A LETTER FROM LONDON: 2/21/25

A FIRE, A FILM, FESTEN, AND ANOTHER FIVE DAYS IN A CITY SETTLED BY FREUDIANS (A FAMILY OF THEM)

DAY ONE: SUNDAY

I have been in London since January 1st when, as I’ve written here before, I was stopped at Heathrow and taken to a holding area and questioned - interrogated really - about why I was staying for three months. I guess I looked sketchy. I had never had a problem before - well, except for my passport never scanning in that quick way of walking into a country through those turnstiles and scanning machines. I always have to go talk to a guard at a desk to get my passport stamped. This time the guard thought I was suspect. Or maybe she had a quota to fill. There were two other people in the holding area who had been culled from those of us entering the country, a young man from Lebanon who was married to a British woman and a young Asian woman whose story I didn’t get because she was so silently teary, wan, worn out it seemed from weeping so that being teary was all that she had left in her. The young man was neither silent nor teary. He was pissed and making it known since he’d been there for four hours without anyone telling him why. Me? I said the Serenity Prayer a lot and surrendered to my not being able to control anything at a place called “Passport Control” except for my reaction to the situation in which I unexpectedly had found myself.

During my “interview,” the guard made me pull up my bank account and show her how much money I had in it. She also demanded to know my medical history although I left out my being HIV positive not only because I sensed it might be a red flag of some sort - there we were, an enraged Arab, a weepy Asian, and a gay HIV positive American sensing and surrendering and trying not to be too much of a sissy - but also because I believed sincerely - believe it still - it was not any of her business even though I am open about it in every other area of my life, even a Substack column. I also thought this: all she has to do is conduct an internet search about me and it would quickly come up. I wasn’t lying. I was just editing - which I should probably do with a keener eye in regard to these columns that can demand themselves more of your time than you might have in your own lives.

The times I freely and unashamedly let people know that I am HIV positive are however my choices, as is this one. But anytime I am in a told-to situation I calmly buck at feeling as if I am in a totalitarian one even though in recovery we are, yes, told to do what we are told and do the work. More important however, I have learned in recovery that to surrender is to do so within a new paradigm for your life and is not about surrendering in the old construct of fueling officiousness even from an official tasked with making demands. I felt targeted enough, but not as targeted as the young man and woman there with me. After an hour or so of being asked a series of questions, the guard told me that I was to be questioned next by her superior officer. “When is that going to happen?” I asked. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. I kept summoning serenity as best I could. In about fifteen minutes she returned. “Follow me,” she told me. I obeyed and we ended up back at her desk where she stamped my passport. “Where am I supposed to go next?” I asked. She grudgingly - but with a performative smile that was appreciated - told me that I was instead now free to enter and head to the baggage claim. I thanked her for allowing me in but assumed she had been overruled by the person she thought was going to interview me.

It’s been six weeks or so since that night upon my arrival in London and then Trump’s subsequent inauguration and his egregious and cruel and fascistic actions as president so it would make even more sense now that an American would be made to feel unwelcome over here - especially during this week when Trump has sided with Putin and Russia against Ukraine and Europe and our longtime allies, including dear old England for which I harbor such heartfelt affection, even a kind of love by now. Trump is making America a pariah state within the free world. On Sunday I was taking a long walk when I was thinking about some of this but I thought mostly about that young man from Lebanon who was letting the passport control officials know how he felt about it all and that teary silent young Asian woman. We weren’t being shunned exactly, but being shunted aside in order to be inspected, judged, in order for it to be decided if, in fact, an official shunning would be in order. I have fought that feeling of being a little Mississippi sissy in danger of being shunned by some greater world all my life so for it to feel so official finally left me rather shaken on my train ride into London that night from Heathrow. But I am left more deeply with the lingering thoughts of those two young people who remained to linger in that holding area as I was set free from it. I hope they are okay and found their ways home.

My home as a pilgrim is finding my way to mine without ever really reaching it. Sometimes I am now stopped in that pilgrimage to justify it in less poetic terms and forced to engage in the back and forth of that justification, the badinage of bureaucratese. But there was also prayer that night at Heathrow. A search for serenity. And the empathy that I still carry with me for that young man and young woman who were held in that area where folks like us are held to explain to the guardians of the world’s gates our living our lives in such a gated world that demands from us such explanations. I have worked on having better boundaries in my life so I understand when countries work on that same issue. And all the gods and goddesses know, God knows, that I still long sometimes to be held. Just not like that.

