Still Standing: The Savage Years (20 page)

Apart from
Sons and Daughters
on daytime TV, an Aussie soap which I’d become addicted to since being laid up, there wasn’t much for me to look forward to.

‘Look, de-ah,’ Reg drawled one day during a break in the panto rehearsals in our front room, ‘I’ll get straight to the point. We cannot find a replacement for you anywhere and as you seem to be quite agile, getting about, de-ah, without the crutches, why don’t you come and do the show with us? We’ll simplify the dance routines and we’ll all help you.’

So for the Christmas and New Year period I hobbled around nearly every pub and club in London in a full-length plaster cast as an Ugly Sister. It amazes me to this day how six people, seven counting the dresser, with over thirty costumes and an assortment of elaborate wigs and headdresses managed to get changed in dressing rooms no bigger than a cupboard. Determination, I suppose, and the firm belief that obstacles are there to be overcome and anything is possible if you put your mind to it. If we’d been offered Cinderella’s coach and a couple of Shetland ponies I dare say we’d have found somewhere to put them.

This panto went down so well that we had to do it again later in the year. As Ian, our Prince, was unavailable he was replaced by an actor called Scotland, who surprisingly enough happened to be Scottish. We all know that in the panto Prince Charming goes off with Cinderella in the end but off stage it was one of the Ugly Sisters he was sharing his bed with. Scotland, or Scott as I preferred to call him, was to become a big part of my life. As well as lovers we became great friends – important, I think, if a relationship is to have any legs, don’t you?

CHAPTER 7

March 1983

BECOMING A MEMBER
of equity, the actors’ union, was virtually impossible in 1983. You were unemployable in the theatre unless you were a member and, for drama students and a certain drag queen, getting hold of an Equity card was akin to the quest for the Holy Grail. You needed proof that you had been employed professionally for forty weeks and yet without a card you couldn’t work, so it was a catch-22 situation. Young actors would take on the strangest jobs to meet the quota of weeks required: I heard of one who became a magician’s assistant on a North Sea ferry and another who became a star stripper at Raymond’s Revue Bar.

I’d been collecting contracts since I’d started the act and eventually, when I had the required forty weeks’ worth, I took myself off to the Equity offices in Harley Street to apply for the precious card. As there was already a Paul O’Grady on the books I had to change my name and so I chose my mother’s maiden name, Savage.

To go with my new name I had a new address as well. The tenant who had supposedly moved out of the Battersea flat suddenly decided she wanted to move back in and could we
please vacate the premises by, say, yesterday? Hush went back to Upper Norwood and me to Vicky Mansions. Chrissie, who had taken over the tenancy of a flat there, knew of a neighbour, Andy, who was keen to sublet his flat. This was very convenient for me and I moved in, delighted that for the first time since I’d set foot in London I had a flat and, unbelievably, a bedroom all to myself.

Following the success of David Dale’s
If They’d Asked for a Lion Tamer
on TV, a stage version was planned to open in March for three weeks at the Donmar Warehouse. The plot involved David’s relationship with the two hard-bitten drag queens he worked with, his mother and his boyfriend. It was written by Bernard Padden with some very clever music and lyrics by Kit and the Widow and produced by Paul Oremland.

Reg teamed up again with Peter Durkin, his old pal from his days as a dancer in West End musicals, to play the drag queens. Sheila Collings, an actor who has been treading the boards since 1949 and is now recognized as one of the Knitting Nanas on the Shredded Wheat commercial, had a lot of fun bringing Bernard Padden’s surreal script alive as a wonderfully eccentric mother, while I grew a beard, lowered my voice considerably and gave my best Scouse Bill Sykes impression as David’s violent and abusive boyfriend.

