Not My Father's Son. Alan Cumming

      “What?” she spat. “What would we even sing together? No one told me about this!”

      You may not know it but Patti Smith is prone to spitting. I first met her at a party in a New York City clothing store a couple of years earlier. She sang a few songs as cute young people in black milled around serving canapés and champagne to less cute older people in black. It wasn’t very rock and roll, but then Patti changed all that. In between two of her songs, she spat. Not an “Oops I’ve got a little something stuck on my tongue” kind of spit, but a great big throat-curdling gob of a spit. A loogie as they say in the Americas. And she spat on the carpet. Several times.

      No mention was made of Patti’s spitting by anyone in the store, least of all me, when I was taken to meet her after the performance. As we were introduced I could see Patti sizing me up rather suspiciously with her Dickensian eyes.

      “You’re the mystery guy, aren’t you?” she said, pupils widening in recognition.

      “What?” I said, a little overwhelmed.

      “You’re the guy who hosts Masterpiece on PBS, aren’t you?” she said, as though she herself were one of the TV detectives I did indeed introduce as Masterpiece Mystery host. I was just processing the fact that Patti Smith was an avid viewer of Miss Marple and Co. when she dealt me another body blow:

      “I’ve always wanted that job,” she muttered wistfully.

      I made a pact with myself right there and then never to tell the Masterpiece people this information, as they would surely bump me and make Patti’s wish come true.

      Can you imagine Patti Smith coming out of the shadows in a black suit, spouting forth about Inspector Linley or some malfeasance on the Orient Express and ending each introduction with a resounding gob into a specially designed PBS spittoon? I can. It would be a lot more entertaining than that bloke in a suit with the funny accent they have on now.

      Meanwhile, Marion had walked to the side of the stage and was shouting to anyone who would listen, “Do something! Do something!!”

      I admired her Gallic sense of injustice, but I knew her cries would be in vain. These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organised with the finesse of a nursery nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.

      Patti and I were left centre stage, both numb. She was presumably running through the list of songs she and Mary J. Blige might both know, which can’t have taken long.

      I was thinking back to earlier in the evening. I had started the show with a song (“That’s Life”—how sadly apposite it now seemed) and a monologue in which I was purporting to channel the spirit of Sharon Stone, the event’s usual host and whose shoes I was filling, as it were. Alas, the crowd was underwhelmed. The only time the drone of chat slightly faltered was when I briefly made them think Sharon was watching the proceedings via a webcam from the film set that forbade her presence. “So make sure you bid high,” I had warned. “Cos that bitch will cut you.”

      A small crowd had gathered at the side of the stage, some offering advice, others offering their services to fill the embarrassing gap. Suddenly Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul and the man whose genius idea it had been to auction off the duet between Patti and Mary J. in the first place, came rushing in from a side door and blurted out that he had just been ripped a new one by Ms Blige. A visible and voluble tremor rippled throughout the gaggle of glitterati. Harvey does not get dressed down by anyone, ever, let alone a ferocious R & B legend who was on her way home when she heard her name being announced for a duet she also knew nothing about. Harvey had that detached air of someone who had just been mugged. I had a sudden thought that witnessing his encounter with Mary J. would have made a much better auction item than a duet between the two ladies, but I used my inside voice and kept that to myself. Harvey mopped the sweat from his brow and said that Mary had finally acquiesced and would be out in a moment, presumably when she had finished wiping his blood off her Louboutins.

      As Mary, Harvey and Patti returned to the stage, smiling as though they had planned all this years before, I fled the tent and sneaked off to the hotel bar to drown my sorrows. I realised I had never actually liked Cannes. Well, I like Cannes, the actual town. What I’m not so keen on are those few weeks every May when the town is marauded by movie folk.

      My first ever Cannes was in 1992, when my debut feature film, Prague, premiered there. Looking back, it was all a giddy blur. The only film festival I had ever been to before then was back home in Scotland, when a film I had made in my last term of drama school, Gillies McKinnon’s Passing Glory, had its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986. I remember that experience very vividly because it was the first time I had ever seen myself on the big screen and I was horrified by how my nose seemed to appear at least fifteen seconds before the rest of my face. A less confident man might have avoided the camera for life.

      But I soldiered on, and here I was, not strolling up Lothian Road and popping into the Edinburgh Filmhouse, but cruising the Croisette and monter l’escalier of the Palais des Congrès! That week I realised for the first time that glamour actually had a smell. But also I was reminded that the industry I was in was show business.

      Film festivals are really just business conventions, you see. It could be photocopiers, it could be shower curtains, Cannes just happens to be movies. And I think any business convention, even such a glamorous one as the Cannes Film Festival, can only be interesting for so long because too many people are talking too much about the same thing: their jobs or product— as not just photocopiers and shower curtains but also films are referred to nowadays. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my job, I love talking about films, but if that’s the only topic of conversation available for days at a time, I get a serious bout of ennui.

      That night, in my beautiful room in the Hôtel du Cap that looked out onto the stunning terrace that sloped down to the twinkling Mediterranean where the little dinghies of paparazzi bobbed in the wake, I had funny dreams. I dreamed I was back onstage in the tent and Harvey was auctioning off a kiss with me starting at thirty thousand dollars, and nobody was bidding! The fact that this had actually happened to Ryan Gosling earlier that evening only further fuelled the nightmare.

      “No, Harvey,” I kept saying. “Be more realistic. Start at a hundred pounds!”

      I also dreamed of my mum, feverishly knitting lots and lots of pairs of socks to give as Christmas presents to all the new Asian relations she was about to acquire.

      Yes, I’ll run that by you again. You see, the very next day, I was to fly to London to prepare for the filming of an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, a very popular programme in which celebrities have their genealogy investigated, and studious, balding men in tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows help the celebs pore over ancient parchments wherein family secrets are hidden. But not for long of course, as a hitherto unpredictable secret is revealed, and then the celeb cries.

      I had been asked at the end of the previous year if I would be interested in taking part in the show, and had immediately said yes. Then came the rather unnerving few months when the production company people went off and did some initial research to see whether or not my past was worthy of a full hour-long probe. In other words, they needed to determine whether my ancestors were interesting enough. Being an actor, I am very used to the notion of waiting for people to pass judgement on me—audiences, critics, awards juries, fashion police—all do it with such alarming regularity that it has almost ceased to be alarming. But this was different. This time the judgement was not about me, and yet it reflected on me.

      And I wanted very dearly to do this show because it would give me the opportunity to get to the bottom of a mystery in my mum’s side of the family, a mystery whose received explanation I had never fully bought and knew would be resolved by the programme once and for all. And hence the dream about my mum knitting socks for all those new family members I imagined I was going to unearth.