by Paul O'Grady
He played me a raucous bump-and-grind number sung by Dorothy Loudon called ‘I’ve Got To Get Hot’, the very funny lament of an aspiring opera singer forced to support her ‘grey-haired mother’ by stripping.
‘How much?’
‘Twenty-five quid.’
‘Twenty-five quid!’
‘Well, it’s the only copy in London after all, and you have to admit that the number is guaranteed to bring the house down! So what do you think? Do we have a deal?’
Recklessly I’d hand over twenty-five pounds that I could ill afford, desperate to secure the number that was going to be the talk of the drag circuit at any price, unaware that Derek gave every drag-queen the same persuasive spiel.
‘Oh, before you go I’d like you to hear something else that you may be interested in. A truly fabulous album by Sandra Church – she played Gypsy in the original Broadway production, but then you know that. There’s some wonderful strip numbers on it, very you. Would you like to hear it?’
Fifty quid lighter but with the satisfaction of knowing that I was the proud possessor of some original numbers never before heard in the gay pubs of London (or so I thought), I made my way to a theatrical fabric shop to buy something knockout for the finale costumes. The solitary assistant who worked there was forever bunging me free feather boas, diamanté necklaces and yards of material. I don’t know why, he didn’t want anything in return – no quick fumble in the stock room, nothing – it was always a puzzle. I came to the conclusion that he either hated his employers or felt sorry for me, but whatever the reason I was only too happy to accept a bag of contraband in among my purchases. This time I’d bought some fabric that I’d seen in the window. It was a garish lime-green sateen and covered in a design of clefs and musical notes.
‘What the hell is that?’ Chrissie screamed when I got it home. ‘Couldn’t you find anything more hideous?’
I thought that it was interesting and unusual if nothing else.
‘It’s fluorescent,’ I protested.
‘Fluorescent! Jesus, like it needs any help to be seen.’
Within a month Chrissie had managed to turn out a set of beautifully made costumes on Anne’s antique Singer sewing machine. We no longer had a spare set of bed sheets as Chrissie had used them to make patterns.
‘Of course I’m used to using calico,’ he said, pinning half a sheet to my chest, ‘but I suppose this is what you get when you work with amateurs.’
‘Will these sheets be OK though?’ I asked him, ignoring the slight even though I knew he wasn’t far from the truth.
I was driven, a drag-queen-in-the-making possessed, and if Chrissie needed calico then I’d throw myself on the mercy of the little man in the fabric shop until I got the length, if you’ll pardon the expression, that Chrissie demanded. Being fitted for a costume by Chrissie was akin to torture. He’d stand you on a chair and insult you as he casually stuck pins in you as if you were a voodoo doll.
‘You haven’t got a curve on your body, you’re just straight up and down and if you want my honest opinion then I think you’d be better off sticking a bulb in your gob and standing in the corner with a lampshade on your head than traipsing around the stage of the Black Cap with a shape like that. No offence, Lil, but it breaks my heart to think that my beautiful couture gowns are going to be hanging off your skinny arse.
‘However,’ he went on smugly, ‘with my beautiful figure I could carry off a sack. Lots of men have told me that.’
‘I think you’ll find what they actually said was you should be carried off in a sack – and dumped, preferably in the river.’
This kind of Ugly-Sisteresque banter was the stuff of life to Chrissie. He thrived on it and I was aware that we were sounding exactly like Alistair Harlequeen and Tony Page that afternoon in Formosa Street in what now seemed a lifetime away.
‘Camp’ he simpered with an evil smirk, sticking a pin in my arm.
‘OW!’
‘Oh sorry, Lil. Did I catch you? It’s this sheeting, it’s wafer-thin. Bit like yourself.’
Chrissie was also a wind-up merchant par excellence but it was better not to rise to the bait as the mood might turn ugly. Then Chrissie would go off into one of his sulks, rocking back and forth on the end of his bed lost in a world of his own, when what I really wanted was him chained to the sewing machine and running up another couture gown.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to get you the proper stuff?’ I asked again. ‘I’m sick to death of hearing about bloody sheets.’
‘You don’t have to put yourself out, this’ll do just fine thank you very much. Listen, when I was inside I used to use newspaper.’
