Filling in the Gaps (3 page)

Sydney - School and Beyond

When I was about thirteen years old, my dad, who continued to climb the corporate ladder, was transferred to Sydney where another exciting chapter of my life began. Nothing in my life has ever been, and probably never will be, just on a nice even plane - there were always extreme highs and some awfully sad lows and this continued in Sydney. Sydney was and still is the biggest city in Australia but at that time it would have been more like the size of San Diego today - about 1.5 million people. I was very excited because Sydney was where all of the big stars of the day visited - they seldom ventured as far as Perth or even Melbourne at times. Stars like Sarah Vaughan, Judy Garland, Tony Martin, Shirley Bassey, Nelson Eddy, Gail Sherwood and Liza Minelli. Sadly I never got to see such stars in the flesh until a few years later when I met many of my idols.

My dad and I still had relationship issues - so sad for me because I loved him so much and wanted, needed, his approval of everything I did, but I couldn't ever seem to live up to his expectations of me. His brothers all had sons who were either footballers or involved in masculine pursuits, whilst I sat alone in a cinema or in my room with the door locked playing musicals over and over. Just writing this now upsets me when I think of the disappointment Dad must have felt.

In Sydney I went to St. Aloysius College, another Jesuit establishment that professed to train boys to be men... well, some of us perhaps! This was my favourite school - it was located practically under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the teachers were most helpful and supportive, and they encouraged me to top the class that year. I also had my first serious crush on another boy, which seemed to be mutual but mainly in a curious sexual fashion that led only to fondling in a theatrette at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. I am sure he ended up married with a dozen children. I remember his name and address - Ian in Balgowlah - to this day! One time we were in chapel, where the kneeler was raised as we boys walked in and then lowered for us to kneel on. During this particular service I didn't pull my foot out in time and one foot ended up being kneeled on by the whole row of boys for the entire service! There was no way I could have yelled out to have them raise the kneeler. After the service I collapsed into the arms of the boys beside me, who carried me outside. When they got my shoe off my foot was so badly swollen that I couldn't put the shoe back on. Nothing broken, just my pride and anger with myself for not having the guts to tell them to get off the kneeler - it still irks me to this day! At that time in my life I lacked the ability to speak out and defend myself in
any
situation, as witnessed when the head teacher accused me of physically abusing myself when in fact it was done by a bully! However, looking back I do feel that my experience in Jesuit-run schools gave me a better and more rounded education. I did rebel but mostly responded to their strict rules in a positive fashion.

At St Aloysius I sat beside a lovely English lad called Jolyon Tester - sadly now deceased - who lived in Lindfield on the North Shore, while we lived nearby in Turramurra. Jolyon's father was a famous television identity called Desmond Tester who hosted a television programme on Channel 9 called the
Mickey Mouse Club
. From that association came another adventure that I have just written about at length in my new eBook for Theme Park Press called
Mouseketeers Down Under
(available at
http://themeparkpress.com
). It describes how through Jolyon I was invited to Channel 9 on several occasions and eventually formed an association with the
Mouseketeers
. Just as I became friends with Debbie Reynolds, once again one of my childhood dreams became a fabulous reality.

Channel 9 was in Willoughby, a suburb on Sydney's North Shore, and to visit the television station was like visiting a Hollywood studio to me - magic time! Desmond Tester was a hero to thousands of kids but he still found the time to escort me through the studio. Little did I know that fifteen years later I would often be at the studio because my future partner, John Frost, was working there when we met and started our seven-year relationship.
The Mike Walsh Show
was the most popular daytime show and I often sat in the audience enthralled by how it ran. I also got to meet many of the guests in the Green Room through John and the wonderful music librarian, ‘Lady' Olga Byron, who became a special friend. Many of those famous guests actually become close friends when I moved to London and the social whirl through my wife Su Pollard.

My sister Jenny and I were very close at the time and in those days movies were our escape. She wasn't as keen as me but tolerated my obsession. I had very few peers I could relate to but there was one, a classmate at St. Aloysius, David Whitehouse, whose parents owned the shop across the road from Gordon Railway Station. They seemed to enjoy my company a lot and, along with his sister, were most kind. Their shop was beside the old Gordon Cinema. One night my sister and I were watching a movie there by ourselves - I think it was
State Fair
with Pat Boone and Ann-Margret - in the empty dress circle when a huge and well-fed possum calmly and slowly ambled up the aisle towards us. It stopped and stared at me and only then did I notice what it was. Being a complete coward I totally froze as it slowly jumped onto my lap and gave me the once over but obviously wasn't that impressed so proceeded onto my sister's lap. She left that cinema in five seconds, taking ten stairs at a time whilst I was in hysterics - the laughing kind!

