The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  First of all, it’s a mistake to compare one’s personal experience with that of another. But you’re sighing deeply. Was the DRC really that bad?

  Yeah, absolutely terrible. It’s a really troubled country, a war-ravaged zone with a legacy of brutal colonial mistreatment. I really didn’t know what I was getting into, although my brave pal, Australian film maker George Gittoes, who had once been locked up there for photographing something politically sensitive, came round to our New York apartment and, in Billy’s presence, warned me that if I went there I’d be dragged into a dark room and interrogated. ‘You’ll be lucky to see the light of day, ever again,’ he said. Needless to say, my husband absolutely forbade me to go. But, by now, you should know me well enough to predict whether his laying down of the law had any effect on me whatsoever!

  I jumped on a plane for Africa (my first trip to any part of that continent that lies south of Morocco) and landed in Nairobi. So far so good, I thought; well hello, there was a shopping mall at the airport. And cappuccinos. I met up with Sally, the Merlin official who would be my companion and guide. She spoke Swahili which seemed like an excellent asset; I wished I’d acquired it, too. Our next flight winged us to Kigali, Rwanda. Although this region still held the terrible legacy of genocide in living memory (not to mention a terrifying movie with brutal images that were still fresh in my mind), I was pleasantly surprised by the excellent roads and the generally impressive infrastructure of the countryside. Driving the entire length of Rwanda – necessary in order to get to Goma and enter the DRC which is a landlocked country without a safe airport – I was forced to wonder, ‘Perhaps genocide is actually profitable!’ It was a disgusting thought but, given the enormous amount of cash that flowed into the country after the Tutsi and the Hutu had finished battling it out in such a desperately savage way, I think I could be forgiven for it. At least the money actually did seem to have been spent on improvements, rather than ending up in some dictator’s Swiss bank account.

  I didn’t feel at all safe in the Congo, though. In fact, I felt uncomfortably visible. You don’t want to be blonde there. And you don’t want to be a woman either. As soon as I arrived, a security officer advised me: ‘You might want to cover your . . . female assets.’ He wasn’t kidding. Sexual violence against women is ubiquitous, and the utterly terrible style of the rapes is hard even to contemplate. I travelled around the countryside to Merlin-funded health clinics and spoke with women who had barely survived the atrocities. They sat stoically with clouded eyes, whispering details of being inhumanely surprised in their villages, homes, on the way to market and in the fields that they were trying to cultivate.

  In that colonially desecrated, war-ravaged land there are multiple dangers – malaria, yellow fever, malnutrition, or crossing the burst Rutshuru River with a heart-stopping ravine just inches from the wheels of your bus. The food was unsafe, so I tried to live on the cereal bars I’d brought. Everyone seemed to be carrying a gun – except us because Merlin’s policy is to be unarmed. I longed for my Glock (I’m pretty handy with guns, since I had to learn to defend myself from pirates during a sailing trip I’ll tell you about later). I was constantly on the alert, which is necessary in a place where the regular police here carry rocket launchers, where you’re just as likely to be robbed, raped or kidnapped by members of the Congolese army as by paramilitary groups or bandits. I travelled only between 10am and 4pm, in convoy, in vehicles with sat-phones, VHF radios and hiding places. I was taught to keep my windows up and doors locked. If stopped, I was briefed to show my ID through the window, put my hands up and try to smile. NGO workers had been pulled out of cars the week before I arrived, robbed and raped.

  My security briefing was shockingly to-the-point. ‘If you get ambushed on the road,’ warned the jaded Frenchman who briefed me, ‘your driver will run away. Wear trousers and trainers you can run in. If they start firing, get out of the car on whichever side is furthest from the gunfire and hide behind the nearest wheel. When you hear them pause to reload, run for your life to the next point of cover.’ To be honest, I was so unfit at that time I could never have run fast enough to save my own life, and this fact pitched me straight back to the gym the minute I returned home.

