by Julian Clary
He had a lot of baths. He would slide silently in and lie there motionless. It used to bother me that I never heard him splashing about. I would sit next door and imagine him lying there thinking about his illness. A healthy, carefree person would splash, I thought. Was he looking through the clear water at his failing body, imagining himself as a corpse? I wished the scientists would hurry up and find a wonder drug that would make him better. We didn’t talk about him dying at all. We never cried. Maybe we both only thought about it during these silent baths.
I had some shows to do in Dublin and Christopher came with me. Homosexuality was illegal there at that time and when I asked at the check-in for a double room, the receptionist said it wasn’t their policy to give double rooms to two men. I looked at him in disbelief.
‘I am a gay man here to perform at the Gaiety Theatre. Tonight I shall be interviewed on the Gaye Byrne show. Give me a double room now!’
His face darkened and he handed me a key.
‘Now,’ I said loudly to Christopher, ‘let’s go upstairs. I’m desperate for a fuck.’
I REMEMBER COMMITTING myself to Christopher one time when he was in hospital for a lumbar puncture. We were sitting in the day room talking about him coming home. Somehow the conversation got on to where exactly his ‘home’ was. Although he’d been living with me in Albert Street, nothing had ever been ‘said’ officially, and he still had ‘Reach View Court’ as the address on his medical records. I said I wanted him with me, I wanted to look after him. ‘I will see you through this’ are the words I remember saying, gravely, eye to eye, hand in hand. It was almost ceremonious. He immediately went to the nurses’ desk there in the ward and had Albert Street registered as his home address, and came back looking happy.
There was a merciful respite for six months when the doctors put Christopher on steroids. He was his old self, full of beans, if a little high and relentlessly jolly. We flew to the Maldives for ten blissful days. We swam in the clear warm sea, met up with two amusing florist women in the bar in the evenings, slept in each other’s arms and generally carried on like a honeymoon couple. But after a few months the steroids were stopped on account of his bone-marrow readings or some such jargon. We didn’t choose to go into too much detail. But he slept a lot again after that.
As with most people who get success in Britain it was decided around this time that I should have a go at America. Addison announced that we were off to New York to play a venue called the Ballroom for three weeks. It’s not there any more, but Eartha Kitt had entertained there, and other music acts had. It wasn’t known for its comedy. Christopher came too.
We stayed in a big brown flat in Times Square and slept opposite a huge ugly portrait of Ethel Merman. Christopher broke out in red angry lesions on his face and coughed all the time. He came to my opening night nevertheless. There are some things Hide the Blemish cannot conceal and there were concerned looks and grave whisperings all around. Quentin Crisp came and wrote a complimentary review, saying ‘Julian Clary wears as much make-up as the human face will allow.’
After that night it all went a bit quiet at the Ballroom. I remember playing to eight people one evening, and they were hoping for a jazz quartet, not buggery jokes and some English queen rifling through their handbags. There weren’t many laughs. I went off stage for a costume change, leaving Russell playing a loop of ‘Leader Of The Pack’. Why don’t I just go home? I thought, and so I did. As I walked down the road I could hear Russell’s voice singing ‘Leader of the pack, but now he’s gone, Leader of the pack, but now he’s gone . . .’ over and over. Russell ground to a halt eventually and then called it a day. It was for the best. I’m not really sure if anyone noticed.
We tried to get some hospital treatment for the various ailments Christopher had but after a few initial questions, when our (rather foolish) lack of medical insurance became apparent, we were directed to another hospital and then another. Eventually we came away with a prescription as long as a weekly shopping list. I doled out eight pills of various shapes and sizes for Christopher’s breakfast in bed. Down they went and he smiled and laughed. Three minutes later they came up again, projected with considerable velocity at Ethel. Red, yellow, orange. ‘Everything’s coming up roses,’ said Christopher and laughed again. We went to Coney Island that day and had even more fun.