I had one other friend, also from England, whose father was the admiral of an inland naval base now gone I believe - the base and the admiral! He used to ask me to spend weekends with him at the base, which I loved - all those ‘
seamen'
'. When I arrived I was met by his private driver and was given a seat on the dais for the Sunday Passing Out Parades, which made me feel like a queen - the real one! He was totally straight but I know he found me very funny and we had some lovely times together. He could never comprehend how I knew singers' names just by hearing their voices. I also knew that I could sexually titillate him, which was confirmed one night when we were lying on our single beds and I was purposely asking him sexually provocative questions, until finally he owned up that he was very, very aroused. Nothing further happened but I went to sleep strangely content. He is now a top lawyer, as is one of my ex-partners. I hope they don't take umbrage at my revelations. Don't want to go to jail again!
Stripes didn't suit
!

I really have no idea why or how I have such an instinctive love of all things ‘show business'. Dad and Mum never took me to one live show but Mum tells me that her mother played the piano beautifully, but that's about it. Dad could only whistle one note and his big joke was that he only knew they were playing ‘God Save the Queen' because everybody stood up!

In Sydney after school I used to love listening to the DJ Bob Rogers on radio station 2UE. He had the best voice and was a charmer. Encouraged by Debbie Reynolds's response to my earlier fan letter I wrote him a letter asking for more Debbie Reynolds music to be played and if it might be possible for me to visit the radio station. He answered positively to both my requests. When I saw the record library, the experience was almost orgasmic. He explained how lots of records were imported and some couldn't be played yet because of various rights. I hung on to his every word. So a belated thanks Mr Rogers, whom I believe is still working in Sydney.

Dad and Mum did take Jenny and me to see Mike Todd's
Around the World in 80 Days
at the Paris Theatre in Sydney where Mike Todd and his then wife, Elizabeth Taylor, were in attendance, but crowds were so thick we didn't even manage a glimpse of them. Meanwhile,
Tammy
was playing all over Sydney, including at the wonderful drive-in theatres. Dad relented and finally took us to see it at the Skyline North Ryde. I caught him blowing his nose at the end so it must have moved him a little. I used to check where it was playing and get a train to a matinee session. I lost count of the number of times I saw it. Now of course I know Debbie Reynolds and I have
Tammy
on DVD but it still cheers me up if ever I am going through an emotionally stressful time, which is probably twice a week. I am jesting of course, it's only once a week!

Melbourne

Dad was then transferred to Melbourne with William Cooper & Nephews, a chemical manufacturing company famous for its ship dip products. We were all flown there on a tiny DC-6B. Mum had a great a fear of flying in those days, as I occasionally still do, so to allay her fears - not ours - she dosed us up heavily on Veganin, a kind of calmative. Jenny and I can vaguely remember boarding the aircraft but have absolutely no recollection of having had to be carried off the plane in the deepest sleep. Melbourne could have been Moscow!

We stayed in a private hotel in South Yarra - all of us in one huge room - and I started school at Xavier College. Whenever my sister or I started at a new school - and there were many over the years - Mum would park her car outside the school just so we could see that she was still there when we had our lunch break. The car was loaded with her lunch and magazines and she would stay all day until we ran into her arms at the end of classes! She did the same thing years later when my youngest sister Patsy was born. It was such a sweet gesture and so typical of Mum.

I wasn't enamoured of Xavier. It was very heavy on sport and I was not. It also meant travelling on two buses, two trains plus a bus twice a day - once before school and once after school - because we lived in Beaumaris and the school was in Kew, a distance of about thirty kilometres. The best thing about Xavier College was that in mid-summer there were so many cicadas in the trees outside the classrooms that when the noise became intolerable we were sent home. Beaumaris was a newer suburb and we had a lovely home. Whenever we moved our new home was always a bit more upmarket. In Melbourne I also bought on hire purchase
– I'm not sure I ever paid it off
– my first portable
Pye
stereogram. I would shut my bedroom door and lie on the floor with one speaker beside each ear and play all my show records at full blast and imagine I was on stage or at least in the front row of a performance. I would play them for hours, totally transported!

