Rufus Wainwright in The New Yorker

Onward
by Jim Windolf
March 29, 2010

At nine-thirty one recent morning, Rufus Wainwright was sitting, rather stiffly, on a couch in the back room of a television studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was flanked by a publicist and two managers, and he looked terrible. He was supposed to perform in a few minutes, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood. A couple of weeks earlier, at Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, Wainwright, who is thirty-six, had sung at the funeral service for his mother, the singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. She had died, at sixty-three, after a long struggle with clear-cell-sarcoma cancer. Now her son had to get back to business, to start promoting his upcoming album, “All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu.” In Williamsburg, his task was to play the affable guest for a taping of an Independent Film Channel cooking-and-music show called “Dinner with the Band.”

The cameramen set themselves up in a small room occupied by a grand piano. A producer brought in an audience of twenty or so attractive young people. One of them looked like Bob Dylan circa 1966. Another had on a red top hat and sunglasses with red lenses. The show’s co-director, a spiky-haired man named Luke Riffle, led Wainwright to the piano and told his audience, “I want to see smiles. This one is going to be the first song of the season, and we’re going to need big smiles. Just remember: smiles translate to happiness.”

“But this is a very sad song,” Wainwright said into the microphone. He got ready to play “Zebulon,” a drifting, dirgelike number from the new album. It was a favorite of his mother’s, and he had sung it at her funeral. He played the opening chord. The director waved a sign with the word “Smile” written on it. As the song unwound, the audience members remained stone-faced.

Next, Wainwright joined Sam Mason, the chef, in the TV kitchen and tried to act game for some cooking-show shenanigans. The main course was rabbit. Wainwright said that he was considering becoming a vegetarian and mentioned that his pet name for his boyfriend, Jörn Weisbrodt, is Bunny. The chef squawked during the retakes.

By the time Wainwright made it back to his apartment, on West Twenty-third Street, he wanted to lie down. “I can definitely function in that mode,” he said. “Then, once it’s ended, I’m kind of wildly swimming to the surface again and getting ready to tread water. It’s a way of soldiering on. But it’s also somewhat brutal. I’m, like, ‘Mom? Can we switch places?’ It’s such a circus. A dark, brooding, Kurt Weill circus.”

The phone rang. It was Weisbrodt. “I just can’t go to a party tonight,” Wainwright said into the receiver. “I’m hitting a block in the road. I just need to lie down for a while. I’ll see you at the ballet, Bunny.”

They had tickets for “Swan Lake,” but Wainwright was wrapped up in thoughts of his mother. “She didn’t want to talk about her death,” he said. “I was prepared for the big conversation about the afterlife. You know, the hand-to-breast admissions, and forgiveness, but we just sat on the couch together watching television, and she started kissing me with her toes.” He took a foot out of his clog and made a little toe-kiss gesture. “She did not falter in her personality.”

He got up and went over to his laptop, on a table. He started clicking through photographs. There was his mother, looking healthy during trips she had taken to Israel and Italy. And there she was, looking weak, at her Laurentian Mountains country house. And there, paler, in her Montreal apartment. Another picture showed a dozen or so people at her bedside—various relatives and her good friend the singer Emmylou Harris. Also, holding a guitar, Loudon Wainwright III, her ex-husband and the father of Rufus and his sister Martha.

“There’s my dad. He played ‘Out of This World.’ And that’s Emmylou, singing. Maybe Mother hated this, I have no idea. Maybe this is what quickened her death.” He laughed and started to make tea. In a couple of hours he would be at Lincoln Center, watching “Swan Lake.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/03/29/100329ta_talk_windolf