Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
The Devil Rides Out (27 page)
‘Oh, Swedes … We feed them to cattle in this country.’
Rex Jameson’s alter ego, the inimitable Mrs Shufflewick, was a drunken old slattern, the type you might have found propping up the bar of an East End pub in a battered hat and ratty old fox fur, knocking back the Guinness and regaling the customers with a salty tale of how she came to end up half naked at the back of a bus with a sailor and a fishcake for company. He’d created a three-dimensional character that was so credible I didn’t realize at first that I was watching a man and not a little old woman. When ‘Shuff’ was on form he was sheer genius, but when he was paralytic, two sips away from being incapable, as he frequently was, I found the drunken ramblings of this tiny man dressed as a dirty old lady painful to watch, some of the audience delighting in laughing at him not with him.
I’d never heard of this Mrs Shufflewick until I saw him at the Black Cap. He’d been a big star in variety, radio and TV in the fifties and sixties, but times and tastes change and thanks to his drinking and growing unreliability managements were extremely reluctant to book him. So Shuff sought work in the only places left that would have him, the drag pubs, and some of his gags always made me laugh no matter how many times he told them. For instance:
‘This sailor comes up to me and says, “You remind me of Elizabeth Taylor.” I said, “Well, that’s awfully kind of you. Is it my figure?” “Yes,” he said, “it’s gone for a Burton.”’
‘This sailor and me, we were standing outside the pub talking about this and that. I don’t know what I said that upset him –
I know I’d mentioned the price of plums – but he suddenly went berserk and made a lunge at me. Well I shot down this side turning which I thought would be an escape route but turned out to be a cul-de-sac and I’m stood there with me back to the brick wall and me legs in two dustbins with a John West salmon tin where it mattered most, with the lid up. And there’s him with his good conduct medals clanking away and his string vest at half mast, well, I thought, this is it tonight Gladys, death or dishonour. And then I thought to meself, well, I’m not bloody dying yet …’
Shuff collapsed one Sunday afternoon on his way to buy fags from his local shop off Camden High Street and died from a heart attack. I was shocked to hear that he was only fifty-eight. I’d thought that he was a lot older than that. At his funeral, they sang ‘My old man said follow the van’ as the coffin vanished behind the curtains and then retired to the Black Cap for a salmon barm cake and a glass of sherry.
To be honest, I’d never been interested in watching drag until I saw the acts at the Cap in action. It was very rare to see a drag act performing in any of the Liverpool gay clubs. The only one I can ever recall was a hairy-chested lorry driver from Manchester who appeared to think that a cheap black wig poking out from underneath a joke shop bowler hat and a tatty corset that looked as if it had probably once belonged to his grandmother instantly transformed him into the living image of Liza Minnelli. He was also under the misapprehension that to get big laughs all you had to do was shove a balloon up an ill-fitting crimplene dress and mime along (badly) to a recording of Dionne Warwick’s ‘Always Something There To Remind Me’, preferably using a disc that had seen active
service and was so heavily scratched it sounded as if Ms Warwick was frying chips when she recorded it.
The act was crude and offensive and I wasn’t amused that I’d had to pay fifty pence to witness this freak show – fifty pence! A bloody fortune in the early seventies to have to cough up for the privilege of getting into Sadie’s, and on a week night. What annoyed me most was that the audience seemed to be lapping it up. What was wrong with them? Couldn’t they see how bad this crap was? I said as much to Billy the barman.
‘That’s because they’re all pissed, love, so pissed they actually think that it is Liza up there. Just look at old Greta. She’s ecstatic, God help her.’ He indicated towards one of the more senior members of Sadie’s clientele, a tiny wizened old queen, blissfully drunk, who was slumped against the wall by the dance floor, blowing gummy kisses and clapping along as Judy Garland’s twenty-stone daughter tried to balance her massive girth on a bar stool while miming to ‘Mein Herr’ from
Cabaret
.