During one tense scene I had to punch him in the face, knocking him to the floor, and one night after I’d delivered the stage whack he hit the deck with a little more force than usual, groaning on impact with an ‘Oomph’ straight out of the
Beano
. That little oomph was enough to set me off laughing uncontrollably. I’d heard about corpsing on stage and now here I was, experiencing it for the first time in a packed Donmar Warehouse during what was supposed to be a
serious moment. Corpsing is a bit like laughing in church or during a funeral, you are fully aware that you shouldn’t be doing it yet you can’t stop yourself. That night I had to run off the stage unable to finish the scene, hoping that the audience mistook my hysterics for the maniacal laugh of the triumphant bully.

I was still having regular physiotherapy sessions on my leg during the run of the play. After six weeks of wearing a plaster cast, the muscles had atrophied to the proportions of a POW’s in a Japanese prison camp. The constant trips to the physio department of King’s College Hospital were transforming my skinny pins into something resembling muscle and I couldn’t believe it when I received a letter from a gentleman admirer claiming that I had ‘nice thighs’ – music to the ears of someone who had always been told that he had legs like ‘two Woodbines hanging out of the packet’ and for a brief moment I even considered buying a pair of shorts.

Strolling menacingly on and off the stage of the Donmar each night wasn’t taxing but it was certainly exciting and I enjoyed every moment of the three-week run.

‘You’re making your West End acting debut, dahling,’ Reg drawled from his perch in the corner of the dressing room he shared with Durkin. ‘So I’ll be keeping an eye on your performance and giving you notes when and where I think they’re needed.’

Reg had adopted an attitude grander than Sarah Bernhardt and Dame Nellie Melba put together from the moment he’d first set foot in the building and Nica Burns, who was running the Donmar at the time (she now runs the best part of the West End), would watch from her office, both amused and bemused by some of the carry-on during rehearsals.

‘Now about your first entrance, de-ar,’ Reg said to me one
day in the dressing room, unaware that David was on the other side of the partition. ‘You’re supposed to be a “geezer”, dahling, your character is basically a rent boy and only after poor Miss Dale for the money. Your entrance is far too lowkey and I don’t feel you’re conveying the true menace of the character. Why don’t you try something a little different?’

He laid his
Guardian
crossword aside on the make-up shelf and stood up to demonstrate how a real geezer would walk.

‘Like this, dahling,’ he said, swaying exaggeratedly from side to side, legs apart with his arms bent, swaggering across the dressing room like John Wayne carrying two imaginary pigs under each arm. To further enhance this illusion of masculinity he bit his lower lip and scowled, which together with the swagger gave the impression that here was a queen who was heavily and painfully constipated and badly in need of a lav.

‘Who the hell are you to go around giving notes, Regina?’ David said angrily, coming out sharply from around the partition. They’d been winding each other up all morning during rehearsals and now here it was, the showdown.

‘I’m merely offering advice based on twenty-five years in the theatre, Miss Dale,’ Regina sniffed, looking down his nose at him.

‘Oh, here we go,’ David moaned. ‘“When I was in
Fiddler on the Roof
, dahling …”’

‘All I’m saying is I’ve had more experience in the theatre than you, de-ar, so listen and learn,’ Reg said icily, returning to his seat and waving his hand dismissively in David’s direction, the equivalent of lighting the blue touchpaper to a highly explosive firecracker but failing to retire.

‘Oh, dear,’ Sheila Collings groaned from her seat next to me as the fireworks began. ‘Here we go again.’

They might have torn into each other verbally on occasions, borne grudges and got on each other’s nerves but deep down there was a mutual love and respect between these two. However, as David’s star ascended Reg’s was declining and he avoided what he saw as a loss of face by adopting the persona of the
grande théatricale
, a mask that rarely slipped even in front of trusted friends.

Reg was a true eccentric and endless fun, sober or drunk, although when seriously intoxicated he could become a bit loud and rowdy, alienating people around him and sometimes getting into trouble. Working with David in Copenhagen at Madame Arthur’s club he got arrested and nearly deported for writing ‘Regina woz ’ere’ on a shop window with a candle that he’d stolen from the Cosy Bar, and one weekend in Amsterdam, blind drunk after a night on the genever and a couple of ‘mother’s little helpers’ (small blue pills that were a form of amphetamine), he nicked a bike.

