I STOOD ON the sidewalk in Greenwich Village, captivated by the clouds of steam belching out of a manhole cover in the middle of a street and excitedly repeating the line that has undoubtedly been spoken by trillions of first-time visitors to New York before me.
‘It’s exactly like the movies.’
‘I know, Savage, I know,’ Murphy sighed, having heard me make the same remark quite a few times since we got here.
I couldn’t sleep in New York. It had nothing to do with Murphy refusing to sleep with the air conditioning on in the studio apartment we’d borrowed off Luke Cresswell of Stomp and thereby turning it into an oven, it was all down to excitement. I felt like I’d been plugged into the mains all the time I was in NYC, fizzing all over and bursting with energy. Just as well, as in the week Murphy and I were there we covered miles on foot exploring the city.
Ian McKellen had invited us to come over for the opening of his one-man show, A Knight Out on Broadway. I’d worked relentlessly up till now, so a bit of a break and the chance to not have to think about Lily Savage before I set off on tour again wouldn’t come amiss.
New York is not the place to go to relax, particularly in the heat of June when the city was celebrating the 4th Gay Olympic Games. I never really did stop thinking about Lily Savage as I was always on the lookout for new sources of comedy material. Nevertheless, I found time to occupy my mind in plenty of other ways. A whole gang of us had congregated for the week: Mark (Bob Downe), Mig Kimpton who was working with Ian, and Michael Cashman and his partner Paul Cottingham.
My first Broadway show was Guys and Dolls and to walk out on to Times Square in all its illuminated glory after seeing a musical set in the very same place was like stepping out into an extension of the show. The same happened with Damn Yankees, another musical, only this time it was about baseball. I went to a matinee of that with Michael and Paul and that night we sat in the Yankee Stadium not watching baseball but the opening ceremony of the gay games, roaring our heads off as the British team paraded by.
Ian and Mig took me to see Beauty and the Beast, but apart from the impressive special effects the show left me cold. It was like sitting through a very beautiful panto but one that lacked soul and I was desperate for one of the cast to break through the fourth wall and talk to the audience.
Times Square before it was cleaned up and sanitized was still a risky area after dark and it was not advisable to walk around on your own. To be honest, I preferred it the way it used to be. It’s lost its edge now, although there are still a few old Times Square bars to be found where things are basically unchanged.
At a very trendy party just off Times Square that I remember being held in a white space – either a fashion house, an art gallery, somebody’s apartment or perhaps all three – I had an encounter with Madonna.
If this party had been held in London then those nonentities who misguidedly considered themselves the height of importance, the type who would show their bare arse in Selfridge’s window for an invitation, would undoubtedly spend the evening either gliding about like storks on ether or stood on the sidelines affecting a ‘too cool for school’ manner. Here in New York there was a different buzz, as they say, and the atmosphere despite the glaring white decor was warm, laid-back and friendly.
The guests were an eclectic mix of supermodels and drag queens, politicos and activists, artists and athletes, actors whose faces I recognized but couldn’t put a name to and the most beautiful waiters I’d ever seen. To quote Shirley MacLaine in Sweet Charity, I was the only person in the room I didn’t recognize.
The porn star Jeff Stryker stood at one end of the room smiling slyly, obviously well aware that every male, as well as quite a few women, who passed by sneaked a surreptitious glance at his crotch. Mr Stryker’s gimmick was his enormous willy. At the other end of the room Elaine Stritch held court surrounded by a gaggle of enraptured middle-aged queens hanging on to her every word as she related one of her tried and true theatrical anecdotes.
Suddenly the mood in the room changed, the atmosphere grew tense and the crowd parted as one to make way for a new arrival. She swept into the room like the evil fairy at the christening, only instead of a spinning wheel this latecomer came armed with an entire film crew and a retinue of flunkeys who proceeded to take over.
‘Oh God, Madonna’s here,’ I heard someone say. ‘There goes the neighbourhood.’
