Melbourne

Dad was then transferred to Melbourne with William Cooper & Nephews, a chemical manufacturing company famous for its ship dip products. We were all flown there on a tiny DC-6B. Mum had a great a fear of flying in those days, as I occasionally still do, so to allay her fears - not ours - she dosed us up heavily on Veganin, a kind of calmative. Jenny and I can vaguely remember boarding the aircraft but have absolutely no recollection of having had to be carried off the plane in the deepest sleep. Melbourne could have been Moscow!

We stayed in a private hotel in South Yarra - all of us in one huge room - and I started school at Xavier College. Whenever my sister or I started at a new school - and there were many over the years - Mum would park her car outside the school just so we could see that she was still there when we had our lunch break. The car was loaded with her lunch and magazines and she would stay all day until we ran into her arms at the end of classes! She did the same thing years later when my youngest sister Patsy was born. It was such a sweet gesture and so typical of Mum.

I wasn’t enamoured of Xavier. It was very heavy on sport and I was not. It also meant travelling on two buses, two trains plus a bus twice a day - once before school and once after school - because we lived in Beaumaris and the school was in Kew, a distance of about thirty kilometres. The best thing about Xavier College was that in mid-summer there were so many cicadas in the trees outside the classrooms that when the noise became intolerable we were sent home. Beaumaris was a newer suburb and we had a lovely home. Whenever we moved our new home was always a bit more upmarket. In Melbourne I also bought on hire purchase – I’m not sure I ever paid it off – my first portable Pye stereogram. I would shut my bedroom door and lie on the floor with one speaker beside each ear and play all my show records at full blast and imagine I was on stage or at least in the front row of a performance. I would play them for hours, totally transported!

Melbourne is where my show business interests and other adventures began (well documented in my autobiography) but there were also many other ‘adventures’. One of these was my Mouseketeer encounter, which was initiated by my friends at Channel 9 in Sydney. I was probably the Mouseketeers’ biggest fan in Australia and never dreamt that one day I would be able to spend time with them. In those days television was only about a year old in Australia, with three television stations - HSV7, GTV9 and ABV2. We were unable to afford our own television set then so we used to gather up folding chairs and rugs from home, take small meals that Mum made and sit outside Myers in Bourke Street where they had television sets in several windows with speakers outside. For ages we would watch such programmes as I Love Lucy and In Melbourne Tonight. We were not the only ones doing so; there were probably more than a hundred people there every night!

One of the most exciting events that happened to me in Melbourne was when Dad decided, to my shock, to take us all down to the seaside town of Frankston - near where my estranged sister now has a very grand home - to watch the filming of the Stanley Kramer production of On the Beach starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner. We had a nodding acquaintance with the stars, Fred and Gregory being the most affable. They were happy to chat and sign autographs whilst Anthony was so handsome but very shy and I sensed that he was probably gay, which he indeed was. Sadly, he died of AIDS many years later. Ava was beautiful but withdrawn. She had just told the world press that ‘if they had to make a movie about the end of the world Melbourne was the right city!’ A few weeks later they filmed scenes on a mock-up submarine built in the show grounds. Then they needed hundreds of extras for a scene outside the Public Library in Swanston Street and Flinders Street Station and of course yours truly was in the throng where they were supposed to be handing out suicide pills for the survivors of a nuclear holocaust - my first and only movie role... to date!

Debbie Reynolds later worked with Gregory Peck in How the West Was Won and Fred Astaire in The Pleasure of His Company. Debbie told me that Fred was her favourite because when she was a teenager and learning how to dance for Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly she had worked so hard there was blood in her shoes. At the end of her tether, she heaved the shoes across the rehearsal hall and was crying under a piano when she heard a tap-tap from a cane. It was Fred, who coaxed her out from under the piano and gave her a hug. He told her that he too still found it the hardest work and advised her never to give up because he believed she had the talent to make it in the industry. She certainly heeded his advice!

