by Paul O'Grady
‘Vera,’ Rita piped, throwing the sergeant a sly smile. ‘Vera. I’m afraid I don’t know his surname, officer.’
‘Vera? His surname?’
I gave the sergeant Vera’s real name, squirming under his scrutiny as I tried once again to explain. ‘Vera’s a nickname,’ I offered lamely, listening to my voice trail off as he shook his head in disbelief.
‘He’s being held until the arresting officers arrive from Liverpool tomorrow to take him back to be charged,’ he said after making a phone call. ‘That’s all I can tell you for now. Thank you.’
‘Why did you call yourself Olivia Shelbourne?’ I asked Rita on the bus home.
‘Well, you don’t want to be giving the coppers your real name, particularly if you have a bit of form like me, it’s common sense.’ She settled down in her seat and started to lard some lipstick on.
‘But why Olivia Shelbourne?’
‘Well, Olivia, after Olivia de Havilland, y’know, the filum star, seeing as how when I was younger me da said I had a look of her,’ she said, smacking her lips at her reflection in the window. ‘And Shelbourne after the beautiful hotel in Dublin.’ Comparing this peroxide bruiser attending to her maquillage on the back of a 41 bus to the ethereal beauty who played Maid Marian to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood I could only come to the conclusion that the drink must be extraordinarily strong in Dublin.
Vera was released the following evening, for as soon as the arresting officers turned up they realized that Vera was not the same person they’d nicked in Liverpool. Whoever they’d arrested was obviously someone close to Vera as he knew all his details, passing himself off as him.
‘Look at me,’ he said, safely back at home. His hand was shaking so violently it sent waves of tea crashing over the side of the mug he was attempting to pick up to wash a Valium down. ‘Just look at the state of me poor nerves.’ Another one with nerves of steel.
One of the other peripatetics had offered to mind the kids for me so I could go back to the flat for a couple of hours to see him. I wanted all the details. ‘What was it like in there?’ I asked. ‘Being locked up?’ I still couldn’t believe that you could be locked up for two days for a crime that you couldn’t possibly have committed.
‘Terrible, Lily, terrible. I nearly went mad banged up all that time.’ He spoke as if he’d just been released from the horrors of a long spell in solitary on Alcatraz. ‘They took me glasses off me,’ he screamed, outraged. ‘In case I committed suicide with them, how stupid is that?’
Vera’s eyesight is on a par with Helen Keller’s and to take his glasses away was uncalled for. I ruminated on just how you’d go about killing yourself with a pair of specs while Vera had another go at drinking his tea. He found that rather than raising the mug to his lips the operation was more successful if he left it on the table, leaned forward, clamped his gob round the rim and sucked hard.
‘I suppose you could break them and then cut your wrists.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Vera spluttered, a trickle of tea running down his chin.
‘Killing yourself with a pair of glasses.’
‘How the hell do I know?’ he said, taking his off and wiping them shakily on his T-shirt. Had the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank broken down then Vera’s lenses would’ve made a more than adequate substitute. In fact he could’ve held them up to the sunlight, that’s if his cell had such a luxury as a window, and burned the lock off the door.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘pop in the Cap with me for a drink on your way back to work. I certainly need one.’
Later on, as we stood drinking our lagers in the Cap, I noticed some leaflets advertising something called ‘Regina Fong’s Saturday Morning Madhouse’. What interested me was the bit at the bottom proclaiming that everyone was welcome to come along and do a number. It was all the encouragement I needed, desperate as I was to tread the boards of the Cap’s tiny stage, and I made my mind up there and then that come hell or high water I was indeed going to get up and ‘do a number’.
I’d taken the children to see their mother in hospital. She was a nice woman, a loving mother trying to raise her kids on what she received from the government and nothing at all like her errant sister.
When we got back to the flat I found I had unexpected visitors, two men, one of whom was in the cupboard under the stairs. They turned out to be the children’s uncle and his friend. The uncle emerged from the cupboard explaining that he was looking for a sports bag but as it wasn’t there it didn’t matter. They were affable enough as we stood around talking and drinking tea but I couldn’t help sensing their unease. What was in that cupboard? I’d have a look later after they’d gone and the kids were asleep in bed.
