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  Sarah and I met up again the following day. She was living by herself in an apartment in Pacific Heights, she’d begun her masters programme around the same time as I’d arrived in San Francisco, a couple of weeks earlier. We spent a lot of time together from that point, practically every night, hanging out, listening to a lot of music, Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits, Steve Miller. She got me into Led Zep’s Houses Of The Holy, which I hadn’t really explored before. They’re a big band for us. We danced to ‘Rain Song’ song in my apartment, so later on we had it as the first dance at our wedding. Sarah was with me when I met Robert Plant in a bar last year, and in the studio with us when we recorded ‘Song to the Siren’ together. Robert’s soundtracked our relationship in a sense. And that honeymoon period in San Francisco was magic, she was wonderful. She bought me tea and biscuits for my birthday to remind me of home – it was really sweet, nobody had ever done anything like that for me before. Got it slightly wrong though. Peppermint tea and chocolate chip cookies. Cute.

  We just connected on every level. The first time we kissed was at a Bohème party Baz put on at the W hotel – a really lovely rooftop party, full of celebs. We were both dazzled by it all, the boy from Fleetwood and the girl from Utah. And she kissed me, I was so shy with her. I soon asked her to come to New York with me for the Broadway run. She was unhappy at college; to some extent her situation mirrored my frustrations at the Opera House. She’d spent the previous four years getting her bachelor’s and wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to continue studying. It was no small thing for her to be at that college; there were 15 in her class from 2000 auditions, but she quit, on her birthday.

  Gala Night in San Francisco was such an event. TV crews, press, red carpet, the works. It was a big deal, Baz was such a big deal, Moulin Rouge had only come out that summer and was so huge. Nicole Kidman was there, Kevin Spacey was there, Baz had a film crew getting audience reactions to the show. He did that a lot, he’s amazing at creating a buzz, generating hype. The Curran is a beautiful theatre, 90 years old, and Sarah had never seen an opera before, she brought her friends with her. I really loved singing that night, knowing that she was out there with her friends.

  We recorded the cast album in that period in San Francisco, at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, and Sarah came with me. I’d had a show the night before and had to get up at 7am to drive up there. My voice was wrecked, because I’d not had time to recover from the show, and I had to sing ‘Che Gelida Manina’, which I didn’t feel in any fit state to do. So I recorded everything else I had to do first, and me and Sarah spent the night there, in a guest ranch near the studios, so I could do the aria the next day. The land there actually looks like something from Star Wars. There are CCTV cameras in the rocks, which moved around, and he lives in a massive old colonial mansion at the other end of the valley. We were in the Norman Rockwell Suite, which had beautiful Rockwell paintings on the wall, and we settled down for the evening. Sarah went to have a bath and I lit a fire; I thought I’d make the room nice and romantic, but she came out of the bathroom prematurely when she saw smoke coming under the door. The fire was properly blazing and I was trying, failing, to sort it out. She said, ‘Did you open the flue?’ I didn’t know anything about a flue. Sparks were flying onto the carpet, some were dangerously close to the paintings, and we worked it out in the nick of time, opened the flue, but it was a hairy moment. I’m glad we didn’t burn the place down. Nobody wants to be the guy who burnt down Skywalker Ranch.

  Chapter Twenty

  SINGING ON BROADWAY, SLEEPING ON LILOS

  The first few nights on Broadway were a whole other level. I went to the toilet during the show on opening night, I think David Miller was on, and I found myself next to James Gandolfini at the urinals. I said hi.

  ‘Alright, mate?’

  ‘Yeah. How are you?’

  ‘I’m cool thanks. Never pissed next to a gangster before.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  Then Harvey Keitel walked in. In the interval, Baz grabbed me and introduced me to Leonardo DiCaprio and Rupert Murdoch. Hugh Grant was there, Cameron Diaz. Drew Barrymore was thrown out midway through Act One because she and her boyfriend, the drummer from The Strokes, were caught being a bit too amorous in the ladies’ toilet. And at the after-party at the Hudson Hotel I ended up playing pool with Leonardo DiCaprio. Nice guy. Shit at pool.

