by Jeff Apter
A similar mishap occurred during his Perth trip. He arrived on 2 February, as per his contract, only to discover that he’d been expected the day before, to attend a charity barbecue.
‘Where have you been, Johnny?’ a reporter snapped on his arrival.
Johnny was lost; it was only when he read the newspaper the next day that he learnt about his supposed ‘snub’.
‘I had no idea what anybody was talking about,’ an understandably defensive Farnham said. ‘They were all accusing me of arriving late, but as far as I was concerned I was there right on time.’
Johnny offered up yet another unnecessary apology. Anything to keep the peace. Being King of Pop had its disadvantages: Johnny was under the microscope.
With the help of the ever-present Sambell, Johnny spent much of 1970 consolidating his place at the top of the pile; it was all about the work. He started hosting a recurring TV spot called Johnny Farnham’s Revolution, appeared regularly on In Melbourne Tonight, and released another album – his third, Looking through a Tear – in late July; it sold 50,000 copies – a gold record. Happening ’70, which Ross D. Wyllie hosted in the wake of Uptight, dedicated a four-hour special to Johnny, in September the King of Pop crown was placed atop his blond head for the second year running, and ‘Comic Conversation’, one of his better singles, was released in November, just days before another Channel 0 TV special, The World of Johnny Farnham.
Looking Through a Tear contained two Farnham originals, ‘What Can I Do’ and ‘Two’, something of a revelation. But the bulk of the LP was existing hits (‘One’, ‘Raindrops’) and cautiously chosen covers. Sambell was no great advocate of Johnny’s original songs; he found them boring. Once, in a drunken rage, he smashed Johnny’s guitar, as if to say, ‘Don’t bother with this’ – not quite the vote of support Johnny had hoped for. How could he escape being seen as some sort of human jukebox, a singer of other people’s songs, when his own manager rejected his songs? (It’s not widely known that Johnny wrote the B-side to ‘Sadie’, a song titled ‘In My Room’. He performed it at least once on a Channel 9 soundstage, surrounded by a team of dancers who appeared to be listening to a completely different song, throwing themselves about the set like whirling dervishes. Johnny, meanwhile, sang his heart out.)
A spot in Charlie Girl, a hit musical from London’s West End that was opening in Australia in 1971, was Johnny’s next engagement. But first Johnny, along with Sambell and Ian Meldrum, travelled to the UK. Johnny needed to audition for the show’s West End producers, while Sambell was trying to drum up some enthusiasm about Australia’s biggest pop star in EMI’s London HQ. What ensued was more the Darryl and Molly show, with Johnny a bemused, sometimes annoyed, onlooker.
First point of business for Johnny was to read for the part of Joe, Charlie Girl’s young romantic lead, with the show’s director, 62-year-old expat Aussie Freddie Carpenter. Carpenter had worked with such greats as Noël Coward and Danny La Rue and had been treading the boards – as dancer, choreographer and director – since his stage debut way back in Melbourne in 1924. He was a veteran, a ‘lovely old chap’, in Johnny’s words, although Carpenter’s ill-fitting wig was a bit of a distraction. It kept slipping about his head as he spoke. Maybe it was too much of a distraction, because Johnny fluffed his lines the first time around.
‘Can I try again?’ he pleaded.
A second read was unheard of, especially for stage novices like Johnny, but Carpenter understood the lad’s marquee value back in Oz, and acquiesced. Johnny nailed the reread and the part was his.
Yet any joy Johnny felt at the opportunity was gradually eroded by the bickering between Sambell and Meldrum, which had begun pretty much as soon as their Singapore Airlines 707 left Tullamarine, and intensified as the trip wore on.
‘They were like two old ladies,’ said a dismayed Johnny.
At one stage Johnny pulled their rental car over on the side of the road and grabbed the squabbling pair by their collars. ‘If you two don’t shut up,’ Johnny roared, ‘I’ll throttle the both of you.’
After one long day, Johnny decided he needed a bath. He luxuriated in the tub, having finally escaped the turbulent twosome. Or so he thought. After closing his eyes and shutting out the rest of the world for several minutes, Johnny was given a rude shock. Meldrum jumped into the bath to join him.
