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News Review interview: Barry Humphries
As Dame Edna he is outrageous: a hilariously accurate judge of suburban pretension. Offstage, and at 75, he remains irresistible to women, including his novelist friend and neighbour
March 1st 2009
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I’ve always felt that Barry Humphries invented me. His alter ego, Dame Edna Everage, has a daughter named Valmai who married a man called Mervyn and moved to a blond-brick house in the suburbs. My mother’s name is Valmai, she’s married to my dad Mervyn and – you’ve guessed it – they live in a blond-brick house in Sylvania, a suburb of Sydney. As Dame Edna would say, “How spooky, possums!”
It was my mum who first alerted me to Barry’s work. I can vividly recall my parents coming home from the St George Leagues club in 1974, weak from hysteria. Dame Edna had satirised suburban life, with its wine-cork-sniffing husbands (the blokes who put the bore into bordeaux), with devastating accuracy. “She even described my duck-egg-blue bathroom with the multicoloured cotton balls,” Mum enthused, lapsing into Ednicity. “Tiles only halfway up the wall, darling? What went wrong, dear – did you run out of money?”
With his astute observational skills and keen cultural radar, Barry is really an anthropologist. As we’ve been neighbours in London for more than a decade (our houses back onto each other), I get to experience his wicked wit at first hand. “Dear Kathy,” he e-mailed a couple of weeks ago. “Back in London tomorrow when I’ll be poised at your rear entrance.”
“Your place or mine?” he electronically flirted upon his return. Followed by, “Why are we sitting in front of these infernal machines when we could just open the window and shout?”
We’ve shared many a raucous dinner in my kitchen and in Barry’s elegant dining room. (While I tend to use my smoke alarm as a timer, Barry’s wife, Lizzie Spender, is an excellent cook.) Nothing brightens up a grey London day quite like bumping into Barry in the local supermarket. It’s hard to believe he turned 75 the other week, although he insists this is a clerical error. “Don’t you know that I just played Hugh Jackman’s body double in the film Aus-tralia?” he says.
Barry has to be Australia’s most influen-tial and successful export. His comic creations – the irrepressible Dame Edna, the odious Sir Les Patterson and the reflective Sandy Stone (whom Barry describes as “Melbourne talking in its sleep”) – have helped shape a nation. With Edna about to celebrate her 52nd year on the stage – he’ll be touring Britain with his new show, Last Night of the Poms, later this year – it is timely to reflect on what shaped him.
Barry dropped in years ago to present me with his newly published autobiography, quipping, “My life is in your hands.” And what a life it’s been. He was born in 1934 and grew up in Camberwell, Melbourne. Legend has it that to alleviate the boredom of school football, he would sit on the field with his back to the game, knitting.
At university, Germaine Greer helped ladle custard into rubber wellingtons for an act Barry called Pus in Boots. He then captivated London with the stage show House-wife! Superstar! – the first of many sell-out West End runs, followed by a string of primetime chat shows. The icing on the fame pie came when Dame Edna finally conquered America, first through a Broad-way run that earned Barry a prestigious Tony award, then with her appearances on Ally McBeal, the legal comedy drama.
So much for the public Barry Humphries – what of the private man? What delighted me when first I got to know Barry was his warmth. Dame Edna has a venomous wit, but Barry is a compassionate and loyal friend. In times of personal crisis, how reassuring it is to see him slinking through the front garden in his fedora and box-pleated, tailored jacket, piquing the interest of pedestrians with his Sherlock Holmes demeanour.
Dame Edna would kill for Barry’s social circle. He rubs tiaras with Prince Charles and the Queen on a regular basis. He “gave away” Pamela Stephenson to Billy Connolly at the altar. Gough Whitlam, the former prime minister of Australia, was so enam-oured of Edna Everage, he gave her a dame-hood – “the only suitable recipient of an imperial honour at my hands”, he wrote.
An array of talented people were invited to Barry’s birthday bash, but most of all he likes the company of women. “Women are so much more broad-minded than men. They have a much more important role than men too. And are just much, much more interesting,” he confides over coffee at my kitchen table.
Even now, at 75, with his fringe flopping over one eye in a boyish manner, he still has women crowding around him at parties. “But you’re maritally incontinent,” I tease him. “Four marriages! Do your wedding vows say, ‘Till divorce us do part?’ Your friends must have thought they were developing tinnitus, but it was just the endless ringing of wedding bells as you kept getting hitched.”