  The next day, The New York Times said it was the coolest show in town, and it absolutely felt like it. It was amazing singing on that stage and looking out at the audience and seeing the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas. Sigourney Weaver came to see it one night. I had a massive crush on her when I was a kid, because of Ghostbusters. Stunning. I still do a bit, she still does it for me. Sarah knows, it’s all above board. I invited her backstage to say hi, and she was lovely, beautiful. I was a little awestruck. Sting came. I was at home one afternoon, David Miller was on that night, and I had a phone call from someone in the cast saying, ‘Alf, you’re a big Sting fan, he’s in tonight watching the show, why don’t you come in and meet him and ask him to come backstage and meet us all?’ So after the show I went up to him, introduced myself and asked him to come back. We walked through the pass door and he said, ‘This bel canto stuff is great, I love it,’ and he started to sing. I’m in this empty theatre, walking across a Broadway stage next to Sting, and he’s singing. Another of those moments. I met him a few years later at the Classical Brit Awards, he was nominated for his lute album. I reintroduced myself and he said, ‘Yeah, I remember you, what are you doing here?’

  I said, ‘My album’s up against you in Album of the Year.’

  He said, ‘Really? Cool, cool.’

  And he just backed away. I didn’t stand a chance, I was up against him and Paul McCartney. Macca won it.

  We were selling out, every night we had a full house. Us three Rodolfos were all very different. David Miller has a beautiful voice, and Jesus Garcia’s is lovely, a very bel canto Italian sounding voice. There was a bit of a competition between us all though. We all wanted to fight for press, we all wanted our faces on the posters, we all wanted to be the stars of the show. The producers wanted to find the star couple as well, something to pin it on. Baz didn’t care, he wanted to spread the love equally – we all had press nights. But for much of the promo the producers went with David Miller and Ekaterina, because they were a very beautiful couple, the pretty boy and the blonde Russian. Deservedly so though, they were great. Sometimes we’d have to swap partners if somebody was sick, so a couple of times I played with Ekaterina. She was a bit of a diva, she performed with me one night when Wei was off sick and started demanding things from me on stage. I had to remind her to consider the rest of us. She only wanted to play with David, I think. He actually married one of the Mimì understudies. It was a soap opera in itself.

  I was living with Sarah in The Ansonia Building, a grand old gothic mansion on the Upper West Side, 73rd and Broadway, over 100 years old, used to be a hotel. Caruso stayed there, Stravinsky, Mahler. Babe Ruth lived there, some of the apartments cost millions of dollars. Big building, big reputation. Our apartment, on the other hand, was tiny. About as big as this page. I think it used to be the maids’ quarters. It was like a wind tunnel, a hallway. Sarah arrived from her family home in Salt Lake with a suitcase and a TV-video combo. We had no furniture, our bedside table was a little box with a napkin for a tablecloth. We didn’t have a bedside light, but we had a tiny little fridge by Sarah’s side of the bed, so she would open the fridge door and use the light to read books at night. I say bed, it was a blow-up mattress in the corner that we had to inflate at 4am every day because it would deflate during the night. We’d set the alarm for 4 and pump it up again to see us through till morning, otherwise we’d end up basically lying on the floor. The characters in the show had better living conditions – you could say I was taking method acting to its extreme. We even had a dog, Guinness, still got him. Sarah’s parents’ dogs had pups, so her mum sent us one
, for crying out loud. It wasn’t very practical. I’m glad she did though, he’s a good old dog. And winter was freezing – it was a crazy winter, two weeks of blizzards, so cold and snowy they shut down Broadway for two weeks; the theatres were dead. We went out one day, me, Sarah and Guinness, and walked through Manhattan – it was a ghost town, hardly any people, no cars, fantastically romantic. There were people having snowball fights in the road, we went into Tavern on the Green and had Irish coffee, it was beautiful. But man it was cold. A lot of musicians on Broadway lost money because of the weather that winter.