‘Good on her at her age I say, getting out and about and enjoying herself instead of sitting in the bloody house on her own. Cider?’ He took a drag of his fag and gently rested it on the edge of the bar while he dipped down daintily to take a bottle of cider from the shelf behind him. ‘Mind you, she’s always been lively,’ he went on. ‘She was a right one in the war, you know, not that I was around to see it, of course, way before my time. Glass?’
I shook my head.
‘Yes, man mad, anything in a uniform, even the bus conductors weren’t safe, on her back twenty-four hours a day. Broken’earted she was on VE Day, poor cow.’
He seemed oblivious of the fact that he hadn’t given me my
cider and there were a couple of people waiting to be served, carrying on with his potted history of the life and times of Greta regardless. ‘They should have given her a medal for services rendered,’ he said, giving Greta a little wave. ‘Well let’s face it, love, she entertained more soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines than Vera Lynn and Gracie fucking Fields put together.’
‘Was she on the game then?’ I asked, moving my empty glass across the bar towards him by way of a hint.
‘Was she buggery. She was only too happy to give it away. Now as for
her
,’ he said, ignoring my hint and the two restless punters still waiting to be served, who were now vainly waving fivers and their empty glasses at him, and turning his attention instead to the act, throwing it a look that Medusa would’ve given her snakes for, ‘I say if you’re going to indulge in this kind of tat trannyism then at least have the decency to keep it within the confines of your own home and not feel obliged to inflict it on a paying public.’ He shook his head in disgust as he deftly opened the bottle of cider, plonking it down on the bar before me. ‘It wouldn’t have hurt her to have had a shave, would it? You’d think the least she could have done was shave her dirty great back before she flung a frock on.’ He took my money and slithered towards the till, never once taking his eyes off the activity on the dance floor.
‘Jesus tonight, poncing about in an’alf-mast nightie with a chemo wig slapped on yer’ead isn’t drag, love,’ he said, slithering back and giving me my change. ‘I’ve seen the best and I know what I’m talking about. You can’t put the likes of that dog in the same category as Ricki Renee, Laurie Lee and Danny, can you? Drag’s an art and there’s nothing worse than bad drag. It’s an insult to both men and women and makes me want to grab a rope, organize a lynch mob and hang that
out of the front window as a warning. Now who’s waiting to be served?’
On the whole the majority of the acts who appeared at the Cap were polished professionals, although it has to be said that there were more than one or two who were complete and utter pony and trap. Some of them were so bad they deserved ten out of ten for cheek, for having the barefaced effrontery to get up there in the first place, blatantly stealing other, more successful acts’ routines and mannerisms and working cheap, undercutting the others. Watching these dogs prance about the stage I’d always remark that I could do better than that, anybody could.
The Disappointer Sisters were a big influence. If ‘cool’ had been in use back then we’d have described them as such. They seemed so ‘today’, unlike the old timers from another era who stood there and sang ballads in nice frocks leaving me stone cold. I couldn’t see the point. There was no reason for them to be in a frock if all they were going to do was sing. They might just as well have worn a suit. Looking like a woman simply wasn’t enough any more, it was what you did with it that made it interesting.
I wanted to get up there but be larger than life, a creature that was more cartoon than human. I wasn’t sure yet. I wanted to get up on that stage and join in the mayhem at the circus that was part Weimar Berlin cabaret, part vaudeville and burlesque and yet quintessentially British, its roots steeped firmly in the traditions of music hall.
I certainly didn’t want to pass as a woman and be able to walk down a street in full drag undetected – that was transvestism. Nor were my desires in any way sexual. There was no urge to don lacy apparel and sheer stockings and come over all girly – quite the opposite, in fact. Watching the acts
at the Cap night after night I finally realized that what I’d wanted to do all along was perform, not as an actor but as a bump and grind, loud and lairy drag queen. Exactly how you went about joining the ranks of this sisterhood was quite another matter.
My next assignment as a peripapetic was looking after a girl and her three brothers while their mother went into hospital for a hysterectomy and their father into prison for alleged IRA activities. It was in another run-down flat, this time near King’s Cross, that I found myself playing Mary Poppins for six solid weeks.
