A Young Man's Passage (28 page)

It was quite a tiring holiday for someone who went away to rest. All that vadaing and those Metaxa Colas are all very well, but the next thing you know the sky is turning purple and the dawn is upon you.

So I’ve been back a week or so and quite exhausted by it all.
Terry and Julian
starts churning into action in August. Gawd help us. That’s me more or less up-to-date. My grandmother isn’t well still. Her hip hurts and she keeps forgetting if she’s had her lunch or not. M and D thinking of building a granny annexe onto their house. My patio is a riot of colour and Tommy from Chicago is still a regular feature by telephone.

Friday is the anniversary of Christopher’s death so I feel decidedly turbulent in the emotional department. Started a new course of therapy with my therapist. Now I lie down with my eyes closed. Gets to the nitty-gritty faster.

Our office in Noel Street is just around the corner from your place of employ so maybe we could meet up one day? It would be nice to see you.

I hope life is amusing,

Lots of love, Julian x

RUSSELL AND I
had been on an exploratory visit to Australia before, but by 1992,
Sticky Moments
had appeared on their television screens and had rather taken off. Always ready to party Down Under, they made the weekly transmissions into social events with barbies, tinnies and fancy dress. As soon as the series finished, it was repeated. When we went to Australia and New Zealand in 1992 it was for a 62-date tour and a TV special called
Brace Yourself Sydney
. The timing was perfect. I was newly famous and I was all the rage. Fanny went to stay with my parents and spent five months looking expectantly out of the dining-room window for my return.

On my last night in London I went to visit Stephen. He was ill, and in the familiar Brodrip Ward. He slipped his jeans on over his pyjama trousers and we went to a bar. The next thing I knew he’d bought three Ecstasy tablets from someone and was swallowing them ceremoniously before my very eyes.

I arrived in Australia ahead of the entourage to do a few weeks of publicity. Gaynor Crawford was in charge of this department and she would hire an entire hotel corridor and install journalists in ten adjacent rooms. I was thrust into each room for exactly ten minutes, hoicked out mid-sentence when the time was up. One day a visit to the Melbourne Positive Living Centre appeared on my afternoon schedule. Before tea or cakes could commence there was a photo-opportunity to deal with. The photographer said, ‘Could we have a shot of you chatting to someone living with AIDS?’ An amicable young man with the relevant qualifications volunteered and we settled ourselves on some chairs and pretended to chat, oblivious to flashbulbs and zoom lenses. But the photographer wasn’t happy. ‘Could we have the PWA lying on the bed and Julian with his arm around him?’ The PWA and I exchanged weary glances.

WE WERE PLAYING
large theatres for several weeks in each city.
My Glittering Passage
was a big theatrical extravaganza, with 18 costume changes, set and props and special effects. Apart from Russell and Hugh Jelly, we employed a camp backing singer called Michael Dalton. Technical matters were sorted by Helen Jackson, or ‘Helga, the lesbian in the wings’ as she became known, and Grazio Abella. There were producers, tour managers, sound lesbians, stage managers and a tattooed lighting boy called Damo.

The performances got under way in New Zealand. For those not in the know, Kiwis pronounce ‘a’ and ‘e’ vowel sounds as if they were ‘i’ which can lead to some misunderstandings for the untrained ear. During my first show in Auckland I asked a couple where they met and they said ‘tricking’. I naturally assumed they were prostitutes. In fact, they met up a mountain with nothing more interesting than a haversack on their backs.

In one of their splendid restaurants after the show, Mr Jelly ordered cock-a-leekie soup and asked the waiter if it had real ‘cock’ in it.

On such a gruelling tour we needed our creature comforts about us. I had nine suitcases. Mr Jelly had a collection of fluffy toys, which he added to each week. By the time we reached Brisbane in Australia he had more than a dozen: kangaroos, koalas, lambs, emus and Tasmanian devils. But disaster awaited on the baggage carousel. The holdall they travelled in had split, and the heads, limbs and beaks of Hugh’s various surrogate children were scattered among the suitcases. ‘It’s my own fault,’ he sobbed. ‘The bag wasn’t big enough . . . there was a teddy bear overdose.’

PAUL O’GRADY HAD
warned me that a Cloud of Evil hung over Adelaide. Even on the drive into town from the airport I sensed something fruity in the air. I felt a strange sexual ache in my loins that remained for the duration of my stay. People in the streets have a look of readiness about them, some vague, dark, slightly unsavoury desire shining in their eyes. You can imagine groups of Adelaide folk meeting in barns at night in deserted fields and performing strange gratuitous acts on each other, children and animals. Vada-laide, we called it, on account of their staring eyes. Indeed, there had been a recent spate of kidnappings there. Teenage boys bundled into vans and driven off, only to be discovered dead, defiled and decomposing in some remote ditch months later.

It was warm but threatening rain when we arrived. This didn’t stop the hotel receptionist saying, ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ with that glazed Adelaide look in her eyes.

I nearly let it pass but couldn’t. ‘Well, it’s cloudy,’ I said.

‘I like clouds,’ came the dreamy response, and she beamed at the fountain as it tinkled in the foyer.

We went out to play that night and I was chatted up by a gay couple in their early twenties, one blonde, one dark. They invited me back to their place for a threesome. Always ready to try something different, I said yes. I had sex with a lot of Australian men in my time. It saved talking to them. After a confusing hour or so of tangled limbs and surprise manoeuvres, we were all tired and dozing off. The blond boy, resting across my chest, then prodded me awake and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ Predicting his next sentence I arranged my face into a sympathetic expression. But he didn’t speak. He reached up to his head, got hold of his public schoolboy fringe and pulled it. With the unmistakable growl of Velcro, he removed his hair and plopped it on the bedside table. He was a complete baldy.