I continued to find my way to Kilburn on my late Sunday afternoon meander with all this on my mind after having left the musical Mean Girls during its interval at its matinee. I wrote about that in my little exegesis on fame as an introduction to the last A POEM FOR A SUNDAY that I sent out to our Paid Subscriber community. My route when I walk “into town” from Kilburn or back toward it after having been in the West End or Soho or Covent Garden is along Regent Street and strolling around Marylebone and Little Venice and Maida Vale. Walking in either direction, I usually stop off at the Chiltern Firehouse, the hotel owned by my old friend Andre Balasz, in order to take a piss in its downstairs men’s toilet where an audio book is always being read over its sound system instead of any sort of music being played overhead. A nice, singular touch. When I went to stop on Sunday I took the photo above of another person standing guard and this fence having been put up because I was shocked to see that the hotel and restaurant were closed. I was about to switch up the roles and ask the guard some pertinent questions but then looked up at the smoky exterior and broken windows in several of the rooms and realized there had been a fire. I had not heard the news. I was heartbroken for Andre and all the many members of his staff who were now out of work . It was the day of the BAFTAs and Netflix had planned to have its party here. Chiltern Firehouse was - shit: was - that kind of place. Full of celebrities and celebrity-adjacents like me who took a piss there because it felt like a welcoming place to stop in a do so because we have spent our careers taking the piss, as they say here, out of celebrities. I searched the internet when I spotted the hotel’s shuttering and found out some facts. The fire started from falling wood from a pizza oven that spread throughout the upper floors through the hotel’s duct system. “Around 125 firefighters from stations across Euston, Soho, Paddington, West Hampstead, Kensington, and Chelsea were sent to the scene," I read at the local news site, Ham&High. “A drone team and two 32-metre turntable ladders from Paddington and Soho Fire Stations were used to help tackle the fire from above. Around 100 people evacuated the building, with no reports of injuries.” It all happened on Valentine’s Day. There was an awful poetry to this hotel, which had been a firehouse built in the 1889, being damaged by such a fire. Andre hopes to reopen the hotel within the coming year.

(I found this photo of Andre and me over on Facebook where I no longer post except for links to this column. It was from a BAFTA party from last year. This is what I wrote when I posted it: “I had only been at the Charles Finch/Chanel BAFTA party a few moments last night when I saw my old friend Andre Balazs who owns the Chiltern Firehouse hotel here, among his many other real estate ventures. We've known each closer to 40 years than 30. He pulled up my info in his phone and we both realized that I have had the same cell phone and AOL email for a lot of those decades. I told Andre - not joking - that I always stop into the Chiltern to use its bathroom on my long walks from Kilburn through Marylebone to Covent Garden. We'd been talking a bit when the coolest young couple in the place came up to say hello, Charlotte and Jack, whom I instantly liked but had no idea to whom I was talking. We laughed a lot. She obviously adores Andre. ‘So who were they?’ I asked him when they headed off into the night. Andre has been like a godfather-like figure in her life since she was a teenager. Her last name is Freud and she is the daughter of Matthew when he was married to her mother, Elizabeth Murdoch. Yep. She's the granddaughter of Rupert Murdoch and the great-great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. That's a lot to keep in genetic balance. I loved her tattoos. And I've always had a soft spot in my then young heart and now my old one for Andre whom I've known since I was - gulp - 30 which is still older than Charlotte and her friend Jack are now.)

(More recently I met Charlotte Freud’s half-brother Jonah, here with his coworker Sophie. This is one of the photos I posted here at Notes when meeting them. Everything connects. I wrote: “Stopped into Reference Point at 2 Arundel Street off the Strand today, the keenly curated book store for cool bibliophiles or certainly young ones. There were tribes of them scattered about the place today. I first discovered the place when Substack chose it as the site to give a party for its London writers. Here with Sophie Dawson and Jonah Freud who run things and set the cool standard.”)