Luckily they were smashing kids, their ages ranging from four to ten, who were hardly any trouble at all to look after and seemed to live only for food and football, the girl included. I took them to see Arsenal play, only the second time I’d ever been to a professional match. My induction into professional football had taken place years earlier when Frank, our next-door neighbour, had taken me to see Tranmere Rovers play and the man standing behind me had done a beery wee down the back of my duffel coat through a rolled-up copy of the
Liverpool Echo
.
Apart from being woken each morning at the crack of dawn by Irish rebel songs played at full belt on the record player by Liam, the youngest boy, who liked to rouse the neighbourhood each daybreak with a selection from his father’s record collection, life at King’s Cross was fairly uneventful until the arrival of the children’s aunty Rita, recently released from a spell in the nick and hot to trot. She was big and blowsy, Mae West with a touch of Blanche DuBois. Except this version had a thick Dublin accent. She was married and lived with her husband in Kilburn, not that
she paid him much attention, but she’d taken to spending most of her time with us in King’s Cross, more for its close proximity to her favourite boozer than out of any concern for the kids’ welfare. Rita was a perennial good time girl and had got it into her head that in her sister’s absence she’d be able to use the flat as a place to entertain her gentlemen callers.
One afternoon, returning to the flat unexpectedly, I was treated to the sight of Rita lying naked on the sofa with her flabby white legs wrapped round a big black arse that seemed to be pounding her into next week.
‘He’s a friend,’ she grunted by way of explanation, waving at me over his shoulder. The ‘friend’, startled by the arrival of a third party, leaped off her as if she were an electric fence and hurriedly attempted to get dressed, shouting ‘Sorry, sorry’ as he hopped about the room pulling his trousers up.
I was extremely grateful that he’d reacted this way, as I didn’t relish trying to throw him out. He was built like the proverbial brick latrine and a blow across the head from the penis that he was having trouble zipping his fly over would’ve been enough to stun me for a week, never mind a smack in the mouth from one of his massive fists. He was extremely apologetic, though, and I almost felt bad about walking in on him.
‘Your mother’s a nice lady,’ he said, offering his hand for me to shake which I declined as I could see where it had been.
‘She’s not my mother,’ I spluttered, looking down at Rita scratching her tatty head and yawning. Her lipstick was smeared up one side of her face and strands of her yellow hair were stuck to her forehead with sweat. I could see now that she wasn’t naked but was wearing a flimsy bra that had started out in life as flesh-coloured but was now grey with age, one strap attached to a fraying cup by means of a safety
pin having no doubt snapped from the stress of attempting to support the weight of her sagging breasts.
‘Ah, don’t go, Ernest,’ she pleaded drunkenly, rooting around on the floor for her fags and matches. ‘This is only Paul, he won’t mind at all.’
But Paul did mind, and while Ernest beat a hasty retreat out of the front door I read the old slut the Riot Act. She seemed unfazed by my rant as if she’d heard it all before and just sat there yawning, scratching her crotch. I could see that she wasn’t a natural blonde.
‘Ah c’mon, give us a break will ya. The kids are all at school, no one was harmed,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m fresh out of the nick and gagging fer it. I get nuttin’ of that owld eejit at home so you wouldn’t blame me if I met a nice fellah in a pub and let me feelins get in the way of me common sense? I’m an owl fool, that’s what I am. An owl fool.’
‘You’re an owl who-er,’ I thought, leaving her to get dressed but deciding nevertheless to give her one last chance.
For a while she was the model of decorum, visiting every day bringing bags of sweets for the kids, a packet of fags for me and half a bottle of Bacardi for herself which she drank from a stainless steel goblet as she mooched about the kitchen, occasionally giving the table a cursory wipe with a dishcloth to show that she was ‘helping’. She’d led me to believe that her husband was a monster, a red-haired giant of a man with a ferocious temper who when drunk, which by all accounts was twenty-four hours a day, was not beyond slapping his wife about.
‘I should’ve left the owl divel years ago,’ she’d sigh. ‘The hidin’s I’ve had off him.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’