Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy.

Now began what I remember as a time of constant darkness, silence, and fear. Being around him was like navigating a minefield. We could never relax. We were never safe. He began to go out every night. I remember sitting in the living room with my mum, hearing him getting ready upstairs. Eventually the door would open and his head would appear. “That’s me away!” But he would be gone before the words had left his mouth, his eyes not even seeing us. It was like he was saying good night to a pet, and eventually he stopped saying it altogether. I didn’t understand what had happened, but of course I assumed it must have been something I had done. I was always being told by him how much of a disappointment I was, both in my appearance—my hair, of course, but also my posture, my weight, my nose, my moles—as well as my inability to perform the simplest of tasks, though his lack of detail in explaining what he wanted me to do or the physical enormity of what was entailed guaranteed I would fail. Once he actually demanded I drive a tractor, though I had never done so before nor had any coaching on how to do so by him or anyone else. I tried to reason with him. Often he gave me tasks that were huge and would take till nightfall and beyond, but this was another level. Now he was asking me to actually endanger my life by operating heavy machinery and I became very, very scared. My father began to shout at me and I knew I had to meet his demand. I clambered up on the high seat. My feet d...

And when the discussion turned to health, and I was asked about family illness, I told the reporter that recently when I’d had my first physical with a new doctor he’d asked if cancer ran in my immediate family, and I realized that, as I’d had so little contact with my father as an adult, I didn’t know. I actually knew nothing about him or his health. Then, out of the blue, in the spring of 2010, my father contacted my brother Tom to tell him he was battling cancer, and Tom and I suddenly discovered which strain of that disease’s odds were genetically stacked against us. As we were finishing, the reporter asked if I thought I would ever see my father again. I said I had thought about this a lot and imagined that the only way we might have any contact would be if he reached out as he was dying. However, the in-depth interview was scrapped in favor of one of those shorter, pithier “What I’ve Learned” pieces, and a collection of my words was assembled randomly under topic headings that bore little relation to the context in which they were uttered. “My life is so much better now that my father is not in it. He does have cancer, which apparently runs in the family. Maybe next time I see him he’ll be really ill, or he’ll be dying and I may not see him” is how the Times mash-up ran.

For me, I found myself embracing the childhood I felt I had missed. My flat began to fill with games I had either played as a boy or lusted after. I discovered I loved the color yellow and so I had all my walls painted in a bright shade of it. I saw a large floor lamp in the shape of a daffodil, and I had to have it. I bought action figures from TV shows of my youth and placed them in pride of place on my mantelpiece. I started to collect marbles again. I realized that I was living my life backwards. I had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, and now I was tending to the little boy inside who’d never had the chance to properly play. I didn’t question it. I went with it. I liked it. I am referred to often as having a childlike quality, or being pixielike. At first, when these sorts of descriptions began to be attributed to me, I didn’t like them. Childhood for me had such negative connotations that the idea that I was in some way overly connected to that time in my life was a cause for concern, not celebration. Why was I so childlike? Was I in some way emotionally retarded, trapped, trying desperately to reconfigure my past before I could move on? Eventually I began to feel more comfortable with it all. Childlike, I realized, tends to mean open, joyous, maybe a bit mischievous, and I am happy to have all those qualities. Had I not had the childhood I did, would these traits not be so at the forefront of my personality? Who knows? All I know is that I am the product ...

I realized my grandfather and I had something in common. I too craved what I hadn’t found in my childhood—security, approval, the love of my father—and throughout my adult life I have sought to re-create the experience of family. He seemed to be always in search of one, but now his actual family was many hundreds of miles away and his army family was literally dying all around him.

