Book review: Baggage, by Alan Cumming

Baggage, by Alan Cumming

Baggage
by Alan Cumming (Canongate, $33)

Sometimes autobiographies by well-known actors can feel like books that no one has cared about particularly – not in their writing, editing, publishing, or even in the reason for their existence, apart from money. Following upon the success of the much more fulfilling Not My Father's Son, which details a childhood spent under a tyrannical father, Alan Cumming's Baggage feels like a contractually obligated second volume, and it suffers from this. Just as in movie franchises, it is definitely Cumming 2 – and it shows.

Subtitled Tales from a fully packed life, Baggage travels the well-worn route of celebrity anecdotes loosely linked by the individual life in which they occurred. The style is perfunctorily chatty. Analysis is minimal. Big names briefly appear – Liza Minnelli, Judi Dench, Tina Turner, Gore Vidal, Donatella Versace, Oliver Reed, Sean Connery, Jessica Lange, and Stanley Kubrick. No one lasts for more than two or three pages - and that often includes the less-famous sexual partners.

Cumming is a much-awarded stage and film actor. He has played the lead in theatrical productions of Hamlet and Samuel Beckett's Endgame, appeared in stage-musicals such as Cabaret and The Three-Penny Opera, as well as big franchise movies like GoldenEye and X2, not to mention the films, Emma and Son of the Mask. The list is long and exhausting but the reader of Baggage soon gets used to the titular pace.

Glimpses of the famous include Minnelli revealing that a heart-rending, personalised story she has just used on stage to great and tearful effect on her audience is a complete fiction, that Faye Dunaway carries a portable pair of scales with her so that she can calculate exactly the number of calories she is eating, that Kubrick was not quite the directorial ogre he was made out to be and seemed happy to encourage Cumming's ever-increasing sexual innuendo as a gay hotel clerk in Eyes Wide Shut…

And more. And more. And more. The drunken writer Vidal in his famed cliff-edge Rapallo house with his partner, Howard Austin, veers dangerously from charming to lethal. The drugged-out director Bryan Singer is barely visible on the set of an X-Men movie which is spiralling dangerously out of control until the whole cast stage an intervention. If anything, this is the piece de resistance of the book: a nightmare shoot, a director with a medicine-chest of pills, an all-star cast from Halle Berry to Hugh Jackman and Anna Paquin, with a typical Hollywood double-edged ending.

Yet where is Cumming in the mix? During the course of the book, Cumming moves from heterosexual marriage to hedonistic gay affairs and finally his marriage to a man. As far as the reader is concerned, they are simply unexamined events in a mysterious interior life, lost somehow in a schedule of movie and stage performances.

Is there really an Alan Cumming? If there is, he is not to be found in Baggage. Events are certainly there, along with the famous and semi-famous, award ceremonies, casual meetings with people who suddenly seem to qualify as "friends", mishaps of timing, and all the prat-falls of comedy. The memoir, however, is somehow lacking in true intimate human meaning, for the simple reason there seems to be no one to connect with beyond a series of well-honed anecdotes tailored for a mid-evening TV talk-show audience, with celebrity gossip and a few risque elements thrown in.