‘I’d have thought that Madonna turning up at a party would’ve been cause for celebration,’ I said to the singer Gabrielle, a big fan of the great lady. ‘But this lot don’t seem very pleased.’
As we stood watching this performance I was beginning to see why. The lighting from the cameras was very intrusive as she charged around the room in her bare feet, filming herself with the beautiful people for a documentary she was making and rapidly turning a great party into a circus.
Murphy was equally unimpressed by Madge’s arrival, which wasn’t surprising as celebrity failed to make an impact on him. He was far more interested in the clean-cut young athlete he was talking to, pulling out all the seduction stops as he focused him in the full beam of his ‘Marlon Brando stare’. This effect was achieved by removing his glasses and squinting myopically but it was guaranteed nevertheless to floor the impressionable and unsuspecting.
‘Seen who’s in, Savage?’ he shouted over to me in the same tone of voice he’d use if Vera had just walked into the Vauxhall Tavern. Then he turned his attentions back to the javelin thrower or whatever he was.
I went and sat next to the author Armistead Maupin on a very long, very white leather sofa. Then the lady plonked herself down the far end.
‘Look who’s here,’ I said to Armistead in the voice my mum used when she spoke about cancer. ‘It’s Madonna!’ Yes, I’ll admit it, I was excited – well, it’s not every day a global superstar sits next to you. Following Armistead’s lead, I looked over and gave her a feeble wave. Armistead’s was more heartfelt, but Madonna was playing at being world-weary and completely ignored us.
She wouldn’t know me from a sack of spuds but she could’ve at least acknowledged Armistead, who apart from being a good-natured fellah was also an internationally famous writer. Armistead took no offence at her rebuttal, that’s if he even noticed it, but privately I thought she was downright rude.
Dressed as she was in a grubby vest and combat trousers, she wouldn’t have looked out of place at a bus stop eating chips, but when you’re a star of that magnitude I expect you believe you can wear anything and still look cool. Lowering her aviator dark glasses over her eyes, she curled up on the sofa tucking her feet underneath her. The soles of her feet were filthy, dirtier than a potato-picker’s who’d forgotten to bring their wellies to work.
She threw her head back dramatically and let out a long sigh.
‘You know what I want?’ she said imperiously, presumably either to me and Armistead, or possibly to herself since there was nobody else on the couch.
‘A fucking good wash?’ I offered.
It came out before I had time to stop it and I sat frozen with bated breath to see her reaction, but none came. She clearly hadn’t heard me or if she had then she was ignoring me.
‘I need some air,’ she announced suddenly to nobody in particular and with that earth-shattering statement she took off, presumably in search of a canister of oxygen or, failing that, a window.
‘I could live in New York,’ I said to Murphy as we sat in the back of a taxi on our way to JFK airport.
‘You say that about everywhere,’ he replied. ‘I remember you saying the same thing about Hull.’
‘Well, it was a nice row of terraced houses.’
‘They were slums, Savage,’ he said, dismissing my nonsense. ‘What you need to be thinking about is getting out of that bloody rats’ nest and buying yourself a nice place to live in.’
‘Vicky Mansions isn’t a rats’ nest,’ I protested, defending my place of abode.
‘It is, Savage, it’s a bloody tip. The place is falling to bits and you’ve got no room to put anything. You should get out. You’re going to be earning some decent money so it’s high time you started thinking about moving.’
I had a love-hate relationship with my flat. Murphy was right, it was cramped and falling to bits but the rent was cheap, it was central and I’d lived there for over a decade. The thought of packing up costumes, wigs and the junk I’d accumulated over the years gave me the horrors, as did spending every penny I’d managed to save on a flat.
What if the work dried up? I’d saved a fair bit now and whenever I panicked and started worrying about the future, which I was prone to do, I’d drag the Halifax savings book out from under the mattress and reassure myself that for the time being I wouldn’t starve.
