Minutes after the game in April 2001, Martin O’Neil, lauded manager of Celtic Football Team, is stepping sure-footedly out of the locker-room showers. He wraps a towel around his waist and marches swiftly around a bend in the tiled corridor. He is astonished to see Billy standing there waiting for him with his friend Russell Kyle. As the proud recipient of a ‘Seat for Life’ in the grandstand, Billy is often at Celtic Park when the team is playing, but Martin hadn’t expected to see him in the men’s room.
‘I saw you running about naked in Comic Relief, my friend,’ he reprimands Billy. ‘Do you want to see what a real one looks like?’
‘Och, give me a break,’ protests Billy, ‘I was freezing at the time.’
Billy’s yardstick for virility and achievement has never been his genital size – he’s always been perfectly happy about that – but rather it has been a question of his ability to seduce the good people of North America. ‘I always thought if I didn’t make it in the USA it would be half a career,’ explains Billy. ‘It’s such a large part of the English-speaking world.’
His experiences opening for Elton John and others left him with an uncomfortable sense of impotence: the very expression ‘opening’ conjuring up wimpish images and an ardent desire to overcome his Amerectile Dysfunction. The Viagra he needed for America was some means of raising his professional profile, not his penis. Billy’s first assault on America began in March 1987, when he embarked on a tour of the US and Canada.
When he began his tour of Canada, Billy was worried that he would be portrayed as a ‘Scottish shortbread type’ but, for the first time ever, he had a real sense that it was the Canadian people who were out in force to see him, not just Scottish expatriates. His standing ovation in Cornwall, Ontario, and the lakeside town of Kingston furthered the thrilling feeling that his audience was building in that country. Billy’s babysitter from Dover Street, Mattie Murphy, was in the audience one night. She had emigrated to Canada with her family many years earlier and settled in London, Ontario. At first Billy did not remember her, but the way she talked about him and Florence as children, as well as Mamie and the other Dover Street dwellers, brought back memories he’d long forgotten.
When I saw Billy’s final American show of the year, at the Lincoln Center, I was thrilled that it was a triumph. Afterwards, at a chic New York hangout called Nell’s Place, run by an Australian pal of mine, I observed Billy reclining happily on a velvet sofa with a Perrier in his hand. After his self-imposed ‘manhood’ challenge, he certainly looked like a person who’d managed to get it up.
In order to promote his USA tour, Billy had appeared on various American chat shows. From his very first spot on David Letterman’s popular late-night TV show in New York, Billy became more widely recognized by members of the American public. A Greek parade was in full swing one day in New York and one of the bands had split from the main marchers and was huddled outside Billy’s hotel door. When the bandleader recognized Billy, he gave him a warm ‘Hello!’, which chuffed Billy to the knickers.
‘I feel more at home in New York than I do in Bray,’ he announced. ‘It’s my spiritual home from home.’ In truth, Billy hated Bray. It was hard for us to find a place that afforded us privacy while also offering him a chance to mix with local people. Bray seemed to be the domain of relocated wealthy people, so there weren’t many real locals in the area.
Early on in our relationship, I had little understanding of either his cultural background or what he needed socially in order to be creatively fed. However, I now realize the notion that a comedian who becomes famous loses touch with his audience is, at least in Billy’s case, quite inaccurate. Billy and others used to fear that, after his lifestyle changed so dramatically, his audiences would balk at jokes about shopping at Liberty’s. But Billy is not reliant on jokes, or even on subject matter. He always finds the points of contact with every audience. No matter what part of the world he’s in, he can always find gut-busting common ground about having children and hating tyranny, about current politics, sports and the wide variety in life and the human condition … from his anarchic, philosophical or bizarre perspectives.
When he first started to perform solo in the sixties his range of subject matter was limited and full of fairly culture-specific scenes, but very funny. I always love his early stories about Glasgow parties, lively pictures of tenement chaos and drunken mayhem. There are budgies, bagpipes, constables and cursing; and fish suppers catching fire.
The more Billy travelled, the more he had to talk about: ‘Aeroplane toilets are made to frighten you. There’s no window, no safety belt. You go in and “Oh, for Christ’s sake, a wee beige jobbie!” You flush and flush with all your might. Sometimes it goes under that shelf bit and hides. There’s no way you’re going to bare your bum to this wee beige jobbie that belongs to someone else. And you can’t leave. You can’t say to the next person. “Oh by the way that’s not mine.” They’d say, “Is that right? … Yours got your name on it or something?” Where do all the wee jobbies go? Three hundred and forty people on a jumbo jet for seven and a half hours. That’s an awful lot of jobbies.’
As Billy continued to experience different cultures and meet a wider range of people, he was able to increase his audience and expand the range of comedy topics that connected with most people. But he is not funny because of his subject matter; he just is funny, as well as provocative, no matter what he talks about. Sometimes it’s just too much for me. ‘Shut up and make me a cup of tea,’ I plead.
Billy’s initial US tour was a satisfying New World beginning. Back in the UK, he had been the host of Nelson Mandela’s Birthday Concert where he’d met the American comic Whoopi Goldberg. Even before they met, I had taken him to see Whoopi perform on Broadway during my Saturday Night Live days. In July 1991 she invited him to share the limelight in her HBO special on American cable television, performed live at the Brooklyn Academy in New York. ‘The audience that night just loved him.’ says Whoopi. ‘He was so refreshing and so much fun. He got to them in the way no one had ever done.’ She seems to understand Billy: ‘Incredibly sensitive is a word I would use to describe him. I think people forget that, in order to do great comedy, you have to have that tragic streak in you.’
