Admit it. More than having sex with movie stars, you’d rather be the movie star everybody wanted to have sex with.

Better: you’d want to be an out gay movie star so you wouldn’t have to waste time dating Hollywood princesses and could zero in on all the beefcake on the hoof.

Plus, you’d be on the A-list, so you could — just for laughs — brazen up to all the Colins and Brads and Tobeys, the Vins and Tommy boys with even the strayest ambiguous twinkle in their eyes.

Talk about charmed lives! You’d soon never be surprised again by what could pop up (and so quickly) in even the most unlikely swimming pool or cabana hut.

You’d want, in short, to be Rupert Everett (at left).

Most people remember Everett as Julia Robert’s real best friend in My Best Friend’s Wedding. There he was her gay man-pal who shows up to lend Julia support at the wedding of her ex-boyfriend. Though the boyfriend was played by Dermot Mulroney — a dark-eyed, dagger-jawed humdinger in his own right — the real romance was between Julia and Rupert. (Everett, in real life, had long been an out gay man.)

The film had a wonderful sense of sexual egalitarianism. The platonic pairing of Julia and Rupert, whose characters both had full sex lives and physical passions that excluded the other, caught the imagination of moviegoers. The beautiful woman and the sleek gay man had a lovely low-flame affection that seemed so nuanced and legitimate you wondered if the actors didn’t care for each other off screen as well . As in Will and Grace, another surprisingly accurate depiction of the mystical marriage that sometimes results between a gay man and a straight woman, Rupert and Julia seemed each other’s one true love.

And certainly, a great friendship between the actors did result, as Everett recounts in his new memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins , a gossipy ramble that distinguishes itself from the usually dishy Hollywood tell-all by being beautifully (and not ghost) written.

The memoir, to be released this January, is currently serialized in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. In the following excerpt, we are given a glimpse of the fabulously unreal parallel universe a major movie star lives in.

We were filming in Chicago and sometimes on a Friday night, at the end of work, she would give me a ride back to New York in the studio’s private jet. Then I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B.

With a cocktail in a crystal glass, wearing a toweling robe, Julia would hop barefoot with wet hair from the trailer to the car. The only baggage was the key to her apartment and me.

We huddled in the back of the limo and sipped our drinks as we sped through the suburbs towards the private airport. Gates opened as if by magic and we drove towards a huge plane in the middle of an empty airfield.

A carpet stretched across that brief yard of the real world; she tiptoed across it and jumped on board. The doors were shut and the jet moved simultaneously.

We sat on the large double bed with drinks and delicious snacks served by sympathetic girls in uniform, and time flew as America passed by. It seemed impossibly far away now.

Then we lay back for touchdown. Standing by the open door of another car was a bodyguard with a large bouquet of flowers in his arms.

Before getting out at her place, Julia put on a pair of grandmother’s slippers to bridge the only gap that Hollywood could not control — the sidewalk between the car and her front door. A star never really has to touch the ground.

© 2006, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com