Barry Humphries stripped bare
She helped him overcome a troubled past. Now Barry Humphries is ready to face the world without her.
A room of mirrors. Wherever Barry Humphries looks he finds himself, and that’s not such a bad thing anymore. A sweeping, all-white dressing room attached to a photographic studio loft space; ’80s minimalism-meets-’60s Yoko. A window between the mirrored walls. Beyond that window is the city of Sydney and all of its lamingtons and Jatz crackers and Iced VoVo biscuits and possums. “But what happened to the asparagus roll?” Humphries asks, randomly and mournfully. “They don’t exist anymore.” So we pause in salute. Vale the asparagus roll. Died peacefully in 2017, along with jar drinks, the dance move known as dabbing and Australia’s sense of humour. And the immortal comic’s eyes ask something else entirely. What happened to us?
The man in the mirror moves slowly in a light blue jacket, trousers and soft black Gucci loafers. When he sinks into a studio armchair, he sinks deep. When he turns his head he fixes his eyes first on the thing he’s turning to so he can decide whether or not he should turn all the way and, in this moment, he turns to smile at himself because he can at 84 when he couldn’t always at 24.
The Melbourne Arts Centre holds collected letters from Barry Humphries’ youth in which he writes about staring into the bathroom mirror and seeing a “coldness”. An uneasy creature who felt substantially “insubstantial”.
“I can remember feeling that,” he says. “I’ve never really isolated it and set it down, but it’s true. It’s just a long journey of self-discovery really. Of self-avoidance.” He pauses. “And then acceptance.”
He pauses again. “You’ve gone into this more deeply than I have,” he says.
“I’ve been diving into your world,” I explain.
“Really?” he grimaces, as though I said I’ve been dumpster-diving for soggy Big Macs. “I never do it,” he says. Which is precisely why this late chapter of his career is so intriguing and why this white room of mirrors setting is so perfect.
“For more than 60 years, Humphries has held a mirror to Australia and Australians,” says the publicity spiel behind his latest one-man show, Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask. “Revealing their virtues, their foibles, their triumphs and their failings through a gallery of adored characters, including Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone. Now he will spin the mirror around, exposing his own highs and lows, the good times and the not so good.” He’s finally diving into his own world. “I’m not in disguise,” he says.
It’s all related to how well he’s ageing. He went for a check-up recently, one of those interminable inside-and-out ones. “You’ve got a few more miles yet,” the doctor said in summary. “But surely there’s something seriously wrong that I don’t know about,” Humphries asked, aghast. “Nope,” the doctor said. “Something in the brain, perhaps?” Humphries probed. “Nope,” the doctor said.
“The people I knew at school who excelled at sport are all dead,” he muses in his armchair. “That’s deeply gratifying.” He beams, proudly. “But I thought to myself, ‘I better keep going then’. But then I thought, ‘What can I give the audience that I haven’t given them already?’ ” His eyes light up with the answer. “My own life.”
A cupboard of darkness. Camberwell, Melbourne, late 1930s. The cupboard stands in the corridor of a suburban kindergarten run by the evil Mrs Flint. The boy howling inside the locked cupboard is the son of local house builder Eric Humphries and his wife Louisa, who live in Camberwell’s new Golf Links Estate. Mrs Flint had dragged the boy by his forearm down the corridor and locked him inside this cupboard, promising not to release him until he found his manners; until the boy learnt how to be boring; how to be normal and average like everybody else.
“Edna!” the boy howls inside the cupboard, tears running down his chubby cheeks. “Edna. Edna. Please come, Edna!”
Because Edna always comes. She always saves the day. “Edna was kind of a nanny to me,” Humphries says. “A friend of the family, and she was more or less always with me as a child.” Strong-willed and bright; clear of thought. It’s Edna who walks the boy to and from kindergarten. It’s Edna who rescues him from Mrs Flint, wipes away his tears on the kindergarten porch. Edna loves the boy.
“[Mrs Flint] didn’t like me and I didn’t like her,” he says. “God arranges these things, conveniently. People who don’t like you, you don’t like either. But I didn’t talk to my parents about [Mrs Flint]. I didn’t complain to my parents because she filled me with such guilt.”
