The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  You still have feelings about that?

  You betcha. But I genuinely appreciate how well and benevolently they tolerated my prickliness. Looking back now, I realize I was really struggling. For example, it was really weird to have such a novel perception of myself – created largely through others. Apparently I was some kind of a phenomenon. I discovered this because people said extraordinary things to me at the time. They said, ‘I’ve never seen a pretty girl being funny before.’ Seriously? Sometimes this would even be posed as a question in the press: ‘But can an attractive woman really be funny?’ That really surprised – and insulted – me. After all, I was being funny, wasn’t I? Well, I was doing my best. I didn’t even think I was particularly pretty; in fact, I always found fault with my appearance. I mean, I understood that what I was doing was new and slightly threatening, but I resented the question. My personal comedy heroines were Lucille Ball and Goldie Hawn – both beautiful, funny women – so I certainly didn’t think there was anything unusual about me. Well, perhaps it was new for Britain at that time.

  I’m wondering . . . now that you understand how traumatic it is for the mind when a person rockets to public attention, are you able to reflect about some of the feelings you were having at the time and put them in that context?

  Oh yes . . . I now recognize them as par for the curse – wow, Freudian slip, I meant ‘course’. But in a way fame is a curse, because it’s rather a hollow victory. While appreciating the good things fame can bring, one also tends to maintain private terror – that it will go away, that you’ll be ‘found out’ as unworthy of it, and that the real person you know yourself to be deep inside can never match up to the scintillating personage others now think you are. I knew, for example that I was personally nowhere near as funny as I was on NTNON, but somehow strangers seemed to expect that I would be. ‘Go on, make me laugh!’ was what they seemed to demand, whether that was on the street, in a cab, or in a public ladies’ room. And the embarrassment! I was once trying to avoid the stares in a doctor’s waiting room when a nurse came in and very publically handed me a small, clear bottle ‘Miss Stephenson? The doctor would like a urine sample.’ ‘Me too,’ I quipped. Brazening it out, I waved the bottle at my wide-eyed fellow patients. ‘Any takers?’

  You made the best of it on that occasion, but it can’t have been easy – all over again, you became acutely aware of people’s high expectations of you . . . That has historically had a negative effect on you, hampering your ability to be productive . . .

  And of course, I wasn’t the only one who had that problem. One day Mel Smith turned up for filming in a state of total panic and announced that, for the first time ever, he’d been asked to give an after-dinner speech – but he had nothing prepared. He had to face this group of 250 Barclays Bank managers that very evening so, in between scenes, the four of us sat crouched over a paraffin heater in a make-up van, desperately trying to think of a decent joke or two. As the day wore on, Mel became more and more terrified – because nothing much materialized from any of us. It struck me as being highly ironic that four people who were supposed to be among the top British comedy-makers were unable to think of a single thing. We were all trying to remember every joke we’d ever heard – even really stupid stuff from our school days. ‘Knock knock . . . ?’ It was sooo pathetic.

  But being in a hit show at the BBC was fantastic, and I was terribly lucky to be a part of it. Really – that’s not just a PR line. And it got me some of the attention I most wanted; Billy called me after I did a sketch in which I parodied pop singer Kate Bush (‘Oh England . . . my leotard . . .’) and told me he thought I was very talented. Wow. From a man I’d never seen perform but the people I was in competition with thought was a comic genius! That meant a great deal to me. Of course, I could be cynical now and tell myself he just really fancied me in that leotard . . .

  Pamela! You’re way too harsh with yourself . . .

  Really? I thought it was Billy I was being harsh with . . . But anyway, my husband’s leotard fetish aside, four series of NTNON, several records, plus a stage version of the show called Not In Front Of The Audience truly launched me as a comedian in the UK. It wasn’t easy and I remember how nerve-wracking it was to perform live every week with so little preparation. But, then again, I’d survived worse.

  So, in many ways, your early trauma and the survival skills you developed to deal with it really helped you to handle difficult situations you subsequently faced – both personal and professional. In fact, one could say they contributed to your success . . . ?

