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regional queer publications— to make ourselves
cheerful and amenable to the film. We also
met the Rupert, for about 90 seconds each, as
his handler herded him around the room.
The lighting was very dim, and the star’s
attire was casual. Nightclub ambience is
designed to make everyone attractive, so it was
difficult (and a little intimidating) to study
Everetts up-close looks. In the darkness, his
most striking quality was his height— relative
to mine, anyway. My secondary impression, not
fully understood until later, was of a warm,
friendly, normal person— where was the
celebrity arrogance, the bitchy attitude?
A little disappointing for my amorously star-
■ struck inner fag.
There was nothing disappointing about the
film, however. The Next Best Thing takes full
advantage of the screen chemistry between
real-life friends Everett and Madonna, and it
offers a pleasing combination of comedy and
drama. The story— about a gay man and a
straight woman, close friends who, in a fit of
drunkenness, conceive a child and agree to
raise the baby together— is very timely and
issue-oriented, with plenty of laughs along for
the ride.
The Next Best Thing thoughtfully handles
hot topics, such as the legal issues related to
gay parenting, while avoiding most of the
clichés associated with the more passé but still
sometimes touchy matter of just plain being
gay— thanks in part to Everett, who added
more than two cents to the screenplay.
Next morning after seeing the film, 1 and
10 other writers attended the second of two
one-hour panel interviews with the star in a
lovely poolside bungalow. Like my upstairs
room with a view of the beach, the bungalow
was decorated all in white, the only color—
aside from the motley crew of journalists— was
the elegant ikebana flower arrangement on the
coffee table.
Everett arrived looking much the same as
the previous night, casual and reasonably well-
groomed. In the morning light, 1 noticed he
has wrinkles I’ve never seen on-screen or in a
magazine— which is not to say there was any
just a stately homo with no other life and basi
cally a nursemaid.”
But Everett didn’t want Robert’s heroism to
come at Abbie’s expense. The Next Best Thing
reaches its climax when Abbie moves away
and Robert has to sue for custody of their child.
In such a context, giving Robert a sex life
endangers his parental rights, and Abbie comes
off as a Grade A bitch for taking advantage of
the legal system’s conservatism.
“She instigated the whole thing of having
the kid in the original story,” Everett said, lean
ing forward and gesturing with his hands— as if
he were in a creative meeting with the director
and screenwriter. “I thought that if she unspon-
taneously had sex with him, then it really did
make her into a villain by the end because she
forced him into the
situation and then
forced him out of it.
Whereas, if two
friends spontaneously
had sex, then she has
a much better foot to
stand on.”
Speaking about pal
and co-star Madonna,
Everett said: “T he pro
ject was brought to
me, and when I knew
originally that I want
ed to make the sexual
act in it a spontaneous
one, I thought she was
the ideal person—
apart from the fact
that we’re friends—
because she’s one of
the few women you
could put into a gay
club and everyone
would still want to
fuck her.”
Asked exactly how
intimate his relationship with Ms. Ciccone is,
Everett’s response— “Have I boffed her?”—
drew raucous laughter from the circle of jour
nalists. Turning serious a little later, he added:
“Madonna’s got a sexual appeal that crosses the
board, which I think is part of her fascination,
for me.”
True enough. Although Madonna is at long
last beginning to show her age in small ways,
she’s hip to that yoga thing now and still look
ing mighty sexy. Also, her acting ability is con
tinuing to mature; this graceful and unaffected
performance is perhaps her best work yet.
Everett’s efforts to revise Abbie and Robert’s
relationship make the conflict between them
less black-and-white, more realistic. Since he
and Madonna are longtime friends, it was easy
for them to add another layer of vérité to the
characters’ friendship.
“I loved all those T V shows where the lead
character has the same name as the actor, and
the character is half the actor and half made
up,” Everett explained enthusiastically. “So, I
wanted very much for my character and for
Madonna’s character to have a lot to do with
us as people, and then maybe you could think
that the story could have happened to her and
me.”
But there are some significant differences
between The Next Best Thing’s upstanding gay
dad and the actor who plays him, as Everett
glibly pointed out: “I thought about having
kids until I was about 25, hut not in a very seri
ous way. You think of those things in a kind of
romantic way when you’re a kid, hut they don’t
probably mean anything. I’m not very good at
responsibilities of any sort. I have a dog.” (Yes,
it’s his black lab in the movie.)
Asked exactly
how intimate his
relationship with
Ms. Ciccene is,
Everett's
response—
"Nave I hotted
her?"—
drew raucous
laughter from
the circle ot
journalists.
thing at all unattractive about him. On the
contrary, this bit of humanness gave him a con
genial, datable quality and made him seem less
the iconic Hollywood sex symbol who can he
touched only in dreams. He was earnest but
not overly serious; his remarks were intelligent
and sometimes eloquent. (His tag-along PR
person stayed quietly off to the side and let
Everett be himself.)
One of the first things we discussed were
the contributions he made to the finished
script, most of which had to do with changing
the nature of the relationship between the
main characters, Robert and Abbie.
“The original screenplay,”
Everett began in his alluring Eng
lish accent, “was about a very, very
hard, hitter woman and a flubby,
asexual queen who’s an interior
decorator (panel members
moaned] who’d given up sex years
ago.. .the idea being that he could
be a father because he’s not dab
bling in the hideous art of homo
sexuality.”
Although one of his goals was
to make the character less stereo
typical, Everett insisted he had no
reservations about a scene in
which Robert pretends to be a
flaming queen in order to embar
rass Abhie’s ex-boyfriend.
“It was kind of irresistible,” he
explained flirtatiously. “I don’t
think John [Schlesinger, the direc
tor] would have done the scene
that way. 1 was very much into
going into character.”
In order for his character,
Robert, to be more of a hero in the
film, Everett felt it was important
for the audience to see “that he
was a practicing homosexual, not
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