The Devil Rides Out (29 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
Reginald Sutherland Bundy aka Regina Fong was standing
in the door of the dressing room at the top of the steps haranguing the DJ.
‘Oh, reeeally, de-ah,’ he said, speaking in an exaggerated theatrical drawl, stretching the syllables out like strands of melted cheese, ‘I don’t need this hassle. The reason there are so many tapes, darling, is because there are quite a few of us all doing individual numbers. Now stop being so awkward and get back to your hutch. We’re supposed to go up at one and I haven’t even unpacked the slap yet.’
The DJ shrugged his shoulders and staggered back to his console at the back of the stage balancing an armful of cassette tapes.
‘First no dresser and now the DJ giving me grief over the tapes. I don’t know why I bother,’ he said, peering down at me imperiously through hooded eyes. ‘And what can I do for you, young woman?’
I found him quite intimidating in the flesh. He was tall, with a dancer’s build and posture, and walked in that flat-footed way with his feet splayed out that ballet dancers tend to have.
‘I’m doing a number,’ I replied, suddenly overcome with shyness.
‘Oh, are you now?’ he said in an uninterested voice, flaring his nostrils and running his tongue over his sizeable front teeth. ‘Then you’d better get ready, hadn’t you, instead of standing out here gossiping.’
He stood by, letting me get past into the dressing room. Inside the other two members of the Disappointer Sisters were getting ready. Rosie Lee, perched on a stool in the corner languidly painting on a pair of eyebrows as thin as butterfly antennae, acknowledged me with a slight incline of the head. Gracie, over by the sink, was having a shave, talking non-stop
as he hacked away at his face, stopping momentarily to stare at me blankly before carrying on where he’d left off. I felt awkward and very much out of place standing in the middle of the room unsure of what to do next.
‘You can get ready over there, dear,’ Rosie Lee said, solving my dilemma for me, pointing to a space at the opposite end of the make-up shelf. I could see him out of the corner of my eye watching me with some amusement as I self-consciously unpacked my few bits of make-up from a Batman pencil case.
‘Is that the foundation you use?’ he frowned, pointing to the tube of Max Factor liquid foundation, the sort that my aunty Chrissie used. ‘You’ll need a much heavier foundation than that for the stage, dear. The lights bleach you out and it would never cover.’
‘Oh, shut up, Rosie,’ Regina shouted over his shoulder, busy sharpening an eyebrow pencil he’d rooted out of an enormous fishing tackle box that he used to store his vast quantity of make-up in. ‘Just because you’ve got skin like leather and need four coats of Dulux to cover it doesn’t mean she has too. She’s young, de-ah, remember it, youth? She’s got young skin.’
Rosie Lee drew in his breath sharply. ‘I’ll have you know I have the skin of an eighteen-year-old.’
‘An eighteen-year-old what, de-ah? Rice pudding?’
‘As long as I never look as old as you, darling, I’ve no need to worry,’ Rosie Lee said in honeyed tones laced with acid. ‘Just take a good look at that face. Why, my dear, you’ve managed to break more veins than a vampire at an orgy.’
‘Oh, shut up, Miss Lee, you’re getting on my nerves.’
I watched them closely as they bickered and bitched and larded on the make-up. They used a stick of what looked like pink wax to flatten down their eyebrows and then covered
them with a coating of glitter. Lips were painted a bright carmine red, and false eyelashes the size of a crow’s wing defied gravity as they hung from the edges of turquoise eyelids. Three pairs of tights covered hairy legs. Chest and armpit hair, Reg insisted, must be Immacked regularly. He hated underarm hair, thought it an abomination on both woman and drag queens, regularly declaring to the others, ‘I hope you’ve done the pits, de-ah, we don’t want to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, do we?’