Sex had well and truly reared its head by now and with it all kinds of confusion, not helped by a dreadful incident with Tommy Steele’s manager at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne. My experience with Mr. Steele’s manager as a schoolboy left more scars than I realised, which were deeply embedded in my subconscious and only surfaced when I wrote about the incident in my first book. They say that once one has opened the door and faced what happened; one is able to move on. However, for me the reverse is true. The wound is still very fresh and easily opened, even though it was a very long time ago. How children who have suffered sustained abuse, both physically and sexually, over many years have ever coped is totally beyond my comprehension.

I used to attend our church teens social functions hoping to find out which path my sex life was going to take, probably more for Dad’s sake than mine. I remember asking a girl to dance, which was the idea of the function, but she held me so tightly I could barely breathe. The situation was not helped by her breath, which was heavy with garlic. I did notice a very good-looking lad who seemed as bored by it all as I was. I was too scared to strike up a conversation with him but we nodded to each other several times during the night and rolled our eyes as if to say “HELP”! I have no idea what happened to him but seeing him there and the occasional smile and nod was enough to make me go back each week - nothing at all to do with meeting the girls!

After school one day, in my school uniform, I was allowed to go to see a movie in the city. In the cinema a much older, swarthy man appeared and kept approaching in the dark, closer and closer, row by row until he was finally sitting beside me. Suddenly I felt his knee brush against mine and being a bit excited but more curious I let him do so. Then he leaned over and said to meet him in the gent’s toilet in the foyer. He left and I eventually picked up my school bag and almost passed out because my heart was racing so fast. I found my way into the toilet where he was standing in the doorway of a cubicle. Seeing me, he lunged and dragged me into the cubicle and forced the longest tongue I had ever seen - or tasted - deeply down my throat like some awful lizard! I was initially scared and shocked but a tiny bit curious because the boys at school had recently been discussing French kissing at length - and believe me, this kissing was indeed at great length! I hated it; it seemed awfully unhygienic so I pushed him away and made my escape, more confused than ever. I had never seen two men kiss, let alone be kissed myself by a grown man.

Something about Melbourne really appealed to me and still does - the European feel of the city, the arts scene, the trams and the Moomba Festival, a big arts event. There was also a little cinema under the Australia Hotel that was considered to be a beatnik hangout, and trying to be bohemian I frequented the coffee shop in the foyer. I was sort of cute looking but did not look at all like any of the rest of the crowd, so very few approached me for a chat - or anything! All they drank was coffee, which I hated even the smell of but I consumed it by the gallon, trying to look ‘cool’. However, the only effect was that it made me more hyper than usual; I couldn’t stop talking yet said very little! Eventually a small group of older types asked me to go with them to look at antiques - ANTIQUES! I feigned interest and agreed to go. Shop after shop offered no charms. To me it was all just old-fashioned furniture, some of it even chipped and broken. But what would I know? Zero! They were oohing and aahing all over the place and stroking it all as if they were stroking a lover. Whenever they asked my opinion I would just say, ‘Very nice indeed!’ I made more and more excuses not to go out with them that they finally gave up on me - thankfully!

Across the road from the Australia Hotel was a sauna that everyone said I had to try. It was entered by going down steep stairs in the centre of an arcade and looked quite nice and had a lovely aroma! I’m not sure whether it was a gay sauna because I never got to find out what it was like. As I was undressing, sirens suddenly went off and we were told to stay where we were. With my vivid imagination, I was imagining some kind of police raid a la Chicago in the bootleg days or even worse the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre - since I had just seen Some Like It Hot. After about an hour a stretcher was carried out with a tiny body fully covered with a sheet. We were told to leave immediately. I have never dressed so fast. I only found out the next day that a very famous jockey had collapsed and died in the steam room. That was my last sauna visit until years later in Sydney and under circumstances that were much more alluring!