Billy thoroughly approves of New Yorkers: ‘You appreciate violence the same as we do, and you swear properly,’ he told them that evening. The show immediately led to an offer for Billy of a solo one-hour comedy special on the same cable network. The producer came to see Billy perform in concert in San Francisco and nearly cancelled the whole thing. ‘There’s too much “farting” material,’ he objected.
‘Well,’ said Billy, for once avoiding the impulse to tell him where to ram his objections, ‘why don’t you come back tomorrow night? I change it all the time … so I’ll do a whole different show for you.’
‘Amazing!’ fired the man after the second show. ‘I love that bit about you not being white.’ Billy had told the audience that, when Scottish people take their clothes off, they’re blue and that it takes a whole week of sunbathing to become white. This was an idea that particularly seemed to captivate the race-and-colour-conscious American audiences, and the show was eventually given the title Pale Blue Scottish Person.
In that show, Billy talked about dipping in the North Sea when he was a child: ‘The fish are saying “There’s a fucking pale blue guy coming in.” I was standing there with skinny muscles, like knots on a midge’s penis. My aunt had hand-knitted my bathing trunks. None of your “Speedo Second Skin”. More of your second cardigan. It absorbed water and grew. I’ve heard that Sumo wrestlers can withdraw their testicles at will. I could do that when I was twelve. One foot in the North Sea, the whole fucking lot disappeared. Just an ugly gaping wound.’
A couple of days after Pale Blue Scottish Person went on air, Billy was in a car park on Laurel Canyon when he was recognized by two young African-American women in a convertible.
‘Oh look!’ they cried. ‘It’s the blue guy!’
‘We’ll have no colour prejudice around here, thank you very much!’ retorted Billy.
It is August 2000 and the heavy green dining-room curtains at Candacraig, our Scottish home, have been drawn to hide the bright evening sunshine of a northern summer night. A few close friends, some of them known to the world as very funny people, have just seated themselves with us around the dinner table. There is a somewhat lengthy pause before the meal begins to arrive. ‘Um, Billy …’ frowns Eric Idle, ‘will there be any food?’
The conversation gravitates to an uncomfortable discussion of the impetus for comedy, in reply to a question from one of the non-comedians at the table.
‘For me,’ interjects Billy at one point, ‘it’s about the desire to win. My audience becomes a crowd of wild animals and I have to be the lion-tamer or be eaten …’
‘Oh, is that so?’ Steve Martin challenges him. ‘You don’t think it’s about a little hurt from Daddy?’
On 11 February 1988, Florence telephoned to tell Billy that their father had had a second stroke. The following day, she informed Billy that, if he wanted to see William alive again, he’d better get to the hospital right away. He ran like an athlete to Heathrow and caught the shuttle.
12 February
Father looks awful. He has lost control of most of his organs. I stayed for as long as I could. I think he recognized me. I hope he did.
13 February
I had a long talk with Pamela and we came to the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained, especially for him, by my sitting around wishing that death would quietly surround him and take the pain and degradation away. It feels awful that such a thought would cross my mind, to wish for the death of your own father, but it is the way of things. I went to the hospital this morning to make my final goodbye to him, by far the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I made my farewell and kissed him and walked away. No one will ever know how I felt or how I feel. I thought he might wave to me from the window.
31 March
With Flo and I at his bedside Father passed peacefully away at three o’clock in the afternoon. Tore my heart out.
After Williams death, Billy gathered enough courage to tell Florence about his ‘dark secret’ and it absolutely crushed her. Siblings often illogically feel responsible, or experience a kind of survival guilt, as though they could have prevented the abuse. Florence was still working as a teacher, at St Mirin’s school in Glasgow. As a result of Billy’s confession, she left St Mirin’s and sought a position at a school for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children in Glasgow.
‘It helped me,’ she says now, ‘being able to soothe those screeching children, all in such anguish. I thought of Billy all the time. He had it for so long … he must have suffered so much.’ Florence blamed herself for years, but of course none of the responsibility was hers. Fortunately, as Florence witnessed the change and healing in Billy over the ensuing years, the pain began to leave her too.
Billy returned from Scotland, back to the family and one ‘little lump person’, as he called her. We were expecting Scarlett, who arrived on 28 July. We called her Scarlett because of her extroverted high-jinks, even in the womb; she is truly an exuberant person. We attribute her musical giftedness partly to the Ravi Shankar concert we attended at George Harrison’s house just before she was born. On hearing his exhilarating evening ragas, she leapt and twirled in her foetal prison until we were afraid she was going to be born right there and then among all the incense, beads and flowers at Friar Park. ‘Layla’ is the title of one of Eric Clapton’s best songs and we gave it to Scarlett as a great rock ‘n’ roll middle name.
In August 1988, Billy’s entire Scottish tour sold out in three hours. It was a sensational show, with an unexpected finale: he sang a Van Morrison song, ‘Irish Heartbeat’, to a surprise pipe band. While we were in Scotland during that tour, I acted on a nagging, intuitive voice and wrote to Mamie to ask if we could all meet her. She agreed to drive up from Dunoon and I met her alone for a short while first, before introducing her to the children. ‘Why?’ I asked, pointedly.
‘There’s a lot more to it. And it was wartime.’ she said softly, with a few tears in her eyes. Billy was wary of her. Over recent years, she had communicated with him via the tabloid press, which had hurt him tremendously.
We took a photo of Mamie and the whole family gathered together, but that was all there was to it, really. In the afternoon, we drove to Hughie’s house to meet Big Neilly, who was now ninety years old. His wife, Flora, had died ten years earlier and Big Neilly lived alone in the house, stubbornly resisting help from the family. He sat up dead straight in his comfy chair, a veritable cliché of Highland reserve, dressed in a tweed jacket and tie with a full head of beautifully groomed, white hair. ‘You’ll have had your tea?’ he inquired, staring disapprovingly at Billy’s messy coiffure.
