Still Standing: The Savage Years (12 page)

‘He wasn’t the genius he was cracked up to be, you know,’ my mother said, suddenly breaking into my daydream.

‘Who?’ I asked, confused as there were no men in the scene she was watching, just Bette being served breakfast in bed by Thelma Ritter.

‘Orson Welles,’ she said, holding the sleeve of a pale pink cardigan she was knitting up to the light, scrutinizing it for any dropped stitches or hidden flaws. She was rarely seen without a pair of knitting needles in her hands, having the uncanny ability to read her library book, watch the telly, hold a conversation and keep one eye out for cats invading her garden and the other on a cake baking in the oven all at the same time. Here was a woman who seriously didn’t miss a trick.

‘He never wrote
Citizen Kane
, you know,’ she continued. ‘It was really some fellah called Herman Mankiewicz who did all the spadework, though Orson Welles took all the credit. Now shut up while I count these stitches.’

The fact that I hadn’t uttered a word apart from ‘Who?’ was conveniently ignored. However, it was wise to take a vow of silence while stitches were being counted, just as it was to keep it zipped during that period on a Saturday afternoon when my dad checked his pools coupon.

‘The Orson Welles who advertises sherry?’ I asked.

‘He did a lot more than sherry adverts. Twenty-two … twenty-three …’ She considered she counted under her breath but in fact she could probably be heard quite clearly by Dot-Next-Door.

‘Twenty-four, twenty-five … I read it in the twenty-six, twenty-seven …
Reader’s Digest
,’ she added in a tone that implied if the information came from the
Reader’s Digest
, a publication much revered in our house, as the little piles of them balanced all over the place testified, then it was obviously nothing less than the truth.

‘This Herman Mankiewicz was a screenwriter,’ she explained, laying her knitting in her lap. ‘And it was his brother, Joseph, who directed this film I’m trying to watch. Anyway, as I said, it was Herman who wrote the best part of
Citizen Kane
, not Orson Welles, so there. Now did I say twenty-two or twenty-six? I wish you wouldn’t start bloody rabbiting when I’m trying to count – I’ll have to start again now.’

Not for the first time I sat in wonderment listening to her prattle on, amazed at the seemingly inexhaustible well of information she was able to draw from, to reel off the facts about the most obscure subjects at any given moment.

‘What do you want for your tea?’ she asked, giving up for the moment with the knitting and shoving it behind the cushion. ‘There’s ham in the fridge and some of that steak pie you like from Marks or you could always go over the park to that Chinese you’re mad on, though how the bloody hell you eat that prawn curry muck slathered over chips, stinking the house out, is beyond me.’

‘Oh, I can’t stop, Mam,’ I answered in what I hoped sounded a light-hearted and casual manner. ‘I’ve got to go back, there’s trouble at work.’

‘’What?’ she replied in tones dry as a martini. ‘The police raided the brothel again?’

‘No, Mother, we’re short of a member of staff. Somebody walked out without warning,’ I explained, not speaking a word of a lie no matter which way you looked at it. ‘I’ll just catch that seven o’clock if I get a move on.’

‘I’d need a Philadelphia lawyer to work you out, my lad,’ she said, heading for the kitchen. ‘I’ll make you a little butty before you go.’

At Lime Street Station I rang Paul at the Stone Chair to tell him what had happened. There was a week’s work lined up for the Playgirls and if I was going to cancel it was best that I did it now.

Paul was sympathetic but told me not to be too hasty in cancelling.

‘Do it yourself,’ he said. ‘Get a single act together, and in the meantime while you sort yourself out you can do a few nights here behind the bar. Sid’s walked out again, it must be in fashion.’

I sat and thought about this proposition on the train to Huddersfield, not really relishing working behind the bar in
drag as the resident tranny. I was an act, or at least I thought I was, and pulling pints in drag and having to join in with ‘The Gang Bang’ at the end of each evening didn’t appeal. Still, it was the only offer on the table so far and it was a way of earning some money, a commodity that was, as usual, in short supply.

As for going solo, why not? I encouraged myself with the notion that I couldn’t be any worse than some of the other acts knocking about, plus there was the advantage of earning more money as a solo act. I still had all my drag and if I put my mind to it I could easily get a thirty-minute show together. So what, apart from fear, was stopping me?