Costumes and wigs were a big expenditure and the more I was doing the more new outfits I needed. The thigh-length boots were made on the Holloway Road, the wigs came from Hairaisers and Martin Taylor was kept extremely busy on the sewing machine, inventing outrageous creations with the fabrics that I’d bought from sources I’d been using since I’d first started this game.
Moving was inevitable but the idea of flat-hunting was daunting for one as indecisive as me, and the issue was avoided for the moment. However, as often happens, a series of events was about to force my hand.
I had two weeks off in the whole of 1994 and the amount of work I got through is staggering. Two national tours, a fairly short one around the smaller theatres first with Bob Downe, followed by a much longer one with Caroline Aherne and Gayle Tuesday that took me into the next year. It coincided with the launch of a video I’d made one Sunday at the Fortune Theatre called Paying the Rent.
The company who made the video normally made adult movies and I was most put out when I sat down to watch it and found that the trailers advertising forthcoming attractions were of hard gay porn. I complained about this, reasoning that if they wanted the video to sell to a wider audience then why was it being marketed as a gay video? It wasn’t a happy relationship and I hated having to sit in the local HMV in whatever town I’d rocked up in on the never-ending tour dressed in full drag in an attempt to flog the bloody thing.
In one shop they put me in the window one afternoon and I sat there mortified as a gang of football supporters banged on the glass shouting, ‘Show us yer tits,’ and other such original inanities. I could empathize with those Amsterdam hookers who plied their trade in dimly lit windows.
Lifeswaps was a series for BBC North with a very simple premise in which people from different backgrounds traded places with each other. A copper from Washington swapped with a village bobby, an Essex girl with a debutante, a barman from Heaven nightclub with the barman of a pub in the remote Yorkshire village of Middlesmoor, and so the list went on. The possibilities were endless and Lily presided over the proceedings as a sort of fairy godmother figure.
It was an interesting experiment seeing how people coped in an alien environment way outside their comfort zones and the outcome was often surprising. The cop from Washington loved village life, and his swap adapted remarkably well to finding himself on one of the most dangerous beats in the USA. The Essex girl, defying all stereotypes, held her own and won everyone over with her quiet charm and grace, while the debutante had the Essex lads eating out of her hand as she proved that she was most definitely no snob.
The barman from Heaven didn’t fare quite so well. His idea of hell on earth was the quiet hamlet of Middlesmoor. Forced to go without make-up and put on a shirt and tie instead of his usual lairy garb, he pulled pints of bitter behind the bar of the Crown with a broken heart. His counterpart, on the other hand, once he’d got over the initial shock of finding himself serving drinks in one of Europe’s biggest gay discos, overcame his shyness and took to life in the Big Smoke like a duck to water. I think he was sorry when his girlfriend arrived to take him back home.
We filmed the series every weekend and each Friday I’d take the train up to Manchester as I’d been doing for years, although this time I was filming instead of working Rockies club. Rockies was definitely the easier option as I now found myself in drag for the best part of the day and in all sorts of absurd locations. I was supposed to be travelling around the country overseeing my swaps in a battered old caravan and I changed in this jalopy. When that wasn’t available, I changed in the back room of pubs, people’s homes, public toilets and once behind a hedge in a field. On one occasion I found myself in the middle of the Welsh mountains dressed as Snow White.
On Saturday mornings I became a familiar sight clacking through the deserted Palace Hotel at the crack of dawn in a wide variety of whorey outfits. The hotel, a former insurance office, hadn’t been open very long and even though it was an impressive building it still wasn’t very busy. Neil Crombie, the producer, called it ‘The Shining’ and what regular guests there were got used to having their breakfast with Lily Savage, hardly batting an eyelid.
I enjoyed making Lifeswaps. Neil was great fun to work with and apart from suffering the indignities of parading through the streets in full drag I had a great time of it.
