There is a prone man chortling in our living room, half-hidden by a couple of Labradors. Billy loves to watch American television evangelists whipping up the emotions and endorphins of their massive amphitheatre audiences.
‘Look at the “Honest, I’m not bald” hair-do on this one!’ he yells. I race in just in time to catch Benny Hinn lunge at a frail-looking Asian woman and forcibly slap her into the ready arms of his trusty henchmen. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Billy protests, ‘the poor wee woman could snap like a twig. He needs his head read.’
‘It’s dinner time. Come and sit down.’
‘Hang on.’ he pleads, ‘I’m desperate to see if that big, ugly woman with the giant pink hair comes on. The one who matches her Bible cover with her dress!’
‘God talks to me …’ booms Benny Hinn to fifty thousand hysterical worshippers.
‘God talks to you?’ Billy is shouting at the television. ‘Go knock on the door of any mental institution in the country and tell them that. They won’t even let you home for your pyjamas!’
Billy’s own close-call-with-his-Maker experiences on the aeroplane jolted him into awareness of a need to make proper arrangements for his children and move on. He returned to Drymen, but he had trouble finding Iris who had found her own solutions to Billy’s departure, hiding away with her brandy in the tree-house. Billy did not realize that, now he was gone, she would retreat there for days on end while Cara and Jamie were left to fend for themselves. He emphasized his love and commitment to the children then returned to London with a heavy heart. If only we had known how bad things were then, for all three of them.
People in Britain were beginning to gossip. Billy Connolly was often in the company of a thirty-one-year-old, New Zealand-born Australian (incredibly, I share a birthday with Mamie) who had turned up in London four years earlier on her way around the world and was now making her name on Not the Nine O’Clock News. Our private turmoil was bound to become public; it was just a matter of time. The excrement hit the extrusion device in August 1981, when Billy’s separation from Iris became headline news. I had moved into a house belonging to the playwright Julian Mitchell in Ovington Street, Knightsbridge, where we tried to take cover from the barrage of media interest, personal attacks and moral outrage. Neither of us had any idea of how to deal with it, but we came up with various lame strategies that included hiding, water-hosing those who door-stepped us and disguising ourselves. Billy even hit a photographer with a loaf of French bread he’d bought for our supper. It bounced off his head like a walking cane.
Meanwhile, far more serious harassment was occurring in Drymen. As the children walked around the town, they were accosted by journalists. Cara remembers her mother standing with a tabloid newspaper in her hands, laughing. ‘Isn’t this hilarious?’ she was saying. ‘Now Pamela Stephenson has to cope with your father!’ Billy flew back to Drymen to soothe the children again. He missed them desperately and it was not easy to keep in touch because, when he called Drymen, the phone was rarely answered.
People in the public eye who become romantically involved don’t have the luxury of being able to court the usual way. Instead of spending relaxed time learning about each other, our task became to defend ourselves emotionally and physically against the world, in particular the media. We managed, however, to get a weekend respite in Marrakech, wandering together beneath peaceful orange groves and gorgeous sunsets … before Billy got a tummy bug and began exploding from every orifice … but then he’s just a born romantic.
After that, I became pretty busy with the final series of Not the Nine 0’Clock News. The Ovington Street house had a fine, well-equipped kitchen, so I encouraged Billy to spend time cooking while I was away working during the daytime. In contrast to the notions held by some societies, Scottish men consider household cooking to be an extremely manly activity. Billy discovered Julian Mitchell’s cookbooks, which were all for the advanced culinary artist, and, undeterred, he attacked the classic French dishes.
‘How does this look? Is this all right?’
He was holding up the finest, thinnest example of a crêpe I’d ever seen.
‘I’ll be making soufflés tomorrow,’ he announced.
I was astonished by his talent as a chef. Cooking turned out to be very calming for him, a meditative activity. He approached the preparation of each dish as if he were Rodin setting free a masterpiece from a chunk of marble and was always a little reluctant to allow it to be scoffed until I’d recorded its visual finery with a Polaroid camera.
We were under siege by door-steppers in Ovington Street for months. ‘God knows,’ said Billy, ‘it’s hard enough without people spying on you as you’re trying to keep your soul together, trying to keep in harmony with the rest of the fucking universe. They sell pictures and stories of your life and don’t share the money. I heard Ken Dodd pissed in a bucket and threw it out the window on them. What a jolly idea!’