‘Help!’ we heard him shout as he went careering down a fairly steep incline at speed. ‘I can’t ride a bike, de-ah.’

He hit a barrier at the end of a bridge and would’ve tipped into the canal had it not been for the swift action of two passing leather queens, one of whom after rescuing Reg took him back to his houseboat, lustfully muttering that he wanted to dress him in rubber. After much tugging and heaving and half a bottle of brandy, Reg apparently ended up wearing what he later described as a frogman’s suit.

‘There I was, de-ar, all dressed up like Buster Crabbe only with a gas mask on instead of a snorkel, trying to keep my balance on the boat. It was hard to stay standing as the boat was still rocking violently from the exertions of getting into the suit. It didn’t help that I was pissed as a fart and had a bottle of poppers in the end of me gas mask either.’

‘What did he do?’ we all asked, eager to know every gory detail of this evening with a rubber fetishist.

‘Nothing, dahl-ling,’ he replied. ‘He just sat there and stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was playing with himself as the gas mask had steamed up and I couldn’t see. However, it was a fucking wonderful evening, verrry erotic.’

We went over to Amsterdam for a weekend of drink and debauchery quite frequently. There was an offer on the back of soap powder packets that enabled the lucky shopper who collected enough of these vouchers to travel by boat and train to Amsterdam for relatively nothing. Consequently we bought boxes of soap powder by the dozen, collecting vouchers like mad until we had enough for a trip.

We’d get pissed on the boat on duty-free booze and after docking at the Hook of Holland would catch the boat train into Amsterdam and check in at the Hotel Orfeo. You got what you paid for at the Orfeo: the rooms were extremely basic but clean and as it was central and ridiculously cheap it became our base in Amsterdam each time we took a trip on the Soap Powder Trail. Today I’d sooner stay at the Orfeo than some of the so-called superior hotels in Amsterdam.

When Reg had been a member of the Disapointer Sisters he’d worked in Amsterdam many times.

‘We performed at the comedy theatre in front of the Queen, de-ar,’ Reg would boast, ‘and it was Juliana then.’

One night in the Amstel Tavern as Reg, Hush and I gave an impromptu performance on the bar to the Andrews Sisters’ ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’, a club owner recognized Reg from the old days and offered us a booking at his club. We returned a few weeks later courtesy of Daz and gave the Dutch gays, at Reg’s insistence, the Hollywood show.

The real Queen may not have turned up but we got one hell
of a reception. Hush had literally thrown a few costumes and headdresses together for this one-off show yet the crowd in the club reacted as if they were witnessing the splendour of the
Ziegfeld Follies
. We did the show the next night to an even bigger response from the crowd and the manager asked if we would consider doing a residency at the club. We made all sorts of grand plans about moving to Amsterdam and how we would rent a flat overlooking a canal, none of which came to fruition as the club closed down a few weeks later and we never heard any more.

‘Oh well, de-ah,’ Reg said philosophically when I told him the news. ‘“Que Sera, Sera”, probably just as well we didn’t go. We’d have been dead within the month.’

At the end of its three-week run the play, much to my regret, came to a close and I went off to Denmark with Hush for a month to work at Madame Arthur’s. The agent got a shock when we arrived as I still had my beard.

‘You haven’t been working?’ he asked, suddenly anxious in case we’d gone down the pan and he’d booked a dud. ‘Has the act not been doing very well?’

‘I’ve been in a play,’ I replied airily, adding in tones that I hoped implied I was no stranger to the London stage, ‘in the West End’, to which he responded contemptuously, as if I’d let the side down.

‘Acting? The theatre? Bah, all a waste of time. There’s no money in the arts, cabaret is where the big bucks are and where all the excitement is.’

Hush wholeheartedly agreed with this sentiment. He was glad that the play was over and I’d returned to the fold and to the world he felt comfortable in, that of drag.