FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... ALAN CUMMING

The polymathic actor/television host/writer/singer/activist ... Pollyanna if they were more, well, 'poly-' .... opens a West End London stand this week for his "Alan Cumming is Not Acting His Age"

(Above: A spread for the recent PHOTOBOOK shoot of Cumming by Mike Ruiz. Styling by Alison Hernon. Left: outfit by Clara Son. Right: Outfit by Études)

This past week Season Two of The Traitors hosted by Alan Cumming premiered on Peacock in America. Cumming also opens at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for a two-night stand this week of his show Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age. I have interviewed the deeply talented Cumming a couple of times - once for the cover of the magazine I created and edited out in San Francisco, FourTwoNine and most recently for the cover of The Mountains, the great upstate New York magazine edited by Richard Perez-Feria and published by Alan Katz. I adore the Alan. As is the case when you interview someone as I did Cumming back in September over a Zoom call - especially someone who has become a heightened acquaintance in the way folks find to be sincerely friendly without really being friends within the world of celebrity that can so often be transactional yet not always depends on backs being scratched but can also mean shoulders being empathetically patted - there are parts of conversations that don’t make it into the arc of the narratives being carved out for the stories being told for magazine covers which depend on word-counts and the crafting of a crafty kind of intimacy. Alan and The Mountains gave me permission to craft, in turn, this latest installment of my FIVE QUESTIONS FOR … series with things that didn’t make it into our latest cover story.

(Above: Cover photo by Mike Ruiz.)

(Above: During our photo shoot with photographer Bjorn Iooss and stylist Moses Moreno for FourTwoNine)

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the opening of The Mountains story:

“Cumming, a sweetheart of a man, and Grant Shaffer, his sweetheart of a husband, have a home in the western Catskills where they retreat when they are craving privacy, which is itself a creatively camp endeavor in their shared life. In fact, Alan Cumming and that other mountain lover, Dolly Parton, have managed to maintain a sweetheart swagger that so many stars lose when their stance in the show business world enlarges to a loping lack of grace as they grub about for more and more success and power. Dolly has certainly been a mountainous version of America’s sweetheart for decades now and I’d audaciously add ‘America’s sweetheart’ to that earlier litany of public roles in Cumming’s life. The more conventional versions over the years have been curated from the ranks of Julia Roberts and June Allyson and Jennifer Aniston and Doris Day and Tom Hanks and Debbie Reynolds and Timothée Chalamet and Meg Ryan and Mary Tyler Moore and Taylor Swift. America’s first sweetheart was Mary Pickford who was born in Canada and was known as the ‘girl with the curls.’ Cumming was born in Scotland and because of his anti-circumcision activism is known as the guy with the foreskin.

“Too audacious? I don’t think so. Alan Cumming has naturalized audacity in the same way he has become a naturalized American citizen—with equal measures of panache and knowing and a grin-laden likability. He’s grown from the Emcee in Cabaret and Eli Gold in The Good Wife and its sequel The Good Fight to a silver-tongued éminence grise of downtown Manhattan and Upstate New York who emanates both a homey and homie openhearted welcome to those who need to feel as if they truly are. There’s diplomacy in his crossover appeal, a directness and empathy that he learned at his own knee when he was a boy navigating the wilds of Scotland and the wilder violent moods of an alcoholic father. A survivor’s sagacity limns his more impish impulses that give them a wrinkle of wryness, even a twinkle of it. He’s the quick-witted Puck, Oberon’s fairy henchman, if they—which I think of as Puck’s pronoun—had steeped themself in a kind of humane stoicism along with their choice bits of poetic mischievousness. It’s an interesting combination, the fairly humane affixing itself to a fairy’s humor, and really rather, well, OK, becoming.”

Here are five questions that didn’t make it into the story.

QUESTION ONE

Do you still find joy in your work?

I absolutely do.  I just did this four-part series for Channel 4 about the Royal Scotsman Train. It’s this amazing train you can go on and visit all these places in Scotland. It has four different routes. It’s sort of like Murder on the Orient Express without the murder. It’s this beautiful train on which they cook all your food for you and they bring you drinks. There was even a Chanel spa onboard. It’s just so swanky. I did this little four-part travelogue thing about it. It was such fun. And I’m doing this show for the Discovery Channel UK [also on the Really channel] called Alan Cumming’s Paradise Homes. I go around and meet these people who have just built their dream homes in all these incredible places - Sicily and Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Normandy and places like that.

Design and architecture and aesthetics are so subjective. Sometimes one person’s dream can be another person’s nightmare. Money can cause some to become more vulgar and not more tasteful. I can imagine a host of such a show giving a bit of side-eye at times to the camera.

