OSCAR WEEKEND

ASHLEY JUDD, PRINCE, JESSICA LANGE, COURTNEY LOVE, NICK DUNNE, JOHN KEATS, AND TOO MUCH SADNESS

(Above: Cuba Gooding, Jr, arriving at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 1997 after winning his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Jerry Maguire. Tom Cruise, sitting next to his producing partner Paula Wagner and me, congratulated him upon his arrival as Jim Carry and Lauren Holly looked on.)

For over a dozen years I would head out to Los Angeles for Oscar weekend for a round of parties culminating with the Vanity Fair one since I worked at the magazine and wrote many of its cover stories focused on folks who found fame out there. I even was Uncle Mame to my three nephews and my niece when they graduated from high school and gave them each a weekend out there with me to attend the parties and experience a bit of my life that I would explain to them was a “Cinderella one. After these few days out here, I go back to cleaning the hearth.” Or, when they would roll their teenage eyes at a fairytale reference used by their fairy uncle trying to be their Fairy Godmother, I’d try to explain to them in the teenage terms that they could better understand by describing it all as just a big high school prom for all of us who didn’t really feel welcome at our own proms when we were their age. Oscar weekend will always be that to me: the revenge of the prom reprobates.

Oh, there were moments over the years I’ll always remember rather fondly when a Cinderellan reverie overtakes me. The moment when Faye Dunaway banged the dinner table I hosted during the ceremony to tell me to shut the fuck up so she could hear the broadcast, her “Do be quiet!” quaking my water glass. Another lower-decibel year when I whisperingly explained to another table mate, Dolly Parton, who the cute guy seated across from us was - Micheal Stipe of R.E.M. - and mentioned their song, “Losing My Religion.” Dolly whispered back, “Bless his heart. I sure hope he finds where he put it,” before later buddying up with Stipe who had the look in his eyes that she was indeed the goddess for whom he’d been looking to put some needed worship back in his life. My asking Prince’s bodyguard at another year’s party if I could speak with him since I’d already been admiring his little ass - Prince’s, not the bodyguard’s. I received permission and Prince offered me a lick of the lollipop he had in his mouth. I declined. The year I took Ashley Judd as my date since she said she wouldn’t come unless she had an escort because the guy she was dating at the time - Michael Bolton - was on tour. I picked her up at the Peninsula Hotel and in the car over we talked Kentucky basketball and her mother’s health since she was then battling Hepatitis C. “Mama’s cured,” Ashley told me. “We’re claiming a miracle.” I thought of that claim when her mother years later committed suicide, no miracle having finally saved her. Another year, I took two rock divas as my dates, Courtney Love and Amanda de Cadenet. I picked them up at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. They had already donned tiaras when I arrived but were still in what I perceived to be their slips. “You guys should get a move on and get dressed,” I told them. “We’re going to be late.” They smiled and Courtney told me, “We are dressed. This is what we’re wearing.” That same night - March 27th, 1994 - Jessica Lange arrived after having won her Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Blue Sky. I had done a recent Vanity Cover story on her and we had bonded a bit. When she got to the party, I gave her a congratulatory hug and in so doing saw my wristwatch and realized it was after midnight. March 28th is my birthday. I was turning in that 30-years-ago moment 38. “I am so happy for you, Jessica,” I told her. “But this is no longer about you. It’s my birthday. Now it’s about me.” She handed me her Oscar. “Here, honey,” she said. “Happy birthday. Carry this around for me a little bit. The thing’s heavy.”

(Above: Tom Ford, my niece Joey Sessums, and me at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.)

Later, after having given her back her Oscar, she came up to Michael J. Fox (to whom I was having a heart-to-heart) and me and asked if we wanted to go over with her to Chasen’s to the Pulp Fiction party. It was going to be Chasen’s closing night as well. So we climbed into her limo with her and her brother, George, and her publicist, Pat Kingsley. Michael took the jump seat on the floor. I sat next to Jessica who put the Oscar between my legs. I remember thinking this should be the most special night of my life sitting in the back of this limo with the woman who just won the Oscar on my birthday, but then I realized that I didn’t really know her and she didn’t really know me and wondered how we had ended up together in that moment. I had to lower the window a bit and get some air because a feeling of sadness was suddenly overwhelming me. It might still be the moment I have felt the saddest in my life. There have been deeper sadnesses - my parents consecutive deaths when I was a child, being of the generation of gay men decimated by deaths from AIDS, other heartbreaks and the way my deeper brokenness has manifested itself over the years - but it was that moment during that Oscar weekend that a coalesced sadness seemed to cosset me more tightly than the cummerbund I had loosened before climbing into the back of that limo. I told a mutual friend recently about that moment and he said that Jessica and I were alike in that regard. “You two hold on to your loneliness,” he said. “You live inside it.”