Tucked away at the back of the electricity meter, wrapped in a carrier bag, I found my answer. A gun. I unwrapped the bag and stared at it, wondering what I should do now. I couldn’t have four lively kids running around a flat with a gun waiting to be discovered by inquisitive fingers, nor was I prepared to put them and myself at risk by living in a possible secret armoury for the IRA. The uncle had either been looking for the gun when I disturbed him, which meant he’d probably be back, or been hiding it. Either way I didn’t feel particularly safe that night and slept with one eye open.
In the morning, as I was about to ring Maura for her advice, the children’s mum turned up. Having made up her mind that she was well enough to go home she’d discharged herself. I didn’t want to worry her but felt I had to tell her about the gun.
‘If you’d lifted them floorboards up you’d have found a few other bits and pieces,’ she said resignedly. ‘That bloody Gerry, I’ve warned him about using my house to hide his arms. Don’t worry, I’ll see that it’s out of here by tonight and that will be the last of it. Forget you ever saw anything, d’ye hear?’ I wasn’t sure if I was to take her last remark as a piece of sound advice or as a threat and kept my mouth shut, telling no one apart from Maura, who replied somewhat darkly that she would ‘deal with it’.
Since Mum was home and claiming that she could manage with a home help my services were surplus to requirements and I was free to go. Rita cried a little when I left. ‘Keep in touch,’ she shouted after me. ‘And if you ever need a bed for the night you know where we are.’ I hoped that I would never have to take her up on her offer.
It was basic to say the least, but as pub dressing rooms go, as I was soon to find out, far superior to the majority of rat-holes that the acts were expected to get ready and changed in. The bright fluorescent lighting picked out the glitter impacted on the bare concrete floor, the residue left behind by a lifetime of drag queens, making it sparkle in places, reminiscent of the rocks on Aladdin’s Cave in Blackler’s Christmas Grotto. A dress rail, hanging with a colourful assortment of the Sisters’ costumes that I was slightly disillusioned to see didn’t look quite so spectacular at close range as they did under the lights of the Black Cap’s stage, ran alongside one wall. A long mirror hung on the other wall, the makeup shelf underneath pockmarked with cigarette burns and splattered with tiny yellowing pools of hardened spirit gum.
In the corner was the unheard of luxury of a sink, used by the acts not only to wash and shave in but also as a convenient lav. To reach the stage from this dressing room, you had to go down a couple of steps and past the gents’ toilet. If it was a busy night it meant wading through the overspill of pee and if it was raining you got soaked as there was no overhead cover in the alley, so either way you got wet. Nevertheless, it was the tingeltangel, the gutter glamour, that I craved with an intoxicating eau de parfum all of its own. A combination of stale booze and fags, hairspray and sweat.
Reginald Sutherland Bundy aka Regina Fong was standing in the door of the dressing room at the top of the steps haranguing the DJ.
‘Oh, reeeally, de-ah,’ he said, speaking in an exaggerated theatrical drawl, stretching the syllables out like strands of melted cheese, ‘I don’t need this hassle. The reason there are so many tapes, darling, is because the
re are quite a few of us all doing individual numbers. Now stop being so awkward and get back to your hutch. We’re supposed to go up at one and I haven’t even unpacked the slap yet.’
The DJ shrugged his shoulders and staggered back to his console at the back of the stage balancing an armful of cassette tapes.
‘First no dresser and now the DJ giving me grief over the tapes. I don’t know why I bother,’ he said, peering down at me imperiously through hooded eyes. ‘And what can I do for you, young woman?’
I found him quite intimidating in the flesh. He was tall, with a dancer’s build and posture, and walked in that flat-footed way with his feet splayed out that ballet dancers tend to have.
‘I’m doing a number,’ I replied, suddenly overcome with shyness.
‘Oh, are you now?’ he said in an uninterested voice, flaring his nostrils and running his tongue over his sizeable front teeth. ‘Then you’d better get ready, hadn’t you, instead of standing out here gossiping.’
He stood by, letting me get past into the dressing room. Inside the other two members of the Disappointer Sisters were getting ready. Rosie Lee, perched on a stool in the corner languidly painting on a pair of eyebrows as thin as butterfly antennae, acknowledged me with a slight incline of the head. Gracie, over by the sink, was having a shave, talking non-stop as he hacked away at his face, stopping momentarily to stare at me blankly before carrying on where he’d left off. I felt awkward and very much out of place standing in the middle of the room unsure of what to do next.