Billy and I were sleeping in late one Sunday morning in September, when the phone rang and rang. ‘It might be Cara or Jamie.’ I said. ‘Better answer it.’
‘Good morning. Pamela.’ said a familiar voice. ‘This is John Cleese.’
I obviously took too long gathering myself enough to be able to speak.
‘You know …’ He seemed to think he had to explain who he was, ‘the bloke from Fawlty Towers … I’d like you to do a sketch with me in the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball.’
Billy had appeared in the original Secret Policeman’s Ball, a live benefit concert in aid of Amnesty International, starring the best comics and rock musicians around. ‘You should do it,’ he advised me, recounting a backstage conversation between John. Peter Cook (whom he regarded as the funniest person in the world) and the actress Eleanor Bron, who had been one of Billy’s fantasy women for years.
‘What this show needs most,’ John had complained, ‘is new satire. Come up with something for tomorrow.’ Peter took up the gauntlet. The Jeremy Thorpe trial was dominating the news at the time and it happened that the judge’s summing up had generally been criticized. He had seemed to be very biased against gay people, leading the jury in a shockingly inappropriate way. Peter wrote a piece called ‘Entirely a matter for you’ that satirized the trial, and performed it in the show the following night. Peter, as the discriminating judge, delivered the brilliant line that Billy still quotes at every given opportunity: A tissue of odious lies has issued from his slavering lips … but that, of course, is entirely a matter for you.’
John Cleese and I decided to perform a sketch in which we played a couple of belligerent strangers at a bus stop. ‘Give me a pound or I’ll take off my clothes,’ we taunted each other, both ending up in our underwear. We rehearsed in John’s back garden, while bemused neighbours peered out of upstairs windows. Billy performed some solo stand-up for the show and Rowan, Mel, Griff and I offered a scene from Not the Nine O’clock News. At the end of the first night, Billy and I were walking hand in hand backstage in the dark, giggling. We thought we were alone, but a London voice came out of the shadows behind us. ‘So!’ said Eric Clapton, who was performing a guitar solo in the show. ‘You two really are in love!’
‘Cover for us, Eric,’ I pleaded. ‘There’s a squillion photographers outside.’
So Eric and I exited the theatre arm in arm, and Billy followed a few minutes later. As I was getting into a car, I heard a crash behind me as well as a great deal of shouting and swearing. ‘I hope you’ve got Vaseline on that Nikon, because it’s going up yer arse!’
The next day, there was a cartoon in the papers of Billy having a tantrum and exploding cameras outside the Drury Lane Theatre. The caption read. ‘He’s normally such a funny bloke.’ On grounds of grammar as well as inaccuracy, Billy took great exception to being described in a newspaper article as ‘the punch-prone Billy Connolly’. ‘I’m not punchprone,’ he protested. ‘I punch other people.’
It was a very stressful time, living under negative public scrutiny, and we were both getting very jumpy. For Billy it was worse because the press had replaced his early tormentors. They became contemporary projections of William, Mona and Rosie, leading to a repetition of his childhood sense of terror and hopelessness. Even today, he is easily wounded by unkind words, especially from strangers. Quite understandably, he feels that, after everything he’d gone through, it’s time he was allowed to live his life without being under constant attack.
We began to form an escape plan. ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree …’ Billy began his favourite poem and I finished it. He was delighted that Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree was my favourite too. Living ‘alone in the bee-loud glade’ certainly seemed like a great idea from where we were sitting.
‘Maybe we should take a cruise or something.’ I suggested.
‘Fuck no. Cruises are like prison, with the possibility of drowning … I know! Let’s drive down to Brighton, to the seaside!”
The seaside has always been a place of happiness and safety for Billy. On his family holidays in the Scottish coastal port of Rothesay, he had a respite from his father’s molestation, for he always had his own bed. We jumped in the car and set off, scarcely reaching the end of the street before we were assaulted by a blinding flash. The paparazzi were obviously in hot pursuit. ‘Bastards!’ cried Billy, but it turned out to be lightning. We didn’t get to Brighton in the end because we couldn’t find it. We ate fish and chips in a terrible transport café then turned round and went home: we were a mess.