The boy in the cupboard will be brilliant and, in turn, bullied. The gym boys at Camberwell Grammar School call him “Granny Humphries” and his teachers will consider him so gifted that his remarkably advanced English work won’t be displayed on school open days for fear it might embarrass fellow students.
Barry leans over in his armchair, digressing. He wants to share a secret. He whispers it theatrically, conspiratorially. “It was such a very booooring place,” he says. “But you knew when you felt it was boring that you couldn’t call it boring. You were saying something that was heresy. It’s Australia. It’s where you come from. But I was hankering for something and I didn’t know what it was and I thought it must be in this mysterious place they called ‘overseas’.” He whispers that word again, like he’s whispering the word “Valhalla”.
“Overseas!” he says grandly. “An art dealer once said to me long ago, ‘Oh, Barry, there’s an increasing interest in overseas art’. I said, ‘I suppose, Joe, you mean van Gogh and Michelangelo. Overseas art, right, Joe’? Overseas was a mythical place. ‘You’ll like the new school, Barry, there’s quite a lot of teachers there who have been overseas.’ ”
In his teens, the boy in the cupboard will watch his mum crumble; break down and repair herself and break down and repair herself through a long depression he’ll only fully understand later in life when his own world begins to crumble, turns him into a near-dead alcoholic at 36, bound to a mental health bed in the Delmont Private Hospital, Glen Iris, attempting to convey to a psychiatrist exactly why he feels so substantially insubstantial.
But Edna will save him. She’ll emerge through the darkness this time in a purple sequinned dress and heels, peacock spectacles and too much red lipstick. A walking jewel-framed mirror reflection of a growing nation’s prudishness and class snobbery, its sunbaked suburbia and its sauce-dipped saveloys. She will host television shows and write best-selling books, and thousands across the world will fill concert halls just to see her smile. “Hello possums,” she will say lovingly, and the whole world will slap their knees at Mrs Norm Everage’s grand 50-year piss-take of those who would choose to be normal and average.
Barry smiles in his armchair. “All these characters grew in the dark,” he says.
There’s an old Jewish lady selling pretzels on the corner of a busy street in New York for 25 cents a pretzel. A Wall Street businessman passes her one morning, feels sorry for her poor sales, places 25 cents on her table but doesn’t take a pretzel. The old lady smiles gracefully. The businessman does this every morning for the following two years but never takes a single pretzel. Then one morning he places his 25 cents on the table and the old lady says, ‘Sorry, mister, the pretzels have gone up to 35 cents’.
“Ha!” Humphries laughs, slapping the armrest. “Isn’t that a good story! That’s called ‘hutzpah’.”
Indolence. Cheek. Rudeness even. Once upon a time Barry Humphries snuck a can of Heinz chunky vegetable soup onto a plane and pretended to vomit the contents into a sick bag. He then forked the apparent vomit back into his mouth as his preferred in-flight meal, to the horror of surrounding passengers.
He lives for the unexpected. The inappropriate. The subversive. “Why does everybody have to ‘double-check’ nowadays?” he asks, randomly. “Nobody just ‘checks’. They haven’t checked the first time yet they always say, ‘I’ll double-check’. I often say, ‘Just once will do’.”
Once upon a time Barry Humphries walked into a shop in Carlton and bought a cake of Lux soap. Upon completing the exchange, he left it on the counter and headed for the exit. When the shopkeeper ran outside to hand him the soap, Humphries said, “No, thanks. I don’t want it. I just wanted to purchase it.” His clockwork mind is always on the brink of genius or madness.
“Dennis Shanahan and Graham Richardson!” he offers, randomly again, suddenly recalling two bylines he saw in this morning’s The Australian. “In Australia, there are still people called Dennis and Graham. How wonderful!”
Once upon a time Barry Humphries planted a full roast dinner on a plate and a glass of champagne inside a rubbish bin on a busy city street. An hour later, in full peak hour traffic and dressed as a homeless man, he padded past a horde of suited businessmen, pulled the roast and the glass from the bin and sat down to a fine meal before his startled impromptu audience.