As if Big Neilly had willed it, Billy’s hirsute days were numbered. In October 1989, Billy talked with a film director who wanted to cast him as the manager of a bare-knuckle fighter played by Liam Neeson in The Big Man, written by Willie Mcllvanney, the Scottish novelist and playwright.
‘What do you think?’ the man asked Billy.
‘Oh, I’d like to do it.’
‘The beard will have to come off.’
‘The beard’ had been a fixture since the days of ‘Ho Chi Minh’. A source of self-soothing, Billy had sat brushing it in the mirror before every concert. Like a man heading for the gallows, Billy slow-marched to the bathroom and stared at his raggedy reflection for the last time that whole decade. He had often wondered who lived behind all that fuzz. All the things I’ve lived through … I wonder what I look like now …’
He was too fearful to proceed until an encouraging notion occurred: ‘Maybe … maybe I’m actually handsome under there.’ Clinging to that hopeful scenario, he set to work with a Bic. In the meantime, I came home to three unsupervised hide-and-seekers.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ I asked Amy.
‘He’s in the bathroom.’ she informed me, ‘scraping off his fur.’
Within fifteen minutes, Billy was confronted by a big Irish potato with a dimple on its chin … he’d forgotten about that dimple. He was dreadfully disappointed. Covering his lower face, he crouched down and spoke to the smallies through his hands.
‘Girls, listen now, I’ve taken my beard off.’ he warned them. ‘I look different.’
‘But… are you still Dada?’ inquired Daisy.
A man came to take pictures for Monday’s newspapers but, in the interim, Billy had the unnerving experience of spending the weekend completely anonymously. ‘I know that voice!’ people would say on the street. He flew to Glasgow, where not a soul knew him either. It was weird, walking unrecognized through his hometown. A policeman gave him a very old-fashioned look, then looked away. Eventually a picture appeared on the front page of Glasgow newspapers: ‘Who’s this? Answer … page ten.’ People had no idea.
Billy’s new look gave him just the right ‘hard man’ appearance for The Big Man. In one street scene, filmed in the southern Scottish village of Coalburn, Billy was cycling down the street, trying to get used to the old upright bicycle he had been asked to ride. He was wearing a horrible tracksuit with incongruous brown lace-up shoes that looked ridiculous. Liam jogged in front of the bicycle while Billy coached him: ‘One, two, one, two …’
A local man was watching the rehearsal on the other side of the street. ‘Hey, Big Yin,’ he shouted in the characteristic southern dialect. ‘You cannae go a bike wi’ thae shin.’
Liam looked completely bewildered until Billy translated. ‘You can’t ride a bike wearing those shoes!’
In the middle of the shoot, Billy raced to the Albert Hall to perform with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Michael Kamen and others in a concert in aid of a charity I launched called ‘Parents For Safe Food’. It was the first time a live audience had seen him on stage without a beard.
‘What do you mean, “Who the fuck are you?’” he harangued the audience when he first went on, his shorthaired, clean-shaven look seeming incongruous with his multicoloured tie-dyed shirt and red shoes. ‘It’s ME! Isn’t it fucking awful? All these years I looked like I’d swallowed a bear and left the tail hanging out… THIS was underneath!’
‘Billy, don’t you get it?’ We are in a weird motel in Palm Springs in 1999. Billy has been invited to attend the Film Festival in that desert city, for the opening of his movie Boondock Saints.
‘Get what?’
‘This must be one of those “adult” hotels you hear about in Palm Springs … that’s why that seedy guy just tried to barge in. They have an open-door/clothing-optional policy, which means anyone’s welcome for a bit of wife-swapping or “swinging”!’
Silence. ‘Wife-swapping, eh? … I could have swapped you for something useful.’
‘Such as what?’
‘I dunno … a mobile home.’
We moved house again. By the end of the eighties, Billy was in the best shape ever, both personally and professionally. He had made serious inroads into North America and we had left the overexposed riverside at Bray for a Victorian house in Winkfield, Berkshire, which gave us more privacy. No more jazz boats interrupting our evening reverie: ‘If you look to the starboard side, you’ll see the home of none other than Billy Connolly – and, yes it’s the man himself in his garden … offering us a two-finger salute …’
We renamed the new place ‘Gruntfuttock Hall’ after a Kenneth Williams character from Round the Horne. Almost everything was in place.
‘Billy, I’ve been thinking …’
‘That was your first mistake.’
‘I’m serious. I’ve been thinking it’s high time … I mean, we ought to…’
‘I know. You want us to get married.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Well, I guess getting me a ring was a big fucking hint.’
When cornered by interviewers on the question of marriage. I had always said I thought we should wait until the children were old enough to enjoy the party. It was not easy to find a comfortable and private setting for our nuptials on 20 December 1989, but we chose a small Fijian island with just a few native cottages, or bures.
It was not a random choice. My maternal grandmother had been a Methodist missionary in Suva. When she lived with our family in Boronia Park, I loved to sit on her bedroom floor, waiting for the magical moment when she raised the lid of her enormous, carved sandalwood chest. Scents of the trade winds would fly out, along with polished conch shells, Fijian rattan fans, lace handkerchiefs and tortoise-shell combs. I had always longed to travel to my mother’s birthplace, imagining the colours of Suva to be of the same curious palette as Nana’s hand-tinted, Victorian Fijian postcards.
