Vanished Years by Rupert Everett Page A

trigger a couple of times before jumping in the car. As we shot off I looked back and he was still standing there, no longer bathed in radiance. Just a sad little snitch in the long shadows, living comfortably on the edge of a swamp.
    We turned a corner and David said, ‘That was West 110th Street, right?’
    I craned to look at the street sign.
    ‘No, 109th.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ said David and kept on driving.

CHAPTER FIVE
Faint Heart Never Fucked a Pig
    T he NBC deal took a long time to come off. It all began one night at the end of the last century.
    It was a beautiful July evening in 1999, the perfect night for the last great American party, and the day I hit my peak. Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown were launching a new magazine called Talk. It was going to be the most successful magazine the world had ever seen. People still talked – thought – like that in those heady last days of the American Raj.
    Harvey was cinema’s most enigmatic producer, a New York hoodlum, the essence of that town, as tall and wide as its streets, as dangerous too on occasion. In appearance he was like a vast manatee recently emerged from the sea. Dripping and scarred, addicted to cigarettes, with flapping shirt-tails. In short, he was a brilliant slob, larger than life, Hollywood style. He had a round face with shrewd eyes and a flat boxer’s nose. People said he was ugly – he always came up in those Hollywood games that were played during commercial breaks at Oscar parties: who would you rather fuck, Wienstein or Fierstein? – but actually I think he was attractive. He had an enormous energy, agreat voice, and the secret of his charm was that somewhere under that blunt exterior you could still glimpse the face of the ten-year-old Harvey, an erased innocence submerged under the bumpy surface of his moon-shaped head. When he wanted you, as he did me once and never again, his onslaught was irresistible, unbelievable. He made great films and great turkeys. He interfered with every aspect of a film and his terrible tantrums were legendary. In other words, he was exactly the type of character that made it all worthwhile, a throwback to the Hollywood autocracy.
    Tina Brown was his unlikely sidekick in those drunken days, as small and thin as he was tall and wide. She dressed carefully, a Princess of Wales in clumpy shoes, often in white to set off her short blonde hair and her ice-block eyes, and next to her, Harvey looked like a giant old couch that had been left on the street. Tina was perched perfectly on the edge, knees crossed, a journalistic falcon, looking, watching, ready to dive-bomb from a great height at any sign of a scoop.
    Together they were a strange combination, a Vaudeville double act. He pushed the barrel organ, while she held the hoops and we all jumped through. They had the makings of the great business marriage
à la mode
. Tina’s pedigree was faultless. First she had breathed new life into Tatler magazine in England. Then she moved to America and created
Vanity Fair
, and just as that magazine hit its peak she abandoned ship for
The New Yorker
, the jewel in the Condé Nast crown, and made a great success of that. She was vastly intelligent, extremely well read and, along with Anna Wintour, the legendary editor of American
Vogue
, was one of the unlikely British bookends that more or less held the boys’ club of Condé Nast together.
    Those two fascinating figurines, so physically smashable, you would think, were as tough as nails under their china veneers and didn’t seem to care for each other much, giving one another a wide berth. Where one was, the other rarely appeared. Possibly they were the same person. Both women were petite, attractive and frosty with sharp tight voices of extraordinary dialect, peculiar to them and toothers like them (Joan and Jackie Collins, Grace Coddington, and all the other various British dominatrices who threw their lots in with Liberty during the seventies and eighties). They are