Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

It has not been pleasant as an adult to realize that dealing with my father’s violence was the beginning of my studies of acting.

not realizing till many years (and quite a lot of therapy) later that my body was manifesting physically what I could not yet cope with emotionally.

I survived my father. We all did—my mother, my brother, and me—literally as well as figuratively. But as with all difficult things, it was a process.

I admired her Gallic sense of injustice,

These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organized with the finesse of a kindergarten nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.

That week I realized for the first time that glamour actually had a smell. But also I was reminded that the industry I was in was show business.

Film festivals are really just business conventions, you see. It could be photocopiers, it could be shower curtains, Cannes just happens to be movies.

Being an actor, I am very used to the notion of waiting for people to pass judgment on me—audiences, critics, awards juries, fashion police—all do it with such alarming regularity that it has almost ceased to be alarming.

Cawdor is a little village surrounded by forest and farmland in the north of Scotland, and Shakespeare had set Macbeth there without bothering to research the fact that the real Macbeths never set foot in the place because they died three hundred years or so before Cawdor Castle was even built. (This lack of attention to historical detail is more grist to the mill for my theory that Shakespeare, if he were alive today, would be writing for TV. But somewhere classy, though.)

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

So it’s not that every second of my childhood was filled with doom. But every second was filled with the possibility that in an instant my father’s mood would plunge into irrationality, rage, and ultimately violence.

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.

sanguine and healthy admittance that sometimes people do you a favor when they drop out of your life.

Every person in the public eye will have stories of media invasion and misrepresentation.

I had thought earlier I might die. Now, once again, I wanted to.

The actual document she had to sign to complete the name-changing process was hilarious, asking her to solemnly swear to renounce the name Gore and to be, from that day forth, forever Gorgeous.

I realized I needed to learn how to hide my feelings better, even outside the home. My training in the ways of the actor came early, you see.

I remember vividly a scene in which he is being pressured by his manager to write more songs for his album and he says the immortal line “I’m an artist, not a machine!” Granny and I thought this was hilarious and repeated it all weekend long, and indeed I still use it today.

I never heard Granny say a bad word about my father, but I know she was incredibly supportive of my mum leaving him.

I think I have inherited some of her mischief and joie de vivre, and I hope her compassion.

“What’s this, another weird haircut, Alan?” said one. “Well, I like it!” Granny’s frail little voice piped up from deep in the chair she was sunk into. “And if I was young again I’d have my hair a different color every week. I’d be a freak like Alan too!”

I’m not religious in the slightest, but I do truly believe that people’s energies can be present or invoked after they’re gone.

It was unusual for Mum to be so feisty. It signaled something changing in her, and her attitude towards our father, and although it made me nervous, I liked it.

very happy to discover via one of its ancient tomes that we Scots were the first to ever catalog the word fuck!

I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.

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.

Childlike, I realized, tends to mean open, joyous, maybe a bit mischievous, and I am happy to have all those qualities.

When I joined Twitter I described myself as “Scottish elf trapped inside middle aged man’s body” and I still think that’s accurate.

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.

It was quite an eerie feeling to be recognizing traits in myself from a dead man.

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.

My father loathed me, so it was only natural I should loathe myself.

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.

The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.

I suddenly felt a rush of animosity towards the military establishment, towards a country that sent its poor young men to war and let their brains become addled only to destroy any record of such damage, thereby heaping shame back onto the very young men who had given and lost so much in the first place. No wonder there is still such stigma today.

We all stitched together facades that we were all okay. Fine. Normal. Of course we weren’t. You can’t go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay. It bites you in the arse big time.

Thinking back to this time, I truthfully don’t think I remembered any of the actual details of my father’s abuse. I was still in denial, along with my mother and Tom. Fear and silence will ensure that.

I had everything going for me, and I felt I had no control over anything.

I sat at the end of the table not talking to anyone, picking at a salad. I had forgotten how to be me. Like Hamlet, I wanted to be absent.

That was the phrase I kept hearing, kept repeating to myself. You have to sort yourself out, Alan. By such and such a date you need to have sorted yourself out.

It was a miserable little place I moved to, and I think that was intentional. I wanted no distractions. I wanted it just to be me with my memories, and of course now, finally, the box in my attic exploded.

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.

Yes, wearing high heels makes your legs look better and your ass look amazing, but I still couldn’t help but worry that they were making me more vulnerable at the same time.

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.

And of course the more you do something, the more comfortable you become, and the less frightening it becomes.

though I still get nervous, it’s the good kind of nerves, the necessary kind, that keeps you on your toes and makes sure the adrenaline is flowing.

But mostly I felt solidarity and support and love, ironically three things I never felt from my father and three things I think Tommy Darling could have done with a whole lot more of.

In this bubble, this fancy no-man’s-land, I found myself decompressing after a week of cabaret and confession.

“You have jet lag,” he said with a smile. “Yes,” I replied. “How do you know?” “Only jet lag people swim at five thirty!” he responded.