‘I was gobsmacked. I got out pretty quick, got my towel, let him have the dirty water. It was a pretty unpleasant experience,’ recalled Farnham.
Johnny and Meldrum would go on to share many things – stages, awards, breakdowns, breakthroughs, a strong friendship that spanned six decades – but this was the first and last time they shared a bathtub.
Safely back in Oz, Johnny went into rehearsals for the show, which was due to open in late September 1971 at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne and run for nine shows a week. ‘It’s flippin’ well marvellous!’ proclaimed a print ad for the show. Charlie Girl’s producer was Kenn Brodziak, a wily operator best known as promoter for The Beatles’ 1964 Australian tour. He’d seen them in the UK in 1963 and spotted their magic straight away, quickly booking them for their first (and only) Australian visit. The 16-date tour cost Brodziak all of £2500, an absolute pittance. By the time they made it to Oz, The Beatles were being offered 50 times that amount to tour America. ‘So you’re the one got us at the old price, are you?’ George Harrison chuckled when he met Brodziak.
In a wild coincidence, Johnny had met Brodziak before – when he was apprenticed to Ken Foster, he’d worked at Brodziak’s apartment.
Johnny, meanwhile, had a new distraction in his life.
It was her legs that got him first. Johnny was deep into rehearsals for Charlie Girl, which were being staged in an old church hall on Batman Avenue in the city, when he spotted Jillian Billman, a 16-year-old dancer from Glenroy. Though six years younger than Johnny, she had already performed in the chorus lines for Casino and Promises Promises. With her long dark hair and doe-like eyes, it was hard not to spot Jillian. She was gorgeous. Johnny was lovestruck. And those legs …
‘I was a bit of a leg man,’ he admitted, ‘and she had great pins, so I just gravitated to her.’
Johnny had not yet had a serious romance in his life, although he had more than his fair share of public and prominent admirers, including Olivia Newton-John and one of Sir Reg Ansett’s daughters. A long-legged dancer from Bandstand arrived unexpectedly at a Farnham family Easter get-together and stayed for the weekend. He’d also been linked with April Byron, a sexy, raven-haired Adelaide-based singer. And of course there were the occasional hotel stowaways – more prevalent when he played shows out of town. Those country girls really knew how to let their hair down. But Jillian was a different matter altogether. Johnny was in love.
Jillian was also immediately drawn to Johnny.
‘I love bottoms,’ she laughed. And she certainly took note of Johnny’s pert derrière as he went through his paces at rehearsals.
But his name and celebrity were lost on Jillian, who’d been almost completely focused on her dancing career for the past couple of years. ‘Sadie’ meant nothing to her: she didn’t know the song. A fellow member of the cast produced a photo of Johnny, whispering something about him being a big pop star. Jillian knew him only as the one with the ‘cute bum’. ‘Shame he’s gay,’ she told her friends.
Despite their mutual admiration they kept a polite distance until one day, during rehearsals, Jillian was struggling with the rusty door to the toilet, which was at the back of the church hall. A chivalrous Johnny came to her rescue, kicking the door open. He smiled and went back to work. Finally, a connection.
As the cast got even further into rehearsals, they moved base, relocating to Her Majesty’s. There, Jillian would arrive each day to find a single red rose on her dressing-room table. Sometimes there’d be some biscuits, or a hot chocolate. Small but heartfelt gestures from Johnny. Jillian’s mind was changed: maybe Johnny wasn’t gay after all.
Producer Bro
dziak could be strict. He drafted a memo that banned dancers from fraternising with the cast (which also included expat British comic Derek Nimmo and West End star Anna Neagle). As opening night grew closer, Jillian was summoned to the producer’s office, and directed to stop talking to Johnny. Immediately.
‘If you don’t,’ the producer warned, ‘I’ll fire you.’
‘Oh yeah, really?’ Johnny responded when Jillian told him.
Johnny stormed into Brodziak’s office, all red-hot fury, in a rare display of assertiveness. ‘If she goes,’ he insisted, ‘I go.’
Brodziak may have been tough, but he was no fool. He chose to let is pass. After all, Johnny was a surefire guarantee of bums on seats. And Charlie Girl was a tough gig: there were six evening shows and two weekend matinees, so there was no point in losing one of his principals this close to opening night. After the Melbourne run, there was a season booked in Auckland, beginning in May 1972; it was a long haul. And he admired the young guy, a kid really, who was willing to stand up for himself.