They’re mostly great. I also have to maintain my own dignity and perspective. Honestly, there were ones I didn’t like. But I came to realize that the success of a home is based on how happy and content the people are who live in it .  That was an interesting lesson to learn from it: it’s not my taste, but these people love it.

Oh … and on my last day of the train documentary show, I did this thing called “wild swimming,” which is what they call just “swimming” in Scotland now.  Because it’s so cold, they call it “wild swimming.” So you jump in and it gets you all going. I did zip lining.  I also did canoeing in this place in the west of Scotland.  I thought: How lucky am I? I love doing things like that: foraging for little things and new things with these outdoor action people.

QUESTION TWO

What is your take on the Hamptons since we’re talking about places in the world and escapes and dream homes - and … well … water?

I have always thought of the Hamptons like being at a party with all the people you don’t want to be at a party with in New York.

There is a need for a kind of geographic affirmation of some sort that rich people seem to have that wealth can’t will away. We’re all tribal, I guess - especially those with wealth and fame. We all need to be affirmed and finds ways to be so.

I don’t even want to be in a town when I go to my place upstate. I want to be away from everybody. I love to bring my friends up from New York and really spend time with them at my place. You’re not at a bar or a restaurant where it’s noisy. You have real time to cook together and do things in the garden. Just really hang out for an extended period of time. That is why I value my place upstate in New York - to be able to take everyone away from the normal slings and arrows of life and have a little place where you can really get away and check in with each other. I’m a bit of a camp director. But it’s also a Scottish thing, that hospitable impulse. I want to make sure you have a good time. I always ask my guests how they slept because I have found that people sleep so deeply up there and have such crazy dreams.

QUESTION THREE

Your father was a forester and you grew up on an estate surrounded by woods and forests. There are such bad memories with your abusive and alcoholic father but he also seems to have instilled in you a love of nature. Is that a good thing about your relationship with him that remains?

I worked, you know, when I was a little boy and a teenager on the estate where I grew up. So I do recognize that I know things by osmosis maybe - I gleaned things - about plants and about the forest and things like that. For many years, I did push that away. But now I kind of enjoy it again. In the past I used to have real difficulty when I was doing things in the garden or any sort of manual things, things that my father would have sort of made me do which I would be ill-prepared to do.

I remember a story about his ordering you to mow the grass at night.

Yeah, mowing the grass at night - stuff you couldn’t possibly achieve and then he’d attack me for not being able to do it. It was a terrible sort of cycle of you knew what was going to happen. Very abusive. For many, many years of my life I couldn’t have someone look at … ah … like if my husband, Grant, came out and I was doing something in the garden and he was just, you know, standing there I’d have to stop and say I can’t go on if you’re looking at me. It was this thing about being watched while doing things like that and my being so self-conscious about it. It all had to do with my father. So now I am able to do that more. I enjoy more puttering around and doing those things and making little stone paths and cutting things down. I enjoy all that which I kind of thought I hated because I associated it with the negative and being hit. That’s been a great thing to claim all that and to make it my own.

All the things that I enjoyed about growing up and all the things I enjoyed about nature and being away from everybody and the land and all that, I’ve got all that back. Even marching around and chopping things down. I have that on my own terms now. I own it.

I think all of us who have had difficult childhoods know that it affects our adult selves. But I also think that if we survived our childhoods with any sort of grace - wherever that survival impulse comes from for some of us - that we begin to look back on those childhoods from a different point of view. I don’t know if I’m talking about forgiveness. But I am talking about grace.

Hmmm .. I feel as if my life is so nuts. I travel a lot and have this crazy life and do all these crazy things and have a crazy schedule. Sometimes I do think my life can be bonkers. But I do think I now have a healthy perspective on it. I am quite calm in the center of it.

With your kind of frenzied even peripatetic life, home is finally the stillness you carry within.

Absolutely. That’s why I feel I have achieved what I have achieved with that place upstate.

A manifested stillness.

Yes. I now can look back on my childhood and have so much compassion for my little self. And yet it doesn’t get any easier. Because the more calm and centered you are and the more you understand people and forgive things because you do have to move on, it all makes me marvel at how insane my childhood was. How absolutely insane it was when you have a parent who actually seems to get pleasure from hurting you. It’s just such a big thing to come to terms with and to accept - but accept you have to. So the older I get and more content I get and feel at peace with myself and my life, the more insane my childhood seems actually. That is not part of my calmness. I cannot calm that. That doesn’t calm. Maybe in a funny way my mind is doing that because the further you get away from something and the longer you are away from it, the less potent it is. But the more calm and happy I am, the more I feel compassion but also great shock and awe that that was actually what my life was like in those days.

