Real Life Dept.

Home Visit

by Ariel Levy June 22, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/22/090622ta_talk_levy

"Palatial gay fantasia" is how Simon Doonan described his apartment in Greenwich Village the other night, as he swept past two garden gnomes crouching under a bright-orange lacquered console in the foyer. "Glamorous romper room," he continued, heading toward a paisley-patterned Ping-Pong table in the living room. "Because Johnny and I are very infantile." Nesting on bookshelves and tabletops were scores of ceramic animals designed by Doonan's spouse, the homeware baron Jonathan Adler. ("I'm just a simple potter!" Adler insisted.) A burlap bust of Napoleon was tucked into the fireplace, and about a fifth of the room was taken up by a huge black statue of a foot. "This is the antithesis of the two-room flat where I grew up," Doonan said.

Doonan's picaresque journey from ration books in Reading, England, to palatial gay fantasia is the subject of the British television show "Beautiful People," which was about to make its American début, on the Logo network. The show is adapted from Doonan's memoir "Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints." "When the book was optioned, everyone thought I'd start flying to work in a mink-lined helicopter," Doonan said. In reality, his compensation was a bit more modest; he wouldn't say how much he was paid, but allowed that it was "better than a poke in the eye with a dirty stick."

Fortunately for Doonan, he has never depended on the material rewards of writing. Since 1985, he has had a day job as the creative director of Barneys, an arrangement that he defends passionately. "If Virginia Woolf had had two days a week at the ham counter at Harrods, she mightn't have offed herself," he said. Doonan offered his visitor a drink from a recessed bar in the wall, lined with glasses bearing skull-and-crossbones decals and labelled "Arsenic," "Strychnine," "Cyanide," and "Wood Alcohol." "We don't drink at all," Doonan said, "but we have this faux masculine-"

"It's mantique-y," Adler said, indicating the bar and a large leather hippopotamus nearby. "You are the ultimate mantique," Adler told Doonan, who, at fifty-six, is fourteen years his senior.

"Cinquante-six," Doonan said. "Ever since I passed fifty, I'm aging in French. It's more glamorous."

Doonan's alleged ancientness is a running joke in the household, as is his fictitious weight problem. Adler frequently refers to Doonan as an "obese elf," even though Doonan weighs in at a hundred and thirty-five pounds of lean white elf meat. Doonan and Adler, who were married in San Francisco in September, 2008, and have been together for fourteen years, adhere to a monklike regimen of exercise, teetotalling, and tea-drinking.

"My associations with alcohol are completely negative," Doonan said. "My dad made wine out of rose petals and potato peelings. My grandfather, his whole life was betting on the horses, and he strongly advised my mom to put gin in my milk so I would stay small and could be a jockey. But, thanks to my mom's two-pack-a-day habit, I stayed small anyway."

The couple settled into a tangerine-colored couch in the den and flipped on the television. In the première episode of "Beautiful People," the character based on Doonan's father does indeed make wine, out of "parsnips and marmalade." "I don't know why you'd bugger about with grapes when you can make a perfectly good wine out of potato peelings," the father says.

"That's directly from my book," Doonan declared, pleased.

Asked if his real father, Terry, who died three years ago, would have liked the show, Doonan replied, "He'd probably be appalled. He and my mom got through their very difficult lives by not examining them. They created a milieu that was so chaotic my gayness was small potatoes."

Instead of being set in postwar England, as Doonan's childhood was, "Beautiful People" takes place in the late nineties. The boys on the show want to grow up to be West End stage stars, but Doonan's own aspirations were different. "Fashion," he said. "I was mesmerized by what was shimmering on the horizon." In the first episode, the young Doonan steals a hot-pink leopard-spotted dress from his best friend's Jamaican mother.

"It makes me appreciate gays," Doonan said, as the credits rolled. "Gay people are brave and resilient!" (Several hours earlier, it had been announced that Proposition 8 was upheld in California, outlawing gay marriage.) He went on, "It's about two little kids who get punched about and called batty boy"-Jamaican slang for "effeminate." "I've been doing that for fifty-six years. Cinquante-six! The other day, I got in a cab and the driver said, 'Are you a lady man?' I said, 'Oh, just take me to fucking Forty-seventh Street.' " ♦