The Varnished Untruth (19 page)

French and Saunders were starting out, though. I saw them at the Comic Strip on the few occasions that I performed there. I was impressed that they had the courage to do softer, female-friendly material they’d written together. It wasn’t easy to handle that crowd. I remember waiting in the wings to go on and wanting to shit myself. I was thinking: I have no armament to please these people. Alexei Sayle would have just rocked the house with his strident chanting: ‘Ullo, John, got a new motor?’ And Rik Mayall’s pants would probably be round his ankles just as I was about to walk on. It was hellish. No point trying anything subtle; you had to bring out your toughest material just to stay alive. I did abrasive sets, as shocking as possible, but they were very hit-or-miss. Once Billy phoned and said he would come to see me at the Comic Strip the following week, but that terrified me more than the audience so I pulled out. I couldn’t bear for him to see me fail.

You’d think I might have been more self-confident at this point. After all, I’d been part of a comedy team that had affected people’s lives; I know this, because recently I met a woman who told me that she was a schoolgirl when Not
The Nine O’Clock News
was on television. At some point – it may even have been the very last episode we made – we sang a song called ‘The Memory Kinda Lingers’. Now, ‘Kinda Lingers’ was a double entendre for ‘cunnilingus’, and people smirked when they heard it. Well, not everybody. This woman I met, who was a young teenager at the time, apparently went to school with a serious mission. At the end of every lesson, when the teacher asked ‘Any questions?’ she put up her hand. ‘Please Miss, could you tell me what “kindalingers” really means?’ But no teacher would tell her. Finally, at the end of the day, she went to the librarian, who took pity on her and told her the truth. Thirty years later, this woman still feels mortified about it – I guess she’d prefer her memory to have a kinder kinda linger.

One memory of my own that I would prefer to be kinder is that of my association with a hero of mine, the late Peter Sellers. In July 1980 his ‘people’ called my ‘people’ to suggest that we meet to discuss a role he was keen for me to play in a new Clouseau movie. It was a character called Anastasia. In this new script, Clouseau fell in love with her, and ends up leaving the police force for her. I was enormously flattered that such a genius as Peter was interested in working with me. But when I turned up to meet him at the Dorchester, I was surprised to see him sitting in the lobby, anxiously watching the door for my arrival. That seemed a bit bizarre. We exchanged pleasantries for a bit and he said some very nice things about work I’d done on Not
The Nine O’Clock News
. To be honest he seemed a little odd – but then, people had told me he was highly superstitious. ‘Don’t wear green whatever you do,’ my agent had said. ‘He thinks it’s really unlucky.’ Sporting a safe choice of pink and blue, I followed Peter round the corner to a Chinese restaurant where we met Clive Donner who was going to direct the film. When the two of them offered me the part then and there, I was completely bowled over. ‘I’ll read some of the script to you,’ said Peter, who seemed worried that I might say ‘No’. ‘You really don’t have to convince me to do this . . .’ I murmured, completely mystified by his apparent desire to please me. But he launched into a scene where Clouseau and Anastasia are on a date and the hapless detective accidentally sets fire to his beard. As he read, Peter was giggling madly in a terribly endearing way, and I could just tell it would be enormous fun to work with him . I wasn’t even deterred by my sense that the man was clearly crazy.

After dinner, feeling rather disbelieving of the whole situation, I sat down with Peter in his suite to hear more about the project. ‘Now, you’re going to hear some things,’ he said, suddenly turning serious. ‘I’m going to LA tomorrow to have a big operation. But, whatever you hear, don’t worry. This movie will happen.’ He walked me to my car and pressed a copy of the script in my hand. ‘Read it immediately, please,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I promised. ‘As soon as you get home?’ he pleaded. ‘Then call me and tell me what you think . . . It doesn’t matter what time.’ Again, it seemed utterly weird that he was so anxious, but I dutifully read the script that night. I loved it, but by the time I reached the last page it was 3.30am. I thought it would be best not to bother Peter until morning.

At 10.15am I called my agent. She had already been telephoned with contractual details and I was verbally engaged to do the movie. It was so exciting – this seemed like an absolutely perfect fit for me. But at around 11am, as I was on my way to rehearsals for something else, I heard an announcement on the radio. ‘Well-known movie star Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack last night. His family is gathering around him.’ I didn’t believe it could be serious because Peter had warned me that I might hear ‘things’, and had promised me the movie would go ahead. But throughout the day the news bulletins became more and more worrying and, by the afternoon, he had passed away.

What feelings did you have about that?

Agh! On the one hand I was terribly sorry about his passing. From what I had seen of him, he was a delightful and enormously talented person. But there was a part of me that was also railing against my own loss – and yet I felt quite guilty about that. I wondered if I had caused him greater anxiety by not calling him after I finished reading the script. Had I contributed to his final heart attack? I felt horrible about that possibility. But to get so close to such an enormous break in my career and have it whisked away all within a matter of hours was a particularly difficult experience, and one that took me years to get over. Oh, and there was also a rather nasty insinuation from some quarters that, well, what was I doing in his suite so late, and had I exacerbated his heart condition by – dot-dot-dot? Oh, please! Being so weird and fragile, Peter had inspired my caretaking instincts – but certainly not my lust.