When we got home to London we both knew there wasn’t much time left. We didn’t say it out loud. It was obvious. He coughed and slept and sweated. I was off doing TV shows and interviews, leaving pills by the bed as Christopher and Fanny snuggled under the duvet. I’m aware in retrospect of a kind of panic neither of us acknowledged. We just carried on from day to day and talked sometimes about going on holiday somewhere warm and sunny. I didn’t really think he could go far from hospital. His blood readings and cell counts were grim. But we went to Majorca in early June and stayed in a rented villa in the north of the island, far from anyone, surrounded by lemon trees and accompanied by Christopher’s mother, Yvonne.
Christopher coughed all night by now, and I got irritable from lack of sleep. We kept a bucket by the bed and looked with suspicion at the morning’s booty, sunset red and alarmingly fleshy. Yvonne commented on how thin he was each morning, but then he went to bed and we lounged about the pool and planned the evening meal.
One morning I emptied the bucket and went out to the swing on the terrace with some pills for Christopher. ‘Look at my leg!’ he said. I knew then it was the end. It was ominously swollen from the knee down and an angry blue and yellow. The rest of his body was so thin and concave it looked like some kind of anchor. Christopher smiled down at his naughty body, but didn’t manage a laugh. Who knows how he felt.
I broke through the shutters of the off-limits room in the villa, where I’d previously heard a phone ring, and called an ambulance. I left some money and a note, I remember, explaining there had been an emergency. Yvonne went to do her hair and put diamante earrings on.
In a Palma hospital they examined him wearing surgical gloves. Removing his mask the doctor explained to me that ‘the disease has entered its final phase . . .’ No one could believe Yvonne was his mother, she looked so young and glamorous. ‘You must try and get him home.’
We couldn’t get a wheelchair at the airport, so I whizzed Christopher through sitting precariously on top of a luggage trolley. He had full slap on. There is some airline rule about being ‘fit to fly’ and we didn’t want some jobsworth refusing to let us on board. We made it and as the plane climbed higher the coughing went into a whole new gear. I passed the tissues and slipped the bloody lumps into a plastic bag. ‘Is it the flu?’ asked the stewardess. ‘Kind of,’ I said and Christopher’s eyes twinkled at me.
Sue Holsten was waiting for us at Heathrow and took us straight to the Brodrip Ward at the Middlesex Hospital in Goodge Street, where familiar nurses greeted us at the door with a smile and a gentle tut in the direction of the patient. We were both relieved, we knew he needed some special looking-after now. But how marvellous that we went on that ill-advised trip, I think today. Christopher had seen the sea and felt the rays of a warm sun one more time. More importantly, he’d done what he wanted.
The next ten days were all taken up with visiting and sleeping. For a couple of days they thought he had TB and the door to his room had warning signs on it. We had to put on masks and plastic aprons before going in to see him. In fact, he had all sorts going haywire in his body, but there was a growth in his lungs that was winning the race to kill him. Yvonne and I had a rota system, but no one was under any illusions. Least of all Christopher. Occasionally I left him to go for a cigarette in the smoking room. The oxygen mask made it difficult for him to speak, so he either wrote things down or mimed. He wagged his finger at me, pointed at me and then at himself. Smoking kills. His notes I keep rolled up in an orange pot by my bed. They say: ‘I am missing you xxxx.’ ‘Will you still love me tomorrow?’ ‘You are always on my mind.’ ‘Chris loves Julian.’ And, ‘Eternally yours,
x.’
As the days passed he was moved progressively nearer the nurses’ station, a sure sign, if any were needed, that he wasn’t getting better. One day I arrived to find him in the prime spot, right opposite, forever under their professional gaze of compassion. A sort of booth with half-glass walls so the nurses can see in. That’s the dying room. Whenever I pass the hospital I glance up at the window. It’s on the first floor at the angle of the building nearest the main entrance and I wonder if someone is in there, breathing their last breath at that very moment.
The morphine supply went in via his neck and I think there was some kind of dial whereby he could regulate his own supply of pain-killing oblivion. I don’t think he was mean with himself.