They didn’t bother feminizing their skinny frames with padding or false boobs. Reg found them offensive. ‘I’m not wearing a pair of humongous fake tits, de-ah. We’re androgynous. You look at us and see a beautiful woman’s face on the body of a boy.’ I was to remind him of this statement some years later as he tried to force his ever-expanding girth into a Marks & Spencer girdle that was quite simply not up to the job.
For my debut at the Black Cap that Saturday afternoon, 7 October 1978, I thought it best if I went for the low comedy look rather than attempt high glamour as I had neither the resources nor the finances for sequins and feathers. From God knows where I’d unearthed a nineteen fifties black and white checked jacket that was too short in the arms and a matching pencil skirt so tight I could barely walk – add to this a pair of Lozzy’s old high heels that added six inches to my height and a top-heavy picture hat decorated with a bunch of wax grapes I’d nicked from the fruit bowl on the table of the pugs’ parlour of the nursing home in Regent’s Park, and you had an accident waiting to happen.
‘Divine hat,’ Regina said, looking up at me. ‘You’re very tall, de-ah, what the fuck have you got on? Stilts? Never mind. Have you got your tape? I’ll give it to the DJ.’ Next to
Regina, resplendent in a black satin ball gown and an elaborately dressed hard wig, the kind you see on mannequins in shop windows, I felt, for want of a better word, a complete and utter twat, like some sad old tranny who’d dared to venture out into the world for the first time.
Rosie Lee, magnificent in platinum blonde wig and silver lamé dress, asked, ‘Have you got a name, dear?’
‘Yes, good point, Miss Lee. What’s your name, dahling?’ Reg said, wiping lipstick off his teeth.
‘Lily Savage,’ I mumbled.
‘Larry Sausage?’
‘No, Lily Savage.’ I wanted the ground to swallow me up.
‘Speak clearly, will you? I can’t understand a word of that Liverpoolian accent. What number are you doing?’
‘I’m doing “Nobody Makes a Pass at Me”.’
‘Is it autobiographical?’
‘No, it’s from a show called
Pins and Needles
. It’s Barbra Strei—’
‘I know where it’s from, de-ah, thank you very much. Now move yourself, you’re on next.’
I could barely breathe for fright as I stood outside the door to the stage waiting to hear the DJ announce me. What the bloody hell was I doing? Was it too late to leg it down the alley and vanish down Camden High Street? Maybe I should faint.
I could hear the DJ over the microphone trying to inject some enthusiam into his voice. ‘OK, a first for you here at the Cap this afternoon, all the way from Liverpool, will you please welcome Lizzy Salvage!’ Someone opened the door and pushed me out on to the stage. There was a smattering of applause and a few wolf whistles and I could feel my legs shaking violently underneath me, partly from fear and partly
from the endless stream of large whiskies that Vera had ferried into the dressing room, with the added challenge of trying to keep my balance in Lozzy’s killer heels.
As my eyes slowly became accustomed to the lights I caught sight of Vera’s anxious face in the crowd. He was chewing his fingers down to the knuckle. I looked away, and tottered around the stage for something to do while I waited for the interminable intro to end and the song to begin. My mouth began moving automatically to Barbra Streisand’s disembodied voice blaring out from somewhere behind me and slowly I began to loosen up and ‘give it some welly’. Just as I’d started to enjoy myself it was suddenly all over and I was gratified to hear a decent smattering of applause following me as I made my way back to the dressing room.
‘Well done, dahling,’ Regina drawled, stepping out of his ball gown and into a pair of red satin trousers. ‘You weren’t bad, no, not bad at all. Help me with this zip, dahling. Our dresser has let us down – I don’t suppose you’d fancy dressing us for the second spot? It’s fairly uncomplicated, and we’ll buy you a couple of bevvies …’ He kept up the running commentary as he struggled to get into a sailor top.
‘You’ve got something, you know, de-ah, raw of course but with a little polish … who knows? A word of advice though,’ he went on, pinning a sailor’s cap to his wig. ‘If you’re considering getting an act together I’d drop the name. Lily Savage is all right for a bit of camp but no one is going to take an act that sounds like an old scrubber seriously, dahling.’