I came to believe that I, and my failings, were the cause of all my life’s woes: my father’s rage, my parents’ crumbling marriage, my not being able to do anything right. The only time my father even noticed me was when he hit me. Then, and the preceding few moments, were the only time I knew I had the full focus of his attention. But even as a little boy I knew that my association of something so awful with my father’s attention was unhealthy. So then I began to feel guilty for thinking that way, and more convinced it must be my fault that he hit me in the first place. It was an easy spiral to observe from the future, but to a little boy it seemed justified. My father loathed me, so it was only natural I should loathe myself. My mother countered him, though. She told me I was special and loved. And actually, having two such opposing messages, although confusing, was ultimately pretty healthy. My father told me I was worthless, my mother that I was precious. They couldn’t both be right, but they evened each other out and I began to make my own mind up, not just about myself but about everything that was going on around me. I think this was also good training for my future career. I didn’t fully believe what either of my parents said about me, and I’ve taken that approach in dealing with critics of my work. “If you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones” is my mantra. The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.

I also thought of the times I had spent working at the Royal National Theatre next door, and of late-night drunken walks along the banks of the Thames with a man I now realized had been the latest in a line of lovers I had engaged with because I was drawn to their anger and I wanted to fix them. Just as when I was a little boy dealing with my father, I thought it must be my fault my lovers were so angry. Now, of course, I can see that it was stupid, irrational, and self-abusive to think so, but it was still a hard habit to kick.

I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in. It’s a little contrary to think that I look forward to careering through the skies in a metal-fatigued box in order to gain some feeling of inner calm, but that’s the way I roll.

As soon as I landed I was plunged back into my life in Cape Town. I was picked up at the airport by my driver, Hodges, a huge African man whose laugh was so bassy and reverberating that the entire car shook when I said something that set him off. It reminded me of my old habit of standing up against a speaker in a club to feel the beat. When Hodges laughed, I really felt it. I went straight to the set for a makeup test, then a wardrobe fitting, then back home to the downtown apartment building where most of the cast were barracked, where a lovely manicurist (or nail technician as she preferred to be called) was waiting to reattach the acrylic nails that Desrae sported and I had relinquished before I left for Cannes. Another thing I relinquished was my body hair. Desrae would not have entertained a hairy arm, and therefore neither did I. Before the first day of filming this series, I had spent an evening in the company of a product called Veet, which, though well known to the female species by other names such as Nair, had hardly ever entered my mental periphery. It is now, however, forever seared into my brain. Do you know what Veet/Nair does? It dissolves the hair off your body. Surely this was an invention of the Nazis? You rub it on, sometimes to very sensitive parts of your anatomy, and very soon the hair just dissolves. It is not a pretty procedure, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell pretty either. But because of Desrae, Veet became a part of my toilette, and I would h...

But we were now ready, I hoped. I picked up the papers from the bedside table and read over what I had written. It seemed so weird to see the entire thing encapsulated so neatly. Only two pages of A4, but packed with portent: Dad The way you behaved towards us throughout our childhood has had a huge effect on us, and has caused us many problems. You brutalized and terrorized us. We were made to feel useless, unworthy; we lived in constant fear of you. Not just of being hit but also of being constantly shouted at and brought down and tormented. We were never good enough for you. We could never live up to your expectations. We were made to feel we were not capable of doing anything. You would ask us to do tasks for you that we couldn’t possibly achieve, and then you would chastise us and hit us for not doing them well enough. So consequently we’ve gone through life feeling unhappy and unable to acknowledge our achievements because we still feel unworthy—as being told we are useless is so ingrained in us. We have made excuses for your behavior all our lives. We were embarrassed because people laughed and didn’t believe us if we told them about the violence, about you stopping us from going to things at the last minute, the way you made us work all the time, and so we started to make up excuses for you, so much so that we all pretended that nothing was really wrong and none of this ever happened, until it exploded out earlier this summer. But we also felt it was our fault. We ...

“It never happened, Dad. You imagined it all. Mum never had an affair. None of it ever happened.” “But I had to believe it, Alan . . . ,” he said incredulously (and incredibly). This really intrigued me. “You had to?” I replied. “Why?” “I saw them coming out of the room . . .” “Whatever you saw was innocent. You made it all up.” I felt like I was talking to a child, or someone coming round from an anesthetic and needing to have everything reiterated again and again. “I saw what I saw,” he said, over and over. “No,” I countered. “You saw what you wanted to see, or what you decided you’d seen.” There was silence. I could feel him regrouping and preparing for his next salvo.

