Cameron and I have more than just our Scottish backgrounds in common. Like me, he can be a wee bit of a control freak, and at a dinner party he held at the priory one weekend, I shamelessly used this trait against him in a prank.
Cameron is a gourmet and he was cooking dinner that evening, so everyone else was assigned a job to help in the process. My role was to pick the vegetables for the salad; Cameron grows his own produce on his farm. As a joke, one of the other guests at the dinner party handed me two baskets. One I filled with good stuff from the vegetable garden, and the other with rotting veg from the nearby compost heap.
It’s important at this point in this story for you to know that early in my career Cameron had given me advice that went something like this. If you want to be a leading man, John, you need to do things leading men do, because if you do otherwise, producers will treat you otherwise.
That afternoon, I walked back into the fully kitted-out kitchen and set the basket filled with wilted lettuce and shrivelled carrots on Cameron’s counter. Now, Cameron has a great sense of humour, but if you don’t get something right that he’s asked you to do, he can really throw a fit. That day, his shouting could easily be heard in the other room.
‘What the fuck is all of this? Haven’t you seen a piece of lettuce before, Barrowman?’
I interrupted him. ‘Cameron, I’m a leading man. I do not know vegetables, and I don’t want to know vegetables,4 and besides, it is beneath me, as a leading man, to pick my own vegetables.’
Laughing, he lobbed the lettuce at me.
Later, at dinner, he sent me into the kitchen to open another bottle of wine.
‘Taste it before you bring it back,’ he called after me.
At that time in my life, I knew nothing about wine, but I could open the bottle, which I did, and then I tasted the wine as he’d asked. The flavour was a bit woody, I thought, so I was in the middle of pouring it down the sink before going for another one, when Cameron came into the room.
‘Jesus Christ, Barrowman! What the fuck are you doing? That wine is about £400 a bottle!’
I’m surprised he ever invited me back.
From the beginning, Cameron – like my family; Bev and Jim; Alex and Ian; Bret and Javier; Gavin and Stewart; and Sarah – was on the long road with me. As well as playing a significant role in shaping my career, Cameron also introduced me to the man who, if I’d not fallen in love with Scott, I could easily have fallen for. David Caddick was the musical director for Miss Saigon and later for Sunset Boulevard, and has supervised the music for scores of other musicals and films, including the soundtrack for the film Evita, starring Madonna. When I first met David, it was during an initial sing-through for Miss Saigon. Claude-Michel Schönberg, one of the brilliant composers of Miss Saigon, was at the piano with David.
‘John,’ Claude-Michel said to me. ‘I want you to put passion into it.’
He sang the first few lines of ‘Why, God, Why?’ in his thick French accent.
I repeated the lines, singing with an equally thick French accent, and had David cracking up at the piano.
‘Yes, Meester Barrowman, you are veree fuckeen funny. Now seeng it correctly.’
After Miss Saigon, David went on to become important in both Cameron’s and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s organizations. He has a very good ear and is brilliant at what he does. David’s demeanour with people is so calming and so wonderful that he gets more out of his performers than anyone else I’ve ever worked with.
Along with Cameron, I’ve known Andrew Lloyd Webber since my early days in theatre, although Andrew and I didn’t see each other very much when I played Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera in 1992. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate even more his talents as a composer and a man who truly has music in his veins. Simply entering one of Andrew’s homes is an experience to savour. His walls are covered in superb works of art, particularly paintings from the nineteenth century and the Pre-Raphaelites. Andrew’s hospitality is equal to his art.
During the initial stages of auditions for Any Dream Will Do, Andrew invited my fellow judges, Zoe Tyler and Denise Van Outen, their partners, and Scott and I to his castle in Ireland for a weekend stay. After a long day, Scott, Zoe, Denise and I all went skinny-dipping in Andrew’s swimming pool. When we climbed out and dried off, we sat with Andrew in one of his living rooms while he regaled us with many fascinating theatre stories. These are the moments when Andrew is at his best and we listened into the wee small hours.
