Rhonda Burchmore: ‘I was the victim of abuse’
HER razzle-dazzle made her Australia’s consummate showgirl, but life hasn’t been all glitter and roses for this entertainer.
Stellar
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THE curtain was set to rise on a regional performance of her one-woman show Up Close And Personal when Rhonda Burchmore heard her mobile ring.
“A voice said, ‘I’m calling from the ambulance — we just found your mother down by the river. Can you come get her?’” Burchmore says. Her adored mother, Yvonne, had in fact wandered from home; she had later-stage dementia, had recently been widowed and could not be cared for by Burchmore’s only sister, Michelle, who was battling her own health problems.
“This was 15 minutes before I was about to go on,” Burchmore tells Stellar. “[Mum] was still in Sydney [where Burchmore was born]. But you get that call... I said, ‘I’m about to go on stage here in Gippsland [Victoria], but I can be there tomorrow.’” And then Burchmore, trouper that she is, managed to get on with the show.
That 2014 call was another bad-news bulletin in a gruelling seven-year stretch of family horrors that have befallen the irrepressible 57-year-old cabaret diva, who has entertained audiences for more than 35 years. Until then, she says, “I’d never seen any of us Burchmores suffer from sickness or disease, or even go near a hospital.” Then she had to watch Michelle (“We were inseparable”) deteriorate from the degenerative condition multiple system atrophy while her mum’s mind corroded. Burchmore had already lost her father, Jack, as well as her mother-in-law, Nadia.
“I lost my whole family unit, except my husband [psychiatrist Dr Nikolai Jeuniewic] and daughter [Lexie, 22],” says Burchmore, sipping plunger coffee as she talks to Stellar inside her airy, Victorian-era home in Melbourne. “I lost my father to a rare form of Parkinson’s disease in 2010 and my mother-in-law. My sister was diagnosed just after my father died and I lost her to the most horrific disease. Every phone call was like... enough is enough.”
Privately, the woman we know for the effervescent personality, the bling, the toothy smile, the jazz hands and those endless gams was living under what she calls “a massive black cloud that is just starting to move now”.
Nine months on from her mother’s passing, and having gone through the wrench of clearing a deceased loved one’s possessions for a third time, Burchmore says she is finally starting to feel she has regained control. The two-woman show she wrote with “bestie” Lara Mulcahy, ABBA-solutely Fabulous, is touring the country, and she is considering another writing project. She is also readying the release of a newly updated edition of her autobiography, Legs 11.
The original 2010 memoir spun tales of a career that started at the age of two and wove a sequinned trail through the Australian and overseas showbiz circuit over several years; it was well received by her large and loyal following.
While she insists, repeatedly, that she doesn’t want to be a “dippy downer” and tries to focus the conversation on the upside of surviving so much loss in such a compact period of time, Burchmore says she couldn’t revisit her sparkling onstage life without sharing what had been happening in the years since she first put her story on the page.
“It’s been challenging. Some people say, ‘It actually makes you stronger’ and I think you do become far more respectful of having every day you’ve got on this [Earth],” Burchmore says. “That’s what makes me so cranky with people [who take] drugs and all of those things ‒ they can control their lives! But all of my lot were just dealt this horrible hand.
“You just try to be the strongest person you can to support them. When the publisher said, ‘Oh, we want you to write what’s happened since the last book... you know, cheery,’ I went: ‘Actually, I will touch on [what really happened], rather than just more happy-happy Legs 11.’”
Especially now, when female performers around the world are talking for the first time about the culture of sexual harassment that long gripped their industries, Burchmore’s take on what she endured will be closely read. A hallway in her home is dotted with vintage photos of the performers and famous names of their day: Brooke Shields, Bette Midler and Debbie Reynolds are all there. In one shot, a glamorous and young Burchmore is with the late Mickey Rooney, who appeared with her and legendary hoofer Ann Miller on the London stage in the late-1980s.
