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The Open Secret -- In A Rare Interview, Jaye Davidson Leaves Nothing To The Imagination When Discussing The Oscar-Nominated Film, `The Crying Game'
Read no further. Or at the very least, be warned that this article will reveal a now-legendary plot twist from Neil Jordan's mind-bending thriller "The Crying Game."
Knowing the Big Secret will not ruin the movie for you. In fact, it will make you feel worldly and superior when it comes time for the Big Scene and everyone else in the theater gasps. In any case, you've been warned.
Jaye Davidson plays a transvestite named Dil, who spends his/her days cutting hair and his/her nights in a bar called the Metro. Stephen Rea plays a freedom fighter named Fergus, who abandons his country, his cause and his Irish Republican Army sweetheart, played by Miranda Richardson. Fergus and Dil meet up in London. Fergus doesn't know that his exotic little flower is a man - and neither does the audience - until the truth is staring him in the face.
When "The Crying Game" was released, the film's distributor, Miramax, asked movie reviewers to keep Jaye Davidson's gender a secret, and they did. And did. And did. The movie, which was made for less than $5 million, became the proverbial hot ticket. Jordan, Rea and Richardson all walked off with awards. Davidson, however, was largely passed over because some critics nominated him as an actor, other nominated him as an actress, and still others didn't know what to think.
Then Oscar weighed in. "The Crying Game" has snagged six nominations, including one for Davidson as best supporting actor. The verdict will be known next Monday night, when the Academy Awards ceremony is broadcast live from Los Angeles.
Jaye Davidson came from out of nowhere and would not mind going back. Neil Jordan cast the 25-year-old Londoner after auditioning a slew of unknowns, many of whom were transvestites and did campy, but not terribly feminine, variations on the Bette Midler-Zsa Zsa Gabor theme.
"I knew Jaye could sail through it if he was just to be beautiful and aloof," Jordan says, "but I worried about whether he could allow himself to move you as an audience. Then we did the scene where he gets his hair cut for the first time, and he suddenly began to act with this pain in his voice. It was extraordinary. Acting is a mysterious thing - you don't know where it comes from."
But you do know when it works. Stephen Rea says: "If Jaye hadn't been a completely convincing woman, my character would have looked stupid."
Last December, Jaye Davidson came to America to shoot a Gap ad with Annie Leibovitz. While he was here, he granted two interviews, one as a woman (to The New York Times) and one as a man. The former interview did not make a single reference to Davidson's gender, but was accompanied by a photograph of the actor in a necklace and hoop earrings, his black hair swept up in a bun.
This is the latter interview. Davidson wore a bulky gray sweater, black jeans and Harley boots. He struck one as preternaturally poised, utterly sure of who and what he was.
Q: The idea of being in a movie must have been terrifying.
A: It was. It was repellent. In fact, I nearly backed out of it twice. When I first went out for the part, I didn't think million years I would get it. I just thought: "Yeah, I'll go have a look at this, why not? It's no skin off my nose."
And when I got it, I just laughed my head off. I got a phone call from the casting director, and I didn't know what to say. I just said, "Oh, thank you very much." And then I put the phone down and just had hysterical, nervous laughter.
Q: How were you discovered?
A: Do you know who Derek Jarman is? I was at the wrap party for "Edward II," and I was very drunk. Someone said, "Oh, are you an actor?" I said no. They said, "Would you like to go out for a film?" And I said no and staggered off drunk. I was so drunk that I didn't remember it happening. But the person I was with gave them my number, and then I got a phone call.
Q: Had you done any acting?
A: I'd been Spear Carrier on the Right - yeah. We've all done school plays when we're very young.
Q: What was your first impression of the script?
A: I thought: "This isn't going to work. We're not going to get away with this film." I thought everyone would hate the subject - the IRA, the racism, the relationships. I thought people would be very turned off by it.
Q: In the film you have a relationship with Stephen Rea. Were you comfortable with him?
A: I would imagine that Stephen would have been more uncomfortable with me than I would have been with him.
See, I'm from another world. Stephen is an actor - a Belfast actor, married with children. And he ends up working with someone like me. I felt sorry for Stephen. I just thought, "This poor man has to kiss me."
Q: For "The Crying Game" to work, the audience has to believe that you're a woman. What made the casting director think you could pass for one?
A: I haven't got a clue.
Q: Do you enjoy wearing dresses?
A: Do I enjoy wearing dresses? I never, ever did drag. Never.
Q: How did you know you could pass for a woman?
