Anything Goes

by John Barrowman

  It broke my heart to see her so tiny and so helpless and yet, on that day in August, she was also the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. From that day forward, Clare and I have always had a special bond with each other. Given what she went through in the first weeks of her life, I knew she was going to be a little fighter, and she still is. Even at three or four, if Clare didn’t want to do something I’d asked her to do, she’d scrunch up her nose and snort through it. It became a secret signal between us when she was growing up, and we still snort to each other on occasion. Clare’s more than capable of starting an argument in an empty house – add that to my, shall we say, slightly controlling nature, and the two of us can go at it like siblings sometimes.

  I was twenty when Clare was born and in a way we’ve grown up together. As a result, she’s as much a younger sister as she is my niece. Over the years, she’s also been my personal Barbie doll, willingly allowing me to send her all the cute girly stuff I see when I’m shopping. She admits this is a chore, but someone has to do it. When I need to talk to someone about something other than work, Clare is always game for a chat about trashy television shows – we both love programmes like Desperate Housewives – and we share a passion for shoes, bargains of any kind, TK Maxx and luggage.

  Over the years, I’ve taught all my nieces and nephews lots of important things: as many words as I know for ‘excrement’, a rich repertoire of cheeky songs, and an occasional mild obscenity. I mean, what else are uncles for? My nephew Andrew, my brother Andrew’s son, has even had the experience of hearing the wild scratching and snarling of the werewolf who wanders my street in London. The werewolf’s haunting of our Kensington-Chelsea neighbourhood began in 1981, when the flat a few doors down from ours became the set for the film An American Werewolf in London. When my brother and his family were over for a visit one time, we watched part of the movie. Guess what happened next? The werewolf began haunting the street, that very evening, right outside our door. My nephew Andrew, who was about four or five at the time, and I had to don some super-protective gear and march into the street in search of it.

  I’ve also tried to keep up the Barrowman family traditions, teaching my nieces and nephews how to pull pranks with a degree of seriousness, how to be silly even when you’re a grown-up and – probably my most important legacy – how to put on a damn good show.

  When I began to do pantos at Christmas, and returning to the US during the holiday season became impossible with my schedule, I flew the clan to Cardiff to celebrate. In the years before that, however, we always gathered at my parents’ house in Florida for a family Christmas and New Year celebration. There are lots of traditions surrounding this family event and one of them is that everyone has to come prepared to do a party piece.

  Carole can’t hold a tune in a Tupperware box, and although Kevin can, they will usually perform an ‘air band’ number to start the evening off. Over the years, they’ve produced an awesome Springsteen routine with Kevin on the best imaginary sax ever, a rousing version of the Dave Matthews Band’s ‘Ants Marching’, and I remember a year when they did the David Bowie/Bing Crosby version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ that would have brought tears to Bob Hope’s eyes. Seriously. Tears. They were awful that year.

  My brother Andrew’s children, who are considerably younger than Carole’s kids, naturally have limited experience of these parties, but when they have participated, they’ve often done dance numbers. Frankly, Andrew and Dot’s daughters, Yvonne and Bridgett, currently aged six and three respectively, are adorable doing just about anything they want.

  For many years, Scott always opted to be the designated photographer or the enthusiastic audience member during these events. But a few years ago, he was bitten by the Barrowman vaudeville bug and gave a performance worthy of the Royal Variety Show. Scott rehearsed for weeks before the holiday. On Hogmanay, usually the night we all perform, he belted out his interpretation of Glen Campbell’s ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ in an outfit comprising chaps, a sequinned shirt, a holster and a six-shooter.5 On any given night, Scott is only slightly better at holding a tune than Carole, but what he lacked in pitch he more than made up for in his choreography.

  After the opening acts, we always play a few rounds of charades, where my dad will get red in the face from trying to hold his tongue as he acts out a film title without reciting any of the dialogue, and my mum will stutter her way through sixty seconds of repeating the same gesture over and over and over again, and then get into a fit of giggles so that none of us have any clue what she was supposed to be doing in the first place. But who cares? My nephew Andrew can hold his own in these games, especially if he picks a footballer or a baseball player from the ‘sorting hat’. However, no matter how good they all are, I am most definitely the ‘king of charades’.