She was in her 20s when the shot was taken, all smiles and legs, decked out in a minxish corset costume for their West End production of Sugar Babies. Rooney comes up to her chin, his left hand spread squarely across her left breast. The professionalism she learnt from the get-go seems evident as you study the shot closer: Burchmore gazes cheerfully at the camera despite the unwelcome touch.
Her recollection of not being able to do anything about Rooney’s antics — and his banking on that — remains fresh. “I was a victim of abuse,” she says. “At the Savoy Theatre in London, every night, this little man would come into my dressing room and tell me about his sexual life.
“He got off on telling me about different women he had seduced or how he’d done it, whether it be Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor... all of his conquests. He used to come in and shut the door knowing he could get away with it, and that’s the problem: he could get away with it because I was young and he knew if I said anything, I’d be on the first plane home.”
Burchmore says the show’s production people must have known what was going on — yet still let it happen. “It repulsed me so much and they let him do it,” she says. “They used to just knock on the door at 10 minutes before the show, so it was all obviously set up. [Rooney] did it for 20 minutes every night and the only thing that got him out of there was we had to start the show.” In the end, Sugar Babies would lay the foundations for Burchmore’s successful stage future, but she still had to put up with Rooney’s behaviour for all of its nine-month run.
It wasn’t the only time an older male star crossed the line with her; she also recounts a run-in with Rolf Harris. “With Rolf, I had the old touch up the arse when [I was performing in] Hot Shoe Shuffle [in 1992]. It’s a funny thing. Now, you’d say, ‘No!’ – back then, there was no excuse for you to not accept it. We shouldn’t accept it; I wouldn’t anymore. But that’s how it was back then.”
Burchmore says she wishes the unedited first draft of Legs 11 could be read, as it contained even more frank recounts of her showbiz life than were allowed to hit the presses. “My husband found out things about me [by reading the first memoir] he didn’t know. A lot of it was red-marked: ‘You can’t say that, you’re going to have so many legal issues...’, but I pretty much said it how it was while being careful with my words to protect the living, I suppose.”
In recent months, three of the biggest musicals of the era have come to Australia — and not one presented Burchmore with a job opportunity. “I looked at The Book Of Mormon, Aladdin and Kinky Boots and there wasn’t a role in any I could do,” she says. The disappointment spurred her to write her own piece for the stage with Mulcahy, a fellow Mamma Mia! alumnus who is also a close friend. Burchmore ploughed into ABBA-solutely Fabulous as producer, putting up her own money to mount a show about two mega-fans who never quite make it to the band’s epochal 1977 tour of Australia.
“We put our toe in the water and it’s a really scary thing,” Burchmore says. “When you produce yourself, you are liable — even that first leg out could have lost me $150,000, which is a lot of money. And by the time I got arrangements and costumes...”
Producing her own show sounds like it has wised Rhonda Burchmore up. She says she would now be cautious about committing to a show without knowing the whole business proposition; she enjoys, as she puts it, “steering the ship”.
“I didn’t lose that money, thank goodness; we’re up to about our 50th show,” Burchmore says. “The magic about it that is so rewarding is the response you get from your audience — they know their ABBA, of course, but the message is girl power.”
Burchmore seems proud she was able to steer herself out of the doldrums and get the enterprise off the ground. She goes so far as to describe ABBA-solutely Fabulous as an emotional life raft on which she navigated the waves of grief that dominated her last seven years. “Doing what I do has been a beautiful distraction,” she says. “Especially this little show — it’s fun and silly and, for all sorts of reasons, it’s been a lifesaver for me.
“I do pinch myself,” she admits. “I’ve notched up 35 years in this business and I’ve worked with a few and seen a bit. And I’m still here.”
Legs 11 by Rhonda Burchmore (New Holland Publishers, $32.99) is out now.
Originally published as Rhonda Burchmore: ‘I was the victim of abuse’
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