‘So, what exactly was wrong with me?’ pouted the author defensively, twenty-one years after their first meeting. ‘What didn’t you like about me at first?’
‘I thought you were way out of my league. I imagined posh Oxbridge guys would be more your line of country. I thought you were a beautiful woman and very bright… but I thought if you fancied anyone it would be some kind of bigshot braniac like a Peter Cook type. Some guy in a blazer from Hampstead … everything I’m not. Never gave it another thought.’
‘Good answer!’
Of course, there was the rather important reason that Billy and I were still married to our first spouses when we met, although both of those relationships were falling apart. My former husband, Nicholas Ball, was an ardent Billy Connolly fan. He took me to see him in concert a few months after we did Not the Nine O’clock News together and I saw Billy on television rendering his fellow Parkinson Show guest, Angie Dickinson, completely speechless with his line ‘as useful as a fart in a space suit’, but it wasn’t until nearly a year later that I met Billy again. By then, Nicholas and I had separated. I was filming at a greyhound track in Brighton with the Not the Nine O’clock News crew, helping to create a tasteful little sketch that involved Epsom salts, racing humans and moving toilet bowls. At the end of a hard day’s funnywork, I was jumping out of the wardrobe trailer when a teenage autograph-hunter stopped me. ‘Billy Connolly’s in town,’ he announced, apropos of absolutely nothing. ‘He’s playing the Dome.’
Billy wasn’t there by the time I arrived unannounced to visit him at the theatre, but Jamie Wark let me into a sparsely furnished dressing room that was half-full of instrument cases. Outside the stage door that same autograph-hunter was lurking. ‘Pamela Stephenson’s in there,’ he said to Billy, again apropos of absolutely nothing.
‘Really?’ Billy replied. That very afternoon, he had been taping Noel Edmonds’ radio show.
‘What kind of women do you like?’ Noel had teased him.
‘I think that Pamela Stephens is very nice,’ returned Billy, getting my name wrong.
‘Oh yeah, you and ten million other folk,’ retorted Noel.
I sat on Billy’s hand-basin while he prepared for his ‘Big Wee Tour’ show. He thought I looked like a ridiculous little goblin, perched up there in my red trousers. He told me all about his current desperate unhappiness, that he felt his marriage had collapsed and he was trying to leave Iris but she refused to accept that and kept calling him, saying, ‘Where the hell are you?’ I took all this with a grain of salt, but I just couldn’t leave his side. He seemed to be filled with terrible hopelessness. We went to his hotel, where he proceeded to drink thirty brandies. I was afraid for him.
If we had wanted to announce to the world that we were in a hotel together, we couldn’t have found a better place. Quite apart from our celebrity, we were two hairy people wearing loud clothing … at the time and place of the Tory Party Conference. A hundred thousand people had marched to Brighton to demand jobs, and most of them were chanting outside our window when we woke up the next morning. There was a gang of workmen belting nails into adjoining corridor walls, while the hotel staff scurried around in a panic because the IRA had threatened to bomb the Tory-ridden building.
‘All those speech defects in one town.’ Billy complained, as I tried to hide. Jamie Wark had barged in without knocking and was crashing about the room searching for guitars and banjos. The two of them seemed quite comfortable with this embarrassing scenario. ‘Thatcher … all those people I hate are here …’ Billy continued, as if nothing was the matter.
‘Oh, I get it,’ I thought, thoroughly humiliated. ‘Jamie’s no stranger to finding Billy in bed with some woman …’
‘… all in their blazers talking shite … and Denis Thatcher even said “Good morning” to me when I arrived. I was so taken aback I said “Oh! Good morning!” in return rather than kicking his arse, which I should have done, but there you go…”
‘Billy!’ I hissed, ‘tell him to leave NOW!’
I’d made a terrible mistake. Engaging though he was, he was also a pitiful, self-destructive drunk who was likely to be Big Trouble. That was apparently a ‘brandy tour’. Whenever Billy went on tour he would choose a different ‘tour drink’. He’d had the gin tour and the white wine tour just prior to that one. On the road he tried to keep his spirits up, in more ways than one. He also had a tour voice, a tour dance and a tour name, which at this time was ‘Captain Demento’ while his sound crew was ‘The Flying McNalty Twins’. You can imagine how delighted I was to hear that I had received the honorary title of ‘Tour Pull’. I had never been treated like a groupie before, but then, I’d never behaved like one.
