by Denise Scott
I rang Brisbane and apologised, explaining I would no longer be coming.
And so it was that on 11 January 1981, John (who was meant to be on the road) and I (who was meant to be taking over the job he’d recently vacated in Brisbane) both reported for duty at clown headquarters in downtown Albury. The five clowns had a meeting together and then for some reason, I like to think it was fate, John and I ate lunch together. It was just the two of us, sitting on the ground in a small park in the main street, eating takeaway vegetarian pies, John thinking, God she’s got great breasts, and me thinking, God he’s got a beautiful body, so fit and muscular. And I love his cheek bones and the way his shirt is missing all the buttons—his torso is fucking gorgeous, and what a smile. He seems so happy and positive and oh my God, I don’t believe it, he’s juggling an apple and an orange and his empty drink bottle. What a talented guy. Wonder if I should I confess to him that I can’t juggle, in fact have an extreme fear of balls? No, why bother, that’ll become obvious soon enough. Oh good Lord, he’s doing stretches, what a show-off. But God, he really has got a great body, look at his calf muscles, and he’s so flexible, wonder if he does yoga? I love that cool stud he’s got in his ear, wonder what it is, oh wow, it’s a blowfly, a sterling silver blowfly! That is so cool …
John in 1981 when I first met him
And call it cute or call it absolutely sickening, but the clown characters we developed, Puff (me) and Drippins (John), quickly developed a strong flirtatious attraction for one another that knew no bounds—the day John, or rather Drippins, was arrested being a case in point. We were participating in a street parade in the New South Wales town of Orange when John/Drippins was taken into custody by the local police for skating through a red light. He wasn’t skating (how could he have been, there was no ice in Orange), he was miming skating—that’s how good at clowning he was! I, or rather Puff, marched into that police station, a clown/woman with a large round ball of a body, a bathing cap on my head and full clown makeup on my face, and refused to leave until I’d got justice for my man Drippins, who was duly let off with a warning to not skate through a red light ever again.
Together in our first show as the new Clown Ensemble (I’m wearing the bathing cap and John is in the striped cap)
Less than four weeks after our first meeting John and I were not only in a committed relationship, but had declared—not that we were in any hurry—that we wanted to have kids together.
Two clowning years later, in 1983, we returned to Melbourne and moved in to a house together.
* * *
Then, on 27 August of that same year, Mum rang me with the news. ‘Denise, it’s your dad. He’s not too good.’ That was my mother’s way of saying Dad had died.
He was at home in bed when the heart attack happened. My mother had always been fanatical about ambulance cover—it was the one thing she regularly pestered me about. ‘Have you got ambulance cover, Denise? You never know when you’ll need it.’ And yet that morning she didn’t call an ambulance. Was she in denial over how serious the situation was? Or did Dad insist she not make a fuss? Whatever her reasoning, Mum didn’t call an ambulance, and Dad died in the back seat of a taxi on the way to hospital. Mum never, and I mean never, forgave herself.
The morning after Dad died there was a gathering of family members, including some of Dad’s siblings, my ‘cousin’ Noreen, my sister, Julie, and, of course, John. We were all seated around the kitchen table while Mum cooked up a storm—bacon, eggs and toast—keeping moving, keeping busy, keeping from facing her unbearable loss.
Noreen was composing her death notice for Dad for the newspaper. She looked up and asked, ‘Who should I say it’s from? Russ’s loving niece?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Noreen, you’re not my niece. You’re my sister.’
For a split second, time stood still, like a freeze frame, as everyone in the kitchen paused in what they were doing to absorb the words my mother had just uttered. And then life resumed once more. Bacon and eggs were served up, Noreen signed off on her notice as my father’s ‘loving sister-in-law’ and Uncle Ken poured us all a brandy.
* * *
A few months after my father’s death, I became pregnant with our first child. I went to my mother’s house to deliver the news and burst into uncontrollable sobs. I thought she would be unhappy because John and I weren’t married. But Mum could sometimes surprise me. When I announced John and I were going to get married (purely to please her), she responded, ‘Oh, Denise, do you really think you should do that? You and John seem to have such a great relationship. It’d be a pity to go and spoil it.’