  Well, yes. I do now see myself as a survivor, but it wasn’t always like that. I have mainly seen myself a bit like a racing driver who is not quite ready for the race she’s in, gripping the steering wheel and hanging on for all she’s worth. At any moment, she could lose control of the car and it could skid into a corner. Frankly, I still struggle with that. Will I ever be free?

  Chapter Eight

  KING OF COMEDY KINDA LINGERS

  Consistently being on the edge as you describe, compelled to place yourself in danger, is not a comfortable way to live – do you ever see respite looming?

  Ahh . . . I’m always grasping for it . . .

  Yes . . . I watch myself doing it over and over again, but feel powerless to stop it. For example, I was in Fiji a couple of years ago. Now, if you’re going to face destruction in the path of a tropical cyclone, it would be nice if they took the trouble to name it. Serious storms I’ve read about in newspapers – and even the few I’ve faced before – were respectfully called ‘Hurricane Francis’, ‘Arlene’ or ‘Todd’. But sitting on an alarmingly low-lying Fijian atoll, constantly ducking flying coconuts is particularly upsetting when the aggressor is simply known as ‘Nineteen P’. Waiting out weather of any kind has always had limited appeal. As I stare at the boiling sea, protectively clutching my fourth cup of rain-infused tea, an irresistible idea forms.

  Idiodynamism – the tendency of an idea to become action – is my bête noire. Determinedly, I stride to the edge of the water, wrestle an ocean kayak from its wooden holster and launch it into the waves. I grab the paddle and make a dive for the middle of the plastic vessel – just as it is upended by a vicious wave. I hang on stubbornly (they don’t sink easily) and manage to right it. With my body finally centred in the canvas seat, I strike away from shore. Adrenaline – oh yeah! That’s what I’m talking about! Perhaps it’s what I really live for. Suddenly I’m excited, inspired, challenged. Out of the corner of my eye I see a local man gesticulating furiously. He’s trying to wave me back, while another concerned person is running along the jetty with a life jacket in hand. I laugh at their earnestness; they don’t know me. They see a middle-aged, crazy woman, but I know who I am: a perfectly sensible, elated, extreme risk-taker. This part of the South Pacific Ocean is choppier than I imagined, and I seem to have hit a cross-current. I have a sober moment of abject fear, but then I tell myself I’ve been in worse conditions. At first I’m struggling to steer the kayak and keep it upright, but eventually I find the perfect groove in the waves. I mount each white-capped water-monster at a thirty-five degree angle, then slide down the other side with a thrilling twist. I glance over my shoulder. Now I have an audience on shore, as tourists and locals have been stirred from their shelters to watch the mad white woman commit suicide before their very eyes. Then it strikes me: what am I doing? Where exactly am I going? What is the point of this?

  Well, aside from unconsciously trying to gain mastery over early trauma, you must be aware of the relationship between the summoning of adrenaline and depression. Do you think it’s possible that the adrenaline or endorphin rush you get from taking risks is important because it can mitigate a depressed mood?

  That may well have been the case – and not just regarding physical risks. It was probably true of my edgy comedy work after Not The Nine O’Clock News, when I started doing stand-up. But many comedians I’ve met seemed to be depressed people who ‘self-medicated’ one way or a
nother, including simply through doing stand-up – one of the scariest jobs in the world! Much of the comedy I did after NTNON involved high risk-taking that made the BBC show look safe. In fact, John Cleese once chided me because he thought one of my acts was ‘more disturbing than funny’. It was during the Secret Policeman’s Ball charity concert for Amnesty International and, for some reason, I had decided it would be funny to do a sketch in which my breasts were haunted. Holding a seance with your tits was not your usual Oxbridge-type skit, and John Cleese finally came to my dressing room and banned it. Well, it may not have been John’s cup of tea, but Sting was in the audience and he later told me it was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen. So there. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

  Of course you understand where your bitterness about that comes from . . . ?