The last night he kept trying to tell me something and I kept trying to understand. It went on for hours and in the end I did something rather unsuitable for the occasion. I pretended I understood, just to give him some peace. His anxiety at being unable to express whatever his last thoughts were before passing on was too much to bear. But I feel bad about it now. I’d like to say now that when I’m speaking my last, no one is to say, ‘Oh, yes dear,’ until I’ve made myself crystal clear.
Soon after that his breathing settled into a slow shallow rhythm. Everyone got ready. But death didn’t come. Eight hours later my stomach rumbles were spoiling the tranquillity of the scene and I slipped out of the room and over the road for scrambled eggs in a greasy spoon café. Twenty minutes later as I hurried along the corridor I was met by a nurse. He’d gone and I hadn’t been there. But I shouldn’t feel bad. It’s often the way. Sometimes people don’t want to die in front of anyone, she said. I went in to see him and put a circle of flowers around his face. I couldn’t bear the thought of body bags and refrigerated drawers, so I asked them to leave him lying in state for three hours. Ideally I wanted three days, but I knew there was a queue for that room.
I said goodbye and thank-you to his doctor, Michelle. I was surprised at how upset she was. I thought they just wrote in the time of death and closed the file, but she cried real tears. ‘He was so lovely,’ she said. I met her by chance at the theatre a few years later, and although we only exchanged pleasantries, we both had tears in our eyes.
The funeral was on a very hot, sunny July day. We went in Sue’s Saab convertible with the roof down. Me, Frances, my mother and Sue driving, all dressed up. I suppose it looked like a glamorous outing, four people from the King’s Road off to the country for the day with smoked salmon and vintage Cava in the boot. I didn’t cry although I sweated a lot, torrents from forehead, back drenched and trickles down my trouser legs. Alternative tears.
His clothes stayed in the wardrobe for years. Sometimes I’d lift a sleeve and get a whiff of the Dead Boyfriend. Yvonne took away his shoes, I remember, sorting out pairs to give to his friends. ‘He’d want them to have something to remember him by.’
Two days later I met up with Paul Merton to start writing a sitcom for Channel 4. We wanted to call it either The Man from Uranus or Meet the Rent Boy, but by the time it went to air it was called Terry and Julian.
It felt a bit disrespectful, writing buggery jokes at such a sombre time. Should I not have been at home crying and wearing black?
‘The thing is,’ said Paul, always economic with his words of wisdom, ‘you can only think about one thing at a time. At least for the hours we’re writing, you can’t be miserable.’ And, as always, he was right. Writing buggery jokes is the perfect therapy for the bereaved. Gales of unseemly laughter were soon coming from the open window of our office in Noel Street. Whenever I became slightly pensive, Paul would do something funny, like shout out of the window to the workmen on the scaffolding opposite: ‘’Ere, Bert, send up my underpants, would you?’
Two days after burying my lover I was laughing all day long. It was life affirming.
I HAD A ‘real’ communication with Christopher some years after he died. I was depressed, stoned and listening to Dionne Warwick’s recording of ‘Heartbreaker’. I was missing him and felt that he was missing me. I thought I heard him calling me, forlorn and desperate for my physical presence. It wasn’t as if he was just in another room or another town, he was in another world, behind glass, through the mirror. I only mention it because it was one of several such experiences I had for a few years. They have always been quite distressing because try as I might I couldn’t comfort or reassure him. I gave up smoking dope.
But maybe it was these experiences that made me try something regrettable. About eight years after he passed away I went along to see a psychic in his surburban semi one winter evening with my friend Penelope. He was in great demand and we’d booked months in advance. We arrived at an ordinary semi-detached house. A porky man sat at the door with a money tin on his knees and charged us £25 to go in. I handed over £30 and waited for my change but the tin was snapped shut. We went into the garden and about 20 people stood around, mostly pale worried-looking women. The atmosphere was hushed and expectant. Eventually we were directed to the ‘Spirit Lodge’, little more than a roomy garden shed at the end of the path. Inside a hodge-podge of chairs, some comfy armchairs, some of the wooden school variety, were arranged in a rough circle. The porky man arrived and explained that the psychic would soon be with us. The seance would take place in complete darkness and we were sternly told not to make any sudden loud noises as this could put the medium’s life in serious danger. After the build-up in came the star attraction, right on cue. Obviously he’d been listening outside the door.
