Noeline: Longterm Memoir

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NOELINE

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NOELINE BROWN

NOELINE LONGTERM MEMOIR

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The photographs in this book have all come from the author’s personal collection. Every attempt has been made to contact copyright owners where known. The author and publisher would be pleased to hear from original copyright owners to rectify any omissions.

First published in Australia in 2005 by Allen & Unwin Copyright © Noeline Brown 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Brown, Noeline. Noeline: a long term memoir. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 617 8. 1. Brown, Noeline. 2. Actresses – Australia – Biography. 3. Politicians – Australia – Biography. I. Title. 792.028092 Typeset in 12/14 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed by GriffinPress, Adelaide 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS Foreword by Barry Creyton

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Prologue Everything started at Vadim’s 1 Stanmore days 2 Always in strife 3 Starting to act or the bare facts 4 Sobranis and stroganoff 5 The years in revue 6 The lure of London 7 Great days at 7 8 Would you believe: ‘It’s Time’ 9 My Naked Vicar and a Wedding 10 Drawing some blanks 11 A Highland fling 12 The family company 13 The King, a saint and my mother 14 A political debut 15 Friends and animals 16 Graham and another election 17 A good home and a ghost

1 5 19 43 53 71 95 109 133 163 183 197 217 227 235 249 259 271

Acknowledgements Index

277 279

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FOREWORD Show business memoirs are notoriously crammed with inaccuracies—some the result of faulty memory, some of wishful thinking or self-aggrandisement, and some downright fibs. So it’s refreshing to turn the pages of this witty and entertaining collection of memories that constitute the life of one of the wittiest and most entertaining people I know and find the accuracy of total recall. Noeline and I first met in 1962 when we appeared in a revue at the Phillip Theatre. The revue was called ‘What’s New’. The critics’ response to the title can be found in this book. The rapport we established during that show led us directly to a best-selling comedy album for Festival Records, the first such recording made in Australia, and the first of many times we would work together. More importantly, it led to a close and deeply valued friendship which has warmed me for forty-three years. Of the many times we worked together, I doubt that any was more rewarding than when we appeared in my play ‘Double Act’ in 1988. The play has since been produced in more than twenty languages, yet uppermost in my view of all

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of these productions, is Noel’s performance for her warmth, her humour, her infallible timing, her faith in the author, and her professional generosity to a co-star who was often grumpy, always demanding and monumentally hard to please. Our professional rapport might be reduced to a few basic give-and-take elements—a shared sense of humour, a sensitivity to each other’s comic timing, a mutual work ethic, and the fact that we’re both baritones. A friendship depends somewhat more on the giving than the taking, and in this respect, Noel’s friendship has always been an inspiration. The qualities which comprise Noeline Brown might be traced to her parents. She certainly inherits her wit and deadpan delivery from her father; and from her mother, her feet-on-the-ground practicality and her stoicism. From both she derives her intergrity as a human being and her loyalty to those closest to her, many of whose names are dropped in this volume. Her evocation of Sydney past in this memoir is a glowing reminder that Australian theatre was once many-faceted, and not dominated by blockbuster musicals, and that television once satirised reality rather than bludgeoning us with it. The characters who inhabited our lives way back when were characters indeed. Eccentricity was not a sin, it was encouraged and nurtured and some of the most memorable of these characters are to be found herein. Noeline has very justly earned the enduring love of the Australian public. She is also loved by all who know her personally—an infrequent duality of affection in the entertainment business. I’m happy to proclaim my unqualified love, respect and admiration for Noeline Brown both personally and professionally. I might add that the contents of this book come without the aid of a laugh track. The laughs are entirely genuine. So, as they say in the classics, read on . . . BARRY CREYTON

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PROLOGUE

EVERYTHING

STARTED AT VADIM’S

Vadim’s was a small late-night restaurant operating in Challis Avenue, Potts Point in Sydney, not far from Kings Cross. It was a magnet for creative people. It was part of our lives for a decade, from the late fifties to the end of the sixties. For me— a little girl from Stanmore with a job in a library and stars in my eyes—this place I had almost stumbled into, became something that would shape my whole life. The restaurant took its name from the man who ran it. Vadim was a charming White Russian with a gambling habit. Everybody went there. The first time I walked through the doors I would have been not quite twenty years old. It could still have been called the Corroboree Coffee Lounge, which was the name it went by when Vadim first bought it. I had been encouraged to go there by Ron, an old boyfriend, who had recently discovered it. I was with my friend Nancy and it was early, so we were the only people in the place. Following Ron’s advice I ordered some of Vadim’s artery-clogging beef stroganoff and asked him—nod, nod, wink, wink—if I could have some red wine to go with it. He looked me up and down and, with a twinkle in his eye, replied, ‘You’re not a copper, are you?’ 1

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The restaurant did not have a liquor licence so the red wine came in a coffee cup.When Vadim did eventually manage to obtain a permit, it was limited, so at about eleven o’clock at night the bottles would disappear and the coffee cups would come out again. The regular customers could identify the licensing cops when they came by so we would all help Vadim out by hiding the booze under the starched white tablecloths. Vadim arrived on the scene when the food we were eating in Sydney was still mostly British-based and boring, except perhaps for the ubiquitous chicken maryland, which was nothing more exotic than a chook and a banana.We viewed the menu at Vadim’s with delight. He introduced us to his delicious, creamy stroganoff, Russian borscht, steak diane and Siberian pelmeni, little ravioli-like balls of pastry filled with meat, which were served either boiled or fried in butter and accompanied by dark soy sauce. After Christmas the leftover turkey would sometimes appear as turkey stroganoff, but it was rather rich and nowhere near as desirable as the beef. Plump crumbed rock oysters, accompanied by bunches of deep-fried parsley, also featured on the menu.Vadim called his ice cream plombiere and it tasted all the more exotic because of it. His chef, Vera, wearing a little triangular cotton babushka on her head, was nearly always hard at work in the tiny kitchen but Vadim would take over on her occasional nights off and it was obvious to me that he was a capable cook. Even if the food had been ordinary we would still have gone there. It was an exciting place, full of interesting people. I was just starting out in the theatre and I learned the influential drama critic, Harry Kippax ate there every night. Vadim made sure we met. Harry’s table was special as it was the only one in the restaurant that was permanently reserved. It was on the upper level of the room and you had to pass it on your way to the toilet. If you were seated downstairs you would be craning your neck all night to see who was fortunate enough to sit in that upstairs area. One of the regulars was Tom Fitzgerald, the delightful editor of the independent journal Nation. Tom was a short, chunky character with a wicked sense 2

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of humour and he would often sit at Harry’s table, where they would talk politics into the night. George Munster, Tom’s swarthy colleague would sometimes join the pair. I admired the two men for their work on Nation, knowing the difficulties anyone faced trying to get an independent newspaper up and running in Sydney. There was at the time a media duopoly enjoyed by the Fairfax and Packer families. So when the left-of-centre Nation first came out it was regarded as a welcome relief for its non-biased reporting, but newsagents were forced to keep the journal under the counter, away from public gaze. They were afraid of putting the major newspapers offside. Nation ran for about the same length of time as Vadim’s, from 1958 to 1972, when it became Nation Review. People still talk about it and mourn its loss. I felt privileged whenever I was asked to join Harry Kippax at his table. Harry was a features writer and critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. He also contributed to Nation, where he wrote his theatre reviews using the pseudonym Brek. I respected his opinion and I knew if Harry Kippax gave an actor a good notice it really meant something. He could be very critical, and sometimes there were complaints that his reviews were a trifle old fashioned, but he had a genuine love of the theatre till the day he died. He lived the latter part of his life just around the corner from the Ensemble Theatre at Kirribilli and was present at every one of their shows. He often dropped by for a meal at night and could be seen eating alone at a table in a corner of their waterside restaurant. I began to suspect that Kippax might be a rabid rightwinger. He could get very angry with anyone who didn’t share his political views and I was often in trouble with him over mine. Harry would sit with his elbows on the table, rubbing the palm of one of his hands against the other, then plaiting his fingers. His left eyebrow would arch and his lips would curl with disdain. He would often disappear behind a dense cloud of smoke. One night Vadim introduced me to a slim young man called Robert Hughes. The restaurant was busy and he 3

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wondered if we might sit together. Bob had only just returned to Sydney after spending a year abroad. He had golden eyes and a lop-sided grin and long, unruly locks the colour of honey. I’ve only noticed lately, in old television footage of the day, that he possessed rather pronounced ears. He looked extremely dapper that evening, dressed in a tailored tweed suit with a mustard-coloured vest and a paisley silk bow-tie. He was probably wearing suede shoes. He carried a hat with a narrow brim and a little plaited band inhabited by some tiny feathers that looked like a fishing lure. I thought Bob was very witty and he made me laugh a lot. He had a cultivated accent which I assumed he had acquired during his time abroad. I was not to know that his background was one of privilege; that Bob came from a wealthy legal dynasty and that his mother still chose to wear a long black velvet tea gown in the afternoons. Bob appeared to me to be worldly and sophisticated, so I was surprised to find that he was only a few months older than I. He gave the impression of being very intelligent and he had a keen interest in theatre and the arts.We clicked immediately and that night was the beginning of a long relationship. Bob lived in a studio over the garage of his mother’s rather imposing two-storey house, high above fashionable Rose Bay. I lived at home with my family in the inner city suburb of Stanmore. ‘Good heavens, why?’ he asked incredulously, when he found out my address.

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CHAPTER

ONE

STANMORE

DAYS

Every car in the world goes past our old house in Stanmore. And every plane goes over it. It wasn’t so bad when we were growing up. Travel by air wasn’t commonplace and the streets and lanes were our playgrounds. Our family lived in a singlestorey conjoined terrace. The bathroom was in the middle of the house while the lavatory was at the back, which sometimes led to a conflict of interests. Our house was called Roslyn, for some reason unknown to us.We could tell it had that name because there was a bevelled glass sign with green lettering on the wall near the front entrance. The door featured a leadlight design of a King parrot, surrounded by Australian wildflowers.The front of our house faced south, to the main street.We never locked the door and in the summer we would leave it wide open so the late afternoon breeze could run right through to the back. The doors would bang shut, one by one, and we’d all breathe a sigh of relief and yell, ‘The Southerly buster’s here’. On really bad days, during heat waves all three little kids would collapse onto the lino and cool off by lying around on the kitchen floor. The house was built in 1902 as we discovered when we found a coin and a newspaper under the linoleum in the front 5

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room while we were replacing it. The small brick semi still stands, looking exactly the same on the corner of Douglas Street and a little lane called Bruce. The first real memory I have of the house is of sitting in a wooden high chair, having dinner with my family. I would only have been about two. It must have been a special occasion because there were other people present. Evidently I asked for tomato sauce on my custard and everybody laughed. I don’t remember making the unusual request, but I do remember everyone’s reaction and I recall distinctly how indignant I was that people were actually laughing at me. It does seem odd, therefore, that I would later choose to enter the comedy profession and spend a lifetime begging people to do just that. Mr Edwards, our landlord, came to our front door every Saturday to collect the rent. He drove a shiny cream and maroon car with running boards and he always wore a threepiece suit with a gold watch chain threaded through his vest. He might also have worn spats. I always thought that he smelt like a woman as he carried the unmistakable scent of musk. He owned other properties in the street and he used to drive from house to house, collecting bundles of cash. When one of his places needed painting he would deliver cans of material that smelt like dead fish to the tenants and they would have to do the work themselves.When Dad painted our kitchen walls we had to leave home and stay with our cousins in Hurstville for a few days to escape the terrible smell. The Olympic swimming champion Fanny Durack lived a few doors up the road from us with her two brothers, Con and Frank. Dad told us proudly that our neighbour was famous for having been the first Australian woman ever to win an Olympic gold medal. In 1912 she came first in the 100-yards freestyle race, the first time swimming for women was permitted as an Olympic event. She was born in 1889, so she was getting on by the time we knew her and she had acquired a rather matronly shape for a swimsuit. She always wore an old-fashioned woollen one-piece costume equipped with a 6

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modesty skirt. Like many others over the years, Fanny tried to teach me to swim with lessons at North Sydney Olympic Pool, but I was never much good at it. Even now I only manage a bit of a weak breaststroke as I like to keep my head well out of the water. Another famous old swimmer, Annette Kellermann, was known to have lived in the nearby suburb of Marrickville many years before. In spite of the proximity to these aquatic legends, my brother, Leo and I remained hopeless swimmers and he believes it was because our father had been brought up in the bush and his idea of teaching kids to swim was to throw them out of the boat. Leo and I both have memories of being chucked into the dark, oily waters of a fenced pool in Sydney Harbour, with old rubber inner tubes hanging from the fence, which someone would throw in if we happened to look like we were drowning, but I admit we may have embroidered that story a bit over the years. I was the middle child in our family. I’ve heard they are often the pushy ones and I was no exception. Family photographs show me gazing shyly into the camera, a seriouslooking little kid with knock-knees and the straightest hair in the world. I had a very deep voice for a girl and friends of my parents would often suggest that I should see a doctor in case there was something wrong with me. Our neighbours called me ‘Smiley’. Dad’s pet name for me was ‘Nugget’. My older brother Leo had a beautiful, shy smile and a lovely disposition.When he was about two years old he started to faint for no apparent reason and my parents were desperately worried about his welfare. They took him to a specialist where he underwent a series of tests and was placed on heavy medication. As Leo got older the doctors warned that he must not take any unnecessary risks and he was forbidden from participating in contact sports. He took to riding a bike instead, against my mother’s wishes. His was the only bike in the house and I was always jealous. Leo was determined to have one and he’d worn my parents down till they agreed to buy him his brand new Malvern Star. He went everywhere 7

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on his bike and once, head down, rode it straight into the back of a truck. He carried it home, fixed it up and took off again. I was four years old when Mum became pregnant with her third child and I was very excited about the coming event. It was 1943, the year a Japanese plane flew over Sydney. One day a woman visitor was talking to me about the addition to our family and she wondered whether the new baby we were expecting might be a boy. ‘It’s going to be a girl’, I yelled, storming out of the house, furious at the suggestion. I already had a brother and was desperate for a sister, probably for some selfish reason like being able to swap our clothes. However, as soon as I laid eyes on my little brother tucked up in his crib at the hospital it didn’t seem to matter one bit that I hadn’t got my wish. Peter was my fifth birthday present, born just two weeks before my day. He was my living doll. I took him under my wing from that day on. Peter looked a bit like a cartoon character. Dad used to call him ‘Sluggo’. He was tough, cute as a button with a snub nose, an undershot jaw and a messy head of snow-white hair. He also had a voice like a frog. He went everywhere with me for years; it wasn’t until I was about sixteen that Mum said it might be time I left Peter at home. My friends Gwenda and Barbara Short lived in a narrow freestanding, two-storey terrace with a dunny up the back near a big peppercorn tree that shaded their smelly old chook shed. The only thing that separated our houses was narrow Lorna Lane, once used for the removal of nightsoil. Our two back gates led to the side lane called Bruce, which was our favourite place to play French cricket.We were allowed to play barefoot on the road—if Dad was not around. My brothers and I were in and out of the Shorts’ house all the time and we would sometimes stay the night. Once when I was sleeping over with the girls, Nana Short came upstairs to tuck us in. The old lady had been brought up in England, in a generation unused to modern conveniences, and she would never turn the light on. Instead, she would come up the stairs carrying a candlestick, like Wee Willie Winkie. This night the 8

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candle blew out as she entered the room. Flustered, she turned around and opened the door again, to get some light from below. Like most sleeping kids, we were almost dead to the world when a strange, eerie noise woke us up. We heard a ghostly voice crying, ‘Help, heeelp’. We pulled the bedcover over our heads in fright. The sound continued and, after we’d gathered up some courage, Gwenda, Barbara and I ventured out of bed to find our ghost. We followed the little voice which led us to the big dark mahogany wardrobe that took up most of one wall. ‘Help,’ called the ghost.We clutched ourselves in fear.‘Heeelp’, it called again. Gingerly we opened the door of the wardrobe and there stood Nana Short, holding her burnt out candle. She’d opened the wrong door and somehow found herself locked in the wardrobe and was unable to find her way out again. Gwenda, Barbara and I all had blonde hair and my brothers were equally fair. We possibly looked alike. We once walked into a milk bar together and ordered our threepenny ice creams and the shopkeeper asked us if we were all from the one family. When we answered no, she quizzed us as to how well our parents knew one another. We couldn’t wait to run home to tell Mum and Dad. The girls’ cousin, JimmyWebster, and his mother also lived with the Shorts. Jim’s father had devoted most of his life to the British Merchant Navy and was away at sea for months at a time, so they didn’t see much of him. The six of us kids used to spend most of our days together, sometimes at their place but more often at ours, along with most of our other friends from the local neighbourhood. It might have had something to do with the quality of Mum’s cooking, but I think it was because she was happiest of all the parents to have a bunch of kids around. Mum was only a kid herself, having married when she was just nineteen. The kitchen was the heart of the house. Mum would spend most of her day in there cooking or making clothes.We were always included in the preparation of the food, even 9

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though we must have got in her way. Mum would sometimes stand one of us on a chair, with her arm around us, so we could stir whatever was on the stove. Food has always featured very highly with the Brown family and it’s a running joke that I can remember every meal I’ve ever eaten. There was a table right in the centre of the room, where we used to do our homework while Mum was cooking, which must have made it difficult for her as that was her only real work surface. There was an old fuel stove along one wall with a chimney over it and a tiny silver-painted Early Kooka gas range in a corner, standing on little curly feet. Sydney experienced frequent gas rationing at that time so the neighours would often bring their food over to our house.At five o’clock, many battered old saucepans with tea for several households would be simmering on top of our fuel stove. Mum preferred to use the little gas range in summer and to regulate the heat when she was cooking her fabulous Christmas cakes she used to place half a brick inside the oven. We loved to share in the process of making cakes and puddings. We took turns beating the cake mixture with a wooden spoon and would fight over licking the bowl clean. Mum would start preparing her Christmas cake and plum pudding weeks before the day, so they would have time to mature. We would help with the greasing of the tin, the cutting of the paper strips to line the inside, adding more paper to tie around the outside, steeping the fruit in rum and stirring the ingredients with a wooden spoon while smelling the delicious liquor mixed with dried fruit and nuts.We’d then pinch the cherries, scoffing them when Mum wasn’t looking. We would also watch as she scalded the three-penny bits to hide deep inside the plum pudding, The cake would be presented on a glass stand with a paper frill around it, which we manufactured ourselves by making hundreds of little scissor cuts into layers of folded white paper, which we tied in place with narrow satin ribbons of red and green We really looked forward to enjoying a hot stuffed roast chicken or a leg of pork with crackling at Christmas time. 10

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Chicken was a rare treat as this was long before the poultry farmers introduced battery hens and chicken became a staple. Sometimes we had to fetch our own. More than once my brothers and I witnessed the killing of our Christmas dinner in our Uncle Bert’s backyard when he chased a chook around with a sharpened axe and I’m afraid we thought it was hilarious when the bird ran around with its head cut off. When the chook stopped running and fell over it was up to the women to clean it and pluck it and stuff it. The preparations took most of the day. Chicken on the table was a very big deal. One chook would feed eight people and if you happened to get the wishbone you were very fortunate. Two of you would hold it with your little fingers and pull at it till it gave way, and the person who had the bigger piece of bone got their wish. Once I was shelling peas for our Christmas dinner with Mum at the kitchen table and I dropped some of the little bullets into my lap and they rolled onto the floor. I tried to retrieve them and somehow I managed to get my head stuck underneath the ‘Early Kooka’ and couldn’t get it out again. I started to scream. Everyone panicked because I was so upset. We didn’t have a phone, so someone ran for the local plumber. Fortunately he was home that day. He applied some butter to my head and eventually they were able to slide me out, redfaced but unhurt. For years Mum had to put up with an old wooden ice chest. It had a lead-lined box on the top and a little cupboard below to hold the perishables. The inside of the chest had its own peculiar, airless, meaty smell. The iceman would park his truck in the lane outside our house, close to the back gate. He would put down a ramp and chip a piece of ice from a huge block in the back onto a hessian bag, which he then hoisted onto a trolley and dragged it, dripping, right across the kitchen floor. We loved to steal a ride on the back of his truck, down to the end of the lane, sliding chips of splintery ice down our throats. The iceman drove very slowly, keenly aware of his precious cargo. 11

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Mum was keen to have a proper fridge, so we finally pensioned off the messy old ice chest and moved it out to the back veranda where it stayed for many years as a cage for some white mice. With her new fridge Mum started to make ice cream from fruit and Carnation Milk, which she froze in shallow metal trays. She had to break it up with a fork and stir it a couple of times and there were sometimes little shards of ice left in it, but it was wonderful to have our own ice cream on tap. Now keen on new technology, my parents invested in a brand new pressure cooker. The kids were not allowed into the room when Mum performed the dangerous operation of removing the lid.We used to peek from around the door while Mum shut her eyes and let off the steam. My brothers and I are still too frightened to use one. I came home from school one day, said I didn’t want anything to eat and asked if I could go to bed early. Mum checked me out immediately and discovered I had a soaring temperature and mysterious spots on my tongue. By nightfall I was delirious and suffering from a painful, swollen throat and neck. The next day my whole body was covered with spots and Mum called for the family doctor as she thought I might have developed scarlet fever. Her diagnosis was correct. I had a severe case of the disease and the doctor was concerned about complications to the heart, so he called for an ambulance to take me to the Prince Henry Infectious Diseases Hospital, which was located many miles away on the coast at Little Bay, not far from Bunnerong power station and Long Bay Gaol. Mum was allowed to travel with me in the back of the ambulance and she kept telling me we were on our way to Prince Alfred, a hospital close to our home. I was feverish but I remember saying the ambulance men must have lost their way because the journey was taking too long. When we arrived at the Coast hospital, as it was popularly called, I was removed from my mother’s arms. Parents were only allowed to visit their children on weekends and then could only speak to them from a distant window. They could 12

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not enter the room and there could be no physical contact. I was not yet six years old and extremely frightened. A stern middle-aged nurse wearing a starched white veil put me to bed in a ward with other small children.We were all neatly tucked into high iron cots with a small chest of drawers between each bed. The unsmiling nurse asked me if I was constipated. I had never heard the word before, but I knew I was sick, so I thought that must be what I was suffering from. ‘Yes’, I lisped. She went away briefly and returned carrying what appeared to be a metal gadget with a hose attached. I don’t think she explained what she was about to do with it and I will never forget the indignity of the situation. I don’t believe in what is sometimes referred to as ‘recovered memory syndrome’ because I can remember every single thing that happened that day. Oddly enough, I can’t recall the face of the nursing sister, which seems a pity. I would very much like to meet her again some day. In a dentist’s chair, perhaps. I can still taste the scrambled eggs they served for breakfast at the hospital and the mashed potato that came with every other meal. They were made from dried ingredients and I thought they were quite disgusting. My parents came to visit me when they could and were made to stand at the door. It had been explained to me that they could not come in, but it was hard to accept. They brought with them some brand new books and coloured pencils in a little wooden box. I pleaded with them to take them back home because the nurses had told me the hospital would burn everything I touched on the day I was released. Once Mum was close to tears as she started to leave because I was absolutely broken hearted when she had to say goodbye. My Nana, who was Dad’s mother, was with her that day. She suggested Mum should double back quietly and have a look through the window to see what I was doing. Mum was surprised to see that I was out of bed and talking animatedly to the little girl in the cot next to mine and we were both giggling and stuffing our faces with jellybeans. 13

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I turned six during my stay at Prince Henry and Mum made me a beautiful cream cake to celebrate the occasion. She lugged it all the way to the hospital with the new baby, Peter, in a pram, travelling the long distance entirely on public transport. Nana accompanied Mum, as she often did, to give her a hand taking the pram up and down the stairs at the railway stations. Before she had left home Nana thought to pick some flowers that she knew were my favourites and had constructed a dear little posy of sweet peas and ‘shivery grass’, which she had tied with a ribbon in my favourite colour. Somehow the nursing staff gave me some boring old full-blown red roses instead, and after one little slice for each of the children in my ward, the gorgeous cake went missing. After about six weeks I was allowed to go home. I couldn’t wait to get out of hospital and sit by the fire. Our living room had a tiny grey marble coal fireplace and as I was still convalescing my brothers and I were allowed to lounge around and sip homemade soup and toast crumpets on a long fork for our tea. We loved to get as close as we could to the fire and make up stories suggested by the shapes in the dying red coals. There was a large free-standing wireless cabinet, finished in shiny timber veneer near the fireplace, with a small dial that lit up, advertising the brand, AWA. We loved the radio.We had all been brought up with the ABC’s ‘Kindergarten of the Air’ and were keen members of the ‘Argonauts’. We curled up in a big armchair together or sat on the floor close to the wireless and listened to our other favourite shows: ‘When a Girl Marries’,‘Hagen’s Circus—the Show of Shows’, ‘Yes What?’, ‘McKackie Mansion’, ‘Lux Playhouse’, ‘Martin’s Corner’, ‘First Light Fraser’ and ‘Search for the Golden Boomerang’. We loved them all. Somehow we were able to read a book and listen to the radio at the same time, a talent that long ago escaped me. Books were not plentiful in our house but we treasured the ones we had. I used to cry buckets over tragic children’s tales that Mum read aloud to us, like The Little Match Girl. I would later read the same books to my baby brother, a captive 14

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audience, and make up stories, with the lights out and the fire spreading ghostly images around the room. I discovered they always worked best if you included the people who were there in the story. My brothers and I loved telling ghost stories and we were always trying to frighten one another by dressing up in sheets and holding torches under our chins. Dad was a shift worker with the Travelling Post Office sorting mail on trains around country New South Wales. He spent a lot of time away from home, so he thought it would be company for Mum to have another woman around when he was away. For a while my parents used to rent a room to Miss Stafford, who was a very proper businesswoman with an office job in the city. She enjoyed bed and board with us for years. When Dad was home from work we used to have to tiptoe around the house because he was always trying to catch up on his sleep. Every Christmas, that being the busiest time for the mail system, one of his brothers would have to stand in as Santa Claus. The job usually fell to Dad’s brother Uncle Casey, as he was the only unmarried person left in Dad’s large family. Casey liked a drink. In fact, Casey was a drunk.‘Never had a drink while he was working’, the family would say, defensively. As little kids we loved Uncle Casey, perhaps because he used to give us each a shilling piece whenever he came to visit. ‘Have a deener’, he would say as he handed you a shiny silver coin with the King’s head on one side.When Santa Claus came into the room the three of us shared one Christmas Eve, with our hopeful little pillowcases draped over the end of the bed, he tripped on the edge of the carpet square and fell over and let out a mighty curse. My brothers and I were lying there with our eyes shut, pretending to be asleep, eagerly waiting for dawn and we were shocked to hear such language coming from Father Christmas. ‘Santa Claus swears’, we informed Mum seriously the following morning.We felt she should know. Casey lived with our Nana, the indefatigable Isabella Brown, in her apartment in Lewisham. I loved visiting her 15

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because I always thought her flat was quite glamorous. She lived upstairs in a two-storey liver-brick building and her flat was one of six. The rooms seemed to be spacious compared to ours. There were timber picture rails on the walls and all the doors were stained with dark brown varnish and featured ripple glass panels. Nana’s little narrow kitchen faced the street but it had a pleasant view of the tops of trees. Her bathroom had small black and white tiles on the floor and a toilet with a wooden seat. The cistern was up near the ceiling and had a black and white enamelled pull on the chain. Nana always had lots of visitors to her flat, but she didn’t ever have a phone. I popped in one day on the off chance to see if she was home but found the place was locked. Her neighbour said she had gone shopping. However there was a thoughtful note stuck to her front door that advised, ‘Key under mat’. Nana was quite likely an early feminist. Her husband had died suddenly from a heart attack when he was still quite young and had left her with the last of their seven children to bring up on her own. To make ends meet she used to go off to work as a shearers’ cook, something she was used to as she had left the family farm in the Hunter Valley when she was barely fourteen to work in service in pubs and on stations around country NSW. She was fiercely independent and was able to manage her own life till she was almost eighty. Once, when she was quite elderly, she had an argument with a neighbour about the use of the clothesline, so she walked to the shops and bought some clothes props and a bag of cement and put up her own. Another time she thought the ceiling in her bedroom needed painting so she did it herself, although she didn’t own a ladder. She managed by climbing from a chair onto the wardrobe, painting what she could reach, then clambering down once more and pushing the wardrobe gradually around the room. She would stop from time to time to take a restorative: a little whisky and hot water with a teaspoon of sugar, her favourite tipple. Nana’s husband, Charles, the grandfather I never met, was shot in the leg while serving as one of the NSW Contingent 16

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in South Africa during the Boer War. Her eldest son, my Uncle Jack, was wounded during the Second World War and was ‘mentioned in despatches’. My own father had enlisted in the army and while he was training, suffered an injury to both his knees. He was operated on in a military hospital but the operation was not successful so he was discharged and went back to his work, sorting mail on the trains. Dad was very disappointed at the time not to be able to ‘have a go’—there are family photos of him in uniform, with his slouch hat and scratchy looking woollen khakis, looking very much the soldier—but he told us in later life that he was not broken-hearted that he hadn’t gone to war.We were able to see how the war made an impact on some families. Young Johnny Ryan used to play with us and his father was captured while serving in New Guinea. He was imprisoned by the Japanese and it was many years before he was reunited with his family. He was always ill and never fully recovered from his time as a prisoner of war. We had our own training exercises at home during the conflict, where we had to fill the bathtub with water and sit under the table with the lights out. We thought it was a hoot as our mother always made a game of it. Dad had given Mum instructions that she was to pull a face and try to look ugly if the Japs came to the house and to ‘cough a lot’ because they were known to be scared of catching tuberculosis. Dad made friends with some US servicemen in a pub one day and brought them home to meet us. One of the men was a very tall, extremely black African–American and when I first saw him I didn’t know what on earth to make of him. I hid in a cupboard for a while but was coaxed out when they offered my brothers some caramels from their survival kits. I came out to try the sweets, which were remarkably soapy. We were also treated to our first taste of Coca Cola. We admired the shape of the bottle but the drink was warm and my brothers and I thought it tasted just like fly-spray. We experienced rationing during the war and for a long time after, but it didn’t seem to be too much of a problem for us kids. That was all we knew. If we couldn’t have something 17

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we just accepted the fact but we never really went without. Mum used to roll her own neat little cigarettes and offer them around to her friends from a silver case. She made all of the clothes for the family, except for Dad’s. She had taught herself to sew at a young age and was very capable but when she finished the last stitch of a complicated dress she would collapse with a migraine. My parents’ social life was limited. There were very few decent restaurants in our area and women were not welcome in the pubs so Dad and Mum quite often went dancing at night, leaving us in the hands of a babysitter. There was one we regarded as a bit of a sadist because she would invariably pick the saddest book on our shelves and wouldn’t be happy till she had reduced us all to tears. I remember my parents bending down one particular night to kiss us as they left to go out in the early evening. Dad always looked like Dad; chunky, pleasant looking, with his curly black hair receding, which it started to do from an early age. He had been a footballer and an amateur boxer, giving it up after his first professional fight. ‘It hurt too much,’ he said. He was always smartly dressed, and his neat shoes were always highly polished. He always wore a hat in daytime, which he used to tip to the ladies. This night he was in his dark blue suit. Mum would probably have been up for hours the night before putting the finishing touches to the dress she was going to wear. This one was made of black watermarked taffeta with the back cut very low, almost to the waist. It had a halter neck with three rows of shiny gold sequins sewn around the collar. Her hair was a lustrous coppery-brown and she had brushed and pinned it into smooth rolls at the nape of her neck. She looked a million dollars. I was very proud of her. But I had noticed that Mum was starting to get very thin. She had always had high cheekbones and a cleft chin but they were becoming more and more pronounced. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked enormous. None of us knew that she would soon be wasting away from a devastating illness.

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Someone was burning our fences.Whoever was doing it would pour petrol along the old wooden palings that were vainly struggling to keep upright under the weight of the choko vines, light a match and then disappear. Later on, the arson was accompanied by graffiti announcing the name of the gang responsible. The offenders were rounded up quite quickly and taken to task. The ringleader turned out to be a boy we all knew, whose parents were pillars of the church. They were horrified when the constable came to their door.Another one of the gang was a very good-looking young boy called Robert, who lived with his mother and stepfather and another woman in a house that shared our lane. There were many whispered stories circulating about their complicated relationship. Robert’s mother had arrived in Sydney from Tasmania as a single woman with a baby in her arms. She married when Robert was three or four and came to Stanmore to live. It was rumoured in the neighbourhood that her child was the illegitimate son of Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling actor who had spent his early years living in Tasmania. Robert didn’t ever deny the story but, sadly, the rumour seems unlikely to be true, when 19

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you consider how many movies Flynn made in Hollywood around the time Robert was conceived. Somehow I don’t think Errol would have had the time to make the trip back to Tasmania to father our friend. Robert’s mother intrigued us because she was frightened of their television set and would watch the box from outside the living room, in the hall, with the door shielding her body from the deadly rays. Patricia, who lived next door to Robert, always seemed to be involved in interesting adventures. When she was walking home from school one day, she took the short cut up a back lane and a perfect stranger exposed himself. Gwenda and I were fascinated when she told us about it. We often played there and had never seen anything of that nature. That particular lane had a sign on a fence with the warning,‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’, which filled us with dread as we imagined it meant you could be executed for setting foot inside. Another one announced,‘Urinators will be Castigated’, which we were sure meant something even worse. One day we had noticed a little Morris Minor motorcar shaking violently from side to side, even though we could see that it was parked and the motor was not running.We tried to peer through the windows to see what was causing it to have such tremors, but discovered they were completely fogged over, even though it was quite a warm afternoon. ‘Don’t you ever go into the lane at the back of the Salisbury’, we were warned, sternly. ‘There are Flag Wavers about.’ We were not quite sure what that meant but it made us all the more eager to find out. For our expeditions Gwenda would often be dressed in her Red Cross nurse’s uniform with a white starched cap and a little scarlet felt cape around her shoulders. She always carried her special bag with her own first aid kit in case of emergencies and would offer to patch up anyone she met who might be in need of her care. Drunks were her speciality whenever they fell down coming home from the pub in the uneven back lanes.We always had our eyes peeled, just in case we saw a ‘Flag Waver’. If we had seen one, I’m sure Gwenda would have insisted on putting a band-aid on it. 20

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A peeping Tom fell off a ladder near our house one night and hit his head on the concrete and died. Evidently he’d been watching some of his neighbours through the window of their upstairs bedroom.We wondered what in the world they could have been up to. Then we heard there was a ‘snowdropper’ who was pinching ladies’ bloomers from the clotheslines, but we still didn’t lock our doors at night. We did have our dog, Paddy for protection although his bark was worse than his bite. Paddy first arrived at our place in the shirt of the clothes props man. He was a tiny golden haired dingo–kelpie cross and was a ‘present for little Pete’. Some of our neighbours, like the Shorts, kept chooks in their backyards. They had bantams and black and white hens and occasionally they would add a duck to fatten up for Christmas. Our dog was always escaping from our backyard and raiding the local henhouses. He would charge home, pursued by an indignant housewife flapping her apron and yelling and cursing ‘you rotten mongrel’ with the remains of a bloody, limp bird lolling out of his mouth. Most of the time he was an amiable dog and we could do anything with him.We used to dress him up in silly clothes and bonnets and sunglasses and push him round in a pram, hoping people would say,‘What an ugly baby’. He seemed happy to go along with it. Paddy was also a successful escape artist and he was always digging out of the backyard and following us to school. Whenever he did we would be forced to take him home again. ‘The police will be called in to shoot him if he does it again’, the principal would warn us.We’d take him back home, as directed, and not bother returning to the classroom. We’d have to stay at home to ‘comfort poor Paddy’ after the authorities had threatened to destroy our beloved dog. One stormy night Paddy seemed to be trying to tell us something. He kept whimpering and running up to the front of the house. When we opened the door to investigate, we heard a commotion outside in the street. A horse had bolted with its rider, who was only a young girl. A car had apparently skidded on the wet road and frightened the horse, which reared up then slipped, and injured its leg. The girl was plainly 21

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terrified and the horse was running wildly into the traffic. Dad ran after it, grabbed hold of the bridle and pulled it down. He was moving the girl away from the horse when the local Baptist minister appeared, carrying a rifle. He asked Dad if he would put the animal down, as he didn’t think it would be right for a man of the cloth to be seen doing it. So Dad had to shoot the poor creature right between the eyes. Our family had been observing the drama through a crack in the fence. When Dad arrived back at the house, Paddy growled at him and would have nothing to do with him for a week. Dad was really hurt because he adored animals.We were pleased when they eventually made it up. Paddy had a thing about motorbikes. Every morning at around seven o’clock his peace would be disturbed by a motorcyclist who rode his noisy bike down the lane beside our house on his way to Douglas Street. Paddy would do a lap of the side passage, barking loudly at the bike as it passed from the back of the house to the front. One day the rider must have decided to give the dog a miss and changed his routine. He started down the lane. So did Paddy. Then the rider took a sharp right, veering off into Lorna Lane, at the back of the house. Paddy continued his chase down the side passage. The rider rather provocatively honked his horn. We were inside having breakfast when we heard the bike change direction. The whole family filed out of the house to see Paddy tearing down the straight, barking like mad at nothing at all.When he suddenly realised what had happened he skittered to an abrupt stop like a cartoon dog. We stood there in a group and roared with laughter. Paddy turned around to look at us, but with one eye only. He put his tail between his legs, hung his head and slunk away to hide from us for the rest of the day. The house next door was identical to ours, only all their windows faced west and ours faced east. Joyce lived there with her elderly widowed mother and they took in boarders to make ends meet. Joyce had given up her job in a photographer’s studio where she hand-tinted photographs, so renting 22

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out two rooms was their only source of income, apart from the meagre widow’s pension her mother received. ‘Christian gentleman, non-smoking’, the ads in the local paper would probably have read, as they did in those days, and may have been followed by,‘Cut lunches provided’. I noticed one advertisement in the local Guardian that read, ‘Room required by sober gent with small dog. Does not like being patted’. Towards the end of the war Joyce and her mother had a handsome young airman staying with them. He had black tight curly hair with a savage centre parting. Even though I was only a little girl I remember being quite taken with him and I used to flirt like mad as I swung back and forth on the side gate. Mum caught me gazing up at the dashing figure in his blue serge uniform and his cute little cap and hurried me inside. Joyce’s mother died in her sleep when she was well into her nineties and Joyce found herself alone in the semi that was joined to ours by a common wall. During her mother’s illness they had stopped taking in boarders and my parents didn’t know how Joyce managed to survive, so Mum used to check on her every day.A hard knock on the brick chimney over the fuel stove in the kitchen was the signal for Mum and Joyce to meet for a chat over the back fence.When we had our phone connected, Joyce was always welcome to use it, as she didn’t have one in her house. Mum realised that her neighbour’s financial situation was probably grave so she helped her apply for a pension and Joyce was always very grateful. She is still living frugally in the home she was born in. She is now well into her eighties and her house has not changed in any way since the day she was born. It is a museum piece. The Yarrows actually owned the house next door to Joyce. I was very friendly with Elaine who was the only child of the family. She and I were the same age but differed in size by a great deal. Elaine took after her mother who was what we called in those days, ‘a biggish woman’. They didn’t waste anything at the Yarrows. Any uneaten bread was sliced very thin and baked in a low oven till it was crisp and it appeared on the table with every meal. I tried to avoid it because it had 23

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a tendency to shatter and I was accident prone with food. Elaine and I went hand in hand, two five year olds skipping off happily to our first day at kindergarten. I’d had my bag packed since my brother Leo had enrolled in the same school without me two years before. I was acutely embarrassed when my friend burst into tears in front of everyone at assembly. I pretended to know her only slightly. Elaine’s parents were committed Christians and attended the Baptist church a couple of blocks away in Albany Road. I would sometimes accompany Elaine to her Sunday school classes, where it must have been obvious to everyone that I knew next to nothing about religion. My ignorance about the subject would really have been apparent the day Mrs Yarrow asked me to say Grace when I was a guest for a meal at their place. I was shocked and experienced a loud drumming in the ears. The closest we ever came to saying Grace at our house was ‘Two four six eight; bog in, don’t wait’, so, blushing a deep shade of beetroot, which just might have been on the menu, I decided to wing it. I screwed my eyes shut and grabbed onto something that was vaguely familiar and in a very small voice I prayed: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the law make us truly grapeful’. I didn’t let on to Mr and Mrs Yarrow that because our mother was Anglican and Dad a Catholic, they had so far avoided having their children christened. On Sundays though, we attended any one of the local churches that took our fancy. Mum told us we could make up our own minds about religion when we were old enough to decide for ourselves.When our teachers asked us what denomination we were, we always answered,‘Church of England’. One day I replied, more accurately, ‘None’, and got into trouble for being insolent but I was really only telling the truth. I came to the conclusion it was easier to claim to be ‘C. of E.’ from then on. Mum eventually had the three of us done as a job lot on the spur of the moment in the Anglican Church at Hurstville after our infant cousin, John, was christened. I developed a major fit of the giggles when the baptismal water was splashed 24

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on my forehead and it ran down between my eyes, causing them to cross unexpectedly. The look on my face started my brothers off into paroxysms of mirth. The minister from our local Anglican Church felt sufficiently moved by the incident to write in his parish newsletter that a ‘disgusting woman’ from his district had not bothered to have her children baptised in his church and had neglected their spiritual welfare. He was talking about my Mum. That was it for religion and me. Dad also had difficulties with his church. When he and Mum got married, the priest refused to perform the ceremony in front of the altar because the bride was not a Catholic. They had to do it on the side, as the saying goes. Leo Clifford Brown, aged twenty-eight, married Dyra Mabel Pooley, who was only nineteen, at St Michaels in Stanmore in April 1936. The priest was Father Tosi and the wedding was small, attended by a few close relatives. They had a little gathering at Dad’s mother’s flat and received a few modest gifts. My father refused to set foot inside a church again, except for weddings and funerals. I always used to say to him, ‘They’ll get you in the end’. ‘No fear’, he would reply. ‘Never, in the history of the world.’ We seemed to be surrounded by Christians in Stanmore. Next to the manse, which was home to the Baptist minister, lived a family with proud connections to an Anglican bishop. The father had a senior position in a bank and had been able to invest in a small block of flats in Douglas Street. He and his family lived in one of the apartments and they gained an income from the others. They had unexpectedly produced their only son, Ronald, quite late in life. Ronnie surprised them further by being able to play the piano from the age of four. His parents indulged their brilliant child but he didn’t have the freedom that the rest of the neighbourhood kids enjoyed. He was a dayboy at a private school and he used to spend most of his spare time inside their flat, practising classical music on his very own baby grand. On the rare occasions when he was allowed to join the neighbourhood kids, he wanted to 25