Melbourne is where my show business interests and other adventures began (well documented in my autobiography) but there were also many other ‘adventures'. One of these was my
Mouseketeer
encounter, which was initiated by my friends at Channel 9 in Sydney. I was probably the
Mouseketeers
' biggest fan in Australia and never dreamt that one day I would be able to spend time with them. In those days television was only about a year old in Australia, with three television stations - HSV7, GTV9 and ABV2. We were unable to afford our own television set then so we used to gather up folding chairs and rugs from home, take small meals that Mum made and sit outside Myers in Bourke Street where they had television sets in several windows with speakers outside. For ages we would watch such programmes as
I Love Lucy
and
In Melbourne Tonight
. We were not the only ones doing so; there were probably more than a hundred people there every night!

One of the most exciting events that happened to me in Melbourne was when Dad decided, to my shock, to take us all down to the seaside town of Frankston - near where my estranged sister now has a very grand home - to watch the filming of the Stanley Kramer production of
On the Beach
starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner. We had a nodding acquaintance with the stars, Fred and Gregory being the most affable. They were happy to chat and sign autographs whilst Anthony was so handsome but very shy and I sensed that he was probably gay, which he indeed was. Sadly, he died of AIDS many years later. Ava was beautiful but withdrawn. She had just told the world press that ‘
if they had to make a movie about the end of the world Melbourne was the right city!'
A few weeks later they filmed scenes on a mock-up submarine built in the show grounds. Then they needed hundreds of extras for a scene outside the Public Library in Swanston Street and Flinders Street Station and of course yours truly was in the throng where they were supposed to be handing out suicide pills for the survivors of a nuclear holocaust - my first and only movie role... to date!

Debbie Reynolds later worked with Gregory Peck in
How the West Was Won
and Fred Astaire in
The Pleasure of His Company.
Debbie told me that Fred was her favourite because when she was a teenager and learning how to dance for
Singin' in the Rain
with Gene Kelly she had worked so hard there was blood in her shoes. At the end of her tether, she heaved the shoes across the rehearsal hall and was crying under a piano when she heard a tap-tap from a cane. It was Fred, who coaxed her out from under the piano and gave her a hug. He told her that he too still found it the hardest work and advised her never to give up because he believed she had the talent to make it in the industry. She certainly heeded his advice!

Sex had well and truly reared its head by now and with it all kinds of confusion, not helped by a dreadful incident with Tommy Steele's manager at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne. My experience with Mr. Steele's manager as a schoolboy left more scars than I realised, which were deeply embedded in my subconscious and only surfaced when I wrote about the incident in my first book. They say that once one has opened the door and faced what happened; one is able to move on. However, for me the reverse is true. The wound is still very fresh and easily opened, even though it was a very long time ago. How children who have suffered sustained abuse, both physically and sexually, over many years have ever coped is totally beyond my comprehension.

I used to attend our church teens social functions hoping to find out which path my sex life was going to take, probably more for Dad's sake than mine. I remember asking a girl to dance, which was the idea of the function, but she held me so tightly I could barely breathe. The situation was not helped by her breath, which was heavy with garlic. I did notice a very good-looking lad who seemed as bored by it all as I was. I was too scared to strike up a conversation with him but we nodded to each other several times during the night and rolled our eyes as if to say “HELP”! I have no idea what happened to him but seeing him there and the occasional smile and nod was enough to make me go back each week - nothing at all to do with meeting the girls!

After school one day, in my school uniform, I was allowed to go to see a movie in the city. In the cinema a much older, swarthy man appeared and kept approaching in the dark, closer and closer, row by row until he was finally sitting beside me. Suddenly I felt his knee brush against mine and being a bit excited but more curious I let him do so. Then he leaned over and said to meet him in the gent's toilet in the foyer. He left and I eventually picked up my school bag and almost passed out because my heart was racing so fast. I found my way into the toilet where he was standing in the doorway of a cubicle. Seeing me, he lunged and dragged me into the cubicle and forced the longest tongue I had ever seen - or tasted - deeply down my throat like some awful lizard! I was initially scared and shocked but a tiny bit curious because the boys at school had recently been discussing French kissing at length - and believe me, this kissing was indeed at great length! I hated it; it seemed awfully unhygienic so I pushed him away and made my escape, more confused than ever. I had never seen two men kiss, let alone be kissed myself by a grown man.