A: I've been mistaken for a woman in the street, so I thought, "Yes, I could get away with this."
Q: Are you surprised that audiences believe Dil is a woman?
A: Yeah. Constantly. I don't have a brilliant body at all. I've got very broad shoulders. I've got very big feet. I've also got a very muscular neck. But again, I know people take me for a woman. It happens all the time.
Q: Having seen your performance as Dil, I find it hard to believe that you've never done drag.
A: Before I did the film, I did have one night out in drag. I wore a white, silk-crepe, baby-doll dress. I had my hair up, and I had lilies in my hair. It was a fierce look and all, but it was too much hard work.
Q: Where were you born?
A: I was born in California. I'm an American citizen, but I grew up in England.
Q: What do your folks do?
A: My mother's a businesswoman. My father's dead.
Q: Were both your parents black?
A: No, my mother's white.
Q: Where did you go after high school?
A: I started working for Walt Disney in their office in London. You know how you have people who are inside the costumes? I was like that.
Q: What costume were you inside of?
A: Pluto. It was hysterical.
Q: What did you want out of life then?
A: I wanted to work in the arts. My dream come true would be to be an architectural historian and work with the royal palaces and all the fabulous art collections. But I'm not committed enough. I'm too trashy. I like to go out and get drunk.
Q: What were you doing before you got the "Crying Game" role?
A: I was a fashion assistant. I bought the fabric. I made sure that everything was smooth in the workroom. And I scrambled all over London on the tube looking for buttons. It was great.
Q: So why do a movie? Don't you have to want to be a movie star to do a movie?
A: No, you have to want the money. I earned almost half my yearly salary in seven weeks.
Q: Are you any better off financially than when you started the movie?
A: No, I'm in hideous amounts of debt. I'm overextended everywhere: banks, credit cards, everything. I have to have the best of everything, and yet I am incredibly poor.
Q: You said that acting isn't your passion. But you don't want to spend an entire lifetime as a fashion assistant, do you?
A: Yes. I can see myself doing that job for a lifetime. I enjoy doing it.
I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.
Q: Your agent's phone must be ringing now.
A: Well, I don't have an agent, because I don't want anyone to offer me another part. I don't want to be tempted (into bad films) just for the money. And of course I'm tempted by money.
Q: Would you like "The Crying Game" even if you weren't in it?
A: Yeah, I would, actually. I would like the subject matter, which hasn't been explored.
The movie is about how you just never know. You never know what you will be attracted to - or who you will love - till it happens to you. I've only been in love once in my whole life, and I never thought I'd fall in love at all.
Q: Why not?
A: I thought I was a bit hard-boiled. I couldn't really see it happening to me. I thought, "Who would be stupid enough to get involved with tricky Jaye?"
I'm not really a shy person, but no one wants to be rejected, do they? Also, my looks are not attractive to the gay community. To be homosexual is to like the ideal of the sex. Homosexual men love very masculine men. And I'm not a very masculine person. I'm reasonably thin. I have long hair, which isn't very popular with gay men. My behavior is often appalling. And I have a terrible reputation in London for being one of the unapproachables.
Q: In the movie, Stephen Rea has no idea that your character is a man until he's confronted with irrefutable evidence. Is it possible to have a relationship with someone and not know?
A: Apparently so. Two of the people who were up for the part were in those relationships. I would never let anything go that far. Not in a million years. When I met my last lover, I said, "You know I'm a man, don't you?" And he said, "Yeah, I do." And I said, "Well, all right then."
Q: In the last few years, there's been some controversy about the way gays are portrayed in movies. Was that a concern of yours?
A: All this hoo-ha about bad role models and positive images! Of course gay people are murderers, bigamists, drug addicts and nasty people - just as much as heterosexual people are all of these things.
What it all boils down to is, we are all people, and we all have the same human desires.
Q: Won't it be hard to go back to being a fashion assistant?
A: No, all that was normal. This is bizarre. This is another world. I shall look back on all this. And everything will go into the box that I keep under my bed and I shall treasure them forever.
Q: What's most important in your life?
A: My life.
Q: That's not an answer.
A: It is the ultimate answer. The most important thing in my life is to live my life and to enjoy it - to do what I think is right and what I think is good.
Q: What else is important?
A: Self. Self-worth. Self-evaluation. Self-respect.
Q: What about leaving something behind?
A: Well, I've left this film behind, haven't I? I don't want to make an impression on the world. I don't want to make an impression on society. That's not important to me at all. The people I know and love can say, "Oh, do you remember Jaye, blah-blah-blah?" And someone else can say, "Oh, yeah, great, blah-blah-blah."