T
WO WEEKS AFTER MY DEBUT AT THE
C
AP
, B
ARBARA
, B
ERYL
and I set off for Poland. Prior to leaving London I’d looked after a small boy while his mother had an abortion, and sat for three nights at the bedside of a sick old lady who had no one else to sit with her as she waited to die, and I was looking forward to getting away.
We’d chipped in and hired a beautiful bright red Ford Capri for our odyssey across Eastern Europe. Barbara was the designated driver since neither Beryl nor I could drive. I was also hopeless at map-reading. I can’t even work out how to fold one back up, let alone read it. They baffled me then as they still do now, and the job of navigator was wisely entrusted to Beryl.
I sat in the back sleeping for most of the journey, waking up at intervals with the hump, moaning and whining, ‘Are we there yet?’ like a mardy kid you want to slap. Apart from the occasional toilet and coffee break Barbara drove the entire 577 miles to West Berlin without stopping, and seriously impressed by the woman’s stamina I came to the conclusion that if she ever gave up working for social
services she’d make a damn good long distance lorry driver.
It was dark by the time we arrived in West Berlin and had started to rain heavily, which did nothing to improve Barbara and Beryl’s mood. By now they were near screaming point with exhaustion. After driving around for over an hour we eventually found our hotel, which turned out to be smart but disappointingly ordinary and nothing at all like Fräulein Schroeder’s lodging house in Christopher Isherwood’s book
Goodbye to Berlin
. I wanted to lie on a brass bed draped with shawls in a room illuminated by amber light, drinking schnapps and smoking a Café Crème cigar whilst listening to the distant sound of a gramophone playing hot jazz somewhere in the house.
Marching into the hotel we could have been mistaken for the zombies from
Thriller
. After fourteen hours in a Ford Capri, all Beryl and Barbara wanted was a meal, a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. I had other plans. There was a city with a reputation for being shockingly sinful out there that I badly wanted to explore. Shaving, showering and changing into T-shirt, jeans and bomber jacket I quickly shovelled a plate of Kassler mit Sauerkraut down me in the hotel restaurant and hit the streets in search of the infamous cabaret bars of Weimar Berlin. My preconceived notions of Berlin night life, inspired by films and books, were forty-odd years out of date. The smoky waterfront bar with a vamp in a top hat sitting cross-legged on a barrel crooning bittersweet songs of the streets to a clientele of toffs, pimps, whores, sailors and queers now only existed on celluloid and in the end, to get out of the now driving rain, I ducked into a bar that was all but empty apart from a sad couple hunched morosely over their lager, numbed into a stupefied silence no doubt by the racket coming from a juke box in the corner belting out what
sounded like the screams of the damned but turned out to be a genre of music known as ‘German Rock’.
So much for Sinful Berlin. Having failed to find anything remotely decadent I returned to the hotel looking like the proverbial drowned rat to find myself unable to negotiate the electronic glass doors. In the end I resorted to hammering on the window, hoping to gain the attention of one of the piss-elegant crowd gathered in the lobby busy pointedly ignoring the tramp banging on the door. Eventually a member of staff let me in and muttering curses under my breath I made my way up to the room we were all sharing to save money, and was in bed and asleep by ten.
As we were driving down the Unter den Linden the next morning the indicators on the car ceased to work, resulting in a search for a garage with the necessary parts. Barbara drove to a police station and managed to convey what the trouble was by chanting ‘Das indikator is kaput’ and pointing towards the car. Eventually a copper who spoke some English sent us off to one of the few garages that were open on a Saturday and after a lot of fuss and fraying of nerves we eventually got the bloody thing fixed. At Checkpoint Charlie we nearly caused an international incident by attempting to cross over to the East with the wrong papers and after more fuss, bureaucracy and lengthy explanations we were redirected to a different route.