Still Standing: The Savage Years (23 page)

‘Tell me,’ I asked him as I watched his bride drain the last of her pint in one, ‘was it the prospect of British citizenship that got you down the aisle?’

Even Chrissie became the butt of a hoary old joke I’d heard one of the comics in the Stone Chair use.

‘See that frizzy-haired old queen over there, the miserable one with a face like a peanut?’ I shouted. ‘I had to take her back up to the hospital today. She’s had a crippling case of piles. The doctor recommended that she smother them in tea
leaves for a week, which she dutifully did. We sat up all night opening teabags with nail scissors to meet the demand.

‘Anyway, when we went back today the quack told her to drop her drawers and bend over the sofa, a request she’s no stranger to, believe me. Well, the doctor stared for what seemed like hours at Chrissie’s tea leaf-encrusted hoop, not saying a word.

‘Eventually Chrissie piped up, “What do you see, doctor?”

‘“Well, your piles are no better,’ the doctor said, ‘“but I see an encounter with a tall dark stranger and a possible trip abroad …”’

Whereas Hush had introduced each act as if they were debs being presented at the Court of St James, I adopted the attitude of a Midwest carnival barker and introduced the girls as if they were the epitome of pulchritude.

‘Roll up, ladies and gents, our first little lady to skip down the illuminated runway of joy sings, dances and crawls on her belly like the very serpent that St Patrick ground underneath his sandal. Please welcome the Fair Maid of Fife herself, the lovely Stella!’

Stella was one of my favourites, a skinny Scottish queen blissfully unaware of just how bad he was as he ‘sang’ ‘New York, New York’ in a key that hadn’t been invented yet, four beats behind his backing track in a voice that could shatter marble. When eventually the catcalls and booing started drowning out Stella’s remarkable vocal talents he’d abandon the song and go into a striptease instead, slowly removing everything, right down to his false teeth. These he’d place in a pint glass and hand to me for safe keeping. I in turn would pop them on the moving turntable of the DJ’s console, setting them spinning around and grinning maniacally in a residue of warm cider at the bottom of the glass. Quite a
spectacular finale to anyone’s act, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The undisputed star of the amateurs was Rose-Marie. His real name was John and he worked in the kitchens of one of the big hotels and lived for his Tuesday nights when he could get into his little crimplene charity-shop frock and take to the stage.

I find it hard to describe Rose-Marie without sounding cruel, though I felt very protective towards him. He had many physical deformities and while he didn’t have serious learning difficulties he was what my mother, in an attempt to be kind, would term ‘not the full shilling’. He was a happy soul, perfectly affable and good-natured until someone crossed him. Then his mood would switch in a flash, transforming him into a filthy-mouthed Mr Hyde with a violent temper. The first time I ever saw Rose-Marie shuffling back and forth on the stage I was horrified. His unlovely face smeared with make-up was set fast in a faintly obscene leer as he hobbled on his club feet, encased in Doc Marten boots, to Susan Maughan’s ‘Bobby’s Girl’, touching his makeshift breasts and lifting the hem of his dress to reveal misshapen legs.

He was a dancing bear, an Elephant Man for the eighties, a monster in drag performing for an audience who at first cruelly laughed at him instead of with him. Thankfully the audience’s attitude quickly changed towards Rose and he became a cult figure on the gay scene. Even though he was still looked upon as an oddity, he was our oddity and was greeted with great warmth and genuine affection each time he appeared.

He was murdered one night by a lad he’d picked up in a pub and taken back to his flat. The gay community were appalled by the senseless killing of such an innocent, but at least Rose had had his moment in the sun. That was when the
agent Paul Wilde booked him in at the Hippodrome, formerly the Talk of the Town, fulfilling a dream Rose would never have thought possible.