By the time the train pulled into Huddersfield I’d talked myself into it. I set off for the bus station bursting with enthusiasm and a new-found confidence in the solo career that I was about to launch on the unsuspecting residents of the north.

People were very encouraging about my plan, which only added fuel to my ambition. That night in the Gemini Club, the owner, John Addy, gave me a couple of bookings there and then, act unseen, as did the current managers of the New Penny pub in Leeds. Chris and Steve were a couple of nice lads who did an act themselves called the Dream Girls, and it was Chris who eventually solved the problem of what I should call myself. There had been much debate at the bar of the Gemini, involving me, Phil, John and various members of staff and customers, over what my new stage name should be. Nicky, one of the bar staff who occasionally performed at the club as a member of a trio called the Shagettes (deduce for yourself what sort of act it was), insisted that I call myself Lily Savage – but I remembered Regina Fong saying a lifetime ago in the dressing room of the Black Cap that a name like Lily
Savage would never do if I wanted to work professionally. I was determined to find another, less ridiculous name to work under.

‘Why not call yourself Paul Monroe?’ Chris said. I wasn’t exactly crazy about the name, not being a huge fan of Marilyn, and I worried that the punters might expect me to totter out and perform an incredible impersonation of the dead star.

No, I couldn’t see myself standing in front of the patrons of Tickles in Wakefield, knee bent, eyes half closed, pouting into the microphone and mouthing the words to ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ and expecting to get out alive.

However, as everyone seemed to think it was a good name I went with it, and so Paul Monroe I became.

On the way home in the car Phil dropped another bomb-shell on me that day.

‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ he said casually. ‘While you were away I told Adrella he could come and stay. I’m picking him up tomorrow.’

Adrella was a well-known act on the London pub circuit and supposedly he’d said something about a number I was doing one night at the Black Cap which was duly misinterpreted and reported back to me by another act desperate to stir up trouble. I didn’t disappoint, and predictably went up like a rocket when this supposed bit of defamation reached my ears. I threatened to ‘have’ Adrella the next time I saw him, much to the delight of the other acts who thrived on such fighting talk, praying that they’d be present for the moment of confrontation between us.

Adrella then went off to work in Germany, nothing to do with my threats. He was blissfully unaware that there was
any animosity between us, while I moved up north, and to the dismay of a lot of drag queens the showdown between us never took place.

Now here he was, fresh off the plane from Hamburg and running around the kitchen trying to catch a mouse like he owned the place, with me stood on a chair, temporarily defenceless. The mouse broke the ice and, over a pot of tea, it slowly began to dawn on me that we were getting on quite well. There was no need for me to prowl around him in the manner of a territorial tomcat and after clearing the air we became friends.

Avril had promised him a month’s work in the north but on his return to the UK he found that she didn’t have one single date in the diary for him. Phil had offered to drive him while he was here, and as Peter (for that was Adrella’s real name) was finding life with Avril and the parrots untenable Phil offered to put him up with us.

Peter’s arrival proved to be a bit of a godsend. Since he had no work and I had over a week’s worth of dates booked in but no partner to do them with, we teamed up.

Like me, Peter had worked some rats’ nests in his time but he was totally unprepared for a few of the venues we worked in that week. The worst, and it must’ve been bad because thirty-odd years later we still both remembered the experience vividly, was a pub in Leeds called the Cherry Tree. When presented on a contract, the name made it sound quite pleasant, bucolic even, but arriving on a cold, grey Sunday lunchtime (two spots, fifty quid between us) we found the Cherry Tree was far from the quaint village inn that I’d naively had in mind. It was the kind of pub that sterner members of the SAS would be wary of training in before a stint in Afghanistan, never mind two drag queens, and I later
discovered the place was notorious and the mention of its name would make many a hardened act quake in their shoes.

However, we took it all in our stride and were quite philosophical about some of the dumps we ended up in, usually managing to see the funny side and enjoy ourselves. Peter had succeeded in drumming up some work in London and when the time came for him to leave I was sorry to see him go. It also meant that it was time for me to literally get my act together as I had bookings in for ‘Paul Monroe’ at the end of the month.