And so John and I remained true to our Goldie Hawn–Kurt Russell status. We bought the house we still live in, Number 26, in a location near my mother’s house. We visited her at least once a week, I rang her most days, and John was always on call to drop everything and race out to change a light globe, replace the fire alarms, move furniture, drive her to appointments and bring her to our place to share meals and celebrate grandkids’ birthdays and other family events.
John and I together at a friend’s wedding (we never married)
But as much as we tried to lift her spirits and she tried to get back on her feet, my mother never recovered from my father’s death. The light in her life had gone out.
* * *
Six years after my father died I became a stand-up comedian.
I was thirty-four years old when I received the call, not from God but from his opposite—not that I’m saying comedy is of the devil, but it is irreverent, rude and profane; at least, that’s my experience of it. I like to refer to it as the ‘call of the wild’, because stand-up comedy for me was a wild choice. It positively stank of the extraordinary, reeked of adventure, dripped with risk-taking edginess. And, God knows, at that stage of my life I needed to recharge my ‘extraordinary’ status.
Because at thirty-four I was ordinary. (Is there really such a thing? Even the Greek woman who lives across the road from me—who, whenever I ask how she is, replies, ‘Oh, you know, every day the same’—has an interesting limp.) By ‘ordinary’ I mean that apart from the odd performing job I was a full-time stay-at-home mum with two children, who were four and five years old. I hadn’t intended to stop working, but to my surprise I found I couldn’t leave my kids—just couldn’t bring myself to do it, couldn’t bear to be apart from them. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (Truth be told, it wasn’t only because I couldn’t stand to be separated from my children; it was also because I didn’t have a lot of options. Hollywood wasn’t exactly calling. No-one was calling. And, just quietly, I was relieved.)
I was over trying to be extraordinary. It was exhausting and relentless, not to mention stressful. The constant sense of failure, never achieving my goal of feeling amazing, certainly never reaching the dizzying heights of glory I had experienced when I won Miss Junior Watsonia, left me feeling, for want of a more literary description, absolutely shithouse. In contrast, those carefree ‘ordinary’ days of hanging out with my kids were blissful—making play dough, going to the park, mooching at home. Godammit, I loved being ordinary! Living in an ordinary house in an ordinary suburb, doing ordinary things, being an ordinary mum: it was as though I’d been let out of prison, freed from the burden of striving to be extraordinary. Of course, there were, as my mother had found, obstacles to ordinariness: John, for instance—his street-performing work as a clown, which often meant him leaving home dressed in drag as a policewoman and armed with a meat cleaver and an apple to juggle—was not ordinary.
But at thirty-four I became restless. The play dough was no longer enough, and, besides, the ‘extraordinary’ was once again calling me, seducing me with its evil charm. I couldn’t resist. I had friends who had started doing stand-up, and I thought, Why not? I came from a funny family, didn’t I? And had I not made the other parents laugh themselves sick when I hosted a Trivial Pursuit night at the kids’ kindergarten fundraiser? Clearly, I was meant, born, to be
a stand-up! More than likely I’d have my own TV show within a year—in the States! And it was the sort of job that meant I could look after my kids and have a career at the same time. How brilliant!
How naive! It was hell!
Nevertheless, with the help (and sometimes hindrance) of John, we made it work in our own crazy, chaotic, stressful way.
What really made my life as a comedian hell, though, had nothing to do with juggling it with motherhood. Just being a comedian made me feel sick, really sick—sick to the pit of my stomach.
When I first decided to become a stand-up I assumed I was going to be brilliant at it. Truly, I had no doubt I was going to be the next Lucille Ball, or, to bring it closer to home, I was going to fill the rather large shoes of Australia’s King of Comedy, Graham Kennedy. God knows, I may not have had his male genitalia but I sure as hell had his eyeballs. But then, knock me down with a feather, it turned out I wasn’t brilliant at all. Sure, I may have jumped to that conclusion a little prematurely—after one gig—but nevertheless my failure to take the world by storm was a terrible kick to the guts. I couldn’t believe it. Me! Denise Scott! Miss Junior Watsonia 1964! Not brilliant as a comedian?