  Even if I say so myself – and, of course, I am saying so myself – I’m an amazing charades player. On the other hand, if we play Trivial Pursuit, Carole, Kevin and Scott must never be on the same team. If we have a game of Scrabble, we just don’t let Carole or Dot take part at all, and if we play cards, Kevin needs to be watched very carefully.

  He’s a shark. Kevin’s parents Bud and Lois Casey, who live in Minnesota, are the king and queen of cards. One summer evening, when Scott and I and Scott’s nephew Gabriel spent a few days at Bud and Lois’s lake home in northern Wisconsin, Lois, who’s a feisty broad, almost karate-chopped my fingers when I tried to take back a card I’d already played during an intense game of ‘Nickel Nickel’. It’s a game that can turn even mild-mannered individuals, like myself, into raving lunatics. It was worth it, though: I won 85 cents that night.

  At a certain point during the Barrowman New Year’s Eve celebrations, when our creative juices are pumping, to say nothing of the vodka tonics, it’s time for the main event. Clare, Turner and I disappear to wardrobe (when we’re in Florida, it’s my mum and dad’s walk-in closet), where the three of us begin our transformation. Usually, Turner and I get in drag and Clare dresses as a man. If we’re lucky, we talk my dad into dragging it up too. Once, he dressed as a bodacious blonde thing, scooted out the back patio doors, re-entered through the front door, and burst into the party. A couple of neighbours at the bash, who did not know my dad very well at that time, thought he was a loose woman friend of the Barrowmans who’d crashed the celebration. A couple of the men flirted shamelessly with her/him.

  Another year, when Turner was about six, Clare and I found a plastic mould of boobs and a big belly at a costume store. We dressed Turner up as a slutty-looking Dolly Parton.

  Was that adjective redundant?

  Turner then recited a dirty ditty as he pointed to his fake boobs and his plastic booty. The poem he recited went something like this: ‘Milk, milk, lemonade. Turn the corner, fudge is made.’

  Turner was the highlight of that year’s performances. In fact, over the years, Turner has been primped, painted and puffed more times than I can remember, and he’s worn more wigs than Marie Antoinette. Because Turner was the youngest in the family for a long time, and because he had a bit of the performer in his genes, too, he was often the one whom Clare and I most ‘dolled up’.

  Other than me, that is, and I still love to drag it up; I have done all my life. In 1997, I was performing as Che in the Oslo concert production of Evita. Between performances one evening, my co-star Jacqui Scott dressed up as Che, I slipped into Eva Perón’s clothes, and we put on a terrific performance for the cast and crew.

  In the summer of 2007, during Turner’s annual visit to the UK, he and I were driving back to Cardiff one night after recording The Friday Night Project, where I’d dressed in drag as Davina McCall, and then as the Big Brother housemate Ziggy, for a parody of the Channel 4 reality show. Turner and I were reminiscing about all the years we’d spent with red lips, stuffed boobs, big hair and big heels at Hogmanay, when he said, with all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, ‘You know, Uncle John, I’m straight, and if you think about all the times when I was a kid that I’ve
been dressed up in women’s clothing and made to sing and dance, I’ve got to be proof that you can’t turn someone gay.’

  I laughed so hard I almost drove right through the toll barrier at the Welsh border.

  At another New Year celebration, Clare dressed up as Sonny to my Cher and we did a fabulous rendition of ‘I’ve Got You, Babe’. A special favourite of mine is the year Clare, Turner and I did a kind of manic version of the Pointer Sisters song, ‘I’m So Excited’. The three of us made theirs look like a geriatric version. The year before that, Clare dressed up as Tony Orlando, and Turner and I were the backing singers, the lovely Dawn. We performed ‘Knock Three Times’ and had the family in stitches. I think that may have been the year the performing bug bit Scott.