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involve the rest of us in games that were not necessarily ones our parents would have permitted us to play. My brothers and I used to make sure we were never alone with Ronald and privately our gang used to refer to him as a ‘perv’. He later became a teacher of music in a private school, but left his position following a scandal involving choirboys, the news of which came as a shock only to our parents. My brothers and I had long been expecting it. Not that we hadn’t had a few sexual experiments ourselves. They were mostly of the doctorand-nurse variety and sometimes involved the use of a tape measure. I always insisted on being the patient. My brothers and I used to walk together to primary school each day with our friends, rain or shine. Just down the road, between our place and the shops clustered around the railway station, we used to pass a beautiful Edwardian house. It had what we imagined to be a magic garden because it was almost hidden behind a high, clipped hedge and a tall iron railing fence with dangerously sharp points like the heads of spears. One of our favourite books was The Secret Garden, which we had read together many times. There was something about this house that reminded us all of the story. It was an elegant house, surrounded by little single-storey workmen’s terraces. Part of the building faced the street but most of it turned into the garden. It had two tiny balconies on the upper storey. The exterior was rendered and richly detailed and it was always freshly painted and well cared for. It was the best-kept house in the street. Some of the plaster detail was highlighted in gold, and must have been painted carefully with a very fine brush. I always wanted to live there and I used to refer to it as ‘my house’.A few years ago it came on the market for the first time in over half a century and I was tempted to bid for it at the auction. The sale price was almost a million dollars and sent shock waves through the community. There was an air of mystery about the place because we had never seen any sign of life.We used to walk past the house twice a day every day on our way to school and back again, but there was never a person to be seen.We invented stories about 26

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the people who lived there. We imagined the owners might have been vampires, which meant they would only be able to come out at night. Then, one day, when I was on my own, on an errand for my mother, I walked past the front fence and I did actually catch a glimpse of something moving. A person came to the gate and opened it slightly. I just managed to catch sight of a young girl before she backed away. She was maybe a little older than I was and she looked quite different. Her skin was pale, with a hint of blue, and she wore her long black hair tied back with a dark velvet ribbon. She had a large, aquiline nose and I could tell from the way her body was bent over that she was what our children’s books described as ‘a hunchback’. I could see she had noticed me. She started to withdraw into the safety of her garden. I smiled at her and said, ‘Hullo’, as I hurried by. I was intrigued.Who was this girl and what was her story? I rushed down to the local milkbar, which was run by a Greek family who had been there for years. My friends, Helen and Angela, the owners’ daughters, worked there every day after school. All the kids in the neighbourhood used to congregate at their popular shop after three o’clock to share a milkshake or a ‘spider’. I was sure they would have known her, if anyone did. They shook their heads when I described her. I asked around the neighbourhood. I knew the girl didn’t go to my local public school, which I had attended since kindergarten. My friend Patricia was a student at nearby St Michaels Catholic School and when I asked her, she wasn’t able to help. She wasn’t a pupil there, either. The girl who lived in ‘my house’ was a mystery. My brothers and I continued to walk past on our way to school and one day we were rewarded when she appeared at the gate again and smiled shyly at us. Leo, Peter and I chorused a bright ‘Hullo’ and were surprised when we got an answer. The girl said ‘Ello’ or something like that. Eventually we got to talk. We were thrilled to discover that she had a fascinating accent—she came from France and her name was Mathilde. She was very pretty, with beautiful dark brown eyes rimmed by 27

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thick black lashes, but you could tell she was ill. Her skin seemed to be luminous. She asked us to call her Mattie and she would sometimes join us on our walk down to the milkbar but that was as far as she would ever go. She would get to the corner and rush home again. One day I was walking past her house in the late afternoon and Mattie was waiting for me. We sat together on the front step, as we often did. She was very upset and I could see she had been crying. She told me she was going to have an operation but it would be risky and she was scared. In my innocence, I imagined the doctors were going to perform some miracle where her back would be straightened, although I have to admit I was sceptical. We never saw her again. Next door to our neighbours the Shorts was a rather rundown guesthouse where we were always welcome. ‘Pop’ Bowley lived in one of the rooms with her husband, ‘Snow’. Pop was a skinny woman of uncertain age and she had yellow, nicotine-stained fingers and upper lip. She also had a terrible smoker’s cough. She wore her hair cut short, back-and-sides, and was extremely masculine, but she was able to make the most delicate baby clothes with fine hand-stitching and smocking. She would finish them off with beautiful embroidery and people would pay considerable amounts of money for them. ‘If you prick your finger with a needle and the blood gets onto the dress, the best thing to do is suck it out’, she once told me. I was horrified at the thought of her old tobacco lips going to work on the pure white christening gown. My brother Peter remembers that she and Snow liked to tickle small children, perhaps inappropriately. I don’t have the same recollection but they might not have liked little girls. One of the tenants in their house showed us how to make jewellery from stale bread and water. She would make a pliable mix, fashion it into a spray of flowers and thread a pin through the back.When the piece was dry she would paint it and finish 28

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it off with a coat or two of varnish. Then she would sell the finished product to us kids.We proudly presented the items of jewellery to our poor mothers as gifts and they had to pretend to like them. She called it Barbola work. I think the mice probably made a meal of them in later years.We always referred to our jewellery teacher as ‘Batty Barbola’. Once we’d got the hang of it Gwenda and I started manufacturing brooches ourselves. A spray of yellow lilies was our speciality. All the women in the neighbourhood had button boxes and we loved to play with them. Buttons were precious items. If a shirt wore out, the collar and cuffs were turned, and later, when the garment was going to spend the rest its life as a duster, all the buttons were cut off and placed in a box or a biscuit tin for future use. Buttons were made from mother-ofpearl and other beautiful materials such as bone and leather and horn. People didn’t throw much away, which meant we could always raid the wardrobe for something to wear in our concerts.We loved to run about in ratty old fur pieces and we giggled as we teetered around in our mother’s high heels. The police came to our front door one morning. Brought up to be in total awe of authority, my brothers and I stayed huddled together in the living room while Mum spoke to the uniformed officer. I couldn’t stand the suspense so I crept up the hall to see what was going on and came back with the news: ‘Grandma’s dead and Mummy didn’t cry’. Grandma had put her head in the gas oven. Dorothy Gladys, as she was known, was not our real grandmother. Gramps had lost his first wife Mabel, my mother’s mother, when she was only thirty years old and he was in mourning for many years. He probably felt guilty about his wife’s death as it appears she died from blood poisoning following a backyard abortion. It was illegal for a woman to terminate a pregnancy in the 1920s, so they were forced to take terrible risks. The family was poor and they already had three small children, the last one still a babe in arms. My grandmother must have felt that she couldn’t cope with another 29

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pregnancy. Antibiotics would probably have saved her life if they had been available but she died after two agonising days. Grandpa tried to keep his little family together as a single parent and paid to have his three children looked after while he was away at work. When he discovered they were being neglected, it was decided they would have to be fostered out with relatives. His two sisters agreed to step in. Gertrude took the two boys; she and her husband, Ernest, had been unable to have children of their own so she was thrilled to finally have a baby to look after. Olive and her husband, Bert, offered to take my fouryear-old mother. She went to live with them and their two young daughters in a house almost next door to her brothers. Eighteen months later tragedy struck the two households. Mum’s little brother, while playing barefoot, jumped from a fence and landed heavily on a nail in a yard that had once been used as stables. He died from tetanus two days later. Not long after, one of Olive and Bert’s daughters contracted meningitis and also died. Olive’s husband, Bert, and her sister, Gertrude, were both so overcome that they suffered nervous breakdowns and were unable to carry on. Bert was a big, bluff man who worked all his life in a foundry but after his daughter’s death he just curled up in a corner for most of the day, crying and blaming himself. Gertrude wept for the baby she felt to be her very own and then her husband left her. She was bereft. It was up to Olive to take charge. She not only had to cope with her own grief and care for her remaining daughter and my mother, she somehow found a way to manage the entire family’s troubles. There was no money coming into either household, so the three adults and three children moved into a little rented three-bedroom cottage. It was already bursting at the seams with people when Olive decided she would take in boarders to earn some money. She cared for them all singlehandedly till her husband and her sister came out of their black depression, although Gertrude would spend many years in and out of asylums, receiving treatment for her recurring bouts of melancholia, and Bert would sometimes spectacularly take to the bottle. 30

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More than twenty years after the death of his wife, Grandpa found somebody else. Dorothy Gladys was bright and amusing but nobody in the family was particularly happy when she and my grandfather decided to move in together because she was overly fond of alcohol and when she had been drinking she was always looking for a fight. My grandfather’s two sisters felt she was not good enough for him, but Mum made sure we had a relationship with Gramps and often took my brothers and me to visit their house. She would push the large wicker pram, sometimes with all three of us in it if our little legs got tired, all the way to Enmore.We were always sent to play outside the house and one day we managed to get into trouble with Dorothy Gladys because we sat in the vegetable garden and pulled all the tiny green bean shoots off the vines. I was fascinated by Dorothy Gladys. She had bright red hair with an inch of white roots and was given to fits of hysterical laughter. She had already had a few attempts at suicide before she was finally successful. Grandpa had always arrived home just in time to turn off the gas. This day she hadn’t counted on my grandfather missing his usual five o’clock tram home, and she had been inhaling the gas long enough to end her life. So Grandpa came to live with our family in the little room at the back of our house. Miss Stafford had left by this time and I had taken over her bedroom. My brothers were a bit jealous because they had to share. Gramps was employed by Dairy Farmers in Ultimo to look after their animals and he used to leave for work well before dawn. I would wake up with a start when I heard the floorboards creak as he passed by my bedroom on his way to the bathroom every morning, with his pronounced hoppidy-go limp. This was the result of a kick from a horse, he always claimed, when the Pooleys and Morans held the coaching contract for the run between Cooma and Yass. Gramps would leave our house about the same time as the milkman clipclopped to the front gate with his patient old horse and cart. Stanmore was changing. There were migrants from Italy and Greece moving into the area. On weekends the backyards 31

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smelt of garlic and rosemary and barbecued lamb. Capsicums were blistering on hotplates and tomatoes were drying on roofs. People sat on their front doorsteps at night and played music and sang. Some of our neighbours complained. My family loved it. Our house was suddenly full of Greek boys who spoke no English, so we had to improvise. We only had to walk a block and a half to reach the local corner shop, which was run by Billie and Mrs Kee. Many of the women from the neighbourhood would gather there in the mornings to gossip. They would sit on the sacks of produce and their kids would congregate outside, sharing a threepenny coke or a triangular packet of sherbet, which they sucked noisily through a fine tube of liquorice. Mr and Mrs Kee were Chinese and their two children attended our school. I once bought some bungers for Cracker Night and found they had Chinese writing on them so I decided to take them to Mrs Kee for a translation. I was shocked to learn that she didn’t know what the writing meant. Mrs Kee had probably been born in Australia, maybe she was even second or third generation, but I felt she’d been cheated of her culture, somehow. Playing mah-jong appeared to be her only real link to China. The butcher’s and the grocer’s shops were down the street near the railway station and they each delivered their goods to our home. The greengrocer travelled the lanes with his ancient truck and scales. He would let the sides of the vehicle down and we would order from the goods he had on display. We would run down to the milkbar with the billycan to get some extra milk if we ran out. We discovered you could swing the billy over your head and not lose a drop. Sometimes the same billycan would be borrowed by the men of the house and taken to the pub for a quart of beer. I realised early on that the container didn’t hold exactly a quart of milk. As Mum used to give me the exact money for that amount, I would be given a halfpenny change. So instead of taking the coin back to Mum, I would buy sweets to eat on the way home. I got tired of having to eat lollies every time I 32

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went for the milk and decided to confess to Mum that I had been cheating. She laughed out loud and asked why I hadn’t just pocketed the money. One of the shops in the strip was a dimly lit, dingy old place with pieces of jewellery gathering dust in the window. Our little gang used to invade it regularly and point at things in the display cabinets and ask ‘How much is this?’ and ‘How much is that?’ We soon became known in Stanmore as the ‘How much is it kids’. The man who ran the jeweller’s shop was very old and stooped and he used to like to place the necklaces we admired around our little kiddies’ throats. Even though we were only very young we knew that he got a kick out of it and we felt strangely powerful. We knew very well that it was wrong so didn’t tell our parents. The Salisbury Hotel was the closest local pub. It was an Art Deco building standing on the corner of Salisbury Road and Temple Street. Like all Sydney hotels it was required to shut down promptly every day at six o’clock.We sometimes walked past and caught sight of crowds of men with two or three schooners in front of them, rushing to quench their thirst before closing time. Dad often joined the crush if he happened to be home on leave. One Friday, the busiest day of the week at the Salisbury, my brothers and I planned to play a joke on Dad. We dressed up in old tattered clothes and streaked boot polish on our faces, and pretended to look very poor and tragic.We poked our heads inside the bar and pleaded with one of the drinkers,‘Please tell Leo Brown to come home because his children are starving’. Dad came to the door trying to hide a grin, picked up a fractured pool cue and chased us all the way home. One day Dad appeared at the kitchen doorway while my brothers and I were playing a game of Scrabble at the kitchen table. Mum was busy cooking dinner at the stove. He had just come back from work and we were making so much noise we hadn’t heard him arrive. We were all shrieking with laughter at my little brother’s hilarious attempts at spelling. I looked up with some surprise to see my father standing there. He 33

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appeared to be a stranger in his own home. I could see at that moment that Dad felt totally excluded from our fun. It struck me for the first time that he had never been home from work long enough to share in our games. I was suddenly aware of how much he had missed by being away so often. I asked if he wanted to join in our game, but he just shook his head and went outside to pat the dog and to roll a lonely smoke. Usually on Fridays we were sent down the street to line up at the local fish shop.We would each order a fried fish fillet, a couple of potato scallops and some lovely fat chips and take them home and eat them with slices of lemon and tomato sauce, straight off the paper they were wrapped in. Our routine was not because of the Catholic tradition of eating fish on Friday, but to give Mum a break from cooking. She was often tired and would have to lie down on the couch in the afternoons. She always seemed to have a bad cough. My brothers were involved with the Scouts and the Cubs for a while, till they became bored with tying knots. I decided to join the Girls’ Brigade with Elaine Yarrow.We rushed along to the church hall one night, proudly sporting our brand new uniforms and forage caps, and changed into our navy bloomers for aerobics, which they called ‘Physical Culture’. Inside the hall we found an elderly woman playing piano and a younger one doing the floor classes. The instructor was dressed in a very short tunic with pleats, roped in at the waist with a sash of corded silk. She also wore black ballet slippers on her remarkably tiny feet. The woman at the piano banged out the march, ‘Colonel Bogie’, and the instructor called out to the class,‘Heel toe, heel toe, heel toe, heel toe’ in time to the music. Every time she sang out the words, she thumped either her heel or her toe down hard on the timber floor.Whenever she did this, great waves of flesh rippled up and down her enormous, dimpled thighs. She had carefully applied matt brown leg paint but it didn’t disguise the fact that she was huge. I thought if that’s what exercise does to you, I’m not doing any more of it. Instead we went on bushwalks at weekends with the Boys’ Brigade and incinerated sausages over a campfire in the scrub 34

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and sang hymns in the train on the way home. I was always a bit embarrassed by the religious content of the songs and chose to lurk up the back, near the dog box, but I loved to get away from the suburbs and enjoy the long hot walks in the crunchy Australian bush. At school I couldn’t wait to get started when our English teacher gave us an assignment to write an entire play. The best one, she advised us, would be performed at a concert later in the year. When the time came she chose mine. I was able to direct the performance, giving me almost total artistic control. I cast myself in the play as well, because I loved to act, but modesty prevented me from claiming the leading role. I handed that over to another girl, who looked a bit like Elizabeth Taylor and I performed the character part. The plotline was mildly predictable and just might have been influenced by a melodrama I had witnessed at the Baptist Church one Easter. My play told the story of a poor immigrant girl who manages to fight adversity with the help of some good fairies. By way of apology, I was only ten. On the day we were to perform the play in front of the entire school and an invited audience of parents and citizens, my star arrived at school looking as cute as the Hollywood child star Shirley Temple. She must have spent the night with her hair in rags and she was wearing an expensive dress with a skirt full of frills that her mother had bought her to wear in the show. I threw my first and only fit of artistic temperament. ‘You’re supposed to be poor!’ I shouted at her. She started to cry but obstinately refused to remove her new dress. The teacher created a sort of apron by cutting a hole in a hessian bag to cover her gorgeous frock and I smeared some brown crayon on her face rather too savagely I have to admit, but nothing could restrain the bounce of the corkscrew curls. My brothers and I had seen our first stage show at Grace Bros department store in Broadway, which was not far from our place. There were regular Saturday concerts for children and some hilarious pantos over the Christmas holidays. I was 35

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fascinated by the people up on the stage and came home and organised performances in our own little backyard. I usually cast my friend Gwenda as the star, because she was musical. She could sing and was able to play the piano ‘by ear’. The boys collected pennies for the admission and played in a comb and paper band. No grownups were allowed to attend our concerts but I suspect they used to sneak a look from the laundry window. We adored the movies as well. The three of us used to spend nearly every Saturday afternoon at the Odeon or the Strand, making a lot of noise when the serials came on. We were never convinced the cowboy hero from the previous episode had miraculously survived his impossible leap across a vast canyon. Little cannonballs of orange and chocolate Jaffas were shaken out of their boxes onto the raked wooden floors and made their way noisily down to the front of the stalls. Torches were shone at the guilty parties. Everybody giggled and tried to look innocent. One of the cinemas in the district was famous for showing special double-feature horror films and we watched them through the spaces between our fingers, as we covered our eyes in fear. The black and white films Isle of the Dead and Bob Hope’s The Ghost Breakers were our all time favourites. We loved anything to do with zombies.We would walk home in a group after seeing a scary movie and one of us would break away from the others and jump out from behind a tree, moaning, ‘I am the Undead’. Whereupon we would all grab each other and shriek with terror. I ran home from the cinema one Saturday in front of the boys with some very important news. I flew into the kitchen yelling, ‘I know what’s wrong with Mum. She’s got TB!’ Dad blanched and said quietly, ‘You heartless little bitch’. I was deeply wounded. He didn’t understand. We had just seen a public health film about a woman who had exactly the same symptoms our mother had been showing for a long while. The woman had an X-ray and was found to be suffering from tuberculosis. Mum was obviously suffering from the same 36

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disease. My words must have been terrible for my father to hear because, to Dad, TB was a death sentence. In 1948 there was a nationwide campaign to wipe out the scourge of tuberculosis, which was then the most pervasive communicable disease in the world. The Australian government passed a new Tuberculosis Act and the film we had seen was being screened around the country as a way of getting the message across. My father hadn’t allowed me to get to the tag, which was: the woman in the film got better. Mum did have TB, as it turned out, and she was taken away to hospital where her condition was found to be grave. We were told she needed an operation; we were horrified to hear the surgeons planned to remove half of her damaged lung. However, a new thoracic specialist at the hospital was pioneering a treatment where surgery could be avoided by collapsing the lung. Mum was away for some time while they tried the new procedure and also attempted to build up her strength. She had lost so much weight that she was only skin and bone. Miracle drug treatment had also just become available and the disease could finally be arrested, but a lot of damage had already been done to Mum’s lung and only time would tell if she would ever recover. She was only thirty years old. People were incredibly ignorant about tuberculosis. My brothers and I were shocked when adults we had known all our lives put their hands over their mouths when we spoke to them. Some of our ‘God-bothering’ neighbours, as Dad called them, prevented their kids from playing with us. A few people we knew even crossed the road when they saw us coming. At long last our mother came home but she was forced to live the life of an invalid, avoiding excitement of any kind. She was told she must spend her time in bed, resting, reading and eating her meals alone. She was not to do anything at all that might compromise her recovery. Bed rest was the cure.We were not allowed to cuddle her or kiss her in case we contracted the disease. I used to sit on the end of her bed and as I talked to her, I could see two pictures on the walls behind her. One was a pastel drawing of a pink-cheeked baby extending a little 37

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chubby hand. The other was a decidedly scary watercolour of an angel taking off with a recently departed soul tucked under its wing. I prayed every time I looked at it that it wouldn’t be my mother the angel was stealing from earth. Mum endured painful medical treatment every week but she never complained. Dad decided to take twelve months’ leave from his government job so he could devote all his time to her care. His mates would say ‘Let Noeline do it’ whenever he told them he had to go home to prepare dinner for his family, but Dad thought I was too young and should be allowed to have a proper childhood, even though the role of the carer was expected of a daughter in those days. I don’t know how my parents managed for money during her long convalescence. I imagine Dad’s union might have helped, as he was an active member, but I know what a proud man he was. I am sure it would have been too difficult for him to accept financial help from outside. I do know Mum and Dad had to spend all the money they had been saving to buy their first house. Mum had lost her own mother when she was only a little girl. She wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her children. My parents were determined to fight the disease and in the end they won. Mum recovered remarkably well over time. She always suffered from breathlessness on exertion and had a slight case of claustrophobia but she was able to carry on almost as before. We had our mother back. It really was a miracle. My schoolwork had started to suffer during Mum’s illness. I had never had a problem with my studies before and was always at the top of the class. I was good at things that interested me, like English and art, but I didn’t much care for maths. I had no interest in the subject and told my parents I planned to employ an accountant when I grew up. I loved to write stories and I never had a pencil out of my hand. I drew over everything. My head was always in the clouds. Everyone was pleased to hear I had been chosen to go to Fort Street Girls High, one of the few selective schools in the State system. It was 1951. The school was then situated in 38

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the city near Observatory Hill, and I used to take the train every morning to Wynyard Station and walk the rest of the way to the freezing old National Trust building, which had once been used as a military hospital. Our art classes were held in a mean little outbuilding that we used to call Siberia. The students often used a tunnel under the busy road to get to the school and there were sometimes strange men lurking in the dark, so we were always advised to travel in groups. We walked together, dressed primly in our hats and gloves and pleated serge tunics and blazers and our maroon and white Fortian ties. Half way through my first year I started to fall behind in dreaded maths and science. I felt ashamed and kept my problems to myself. I thought my parents had more than enough to worry about. I was also growing up really quickly and starting to rebel. I was only twelve but looked a bit older than the other students in my year. I found I could mix with the senior girls and manage to dodge a few classes. I teamed up with two friends who lived in Millers Point, near our school, and we used to take off to one of their interesting old terrace houses instead of attending scripture lessons, which we all found excruciatingly dull. Once we even drank some alcohol in our lunch hour—a lethal concoction made up of Advocaat and cherry brandy. Our French instructor, Miss Kent-Hughes, was inclined to spit over us when she was talking, especially when she was demonstrating her French ‘R’s, so one day I wore a bright yellow shower cap into her class. Miss Kent-Hughes was not amused but the other kids were. We were not permitted to study drama at Fort Street. That was available only to the two senior classes. Instead we were encouraged to join their famous school choir, which I found incredibly boring. They determined I was a bass and there wasn’t much singing for me to do. My beloved art was a half-subject only. One of our teachers was a plain woman who wore paper under her armpits.When she took her chalk to the blackboard we could hear it crackle. I used to get into trouble from her for ‘having that look’ on my face. I was puzzled. I didn’t know 39

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what ‘look’ she was talking about. I had to spend a lot of time out in the hall for an offence known as ‘dumb insolence’. My hair was quite long and it had one big wave that used to fall over my right eye. One day I was appalled when the teacher grabbed at it without warning and stabbed at my skull with a bobby pin that she had pulled out of her own hair. Another day the science mistress squeezed me between the door and the jamb for not paying attention. I was convinced there was not a lot of fun to be had at high school. At the end of twelve months of misery I was informed I would have to repeat the year. I didn’t think so. I left Fort Street and attended Stanmore Girls School for the next two years, where we learned, among other things, to touch type to music on ancient Olivettis with black plastic covers over the keys so we couldn’t cheat. On Saturday mornings I travelled to East Sydney Technical College to study painting. I was mad about art and liked to spend all my spare time at the beautiful Gallery of New South Wales, gazing at the pictures on the walls. Drama wasn’t an option at my new school, either, but we did have the odd excursion to attend the theatre. We were taken to see a matinee of As You Like It, and one of my classmates, Carol Kitching, and I were both madly impressed by the experience and would rush home from school every day and disappear into my little bedroom where we would read aloud from the collected works of William Shakespeare. I was listening to the ABC one day when I heard an announcement saying that auditions were being held for a children’s radio program and any child could apply. I was tremendously excited. I thought I might be able to work with people I admired, like John Ewart (our beloved Jimmy of the ‘Argonauts’) so I wrote away immediately. When the time came I went alone to the studios and nervously tried out with a script supplied, but was disappointed to be told my vowels were too Australian. In those days local performers on radio often sounded more English than the English except in variety shows where they used to pretend to be American. I took my 40

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rejection bravely even though I felt certain that as I had been playing the part of a kangaroo I should definitely have had an Australian accent. I had been quite happy with my interpretation and had even tried to incorporate a hop in my voice. In my final year at school my classmates, in a rather democratic process for the fifties, selected me for the position of school captain, although I suspect the teachers were probably required to approve the decision. I am certain my deep voice convinced everyone I was the right person for the job, for I had no other qualifications. When I was called upon to make my first speech I suffered a major nosebleed, but I managed to stop it just in time. Later on I was almost removed from my position for doing what I thought was a quite acceptable caricature of the Anglican minister who took our scripture class, and for putting up a notice on the staff room door that stated,‘If bread is the staff of life, then the life of this staff is one long loaf ’. I sat for the Intermediate Certificate in 1953, passing in all seven subjects, including shorthand and even maths, much to everyone’s surprise, and received a very nice reference from Miss Smith, the Principal. I was more than happy to leave school, although there were meetings between the headmistress and my parents. Afterwards some pressure was applied for me to go on to do the Leaving Certificate. I wouldn’t listen. All I wanted to do was leave school and find a job and make some money. I wanted to be an artist.

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CHAPTER THREE

STARTING TO ACT

OR THE BARE FACTS

The week I left school I took a Christmas job at one of the old Grace Bros twin stores in the western end of the CBD, the closest I would ever come to working on Broadway. I was selling china and glassware in the eastern building on the ground floor. It was there that I happened to meet the first real love of my life. His name was Ron and he worked down the road at CSIRO, in the grounds of Sydney University. He and a mate had drawn the short straw and found themselves lumbered with the difficult task of choosing a wedding present for one of their colleagues. The two men came in to my department and spent what seemed like hours deciding on an appropriate gift. At closing time Ron returned, alone, to thank me for my help and to follow me home. Ron was tall, lean, narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered, tanned and handsome with a great, warm, generous smile. He was a sailor and an adventurer. He had been shipwrecked on a desert island, he had crewed aboard a pirate vessel and he had once been arrested by the military in Franco’s Spain. He drove a little convertible with the hood down and he and a mate had shares in a cruising yacht. He was also nearly twice my age. Ron 43

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had just returned home after spending years at sea and travelling the world on a motorbike. He was ready to get married and settle down. I didn’t tell him I had just turned fifteen. My Christmas job came to an end and it was time for me to think about getting a permanent position, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I realised it would only ever be a job and not a career. Careers were for men. Girls were usually nurses or secretaries or shop assistants in the fifties. I knew that if I wanted to write or to paint, I would have to do it in my spare time. At least I could type, so I imagined I could get a job in an office somewhere. Dad was keen for me to get some training—‘a piece of paper’ as he called it. I noticed an advertisement in the local newspaper for a position with Marrickville Council as an assistant librarian. I always had my head in a book so my family agreed it sounded like the perfect job for me. My mother accompanied me to the interview at the Town Hall where I was told I didn’t have the necessary qualifications for the job and needed to have the Leaving Certificate. I was disappointed and there were a few, ‘I told you so’, barbs from my parents, but a few days later I received a letter from the Council saying that, although they could not take me on as a librarian, they would like to offer me a job as a library assistant at a starting salary of three pounds ten shillings per week. So I was going to be a library assistant and not an assistant librarian. I wondered if there would be a difference. I started work the following Monday. I was very nervous on that first morning, although I was dressed in a narrow skirt and high heels and had my hair pinned up in a French roll, having just seen Grace Kelly wearing one in her latest movie. I appeared to be very sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old, but when I sat down to morning tea I was too shy to ask anyone to pass the sugar, so I had to do without. The chief librarian was a grey sort of person with the unfortunate name of Churm. He introduced me to his deputy, an attractive young woman who seemed to do all the 44

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work. I spent the morning being introduced to the Dewey system and at lunchtime the staff showed me a room in the basement where we could play table tennis. I joined them in a game of doubles but, never having been talented at sports, proved not to be very good at it. Mr Churm offered to teach me. He stood behind me and placed his hand around my right wrist, which was holding the bat and then he took me by my left wrist, which was holding the ball, and demonstrated the correct way to serve. I felt decidedly uncomfortable in that position and never played ping pong with the boss again. A little while later Mr Churm took a job with another council and the deputy took over as chief librarian. Frances Charteris was keen and imaginative. She was a gifted artist and recognised special talents in her staff and encouraged them. She knew I was interested in literature and painting so she suggested books for me to read, authors like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger and Nabokov, all of which I devoured. I was encouraged to write for the newsletter and to design their monthly displays. I was doing the work of a librarian. By now Ron was a permanent fixture at my place and had become a welcome part of the family. My parents adored him and, even though he was many years older, they felt that I was in good hands.And I was.We had the most wonderfully adventurous time—sailing, swimming, bushwalking and fishing. The yacht we sailed in was moored at Neutral Bay, at the home of ‘Gelignite Jack’ Murray, who always travelled with a few sticks of explosives in the boot of his car. He’d earned his name in the Redex Trials when he used the gelly to blow up the occasional obstacle on the dirt roads in the outback. Ron and I would sail the boat out through the Heads with our friends and follow the coastline up to the mouth of the vast Hawkesbury River, where we enjoyed idyllic weekends, catching fish with lures set over the side, and rowing our small dinghy to shore to chip fresh oysters off the rocks, eating them straight from the shell. Ron’s sailing partner, Ray, worked at the School of Physics with the controversial Canadian-born atomics whiz, Professor 45

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Harry Messel. Ray was a small man with a big moustache and he drove a wonderful old car with voluptuous curves called a Triumph Gloria. He had actually built the boat we sailed on in his spare time in his parents’ tiny backyard in Strathfield. Ray had just taken up with a new girlfriend, Nancy Rattle, whose middle name we were delighted to discover was May. Ray lived with his parents, who were quite elderly, in a house just off busy Parramatta Road. His mother invited all the young members of the crew home for dinner one night after we’d spent a day out on the harbour. I offered to help her set the table so she took me into the pantry to pass me some plates. I was amazed to see that she had hundreds of cakes of soap and boxes of detergent and toilet rolls and canned goods on the shelves. She told me she had lived through a war in England and she wasn’t going to run out of anything again as long as she lived. She had prepared the meal beforehand and as we sat down at the table we all stared mournfully at our congealing plates of tripe in white sauce. The only green thing in evidence was a lonely sprig of parsley. I had never met a meal I couldn’t eat till this one. I tried. The only way I could get it down was by not allowing my teeth to come into contact with the slippery stuff. If I could fork in the tripe and swallow it in one gulp I was fine, but as soon as I experienced the bouncy texture I started to gag. It took a long time before I was ever able to look at tripe again, until I found a recipe called ‘Trippa a la Romana’ in one of Elizabeth David’s wonderful paperbacks. The difference was quite incredible. The tripe was more like pasta than rubber and there is something about the addition of onions, garlic and tomatoes that transforms most food. My boyfriend, Ron, was an exceptional sailor and because of his past experience in the Merchant Navy, if anything went wrong with the engine on the boat or in his car, which was a handsome but ancient SS Jaguar, he could always fix it. He was incredibly capable. Apart from a tendency to make extremely bad puns, he was everything a girl could wish for. Ron and I became engaged on my eighteenth birthday and I was thrilled 46

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to wear the diamond ring that we chose together: a single, beautifully cut stone sitting modestly on a plain gold band. We celebrated by having dinner at a favourite little Victoria Street restaurant called the Home Café, where the owner bore a remarkable resemblance to Vladimir Petrov, the Russian diplomat who made headlines when he defected a few years before. The restaurant served cold fruit soup and Vienna schnitzel and with it we drank glasses of sweetish sparkling Rhinegold. For dessert we enjoyed their boozy mousse-like iced fruit brandy cream. During the night the background music would increase in volume and ferocity, finishing up with a loud march, to get rid of the first sitting and allow the place to fill up again. There was huge excitement in Australia that year. It was 1956 and Melbourne was to host the Olympics. Our councillors had decided to ignore the coming event, but were embarrassed into action by the local newspaper. They convened a hurried general meeting in the Town Hall and I was asked to attend to represent the library. The mayor called for volunteers. Nobody offered. I think I was the only young person at the meeting, so it was a case of, ‘You’ll do’. I was presented with a blue and gold sash, similar to the ones they drape over cattle at the Royal Show, which branded me ‘Miss Marrickville Olympics’, and given the job of raising money for our local athletes. One night I appeared at a fundraiser, with my new fiancé at the local RSL Club. I dressed up in a new cocktail frock and insisted that Ron wear a suit. I was on stage, being introduced as ‘Miss Marrickville’ by the president, who was wearing a rather fetching fair-isle vest, when I overheard a woman with a head full of rollers remark to her companion, ‘She’s not so hot’. Ron possessed a well-developed social conscience and he took me to my first protest rally. We shared a love of old Sydney buildings and we were attempting to save the beautiful sandstone village of Hunters Hill, hoping to preserve its grand old homes like glorious St Malo, which was built by the Frenchman Didier Numa Joubert. A committed crowd of 47

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conservationists attempted to stop the bulldozers but we lost the battle in no time at all to the Department of Main Roads and now a highway slices through the suburb. Ron lived with his parents on the North Shore. They were both seriously Methodist and one of the first dates we had was to go with them to hear Handel’s ‘Messiah’, sung by a massed choir at Sydney Town Hall. Ron’s mother knew all the words. There was never any alcohol served at his home, although I heard someone might have snuck some into a trifle once. There was nothing of the wowser about their son, however. Ron had a very healthy attitude towards sex. I didn’t ask him about the women who must have shared his love life before I came along, but he used to pinch my ear from time to time, and say, ‘Tinks I’ll have a ninny noony’, which made me think he had done some experimenting away from home when his ship dropped anchor at the carefree islands of the Pacific. When Ron and our crowd were out sailing on the harbour we would sometimes moor the boat close to the marina at Elizabeth Bay and have lunch at The Elizabethan, a little mock-Tudor restaurant on the street level of an apartment building. I was having a good deal of trouble balancing peas on the back of my fork when one of the other sailors we had crewing that day made a joke about it, causing me to blush. He saw that I was embarrassed and apologised. He was a rather eccentric young physicist by the name of Geoffrey Chandler who rode around town in a fire engine. He later achieved notoriety through what became known in the press as the Bogle–Chandler murder case. He has had a cloud over him since the early sixties when his wife, Margaret, and another scientist, Dr Gilbert Bogle, died mysteriously in Lane Cove National Park after they had all been guests at a New Year’s Eve party. The cause of their deaths was never revealed, but one of the theories at the time was that they were murdered by someone who knew them and who had access to an exotic poison. There was later some speculation that they died from the effects of LSD. We will probably never know what 48

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happened that night, but I always remember the carefree young man who used to crew with us on our yacht. I enjoyed sailing but not nearly as much as Ron did. I was keen to get involved in other things. My friend Patricia Rice expressed an interest in joining the nearby Petersham Musical Society and asked me to go along to an audition with her.We found ourselves in the chorus for their next production, which was a musical revue. Patricia became bored with the long rehearsal period and dropped out after a few weeks but I stuck it out.When opening night came around I was embarrassed to find I had to wear a scanty costume in one of the production numbers, although it was really no briefer than a two-piece swimsuit, which I wore happily and without shame every weekend. I was extremely shy and self-conscious when people looked at me, which makes me wonder why I ever wanted to go on the stage in the first place.We played the revue for a few nights only at the cold local Town Hall. The next production was to be the musical comedy, No No Nanette. I was cast as a little French girl and even landed a speaking part. I had one line to say and that was ‘Ooh, la, la’, which I thought was so corny I decided to leave. With regular money coming in from my work at the library I was able to go to the theatre more often. My favourite was always the Phillip Street Theatre with its wonderfully funny satirical revues starring people like the talented Gordon Chater, Bud Tingwell, June Salter, Ruth Cracknell, Lyle O’Hara and the young Reg Livermore. Phillip Street shows were fantastically successful. They poked fun at the establishment in Sydney and gave Australian writers and actors a real opportunity to star in local shows at a time when most of the productions in Sydney were imported from England or America, with overseas actors heading the bill. Australians were mostly cast in supporting roles but at Phillip Street they were able to be stars in their own right. I went to see every new show and the following day I would run through the sketches for the benefit of my workmates. My boss encouraged me, even though I was often late for work owing to a chronic lack of sleep. 49

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One of the librarians I worked with was a member of the Genesians Theatre Group. When I first met her she was in rehearsal for a production of The Glass Menagerie in which she was playing the lame daughter, Laura. She was very serious about her art and walked around the library with a stone in her shoe to practise her limp for the part. Her name was Edna Baker and she eventually landed a job in the TV series Number 96, after changing her name to Philippa. One of her friends was a budding playwright called Peter Kenna and he often used to visit her at the library. Another of my employer’s protégées was the young composer Richard Meale, who lived in Marrickville and was often seen in the music room at the library discussing his career with my boss. Frances Charteris was a talented painter and had studied at a number of Sydney art schools. She believed in encouraging appreciation of the arts in the community. Towards the end of the fifties she helped a group of locals start their own theatrical society. They held their first meeting one evening in the back of the Town Hall in the children’s library. My boss asked me to go along to take notes, where my schoolgirl shorthand came in handy. Following her suggestion they decided to call themselves the Marrick Players, which I recorded dutifully. It might have just been because I was there, representing the library at that first meeting, but I was voted in as the group’s honorary secretary. I was also given the job of leading lady in their first production, a one-act play in rhyme. The other details have long been lost, although I can still remember my first line of dialogue. The director was Bill Juliffe, a rather eccentric individual with big ears and enormous hands, who I discovered lived just up the road from me in a block of flats called, mysteriously,‘The Orb’. Mum and I made my costume for the show and then took to it with a pair of scissors as my character in the piece is supposed to be in prison and in tatters. We took the play to Bathurst for a drama festival and on the long drive I was rehearsing the lines in my head all the way over the Blue Mountains and beyond. Mr Phillip Street, another actor in the show, whose name I suspect was an 50

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invention, drove the car. He laughed at my anxiety and boasted,‘I never forget my lines’.We arrived at the hall, dressed for our show and were called onto the stage. I had the opening line of the play which concerned a cobweb and a scratch on a mirror and Mr Phillip Street had the next. I said my line. He said nothing. I said it again. He looked blank. Somehow we got through the play but we didn’t win a prize. Mr Street was very quiet on the way home. To make up for my disappointment, I did manage to meet a very nice Bathurst boy called Max, with whom I would keep up a correspondence for well over forty years. Ron encouraged my new interest in show-business. He made the mistake of taking me to every new production in Sydney. I fell in love with the theatre. I realised I wasn’t ready for marriage. I was only nineteen. Regretfully I returned the ring. My family was heartbroken. Ron, ever practical, took the engagement ring back to the jeweller and exchanged it for a wristwatch. What might well have been our last date was when he took me to the New Theatre, which was then housed in the Australian Seamen’s Union Hall down near The Rocks.At that time The Waterside Workers’ Federation was active in promoting appreciation of the arts to its members. The wharfies believed that culture was vital to the worker. They supported the theatre. They encouraged debate. One of their other groups was producing wonderful documentaries with the aid of the union’s funds and some of those filmmakers also had active connections with the New Theatre. I did not know when I went to my first performance that ASIO had a keen interest in the theatre’s activities and kept its members under surveillance. I had no real knowledge of the politics around the New at that time. I just thought they produced interesting and challenging works, and some of the plays were even written by Australian authors. The first production I saw at the New was Black Diamonds, a play in three acts written by the novelist and humorist Frank Hardy. I had just read his sensational book, Power without Glory, 51

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so I was looking forward to meeting him after the show. The play he had written was about striking coalminers and Frank Hardy actually performed in it as one of the thirteen male characters. He was quite an acceptable actor, as I remember, playing a fairly typically laconic Australian type. Hardy was a thin man with rather sharp features and he would have been about forty years old at the time. He seemed to be very comfortable in his role and I was impressed to see that he could speak his lines clearly and chew on a pipe at the same time. Someone on the night remarked unkindly that Frank looked like a ‘rat with a gold tooth’. I became a member of the New Theatre immediately and went straight into rehearsal for a show called Fission Chips. As the name implies, it was a satirical revue and had a bit to say about nuclear disarmament. The cast was dressed as cavemen for some of the show, demonstrating what life would be like after the world had been nuked. The wardrobe department constructed a rather ratty but brief rabbit bikini for me to wear. I was still self-conscious and kept trying to hide behind the scenery. People at the time did not seem to have a problem with the wearing of fur, so at least I didn’t have animal liberationists throwing paint over me. Frank Hardy and I were cast together soon after in a production of Douglas Stewart’s classic piece, Fire On the Snow. I was the narrator and I believe Frank played Oates. We enjoyed working together but there was nothing to suggest that we would later become close friends or that I would actually be asked to act as a spy for Australia’s most notorious communist.

