All Balls and Glitter (12 page)

They were right, of course: I wasn’t finishing my lines properly. It’s one of the many things I look out for on
Strictly
. I always say to people like Zoë Ball, ‘You have long arms so they need to be controlled.’ The longer the arm, the further it has to go; every flaw is magnified and more obvious.

You have no choice but to listen to that sort of criticism as a dancer because it could mean the difference between getting the job or not. After the producers’ feedback, I danced in front of a mirror every day and, as part of the show requires the chorus to be in drag, I even commandeered a pair of high heels to practise in, so that I grew used to balancing on them while I moved. They were a pair of strappy sandals – not ideal for dancing as they had absolutely no ankle or heel support, but they were the best I could get to squeeze my size 11 feet into at the time.

You can buy size 11 women’s shoes at specialist shops for tall ladies – because they tend to have pretty large feet too. The problem
is that they rarely stock high heels, because generally women that tall don’t want to be any taller. Back then, in Australia, it was odd for a man to buy a pair of strappy heels – it probably still is, for that matter – so trying to get dance shoes was tough. All the ones in
La Cage aux Folles
had to be made specially. The first pair I practised in, I borrowed from a friend.

The auditions for the show dragged on for weeks and weeks. The final one lasted three days – eight hours a day – because I had to be made up. I learned to walk in the heels and wear leotards on stage, and I was tested to within an inch of my life. I memorized the script for five different characters: the songs, the jazz, the cancan, tap, classical, character combinations, everything. It was a major audition and I put my heart and soul into it. Then I heard absolutely nothing.

My first thought was that I just wasn’t good enough for the part and they didn’t want me. I decided I needed to get back to Melbourne, back to classes and intense training. I was upset because other people I knew were offered roles in the show, and I thought I was a better dancer, but I hadn’t received the phone call I’d been waiting for. As soon as I returned to Melbourne, that call finally came. I’d landed the job. It had been an agonizing wait, but I was over the moon.

For the rehearsals, we were issued with our custom-made heels. It is absolutely essential to practise in heels because if you’re not used to dancing in them, they kill. After the first two days, we were all screaming in agony. I don’t know how girls cope! It’s torture. Tap-dancing in a pair of heels felt almost impossible. You miss so many beats because you are already up on
relevé
(on the tips of your toes), so I missed all my shuffles to begin with. It was so frustrating.

The girls on
Strictly Come Dancing
wear four-and-a-half-inch heels, which are high for a dance shoe, but it’s not the six-inch stiletto we had in
La Cage.
The professionals are used to dancing in the Latin heels and literally grow up in them, but contemporary
and classical dancers are used to flat shoes, so as soon as they put high heels on, they can’t dance any more.

In
La Cage
, the boys had to dance as boys
and
as girls, so we were always hurting our Achilles tendons. It was great fun, though. Bizarrely, the straight boys were the campiest. They loved dressing up. The whole atmosphere was so alive that it was a joy to sign in every night at the stage door. My old friend Magatha, of
West Side Story
and
The Black and White Minstrel Show
fame, had also been cast, playing Hanna from Hamburg, one of the lead Cagelles (the name for the drag queens in the club), and we had a riot together.

There was one section where we slid down fireman’s poles from the fly floor (a narrow raised platform very high above the stage) in drag, wearing white heels, white leotards, glitter skullcaps and white satin tails. After making our dramatic entrance, we formed a line of high-kicking gals. One night, I landed badly at the base of the pole and felt something snap in my ankle. I continued with the show to the end of the kick line, fuelled by adrenalin, with my foot just feeling numb.

After I’d limped off stage, I went into the office and my whole foot ballooned up to twice its normal size. I’d ruptured a vein. I had to rest it for two days, but I carried on with the ‘man’ part of the show; I just couldn’t dance in high heels until the swelling went down.

When I wasn’t on stage, I was a booth singer, providing backing vocals while sitting in a booth wearing headphones. A lot of shows, including
Cats
, use live booth singers instead of backing tracks, mainly to beef up the sound in the big choral numbers when the dancers on stage have been dancing their hearts out and have no breath left with which to sing.

