Kathy Lette remembers ‘my cherished, beloved friend’
To me, he will always be a mischievous maverick, with a Puckish, impish sensibility, who became one of my most cherished, beloved friends.
I always felt that Barry invented me; Dame Edna has a daughter named Valmai who married Mervyn and built a blond brick veneer in the suburbs. My mum’s name is Valmai and she married Mervyn and they built a blond brick suburban home. When I first met Barry in my late teens and told him this, he laughed, then went straight into Edna mode – “How spooky, possum!” And a friendship was struck.
When I moved to London from Australia, it was to Barry’s neighbourhood. His house backs on to mine. Whenever he got home from a trip, he’d email me, “Kathy dear, I’m poised at your rear entrance” or something similarly wicked.
Our two houses became the unofficial Aussie embassies, playing host to Antipodean poets, maestros, Booker prizewinners, “slebs” and prime ministers. To my mind, Barry’s success is partially due to his quintessentially Australian characteristics – a sense of humour, drier than an AA meeting; optimism mixed with scepticism (he had chronic sceptic-emia). Although occasionally caustic, he was also disarmingly charming; his charm was more disarming than a UN peacekeeping force.
It became traditional for us to spend New Year’s Eve together in his Sydney apartment, with his glamorous and captivating wife Lizzie whizzing up gourmet treats, champagne corks popping as loudly and often as the fireworks.
This year’s get-together was particularly magical, with Barry serenading us with his favourite Cole Porter songs, while we basked in his brilliant anecdotage.
The man was an anecdotal jukebox; he had a hilarious story about any topic or any person raised in conversation. He was brimming with enthusiasm about the coming year, busily planning the British tour of his brilliant one-man show.
But when medical complications set in after a hip operation, he didn’t show a skerrick of self-pity. His one aim was to amuse his nurses and put visitors at ease.
“The Grim Reaper was here, Kathy, but I sent him down the hall, swinging his scythe.”
He went on to joke about the Reaper’s awful outfit, which he described as the “original hoodie”. “I just keep asking the nurses how many people he’d collected today.”
“Thanks to you, they probably died laughing,” I teased before going on to suggest that the best thing about being dosed up on meds is that he could say inappropriate things and pretend it was the drugs.
Barry chuckled. “I’ve been doing that all my life. I am generally well-received,” he mused, humbly, “but every now and then I give offence. My motto is: ‘I offend, therefore I am’.”And, because Barry’s humour was dark enough to require night-vision goggles, he then discussed obituaries and which adjectives are lethal.
“Let’s hope nobody ever calls you ‘delightful’ Kathy.”
“Or you ‘refreshing’.”
“Or bubbly – that means you’re drunk.”
“Or nice … that’s the worst adjective surely?”
“You should write a delightfully nice, bubbly, refreshing obit for me, Kathy dear.”
The last time we spoke on the phone Barry said that he “wasn’t too well” but then went on to hum the second movement of Milhaud’s Creation du Monde and made sarcastic jokes about his “lovely view” over the car park.
I am penning these recollections through blurred mascara, glancing mournfully out of my window across our gardens to his house. I just can’t believe that my beloved Barry, showman extraordinaire, is not coming back for an encore.
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Barry Humphries was so many people rolled into one. The caustic Dame with her ability to shoot from the lip with the most lethal one liners; the brutish Sir Les, able to point out the herds of elephants in any room; a bibliophile whose book shelves groan under the weight of 50,000 tomes; a discerning art collector and intellectual.