While I sat with Andrew and the others that night in Ireland, I remembered an evening in the States the year after high school, when my friend Laura Sales and I spent several hours in my bedroom listening to the cast album of The Phantom of the Opera. She and I imagined what it would be like to be in a musical as grand as that. I looked over at Andrew, who smiled as he finished up a story, and I smiled back. It’s at times like that when I’m reminded that I’m truly living my dream.
‘There’s No Cure Like Travel’
Whenever Scott and I travel, we have certain rules. Clearly, one of them isn’t about remembering to fill the petrol tank. One of the more important ones is that there are limits to how much historical rubble I’ll look at in any one day. I don’t mind going to places of historic interest, but staring for days on end at a pile o’ rocks left by one group or another is not my idea of a vacation; however, relationships are all about compromise and commitment. Scott compromises and I commit him to sticking to the compromise. Kidding.
At some point during a holiday, I’ll get bored and there will have to be shopping. I don’t care if it’s a bead stall in a market on the Greek island of Santorini – where Clare and Scott’s brother’s daughter Mary and I found some lovely trinkets while Scott lounged by the pool and read his fourth book of the trip – or an outlet mall in Palm Springs, there must be time to shop.
I have to admit, though, while we were on the Santorini trip in 2004, Scott, Clare, Mary and I did visit some awesome rubble. We went to a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age town. The settlement was perfectly preserved under ash and petrified lava, and the four of us were able to walk down the streets as if the whole event had happened only days ago.
Our accommodation for this trip was fabulous. We stayed in a private villa overlooking a volcanic crater with our own swimming pool, where, every afternoon, we’d perform our own improvised air-band dance routines before the cocktail hour. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Clare, Mary and Scott perform Bon Jovi under the Grecian sun.
During many of the hot sultry days, we all tried to do something cultural and then something outrageously fun. I know cultural can be fun, but go along with my distinction anyway. I know you know what I mean. One day we paired up – Clare with me, Scott with Mary – and we paraglided above the Aegean Sea. I peed from the sky and hit the speedboat.
Now, that’s talent.
The four of us also kayaked around the smaller volcanic Cyclades islands. Because Clare and I were a teeny wee bit competitive with Scott and Mary, we challenged them to a race to one of the private coves. Clare and I were kayaking so fast and furious that we lost sight of Scott and Mary. A boat horn blasted us out of our celebratory reverie.
‘Uncle John, that boat’s heading right for us.’
‘No, it’s not, Clare, but row faster anyway or we’re gonna fucking die!’
Clare and I did make it to the cove first, but only after a few tense minutes of squabbling as the two of us tried to row in unison in order to kayak quickly to safety. In our haste to get ahead, we’d raced into the cruise-ship lanes.
Over the years, Scott and I have taken many memorable trips, and although not all of them were life-threatening or life-changing, they were most certainly life-affirming. The American poet Langston Hughes once wrote a poem, ‘City’, in tribute to his beloved Harlem. I read it in high school. In its vitality and grace, the poem always reminds me of Rome, one of my favourite places to visit.
Rome, of course, is the ultimate city of rubble, but, oh
my, what wonderful rubble. It is bursting with ‘stone that sings’, as Hughes wrote. Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and romance notwithstanding, Rome is also one of the best shopping cities in the world.
When Scott and I arrived there, a trip we took in the mid 1990s, we rented scooters and travelled around the city as if we belonged there. The ease of movement those scooters gave us on the crowded, chaotic Italian streets really turned us on to scooter travel, so much so that when we returned to London after this particular vacation, we bought our first and not our last scooters. For Christmas one year, I bought Scott a Kawasaki Versys 650. I currently own a Piaggio 125.
While in Rome, we rode our Vespas along the Appian Way, the ancient road that once connected Rome to its conquered cities in the southeast, and although the cobblestone road was a bit hard on ‘the boys’ at times, I did feel like Spartacus in my chariot nonetheless. We visited the Trevi Fountain, into which I made Scott throw three coins (tossed over his shoulder with his left hand) to ensure we’d both return to Rome some day. Considering the thousands of superstitions I hold dear, he’s lucky that’s all I made him do.