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After I met Bob Hughes at Vadim’s restaurant, he and I became almost permanent fixtures. We could be found there together nearly every night, sharing a table with the regulars on the prestigious upper level. Bob was back home from the UK, where he had gone to pursue a young ballet dancer from Rose Bay. I was very glad the relationship had not worked out. He had resumed his studies at Sydney University but was often too busy doing other things to attend lectures. Bob was studying architecture and also providing stories and cartoons for a number of magazines. In his spare time he was working in his studio at home, painting rather voluptuous landscapes in oils. He was also having discussions with a publisher about writing a book on Australian art. I was heavily involved with the theatre while trying to hold down a fulltime job at the library. Bob and I were obviously burning the candle at both ends.We didn’t have time to sleep. I would sometimes approach the local chemist and tell him I had some studying to do and ask if he had something to keep me going. The stimulants Dexedrine and Benzedrine were both available over the counter. One night I took a quantity of 53

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straight caffeine powder in a strong cup of instant coffee and nearly became the first fatality from an overdose of one of the world’s most popular beverages. The powder was supplied by one of our two tame French medical student friends, known affectionately as the ‘Gallic Symbols’. They lived in bohemian splendour directly opposite the high sandstone walls of Sydney University in the district known as Forest Lodge and they changed their women more often than they changed their sheets. I was now part of a new and exciting world. All the artists in Sydney knew each other. Bob had a large circle of friends and I was thrilled to meet some of the talented people whose work I so admired. I was able to mix with the people who made up the Victoria Street Group. John Olsen, Bill Rose, Stan Rapotec and Clem Meadmore. I met Robert Klippel, John Coburn and Peter Upward. I enjoyed the heady first exhibitions of The Annandale Imitation Realists, as they called themselves. Colin Lanceley, Michael Brown and Ross Crothall had just started showing their witty paintings of mixed media and found objects. Bob Dickerson, the ex-boxer who used to fight under the name of Bobby Moody, was making a big name for himself.When I met Albert Tucker for the first time he insisted on calling me Nefertiti all night. I was really flattered, as I had always believed that I had a big nose but Tucker insisted I had a beautiful profile. The art world was flourishing and it was becoming quite fashionable in some circles to cultivate an artist. John Olsen was hired to paint a fabulous ceiling in a private dining room. Some artists we knew were popping in and out of society bedrooms. Even a couple of old rough-and-ready ones were visiting wealthy Eastern Suburbs matrons soon after their husbands had left for work. Bob Hughes remarked dryly that the women were probably ‘hoping for talent by injection’. One artist I had only heard about was Ian Fairweather, a recluse living a primitive life on Bribie Island in Queensland. He was a seventy-year-old Scot who had travelled to Australia after a lifetime of adventure and now lived alone in a grass hut. 54

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He was sometimes referred to as Australia’s greatest living artist. Fairweather used to paint on paper, roll the pictures up and post them off to his Sydney gallery. The owners of the gallery decided to send him some canvas to paint on, but he used it instead to construct a tent. In the early sixties the Macquarie Galleries held an exhibition of Fairweather’s work and people actually queued to buy them. Bob and I took our sleeping bags along and slept in the street all night under a plastic sheet so we would have first choice when the gallery opened. It was a cold, damp night and I wore a fake fur hat and woollen gloves and was captured on film lying on the pavement. I was in the queue mainly to keep Bob company and to act as a proxy for Harry Kippax, who was unable to be there himself. I was happy I was able to secure a picture for Harry for the sum of four hundred pounds. When I saw Ian Fairweather’s intricate work hanging on the walls for the first time, I was a bit sorry that I hadn’t been able to invest in one for myself, but I didn’t have the funds. Elwynn Lynn was a Sydney art critic and painter of big abstract pictures which he made using thickly textured paint and collage. He had been around the art scene for a long time and he owned a country house on a few acres on the outskirts of Sydney. Bob and I were invited to spend the day with him at his property. As we drove through the cattle gates we observed a beautiful young girl dressed in what might have been a Grecian tunic, holding a watermelon high on one shoulder. She posed there for some time, till all the cars had arrived, no doubt positioned there by the artist for maximum effect. She was his girlfriend at the time, and also one of his students. There was quite a big age difference, I noticed. She was Lolita to Elwynn Lynn’s Humbert Humbert. Russell Drysdale, or ‘Tas’ to his friends, was already a very successful artist by the time we met. He lived in an apartment at Potts Point, close to Vadim’s restaurant. Tas’ wife, Bonny, had a caustic tongue on occasions. Bob laughed heartily at something Tas said when we were having drinks with them one night and Bonny remarked loudly to nobody in particular, 55

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‘Never trust anyone who shows their gums when they smile.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say in response, but I was always very careful not to laugh whenever she was around. We were at a function one night and a murmur went through the room. Patrick White was coming. I remember Bob and I were standing in the host’s kitchen when the famous author and his small entourage arrived. He was tall and sharpfeatured and he appeared to be almost translucent. He looked like a cartoon by Ronald Searle. He came into the kitchen, sniffed loudly, and remarked that he ‘hated young people’, while looking directly at Bob and me. Another night we were eating Spanish paella at the home of Bob Raymond, who was the producer of the popular ABC current affairs show Four Corners. His first wife, Marion, who was a wonderful cook, had arranged the feast. The writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift were among their guests. They had just returned from living in Greece and George was in the process of writing My Brother Jack.When she discovered that I wanted to become an actor, Charmian told Bob that he should not stand in the way of my career. I’m sure she was thinking of her own. The impeccably turned out Mervyn Horton was one of the colourful Sydney arts identities. Mervyn was a writer and collector and he edited the magazine, Art and Australia. He also ran a gallery and coffee shop in the heart of the city, which boasted one of Sydney’s first espresso machines. The café was called The Galleria and it was located halfway down Rowe Street, which was really only a narrow lane behind the old Australia Hotel. Both the hotel and the tiny street have now disappeared. Rowe Street was sometimes referred to as Sydney’s Little Bond Street because of its elegant boutiques dealing in artworks, rare books and antiques. The Galleria was a popular meeting place for artists and collectors. Bob and I would rendezvous there often for lunch on my half days off from the library. Mervyn Horton had once been charged with publishing obscene material in his publication Art in Australia, following an edition that featured a self-portrait by Norman 56

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Lindsay. In the offending picture, the artist drew himself surrounded by his usual naked leering nymphs and satyrs. Bob Hughes once found a Norman Lindsay etching in the back of a pantry cupboard at his home when he was a child much like somebody else might have found a hidden copy of Playboy. It must have had quite an influence on the young boy. Bob spoke about the discovery in Ian Britain’s book, Once an Australian, where he is quoted as saying, ‘A great many of our primal experiences do come from bad art. No one is born in the Uffizi.’ In Bob’s book The Art of Australia he wrote about Lindsay’s nudes: ‘Their eroticism is depersonalised and cowlike; the very embodiments of sexual fantasy as it was in the days before teenagers were allowed to go to bed together’. I wonder how many times the Jesuit-educated adolescent Robert Hughes revisited the Norman Lindsay in the cupboard. Donald Friend returned to Sydney after living in Bali for many years and he and Bob spent a lot of time together, discussing the time Donald had spent as a war artist. Donald was a charming, chain-smoking, ‘humourous troll’, as the poet Geoffrey Dutton once described him.At Vadim’s restaurant one night Donald and Bob were busily executing lightning sketches of people in the room. My brother Peter was with us at our table and he was pocketing all the discarded drawings as they fell to the floor. Bob was obviously the more gifted cartoonist and I complained that he had never done a caricature of me. He dashed one off in seconds and put it in my hand. The drawing was done in biro on yellow paper and shows me frowning and looking cranky and peering through a curtain of hair while pulling hard on a cigarette. He wrote on it,‘To my bad-tempered darling. The only one ever’. I think he meant that it was the only drawing he would ever do of me. Donald Friend told us that night that he was afraid his beloved Bali would be destroyed once the tourists discovered it. I heard about a community theatre in Sydenham, not far from where I was working at Marrickville. The Pocket Playhouse 57

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was run by a group of enthusiastic theatre lovers and their dedicated director, Qantas employee, Norman McVicker. I was encouraged by my boss Frances to attend an open reading for their next production. I went along to audition, hoping I might land a small part in the play, one where I could actually talk and wear clothes. I had never been to the theatre before and was surprised by its size. The Pocket Playhouse was so-called because it was a tiny space, seating only about sixty people. The company held performances on Friday and Saturday nights, with children’s plays on Saturday afternoons, and flew a flag on a pole outside the theatre on the days it was open, a custom the director borrowed from the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare’s day. I heard that Norman McVicker was keen on introducing children to theatre from an early age so they would become the audiences of tomorrow. On Saturday afternoons, the actors would be waiting in the foyer in makeup and costume, ready to welcome the children when they arrived. Audience participation was encouraged, with kids being invited to join the actors up on stage, where they were allowed to see how things worked behind the scenes. The Pocket started life as a Rechabite Hall, a temple to abstinence. It was located in the middle of Terry Street in the working class suburb of Sydenham and was about the same size as the squat terrace houses that surrounded it. The interior of the hall had been gutted and raked and the foyer had a tiny bar for serving coffee at interval. The backstage area and wing spaces were incredibly small and the actors always had to get into the theatre early because the only entry was by way of the front door and through the auditorium. Some tardy performers had been forced to scale the back fence from time to time. I arrived for the reading, filled in a form and was given some pages of a script to read. When it came to my turn to audition, I read my lines and was given more, after which I was told I had a major part in their next production, Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince. The Prince of the title was to be played by Ted Lansdowne, who had performed many times at the Pocket. Marie Byron, another old hand, was cast in the 58

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wonderful role of the Grand Duchess and a newcomer, Jan Ikin, in her first part on stage, was to play the young Princess. I had landed the role of the central character, the slightly dizzy American showgirl, Mary Morgan, who wins the heart of the Prince after he invites her to the palace one night for a royal fling. The play had been written for the famous husband-andwife team, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and was first performed at the Phoenix Theatre in London in November 1953, just at the time I was leaving school. Olivier had asked his good friend Terence Rattigan to write something as a vehicle for the stars, to keep Vivien happy after she was recuperating from one of her many stays in hospital. She had been receiving treatment for one of her recurring bouts of manic depression, although the couple always referred to her illness as a chronic lung condition. The play ran for a little over six months at the Phoenix Theatre in London, but Olivier felt that it hadn’t been a great success. Some of the notices were fairly cool and in his withering book Curtains, the acerbic critic Kenneth Tynan quotes a visiting American who described the show as ‘a breath of old caviare’. Later Marilyn Monroe played Vivien’s part in the film of the play, which was retitled The Prince and the Showgirl. Laurence Olivier, reprising his role as the Prince, also directed the movie. Olivier had a terrible time working with Marilyn, and he wrote about it in his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor. He might also have had difficulties at home with Vivien, although he did say that his wife had not reacted as badly as he had expected when told that she had not been cast in the film, in the role that had been written just for her. We rehearsed our own production of The Sleeping Prince for a number of weeks and our opening night took place on Friday, 15 September 1961. The play was ‘presented by the Pocket Playhouse as part of the Marrickville Municipal Centenary Year celebrations’, as it says on the program.We managed to get through the opening performance somehow without too much going wrong, which is just about all you can expect 59

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on first nights in my experience. You rehearse for weeks and the night before you are supposed to face an audience, they bump in the set that never fits, and put you in your wig and costume for the very first time, then an electrician on a ladder shares the stage with you, changing lighting settings, and it’s the full dress rehearsal. All the fine detail you discovered in rehearsal flies straight out the window so it’s a matter of just saying the words and not bumping into the furniture. My nerves were unbearable leading up to my first entrance and they haven’t improved in any production since. After the curtain came down and our friends and relatives lied and told us how wonderful we all were, we removed our makeup and costumes and made our way to Kings Cross to have a nervous supper while waiting for the notices to come out. The Sydney Morning Herald appeared on the newsstand on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and William Street some time after midnight. We attacked the paper, approaching the arts page with trembling hands. According to the reviewer, who went only by the initials A.W., the Pocket had a success on its hands. Norman Kessell’s notice in the Sun came out the following Monday and he liked it too. And so did the Daily Telegraph. Everyone loved the show.We were a hit. Best of all, Professor A.K. Stout, writing in the scholarly magazine The Australian Quarterly, declared that he had enjoyed the show at the Pocket Playhouse more than the visiting English production six years before. The performance he referred to had also been the historic opening night of the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, with a cast that included Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Meriel Forbes and Lewis Casson. Our cast had kept the notice from me, saying I wouldn’t like it. Then smiling they gave it to me to read. An outstanding performance was that of Noeline Brown as Mary Morgan, the American actress who captivates the heart of the Regent of Carpathia and finds herself unexpectedly, through her own strength of character, playing a key role in the political fortunes 60

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of that mythical country. This was Miss Brown’s first appearance for the Pocket and on the strength of this performance alone I prophesy a distinguished career for her in the theatre. She played with charm, assurance and wit, never missing or muffing a point. What is more, she was convincingly American, without a sign of trying to be one—something that not many Australians achieve. All in all, I got more enjoyment from her performance than I did from that of Meriel Forbes in the ‘all star production’, excellent though that was. Wahooo! I was hooked. My days at the library were numbered. The theatre was calling. Now I found that whenever I was introduced to new people at Vadim’s it wasn’t just as Bob Hughes’ girlfriend. I was ‘an actor’ who was ‘starring in a play’. I would meet Bob at the restaurant after my show came down and we would often stay talking with friends till very late.Vadim would never ask us to leave and if he grew tired of waiting around he would simply hand us the key and ask us to shut the door behind us when we were ready. Sometimes we didn’t leave until dawn. Bob loved to talk but he had a slight stammer at times when he was excited. He used to blame it on the fact that he was the youngest child, born quite late into a family of talkers. His father, who died when Bob was young, had practiced as a solicitor and his grandfather was elected Lord Mayor of Sydney. His oldest brother, Tom, followed his father into the law and became a Queen’s Counsel at a very young age. Bob’s other brother, Geoffrey, also had a legal background. His sister, Constance, the only other one in the family to escape the law, was working with a firm of architects. Bob maintained he had to speak quickly just to be heard at the dinner table. One night Bob and I were driving in his mother’s Morris Minor along William Street on the way to the restaurant when we were amazed to see a new neon sign right at the very top of the Cross. You couldn’t miss it. It was huge. ‘Dunlop’, it 61

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flashed in capitals. Then we saw a bright coloured circle penetrated by a moving arrow. This happened every few seconds. We stopped the car and gawped. What a graphic way of advertising the joys that Kings Cross had to offer. People were howling with laughter and running around taking photographs of it. The flashing arrow was removed after a very short time, following the predictable outcry from a number of conservative church groups. Germaine Greer sometimes made an appearance at Vadim’s. Germaine was tall and attractive and it was obvious she possessed an alarming intelligence. Like Bob she was studying at Sydney University. One night, after the opening night of a University Revue, she waltzed into Vadim’s in full costume dressed in a dark-green velvet gown with huge jewelled sleeves. I later caught the show. In one sketch she played a tube of toothpaste and looked remarkably fetching in a pair of striped tights. Another time she brought along a friend, a boy from Kogarah, a student called Clive James. Clive was a fit young man, quite handsome with a full head of hair and clear, bright eyes. As a twenty-year-old, Clive James was funny in a knockabout way, but I had no idea he would ever amount to anything. Vadim always had a game of chess set up at one of the tables near the coffee machine. If he could find anyone game enough to play with him, the challenger would sit there, mulling over the board for what seemed like hours.When they finally made a move,Vadim would pop out of the kitchen and swiftly move one of his pieces, apparently not even needing to think about it. He always won. I suppose he had bets on it. He seemed to make bets on everything else. Vadim acquired a new French waitress, the beautiful Camille. Everyone adored her and loved to listen to her charming accent. The restaurant was the regular haunt of the psychiatrist and man-about-town Doctor Jim, who I noticed was very successful with women. Jim always sat at one of the top tables at Vadim’s. He was quite a flirt and every few weeks there seemed to be a new and gorgeous woman on his arm. 62

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He started a relationship with Camille but their affair didn’t last long. I think Camille had been hoping for more. She confided to me that Jim had taken her out to dinner at another restaurant to tell her it was all over and then gave her a parting gift. She was very upset. Jim still came back to his regular table at Vadim’s, and whenever he was in you could hear Camille banging the crockery while she was serving her customers, murmuring whatever the French is for, ‘shit on toast’. The journalist Francis James came over to Harry’s table one night when I was there with Bob and the Adelaide poet Max Harris. He was wearing a large black felt hat with a wide brim, rather like a woman’s. I thought he looked a lot like a preacher out of a cowboy movie. He draped his long dark coat over his shoulders so it looked like a cape. Perhaps it was a cape. I thought he looked too theatrical to be a newspaper man. I found out later that he was the son of an ordained Christian minister and had spent his early years in Tasmania. He had also been injured in a plane crash during the Second World War while serving as a fighter pilot and had suffered extensive burns to his face and body. His facial scarring, though faint, seemed to have changed the nature of his skin—it was slightly patchy, chalky and dry and mask-like around the eyes. He had a unique way of speaking; very measured and also very dry. Francis James looked invented, not real. ‘Are you a Beatnik?’ he inquired as he sat down next to me. Actually he pronounced it as two words. Beat Nik. I was going through my foreign film phase and had forsaken the step-ins and killer heels fashion of the day for the more arty uniform of black tights, black sweater and ballet pumps. My hair was very long and straight and my eyes were outlined heavily with black kohl. I smoked black Sobranis constantly. I think I had also started to affect a slightly French accent. Francis James lived in an apartment at Rushcutters Bay, near the marina. He was often away on assignments, so he used to lend his flat to Bob and me so we could play house. One night I cooked my version of a Japanese meal and we sat on the floor to eat it. It involved strips of beef and a lot of cabbage 63

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and I suppose it was a sort of sukiyaki Down Under. Bob ate it dutifully. Francis James became a fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam and, because of his beliefs, he decided to enter politics, standing unsuccessfully for the Liberal Reform Group. We were stunned when he was arrested by the Chinese for spying and subsequently imprisoned. His old school friend from Canberra Grammar, Gough Whitlam, worked hard for his release and he was set free in 1973, after spending three years in prison. There were rumours circulating that Francis James was, in fact, a spy. When we met him he was employed as the editor of the Anglican Press, a newspaper run by the Church of England Information Trust. In 1960 the paper was in the middle of a takeover bid by the Packer family and their company, Australian Consolidated Press. One night Francis rushed into Vadim’s in a state of high excitement. He had been involved in a dramatic turf war over ownership of the premises of the Anglican Press. The Packers were under the impression that they had been successful in their bid to buy out the paper and that night Sir Frank and some goons decided to take possession of the building. They locked all the entrances except for one small window high up in one of the toilets. Somehow Francis James managed to get himself into the offices and a mighty fight ensued. Young Kerry Packer, who was a large man, in the Packer mould, had gone along with his father to lend a hand. He was surprised to find himself flat on his back. Sir Frank’s older son, Clyde was not involved in the fracas that night. They didn’t get along. Packer had fired his first-born from his job at the Telegraph more than once and Clyde had declared publicly that the family name was like an albatross around his neck. All he wanted to do was escape. Clyde was a warm and pleasant person but he looked like a voluptuary. He was a big man in his mid-twenties, bigger than his father and already running to fat. He had a very high forehead, straight silky brown hair, an ivory complexion, dark, wide-set eyes and full, luscious, red lips. When I first saw a print of the famous 64

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Caravaggio painting of the Young Bacchus, I thought it looked just like Clyde Packer might have done when he was a boy. Clyde always wanted to go to university but his father insisted he join the family business. He worked first as a print journalist and then went on to run Channel Nine. In 1972 he fell out famously with his father, Sir Frank, over a planned interview on his station with Bob Hawke, who was then President of the ACTU. Sir Frank gave the order that the interview be cancelled. Mike Willessee was scheduled to do the piece with Hawke. Sir Frank roared at Clyde that he must inform Mike that he was to pull the interview. When he was approached, Mike Willessee refused to oblige and said he felt, because of the pressure being placed upon him he would have to resign. Clyde shook his hand and beamed at Mike, saying ‘Congratulations. I just resigned, too.’ I lost touch with Clyde but read that he ‘joined the hippy culture’ of the early seventies and had taken to wearing caftans and smoking joints in public. He and his lovely young wife, Angela Money, broke up. She later married the avuncular Bob Raymond of ABC Four Corners fame. Clyde made good his escape from the Packer family and his father cut him out of the will. He married again and lived most of his life in the United States where it was rumoured he was briefly involved in soft porn, before settling down to a more respectable career in publishing. He lived in Santa Barbara with his second wife Kate and grew to an enormous size. He was eventually reunited with the Packer family but died in 2001 at the age of sixty-five, after a long and painful illness and years of waiting for a suitable donor for an organ transplant. Bob Hughes and I went with Kerry to the Packer compound in Bellevue Hill late one night after a concert at the Stadium while his parents were away. Commonly referred to as ‘the house of stoush’, the Stadium served as Sydney’s only multi-functional venue. One night you could see boxing, another wrestling and then the next night one of the world’s biggest stars. We ordered a pile of hamburgers from a popular stand at Rushcutter’s Bay, because Kerry was concerned about 65

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waking the domestic staff. We raided his dad’s cellar and Bob extracted a few bottles of Margaux—Sir Frank would be glad to know that he chose a very good year. Kerry stuck to Fanta, as he usually did. He didn’t drink alcohol and his brother Clyde quite often poured lemonade in his red wine to break it down. I was surprised to see that the Packers lived quite simply even though I knew Sir Frank was renowned for giving boardroom lunches that featured meat pies with tomato sauce. Bob and I once found ourselves standing around rather nervously in Sir Frank’s den, a rather masculine room with animal skins on the floor and possibly heads on the walls. Sir Frank was encouraging Bob’s brother, Tom Hughes, to enter politics, and declared he would make an excellent AttorneyGeneral. Tom decided to run for a Liberal seat not long after the meeting and went on to become the Federal AttorneyGeneral. Tom Hughes was known to have a rather hot temper and when a group of protestors picketed his house in Bellevue Hill he had a go at them with a cricket bat. Unfortunately the press managed to catch the action on film. Bob Hughes was invited to exhibit his paintings at Betty O’Neill’s Hungry Horse Gallery in Paddington, which was a small space above a two room restaurant. He would be sharing the exhibition with eleven other painters and sculptors. They were Robert Klippel, Bill Rose, John Olsen, Stan Rapotec, Colin Lanceley, Charles Reddington, Frank Hodgkinson, Carl Plate, Emmanuel Raft and John Coburn. It was to be one of the first exhibitions in Sydney to attract corporate sponsorship. The Hungry Horse printed an example of each of the artists’ work in a large calendar-style publication called ‘Twelve’, a copy of which I still have in my possession. On the cover is a wonderful black-and-white photograph taken of the gifted dozen, crowded precariously on the delicate cast iron balcony of the Hungry Horse, which stood on the corner of Windsor and Elizabeth streets. In the shot Bob Hughes is struggling to light a cigarette in what must have been a rather stiff breeze. He has a fag in his mouth and is frowning, while looking down in disgust at a dead match in his hand. The copy of his painting 66

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in the catalogue,‘Spring Hill’ is a colourful abstract but appears to me to be more a nude than a landscape. The Hungry Horse’s wonderful dining room downstairs was run by the sometimes cranky but always talented Madeleine Thurston. A gallery opening was a very enjoyable event—a great lunch followed by a witty speech from some celebrity, then a trip up the stairs to view the latest show. The building is now known as Lucio’s, a popular Italian restaurant that is still a favourite spot for many of those twelve artists, all of them well known now and much more able to pay their way. Madeleine Thurston famously threw Bob Hughes and Colin Lanceley out of her restaurant one night because one of them was heard to say ‘fuck’. The same thing nearly happened at my parents’ house one night. Bob was using their telephone to speak to a friend and the magic word flew down the hall, straight into the ears of my mother. She was quite shocked and for a long time tried to talk me out of my relationship with Robert Hughes. Bob decided to host a lunch party to welcome the cast of the Old Vic Company to Sydney. Theatre lovers had been thrilled to learn that Vivien Leigh and The Company were to tour Australia. For their Sydney season they opened at the Theatre Royal and their director was Australia’s own Robert Helpmann, the flamboyant ballet dancer. Bob planned to hold the party in the garden of his mother’s house in Rose Bay. Vivien Leigh, the beautiful star of Gone with the Wind, rather surprisingly accepted the invitation and attended the lunch with her new boyfriend, actor John Merivale. Her marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier was well and truly over by then, following her passionate love affair with the dashing but self-destructive Australian actor, Peter Finch. She arrived at the party looking every inch the film star, sporting a pair of dark glasses that hid most of her face and a large straw hat with a pale chiffon scarf tied under her chin. She wore light blue Capri pants and a pastel top. There just might have been a parasol. 67

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Vivien took quite a shine to Bob and disappeared into his studio with him after lunch to look at his artwork, or so they said. I wasn’t too thrilled, because I’d heard Ms Leigh had a reputation as a man-eater. I also thought that in the cold light of day she bore a strong resemblance to the faded beauty Blanche du Bois, a character she had played in A Streetcar Named Desire, or maybe her lead role in the other Tennessee Williams film, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, where she portrayed a wealthy widow of a certain age who falls in love with a young gigolo. These images I had were almost certainly from the warped perspective of a jealous twenty-year-old. Ms Leigh was still in her forties, so she was in her prime.When I saw her on stage after the opening of her first show I thought she was divine. During lunch, Vivien Leigh learnt that the Pocket Playhouse was running The Sleeping Prince and she declared that she would very much like to see it. On hearing this Norman McVicker, the director, gladly arranged for a special Sunday evening performance of the show, just for Miss Leigh and John Merivale, her leading man. Only close friends of the theatre company were to be invited, and the couple requested that the visit be kept secret from the mainstream press. They arrived at dusk at the little theatre in Terry Street, Sydenham, just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip. They were in a sleek black hire car and a uniformed chauffeur opened the door for the dazzling star. Vivien Leigh was wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket over a little black cocktail dress. On her head was a small close fitting hat with a veil. There were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands. I was in a dress my Mum had made for the show. We started the performance on time, which was probably the only thing we got right. The actors were far more nervous than they had been on opening night. Everything that could go wrong did. People were stabbed when they were pinned with their royal orders. Props were dropped and lines were fluffed. I shudder to think what our guests thought of the show. 68

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Ms Leigh and Mr Merivale were invited up on stage after the performance. Norman McVicker presented them with a box of orchids and an original painting by the Australian abstract artist Tom Gleghorn, who lived around the corner. The stars generously allowed time for autographs. I glanced at my signed program, and I noticed there were no added words of encouragement from Vivien Leigh. The director had discreetly arranged for one cameraman to record the occasion for posterity. Unfortunately the only thing you can see of me in the photograph is my feet, as Ms Leigh stood right in front of me for the shot. If you use a magnifying glass you can just detect my profile, like a ghostly shadow of her own, which is pretty much how I felt on the night. But I guess I could honestly say that I shared a stage with Vivien Leigh. Bob then accepted an exciting offer to hold a one-man show at the Clune Galleries. The building was in Macleay Street, Potts Point, and later became known as ‘The Yellow House’ when artist Martin Sharp of Oz Magazine fame took it over. Terry Clune and his mother Thelma ran the gallery with financial backing from Terry’s father, the rather macho Australian author Frank Clune. Bob had to work in his studio day and night to get enough paintings ready to hang on the walls. Among the guests at the opening was Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, a well-known collector of paintings and a patron of the arts.When I asked Thelma who he was, I was told,‘The Mad Millionaire’. I found out later that he had made a fortune from grazing cattle in outback Australia and during his lifetime made several donations of some quite important paintings, among them a Degas, a Picasso, a Vlaminck and a Renoir, to the Queensland Art Gallery. In spite of his immense wealth he bore a remarkable resemblance to a popular BBC television character, the rag and bone man, Steptoe. Major Rubin surprised everyone by offering to buy out Bob’s entire exhibition. He also issued an invitation to Bob to visit him at his Brisbane home. Bob asked me to go with him so we flew up together and travelled in a taxi from the airport 69

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to the Major’s rambling, Victorian mansion set in a large, semi-tropical garden. Mrs Rubin greeted us at the front door wearing lace-trimmed ankle socks and an apron over a printed cotton frock. She appeared to be considerably younger than her husband and she had a heavy European accent. The Major gave us a tour of the house. The kitchen was located at the back in a totally separate building, which was not unusual for a house of that age, but it had a deep water-filled moat dug all the way around it.‘To keep out the ants’, the Major explained. As well as acquiring works of art, Major Rubin liked to collect exotic birds. In one section of the formal gardens a large aviary had been constructed. Bob and I were taken inside for an inspection of the lavish avian accommodation. Our host spoke knowledgeably about the captive birds and their mating habits. As he was talking we could see copious amounts of bird shit accumulating on the shoulders of his dark blue business suit. Bob and I kept ducking and weaving, hoping to avoid becoming equally decorated. Even though the Major had once worked for British Military Intelligence during the Second World War he did not seem to detect the missiles heading his way. While we stayed there we ate our meals at the end of a long, highly polished mahogany dining table in a cool, dark room. The Major sat at one end and Bob and I were at the other. Marking Rubin’s place near the condiments was a number of pill bottles.We did not seem to be eating the same food. His wife cooked and served our meal but did not join us at the table. On our second day at his home, the Major discovered that someone had left the door to the aviary open and some of his prized birds had escaped. Bob was accused of the crime. He was bewildered. ‘Why me?’ he asked. Major Rubin threw his arms wide.‘Setting free the birds’, he exclaimed. This was the title of one of Bob’s paintings, now the property of the Major.We left soon after, under a cloud. The culprit was never found. I don’t know what happened to the birds or to Bob’s paintings or even if he was paid for them. I do know he didn’t commit the crime.

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I had heard on the grapevine that the Phillip Street Theatre Company was auditioning for new talent for their next production. I ran to the telephone as soon as I could. The opportunity to work for the Phillip Street Theatre excited me tremendously. The revue theatre had been running successfully for years in a dear little venue in the legal end of Sydney, in the street from which it took its name. It had once been known as the Phillip Street Workers’ Education Hall. The theatre had become a success story, showcasing the talents of local actors who were lucky enough to get paid to spend their nights entertaining Sydneysiders while taking the piss out of them. They ridiculed everyone. The first show I saw there was Top of the Bill with a large and talented cast of fifteen and I laughed my head off. I wanted desperately to work for the producer, Bill Orr, and his partner, Eric Duckworth. I did not have an agent, I had to admit when I rang them, but I still managed to talk the two men into letting me audition. I spent days locked in my room rehearsing some material that I hoped might be suitable, using an old sketch from an English revue and a brand new song, written by a law student friend. It was a sultry torch song that 71

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suited my deep voice, but I secretly hoped they wouldn’t ask me to do it, as I had no confidence at all in my singing ability. I think I only caught Bill Orr’s interest at the audition because I had a broken foot at the time. I was appearing in a production of My Sister Eileen at the Pocket Playhouse and had been picked up to go to a party after the show one night by a journalist I knew slightly from Vadim’s. Derek Taylor was a foreign correspondent working in Vietnam and he had come back to Sydney for a short break. He was staying in Paddington with a helicopter pilot mate and came along to see me in the play. Derek was quite a bit older than me, but he seemed extremely youthful. He had a slim build and dark red hair, which had a habit of falling over his eyes. Dimples cut deeply into his cheeks when he smiled and there was an even deeper crater carved into his chin. He also possessed a remarkably stiff upper lip. The ABC newsreader ‘Pip’ Macleay’s much younger wife, Janie Stewart, used to refer to him as ‘Biggles, Boy Hero’, which was a pretty accurate description. Derek had spent most of his adult life covering stories of conflict overseas and as a result he was only used to living in war zones. Driving in his car without seatbelts, as everyone did in those days, we were rammed by another vehicle on the passenger side. Always on the alert for an enemy attack, Derek threw himself in front of me, thus preventing me from catapulting head first through the windscreen. As a result of his prompt action he managed to cut his own forehead quite severely on the rear vision mirror. My feet hit the dashboard with some force as I bounced down onto the seat again. I blacked out for a while and when I came to, discovered I was out of the car but unable to walk.We were taken to St Vincent’s Hospital by ambulance and the duty nurse in emergency took one look at Derek’s bleeding face and enquired, ‘What happened to you?’ Derek brushed the crusted hair from his bloodied forehead. ‘Lung cancer’, he replied. X-rays revealed I had broken some small bones in my foot so I had to get around on crutches for a time but later I was able to walk using a stick. Bob Hughes lent me an elegant little 72

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black cane with a silver top, a useful tool I discovered when perfect strangers offered to carry my parcels from the shops. Another actor, Bobby Gledhill, took over from me in the play for a short while but I couldn’t bear another person playing my part, so I insisted that I was able to go back on stage. Eileen had an unexplained limp for the rest of the run but fortunately the stage at the Pocket was small so I was able to execute my moves by hanging on to the furniture. When I was finally called in to audition for the new production at Phillip Street Theatre, the musical director, Dot Mendoza, was kind enough to act as my accompanist. Dot always used a stout walking stick, which she absolutely needed. She had a very bad limp after undergoing scores of operations as a child to correct a problem with her hip and she was most solicitous when she saw my little cane. I performed my monologue first, a lightweight piece of fluff about a gentleman taking me upstairs to look at his etchings, which even managed to get a few laughs, I was pleased to hear. However, I was not looking forward to the musical part of the audition. Dot Mendoza was very helpful as I struggled through my point number.As we talked I noticed she also had an extremely deep voice and hoped that it just might influence her decision. John McKellar, probably the most admired sketch writer in the country, was also in the theatre watching the auditions. To my utter joy they all agreed that I should be in the show. They told me I had already been ‘spotted’ by someone from their theatre while I was working at the Pocket Playhouse so they knew about me before I arrived. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was going to work for Phillip Street. I called an agent for an interview and was welcomed onto her books. I rang my Mum and shouted that I had a job. I joined Actors’ Equity straightaway. I was about to become a member of the ‘professional theatre’ and I was going to be paid for my work. I resigned from the library, probably just moments before I was asked to go. My only regret was that the theatre had moved. It was no longer the dear little dark blue cave in Phillip Street. The 73

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company had taken over a new, larger venue that seated nearly five hundred people. The tiny old original Phillip Street Theatre had gone and the new premises were located at 150 Elizabeth Street. It had undergone a minor name change and was now known as The Phillip Theatre. While the new auditorium was more comfortable and modern and the backstage facilities improved, it was not nearly as intimate a space as the original. Bill Orr, ‘The Black Scot’ as he was known, and his charming partner, Eric Duckworth, told me they were very excited about the ‘young George Sanders’ they had discovered. His name was Barry Creyton and I would be meeting him soon. All I knew about Barry was that he had been delighting audiences at the Music Hall in Neutral Bay playing the villain in the over-the-top melodrama, East Lynne. Bill Orr invited his new cast to gather for the first time in the foyer at The Phillip for a promotional cocktail party with the producers and members of the Sydney press. A young man walked through the door and I knew it had to be Barry Creyton. He was about six-foot tall, very lean with matinee idol looks and when he spoke I was struck by his English accent. I knew he came from Brisbane and I wondered where he had acquired such polished diction. Evidently he had had it drummed into him by his mentor, Babette Stephens, a rather forceful Lady Bracknell character from his hometown, and probably reinforced by a year spent touring with the British actor, Googie Withers. I thought Barry was frightfully good looking and very fashionable in his dark jacket and narrow trousers with a pair of polished winkle pickers on his feet. His hair was dark and shiny and perfectly groomed and featured a wicked widow’s peak. He engaged in a lot of fascinating eyebrow work. We met Maggie Dence, a very tall, slim nineteen-year-old with delicate features and long hair almost to her waist, who would be the youngest in the company; Janet Brown, a young mother of two with a sensational smile; and Reg and Colin Gorman who, remarkably, were not related. Others in the cast 74

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were the exotic brunette, Arlene Dorgan (whom many men would fall in love with, and who later married the English cartoonist Will Rushton), Earle Cross, Dalvern Thom, David Yorston and a wide-eyed Kathy McGarrity. Bill Orr informed the press that our show was to be called, What’s New? and would open on Friday, 6 July 1962. I think we were each going to be paid about twenty-six pounds a week. Whatever my salary was, I believe it was less than I had been getting at the library. I didn’t care. I was in show business. We were billed as ‘Eleven New Faces’ and the publicity claimed that we were ‘chosen from 150 eager young people who auditioned from all over the country’. The oldest member of the company was only about twenty-six. We went into rehearsals almost straightaway. Ronnie Hay was our choreographer. He also designed and made women’s hats and handbags in his spare time. Whenever he bent down to demonstrate a dance step, I was fascinated to see bobby pins stuck in the top of his hair. I proved to be hopeless at performing a sexy dance while dressed as a panther in a circus routine, so Ronnie gave it to Janet Brown, who was no relation. Janet was terrific and as my name was in the program, and the panther wore a mask, everyone thought I had done it anyway. The controversial TV host Ray Taylor wrote most of the material for What’s New?. Ray had contributed to Phillip Street twice before in the revues, Yes Please and At It Again. He had a breakfast show on ATN 7, which was more like a late night show; it was almost certainly way ahead of its time. I used to love to watch Ray on camera in the mornings as he seemed to break all the rules. My brother Peter and I swear we saw him throw up into a waste paper basket one morning after complaining of a hangover. Ray and I had already met one night at the Royal George, the home of the Sydney ‘Push’, a group of mostly male intellectuals and libertarians. Bob and I were in the bar that night with Frank Hardy and the two wanted to meet. I was surprised when Ray suggested we might collaborate on some of the material for What’s New?. 75

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A couple of the sketches in the show were quite shocking for the times. In a piece about the Middle East, Ray wrote the line, ‘I can’t get a good fakir for love nor money’. I remember saying,‘I don’t think you’ll get away with that’. Barry Creyton was given the line, which he adored, but it was cut after the opening night. Ray’s work was considered quite risqué at the time and was not to the liking of some of the critics.‘It’s a pity that the talented Ray Taylor had to descend to juvenile smut’, Norman Kessell wrote in the afternoon newspaper, the Sun. What’s New?—Not much, was pretty well how the show was received. Harry Kippax was kind to the actors but most of the reviews were no more than lukewarm. Even so, many of the cast would go on to enjoy long careers in the business. Barry and I became firm friends during the run and decided we wanted to work together in something else once the show was over. We got together most nights at his place after midnight and tried our hand at writing our own comedy sketches. After the season at the Phillip ended I found myself out of work for a while and my father took me aside for a serious talk. He wondered if I had made the right decision by going into show business and suggested that perhaps I should not have left the security of the public service for the uncertain life of an actor. The next day I took a call from my agent. This time it was for a job on television. I yelled, ‘Thanks, Dad’. Channel 7 was in production with a twenty-part drama series called Jonah. It was the ‘rags to riches’ story of a fictional Jewish merchant and his relationship with genuine historical characters in New South Wales during the early nineteenth century. Jonah was written and produced by Harry Dearth, who had for many years been associated with Lux Radio Theatre and the Macquarie Network. Jonah resembled a period drama series from the ABC, with a great deal of attention paid to sets and costumes. Then, Channel 7 seemed closer to the public broadcaster in the way it made programs than to Channel 9, up to then its only commercial competition. It was to be my first real experience of working in television. Neil Fitzpatrick and 76

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Brian James, two of Australia’s best-known classical actors, were the male stars with a young Hilary Bamberger as the female lead. Each half-hour episode cost three thousand pounds to make, which was regarded as a serious amount of money in those days. Jonah was probably the first Australian series to achieve an overseas sale when Channel 7 sold it to Associated Television in the United Kingdom. I was called in to read for the producer, David Cahill, and Ken Hannam, the director. In my presence they discussed openly that I had a space between my teeth, which made me feel like a heifer about to lose a prize. Ken Hannam was my champion, saying he thought it was perfectly natural and he liked it. Of course, everyone now has perfectly even teeth and the wearing of bands is commonplace, if not obligatory, but cosmetic dentistry was in its infancy in the early 1960s. Lots of people had spaces between their teeth and some of them had no teeth at all. An Australian politician had once claimed that there would never be a local film industry because Australians were too ugly. Early in his career, a twenty-two-year-old Graham Kennedy actually had four perfectly healthy teeth removed at his own expense because the management at GTV 9 complained that they were uneven. Since my maiden TV appearance in Jonah I have invested what would amount to the cost of a BMW in aid of the perfect smile. Jonah ran into trouble with Actors’ Equity over some sort of industrial dispute and also experienced disappointing ratings in Melbourne. The Sydney–Melbourne divide was even evident in the entertainment world; shows that did well in Sydney often bombed in Melbourne and vice versa. Jonah finished after twenty episodes. I remember it as being more of a radio play with pictures. Bob Hughes was busy writing The Art of Australia for Penguin Books. His research was taking him around the country to look at paintings and to interview people. I accompanied him whenever I could, but my work was keeping me in Sydney.We managed to spend a few interesting days together in South 77

