A Young Man's Passage

by Julian Clary

  You’d have laughed at me the other day. We were rehearsing As You Like It outside. In one scene, a lord and others are eating a banquet. Orlando enters, grabs me by the neck from behind and says, ‘Forbear and eat no more!’ As he said this we staggered backwards and fell into a fishpond. Right in, suit and all, up to the neck. We had to go and have a bath and borrow some clothes. Onlookers said it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

  My mother wrote back: ‘Don’t get temperamental about your play. After all, everyone connected with it is intent on doing it well and making the production successful. Don’t get too possessive about it. Just imagine how Shakespeare must feel as he looks down on some of the efforts put on under his name!’

  The ‘no frills’ policy was very clear when we arrived in Edinburgh to find our accommodation was a scout hut. Eighteen foam mattresses were laid out side by side and meals were cooked by each of us in turn in the adjoining kitchen. When my time came I cooked goulash with rice, but mistakenly used pudding rice. It looked as bad as it tasted.

  One night we had a barbecue outside the scout hut. ‘I didn’t enjoy that much,’ I wrote to my parents. ‘The conversation digressed and became rather serious with talk of “What I personally think is . . .” and “All I’ve got to say is . . .” concerning the function and future of the company. They are a funny lot – probably because they’re mostly actors. They rarely DO say what they “personally think”, although barriers are beginning to be broken, living so closely together.’

  With three different shows a day to perform, we were rather busy. It wasn’t a laugh a minute, more like one a week. Putting the word ‘work’ in the title of the company had rather set the tone for the experience. And while I was as left-wing and group aware as the next thespian, I didn’t see why glamour and glitter should be perceived as the devil’s work. I wanted to wear make-up and theatrical costumes and add the odd flourish to my performance. Sleeping in scout huts and queuing up for vegetarian chilli rather took the fun out of things. Whatever my future was, I wasn’t prepared to ‘muck in’ to that extent again. Power to the people and all that, I secretly thought, but if it wasn’t too much trouble I’d like the star dressing room, hot and cold running water and some complimentary top-of-the-range skincare products thrown in.

  Of course, sleeping 18 young people in a scout hut for three weeks is asking for scandal. There was plenty of late-night whispering, giggling and midnight walks. I tried to keep myself nice but I was awoken one night by a hand invading my sleeping bag. Pretending to be asleep, I tried to guess from the touch and size who it belonged to; too small to be Sir Toby Belch, I thought. The hand reached down and began to caress me. I turned, almost involuntarily, and we began to kiss. Then I realised: the hand clutching my manhood belonged to a girl.

  FIVE

  ‘The supreme object of life is to live . . .

  It is true life only to realise one’s own perfection,

  to make one’s every dream a reality. Even this is possible.’

  OSCAR WILDE

  HETEROSEXUAL SEX WAS a revelation to me. So snug, warm and wet – I was full of admiration for Nature’s cleverness. I mastered the basic manoeuvres of intercourse in the missionary position, but the taking of the vagina from behind, known rather sordidly as ‘doggie position’, soon became a firm favourite. I also learned how important it is in the straight world to sustain sexual activity and not peak before your partner is ready. This I achieved by reciting mathematical tables (not out loud, though). Another useful trick was to sign my name, imagining the penis is a pen. Whether this works with anyone else’s name other than my own I couldn’t say, but the unpredictable twists and turns of writing ‘Julian Peter McDonald Clary’ with such a novel instrument certainly had the desired effect. The female orgasm (unless she was acting) was a Dyson to the male carpet sweeper, a whooping cough to our throat clearing. What with nipples and breasts, secretions, G-spots and sundry other erogenous zones to discover and excite, it’s a wonder I ever bothered with men again. The female body is peppered with erogenous zones. To me, as a beginner, it was a bit like learning to fly a helicopter; I didn’t know where to begin.