  Well, all right, we can factor or in my rejection issues, but frankly I was bucking against the prevailing notion that only a certain type of comedy was ‘the right kind’. And it was largely the stuff driven by middle-class males – with a notable exception, of course, being Billy. ‘The boys’ club’ as I called it, looked down on most workingclass comics – people like Les Dawson, who’d been making people laugh heartily well before the rest of us were born. And as far as women were concerned, there had been few examples of females on the British comedy scene doing outrageous comedy in their own right. In Monty Python, for example, poor Carol Cleveland was always ‘The Crumpet’. Of course, the wonderful Joyce Grenfell certainly had her day, the Carry On crew did lots of smutty jokes at Barbara Windsor’s expense, and there was Eleanor Bron who was funny in a gentle, intellectual kind of way. But brash, smart, in-yourface comedy from a woman on British shores? There had been no Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett here. Just hadn’t happened.

  French and Saunders were starting out, though. I saw them at the Comic Strip on the few occasions that I performed there. I was impressed that they had the courage to do softer, female-friendly material they’d written together. It wasn’t easy to handle that crowd. I remember waiting in the wings to go on and wanting to shit myself. I was thinking: I have no armament to please these people. Alexei Sayle would have just rocked the house with his strident chanting: ‘Ullo, John, got a new motor?’ And Rik Mayall’s pants would probably be round his ankles just as I was about to walk on. It was hellish. No point trying anything subtle; you had to bring out your toughest material just to stay alive. I did abrasive sets, as shocking as possible, but they were very hit-or-miss. Once Billy phoned and said he would come to see me at the Comic Strip the following week, but that terrified me more than the audience so I pulled out. I couldn’t bear for him to see me fail.

  You’d think I might have been more self-confident at this point. After all, I’d been part of a comedy team that had affected people’s lives; I know this, because recently I met a woman who told me that she was a schoolgirl when Not The Nine O’Clock News was on television. At some point – it may even have been the very last episode we made – we sang a song called ‘The Memory Kinda Lingers’. Now, ‘Kinda Lingers’ was a double entendre for ‘cunnilingus’, and people smirked when they heard it. Well, not everybody. This woman I met, who was a young teenager at the time, apparently went to school with a serious mission. At the end of every lesson, when the teacher asked ‘Any questions?’ she put up her hand. ‘Please Miss, could you tell me what “kindalingers” really means?’ But no teacher would tell her. Finally, at the end of the day, she went to the librarian, who took pity on her and told her the truth. Thirty years later, this woman still feels mortified about it – I guess she’d prefer her memory to have a kinder kinda linger.

  One memory of my own that I would prefer to be kinder is that of my association with a hero of mine, the late Peter Sellers. In July 1980 his ‘people’ called my ‘people’ to suggest that we meet to discuss a role he was keen for me to play in a new Clouseau movie. It was a character called Anastasia. In this new script, Clouseau fell in love with her, and ends up leaving the police force for her. I was enormously flattered that such a genius as Peter was interested in working with me. But when I turned up to meet him at the Dorchester, I was surprised to see him sitting in the lobby, anxiously watching the door for my arrival. That seemed a bit bizarre. We exchanged pleasantries for a bit and he said some very nice things about work I’d done on Not The Nine O’Clock News. To be honest he seemed a little odd – but then, people had told me he was highly superstitious. ‘Don’t wear green whatever you do,’ my agent had said. ‘He thinks it’s really unlucky.’ Sporting a safe choice of pink and blue, I followed Peter round the corner to a Chinese restaurant where we met Clive Donner who was going to direct the film. When the two of them offered me the part then and there, I was completely bowled over. ‘I’ll read some of the script to you,’ said Peter, who seemed worried that I might say ‘No’. ‘You really don’t have to convince me to do this . . .’ I murmured, completely mystified by his apparent desire to please me. But he launched into a scene where Clouseau and Anastasia are on a date and the hapless detective accidentally sets fire to his beard. As he read, Peter was giggling madly in a terribly endearing way, and I could just tell it would be enormous fun to work with him . I wasn’t even deterred by my sense that the man was clearly crazy.

  After dinner, feeling rather disbelieving of the whole situation, I sat down with Peter in his suite to hear more about the project. ‘Now, you’re going to hear some things,’ he said, suddenly turning serious. ‘I’m going to LA tomorrow to have a big operation. But, whatever you hear, don’t worry. This movie will happen.’ He walked me to my car and pressed a copy of the script in my hand. ‘Read it immediately, please,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I promised. ‘As soon as you get home?’ he pleaded. ‘Then call me and tell me what you think . . . It doesn’t matter what time.’ Again, it seemed utterly weird that he was so anxious, but I dutifully read the script that night. I loved it, but by the time I reached the last page it was 3.30am. I thought it would be best not to bother Peter until morning.