The man was a total nightmare. I met him again at the Carlton Hotel a week or so later. When I arrived, he was watching a football match and refused to speak to me. ‘Ssshh!’ he kept saying. ‘In a minute.’ I was furious, until I again saw his vulnerability and sweetness. Despite his shocking, chauvinist behaviour, he was really wonderfully kind and his terrible sadness melted me. But after a couple more meetings, during which he again consumed outrageous amounts of alcohol that altered his personality for the worse, I decided I couldn’t save him. Severing contact was hard, because I was deeply drawn to him. It felt as though we were joined at the wound. He had unresolved issues of abandonment and abuse, and so had I; he had always been punished for being ‘stupid’, and I had always been punished for being ‘bright’.
As Christmas of 1980 approached, I decided to run away to Bali, a place where I had always found peace. This time it eluded me. My first visit to the island had been in 1974. While Billy was careering round the world on his ninety-day tours, I was swaying to the sounds of gamelan orchestras, squelching through rice-fields and observing curious trance dances in the monkey forests of central Bali. It is a magical island, the sweetest-smelling place on the planet. Intoxicating jasmine incense, the perfume of luscious fruits, fragrant leaves and grasses, fresh chopped coconut and clove cigarettes are fanned through the air by giant palm fronds or the delicate wafting of silk or cotton sarongs worn by both men and women. Time creeps as slowly as the giant snails that crossed my night path to pluck a perfect Frangipani flower for my supper-time hair-do.
At that time I hated Christmas. The Balinese are Hindus, so I had imagined a paucity of sacrificed evergreens dotted with tinsel, but I was wrong. I languished on the beach in the shade of the biggest Christmas tree in Indonesia. As 1980 came to a car-horn-honking finale, not even the delicate, ornately clad teenage Legong dancers with their intricate head and finger movements could take my mind off my problem.
As a human being, Billy was thoroughly intriguing. Culturally, we were worlds apart and his accent was so thick I barely understood a word he said. Even when I did discern his words, his phraseology was terribly confusing. For example, I had taken his statement, ‘I want to be myself’ to be a cry for self-discovery. Instead, it turned out to be the Scottish form of ‘I want to be alone’ … in other words he was telling me to skedaddle.
‘Is it really my task in life to help preserve this National Living Treasure?’ I kept asking myself. The healthy answer would have been ‘no’, but that at the time my grandiosity, as well as my attraction to him, told me otherwise.
Trying to distract my thoughts from the Scottish beastie, I set sail on a jukung, a small, wooden vessel with a triangular sail. I was searching for Komodo, the island habitat of real-life ‘dragons’, prehistoric lizards that had intrigued me since childhood. I was unwittingly retracing my own family history on that sea voyage for, as I later discovered, my great-great-grandfather, Captain Samuel Stephenson, who was a master mariner, also sailed right there in the Flores Sea in 1821 on his way to the Molucca Islands. In poorly charted waters on his own ship, the Rosalie, a section of his crew rose up against the rest, killing several men and taking possession of both ship and cargo. Only one crew member escaped back to Jakarta, then known as Batavia, and he reported that Samuel had been thrown overboard and lost at sea during the mêlée. When news of the mutiny reached his native England, his seventeen-year-old son and heir, Samuel junior, began to make plans to sail for Batavia in order to secure his father’s Javan assets. It was young Samuel’s first excursion to the Southern Hemisphere and one that must have inspired his interest in the region.
A few years later, probably around the time Jack Connolly’s predecessors were making tracks to Scotland from Connemara, my great-grandfather emigrated to New Zealand on a single-decked schooner called the Fortitude, followed in 1840 by his mother. Ann, on the Deborah. They settled in Russell, in the Bay of Islands, where the young Samuel Stephenson opened a trading station at Okiato. He is still remembered as a historical character from New Zealand’s history, a pioneer merchant whose partner, Captain Clendon, was a signatory on the Treaty of Waitangi that pledged peace between the Maori people and the newly arrived Pakehas (Europeans).
In 1844, Samuel married my great-grandmother, a half-caste woman with a distinguished Maori lineage, who had both a Maori name, Hira Moewaka, and a Pakeha one, Ada Charlotte Macauliffe. Her Pakeha father, Captain Macauliffe, was presumably Scottish, while her Maori mother was called Ehaku. The two were married first by Maori rite in 1844 and then, some eight years later, they again solemnized their union in a Church of England rite at the Chapel of Waimate in 1852. By then, Hira had borne Samuel a number of children. Henry, who eventually bought the historic Pompallier House in Russell, was born later, while my grandfather, George ‘Octie’ Octavius, her eighth and youngest son, was born in 1868.