One of my ambitions was finally fulfilled that year and that was to present Top of the Pops. E17 were number one and it was still shot in the same old way that it had been for years. You stood surrounded by teenagers bopping away as you introduced the next guest and while the act sang to backing tracks (well, some of them did but there was also a lot of miming going on) you charged across the studio to the next location and stood among a different group of teenagers, who were either trying to look nonchalant or gurning at the camera and waving at their mates back home.
It was all filmed live so there was no room for error and the time just sped by, and I can safely report that nobody tried to touch me up.
Another memorable job was filming Late Licence with Gayle Tuesday. In a tiny studio in the basement of Channel 4 on Horseferry Road we recorded links for the shows that were shown throughout the night, in other words, the graveyard shift. Brenda (Gayle) and I ad-libbed the entire thing, and what were supposed to be brief links became twenty-minute epics, invariably ending up with Lily blind drunk and Gayle apologizing for her. We flew very close to the wind with some of the stuff we came out with, but as it was going out in the wee small hours of the morning it didn’t matter.
We had a ball making these and eventually they became so popular the channel would occasionally drop the scheduled repeat and leave us to ramble on instead.
Late Licence became a cult among students and Brenda and I were amazed when we were approached and had whole scenarios quoted at us word for word that neither of us could remember saying as we’d simply improvised. I worked well with Brenda. The character of Gayle Tuesday, Page Three Stunner, was extremely funny and an ideal foil for Lily and these links were a great opportunity for us both to allow our imaginations to run riot as we bounced off each other with increasingly absurd dialogue.
Murphy thought performing at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the bill for a Stonewall fundraiser alongside the likes of Elton John and Sting would be the most memorable occasion of my career so far, but it wasn’t. It was an unbelievable experience, to say the least, but despite sitting in a dressing room alone with a shirtless Sting strumming on a guitar as he sang ‘I’ve Got A Crush On You’, that honour belongs to another night.
‘He’s into tantric sex,’ Agnes, my dresser, had said knowingly at the time. ‘He goes all night.’
‘I don’t care if he’s into Irish dancing,’ I murmured in reply, still dazed by the effect of being in such close proximity to the pure animal sexuality of the beautiful Sting, ‘and he can go for as long as he wants.’
The icing on the cake of ’94 belongs to the London Palladium. As promised, Murphy had booked it for Easter Sunday and I was the busiest person in London preparing for it. I had new costumes made and some of the flashier ones that Hush had left me when he died taken in and altered to fit. Simon (Betty Legs Diamond) came on board as choreographer again. As I wanted to do a send-up of Torvill and Dean with Bob Downe, he set us to work on a complicated routine to Boléro that made us look as if we were skating. Brenda was heavily pregnant with her first child and it didn’t help that she was suffering from permanent morning sickness, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. Along with Jimmy Somerville and the Tiller Girls (of course) she joined the troupe.
We had very little time for an actual rehearsal on the stage of the Palladium, just a few hours before the show, but the old revolve was still in place. Simon put it to good use as part of the Torvill and Dean routine, changing a few of the well-rehearsed steps to accommodate this new bit of business, which panicked me slightly in case I messed it up.
‘You’re not nervous, are you, dear?’ Agnes asked as he always did.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I lied as I stared into the mirror of the number one dressing room, the same room where Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich and just about every other great star who’d ever appeared here had done at one time or another.
Our brief dress rehearsal had been disastrous. Brenda was chucking up into a bucket with the force of the kid from The Exorcist, and a fiery club manager from Wolverhampton, who was not amused at having his Easter Sunday act cancel on him as somehow I’d been double-booked, was threatening to come down and disrupt the show.
Murphy had promised to ‘lay him out’ if he so much as put his foot in the door, which did nothing to alleviate my nerves.
‘Never mind, dear, you know what they say,’ Agnes said, wincing as a curl of smoke dangling from his lip caught his eye, ‘a good dress rehearsal makes for a bad show.’
‘It’s the other way round, you dozy mare,’ I told him.