There was another moment of such lived-inside lonely sadness at an earlier Vanity Fair Oscar party which was then being held at Morton’s. I wrote about it in my second memoir I Left It on the Mountain in its first chapter “The Starfucker.” It involved some advice that the late Nick Dunne once gave me which involved as well a story about Chasen’s. I loved Nick. I miss him. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter.

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"What's wrong, kid," Nick asked.

I shrugged and shook my head at it all. I tried to pretend I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. But the pretense was too much - not the party's but my own. "I was just thinking of something John Keats once wrote in a letter," I told Nick, sounding even more pretentious than I was feeling. Yet Keats has always been a comfort to me. "'Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous,' he wrote, 'who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?' This is a kind of commonplace crowd of the overly famous, but it still holds true, huh. They are each individually lost in a throng of themselves. I know I'm lost in it. I feel like I'm just visiting my own life."

Nick put an arm around me. "Fuck John Keats," he said. "You know Chasen's?" he asked me. "It was the Morton's of its day. Not sure how long it can hang on. So glamorous, yet so homey when Hollywood itself was both of those things. There's a great waiter who's still working over at Chasen's. He's hanging in there. His name is Tommy. Tommy Gallagher. He's a real character. Doesn't take guff from anybody. Much wiser than John Keats. Some of the stars used to come in just so Tommy could take their measure. See Nancy Reagan over there," Nick said, nodding toward the former First Lady who had attended the party that year. "She and I were talking earlier about Chasen's. She and President Reagan loved to dine there. They go way back with the place. She told me that when she was in the hospital having both her children, Tommy sent over food from Chasen's so she wouldn't have to eat that hospital grub. She also told me that Ronnie had even proposed to her there in his favorite booth and that Tommy had overheard their plans to be married at the Little Brown Church in the Valley with Bill Holden as their best man. Nobody else was invited but Bill and his wife - I forget her name. Nancy told me that Tommy never breathed a word to anyone. Never told a soul. Never tipped off the press. And the day of the wedding he came and stood across the street from the church in order to pay his respects. That's who we are - you and I, Kevin - we're Tommy the waiter from Chasen's standing silently across the street all alone. You just have to find a way to feel lucky about that. I've got to get back to Nancy now. She's looking over here. Sometimes we get to cross the street."

He touched my arm.

"Happiness is a choice, kid," he said. "Choose to be happy."

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(Above: Herb Ritts, Courtney Love, me, and Amanda de Cadenet at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.)

I have thought a lot about that piece of advice from Nick as this weekend approaches and I have the vantage point of seeing it not only from London, where I live for most of each year now, but also from this 30-years-later moment. I have not chosen happiness but contentment. I think trying to be happy just gives me another reason to feel as if I’ve failed in my life. I much prefer to have the balance of contentment where happiness and sadness can exist side-by-side - and sometimes even hold hands. I am deeply content this Oscar weekend. Tonight I am going to see principal dancer Alexander Campbell’s farewell performance at the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House in the last performance of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon this season. Francesca Hayward is dancing the title role. Tomorrow I am going to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama to see the student matinee of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and then tomorrow night I head back to the Royal Opera House to see Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. On Sunday afternoon I am attending the last performance of the New York City Ballet’s run at Sadler’s Wells. This Oscar weekend ends not with a Vanity Fair party but a George Balanchine ballet. I had to live through the glamour of my own sadness for all those weekends in Los Angeles to get to the glimmer of contentment that now beckons me each new day here in London. Life itself can be choreographed in such a way if we are lucky enough to learn the letting-go it takes - the surrender - to find its deeper rhythm instead of trying to dance at the prom that still doesn’t want us to be there. I am no longer visiting my life. I am finally just living it. I am claiming that miracle.

Onward.