‘You can get ready over there, dear,’ Rosie Lee said, solving my dilemma for me, pointing to a space at the opposite end of the make-up shelf. I could see him out of the corner of my eye watching me with some amusement as I self-consciously unpacked my few bits of make-up from a Batman pencil case.
‘Is that the foundation you use?’ he frowned, pointing to the tube of Max Factor liquid foundation, the sort that my aunty Chrissie used. ‘You’ll need a much heavier foundation than that for the stage, dear. The lights bleach you out and it would never cover.’
‘Oh, shut up, Rosie,’ Regina shouted over his shoulder, busy sharpening an eyebrow pencil he’d rooted out of an enormous fishing tackle box that he used to store his vast quantity of make-up in. ‘Just because you’ve got skin like leather and need four coats of Dulux to cover it doesn’t mean she has too. She’s young, de-ah, remember it, youth? She’s got young skin.’
Rosie Lee drew in his breath sharply. ‘I’ll have you know I have the skin of an eighteen-year-old.’
‘An eighteen-year-old what, de-ah? Rice pudding?’
‘As long as I never look as old as you, darling, I’ve no need to worry,’ Rosie Lee said in honeyed tones laced with acid. ‘Just take a good look at that face. Why, my dear, you’ve managed to break more veins than a vampire at an orgy.’
‘Oh, shut up, Miss Lee, you’re getting on my nerves.’
I watched them closely as they bickered and bitched and larded on the make-up. They used a stick of what looked like pink wax to flatten down their eyebrows and then covered them with a coating of glitter. Lips were painted a bright carmine red, and false eyelashes the size of a crow’s wing defied gravity as they hung from the edges of turquoise eyelids. Three pairs of tights covered hairy legs. Chest and armpit hair, Reg insisted, must be Immacked regularly. He hated underarm hair, thought it an abomination on both woman and drag queens, regularly declaring to the others, ‘I hope you’ve done the pits, de-ah, we don’t want to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, do we?’
They didn’t bother feminizing their skinny frames with padding or false boobs. Reg found them offensive. ‘I’m not wearing a pair of humongous fake tits, de-ah. We’re androgynous. You look at us and see a beautiful woman’s face on the body of a boy.’ I was to remind him of this statement some years later as he tried to force his ever-expanding girth into a Marks & Spencer girdle that was quite simply not up to the job.
For my debut at the Black Cap that Saturday afternoon, 7 October 1978, I thought it best if I went for the low comedy look rather than attempt high glamour as I had neither the resources nor the finances for sequins and feathers. From God knows where I’d unearthed a nineteen fifties black and white checked jacket that was too short in the arms and a matching pencil skirt so tight I could barely walk – add to this a pair of Lozzy’s old high heels that added six inches to my height and a top-heavy picture hat decorated with a bunch of wax grapes I’d nicked from the fruit bowl on the table of the pugs’ parlour of the nursing home in Regent’s Park, and you had an accident waiting to happen.
‘Divine hat,’ Regina said, looking up at me. ‘You’re very tall, de-ah, what the fuck have you got on? Stilts? Never mind. Have you got your tape? I’ll give it to the DJ.’ Next to Regina, resplendent in a black satin ball gown and an elaborately dressed hard wig, the kind you see on mannequins in shop windows, I felt, for want of a better word, a complete and utter twat, like some sad old tranny who’d dared to venture out into the world for the first time.
Rosie Lee, magnificent in platinum blonde wig and silver lamé dress, asked, ‘Have you got a name, dear?’
‘Yes, good point, Miss Lee. What’s your name, dahling?’ Reg said, wiping lipstick off his teeth.
‘Lily Savage,’ I mumbled.
‘Larry Sausage?’
‘No, Lily Savage.’ I wanted the ground to swallow me up.
‘Speak clearly, will you? I can’t understand a word of that Liverpoolian accent. What number are you doing?’
‘I’m doing “Nobody Makes a Pass at Me”.’
‘Is it autobiographical?’
‘No, it’s from a show called Pins and Needles. It’s Barbra Strei—’
‘I know where it’s from, de-ah, thank you very much. Now move yourself, you’re on next.’
I could barely breathe for fright as I stood outside the door to the stage waiting to hear the DJ announce me. What the bloody hell was I doing? Was it too late to leg it down the alley and vanish down Camden High Street? Maybe I should faint.