  At 10.15am I called my agent. She had already been telephoned with contractual details and I was verbally engaged to do the movie. It was so exciting – this seemed like an absolutely perfect fit for me. But at around 11am, as I was on my way to rehearsals for something else, I heard an announcement on the radio. ‘Well-known movie star Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack last night. His family is gathering around him.’ I didn’t believe it could be serious because Peter had warned me that I might hear ‘things’, and had promised me the movie would go ahead. But throughout the day the news bulletins became more and more worrying and, by the afternoon, he had passed away.

  What feelings did you have about that?

  Agh! On the one hand I was terribly sorry about his passing. From what I had seen of him, he was a delightful and enormously talented person. But there was a part of me that was also railing against my own loss – and yet I felt quite guilty about that. I wondered if I had caused him greater anxiety by not calling him after I finished reading the script. Had I contributed to his final heart attack? I felt horrible about that possibility. But to get so close to such an enormous break in my career and have it whisked away all within a matter of hours was a particularly difficult experience, and one that took me years to get over. Oh, and there was also a rather nasty insinuation from some quarters that, well, what was I doing in his suite so late, and had I exacerbated his heart condition by – dot-dot-dot? Oh, please! Being so weird and fragile, Peter had inspired my caretaking instincts – but certainly not my lust.

  Thankfully, a few other things were happening in my career – people began to invite me to appear in other movies – and there was a major development in my personal life: Billy and I got together. This happened roughly a year after we first met. I was filming in Brighton and a young man approached me on the street: ‘Did you know Billy Connolly’s here? He’s playing at the Dome.’ I have no idea who that young man was but Billy and I always joke half-seriously that h
e was an angel. The minute he said those words I knew what I had to do – find Billy immediately and try to reconnect with him. Strange, eh? Previously I’d had no conscious understanding of the depth of my feelings for him. At least we were both in the process of marital separation, although for both of us things were still jolly complicated. I got to the theatre before Billy arrived. When he turned up the same young man was at the door. ‘Pamela Stephenson’s inside,’ he said. Freaky, huh?

  As I sat on the wash basin in his dressing room (there was only one chair and his clothes and banjo were on it), we chatted as if we’d always known each other. Then I went into the auditorium and watched his show. I just couldn’t believe it. How on earth could one person manage to keep the attention of that wild, well-tanked crowd? It was such a difficult space to play. People were walking in and out, spilling beer over each other. They were loudly heckling Billy too, although they did so at their peril because Billy was totally on the offensive. ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ he’d scoff. If someone stood up in his eye line he would mock them mercilessly. ‘Edna is wearing . . .’ Emulating a fashion announcer he would provide a hilarious running commentary of some poor woman’s appearance as she tried to scuttle up the aisle to the bathroom.

  I especially loved two particular stories he told that night: one about a ‘wee woman in a fat coat’ who was pitched off a bus into a shrubbery, and another about a budgie that got loose in a pub. The extraordinary pictures he created for the audience, the world into which he invited us, the colour and insanity of it all – were breath-taking. At that point in my professional life I had been so involved in the making of comedy, I was far from a comic’s favourite audience member. At other comedians’ shows I tended to sit there being quite analytical and watching them work, rather than being swept up in the performance. But with Billy, I was totally engaged, and left the theatre at the end clutching my hurting stomach, just like everybody else. It didn’t even matter that I only understood every third word. He was angry as hell, but beneath it all there was a philosophical angst – not to mention a palpable, deep wound. When he talked about his father smacking him in a rhythmic fashion to match his diatribe, and being hit so hard he flew over a couch, I felt enormous empathy towards him, even though I was laughing hard along with everyone else. He touched everyone in the room in a most powerful fashion, and I knew then he truly was a genius. It hadn’t been hyperbole from the NTNON crew after all; I had seen it with my own eyes. So I’m afraid it was very hard to resist when he popped the question: ‘Come to my hotel room and save my life . . . ?’ He was quoting Loudon Wainwright but, in a way, he meant exactly that.