Our wedding invitations were silk sarongs mailed to just twenty people. We were married knee-deep in the turquoise sea by a Fijian minister as part of a traditional island three-day celebration that included spear-fishing by the bride and bridesmaids. Kava Kava ceremonies and a feast of baked sea snake. The children enjoyed some of it, sheltering from the tropical sun beneath leafy parasols made of giant banana fronds.
Palm trees and rainless months became more familiar to them a few months later when we set up temporary residence in California. In the past, Billy had made fun of the place: ‘Any town that’s got an all-night, drive-in taxidermist has got to be weird,’ he would say. Now he’s quite used to Los Angeles and enjoys his ‘Decaff No-whip mocha’ with the best of them.
I had been reluctant to uproot the children, but Billy was invited to be the replacement star of a popular comedy show on NBC network television, and this necessitated his agreeing to a four-year contract. He was to play the immigrant teacher of a group of gifted children in Head of the Class.
Initially, Billy was worried about doing something as mainstream as an American sitcom, but he believed it would introduce him to the American public at large and he was right. He was well received and maintained the role until the show came to the end of its natural life when the students grew too old to be believable as youngsters.
Billy’s level of comfort in the unlikely situation of this somewhat clean-cut venture was largely due to the efforts of the show’s producers, Michael Elias and Rich Eustis. They understood Billy’s need for improvisation, so they gave him a weekly studio stand-up spot. Given their mandate to satisfy the corporate sensibility, however, it was hardly surprising that little of that unscripted material stayed in the show. Michael and Rich developed another television series for Billy about a man who marries an American citizen in order to obtain a Green Card. The show, which was titled simply Billy, was an uninspiring vehicle for him and not a great success, but it did last for an entire season.
Billy’s venture into American TV allowed him to ‘achieve penetration’ as managers say, with the American public: he immediately became far better known to them and this in turn influenced people in the film industry to seek him out for movie roles. Los Angeles is really a small industry town in many ways and the word got around that Billy was unique, hilarious, and a ‘great guy to work with’.
Our move to California helped to crystallize my realization that I was bored with doing comedy myself, so I embarked on a PhD course in the field of Psychology with a plan to become a psychotherapist. My career switch was ostensibly supported by Billy, his deeper feelings about it emerging only on stage: ‘My wife … who’s a very clever person … considers me a work in progress,’ Billy confided furiously to subsequent audiences. ‘I was perfectly sane when all this started, but now I’m completely fucked up. I’ve got abandonment issues! If I say, “No I haven’t!” she says, “See, you’re in denial!” You just can’t win.’
When my studies included the treatment of sexual disorders as a speciality area, Billy seemed more interested. ‘I only wish she’d bring her work home!’ he complained on every chat show in the world.
I called Mamie one day from Los Angeles and found that she had become gravely ill with motor neurone disease. Just a few months later, Florence and Billy attended her funeral in Dunoon. They sat together on the left of the church, while other family members sat on the right. ‘I felt no sadness,’ remembers Florence, ‘only a calm sense of relief.’ The two siblings were startled to see a wreath from their half-siblings, Willie Adams and Mamie’s children, with a card on it that said ‘Ma’. Florence and Billy looked at each other for a moment when ‘You Are My Sunshine’ was played in church, then stared ahead for the rest of the service. Afterwards, they were introduced to their unknown ‘family’.
It had been different for Florence when their father had died. She had been devastated to lose him. In traditional Scottish culture, only men go to the graveyard, help lower the coffin and throw a little earth over it, while the women make sandwiches. Florence and I broke with tradition and went to the graveyard, but she didn’t feel entitled to act on her desire to throw earth with the men, so I pushed her forward and she did perform that final ritual. When she watched her mother’s body being lowered into the same grave as Willie Adams, Florence felt sad for her father, for she believed he had really loved her. ‘She should have been with Father,’ she thought.
Billy was on an extensive Canadian tour when the film director Adrian Lyne’s telephone call reached him in Nova Scotia. ‘I want you to play yourself as a charity auctioneer in my movie Indecent Proposal.’
‘That’s nice,’ replied Billy, ‘but I can’t make it. I’m in the middle of a tour.’
‘I need you here tomorrow,’ insisted Adrian who immediately sent a Lear Jet to transport Billy three thousand miles to the set by 6 a.m. in time for the next day’s shoot. Billy hadn’t known that Lear Jets lack lavatories, so the pilot had to stop in Indianapolis for him to pee.
‘Do you know Bob?’ asked Adrian.
Billy shook hands with the star of the movie, Robert Redford.
‘I was really glad when I heard it was you,’ said the handsome man warmly.
When Billy performed his bit part as the auctioneer, he improvised to keep the audience interested through the many takes. One of the retakes occurred because Redford had failed to leave the scene as early as he should have. ‘But it was so funny!’ he protested. ‘I didn’t want to stop listening to Billy!’
Cara went to see the finished movie in a Glasgow cinema, unaware that her father was about to bounce across the screen. The moment he appeared, the entire cinema went: ‘Whoooo!!!!’
We had become bi-continentals, living between Gruntfuttock Hall and the Los Angeles house we bought in the Hollywood Hills. The latter is a queer black-painted space that Billy describes as Anthony Perkins’ Psycho farmhouse. We bought it from a couple of eccentric artists who had even painted the front-yard trees. The neighbourhood turned out to be an enclave of artists, musicians and film-industry people who, like us, had shunned the shiny, palm-decked palaces of Beverly Hills.
One of our new neighbours turned out to be the painter David Hockney, whom Billy adores. ‘I’ve just painted the Grand Canyon.’ David sometimes phones us with an invitation to visit him in his studio to view his latest masterpiece. ‘The sky’s still wet, but I’d like you to see it before it goes to the Pompidou.’