  In South Kivu alone, a woman is sexually assaulted every two hours – often by men in uniform. ‘How does one become a soldier here?’ I had asked the security adviser. ‘C’est compliqué,’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘They give you a uniform, a Kalashnikov [AK-47] – and off you go!’ The extraordinary women I met completely humbled me. I knew from personal experience what it was like to be helpless, to be at the mercy of a cruel man, but my own negative experiences paled into insignificance when I heard these survivors’ stories. Compared to them, I had been incredibly lucky. I’d had the opportunity to learn to read and write. I’d been to school, been clothed, and there was always food on the table. I’d had the resources to create a career for myself, through attending an excellent drama school, and that experience gave me the confidence and strength to walk in the world with my head held high. How I wished the women I met in the Congo could have the same opportunities.

  You said that drama school saved you . . .

  Yes – although NIDA was certainly challenging. But I enjoyed everything about it – the movement lessons, the acting coaching, the voice classes, the improvisation sessions, and especially the productions. It was a completely new culture, too. However, after what I’d just been through it took some time to relax, trust my teachers and fellow students, and realize no one was going to beat or mistreat me. I was often cast most strangely – as the tinker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example – and I believe it was a good school policy to cast against type for a while – but I finally earned decent roles, as Helen in Look Back in Anger and Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. My tutors were extremely demanding, but they were also very clever and supportive. And I sensed true benevolence from them. I blossomed.

  Half the student group was always asked to leave after the first year. When it was crunch time, I went nervously to sit before the panel of serious faces who would decide my fate. I was expecting rejection, but instead I was met with smiles and encouragement. ‘We thought you’d only last a few weeks,’ they said, ‘but you’re still here and you’ve improved so much . . .’ Little did they know those were the most helpful words I could possibly have heard. They showed me that, unlike my parents, no one there had high expectations of me. That meant I was able to develop, feel free, accomplish. I felt I had permission to make mistakes, and that I would be appreciated. Yes, it was exactly the right environment for me. How lucky I was to find it, and still be there! I thoroughly enjoyed my final year. After our last production – Lorca’s Blood Wedding, in which I played an elderly woman as a kind of weird bird, all trussed up in latex with wings under my cloak – I graduated in 1970. I adapted a passage from Jeremy Sandford’s book Synthetic Fun as my audition monologue – a funny and poignant piece as a character who appeared in a strip club as a topless highwayman – and presented myself to the world as a professional actor.

  Straight away I acquired an excellent agent and was in demand for TV, film and stage work. I accepted an offer to join the Perth Playhouse repertory company run by British director Edgar Metcalfe. It was a wonderful start: I played six leading roles in a row, including Dixie in David Mercer’s Flint, Linda in Tom Stoppard’s Enter a Free Man and Celia in Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist. I was well received in all those comedies, and discovered how much I loved to be funny. I particularly liked playing Dixie – a troubled teenager to whom I could certainly relate. She was funny, brave and optimistic – qualities I was grasping for in myself.

  I noticed that, unlike drama, comedy brought immediate audience rewards. But the final play I did in Perth was a serious piece – Australian playwright Lance Peter’s Assault with a Deadly Weapon. It transferred to the centre of Sydney, which meant that I was immediately starring in the Australian equivalent of London’s West End. This
was the chance I’d been hoping for. I worked hard at my career and promoted myself with a vengeance. Newspapers carried my picture quite frequently – after all, I was pretty easy on the eye at that time – and I was always posing in a terribly dated, fifties starlet manner. At one point I even paraded for the cameras wearing a white mink bikini. Seriously, Pamela?

  Recently, I was confronted by an image of myself in a very early TV interview – it’s on YouTube – and I was really struck by my voice. I had such a strange, fake accent – a bit like old British B movies. Why on earth was I talking like that? I have no idea. Perhaps it was the result of the NIDA voice production classes; in those days, the more English you sounded the better. I never really had a strong Australian accent but, honestly, I sound like Prunella Scales with a poker up her arse.