That night at the Elly was a revelation to me, a real eye-opener as to what I was capable of, but even though I was high as a kite on adrenalin and flushed with success, I was not so giddy as to get carried away by the requests from other pub landlords in the audience to book me for their own venues. I realized that compèring a crappy talent show was one thing but actually launching myself on the circuit as a live patter act was another. I wasn’t ready yet by any means and I knew it and besides, I told myself, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and next Tuesday I might die on my arse.

No, I told myself, far wiser to stay in the Elly for the time being. If I was to seriously make a go of this ‘going live’ lark then I’d have to work at it first and try to hone whatever skills I was developing, and the Elly seemed as good a place as any for me to practise in.

‘A star is born, dear,’ Campella said, kissing me on both cheeks and giving me a hug. ‘Pure fuckin’ anarchy, love.’

The star that had just been born staggered down South Lambeth Road with Chrissie in tow. He was drunkenly waving at cars and swinging a bin-liner containing the head of the disassembled Lily Savage around in the air while I, equally pissed, lugged the rest of her in a holdall and wondered how the hell we were going to get up for work in four hours’ time.

‘I’ll gerrus up,’ Chrissie slurred confidently, pausing momentarily as we crossed the road to moon at a lorry driver who’d stopped for the lights.

‘Call that an arse?’ the lorry driver shouted out of the cab window.

‘What are yer talking about?’ Chrissie shouted back, breaking into peals of flirtatious laughter and slapping a bare cheek. ‘It’s like a full moon, that is.’

‘Shame you didn’t see it last night,’ I chimed in. ‘There was a man in it.’

Oh dear. Rapier wit on the South Lambeth Road at 3 a.m. I really did need to hone those skills.

After a couple of Tuesday nights, word went round like a bush fire that the Elly was the place to be.

‘There’s this new drag queen on, Lily Savage – one half of the Playgirls, common as muck, mouth like a viper, hosting a talent show with the worst acts you’ve ever seen.’ Soon, as well as the usual melting pot of perfectly nice people, rent boys, drunks and the mentally unstable, Ladies’ Night began to draw an eclectic crowd with the likes of fashion designer Katharine Hamnett and her team, the artist Patrick Proktor and the film-maker Derek Jarman rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi of the Elly.

The BBC made a programme called
Patrick Proktor’s Britain
with Patrick trailing all over the country visiting people and places that he liked. Lily was one of these people and he interviewed me in the dressing room of the Vauxhall Tavern, making this one of my very first television appearances.

Patrick wrote me a letter in which he compared Tuesday nights at the Elly to the cabaret of the Weimar Republic. ‘There’s nothing else quite like it in London, or indeed the British Isles,’ he wrote, ‘than spending an evening in the company of the most mordant of hostesses, blessed with the tongue of Medusa and the unnerving ability to turn any foolhardy heckler into stone and of whom I am her most
ardent of fans. There is a maternal side to this tough, funny conferencier that I find most endearing in the way that she protects the “girls” of her troupe against the cruel jeers and drunken catcalls from the raucous crowd.’ He went on to say of the ‘girls’ that ‘despite their obvious lack of talent and peculiar physicalities’ he found their naivety and self-effacement refreshing and that ‘if one ever imagined what a working class gay cabaret on the Karlstrasse in pre-war Berlin was like then it could be found in a corner of Vauxhall’.

I don’t know about that but it was certainly lively. One night during the show a punter made his entrance via the unorthodox means of a window. This drunken homophobe had already been ejected by Campella but had hung around outside, turning his wrath on a couple taking some air who, despite their appearance, were not the sort of queens you’d mess with, and with little effort they threw him through the window. As I said, it was rough but good fun.

Among the ragbag of queens who made up the cast of Ladies’ Night was a solitary woman called Linda. Along with a line-up of her gay mates dressed as zombies, she would drag up as Michael Jackson and bring the house down with their version of
Thriller
. Linda had what I considered to be a pure cockney accent and the wit to go with it and could make a simple remark such as ‘Put the kettle on, will ya,’ sound funny. As I sat in her front room with her one afternoon, smoking and drinking tea and listening to her in full flight, she suddenly shot out of her chair mid-conversation and starting hammering on the window.