I’m not going to let this concept of grace go because I think you have had a lot of it in your life, not just in order to survive the trauma of your childhood. Or maybe it arrived either inside of you or you were imbued with it from wherever it came from because of that trauma. I think if those of us who survive trauma in our childhoods with any sense of grace then when we get to be our age that matured grace settles into our lives as its own reward. You have the frenetic good luck of a celebrity life, Alan, yes, but you have Grant and your upstate retreat and this stillness within you. Sometimes I find myself being grateful for the trauma because through it grace arrived to save me from it.

It’s so funny, Kevin. I was at Club Cumming last night [in New York’s East Village] and every time I go there so many people say to me, “Oh, thank you so much. It’s such a great feeling to be here. It all feels so kind. And I get a chance to experiment and do my show here.” I actually feel that that is the thing I have been able to do that I really love - to create an environment where you can go and have fun and people are kind to you. And you can meet people that you wouldn’t normally come into contact with and to see how they are just like you and they are not any different. But it is also a place for performers to feel that they are not going to be judged in the usual ways and it is this kind community. That is what Club Cumming has done. I really do think that Club Cumming is my greatest artistic achievement. I think the camp-like compound I’ve created upstate is up there as well.

This sense for you of both finding and creating a tribe - that term again - sounds like an act of service as well as an artistic achievement. During our conversation you have reminded me of a poem called “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. I keep a copy framed on my desk no matter where I am in the world.

I don’t know it.

It’s right here. I’ll read it to you:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

QUESTION FOUR

So when do you feel free?

I feel free in lots of different ways. I feel free having a laugh and being out - like I felt free at Club Cumming last night feeling completely happy and not self-conscious. I also feel free when I travel. I love traveling alone.

You like a long flight, too.

Love! I’m going to India after Christmas and I’m so excited just for the flight. I’m also going on a train trip on one of those swanky old Indian trains. That’s another good thing about getting older. I like to travel more than Grant and I just think, well, I’m going to do that and it’s okay that he’s happier staying home. I think it’s a good thing to understand that you don’t have to do everything all together all your life. You can still be independent and do your own things and actually be happier because of that. I actually really do love traveling alone. I spend so much of my time with lots of people all around me telling me what I have to do on a schedule or pointing me in the right direction. So I do quite like that sort of thing of just being alone.

But feeling free? I feel very free upstate. I arrive there and and I always feel so lucky that this is my house and my camp. I have a little ritual when I arrive. I walk onto the deck and look out at the hills and I look up at the stars. I even love the noise the house makes. The creaking of it. I love that. I feel very free and unencumbered. It really is my sanctuary.

It’s been lovely talking with you, Alan. I love your new blonde hair. You always make me smile. I’m seeing Jake Shears as the Emcee in Cabaret when I get to London. I know you’re friends.

We are. But I haven’t spoken to him about it yet. I think he’ll be great. A friend of mine is going to be in the New York version they’re bringing over. I told them, “I never want to see Cabaret again.” [Note: After this Zoom call, I did see Shears in Cabaret and he was brilliant, the best Emcee I’ve seen in an array of them since I saw Cumming cauterize the role with his own imprint when he starred with Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles in the 1998 New York production at the then Henry Miller Theatre - now the Stephen Sondheim - which had been the old Xenon disco where I had danced the nights away in my own “Emcee” days in the late 1970s and early 1980s.]

QUESTION FIVE

If they ever I ever do yet another production of Cabaret and gender-blind cast it, would you consider playing Fräulein Schneider?

I would love to play Fräulein Schneider. Someone asked me if in another ten years I’d play the Emcee again? I said I’d be 69. That would not be pleasant. Getting harnessed up and all those straps around my old-man waist. But I would love to play Fräulein Schneider.

She has the best songs in the show. Put them in your act - although since they were originally written for Lotte Lenya they are far from sappy. [Cumming toured in a show titled Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs.]

I have a new show now. It’s titled Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age and is about some of the things we’ve been talking about. I think we get so many mixed messages about aging so the show is about not letting other people tell you how to live your life. What is age appropriate and who gets to say that? Some people are old when they’re 22. And some people are youthful when they are 90. I think it is about your spirit and you should embrace your own spirit. Do what you want to do. But don’t live your life especially because people tell you that you should be doing it in a certain way and letting them tell you, “Well, you’re too old for that.” Why? Who says? Who are these people?

And then I’m going to do a residence at Yaddo where I am going to develop and new show I’m calling Alan Cumming Uncut.

Yaddo? Wow. That’s so literary. Eudora Welty had a residence there and Carson McCullers and Truman Capote and James Baldwin and Philip Roth and Hannah Arendt and …

Me.