So Me (30 page)

Watching people desperately trying to hang on to fame is always depressing, but when I watch someone like Jenny Bond lying in a coffin being trampled by rats in
I’m a Celebrity
, Get Me Out of Here, I realise that fame must have a strange hold over people. When someone asks me if I would ever do a show like that, my stock answer is, ‘Never say never.’ Perhaps being on telly is like a drug and if you aren’t getting a regular fix you’ll do anything, even eat a fish eyeball in public, in order to get your TV high. I’m pleased to report that while working in New York, as I am at the moment, I don’t miss being famous at all. I thought I might, but when my mother visited recently and we went to tourist spots where British and Irish people knew me, I realised that life without the attention is much nicer. I know it is hard to then explain why I’m trying to be successful here in the
States. Having thought about it a great deal, I think it is all about the job, which I still adore. Carrie Fisher has a theory that people in the entertainment industry do their work for free and then get paid to deal with all the other shit that comes with being well known. True, we get paid very well, but as another wise American, Billy Crystal, says when he meets people who want to be rich and famous, it’s best to try being rich first, as you’ll probably find that it pushes most of your buttons.

Please forgive me if this all sounds like I’m moaning about my success – God forbid! I completely understand how fortunate I am to be in the position I am, and for the most part I really enjoy all my encounters with people who like the show. Please feel free to chat if you see me out and about. But perhaps have a little think about what you want to say before you come over. You’d be amazed at the number of people who ask for an autograph and then look puzzled and surprised when I ask them if they have a piece of paper or a pen. One family in Blackpool asked if they could have their photo taken with me. I happily obliged and we huddled together in a smiling group. It took some minutes before I worked out that none of them had a camera. When I pointed this out they all seemed slightly annoyed with me, as if I was the one who had forgotten to bring my camera out with me. The family stood there staring at me, like a fuzzy photograph, perfectly pleasant but not fully developed.

16

Stars and Gripes

F
AMOUS FRIENDS. THOSE TWO WORDS
make about as much sense to me as Fun Run or Japanese Banquet. Although I meet celebrities almost every day as part of my job, I have made actual ‘friends’ with practically none of them. That is not to say that I don’t like them – many of them I am genuinely fond of and indeed would like to hang out with – but to put it in perspective I think I only have the phone numbers for about six celebrities. When I apply to get home insurance they invariably ring me back and ask if I’m ‘the’ Graham Norton? As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, they then go on to ask me if I will be having many celebrities around to my house? It always seems so pathetic when I say ‘No’, that I then go on to assure them that I do have friends, it’s just they aren’t well known. Part of me wants to discuss it. Is Ann Bryson, the woman from the cheese commercials, famous? And why do you want to know anyway? Are you afraid that someone will break into my house and steal Angus Deayton?

Occasionally I am invited to something special where I meet a whole bunch of celebrities. Carrie took me to a Christmas party at Joan Collins’s where I ended up sitting on her bed next to Roger Moore and George Michael. I shared a taxi home with the Queen’s personal piper. As I
dropped him off at Buckingham Palace he turned and said, ‘I’d ask you in, but I need to give them forty-eight hours’ notice.’ I’ve a funny feeling that had they found out that it was me, it would have taken a lot longer than forty-eight hours.

I went to the Beckhams’ for a World Cup party. It was all very glamorous and when Victoria greeted me I bent down to admire the huge diamond she had hanging around her neck. Just then David came over to say hello. I stood up quickly and just blurted out, ‘I’m so sorry. I was just staring at your wife’s tits.’ He smiled – oh, that smile! – and said in his girlish whisper, ‘I don’t mind.’ It was lovely to watch the two of them together that day, obviously in love and with the world at their feet. Sadly, due to the show’s monologue jokes, I think it’ll take even longer to get my next invitation to Beckingham Palace than to the Buckingham one.