  It was all a bit of a shock for Sarah, leaving college without a plan, leaving her family to be with me in glamorous Manhattan, but living in this tiny room. We made the most of it. She’d buy clothes from Neiman Marcus and keep the tags on and return them. She wore her prom dress to opening night. I bought her a dress from BCBG. But it was an odd double-life, partying with A-list stars and going back at the end of the night to this box; I was starring on Broadway and sleeping on a lilo. But as hard as it was, we had a romantic time of it. I proposed to her there in New York. She was working in a casting agency, Mackey/Sandrich, doing secretarial work, and I dropped her off at work one morning then went into town to check on the engagement ring I’d got for her, then went hunting for a restaurant to propose in. Every restaurant I wanted to go to was closed for refurbishment. Green Room, Rockefeller, Greenwich Kitchen, they were all shut. I bumped into Alvaro Domingo, Plácido Domingo’s son; they both had some sort of connection with La Bohème on Broadway, and we went for a drink. I told him I was struggling to find a restaurant, and he told me he and his dad owned a restaurant in Midtown East called Pampano, a Mexican seafood place, and suggested I take Sarah there for dinner. So I phoned Sarah at work, told her I was going to take her to a burger joint, and I got myself suited up. She came home, said, ‘Why are you wearing a suit to get a burger?’ I told her to get her glad rags on and we went to Pampano. I always used to do napkin tricks with Sarah, Charlie Chaplin gags with my fork, and when she went to the bathroom I put the ring underneath her napkin. I said, ‘Pick up your napkin, I’ve got a trick to show you.’ And she lifted it up and there was the ring. That was a year after we’d met.

  The Tony Awards were in June, and at first there was talk of an award only going to the couple who played the leads on the first night, but Baz, bless him, didn’t want that. So the Tony bigwigs created an honorary award and a few of us got one for best performance, best principals. I got one, Wei got one, all of us from the principal ensembles, the three Rodolfos and Mimìs and Musettas and Marcellos. And it was great, we performed in Radio City, did a section from the show. I was stood on stage with Wei and I was screaming it out, and the mixer got the level just right, my voice was flying. Radio City’s absolutely huge, it’s massive, it’s like an arena. It’s incredibly glamorous, very art deco, very high, seats for miles, up to the heavens. It’s proper New York, you just know you’re singing into history, the amount of legends that have played there. That night was a bit of a conveyor belt though, because those things are run like clockwork, and they didn’t have enough space for all the shows to be hanging out backstage so they had to keep moving everybody through. We turned up on a bus, walked through the stage door, were pushed on stage, came off the other side, out the pass door, back onto a bus and back to our theatre. The highlight for me was meeting Christopher Reeve – he was in his wheelchair in his dressing room, we all met him. I had so much respect for him, and he was really sweet, and very complimentary to us all.

  Soon after that, after nine months on Broadway, the show closed. It wasn’t long after 9/11, so people weren’t coming into the city as much, and there had been that crazy winter with no shows, and also a musicians’ strike, so money was lost there too. And the La Bohème cast was big, they couldn’t afford to keep it running there. So it moved to LA. I had nothing to lose by going back into it. I loved the production, it was a great opportunity to do it again, a great chance to be in LA, and I thought it might give me the opportunity to develop some relationships with an agent out there, to get some film and television work.

  The first few weeks were a little nomadic, we lived just off Sunset Strip, in the hills, for a couple of weeks, moved into a friend’s house for another week, then settled in Santa Monica with some of Sarah’s family friends, which was lovely, by that great beach. Owen Wilson lived across the road from us – we used to see him and his girlfriend on their bikes. We’d only ever see him on his bike and he’d only ever holler, ‘So where do you ride?!’ His brother Luke nearly ran me over with his Porsche. I was walking down the alleyway behind the houses with Guinness and he pulled out of his garage, nearly knocked us over. You bump into people – not so literally – like that everywhere in LA. Oh, that’s David Schwimmer in front of me in Starbucks. There’s David Hyde Pierce walking down the street. Quentin Tarantino eating next to us in a Thai restaurant. I was in an Italian restaurant on Fairmont Street once, sat on a table next to Steve Austin, the WWF wrestler, bit of a thrill. A bit. I was kind of a WWF fan. I prefer the old-fashioned British stuff, the beer drinkers. I used to watch the wrestling on a Saturday morning, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. I loved Giant Haystacks – he played the Marine Hall in Fleetwood. He was such a big guy he couldn’t make it up the stairs to the stage, so they had to put a little dressing room for him on the auditorium floor, which was kind of sad really. I loved those wrestlers. To see Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks fight on Grandstand, on the telly on Saturday afternoons . . . it was like watching King Kong and the T-Rex. Nothing could break the boulder of Big Daddy’s belly, but Haystacks came close.