He realized that he’d said too much and to cover his embarrassment started fussing unnecessarily over a dart in the sheeting.
‘Have you been in prison then?’ I asked cautiously, not wanting him to clam up on me. Not that I need have worried.
‘Has Rose Kennedy got a black frock? Course I have.’
‘What were you in for?’
‘Oh, nothing much.’ He shrugged, feigning an air of nonchalance as he busied himself with his pins. ‘I nicked the polio box off the counter of Burton’s in Grange Road, got six months. I wouldn’t have minded but there was fuck all in it anyway, the miserable gets.’
Once the cat was out of the bag, Chrissie’s tales of prison life became legendary. Even if he was prone to gross exaggeration and you never really knew if he was spinning you a tale or even if he’d spent any time in nick whatsoever, he enjoyed playing the hardened con and he had a willing audience in me and Vera.
‘You wouldn’t believe what I’ve done for two Swan Vestas and a Park Drive,’ he’d brag, helping himself to one of your fags.
I spent hours listening to my ever-growing collection of LPs for suitable numbers and became totally engrossed in the process of editing them down and cutting songs together, obsessing until the joins were undetectable. It was all done on a music centre that I’d got on the HP from the electricity board around the corner. When finally I’d got together what I considered to be two strong twenty-minute shows we set about clumsily rehearsing them in Joyce’s flat.
Babs had let us use the Black Cap at first. We rehearsed in the afternoons when the bar was closed but I felt uncomfortable as the staff would watch us as they cleaned up and stocked the bar, offering suggestions and sniggering. Even Regina popped in one afternoon. ‘You need to use the hands more, darling,’ was his critical response to our lack of terpsichorean talent.
‘The hands are very expressive. Movement should be fluid and elegant,’ he drawled, rolling his flexible wrists and positioning his hand in the manner of a shop window mannequin to demonstrate. ‘But carry on, I’m sure it will be all right on the night.’
I preferred to rehearse in private so it was off to Joyce’s to annoy the neighbours below as we clumped around, devising some form of dance routine to ‘Lullaby Of Broadway’. I’d become friendly with a lot of the acts by now, in particular a young Liza Minnelli-obsessed drag queen called David Dale, the possessor of an incredibly mobile face that he could contort into a million expressions and a pair of rubber lips he could do the most extraordinary things with. David, or Doris as he was known to his friends, was a seemingly inexhaustible whirling dervish on stage. He didn’t just stand there moving his mouth like a goldfish gasping for air to whatever soundtrack was playing, he put his heart and soul into it. With Doris it really was a case of ‘Every Little Movement Has A Meaning All Its Own’ and, like me, he idolized Regina.
‘I’m grooming Miss Dale to be my protégé,’ Regina told me one evening in the Cap after I’d bought him a drink (‘Large brandy, darling’). ‘Rosie Lee is threatening to quit the act. Mrs Norris told her that it was undignified for a queen to be dragging up after she’s hit thirty, silly cow, and as it’s her thirtieth birthday soon I’ll be looking for a replacement.’
He paused to take a hefty slug of his brandy, sucking it through his tombstone teeth and then exh
aling loudly as if he’d just sipped petrol.
‘Between you and me, dahling, I think Miss Dale would be divine in Rosie’s part, don’t you?’
I wanted to shout that I’d be great in Rosie’s part but since I was commited to the Glamazons I silently knocked back my cider and kept my thoughts to myself, agreeing that David Dale would indeed be ideal for the job.
David was extremely inventive. He got a group of people together, including a young teenage girl, to perform a version of The Wizard of Oz and as well as playing the Cowardly Lion he choreographed, directed, got the tape together, designed and made most of the costumes and hats and was responsible for ringing round the pubs and clubs to get the bookings. He was also prone to throwing the odd hissy fit, as we all were, and there was many a drama and intrigue among the cast of The Wizard of Oz. I went up to Newcastle in the back of a white Ford Transit van with them to play a club called the Copacabana and ended up in bed with the Tin Man.
