The other is good lighting. People have found that lighting and everyone's got a ring light. Thank f***."
He was Hamlet by night in the West End while all this was going on. Geri Halliwell, the future Spice Girl, saw him as the Danish prince a few days after the death of her own father and his performance "connected with her … in her bereaved state", he says. This apparently led her to insist, during the casting for Spice World: the Movie, that Cumming be chosen for the role of the documentary maker in the film.
Straight after Ginger Spice, he was working with Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut.
"You're not American," Kubrick complained, when he said hello on set. "You were American on the tapes."
Cumming's scene was to be a few minutes long and he'd been waiting months to shoot it. Exasperated, he said, "Yeah, that's because I'm an actor, Stanley." Tom Cruise, standing beside Kubrick, awkwardly cleared his throat, but, "I thought I caught the hint of a smile beneath Stanley's bushy beard."
They got on well after that. Cumming played a hotel clerk, flirting outrageously with Cruise. Cumming kept thinking he had gone too far; Kubrick kept insisting that he go further. The director asked him to stay longer, to keep shooting this small scene, but he had another commitment.
"I would have been there for weeks," Cumming says. "Partly I think because he just really enjoyed it … Imagine what it would have been like if we'd gone any further. Tom Cruise would have been propelled off the screen by my superhero queen energy."
He did not think that Cruise was gay while flirting strenuously with him on set.
"He was married to Nicole [Kidman]. He'd talk so fondly and lovingly of her," he says. "And … he came to a party at my flat."
This was after Cumming arrived in New York, with Cabaret. "I ran into them somewhere," he says. "I said, 'Oh, what are you doing for New Year?' And they're like, 'We're not sure. What are you doing?' " He was having a party, naturally. "So then they turned up," he says. Cruise and Kidman? "Yeah! Making out in my living room."
His life by then was full of encounters like this. Cabaret was causing a sensation. At the time it was overwhelming. Each night after the performance, he would cry in the shower while various national treasures knocked on the door of his dressing room, hoping to meet the coming man. "What's he doing in there?" Whoopi Goldberg shouted. "I want to meet this guy." Lauren Bacall caught him dripping wet, wrapped only in a towel. "You," she exclaimed, "are a sensation and a killer."
He became friends with Liza Minnelli; he shot Titus in Rome with Jessica Lange. Lying naked on top of her to shoot a post-coital scene, Cumming as a Roman emperor, Lange as queen of the Goths, Cumming had to hold one of her breasts. "I don't know what you're talking about, Jess," he said. "You have fantastic boobs." They had a "naughty, flirty relationship", though reading this, I wondered if actors could work that way now with all the changes wrought by the #MeToo movement.
"I wonder now if I would say that," he replies. "I don't know. It's been a while since I saw girls' boobs at work. But … people in those moments need to be bolstered and feel supported." Now there would be an intimacy coach advising them on their contact, he says.
Just before the pandemic he was on stage in Daddy, by Jeremy O. Harris, playing an art dealer who has an affair with a young black artist. In one scene, the younger man "was on this chair and I was standing. We were both naked and I'm saying dirty things to him," Cumming says. The intimacy coach said, " 'I just want you to know that your penis grazed his shoulder.' I go, 'Did it?' And she goes, 'Yes. If you could just not have that.'" She asked that he "open out a bit more", avoiding the shoulder-grazing but giving the audience more of an eyeful. "I was thinking, 'We're about to have sex in this thing.' I found it crazy.
"It's very necessary, of course, to reassess all these things, but I find it hilarious. We haven't quite got it right … #MeToo and all that stuff, the whole notion of consent and how you manoeuvre these things in this new world, of touching someone's shoulder with your penis – we were just working all that out and then Covid came along."
In that play, particularly, there was a lot going on, he says. "Black queerness is a minefield. I mean, any queerness is a minefield. But I think what's interesting is that in some way, in same-sex relationships or male/male relationships, the idea of consent is much more present in the discussion about sexuality. Because there are rigid rules about who does what in gay sex. You're top or you're bottom, all that stuff, which I hate. But you've discussed these things early on …"
More broadly, he noticed, when he went back for a second run of Cabaret from 2014 to 2015, that people were no longer obsessed with the sexuality of the show.