  Of course, we didn’t attempt any preliminary lessons in the scout hut. We waited until we got back to London and the privacy of my room at Hardy Road. The world of boy/girl romance was suddenly revealed to me. That was it, we were lovers. We lay in bed half the day eating boiled eggs and listening to ‘Cool For Cats’ by Squeeze. If she was woken early by the concert violinist who lived next door, she opened the sash window in my bedroom and shrieked, ‘Stop that bleedin’ racket!’ On Valentine’s Day she gave me a card in which she’d written:

  I can’t resist your silky style

  The diamonds in your head

  And though you are a super star

  You bring me tea in bed.

  I shall call her Michelle. We had been flirting with each other for weeks before it all began. I had announced one day that I was contemplating a love affair to see me through the winter. Who did she suggest? ‘Me,’ she answered firmly. She had big brown eyes, and although she didn’t exactly stare at me she would, I noticed, rest her eyes upon me. During rehearsals we had sometimes held eye contact for a little too long. Now we were embarking on something major. At that age you don’t analyse things much, but it was hardly practical: I was gay and she had a boyfriend. But she was an alpha female, not to be denied, and I was besotted. For her birthday I gave her some big brass earrings. On one was engraved: ‘Will you marry me?’ On the other was: ‘Why ever not?’ I think we both knew we were doomed in the romantic longevity stakes, but we were helpless. We couldn’t do without each other.

  The arrangement was she slept with me during the week and her boyfriend at weekends. Clothes and toiletries accumulated at my place for weekday convenience, and for four days a week I was her man. Her ritual weekend defection to the ‘other’ boyfriend became the source of some unhappiness. Consequently I was always a bit tortured on Friday, but all smiles by Tuesday. Eventually I grew accustomed to the arrangement. Secretly I rather admired Michelle’s refusal to adhere to social convention, although when a third suitor entered the fray I think we all felt a trifle mucky. We struggled gamely on for a few months, but it wasn’t fun any more.

  I remember taking a suitcase full of her clothes over to her flat towards the end and emptying them on her front doorstep. There were tears and tantrums. We never quite let go of each other, and even these days, 24 years later, although we see each other from time to time, we do not socialise with each other’s husbands or discuss our personal lives. When I look into Michelle’s eyes, my heart still races and I imagine a life other than the one I have lived. I have never reprieved my heterosexual life, or dabbled again in that procreative world. I have thought of it – sometimes longed for it – but it has not come to pass. Those sacred, carnal pastures belong to Michelle alone. Once you become a renowned homosexual you subconsciously, if not culturally, feel obliged to keep within those boundaries. And if your sexuality is your career, or at least a defining aspect of it, you do not ask any questions.

  I do not cast any doubt on my homosexuality (Lord knows, we’ve all got better things to do with our time) but in analysing my life for your reading pleasure, my relationship with Michelle must be given its due. It was a happy, if emotionally stirring, interlude in this my gay life thus far.

  AT THE TIME I didn’t dwell on things for too long. I wrote some dreary poems, but soon after our affair petered out I returned to the gay world with an enthusiasm that surprised even me. I got a job as a bar man at Heaven nightclub behind Charing Cross station. Taking a handsome boy home after work wasn’t so much a perk, more a part of your job description. My job there came to an end on ‘toga night’. As is not uncommon on such themed nights, all the bar staff wore minimal loincloths to help the atmosphere along. A crusty old punter draped in a beer-stained sheet leered at me all evening then asked me, ‘Is it yes or no?’ Once I understood that the qu
estion requiring an answer was whether I was his for the night, I answered in no uncertain terms and he complained to the management. The next night the manager, David Inches, ‘let me go’.

  My days at Goldsmiths were nearly over, too. I wrote to my parents: ‘No one talks about anything but exams and work and what they’re going to do afterwards. Whatever will become of me? I change from being worried and depressed about it, seeing myself ending up as a disillusioned teacher or office worker, to being very excited, thinking that now is the time I’ve been waiting for, and now it all happens.’

  After university the plan was to get acting work. We signed on the dole, sent hopeful letters to the National Theatre and the RSC, and got a few dismissive replies. In those days you couldn’t get far without an Equity union card. Linda and I got our provisional card by doing Glad and May gigs wherever anyone would take us. Old people’s homes provided us with a few of the required contracts, although the old dears weren’t terribly taken with us. They watched our nonsense for a few minutes then started playing cards.

