BAGGAGE
Tales from a Fully Packed Life
by Alan Cumming
William Morrow. 288 pages, $27.99
WHAT any reasonable reader wants when picking up a celebrity memoir is a compendium of splashy anecdotes about other celebrities. Oh look! There’s Whoopi! Baryshnikov! Arbus! Channing! Manilow!—“American cultural royalty,” as Alan Cumming calls them. With this as the gold standard, the song-and-dance man with a new memoir titled Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life does not disappoint.
This is actually Cumming’s third memoir, and he’s beginning to distinguish himself as a writer as well as a first-rate actor of stage and screen. A household name in Britain for his many leading roles on stage and on the telly, he’s best known in the U.S. as the Master of Ceremonies in a Broadway revival of Cabaret in 1998. His first memoir, Not My Father’s Son (2014), was a deep dive into his complicated relationship with his abusive father while growing up in Scotland. You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams (2017) was a more lighthearted look at some real-life adventures and “celebrity moments” in his adult life. Baggage is about his life in Hollywood and how his acting career “has repeatedly whisked me away from personal calamities to sets and stages around the world.” (Both memoirs were reviewed in these pages, in March-April 2015 and May-June 2017, respectively.)
To start with a random anecdote from Baggage: when Cumming was starring in Cabaret on Broadway,
Other forms of patriarchy involve his father’s savagery when Cumming was growing up gay in rural Angus, Scotland. “My father, my domestic terrorist,” he calls him, left only a legacy of “all-pervading shame.” In Not My Father’s Son, he recalled meeting his partner Grant when the two were both 39 years old. The “euphoria and passion of our coming together,” he wrote, was “adult, honest, and frank [because]we’re all so conditioned to entering relationships hiding our baggage.” Seven years later, in the new memoir, he admits that he’s not quite ready to let go—even if he appears to be levitating on the book’s cover—as he purges, through storytelling, the painful details of his father’s beatings. There are some surprising confessions. In a chapter titled “Ecstasy,” he reveals that in the role of Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, he used sedatives to unwind after performances. He can also be funny: on the source material for the musical, he observes that “Isherwood, Auden, and Spender actually went to Berlin for cock!”
The memoir is neatly balanced between traumatic memories of physical abuse and the hope for a brighter day. But I gravitated toward Cumming’s confessional bits because of his working relationship with the late, great Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in the role of the desk clerk in Eyes Wide Shut, possibly the sexiest film made in the 1990s and the capstone to Kubrick’s career. What happened on the set was top secret, but, spilling the beans, Cumming discloses that Tom Cruise was “sweet and approachable” and “never registered on my gaydar.” When Cumming apologized to Kubrick for being too flirtatious with Cruise onscreen, the fearless director shrugged it off, saying: “Keep going! It can go up another notch!”
Colin Carman, PhD, author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys, teaches English literature at Colorado Mesa University.