“Most men have girlfriends between marriages. I usually have had wives between marriages,” he jests in reply. “I’m just not all that good at being a spouse.” When he flirts, his voice is low and mellifluous. He loves to linger over words, rolling the syllables around in his mouth, in lieu of the wine he no longer drinks.
I ask him whether knowing Edna so intimately for all these years has made him more sympathetic to the female psyche. “Oh yes,” he says. “Dame Edna doesn’t want Les in the show. Most women wake up next to a Les on their pillow every morning, and Edna feels sure that they don’t want to spend an evening with him as well. And I think women find Dame Edna empowering because she’s saying there’s a way out. You can tiptoe through the broken kids’ toys in the backyard and escape over the fence to a new life.”
This is a sentiment that would not have gone down well with Barry’s mother, a beacon of suburban respectability, who was always slightly disapproving. Barry told me that he once asked her if she loved him. “Naturally I love your father most of all, then my mother and father, and after that you and your sister, just the same,” came her painfully matter-of-fact reply.
I ask Barry if Edna is based on her in any way. “My mother had very good taste. And was very amusing in an extremely sardonic way. But Edna is nothing like my mother. She’s much more extrovert. Edna is really quite bright. Sometimes I hear her say something and I think, ‘That was quite a clever thing to say. I wish I’d said that’.”
I suggest perhaps women adore Edna because of her black belt in tongue fu: women are generally more verbally dexterous than blokes, but Edna is the Martina Navratilova of the backhanded compliment. She can elevate then annihilate in the same breath. Talking to Michael Bol-ton, the singer, on her most recent talk show in Britain, she purred, “You’ve had nine hits this year.” Just when the singer was preening himself, Edna added, “On your website.”
“I think women like Edna because she’s evolved along with them,” Barry continues, over our second coffee. “She began life wearing cast-off clothes and housecoats. Then she became smarter. She was a pioneer of Thai silk, you know. In the late Seventies she showcased the denim tennis outfit,” he adds with facetious pride.
After the success of Barry’s “frock-athon” – an exhibition of Dame Edna’s frocks in Melbourne – he encouraged Kylie Minogue to do the same. KM’s exhibition was a huge hit at the Victoria & Albert museum. “Yes,” sighs Barry with faint disgust, “Sir Les broke his nose at the Kylie exhibition. He didn’t realise those hot pants were behind glass.”
Most successful artists become so vain, they should install spotlights in their bedrooms, but Barry is disarmingly self-deprecating. Dame Edna often observes she was “born with a priceless gift: the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others”. Barry laughs most heartily at himself.
For The South Bank Show, Barry gave Melvyn Bragg, the arts programme’s presenter, two interviews, one as the intellectual Barry, surrounded by his books and paintings, and then as Dame Edna, who savaged Barry as pathetic, pitiful and pretentious.
Her put-downs of her “manager” Mr Humphries were hilariously hurtful. However, while Barry is generous, he’s no pushover. He tells me about being stalked by an obnoxious paparazzo. “I was in Sydney having coffee with a friend. This photographer approached, reeking of alcohol, shoving his camera at us. I saw a knuckle moving past my face. Much to my surprise, I realised it was attached to my own hand. I just watched as my fist moved in slow motion.”
A Sir Les moment, I suggest, and out of character for the refined and highly intellectual Humphries. Whereas Les Patterson probably thinks “erudite” is a kind of glue, Barry paints landscapes and wears only bespoke clothes. He once mortgaged his flat to buy a painting he adored, with no obvious means of paying off the debt.
He collects paintings and rare books, including volumes of surrealist poetry. His library of 18,000 books, most of which are first editions, takes up an entire floor of his West Hampstead home. And yet there is nothing elitist about him. The fact we’re friends (I left school at 16 – the only examination I’ve ever passed is my cervical smear test) proves he relates to the everyman.
“But,” he ruminates, “Edna quickly developed amazing cultural power. Everything Edna liked, people banished. I was invited to dinner after the show by some nice Adelaidians once. Anyway, the food was lovely, the people were really nice . . . the only unusual thing was the rectangular shapes on the walls where the pictures used to be. They’d obviously taken down their paintings before I arrived.” We laugh. Then he adds, thoughtful once more, “But I felt quite upset that people thought I was sneering and snobby.”
Happy birthday, Bazza.
Long Live Dame Edna!