Billy was thrilled to discover that his big hero Frank Zappa lived nearby. He always wanted to knock on the musician’s door but he never did. Apparently, Frank had been planning to go into politics. ‘Can you imagine that?’ Billy would say. ‘Frank Zappa … the President of the United States. In my dreams.’
After Frank died, Billy was walking the dogs past Frank’s house when Mrs Zappa came out. ‘Are you Billy Connolly?’ she asked. ‘Frank was your biggest fan.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ thought Billy, ‘I could have been Vice President.’
On 4 October 1992, Melvyn Bragg interviewed Billy on the South Bank Show, in a special to commemorate Billy’s twenty-fifth anniversary year as a performer. Melvyn is unique in always providing a serious platform to Billy’s idiosyncratic raison d’être.
Billy certainly deserved to be celebrated, for with twenty-five incredible years of performing behind him, he was more successful than ever. The previous twelve months, for example, had been extraordinary. On top of his American successes, the video of Billy’s three-week London Apollo concerts had sold more than half a million copies in the UK. He’d played the Dome Theatre in Brighton, the Apollo in Oxford and the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
‘Glasgow’s a weird town to play in for me.’ Billy announced to his Glasgow audience. ‘I get nervous here. It’s like singing to your aunties.’ When I saw him in Glasgow, he had an energy and comic fury that made me think he just might manage to be a prophet in his own land. Billy had been studying Scottish history in great depth. In Glasgow he presented his own unique version of his country’s past lives. It was not the same stuff he’d been taught at St Gerard’s: ‘Bonny Prince Charlie was not the imposing guy you see on the shortbread tins,’ he informed his Scottish audience. ‘As a matter of fact, he was a gay Italian dwarf.’
Billy’s twenty-fifth celebration was overshadowed by news of his Australian friend, Brett Whitely’s, death. Brett had been in recovery from his heroin habit but had succumbed to a heart attack. Billy was inconsolable; Brett had been such a kindred spirit of his. Billy had loved Brett’s lust for life and his inventive playfulness. This had been illustrated to the whole family when Brett once visited our holiday house in Palm Beach.
‘Daisy!’ he said, ‘did you ever see a man disappear?’
‘No,’ she replied, whereupon he jumped right over the verandah and landed ten feet below, in the swimming pool.
Brett ate Japanese sushi every single day. He gave Billy a Japanese-style ceramic plate he had made with a little bluebird on it.
‘I always thought of him as a bird,’ Billy said to Wendy, Brett’s widow.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and the little bugger flew away.’
‘I love warm wind in the evening,’ I remark, ‘isn’t it lovely?’ We are drinking bottled water on our Hollywood deck, tracking the paths of patrolling news helicopters and circling barn owls.
‘Warm wind in the evening …’ Billy repeats the phrase, searching for an angle. ‘It’s my latest medical condition.’
Billy’s fiftieth birthday party, on 24 November 1992, was celebrated at his friend Phil Coulter’s house in Donegal. Billy was on tour in Ireland at the time. My academic studies, as well as the children’s schooling, prevented our travelling at that time, so Phil gathered a gang of cronies who, as he put it, ‘would have all sung in the same smoky folk clubs and slept in the same sleeping bags above it’.
Ralph McTell, Irish folk singer Christy Moore, songwriter Seamus Healy and others dominated the storytelling while Billy, for once in his life, sat back and savoured each one … until Phil threw them all out at 4 a.m.
It never bothered Billy to turn fifty, or so he says, but he did seem to be searching for new ways to appear adolescent. When he’d turned forty, he’d complained about his greying pubic hair. ‘But it’s not all bad,’ he informed his audiences at the time. ‘In a certain light my willie looks like Stewart Granger.’
Piercing both his ears had been a significant ‘fuck you’ statement earlier on, but ever since Billy saw a London male traffic warden displaying the exact same symbol of rebellion, the look had lost its appeal.
There is a piercing parlour on Ventura Boulevard run by one Cliff Cadaver. ‘So why do you want to have your nipples pierced?’ the man inquired on Father’s Day, 1994.
‘Oh, I’ve always regarded myself as an alternative,’ replied Billy, ‘but I feel I’m drifting towards the beige.’
The process of keeping his rebel flag flying turned out to be excruciatingly painful, although it was followed by an endorphin rush ‘high’ that lasted for weeks.
‘You want me to do the other one too?’ asked Cliff.
‘I think that will do for now,’ replied Billy. ‘It was fucking agony.’
Cliff swabbed him with antiseptic, then stood back to admire his handiwork.
‘Yep.’ He looked pleased. ‘That’s one more of us… and one less of them.’
Billy was delighted to be an ‘us’. Exactly one year later, Cliff was invited to plunge his steel needle into Billy’s remaining virgin nipple.
‘What possessed you?’ I asked when he came home wincing.
‘I looked lopsided,’ he explained.
As a psychologist, how could I not have been impressed by such grand-scale symbolic gestures of paternal rebellion as these twin-piercings, occurring each Father’s Day for two years running? If you’re wondering whether I’d ever voice such a thought to Billy, the answer is ‘not on your life’. His immediate response would be: ‘Quit the psycho-babble.’
Paternal rebellion was an underlying theme of Down Among the Big Boys, Billy’s next television play, which had been churning around Peter McDougall’s mind for years. When it finally materialized, Billy played a Glaswegian gangster called Jo Jo Donnelly, whose daughter planned to marry the son of a police superintendent.