In 1844, Samuel married my great-grandmother, a half-caste woman with a distinguished Maori lineage, who had both a Maori name, Hira Moewaka, and a Pakeha one, Ada Charlotte Macauliffe. Her Pakeha father, Captain Macauliffe, was presumably Scottish, while her Maori mother was called Ehaku. The two were married first by Maori rite in 1844 and then, some eight years later, they again solemnized their union in a Church of England rite at the Chapel of Waimate in 1852. By then, Hira had borne Samuel a number of children. Henry, who eventually bought the historic Pompallier House in Russell, was born later, while my grandfather, George ‘Octie’ Octavius, her eighth and youngest son, was born in 1868.
My father was the youngest of Octie’s seven children, born in Opotiki in 1916. In adulthood, he became a zoologist, sharing an interest in rare frogs with a Fijian-born colleague, Elsie Thomas, the daughter of a Methodist missionary. The two married in 1947 and were expecting me when they each obtained their doctoral degrees at University College, London, in 1949. We lived in Auckland until 1953, when we relocated to Australia so my father could take up an academic post at the University of Sydney. That is how my two younger sisters and I came to be brought up in the luscious harbourside city of Sydney, as Australian citizens.
I grew up in the arid suburb of Boronia Park, the Drumchapel of Sydney. When my family moved there, to a three-bedroom, concrete-clad bungalow, Boronia Park was a new development, a sparsely landscaped desert, dotted with mound-dwellings of indigenous giant, red, biting ants. The few eucalypts and scrub bushes that remained after the bulldozers left were home to fierce magpies, striped goannas and funnel-web spiders. We became accustomed to leaping over venomous black and brown snakes that lay sunning themselves on our path to the nearest bus stop. A million cicadas hummed evensong to us, while a friendly kookaburra sat on our landscape-blighting, rotary clothesline, waiting to be fed leftovers from our dinner.
Taming that wasteland was a backbreaking job. My parents planted tough desert grasses, sunset-hued Hibiscus and poisonous, fire-resistant Oleander bushes, and they watered the garden early and late. Sydney is a thoroughly humid place: her heatwaves are only bearable if you happen to be near the coast, however our house was inland. Bush-fires raged throughout the summer, filling the sky with eye-smarting, throat-catching smoke. While Billy was freezing in the Stewartville Street kitchen, my sisters and I lay breathless in the sweltering room we shared, slicking our legs up flat against the cool, concrete walls and fanning ourselves with the Australian Women’s Weekly.
Respite came every year when we returned to New Zealand for the Christmas holidays. We stayed in my grandfather’s home near Auckland. My sisters had to share a bedroom but I always won the sanctuary of my father’s tiny boyhood chamber, in which hung an illuminated certificate of appreciation that was presented to Octie when he retired as the postmaster at Opotiki. In our lazy summer days, my cousins and I would lie in the orchard squishing ripe peaches, apricots and plums down our throats and would race each other past the tallest, white-capped waves on Takapuna Beach.
I was stricken with polio when I was a toddler in Sydney so, in the hope of strengthening my limbs, my mother took me to ballet lessons in the elegant suburb of Hunter’s Hill where there were better houses. Ironically, these had been built a century ago by convict labourers from places like Glasgow, fashioned from the same fabric as the tenements, yellow and red local sandstone. I passed them every day, then scrambled to finish my homework on the Hunter’s Hill ferry as it ploughed its way across the glorious Sydney Harbour on my way to school in the centre of Sydney.
My parents held positions at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales during my entire childhood. Those institutions must have been ‘publish or perish’ places because I always remember my parents working at a frantic pace to complete research and write up articles for scientific journals. Academic success was a requirement in our family. My sisters and I were given a solid, classical education at the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, then a rather formal establishment for young Australian ladies with a strict code of conduct and dress. Ties were worn at all times, even in the crazy temperatures of our sub-tropical summer, while hat and gloves were obligatory for the journeys between home and school.
Schoolwork was never a challenge for me, in fact it bored me, so I spent most of my time writing plays and performing in drama projects. After attending university and then the National Institute for Dramatic Art, I eventually had a successful career as a performer in Australia before making my name in Britain on Not the Nine O’clock News.
Thousands of young Australians end up in Bali every year. In that Christmas of 1980, the place seemed more crowded than usual. I was refused entry to Komodo on grounds of safety, for the ‘dragons’ had recently devoured a Japanese tourist who got too close with his Nikon. Apprehensive about seeing Billy again, I returned to London bearing an intricately entwined, black seaweed bracelet for his beer-lifting wrist.