‘You know what I mean, hen.’ He was gathering up my costume for the quick change. ‘I’ll just take these up to the wings, dear. Will you be all right on your own? You’re not going to lock yourself in the bathroom like Judy, are you?’
‘No, I’m going to hang from the light fitting like Bela Lugosi. Now will you please bugger off?’
It was good to be on my own. As I’d been too preoccupied worrying about the show to have time to gather my thoughts, at that moment I allowed panic to set in.
‘Pack it up,’ I said to the reflection in the mirror. ‘It’s a bit late to start bloody fretting now, so get a grip and get on with it.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Murphy asked, strolling into the room.
‘Myself, and you’re supposed to knock.’
‘Bollocks, and what were you talking about?’
‘I was giving myself a pep talk,’ I told him, turning from the mirror to face him. ‘I’m a bit worried about how this show is going to go, to be honest.’
‘Budge up.’ He pulled up a chair next to mine. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Savage, believe me. The fates won’t allow it.’
This made me laugh. ‘Since when did you believe in fate?’ I asked him.
‘Since now,’ he said, gripping my shoulder to grab my full attention. ‘Listen to me. This is your Gypsy Rose Lee moment.’
‘How d’ya mean?’ I asked, bemused by this as Murphy didn’t have a camp bone in his body and was most certainly not into musicals, preferring football, Joni Mitchell and The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda to people bursting into song mid-sentence.
‘This is it. This is your Minsky’s,’ he explained patiently. ‘You’ve done it, Savage, just as she did. You’ve achieved the unattainable and worked your way up from being a drag queen in gay pubs to topping the bill at the London Palladium. Didn’t she do the same? Work her way up from humble origins in what is considered by some a dubious profession to star at the most famous theatre in the world?’
This analogy tickled me pink and I was amazed that he’d even thought along these lines. Normally he was so pragmatic and not fanciful in the least, but knowing that I was a big fan of both the musical and Miss Lee herself he’d made this tenuous link.
‘You must treasure moments like this,’ he said, ‘as they don’t come along for everybody.’
I understood and nodded in agreement.
‘Now go out there and show that full house just what you’re made of, kid,’ he said as he was leaving, in a mock-American accent. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Open the cage, Murphy,’ I replied, as always with false bravado, ‘and let me out.’
Before you enter the wings of the Palladium there is an enormous mirror with an elaborate frame in the hallway that I think they built the theatre around. I stopped to check myself as thousands of others had done before me, and, satisfied with what I saw, I took my place on stage at the top of a flight of stairs ready to make my descent to ‘I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise’.
‘Break a leg, dear,’ Agnes hissed from the wings and before I knew it we were off.
Despite my worries, the show went without a hitch, everyone went down a storm and the Torvill and Dean routine brought the house down. Brenda managed not to throw up and despite her advanced stage of pregnancy squeezed into her Miss Electra outfit and caused hysterics as her bits lit up when she joined Betty Legs and myself for the ubiquitous ‘You Gotta Have A Gimmick’.
As Tessie Tura the Texas Twirler, Simon (Betty) executed a perpetual spin at breakneck speed from one side of the stage to the other. What with Gayle’s light bulbs and the Texas Twirler my poor old bugle dance had some heavy competition. Nothing I couldn’t handle though …
We ended the show in the traditional Palladium way, with the Tillers going round one way on the revolve and the cast going round the other on the inner revolve. I’d stuck Vera on it dressed in an old coat and headscarf. He was in seventh heaven as he went round and round clutching a carrier bag from Bejams and waving to the audience. I came up on the drum that rose slowly from the centre wearing an elaborate turquoise creation of Hush’s to which Martin and I had gone cross-eyed glueing thousands of small diamantés.
Going around on the revolve at the London Palladium should be available on the NHS as a cure for depression. As I stood there spinning slowly to Val Parnell’s familiar finale music and a standing ovation I remember thinking that Murphy was right. It doesn’t get any better than this. Whatever happened from here on in, I would never forget this magical night.