Thankfully, a few other things were happening in my career – people began to invite me to appear in other movies – and there was a major development in my personal life: Billy and I got together. This happened roughly a year after we first met. I was filming in Brighton and a young man approached me on the street: ‘Did you know Billy Connolly’s here? He’s playing at the Dome.’ I have no idea who that young man was but Billy and I always joke half-seriously that he was an angel. The minute he said those words I knew what I had to do – find Billy immediately and try to reconnect with him. Strange, eh? Previously I’d had no conscious understanding of the depth of my feelings for him. At least we were both in the process of marital separation, although for both of us things were still jolly complicated. I got to the theatre before Billy arrived. When he turned up the same young man was at the door. ‘Pamela Stephenson’s inside,’ he said. Freaky, huh?

As I sat on the wash basin in his dressing room (there was only one chair and his clothes and banjo were on it), we chatted as if we’d always known each other. Then I went into the auditorium and watched his show. I just couldn’t believe it. How on earth could one person manage to keep the attention of that wild, well-tanked crowd? It was such a difficult space to play. People were walking in and out, spilling beer over each other. They were loudly heckling Billy too, although they did so at their peril because Billy was totally on the offensive. ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ he’d scoff. If someone stood up in his eye line he would mock them mercilessly. ‘Edna is wearing . . .’ Emulating a fashion announcer he would provide a hilarious running commentary of some poor woman’s appearance as she tried to scuttle up the aisle to the bathroom.

I especially loved two particular stories he told that night: one about a ‘wee woman in a fat coat’ who was pitched off a bus into a shrubbery, and another about a budgie that got loose in a pub. The extraordinary pictures he created for the audience, the world into which he invited us, the colour and insanity of it all – were breath-taking. At that point in my professional life I had been so involved in the making of comedy, I was far from a comic’s favourite audience member. At other comedians’ shows I tended to sit there being quite analytical and watching them work, rather than being swept up in the performance. But with Billy, I was totally engaged, and left the theatre at the end clutching my hurting stomach, just like everybody else. It didn’t even matter that I only understood every third word. He was angry as hell, but beneath it all there was a philosophical angst – not to mention a palpable, deep wound. When he talked about his father smacking him in a rhythmic fashion to match his diatribe, and being hit so hard he flew over a couch, I felt enormous empathy towards him, even though I was laughing hard along with everyone else. He touched everyone in the room in a most powerful fashion, and I knew then he truly was a genius. It hadn’t been hyperbole from the
NTNON
crew after all; I had seen it with my own eyes. So I’m afraid it was very hard to resist when he popped the question: ‘Come to my hotel room and save my life . . . ?’ He was quoting Loudon Wainwright but, in a way, he meant exactly that.

We fell in love very quickly; in fact, as I have already implied, we had probably became (somewhat unwillingly) enamoured of each other the second we met. When I wrote my husband’s biography,
Billy
, I naturally put the focus on his early story of abuse, and on his courage and survival. But now you know that I too was an abandoned child, you’ll understand how fitting it was that we should have met. Joined at the wound, we were. But there was one really big problem; the man drank. In a way, it was impressive; I had never seen a man imbibe as many whiskys as he did that night and still be able to make a girl happy. At first, I thought his excessive drinking was just nerves, but I soon discovered he was not only adorable, loving and delightfully vulnerable, he was also anxious, traumatized and bent on self-destruction. I kept flip-flopping between thinking, ‘This man is a nightmare’ and ‘I want to have his babies.’ As a cautionary message to self, I copied a passage from the Buddhist scripture the
Dhammapada
into my notebook:

Fortunately, my early illusory state gave way to a slightly better grip on the reality of Billy Connolly. I became aware that my attitude towards him waxed and waned depending on whether he was drunk or sober when we met up. He was highly unpredictable and, most alarmingly, under the influence of quite a lot of alcohol he seemed to undergo a personality change, becoming a rather mean version of himself. I jokingly referred to that dark alter ego as ‘beastie’ but, to be honest, it was no joke. I suppose, to some extent, I found his complexity fascinating, but it was also scary. Sometimes I even worried for my own safety. Eventually, I decided he was too hard to handle and ran away to Bali to try to forget him. But, predictably, that didn’t work.

And . . . how did that resolve work out for you?

Ha! I just could not stop thinking about him. And Bali was a disappointment on this, my second visit. See, I hadn’t just fled from Billy.

I didn’t write down the worst thing that could happen to me at Christmas – a family get-together – but I imagine that was uppermost in my mind. My parents were now living in Epsom, Surrey, and wanted me to turn up for festive fun and fake familiarity. Awful. My sister Lesley was now an opera singer, living relatively nearby in Zurich, so I guess they had a fantasy of playing happy families in their retirement years. Hmm. Not on your nelly . . .

Again, such bitterness. And you know, your prolonged anger towards them hides deep, continued sadness that you’d be a lot better off without . . .

Yep. I know, it would be wonderful to be able to let it go. If only insight alone were enough to release it. Hopefully, one day . . .