There is a theory that my lack of immediate success was due to the stink of fear—the audience could smell my terror as soon as I walked onstage. I’m sure it was more complex; whatever the reason, the fact was that my career didn’t take off. As a means of survival I gradually lowered my comedy expectations until I aimed to do nothing more than be a good stand-up—by no means the best, just good. I determined that I would not quit until I had achieved that goal. If anyone had told me it would take twenty years, I no doubt would have said, ‘Fuck that for a joke’ and given up there and then. But no-one did tell me …
And so for the next twenty years I pursued a career that made me feel ill. Not all the time: I had some great experiences along the way, doing shows with Judith Lucy and the late Lynda Gibson, and the Comedy Festival show I wrote and performed with my nineteen-year-old son. But more often than not I found the job torturous—not so much the twenty minutes I spent onstage, but the lead-up and aftermath, especially the aftermath. Rarely did I come offstage feeling good about myself. Often I’d go home, get into bed, hide under my doona, curl up in the foetal position and palpably burn with a deep sense of shame. I’d lie there groaning (and no, I wasn’t pissed, although I admit I behaved in exactly the same manner after a big night out). Groaning and hiding, I would relive the stupid things I’d said or done onstage.
Sometimes this shame was entirely warranted. There was the time I hosted the Jenny Craig awards night for all their centre managers and when one of them walked across the stage to accept her award I noticed she only had one arm, because I’m quite observant like that, and I said, ‘I realise the pressure’s on to lose weight, but …’ I didn’t get asked to do that gig the following year.
Then there was the Our Lady of Mercy College centenary dinner, but I blame the organising committee for that debacle: they were the ones stupid enough to invite me to be their only speaker. All I did was say ‘Yes.’ I was genuinely thrilled to be asked. I had loved my time there and assumed, very wrongly, as it turned out, that it would be a hoot—a love fest of crazy, fun-loving Catholic-school girls reliving those wild days of youth.
I admit, I was surprised when I rocked up for the dinner and discovered everyone was really quite conservative. Some were wearing crucifixes on chains around their necks! Were they nuns? I wasn’t sure. They could easily have been—they were also wearing extremely comfortable shoes. But then again so was I. And gee, some of those women were old! They looked ancient; I almost felt a need to dust off the cobwebs, that was how old they looked, which quite frankly made a nice change, as usually when I performed comedy I was the geriatric in the room. After a few subtle enquires I managed to confirm that there were indeed a few nuns present, including an adored ex-principal who was being treated with such reverence that I suspected that had her former pupils followed their gut instincts they would have thrown themselves on the floor and lain prostrate at her feet.
Given the conservative vibe of the room I decided to forgo my opening line, which was ‘Our Lady’s was your typical Catholic girls school—you know, full of loose, easy sluts,’ although it seemed such a shame to lose it: it always went down a treat in the stand-up venues. As I waited to go onstage a mantra was going around inside my head: ‘Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck.’ This was weird, because I rarely did use that word onstage, especially at formal events.
So why did I say it that night?
Actually, it wasn’t the first thing I said, which was, ‘So, how many of us here have lapsed?’ From the deafening silence, I gathered I was the only one.
And then I said it. That word. Why did I do that? It was because I was talking about our old sports uniforms and how they were white cotton frocks with knee-length pleated skirts and what a fucking-fucker they were to iron. Because they were a fucking-fucker to iron. But I didn’t say ‘fucking-fucker’; I just said ‘fucker’, so I did make a compromise for the nuns.
The silence in the room at that point of the proceedings was very deep.