  No wonder that, behind my back, people called me ‘Plastic Pam’. Well, I suppose at the time I was trying on different personalities to see what fitted – no wonder I came across as inauthentic. Understandably, I really didn’t know who I was. I had stuffed down all the pain of my father’s abandonment, all my fury at my mother, my ill-treatment by Helmut, and was vengefully doing everything I could to make my mark in the world and prove that I was worth something. At the same time, this seemed to help assuage my anxiety. I was characteristically very, very serious about every aspect of my career. I worked particularly hard at presenting myself attractively – those were the days when the ‘dolly bird’ style was in vogue in Sydney (originally made popular by British icons Mary Quant, Twiggy and Pattie Boyd), so I became adept at donning the tiniest miniskirts, the highest platform boots and the most enormous false eyelashes, top and bottom. I relished the power that decorating my face and body like that seemed to bring me, both personally and professionally.

  At some level, perhaps it seemed to be a safeguard against abandonment . . .

  You’re right. It did seem that way. And I never stopped. I appeared in quite a few TV detective shows (they were very popular in Australia at the time); in fact, I became rather in demand for guest spots in such shows. Oh, now I’m getting chills because I just remembered that one day a script arrived that horrified me because it appeared that I’d be expected to drive a car. At the time I couldn’t drive at all – but I was determined to keep the part. I telephoned a friend of a friend who was a racing driver. He turned up with a lovely, expensive sports car and kindly gave me my first driving lesson. But I imagine he thought better of it when I nearly parked his four-wheeled pride and joy in the pond of a local park – I’m blushing now just to think of it – and, well, lesson over.

  So, I still couldn’t drive when I arrived on the set a couple of days later. Why on earth didn’t I just ’fess up? I was just praying that no one would ask me for my driver’s licence (to be honest, they didn’t really care in those days!). But, even worse, it turned out that I was actually expected to perform something akin to a stunt: while a man was trying to drag me out of an open sports car by my right arm, I had to start the engine with my left hand and perform a hill start, then roar away from my attacker – spinning him away and narrowly missing the parked car in front! Nowadays they’d never ask an actor to do a scene like this and it seems an incredible ‘ask’, even in those days, but I was so determined to stay in the programme, I focused hard and actually managed to do it rather well – on the second take! Now, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because then my problems were compounded; I’d made a name for myself as a bit of a stunt-driving actor and was offered even more driving roles. I quickly took my driving test – and, of course, I failed!

  A similar thing happened with horse riding; I couldn’t ride, but aspired to certain parts that required equestrian skills. After being thrown off a horse a couple of times, under thoroughly precarious conditions, I realized that commanding living beasts was a bit more difficult to fake than simply driving a vehicle – and potentially even more dangerous. Frankly, I was really lucky to avoid serious injury, but it was entirely consistent with my risk-taking, ambitious character and determined mindset at the time that I felt I had to either succeed at everything I tried – or die trying.

  So no change there, then? You still like to take risks?

  Absolutely!

  It’s not unusual for someone who has faced physical abuse to subsequently deliberately place herself in danger. It can become a compulsion to prove one’s efficacy in surviving, time and time again . . .

  Well, that certainly rings some bells for me. But I did settle down a bit for a while when I landed a permanent role as a detective’s secretary in a popular new series called Ryan. I played the power-behind-the-throne type of girl, who occasionally solved the mystery before the boss did. It was pretty silly, and I became bored. I appeared in a couple of experimental, low-budget films, such as Private Collection, and even dabbled in musicals, doing a run as June in Gypsy (again, I over-challenged myself by saying I could do the splits when my legs really weren’t quite that loose, and ended up with ripped tendons). But I was more interested in serious theatre at the time, and was thrilled to be invited eventually to join Australia’s foremost theatre company, The Old Tote. I played Lucrezia in Machiavelli’s comedy La Mandragola, Cordelia in Edward Bond’s Lear, Solveig in Peer Gynt and, when the Sydney Opera House opened, I starred in two plays in the launch season at the Drama Theatre – Queen Isabel in Shakespeare’s Richard II, and as Polly Peachum in Jim Sharman’s production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, set in Australia in the thirties. This was a really big deal. At twenty-six years old, as a serious young actress, I suppose I had arrived.