The best invitation I’ve ever got, though, arrived one night on the set of
V Graham Norton
. Liza Minnelli was my guest, and although shaky and nervous at first, she slowly thawed out and became the Liza we remembered from before all the weight gain and illness. She had just got engaged to the previously unknown David Gest. Rumours were rife about his sexuality and the nature of their relationship, but what could not be denied was that since she had met him, she had lost wheelbarrows of fat and was planning a return to performing. Liza had come on the show to promote her first series of concerts, which were to be held in the Albert Hall later that month. Like the professional she is, she worked in plugs for her shows over and over again during the interview. Because of this, when she took out an envelope and told
me it contained a very special invitation I simply assumed that it would be free tickets to the Albert Hall. When I ripped open the paper I stared at the card inside. I read it and then read it again. It was an invitation to the most talked-about wedding since Charles and Diana’s. On the show I made a great deal out of how thrilled I was to be invited and of course I would be going, but afterwards I kept asking people if they thought it was serious. A few days later one of David Gest’s assistants called to ask where they should send all the details about the wedding. It was true! I was going to New York to see Liza, the living legend, get married to a boiled egg in sunglasses! I was genuinely thrilled.

There is no denying that it was a star-studded affair, but there is also no denying that tickets weren’t that hard to come by. At the reception I shared a table with Carrie (my guest), Helena Christensen and her boyfriend (she had been the second guest on my show the night Liza invited me), Mel C/Sporty Spice and her date (she had moved tables in the VIP section of a night club to accommodate David and Liza after my show), and Martine McCutcheon, who was the only one at our table to have met the blushing bride more than once. She was a bridesmaid. Anthony Hopkins walked by. There was Mickey Rooney. Joan Collins. Is that Elaine Paige? Thank God Elaine could make it. Alan Cumming, Rosie O’Donnell and of course Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. It was like a very random fancy-dress party. At the reception I think I might have had a little too much to drink again, because at one point I thought it was a really good idea to lean across the table to Mel C and apologise for all the times in my monologues when I’d called her a fat
lesbian. The fact that she didn’t punch me makes me fairly certain that she isn’t one.

I imagine that most people had probably come, like me, to enjoy the bizarre spectacle of the whole event. The church was full to the rafters, everybody craning around to see who was there. The big news was that Whitney Houston had let them down and that Natalie Cole was going to do the singing. Then word reached us that Liza was having to wait because Liz Taylor, who was the maid of honour, was late. Apparently Liz had forgotten her shoes and it was felt that slippers or tennis shoes would be disrespectful. Carrie reported all the latest developments to Tracey Ullman on her mobile phone and, while she got a few disapproving glances, most people were just jealous that they didn’t have the nerve to do the same with their friends.

Suddenly it began. There was a strange sequined pudding – ‘That’s Liz!’ – and a surprisingly tall man looking like the maître d’ from some restaurant with a circus theme – ‘Is that Michael?’ – and then, front and centre, the happy couple. No videotape can properly convey the full horror of watching David Gest in the flesh trying to floss Liza’s teeth with his tongue. Even in the gallery where we were sitting you could hear the strange slurping that sounded like water draining through a plughole that’s partially clogged with soap and pubic hair. However, the biggest shock was that, despite everything, somewhere in the middle of all this I did believe there was a happy couple. I couldn’t begin to explain how that relationship, no matter how briefly, functioned, but there was no denying that in that moment the living legend was happy, truly happy, and the boiled egg with sunglasses was the one making her that way.

A few weeks after the wedding I got a call from David Gest. Would I like to introduce Liza Minnelli at the Royal Albert Hall? Of course the very idea of doing it was terrifying, but I had to say yes. This was Liza’s return to the stage and a bit of showbusiness history. How could I resist being the answer in a really hard Liza Minnelli trivia quiz?

On the opening night I had to go in early to do a soundcheck, and afterwards David told me to go and say hello to Liza. I knocked on her dressing-room door and a quiet voice asked me to come in. Liza was lying on a sofa at the end of the room and I had obviously woken her from a nap. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and as she reached up to kiss me I looked into her huge liquid eyes and was shocked to see how beautiful she was. Many years had passed, but you could still see the scrubbed beauty of the woman who had won the Oscar for
Cabaret
.