It became clear that this myth had been hatched to benefit only one person: himself. Somewhere along the line, my father had decided this was true to make himself feel better about the way he was treating my mother, and the way he was abusing me. Of course the awful, glaring flaw in this logic is that he had also been a monster to Tom too. It didn’t make sense. But of course it shouldn’t and it couldn’t. I was trying to fathom my father’s psychopathic behavior that was based on a huge delusion. Surely it was not a big leap to think he might have found his own logic to merit Tom’s abuse too? But every night, just as sleep began to smooth out the rattling of my brain, I would return to the same thought: I couldn’t believe I was related to him. Maybe I had wanted it to be true so much, maybe that wish had actually seeped into my psyche, but now I couldn’t accept that I was his son. And although I was, I most certainly was, I had the documents to prove it, I knew with every fiber of my being that there was nothing aside from blood that related him to me. And that’s what kept me going. I may have been a robotic transvestite acting machine by day, and a preoccupied and cheerless dinner companion by night, but there was a light at the end of my tunnel: I was not my father’s son.

I smiled at both the men and thanked them. They could not possibly know how much that last sentence resonated with me. All through my childhood, as I toiled my way through the exhaustive, insurmountable series of tasks my father would set me, I would dream that the conclusion of my work would be not the silent inspection followed by the inexorable spiral into anger and the force of his hand propelling me off balance. I dreamt that one day I would not be hit, and over his shoulder as he walked away from me I would hear my father say the words: “You did a good job.” I felt connected to Tommy Darling in ways that went beyond our common lineage. We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods—the love of a father. For different reasons, of course, but it was a shared experience nonetheless. We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not. But I also recognized restlessness in his spirit, a need to challenge himself, that I too have experienced throughout my life. I wondered, if I didn’t have the job I have, which provides me with such thrilling, visceral release, would I be seeking those thrills in destructive ways? I know I love the rush of adrenaline pulsing through my veins. I wonder to what lengths I would go to experience it if I didn’t do what I do?

I got a beer and sat in the window watching the world go by as the crew set up, enjoying the feeling of nearness, thinking about how he must have sat here sipping a drink and looking out on this same street. My odyssey was nearly over but I knew it would resonate with me for a very long time. I began to wonder how Tommy Darling would have fared in the present, if he were a soldier now in Afghanistan or Iraq, how different his life would have been. I remembered the article I’d read in the middle of the night before, jet-lagged and fixated on his story and how to best couch it all to my mum. Although combat stress, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is now recognized by the military as a medical condition, there is still a huge amount of stigma attached to it by all sections of society, and there is no significantly successful treatment. Sadly, the article went on to say that suicide is the leading cause of death for members of the U.S. Army today, which has seen its rates double since 2004. Maybe Tommy Darling wouldn’t have fared so well today either. But as I downed the last of my beer I determined to do something when I returned home, a fund-raiser, some sort of memorial in Tommy’s honor that would benefit a PTSD organization, in the hope that someone, somewhere would get the help he never did. “His death is not so shocking when you look at his life,” I began when the crew was set up. Elizabeth asked if I felt I’d learned anything about myself. I stared into space and tho...

I began to look into PTSD organizations with a view to arranging a charity screening of the program in honor of my grandfather. I discovered one called Give an Hour that I decided to contact. The premise of this group was that mental health professionals would give free hourly increments of mental health services to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then in turn the people who received this free care would give an hour of their time to some form of community service. I liked the way it was so simple and straight to the heart of the problem, and also that the veterans who were receiving the care were also able to give something back in return. I hoped that in some small way I would be able to help some people in need, ensuring that they were given the professional psychological care that was never available to my granddad. But that wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but now I understand that this event was a gesture to my father too. The more I have talked about him and what happened in my past, with both friends and mental health professionals, the more I have come to believe that he too suffered from some undiagnosed mental condition. It’s not just his violence, his volatility and mood swings, it’s his complete lack of empathy, his seemingly utter inability to consider the feelings of anyone else. And of course my dealings with him over the course of that summer only underscore this. I was not talking to a sane man in those phone c...