It was David who pointed me in the direction of Fox’s, a shop in Covent Garden that specialized in theatrical make-up. It was run by the indomitable Fred, who knew everything there was to know about slap. He it was who taught me how to glue three pairs of eyelashes together until they were the required length and thickness of a Lido showgirl’s. I practised getting the make-up right at home, caking it on until I was satisfied that I’d arrived at real drag queen slap, surprised and a little dismayed to find just how much it aged me.
I had no idea where to buy wigs until eventually I stumbled upon a small shop in King’s Cross. The range of colours was limited, mostly black and brown and the closest that they had to a blond was a silver grey, but I bought a handful and took them home to Colin, a hairdresser friend from Liverpool who now conveniently lived locally. He transformed them with a flick of a tail comb and a couple of cans of lacquer into something slightly more flattering and less like a bag full of dead rats.
As the great day of the Glamazons’ debut approached I could barely sleep or eat. We were having a full dress rehearsal in the front room of the flat a few days before when my interpretation of ‘I’m Still Here’ from Follies was annoyingly interrupted by a ring on the front-door bell. We instantly went into a blind panic as we always did when the doorbell rang. I peeped through the dirty net curtains to see a policeman on the steps.
‘It’s a copper,’ I hissed, sending Chrissie bolting for the safety of the bathroom. ‘It’s no point pretending we’re not in, he must’ve heard the music halfway up the street. Go and see what he wants, Vera.’
‘Why do I have to go?’ Vera quacked indignantly.
‘Cos you’re not in drag, that’s why.’
The bell rang again, only more persistently this time. Vera and I hopped up and down as if we were on hot coals, flapping our hands about and silently panicking.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, I’ll go, luv,’ Joyce announced, making for the front door.
The copper was a pro. He didn’t miss a beat at the sight of Joyce in a Bri-Nylon leopardskin halter-neck dress and black beehive wig, nor was he looking for Chrissie. He merely wanted to know if we had any idea whose car it was parked outside on the pavement.
Bank Holiday Monday had finally arrived. I was up at the crack of dawn and banging on the door of the Black Cap way before opening time to make sure I was ready to go on at one o’clock. Chrissie declined to help in the dressing room, declaring, ‘D’ya think Norman Hartnell hangs around to pull the Queen’s zips up? I don’t think so. Anyway, I want to watch from out front.’
Lozzy designated herself as dresser, wearing a white overall and a pincushion on her wrist as her badge of office. She was now living in a cosy little flat in Victoria Mansions on the South Lambeth Road. We’d tried out bits of the act at one of her regular parties before a conveniently inebriated and good-natured audience and Lozzy was eager to get involved. She loved showbiz, even if it was in a pub, and busied herself making lists and checking costumes. As I slowly unpacked my make-up, laying it all out in readiness on a hand towel the way I’d seen the pros do, I began to have serious self-doubt. What if we die on our arse? What if we are so abysmal the audience laugh us off the stage, or even worse hurl bottles and pint pots? I’d never show my face in public again. What the hell was I thinking of, arrogantly assuming that I was good enough to get up on the Black Cap stage, on a packed bank holiday no less, a premier date in any seasoned act’s diary, and perform for a paying public?
‘Would you like a drink? A whisky or a cider?’ Lozzy asked, interrupting for a moment my train of negative thoughts.
‘No thank you,’ I replied primly. Real pros never drank before a performance and I intended to start as I meant to go on. Joyce, on the other hand, had no such qualms and was busy quaffing a bottle of Martini.
‘For the nerves, luv,’ he offered apologetically.
The opening number was a military big band song from a show starring the two surviving Andrews Sisters called Over Here. I’d gone to Laurence Corner, a shop off the Euston Road that sold army surplus, and purchased two olive-green ladies’ jackets belonging to some branch of the American women’s armed forces, a couple of khaki skirts with matching shirts and ties and some smart GI’s hats to pin in the wigs. I was quite pleased with these purchases, having managed to clothe the opening number for next to nothing in what I considered to be two very smart and undoubtedly flattering outfits.