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Australia, visiting the poets Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton, and later Bob expressed a desire to buy a bluestone house and live in the Adelaide hills. I wasn’t so keen. I had just become a Weather Girl. I don’t remember actually applying for the job— it just seemed to happen one day in the corridor at Channel 7. The station had lined up some new faces to do the meteorological reports at the end of the evening news each day. Seven of us were chosen to represent a different day of the week and I was Miss Thursday. All the girls had to go to the Weather Bureau to study the subject and I have to confess I found the graphs of the highs and lows just a bit bewildering. ‘Smile more often’, I was instructed, but I couldn’t see anything funny about it.We had to learn our material as there was no autocue. I thought it was all deadly serious. I did laugh, however, when one of the girls said quite earnestly at the end of her report, ‘I can promise you more weather tomorrow’. I was now a regular television performer but I was still living at home with Mum and Dad. I planned to move out of their house as soon as I could and take a flat of my own at Kings Cross, which I saw as the Mecca for artists. My friend Barry Creyton lived in what I thought was a very smart apartment in Bayswater Road and I was envious of the freedom he enjoyed. Barry had returned to the Music Hall after the run of What’s New? ended and was busy rehearsing for his version of the melodrama, Lady Audley’s Secret, which he had managed to write in his spare time. The Music Hall Theatre Restaurant was the brainchild of George Miller, a Melbourne impresario who moved to Sydney with his family to start the venture. He had converted an old barn of a space in Military Road in Neutral Bay into a mock Victorian palace, with velvet drapes and tassels and overdecorated tables and chairs. Everyone wore Victorian costume, even the waiters and the box office staff. It was dinner with a comic take on melodrama and the audience warmed to the ‘cheer-the-hero, hiss-the-villain’ style of production. The format was an immediate success and quickly became a Sydney institution. The owners were closely involved in the running 78

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of the Music Hall and were present every night, warming up the audience as they dined by wandering around the theatre in frock coats or bustles and serenading the customers at their tables. George was a gifted violinist and his wife Lorna was also a talented musician. Barry Creyton invited me to the Music Hall one night to watch him perform, so I asked Bob Hughes to go with me as my date.We were having dinner and enjoying our wine when George and Lorna Miller appeared by our side and started to serenade us. When they finished their first number, George took the violin away from under his chin and enquired, ‘Is there anything you would like?’‘Yes’, Bob replied,‘I would like you to go away.’ Up to that point I had rather been hoping to land a job at the Music Hall. I had already asked my agent if she could get me an appointment to read for the Millers and Barry had offered to speak for me. I prayed that George and Lorna would not remember my face when they saw me up on their stage. On the day I was to audition I awoke with a terrible, chesty cough but I struggled through with the help of some Fishermen’s Friends. I performed a solo sketch and a brief song for John Faassen, the director. He took me on, I’m convinced, because of the remarkably deep voice I had on the day. I was given a couple of solo numbers in the show, which filled me with dread. One of them was a song Marlene Dietrich had made famous, ‘See What the Boys in the Back Room will Have’, and the other was a bouncy little number called ‘Up in a Balloon’. I rehearsed the two songs with Bernadette Alam, the musical director, whom I was amused to discover always wore fur-lined flying boots under her long evening gown. I was managing quite well in rehearsal, in spite of my musical uncertainty, but on opening night I heard the audience yelling what I thought was abuse at the performers and took fright.As the tiny orchestra played the opening bars of my first song, I appeared on stage and opened my mouth and instead of the timid Noeline Brown, out walked Sophie Tucker. Bernie looked up in astonishment from her seat at the piano and with 79

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an enormous grin followed me as I vamped my first number, challenging anyone in the house to throw something at me. Nobody did. Barry Creyton was a marvellous villain and he loved to manipulate the crowd. If any members of the audience close to the front were not behaving, he would sometimes flick a little ash from his cigarillo and it would drift gently from the stage and lightly dust their food, much to their apparent delight. The Music Hall’s young resident designer, James Murray, was rather short and thick-set and he wore a tiny black goatee. His costumes were easy to wear and made you feel beautiful. His hats and accessories were fabulous. For one scene he dressed me in a little black corset and high button boots, which I wore with fishnet stockings and a saucy garter. For once I didn’t mind showing off my body in front of strangers, and for someone who was never fond of singing, I found myself doing a lot of it.We were lucky to have with us the talented dancer, Ronne Arnold, as our choreographer. Ronne had originally come to Australia for the musical West Side Story and decided he didn’t want to go back home to America. I believe Ronne Arnold can make anyone dance. Under his direction even Barry Creyton and I, with our acknowledged feet of lead, managed to execute a perfectly acceptable ‘buck and wing’. Donald Macdonald played the hero for many of the productions at the Music Hall. He and I would meet after the show at Barry’s place every few weeks, where the three of us would watch television, listen to music and change the colour of our hair. Donald had to have golden curls for his role as the upright, downright forthright hero, who was sometimes dressed in a pale lilac suit. Barry was keen on his villain having sleek jet-black hair and eyebrows to match, with a slim, waxed moustache. I liked to give my hair a lift from dark blonde to light. It was always up to me to go in to the chemist shop to purchase the dyes, as the boys were too embarrassed to ask for them. One evening, while I was waiting for my order, a young man sidled up to the chemist and whispered that he wanted to, ‘buy a shirt for the little fella’. 80

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It was during our early time at the Music Hall that I discovered Barry Creyton had a secret. He played the piano accordion. All pretence of sophistication immediately flew out the window. Barry had learnt to play the instrument when he was about ten and as it was portable he still found it useful to take with him whenever he was composing music. He always insisted, however, that ‘Good taste is knowing how to play the piano accordion and choosing not to’. Barry Lovett performed the character work in possibly every production staged at the Music Hall, sometimes playing multiple parts. Lovett embroidered his performances outrageously. He would affect a beard and a limp and a lisp and a drool and a clubfoot; whatever he could manage to get away with without blushing. He could never have enough makeup to hide behind. He once declared war on me in The Evil Men Do because he thought I had been upstaging him. I was the villainess and had been told by John Faassen, the director, to appear drunk in a scene while Barry Lovett, playing a clergyman, was singing ‘Home Sweet Home’.When the audience laughed, he thought I was pulling focus. He stood in front of me every time I spoke and when I tried to move he trod on the hem of my dress. If he had chains he would have rattled them. There was a dramatic finale to the show where we attempted to kill each other in a cathedral. I was a bit worried how it might turn out. I remember I had to stab one of Barry Lovett’s evil characters to death with my finger because I was so flustered when I was changing that I totally forgot to put the rubber knife in my handbag. We hammed it up with gay abandon every night and on weekends performed on the same stage in shows for children. In one, Beauty and the Beast, Barry Creyton played the Beast with a lion’s head and tights and I was his Beauty in pale blue velvet and pantaloons. Our days started before ten, eating toasted sandwiches in a cab on the way to work.We rehearsed all day, with a break for dinner at a little family restaurant nearby. After that we were back on stage, finishing our work at about eleven o’clock, when we would go partying. The best place to do this was 81

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always Vadim’s. Barry and I took Donald Macdonald with us one night and he was about to ask for tomato sauce to have with his stroganoff. He said he had it with everything as a defence against his mother’s cooking. We stopped him just in time.Vadim could give you a withering look if he wanted to. Bob Hughes decided he wanted to go overseas again. We talked about it and I promised to follow him as soon as my contract with the Music Hall ran out. Almost immediately I was offered a part in The Right Thing, a play written for television by the Australian author Raymond Bowers, who for a long time had lived and worked in London. Directed by Ray Menmuir, the play starred Alister Smart as a young Spaniard, new to Australia and its culture. Tom Oliver and Anna Volska were in the cast as sun-worshipping surfers and I played what the author described as a ‘beach and party girl’. The producers made it possible for me to rehearse and film during the daytime and then rush back to the Music Hall to perform on stage at night. Alister Smart was a handsome young actor with beautiful olive skin, but he had been living overseas for a while and had gained some extra weight. He had been trying to lose a few kilos to achieve a svelte Spanish matador look and to appear sexy in his Speedos for the beach scenes. He used to munch his way through two orange Limmits for breakfast and lunch and gazed at the rest of us with envy as we devoured our meals from the catering truck. Women were still allowed to have curves in the sixties, so we didn’t have to count our calories. I was so new to television that when I read the words ‘Dolly Shot’ in the shooting script, I assumed they had introduced a new character.We rehearsed the play in the studio on a wooden stage with imported golden sand and striped umbrellas positioned on a wooden riser. One of the scenes involved a night shoot and a swimming pool. The location scout at the ABC had booked a private home in a leafy suburb and we were going to film the scene from there. The garden featured a large pool conveniently lit from below. I was to dive into the deep end and swim the length of the pool then start 82

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up a flirtatious conversation with Alister, the handsome and exotic stranger, when I got to the other end. I hadn’t realised when I accepted the engagement that I would actually have to swim in the scene. There had been no mention of such activity in the original script. The directions in large type simply described the two of us engaged in conversation by the pool. But our director probably assumed all Aussie girls would be able to swim. So when it came to the night and it dawned on me what I would have to do, I was really shaking. It was possibly the cold causing me to shiver, because it was early in the evening in chilly August, getting quite dark and there was steam coming off the cold water. Ray Menmuir popped over to have a chat as I came out of the house, dressed in my own blue bikini.‘I’d like you to dive in at the beginning of the scene’, he said. I gulped. I did not tell him I could hardly swim, let alone dive. We were all aware that we didn’t have a lot of time to film the scene, owing to my commitments at the Music Hall. I was due to be on stage no later than eight-thirty. ‘No rehearsal, just go for it’, I heard someone say. After the clapper, Ray called, ‘Action’. I executed my dive, which I hoped would be graceful, but my efforts resulted in a huge belly flop and a minor tidal wave that caused me to inhale a face full of water. By some fluke I was able to negotiate the length of the pool and even managed to find the light. Rising like an awkward seal from the water I croaked as flirtatiously as I was able, ‘G’day’, simultaneously spouting copious amounts of water out of both my nostrils, like a tap in a Roman bath. Alister, who was sharing the scene with me, became hysterical and went to pieces and the director thought it was the silliest thing he’d ever seen. Not surprisingly he had to shoot the scene several times, wisely cutting the dive. I was able to resort to my leisurely breaststroke and keep my head out of the water, when I am sure what Ray Menmuir had in mind was a good old Australian crawl.As the night wore on it was getting really cold and I was finding it harder and harder to speak. My teeth started to chatter. Great gusts of 83

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steam were issuing from my mouth so I was given some ice cubes to suck to stop the fog. The treatment worked and we managed to get the scene done, but I was yawning and on the verge of hypothermia. One of the crew had thought to bring along some brown rum in a hip flask and he rushed it to me in a cup of hot black coffee. Then the wardrobe assistants wrapped me in blankets and took me inside. The rum seemed to do the job and I was revived and ferried back to the Music Hall. I only just made it in time to throw on my clothes and fly onto the stage.As soon as the lights hit me the effects of the rum kicked in and I forgot my first line. It was a terrible lesson that drinking and acting don’t go together. The Right Thing went to air on the ABC in October 1963. The reaction to it was interesting. Denis O’Brien’s review in the Sunday Telegraph was headed, ‘Did you see us in that Orstrylian play?’ The show was written for export to the UK, as well as for local consumption, and some critics felt the author had overdone the ‘outdated lairy colloquialisms’ as one paper put it. ‘The insistence on heavily outdated Australiana may be more acceptable to overseas viewers than to home audiences’, complained the Herald critic, who went by the initials, H.L.C. I was stopped in the street by a neighbour shortly after the show went to air and she, too, was critical of the Australian accents. ‘Noooweeeleeeen’, she insisted, ‘Noooooo-one torks like thaaat.’ All the notices did go on to say, however, that the actors were good, the direction was excellent and that it was a ‘notable advance in Australian television’. Back at the Music Hall, Barry Creyton was creating a new show for the two of us to star in, called How the West was Lost. Barry planned to play the villain once again; this time a dashing riverboat gambler called Beauregarde Jackson. My part of a tough-talking, gun-toting saloon owner, Belle Starr, could have been written for the screen siren Mae West, who was a favourite of Barry’s. The songs he chose were certainly ones that she could have sung, like ‘Eadie was a Lady’ and ‘My Man’, which he included in the show because he knew it was my 84

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favourite song at the time. I got in touch with Bob and told him I had decided to put my travel plans on hold for a few months and rented a small garden flat on the Darlinghurst side of romantic Kings Cross. Early in our rehearsal period Barry received word that Channel 7 was planning to produce a weekly satirical series for television based on the Phillip Street revues, and they wanted him to work on the pilot with the popular comedian Gordon Chater and Carol Raye, who was then a special assistant to Jim Oswin, the General Manager at 7. Barry decided to accept the offer, meaning his part in our musical would have to be recast. I was deeply disappointed because he had written How the West was Lost for the two of us and I couldn’t imagine working with anyone else. I had also put off my overseas trip to do it. Barry was invited to attend a party at the home of the TV show’s head writer, Michael Plant. As usual he took me along with him. Plant lived in a wonderful Victorian classical revival apartment building in Challis Avenue, directly opposite Vadim’s restaurant. At some point Michael announced that the pilot was going to be called, The Mavis Bramston Show, in honour of an air-hostess of that name, who was once extremely rude to someone he knew on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne. I have read other versions of how the show came to be named, but that is my recollection: a comedy writer getting his own back. The joke on the audience was to be that Mavis Bramston, after a tremendous build-up, would be exposed as a British has-been with absolutely no talent. She would not be able to sing or dance or tell a joke. She would be so awful that she would be sent straight back to England on the first plane after the initial show went to air. Then Barry, Gordon and Carol Raye would get on with it, Australian stars in their own right. We loved the joke because Australian performers were not encouraged to be stars in their own country, either on stage or on television. They were forced to play second fiddle to someone imported from overseas, often at the very end of a not particularly stellar career. 85

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‘We only have one problem. Who will we get to play Mavis?’ one of the writers mused,‘She has to be an Australian, but no one must know that she is.’ Suddenly all eyes were on me. ‘Oh no.Why me? Thanks a lot.’ They promised it wouldn’t kill my career. I was told I was perfect for the part, not because of any lack of talent, they assured me, but because I had just started in the business and I wasn’t yet well known. It would be a one-off appearance only, they promised, and they guaranteed they would disguise me heavily for the part. I agreed to do it simply because I have always had difficulty with saying ‘no’. I also secretly believed that the show would never go ahead; that it would never get past the pilot stage. As we were walking home that night, Barry told me he thought that its success was unlikely. He said it was probably ‘one pilot that wouldn’t get off the runway’ and wondered whether he should have stayed on at the Music Hall. Channel 7 had a wonderful makeup artist as head of the department. Val Smith had started her career at the Pocket Playhouse as an actor before she decided to branch out into makeup. She often went overseas to observe new techniques and had studied prosthetics with the famous Dick Smith in Hollywood.Val did a terrific makeover job. She ordered a full black shoulder length wig and made a set of extremely long eyelashes. Then she set to work changing the shape of my face with clever shading and highlighting. The wardrobe department dug up from their existing stock a little black dress, long gloves, a big black picture hat and a pair of high heels. I was totally unrecognisable. This was in the days of black and white television so the costume made quite a dramatic image. The day I was booked to record my material I felt completely on my own. None of the other actors was involved. Barry wasn’t around to give me some much needed direction. I had never sung in a television studio before and I didn’t really know what to do. I felt I had once again been thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim. 86

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We had a rough rehearsal for a song-and-dance number. The producers chose ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from My Fair Lady, which I was to perform with Tommy Tycho, the legendary musical director, and the Channel 7 Orchestra. I was told that if I saw a red light on a camera, to sing at it. I did exactly that and somehow it seemed to work. It was really quite funny, more by accident than design. After I taped my material I went back to the Music Hall rehearsals, this time with a new actor playing the villainous Beauregarde. John Unicomb had been brought in to replace Barry in his first musical since Once Upon a Mattress. Our costumes for How the West Was Lost were terrific. Jimmy Murray had done it again. Knee-length skirts with bustles and boots and feathers and ‘rings and things and buttons and bows’. Barry had written a wonderful catfight between Belle Starr and her arch-rival, Priscilla Pruett, who was played by Fernande Glynne, who happened to be married to John Unicomb at the time. John Faassen, the director did justice to Barry’s hilarious scene ending the first act—the two women hissing and fighting and pulling out each other’s hair, working towards a big musical number involving the entire cast and the remarkable Sheila Kennelly, who arrives moments before interval singing her lungs out from a stage coach. How the West Was Lost opened to mostly good reviews, but there is one by columnist Ron Saw that I treasure. It raves about the show and finishes: Every member of the cast performs so well that it hardly seems fair to single out one. Yet there is Noeline Brown. Blonde, bawdy, brazen, bouncing, bustled, biting, bitten, bosomy and boisterously bedworthy, as a saloon keeper, she steals the show. We were amazed that Saw had enjoyed himself because he was pretty pissed when we saw him after the performance and he had not been particularly flattering to anyone. ‘You should 87

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never meet an actor after the show’, he growled as he left, so we had been expecting the worst. Towards the end of that year the pilot for the Mavis Bramston Show was previewed to an invited group of industry people. I attended the screening in the early evening before I went to work at the Music Hall. As I sat in the little auditorium watching the edited version, I was thrilled to see people looking sideways at one another and nudging their neighbours during the introduction to the visiting English performer. Melbourne actor and writer Jon Finlayson conducted the interview with Ms Mavis Bramston and he did it perfectly straight, in the style of a legitimate current affairs journalist. To preserve his anonymity Jon was viewed mainly from the back, apart from a few brief ‘noddies’ as they are called in the trade. Mavis rabbited on about how happy she was to be in Awestralia, which she referred to throughout as ‘that wide brown thing’. People in the audience started to look sideways at their companions. Then I witnessed their astonishment at Mavis’ terrible song-and-dance routine. The Taylor Sisters, a local vocal act, were sitting in front of me and they were pinching each other in disbelief. They actually thought Mavis was for real. The joke had worked. One of the guests at the screening was the talented Australian actor, John Meillon. John had just returned from England where he had been working for some years in the film industry. He was at the function to see his wife, June Salter, perform in the first Mavis Bramston Show. June had a wonderful way with a seductive song. She had a distinctive husky voice, like black velvet. I knew her as one of the funniest performers to have ever worked at Phillip Street Theatre, so I thought it was appropriate that she should be a guest in the first episode. John Meillon was the only person not directly connected with the program who knew that I was actually Mavis. He thought it was a great joke and whispered to me how much he had enjoyed it. The first ‘Mavis’ included sketches about Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the Voyager disaster, conscription and 88

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Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It included a serious moment with a reading from a poem written by an Aboriginal woman. Gordon Chater performed his famous custard pie routine, where he hits himself with food, cracks eggs on his head and squirts the lot off with a soda siphon, delighting the audience but not necessarily the Chairman of Channel 7 or the critics. A young Richard Walsh, from the controversial satirical magazine Oz, provided ‘The Oz News’. Barry Creyton wrote the opening number, ‘Togetherness’, which was used at the beginning of every show over the entire run of Mavis, but he was never paid for it. Evidently there had been some sort of fight about royalties and ownership. At the end of the very first show, a jolly chorus sang the cheery words to ‘Friends and Neighbours’ off camera, while footage of mob violence, battle scenes and images of the Ku Klux Klan flashed across the screen. ‘They did it—a fresh new show!’ announced the Sun newspaper the day after Mavis went to air in Sydney, on 11 November 1964. The review went on to say the program had brought ‘authentic, biting, saucy, swinging satire to ATN’. There had never been anything like it. Mavis Bramston created a sensation. The ratings were phenomenal. The show also attracted its share of critics, especially certain vocal members of the clergy. We thought it might run for a few months but we could never have suspected it would be screened every week for more than forty weeks of every year for over four years. It would also turn the actors into stars. Beauty and the Beast was another show that had its debut that year on Channel 7. It was a televised version of a popular long-running radio program called Leave it to the Girls. Eric Baume, a crusty old print journalist, was Channel 7’s choice to play the Beast. Baume was known for his rather bombastic news broadcast called, ‘This I Believe’, so he was regarded as the perfect man for the job. Craggy-faced with glasses and a big black moustache, he could be quite fierce. Former model Pat Firman, who did not seem to have a single line on her beautiful, mask-like face, was one of the first panellists to be 89

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chosen. Her mother had advised her never to smile if she wished to avoid getting crow’s feet. At night she wore a bandaid between her eyebrows to prevent frown lines. I discovered Pat was also the special friend of Channel 7 boss, Rupert Henderson but as someone else told me, there was no ‘funny business’. Ena Harwood, a doctor’s widow of a certain age, who I learnt had had every hair on her legs removed by electrolysis, the stunning ex-model Maggie Tabberer, a single mother of two from Adelaide, and another divorcee, redheaded singer Hazel Phillips were regulars. Other Beauties were the very intelligent and sensible Freda Lesslie and Mister Squiggle’s co-star Trish Lovell. Ann Deveson, who would go on to become a successful documentary filmmaker and author, was a regular, while I was what they termed a ‘swinger’ and appeared whenever I had the time between my other commitments with the Channel. I heard rumours about Eric and Ena being involved romantically but in spite of their relationship Ena and Pat Firman would often be reduced to tears by the beastly Baume. After taping days they would ring each other from their homes and ask mournfully, ‘How many gins and tonics have you had?’ A new cast member made a spectacular impression on the viewers. Outspoken German-born Dita Cobb, who John Meillon’s little son, Johnny, called ‘Dita Cobra’, had undergone cosmetic surgery, which was most unusual in those days, and she was more than happy to talk about it. I used to sit on the panel frantically thinking up things to say. I was still single, I had never travelled, I had never married and I came from a happy home. I had to take the cue from the other women as I gave my opinion on many things that I probably should have kept to myself. Eric Baume died suddenly and was replaced by other Beasts. I worked with most of them, from the jolly reformed alcoholic actor Noel Ferrier to the suave and much married radio star John Laws, smooth Stuart Wagstaff—or ‘Mr Benson Hedges’ as I heard someone call him, after the cigarette ads he was famous for—and the ex-football player with the extravagant vocabulary, 90

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Rex Mossop. I’m sure that even Alwyn Kurts, who played the gruff senior detective in the cop series, Homicide, had an attempt at being a Beast. Then John Meillon and I discovered we were going to work together. I knew he was back in Australia to play the role of Plume in a new television production of The Recruiting Officer for the ABC and couldn’t believe my luck when my agent gave me the news that I had also been cast in the show. I had landed the role of Melinda, described as ‘a beautiful lady of fortune’. The play, written over 200 years ago by Irishman George Farquar, also happened to be the first theatrical production staged in Australia when it opened on 4 June 1789 to ‘celebrate the King’s birthday’. ‘The actors acquitted themselves with great spirit’, wrote Captain Watkin Tench of the Marines following their opening night. The performers he referred to were all convicts and they performed in a mud hut that had been ‘specially built for the purpose’. One hundred and seventy five years later the ABC’s new television version was in the hands of Australian director Ken Hannam. Two whole studios were put to use to accommodate the many sets, which included a market place, a formal garden, a courthouse and stables as well as several interior settings. Wendy Dickson designed the lavish sets and costumes and Ian Fordyce, who was responsible for the wigs in the rollicking film Tom Jones, made all the hairpieces for our production. It was widely reported that the ABC was throwing an enormous amount of money at the show; the budget was supposed to be well over three thousand pounds—a sum regarded as so large that several magazines and newspapers devoted many column inches to it. The wages for the entire cast, seventeen speaking and six non-speaking roles, approached a giddy two thousand pounds. Videotaping took place over four days. The finished show was ninety minutes long and screened at 8 p.m. on 6 January 1965. The all-Australian company led by John Meillon included the talented Anna Volska as Sylvia, a beautiful young woman who disguises herself as a man (complete with a huge black 91

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false moustache that would fool no-one), the revue actor Reg Livermore as the foppish Brazen, Ted Hepple, Stuart Finch, Tony Ward and Yvonne Mitchell. My good friends Arlene Dorgan and Tessa Mallos played a couple of splendidly bawdy wenches.We enjoyed the luxury of having three full weeks for rehearsals and Ken Hannam always made sure I was able to rush back to the Music Hall from Gore Hill in time to change clothes and become the Mae West character in How the West was Lost. John Meillon was wonderful in The Recruiting Officer. He was an inventive young actor with a great comic gift. In his late twenties, he had a dazzling smile, a tumbling mass of wavy hair and a charming naughty boy quality. It was obvious that John had had a lot of experience on film and was very comfortable in front of the television cameras. He told me the one trick to screen acting was ‘to listen’. The Recruiting Officer received excellent notices when it went to air although one reviewer asked the question, ‘Can’t those cameras move?’, which came as a bit of a surprise to all concerned. It was a spectacular production and I thought it had been lost forever but the ABC wisely kept it in their archives and a copy of it quite recently came into my possession, courtesy of George Negus whose show New Dimensions was axed by the ABC in 2004. I was surprised when John Meillon started to arrive regularly at the Music Hall to watch our play. He would often stay for a drink with the cast after we finished and one night he suggested that I should go overseas and try my luck in London. He told me I still had a lot to learn about television but ‘nothing could touch me on stage’. I was flattered by John’s attention but I was also uneasy about it. I felt I should discuss it with Bob so I wrote to him in Porto Ercole. As I posted the envelope I wondered if I had done the right thing. Bob rang soon after, telling me his book, The Art of Australia, was just about to be published and that there was another person in this life. I was not surprised to hear this revelation; he had been away for a long time and I knew how much he loved women. I was still hurt, though, and I realised I had been 92

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unbelievably stupid. It was hard to believe I might never see Bob again. I was lucky I had a lot of work to do. The Mavis Bramston Show was going from strength to strength. The public still didn’t know I was the creator of the character of Mavis till John Howard, an ex-medical student friend of Bob’s, who was now a journalist working for a TV magazine, revealed that the black-hatted star of the series was actually ‘the young actress Noeline Brown’. I was all over the newspapers for weeks. Barry Creyton and I had been impressed by the work of comedians Mike Nicholls and Elaine May, who were enjoying successful careers performing improvisational comedy in the United States. We thought we would like to try the same format so we workshopped some of our own material on a radio program on 2SM run by a friend, Terry Pritchard. Our improvised sketches seemed to go over rather well with his audience and as a result Barry and I were both offered contracts with Festival Records. Our first LP went into the stores bearing the title of The Front and Backside of Barry Creyton and Noeline Brown. The black and white cover shot of that first album shows Barry rather cheekily placing his hand on my behind. There is a large red cross drawn through the word ‘backside’ with a scrawled correction, changing it to ‘flipside’, as if we had been censored. I seem to remember we were actually banned as several of the tracks were described as ‘too daring’ in an issue of TV Week. Our LP went on sale in the first week in March 1965. A Festival Records spokesperson claimed it was the ‘first time a record of this type has been produced here’ and described it as ‘a major breakthrough for the recording industry in Australia’ and we managed to outsell The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley in the first week of our record’s release. I was more than surprised when critic Norman Kessell wrote in his list of the previous year’s ‘Best New Shows’ that mine was ‘the best performance in a musical’. My career 93

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seemed to be going well. But suddenly, things started to change at Channel 7. Mavis Bramston was no longer going to be sent back to England. She would be required to stay in the show and film regular commercials for Ampol, the major sponsor. I thought, ‘One of us is going to England!’ I booked a ticket for my longed for overseas trip. I was going by plane, though, not by sea. I’d put it off too long and I was in a hurry. ‘You can’t go, you’ve got a contract’, I was warned. But I had never been offered a contract as Mavis and decided against signing one now.

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There was no going back. I had finally decided that I would be in London for the spring. I had wanted to travel ever since I was a twelve-year-old wandering around Blackwattle Bay with a sketchbook and had come across a battered old cargo vessel that I thought looked incredibly romantic. I started to imagine myself travelling the seven seas. Since then I had thrown endless envious streamers at departing ocean liners at the overseas terminal at Circular Quay and yearned to be one of the lucky passengers. Now I felt I had waited too long to realise my dream so I chose to fly straight through to England with Qantas Airways. I was in a hurry. As I paid for my ticket I secretly hoped that I might run into Bob Hughes again one day while walking through the crowded streets of London. It finally filtered through to everyone at Channel 7 that I was actually leaving the Bramston Show. The producers were still keen to have Mavis do all the commercials for Ampol so they realised they would have to find a replacement. My friend from What’s New? days, Maggie Dence, was asked to take over the role and she accepted. This time Channel 7 made certain their new Mavis had a contract to sign. The wardrobe department must have altered the little black dress somewhat because 95

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Maggie is very much taller than I am. Maggie stayed with the show for a year after it went national and became firmly identified with the character of Mavis. When she first took over from me I don’t think anyone really noticed the difference. ATN 7 published a recent history of the network called Forty Years of Television and one of the photographs shows Maggie dressed in the black cocktail frock with the elbow length gloves and picture hat, posing behind a Channel 7 camera with the station logo on its side. Above the logo is a photograph of me wearing the identical costume. I left my little garden flat in Darlinghurst, which must have been a disappointment to my regular ‘peeping Tom’ whose face sometimes appeared at my bathroom window. I sold most of my furniture and went home to Mum and Dad. I stayed on at the Music Hall just long enough to finish the season, but my bags had long been packed. In the last days Barry Creyton and I were frantically busy finishing off some material for a second LP for Festival Records.We approached our recording sessions with not much more than a slim idea and a great deal of confidence. I could not leave the country without honouring my contract, so Barry and I planned to do it all in one night.We had a title but not much else when we shut ourselves in the studio to record that second album. It would only be a matter of hours before I was to leave the country so we were being fairly optimistic. We called the LP The Not so Wet and Dry Side of Barry Creyton and Noeline Brown. Barry had organised the cover shot which shows the pair of us larking about in front of the fountain at Kings Cross. We put the record down in a state of high anxiety between midnight and dawn, after I had finished my last show at the Music Hall, which was the end of a happy relationship that had lasted almost two years. Barry remembers me shouting ‘I hate you, I hate you’ when he insisted we repeat take after take, so we could get the material absolutely right in his eyes. My eyes were closing. I needed to get some sleep. I was about to take off on my big adventure. I was flying to 96

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London the very next day. I managed to get to the airport a few hours after we recorded our final track, suffering from a mild case of laryngitis. Barry and I arrived at the airport together on the morning of 28 March 1965 and were quite surprised to find a print journalist and photographer waiting to cover my departure. The press was convinced we were lovers so Barry was asked how he felt about my leaving the country. He declared he would follow me to England as soon as he was able. He was also asked to comment on remarks made by a Catholic bishop, Thomas Muldoon, who had made headlines when he said that he was so shocked by the content of The Mavis Bramston Show that he vowed to divest himself of all his shares in Ampol. Barry replied that he was surprised a bishop would actually own shares. He would be even more astonished the following day after he caught sight of the banners outside his local newsagent, telling the world, ‘Actor insults Bishop’. My family and friends all turned up that morning for an incredibly early farewell party in the Qantas terminal, with John Ewart sneaking brandy into our coffee cups. Helen Livermore, sister of Reg, presented me with a stuffed clown to accompany me on my long journey in the air. I kissed everybody goodbye and, clutching my new doll and favourite white rabbit coat, took a seat on the plane. I flew economy class all the way to London, sitting in cramped conditions for over thirty hours and I found the trip to be absolutely tortuous. John Meillon and some of his English mates met me at the airport at Heathrow and took me straight to their favourite watering hole. I collapsed in the bathroom and was discovered by the actor Bill Kerr when he went in to wash his hands. I was fast asleep. As soon as I recovered from my shocking jetlag I started exploring the city. I walked everywhere and loved every minute of it. I was actually Overseas. The little girl who used to hang around the docks and dream about travel was actually doing it. I stayed in a funny little hotel in Knightsbridge while I looked around for a flat of my own. I managed to find a pleasant 97

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bed-sitter on the ground floor of a handsome terrace, quite close to Primrose Hill. It was one very large furnished room with a narrow bed and a writing desk in a bay window overlooking the street. Its one drawback was that I would have to share a bathroom with the other tenants. The owner took me on a tour of inspection and when I caught sight of the ancient gas heater lurking over the bath I admitted to her that I was frightened of them. ‘That’s silly’, she laughed as she struck a match and lit the pilot light. ‘Whoooosh.’ It exploded in a bright flash of blue, blowing us both out onto the landing. I rearranged the furniture in my flat and started to look for work. It wasn’t long before I discovered that some producers didn’t think much of Australians. I was forced to adopt an English accent to protect myself. I don’t think the British have quite forgiven our ancestors for having settled in Australia:‘Too much sunshine, too good for them’. I didn’t encounter hostility all the time, but it was definitely there on occasions. I was surprised to find that life was so different over there. I had never really been out of work before and I was shocked by how much leisure time most of the actors I met seemed to have. Their lives appeared to revolve around the London pubs. The changeable weather usually meant they were forced to spend their free time inside, drinking and gossiping and placing the odd bet. I was also surprised to find the pubs shut for a couple of hours after lunch. From three o’clock onwards, my new friends and I would move on to one of the many private clubs they belonged to, or to Lords where we would pretend to watch the cricket. The sun came out one day in early summer so everyone rushed into the parks and gardens and took off their clothes. I strolled across to Primrose Hill and did likewise, stripping down to my bikini. It was lovely to feel warm all over, after weeks away from Sydney, so I stayed most of the day, immersed in a book. By the time I got back to my flat, I had started to turn red and by evening my body had begun to swell. Fluid began to accumulate behind the skin and I suffered severe burns over most of my body. I had to wear a loose cotton nightdress and stay at home for many days till the blisters burst. 98

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The theatre world in London was as fabulous as I had hoped it would be. Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight was a sensational play with a hanging on stage that seemed so real the image haunted me for months. I spent a wonderful night at A Homage to T.S. Eliot with its galaxy of English stars. I saw musicals in the West End, starring people from home including Keith Michell and June Bronhill. I noticed there were many other Australians working in the chorus. My friend Neil Fitzpatrick had a contract with the National Theatre. I wondered if that was why they didn’t like Australians; they had taken all the jobs. A doctor friend visiting London took me to see a wonderful production of Tosca at Covent Garden with the talented Australian singer Marie Collier, who had taken over the lead role from Callas to great critical acclaim. He and I wandered around afterward, eating jellied eels and raving about her voice. I would later be shocked to hear that Collier jumped from a window to her death, oddly imitating the character she played in the opera. She was only forty-three when she defenestrated in full view of her agent. John Meillon introduced me to his agent, Peter Crouch, who had, among other performers on his books, Judi Dench and the leggy Dianna Rigg, later to become famous as one of the glamorous stars in the TV series The Avengers. He also handled the tall, young blond Scots actor Nicol Williamson, who had been thrilling audiences in the West End for nearly a year in Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, playing a man twice his age. Peter Crouch was olive-skinned, aged somewhere in his late thirties with a smiling face and large, square teeth. He and I got along famously but I never thought to ask if he would represent me. Soon after I met Peter he invited me to the opening night of a brand new play called The Overdog, starring one of Peter’s clients, Clive Dunne of Dad’s Army fame. Clive had a major dramatic role in the three-act play, which turned out to be an absolute stinker and I don’t think has ever been performed since. The notices went up before interval, informing the cast that their opening night was also the end of the run. It was a 99

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terribly long evening in the theatre and I had to spend most of the night jabbing Peter with my elbow as every few minutes his head would snap back and he would snore so loudly he became part of the show. I wondered if his client could hear him. At last, the final act ground to a halt and when the cast took their curtain calls, a man’s voice boomed from the back of the stalls, ‘What a waste of talent’. Peter Crouch also took me to a small private gathering one Sunday afternoon, where the jazz singer Cleo Lane sat on the couch next to me and, unaccompanied, sang for her supper. Another time he arrived unexpectedly at my place with a tiny woman on his arm and I had to hastily cook dinner for him and for the charming, giggly actor, who would later become the beloved Dame Judi Dench. Peter rang one night to say John Meillon had suddenly been admitted to hospital. He had evidently been in a great deal of pain for some time and was found to be suffering from an anal fistula. After an emergency operation John’s doctor advised him not to drink alcohol till the wound healed but when Meillon pleaded with him, he relented slightly. ‘All right, but you may only have half a bottle of champagne’, he advised. Every visitor who went to see John at the hospital was asked to take him a half bottle of champagne and some nights when he had a few guests he managed to get as full as a boot. I was glad to hear that a Sydney actor friend, Janice Dinnen, had arrived in London so I called in to her flat to see her.When she opened the door she didn’t look well so I apologised for not ringing first. Janice told me she had been asked to read for a part in a film starring the wonderful movie actor, James Mason. She then confided that she was suffering from endogenous depression and had been receiving treatment for her condition. Janice was worried that she would not be able to make it to the studios for her audition and might be forced to cancel. She said she found it too difficult to manage public transport on her own, so I offered to travel with her to the studios and take her home again. I didn’t realise how ill she was 100

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till she asked me to help her dress before we left. She couldn’t even pull up her own stockings. We travelled to the studios by train and I was able to go over the scene with her several times.We met the director and Janice struggled through the reading but she looked so vulnerable it was obvious she was not going to be cast as a bitchy young socialite. Maybe I looked more the type because the producer asked if I would like to read for the part. I declined, saying that I had looked at the script and didn’t really like it. The film was Georgy Girl, which has been described by Leonard Maltin in his Movie and Video Guide as a ‘delightful adult British comedy of modern day morals’. When I read it on the train I thought it was just a sordid, dirty story totally devoid of laughs. The part went to Charlotte Rampling and the film became one of the biggest cinematic hits ever to come out of the UK. Mike Walsh, a friend from Sydney, rang telling me he was in London and invited me to accompany him to the Elizabethan Room, a theatre restaurant that was popular with overseas tourists. Mike was an ex-pharmacist turned radio announcer and was one of 2SM’s ‘good guys’. At his hotel where we had arranged to meet, I noticed the American entertainer Chubby Checker walk into the lobby. I rushed up to him and brazenly asked for his autograph. When he signed it ‘Mohammed Ali’ I did a huge double take. I was embarrassed that I had not recognised the world famous boxer, then known to most of his fans as Cassius Clay, but I thought my brother Peter, the sports nut, would be thrilled to acquire his autograph. Mike and I arrived at the Elizabethan Room and were amused to find all the staff wearing rather dusty period costumes. Our drinks were served in metal tankards and bosomy wenches served the roast beef. All the waiting staff sang ditties with impenetrable regional accents. Mike was declared ‘Master of the Revels’ by the court jester and made to wear a crown and sit at the head of a long table where he was required to engage in a lot of undignified behaviour.‘Off with 101

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their heads’, he shouted, getting into the spirit of things and perhaps preparing for the day he would become the king of Australian daytime television. Peter Crouch introduced me to a journalist friend one afternoon in a Scottish-themed pub in the heart of the London theatre district. Peter told me his friend was wellknown for his popular sporting column called ‘Low Life’, in the Spectator. His name was Jeffrey Bernard and he was a regular at the hotel. And at many others, I would discover later. Jeffrey was a smallish man with rather ordinary but pleasant features and light brown hair. He was very amusing, if a little caustic, and he lived in a flat in the middle of somewhat seedy Soho, in the days before it became trendy. We started seeing each other quite often. I didn’t know at first that Jeffrey had a drinking problem, but he told me later that he had been warned to abstain from alcohol or he would be dead within a year. I was shocked; he was only a young man. As far as I know he didn’t give up the booze for another thirty years so he lasted a lot longer than they thought he would.A play was written about his life in the nineties, called, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. It took its title from the notice that often appeared in place of his column when he was hung over and feeling too sick to submit his copy. Peter O’Toole, who had also fought the demon drink, played the lead role first at the Apollo Theatre. O’Toole went on tour with the play and won several awards for his portrayal of the boozy but brilliant journalist. Jeffrey visited Australia just before the play was staged locally and was interviewed about his life on Australian television. He explained that the show begins with a drunken Jeffery Bernard waking up to discover he has been locked in overnight in the bar of his favourite hostelry, The Coach and Horses. I didn’t see the show but I did see Jeffrey Bernard, who, like the title, looked decidedly unwell. In fact he looked about a hundred years old and he thought my name was ‘Darlene’. Jeffrey later went off the booze and lost a leg and died of boredom, having been deprived of his one and only meaningful hobby. 102

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One of Jeffrey Bernard’s close friends was John LeMesurier, the wonderful comic actor who had starred in the eccentric television series Dad’s Army as well as countless, if not every British film ever produced. Both John and Jeffrey received invitations to spend the weekend at the country home of a current affairs show host, Daniel Farson, whose television series had been broadcast in Australia and most parts of the world. I knew Daniel Farson was a successful journalist but his other great claim to fame was that his uncle was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Farson was another Soho personality but his country house was in Devon. John and Jeffrey had been told they might bring a friend for the weekend and I was asked to join them. John explained mournfully that he was having romantic troubles again, so he came alone. He thought I should see some of the countryside so the three of us decided to take a train down together and our host promised to meet us at the station. As we passed through the various counties, with their fields like patchwork quilts, John and Jeffrey demonstrated the different regional accents by trying them out on the locals. It was a hilarious journey with plenty of warm gin and tonic that they like to serve on British Rail. When we arrived at the handsome and very old seven bedroom greystone cottage that stood close to a deserted beach, Daniel Farson could not have made us feel more welcome. He cooked a freshly caught salmon for our meal and this was the first time I had ever even laid eyes on one; in Australia at that time salmon usually came out of a can. The entire fish had been lightly cooked in broth in a poacher and presented at the table, plump and pink on an oval platter and garnished with chervil fresh from the garden. There was blackcurrant ice cream to follow, which had been made by the simple method of churning together quantities of thick Devon cream and delicious fresh fruit and sweetened with a little local honey. After our long, leisurely meal some sailors arrived in mufti. I thought, hello, could they be a further dessert for the host? We moved on to a rather touristy pub in town and the sailors decided to chat up the blonde Aussie bird. What a 103