No one asked about his nipples? "They were mentioned," he says. "Actually, we didn't put glitter on them this time. They were rouged but we didn't put the glitter. The armpit hair still got a mention, but it wasn't [the focus]."
Cumming is happily married now to Grant Shaffer, an illustrator. He met Shaffer after having a short relationship with Shaffer's friend, who is also called Grant and who officiated at their wedding. Cumming says he is still friendly with all but one of his former partners. "I think it's more common in non-straight relationships," he says.
The weekend before our meeting he threw a party at his place in the Catskills, attended by quite a few old flames. "People that you have intimate things with, it's nice that they're still in your life," he says.
He once longed to have children. "For years I had this fantasy that one of the girls I'd shagged in my youth had had a child," he says. "Aged 18, this fully formed person comes … Now I'm very glad I don't have children. I got older. I got content. I stopped feeling that my worth had to be replicated."
He starts to talk about Tommy's Tale, his 2002 novel, which was about this longing for children and what you can do about that feeling if you are a man who is "not in a relationship that can provide that, or you don't want to be in a relationship necessarily".
Does he mean that thing E.M. Forster wrote – that he'd rather leave behind an idea than a child? He pulls back one of his sleeves, revealing the words "Only connect" tattooed on the inside of his forearm. I look at him blankly.
"That's from Howards End," he says. "It's got this whole thing about it … For him it was about connecting your desire to the life you lead and, of course, he was never able to do that. And so that's what I find fascinating – to make sure that your desire is reflected in the way you live your life."
I think Cumming is managing it. At his house in the Catskills he has installed a swimming pool and an enormous treehouse.
"We just got electricity put into it this last week," he says.
And as we finish up, the proprietor of the restaurant brings him dessert on the house.
"I love your work," she says.
We step outside into the afternoon. "Hey, it's you," shouts a man leaning against a door. "The actor." "Hello," Cumming says.
"Hey, can we do a picture?"
"Oh no, sorry. I've got to go."
"Oh please. You're my favourite actor."
"Thank you," Cumming shouts over his shoulder. "You have to keep moving," he says.
We stop at the next corner and a genial middle-aged man coming down the street smiles at him and says, "You know, this is my corner." "Oh, it's our corner," says Cumming.
He shows me pictures of Club Cumming on his phone, recounting the stories behind each one. Once, before the pandemic, he announced from the stage that, " 'Now, for the next 10 minutes, you can snog anyone you'd like in this room, and it's absolutely fine. And it's a guilt-free and shame-free zone.' And people just snogged each other. Things like that, you just have to guide people." This was back when he was a sex symbol. "It was a time when I was snogging a lot," he says.
After he won a Tony for Cabaret, he and a friend had a contest to see how many people they could snog that night. "And I was merciless," Cumming says. "I would go up to people and say, 'Can I make out with you? I won a Tony tonight.' They'd be like, 'Sure.' I'd be like, 'Another one.' And there was one who said, 'I'm actually married.' " I expect when you get past 10, it becomes a little wearying. "I like snogging," Cumming says. He thinks he got to about 15. "It was a competition."
The production company had installed him in a swanky building that was home to various famous musicians. Cumming had asked the estate agent if it was true that Bjork lived there. "He went, 'The Eskimo singer? Yeah.' "
The morning after the night before, he woke to the bell. "It was my neighbour, Frankie Knuckles, the legendary D.J. who invented house music," he says. "And he went, 'Congratulations, Alan.' And he gave me this big bottle of Champagne. I was like, 'Oh my God, Frankie, thank you so much.' I was in my knickers and holding this bottle of Champagne and I just loved that. He was the first person I saw the next day. In a way that sort of started my life," he says. "It was the new dawn."
Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, by Alan Cumming (HarperCollins, $28) is published October 28.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London