  Half the fun of these performances was in the process, which always began with a shopping spree to find the perfect shoes and accessories. Clare, Turner and I didn’t always have to hit the high street to find these. Over the years, I’ve accumulated wigs and other sundry costumes from my professional life, and bits and pieces that I’ve bought from my TV shows usually end up in our acts. Clare once performed with a purse and shoes worn by Victoria Principal in Titans, while Turner once donned a sparkling halter dress that Mariel Hemingway wore in Central Park West. He looked fabulous, dahling.

  In fact, in a life-imitates-art-imitates-life kind of moment,6 I gave my mum an evening dress that Victoria wore in Titans while playing my screen mum, and my mum – real one, that is – wore it one Christmas Eve. She looked fabulous too, dahling.

  My mum and dad have shared in my success in other ways, too. They’ve both chatted with Bob Hope and Kirk Douglas at a concert I gave in LA, Red, Red, Rose; they’ve had dinner with Dame Diana Rigg in London after a show; and they consider Elaine Paige a special friend.

  Performing may be one of the dominant passions that’s shaped my life, but the importance of my family and the ability to share my success with all of them is an equally strong drive. I want to give them the world – and so when I can, I do. Over the years, Scott and I have taken our nieces and nephews on trips that they might not normally have had a chance to take. For example, soon after Gabriel’s dad died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1997, we took Gabriel, who was then seven years old, on an American road trip with us.7

  The holiday included some time in Las Vegas. While there, we stayed at the hotel New York, New York, but they wouldn’t let our dogs into the room, so we rented a room next door in the LaQuinta Inn just for our canines, Penny and Lewis.8 One morning, we told Gabriel we were going there to walk the dogs and he could order whatever he wanted for breakfast. When we came back, what we saw was like a vision from a Tim Burton movie.

  Gabriel was sitting in front of this huge hotel window, which looked out on to an amazing roller coaster. Two trays piled high with food sat on the table in front of him. He’d ordered everything on the menu from steak and eggs to pancakes with cream, as well as sausages, bacon and a rich sticky selection of buns and doughnuts. He was having the time of his life and he finished everything on the trays. As you might have guessed, he was ill for the rest of the day.

  When Scott and I came back from walking the dogs, we stood at the hotel-room door for the longest time, quietly observing Gabriel. We got such a rush of pleasure as we did, because there was something very poignant about this wee boy, who had just lost his dad, watching the roller coaster as if it was his childhood whizzing around in front of him while he enjoyed every last mouthful of food.

  On this same cross-country road trip, the three of us visited what I think was one of the best off-road stops I’ve ever made. In a small town called Alliance in the plains of Nebraska, an artist, Jim Reinders, has recreated Stonehenge using rusting American cars. This Carhenge, as it’s called, is not the only car sculpture on the site, but it’s the most impressive. Over thirty cars are arranged in a wide circle, with the pillar stones formed by vehicles stood on end in pits, with other cars welded across the top. The dimensions and placement of the cars are exactly the same as the real Stonehenge. The keystone at Carhenge is a classic Cadillac. I’d have to think a bit on which one is the more interesting – the real one or the kitsch?

  On that same trip, Gabriel, Scott and I travelled along part of the Oregon Trail, which pioneers from the 1840s and 1850s followed up into the northwest of the United States. At Guernsey, Wyoming, the place known as the ‘hub of the Oregon Trail’, we were able to examine the deep ruts made by hundreds of Conestoga wagons. But that wasn’t the coolest part of the day. (I know it’s hard to believe it gets cooler than staring at ruts in the rocks, but hold on, it did.) As the pioneers lumbered past a limestone cliff on their route west, many stopped and carved their names into the limestone. The three of us were able to read their imprints after almost two hundred years.9

  In the classic 1952 western High Noon, Gary Cooper walks up a hill to a white picket-fenced graveyard. During this trip, we visited a graveyard that could have been the set for High Noon and hundreds of other westerns. I even had to dart away from a huge rattlesnake slithering its way across the parched ground. Get the picture, pilgrims?

  The best part of having lots of nieces and nephews is that there will always be children in the family for Scott and me to spoil. We can’t wait until Andrew’s children are old enough to go on adventures with us too.