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mistake. Farson turned like a python. On the sailors and on me. He raged at us, delivering a torrent of abuse and even accused me of pretending to be an Australian. The rest of the weekend was a bit of a disappointment as Farson nursed a hangover and I nursed considerable resentment. I was very happy to get back on the train to London. I thought I must have done something terribly wrong to bring about the dramatic change in our genial host. Many years later, after Daniel Farson had died, I looked up his obituary on the net. The anonymous piece was headed ‘Monstrous Drunk’. In it the writer mentioned Farson’s many talents as a journalist, television presenter, photographer, biographer and novelist. The article then went on to describe the hideous change that would come over him after he had drunk a few shots of almost straight gin, his preferred tipple. Farson might be engaged in polite conversation one moment, then at about nine o’clock at night he would undergo a spectacular change.‘I loathe you, I can’t stand you’, he would roar, according to the author of the piece. Daniel Farson was a known homosexual, but one with a very dark side, hiring rent boys and frequenting low dives where he would get bashed up on a regular basis. I had experienced the full horror of his rage that night in a picturesque pub in a port in Devon, but the next morning, evidently he would not have remembered a thing. After our weekend away I grew tired of the pub culture and of helping Jeffrey stagger home from the bar in the dark so he and I stopped seeing each other. Then out of the blue I received a letter from Bob Hughes, telling me he was coming to London and he wanted to meet me. I was thrilled to hear from him and arranged to cook him a meal at my place on my dangerous little toaster oven called a Baby Belling, which was responsible for multiple burns to my hands. Over dinner he told me he was broke so I offered to let him stay with me for a while and made up a bed for him on the couch. My landlady was not pleased when she discovered there were two people living in her single bed-sitter. I explained it was only for a little while and we were ‘just friends’, a situation that altered a 104

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little while later. I felt a bit paranoid, now that the landlady was monitoring my movements, so I decided to look for another place to live. A colleague of Bob’s was going to Europe and offered him his house for a while. It was in a very nice part of town, but I thought it better to find a place of my own. I was lucky enough to meet up again with Bob’s close friend, the artist Colin Lanceley, and his wife Kay, who were living with their two little children in a huge apartment. They told me they just happened to have a spare room available. The flat was in fashionable Hanover Gate Mansions and the rent was probably much more than they could afford. Colin had won the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship the year before, which had made it possible for him to take his young family to England but he has since been quoted as saying that financially they were ‘hanging by their fingernails’. You would never have guessed, judging by the splendid way they lived. I moved in quickly, in case they changed their minds. The rooms in their apartment were large, if sparsely furnished. Colin was just beginning to work on his combined canvas and sculptural pieces in his beautiful, ordered studio. He was a committed artist and would disappear into his workroom early in the morning, surfacing briefly at lunchtime. He’d come out again in the late afternoon and we’d start creating our meals. Kay was a fabulous cook and dinner would often last for hours with the four of us talking into the late evening, drinking the only wine we could afford, which was probably Hungarian Bull’s Blood. Bob decided to bring along a finer bottle to celebrate the day we heard that Colin had just received an offer to exhibit his paintings with the prestigious Marlborough Fine Arts Gallery in London. Bob asked me to attend a show at the Royal College of the Arts, which was to be opened by one of the Royal Family, so Kay and I went through all our clothes before we decided on something suitable for me to wear.When Bob and I arrived we found we were required to stand in a line to shake the hand of Princess Margaret. As we waited for her to materialise, I 105

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realised I could not find it in myself to bow to another human being, so I made my excuses and hid near the bar. I heard from another person, who was also hiding, that Princess Margaret was regarded as an absolute ‘pain in the arts’. He told me she was in the habit of ringing the Royal Ballet to have some young male dancer she admired sent around to the palace after work. Everyone knew that Margaret loved to sing and she would insist that everyone else should, too. Her guest’s eyes would be hanging out, but no one could leave before the royal banging away at the piano decided it was time. I couldn’t wait to pass the information on to Bob, who then told me the Australian painter Brett Whiteley had been considered worthy of interest and he and his wife,Wendy, had made it as guests for supper with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. At one stage during the meal Brett called out, ‘Pass the salt, Queenie’. Everyone at the table froze, except the few who knew that Brett always called Wendy ‘Queenie’. Bob was now being asked to appear on TV shows as an art critic and was enjoying many new challenges. One night he was cooking dinner for a group of us in his smart borrowed apartment when he received a call inviting him to be a replacement guest on a current affairs show. He left almost as soon as he put the phone down, after asking me to finish preparing the meal. I was aghast. I had never seen a dead pheasant before. I did the best I could, but I made a pudding out of the apples he had left on the bench instead of serving them with the birds. Then halfway through the night all the lights went out. I don’t think Bob had paid the electricity bill. At last I had some work coming in and was not just dependent on the modest royalties from my Australian recording sales. I had found a job with the BBC and for once being Australian had helped. The producers were actually looking for one. I was contracted to do on-camera interviews for a current affairs show called, This Week in Britain, and my segments would be broadcast back in Australia on the ABC. My family was thrilled to hear I had managed to find prestigious employment in the 106

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UK. The money was not particularly good so I also applied for some fieldwork for the London School of Economics, which I had heard about from an actor friend. All I was required to do was ferry sweaty, adolescent boys from their council estates to the college and ask them questions like, ‘When was the last time you nicked something?’ for a survey on delinquency. I loved the job because I was able to see inside other people’s homes. I noticed that most of the council flats I visited had bars full of expensive alcohol and the boys would sometimes pinch my bottom as I got into the cab. None of my friends had any money but we all somehow managed to live comfortable lives. Kay and Colin were always sharing their table with other painters; John and Valerie Olsen and Charles and Barbara Blackman were regular guests. One day Bob and I were invited to dinner by the Victorian stockbroker and patron of the arts Sir Ian Potter and his wife. They took us to a fabulous restaurant in a luxurious hotel where they kept a permanent suite. Sir Ian was a charming man with a sleek, silver mane and his wife was a lively and attractive woman, dressed beautifully with perfectly groomed golden hair. I had done my best to look good for the occasion but I had to remember to keep my feet firmly planted on the floor as I had a hole in the sole of my shoe. Sir Ian spoke knowledgeably and wittily about the arts in Australia and abroad. During our meal Bob whispered to me, ‘Happy birthday, darling’, and Sir Ian promptly ordered champagne to celebrate. I had just turned twenty-seven. We talked about Bob and his writing and my ambitions as an actor and we all agreed on the importance of work for a woman. Sir Ian’s wife, who had once had a career in fashion and referred to herself as ‘a shopgirl’, said that she would love to be able to go back to work and then, with the tiniest suggestion of a pout added, ‘I must have asked Ian a thousand times to buy me Myers’. Britain was starting to loosen up and pungent joints were passed around at many functions. The first time I was aware of people smoking dope openly, we were sitting in an English artist’s living room and Bob was holding forth as he usually did, 107

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given an audience, when someone to his right took a drag and passed him the cigarette he had just rolled. Without looking, Bob took it and inhaled deeply, then hung on to it, continuing to talk and smoke without once changing expression. I don’t think he realised what was in it or that he was supposed to pass it on. It didn’t appear to have any effect on him, even though most of the other people in the room appeared stoned after a couple of puffs. I am certain it was the first time Bob had ever had a joint and I’m almost sure he did inhale. The days were getting shorter and Christmas was getting closer. I was homesick. Bob went off to Europe again to look at some paintings. Nineteen sixty-five was drawing to an end. Snow fell outside the Lanceleys’ flat for the first time and Kay and I rushed to wake her children up to see it. Then the weather got so cold we were forced to spend most of our days inside in front of the fire. To fill in the time, Kay and I manufactured Op Art Christmas stockings, which we managed to sell to Biba, the trendy department store. The proceeds paid for our Christmas dinner of roast goose and French champagne. We visited the markets late on Christmas Eve when Kay knew the goods would be cheaper. Unfortunately Colin’s car broke down and we had to push it to a garage through the snow and ice, freezing our fingers as we had forgotten to wear our gloves. My two jobs had finished for the year and after nearly twelve months away from home I felt I needed to go back to Sydney and see my family and maybe earn some decent money. I also suspected I would be happier working in my own country. There were thousands of out-of-work English actors. I felt it was unfair that I should be competing for their jobs.As I was making my plans, the BBC unexpectedly came up with the offer of a regular position on This Week in Britain to replace the host, who was pregnant and would be leaving the show. They wanted me to start in the New Year. Then, surprisingly I had an enquiry from Channel 7. They wondered whether I would be interested in joining The Mavis Bramston Show as a regular cast member. I didn’t need to toss a coin. I knew straightaway what I had to do. 108

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I flew home to Australia at my own expense, or rather with the aid of a loan from my parents who probably had to mortgage their house. Before I left London, I promised everyone that I was only going back to Australia for a little while and had even left most of my belongings with Kay and Colin as proof that I would return. When I managed to unravel myself from the aircraft I couldn’t believe how beautiful Sydney looked that morning in 1966. The brightness of the sky and the intense colours of the vegetation amazed me after the dark, short days of wintry London. Here, it was mid summer and the bougainvillea was in bloom. Even charmless old Mascot looked appealing. Sydney appeared to be a tropical paradise. As I left the terminal I tried to tip a porter who had helped me with my luggage, but he wouldn’t take the money. ‘No, you’ll probably need that for a taxi’, he said, handing the money back to me. This was a major difference between Australia and Elsewhere. I returned home a much more rounded person, thanks to the invaluable experience of travel and to the British diet of carbohydrates combined with the northern winter. I started on a rather bizarre diet of six eggs a day with copious amounts of 109

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steamed vegetables and I lost the weight rapidly. I ate two soft boiled eggs for breakfast, hard-boiled for lunch and lightly poached for dinner. At the end of that diet, I thought I should have my cholesterol count tested knowing how eggs are regarded as absolute killers. When I did, I discovered my reading was in fact extremely low—so I’m not sure what that says about eggs. I loved my role as a member of the regular sketch team. The Mavis Bramston Show was still tremendously popular with the public, who watched it religiously for an hour every week. Years later I heard from a detective in Balmain that a cat burglar in Sydney was making a fortune robbing people in their own homes when he knew they would be glued to their sets watching Bramston. Barry Creyton and I enjoyed the chance to work together again and to resume our close friendship.We were becoming inseparable.We had lunch and dinner together almost every day. Barry loves to eat. In fact his appetite is legendary. I took him to my parents’ house for a meal one night and when he left my father remarked, ‘That Barry Creyton would eat the arse off a corpse’. June Salter and I became very good friends even though she was aware I had once had a crush on her husband.We just never mentioned it. We were teamed up by the Bramston writers for a regular sketch playing a pair of socialites sitting under the dryers at the hairdressers, commenting ignorantly on current affairs. Because we were both ‘baritones’, as we used to call ourselves, June and I were constantly being mistaken for men on the phone.We always used to get someone else to call if we needed a cab. It was 1966 and Bob Menzies had just retired and Harold Holt was our new prime minister. We performed sketches poking fun at Holt and his rather glamorous step family, who we usually portrayed as a circus act. Ken Shadie proved to be our most versatile satirical writer. I loved the fact that we had a chance to criticise our leaders and the decisions they were making on our behalf. The political climate was ripe for satire. The conservative government under Holt was sending even 110

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more troops to Vietnam and that action was starting to divide the country. At least on Mavis we were able to stir things up and get people thinking. Sometimes they weren’t happy about it. Barry Creyton was given a number to sing about a conscript burning his call-up card and he received sacks of hate mail. Barry took possession of a brand new convertible and then decided he had better organise some driving lessons. The day he obtained his driver’s licence he arranged to pick me up to take me to work. He arrived in his sporty little car with the hood down. I was terrified that he would kill us both so I refused to sit in the front. I didn’t want him driving over the bridge with its narrow lanes so I told him I knew a quicker way to get to Epping. I was shouting instructions from the back seat but Barry and I share a rotten sense of direction and we managed to get hopelessly lost.Without warning, the skies suddenly turned black and there was a crack of thunder, followed by a huge downpour. Barry pulled over to the side of the road and we had to consult the instruction book before we could get the top back up.We were both drenched and the car was full of water by the time we arrived at rehearsal.We were very, very late. Our producer, David Sale was furious and didn’t believe us when we told him that we had been held up because of the rain. There hadn’t been a sign of it at Epping. I was still intending to return to London so I remained at home with Mum and Dad in my old bedroom but as the weeks rolled by it became clear to me that I would not be going back. I took a long-distance phone call from Bob one night and told him I needed to live and work in Australia. I cannot remember what else we said but my sister-in-law passed me in the hall and looked at me with surprise when she overheard my end of the conversation. I realised what a big decision I had made because I knew that Bob would be working overseas for the rest of his life and our relationship had come to an end. It was around this time that I first met Graham Kennedy. He was by then the undisputed ‘King of Television’, the 111

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biggest star on Channel 9, working nearly every night of the week on his hilarious In Melbourne Tonight. We had both been invited to an industry party one Sunday afternoon. It was held in a large house in one of Sydney’s eastern bayside suburbs. Graham arrived in the company of a bunch of network minders. Don Lane, the American cabaret singer, was present with a support team of sporting heroes. I was in the company of some colleagues from The Mavis Bramston Show and it was clear to everyone there that Graham Kennedy would rather have been shedding his last drop of blood than attending the gathering.We all sensed that we should keep our distance from ‘The King’. I would never have guessed at this time that one day I would become responsible for his welfare. With a regular salary coming in I was able to pay back all my debts and move out of my parents’ home at last. I rented an apartment in McMahon’s Point, in a tall blond-brick block with a swimming pool. My flat was high in the sky on the tenth floor and had views across the water to Luna Park. It was wonderful to gaze at the famous landmark at night; to see the lights illuminating the rides and listen to the delighted screams coming from the thrill-seekers on the Big Dipper. There was always something faintly eerie about Luna Park but it had an enormous amount of charm. I can see why Sydney artist Martin Sharp fought so hard to get it going again after it was closed down following a tragic fire on the Ghost Train. Luna Park was very much a part of Sydney life. I had grown up with it but now I liked it best about midnight when the customers had gone home and one by one, the lights went out, till all you were left with were some shadowy images against the skeletal background of the Harbour Bridge. Barry Creyton appreciated my view so much he was willing to cross the bridge himself. After years of living in the eastern suburbs he decided to rent a flat a few floors below mine. Barry was without a telephone for a while so when I wanted to see him I would blow on an old trumpet I had found in a junkyard and he would pop upstairs. Later we invested in a walkie-talkie set. When we weren’t working on 112

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the show we would burn ourselves to a couple of crisps by our harbour-side pool, where Barry and I discovered that we had one more thing in common. He is a rotten swimmer, too. He believes it’s because he has no body fat. I watched him as he tried to float and was amazed to see him sink like a stone to the bottom of the pool. It was great to be working in a hit. In its first year The Mavis Bramston Show had become such a success that late night shopping in Canberra had to be changed because nobody was going out and the stores were empty.While I was living overseas Maggie Dence visited Western Australia as Mavis and she attracted a bigger turnout for her street parade than the Queen had for hers. There was of course a downside. We had to endure the curse of Celebrity. We did not have to put up with photographers’ cameras trained on our every move, as with today’s voracious paparazzi, but we no longer enjoyed ordinary lives. We had become public property. Some of us had our share of stalkers. I once received a letter from a fan that finished,‘When we have it off (which I know we will) my underpants will burn. Signed, the Yellow Dog Man’. Another enthusiast had to be banned from the audience on taping days because he was turning up everywhere I went. I caught the train once to Epping to record the show, which was something I had never done before, and when I looked around at Wynyard Station there he was. I kept well away from the edge of the platform. I resorted to wearing large sunglasses and a curly wig in an attempt at anonymity. People called out, ‘Love the wig, Noeline’. I was once descending an escalator and two women were ascending in a crowded shopping centre when one of the women shrieked,‘Are you Noeline Brown?’‘Yes’, I smiled weakly. They had reached the top when she screamed again, ‘My friend wanted to know. I wouldn’t know you from Adam’. My friend Stuart Wagstaff recounted an experience he had with an autograph hunter when he was the face of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. A woman stabbed him in the chest with the 113

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ink end of a biro and asked, ‘Are you Stuart Wagstaff ?’ When he nodded she said, ‘What happened to you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘You look so old’, she answered. ‘Well, you don’t look so fucking good yourself ’, was his snappy reply. He insists she took it well. Barry Creyton was always busy. In his spare time he and a journalist friend from the ABC, Stuart Carmichael, were writing a musical based on the radio serial Mrs ’Obbs. The characters were familiar to Australian radio audiences who had listened to thousands of episodes, with the Mrs ’Obbs of the title being played in the best pantomime tradition by a man, firstly by Athol Tier and later by Dan Agar. My brothers and I were devoted to the series when we were growing up. Everybody knew and loved its regular characters, like Mrs Jeffries, Mrs Jupley, Blossom, and Alfie and Mrs Bottomley. Barry wrote the music and Stuart and he collaborated on the book and lyrics. A group of us got together and made a recording of some of the material on reel-to-reel tape, hoping to pitch it to a producer. The show was never finished, which is a tragedy because it would have been a perfect vehicle for Gordon Chater as the panto dame. Stuart Carmichael died tragically early from a heart attack, and that was the end of the project. Barry and I once again started to attract a lot of media interest as a ‘showbiz couple’. Journalists were always trying to marry us off. On my return from England one newspaper had carried the banner ‘In Love’ with a huge photo of the two of us smiling happily at one another. A Melbourne magazine article confidently predicted that we would marry soon. In an interview we had together, a hopeful female reporter even offered to lend us her diamond ring to use in a photograph. Her magazine published a picture showing me sitting in a bentwood chair with Barry standing behind and, responding to the journalist’s instructions, he has my left hand in his, holding it out to the camera. There was never a ring. In spite of our great friendship, we never took it further, which was probably 114

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a good thing as we have had a relationship that has endured for well over forty years. Barry and I were always sending each other up in rehearsal, something that had started back in the days of our long runs at the Music Hall and we often got into trouble for our behaviour from David Sale, our producer. We always limited the fun to the rehearsal room but once we lost it completely in front of the audience.We were playing two unbelievably pretentious characters sitting together at a table in a fashionable restaurant. I was criticising my companion’s manners and at the end of the sketch Barry had to say something like, ‘What, me, uncouth?’ and then he would follow it with the tag.When the time came to record it in front of the studio audience, Barry got to the, ‘What, me, uncouth?’ line but as he was about to speak he uttered a tremendous fart. I was hysterical. It was completely unexpected. Barry Creyton was just not the sort of person who did anything like that, or if he did you would expect it to come out wrapped and tied with a bow. I was almost unable to continue. The audience thought the fart was the tag. On reflection, it was better than the tag. I was able to be serious about some things, however. Like a lot of Australians I was becoming more concerned about our involvement in Vietnam and our grovelling subservience to the United States. Increasing numbers joined the protest movement. The papers and the television news still chose to concentrate on the few unkempt ‘student activists’, as they were contemptuously called but there were entire families marching; ordinary people in ordinary clothes. Harold Holt vowed in Washington that Australia would go ‘All the Way with LBJ’ and invited President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his curiously named wife, Lady Bird, to visit our shores, always a vote catcher as John Howard realised when he entertained George Bush on his lightning visit to our national capital. When Johnson arrived, the government of the day organised a motorcade to travel through the streets of Sydney so mere mortals could catch a glimpse of the Texan president and his wife. There were plans by the anti-war movement to 115

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release some white doves during the parade as a message of peace. One of the Coalition supporters held up a banner with Holt’s promised ‘All the Way with LBJ’ line and one of the protestors waved another that read, ‘Drop a Turd on Lady Bird’. The prime minister of Australia and the premier of NSW also took part in the procession, which was watched by over a million people. Premier Robin Askin, on seeing a group of protestors lying on the road in front of his car, is supposed to have instructed his driver to ‘run over the bastards’, much to the enjoyment of the visiting president. The motorcade was later described by a local wag as ‘a hurried dash through unfriendly territory’. President Johnson, however, is supposed to have been extremely happy with the visit and is reported to have said to Askin, ‘I have looked into the faces of the crowd and I can tell that 90 per cent are with me. That’s more than I would find in America.’ It was great to be able to make fun out of such things but it was suggested to some of The Mavis Bramston cast that we might be regarded as ‘Agents of Influence’ because we were public figures known to be involved in the protest movement. I may have been paranoid but my phone started to make funny noises when I picked it up, so I always started my conversation with ‘Hello to ASIO’. Part of being a television celebrity meant that your working day didn’t end when you finished the job. There were functions you were expected to attend for photo opportunities for the channel. One of these was at the nightclub, Feathers, which was run by Jimmy Fishburn and his mum who sat on the till. Jimmy had worked as a theatre director for a while, moving on to television for the Mavis pilot following a recommendation by Gordon Chater. The club was not far from the Cross and featured a ‘drag show’ full of sequins, glamour and, of course, feathers. A group of us from our show went along to the opening of one of their productions, which of course meant dressing up for the occasion. I wore a slinky pearl grey crepe evening dress and some very high heels. I had my 116

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platinum hair piled up on top, with a couple of extra hairpieces attached. False eyelashes and full makeup were, of course, de rigueur. David Sale rather took the wind out of my sails when he whispered in my ear, ‘That colour does nothing for you, dear’. Some New Zealand visitors to Sydney were being entertained at the club by one of Jimmy’s regular customers.As they walked in, they admired a beautiful woman at the bar and were told, ‘That’s not a woman. It’s a man.’ Their mouths fell open. Gradually, as the night wore on they felt they were finally able to sort out the genders. ‘That’s a bloke, over there’, they cried and pointed in my direction. All my life I have been mistaken for a man, during early morning phone calls especially. It could be genetic as my mother remembered her grandmother having a deep voice, but I think mine probably stems from being told as a child, ‘Don’t whinge’. Barry Creyton decided to leave the cast of The Mavis Bramston Show at the end of l966 to star in a comedy series of his own, called, not altogether imaginatively, The Barry Creyton Show. It was recorded in Melbourne and a lot of time and effort went into the production but it did not achieve the same success for Barry as Bramston. Barry is quoted in Johnson and Smiedt’s history of Australian comedy, Boom Boom, as saying the show didn’t work because they ‘paid the star too much and the writers not enough’, knowing that without a good script you have no show. After a while the ratings did improve and the producer, Bob Huber, took the results to show the studio heads and said, ‘We’ve upped our ratings, so up yours’. At that time, Channel 7 bought the rights to John Cleary’s novel, You Can’t See Round Corners, and had plans to turn it into a twenty-six part television series. The book tells the story of a young draft dodger who hides away in the inner city suburb of Newtown. While on the run, he has a relationship with an innocent teenager. The new writers had brought it up-to-date by changing the period from World War Two to the then current conflict in Vietnam. Barry and I were shown some of the early scripts for the show. In one scandalous scene, the 117

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boy has to put his hand up the girl’s skirt and she, as well as the audience, would be shocked. Because Barry and I had enjoyed a moderate amount of success working together, management decided we should play the two leads in the proposed series. We seriously had to talk them out of it. Barry and I were both in our late twenties, far too old to play the parts, and also too well connected to comedy. People would laugh, we warned them. Barry told them about a young girl he had spotted recently in Brisbane playing the lead in the musical Calamity Jane. She was very talented and she was only seventeen. Acting solely on Barry’s recommendation they flew the girl down to Sydney and as soon as they tested the teenager, the part was hers. It was the start of a long television career for Rowena Wallace. Barry was asked once again to consider the role of the soldier but he wisely declined. A young unknown was chosen instead. The role went to Ken Shorter, an ex-cop and fitness fanatic who never drank alcohol. One day we saw him outside the studio, running around and around in circles, and asked him what he was doing. He explained that he was preparing for a scene following a party and he wanted to appear drunk. I received another unsuitable offer from the Channel 7 executives. The ex-footballer Rex Mossop, who had been one of the many Beasts on Beauty and the Beast, was called upon to host a Saturday night program called The Club Show for which I was chosen as his rather reluctant sidekick. It was a program almost totally devoted to sport, with a few interviews and some music. Rex did all the talking as I knew nothing about sport. However, he knew nothing about comedy banter so I used to sit there like a fish out of water, almost totally mute. I pleaded to be let out of my contract and was finally able to convince the producers that I should go. On my last night Rex announced, ‘You’re leaving us, Noeline’. And I answered,‘Yes, Rex’. ‘Why are you leaving?’ he asked. ‘Laryngitis’, I replied. The cameramen exploded. I ran into Rex Mossop again about ten years later at Channel 7 when I was doing an episode of Rafferty’s Rules. 118

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I was in a rather smart costume and he saw me in the green room, waiting to go on. He greeted me with, ‘Hello, Noeline. I haven’t seen you since I used to sit adjacent to you in Studio B.Well, I see you haven’t lost your figure. You must be a pretty old girl by now.’ I actually heard myself saying, ‘Thank you, Rex’. It was Barry Creyton’s turn to travel overseas. He went off to New York where he spent six months and most of his money having a good time with his friend, the singer Lana Cantrell, who had once made headlines when Graham Kennedy jokingly announced their engagement. I decided to get out of sport and back into comedy. I had a sitcom to do. My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? was the brainchild of Ralph Peterson, who started out early in show business as one of the naughty school kids in the radio series Yes What? with vaudevillian Rex ‘Whacka’ Dawe playing the schoolmaster. The show had entertained Australian households for years and my brothers and I loved it when we were growing up and listened to it on the wireless, not the radio. I had met the author of McGooley once before, at Bob Hughes’ home, just before Ralph and his actress wife, Betty Lucas, left to try their luck in England following the success of Ralph’s stage play about the fight game, The Square Ring.When his new TV show went to air, it was obvious from the first episode that it was going to be a success. McGooley starred the wonderful Gordon Chater as McGooley and John Meillon as his son-in-law, Wally Stiller. Judi Farr expertly played Rita, the long-suffering wife and daughter. It also featured the lovely character actors Stuart Ginn and Les Foxcroft and had a truly Australian flavour. Set in the pre-trendy waterside suburb of Balmain, it won the hearts of the Australian public from the moment the harmonica played Tommy Tycho’s catchy theme song. Ralph Peterson had written the show for his old friend Leo McKern, but Leo had withdrawn from the project on the advice of his agent, so Ralph re-worked it to suit the talents of Gordon Chater. Gordon was really too young for the role but with the help 119

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of the makeup department and the talented Val Smith, he managed to convince us all that he was an irascible old codger. I sent Ralph a telegram to congratulate him after the first show went to air. It was one of the few fan letters I have ever written. I don’t think that was the reason he wrote me into the series, but if it was, I’m not apologetic. The show was recorded at Channel 7, so it was not a problem for me to leave Bramston and move across to the McGooley set—they came from the same stables, so to speak. By then Mavis had been running for four years, and was screened nearly every week of the year, so it had started to lose its impact. Ironically, considering the way the show started out, overseas performers were now being imported to star in it. Ralph Peterson wanted me to join the show as Wally’s sister, to whom he had given the nickname of ‘Possum’. She was a rather tough character who was able to dish it out to Wally in return for the rotten way her brother treated his wife and father-in-law. Ralph once said that Wally Stiller would ‘light the fuses and throw the crackers’ but by writing ‘Possum’ into the show, Wally had a chance to react himself. John Meillon’s reactions were wonderfully funny and his comic acting made him a favourite with the viewers. McGooley was a constant ratings winner for Channel 7 for its three-year run of 115 episodes. It received high praise for Ralph Peterson, winning at least two Logies and one award from the Australian Writers’ Guild. Ralph was also presented with the Henry Lawson Grenfell prize for his work on the show. One morning we were in the studio, rehearsing scenes for the cameras prior to recording when Stuart Ginn, who played McGooley’s best mate Nancarrow, complained of chest pains. He was advised to consult the television doctor who was recording a show of his own in another studio. When Stuart saw the doctor he was told to go to the canteen and have a gassy drink. It became obvious to me as the morning wore on that Stuart was suffering from more than simple indigestion so I spoke to our director, Ron Way, who asked his assistant to call 120

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a cab to take Stuart to Royal North Shore, the nearest hospital to the studio. I wasn’t needed on the set for a couple of hours so I went with him. We arrived at the casualty section of the hospital. A nurse started to ask Stuart a lot of questions then gave him a form to fill in. I could see that we were running out of time so I yelled, ‘He’s having a heart attack’.And he was. He was rushed immediately to intensive care and given the appropriate treatment. Stuart returned to the set a few weeks later and received a hero’s welcome. After lunch he took me aside and said he thought we would have to go to hospital again because something terrible had happened to his eyes. I looked at him carefully and noticed he had left his sunglasses on after coming in from outside and that one of the lenses had fallen out. His relief was palpable. He died some years later from the damage caused to his heart, but everyone remembers him with affection for his cheeky portrayal of Nancarrow, McGooley’s good old mate. One morning at rehearsal Ralph Peterson told me he had heard Bob Hughes was going to be married. I burst into tears. I somehow thought Bob would always be there for me. I made a long-distance call to wish him luck but I secretly hoped he might change his mind. He married an Australian girl called Danne. They had a son named Danton, and they all moved to the United States. Spike Milligan happened to be in Sydney so Ralph, who knew him well, wrote him into an episode of McGooley. Ralph warned our director that Spike could be a bit unpredictable, so all the cameramen were put on high alert. They had just seen Spike reduce a newsreader to tears when he was doing his nightly bulletin. Spike was given the role of a pest inspector and he decided to go over me for white ants. John Meillon seemed to be drinking more and his love life was in tatters. He’d arrive on the set in the mornings holding a handmade leather six-pack container that one of his devoted girlfriends had given him. ‘Just the one’, he would say as he downed his can of beer at eight in the morning. To John, beer 121

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was not booze, but soft drink. I was amazed that he was always able to work and had no difficulty with his lines, but by about four o’clock his eyes would become dull and we would have to pack it in. John’s anal fistula returned and he was hospitalised again. After his operation he went home and a couple of days later rang his doctor, who was a close family friend, and asked, ‘When is it safe to use the toilet?’ There was a pause, followed by ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Is it alright for me to go?’ ‘What do you mean?’ John screamed, ‘Is it okay for me to have a great big shit?’ And the reply came down the line: ‘Don’t ask me, mate. This is the Mosman timber yard.’ Gordon Chater decided to leave the show and there was talk of his suffering a heart attack. What the rest of the cast didn’t know was that he had attempted suicide. Depressed and overworked, he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and had to be hospitalised. He wrote about his illness in his autobiography (The Almost Late) Gordon Chater, and described how the shock treatment he received caused him to fracture a vertebra. Gordon recovered from his bout of depression and went on to star in another sketch series for Channel 7 called, not very adventurously, The Gordon Chater Show. He teamed up with his dear friend from the UK, Miriam Karlin, who was known to Australians for her portrayal of the fag-smoking union delegate with the hacking cough and the foghorn voice, who called, ‘Everybody out’, in the British comedy series, The Rag Trade. Ralph Peterson kept the rest of the McGooley cast together by writing a spinoff series called Rita and Wally. The Stillers had moved up in the world after Wally was given a promotion. Ralph relocated them to a nice new home in the suburbs. Possum was still living with her brother and sister-in-law for the purposes of the scriptwriter. John Meillon was now drinking very heavily indeed. We were doing some filming for the show one day in Melbourne, probably to get the ratings up in that state, and 122

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John had to do a scene where he was called on to dodge heavy traffic. The night before, Ralph, John, Judi and I had dined together at the Lido and perhaps too much wine had been drunk. John rehearsed his scene several times but when it got to the take he misjudged his timing and the stunt car hit him. Meillon was on the ground, not moving. We all stood there, aghast, some of us thinking of our mortgages. Wally was dead. What would we do now? But he recovered in a matter of seconds, without any more damage than a corked leg. We taped a total of twenty-three episodes of Rita and Wally and then decided to stop. Ralph had written every one of the McGooley episodes and the spinoff, which amounted to well over a hundred scripts, and he wanted some time off. His hands had become crippled. He blamed it on his hunt-and-peck method at the typewriter but in fact he suffered from Dupuytren’s Contracture, which causes fibres in the hand to shorten. He was unable to straighten his middle fingers, so a handshake was interesting and the act of typing had become torture. Ralph went bush. While I was working at Channel 7 I heard that Tony Hancock was booked to do a show for the same network. Everyone at the channel was excited as we all admired him for his brilliant show Hancock’s Half Hour, which had run successfully on the ABC. It was a big thrill to everyone at the station when he did actually accept the engagement.We couldn’t wait to see him at work.We would meet Hancock sometimes in the canteen during our breaks from Rita and Wally. He was always with a minder, Dusty Nelson, a young Channel 7 employee who Tony knew and trusted from England. It was Dusty’s job to keep an eye on him. Then we found out why Dusty was always around. Hancock was a chronic alcoholic and a depressive. He would sit at a table with the crew from his show in their lunch break, but his chair would always be turned slightly away from the group, as if he was dying to make a break for it. I don’t know how many people at the channel knew of his unstable history before the contract was signed. 123

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Hancock had been booked to do a guest spot on The Mavis Bramston Show, but he walked out once he realised he would actually have to learn a new script and perform in front of a live audience. He had also been involved in a recent tour for the Australian entrepreneur John Collins that had resulted in a series of disasters. The rumour mill started to turn and news of his problems was spreading all over the station. Tony Hancock was staying in a basement flat behind the rented home of the producer of his show, an old friend of his from England, Eddie Joffe. It was evidently very spartan accommodation, even though it was in fashionable Birriga Road, Bellevue Hill, not far from Royal Sydney Golf Club. There were stories flying around Channel 7 about how Hancock needed to have cue cards everywhere on the set of his show, but was often too drunk to read them. Then we heard the writers were being instructed to invent scenes for him totally without dialogue. Take after take and nothing in the can. Network boss, Rupert Henderson, had even sent him away to a discreet clinic to dry out at the channel’s expense, but nothing seemed to be working. Hancock was a brilliant but destructive person who had wrecked the lives of many of his friends. John Le Mesurier and his second wife, Joan, had taken him in just before his tour of Australia and he had destroyed their marriage. He stole the wife of the person he often described as his best friend. He had sacked his brilliant writers long before and had turned into a bitter and tragic drunk. In the early hours of 25 June 1968, Hancock rang Spike Milligan to tell him that he was doing a new series and that Spike should try and see it when it was released. He went back to work on the script he was trying to learn for the next day’s rehearsal. Then he decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. He ended his life with a cocktail of pills and alcohol and was found lying in his bleak room sprawled on a single bed with his arm around a vodka bottle. He left a few letters, saying how hard it all had become, that life wasn’t funny. He was only forty-four when he died, but he looked at least twenty years older. However, even now, more than thirty-five 124

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years later, to see or hear old tapes of the magic Hancock’s Half Hour you cannot deny his comic brilliance. The writers of the show at Channel 7 have long had to put up with jokes in the business about the scripts that killed Hancock. Spike Milligan was also a well-known sufferer from depression, which may have been the reason Hancock rang him shortly before he decided to take his own life. Milligan made his condition known and by being so public about his illness, brought it out in the open. A lot of actors I know have had a problem with depression and I have experienced it myself. It seems to go with the territory.A lifetime of rejection doesn’t help. I was pleased to be cast in a movie after our television series had finished. Walkabout has now become a cult film. It made such an impression on the American travel writer, Paul Theroux, that he made a pilgrimage to most of the film’s locations when he visited Australia while conducting research for his pessimistic book, The Happy Isles of Oceania, subtitled Paddling in the Pacific. Theroux devoted an entire chapter to his experiences here, which he called ‘Walkabout in Woop Woop’. Englishman Nicolas Roeg of Performance fame was the director of the film and shooting took place over a period of four months in outback Australia in 1969. I had only a tiny part in the film but I was just pleased to be in it because it was such an interesting story. My scenes were to be shot near the railway town of Marree, which is, evidently, an aboriginal word for ‘place of possums’. I was to travel with a group of Italian extras, who had been chosen during an earlier casting session in Sydney. We were all due to meet at the production office early one morning before flying out in a chartered aircraft to Marree and then drive out to Lake Eyre.When I arrived at the meeting place in Darlinghurst, I was told that one of the extras had failed to turn up. We waited anxiously for him to appear and eventually one of his countrymen told us that his mate wouldn’t be coming with us because his wife wouldn’t let him go.We then had to drive around Kings Cross at six o’clock in 125

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the morning, asking anyone who looked slightly Mediterranean,‘Do you want to be a movie star?’ Fortunately one man did, so we grabbed him and just managed to take off from Mascot on time. The little prop-driven plane we were travelling in was very crowded, and the trip seemed to take forever. One of the Italians sitting near me had quite sensibly brought his own lunch.At one point he broke open a fresh purple fig and leered at me. I don’t recall seeing any possums around the tiny town of Marree when we arrived, but the place appeared to be bursting at the seams due to the presence of the large Australian and English film crew. Most of the Poms had gone ‘troppo’ and were deeply tanned from their unaccustomed months of exposure to the sun. The weather was uncomfortable as it was approaching the height of summer and the end of the year. Most of the crew was staying in the Marree pub and I had been booked in with them. I entered the hotel and the first person I recognised was John Meillon, who was fulfilling one of his lifelong fantasies and working behind the bar. He appeared to be in his element, pulling beers for the crew. John had just finished work and was heading back home to Sydney the very next day. In the first scene of the film, the character John plays drives his two young children into the desert. Something has happened to him and he has decided to end it all and take his children with him. He pulls out a gun and shoots at them, then incinerates his car while he is in it. The children manage to escape and we follow their adventures as they meet up with an Aboriginal youth who teaches them how to survive in the wilderness. The director held auditions all around the country for the role of the pivotal character and discovered a wonderful young Aboriginal boy called David Gulpilil to play the part. David was born in Arnhem Land and is one of the Mandalpingu people. He wasn’t sure of his age at the time of filming but he thought he was about sixteen. He gave a brilliant portrayal 126

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even though he had almost no spoken English. Gulpilil has since gone on to enjoy a long and distinguished career working as an actor, dancer and teacher. He now divides his time between his traditional life in the Northern Territory and his working life on the world’s stage. He is very difficult to find when he is living his tribal life as he lives in a remote area and his agent almost has to send out smoke signals. Jenny Agutter came out from England to play the young girl and a full-time chaperone was required to accompany her before her parents would allow her to travel so far without them.An Australian cameraman confessed to me one night that he had fallen in love with her. I don’t know how she felt about him, but I suspect the sixteen-year-old would have been very flattered and assured of being photographed well. The director’s young son, Lucien John, or Luc Roeg as he became known later on in his career, played the part of her little brother. The two children were both natural actors and they loved being on holiday and working on a movie at the same time. They had a tutor while on location, but the kids were learning more about life from the places they visited and the different people and cultures they met. We were required to shoot our scenes the morning after we arrived and the crew left the hotel at dawn, following a rowdy party at the Marree pub, where some Aboriginal people we met insisted on calling me ‘Marilyn’, which I didn’t mind at all.We drove at speed through a dust storm along a road that only the driver could identify, out to the location at Lake Eyre. I had woken up early so I would have time to shower and wash and blow-dry my hair, but by the time we arrived at the location by the shores of the lake, like everyone else, I was covered from head to toe in fine red powder, courtesy of the desert sands. Lake Eyre is a weird place. It is not really a lake at all. It is a huge area of blinding white salt. At its lowest point it is sixteen metres below sea level. It seldom rains and it has a very high evaporation rate, which is why we could not seem to quench our thirsts, even though we drank fluids all day. The part I was 127

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playing was that of a scientist, German I think, working in the middle of the lake. I was using a collection of mystifying machines, which could possibly have been instruments for testing the weather. Their purpose was never fully explained to me. I shared my scenes with the group of Italian extras. Nicolas Roeg directed them to look hungrily in my direction. My wardrobe consisted of a practical white uniform and some very sexy underwear. A lacy dark blue push-up brassiere could be glimpsed at the gaping top of my crisp white uniform and I also sported a matching bikini and garter belt, which held up my sheer white nylon stockings. Nic Roeg directed me to cross and uncross my legs and to look seductive while fiddling with the strange weather gadgetry. The intense heat had encouraged new hair growth on my legs and I felt sure they would have a five o’clock shadow for the close-ups. I also thought I would faint. The weather was shocking. Nearly boiling point.We kept losing weight as the cameras rolled. The Australians were trying to huddle under umbrellas and the English were stripping. One of the women in the production team was topless by morning tea. We staggered into the hotel and we were pretty hungry by the time we hit the dining room because the catering truck managed to get lost and failed to turn up with lunch. As we filed in, we were informed by the manager, who had obviously trained at the Basil Fawlty school of hospitality, that we were too late to have dinner. There was no chance of getting any food so we had to make do with chips and nuts. Later in the week the weather started to change. The locals predicted that the big rains were coming. We worked hard to finish our filming and while the crew packed up, the actors took off to the safety of Marree. As we arrived in town we were told that if we didn’t leave soon we could be rained in and might be there for weeks. I was lucky to get on a plane and out of town the next day. The rain started just as we left. Lake Eyre was soon in flood, the first time this had happened in many years. What was normally an expanse of salty mud, covered with a thick dazzling white salt crust, magically turned 128

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into a huge body of water, full of wild life and everywhere around it, flowers were starting to bloom. The crew would have to give the lake time to drain once again before they could finish the film. I went back to my home, which was now in a flat-iron building behind the notorious Texas Tavern. It was just down the road from Elizabeth Bay House, the beautiful early Australian John Verge mansion, which has been so handsomely restored. The Art Deco building I lived in was very handy to Vadim’s, being just a short stroll along Macleay Street to Challis Avenue. Unfortunately I strolled there one night and met Sean. I was charmed by his laugh and his looks. I didn’t know that wherever Sean went he left a trail of emotional destruction behind him. According to my friends, I had possibly the best apartment and the worst boyfriend in Sydney. My flat was on the ground floor and it had a veranda on the western side that overlooked the jungle-like plants of a large house with a magnificent garden. One evening I was lying on a rug in the sitting room, watching television with a girlfriend who was curled up on the couch, when I saw a man’s figure leap over the small retaining wall that stood between the two buildings. I watched him creep across my veranda and disappear into the main bedroom, which was at the other end of the flat.‘Shhh’, I whispered to Big Red, my friend, a makeup artist from Channel 7. ‘It’s Max Phipps’, I giggled. Max, the gifted actor, lived nearby and was a regular visitor to my apartment. I thought he must have been planning to surprise us by sneaking into the unlocked bedroom and tiptoeing down the hall. I was always careful to secure the doors and windows on the side of the flat that faced the passageway but I never bothered locking the doors to the balcony. I expected Max would soon burst into the living room, but I thought I would get to him first and give him an even bigger surprise. I crept up the darkened hallway and as I approached the bedroom, I saw a strange man in the doorway. It was obviously not Max. I could just make out his shape and I could see that he was a much bigger person. I could also see that he had 129

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something raised above his head. I screamed very loudly. Big Red yelled out,‘What’s the matter?’ as she started to run up the hall. The object, in what seemed like slow motion, jerked backwards away from my head as the intruder turned on his heels and fled out the French doors. He ran across the deck, jumped over the veranda rails and disappeared into the thick shrubs next door, taking my wallet with him. Trembling, we rang the cops. They arrived some hours later, recognised me from my days on The Mavis Bramston Show and went into a double act. Big Red and I had a party to go to later that night at the home of a television clairvoyant. We arrived by taxi, still shaken, our hair almost standing on end after our ordeal.As our host opened the door he trilled, ‘How are you, my darlings?’ We shrieked, ‘You should know. You’re supposed to be a bloody mind reader.’ The incident happened during the time of the Vietnam War and the invasion of the Cross by Amercian servicemen on R & R. I suspected the would-be attacker might have been one of them. He wore the typical marine crew cut and I knew a lot of US soldiers were billeted in Macleay Street in a highrise apartment building. I realised that most of the back flats would have had a clear view into my living room. There was a narrow passage with stone steps leading from Macleay Street down to Elizabeth Bay, between Manar, a local architectural landmark, and the infamous Texas Tavern. It went right by my apartment. I decided I needed a roommate. I couldn’t depend on Sean. He had too many women in his life. I had a few flatmates; one of them being the exotic English rock singer, Eden Kane, who was supposed to have been mauled by a tiger in India. His real name was Richard Sarsted and he told me not to believe the hype. The incident had happened when he was a child and the tiger was the size of a kitten. However, I did get to see his scar and it was quite impressive. I was having breakfast one morning with Sean at The Sweetheart, a coffee shop just around the corner, when a stranger stopped at our table and introduced himself as Frank. 130

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After he had left Sean told me he was also known around town as ‘Frank the Injurer’. He was a European migrant who had a fulltime career as a gambler in one of Sydney’s illegal clubs and he sported a ‘nightclub tan’. He was employed as a blackjack dealer and he once boasted that he had robbed his employer blind. He had never held down a proper job but was proud of the fact that he had never been to gaol. One day Frank paid cash for the full price of a two-bedroom unit at Kings Cross. I heard rumours that he had a second job as a standover man, but he insisted he never really hurt people. I don’t know why he took an interest in me but he was always very polite and courteous. Knowing his reputation, I was always civil in return. Frank walked me to my front door one morning and advised me to change the locks because he claimed he could break in within two minutes. I was glad when he decided to change his life. He married a very young French girl with an impenetrable accent. She wore lipstick that looked like pearl shell and drew very dark pencil lines under her eyes. They had a baby soon after they married and Frank took his new family away from the Cross, to start a new life in Western Australia. Fortunately for me, Sean also left to start a new life with somebody else. My friends drew a collective sigh of relief.

