Rupert Everett’s latest TV appearance has reminded me of how I love a good memoir

The actor’s honesty is dialled up even further on the page, and there are plenty more examples out there, writes Janet Street-Porter

Rupert Everett with some sweaty barmaid (allegedly) at an event in 1999 (Stan Honda/Getty)

I’m glad Rupert Everett knows relatively little about me – because he has the best put-downs about people he’s encountered during his long career. Worse, he never fails to repeat them in print or in interviews.

This jaw-dropping “honesty” has proved a lucrative earner when acting roles started to thin out. This week, Everett’s “observations” (sample – “Colin Firth tongued me when filming St Trinians” – meaning kissed – and “well parked was the biggest compliment in our family”) were delivered to an unusually sycophantic Piers Morgan (ITV’s Life Stories), providing a welcome tonic during these grey and gloomy times.

Having met Rupert many times, on each occasion I’m slightly fearful about what he is mentally filing away – his three volumes of  best-selling memoirs have been revelatory about his self-confessed shortcomings (huge vanity and vast ambition), his sexual explorations and his determination to become a star at all costs.

He’s not held back on his famous co-stars, describing Madonna and Julia Roberts as smelling “vaguely of sweat” because they shunned deodorant. Although he came out as gay in 1989 (did it limit his career?), he’s subsequently owned up to sex with women, claiming he was “basically adventurous”. When asked about his six-year affair with Paula Yates, Everett told Piers “it was up to her to feel guilty, I wasn’t married to Bob”.

Rupert’s hour was frothy telly entertainment, but for the real McCoy you must read his memoirs – which veer from the utterly tasteless (encounters with fans in a porn shop) to the touching (wheeling his father on one last trip to Lourdes as he was dying).

My closest encounter with the fearsome diarist occurred an hour before we were invited to appear at a posh costume party (the theme was “revolutionary”). As I panicked, Rupert got down on hands and knees with scissors and a staple gun, creating a Mad Max look of genius constructed from army surplus netting and camouflage trousers (which he shredded and turned into a blouse). Naturally, he shunned the dress code, appearing in a perfectly cut suit.

In case you think we’re close pals, he’s since described me (along with Madonna) as “a whiny old barmaid”.

Reading memoirs has been a very rewarding way to explore and travel in other people’s worlds through the months of confinement – and Rupert’s remain the gold standard. But what kind of personality sets down their judgement on everyday encounters? Do they care if they lose friends as a result? What about their friends and partners? Rupert is highly selective – choosing to keep one part of his life out of the public view, his 20-year relationship with his partner Henrique, a Brazilian accountant. Is that fair?

I’ve just finished Sasha Swire’s memoir Diary of an MP’s Wife, covering the years between 2010 and 2019, of her MP husband’s journey from the back benches to ministerial office and back again. She talks of local constituency bores, the dreary fund raisers and the shameless chumocracy of Cameron and co – but has anything changed with Boris at the helm?

By the end of Swire’s book, I felt slightly unclean and a little bit nauseous. It is compelling, providing an insight into the way that Tory world operates, with its snobbery and social demarcations. Image is everything – Boris still employs one of the personal photographers (he has three on the payroll) that Cameron used to buff up his image. Swire appears to tell us about life at the coalface of politics, but has she left stuff out? Now her husband has retired as an MP, can we expect more?

I’m guilty of selective recall, having written two volumes of memoirs. Baggage examined my fractious relationship with my mother, written after her death. Fallout is about the late 1960s, sexual infidelity, college and being a newcomer in the very male world of Fleet Street in the early 1970s.

Fallout stops at 1976 as I’m still working in the media and too much honesty (unless, perhaps you are Rupert Everett) could see me blacklisted. Yes, people do settle scores, and I know plenty about those I’ve encountered during my career in print and television.

As an antidote to Sasha Swire, the memoirs of Lady Anne Glenconner (Lady in Waiting) are utterly seductive, mainly because she is determined never to feel sorry for herself, in spite of losing two sons (one, a heroin addict, to hepatitis and another to Aids) and nursing another through a coma following a motorcycle accident.

Having dedicated her life to service as an uncomplaining (and long-suffering) lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Lady Glenconner tolerated her eccentric husband’s behaviour until his death, only to discover he’d left everything to a favoured employee in Mustique.

Anne’s voice comes across loud and strong, in the same way that you can hear Rupert Everett as you read Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, or his latest opus To the End of the World, grovelling around European film festivals trying to raise money for his movie about the last years of Oscar Wilde.

But the most original memoir I’ve read this lockdown uses the story of a building, the unique modern house designed by Peter Womersley in 1957 for the textile designer Bernat Klein. The See-Through House, written by Klein’s daughter Shelley, after his death, describes how her teenage father left his parents in northern Yugoslavia in the 1940s to study in Israel, returning to the UK after the war and starting his own mill in the Scottish Borders.

His deep love of the surrounding countryside translated into sensational tweeds which were used by all the top Parisian couturiers. The see-through house, near Selkirk, was the ultimate expression of Klein’s determined modernism, and Shelley’s book describes the tyranny of living with “Beri” – a dad who refused to allow any decoration, insisting that toys and any object he had not authorised were placed out of sight. Furious rows ensued.

Funny and shocking at the same time, I wish I could have met Beri, we have a lot in common.