‘I guess,’ Billy had said to me before my departure, ‘if you’re falling in love with a drunken weirdo, you’ve got to give it a great deal of thought.’ Billy had to give everything a great deal of thought. Just after I returned from Indonesia, he called me from a police station. He had turned up drunk at the house in Drymen and Iris had locked him out. While he was conducting a one-man riot, a police officer turned up and took him off to jail. The policeman, a delightful fellow, got Billy out of the cell for a game of darts and later sneaked him back home.
‘I can’t go on like this.’ Billy told me on the phone. ‘I can’t bear it … there’s no future. Any time I think of the future I just want to die.’ That kind of hopelessness is very dangerous, for it frequently precedes either a deliberate or an ‘accidental’ suicide attempt. Billy decided to join me in London, although I was ambivalent about that idea.
Billy had verbally and emotionally separated from Iris, for they had become antithetical strangers to each other, but he had not permanently moved elsewhere. For three years now, he had rented a serviced flat at Three Kings Yard in London, but he returned to Drymen from time to time. No clear arrangements had been made for the children, although Billy’s irregular visits were not terribly different from the way it had always been since he had begun to tour extensively. His career path had necessitated long absences from home and it still does today. I envisioned that we too might end up on different parts of the globe most of the time, but Billy had an extravagant idea of being a ‘house-husband’. ‘I’ll be like John Lennon,’ he promised. ‘I’ll just stay at home and cook and raise children.’
Germaine Greer once told me she thought women’s love and ambition are very closely linked. After my return from Bali, I became worried about a forthcoming stand-up performance at the Comic Strip in London and decided to share my concern with Billy. He asked me a very perceptive question: ‘Does it feel nice when you’re on stage?’ The question surprised me, for I had never really thought about it (I had been performing on stage since I was five years old). ‘Yes …’ I answered, although I knew it was not always pleasant. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine then.’
Our on-stage experiences turned out to be very similar: a period of intense fear and panic followed by a heady surge of adrenaline, then a highly enjoyable rush of endorphins and finally, if all went well, a powerful sense of validation. The good feelings would last for a few hours after the show, but in the morning there would be a sense of loss, an uncomfortable physiological experience of our bodies still being over-pumped with adrenaline, torturous regrets about imperfections the night before and renewed anxiety about the next performance.
Billy had learned to deal with his morning-after blues by consuming vast quantities of alcohol the night before, which in a way made sense since drink does help the body to eliminate excess adrenaline. As excruciating as the performing cycle was, I couldn’t bring myself to imbibe the way he did and preferred not to wake up with breath like a burst lavatory.
At the time, I was conducting a search for careful professional management, and I eventually signed up with Harvey Goldsmith. His employee Pete Brown engineered both of our careers for a few years from then on, so Billy and I were bound to spend time together no matter what happened personally between us.
When Billy embarked on a Middle East tour in the summer of 1981, Pete and I flew to Dubai to join him for a few days. I love the silence, the architecture and the searing, dry heat of desert cities. While cooling off in the swimming pool of the Dubai Hilton. I watched builders erecting a huge outdoor arena for Billy’s show. The evening’s performance was patronized by thousands of expatriate British people, many of whom worked in totally ‘dry’ Middle Eastern areas. During this visit to the Arab Emirates, a more moderate part of the Arab world, they took the opportunity to imbibe alcohol at a startling rate in order to make up for lost time. Many had started drinking on the plane and hadn’t stopped since, so there were puking punters everywhere you looked. Some were just lying on the grass completely unconscious. Billy pointed to one paralytic body during his show. ‘Aye,’ he remarked pointedly to the upright members of his audience, ‘if you can lie on the ground without hanging on, then you’re not drunk.’
I was hand-on-heart breathless, seeing him perform in this situation. At last I fully understood what all the fuss was about. ‘The man’s an absolute genius,’ I thought, coming rather late to the exact same conclusion thousands of others had beforehand. His words seemed to have come from nowhere. He hadn’t prepared anything. He spoke about events that had occurred very recently, only now they had moved from the mundane to the screamingly funny. The previous week, Billy had performed for workers at a refinery on Das Island in the Gulf of Arabia, so he created a spoof comparing their situation to that described in the then popular prisoner-of-war novel Camp on Blood Island. He impersonated all the workers marching to work, whistling the ‘Colonel Bogey’ march from Bridge on the River Kwai.