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Sean returned to my flat one night to pick up some things he had left behind. I helped him pack and as he was about to leave I gave him a warm hug and wished him luck. He said he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life. I was surprised to realise that I didn’t really care. I had been booked to appear on Would You Believe?, a television series for the ABC, which had already gone to air with its first couple of shows in 1971. It was a quiz-style program with questions about Australian colonial history. The show’s researchers had managed to dig up amazing archival photographs of people and objects and it was the job of the panellists to contrive stories about them. Some of the wildest tales told in the program turned out to be true. Taping Would You Believe? was more like having a party with friends than going to work. The author Frank Hardy was an obvious choice for the program because he had an alter ego known as ‘Truthful Jones’, the inventor of long and involved shaggy dog stories. Others on the show were the very young and bubbly actress Jacki Weaver, wine guru Len Evans, historian Cyril Pearl and Michael Baume, who was then working as a journalist but later 133

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became a politician, serving as an attack dog in Malcolm Fraser’s government, achieving some degree of notoriety later by attempting to dig up muck on Paul Keating’s piggery investments. The host of the show was Peter Lazar, who enjoyed another life in advertising and public relations for the dentistry profession. John O’Grady Jnr wrote and produced Would You Believe? for the ABC and also ran the comedy department at the time. He was the son of John O’Grady, who had written the bestselling novel They’re a Weird Mob under the pseudonym of Nino Culotta—the book was later made into a film featuring John Meillon in the highly comic role of a labourer. I loved working on Would You Believe? and invested in a leather bound six-volume set of the Australian encyclopaedia so I could do my research at home. My history teacher at high school would have been amused if she had seen me in the show as she had once written, sarcastically, in bright red ink right across the top of one of my assignments, ‘Don’t invent history’. The first time I appeared on the show I was given the wrong slide to talk about. I looked at it, aghast. It had nothing to do with the information I had in front of me, so I spent five minutes babbling on about some nonsense that I hoped might fit. Stopping tape was such a chore in those days so our producer was delighted that I’d been able to cope. Frank Hardy was the only one who knew anything was out of place because he had been given the other story. Frank seemed to have been born with the Irish ability to invent a tall tale about absolutely anything. Acting was probably in his genes—the Melbourne comic Mary Hardy was his sister. Like a lot of the Irish, he had an excellent singing voice. When the poet Yergeny Yevtushenko visited Australia, we were invited to meet him at a party. Yevtushenko thrilled us with a reading of his poems, which he recited in a muscular fashion in his native Russian. Frank followed his performance with a moving Irish song of protest, which he sang unaccompanied in a clear, fine tenor voice. 134

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Sometimes the panel members and television crew would drift into the 729 Club in St Leonards after recording had finished to have a drink and pull the handles of the poker machines. The Club was named after the three existing television channels in Sydney, before the days of Channel 10 and Pay TV. We went along mainly because of Frank Hardy, who loved to gamble. One night we were sitting in the lounge when two young men wearing conservative suits and ties sat down at the table next to ours. Most of the people who used the club at that time of night wore casual clothes so they were obviously out of place. These two looked like a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was at one end of our table and they started chatting to me. I thought they were just flirting but as the night wore on, one of them seemed to be much more interested in Frank, who as usual was away playing the poker machines. ‘Isn’t that bloke Frank Hardy?’ he asked me.When I replied that it certainly was, he started to ask more questions, which I didn’t feel I should answer. When the two strangers moved to the bar and Frank returned to our table I told him about the man who had grilled me. Frank drew on his pipe and said, ‘Why don’t you go out with the bloke and find out what he’s up to?’ So I did. We made a date to meet at the popular French Restaurant which was in the basement of a building near Martin Place. During our meal the man claimed that he was employed by ASIO, Australia’s intelligence service. He asked casually if I knew about the famous English spies Kim Philby and Burgess and McLean, who had defected to the USSR years before. Then he dropped, even more casually, that he would like to get more information on the activities of Frank Hardy. I suppose he was hoping to make his reputation with his organisation by exposing Frank as a spy. I was no help to him at all. I knew that Frank Hardy was often described in the media as a ‘Commo’ and a ‘stirrer’, but I only knew him as a good mate and a vocal defender of the Aboriginal people.When the evening was over I grabbed a taxi to take me to the 729 Club, where I reported 135

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back to Frank. I felt like Mata Hari. I was a spy, reporting on a spy, to a spy. I was surprised to see Derek Taylor, the redheaded, accident prone journalist I hadn’t seen in years, walk into the club one night. I didn’t know that he was back from Vietnam. I wondered why he hadn’t called me. Whenever Derek knew he was going to be in Sydney he would ring and we would have a meal somewhere, although I always said I wouldn’t get in a car with him ever again.We always had fun together but I had never thought of him as anything more than a friend, even though he had once asked me to marry him after a lengthy lunch at The Astor. I just laughed. He repeated the offer again many times but I never took him seriously. Derek suggested that we leave the club and go to supper at Vadim’s, where he ordered a bottle of champagne and announced that he had finally decided to stop living dangerously and had closed down his office in Saigon. He was going to settle down with a regular job back in his hometown of Adelaide. Derek had accepted a position with the Department of Highways in Don Dunstan’s Labor Government and was leaving Sydney the following day. He rang from South Australia soon after he got there and once again asked me to marry him. This time I didn’t laugh. Derek Taylor and I were married in the Flinders Street Registry Office, which was situated next door to the Department of Poultry and Apiary. The sign can be seen just behind my shoulder in the press photos taken on the day. Our sudden marriage made the front pages in Adelaide on 12 June 1970: ‘TV Star Wed Here in Secret’. Derek was described in the article as a public relations consultant and we were photographed at home together, with me in a miniskirt perched on his knee and with him looking as if he would rather be facing a firing squad. There were just four people at the wedding: the bride, the groom, his friend and best man, Adelaide journalist Tony Baker, and Tony’s wife, Lili. The little bridal party celebrated by having dinner at a restaurant afterwards at the unfashionable time of five o’clock and that was the start of our married life in the City of Churches. 136

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Derek found a flat right in the centre of Adelaide in a thirties style building destined to be demolished to make way for a new road. The rent was cheap because of the impermanence of the situation. The apartment had a beautiful staircase leading to the bedroom and it featured a delicate cast-iron balustrade of grapes and vine leaves painted in white enamel. We had no furniture, apart from a bed. I took a couple of doors off their hinges and made up a couch and a low table with the aid of some bricks and piles of cushions but I was missing the favourite items of furniture I had collected over the years. I had packed up my flat and put everything in storage in Sydney before I left. Derek had lived out of a suitcase for years and he couldn’t understand my attachment to possessions. Neither of us could afford to send for them. We were both totally unprepared for marriage and it soon became clear to me that I had made a huge mistake. We knew nothing about one another. Derek found it difficult as well, particularly the unexpected media interest in our relationship. He complained that he often felt like a prize bull. There was no work to be found as an actor in Adelaide and I was trying to think what else I could do with my life when Ralph Peterson came up with the offer of a lead role in a new series he had written for television called Birds in Paradise. I flew back to Sydney to record the show. I moved in with Mum and Dad once more, and after a while Derek came up to see me and we talked about the state of our marriage. I told him I had married a friend and he believed I had simply done it on the rebound. He was probably right. Derek decided to take off overseas again, so we said our tearful goodbyes one night after having a meal with my family at their home. My mother said if only we’d lived together for a while we probably wouldn’t have made such a mistake. The television series, too, sank without trace. My husband flew off to Africa. I would soon take myself off to the Clinic. The TV series had paid quite well but during this time my agent went bust. He was a theatre director friend who had 137

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started the agency in 1969 after convincing some of his industry contacts to join him. He boasted about his great backers and promised that if we went on his books we would enjoy huge success both here and overseas. What we didn’t know was that a mining company actually ran the agency’s finances and when they went into receivership the following year, I lost all the money I had coming to me from the television series. I couldn’t understand how it happened as they were only allowed to have ten per cent of my earnings, but I lost the lot. I didn’t want to take advantage of my parents for too much longer so I started looking around for cheap accommodation. I met a friend who lived in Edgecliff in a run-down terrace owned by the Anglican Church. The rent was low and the place was cheerful. He offered to find out if there was another one available and when he was successful I moved my furniture out of storage and into the top floor of an old house just down the road from a corner shop that was popularly known as ‘Emma Chissit’. A few doors away from my new flat lived the colourful Chica Lowe. Chica had at one time run a boarding house for artists and writers and was an old friend of Russell Drysdale and his daughter Lynn, who was also a dear friend of mine. Chica drove a Volkswagen that was painted bright yellow so she could find it wherever she parked. She usually wore a uniform of narrow slacks and loose sweaters over her ample bosom and nearly always tied up her snow-white hair with a black shoelace. Chica always used fierce red lipstick and lined her eyes heavily with shiny black crayon. The colours often ran. She once said she didn’t like to wear a belt because if she did she tended to look like a badly wrapped parcel. Chica shared with me the tragic story of her first marriage and her subsequent divorce, when she lost custody of her children because of a love affair she had been having with the man she eventually married. Her divorce had made headlines in the days before ‘no fault’ legislation, when paid investigators were able to leap into people’s bedrooms with cameras and tape recorders. 138

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Chica Lowe’s little house was dusty and cluttered but very appealing. She regularly held dinner parties where she would often cook a dish made from a sheep’s head, which she used to call ‘John the Baptist’. She would warn her close friends not to eat part of it as it ‘might have fallen on the floor’.After a while I started to notice changes in Chica’s behaviour. She seemed to be forgetting things, and not just where she had parked the VW. Her stories would be repeated as soon as she had finished them. They appeared to be on a loop. One day she told me how she had been invited to drinks up the road at five o’clock, so she had dressed up and put a rose in her hair and decided to have a little rest before going out. When she woke up she looked at the clock and as it was nearly five she walked around the corner and knocked on the door. It was actually five o’clock in the morning. I had a few problems myself, like how to pay the rent. I ran into an old family friend, a nursing sister, who had looked after my mother during her long stay in hospital years before. I knew she worked in some sort of clinic. I explained to her my difficulties with my agent and complained that I was sick of being chased around the table by businessmen after lunch. I asked if I might be able to get some sort of job with her at the clinic, to help pay the rent. She spoke to the matron who said I could start immediately. I painted my platform shoes white with the trusty Colour Change, took up the hem of the regulation blue uniform to the more fashionable ‘mini’ length and popped on a disposable nurses’ hat that came in a pack of six. The Langton Clinic was a facility for people suffering from severe drug and alcohol addictions. I arrived on my first day expecting to find the place full of old men in army overcoats. I was surprised to find these were ordinary people of various ages from all walks of life. One woman I cared for was well past middle age, a typical grandmotherly type, but I was shocked to learn she used to drink methylated spirits and milk on a regular basis. She used to keep her ‘white lightning’ under the sink along with the detergent so nobody would find it. Most of the people in the clinic were recidivists. They’d come in, dry out, 139

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regain their health and then some time down the track, in they’d come again. The alcoholics I met told me they had no time for the drug addicts, and the ‘druggies’ looked down on the ‘drunks’. I suspected one of the medical staff might have had a bit of a drinking problem as he used to have vitamin B injections from the nurses every Monday morning. The doctor had a keen interest in the arts and I believe he owned a genuine Picasso. He asked two of the senior nurses home for dinner one night. After they had lost count of their pre-dinner drinks and no food had materialised, they excused themselves at eleven o’clock and staggered home via Harry’s Café de Wheels. One of my jobs at the clinic was to look after alcoholics while they were experiencing the symptoms of withdrawal. They were sedated when they first arrived and put into a room with only a single bed and some sweet cordial to quench their raging thirst. The rooms contained very little in the way of furniture so they couldn’t injure themselves. I would have to pop in and check on them from time to time to see that they hadn’t came to any harm. I lost one patient when he decided to take off suddenly after I had escorted him to his room. I was returning from the kitchen with his jug of cordial when I realised he had gone. Somehow, full of Valium and alcohol, he managed to find his way to the front entrance and then get out onto the main road where he hailed a passing taxi. The driver stopped and picked him up, even though his fare was barefoot and wearing pyjamas. I chased after the cabbie, yelling at him to stop, but the car took off with my patient. I couldn’t believe how easily a man with delirium tremens could find a vacant taxi at peak hour on busy Moore Park Road. I had never even seen one. He never returned to the clinic. I decided I would be more prepared in future. I wouldn’t let my patients out of my sight. I was carefully watching over a new man, who seemed to be having a terrible attack of the horrors. He was upset and babbling, so I talked to him and tried to find out what his problem was. It appeared that he was a builder and he imagined he had constructed a shoddy wall. He was afraid it would fall over and kill someone. I tried to 140

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reassure him that his bricklaying skills were excellent and that the wall would last for years and that no one was going to die, then he opened one bloodshot eye and looked at me. ‘What’s your name, Girlie?’ he asked. ‘Noeline Brown’, I replied. ‘Oh, sure’, he scoffed.‘I suppose Bobbie Limb is doing the operations!’ I realised that I wasn’t cut out to be a nurse when I was offered a job in an episode of Matlock which was a television show to be shot in Melbourne. I handed in my paper hat and said farewell to my regulars. ‘You’ll be in here one day, Brownie’, predicted one of my favourites, with a knowing wink. Maybe he had seen me looking a bit bleary-eyed, coming to work at dawn after attending a showbiz party. While I was in Melbourne working on Matlock, a young Sydney actor casually asked in front of everyone on the set if I would be interested in having an affair with a younger man. ‘Who do you have in mind?’ I replied, thinking ‘saucy bugger’. His name was David Foster, he was tall and attractive with a toothy smile. I was 33 and he was 25. I had been celibate for eighteen months. I was tempted. When I returned to Sydney I ran into a singer I knew slightly who asked me to go to a club where he was performing that night. He suggested dinner at a well-known restaurant afterwards. I didn’t have anything in the fridge so I promptly said yes. He arranged to have me collected in a chauffeurdriven hire car. When I arrived at the club after a very long drive, I found my bar tab had been paid in advance and the singer had told the staff to look after me. I am always hungry so after a couple of glasses of wine I was more than ready for dinner. The show was long and I was becoming ravenous. I knew I should have had some lunch. I was very impressed with the singer’s performance that night. He obviously loved working ‘live’ and he absolutely devoured the audience. The women at the club loved him and threw kisses. He was having a great time, enjoying encore after encore. My stomach was growling. 141

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At last we climbed into the back of the hire car to drive back to town. My date offered me a cigarette from a smart silver case. I was still a smoker then so I took it. I was rather surprised to find it was not the kind that came out of a regular packet. During the long drive to town there could well have been more than one.We drove through the city, past the restaurant and I realized we were heading towards Watson’s Bay. ‘Hang on, where’s dinner?’ I thought. ‘Let’s go to my place’, said the singer, to my intense disappointment. He opened the door to his house, went straight into the living room, turned on the record player and put on a recording of himself singing his latest hit. I swooned. Too much of everything, but too little food. I fell straight to the floor. I awoke rather groggily to hear the singer’s voice again. He was on the phone talking to his solicitor. Not the ambulance or a doctor, but a lawyer. He thought I was dead. I don’t know whether he gave me any food to revive me but I managed to recover quickly and he called the hire car to drive me home. If ever we ran into each other after that night, the singer would always remark,‘You’re looking pretty good for a dead woman’. Around this time, an invitation arrived, asking me to be part of the audience at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney for the start of the historic ‘It’s Time’ campaign to help Gough Whitlam and the Australian Labor Party win the 1972 election. The atmosphere on that October night was electric. The theatre was full of celebrities, writers, performers, singers and intellectuals; the ‘elites’ as John Howard would call them now, as if they are something to despise. The organisers had given me a seat next to Gough, on his left. In fine Labor Party tradition, his group must have been to nearby Chinatown for an early dinner before the function for as he eased himself into his seat, Gough Whitlam intoned, ‘Forgive the garlic prawns’. I would have forgiven him anything. My companion for the evening was the young actor I had met on Matlock. I’d obviously had time to consider his offer. David Foster was a person of considerable height and I was wearing platform shoes, so we were able to talk to Margaret 142

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and Gough comfortably, without having to jump up and down to make ourselves heard. As a family group the Whitlams looked quite regal, the shortest member of the clan being a mere six-foot three. They towered over us mere mortals. We wore our ‘It’s Time’ campaign t-shirts everywhere, even though David later joked that I had presented him with a singlet and forced him into becoming a Labor supporter. He told me how he had worn the t-shirt under a jacket to the Kirribilli Yacht Squadron one night and was shown the door by a Mr Hudson Fawcett, who informed him that ‘his type’ was not welcome in his club. My old friend, the critic Harry Kippax was scathing about my public support for the Labor Party and we sometimes argued about my position. I often had to fight back tears as I tried to defend myself, but I wouldn’t let him win. I believed I was right. The official launch took place on 13 November at Blacktown Civic Centre, where Gough Whitlam delivered his stirring ‘Men and women of Australia’ speech to an audience of four thousand supporters. It was an exciting time. At long last, I felt we might see the end of the conservative government, the only kind of government I had ever really known. On 2 December 1972 Australia went to the polling booths and that same night we knew that Labor was finally in.We had won and Gough was our new prime minister.We were ecstatic and celebrated all evening. One of the parties I went to was at the home of my brother, Peter, who was then working with Australian Associated Press and living in the critical seat of Lowe. The other was held in the Darlinghurst terrace house of Tessa Mallos and her journalist partner, Tony Reeves. Tony was an investigative journalist and at one time he and fellow journalist Bob Bottom were to give evidence at the Moffat Royal Commission into crime in the NSW club industry. He and Tessa were forced to share their home with Commonwealth policemen who were there to provide them with protection round the clock. Their election night party was mentioned in the papers the next day as the best victory celebration in town. The empties lined the 143

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street. Gough and Margaret Whitlam celebrated with their family and supporters in the backyard of their modest home in Sydney’s outer western suburb of Cabramatta. The Whitlam Labor government moved like a whirlwind from the moment it took office. Some critics said it moved too quickly. It delivered the things it had promised in its campaign. There were no ‘core’ or ‘non-core’ promises. In its first year the government passed an amazing amount of new legislation. It put an end to conscription and freed the young people who had been jailed for refusing to be drafted. The government ordered the remaining troops back from Vietnam. It ended the British honours system, it abolished fees for higher education, reformed the health service and brought in Medicare, changed the national anthem from ‘God Save the Queen’ to ‘Advance Australia Fair’, put money into Aboriginal communities and started the long overdue work towards reconciliation. The voting age was lowered to eighteen and the government legislated for equal pay for women in the work force. It promised support for the arts. I was proud to be an Australian. It was a busy time for me as well. I was booked to do two plays for the Tasmanian Theatre Company in the first months of 1973. The first one was Move Over Mrs Markham, a British farce, and the second was an American drama called Sticks and Bones. I also had a contract with ABC-TV for a new series of Would You Believe? in Sydney. I left David at home to look after the flat. The first time my plane touched down in Hobart I couldn’t help thinking about the convicts who had been sent there only a couple of hundred years before. They must have felt they had been sent to the end of the world. The sight of snow-topped Mt Wellington looming up behind the little fringe of buildings that made up the city gave a chilling first impression. The place looked menacing, somehow. I could never have imagined that I would keep coming back to the island. The Theatre Royal in Hobart was built in 1838. It is one of the few remaining Georgian theatres in the world and also 144

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one of the prettiest. The acoustics are wonderful. You can hear a whisper from the stage. Even though the roads now isolate the building and it has endured at least two major fires, it is still standing after well over 170 years. Everyone who has had the pleasure of playing in the theatre knows what an important building it is to the heritage of Australia. When the Old Vic Theatre Company toured Australia in the 1940s, Laurence Olivier called The Royal ‘an adorable little theatre’, and made a passionate speech from the stage begging the people of Tasmania to preserve their national treasure. The actor John Unicomb was the director of the Tasmanian Theatre Company at the time. I hadn’t seen him since he had played the villain at the Music Hall in How the West was Lost. John had left Sydney when he married the young Tasmanian actor Gillian Hunter and made Hobart his home. They lived in a rambling old timber house overlooking picturesque Battery Point. The cast assembled for its first reading at ten o’clock at St George’s Church Hall in Cromwell Street. When I arrived after spending my first night in Hobart in the fading splendour of the old Hadley’s Hotel, I recognised only one familiar face—Johnny Norman whom I knew from Sydney. The rest of the cast were new to me. Move Over Mrs Markham had already enjoyed a great deal of success in England. It was a clever farce written by Ray Cooney and John Chapman. I was contracted to play Joanna, the Mrs Markham of the title. Johnny Norman was cast as Alistair, the interior decorator who appears to be gay but isn’t. Izobel Kirk, who was once known as Beverley but changed her name for some reason I have long forgotten, gave a wonderfully dizzy performance as Linda Lodge, which we thought sounded more like an address than a person. Farces require a lot of intensive rehearsal if they are to work properly. Doors have to open at exactly the right time, cues have to be perfect, and the ‘funny business’ must be rehearsed again and again so it all runs like clockwork.We rehearsed the play for four weeks and really enjoyed the process. Our director was open to ideas and we happily contributed. We opened in the last week of 145

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January to very pleasing notices and the people of Hobart took us into their hearts. After opening night we went straight into rehearsal, from Monday to Friday, for Sticks and Bones. I also had to fly back to Sydney every Sunday to record episodes of Would You Believe? for the ABC. David complained he never saw me and we often quarrelled about it on my one night at home. Then I would have to go back to Tasmania on Monday morning on the seven o’clock flight. As there was no direct service from Sydney to Hobart, I was forced to fly to Melbourne first, then to Launceston, then finally struggle out at Hobart and cab it straight to the theatre for rehearsals. The only time I was not at the theatre, I was in a plane travelling to do another television show. I flatted for a while with a local girl in Hobart and was fascinated to discover there had still been people in the convict prisons in Tasmania, right up to the 1870s. She showed me published photographs of some of these men that I found absolutely haunting. The bleak history of Tasmania was all around me. I visited the museum in the city where an exhibition charted the gradual destruction of the Aboriginal people. I visited the penal colony at Port Arthur and became fascinated with the history of the place, especially after discovering some convict ancestors of my own. I had my first day off in over two months so a group of us drove up to Mt Wellington. John Norman planned the day to show me some of the natural beauties of Hobart. First, he cooked us a lovely lunch of roast lamb, which he basted with the pan juices and some Rose’s marmalade. Then we drove up to Mt Wellington and looked at the view through low clouds and a kaleidoscope. I first met John Norman when I was just starting out in show business. He had a wonderful voice and very good diction, which guaranteed him a lot of radio work. His experience on television was mainly working in historical dramas, as his looks suited period costume. John was often cast as the son of Michael Pate because they looked so much alike. They were both dark and nuggetty with large mouths and very full lips. Their voices were similar; deep and resonant. Johnny 146

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Norman was a complex person. He had a succession of girlfriends in the time I knew him in Sydney and his downstairs neighbours used to beg him not to be so noisy with his love life. David Rabe’s Tony award-winning anti-war drama, Sticks and Bones has some very funny moments and some really chilling ones. The play starts as a send-up of the early American sitcom Ozzie and Harriet. Brian Young, a talented Tasmanian-born actor who had made his name in the early days of Hayes Gordon’s Ensemble Theatre, was cast as Ozzie, the father of a blind GI who has just returned to his home from Vietnam. Although not much younger than Brian, John Norman had the role of his son. The relationship was believable due to the sincerity of their performances. I played the housewife and mother as a big-haired TV Mom, ‘full of pancakes and platitudes’, as a critic said at the time. Now that I think about it, I was about the same age as my son. John Norman, trying his hand at Method acting, used to play the part of the blind soldier with his eyes shut tightly behind a pair of dark glasses. He would often wreak havoc on the set as he blundered about, thrashing at everything that got in his way with his white stick. The furniture for Ozzie’s living room was on loan from a local department store for the duration of the run only, so the stage manager was furious. John’s new partner in Hobart was Jenni Smith, who played his phantom Vietnamese lover in the play. In one scene Jenni had to lead John up the stairs to his bedroom, leaving the rest of the family onstage. Once they had made their exit and the door was shut behind them, the two actors had no access to the backstage area. They were forced to stay on a little landing until their next entrance. The rest of us sometimes imagined we could detect the smell of a burning joint wafting down from the top of the stairs but John always denied it. We used to warn John about the perils of losing concentration. I told him what happened on the stage of the musical The World of Suzie Wong. Bill Hunter told me he once played the part of a sailor in the show. He had to appear in a bordello 147

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scene and take a prostitute to her upstairs room for sex. They would make their way up the staircase together, shut the door to the bedroom and stay there for most of the act. Like Johnny in our play, there was no way out for him till he made his next entrance, alone, from that same room. Bill and the actress playing the working girl became very friendly over the run and on one occasion, affection took over. They got carried away and Bill was unaware of how long they’d been up there. Suddenly hearing his cue, he took off.And so did the girl, even though she wasn’t meant to. All around town for weeks after, people were grinning and saying,‘Have you been to see “Suzie Wong?”’ A local Hobart boy, Michael Siberry, acting in his first professional engagement, shone in his role as the veteran’s bewildered younger brother. Michael was only about seventeen years old. He was tall and fair and had tremendous assurance for someone so young. It was obvious from his performance that he would become a fine actor. After our season finished he was accepted by NIDA and went on to study in England, where he was asked to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. He now spends his time working in both the United States and the United Kindgom. He has a wonderful range, tackling roles in the classics, television sketch comedy and drama and also stars in the musical theatre. He played Captain von Trapp in a Broadway revival of The Sound of Music to great critical acclaim. He recently performed in Uncle Vanya in Los Angeles, where he received wonderful notices for his performance as ‘the handsome blonde eccentric doctor Astrov’. I have noticed that Michael Siberry gets to play a lot of doctors, which is quite appropriate because his father is one. Sticks and Bones featured a party scene where my character, Harriet, appears onstage carrying a huge pink and white cream cake, a triumph of bakery kitsch made by the mother to welcome home her injured son. On opening night the theatre held an after-show party and much mention was made of the cake. I went backstage to the prop table and brought the object out for a closer inspection. What followed was a messy cake 148

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fight in the foyer of the oldest theatre in Australia, instigated, I believe, by a well-respected Anglican priest. All the actors were severely admonished afterwards, and rightly so. I don’t think the cream was too hard to remove from the carpet though, as I’m pretty sure the icing on the cake was actually shaving foam. The hairdresser for the Tasmanian Theatre Company was John Bird, who also ran a successful salon in Hobart.‘Birdy’, as he was known, was mad about show business, so he was happy to come in every night and tease my hair and I was pleased, as on other shows I usually had to do my own. John had done his training in his hometown of Melbourne with Lillian Frank, the flamboyant society hairdresser. John could speak at least three languages fluently. He had remarkably good legs and streaked blond hair and looked a lot like a young Danny Kaye. He was a fabulous cook and he possessed amazing vitality but he had absolutely no head for alcohol. His powers of speech would desert him after a couple of glasses of wine. For a man who was proficient in many languages, he could hardly speak his own. One Sunday night Birdy and I dressed up and took off to the new Wrest Point Casino, the first such establishment in Australia to be legalised. As the restaurant was expensive, we agreed to go dutch. John wanted to engage in a spot of gambling first so we took up our postions at the roulette table and placed our bets. I have never had any luck with gambling but John won enough to take us both out for the night. We were almost the only people in the room to hear the fabulous and talented American singer Mel Torme, one of the world’s best jazz musicians. John and I were real fans and I hope we were able to let him know how much we appreciated his show. The support act was the Australian comic, Joe Martin, who did his famous T Model Ford routine, which in those days I knew almost by heart. My season in Hobart came to an end and I packed up and left for home. I had come to love the little island and felt sure that I would return. I didn’t know that while I had been busily engaged at the Theatre Royal the man I would eventually 149

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marry had been hammering away on a typewriter in an office just around the corner. Just after our season finished John Norman had a serious accident while he was chopping wood and injured his foot very badly. There were rumours he was taking drugs at the time and had been hallucinating. There were even stories that he had cut off his foot and ‘given it to Jesus’. John stopped performing for a very long time and I would occasionally hear stories about his increasingly odd behaviour. Then a friend told me he had started working as an actor again after a long absence and had put together his own one-man show. John was touring his play around the Australian countryside when he died suddenly of a heart attack. When I arrived back in Sydney from Tasmania I was eager to get settled in my home again. One of the first things I did after I unpacked was arrange to see a new production of David Williamson’s comedy, Don’s Party. The show had premiered in Melbourne at The Pram Factory and a year later its first Sydney production opened at the tiny Jane Street Theatre. Within twenty-four hours the entire season had been sold out, so it had to move to the Parade in Kensington. Set over a long night at Don’s house, a group of old friends and their wives are invited to watch the results of the 1969 election on TV. This was the year the Gorton government became unpopular with the electorate and it looked like Labor could win, even though it would take a swing of nine per cent to do so. By 9.30 on election night, the friends celebrate a huge swing to Labor, but an hour later the picture starts to change. At the end of the evening, and without a clear result, the characters drift away disenchanted with their lives and poltics. The theatrical company JC Williamson and Dudley Goldman joined forces with The Old Tote Theatre Company to take the play to most of the capital cities in Australia. Tasmania and Western Australia were usually left out of major tours because of the high costs involved in transporting actors and sets over vast distances but they were to be included this 150

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time. John Clark, the head of NIDA, was the director and most of those taking part in the tour would be the actors from the original Sydney cast. I was asked to take over from Judith Fisher, whose family commitments made it impossible for her to travel. I thought I would miss out because I had a booking to return to Tasmania for a couple of weeks but John Clark was willing to let the understudy cover for me during that time. I was going away again. There was only about ten days between the closing night of Sticks and Bones in Hobart to the opening night of Don’s Party in Adelaide, so I had a busy time flying back to Sydney, organising a housesitter and rehearsing with the rest of the cast, who already knew the play. I also had to pack up again for the long months ahead. The first items I put back in my bag were my good knife, a coffee pot and a pepper grinder. My boyfriend, David, couldn’t complain. He was coming along this time as he had a job understudying all of the men in the show. Martin Harris played Don, the schoolteacher and failed novelist. Martin had also been in Williamson’s great, confronting play, The Removalists. I will never forget seeing his wonderfully cocky performance as the little bloke who is killed brutally in a police station. Martin Harris was strong, wiry, quite slightly built and balding. He had a beautiful baritone voice and a very volatile personality. He would sometimes have noisy altercations with another male actor as he came offstage, angry about some incident, real or imagined. Occasionally there would be fisticuffs. One night Martin failed to arrive at the theatre in time for the half-hour call so the stage manager had to drive around to his house to get him out of bed. I did not find out what was troubling Martin, but one day he turned his back on show business and disappeared from sight. Then someone told me they had seen him wandering aimlessly around the streets of Sydney. Quite recently, I was pleased to hear, he had managed to overcome his difficulties and is back in society, now pursuing a new career as an artist. John Ewart, the radio star famous for being Jimmy in the Argonauts, played the larrikin lawyer Cooley in Don’s Party. I 151

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was thrilled to be working with John, whose long career had begun on radio and in the film Sons of Matthew when he was just a teenager. Perth-born Judy Nunn, who had recently returned from England, played one of the two Liberal guests at the Labor Party function. I was cast as the downtrodden housewife and mother Jenny and I had my hair cut short and dyed brown for the part. Allan Lander played Mal, my psychologist husband, who thinks of himself as a real Casanova. I had a splendid time playing a scene where I reveal to his mates that he is actually terrified of women and is scared that he has a little dick. I was required to say the ‘magic word’ in one of my speeches and I was worried about how my parents would take it when they came to see the show, as it was one of the two words that we could never use in front of them. I didn’t tell Mum and Dad what to expect, and when I uttered the forbidden word my Dad’s laugh was the first and the loudest. But then he had been known to go to any show I was in and turn around to the people laughing in the next row to boast,‘That’s my daughter’. Kerry McGuire and Briony Behets were the two young, glamorous objects of desire in our touring production. Kerry was tall, dark and myopic; Briony was blonde, tanned and gorgeous. There were five women in the show and we were all dieting competitively for most of the run.We complained constantly about having to eat pizza on stage, as it was so fattening. We weighed ourselves every day and kept journals recording the number of calories we had consumed in the previous twentyfour hours.We all vied with each other to see who managed to weigh the least. One of the cast was bulimic and one night two of the girls almost passed out on stage because they had been sitting in the sauna for the entire afternoon. James H. Bowles played Mack, the keen amateur photographer and he really made the character his own. James didn’t look like an actor. He was born in Cooma and had experienced another life working in the Public Service before he decided to study drama at NIDA. He was a stocky redhead with a face full of freckles. He played Mack dressed in a burgundy blazer with 152

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a silver tankard tied around his neck. Sometimes when he walked on stage to make his first entrance, there would be a gasp of recognition from the audience, who seemed to think some stranger had accidentally found his way on stage. James was hilarious on stage, but behind the scenes he was often complaining of health problems and the rest of the cast dismissed him as a hypochondriac. He always looked the picture of health. We did not realise at the time that he had only a couple of years to live. Don’s Party started out as a capital city tour and the cast flew in comfort from state to state.We enjoyed pleasant living arrangements away from home and were all very happy. It was very civilised.We thought we would enjoy nine months away from home. We flew to Adelaide first. The theatre proved to be a disappointment. It was a converted cinema with carpet on the walls as well as the floor, which managed to swallow up the sound and we had to adjust to the difficult acoustic. The notices came out after opening night and it seemed everyone in South Australia had been under the false impression that Don’s Party was going to be a play about Don Dunstan, their unconventional Labor premier, who was famous for wearing pink shorts. I’m sure they were disappointed. The English actor, Robert Morley, was touring Australia in a production of Alan Ayckborn’s clever play, How the Other Half Loves. We found ourselves in Adelaide at the same time and were able to see a matinee of his delightful show; and he brought some of his company to see ours.When he was interviewed that week on television he advised the audience not to see his show, but to go instead to see David Williamson’s, which he described as a ‘golden play’. He was so impressed that he was partly responsible for its London production, which took place in 1976 at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. In that, my Mavis Bramston mate, Barry Creyton, played the Liberal Simon and Ray Barrett, Max Phipps,Veronica Lang and John Greggs were in the cast; all Australians apart from the one English actor, Tony Heygarth. Their director was talented 153

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Michael Blakemore, who was also from Australia.Although the British critics gave it a bit of a pasting, as they often do with works from Down Under, word of mouth proved to be helpful and it enjoyed a very good run. I had to take time out from our production of Don’s Party to fly to Launceston to do a week in Move Over Mrs Markham in the Princess Theatre. Carol Yelland, who had to cover all the women in Don’s Party, took over my role as Jenny for the short time I was away. One night in Launceston there was such a reaction to the final scene before interval that the show almost could not continue. Something happened that made one of the actors laugh. Then another one broke up, till finally everyone on stage was giggling except me. I was a bit cranky with everyone for cracking up, but the audience wore me down. They wanted me to laugh too so I had to oblige. The sound of the large audience roaring with laughter was like a gigantic wave crashing over the stage. After a week I was back in Adelaide with the cast of Don’s Party, getting ready for our next engagement at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne, where we enjoyed a good run of five weeks, although the play did experience a bit of a critical mauling. Leonard Glickfield and Barrie Watts both tore into David Williamson for the play he might have written, a criticism that is often levelled at David’s work. There were a few Melbourne–Sydney cracks as well and some about NIDA. Fortunately Gerald Mayhead of the Melbourne Herald loved it and encouraged people to see it. More positive press followed. Then I had to take another few days off to race back to Launceston for a reprise of Sticks and Bones. It’s a wonder I knew who I was or what play I was in. David Williamson and his wife decided to throw a party for the cast of his play on the last night of its Melbourne season. We couldn’t believe it when he served pizza for supper.We had been eating it on stage every night for the past four months. Maybe it was his idea of a joke. After our Melbourne run we flew the show to Tasmania, and the rest of the cast fell in love with the charms of Hobart 154

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and its Theatre Royal, where we played to packed houses for a couple of weeks. It was now the end of June 1973. Our next stop was Newcastle, north of Sydney.We were booked into the Hunter Theatre for ten days where there was standing room only for our last night. Two days later, on 10 July, we flew across the continent to Perth. We enjoyed a month working at The Playhouse and were able to explore some of the pleasures that Western Australia has to offer with the help of one of the locals, cast member Judy Nunn.We visited the winemaking regions to the north of Perth, where we were looked after so well we almost didn’t get back in time for the show. One Sunday, David Foster and I took a ferry over to Rottnest Island. As soon as the ship had left the wharf we noticed the bar was open and the passengers were all lining up. As it was quite early in the morning we were surprised that so many people would be interested in having a drink. Then we noticed that they were actually just collecting brown paper bags. I wondered why they were doing this till suddenly the boat began to roll about with the swell and everyone on board started to throw up into their open bags. David and I just managed to avoid joining them and were both very glad when we arrived at Rottnest, where we spent the day riding around the pretty island on ratty old rented pushbikes, the charming but aggressive quokkas in hot pursuit.We learnt the quokka is a small scrub wallaby, the Setonix Brachyurus, and is unique to that part of Australia. To the Dutch mariner Willem de Vlamingh, who visited the island in 1696, the creature looked just like a rat, so he named the place Rottnest, or Rat’s Nest. The tiny island was once used as a prison for Aborigines and later as an internment camp, but when we visited, it had become the much-loved summer resort for people from nearby Perth and Fremantle who were quite willing to put up with terrible seasickness to visit their holiday shacks every weekend. We stayed in a pleasant apartment building in Perth overlooking the Swan River. The owner was a charming 155

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Hungarian with the fascinating name of Zoltan. He made sure that the cast had every comfort, so we hated to leave. By August our Perth season had finished and we were back in Melbourne. Then we were told we had been booked to do what amounted to a country town tour, doing one-night stands in Bendigo,Wangaratta, Benalla,Albury, Canberra, Shepparton, Mildura, Horsham and Warrnambool, and travelling together on a bus. We played in town halls and civic centres and the company fast began to disintegrate. We had to eat fast food in milk bars because that was all that was available in country towns at the time—the girls stopped eating altogether. Jimmy Bowles played the same country music tapes on the bus all the time and it was sending the rest of us mad. We were fighting over the limited accommodation available in the towns we visited—it was often a case of the first to get off the bus managed to get the bed. Some of us ended up sleeping in caravan parks or in fruit pickers’ huts. Four of us even slept in a double-decker bus. I came down with dysentery. The boys were fighting. There was a rumour that one of the actors had actually threatened the life of one of the girls; we heard he even had a gun.We were starting to hate one another. There was an incident with the police but John Ewart stepped in and saved the day. In spite of all this, the show was a success and extended its run to October l973. We couldn’t wait for that day to arrive. We left town the morning after our last performance, having finished the tour hardly talking. I flew back home and came down with mumps. As soon as my face had returned to normal my agent arranged an appointment for me to meet Margaret Fink to discuss a possible part in the film she was making of David Williamson’s play, The Removalists. This was to be Margaret’s first venture into movie production. Martin Harris was already booked to play the part he had made so memorable on stage and I was up for one of the women’s roles. I took a taxi to Margaret’s beautiful house, which she shared with her husband, the developer Leon Fink. Leon met me at the door and let me in. I could see a group of men playing cards in the study 156