My dad adored
La Cage
and would come up as often as he could to see it. It was somewhat bizarre that he loved it so much, given his negative reaction to my dressing up as a child. Things changed after I moved out of home and started performing. He began to accept my passion for dance and the theatre.

He first saw me in proper drag in Melbourne, when I was living with Cecily. I was kitted out to go to a fancy-dress party when he popped round for a visit. He told me he thought I looked spectacular. When
La Cage
was on, he watched it at every opportunity – even if he just ended up getting drunk and falling asleep in the audience, as he once did. Everyone had cleared out one night when I heard a knock on my dressing-room door, and someone from front of house said, ‘Your father’s asleep in the auditorium.’

It was one of those unfortunate moments, but, of course, the next day he couldn’t remember a thing.

Another night, he picked up Jon Ewing, the star of the show, and dragged him out of the toilet over his shoulder in a strange sort of celebration because he thought he was wonderful. He was captivated by that musical and so proud of me.

It was at this time that Lavish hit the circuit and began whoring herself about. Dad fell in love with the character. He would come to see the act all the time and even travelled all the way from Ballarat to Adelaide, South Australia to see Lavish in a comedy club there. I slid down the banister and went into ‘Greatest Love of All’ – and there he was in the audience. It shocked me, but he got such a kick out of watching her in action.

It was interesting having his support, particularly as my mum didn’t like the idea of me being a drag queen. She eventually accepted that it was a theatrical outlet and not a life choice, and then she was happy to celebrate it. At the time, I think maybe she feared I would go the whole hog and become a transsexual or something. She certainly didn’t think it was a great career choice. At that point, of course, nobody else predicted that it wouldn’t be. The character was so popular that everyone addressed me as Lavish, even when I wasn’t in drag. My dad, to this day, still calls me Lavish and writes ‘Dear Lavish’ in cards, which Mum hates.

I have the most beautiful picture of my alter ego painted by Keith Michell, the wonderful actor who starred as Heathcliff in
BBC TV’s 1962 adaptation of
Wuthering Heights
, and who led the cast of
Man of La Mancha
in its first London production, among many other achievements. Keith is an accomplished artist in his spare time. He was in
La Cage aux Folles
with me and we did a private sitting as part of his
La Cage aux Folles
collection. I had a photo of the portrait enlarged and it now takes pride of place in the sitting room of Mum’s home.

Despite my success, I got really paranoid about my body shape during the run of
La Cage
because people were making fun of my protruding hips. They have always been quite large in proportion to my torso and legs, and I felt that they were about an inch too wide.

So, I went to a doctor and asked him if it was surgically possible to remove part of my hips to make them smaller. I hated them, and the thinner I got, the more they stuck out. What I should have been doing was building up my shoulders to balance out my hips, and strengthening my abdominals and pectorals. Instead, I begged the consultant to take an inch off each side.

‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so stupid!’

I didn’t think it was such a wild idea. People were having sex changes, so I hadn’t anticipated that an inch from each hip would be a problem!

While I was in
La Cage
, I dated the Cherry Ripe man, who was my first proper boyfriend on the gay scene. He was a model in the Cherry Ripe ad – Cherry Ripes were chocolate bars that were hugely popular in Australia in the 1980s.

I met him when I was dancing in a club. We only went out for about three weeks, but I sent him a huge bunch of flowers that was so big he couldn’t get it through his front door. In return, he taught me how to wet shave, because I’d only used an electric razor up until then.

He came to see me in the show
and Magatha and the cast ribbed me about him something rotten. We deliberately put him in an aisle seat because the drag queens come screaming down the
aisle, and then we bought a load of Cherry Ripe bars and threw them at him as we passed.

