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Interview with the former vampire
Anne Rice has left New Orleans and its creatures of the night behind. She tells Chris Ayres about her new faith and her new passion – Jesus Christ
OUT OF EGYPT (USA)
by Anne Rice
Chatto, £17.99; 336pp
£16.19 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
When Anne Rice was the Grande Dame of New Orleans, she used an unusual mode of transport: a six-foot coffin, driven in a blacked-out hearse.
The spectacle of the coffin, flanked by her “personal undertakers”, amused Rice, as it did the legions of pallid fans who followed her every move around the Big Easy. Their ultimate prize: her signature inside a blood soaked copy of Interview with the Vampire. How things have changed. New Orleans is now ruined, descended into a purgatory worse than anything visited upon it by Louis and Lestat, Rice’s celebrated blood-sucking creations.
Rice now lives with three personal assistants in a millionaires’ seaside town called La Jolla, about two hours south of Los Angeles. Outside her Tuscany-inspired villa is a Lexus convertible and a Mercedes, not a funeral motorcade. These days the 5ft 2in (1.57m) best-selling author weighs 128lbs, not 200, thanks to a gastric bypass operation and a diet of lamb and pears.
She is also single: her husband and high-school sweetheart, the painter and poet Stan Rice, died of a brain tumour three years ago. Rice, who lost her six-year-old daughter to cancer in the 1970s, no longer hears the calling of the undead. After a near-fatal experience with type 1 diabetes, she has converted to the Catholicism of her childhood, and her latest book is boldly entitled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
Rice hopes that Mel Gibson will consider turning it into a prequel to The Passion of the Christ, just as Neil Jordan transformed Interview with the Vampire into a Hollywood blockbuster with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst.
The advance copy of Christ the Lord is bound in white and gold, like a Bible. As for the narrative, Rice has done a Normal Mailer and produced a semi-historical account of the early life of Jesus Christ, as told by the man himself.
She says that it took a decade to research. “I wanted to write in the first person,” she writes in a lengthy and defiant author’s note. “I consecrated the book to Christ.”
There is something disappointing about interviewing a converted Rice in bland La Jolla. Yet she manages to see me at her $8 million ( £4.5 million) mansion on a brooding, foggy day.
Down the long driveway, beyond the front door, is a vast 30ft high sitting room, with a gothic chandelier and a dozen or so vintage dolls in glass cabinets. Religious artefacts abound. The author, I am told, will come down shortly. I imagine organ music; the scurry of rodents; the flap of a bat’s wing. Then a pretty 64-year-old appears, eyes shining with mischief under a long fringe, like a schoolgirl who has just thrown a pebble at the vestry window.
Her outfit (another disappointment) is more librarian than vampire: a sharp white collar poking out of a neat blue tank top. I glimpse a striped purple cuff. The look is completed with a large, oval brooch, worn in the centre of her neck. I wonder if it is pinned directly into her flesh. She smiles. I think I see blood.
“I live my life like the prophet Jeremiah,” Rice declares. with a sad giggle. “I am very . . . alone.” Suddenly brightening, she qualifies this: “I enjoy very, very much being alone, and being able to devote all my time to work.” During the writing of Christ the Lord, Rice exercised that freedom by waking up at 8pm and going to bed at daybreak. Now she is trying to readjust with the help of Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug, and melatonin. But she is in no hurry. “It’s a great thing to do purely what you want,” she says. “To just read, write, and watch films that are interesting, and watch the news, you know?”
The news has not been of much comfort. She was “heartbroken and terrified” the day that Hurricane Katrina inflicted its Noah-like destruction on New Orleans.
With almost suspicious providence, Rice had moved out in March, relocating to La Jolla to be closer to her son, the gay novelist Christopher Rice.
Her 19th century former New Orleans home, sold for $3 million in 2004, survived Katrina, but she was sadden and infuriated by the reaction to her hometown’s suffering.“I remember when the San Francisco earthquake happened,” she says. “I don’t remember anyone saying that San Francisco shouldn’t be rebuilt. I think that racism had something to do with it. So many of the people were poor and black; there was less of a sense of urgency.”
Even with her rediscovered faith, these are queasy times for Rice. Although she sees the move from vampires to Jesus as a natural one, many fans are unlikely to agree.
“There’s a segment of my readers who are very angry with me,” she says. “They go online and they ‘flame’ me. They’ll do it with this book, too.” When her last book, Blood Canticle, received this treatment, she made a very public stand, posting a 1,200-word defence on Amazon.com. “Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander,” she wrote. “You have used the site as it if were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies.”
In reinterpreting the Bible, however, Rice risks a backlash of an altogether different scale, such as that unleashed on Gibson by Jewish leaders who said that The Passion was anti-Semitic, designed to blame Jews for the killing of Christ.
Rice admires Gibson but says that the film was flawed.
“I think it was very unfortunate that he presented the Jews as he did,” she says. “I’ve tried very hard to write something that I can hand to the rabbis who were so distressed about that movie and say, ‘please read this, I do it differently’.
“I try to show that Jesus is a Jew, his whole family are Jews, and Judaism was the pervasive influence on Christianity.”
Christ the Lord comes at a time when the appetite for biblical drama seems insatiable. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code continues to sell by the lorryload, and even Paradise Lost is to become a Hollywood movie.
In Christ the Lord’s cinematic opening passage, the seven-year-old Jesus discovers his powers by killing a playground rival, then bringing him back to life. It’s as if Rice is casting Christ as the new Harry Potter, or the next Neo from The Matrix.
She knows that many will find the subject off-putting. “Look at biblical movies,” she says, with a cackle. “All the hot scenes are with the pagans. We’re all waiting for the orgy scene in Nero; we don’t care about the Christians.”
Rice’s Catholicism lapsed when she was 18, at college in Texas. “It was a violent rupture,” she remembers. “My faith just cracked. I wanted to read books on Jean-Paul Sartre, and find out what existentialism was, and all this was condemned in the form of Catholicism that I’d been brought up in. I was also curious about sexuality and love.”
She returned to the faith in 1998, even convincing her atheist husband to go through a religious marriage ceremony. A few days later, undiagnosed diabetes left her so dehydrated that she went into a coma. Doctors said that she escaped death by 15 minutes.
Given that she didn’t smoke, gamble or drink before her conversion, how is her life different? “What changed was that I stopped feeling alone and lost and fearful, and experienced what people always do when they go through a conversion: a great sense of peace,” she says. “It has changed my behaviour in that I’m trying to be more patient, more kind, more understanding, not to have a bad temper, not to flash back at people who criticise me.”
She is certainly forgiving of Tom Cruise, with whom she became friends after initially objecting to his casting in Interview with the Vampire. (She wanted Jeremy Irons to play Lestat).
Of Cruise’s recent outbursts over Scientology and the dangers of psychiatry, she says: “All the things he said about psychiatric medication, I thought he was right. I have taken all different kinds of psychiatric drugs. The withdrawal symptoms and the side effects are dire. I felt sad that he took such a public beating afterwards.”
The interview almost over, Rice begins to make her way back upstairs to her bedroom (one of six), where she does most of her work wearing a pink and blue flannel nightgown. She keeps a year’s supply in her closet, along with her sun lamp and exercise bike, which she rides after her alarm goes off — now at 4am.
She is about to leave on a ten-city book tour, although the reading in New Orleans has been canelled I ask whether she hopes that Christ the Lord will convert her readers. “If can just make them think,” she replies, with her charming yet unsettling smile, “that would be a wonderful victory.”
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