And that's more than enough for me.
Copyright (c) 1993 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.
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Image&1&of&4
Gavin Welby, left, and Bishop Welby&Photo: REUTERS
Image&1&of&4
Jane Portal, the bishop's mother, was a secretary to Churchill&
Image&1&of&4
Gavin Welby even dated the future president’s sister Pat&Photo: CORBIS
Image&1&of&4
Actress Vanessa Redgrave also dated Gavin Welby&Photo: REX FEATURES
By , Investigations Editor
He worked his way into the upper echelons of society on both sides of the
Atlantic, using a series of adopted personas. But when he died of a heart
attack in 1977, alone in a flat in Kensington, his only son - the person
closest to him at the end of his life - did not even know his real name or
birthdate.
Justin Welby, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, was only 21 years old at
the time and studying law and history at Trinity College, Cambridge. He knew
his father as an erratic and alcohol-dependent but &really, really
brilliant& man who had lived an extraordinary life, although the true
details were unclear.
&I lived with him, but I didn&t know him very well,& he said yesterday.
Summoned down to London to complete the formalities after the death, the
heartbroken son recorded the name of his father as Gavin Bramhal Welby, born
on November 28 1914. Neither detail was correct.
The mistake was understandable, as Mr Welby Sr had hidden his identity many
times. A chancer, draft dodger and adulterer, he had been sued for libel by
a Cabinet minister. There was even a secret first wife that he never spoke
of. But he had carefully constructed a respectable persona which allowed him
to survive and to flourish, and without which his son would not have had a
public school education or possibly a chance of high office.
Gavin Welby claimed a connection to the aristocratic Welbys of Lincolnshire
and in particular Sir Charles Welby, the fifth baronet. He also suggested
that his family owned a Scottish distillery. These untruths helped him
befriend John F Kennedy in America, becoming so close that he even dated the
future president&s sister Pat.
In this country, he won over senior members of the Conservative Party and the
family of the deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler. He married Butler&s
favourite niece, Jane Portal, who had been Winston Churchill&s personal
secretary and who would become Justin&s mother.
His powerful connections helped him towards a career in politics and two
failed attempts to win a seat in the House of Commons. Gavin Welby earned
enough money to send his son to Eton - although he is said not to have
passed on enough for Justin to pay his way on a daily basis, leaving him the
poorest child in a school house that included two Rothschilds.
The present Bishop of Durham admitted last night that his father had told him
&virtually nothing& about his true background, although the life that they
did share together towards the end gave him a first hand insight into
addiction and suffering.
&He drank quite heavily, and you know, he would say things sometimes when he
had been drinking and you did not know what was true or not.&
The Sunday Telegraph was able to share remarkable new details with Bishop
Welby about the life of a man who was actually born Bernard Gavin Weiler on
November 28 1910 in Ruislip, on the outskirts of west London.
His father was &Hebrew& German emigre also called Bernard Weiler, who had
moved to Britain from modern-day Germany some 20 years earlier. Mr Weiler Sr
had an elder brother called Herrman who had refused call-up papers for the
army and been stripped of German citizenship.
(Much later the synagogue in the village where they came from would be burnt
to the ground by the SS, and Jews sent to Nazi death camps. Several people
called Weiler from the area appear on the list of victims of the Holocaust.)
The senior Bernard Weiler became a successful ostrich feather merchant with
premises in the Barbican and in Cape Town, South Africa. He lived in a large
house with his English-born wife Edith, who was two decades younger, as well
as a cook, a maid and a nurse for the children.
But the family fortunes were hit by the outbreak of the First World War in
1914, and the so-called &feather crash& which saw austerity and changing
fashions kill off the demand for expensive feather-adorned garments and
Anti-German sentiment was strong, so the family name was changed by deed poll
to Welby and Gavin&s father took an agency job selling worthless &snake oil&
drugs on sales trips to America. He sold an art collection, but in spite of
failing health he was forced to continue making arduous week-long voyages
across the Atlantic, cramped in steerage class.
Gavin took over this dubious business shortly before his father died. He was
19 years old. As he began to spent increasing amount of time in New York,
the young man set about re-inventing himself. This part of the story did
enter family history and Bishop Welby said recently that he believed his
father had been a bootlegger during the Prohibition era.