The next words to come out of my mouth were accompanied by the distinct clicking sound that started when, aware of the phenomenal debacle I was in the midst of, my mouth stopped producing saliva and consequently I began to open and close it, clicking my tongue and trying to swallow in a desperate bid to create some moisture. I was spiralling out of control, nosediving towards disaster. I had to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Sadly, I pulled the wrong rabbit. I began to rave mindlessly about the fact that our sports dresses were white. ‘White dresses! Adolescent girls! White dresses! White! Adolescent girls! White dresses! Do I have to explain myself?’ Tragically, that night, I did. I told the story of how in 1970 I’d seen ‘Joanna Murphy run to first base on the softball field with a blood stain on the back of her dress the size and shape of Europe—including Italy in the shape of a boot.’
Gee, I hadn’t thought the silence could go any deeper, but blow me down it did.
Now I was having an out-of-body experience, possibly a panic attack. I was looking down at myself onstage, screaming, ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’ But I couldn’t shut up. I couldn’t stop the words coming out of my mouth. Now I was raving on about the burners. For those unfamiliar with burners, back in our day we didn’t have nice pale-grey Rentokil bins with pale-pink lids that men in overalls and gloves and masks came to collect every other day; no, we had mini incinerators attached to the wall of each toilet cubicle. ‘I’m telling you, on a hot day, if they were downwind, girls just fainted. We had to step over their bodies …’ A hundred years of school history, and I chose to talk about the burners.
What a nightmare for the poor organiser of that dinner, such a lovely woman. I burnt with shame for months afterwards.
A couple of weeks after the centenary debacle I ran into an old friend, who introduced me to her nineteen-year-old daughter, who was studying to become a psychologist. I told them about the dinner and how I hadn’t seemed to be able to control what I was saying. The young up-and-coming psychologist became excited. ‘We’ve just been studying that sort of thing at college, and apparently what happens is when people get older their brain pushes onto the frontal lobe, which is where all your inhibition factors are, and loosens them up, and that’s why old people start swearing and saying what they think, so that’s probably what’s happening to you.’
Well, thank you, Little Miss Gen Y. Such comforting news.
* * *
My mother hated my comedy. I realise ‘hate’ is a strong word, but on one of the rare occasions when she said what she thought after seeing me do a routine on TV, ‘hate’ was the exact word she used.
The rational part of me accepted this situation. How could I possibly expect my mother, a woman born in 1924, raised in an extremely conservative Catholic family in a small country town, to approve of my
work? She didn’t think stand-up was a suitable profession for a lady. As I’ve mentioned, she hated swearing, especially when the expletives were uttered by women or, more specifically, by her daughter, or, even more specifically, by her daughter when standing alone at a microphone onstage. She also thought poorly of people telling personal stories to friends, yet alone telling them to Bert Newton on national TV. And as for failing in public, something she thought I managed to do with unbelievable aplomb: the concept was unbearable for her.
I told myself that parental approval was not a right. You couldn’t expect a human being to love and encourage what you did just because they’d given birth to you. Just ask Mrs Hitler or Mrs Pol Pot. Not that I’m suggesting that having a child who became a stand-up comic is the same as having a child who became a mass murderer, although I suspect that had I become the latter my mother’s reaction would have been much the same—a grim, stoic, silent acceptance of a disappointing and shameful situation. But deep down my mother’s disapproval of my work hurt and often made me angry. I know, I know: if I was reading this I’d be thinking the same thing. Oh, poor Denise. Boo hoo! What a hard life. Fancy having a mother who didn’t praise you for saying ‘fuck’ and telling stories about smoking vaginas onstage. No wonder she’s written a book about it. Such cruelty! It makes Angela’s Ashes read like a picnic.
The only time my mother ever saw me perform in my own show was in 2000. I had written Suburban Riot, and it was being shown as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Mum had heard that during the show I talked about her and the time the fires had come close to Greensborough, so she and her sister Noreen came to check it out.
I was performing in the Melbourne Town Hall. For those picturing the main hall, which seats fifteen hundred people, let me clarify: I was in the ‘cloakroom’, a small room that seats about a hundred.