However, in the cold fluorescent light of the Black Cap’s dressing room my heart sank as I stared at our reflections in the mirror. Even though Colin had worked miracles with what little hair there was on the King’s Cross wigs, they still looked like a pair of National Health teasers, the kind that were given out to cancer patients who’d undergone chemo. We looked grotesque in them and while I would have won first prize in a ‘Pat Coombs as a clippie in On the Buses’ competition, Joyce, on the other hand, was a dead ringer for one of those stereotypical bull-dyke women’s prison officers frequently seen terrorizing the vulnerable in black and white American movies set in a women’s detention centre.
Apart from standing in the alley waiting to go on, rigid with fright as the we heard the DJ announce us, I have very little recollection of the performance. The pub was packed and the response was fairly respectable, nothing earth-shattering but at least they didn’t boo us off. As soon as we got home I collapsed on the bed. Having had quite a few drinks after the show, I was a bit pissed and down in the dumps as it had all been such an anticlimax. I hadn’t enjoyed it that much and felt in my heart of hearts that the act wasn’t at all special and we still had a long way to go. What we needed was something different, preferably funny, if we wanted to be noticed. As I dozed off to sleep the phone in the hall rang.
‘That was Babs,’ Vera said, coming in from answering it. ‘She said that the Dueragon Arms has been on the phone and they want to book you for tonight. Joyce is up for it if you are.’
Oh Christ. All I wanted to do was go to sleep.
‘Go on, you might as well, think of the money.’
Vera was right, it was stupid to turn good money down and wearily I dragged myself into the bathroom for the second shave of the day. The skin on my face was going to resemble a quarter of corned beef at this rate.
The Dueragon Arms in Homerton was a famous East End pub that had once been run by Gay Travers, an East End legend in his own right.
‘I do hope you’re glamorous,’ Mae, the current landlady, whined as we introduced ourselves. ‘We had the Harlequeens on last night. Fan-tas-tic! Took the roof off. You should see their costumes, must’ve cost thousands, all those feathers and beads … Are yours anything like that? I mean after all with a name like the Glamazons you sort of expect something … well, glamorous, don’t you?’
‘We’re a mixture of comedy and glamour, luv. We’ve got some beautiful finale costumes,’ Joyce lied with authority. ‘Wait till you see them.’
Mae didn’t seem very impressed when eventually we trotted out in the fluorescent lime-green sateen fishtai
l dresses, in fact I think she visibly flinched from the glare.
‘Well, thank you very much,’ she said later, handing over the thirty-five quid fee in the dressing room. ‘Don’t be put off by the reaction, it’s a very nice little act you’ve got, a bit gay but very nice. It’s just that it’s not the sort of thing that appeals to my punters.’
Really? And here’s me thinking that we’d gone down all right.
‘What my punters like is drag that’s either funny or looks like real women. Now take Lorei Lee, they don’t come any funnier and he looks fabulous, got a nice cleavage as well. And then there’s Terry Durham. Well, he’s got real breasts, a lovely pair they are, better than most women’s. He strips right down to a tiny g-string and a pair of tassels and then plays the accordion. Wonderful act.’
‘He wants to watch he doesn’t get pleats in his tits,’ I snapped, shoving costumes into my case. It was obvious from her tone that we wouldn’t be invited back so I saw no reason to keep up an air of polite gentility. I was tired, hungry and growing more irritable by the second and this patronizing drivel was getting on my nerves. It seemed that if you wanted to please Mae you had to jiggle a pair of tits with a bunch of beads and feathers hanging out of your bum.
On the way home in the taxi after I’d dropped Joyce off I sat and thought about what Mae had said. She was right. She had only confirmed my own suspicions that the act was boring and if we were to carry on then it was time to up our game. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
The next morning I was up bright and early to look after a family of children who wanted to know why my face was covered in glitter, but seemed satisfied with my explanation that I’d been clearing out a cupboard and had an encounter with an extremely sparkly Christmas tree. Thankfully this job was more or less nine to five, leaving me available for all the work that would soon be pouring in for the Glamazons.
I was hopeless at ringing round the pubs for work. It felt like begging, particularly when it came to haggling over the fee with a landlord who had no idea who you were or what you were like, and if it had been left up to me the Glamazons would never have worked again. Eventually Joyce took charge and managed to fill a few dates in an otherwise empty diary.