Something about Melbourne really appealed to me and still does - the European feel of the city, the arts scene, the trams and the Moomba Festival, a big arts event. There was also a little cinema under the Australia Hotel that was considered to be a beatnik hangout, and trying to be bohemian I frequented the coffee shop in the foyer. I was sort of cute looking but did not look at all like any of the rest of the crowd, so very few approached me for a chat - or anything! All they drank was coffee, which I hated even the smell of but I consumed it by the gallon, trying to look ‘cool'. However, the only effect was that it made me more hyper than usual; I couldn't stop talking yet said very little! Eventually a small group of older types asked me to go with them to look at antiques - ANTIQUES! I feigned interest and agreed to go. Shop after shop offered no charms. To me it was all just old-fashioned furniture, some of it even chipped and broken. But what would I know? Zero! They were oohing and aahing all over the place and stroking it all as if they were stroking a lover. Whenever they asked my opinion I would just say, ‘Very nice indeed!' I made more and more excuses not to go out with them that they finally gave up on me - thankfully!

Across the road from the Australia Hotel was a sauna that everyone said I had to try. It was entered by going down steep stairs in the centre of an arcade and looked quite nice and had a lovely aroma! I'm not sure whether it was a gay sauna because I never got to find out what it was like. As I was undressing, sirens suddenly went off and we were told to stay where we were. With my vivid imagination, I was imagining some kind of police raid a la Chicago in the bootleg days or even worse the St. Valentine's Day Massacre - since I had just seen
Some Like It Hot.
After about an hour a stretcher was carried out with a tiny body fully covered with a sheet. We were told to leave immediately. I have never dressed so fast. I only found out the next day that a very famous jockey had collapsed and died in the steam room. That was my last sauna visit until years later in Sydney and under circumstances that were much more alluring!

I was starting to rebel a bit mainly because of the abuse at school and not feeling understood at home - the usual teenage angst I guess. Dad and I drifted further apart emotionally, which I found dreadfully sad but would never admit it to anyone. He was a regular guest on a popular early morning television show called the “Today Show' which did make me proud and also enabled me to mix with some of the biggest television stars of the day. One of them was Bert Newton who was one of the most popular television personalities of the day and is now a regular performer in big musicals usually produced by John Frost and he is also a friend of ours today. I also met the performer Toni Lamond who was also a regular with Bert Newton on ‘In Melbourne Tonight' hosted by Graham Kennedy the biggest television personality of the decade plus a big musical comedy performer and who was and is a total joy. She had the most amazing voice and was hilarious in sketches. Many years later I saw her perform as Miss Hannigan in a matinee of
Annie
in Century City, Los Angeles and had dinner with her after the show. Years later again, we flew her over to Perth to perform in cabaret at DownStairs at the Maj with the gloriously urbane Stuart Wagstaff who played Professor Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady' in Australia plus hosted, very successfully, several television shows, Stuart sadly just recently passed away. Toni's talent was as keen as it was years ago and she and Stuart delivered a stunning show. A friend of ours, Kevin Coxhead, along with David Mitchell
,
recently helped organise a tribute to Toni at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne. So well deserved!

I remember waking up one morning with excruciating pain on the right side of my stomach, which Mum insisted was just wind, so she gave me a dose of bicarbonate soda. I can't really blame her because I was quite the hypochondriac. Later that day I was walking down Collins Street in Melbourne when I collapsed in pain and came to in a doctor's surgery with the doctor's finger inside my rectum! I was pacified when he said that by touching certain spots inside my rectum he could tell I had bad appendicitis. I was rushed to hospital and shaved - this time professionally by a nurse - who told me that she had a cold spoon for any men who may become aroused. Believe me, I was far from aroused! After the operation the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my appendix in a jar - it was all twisted and looked like a spring because it was just about to burst, so they saved my life.

The above incident reminds of a more recent one involving a similar part of my anatomy. I used to suffer from the most debilitating migraines from the age of about fifteen and all through my years with Su. Last year after a brain scan - some may be surprised to find out that I have a brain - the migraines were diagnosed as ‘cluster headaches', also called ‘the suicide disease' because the pain associated with them is so excruciating. However, earlier back in Perth I had found a doctor who prescribed suppositories for migraines. I think they may have contained a bit of morphine. One night I was in agony with an acute migraine so I popped in a suppository and waited and waited, to no avail, so I popped in another and then another. Talk about a full house! Suddenly I was violently ill from both ends of my body for hours. Finally, as I was starting to black out Sach called an ambulance. When it arrived they found that because I had lost so much fluid my heart had gone into atrial fibrillation, a dangerous condition. They told me to sit there while they got the stretcher and as they left the room they asked Sach if I was his FATHER! That riled me so much that I ignored waiting for the stretcher and as sick as I was I literally stormed - more like staggered - into the back of the ambulance and
then
collapsed!
How dare they?