I could hear the DJ over the microphone trying to inject some enthusiam into his voice. ‘OK, a first for you here at the Cap this afternoon, all the way from Liverpool, will you please welcome Lizzy Salvage!’ Someone opened the door and pushed me out on to the stage. There was a smattering of applause and a few wolf whistles and I could feel my legs shaking violently underneath me, partly from fear and partly from the endless stream of large whiskies that Vera had ferried into the dressing room, with the added challenge of trying to keep my balance in Lozzy’s killer heels.
As my eyes slowly became accustomed to the lights I caught sight of Vera’s anxious face in the crowd. He was chewing his fingers down to the knuckle. I looked away, and tottered around the stage for something to do while I waited for the interminable intro to end and the song to begin. My mouth began moving automatically to Barbra Streisand’s disembodied voice blaring out from somewhere behind me and slowly I began to loosen up and ‘give it some welly’. Just as I’d started to enjoy myself it was suddenly all over and I was gratified to hear a decent smattering of applause following me as I made my way back to the dressing room.
‘Well done, dahling,’ Regina drawled, stepping out of his ball gown and into a pair of red satin trousers. ‘You weren’t bad, no, not bad at all. Help me with this zip, dahling. Our dresser has let us down – I don’t suppose you’d fancy dressing us for the second spot? It’s fairly uncomplicated, and we’ll buy you a couple of bevvies …’ He kept up the running commentary as he struggled to get into a sailor top.
‘You’ve got something, you know, de-ah, raw of course but with a little polish … who knows? A word of advice though,’ he went on, pinning a sailor’s cap to his wig. ‘If you’re considering getting an act together I’d drop the name. Lily Savage is all right for a bit of camp but no one is going to take an act that sounds like an old scrubber seriously, dahling.’
CHAPTER 13
Invading Poland
&nbs
p; TWO WEEKS AFTER MY DEBUT AT THE CAP, BARBARA, BERYL and I set off for Poland. Prior to leaving London I’d looked after a small boy while his mother had an abortion, and sat for three nights at the bedside of a sick old lady who had no one else to sit with her as she waited to die, and I was looking forward to getting away.
We’d chipped in and hired a beautiful bright red Ford Capri for our odyssey across Eastern Europe. Barbara was the designated driver since neither Beryl nor I could drive. I was also hopeless at map-reading. I can’t even work out how to fold one back up, let alone read it. They baffled me then as they still do now, and the job of navigator was wisely entrusted to Beryl.
I sat in the back sleeping for most of the journey, waking up at intervals with the hump, moaning and whining, ‘Are we there yet?’ like a mardy kid you want to slap. Apart from the occasional toilet and coffee break Barbara drove the entire 577 miles to West Berlin without stopping, and seriously impressed by the woman’s stamina I came to the conclusion that if she ever gave up working for social services she’d make a damn good long distance lorry driver.
It was dark by the time we arrived in West Berlin and had started to rain heavily, which did nothing to improve Barbara and Beryl’s mood. By now they were near screaming point with exhaustion. After driving around for over an hour we eventually found our hotel, which turned out to be smart but disappointingly ordinary and nothing at all like Fräulein Schroeder’s lodging house in Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin. I wanted to lie on a brass bed draped with shawls in a room illuminated by amber light, drinking schnapps and smoking a Café Crème cigar whilst listening to the distant sound of a gramophone playing hot jazz somewhere in the house.
Marching into the hotel we could have been mistaken for the zombies from Thriller. After fourteen hours in a Ford Capri, all Beryl and Barbara wanted was a meal, a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. I had other plans. There was a city with a reputation for being shockingly sinful out there that I badly wanted to explore. Shaving, showering and changing into T-shirt, jeans and bomber jacket I quickly shovelled a plate of Kassler mit Sauerkraut down me in the hotel restaurant and hit the streets in search of the infamous cabaret bars of Weimar Berlin. My preconceived notions of Berlin night life, inspired by films and books, were forty-odd years out of date. The smoky waterfront bar with a vamp in a top hat sitting cross-legged on a barrel crooning bittersweet songs of the streets to a clientele of toffs, pimps, whores, sailors and queers now only existed on celluloid and in the end, to get out of the now driving rain, I ducked into a bar that was all but empty apart from a sad couple hunched morosely over their lager, numbed into a stupefied silence no doubt by the racket coming from a juke box in the corner belting out what sounded like the screams of the damned but turned out to be a genre of music known as ‘German Rock’.