‘Get orf my wall, you cunt,’ she roared at the unfortunate youth who’d had the temerity to sit on the wall outside her window. Once satisfied that her request had been obeyed, she returned to her chair and carried on where she’d left
off, bemused as to why I was suffocating with laughter.

We all went trailing off in a coach to Manchester to give the unsuspecting patrons of a club called Napoleon’s a taste of Ladies’ Night, organized for us by a shop called Clone Zone. After the audience got over the shock they quite enjoyed it, I think, anyway we all got roaring drunk and I had a fling with one of the zombies in the hotel Clone Zone had put us all up in.

The next day on the way back to London I pulled out the old fox fur that Chrissie had given me and starting playing with it, discovering that if I slid my hand inside this decrepit old scavenger and manipulated the clip that served as a bottom jaw I could bring it to life. I christened it Skippy and would sit on the stage having imaginary conversations with the moth-eaten thing, unknowingly creating a cult figure in the process.

After six months working on and off at the Elly I defected to the other side, the other side of the road that is, to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I was already a regular at the Tavern, working there with Hush and Doris at least once a week, and on my nights off I could invariably be found perched on a stool at the end of the bar, chatting to Paul, the manager. It was Paul who, after plying me with copious amounts of cider at one of the regular lock-ins, persuaded me with the offer of fifty quid as opposed to the fifteen I was getting at the Elly to jump ship and bring the amateur night over to the Tavern.

‘I’ll do it for a few weeks’ were my famous last words.

I was to sit in my chair at the end of the stage presenting ‘Stars of the Future’ on a Thursday night for over eight years.

CHAPTER 8

THE ROYAL VAUXHALL
Tavern was to play an extremely important role in my life.

For us locals the Vauxhall was our village hall, a place where we congregated most nights to chew the cud and get bevvied in the process. All the big occasions in our lives, like birthdays and Christmas, were celebrated at the Vauxhall, and after each New Year’s Eve’s shenanigans I rarely got home to my bed before ten the next morning.

And when the nightmare of Aids hit us, devastating our community, wiping out most of our friends, the reception following the funeral was frequently held in the Vauxhall.

The ‘Stars of the Future’ talent show on a Thursday night became even more popular than Ladies’ Night at the Elly, and over the years it seemed that the whole world passed through those doors on a Thursday night at one time or another.

Years later, on the Eastern and Oriental Express travelling from Singapore to Thailand, one of the inscrutable staff dressed in full Thai costume knocked on my cabin door just as we were pulling into Bangkok station, and dropping the gentle Thai twang he’d spoken with for the entire trip asked
me in an accent that owed more to the banks of the Thames than the Chao Phraya if I’d sign the visitors’ book, as he never used to miss a Thursday night down the Vauxhall. Up a mountain on the Isle of Skye a climber stopped to tell me how much she enjoyed Thursday nights in the Vauxhall, and even in a tea room in Shanghai I was approached and asked for a photo ‘for old times’ sake’, to remind them of the good old days down the Vauxhall.

Looking back now, I might be recalling the past through a slightly sentimental and rose-tinted pair of specs, but I can see that those pre-Aids times in that pub really were the Good Old Days, scratching around, earning a living, going about our daily business not expecting much and not getting it either but managing to have a good time nevertheless. Our social life revolved around the Vauxhall, the Elly, the Market Tavern in Nine Elms Lane and the Union Tavern in Camberwell and we very rarely strayed outside the vicinity to go drinking.

My first few Thursday nights at the Vauxhall were not so much a baptism by fire as a roasting in the white heat of the core of a volcano.

Paul had promoted his new show heavily in
Capital Gay
, a free weekly paper for the London gay and lesbian community, and there was a bit of a buzz of anticipation about it going around the gay pubs which did nothing to boost my confidence. Instead it had the opposite effect, making me question my ability to carry it off. I’d lie in bed anticipating the heckles that might come my way and thinking up suitable put-downs for them just in case.