This is the mind that dreamt up a hundred colourful and grotesquely exaggerated ways for his hapless comic book and film creation, Barry McKenzie, to say he’s thirsty or hungry or desperately needing to “siphon the python” or “point Percy at the porcelain” or “park the prawn” or “technicolour yawn”. The cultural elite howled in shame — a young hotshot international lawyer named Malcolm Turnbull deemed it all an embarrassment — but the six o’clock swill set howled with laughter. What happened to us? Well, we decided it was time to stop referring to sexual intercourse as “spearin’ the bearded clam”.
“People are so prudish,” Humphries chuckles.
He collects street directories. He has a home in West Hampstead, London, that he shares with his wife of 26 years, Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet Stephen Spender. The home’s library boasts 30,000-plus books, hundreds of them street directories dating back a century. He regularly finds himself tracing the expansion of his beloved Melbourne through historical street directories, ever-thickening to accommodate new communities: Italians. Chinese. Vietnamese. Muslims. A century of sensitive class and race discussion mapped out in indexed street and road names. “I have always loved those tensions in Australia,” he says. “Those divisions. Sectarian divisions. Geographical divisions. It’s endlessly interesting to me.”
He doesn’t take sides politically but he abhors the politically correct. He offended the transgender community two years ago by calling high-profile transgender woman Caitlyn Jenner “a mutilated man” and “a publicity-seeking ratbag”. He was weighing in largely to support his friend Germaine Greer, who had presented dutifully for her annual stake-burning after this quote: “Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f..king woman”. Humphries shrugged as if he was enjoying the sport of it all and let the inevitable wave of social media outrage wash over him. “If you criticise anything you’re a racist or sexist or homophobic,” he said.
“The new puritanism,” he says today. “Kids are learning it. They’re teaching it to kids.” It was puritanism that spawned Dame Edna and that other glorious monster inside of him, Sir Les Patterson — Australia’s wine-sodden and well-connected “cultural attache to the Far East” — and the mirrors that they held to the bigotries and hypocrisies of suburban Australia.
“I was appalled, very early on, particularly by my mother’s bigotry,” he says. “My mum was a terrible bigot. She was anti-Catholic but she wasn’t religious at all. She was one of a lot of sisters and it was all to do with the fact her only brother had married a Catholic. It was a catastrophe. We were brought up with this idea of something being strangely threatening about Catholicism. I didn’t really ever believe it but segregated religion was part of it.
“Then there was the veiled anti-Semitism we had in Australia.” He remembers his mother arguing with his father about why a Jewish man should be allowed membership at the local golf club. “Hearing this,” he says, “I knew that behind it all, behind the cosiness, behind the comfort of our lives, there was hatred. Real, ignorant hatred.”
He says his mum had a deep current of fear running through her that was tied to her struggles with depression. He couldn’t see that as a boy, so he couldn’t make sense of the graphic and raw anxiety attacks that would leave Louisa Humphries shaking uncontrollably on the lounge room couch. “I can see the struggles now,” he says, softly, dwelling on this for a moment.
I ask Barry to look at one more reflection of himself. It’s a portrait his dear and late friend Arthur Boyd sketched of him in quite possibly his darkest hour. “Where did you get this?” he asks, studying the portrait blankly. It’s a screen shot from an image that writer Anne Pender dug up for her 2010 biography of Humphries, One Man Show. A rough sketch of Humphries on a hospital alcohol rehabilitation bed around 1970, his long-suffering second wife Rosalind Tong at the bedside, her head bowed sorrowfully.
Ros is the mother of his two daughters, Tessa and Emily. He fathered two sons, Oscar and Rupert, with his third wife, Australian surrealist painter Diane Millstead. He loved all his wives madly and truly, but he always “tripped and fell” into love. “No one told me how to do it,” he says of love and marriage. “We learn by example but my parents didn’t teach me anything about it.”
Boyd hasn’t given eyes to Humphries in the sketch, just deep black gashes, and he’s smudged his face to cast a shadow over his whole weakened being. Pure darkness and tragedy, the kind Ros was feeling when she walked away from it all; when she fully doubted the man she loved deeply would ever climb out of the hole of addiction. Humphries stares at the image and his eyes fill with tears that don’t run. I apologise for showing it to him. Awful thing to show a long-dry 84-year-old man the mess of his past.
“Noooooooo,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen it.” He’s momentarily mesmerised by the image. “Ohhhh,” he says. “No. I’ve not seen it. Good, isn’t it. Goooood.”