Brodziak’s pragmatism paid off: the show was a hit.
In a curious footnote, during the run of Charlie Girl Farnham came to the attention of ASIO – for the first and probably last time. On 26 March 1972, Aboriginal activists announced that Johnny was going to play a charity gig to raise funds for the ‘tent embassy’, which had set up base in front of Canberra’s Parliament House in January as a protest against Prime Minister Billy McMahon’s refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights. This was way out of character for Farnham and it’s unclear if he actually agreed to the appearance. Sambell rejected all requests for Johnny to align himself with anything vaguely political or controversial, seeing it as bad for his boy’s public image. And there’s no record of Johnny gigging in Canberra at this time, so it seems that if the activists did reach out to Johnny, he didn’t perform in the end. It’s unclear how deeply ASIO explored his activities, but Farnham’s name appeared in a report unearthed in 2012, which documented a 1972 student meeting where plans for the charity gig were mentioned. ‘The singer of hits including “Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)” came to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1970s as a potential supporter of the Aboriginal tent embassy, which the spy agency feared could have been a front for a Maoist-led, armed overthrow of the Australian government,’ stated the 2012 report, disclosed by Fairfax’s Andrew Taylor.
Farnham has never spoken about the event. But he did put in an appearance, also while in Charlie Girl, at the far more ASIO-friendly Night of the Stars, a fundraiser for Freedom for Hunger, put on at Dallas Brooks Hall, Melbourne, in September 1971. Also appearing that night were irreverent Brits Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Around this time, Johnny made his second promo appearance for TAA, but this time he was not just given a credit, he was the star. It was a relentlessly upbeat, almost frenetic TV promo, spruiking the airlines’ ‘friendly people doing their thing the friendly way’. Trailed by an ever-present camera, Farnham was chirpier than a chipmunk as he burst into a sprint inside the airport terminal, waving and smiling every which way. This led to an all-in dance routine on the tarmac – Johnny mixing it with mechanics, hosties and passengers – before he finally found his window seat and kicked back, reminding everyone how ‘you get a little more the friendly way’ as his plane disappeared over the horizon. All of this in a touch under 30 seconds of screentime.
Johnny fast became a go-to guy for advertisers, spruiking everything from Sunblest bread – ‘Use your loaf,’ Johnny suggested, ‘say Tip Top Sunblest’ – to Bushells tea. He was now in every kitchen of Australia.
The appeal of a pop idol, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, diminished greatly when – heaven forbid – they met the love of their lives and the relationship became public knowledge. Beatle John Lennon had suffered this fickle backlash twice: first when he married Cynthia Powell, his college girlfriend, in 1962, then again – and even more feverishly – when he married Japanese artist Yoko Ono seven years later. Elvis Presley fans were mortified when the King wed Priscilla Beaulieu in 1967. Closer to home, Johnny O’Keefe’s marriage to his first wife, Marianne Renate, at the height of his success in 1958, radically altered the way his fans saw him. The crowds of girls that once gathered on the nature strip of O’Keefe’s house faded faster than you could say, ‘Do you take this woman …’ If you were a hormonally charged teenager, why bother? There were other, unattached pop stars in the ocean.
In 1971 Johnny Farnham wasn’t married – not yet, anyway – but Darryl Sambell understood only too well the potential dangers of Johnny’s relationship becoming public. The screams would fade; the allure would be gone. Johnny would become untouchable. Taken. The Army had stolen Normie Rowe – Sambell had met with influential people in Canberra to ensure the same didn’t happen to Johnny – and he wasn’t going to let some dancer ‘steal’ Australia’s latest pin-up boy. It was a potential career killer – his fans were besotted with him. (‘I was in love with Johnny Farnham,’ read a typical fan letter, ‘he was my first “boyfriend”.’).