  On my 21st birthday Linda and I did a Glad and May gig in a pub somewhere in Shepherd’s Bush. As it was a special occasion we got a taxi back to Hardy Road from Blackheath Station. I paid for the fare with our wages – a £50 note, and, without noticing, got change for a fiver. Linda wasn’t pleased.

  After pestering the local paper we got some publicity. ‘Cheek and chat are where it’s at,’ announced the entertainment page of the Lewisham Gazette. ‘Gaudy, fast-talking housewives Glad and May have found just what they wanted in a nervous pub customer’s handbag.’ Our big break, or so we thought, was a centre spread in the Sun on 17 July 1980. ‘Come to the Cabaret!’ wrote Roslyn Grose. ‘All over Britain song-and-dance is coming up on the menu nearly as often as fish and chips. Glad and May are a pair of housewife superstars who would make Dame Edna Everage gnash her dentures with envy. They’re so young and pretty they make other women feel nervous – especially when they nudge each other and ask: “Feel like a rummage?”’ Someone recognised me in the newsagents and I was thrilled.

  To make the most of this national coverage we put an advert in the South-East London Chronicle saying, rather naively, ‘Glad and May, Housewives Extraordinaire, will entertain you at your office party’. I only got one call, from an Indian man, who asked what the show entailed.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we come out dressed as two char ladies talking about our lives.’

  ‘And then?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, then we turn into Amanda and Elyot from Private Lives.’

  ‘And then?’ he said, breathlessly.

  ‘Then we sing a song and do a handbag competition.’

  ‘And then? S-s-sex cabaret?’ he whispered hopefully.

  I hung up.

  I remember a few of our gigs. The Queen’s Head, a tiny pub in Steine Street, Brighton. We were introduced by Simon Fanshawe, who said afterwards, ‘There are two things going to happen to Julian. Firstly, he’s going to become a huge star. Secondly, he’s going to be seeing a lot more of me!’ One out of two isn’t bad.

  We were also booked for a Saturday night at the famous, if notoriously rough, south London drag pub the Vauxhall Tavern – home for 15 years to Lily Savage. Booked to do half an hour, we only had 20 minutes of material, so I asked my old schoolfriend Nick, now a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, to warm up the crowd with a few show tunes. We were all in a state of terror beforehand. Nick sought comfort in a bottle of sherry before he went on. After a couple of numbers the crowd were turning ugly. Nick’s microphone was unceremoniously unplugged and Lee Paris, the resident compère, introduced us.

  ‘We’ve got something a bit unusual for you now, ladies and gentlemen – a double act, one of whom is a real live woman!’ The audience growled their disapproval. We raced through the act getting no laughs at all, and in no time were into the handbag competition. There weren’t many on offer but we grabbed what we could. Linda opened hers first and pulled out a letter. ‘Oh, look!’ she said, ‘her husband’s in Pentonville Prison!’ We both knew it wasn’t wise, but it was too late to do anything but read on – a harrowing, personal letter from an incarcerated husband to his darling wife. Desperately trying to squeeze some comedy out of the letter, we sounded suspiciously like two inexperienced students making fun of a sad, private communication.

  ‘’Ere, Glad, I wouldn’t mind being banged up, how about you?’

  ‘Oh no, May! I was sent down once and it left a terrible taste in my mouth!’

  That’s when the ice cubes started to be thrown. A slow hand-clap started at the back of the pub and swiftly gained momentum. The burly woman who owned the bag stood at the front punching her fist into the palm of her other hand. We hurriedly retreated to the dressing room where we stayed long after closing time in case we were lynched.

  MEANWHILE, WE SCOURED the back pages of the Stage where acting jobs were advertised. There were lots of profit-share companies doing group-devised plays that would tour the outer reaches of Wales, or worthy theatre-in-education productions funded by the GLC. Sometimes we’d get an audition. Linda got lucky first, a contract for a year’s work with the Chipping Norton Repertory Company, strangely enough the very place my great-grandmother came from. I went to quite a few auditions but rarely got a re-call. Not only was I extremely uncomfortable and nervous when expected to impress a panel, but my languid mannerisms and breathy voice, let’s face it, excluded me from most roles. I didn’t really go in for versatility. But eventually my persistence paid off. My first job was with the Covent Garden Community Theatre. Legend has it that just as I started my audition speech a shaft of sunlight broke through the window and gave me an ethereal glow. The panel of jolly left-wing types thought I was some kind of Second Coming and gave me the job on the spot.