The biggest change in Billy’s acting occurred during the making of this film. We were sitting together in the kitchen one day, when Billy awkwardly asked me for acting advice. ‘Pamsy, what’s “method acting” all about?’ He knew I had received formal training and wanted to know everything in a nutshell. I knew I was no Meryl Streep, but I gave him a ten-minute précis of method acting, which included simple tips like how to be quiet in the trailer and think about what had happened previously to his character. ‘Right,’ said Billy. ‘I’ll try that.’
In keeping with his extraordinarily laissez-faire style, Billy seemed to think there was nothing more to it… but he did read some books on acting by the American ‘method’ master, Sanford Meisner. As soon as he thought he’d got the hang of the method, he was annoyed because acting wasn’t as easy for him as before. It was the difference, he decided, between singing ‘The Wild Rover’ and strumming banjo bluegrass style in accompaniment to singing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’: much more complicated, yet more joyous because it produced better results.
In Down Among the Big Boys, Jo Jo’s catch-phrase throughout is: ‘tickety-boo’. This became the name of Billy’s new management company, after Steve Brown and Billy left John Reid Enterprises to set up on their own. They started a company that continues to be a most successful partnership, spawning a charitable enterprise as well. In October 1999, Billy and Steve launched ‘Tickety-Boo Tea’ with a party aboard a square-rigger called the Grand Turk. Profits of the tea go to charitable causes, particularly neglected and abandoned children worldwide. It’s a far cry from bringing a penny ‘for the black babies’ every Monday at St Peter’s. Billy proudly proffers photos of the Indian hostel for abandoned children that is funded by the proceeds.
Billy loves to take photographs himself. Not surprisingly, they are rarely ordinary records of people or places. Instead he focuses on the weird, the angular and the ridiculous aspects of life. In particular he loves to photograph amusing signs. When we first visited the United States together, he recorded ‘Don’t even THINK about parking here!’ on Venice Boulevard. Outside a beach restaurant called Jesse’s, he nearly dissolved when he read the sign, ‘Parking For Jesse’s Only.’ In Glaswegian slang, of course, ‘big Jessie’ is used to describe an effeminate man, or one who is believed to have been coddled by his mother. ‘That big fucking Jessie!’ Billy will cry. ‘He’s never had a sore heid in his life!’
The antithesis of a Jessie, Billy’s grandfather Big Neilly, died in October 1998 at the age of ninety-six. Neilly had stubbornly refused adequate care in his old age, continuing to live alone until he was ninety. He had been taken into hospital in 1994 where they discovered he was so malnourished he actually had scurvy, one of the few reported cases since the seventies. Big Neilly had apparently never had any idea what Billy did for a living. Flora had sometimes remarked, ‘Oh he’s awful funny, isn’t he?’ but Neilly, who had little social contact because he didn’t go to the pub, never mentioned his celebrated grandson. After Flora’s death, Neilly relied on Hughie’s wife Margaret to care for him.
‘Before Flora died,’ she says, ‘when Grandpa was eighty-two, he was still dressing up and going into town once a week to visit private shop owners he’d known all his life. Flora was worried about this. She asked me one day, “Do you think he has a girlfriend on the side?” “No,” I replied, “he’s far too stingy.’”
Margaret bought Billy’s album The Pick of Billy Connolly for their son Neil for Christmas. It floored him. He had never met his famous cousin, a fact that had earned him ridicule and at least one beating at school. When Billy and the rock star Midge Ure visited a rival school during the Live Aid campaign, young Neil McLean was lucky to survive. ‘If he’s your fucking cousin, how come he never came to visit our school?’
Young Neil had known Mamie when he was growing up. She was fun to visit, for she often imparted adult family gossip he was not supposed to hear. ‘Does your father know you smoke?’ she would inquire slyly, offering him a cigarette. ‘Then don’t tell him.’
Billy’s childhood visits to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery bore fruit when he was inspired to present The Bigger Picture, a six-part television series on Scottish art. The plan was to find Scottish art wherever it resided in the world, show it and tell its story. Since a great deal of Scottish art ended up in Rome during the Enlightenment, especially in the eighteenth century. Billy and his crew travelled to Italy, where they were given access to the entire art collection in the Vatican museum. He discovered that Bonny Prince Charlie was buried in the crypt in St Peter’s and learned why Scottish art had flowered in Italy during the Prince’s later years. ‘Having your own king in town was a social plus,’ Billy explained.
He loved the endless Vatican rooms jam-packed with ‘heathen’ art, and he especially admired one huge sarcophagus sculpted from marble the colour of plain chocolate with satyrs bursting out of its sides. Billy had imagined that his Catholic roots and education might have prepared him to feel comfortable in the Vatican, but its opulence was so over-the-top, it felt just as foreign as might a mosque. Billy felt sad about that. He preferred tiny French churches, plain and dark, with a meditative atmosphere. ‘It’s a shame about St Peter’s,’ he mourned his shattered illusion. ‘It’s the Harrods of religion.’
In keeping with Billy’s love of rambling, he likes to take walks when he is on location or tour and staying in a hotel. In each location, he embarks on a route that will establish a pattern for all future walks in that place, for he seeks consistency. It will take him from, say, the coffee shop to the postcard shop, to the post office and back to the sanctuary of his room. In Vancouver in 2001, during the filming of a cameo role in Prince Charming, Billy had a week off, during which he took his regular walk. He first stopped at Starbucks and then at a newsagent, where he liked to purchase a particular journal with a very good crossword puzzle.
A homeless man always sat with his wine bottle outside Starbucks, so Billy gave him a little cash every day for three days in a row. On the fourth day, the man spoke to him with more than a little irritation in his voice. ‘You don’t need to give me money every time, you know.’
‘I know that!’ Billy snapped back.
They ignored each other on the fifth day but, on the sixth, the man again challenged him disdainfully. ‘Don’t you got any friends, man?’