He sat in a vacant chair that was really more of a throne. He strapped himself in with plastic ties around his wrists and ankles, explaining this was necessary in case of convulsions. The lights were turned out and we sat in pitch darkness. We then sang a rousing chorus of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes’ – to summon the spirits, apparently.
First he ‘channelled’ Charlie, a twelve-year-old boy from Victorian London. He began to speak in a cockney falsetto: ‘My mum’s a lady of the night but she’s still a lady.’ Charlie mentioned various random names from the Other Side, until a punter whispered their recognition. The general drift was that they were ‘all right’ and no one was to worry. Next up was Dolly, a former music-hall artist who had committed suicide on the jagged edge of a baked-beans tin. She was raucous and theatrical and also brought messages from the dead saying all was well.
When she left there was a pause. From the nasal tones and the greeting, ‘Oh ’ello, it’s Kenneth ’ere . . .’ I gathered we were to believe Kenneth Williams was in our midst. So far I was prepared to go along with all this nonsense. It was vaguely amusing as a naff cabaret, but I was disturbed by the quivering responses of the assembled punters who’d handed over their cash in the belief that they really were getting an audience with their dearly departed.
But it was to get a lot more unsavoury. Suddenly Kenneth’s voice changed to a breathy whispery sing-song. ‘Hellooo! It’s Christopher! Julian, I love you! Thank you for looking after me! Thank you! I love you!’ I felt spidery fingers stroking my cheek. Although I was incensed by the impersonation, at the time I just said a curt ‘Thank you’ and brushed away his hand. How low can you get? Pretending to be dead people for money? As it turned out this was his finale. Once again we were asked to sing-a-long-a-psychic, this time to ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, although I’m quite sure the choice of song is irrelevant. As I worked out later, this is just to stop us detecting the noise of our medium getting in and then out of his plastic ties. As this was going on I felt a chair leg dig into my calf and when the lights came back on, there he was, in a state of collapse from his exertions, the chair in a different part of the room. We sat in bleary-eyed silence while Porky Man untied him, near collapse from his supernatural efforts, and ushered him out of the shed with the delicate reverence accorded to the Turin Shroud.
We, the paying public, then filed silently out. As we slipped through the side gate I saw him, Britain’s premier psychic, smoking a B
enson and Hedges in the kitchen, a healthy bulge in his top pocket, no doubt the £500 he’d conned out of us. It wasn’t until I was back in the car that my indignation surfaced. Why had I gone along with it? Why hadn’t I exposed the con for what it was there and then? How dare he pretend to be Christopher, or anyone else’s dearly departed?
I HAD FELT the need to close this chapter with a moving epitaph to my dead boyfriend, such as: When I think of Christopher now I feel a warm glow, as if I’m basking in his presence although that is gone forever, on this earth at least. His eyes are alive, hovering in front of me, glorious amber fireworks of adoration, his aura swirls around me like a cashmere wrap fluttering in the breeze of an unknown existence. His mood is always benign, the gentle euphoria of an angel, banishing shadows and illuminating all that is dark and confusing. I know he is always there, I only have to call. It’s just like the movies.
But I think it sounds a bit crass, don’t you? The mourning homosexual secretly loving the tragedy of his bereavement, making sure he has a faraway look in his eyes at all times. His own pose and posture more important to him than any real depth of sorrow in his soul. His relationship with the dead the only one he can keep alive.
The dead don’t snore or leave you for another. Nor do you bump into them unexpectedly when you are out on the town with someone else. In many ways, death is the ideal ending. There is a lot to be said for it.
NINE
‘What’s this? Take it away. It’s enough that I am here.’
MARLENE DIETRICH REFUSING THE BILL IN A RESTAURANT.
THREE LETTERS TO Nick.
5 Albert Street
21 March 1992
Dear Nick,