As I began work on a new Superman movie at Pinewood Film Studios, Billy was asked to take over the lead, from Simon Callow, in a J. P. Donleavy play called The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, which necessitated his learning the entire play in just a couple of weeks. I could see that he was really struggling with it, cramming day after day without a break. ‘The mind doesn’t work like that,’ I told him. Even then I was passionately interested in psychology and neurology. ‘The brain doesn’t respond well to constant learning without a break.’
‘But I open on Friday …’
‘You’re not doing a thing tomorrow,’ I insisted. ‘Cara and Jamie will be here and we’re all going on a picnic!’ We ate egg sandwiches and chocolate Olivers in Richmond Park. When he opened, not only was Billy word-perfect as ‘Beefy’, but he received considerable critical acclaim for the role, as well as prudish alarm and embarrassed giggles. Resplendent in his birthday suit, a pair of work boots, goggles and a kinky set of chains, he leapt on stage in the third act, screaming: ‘Good evening, ladies!’
On a few of his non-matinée days, Billy appeared on Kenny Everett’s TV show. He and Kenny, who both sported massive beards at the time, shared a penchant for dressing up as women and referring to each other’s ‘delicate problems’.
As Billy’s West End run progressed, the Superman shoot moved to location in Canada. I began to notice my own stress level was high, and I did not have Billy around to read me a chapter of Roald Dahl’s BFG, which always soothed me. Finding a gap in my schedule, I asked members of the cast for ‘quiet week’ suggestions.
‘Las Vegas,’ joked Richard Pryor.
‘Green Turtle Cay,’ suggested Christopher Reeve.
I flew off to the latter, wishing out loud that Billy could join me there.
‘I’ve not got long,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a gig, you know.’
Billy actually flew to meet me in the Bahamas for a day. It was the stupidest, most romantic thing in the world. Billy had never snorkelled before, so I showed him how and he took to it like a drowning tomcat. I was beginning to understand how terrified he was in the universe. He often referred to John Lennon as a kindred spirit, remarking that Yoko had forced John to travel round the world alone in order to conquer his fear of it. He seemed to be giving me permission to push him into new territory, so I did.
We were in the sea, just off the Bahamian coast. ‘It’s an amazing world down there,’ I said. ‘Preparing to dive! Follow me!’ I led him on an underwater cruise past flirtatious angelfish, giant crustaceans and exotic live coral.
‘That was brilliant,’ he shouted when we surfaced. ‘Hang on, I’ve got to adjust my mask.’ I turned round and was horrified to see that not only was he about to brush past some stinging fire coral, but a giant barracuda had decided to follow him. I waved him towards me, trying not to induce alarm. He thought I was being jolly and waved back.
‘Yowee!’ he yelped as the nasty little polyps took hold.
‘Shiiiiiiiiitttt!’
He’d seen the big fish.
‘It’s safer in the Gorbals,’ he said.
External environmental threats seemed mild compared to Billy’s battle with his internal demons. Unfortunately, alcohol had more than a disinhibiting effect on him: it turned him into a mean, violent, out-of-control nutter with psychotic rage, frequent blackouts and memory loss. Apparently, no one had ever challenged him about this before and I tried hard to figure out why. Perhaps they were too frightened of him, too in awe of him, too drunk themselves to notice, or had something to gain from his loss of control. Certainly, Billy exhibited classic defensiveness the first time I brought it up. I’d had no experience with addiction so I got hold of the alcoholics’ bible, the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, and read it cover to cover in one sitting. I learned that I could not help him unless it was his desire to heal, and internalized the wonderful phrase, ‘Detach with love.’ The next time he became insane with drink. I faced him the next morning. ‘I’m not sticking around,’ I announced sadly. ‘You’re ugly when you drink: ugly and abusive. I care about you, but I’m not going to watch you continue to self-destruct. Goodbye.’
Billy’s fear of abandonment helped him in this moment. ‘OK.’ he said eventually, finally perceiving a link between his alcohol abuse and a possible loss of personal happiness. ‘I’ll stop for a whole year and then we’ll see. Fair enough?’ ‘One day at a time’ as the twelve-step people say, was good enough for me.
‘I decided to stop drinking while it was still my idea,’ he correctly tells people (for I couldn’t have challenged him successfully unless he was ready). His alcohol abuse was a symptom of underlying problems: depression, anxiety and trauma – all, of course, related to his childhood experiences – and, as he began to heal, he became naturally temperate.