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nearby. One of them I recognised as the Phillip Street Theatre’s head writer, John McKellar. Leon disappeared for a while, after saying that he would let Margaret know that I had arrived. Time went by and I was still waiting in the hall. I took in the décor, investigated the bookshelves and admired Margaret’s obviously artistic touch. There was a gorgeous little wooden mouse on a bicycle perfectly framed by a tiny window. I could just see into her admirable kitchen, which featured early trendsetting stainless steel finishes. There was a tall cake stand with a glass dome sitting on a high bench-top and I could see dozens of snowy white meringues scattered all over the kitchen floor. Leon came downstairs a little while later and told me that Margaret had come down with a severe migraine and would have to call off our meeting. Kate Fitzpatrick eventually got the part and she was perfect in the film playing Jacki Weaver’s older sister Mrs Kate Mason, the wife of a dentist. At the same time I had been asked to audition for a role in a major musical but told the producers I was not right for the part. I had chickened out at the thought of singing with a full orchestra, my old lack of confidence rearing its ugly head. I talked myself out of a job. Then, weeks later, I did it again. David Williamson’s autobiographical play What if I Died Tomorrow? was going to London and I was asked to read for the part of the editor who has an affair with the writer. I had been to see the play and liked it, but in an attack of prudishness, I decided I didn’t want to strip down to my underwear on stage. When Jacki Weaver heard this she asked me, quite sensibly, ‘What’s wrong with your body?’ I hadn’t thought of it like that, I must admit, and I was in pretty good shape at the time. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was exhausted after having been on the road for so long and that my attack of mumps had left me weaker than I thought. I decided to accept a part in the musical tribute to Noel Coward, Cowardy Custard when it was offered to me. I knew I had to stop being terrified of working in the musical theatre and the best way to beat it was to do it. 157

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We rehearsed through December and opened on 2 January 1974 at the Community Theatre in Marian Street, Killara. The theatre has had many names over the years, including Northside but it was always known popularly as Marian Street Theatre. Others in our cast were the tall, suave Ric Hutton, who was a popular stage and radio star; Raymond Duparc, an English actor with a beautiful tenor voice; song and dance man Doug Kingsman; the renowned musical comedy star, Sheila Bradley; a wonderful young soprano, Rona Coleman; and a delightful newcomer to Australia, Zimbabwean-born Angus McLean, who was also a talented singer. Ours was a much smaller cast than the original British one, so we knew we had to do a lot of doubling up in the show. I was surrounded by people with wonderful singing voices and I didn’t want to let the show down so I arranged to take regular lessons with Josie Kean in her home in Roslyn Gardens at six dollars a session. I visited her till I felt more confident. I heard from Barry Creyton that he was playing in Cowardy Custard in England at the same time. He said he wished that we could have done it together. The director for our Sydney show was Alistair Duncan, who is best remembered for his long and distinguished career on radio and as a voice-over specialist. He was running Marian Street at the time. He was aided by Doug Kingsman, who directed the musical numbers, while Bobby Lloyd and Robert Goss designed the sets and costumes. Ric Hutton and I shared the beautiful duet ‘Some Day I’ll Find You’, which we did in the style of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, or so we hoped. During rehearsals,Alistair called out, ‘Don’t sing’. I imagined it had to be because of my rotten voice, but he thought one of my songs would work better with the words spoken to music. He was right and it worked very well. The ebullient cast all tried to outdo each other playing the grass-skirted native chorus in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. I would have killed for the point number,‘I Went to a Marvellous Party’, and couldn’t believe my good fortune that it was part of my material. I played it getting drunker and drunker as the song progressed, shamelessly showing off. 158

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We tried the show out in Canberra at the Playhouse prior to its Sydney opening, which was a luxury you don’t often get in Australian theatre. While we were working in the national capital, a distinguished diplomat came to watch nearly every performance. He was Dr Robert Lardner, the handsome Austrian Ambassador to Australia. Evidently he was a great fan of the work of Noel Coward and he came backstage to congratulate the cast and to tell us how much he loved the show. He demonstrated his appreciation by entertaining us all at a supper party at the Austrian embassy in Canberra. At the end of the evening he made a charming little speech about how much he had enjoyed our performances. Ric Hutton responded with a quite lengthy speech without notes and in fluent German. We were all amazed. We had not realised that Ric had been born anywhere but in Australia. We took the show back to Marian Street and sweated through a Sydney heatwave, in the days before money was raised to air-condition the theatre. Dr Lardner flew to Sydney to see the show again. He arrived late, after curtain up, complaining loudly of the distance from the airport to Killara and calling out to the cast that he had arrived. The month after we finished our season, John Meillon and I appeared together again, this time in a three-part series written for the ABC by actor and writer Michael Craig. The Fourth Wish is the story of a young boy who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Mark Shields-Brown played the child being brought up by his father after his troubled mother deserted them. The father does not tell his son the truth about his mother’s whereabouts. He also tries to hide the seriousness of his child’s illness from him. One night the father asks his son to tell him the three things he most desires, and then goes about trying to grant those wishes. I had the part of the boy’s estranged mother who was living a tough life in another city. The father tracks her down, after his son expresses a desire to see her. Mother and child are reunited briefly and the three of them spend a weekend together as a family. Mark ShieldsBrown was very good as the boy and Meillon was wonderful 159

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as the father. It was a very moving story. When my character breaks down in a taxi, as she leaves her son for the last time, my tears were real. John Meillon was fine during the rehearsal period and the filming and he didn’t seem to be drinking at all on the set, although we had to shoot some of our scenes at Luna Park and for some reason John refused to go on any of the rides. Mark Shields-Brown and I had to pretend to be having a good time as we shrieked together on The Octopus. Every time we passed John he would toast us with a can of Fosters. The series won several awards, mainly for the fine performance from John Meillon and for Michael Craig’s sensitive script. I was delighted to be asked to perform at the Sydney Opera House when it finally opened, after years of controversy, in October 1973. The University of NSW Drama Foundation presented The Old Tote Theatre Company’s version of Three Men on a Horse, a play written in the 1930s by the veteran American authors, John Cecil Holm and George Abbott. Ted Craig directed the show and the cast was thrilled to be working at the fabulous venue. David Brown, who had also started his career in show business at the Pocket Playhouse, was the Opera House’s publicity manager and he proudly gave us a tour of the building. Three Men on a Horse had a cast of fifteen and we all revelled in the smart dressing room facilities and the availability of the huge Green Room where we could mix with opera singers, wandering around in full costume and makeup. Backstage glamour is a very rare thing in Australian show business. I was always nervous about having to catch a lift to get to the stage, in case it broke down. Norman Kaye was perfectly cast in Three Men on a Horse as the mild mannered Erwin who has worked all his life for a greeting card company. Because of his uncanny ability to forecast winners at the races, Erwin finds himself in the unlikely company of gamblers and gangsters with names like, Charlie, Frankie and Patsy—played with great gusto by a handsome actor not long out of NIDA, the young Ivar Kants, 160

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and two veteran performers, the comedian Al Thomas and Robert Levis. Phillip Street revue funny girl, Barbara Wyndon, was given the role of a Hollywood gossip columnist, dressed in a smart suit and ‘set of foxes’ around her shoulders that appeared to be devouring one another. The young Ingrid Mason, who would later blush so prettily in Blankety Blanks, was also in the show, along with Robin Bowering and Craig Ashley. The designer was Ann Fraser and her sets for the difficult letterbox stage with concentric revolves for quick scene changes were exceptional. I played the part of Mabel, an ex-Follies chorus girl. I loved the character because she was deliciously daffy and not just a tough dame, as I was nearly always cast on television. I didn’t let on to anyone that Mabel was also my own middle name. I was required to do a little dance routine in a scene with Norman Kaye and the choreographer appeared only once and late in rehearsal, giving me almost no time to work on it. In that scene I had to take my dress off, revealing a fetching set of pink camiknickers to an astonished Norman Kaye. When we were on stage for our full dress rehearsal I peeled my costume over my head and my platinum wig flew off and travelled some distance into the orchestra pit. The wardrobe department hastily sewed in a zip so I could step out of the dress more easily and also keep my hair on. The reviews were good. ‘A runaway success’, pronounced Romola Constantino, borrowing the horseracing parlance, and ‘a rollicking piece of escapism’, declared Robin Ingram in the Sun. We were still playing when the Opera House celebrated its first birthday in October 1974. I celebrated my birthday in the same month. I turned thirty-six and I considered myself a contented single woman after David and I had come to the mutual conclusion that we were definitely not compatible. I went straight into the Feydeau farce, Hotel Paradiso for the same company. This time Norman Kaye was cast as Monsieur Boniface, a French builder, and I was Angelique, his overbearing ‘gorgon of a wife’, as Romola Constantino described her 161

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later in the Sun-Herald. The three-act play boasted a cast of about twenty, including Ivar Kants and kittenish Brisbane blonde Judith Arthy, who played the character my stage husband desired but who was inconveniently married to another, a character played by Reg Gillam. NIDA instructor Kevin Jackson, Ronald Falk, Ingrid Mason and Al Thomas were all in the show and the four pretty schoolgirls were played by Julieanne Newbould, Angela Punch—before she married Ross McGregor and added his name with a hyphen—Jennifer Cluff and Zoe Lake. The inventive but eccentric English classical actor Ralph Cotterill used to ride his pushbike to rehearsals and he would often give me puzzled looks while I was working. George Whaley, the director, and I had decided that I should be padded up for my role of the haughty matron, so I was giving a very fat performance even though I was thin. When it came time for the full dress rehearsal and I was in my padded costume for the first time, Ralph appeared to be somewhat relieved. ‘Now I know what you were up to’, he remarked, smiling at me for the very first time. I loved farce and enjoyed the energy required to play it on stage. I was interested to read that Feydeau once said, ‘In comedy there are two leading characters—the one who delivers the kicks to the backside and the one who receives them. The one who delivers them never gets the laughs—only the one who receives them.’ His characters in Paradiso are all unpleasant so it is easy to laugh at their misfortunes. The notices were favourable and Jock Veitch said in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Hotel Paradiso is three hours of solid audience laughter’. I was pleased to be part of the process of bringing pleasure to a delighted audience. However, I was about to find that my audience would be increased from merely hundreds to millions of people all over Australia.

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NINE

MY NAKED VICAR AND A WEDDING My morning sleep was disturbed by a telephone call that would change my life forever. There was an old man on the phone and his first words to me were: ‘I don’t suppose you’d want to be in a new comedy show?’. Not a very promising start to the conversation. When the senior citizen went on to explain that the show would be for radio only and that they would be recording it early on New Year’s Day at the ABC for a company known as RS Productions, I almost agreed that I wouldn’t want to be in it. But as the play I was working in had only another few weeks to run, and I didn’t have anything following it, I accepted the engagement then and there. The cast of Hotel Paradiso enjoyed a small after-show party at the theatre to celebrate the 1975 New Year, and I stayed longer than I had intended. I was reasonably underwhelmed when the sun hit my face a few hours later and I realised I had to get out of bed and be at work by nine o’clock. When I arrived at the ABC studios, a short distance from my home, I discovered the old man who had asked me to do the show was actually a remarkably young person. When he introduced himself as Tony Sattler, I recognised the distinctive, slightly shaky voice I had spoken to on the phone. Even at that 163

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time of the morning and in my condition I could see that Tony was very pleasant looking. He was just below six-foot tall, with a very slim build, and he wore his fine, silky brown hair very long and straight. He had neat, close-fitting ears and a longish nose with a slight bump and a large, coarse, bristling moustache that totally obscured his upper lip. I noticed, however, that his lower lip was delightfully full. Tony was wearing a faded blue denim jacket and matching jeans and a very desirable pair of tan cowboy boots. As we talked we discovered we had both been living in Tasmania at the same time, when he had a job writing copy with the advertising agency Jackson Wain and I was just around the corner at the Theatre Royal. I thought Tony’s writing partner Gary Reilly looked rather like an American Indian brave. He was tall and thin and slightly round-shouldered. He had long, dark brown messy hair and a very distinctive profile, which has sometimes been compared unkindly to a dorsal fin. Gary was also dressed in faded jeans and boots. Intially I wasn’t quite sure which one was Tony and which one was Gary, or if they were a couple, so I resorted to calling them both ‘darling’. They were keen to get into comedy and escape from the world of advertising and their opportunity arrived when they saw an advertisement calling for people to staff a new radio station the ABC hoped would appeal to a younger audience. Tony and Gary quickly arranged a meeting with Arthur Wyndham, then the Director of Radio One. Arthur joked he had been with the corporation since the days when any remittance man with a hyphen could get his own department. At the time the three of them met in the brand new offices of 2JJ, there was not a skerrick of furniture, so they had to perch uncomfortably on upturned waste paper bins. Tony and Gary explained to Arthur that they didn’t really want a job at the station, but would like to write material for it. However, they insisted they must be able to produce their shows themselves, as they’d hated what had happened to some of the work they had submitted in the past. Arthur Wyndham commissioned Tony and Gary to write a serial for the new 164

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station. They went to work immediately and created Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol. Roger Newcombe, a young Canadian actor, was perfectly cast in the role of Chuck. Ross Higgins, singer and advertising voice-over expert, played a host of different characters and I was given the role of Fay Fondle, a woman madly in love with Chuck but never able to drag him to the altar. The anti-hero Chuck Chunder was portrayed as a quivering coward, who would send his fiancée Fay out to fight interplanetary monsters or to forage for food. My fee for that first day working for RS Productions was eighty dollars, which I thought was more than fair at a time when actors were usually paid peanuts for radio work. We recorded Chuck Chunder in a little booth just off Studio 221 in Upper Forbes Street. Our sound engineer was Mike Byrne, who was tall and lean with a particularly neat full beard. Mike had left the navy to work for the ABC and looked just like the character on the label of Navy Cut tobacco tins. I discovered Tony and Gary had a completely new approach to radio.Actors usually had to share one microphone in a studio so they were often forced to jostle for a place close to the mike just to be heard. I always thought it was impolite to elbow a senior actor out of the way when it was my turn to speak, so I often sounded as if I was doing my part in another country. Tony and Gary made sure we had two microphones in the booth and we each had our own set of headphones so we could check our sound levels as we worked. Ross and Roger worked on one microphone and I usually had the other all to myself. Roger was very short and Ross was very tall so Ross used to have to bend his knees in an effort to get closer to the microphone until Mike Byrne commandeered a couple of telephone books to jack Roger up to somewhere approaching Ross’s height. Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol went to air on Alan McGirvan’s morning program and drew a big audience. Mike Byrne developed a great fondness for Chuck and he begged Tony and Gary not to let Chuck marry Fay. But in time they did, after two hundred episodes. There was a big wedding and 165

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that was the end of the series. The show proved to be very popular around Australia and even went on to achieve an overseas sale, all the way to New Zealand. Just before the last recording of Chuck Chunder I fell in love with a house. It was a narrow terrace in the decidedly unfashionable inner city suburb of Pyrmont. I had often passed the row of tall stone houses in the bus on my way to town from my parents’ home. They had been neglected and were covered in more than a century of grime, but I could see what handsome buildings they had once been. I liked to imagine how they would look if they were cleaned up and I longed to look inside. One day I was passing and I was surprised to see someone else had seen the same possibilities—the terraces had been steam cleaned and renovated. The grimy convict-hewn sandstone had been restored to a beautiful pale gold and there was a ‘For Sale’ sign on number fourteen. I knew I had to have that house. I had no money to speak of and it was just about impossible for a single woman to obtain a loan in the mid-1970s. Ever the optimist, I made an appointment with the manager at a bank in nearby Balmain. I stammered my request for money and he asked me what I did for a living. I whispered that I was in show business. He frowned. I told him I played Fay Fondle in Chuck Chunder. He smiled and gave me the money. I moved in as soon as the ink was dry on the contract. Pyrmont had its beginnings in 1795 when Thomas Jones was granted fifty-five acres of land. It was sold later for a quantity of rum. The suburb got its name in 1806 when, during an excursion by a group of fashionable young things, one of them remarked on the beautiful natural springs and compared the land to Pyrmont, a popular spa near Hanover in Germany. Sydney’s Pyrmont had once been a beautiful suburb, with dwellings built mainly from locally quarried golden sandstone. At one time there had been mansions within walled gardens and rows of two- and three-storey terraces like mine, built in a simple design lining the narrow streets. There were shipyards on the waterfront and a wooden toll bridge that took goods into the city. The residents of Pyrmont were once 166

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captains of sailing vessels, engineers, shipwrights, stonemasons and quarrymen, and they were all employed in the area. When I first bought my house Pyrmont was regarded as a slum. It was well before there was any thought of redeveloping Darling Harbour. Most of the grand houses and sandstone terraces had been demolished to make way for heavy industry and car parks. Pyrmont Power Station, the last coal-fired steam generator to be built in Sydney, belched smoke into the air twenty-four hours a day not far from my home, and ugly factories replaced the old Pyrmont baths. There were still a couple of working docks and also some public housing. The old tenement flats at Pyrmont Point, tied together by the washing permanently flapping on the balconies, had some of the best views in Sydney for some of the poorest people. Many of the old residents had spent a lifetime working with local industries such as CSR. I met one elderly neighbour who described the long illness of her late husband, the cause of which was almost certainly work-related. When he died, the company he had worked for all his life paid to have a new bathroom installed in her house and she was more than satisfied. She took me inside and proudly showed me the new little room. I couldn’t help feeling that it was a small price to pay for a person’s life. My new neighbours were Marilyn, a barmaid at one of the local hotels, and her butcher husband. They reminded me of one of Roy Rene Mo’s regular radio sketches, which began with Mo reciting ‘The Barmaid and the Butcher’. Mo was always stopped before he could get to the dirty bit, causing him to slobber all over the microphone. Marilyn was a large woman in her late thirties with a towering ox-blood beehive, like Marge’s in The Simpsons. She loved a drink and once told me she might have ‘twenty-seven stubbies doing the ironing’. She and her husband had been married for a long time and had been trying to have children for many years without success, so Marilyn made an appointment with a fertility specialist.When the doctor met Marilyn he quizzed her about her lifestyle. She agreed to give up smoking and when she was asked, ‘Do you drink?’ Marilyn played it rather coyly. 167

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‘I might have a beer sometimes’, she replied. ‘Would it be more than one?’ Marilyn fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Would it be, say, a couple of middies?’ the doctor enquired. Marilyn, not wishing to incriminate herself, asked innocently, ‘What’s a middy?’ Shortly after her visit to the doctor and following an unusually dry spell for Marilyn when she actually went off the grog completely, she did manage to fall pregnant. She is the only woman I have ever met who actually lost weight having a baby. Next door to Marilyn’s house was a little dark greengrocer’s shop run by a Lebanese family, who sometimes employed one of the locals to help out—Bridie O’Reilly, an old Pyrmont identity. Bridie had a huge growth on one side of her face that looked rather like a cauliflower and it dragged her face to one side. She had undergone surgery to remove some of the growth when she was young, but it had grown back and was horribly disfiguring. It was difficult to have a conversation with Bridie, although she loved to talk, but when you did manage to understand what she was saying it was always worthwhile. Bridie knew all the Pyrmont stories. She had been married twice and given birth to several children and had never moved out of the area. She told me how in the old days, the men would take their pay packets on a Friday and go to the hotels to drink. The wives would leave their husbands’ dinners on a plate covered with a saucepan lid in a low oven and take their kids and huddle together in the bus shelters for the night. They would only return in the morning when they knew their men would be unconscious and sleeping it off. Bridie also told me about a character she knew as ‘Mr Giraffe’, who was once one of the regular drinkers at the pub on the corner. He always carried a Gladstone bag when he went in for a beer. One day someone sneaked it open. In it, she swears, they discovered the head of his wife. 168

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An actor friend of mine, Melissa Jaffer, opened a beauty salon just around the corner in nearby Harris Street. Melissa had taken a year off from the acting profession to study in London with the innovative hairdresser Vidal Sassoon and she brought back to Australia some new and interesting techniques. Her salon quickly became a popular meeting place for many of the women in the community. Melissa was always charming and welcoming, even though Marilyn would pop in every day of the week with a bottle of champagne and a flute and would sometimes shout expletives from under the hair dryer. The talk in the salon one morning was about federal politics and how the Liberals were blocking supply in an attempt to force the Labor government to an election. It was a time of great anxiety in the neighbourhood. I had taken my little radio with me while I had my hair done, as I felt that something terrible was about to happen. And then I heard it. I grabbed a taxi and flew into the RS Production offices to deliver the news. Gough Whitlam, our elected prime minister, had just been sacked by the Governor-General. Tony and Gary were shocked and all my other friends were equally stunned.We shouted it was the ‘death of democracy in Australia’.We ‘maintained our rage’, as Gough asked us to.We took to the streets as ‘Artists for Democracy’. We filled Paddington Town Hall. We attended rallies wearing our ‘Shame, Frazer, Shame’ badges. I covered myself with as many messages of protest as I could find to wear to a march, along with other political curiosities that I had collected over the years. Notable among these was an old American campaign badge that I had treasured since it was given to me by Robert Hughes years before. ‘You Can’t Lick Our Dick’, it stated proudly. It had actually come from the Richard Nixon Republican campaign office. Nothing helped. The conservatives were back in power. Malcolm Fraser, nicknamed ‘The Prefect’, was Australia’s new prime minister. I read at the time that his hobbies included fishing, vintage cars and motorcycles.‘Well, the arts are stuffed’, I cried. I went back to radio. Tony and Gary had come up with a new series for the ABC. This time they had written about 169

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totally incompetent medicos and called the show Doctors and Nurses. Mike Byrne was with us again as engineer, in spite of his disapproval of the marriage of Chuck Chunder to Fay Fondle. Ross Higgins was cast with me and Kev Golsby, another specialist in voice work. Kev joined us after having impressed Tony and Gary when he came on board for the last few episodes of Chuck Chunder. Kev played the smooth but incredibly stupid surgeon Mark Temple and Ross was a very peculiar anaesthetist called Harry Stones. I was Nurse Marcia Bronsky, the practical one. I couldn’t help noticing the women always seemed to solve the problems in RS radio productions. Doctors and Nurses was immediately taken to heart by the medical profession and some of them wrote to the producers saying they were convinced the writers must have worked in a hospital to have such inside knowledge of the system. One hundred and thirty episodes were made and it played in all of the states of Australia and was sold to Hong Kong. I don’t know what they made of it there. Not long after we finished Doctors and Nurses we started a new half-hour sketch show, commissioned for radio by Arthur Wyndham. Julie-Anne Ford, who was Head of Drama at the ABC, was our executive producer. Tony and Gary hit upon a suitable title for the show after reading about a cleric in Europe who had been found dead of a heart attack, naked in a brothel. The official story given to the press was that the priest had answered a telephone call from a distressed parishioner and had run all the way to the address on the other side of town, causing him to overheat. When he arrived, panting, at his destination, he had been forced to remove all his clothes. The Naked Vicar Show was born. Tony and Gary talked our sound engineer into taking off his clothes to play the Vicar for a publicity shot. Mike Byrne was photographed in front of a potted palm, looking very formal, wearing only a beard, a clerical collar and carrying a Bible, which he held over his naughty bits. The two writers started full of enthusiasm but they often had to work terrible hours to come up with the material they 170

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needed week after week for the radio show. They complained once that they would get into the office some mornings and stare at the typewriter till blood formed on their foreheads. Actually, Tony did all the typing, as Gary couldn’t use a keyboard because he had bitten his fingernails down to the quick and it hurt too much. For the three performers, Ross Higgins, Kev Golsby and me, The Naked Vicar was easy work and we loved it.We just had to read from the script. No learning required. We would rehearse the show a couple of times and then perform it in front of a live audience of some 200 people on Saturday afternoons in Studio 221 in Upper Forbes Street. It had been a long time since radio shows had been staged in front of an audience and people seemed to love it. Mike Byrne recorded us in stereo and rigged microphones throughout the audience so they became very much part of the show. A visiting producer from England asked if he could buy The Naked Vicar laugh track, and Tony and Gary had great delight in informing him that no, he couldn’t. It was real laughter coming from the real live audience who were having a good time on the day. Our musical director was the ex-Dalmatian-ex-New Zealander, Michael Perjanik. Everyone used to refer to Mike by his surname and Graham Kennedy later said it made him sound like a vacuum cleaner.‘Go and plug in the Perjanik’, he would joke. Mike and his band of eight top musicians were an integral part of the program and every week they showcased the talents of some of Australia’s best singers. We were lucky enough to have Doug Parkinson for our very first Naked Vicar Show and most of Australia’s top performers, including John Farnham, Kerrie Bidell and Renee Geyer featured in the show during its run. Tony and Gary liked having the musical segment because it meant they didn’t have to write the full half-hour. The Naked Vicar Show went to air on Sundays, nationally, at one o’clock on ABC Radio One. The first program was greeted with enthusiasm by the press and the listening public and we had no difficulty recruiting audiences to attend the 171

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subsequent Saturday afternoon recordings. Cartoonists had a field day, drawing crazed clergymen running naked through the streets and on 13 May 1976, in a column headed ‘Nothing sacred to the Naked Vicar’, journalist Valerie Lawson quoted from the ‘news’ broadcast at the start of that first show: ‘Today the Governor-General will fly to Adelaide to address a riot in his honour and then attend an official snub from the Premier of South Australia’. Obviously RS Productions was still maintaining the rage. There were regular sketches in the show that became instant favourites with our audiences, like the mock gardening segment called ‘Getting Rooted’, where both Kev and Ross whistled like the beloved green-thumbed Australian icon Alan Seale as they spoke about their secateurs, their thistles and their sap-sucking insect pests. It was obvious to everyone that The Naked Vicar Show would be ideal for television and all of those involved in the series were eager to make the transition. However the Department of Light Entertainment at ABC-TV rejected the idea.We were all disappointed but I had something else to move on to. Phillip Street writer John McKellar had asked me to take over from Maggie Dence in a show he had written with Ron Frazer. The play was Girls’ Night Out, which had been running in Sydney at Jools Theatre Restaurant for six months. I was familiar with the show because I had already stepped in for Barbara Wyndon when she had to go to hospital for a few weeks. The theatre was in Crown Street, which for a long time had enjoyed the reputation of being part of Sydney’s red light district. The venue was opened a couple of years before by two unlikely partners: one was the speed ice-skating champion, straight-talking Dawn O’Donnell and the other was the exotic, hirsute Frenchman Roger Claude Teyssedre, who later died of complications from AIDS. (His gay lover Ludwig Gertsch would later be found murdered after inheriting Roger Claude’s fortune.) I was unsure of Roger Claude’s sexuality when we first met, as he used to flirt outrageously with everyone. Jools had been designed to become a casino but its licence had never materialised. The front of house was over-decorated, like a 172

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French bordello, but the backstage conditions were very ordinary indeed. Ronnie Frazer and I were old friends from the Bramston days, when he had become a favourite with the audiences for his portrayal of the cravat-wearing snob Hugo, and for his ‘Second Best Friend’ sketches. I had visited Ron and his elderly maiden aunt many times in their beautiful Astor apartment building in Macquarie Street, with its lovely views over the Botanic Gardens and Sydney Harbour. His co-writer John McKellar and I had known each other from the days of What’s New?. Ronnie Frazer also played one of the central characters in Girls’ Night Out and James Bowles, the hilarious Mack from our Don’s Party tour, played Ronnie’s sidekick, but he became unwell during the run. The mysterious pain that had plagued him in Don’s Party had returned and would eventually take him out of the show. Roger Claude often came backstage to see the actors, just after helping himself to some cash from the till. He was a flashy dresser and usually wore massive gold chains around his neck, with a gold cross lurking in his luxurious chest hair, and enormous rings on most of his fingers. He would then do the rounds of the restaurant floor, flirting with everyone in the audience, whatever their sex. Because Roger Claude was Parisborn, the menu at Jools was somewhat French inspired. It included onion soup, prawn cocktail imperial, paté—described on the menu as having ‘an unusual texture’—and Russian eggs. The main courses were steak barbeque aux herbes, chicken a la Lyonnaise, and veal Danielle. For dessert you could toss up between chocolate mousse or fruit pie and ice cream. Everyone had garlic bread. Most of the wines came from Seppelts, with an emphasis on German styles like moselle and riesling. Cold Duck was top of the list for the sparkling wines. Well-known sporting identities appeared at Jools and sometimes shouting took place between Roger Claude and a tearful young man, but the cast tried not to notice the drama backstage. Girls Night Out had a fairly slight plot. It was the story of a group of women out on the town, who finish up in 173

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a place not unlike Jools where they meet two men sitting at the next table. Maggie Dence, Bernadette Hughson, Maureen Elkner, Barbara Wyndon, and Robina Beard made up the women in the cast and when sickness took James Bowles out of the show, his part was taken over by John Colby. Danny Adcock was cast as the comic waiter. Ronnie Frazer played the gormless main character in a loud check jacket and Gold Coast property developer white shoes. The girls were dressed by Osti. Tony Sattler and Gary Reilly decided to see the show one night because they had been approached by two businessmen about the possibility of staging The Naked Vicar at another theatre restaurant in Kensington, which had the rather suspect name of The Speakeasy. I think Tony was a bit shocked to see me playing an old bag in a wig and glasses. I came out on stage at the end of the evening and a huge Maori drag queen wearing a halter neck top, exposing the massive shoulders of a front-row forward, jumped up from the audience and stood in front of me, basking in the stolen spotlight. Tony and Gary saw the crowd at Jools that night and decided a stage show might be a profitable experience. They called a meeting with The Naked Vicar actors and proposed a cooperative venture. They warned us that we could all be taking a risk, but they believed it could be very rewarding. I was keen to do it. I had the house to pay off. Tony and Gary booked jazz singer Kerrie Bidell to join us, making it a cast of four. Tessa Mallos was brought in to understudy the two girls and stage manage. Tessa and I had to give our producers a crash course in staging a show as they had not had any previous experience in the theatre. I was also allowed to design the costumes and one of my friends, the young fashion designer Jill Fitzsimon, provided us with some of her glamorous gowns, which was a great help to the budget. Dinner and tickets to the show at The Speakeasy set the punters back ten dollars a head during the week, or twelve on weekends. The menu was fairly limited. Soup du jour or a seafood cocktail were the only two choices for entrees. The mains were either fillet steak a la maison or chicken Hawaiian 174

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and desserts were either apple slice or cheese cake. The chicken Hawaiian was probably only chicken Maryland, but they would have swapped the banana for a pineapple ring. It was obviously well before the restaurant revolution hit Australia. The two partners who ran the nightclub were originally from Turkey and they were often at loggerheads over some matter that just may have been drug related, as one of them later went to jail for possession. They employed a dangerous Irish barman who once attempted to attack me sexually. I was shocked when it happened and imagined that it was somehow my fault; that I must have led him on without realising it. I chose not to tell anyone about the incident and from that day on I always made certain I was never alone with him. I just couldn’t explain to anyone why I didn’t want to have a drink at the bar after work any more. I heard later that the same man had threatened Kev Golsby one night with a knife, simply over a line he had to say in the show. I loved working on The Naked Vicar and admired its two writers tremendously. They gave us new material every night and I couldn’t wait to open my script to see what they had written. The stage venture was working well for us, artistically and financially. I was having more fun in the business than I had ever had before and I knew that Tony and Gary were pleased with my work. One day when they were not particularly happy with the way a new sketch was working, I overheard Gary say to Tony, ‘Don’t worry. Noeline will fix it.’ What no one in the company suspected was that Tony Sattler and I were in love. He asked me to lunch one day and didn’t go home again. He took me completely by surprise when he told me he was in love with me and wanted us to live together. He literally swept me off my feet, and I realised that I felt the same way about him. I had deliberately not encouraged him because we were both married to other people at the time. Tony and his wife Anita had been together for five years and I was still legally Mrs Taylor, even though Derek and I had only lived together for a matter of months. I had not bothered to apply for a divorce because I was convinced that I never 175

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wanted to marry again. Derek had also found someone else but didn’t feel the need to change our arrangement. I had no wish to wreck Tony’s marriage and I was also worried about the difference in our ages. I was nine years older, and I was not optimistic about the long-term future of our relationship. In spite of our feelings of guilt and my uncertainty, we were blissfully happy together and Tony insisted I apply for a divorce. ‘Men need to be married’, he informed me, which I now know to be true. Tony can be very persistent, and I obliged, a statement that might shock my feminist friends. I had never really wanted to give up my freedom. I always saw myself living on my own.When I was a kid I used to say I wanted to be a thirtyyear-old widow, after having seen a film where a woman wore little black dresses and hats with fetching veils. I must have felt ready this time. Tony and I were having a passionate affair and sometimes when we were together my feelings for him were so intense I could hardly breathe. He brought his clothes and a stack of records with him and we settled in to my little old house that The Naked Vicar had helped to buy in Union Street in Pyrmont. One night Vadim appeared at The Speakeasy. I hadn’t seen him since he shut down his restaurant several years before. He and his girlfriend, Patsy, came to see our show, but had to watch it from the bar because the house was full. I was astonished when he told me he was now working as an accountant and had a job with the Public Service. He said that meeting Patsy had ‘saved his life’. I imagined that meant he had stopped gambling. Tony and I asked them to dinner and we had a riotous meal at home in our basement dining room, recalling when Vadim’s was the only place in town, and regretting the passing of an era. I loved cooking and feeding people and always went to great trouble and effort. I invited all my friends and all of Tony’s to eat with us, as I wanted them to see how happy we were. I asked Frank Hardy, my colleague from Would You Believe? to lunch to celebrate his new book, But the Dead Are Many, which had just come out to rave reviews worldwide. 176

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I walked down to the nearby Fish Market in the morning to buy the ingredients for my version of bouillabaisse and Tony supplied some fabulous wine. Frank came to lunch alone and brought along a copy of the book, which he inscribed ‘To Noeleen’. I ignored the incorrect spelling and read on: ‘With affection and some love—you really are one of my favourite people—good luck, Brownie!’ He signed it and charged us $9.95, the recommended retail price. The season at The Speakeasy was going very well.We were making lots of money and soon after both of our divorces were finalised, Tony and I made plans to get married. Just before the day of our wedding, Tony brought a stranger home for dinner. He was a doctor, a jolly person with extremely curly dark hair and little round glasses. He had come up with an idea for a film and wanted Tony and Gary to write the screenplay. After he discussed the synopsis with the two of them at their office, Tony asked him home to meet me. During dinner I heard the storyline, a dark tale of anarchy, chaos and revenge. The doctor wanted to make a comedy out of it. By the end of the night Tony told him he didn’t think there was anything funny about the idea and that he was sure he and his partner could not work on it. George Miller went on to write Mad Max himself and the rest, as they say, is history. Tony and I were to be married by the Reverend John Beer, which seemed appropriate according to most of Tony’s friends. We met the Reverend at his home in Marrickville to discuss the ceremony. He told us he was without a church at the time but he could borrow one of a friend’s at Waverley. On l August 1976, otherwise known as Horses’ Birthday, Tony and I climbed into our Mini Moke and drove across town from the home we shared to the borrowed chapel in the Eastern suburbs. Tony was not dressed in his usual denims that day, which would have come as a surprise to most of the guests at the wedding. He wore a new coffee-coloured suit with a white shirt and a rather subdued tie. His pants must have been flared, being the height of fashion in the mid-1970s, but apparently 177

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not overly so judging from the few photographs we have of the day. My dress was from Cash Palace in Oxford Street. It was floor length, covering my towering platform wedges, and made of sueded cream silk. It had an old Japanese kimono panel, front and back, with screen-printed patterns of oriental flowers in shades of turquoise and coral. I carried a single longstemmed cream flower of some kind, possibly a lily, which was more than a trifle limp by the time we reached Waverley because we drove all the way in the Moke with the top down. When we found the chapel we were shocked to discover that it was immense. St Marys in Birrell Street, Waverley, was high Church of England, built of stone and it looked as if it could seat about a thousand worshippers. Tony and I had invited no more than fifty people. Friends and family all huddled together in the first few rows. I had to walk forever, or so it seemed, down the long aisle to get to the groom. I have no idea what sort of music was playing, if any. Poor Tony was nearly fainting from nerves when I eventually joined him. I didn’t think he’d make it through the ceremony. He went quite pale and weak at the knees. I remember feeling incredibly calm and a little removed, as if I were an observer instead of a participant. Tessa Mallos was my matron of honour, and Tony’s younger brother, Mark, was the best man. My father and mother were beaming as Dad pronounced Tony,‘The best thing that ever happened’ to his daughter. Tony’s mother came up from her home in Melbourne. It was the first time I had ever met my husband’s family. We held our reception at Ziggy’s restaurant in Annandale and everyone agreed it was a lovely party, but Tony and I don’t remember much about it at all. I do recall they made a delicious croquembouche for our wedding cake, which was a huge hit with the guests. It seems incredible that we didn’t take one photograph on the day because Tony is keen on recording everything for posterity. Fortunately one of our friends had a camera with her and she took a few candid shots and sent them to us a week later.We were able to keep the event secret from the press as I was only an anonymous Noeline Taylor getting 178

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married to Tony Sattler, which nobody could ever spell. I now wish there had been some paparazzi lurking in the bushes, just so we would have some decent photographs to remind us of our lovely wedding day. Tony’s mother Pat stayed on in Sydney so she could catch a performance of The Naked Vicar. I cooked an early dinner for us all and Tony later brought her along to The Speakeasy to see the show. One of the sketches was a send-up of a children’s television program in which I played a character called Princess Joyce. I wore a long tatty gown and a crown, with a wand in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other. Kev Golsby, also in a frock and moustache, played my sidekick, Princess Ralph. As part of the action I had to wheel in a steel trolley that contained instruments to frighten little children and also to hide some bottles of fake booze in the drawers. Because my new husband and mother-in-law were in the audience I was showing off outrageously and I pushed the trolley a little too vigorously and it shot right off the stage. Aghast, I looked down at the people closest to me, to check out the damage. There were twelve people in wheelchairs, all looking whitefaced, but thankfully they were not hurt. One evening we were doing a show before a full house, when I noticed an acrid burning smell coming from somewhere in the building. A few minutes later we saw smoke slowly enveloping the room. A small electrical fire had started in the kitchen. As soon as it was detected the nearest fire brigade was called. Our stage manager made an announcement and told the audience they could vacate the premises or stay till the brigade arrived. The actors were hoping for an early night, but the well-oiled audience chose to stay. They had eaten dinner and most of them were into their second bottle of wine, so they weren’t going anywhere. As there was almost a total blackout in the room we were going to have to wait to start the show again. The wonderful Alison McCallum, who had been the lead singer in the ‘It’s Time’ campaign song, had taken over from Kerrie Bidell, who was ill. Alison found her way out onto the dark stage and sang a bracket of songs, 179

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keeping the punters happy till the fire crew arrived. We were surprised to see the firemen being followed into the room by a camera crew. The ABC had just happened to be doing a documentary using their fire station and had the good fortune to be there in time to film the drama. The audience thought it was part of the show. The cast members were all getting tired. We had been working hard for a long time so Tony and Gary decided to give the original crew a break. They put together some material for a new show to be called Son of Naked Vicar, and started auditioning for the actors who would take over from us. I convinced Gary and Tony to fly my old friend Barry Creyton back from England, where he had been living and working for the past few years. I had told them all about the funny skinny actor from The Mavis Bramston Show and the Music Hall days, about how he could play all kinds of parts, from a matinee idol in a drawing room comedy to an ocker-digger cow-cocky. Barry accepted the engagement and flew back to Sydney. Tony and I drove to the airport to meet him but when he got off the plane I didn’t recognise him. Barry looked more like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had been working out at the gym every day for months and had bulked up to twice his former size.We sent him off to the tailor for a fitting and found we even had to have shirts custom made for him, just to get over his bulging new biceps. In spite of this immense physical change, Barry was still as funny as he’d been in our days in Bramston. I was asked to sit in on the casting session for the new show, which was going to be mounted in both Sydney and Melbourne.When we saw the work of the lovely blonde Tina Bursill and the madcap redhead Julie McGregor, we were greatly impressed by their comic talents. They were cast instantly, as were the actor and writer Michael Aitken and another good mate of mine from the Music Hall, Donald Macdonald. Son of Naked Vicar opened in the two states simultaneously. Colin McEwan, a Melbourne radio announcer, joined the second company for its long run at the Windsor Regis in the southern capital. 180

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Tony and I went along to the opening night in Sydney to see Barry, Michael and Tina star in the new production. It was funny being on the other side of the stage for a change, but I enjoyed it and everyone around us was laughing heartily. I also noticed the menu at The Speakeasy had changed slightly. Soup du jour and seafood cocktail starters were followed by a choice of beef zingara or chicken a la maison, with apple slice or cheesecake for dessert. I looked up zingara in Larousse Gastronomique when I got home and it described it as a sauce made of lean ham or tongue, mushrooms and truffles bound with a demi-glace flavoured with tomato and tarragon essence. I think it might have suffered in the translation at The Speakeasy. Not long after, Jools also experienced a fire. Although more serious than the one at The Speakeasy it had not been big enough to destroy the building, some cynics commented, ‘unfortunately’, but the owners had to close it down for months to carry out repairs. After the refurbishment was complete and it re-opened, the theatre-restaurant style of entertainment disappeared forever and Jools became a disco for dykes. Later still, it was reborn as The Hard Rock Café, and its opening night crowd of party goers snaked around the block.