His brilliant friend Boyd has captured a turning point in that portrait. Humphries broke his addiction. Years of AA meetings helped and so did Edna and Sir Les, through whom he channelled the very best and worst of his Dr Jekyll-on-the-turps dark side. (“I called him Les Patterson because it was the most boring name I could think of,” he says. “I could have called him Graham Richardson.”)
He hands the Boyd image back. He’s not at all ashamed of it. “The past was once something that I shunned,” he says. “I shuddered at the thought of it. Now I really do love the past because I know where it’s led. It doesn’t have any unpleasant surprises for me.” He says it’s no coincidence that those days in hospital directly preceded the glittering international success that defined the following three decades. “If you have that illness, it takes you down a road which ends, of course, in death and insanity,” he says. “You’re living life with the handbrake on. You are in arrested development.
“Once you put the cork in the bottle, who you are meant to be suddenly and warily comes out and presents itself. There’s a sort of small print on the bottle label, I think, that says, ‘You will think you are discovering your real self but, in fact, the contrary is far, far more true’.
“Most alcoholics generally think, ‘Well, I’d be boring if I didn’t drink’. They don’t know how boring they are when they’re drunk. It’s a very interesting subject. It’s also the illness of isolation. You find the biggest alcoholics in isolated societies. Russia …” He thinks for a moment. “Ireland.” He thinks for a moment. “And, of course …” He smiles, pausing for effect, adopting a melted sugar voice like he’s a daytime TV saleswoman pushing woollen winter boots for kittens. “…Australia.”
A British television studio, 1982. Suited talk show host Michael Parkinson at last realises his hands are covered in Vaseline, caught in a trap set almost a minute earlier when volatile guest Sir Les Patterson shook his hand on stage. “What is it I’ve got on my hands?” asks a flummoxed Parkinson. “Awww, sorry Mike,” says Sir Les. “It’s an ointment I’m supposed ta use. I was just giving myself a quick application before the show.” Not more than a minute into the chat and master interviewer Parkinson can barely carry on through his uncontainable belly laughs. Pure full-flight Humphries magic. Six layers deep in the comedy pocket. The whole world in the greasy palm of his hand.
“That is a nice feeling,” Humphries says today, a twinkle in his eye. “I saw Michael the other night at a party in Australia House. It was to celebrate the direct flight from London to Perth — 17 hours on a plane to Perth [his eyebrows raise knowingly]. They were really pushing the quokkas you can see over there. You know, after 17 hours on the plane you think, ‘Where are the quokkas?’ Anyway, Michael was at this party and I hadn’t seen him for a while and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll never forget the handshake’.”
The sadder aspect to that story was how thin Parkinson was looking. “He’d been very, very sick. He had nearly died.” Humphries has lost at least 10 dear friends and contemporaries in the past two years. “Remember, I can vaguely remember the 1930s,” he says. “I was listening to the radio during the Second World War. The first film I ever saw was The Wizard of Oz.
“I get hate mail sometimes — well, crazy mail. ‘You slept with me on Anzac Day, 1958, and I want free tickets to your next show’!” Longevity has its drawbacks. “But it all reminds you of how precious time is,” he says. “It reminds me not to waste time. It reminds me not to use too much energy on resentment and to try and get a bit of gratitude into my life.”
The final curtain, much like outrage and crazymail, should at all times be exposed for what it truly is — a punchline …
St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, in the not too distant past. The not quite normal boy from the cupboard all those years ago successfully completes another examination from another esteemed squeezer and poker from the medical world, and pads slowly down to the front desk to pay his bill. He smiles at the polite young woman in attendance and turns to walk away. But then he turns back around again.
“Oh, by the way,” he says. “I’m wondering if you could tell me something.”
“Yes?” says the young woman.
“Are people allowed to bring farming instruments into this hospital?”
“What do you mean?” asks the young woman.
“Well, I just saw this person in the elevator. Very tall, with a long cloak. Hooded. He was going up to intensive care carrying a farming instrument used for cutting crops. Who was that?”
The young woman is confused, gives a nervous laugh. She has no answers.
“Never mind,” says the immortal comic with a gentle smile, turning slowly to the exit doors.
Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask starts in Newcastle on May 5 and tours nationally
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