  A year after our trip with Gabriel, Scott and I took Clare and Turner on a holiday to the Sequoia National Park in California, at the southern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I think the park is a natural wonder of the world. Amazingly, until a law was passed in 2006, it was under threat from the Bush administration, which wanted to make it legal to farm the ancient, gorgeous giant trees. But I digress. Never happen again.10

  In 1998, Scott and I took Clare, then almost ten, seven-year-old Turner, and the dogs, Penny and Lewis, and travelled through the Sequoia National Park. On the way, we stopped at Kaweah Lake and Three Rivers, where we shot the rapids – and almost lost Turner in the current. Almost, mind, because like me when I was a child, he has a habit of coming back. Later, the four of us climbed to the top of the mountain at the Giant Sequoia National Monument to see the view, which was spectacular.

  Both Clare and Turner had taken smaller road trips with Scott and me before, so they were prepared for lots of silliness. For example, on a different trip, while we were driving back from Disneyworld in Florida, I suddenly realized we were driving on petrol fumes. It was Scott, of course, who’d forgotten to fill the tank. I dropped the car into neutral. I could see the gas station calling to us in the distance and it was all downhill. Nevertheless, we were still yards away when the car began to slow.

  ‘Emergency flapping!’ I yelled, and, as if we had all practised the manoeuvre, each of us opened a door and began flapping it back and forth.11 We made it into the petrol station on our own wing power.

  One of the reasons Turner was especially excited about this trip to Sequoia was because I’d told him that we might be staying at a couple of fancy hotels – and fancy hotels often leave chocolate on your pillow at night. On our first evening, Turner came rushing into his room, only to find a wee pile of poo on his pillow. I’ve no idea how it got there, but as the song from the musical episode of Scrubs suggests, ‘everything comes down to poo.’12 Until he leaned in close, Turner thought it was his chocolate treat.

  When we reached the Sequoia National Park, we left the van near a campsite and decided to hike for a while. Signs were posted everywhere warning of black bears, telling tourists how to protect themselves against an attack, and alerting people about the dangers of exposed food and neglected garbage. Bears, you know, are smarter than the average campers and can recognize coolers and backpacks bearing jam rolls. Four or five German students had pitched tents just off the hiking trail and we watched as they finished up their picnic lunch and bundled their packs into very high-tech-looking metal containers. We chatted to them for a few minutes, and that was how we knew they were German, in case you were wonde
ring.

  Afterwards, we took a few pictures of each of us standing under the General Sherman Tree, one of the oldest and biggest in the park. Five bucks if you know who General Sherman was. Kidding – only Turner gets to guess.

  We were heading back towards our van when I saw a shadow off to my right.

  ‘Don’t move,’ I whispered urgently, grabbing Turner’s arm. ‘I saw a bear.’

  Clare looked up at me, terrified. ‘Where?’

  ‘Near the tree, directly behind Scott.’

  ‘What should we do?’ said Turner, edging behind me.

  ‘Is it in its bluff stance?’ asked Scott.

  Now, let me pause here to point out one of the differences between Scott and me. I see a bear and want to run like hell. Scott sees a bear and wants to know if it’s in its ‘bluff stance’.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Clare asked.

  ‘It means he may not attack us,’ Scott replied.

  ‘Who are you?’ I yelled. ‘Doctor fucking Doolittle?’

  ‘He’s moving,’ said Scott, suddenly grabbing Clare’s arm and shoving her back on to the trail.

  ‘Run!’

  Clare and Turner shot down the trail towards the van so fast they left cartoon speed lines in the air. Scott and I sprinted behind them. When we passed the Germans in their tents, I screamed maniacally, and in my biggest West End voice, ‘Bear!’

  They scrambled from their tents as if the bear was inside the space with them, abandoned their camp and ran off, flapping wildly, into the trees. Clare got to the van first, threw the door open, and she and Turner hurled themselves inside. Seconds later, Scott and I reached the van and climbed breathlessly on to the front seats.

  Clare looked at the red button blinking on the video camera. After a beat, she said, ‘There was no bear, was there, Uncle John?’