'I remember my father telling me [his mother] gave him &5 and put him on a
boat. He said he went to New York in 1929 and traded whisky. When I was
studying history, the penny dropped that Prohibition ended in 1933... so he
was bootlegging. He was illegally trading whisky.&
After being told on Friday of the remarkable details of his father&s life,
Bishop Welby said: &He would tell me how he ran alcohol with his 'Italian
friends& as he liked to call them. But he kept so much to himself.&
The Sunday Telegraph has discovered that when Prohibition ended, the inventive
young man - now calling himself Gavin Bramhall James Welby - was the New
York import manager for the National Distillers Production Corporation.
His job was to supply Manhattan&s newly booming hotels and cocktail bars with
the ingredients for their latest frozen, shaken and stirred alcoholic
creations.
Aged 23, with a clipped English accent, and dark, debonair good looks, he
modelled himself on the Hollywood star Cary Grant.
Gavin Welby quickly became the man to know if you wanted to hold a party in
one of Manhattan&s upmarket hotels. He arranged balls for the sons and
debutante daughters of New York&s wealthy elite, befriending businessmen and
their wives. By 1940 he was earning $7,000 a year, the equivalent of
$116,000 today, and had rooms at the fashionable five-star Hotel Pierre
overlooking Central Park. He could also afford to rent an apartment on the
upmarket Upper East Side, where he held parties for high society.
Rather than admitting to be a mere employee, Welby began hinting that his
family owned one of the distilleries supplying the liquor.
The society columns of the New York Times from this period are filled with his
exploits. They also reveal details of Welby&s first marriage: to Doris
Sturzenegger, the daughter of a wealthy factory owner, in January 1934.
Hailing from Chester, New Jersey, she was of German descent just like her new
husband. &Doe& as she was known had been a student at Boston University,
whose yearbook for 1930 says: &Effervescent, always with a smile, Doe&s a
cheerful girl, sans guile.&
The marriage appears to have been very short lived. Before the year was out,
she had left him. After returning first to Boston, she used her maiden name
and a newly-minted American passport to sail to Britain, identifying herself
as a dance teacher. There is no trace of the couple getting divorced.
After the outbreak of war in 1939, Welby remained in New York, organising
parties. But when America entered the conflict, he was ordered to return
home and enlist. In December 1942, he held a farewell party to mark his
departure.
The New York Times reported: &Several hundred persons, including many
prominent English men and women living here, attended a farewell reception
given in the small ballroom of the Pierre by Gavin Welby, son of Mrs E James
Welby of London and Surrey, who is about to join the British Army as a
commissioned officer.&
He became a First Lieutenant. However, when demobbed three years after the end
of the war, he placed an announcement in The Times as &Captain& Gavin
Welby, announcing that he would now be taking up residence at the Ritz
Carlton Hotel in New York.
He also applied to Conservative Central Office, asking to be considered as a
candidate for Parliament. His application forms to the party are sealed, but
it is understood that he gave false details about his background, shaved
several years off his age and overstated his position with the American
firms that had employed him before the war.
Nevertheless, his easy manner and direct-speaking style apparently impressed
the Conservative hierarchy. In 1950, he was selected to fight for Coventry
East against an up-and-coming politician, Richard Crossman, who was later to
become a Labour Cabinet minister.
The local Conservative party activists seem to have taken against their
candidate, who continued to be based in London. A report to the constituency
in January 1951 complained: &Adopted last October (Welby) has made a few
visits to the Constituency, but has by no means got round the Division. I
should say that he is not particularly well suited to this type of Division.&
The Coventry Telegraph reported that he was heckled at the hustings. During
one debate, Welby referred to the Stone Age, saying: &It was not uncommon
for a man to beat his wife with a cudgel.& Someone shouted: &That&s private
enterprise!&
His brief visits to Coventry were dubbed &jet-propelled canvassing& as he took
to driving around the constituency in a car with a loud-speaker, accompanied
by his mother. It was reported that she had delayed an operation in order to
Days before the poll, disaster struck. The Welby campaign team published a
pamphlet entitled &Good Advice& which misquoted his opponent as saying:
&Labour is not fit to govern the country...&. Crossman sued and Welby was
forced to publish a grovelling apology on the eve of the election.
He had apparently approved the pamphlet, but now accused his election agent of
inserting the quote &entirely on your own initiative.&
Crossman won a massive majority, and Welby headed back across the Atlantic.