We had been greeted rapturously in each city, but on our first night in Adelaide I was aware of some disruption at the back of the stalls. We carried on regardless, and it wasn’t until after the show that we learned there had been no less than three fights in the auditorium. Police had been called and were taking statements from the injured. At the stage door I met a woman with a horribly swollen eye who had been punched by a man when she told him off for talking homophobic nonsense. A boy called Scott had been kicked to the ground and was in shock.

Later we went to wind down at a gay club called Cloud 9 where the staff were recovering from an attack by six local queer-bashers. They had stormed in an hour earlier wielding broken bottles; two bouncers were having their injuries attended to in hospital. The bar staff served us drinks with bandaged heads and hands. Punters were few on the ground but we stayed and watched the show – two drag queens and three boys in cut-off shorts doing rather well to a Madonna track. Whether all this nastiness was a nightly occurrence in Adelaide or had simply erupted in my honour I couldn’t say, but my performance certainly inspired strong opinions one way or the other, as the next day’s review testified.

‘Derivative, insulting, patronising and pathetic drivel,’ wrote the
Sunday Advertiser
. ‘Julian Clary is the most embarrassing, inept and unfunny comedian you’ll ever have the misfortune of seeing.’

The matter didn’t end there. The next night I was featured on Channel 10 news, where they read bits of the review and filmed indignant punters coming out of my show kissing their programmes and me signing autographs. I rang my mother to tell her I was on the news.

‘Why?’

‘Well, I got a bad review . . .’

We were packed out, of course. In the next week’s
Sunday Mail
letters page, a headline declared: ‘ADELAIDE THEATREGOERS HAVE THEIR SAY! The only drag is your critic.’ Ten letters were printed, all saying nice things about the show. Printed between them in darker lettering was a reprint of the original review.

There was small-scale weirdness too. One night after a pleasant evening chatting to one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, called Sister Whip Me, Beat Me, Call Me Louise, I returned to the hotel at about 1 a.m. The receptionist told me a gentleman had arrived an hour ago claiming to be a member of my party and asking if he could wait in my room. ‘His name was Mr Hammond, about 55, wearing a blue shirt.’ I knew no one called Mr Hammond and had invited no 55-year-old men up to my room. Perhaps he was also known as ‘David Pervis’, someone who phoned me at the hotel every few hours and whose calls I always refused. ‘I don’t know anyone of that name,’ I had said to the operator. ‘Ask him to leave a message.’ Within minutes, cryptic typed messages were being slipped under my door, saying ‘Lift your game’ or ‘Be careful tonight’.

One night before the show he manifested in person in my dressing room. He just walked in and said, ‘I’m David Pervis. May I shut the door?’ I said no, he couldn’t. He was about 50, badly preserved, swaying slightly and with wicked, watery eyes that spoke of madness, perversion and violence. ‘Do you work in the theatre here?’ I asked, having clocked the dubious eyes and been further alarmed by the clinging, clammy handshake. The answer was no and he settled down on a chair, looking at me triumphantly as if I was a long-lost son or a pleasant fabric he was thinking of covering his sofa with. Just then Helga arrived with a photographer. ‘This man must go!’ I said and Helga did some strong-arm lesbian work.

I never established if Mr Hammond was David Pervis, as the next day we moved on. As we drove out of Adelaide I could see a thick bluish-black cloud hanging low over the city. I knew what Paul O’Grady would have said.

We were all tired out by Christmas and in need of our week off. I had a painful ear infection and was on a course of antibiotics. My rather wonderful surprise gift from our promoter Adrian Bohm was a week’s holiday in a luxury villa on the island of Orpheus on the Barrier Reef. It was a beautiful island: palm trees, cocktails, snorkelling outings to see the underwater coral and multi-coloured tropical fish. Unfortunately my doctor had given me strict instructions not to get any water in my ear. I sat on the beach and listened to others snorting in wonderment through their snorkels. It was a bit like being in a sauna but unable to take your towel off. And there were mosquitoes to deal with.

26 December 1992, Island

How anyone can stand living here with these wretched mosquitoes, sand-flies and so on is a mystery to me. I’m bitten to buggery and have just had a tantrum with my can of Rid – spraying a harmless and rather beautiful moth for no reason, other than it was visible and slow enough to catch. It’s flapping listlessly on the kitchen counter as I write. I’m rather hoping it will recover and fly off home to its babies, full of tales of the evil punter in chalet number nine. Some other flying nuisance has just dived into my Champagne and sizzled to its end. A relative’s revenge.

My watch mysteriously gained two hours today. I went down to dinner at what I thought was nine o’clock, full of questions about how come it wasn’t getting dark at the usual time only to be told by a waitress setting napkins in a deserted dining room that it was only 7 p.m. My guess is the girls who serviced my room played a trick on me, tipped off by the lunchtime waitress who was clearly put out by my 2.30 p.m. arrival. Although I just wanted a salad and apologised, I guess it elongated her shift a bit and by resetting my Rolex they thought they’d buck me up a bit or at least make their point. Can’t think how else it happened. It was two hours fast exactly.

On a desert island all by myself I have time to think.

Reaching for a cigarette as I dined alone tonight, I suddenly realised the significance of the date. Christopher died exactly eighteen months ago today. Made me pause. Seems such a long time ago, but it isn’t really.

There have been three significant lovers since then. Tommy (Chicago), Hans (Amsterdam) and Josh (Perth). An interesting geographical triangle if nothing else. Josh is foremost in my mind, almost an obsession, but I remember when the others were too. And I’m reading Adam Mars-Jones’s
Monopolies of Loss
, which is making me philosophical, seeing my life in terms of a short story (or series).

Josh 18, me 33 – he on the threshold of physical maturity, me on the threshold of decline, hanging on by means of expensive moisturiser and sit-ups.