On our last day in the city, I shopped. My biggest challenge was how many Armani bags I could fit in and on the scooter. Let me tell you, I was able to carry quite a few, with two hanging off the handlebars, three in the scooter’s pack, and two slung around my neck. Given that you’ve read about how much I hate anything or anyone touching my neck, you’ll appreciate the sacrifice I made.
Scott and I have taken a number of holidays during the course of our relationship in order to satiate our love of scuba-diving. We are both certified PADI open-water divers. On one diving expedition, we went to the Yucatán Peninsula, the isthmus of land that juts out on the east coast of Mexico and separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico. During this trip, Scott and I went on a night dive. The amazing thing about diving at night was that everything in the sea appeared to be luminous. It was like watching an animated film. I expected Nemo to greet me at any minute.
The night was warm and the water was like black glass. When I rose to the surface, before flashing my light so the dive boat could see me, I floated on my back and admired the night sky twinkling above me. It was a profoundly humbling moment and one that I try to remember whenever I find myself giving in to some of the glitzy trappings of fame and success. Oh, it happens. It’s easy when you’re an actor to think that you’re the centre of your own universe, and so it doesn’t hurt to remember that we are none of us the centre of the real one.
As I floated in the darkness, the fact that Scott and I had spent the day visiting the ruins of the Mayan pyramids at Chichén Itzá magnified the feeling of insignificance. The ruins are all that’s left of a once-vibrant ancient culture, a civilization that before any on the European continent had a sophisticated understanding of mathematics and the cosmos.
Since Scott and I travel whenever my schedule and his allows, we are both adept at planning and reserving all that we need for a holiday. On this particular trip to Mexico, I’d rented what I hoped would be luxury accommodation on the white sand of the Mayan Riviera on the island of Cozumel. The first night in our ‘beach bungalow’ (and I use the term loosely because it was basically a thatched hut), we huddled together the whole night – and not for any romantic reasons. The tropical temperature drop, coupled with the close location of the sea, which was literally touching the door of our hut, I mean bungalow, made it so bloody cold that we were freezing our asses off. By the second night, we’d moved into a beautiful beach resort hotel instead.
The funny thing about the hotel was that it was filled with couples from Minnesota. Don’t get me wrong, I love Minnesota – the Mall of America, home to all of Carole’s in-laws and 10,000 lakes or thereabouts – but throw into this hotel scenario two good-looking, very tanned gay guys dressed in skimpy Speedos, while everyone else was incredibly pale and wearing considerably more clothing … well, we did stand out. However, after only a few days, Scott and I had all the wives playing on our beach volleyball team and we were killing the husbands’ team. After the volleyball games, I organized sexy dance contests and beach fashion shows for the women, and the men kept buying Scott and me drinks because we were loosening up their wives for them.
On another trip, this time to Israel, we not only went diving in the Red Sea, but we also visited a number of sacred sites. We spent time at the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic temple in Jerusalem, where it’s believed Muhammad appeared before he ascended to heaven. We stood silently in front of the Wailing Wall, and watched holy men in their traditional Jewish garb touch the bricks and pray at the tables lined with Torahs and ancient scrolls that populate the courtyard area.
Afterwards, we moved from the spiritual to the sublime, spending a few nights at Masada on the Dead Sea at a great spa hotel, where we had incredible mud baths and hydrotherapy treatments. Masada is actually an ancient fort and was the place where, during the height of the Roman Empire, a small band of Jewish fighters held off legions of Roman soldiers. According to a guide at the fort, the battle didn’t end well for the Jews, who killed themselves rather than be captured and forced into slavery in Rome.
We concluded this trip with a visit south to the Mediterranean port of Caesarea, where we explored King Herod’s palace. The view from the edge of the palace across the desert was awe-inspiring, and from there we headed to Bethlehem to see the Nativity Church.