If Johnny was going to date Jillian, what he needed was a ‘beard’, someone to distract the hungry media, keep them off the scent of the real story. Lesley Shaw, a producer at Uptight, had gotten to know Johnny and she became a go-between to keep the press off the trail of this hot new romance. Reporters were confused: if Johnny was going out with the dancer they’d heard whispers about, why had he been seen in public with Shaw? It was a little bit complicated, however, because Lesley was actually attracted to Johnny but he made it clear he had feelings only for Jillian. Still, Lesley provided ‘cover’ when Johnny wanted to step out with Jillian; she even helped him when he needed saving from Sambell’s wild parties, which happened more than once. Johnny wasn’t comfortable with the more over-the-top behaviour he witnessed at Darryl’s place.
Sambell could be overbearing.
‘Where are you going tonight?’ he’d demand of Johnny.
‘I’m going out with Lesley,’ Johnny would tell him. But Sambell knew something big was brewing between Johnny and Jillian, and he didn’t like it.
Ian Meldrum said that Sambell was ‘possessive and obsessive’ about Johnny, and this was becoming more obvious by the day. On the surface, it seemed like a crush – who wouldn’t develop feelings for a young guy as pretty as Johnny? – but it was a tricky thing to add to the mix of a business partnership. It seemed as though Sambell was hung up on keeping Jillian away from Johnny. And clearly he disliked all the attention Johnny was giving his new love. He was jealous.
There were flashpoints, clear signs that all was not well between Sambell and Farnham. Johnny, hardly the most physical of men, threw a rare punch at his manager when Sambell referred to Jillian as a ‘slut’, an insult that would have dire ramifications. (Johnny later said he could forgive just about anything from Sambell, ‘but not his treatment of Jillian’.) Jillian herself stood up to a verbally abusive Sambell during a barbecue on the Yarra. When Johnny and Jillian planned a quiet getaway on Brampton Island, Sambell got the news and arranged for a reporter from TV Week to ‘visit’, which forced Jillian to hastily leave the island.
During Charlie Girl, producer Brodziak was forced to intervene when he felt that Sambell was overworking Johnny, not necessarily to maintain his public profile, but to keep him at a distance from his new girlfriend. Sambell denied this, naturally, when challenged by Brodziak, but it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. Sambell had already lost The Masters Apprentices; now it seemed he was on shaky ground with Farnham. He was letting his emotions intrude upon business. Not smart.
But Sambell was relentless: some nights Johnny and Jillian would be at Farnham’s South Yarra flat when the phone would ring or there’d be a knock on the door. It was Darryl. It was always Darryl. The courting couple were forced to hide out at the apartment of a friend of Johnny’s, Geoff Reynolds. Or sometimes they’d go down to the St Kilda marina and take off in the small boat Johnny had moored there.
‘We’d go out and cuddle for hours,’ said Johnny.
The Farnham–Sambell alliance was showing cracks. Even the racehorse Johnny and Sambell co-owned, a grey mare named Seascape, ran last at its first two outings. Surely this was a bad omen.
There were other more public problems: Johnny’s three latest singles, ‘Acapulco Sun’, ‘Baby, Without You’ (a duet with Allison Durbin) and ‘Walking the Floor on My Hands’, released between May and November 1971, barely grazed the Top 40. The King of Pop was being overtaken by the likes of new kids Daddy Cool, pin-up Russell Morris and pop sirens Colleen Hewett and Olivia Newton-John (whose ‘Banks of the Ohio’ was a worldwide smash). The lustre on the King’s crown was starting to fade.
‘Sambell’s not doing right by you,’ EMI’s Cliff Baxter told Johnny. The label boss thought Johnny could do better if he and producer David Mackay co-managed him.
Johnny wasn’t having it; he defended Sambell. Despite everything, Johnny was loyal to his manager; after all, this was the man who got him started, who believed in him. And loyalty was paramount to Johnny.
He was shocked that Baxter could be so upfront.
‘You can’t say that,’ Johnny said. ‘You can’t talk to me like that.’
But it was clear that time was just about up on the relationship that had transformed a plumber’s apprentice into the nation’s biggest star.
5
WEDDING BELL BLUES
Several months into their relationship, the bond between Johnny and Jillian was profound; he’d never felt like this before. In mid-1972 Johnny approached his Charlie Girl co-star, Englishman Derek Nimmo, to discuss his feelings for Jillian.
‘Why don’t you marry the girl?’ Nimmo asked. It was clear that Johnny was deeply in love; Blind Freddy could see that.