  There was this pool hall we used to go to in Santa Monica. I got into playing pool in America quite a lot. I used to go there to chill out on my days off, and I played with some dude called Frank. He must have been in his ’80s. I got to know the guys behind the bar and I said, ‘What’s his story?’ Because behind the bar there was a photograph of him with Paul Newman, back in the ’50s or ’60s. They said, ‘That guy is the reason they wrote The Hustler.’ The Hustler was adapted from a novel, but I never got to the bottom of it, I never asked him. But I used to play pool with him all the time and he was bloody good. He used to kick my arse like crazy, he’d clear up all the time. I never said, ‘Are you the guy they wrote The Hustler about?’ It might be a pack of lies, but I’d rather live with that than investigate it – it doesn’t matter if it’s not true. All I know is I played pool with him a lot and he taught me how to play.

  Elaine Padmore and Antonio Pappano from the Royal Opera House came to see me in Bohème and were very complimentary, it was wonderful to see them. Meanwhile I could see the show coming to an end, it was only a limited run, and I was desperately trying to figure out how we could stay in LA, we loved it there. I sang to loads of opera houses while I was there. One night Danny DeVito and his wife Rhea Perlman came to see the show. I really wanted to meet them, so I asked the company manager to invite them back, and after the show we walked to our cars together, Danny was such a solid, down to earth guy, and Rhea was a diamond. I mentioned that I was looking for an American agent and he told me about his agent, Fred Specktor, Vice President of CAA. I did already have an American agent but he was doing bugger all. I did nine months on Broadway and he didn’t bring anybody to see me, and he’d rarely return my calls. I put a lot of trust in that guy to help me with my career over there, to get me in front of people, and he achieved nothing. So I wrote a letter to Fred Specktor, inviting him to the show, and he came along, then asked me to come for a meeting in his office in Beverly Hills, and he was really cool. I asked him for advice, because I really wanted to get work in LA, acting work.

  And Fred was incredibly helpful, he set up meetings for me with casting directors on the big studio lots. I went to see some at Twentieth Century Fox, DreamWorks, three or four of them. One of them was really enthusiastic until she realised I wasn’t who she thought I was. She checked the headshot of the person she was supposed to
be meeting and said, ‘Oh, you’re my three thirty appointment.’ That was a bit of a letdown. But that was really good of Fred, to do that for me. We keep in touch, I talk to him every now and then. He’s a big deal, but what a nice guy.

  La Bohème finally reached the end of its life there in LA, and we went to Salt Lake to get married. We were living in Sarah’s family house with her parents, and a month before the wedding, Mum and my brother John came out to stay with us. Sarah and I took them to Zion, the national park, for a weekend break, took them around Bryce Canyon, stunning red rock. We wanted to show them where Sarah was from. Mum was a real trooper, she loves hiking. But my goodness, our families are as different as it gets. Bit of a culture clash. Sarah’s friends threw some themed wedding showers for us, guests had to come and gift both of us, and one party was themed ‘lingerie and tools’. I think Mum was a little taken aback. Sarah got some pretty underwear, I was given a bum-bag with a toilet-roll in it and a trowel.

  I wanted to do something really simple for my stag do. Eat some chicken wings and chill out with everyone, play pool or something. We ended up in a strip-club. I didn’t want to go in the slightest, but others did, and I succumbed, I even invited the priest along. He didn’t come, funnily enough. Probably a good thing, because it was exceptionally horrible. The amount of people who so easily adjust to being in that environment, it’s really something. I’m not a fan. One of the girls was attempting to pole dance with me and I was saying, ‘Please don’t. If you don’t mind.’ Mainly because she was pretty disgusting. But she was laughing her head off, she thought it was great.