I was starting to rebel a bit mainly because of the abuse at school and not feeling understood at home - the usual teenage angst I guess. Dad and I drifted further apart emotionally, which I found dreadfully sad but would never admit it to anyone. He was a regular guest on a popular early morning television show called the “Today Show’ which did make me proud and also enabled me to mix with some of the biggest television stars of the day. One of them was Bert Newton who was one of the most popular television personalities of the day and is now a regular performer in big musicals usually produced by John Frost and he is also a friend of ours today. I also met the performer Toni Lamond who was also a regular with Bert Newton on ‘In Melbourne Tonight’ hosted by Graham Kennedy the biggest television personality of the decade plus a big musical comedy performer and who was and is a total joy. She had the most amazing voice and was hilarious in sketches. Many years later I saw her perform as Miss Hannigan in a matinee of Annie in Century City, Los Angeles and had dinner with her after the show. Years later again, we flew her over to Perth to perform in cabaret at DownStairs at the Maj with the gloriously urbane Stuart Wagstaff who played Professor Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’ in Australia plus hosted, very successfully, several television shows, Stuart sadly just recently passed away. Toni’s talent was as keen as it was years ago and she and Stuart delivered a stunning show. A friend of ours, Kevin Coxhead, along with David Mitchell, recently helped organise a tribute to Toni at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. So well deserved!

I remember waking up one morning with excruciating pain on the right side of my stomach, which Mum insisted was just wind, so she gave me a dose of bicarbonate soda. I can’t really blame her because I was quite the hypochondriac. Later that day I was walking down Collins Street in Melbourne when I collapsed in pain and came to in a doctor’s surgery with the doctor’s finger inside my rectum! I was pacified when he said that by touching certain spots inside my rectum he could tell I had bad appendicitis. I was rushed to hospital and shaved - this time professionally by a nurse - who told me that she had a cold spoon for any men who may become aroused. Believe me, I was far from aroused! After the operation the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my appendix in a jar - it was all twisted and looked like a spring because it was just about to burst, so they saved my life.

The above incident reminds of a more recent one involving a similar part of my anatomy. I used to suffer from the most debilitating migraines from the age of about fifteen and all through my years with Su. Last year after a brain scan - some may be surprised to find out that I have a brain - the migraines were diagnosed as ‘cluster headaches’, also called ‘the suicide disease’ because the pain associated with them is so excruciating. However, earlier back in Perth I had found a doctor who prescribed suppositories for migraines. I think they may have contained a bit of morphine. One night I was in agony with an acute migraine so I popped in a suppository and waited and waited, to no avail, so I popped in another and then another. Talk about a full house! Suddenly I was violently ill from both ends of my body for hours. Finally, as I was starting to black out Sach called an ambulance. When it arrived they found that because I had lost so much fluid my heart had gone into atrial fibrillation, a dangerous condition. They told me to sit there while they got the stretcher and as they left the room they asked Sach if I was his FATHER! That riled me so much that I ignored waiting for the stretcher and as sick as I was I literally stormed - more like staggered - into the back of the ambulance and then collapsed! How dare they?

To help me recuperate Dad and Mum sent me back to Perth by train for a couple of weeks’ holiday. However, half way across the Nullabor Plain in the midst of the longest straight stretch of train line in the world - 477 kilometers - there was a sudden storm that washed away part of the track. It was going to take at least two days to fix and there was no air-conditioning. On the second day, because of the heat, many passengers washed their clothes in the sink in their compartment and left them overnight to dry on small bushes. The next morning most of the clothes were gone, apparently taken by some of the desert dwellers! I remember one woman screaming out, ‘There go my bras. That woman is wearing my bloody bras!’ It is quite funny looking back. Also on the train was a young woman who was determined to get me into her bunk. I was so obviously gay she must have seen me as a challenge. She asked me to kiss her one night, which I sort of did but she said I wasn’t doing it properly. Which, she said, is why I wasn’t enjoying it as she expected me to, so she decided to give me lessons? It was just so awful –- not to mention the fact that she turned a bit nasty because she felt insulted. When we finally reached Kalgoorlie - still 600 kilometres from Perth - I rushed to see if I could change carriages. I would happily have gone the rest of the way to Perth by camel if need be to escape her clutches!