  The show was called I Was A Teenage Sausage Dog, written and directed by Andy Cunningham. I was to play Auntie Vera. It wasn’t glamour drag: I wore a rainbow-coloured Afro wig, a woollen minidress and Dr Martens boots. Aimed at children, it was an anti-vivisection romp about Vera’s dog Fluffy Wuffles (played by a collie puppy called Georgia Georgio) being pursued by evil scientists who wanted to perform unspeakable experiments on him.

  We rehearsed in the Holy Trinity church hall, opposite Holborn tube station. The acting style was loud and cartoon-like and we performed in community centres, adventure playgrounds and the occasional London pub, travelling round in a battered red van. As soon as we were all on board and en route to our first gig of the day, a joint would be rolled and passed around. To begin with I was worried about my promise to my mother, and about fainting again, so I just mimed my inhalations. Soon enough, however, I got the idea and the weeks passed in an amiable, stoned haze. But this was just the start. We also took our show off to various summer hippy fairs, such as the Elephant Fayre in Suffolk. Drugs of every sort were all the rage there, of course, and along with everyone else I took magic mushrooms and LSD, which made the corn in the fields turn a heavenly yellow and the sky blood-red. ‘Ooh! Aaah!’ we all said. I also remember joining the queue outside a caravan. ‘Cocaine £1 a line’ read the advert, written in felt-tip on a torn piece of cardboard. Taking drugs at that time among those people was commonplace. I remember going to see an acupuncturist and being asked if I’d had any drugs in the last week, and proudly giving a very extensive response: ‘Marijuana, speed, cocaine, mushrooms, Valium and temazepam.’ It didn’t occur to me that if I’d cut out all the substances, I’d have had no need of the treatment for exhaustion in the first place.

  I got my comeuppance soon enough, of course. At a party in a big hippy commune house in Muswell Hill, I helped myself to a rather generous dessertspoonful of magic mushrooms preserved in honey. About an hour later everyone was sitting in a circle massaging each other’s feet, while I was wandering about the garden having a bad trip. For some reason there was a mattress propped against a washing line. As I rested against it, panicking at the realisation of what I’d inflicted on m
yself, it crashed to the ground. After this violent jolt my spirit hovered above my body and couldn’t get back in. I went back into the house where they were all in cloud cuckoo land. In my hallucinating state everyone I saw was dead or dying. I saw corpses hanging from ropes, bodies putrefying or being incinerated – ghastly images that I couldn’t, even today, say were not real. Finally I was in such a state of terror that I returned to the garden and lay in the foetal position praying to God for salvation. He came up trumps, as He usually does, and I managed to re-enter my body.

  Sometimes, just as I’m falling asleep, a familiar wave of fear washes over me and I sit up gasping for air. My soul, having tasted freedom all those years ago in Muswell Hill, is trying to sneak off again. I suspect that if it successfully escapes, I shall die. Keeping my spirit in place until I’m ready to go isn’t easy. The caged bird’s desire to fly away is a persistent one and I must be vigilant.

  I stayed on at the Covent Garden Community Theatre for the next two productions: Winter Draws On!, a sketch show in which I played, among others, a paedophile Santa Claus and a faith healer in a kaftan called Gillian Pie-Face, and Aaaaargh! No, it’s ’orrible! – another children’s show, this time about the evils of germ warfare. Jane Janovic and I played Harold and Hiram, two chaps battling over the ownership of an island with an evil countess and her sidekick Cyril Vain, played by Penelope Taylor and Nick Mercer. For any politically aware children, this had deft references to the Falklands War, which was raging at the time. Unfortunately Andy Cunningham, author and director, never got around to writing or indeed rehearsing the ending of Aaaaargh!. It just finished rather abruptly with a couple of green smoke bombs, which if the wind was in the wrong direction sent the more asthmatic kids off to the nearest Casualty.