Then in 1952 Walter Winchell, the king of American gossip columnists,
revealed that the Englishman was dating the daughter of Joseph Kennedy,
former US ambassador to Britain. Patricia was also the sister of John F
Alongside snippets on the love affair between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner,
the columnist wrote: &J. P. Kennedy&s daughter Pat and Gavin Welby (of the
Scotch whiskey clan) are intoxicated about each other.& However, Patricia
later married the British actor Peter Lawford. Welby returned to Britain.
During the election campaign he had met and befriended Adam Butler, the son of
Rab, who would go on to be an MP, a minister and aide to Margaret Thatcher
and a knight. They became so close that Welby later added a clause to his
will, making Adam Butler the legal guardian of his son. He added: &I express
the wish that (he) take my son to live with him...during his infancy.&
It was Adam Butler who introduced Gavin Welby to his cousin Jane Portal, the
private secretary to Winston Churchill. She later said that she had been
hired by Churchill as a &donkey& and &dogsbody& to do late night work, as
well as taking dictation of his war memoirs. Being a niece of Rab Butler had
helped her get the job. After meeting her in 1940, Churchill had said:
&You&ll do.&
She went on to work for Churchill as he led a government after the war,
helping to keep his stroke and failing health hidden from the wider world.
Gavin Welby and Jane Portal married on Monday April 4 1955 in Baltimore,
Maryland, without their family and friends in attendance. They had
apparently eloped because of disapproval from her parents. Later that month,
however, the marriage was announced in The Times. A reception was held at 11
Downing Street, arranged by Rab Butler.
When details of the wedding reached America John F Kennedy wrote to his
21-year-old Swedish mistress Gunilla von Post: &Did you see in the paper
that our friend - the cold, frozen Mr Gavin Welby - got married to Mr
Churchill&s secretary? Something must have happened.&
By 1956, the Welbys were living in Onslow Square, Chelsea. Gavin had invested
much of the money he had made in America and was now a Name on the Lloyds
insurance market. His son was born on January 6 that year.
Justin Portal Welby was christened at Holy Trinity, Brompton, with Adam Butler
and the Hon Flora Fraser, now Lady Saltoun, acting as godparents. This was
the same church to which he would return for comfort after the death of his
first child in a car accident in Paris, and where he first felt called to
the ministry.
Contrary to reports, the future Archbishop did not graduate from HTB&s popular
Alpha Course, which was not running in the same form when he was there.
The marriage between his parents did not last. Within three years, Jane Welby
petitioned for divorce on the grounds that her husband was &guilty of
adultery&.
Mr Welby did not contest the claim. The divorce was finalised in February
Jane Portal went on to marry Charles Williams, the former Essex county
cricketer and oil executive, in 1975. When he was elevated to the House of
Lords as a life peer in 1985, she became Lady Williams of Elvel.
After the marriage ended, Gavin Welby went back to dividing his time between
Britain and America. He stood for Parliament again in 1955, as a last-minute
replacement candidate in Goole, Yorkshire.
The local party chairman wrote: &His qualifications seem so astonishingly
good...[we] are extraordinary lucky [to have] a man of such calibre.&
But Mr Welby lost again, badly.
His next notable romantic involvement was in the early Sixties, with the
23-year-old actress Vanessa Redgrave, a rising star of the Royal Shakespeare
Company. Welby was now 50, but claimed to be younger.
&I have something very special to tell you,& Miss Redgrave wrote to her
father. &I am going to marry a sweet, darling man called Gavin Welby.&
Her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, did not approve. Her mother, Rachel Kempson,
wrote to him: &Vanessa is completely infatuated... I only pray we can
prevent marriage.& They feared Welby was a &rotten piece of work&.
The actress did eventually end the relationship. She told her father: &I have
decided not to marry Gavin because, although I do love him, for various
reasons I know it wouldn&t work... I had a talk with Mum this evening and
realised that it is the only thing to do.&
So much of this astonishing life was hidden from his son, who was moved by the
story the Sunday Telegraph was able to share with him. Bishop Welby did not
know, for example, that his father had Jewish ancestry, or an older sister
called Peggy. He continues to wonder whether he has secret brothers or
&In many ways, I think the story you have told me brings more credit on him
than the story he himself told,& Bishop Welby said. &It is the 'making good&
story isn&t it? It&s a great thing of overcoming setbacks. I would have
thought 'wow, that&s a fantastic story& if he had told me about it when I
was a child.&
He went on: &There is no hiding the fact that he was a complicated man. He was
really, really, brilliant. I think what you have said shows he was really
brilliant in many ways. But there were, probably from his background,
complications in his life that hindered that brilliance really being
deployed fully.&
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