When I got home on Sunday, I settled in to watch the BAFTAs which are rather sweet and quaint compared to the Oscars and remind me that London - as classy and class-conscious as it is - is also a small town. I always feel like I’m back at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, at its yearly drama department awards ceremony when I watch the BAFTAs or the Olivier Awards. But maybe that is another reason why London feels so much like home; it is a better version of what home initially was for me. But there was another everything-connects moment watching the BAFTAs that did upset me a bit. When I initially posted in a previous column about my being stopped at Heathrow it was as an introductory bit that led to my writing about my HIV meds problem being solved here by the Soho clinic offering to become my main point of HIV care. I had not asked for it because I didn’t even know it was possible. I was both shocked and exceedingly grateful for the law passed here that enables such a clinic to offer such a thing to me as a cutout from any other services offered from the NHS.

When I posted an excerpt on Facebook in order to link to that previous column, I was attacked with both barrels blazing from a “Georgina L. Chapman” who accused me of being a freeloader and got quite nasty about it all and threatened to report me to the authorities regarding my not only wearing out my welcome, but overstaying my time here without a visa and without “her” actually knowing my travel retinue. It was one of those long rabbit-hole threads when someone goes on the attack against you on Facebook. Georgina Chapman was married to Harvey Weinstein and is a fashion designer with her own label known as Marchesa. It dawned on me that this “Georgina” attacking me was tarnishing that brand with such an outpouring of bile toward me. The language “she” was using also sounded alarmingly like a cyber stalker of mine who hides behind fake profiles. In one of my final responses, I wrote something like that and within moments the thread had been deleted as had the profile when I went to block it. But a brand new “Georgina L. Chapman” profile had been created and gone up within the subsequent moments of that attack and those deletions.

I no longer post on Facebook except for those links to this column because of Mark Zuckerberg’s using Meta to go full MAGA. But such an attack and engaging in it down that rabbit-hole reminded me of another reason not to be on Facebook. My life has been free of such rabbit holes and attacks since I stopped posting there. So in some warped way, I was grateful to be targeted like that. It confirmed I’d made the right choice to cease my posting there other than those links.

Georgina now dates Adrien Brody. She was sitting with him at the BAFTAs. I’m glad he won. But when I saw her sitting there it reminded me of that night she - or more precisely “Georgina” - went on that attack and I felt once again I was on that train from Heathrow wondering if London were really my home base in this world now getting nastier by the moment. I decided it still is. But like all homes, it’s complicated. Maybe I need to find a Freudian and talk it all out.

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DAY TWO: MONDAY

There is a Monday afternoon screening of a classic movie at Regent Street Cinema each week. I wanted to catch the one this week, My Sister Eileen, which I have never seen. It is an alternative musical based on the play of the same name. Wonderful Town is the other with a score and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Comden & Green. Harry Cohn from Columbia wanted to buy the rights to that one but thought they were too expensive. So he hired Jule Styne and Leo Robin to write another score and made another musical version. It not only has Bob Fosse and Jack Lemmon and Janet Leigh in it, but also Betty Garrett, an actress who was blacklisted along with her husband Larry Parks. I have always been fascinated by her ever since she played Archie Bunker’s liberal neighbor on All in the Family and Laverne and Shirley’s landlady on their show with the same name. I once interviewed Lloyd Bridges and his wife Dorothy at their Westwood home when I was doing a cover story for Vanity Fair on their son, Jeff. I adored all of them but I especially have such lovely memories of that afternoon having coffee and cake and reminiscing with Lloyd and Dorothy who told me that their best friends were Betty and Larry and that Lloyd had even been the Best Man at their wedding before they were all blacklisted. Larry and Lloyd ended up being cooperative witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee but Larry used his time away from show business to go into the construction business and build apartment houses from which he and Betty - a landlady in real life - became wealthy. Dorothy told me that giving birth to Jeff was like falling down an up escalator. I’ve never forgotten that either. But the story on Jeff never ran because the cover photos that Helmut Newton took of him in western garb were not up to then editor-in-chief Tina Brown’s liking. Jeff wasn’t in the best physical movie-star shape and looked a bit too soft and pudgy if I recall that correctly. So Tina put the kibosh on the cover. I remember liking what I wrote but lost my copy of it. I always felt guilty that Jeff and Lloyd and Dorothy didn’t get to read it. The dude abides - but that cover story no longer does.