‘Yeah.’ frowned Billy. ‘I just like being alone.’
In 1995, Billy spent a week on Ellesmere Island off the coast of Greenland for the BBC documentary A Scot in the Arctic. The plan was to create a television programme where viewers would be able to see, through Billy’s own video diary and the interviews and observations of a daytime crew, how he survived on the freezing glacier.
The town of Gris Fjord is the furthest northern human habitation on earth, consisting of merely a village and a cooperatively run hotel with all the comforts of a grade-B youth hostel. When Billy arrived, it was almost spring. He spent a couple of nights in the hotel while local Inuit women made him some special clothing: a sealskin suit and elk socks. The latter were boots with the furry part on the inside, which were supposed to be worn with bare feet. Billy was apprehensive about doing so at first, thinking his feet would not be warm enough, but a short trial proved immediately that the Inuit footwear style was far warmer than five pairs of socks with regular boots.
A dog-sled team transported Billy and the crew for miles and miles through the frozen landscape until eventually they found a campsite close to some icebergs, where Billy set up a tiny one-tent camp. He was supposed to build an igloo but halfway through the task, he sat down on the top and demolished it.
An SAS soldier watched over him from miles afar, in case he was stalked by something huge and hairy. In fact, the threat of polar bears attacking him from the sea was a considerable one. Fortunately, the soldier, an outdoor terrain expert, helped Billy to brush up his rifle-shooting until he was competent again: he had become rusty since his days in the Territorial Army.
It was a glorious feeling, being left alone on the iceberg. He was completely isolated for twenty hours every day, until the film crew arrived in the morning to do some filming and check the self-operated camera that Billy used to create a video diary. Then the crew would disappear again at midday, leaving Billy to his own devices.
At first, Billy would be longing for them to return but, after a couple of days, his enforced solitude began to have a profound effect on him: he began to dislike the crew and resented their daily intrusion. He could hear them for miles, ploughing towards him on their snowmobiles, spoiling the lovely silence. After they left, the snow around Billy would be all messed up, its virgin whiteness all slushy like a city pavement, and littered with their cigarette butts. Billy became the protective housewife of his pure, white home, obsessively cleaning it and hoping they wouldn’t turn up the next day to ruin it again. He learned there is no connection between being alone and lonely.
Arctic spring has no darkness at all, so Billy had to remember to sleep. At first he would wake up with a start in the sunlit night thinking a bear had come, because the iceberg was very noisy. Icebergs are freshwater giants floating on seawater and, as they are raised and lowered by the tide, they growl. ‘It’s like sharing a room with an old guy,’ thought Billy. He would wake in a panic and grab his rifle but there was never anything threatening outside his tent. He gradually came to recognize the iceberg’s language.
Although the temperature was thirty degrees below freezing, the locals complained to Billy about the heat. He loved the local Inuit people and was fascinated by their culture. He learned that Inuit names are not gender-specific. When a child is born, a name is not given until they recognize who from the past has been reincarnated. Once the traits of a particular ancestor are perceived, the child is named after that person, whoever it is. So a boy, for example, might be given his grandmother’s name; as a term of endearment his own mother might call him ‘mum’ and he in return would call her ‘daughter’.
The Inuit visited Billy every now and again to give him ice from the iceberg for his tea. They have a spiritual connection to the iceberg, so they first talked to it, to explain what Billy was up to, dwelling in its vicinity. They believe the spirits of their ancestors come to see them every year in the icebergs then disappear until the next spring. By the end of his time, Billy could see little groups of people inside the iceberg, groups of four and five huddled together, all with their hoods up talking. Billy would tease his daytime visitors. ‘Gosh, your ancestors were a bit noisy last night.’
He watched the Aurora Borealis completely on his own, as if he were the only man in the world. It was such a privilege. Sometimes it was so quiet in that place, he could hear his own heart beating. ‘I can even hear liquid stuff sloshing around inside me,’ he marvelled.
‘Where has Daddy gone?’ asked Daisy, studying her picture book about parrots.
‘To Mozambique,’ I replied. ‘To help some hungry people there and make a film.’
She looked at me curiously. ‘He’s helping some people in Nose and Beak?’
Billy’s trip to Mozambique later that year was a mind-and-body-shocking contrast to his Arctic experience. I was opposed to Comic Relief’s idea of sending him to the famine-stricken war zone. ‘They’re shooting down passenger planes over there,’ I protested to the organizers. ‘And if he survives that, I’m afraid he’ll drink putrid water by mistake and end up with cholera or something.’
I lost the battle and Billy set off for Africa carrying a pint of his own rare blood (A Rh (D) Negative), a pack of sterile needles, water purifiers, malaria tablets and diarrhoea pills. He expected to experience a people hungry through famine, but there was plenty of food in the fields for anyone brave enough to try to harvest it. It was because members of the Renamo group were waiting to dismember field workers that the people were starving. Everything he learned and witnessed there was profoundly shocking to Billy. There was barely enough water. Village chiefs would invite him and the crew to their home for a bowl of mealie, the white porridge staple of Mozambique, while villagers stood watching them through the window. Billy thought it tasted awful so he mixed it with salad dressing to create ‘mealie vinaigrette’.
He tried to create some comedy in that harsh place. He improvised silly walks to make the children laugh and invented a new way to groom his hair, sticking his head down low enough for hundreds of tiny brown fingers to run through his hair to the accompaniment of infectious giggling.
Comic Relief helped to reunite families who had been separated by the war and the most moving part of the TV programme is a moment when a father finds his lost son. Billy is seen to be deeply affected by the reunion, but unsure how to behave. He tentatively paws the man on the shoulder, but his own lack of family bonding prepared him badly for such a moment.