La Cage
ran for six months in Sydney and three months in Melbourne, where it was suddenly cut short by the arrival of AIDS. This terrible killer disease had just hit the headlines and nobody knew what it was. Some believed that
La Cage aux Folles
was propagating it because the show was about two gay guys and it was full of drag queens. The fear of the unknown caused homophobia to take over and people seriously thought that if they were even touched by a drag queen, they would get AIDS. It was really bad, totally ridiculous, but it caused the production to close early. In fact, most of the boys in the show were straight, so it was doubly stupid.

Like most gay men, I was scared to death by the spread of AIDS. Everyone was hearing that a friend of a friend had died, or someone you vaguely knew had passed on. People started hiding themselves away, particularly the guys with Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is a skin cancer that comes up in big black patches. Once you had that, there was nothing anyone could do, so you had to start saying goodbye.

While I was doing
La Cage
in Sydney, everyone was talking about how you could catch it, questioning whether you might contract AIDS from kissing and so on. The topic cropped up again one day when a group of us were in the kitchen at my digs. One of the guys in the room, a friend of my landlord, was wearing a polo-neck sweater, despite it being the middle of summer. Partway through this conversation, he pulled up his sleeve to show me what Kaposi’s sarcoma looked like and he said, ‘This is all over my body.’ They were huge black lesions and I thought, ‘Oh my God. This is just horrific.’ Everyone was being really cautious, and it did change everything.

In those days, once you were diagnosed, it was pretty much a death sentence. Even in 1993, when I was appearing in
Crazy for You
, a good friend of mine from the production, Colin John-Bell,
died from AIDS. I remember how he used to try to keep his weight up by eating fish and chips and really high-fat foods.

In the end, he decided that he’d had enough, so he retreated to a darkened room and burned candles. It was really difficult for him because he was very young, only twenty-five. His life had just begun and his showbiz career was taking off. He was so in love with tap-dancing and so in love with the show because he’d created the character of Moose, which was a fantastic achievement.

I saw him at the theatre in the very last stage of his illness. He was completely ashen and looked awful, but the light behind his eyes was still there because he was watching the musical. Colin was such a lovely guy, great to be around, with the capacity to make people laugh every minute of the day. It was so sad to see such a talented, fun, young man die from this dreadful disease.

Now combination therapy has changed everything for the better, but back in the eighties it was a very different story, which I saw played out time and time again among the people I knew. If you were diagnosed with AIDS back then, that was it. There was no hope. It was a frightening fact for a young man coming out into the gay world and we were all really afraid. Not only was it fatal, but it also had this horrendous stigma attached to it that I don’t believe the youth of today understand. It’s not seen as much of a threat now, because of the life-saving drugs, but it is, and should be treated with all the seriousness that such a devastating disease can command.

I was lucky because, by the time it had become a recognized danger, I was in a long-term relationship with someone and I felt very secure in that. His name was Mark Gogoll. He was very good for me because he was a bit older and more experienced, and he gave me some excellent advice. He’s now an agent in Melbourne, but he was an actor at the time.

Mark and I met as a result of a bet. Magatha was acquainted with him and dared me to go and ask him out. Never one to resist
a challenge, I did just that and we stayed together for almost three years. He was the first boyfriend I brought home to meet Mum. The whole family loved him and they still do. Mark is now with a long-term partner called Darren, and they see my family to this day.

We lived together in Sydney for a little while and we were quite a romantic couple. One Valentine’s Day, I bought 101 red roses and two white parakeets in a big, ornate cage, and had them delivered to Mark in Queensland, where he was working with the Victoria State Opera. He kept those birds for years. The gift cost me a fortune; I was totally broke, but I put it all on my credit card.

Being poor has never stopped me from making extravagant gestures towards the people I love. On Mother’s Day 1985, when I was twenty and penniless, I splashed out and bought Mum a complete outfit from Myer in Melbourne. It cost me A$800 (£375), which was a huge amount of money to me at the time, but she still wears those clothes today and the look on her face back then was worth every cent. I bought Mel and Trent a trampoline as well. I was touring all the time, and hardly ever got to see them, so I wanted to do things for them when I could.