Liza was nervous, but she wasn’t the only one. There was a palpable tension in the audience as well as backstage. No one knew if she could do this. Everybody wanted it to be fantastic, but what if it wasn’t? The lights dimmed, the audience yelped with excitement and then I was introduced. People didn’t exactly sigh with disappointment but I’m sure they wanted to. I ran on quickly so that the applause lasted long enough for me to get to the centre of the stage.

‘Yes, like a showbiz version of the Easter story, she’s back!’

The crowd roared their approval and everything was all right. They knew that I was just another fan and I wasn’t trying to make the evening about me.

The welcome Liza herself got was incredible: a solid wall of applause, approval and love. At first her voice was a little tentative, but you could almost see her feeding off the
crowd’s adoration until by the end of the show she was a genuine knockout. She got a spontaneous standing ovation and I slowly made my way backstage to add my congratulations. I stopped off at my dressing room first because I thought I’d wait until David and the VIP guests had paid their homage. About five minutes later I went around to Liza’s door. There was no crowd of people outside. Odd. I knocked.

‘Come in, come in!’

I walked in to find Liza Minnelli all alone sitting at her dressing table, still sweating and wiping the make-up from her eyes. She looked up at me like a child who had just performed in its first nativity play.

‘Oh, baby! Did I do OK?’

‘Yes! Yes, it was brilliant. Simply amazing. Really special.’

‘Really?’

She had just surfed the unconditional wave of love in a sold-out Albert Hall and suddenly I was having to prop her up single-handed. For a second I had a glimpse into how difficult it must be to be Liza Minnelli and what a hard job it must be to be part of her life. No one can compete with that audience, and yet that’s the love everything else must be judged by.

I have seen many big divas respond to an audience over the years – Shirley Bassey, Cher, Dolly, Mariah Carey, Diana Ross – and it never ceases to amaze me how the applause almost literally pumps life into them. Beforehand some of them can be difficult or demanding and get a bad press because of it, but these performers are loved unconditionally by so many people that I suppose it’s only surprising that they don’t behave worse.

Dolly, as I’ve already said, is pure joy and I’ve never met anyone with a bad word to say about her. Shirley was a real coup for us to get and it wasn’t that easy. We had booked her a couple of years before but then unfortunately she sat down to watch an episode of the show. Elton John was the guest and because he is so funny and rude the show was even more outrageous than normal. At one point I gave him a sort of dildo space hopper which was made to look like a football with a big cock sticking out of it. Somewhere in London an elderly lady swathed in taffeta looked on aghast. The booking was cancelled. We tried to explain that I wouldn’t be giving Miss Bassey a cock attached to a football but it was too late – the damage had been done. After many notes and flowers she finally said yes. She turned out to be a great guest, and although I had promised to do nothing rude with her, she seemed only too happy to talk about sex. In the end she is a lady of simple needs – good lighting and Cristal champagne and you’ve got a sunny Shirley.

The day after Diana Ross did the show she personally contacted the office to say how much she had enjoyed it. Great! Was it the comedy bits, the audience, the gifts in her dressing room that she had liked? No. The reason she had felt moved to call was because she thought her skin had looked nice. Whatever.

Mariah Carey was a huge booking for us and her publicity team made sure we knew it. If Jesus himself had agreed to do the show I doubt his PR would have made such a fuss. Of course, as is often the case, once you got past all the haunted skinny women with mobile phones for earrings, the star herself was really quite fun, in her own way. There are legions of stories about how demanding Mariah Carey is,
including one where she demanded a basket of puppies before a concert. I asked her if it was true. She laughed and said, ‘Of course not. What actually happened was . . .’ and she then went on to tell a story about how she had asked for a basket of puppies before a concert. Quite how she failed to see that both stories were exactly the same remains a mystery to me, as are her odd drinking habits. When she requires a drink she simply cocks her head to one side like a puzzled dog and a small army of people run to her side with all sorts of juices and sodas, each bottle with a straw sticking out of it. So far, so mad, but whereas anyone’s natural reaction would be to take the chosen bottle and drink it, Mariah’s hands don’t leave her side. Like a beautiful celebrity gerbil she just suckles at her drink while a patient assistant holds it. God knows how this started, but you can’t blame a baby for not being able to walk if people carry it everywhere. Somebody needs to tell her. Perhaps she’ll read this book?