Such memories surface at the oddest moments. (“Memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history,” wrote Annie Ernaux.) I was waiting in line to buy the ticket to My Sister Eileen on Monday afternoon and had plenty of time to remember them as I looked around at all the elderly folks who wanted to see it along with me and the ones in line who were holding it up for various reasons. There were only three people there in front of me but after about 20 minutes and hearing the film start inside, I gave up and left in a bit of a huff. It is a pet peeve of mine never to enter a cinema after a film has started. So I took another of my long walks around London to calm down and realized it was, in fact, realizing that I belong in that elderly audience that had upset me more than entering a cinema late. So I then thought more about the elderly Lloyd and Dorothy and how lovely they were that afternoon in Westwood - so full of joy and life and memories and even poetic takes on it all - - and how Jeff is just as cool as he always was now that he is even older than they were then. Maybe even cooler having survived cancer and the vagaries of an actor’s long career. I'll never be as lovely and full of joy as Dorothy and Lloyd were or as cool as Jeff continues to be. But I abide somehow. Abide, I do.

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On Monday night I saw The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It has been adapted by its director Ilene Arbo from the literary memoir, Les Années, by the aforementioned Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Members of its remarkable cast each play one woman in all her iterations throughout her life, and it is one of the smartest and most graceful and challenging theatre experiences I’ve had in a while. I was bowled over by it. It is so challenging that during its abortion scene people are fainting and getting sick - or supposedly so. When I bought my ticket at the box office during a matinee there was a woman lying on the floor of the lobby being attended to. When I saw the production, two members of the audience fell ill or fainted during the abortion scene and the play had to be stopped for about 15 minutes while they were seen about. It seems to happen every night even though when you buy your tickets you are told of this scene and when you attend a performance a printout is handed to you advising you of it. The New York Times has even written an article about this aspect of the production. But the Times didn’t put forward the theory that I have about this. I turned to the person next to me the night we were there when the production was stopped and said, “This all has the whiff of political activism,” I said to him. “I think these are anti-abortion activists. It feels like protests from the old ACT UP days in America.” I still think so. Not enough has been written about this theory. So I’m putting it forth.

Even with that interruption, I highly recommend this production. If you are in London, do not miss it.

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DAY THREE: TUESDAY

(Above: I met my friend Maureen McCarron at my favorite West End cafe, St George on St. Martin’s Lane. She and her fiancé, Paul, had come down from Newcastle where he lives. She was visiting him from Provincetown where we first met around 13 years ago when I washed ashore there with my two dogs, Teddy and Archie (now dead), to rent a tiny little room in a boarding house in the middle of January in order to get sober and begin a life in recovery. Maureen had recently moved there herself from New York, and we bonded. My sister, Karole, who had traveled with me to Ptown that winter to get me settled, sent Maureen two months of my HIV meds a few weeks ago that she, Karole, had picked up for me in November and December before they had gotten too expensive for me this year along with three months of my cholesterol and prostate meds she also picked up. Maureen kindly brought them with her and handed them off. I was deeply grateful. And I was so happy - elated really, I got silently teary myself - when she showed me her new engagement ring.)

(Above: After Maureen and Paul left I ran into Anjana Vasan who is again portraying Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire down the street at the Noel Coward Theatre and for which she rightfully won the Olivier Award. She and the rest of the cast will be taking this production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music where it opens on February 28th. I have seen it five times and Anjana remembered me from my four times seeing it in its original production at the Almeida. There is a kind of humble greatness in her interpretation of Stella, and in her talent as an actor.)

After visiting with Maureen and Paul and Anjana, I headed over to Picturehouse Central to catch an afternoon screening of The Substance. I wrote about it in my last column in my RECIPES & REVIEWS series a couple of days ago. But if you missed it, here is what I wrote after posting the video of my cooking my latest dish for you:

I alluded in the video above to my coming home to cook and to have some dinner after having seen a late matinee of The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and its being the latest bit of incongruity in my life. Because my seeing this bloody film full of wit and fuller still with entrails should have deadened my hunger but I had a deadline to meet for this column, and paying witness and being a writer are finally both halves of the one being that goes into making me the person that I am just as young’un Sue and Jungian Elisabeth are melded themselves in the film but more monstrously so. In fact, The Substance, which satirically redefines the coming-of-age story, is good enough to be passed off as a highfalutin piece of social commentary but it is finally just a monster movie as purposefully risible in its overripe way as those I watched at the Town Theatre in Forest, Mississippi, on a Saturday afternoon at other matinees when I was ripening into my puberty longing to be a bit over-ripened myself as I held the hand of a girl but really wanted to hold the one of a boy named Bobby. I often say now that the only thing I really long for anymore is for someone to hold my hand in a movie. I think that began when I was longing back as a twelve-year-old boy for other boys before desiring sex with them complicated it all. In some ways I have come full circle, as The Substance does in that overripe, overblown, overhead-shot, you’re-shittin’-me, no-you’re-not, okay-I’ll go-with-it ending. I groaned a lot while watching the movie. Laughed unexpectedly a few times. Inspected Dennis Quaid’s enhanced hair which itself was a comment on what the film is commenting upon except within its female constructs, a film for which he serves as the ridiculous villain that is thus not actually villainous unlike Quaid’s hero Trump for whom he campaigned and whose own clownish ridiculousness makes him even more of a villain and more dangerous. Margaret Qualley is quite good in the Elizabeth-Berkley-in-Showgirls role. Demi Moore just might win the Oscar for playing this Elisabeth. Sometimes she looks alarmingly like Caitlyn Jenner, others like Donald Pleasance in the Bond film appropriately titled You Only Live Twice, and finally like a dream that Francis Bacon might be talking to, yep, Carl Jung about before he, Bacon, just decided to chuck all that nonsense and splatter it on a canvas instead. I wouldn’t be upset if Demi won but I’d like to see Fernanda Torres win for I’m Still Here. If Demi does win, she’ll win more for being so herself than for the half of the one role she plays in this.

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DAY FOUR: WEDNESDAY

I spent the morning strolling thought the V&A and then having a lovely lunch with a friend at the Polish Hearth Club around the corner in West Kensington. I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing up that RECIPES & REVIEWS column.

In the evening I headed to the Royal Opera House to see Festen. It has been composed by Mark Anthony-Turnage who wrote, among his many credits, the opera Anna Nicole. The libretto is by another bloke from Newcastle, Lee Hall, who is best known for writing the book for the musical Billy Elliot as well as its screenplay, and the screenplay for Rocketman which is about the life of its own composer, Elton John. Festen is based on the Danish film by the same name. I saw the film. I saw its stage version in 2004 on the West End and on Broadway in 2006. I have always thought it had a hard time keeping its balance between satire and something that O’Neill would have written if he’d been born later. It’s a bit overstuffed like a Danish smørrebrød prepared by a ravenous viking. Or as the Royal Opera House has posted as guidance: “Suitable for ages 16+ The opera contains themes of child sexual abuse, suicide and addiction. There are depictions of racist behaviour, sex and violence. Strong language is used.” The critics have raved about it. I still had mixed feelings after all these years.

DAY FIVE: THURSDAY

I saw the matinee of Kyoto, the Royal Shakespeare Company production now at the Soho Place Theatre. It is a play about climate change set at different world conferences in the recent past and told through its narrator, Don Pearlman, who was the real person placed within them by the big oil companies - known as “The Seven Sisters” whose representatives reminded me of the Weird Sisters from Macbeth - through a fake think tank in order to disrupt each conference with his slyness and cynicism and knowledge of how such conferences filled with ambitious bureaucrats rely on the Machiavellian maneuver in order to be able to navigate them all. Pearlman was a student of such maneuvering by being a reliable steward of Republican politics and being placed within the Bush administration after the Reagan ones to help steer its policies. He is not a good guy but the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson using him to guide us through it all is rather sly and cynical itself. Think Iago as the Stage Manager in a version of Our Town retitled Their Earth. Stephen Daldry and Joe Martin direct it at the clip that’s needed to keep us transfixed. I was. And it is being presented by another exemplary cast, especially Stephen Kunken as Pearlman.

I was also kept rapt during both acts because it is finally a play about language and grammar. So much of the debate is not just about the power of money and politicians and corporate titans and oil oligarchs, but also about the power of words. Indeed, after seeing the play I came home to see this front page from the Financial Times.

Everything - alas - connects.

Onward …