He gained an interest in being physically healthy too, stopping smoking and eating better. Some people sneered at the very sudden change in him, but those were people who, for their own reasons, felt strangely comfortable with Billy’s self-destructive path. Perhaps, by comparison, it made theirs seem less drastic. Perhaps they erroneously thought he would no longer be funny. People all over the world loved to swap stories about their legendary night out on the town with Billy Connolly and were thoroughly pissed off when it all stopped. On the other hand, those who actually cared about him were relieved and knew he now had a shot at longevity.
Understandably, some of his friends were very wary of me. What exactly was this overconfident ‘Sheila’ with a penchant for outrageous on-camera stunts doing with Billy anyway? Was it all a giant publicity exercise? Perhaps I would keep Billy away from his friends. Michael Parkinson, for example, wondered about my motives and, knowing Billy was ‘a handful’ (he had witnessed many of Billy’s debauched evenings in Tramp’s nightclub in London), worried that I wouldn’t be ‘up to the job’. Peter McDougall and Ralph McTell both independently worried that I would be somehow ‘eclipsed’. These were all very reasonable concerns, from people who barely knew me.
As a direct result of his sobriety, Billy’s involvement with his children grew stronger. At eight years old, Cara was a delightful little girl who always wanted to come with me to my matinées of Pirates of Penzance at Drury Lane and sit right in the front row. She idolized her father and would sit on his lap for hours, just staring at him. Jamie at eleven was a different kettle of fish. Fiercely loyal to his mother and furious at his father, he avoided me at first and it took us a while to become close. The children began to stay with us a great deal and they responded well to the structure we offered them. They liked the really simple things like our talks together, being given clean towels with an order to bathe, and watching shooting stars in the garden on summer evenings.
Billy and I bought a house in London that was originally a warehouse where fish were distributed. ‘The Fish Factory’ was protected from the street and had an inner courtyard, so at last we were able to have some privacy from strangers. On 24 November, Billy’s fortieth birthday, I arranged a party for him. At the time I didn’t understand quite how much it meant to him that his birthday was celebrated, but he was clearly thrilled.
I had hired a Pope look-alike, a Welshman called Mr Meredith, who came up on the train all the way from Wales. He jumped out of a cake wearing his mitre and robes and blessed the crowd of well-known faces peering at him. He later became less interested in popish activities and more interested in downing a few beers, then he chatted up the girls from the punk band Shock who had large, revealing designer holes in their clothing. The scene intrigued jazz musician George Melly.
‘Look!’ he nudged Billy. ‘It’s the Temptation of Saint Anthony!’
After the party, I approached the birthday boy.
‘What’s your favourite girl’s name?’
‘Daisy,’ he replied instantly.
Just a few weeks after that, Daisy was conceived. By then, eleven-year-old Jamie and eight-year-old Cara were regularly spending a lot of time with us and our lives together in London were very happy. In a very understandable effort to be loyal to their mother, the children had not been able to tell us that things in Drymen had been getting worse and worse. Unknown to us, Iris’s alcohol use had reached the stage where she was having severe withdrawal symptoms, blackouts and episodes of delirium tremens, witnessed by both children. She desperately needed treatment and her children needed protection. One weekend when Cara was staying with her grandparents in Glasgow, she had gathered up the courage to say to them, ‘I don’t want to go back to Drymen.’
When we told the children that we wanted them to live with us for the time being, Cara was delighted. Two years earlier she had looked at Billy with her big, sweet eyes and asked, ‘If you leave, can I come too?’ Since then she had written innumerable letters asking him the same thing, but had always torn them up. The writing had, though, been on the wall from the very beginning. Billy had even composed a song in 1969, the year Cara was born, that went:
‘I’m leaving you now I’ll be gone for a while
You’re never going to see daddy’s loving smile
Don’t say, “Oh no!”
When the sun comes up I’ll be leaving,
I don’t care if your heart’s grieving.
I’m following the things I believe in.
Don’t say “Oh no!”’
Jamie wasn’t entirely happy about moving to London. He knew things were far from fine at Drymen but he’d become accustomed to the inappropriate freedom he’d been given there. He’d had little supervision for years, which he then thought was a good thing and he had assumed the role of Cara’s protector. Now he would have to go to school every day.
