An Escort In Tangiers

Hello Darling, Are You Working? by Rupert Everett (William Morrow & Co., paperback, 240 pp.)

If you're an aficionado of  high camp, which I'm not, then film actor Rupert Everett's comic first novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, will probably be a welcome addition to your library. For me, the humor, British in this case, elicited not one laugh. It just went right past me.

Hello Darling, Are You Working?  takes place mostly in Paris. The protagonist is Rhys Waveral, an out-of-work British actor who once starred in an American soap opera. When Rhys, who goes by a number of names (Dorita, Wavy, et al.), depending on his mood and/or situation, loses all of his money in the 1987 stock market crash, he finds he has no other alternative to paying his enormous hotel suite bill but to turn to prostitution. Enter Mrs. Rikki Lancaster, a rich American widow "dressed to the hilt,...in her hallmark turban and cape and liberally splattered with chunky jewellery" and her sidekick, Miss Elida Schumann. Mrs. Lancaster over lunch offers to pay Rhys $100,000 to escort her to a costume party in Tangiers, Morocco--$50,000 upfront, the rest after they have done "the deed" (have sex) following the festivities. Rhys reluctantly agrees to the assignment or, in this case, assignation.

At the party in Tangiers, hosted by a flaming queen from the American Deep South, Ashby Montgomery de la Zouche, an interior decorator, Rhys dresses up as a fruit plate, a costume that takes him "almost as long to get out of" as it does "to get into...."

The other bizarre characters include: Peach Delight, a gorgeous transvestite who speaks in pidgin English ("You Rhys father? I Peach. I friend of Rhys."), Maurice Goodbuns, an aging actor who Rhys encounters on the streets of Tangiers disguised as a beggar, and Dim (the Brigidier) Waveral, Rhys's blustering father, who constantly berates (with glee) Rhys.

Divided into three acts like a stage play, Hello Darling, Are You Working? is liberally and wonderfully illustrated by Frances Crichton Stuart. The pictures are like the black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings found in a children's storybook. At the beginning of each chapter there is a headnote that summarizes the action therein.

Although Rhys is supposed to be a gay man, there is very little in the book to suggest this, which is another reason I found Hello Darling, Are You Working? of no significance to me as a reader or to gay literature in general. There are so much hijinks going on that the reader becomes exhausted and loses the thread of the story. The question arises: What is the point of it all?

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (November/December 1992).