I opened with the hated Biddy. I would’ve preferred to close with Biddy but the time it took for me to get into the fat suit made this idea impractical. I also made more of the fire-eating, finally waking up to the fact that it went down a lot better if I sent it up instead of taking myself so seriously.

Paul Monroe made his debut on a Sunday lunchtime at the New Penny, fortified by cider and my fears muffled by the knowledge that I had a sympathetic audience. To my relief the show went down very well, the evening show even better, and I came away with eighty quid all to myself – a fortune!

I worked at least four nights a week and on weeks when business was slack I’d work behind the bar at the Stone Chair in drag, which I never really enjoyed, feeling stupid and demoralized to be mincing up and down serving pints. On the plus side I got to see some great comics, Dudley Doolittle, Mickey Finn, Stan Richards (a brilliant Yorkshire comic who played Seth in
Emmerdale
), Johnnie Casson, and a young Les Dennis who, the manager, Paul, would tell me, was on the brink of big-time stardom.

Paul was always encouraging me to get up on the stage and try my hand at compèring but I was terrified of the microphone. And besides, what would I say?

My baptism of fire as a live act eventually happened one night in a pub in Bradford called the Furnace. The tape broke, and I was left standing in front of a packed pub like a rabbit caught in the glare of car headlights.

‘Tell us a joke, Paul,’ someone in the audience shouted.

‘Yeah, go on,’ another joined in. ‘Say something.’

Soon the entire pub was baying for me to tell them a joke, and even though I wanted to run off the stage and out of the pub I found myself edging slowly towards the microphone.

Out of desperation I nicked a few gags I’d heard Dudley Doolittle and some of the other comics tell at the Stone Chair but apart from that I have absolutely no recollection of what I said. I do know that after the initial shock of hearing my own voice reverberating around the room and finding that talking into the mike wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined, I took to it like a duck to water and stayed up there for over half an hour cracking hoary old gags and having a bit of fun with the audience, who in return gave me a standing ovation at the end.

‘Not bad,’ the manager said afterwards at the obligatory lock-in. ‘This lot are a tough crowd. If I were you I’d ditch the mime act and go live. You’re a natural.’

Even Phil was amazed and on the way home he turned into Madame Rose.

‘Right, you can start getting a load of jokes together,’ he said determinedly. ‘Write yourself an act, open with a number and finish with your comedy fire-eating. You’ll be able to put your fee up. I’ll get on the phone tomorrow. Hush leaving was the best thing that ever happened to you.’

But come the morning I found that the magic had faded. Last night, I told myself as I waited for the kettle to boil, was nothing more than a fluke. I’d been forced to ‘go live’ out of
necessity, driven by a combination of fear and pure undiluted adrenalin, and I doubted that I could repeat that success on a regular basis. By the time I’d made a cup of tea I’d convinced myself that it was easier (and a lot less nerve-racking) to remain a mime act.

Even Paul from the Stone Chair couldn’t convince me when he rang later in the day. ‘I hear you went live last night,’ he said proudly, ‘and not before time – how many times have I told you to go live? Played a blinder, I hear, went down a storm. I’ll start booking you out as a live act, shall I? You can come and work here on Saturday so I can see if you’re any good.’

I turned him down flat. A lack of confidence, I suppose, led me to believe that I wasn’t up to scratch as a comic and despite people repeatedly telling me that I should give it a go I returned to the security blanket of the taped voice.

It was to be a few years yet before I picked up a mike again and when I finally did, I couldn’t put it down.

Things were going well and I was slowly getting used to working solo. This was proving to be not just profitable but, if I could only allow myself to admit it, surprisingly enjoyable. I seemed to be going down remarkably well as I did the rounds of the pubs and clubs.

To add to this rare run of good luck, an unexpected bonus landed on the mat one morning from Camden Council in the form of a very tasty cheque. There had been an industrial dispute over back pay and overtime just before I left and it seemed that I was owed a considerable amount of money. I proudly stepped out of the Huddersfield branch of the Halifax Building Society with over fifteen hundred pounds in my account and for the first time in my life felt financially secure.