DIARY
DEBORAH BU LL It has been the week of two continents and three hats: ballet dancer's tiara, author's headache and Rolls-Royce wing. If I may explain the latter, one of my sidelines is going round the world promoting the lat- est Rolls-Royce. (Well, someone's got to do it.) I wear the trademark wing in my hair. My multiple personality makes pack- ing a nightmare, so I always stick to the same formula: keep adding outfits until the case won't close, and never, ever take one black suit when you can squeeze in three. After two weeks on the road with the Royal Ballet's Dance Bites tour, I was heading off to the United States to publicise my book, The Vitality Plan, in its American incarna- tion, Totally Fit. I'm not quite sure why the title change came about, but I think it may have been necessitated by the American tendency to mispronounce the letter t. The Vidalidy Plan wouldn't have cut the mus- tard in the United States, and Totally Fit doesn't work unless you turn the second consonant into a d.
My publicist, Lucy, picked me up from New York's Carlyle hotel in a white stretch limo. I had been reading a Spectator article on the plane by one of the Two Fat Ladies, and like me, she had been amused to be collected (out of necessity?) in one of these vast cruising gin palaces. I find these vehi- cles irredeemably seedy, with their cheap decanters, disco lights and myriad tissue boxes. As we set off for Connecticut the panel separating us from the driver slid silently across. I guess he's seen it all, but I'm not sure what he expected Lucy and me to be getting up to on a Monday morning.
The next day, in Boston, I was picked up from the hotel at 6 a.m. for breakfast television on location at the World Gym. Being up before 8.30 a.m. is such an achievement for me that I was momentarily disappointed to see from the parking lot that several other people were sharing my moment of triumph. Once the camera crew and the obligatory big-haired presenter arrived, I was given three minutes to distil the essence of Totally Fit and convince the Boston Brahmins that they really couldn't do without it.
After a brief pause we headed off to a television show entitled Doctors on Call. Being greeted by a man wearing more make-up than I before 10 a.m. might have been the final straw if I hadn't had Smoki Bacon still to come. Smoki and Dick Con- cannon have a weekend show which includes lunch at the Café Rouge with a celebrity. Me, in case you were wondering. They are the archetypal American TV hosts, everything their names lead you to expect. As the lunch takes place away from the studio, Dick asks the questions while Smoki (aged 70) operates the camera. It brought to mind those public television channels in New York, where you buy a slice of air time and then make your own programme to fill it. Everyone can be a star in America. There used to be a channel which was so outrageously pornographic (free) that I guess either Mayor Giuliani or the pay-as-you-yearn porn mafia closed it down. It was still going strong when the company was here in 1992, and groups of dancers would turn up for work red-eyed from the combined effect of very late nights and crying with laughter.
0 n Tuesday my new best friends at Rolls-Royce arrived in New York. Initially I was booked for a week of events in Scot- land, but that has now expanded to become a world tour: Geneva, New York, London, Munich, Berlin, Tokyo and Hong Kong. I still don't know how I got involved with launching the best car in the world. It's not at all the sort of thing I'm normally asked to do — for a start, I'm not required to open my mouth — but it's certainly some- thing I could get used to. I had to do anoth- er live TV show in the evening, but I joined them all for a late dinner. There was no rush. We were scheduled to rehearse with the Silver Seraph in place on a specially constructed stage in the Seagram Building at 1 a.m. During dinner, the phone rang. Change of plan. 2 a.m. Bleary-eyed, we dragged ourselves over there to find a stage barely half built. It didn't look as if any- thing was going to happen before 3 a.m., and sure enough, nothing did. Nor before 4 a.m. We gave up and went to bed.
The next day's event was a glossy affair for the invited guests, but less than glam- orous for me. My dressing-room was an office in the kitchen, and despite a Do Not Disturb sign on the door, I was regularly disturbed by waiters wanting to eat their supper with me. It was nevertheless an improvement on conditions at the Geneva Motor Show, where I changed in a brochure cupboard, two feet by six, and warmed up like an Egyptian mummy. It is a good job they signed me and not Pavarotti. The Duke of Edinburgh did sterling work in per- suading the Americans to buy British. With hubris, an extraordinary number of guests attempted to impress him by claiming own- ership of the building we were in, temporar- ily forgetful of his wife's family having, until recently, owned much of the world.
Icame home to a sheaf of cuttings which brought me up to date on the South Bank, but I've searched in vain for news on what I gather has been another momentous week in the arts. The disbanding of the Arts Council on Thursday merited a single col- umn inch in both the Telegraph and the Times. One of the problems with the arts is that its supporters are on the whole very nice people, people who keep their views to themselves and try not to give offence. Aside from a few of us who won't shut up on the subject, the arts-loving public suffer numerous blows with resigned shrugs and philosophical mutterings. Last month, 250,000 people managed, in a very nice way, to bring the capital to a standstill, focus the nation on their fate and capture the front page of every newspaper for what seemed like the rest of the week. Six hun- dred and fifty thousand people work in the arts in England, and last year there were around 20 million paid visits to galleries, concerts, theatres, opera and dance. We are hardly a minority, but all too often our interests don't even make the national press. We have to speak up. It's time for people who care about the arts to stop being so nice.
Aweek later, I was back in my day job, dancing Sleeping Beauty with the company in Frankfurt. It felt like Groundhog Day; the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky and the stacks of pastel tutus could indicate any city, any tour of the last five years — Wash- ington, New York, Costa Mesa, Madrid except that just before curtain-up some- thing happened to distinguish this perfor- mance from all the others. The Royal Opera House lost another chief executive. I keep hearing echoes of Oscar Wilde, 'To lose one parent may be regarded as a mis- fortune,' and so on. Pelham Allen, recently appointed to the board, will act as chief executive until a replacement can be found. Well, that'll save on the cost of new sta- tionery. A bit of Tippex should do it.
The author is a soloist with the Royal Ballet.
Previous page