When I’d seen Billy in Brighton, his show had been quite theatrical, especially at the end. There had been confetti bombs and Billy had appeared in a teddy-boy outfit at the end with a rock band, singing Hank Williams and Buddy Holly songs. He had performed an outrageous parody of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ in which he’d ripped his shirt (‘very labour-intensive, sewing on all those buttons every night.’ he’d complained) and whipped himself with a black leather cat-o’-nine-tails that Jamie Wark had found in a local sex shop. But here in the desert, he was naked, unsupported and incomparable.
I felt quite envious; all my working life I wrote, studied and practised before going before an audience. Billy had this gift of spontaneity that I knew I would never have. It was almost eerie, like the trance dances I’d witnessed in Bali, weird and powerful occasions when the difficult Legong was danced by young girls who had never been trained to do so. The Balinese believe that during those ritual performances they receive messages from heavenly spirits’ who prompt their movements. I imagined some wickedly funny angels always whispered in his ear.
Billy has an extraordinary motoric intelligence. His body was speaking the most hilarious truths, so knowledge of his language was unnecessary. From my grassy vantage point, watching both show and audience, I could see what the audience missed: Arab people hanging out of every window on the side of the hotel that faced the stage. They were absolutely out of control with delight whenever Billy performed one of his physical pantomimes. It didn’t matter that they lacked a point of reference for his description of a little old lady in a fat coat flying out of a Glasgow city bus or a drunken Frank Sinatra wannabe at a party in Govan: they just exploded at whatever was communicated by his rubbery body.
I was on a break from Not the Nine O’Clock News a few months later, when Billy called me from Hong Kong, a place he adores for its food and exoticness, especially the Chinese apothecaries with their curious wares. ‘If ever you’re in need of a ground-up tiger’s willie. Hong Kong’s your place.’ he advised me. Billy was tickled to discover that the Hong Kong tramcars were the same ones he’d known in Glasgow when he was a boy. The ‘caurs’ had been sold, transported abroad and repainted with strikingly colourful Chinese advertisements for ginseng, gelatine and hairspray.
Billy was flying out of Hong Kong on his way to Los Angeles when one of the plane’s engines blew up. Billy didn’t notice, for he was a little under the weather, attacking the miniature brandies and listening to Eric Clapton on his headset. Flying had never been his favourite pastime. ‘Turbulence must be the best laxative known to man.’ he says.
The sober passengers around Billy shrieked in alarm as the plane’s shaking escalated to a body-lurching peak, prompting the pilot to announce they would need to land in Tokyo. He had been in touch with the emergency services and said there was no need to be frightened for they would probably be able to make a perfect landing. Fortunately, they did.
The passengers spent the night in a Japanese hotel before boarding the same plane in the morning with a new engine. That was not the end of their crisis, though, because about half an hour out of Narita Airport there was another ominous bang, indicating that another engine had blown and they had to return to Japan for the second time.
‘We can’t land with all this fuel, so we’re just going to have to dump it in the bay,’ explained the pilot. ‘If you’d like to go to the back of the plane, you’ll be able to watch it being jettisoned.’
‘I think I’ll fucking give that a miss,’ said Billy.
This time, the atmosphere was considerably more tense. I had given Billy a paperback copy of The Dharmapada, a collection of Buddhist writings, which he happened to have been reading on the journey. For several years now, I had embraced the Buddhist philosophy and had suggested to Billy that Buddhist meditation practices might be very useful to calm his anxiety, help him focus and cut down on his brain-chatter. It worked well for him, especially a practice called ‘The Mindfulness of Breathing’. The logic of The Dharmapada was extremely comforting to him, helping him to accept what was happening and be at peace with it. As Billy’s plane approached Narita Airport for the second time, there were hordes of ambulances and TV crews waiting there for the crash that never happened. After about four hours in the airport, the passengers were offered a no-brainer. ‘Would you all prefer to have the original plane with a new engine, or a completely different plane?’
Not too surprisingly, they all voted for a new one. After their third take-off, there was a wild party in the first-class cabin. A drunk American woman with little grasp of the situation kept saying, ‘I don’t care what happens as long as I get back in time to watch the Royal Wedding on TV.’ Her husband was walking round with a bumper sticker Billy had given him stuck to his forehead. It read, ‘I may be old but I still get hot.’
In extraordinary times, people try to make sense of a senseless universe. ‘This whole thing’s probably my fault,’ confessed the American next to Billy.
‘How’s that?’ asked Billy.
‘I’m jinxed. I crashed my helicopter four times when I was in ‘Nam.’
‘If I get out of this alive,’ returned Billy, ‘I’m going to tidy up my life a bit.’