  Bizarrely, at this point my parents seemed rather proud of my success and wanted to be part of my life again. That actually started to happen during my second year at drama school. They realized that I was moving up in the world and was less of a threat to their peace and sanity, so they invited me to move back to the house. The idea was that I could have a solid, inexpensive base, but I felt very ambivalent about it. It was weird and uncomfortable, to pretend nothing had ever happened, and everyone being fairly nice to me. I still desperately needed their approval, so I was happy they wanted me again, but I was understandably suspicious of the sudden turnaround. Nevertheless, it meant that I no longer had to work at night, which was becoming impossible with all the evening performances I had. Funny thing, fame – it changes every relationship in a person’s life. I bet my sisters felt angry with me when I turned up back in Thompson Street – and understandably so. It was a modern re-enactment of the prodigal son’s return. But there was so much left unspoken in the household. Even before I graduated I realized it was too hard to be around my parents at my age, and so I moved into a rented house in the arty suburb of Paddington.

  I remember eagerly seeking out the company of young men – in keeping with the zeitgeist of sexual promiscuity at the time. But, although I really enjoyed sex, I suspect that physical pleasure was not really my uppermost desire. Being held tenderly, caressed, seemingly adored – even briefly – those things were probably more important to a young woman like me who was so strongly imbued with longing. Lying in a man’s arms seemed to provide the only true peace I could summon at that time.

  Hmmm. That’s known as pseudosexuality . . .

  It also felt like pseudolove because, well, I never seemed to be able to keep those guys around. I imagine my excessive neediness at that time scared them off. Outside my little attic bedroom in Paddington, there was plenty of stimulation. There were some interesting things going on I was also inspired to explore. I became aware of a society of Sydney and Melbourne artists – not just the actors I met, but wonderful painters like the late Brett Whiteley, a charismatic vision on roller skates whom I encountered briefly at that time. Many years later – not long before his untimely death from a heroin overdose in 1992 – he became friendly with Billy. But in the late sixties and early seventies there was a terraced house somewhere in Macleay Street, Potts Point, that became known as The Yellow House (presumably named after the subject
of the famous Van Gogh painting), and it attracted all kinds of fascinating people. In my patchwork maxi skirt, floppy hat, leather jerkin and beads (‘dolly bird’ style eventually gave way to ‘hippie’ clothes), I could turn up there any time and witness something stimulating and unusual – it was a kind of full-time ‘happening’. I remember walking in one day and seeing two terribly sleepy pianists playing Erik Satie’s ‘Trois Gymnopédies’ exactly the way they are meant to be played – gravely and dolorously, in a marathon of repetition. Yes, there was something cool and exciting going on I wanted to be a part of. I’m still a bit like that – never want to miss out on anything . . .

  Fear of rejection again?

  Mmm. Maybe. But it was more than that. I craved something I’d rarely had – fun. But also, there was a side of me – the creative artist – who craved the company and support of like-minded souls. Since drama school, I had become aware that there were some thoroughly edgy people around who could make me feel more . . . normal. I especially admired artist Martin Sharp, who was producing extraordinarily clever underground cartoons (he actually started the Yellow House artists’ collective). People were wearing clothing made of crushed velvet, denim and Union Jacks. They were smoking pot and listening to Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’ (I remember we were all worried that his motorcycle accident might have affected his ability to produce another Blonde on Blonde). I actually performed as a folk singer myself in a couple of basement dives but, although I had a friendly guitarist supporting me, it was a bit too much like my horrid Sunday school experience, trying not to make mistakes on my guitar. I thought the early seventies folk scene was cool (although we didn’t use that word then) and, even though I felt inadequate, I was drawn to it.