Billy felt very bad for Iris, but he knew he was doing the right thing. He wanted formal custody of his children primarily for their safety and well-being, yet to achieve this he was forced to go to court to fight a nasty, public custody battle. Billy was dreadfully anxious: a court reporter had come to our house and sat there for days, just watching our family interaction. Billy cooked a meal one evening and Cara had started picking out the mushrooms.
‘If you don’t eat them,’ he joked in a funny voice. ‘I’ll thrash you within an inch of your miserable life!’ He was performing a savage, comic replay of his own food-battles with Mona. We all laughed, until we saw the court reporter making a note in her booklet. ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Billy when we got to bed, ‘she thinks I’m a child-beater.’
I barely recognized him when he went off to court in Edinburgh in a sober, grey suit and neatly trimmed hair and whiskers. ‘Please don’t thump any journalists today,’ I pleaded. To our enormous relief the judge ruled that the children would be better off with Billy and me. We tried to ignore all the ill will and ignorant nastiness that came our way after that. We couldn’t explain the situation to the world so we just had to set about creating a proper, permanent family life for the four of us.
I was eight months pregnant and the size of a bouncy castle when Billy offered me a ‘by the way’ that had me shrieking for an emergency appointment with my obstetrician. ‘You were how many pounds at birth?’ I puked, ‘Now you tell me you were an eleven-pound baby?’ Genetics being what they are, my ensuing Caesarean section seemed like a dandy way to have his baby and, a week later, Daisy was plucked from my womb on 31 December 1983.
Famous people seem to get treated differently from others in medical settings. ‘Wanna watch?’ the surgeon asked Billy. He leapt at the chance: ‘It’s not every day you get to gaze on your wife’s bladder for God’s sake,’ he explained to me at the time. ‘I’ve seen more of you than you’ve seen of me,’ he is now inclined to boast. ‘I’ve seen your pancreas!’ He really is a sick bastard.
Daisy was a beauty, weighing in at nine pounds ten ounces. Her father whisked her off to the surgeons’ changing room, where he was so pumped with endorphins he performed a twenty-minute stand-up routine for the entire hospital while I lay freezing in the corridor on a tin trolley. ‘Stop that!’ I moaned. ‘Get me drugs and blankets!’
Everything we’d been through at last seemed to make sense, except that Billy, who had been temperate for over a year, thought – wrongly – that he could now drink with impunity. I didn’t know what to make of it. He had certainly proved he could stop completely when he put his mind to it and he never drank heavily around me or the children, but when he was out with his mates, moderation was a serious challenge.
The day after Daisy was born, Billy began a diary that he continued for four years. He chose a beautiful leather book from Smythson of Bond Street, designed for aristocrats. It’s a hoot to read his entries under headings like ‘Pheasant and Partridge Shooting ends’.
1 January 1984
I was wakened by a phone call from Pamela in hospital. She sounded a million dollars. What an improvement, she must be really healthy which is more than can be said of me. I’m suffering from the mother and father of all hangovers. Jesus, what a price we pay for that one night of debauchery!
2 January
A family again at last! The difference in the house is extraordinary. I think we are going to be very happy here, all five of us!
Billy was doing his best to deal with all the stresses in his life. It was not easy and, emotionally, he was flipping from one extreme to another.
I got up and made French toast muffins for the kids. When I got out of the door there was a photographer there who kept telling me to smile. I told him to fuck off or I would break his jaw. Pam was looking great, so was Daisy. I changed her for the first time. I’m a bit awkward but Pam thought I had done well. When I left the photographers tried to pose me with a book called Non-Violent Childbirth.
Billy looked forward to introducing Daisy to his father and siblings. Florence cooed over her, but William, who still lived in the tenement flat in White Street, greeted us briefly then turned on the television and sat with his back to us all. Not long after that meeting we heard he’d had a stroke, which left him quite bereft of speech and balance. The left side of his brain was affected so he couldn’t write with his right arm and he dragged his left leg. When Billy visited him in Gartnavel Hospital, he was very struck by his father’s appearance, lying there in the ward with Florence and a priest by his side. ‘He’s small,’ he thought. ‘All these years he seemed like a big guy, even when I got taller than him … but now he seems shrunken.’
He waited until the priest left before he approached William and spoke close to his ear. ‘Celtic won on Saturday,’ he lied, ‘four-nil.’ He could have sworn he saw a flicker of triumph in the dazed man’s eyes.