Billy went back a year later to report on developments in the area, and this time it was mercifully a more hopeful picture. Artificial limbs were being provided for those who needed them and the people could go into the fields with impunity. Schools had been built and the little boy who had no legs but managed to crawl a mile to his classroom touched Billy’s heart. That second television special was given the title suggested by Daisy’s confusion, Return to Nose and Beak.
Daisy had no conceptual difficulty when Billy’s voice was featured in the Disney animated children’s film Pocahontas. When he was asked to meet the director, Billy was mystified that animated film should even have a director. ‘How do you direct Pinocchio or Donald Duck?’ he wondered. ‘They’re not even there.’
Billy did a test playing Ben the sailor, first with a gruff cockney voice and then with a smooth one. ‘Try it in your own accent,’ suggested the director. It worked.
Early in the project, the animators gave Billy a tiny taste of the finished product: the opening scene of the film. Billy was still only a pencil drawing, leaning over the gunwale of a sailing ship, welcoming John Smith aboard. Billy nearly fell on the floor. ‘There is nothing to equal the weirdness of seeing a drawing speaking in your own voice,’ he says.
In the same vein, Billy also appeared as Billy Bones, the pirate in the new Muppet movie version of Treasure Island, and maintains the record of being the only man ever to die in a Muppet movie. Billy never had more fun on a film set, although he found one of the actresses rather difficult: Miss Piggy stayed in her dressing room and refused to grant him an audience on the grounds that ‘he wasn’t big enough’. He couldn’t decide if she was just a bitch or a very private person; the wardrobe people told him they’d never even seen her naked, for she dressed behind a screen.
Difficult divas aside, Billy absolutely loved working with all the other characters, seeing the puppeteers working from underneath the floor. In between takes, he would look around the room. A massive reindeer head on the wall once winked at him unexpectedly, while a dog that lay sleeping on the landing and a group of chickens all nodded at him when he glanced their way. Billy’s scenes were mainly with Gonzo and the little rat called Rizzo. He’d always loved Gonzo, ever since he’d seen him doing his own version of the song ‘Macho Man’ in a satin shirt and oversized medallion. It was always fun when things went wrong in the middle of a scene. One of the characters would suddenly say: ‘The pupil just fell out of your eye!’
As a result of Pocahontas and Muppets’ Treasure Island, Billy has become a firm favourite of six-year-olds all over the world. ‘It’s Billy Bones!’ they cry in shopping malls and ice-cream parlours.
‘Never wave,’ their mothers fuss, ‘at weird men with tattoos.’
Billy’s 1994 Scottish tour provided the footage for his celebrated six-part World Tour of Scotland, which was broadcast in the summer then released on video. He hadn’t intended to create such an interesting travel film – it just turned out that way. Billy had decided to play little Scottish towns for a change. In recent years, he had only played the major cities, but he missed the unique atmosphere in places like Dumfries, Orkney and Wick.
He began to present such a quintessentially personal flavour of Scotland that it became a whole series, a potpourri of his favourite haunts, landscapes, people and monuments of the north. Some of the inconveniences and realities of life there became the basis of the most engaging episodes. When the ferry to Arran was cancelled, Billy and his crew had to try another crossing at Gourock and they filmed the whole thing, including a piece to camera, sailing on the Clyde, in which Billy spoke of his affection for the river and its meaning in his life.
Old friends from Billy’s early folk-scene days played music with him. George McGovern turned up … and so did the usual evangelist demonstrators outside the hall in Ayr. In the Shetland Isles, the Garrison Theatre had been modernized. Billy thought this was a shame because, years ago, he would go to the hall keeper’s house to get the key to the hall. ‘We’d like to hire some ushers,’ he used to say. ‘Could you give us some names? How much should we pay them?’
‘Och, they’ll get in free and they’ll be delighted,’ was always the answer. Billy’s sound technician, Malcolm, was always tickled by that kind of quaint behaviour. He had spent twelve years on the road with the rock band Status Quo and loved the contrast with the kickbacks and ticket-touting in the great stadia of the world.
In Dundee, the snow and poor visibility made panoramic filming impossible, so Billy took the opportunity to recite an entire epic poem: McGonagall’s The Tay Bridge Disaster, in the middle of a furious blizzard. In Shetland, he had to cram in two shows per night to cope with the numbers, which amounted to five hours on stage every night.
Orkney is a magical Viking place with its own peculiar atmosphere that intrigues Billy. That’s where he invented the bare-bum dance. He did it because he didn’t know what to do with the standing stones. ‘At the end of the day, they’re just standing stones,’ he complained. ‘You can eulogize all you like about astronomy and pre-Christian religions, but no one knows what the fuck they are.’
Billy strongly recommends that the notice boards in historical sites such as that do a rethink. Instead of guessing the purpose of the stones, he would prefer something rather more frank: ‘We have no idea what this is. Try and leave it the way you found it.’ His own solution to addressing the mystery of the ancient stones was to resist stating the obvious and simply dance around them naked, like an old Celt.
The World Tour of Scotland was a huge success. It was all the more appealing because Billy had not shown all the usual tourist sites, but had introduced his audience to the Scottish places he had liked over his many years of touring, from the treacherous seaside stairs near Wick to the haunted underground city of Edinburgh, and from the bleak tundra of snowy Sutherland to a graveyard in the middle of Glasgow.
When the show was broadcast, Billy wanted to go into hiding. ‘Fuck, they’re going to think I’m trying to be some kind of amateur Alan Whicker,’ he moaned, but he was wrong. His deep and genuine love of the Scottish landscape, as well as the people, was perfectly apparent.