On another diving holiday, in Egypt, Scott and I once dived one of the most famous wrecks in the world: the Thistlegorm, a Second World War carrier that was sunk off the coast of Egypt by a German bomb in 1941. Not only was the dive one of my favourites of all time, it was also one of the spookiest because the remains of aircraft, trucks and motorbikes filled the submerged wreck. Side by side, Scott and I swam through the passageways and cabins as if we were time travellers bearing witness to this terrible loss.
I’ve organized a number of vacations so that Scott and I can put in some quality diving time. I even once accepted an acting job in part because of the scuba-diving possibilities. As it turned out, my diving skills actually saved my life. Seriously.
In the autumn of 2001, the producers of the Shark Attack DVD film series made me an offer that, frankly, at the time was hard to refuse. Titans had been cancelled and my first cabaret booking in New York was a few mortgage payments away, so I accepted the male lead in the movie Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, which was set to film in Varna, Bulgaria. The film has since become a cult classic in this fishy genre because, among other things, it has one of the most famous awful lines of movie dialogue ever.
When I left to film Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, from LAX on a 747 bound for Munich, it was the first day that planes in the United States were cleared to fly again after the tragedy of 9/11. I thought about not flying, but, along with lots of other folks that year, I made a decision that I wasn’t going to live in fear. Fly in fear, maybe, but not live in it. When I boarded the aircraft, the attendant checked my ticket and directed me to the back of the plane. Normally, a 747 seats close to 200 passengers; there were five of us on board. I looked at the huge expanse of empty seats and turned back to the attendant.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘given everything that’s happened this month, I’m not sitting in the back by myself. I’m sitting here in business class.’ She didn’t argue.
I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times. This flight was taking off during one of the worst of times. I had everything that could be tightly clenched, clenched. I was having my own wee panic attack. As the plane began barrelling down the runway, the woman sitting in front of me turned and asked, ‘Have you found Jesus?’
Jesus! I could have punched her. She’s saying this to me, Mr Superstition. We’re taking off after the most horrific terrorist attack in history, and she wanted to know if I’d found Jesus. If I said ‘no’, I’d panic even more.
‘Jesus isn’t lost,’ I shouted at her. ‘Mind your own fucking business!’
From Munich, I
boarded a plane to Varna, a resort in the Black Sea. This second plane was like a prop from the cartoon The Flintstones. All it was missing was the space for our feet to stick through the floor so we could assist the take-off. Inside, the seating was cramped and oppressive. Although an attendant was present, she didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to the fact that there were oxygen canisters hanging exposed from the overhead compartments and that all the passengers, except me, were smoking like chimneys.
The plane looked as if it was held together with pipe cleaners – and everyone inside was puffing away on the bloody pipes. I was a basket case once again. I did not want to sit in an aircraft filled with smoke, and despite signs designating this as a no-smoking flight, nobody gave a shit.
Eventually, I sucked it up and the plane took off safely. But as we were levelling off, I suddenly collapsed to the floor, gasping, wheezing and tearing at my chest. The flight attendant rushed down the aisle to help me. She immediately insisted everyone put out their cigarettes. She opened one of the canisters of oxygen, flipped the face mask over my mouth and nose, and after my body stopped wrenching from the apparent asthma attack, she helped me back to my seat. The plane soon cleared of smoke and I got a little high from the oxygen. My performance was Academy Award calibre. Norma Desmond would have been proud.
Varna is one of the oldest cities in Europe and it’s a beautiful place – but in 2001, it was still reeling from the last vestiges of Communist rule, plus it was fucking freezing. In fact, if you look carefully at the movie’s opening scene of sunbathers frolicking in the so-called Californian surf, you’ll see that all the slapping of arms and bobbing in the water was from the frigid sea and not the pleasure of the setting.
The majority of the movie was filmed at a holiday resort in a huge swimming pool, which was made to look like the ocean. This setting made it easier to manipulate the special effects, the model shark and the underwater camerawork, all of which would have been far too dangerous to execute in the sea. For one of the crucial action sequences, I needed to get into a kind of submarine-like shell, close the top panel, open the other side, and swim out. The camera would capture me in close-up swimming out, and later the shark would be superimposed on the scene so it would look like I was swimming through the shark.