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Tony and I had been married for a little over three months when my agent was asked about my availability for a new TV panel show. The inquiry came from the independent producer Reg Grundy. A week later, I heard that I had been ‘shortlisted’ and I would be required to audition the following month. Grundy’s refused to tell my agent anything more. I was intrigued by all the secrecy surrounding the project. It was Tony’s birthday the day after I took the booking and we were due to visit my old stamping ground, the Music Hall in Neutral Bay, for the Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, or the AWGIES as they are affectionately known.Writers’ Guild parties are often quite rowdy affairs, with missiles in the form of bread rolls being launched from one group of authors to another. The last people to leave the function that evening were Tony, the playwright Ralph Peterson and me. Tony and Ralph had never met before and they were literally under the table. They had decided to retire there sometime during the night as the rest of the guests were making too much noise. Ralph told Tony that Grundy was staging the tryouts for the new show at the Shore Motel in Artarmon but that was all he knew. The rest was a closely guarded industry secret. 183

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I was one of a group of hopeful auditionees who gathered at the motel at ten o’clock on a morning early in December 1976. It was only then that we discovered we were being matched with the incomparable Graham Kennedy to see if he could work with us. We were all animatedly discussing this when the room suddenly went quiet. The King had arrived. When it was my turn to be introduced to Mr Kennedy I didn’t remind him that we had already met at a party more than a decade before when he was the star of In Melbourne Tonight and I was just another actor on a rival television station. The new show was to be a local take on The Match Game, which was already a huge success in the United States. The original American show featured a straight host and a panel of comics and celebrities. Ours was going to be altered to suit the Kennedy talents, with the guests actually feeding the host. It was a very simple format with contestants being given a part of a line and they had to fill in the blanks. If their answers matched those of the panel, the contestants would win a prize, although it must be said the Australian rewards were much more modest than the American ones. The show was to be renamed Blankety Blanks and it would go out on the Ten Network. For several days we hung around, ate the very acceptable catering and tried to match our wits with the King. Something clicked between Graham and me, and I got the job. We put our first few shows in the can just before Christmas 1976. After watching him work live we were all very much in awe of Graham Kennedy, but I had no idea at the time that the show would become as popular as it did. I was offered some commercial work as well. John Mackellar, the talented writer from the old Phillip Street days, came up with a series of TV ads for an instant food product for Vesta. I was cast as a housewife whose husband always managed to screw up their arrangements. Mackellar came up with several funny incidents where the husband would take his wife out to a fancy restaurant or some function as a special treat and something disastrous would happen. The wife was always able to save the day and rescue them from starvation by going into the 184

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kitchen and grabbing a Vesta packaged meal out of the cupboard. ‘Life is full of Vesta situations’ was the running tag. We did a number of these commercials and I don’t once remember the camera crew ever descending on the food after the shoot. Even after all these years I still have difficulty going down the aisle in the supermarkets that stock the product. Someone will always pick up a packet and say, ‘Life is full . . .’ and expect me to supply the ending. Suddenly there was talk of taking The Naked Vicar to television. After the ABC had decided not to do it, Channel 7 grabbed at the idea. General Manager Ted Thomas was enthusiastic and we were pleased to be doing the show at Epping. I now found myself, much to my delight, working on two different shows on two different channels every week: Blankety Blanks on 10 and The Naked Vicar on 7. Kev Golsby, Ross Higgins and I were hired to work as a team again. Julie McGregor, who had been tremendously successful in the Melbourne production of Son of Naked Vicar, was an obvious fourth choice and Colin McEwan, who worked with her, made up the fifth performer in the television company. After having written every bit of their material together, Tony and Gary realised they would need to get some help because their workload was killing them. Occasionally people would submit material to their office and one day they received a script written by an accountant with the Education Department. They liked what he had written and arranged a meeting. When Doug Edwards arrived at the office he bore a striking resemblance to the cartoon character Yosemite Sam, so on the strength of that he was hired immediately. Doug was soon writing some excellent material so he was able to leave the security of his Public Service job and become part of the team. He would later go on to write and produce his own hugely successful syndicated radio serial, How Green was my Cactus. An occasional contributor to The Naked Vicar was Clive Robertson, who was then a popular but notoriously moody breakfast announcer for the ABC. Clive wrote some material 185

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for RS with actor Col McEwan, but most of it had to be edited heavily because it was often about unsavoury topics like chopping up pet animals in a butcher’s shop. Clive once arrived at the production office straight from his breakfast program and invited the boys’ secretary, Ann, to join him in the bathroom while he shaved, an offer she found easy to refuse. Clive often looked very gloomy when we saw him in the mornings, only brightening up when he caught a glimpse of a cream cake. He was a misogynist and a depressive with an interest in classical music and steam trains. We recorded The Naked Vicar in front of an audience in the large studio at Channel 7. The cast had become quite close after working together for so long and we were aware of each other’s idiosyncrasies. I knew Ross Higgins, who was once a professional singer, was terrified of catching germs. Ross always brought his own lunch to rehearsal; usually a single Granny Smith apple and a small knife to peel it with, tightly enclosed in Glad Wrap. Ross chose to sit at one end of the rehearsal hall while we all ate and drank coffee at the other. In one of The Naked Vicar sketches Ross had to play the part of Doug Anthony, who was then deputy prime minister and leader of what was then the Country Party. His job was to interview one of his constituents, who just happened to be a sheep. Ross was concerned that he might catch something from the animal, but Tony convinced him that it was a highly trained stunt sheep, not just any dirty creature from a paddock and that nothing dreadful would happen. At one point in the recording Doug Anthony had to look intently at the sheep, which peered just as intently back. Then, without warning, it sneezed wetly all over Ross’ horrified face. Ross finished the sketch then fled to the bathroom. He hadn’t dropped a word of his material and he certainly got the laughs. Ross’ family was in the audience that night. His wife and his three children used to come to see the recording of every episode and they were holding on to their sides, laughing hysterically when this happened. The kids couldn’t believe what they had just seen because their father, in an effort to avoid airborne germs, would never allow them 186

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to blow out the candles on their birthday cakes; they had to wave them out with a serviette. A popular sketch on The Naked Vicar involved a family of three: Mum, Dad and their teenaged son. It starts with Mum asking for the lawn to be mowed. Dad (played by Ross), and the kid (who was a rather mature Kev Golsby with a big black moustache at the time) have an almighty argument over whose job it is. The argument is stopped only by the sound of the Victa turning over when the exasperated Mum, played by me, mows the grass herself. The tag from Ross to Kev is, ‘Works every time’. That sketch was the idea behind what would become Kingswood Country, another popular TV series for RS Productions which ran for eighty-nine episodes. In other sketches Julie McGregor and I played two girls who met daily at the tea urn on a factory floor. Every week Julie’s character, called Narelle, had a wild and unlikely story about what she had done the night before. I would listen to her unbelievable ravings and respond with, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’. The expression really caught on with the viewing public and is still in use today. In another favourite sketch, Kev Golsby played a whimsical character called Bruce and I was Mrs Jackson, who ran the corner shop. Bruce would appear at my counter wearing a peaked vinyl cap with earflaps and a propellor and harangue me with a long monologue about his experiences, all of them obviously products of his imagination. Kev had to do all the talking and I would nod occasionally and drop in a bored,‘and then what?’ just to interrupt his train of thought. I always finished off the sketch with an exasperated, ‘Bruce—piiiiiiiiisss oooff ’. That expression caught on too, but I was not sure whether to oblige little kids who used to stop me in the street and ask sweetly, ‘Tell me to do what you say to Bruce please, Noeline’. Tony and Gary decided to move the offices of RS Productions to Crows Nest on the Pacific Highway. Two other tenants shared the building; one of them, we were amused to discover, was Mr Grocock, Artificial Limb Maker. The other business operated under the innocent sounding name of ‘North Sydney 187

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Therapeutic’ but we suspected it really was a brothel.Ann, who ran the office for Tony and Gary, used to peer through the peephole and watch the clients’ comings and goings. Quite often a man would knock on the wrong door and ask her for the—wink, wink—Health Club. Annie loved to see their expressions when she announced, ‘No, sorry, sir, we’re the comedy writers’. I was in the office when the bills came in one morning and after glancing at the enormous account from the electricity company I cried, ‘How can it possibly cost that much? You’ve only got an electric typewriter and a one bar radiator.’ The health club, however, probably had a lot of interesting electrical devices and it was obvious the bill for the brothel had been sent to RS Productions instead of North Sydney Therapeutic. When the technicians came to check the building they discovered the meters for the two businesses had been tampered with and gave us a refund. RS decided to bury The Naked Vicar after two years on television, to the surprise of everyone but the actors involved. Tony and Gary pulled the plug, saying they wanted to take it off air while it was still popular. They then went on to write the successful sitcom Kingswood Country and Tony and I decided to spend more time at our house in the Southern Highlands. I had been complaining for a while about having married a workaholic. Tony didn’t seem to believe in leisure. He would work till he dropped and I was doing the same.We decided to fly to Tasmania where we had a wonderful few days rediscovering Hobart and doing some walks around Cradle Mountain. We visited Port Arthur again and I was able to meet Tony’s friends from the days when he lived on the island: the tall bearded artist Roger Murphy and his wife, Jan, who was one of the best cooks in Tasmania. We had a wonderful time and even Tony was starting to relax. We then took our belated honeymoon in Europe, flying in decadent luxury in the front of the plane for a change.We travelled to London and stayed in a smart hotel in Bond Street, 188

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where I somehow managed to lose the diamond ring Tony had given me. The duty manager brought in detectives from Scotland Yard but the ring was never found. Fortunately we had taken out travel insurance. I proudly introduced my new husband to Kay and Colin Lanceley. They threw a party for us and invited some of their friends, including Germaine Greer who had shot to international prominence with her book The Female Eunuch. Tony and I took off for Paris the following day and booked into a charming small hotel near the Eiffel Tower and ate some wonderful food. We were madly in love and having a wonderful time. Everyone could see we were happy. Even the French taxi drivers were nice to us.We made our way by train to Lyon for sausages and Marseilles for bouillabaisse and to Nice for anything niçoise.We flew to Rome and arrived in the city just before dawn. Tony and I felt we had the Eternal City all to ourselves as we drove around the empty streets in a hire car. We stayed in a landmark hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps.We threw our coins over our shoulders into the Trevi fountain and swore that we would come back one day. I had to return to work on Blankety Blanks. The show had been getting good ratings for Channel 10, thanks to Graham Kennedy’s great gift for comedy. I was lucky enough to be one of the regulars, usually sitting next to ‘Ugly’ Dave Gray, the cigar-smoking comedian with glasses and moustache who possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of jokes. Other popular panellists were the ‘urbane Stuart Wagstaff ’ (as he is often called by people who don’t know that he’d rather be a red-nosed comic), my mate Barry Creyton, young Ingrid Mason (who seemed able to blush all over much to Graham’s amusement), singers Trevor White and John Paul Young and many others who would come and go. Graham had his favourites and if he didn’t like someone, they were never seen again. Tony used to collect me at Channel 10 sometimes after taping had finished and stay on to enjoy the Green Room antics of Dave Gray and the others, including Tony Connolly, who worked on the production side of the show. Connolly became an integral part on-screen when Graham started to 189

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refer to him as ‘Tony the Moustache Twirler’, and one of the camera operators became equally famous as ‘Peter the Phantom Puller’ because of his ability to focus. Graham seemed to enjoy himself on the show and relished playing a gay character called Cyril, which only a few of us knew was his middle name. Cyril was so sibilant he could put an ‘S’ in banana. Graham used to rehearse his material in his dressing room alone and didn’t mix much with the rest of us, but he welcomed any opportunity to use his talent for adlibbing once the show was underway. He appreciated it whenever one of the panellists came up with a funny line and was always very generous when it happened. Graham and Ugly Dave used to milk their moments together at the end of the show with a long routine, full of innuendo and double entendre, where they would talk about a character called Dick. Dave Gray would get a signal from the producer towards the end of each show, which would indicate how long the ‘Dick’ joke should run—whether it was to be a ‘little Dick’ or a ‘big Dick’—and he and Graham would wing it, with Dave trying to concentrate as the host interjected. Then Graham would pucker up to give me a fake passionate kiss after which he once pretended to drop his microphone down the front of my dress. ‘Gra Gra fondled my breasts’, was the rather surprising headline on the front page of a Melbourne newspaper with an accompanying photograph of me. The story alleged that Graham had put his hand down my dress and I had complained about it. It was an absolute pack of lies and I was pretty angry about it so I rang the editor to complain. I told him that if such an incident had occurred, which it hadn’t, I would have taken up the matter with Graham Kennedy myself. I certainly would not have rung some journalist whom I’d never heard of, or a paper that I didn’t know the number of, nor would I have spent good money on a long-distance phone call to Victoria when I had a number of journalist friends right here in Sydney, not to mention a brother with AAP who could have informed the world. The editor refused to apologise or publish a retraction, 190

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so I decided to take the matter to court. The paper settled, grudgingly, the day before the case was due to be heard. The journalist who had written the story had admitted he had invented the whole thing and his editor had given him instruction to ‘beat it up’. I only settled out of court because I was warned they were ‘going to bring out the big guns’. I wasn’t sure what they meant by that but it succeeded in making me nervous. Graham Kennedy recorded five hundred episodes of Blankety Blanks. He taped three shows one night and another three the next. As they were shown five nights a week we had to work at that sort of pace just to keep in front. Some of the material just happened.A few people were offended by the ‘offcolour’ nature of the show and a certain school principal from Wollongong wrote to the producers complaining about the content. Graham read the entire letter on camera and named the author, getting some of the best laughs on the night. I received some fan mail while I was working on the show; most of it asking for autographs and photographs. I sometimes regarded answering the letters as a bit of an inconvenience. One day I got a letter from a woman who informed me that I should not wear off-the-shoulder dresses, as I was ‘too scrawny’. She then went on to tell me she couldn’t stand me and signed the letter, which also had her postal address at the top. I wrote an answer immediately only to Mr Name Supplied. In it, I advised him that some maniac was using his wife’s name to write insulting letters to people on television. Posting it made me feel a whole lot better. Then I thought of all the fans who had actually taken the time to write something nice, and of all the people who had called out my name in the street and smiled and waved. I realised then that I should thank them for their kindness, instead of reacting so quickly to a single letter of criticism. From that day on, I have written back as quickly as I could to fan letters and have always thanked the people who have written for their generosity. That year I was awarded my one and only Logie for ‘most popular female television personality in New South Wales’. It 191

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was 1978 and Tony and I flew down to Melbourne to collect the award. I said I had probably won it only because I was in everything. Mohammed Ali was the special guest at the TV Week ceremony and for one moment during the evening the boxer appeared to be about to flatten the host Bert Newton. After I collected my award I was introduced to Mohammed Ali but I decided not to remind him that, ‘We’ve met before’. Graham Kennedy, the winner of many Logies, slowly became our friend. Tony and I often invited him to join us at home for a meal as we shared a keen interest in food and cooking. It took some coaxing but he finally agreed to visit our little terrace in Pyrmont for dinner with a few of our friends. Quite early in the evening Bryan, his driver, arrived to take him home. Graham must have been having a good night because he invited Bryan in to have a drink and they didn’t leave till after midnight. I realised that was how he organised his life. If he was bored he could always count on being saved by the driver. He could not possibly have been bored that night.We lived in a bald-face terrace, built right onto the footpath. The front door opened directly into the living room. There was a bus stop almost in front of the house and people sometimes used to shelter from the weather in our doorway. As we were chatting away, holding our drinks and nibbling canapés, I heard a light tap at the door. I thought it was odd, as all our guests seemed to have arrived, but I decided to open the door to check. As I did, a perfect stranger fell backwards onto the carpet, executing a perfect limp fall. He picked himself up, brushed himself off, noticed our champagne glasses and the merry atmosphere and said,‘Now that I’m here, I might as well have a drink’. If Graham liked you, and you were lucky enough to be invited back to his house, you could be in for a very late night. Movies were played, dictionaries were consulted, show tunes were sung and plenty of alcohol was consumed. He always had the Oxford Dictionary and an ornate silver magnifying glass sitting together on the coffee table. Graham loved words and always referred to the official ABC book on correct pronunci192

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ation. He was responsible for the inclusion of several Australian words into the Macquarie Dictionary.When the first edition came out he rang the editors to tell them that they had neglected to include the word ‘Logie’, the name coined by Graham in memory of John Logie Baird, the inventor of television. Graham sometimes used to pack a bag and drive down to stay with us at our weekender in the Southern Highlands. Never really a confident driver, he was pleased that our house was easy to find as the gates were just before the ‘Welcome to Bowral’ sign, which currently sports a large picture of a batsman in action. The people of Bowral have always been immensely proud of their town being home to the young Don Bradman and have built a museum to honour their favourite son. Our house was ‘Tallawalla’, a rambling timber bungalow built during the wars, mainly from hardy Western Australian jarrah. It had a long steep drive through an avenue of trees that ended in a turning circle around a fifty-year-old palm. Whenever we arrived home at night, with the headlights from our car penetrating the fog, I was always reminded of the film Rebecca that began with the voice-over, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay’. Whenever we invited Graham to visit he would ask, ‘Is any one else coming?’ He didn’t care for the company of large groups of people. He would much prefer to have us all to himself—just a small, intimate audience. He explained that with a large gathering he always felt the pressure to perform. A crowd to him could be six people. He much preferred it to be just the three of us. Tony and I had extended the house so it had a guest wing at one end and our quarters at the other. That appealed to Graham. He could disappear quietly if he needed to. I was amused that he would never let me make his bed in the mornings. He always had the sheet turned down just in case he wanted to pop back in for a nap during the day. Graham asked a tailor in Sydney to design a special outfit to wear on summer holidays in the country. We couldn’t believe our eyes when he appeared one weekend in a jumpsuit of lightweight blue and white striped cotton seersucker, button 193

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through, without a belt as he was starting to fill out in middle age. He wore it all the time from then on. He claimed it was comfortable but I thought it should have had a tail sewn into the back seam. The three of us would sit on cane chairs under the fruit trees in the garden for lunch and Graham would hold court until he decided it was time for another restorative kip to prepare himself for the martini hour. One New Year’s Eve Graham came to stay and brought with him the most enormous bottle of French champagne I had ever seen. It appeared to be the size of a small boy. I was impressed by the generosity of the gift and even though there would only be three of us for our New Year’s Eve dinner, as he had requested, I insisted that we should open the bottle. Not a pop from the cork. A hesitant taste proved the champagne was absolutely flat. They say that wine doesn’t travel well but it should have taken more than a mere 150 kilometres from Graham’s place in Hunters Hill to cause such damage. Graham confessed that for some years Bert Newton and he had been exchanging the same bottle of champagne at Christmas. I think it had originally been a gift from Bert to Graham, but by now it was well and truly over the hill. I had a piece of corned beef in the refrigerator, so I cooked it in the flat champagne the following day. It tasted heavenly and I’ve been doing it that way ever since, although I always use a local wine these days. Graham has always had a keen interest in food. He said it all started when his aunt married an Italian and he discovered the difference between grey food and red. Even though he is a very good cook, he loves having other people do it for him. ‘The best food is the food you don’t have to cook yourself ’, he has said many times. He would often ask if he could take some of our leftovers home with him. ‘Don’t throw that fat away’, he would yell while I was carving the meat.‘That’s the best bit.’ I heard he had once taken home some scraps from his plate at the old Channel 9 canteen. When the television series of Kingswood Country was ready to go into production at Channel 7 in 1979, Tony and I decided I 194

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was not going to play the wife. I was going to be a real housewife and stay at home. Ross Higgins would play the grumpy character, Ted Bullpitt, as he had in the original Vicar sketch. Judi Farr was cast as Thelma, Ted’s long-suffering wife. Peter Fisher, who was fairly new to television, was the son, the part originally played by Kev Golsby, and their daughter Rita was played by Laurel McGowan, who had also done a season with us in The Naked Vicar. Greek–Australian Lex Marinos was booked to play her husband, the ‘wog’ as the politically incorrect Ted Bullpitt used to refer to him. The audience was always glad to see that Lex’s character, Bruno, seldom lost in the end. Kingswood ran for eighty-nine episodes and was enormously successful for Channel 7. The show was taped before an audience on Saturday afternoon, followed by a dinner break, which would give the station time to broadcast the news and to wheel in a fresh audience so they could record a second show. We knew that Graham Kennedy was not keen to work anymore but Tony and his partner Gary persuaded him to appear in a special episode of Kingswood Country. Graham was to be the guest of Ted and Thelma after Thel wins a cookery contest with her recipe for meatloaf. Thel’s prize is dinner at her home with her favourite celebrity. Her hero, Graham Kennedy, arrives at the door in Wombat Crescent and Thelma drops to her knees in a deep curtsy and kisses the back of his hand. Graham assures Thel that he cannot wait to taste her famous prize-winning meatloaf. In the show the food for Ted’s greyhounds is somehow mixed up with the meatloaf in the kitchen and Graham eats the dog food. Kennedy, being the inventive actor that he is, has the audience in hysterics as he tastes the wrong dish. The camera stays on his face as he puts the food in his mouth, chews, makes appreciative noises and then slowly comes to the realisation that what he is eating is absolutely disgusting. He is unable to swallow. He looks around wildly for somewhere to get rid of it without insulting his hosts. On the night the people in the audience were all convinced that Graham Kennedy had actually eaten the tinned dog food. Around this time I decided to learn to drive. I had never bothered to get a licence while I was a resident in Sydney 195

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because I lived so close to town. I had also been too nervous to get behind the wheel of a car following the accident I had had with Derek, but now that Tony and I were going to spend most of our time in the country I knew it would be an absolute necessity. When I passed my test Tony presented me with my own little Mini Moke with an extra rollbar for safety. I used to drive it from Sydney to the Highlands over the winding Razorback with the hood down, rugged up snugly in, I regret to say, a fur coat. I now had time to myself during the days Tony was working in Sydney so I investigated the Highlands and toured most of the state in the Moke. I also returned to my interest in local history. I was doing some research into my convict ancestry in the archives office in Globe Street down at The Rocks and a man sitting next to me asked if he might borrow the reference book I was looking at. I thought I knew the voice. I looked up and was astonished to see that it was Robert Hughes. ‘Good God, it’s Bob’, I exclaimed. ‘I beg your pardon, madam?’ he replied. He was stunned when he realised who I was. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were an actress.’ Bob was back in Australia on a brief trip from the United States. He was amused to find that we were both doing research on convict Tasmania. I was doing mine out of interest. He was working on what would become his best-selling book, The Fatal Shore. I reminded Bob of the times we had spent in the library at his home where his mother used to make up a bed for me. The room was lined with bookshelves containing wonderful first editions and sometimes we would read together the logbooks of sailing ships and shudder at the dreadful punishments the captains used to inflict on the unfortunate sailors during their long and arduous voyages to Australia.‘Let’s have coffee after we’ve finished’, Bob suggested. I returned to a microfiche for the rest of the morning and then had to dash out to feed the parking meter. By the time I returned, Bob had disappeared. That was the very last time I saw him. 196

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When Tony and I made the big decision to leave Sydney and take up permanent residence in the Southern Highlands, our friends greeted the news as if we had announced we were going to live on the opposite side of the world.‘What on earth are you going to do?’ asked my colleagues. I told them I would do what I had always done; it would just take me longer to travel to work. Tony was unable to cope with Sydney’s humidity and had grown tired of the punishing hours that he and his partner had put into their business over the past few years. He was ready for a break and, even though he was not yet thirty, he often talked longingly about ‘retirement’. Gary Reilly just wanted to play golf. Tony wanted to work in the garden for a while and I thought it might be a good time to get pregnant, so we made plans to devote ourselves to those two activities. The garden flourished, but that was all. I had stopped smoking as soon as I read that it could cause infertility. I consulted a doctor who referred me to a specialist. I was 37 but he did not think that was a problem. Tony had tests and was relieved to find his sperm count was impressive. I had a minor procedure to investigate why I had not conceived. Then I had 197

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another operation to remove a cyst. That was followed by a further procedure where the doctor dilated my cervix without warning and without anaesthetic. I thought I would die. I found a more sympathetic gynaecologist who operated again—this time I had an ovary and a tube removed in an operation called an oophorectomy, which sounds a lot more fun that it actually was. We were told there was no reason now why I should not fall pregnant and just to make sure I received daily injections of hormones. My ovulation ruled our lives. I would have to take my temperature every morning as soon as I woke up and I would burst into tears every twenty-eight days.We couldn’t go on like this forever. I had to face the fact that I was only ever going to be a ‘one off ’. Someone decided my difficulties were newsworthy and I was infuriated when I saw the front cover of a television magazine bearing the headline, ‘Noeline Brown’s desperate baby bid’. I was on the phone in a flash to the editor, a journalist I had always thought of as a friend, to tell him how I felt about his revealing what was a totally private matter. I was so upset I could hardly speak. He said he could tell I was upset, but he didn’t apologise. Tony and I decided to take up sailing. We bought a little Windrush, a colourful fourteen-foot catamaran, and joined the Southern Highlands Sailing Club, which met close to Fitzroy Falls every Sunday.We hooked our boat to a trailer and took it out to the dam that makes up part of Sydney’s water supply. Tony had always loved sailing and had spent a lot of his time around boats so he cast me as the forward hand and himself as the skipper when we took the vessel out for its trial run. I found that most of the time I had my face in a wave trying to avoid the boom. I thought longingly of the fortyfoot ketch I had sailed with my old boyfriend, Ron. In our first race Tony and I managed to catch a freak gust of wind that took us well ahead of the field. Unfortunately it also flipped us both right out of the boat, straight into the icy Highland waters. I actually saw the bottom of the dam and the 198

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face of a startled trout but was relieved to find that I bobbed straight back to the surface again. My flotation jacket had worked. Everyone at the club told us we were a great team but secretly I thought that sailing a catamaran was a bit like riding a motorbike underwater or sitting in the fridge with a hose in your face. Even though I felt I was a happy housewife I was pleased when Tony and Gary came up with an idea for a new series that they wanted me to be in. The show, set in a city newspaper, was called Daily at Dawn. I was to play the part of a rather boozy senior journalist, a hopelessly flawed individual, like most of the others who worked for the paper. Tony and Gary had spent some days researching the show at the offices of several Sydney newspapers and we were once again set to work in the studios of the Seven network. Henri Szeps played the editor of the Daily. I also happened to be his ex-wife. Young Julieanne Newbould was the only other permanent female character in the series. Tony and Gary used to refer to Julieanne as Robert Mitchum because they decided she had a walk like a cowboy. They wrote a special episode for her when they discovered that she could play the cowbells, an act she used to perform as a child in the clubs with her mother. Theatre Sports comedian Paul Chubb and versatile actor Terry Bader were cast as sports and entertainment writers and the actor Robert Hughes played one of the other journalists. Hughes earned the name of ‘X-Ray’ during the run because the writers believed he could see through the envelope and learn the script even before he opened it. He was an amazingly quick study, which could be why Gary decided to use him as his central character in Hey Dad, which he wrote after RS broke up. Tony and Gary wrote a hilarious episode about Paul Chubb’s character attempting to give up smoking. There was a lot of physical comedy involved, which the writers always rehearsed together to make sure it worked. Paul was very pleased that he didn’t have to learn any dialogue and wouldn’t have to suffer from ‘flop sweat’, as he put it, if he got any words wrong in front of the audience. 199

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During the run of Daily at Dawn, David Mitchell, who was working with the English interviewer Michael Parkinson, asked RS Productions if I could make an appearance on his show. I didn’t think it would be possible as I knew that show was recorded at the ABC at Gore Hill at the same time we did Daily at Dawn in Epping. Tony and Gary obliged by writing me out of the last couple of scenes. I was the envy of all the women at Channel 7 as I left in a hire car with David Mitchell. Michael Parkinson was regarded as a very sexy man and he must have been, because Tony decided to collect me after he had finished Daily at Dawn. I had not had time to meet Parkinson before the actual taping so neither of us knew what to expect.We were two absolute strangers when we sat down on the set together. It must be said that I did find him extremely attractive and his interviewing technique was so relaxed I just forgot about the audience and the cameras and I felt like I was the only person in the world Michael Parkinson wanted to talk to. The week the show went to air I was on three channels, 2, 7 and 10, only missing out on Channel 9—and I hadn’t worked there since I caught the eye of chairman Bruce Gyngell when I was picketing the Broadcasting Tribunal, pleading for more Australian content. At around this time Fiona Wintergreen, the former Head Mistress of Radclyffe Hall, a famous school for girls, wrote her way into our world. She was the invention of Tony and Gary. Fiona turned to writing after she was asked to leave Radclyffe, for reasons somewhat shrouded in mystery. She wrote a daily serial for Bob Hudson’s breakfast show on ABC radio and she used to ride her bicycle across the bridge to hand deliver her script every morning. In reality it was often a very hair-raising drive for Tony in his little red Alfa, as he had to compete with Sydney’s peak hour traffic and highway police to get the words to Bob Hudson on time. Tony would then come home and collapse. Fiona shared a special relationship with Miss Grace, a dashing former sportswoman who had pushed Hitler away when he attempted to kiss her following her winning one200

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hundred-yards dash in the 1936 Olympics, an event that precipitated the beginning of World War Two. Fiona wrote several great novels, Jealous Throbs the Heart, Damned Be My Desire, Rapture Be My Witness and the sultry, Yearn, Bwana, Yearn. One of her episodes was banned in Geelong because it involved a virgin sacrifice. Her autobiography was called, Behold the Cruel Heart. Fiona disappeared from our lives far too early in my opinion. Disappointed at not being awarded an Order of Australia, she is reported to have retired to her home on the upper North Shore. Fiona Wintergreen was syndicated all over Australia. I loved lying in bed in the mornings and listening to Bob Hudson reading her work. Tony and I honoured her memory by forming a production company using her name. We became Wintergreen Productions, reluctantly leaving our former partnership of Acme Media Products in case Warner Bros decided to sue. I was asked to go down to Melbourne for an industry awards night and the Hon. Jim Killen, who was once the president of the Liberal Party, Minister for the Navy and Minister for Defence was also invited. We were seated together, with his wife and five other people, for what turned out to be a very long night. Dinner and drinks were served and Jim was getting friendly. ‘My God, you’re a beautiful woman’, he said to me several times during the course of the meal. After dinner we both had to go to the backstage area of the function centre to wait for our cues. ‘My God, you’re a beautiful woman’, he repeated as he lurched forward. His wife suddenly appeared, and stepped between the two of us, saying, ‘It’s not your fault, dear. He’s a silly old bastard.’ Shortly after I was asked if I wanted to work with another ‘Beast’. Channel 7 had decided to resurrect Beauty and the Beast some twenty years after it had first gone to air. This time they had chosen the controversial journalist Derryn Hinch to take over the Eric Baume role. Derryn and I discovered we could spark off each other and really enjoyed working together. He loved women so he was in his element doing a show where he 201

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was surrounded by them. Most of the early programs were recorded in Melbourne where Derryn also had a daily radio show. Our Beast didn’t hide the fact that he had fallen in love with Jacki Weaver and he would ring her often to tell her how much he adored her. They were crazy about one another and Derryn once took out a half-page advertisement to tell the world how much he loved her. Jacki was working in a play in Sydney and she wanted to get down to Melbourne for Derryn’s birthday but she couldn’t get a plane at the right time so she chartered a Lear jet to fly her down. She may have broken her contract by doing it. She would certainly have broken the bank. The party was held at the lavish home of promoter Glenn Wheatley and Jacki planned to jump out of a cake. I was at the function but I left too soon to see it happen. Among Hinch’s beauties were Freda Lesslie from the original show, Melbourne personality Denise Drysdale, actor Bernadette Hughson, horse trainer and journalist Suzie Jarratt, singer Geraldine Turner and the over-the-top society hairdresser from Melbourne, Lilian Frank. Jane Priest, the leggy model from Perth who once made international headlines when she ran from the surf and planted a kiss on the cheek of Prince Charles, was also a regular on the show. She did not surprise anyone when she told us it had been a set-up with Charles. Grahame McPherson directed us once again and John Bird returned from doing the hair of royalty in far-away places to fix up the heads of the local Beauties. One day he decided to cut all my hair off. ‘Takes years off you’, he beamed. Tony announced that he was going to be leaving for the Antarctic to film some exteriors for a new show he and Gary had written called Brass Monkeys, which was to be set in an Australian base on the frozen continent. When he told me of his plans I was incredibly envious and begged to be able to go. He said it wasn’t possible and even Gary couldn’t go with him because he had an ulcer and wouldn’t pass the physical. Instead he would be taking a cameraman from Melbourne, an old friend, Eric Lomas. Just as I was starting to sulk I was asked to consider another musical. It was for the lead role in Applause 202

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for the Queensland Theatre Company. I was tempted this time because the show was the musical version of the witty film, All About Eve, which had starred Bette Davis as Margo Channing and Anne Baxter as her conniving younger rival, Eve. Tony encouraged me to try out for the show when he heard the book had been written by the fabulous Comden and Green, who had also written, On the Town, Bells are Ringing and Singin’ in the Rain. Graham Kennedy had a tape of the Broadway show and brought it around. I put on my headphones and practised singing whenever I was doing the ironing, until Tony nearly went mad and we had nothing left in the basket. My agent made an appointment for me to meet the show’s director, Queenslander Gregory Gesch, the choreographer, Londoner Hugh Halliday, and the musical director, Peter Casey. As the day of the audition drew nearer I started to panic. On the morning I was to appear I pulled on a pair of old blue jeans and an ancient pink t-shirt and, in a state of high anxiety, drove to the theatre practising a speech where I would tell them I simply couldn’t do the show. When I arrived I could see that every well-known Sydney actor around my age was there, all dressed up and eager to be cast in the role that had been written for Lauren Bacall, the glamorous widow of Humphrey Bogart. When it came to my turn I flew onto the stage, exclaiming loudly that I was wrong for the part, that I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, that I didn’t want to waste their time, and that I had been trying to have an accident on the way to the theatre rather than face the audition. They all laughed out loud and gave me the leading role. I worked for weeks with the musical director in his apartment at Neutral Bay. I also took lessons with the respected singing teacher Bob Tasman-Smith, who surprised me when he said my voice had a ‘lyric quality’. I was determined to be good in the part so I did a lot of preparation. But I had to stop work on Christmas Day so I could fly down to Hobart to farewell my husband.We went down to the docks together on Boxing Day and I watched him leave in the tiny ship Nanok S, 203

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heading for the Antarctic.When I got home I packed my little hatchback with my lightest clothes and drove to Brisbane to spend the summer in the tropics while my husband was on ice. My leading man was Alan Dale and I was very happy with that choice.We had met once before during a charity telethon. He was with his partner, quiz-show hostess Victoria Nicolls, and I liked him very much. Alan was a New Zealander who had spent many years working in Australian television on The Young Doctors. He was very tall, lightly tanned, with fair, close-cropped hair. He had long arms and legs and broad shoulders and he put me completely at ease on the first day of rehearsal when we were required to show some degree of intimacy. I felt quite at home snuggling up to Alan’s strong swimmer’s chest and evidently we looked so comfortable together that the other actors were convinced that we were having a relationship. I missed Tony terribly during the rehearsal period and every time a phone rang I thought it might be him ringing from the ship or an Antarctic base. Everyone could tell my nerves were on edge. Tony and I were both experiencing the same difficulties as we tried to communicate from one distant place to another. He was convinced I had simply forgotten all about him. I tried desperately every day to get a call through to him from my hotel but Tony never knew. A lovely young Sydney actor, Zoe Bertram, had the role of the manipulative Eve in our musical. There were twenty-four others in the cast and chorus and James Ridewood designed some dazzling costumes for the two rival women to wear. Peter Casey chose to play the piano on our first day of rehearsal and as we sang the numbers one by one I noticed everyone relax. It was going to be a good show. I was so grateful that Peter had made himself available to work with me in Sydney and I wasn’t frightened of singing anymore. That was until we had our first rehearsal with the orchestra. ‘Everybody get ready tonight for the sitz probe’, I heard our stage manager announce. I had no idea what kind of probe they were talking about. I wondered just how thorough these 204

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rehearsals were going to be. Suddenly thirty players from the Queensland Theatre Orchestra made their way into the pit and we had our first experience working with them, instead of just singing with the piano. It was rather scary when we started to work to a totally different sound, but then it became really enjoyable. I discovered that ‘sitz probe’ means ‘sit and try out’ in German. It is simply the first musical rehearsal with artists on stage without costumes, scenery or props. I was delighted when Barry Creyton arrived in Brisbane. He was starring in the wonderful comedy Noises Off with Stuart Wagtstaff and Carol Raye and they were just starting their Australian tour. Our company was invited to a Saturday matinee to see their hilarious show. Barry spent a lot of time on stage hopping up a flight of stairs with his trousers around his ankles. I roared with laughter from start to finish. Later the cast of Noises Off sat in on a rehearsal of our show, where Barry was amazed to see me being thrown around by a group of chorus boys. I will never forget the fear that came over me the first time I had to dive off a bar into their waiting arms. On opening night of Applause I was happy to have my husband in the audience. Tony had come back from the Antarctic at last and had flown up to Brisbane and I had to spend a night or two convincing him just how much I had missed him. He dropped me at the theatre an hour before we were to go on, wished me luck and went on to find a bar. Ten minutes before the show was due to start we were fitted with our body mikes for the first time. They were old and hired. The sound recordist was working in the back of the theatre, which was notorious for its difficult acoustics. We experienced a lot of battery problems during the show. My microphone was on the lapel of my jacket, a long way from my mouth, and in one scene I had been directed to clutch a pillow while I sang. Our first night was pretty disastrous and the large orchestra drowned me out completely when I hugged the pillow. I wondered what sort of notices we would receive and I was dreading opening the paper. The director of the show was mauled by the Courier Mail the next day but the cast 205

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survived. I seem to have lost the review that said ‘Noeline Brown says she is not a singer’ which was followed by a quote from The Naked Vicar Show: ‘You’re not wrong Narelle’. The musical did improve and we became a happy company. On the last night of the show we all trooped off for a round of frozen pina coladas at JoJo’s, our favourite bar.We sat together and laughed about the things that had gone wrong on that first night and the problems we had experienced since, and I said something to the sound engineer about never having used a body mike on stage before. He confessed that our show was the first time he had worked with microphones of any kind and that he was actually a cameraman. I left Brisbane early the next morning and drove south with Tony. We took the long way home. I needed to warm him up. I arrived back in Sydney to a small part in Emma’s War, a film produced in the mid-1980s by Clytie Jessop and David Hannay, starring the lovely American actor Lee Remick. I believe that one of Mel Gibson’s brothers was also cast in the film, playing the part of a young American serviceman. He had a very believable accent, as you would expect as he had an American father, but he looked nothing at all like his famous brother. I think Mel got all the looks in the Gibson family. Tony and I still had our little house in Pyrmont and I was delighted to find they were going to shoot my scenes just a few blocks away from where we lived. I could enjoy the luxury of being able to leave home a few minutes before I was due on the set. The location chosen for the filming was just up the road from CSR. I was to play yet another barmaid; this time I was a Mrs Mortimer, the owner of a sly grog shop operating during wartime in the 1940s. I hid my short blonde bob under a ghastly red wig and the makeup girl had a field day. I looked like an old bag when the wardrobe department had finished with me. I was required to chain smoke, which nearly killed me after having given up cigarettes at least ten years before. I modelled Mrs Mortimer’s voice on Marilyn, the real-life Pyrmont barmaid from around the corner, but I was told to tone it down. Vocally she was ‘too big’. They didn’t know Marilyn. 206

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An elderly local character had leased his house to the film crew for use as the illegal premises. He was also booked as one of the extras and he smiled as he told us how well the art director had dressed his living room—it really looked like the sly grog parlours he had known when he was a young man. It was remarkable to peek inside his house. Lee Remick and I had to wait for our cue in the old kitchen and we could see that it remained very much in its original condition. No maintenance had been carried out in years. The original wooden laths were visible where the plaster had broken away from the ceiling and not been replaced. It was a very mean little dwelling and the American star of the film was plainly shocked by her surroundings. She was also surprised at the close of filming when I hopped out of my little Mini Moke in a pair of shorts, with my own makeup on and my normal blonde hair, and gave her a goodbye kiss. As I drove off I heard her ask, ‘Who was that?’ Dad rang to tell me that his sister’s husband,Arnold Smith, had died and asked if I would drive him to the Central Coast for the cremation. I had to travel for two hours from the Highlands before I could pick him up at Stanmore, then we had another couple of hours’ drive to get to the crematorium. Dad had a habit of being early for everything and it must be in the genes because so am I. I called in early to collect him but Mum said he had been ready for hours and pacing up and down, impatient to be off, so we left straight away, driving over the bridge, travelling north to Uncle Arnie’s funeral.We found the crematorium at Ourimbah easily enough but we were there far too early, even though we’d been forced to drive slowly for the latter part of our journey owing to a startling amount of rain. There were very few vehicles in the parking lot when we arrived, so we huddled under an umbrella I had in the back of my car and checked out the various chapels. We found one with a wreath of flowers outside with the name A. Smith on a card so we waited there for the other mourners to arrive. A man wearing a clerical collar opened the door of the chapel 207

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and as he was leaving, thoughtfully suggested we should go inside and wait. We took two seats, fairly close to the front, in the pleasant little chapel, leaving the first few rows for immediate family members. Dad and I chatted quietly for a while and he shared with me his fond memories of his brother-in-law, who was lying before us in his simple wooden coffin heaped with colourful spring flowers. Soon other people started to arrive and take their seats behind us. Dad and I turned around every time we heard the door open, looking for a familiar face.‘See anyone you know?’ I asked. I hadn’t laid eyes on these relations for years and neither had Dad. He was looking forward to seeing his oldest sister again and I was hoping I would recognise my cousins, whom I had not seen for years. The chapel eventually filled up and the family of the deceased was led to the two front rows. It was a family of absolute strangers. I grabbed Dad’s knee and he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I think we’re going to quite a few funerals today’. The minister took his place at the lectern and started to speak. ‘Dearly beloved’, he began, ‘We are gathered here to remember the life of Cecil Winterbottom’. The name was so far from Arnold Smith that I just cracked up. I started to shake with laughter and tears were pouring from my eyes. I was choking and going red in the face trying to stop myself from laughing out loud and Dad had to put his arm around my shoulder in an effort to get me to pull myself together. When the service was over I hissed,‘Get out of here as fast as you can. Meet you at the car’. But Dad was a bit slow on his feet, following a recent operation on his toes. As a result of his handicap we found ourselves successfully ambushed by the family of the deceased. One of the mourners said with amazement,‘We had no idea that Uncle Cecil knew a celebrity’.And she probably thought he must have known her well, because she was so overcome with emotion that she broke down in floods of tears in front of everyone and her father had to comfort her. Dad and I had to confess that we had come to the 208

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funeral of Arnold Smith, not that of Uncle Cecil Winterbottom. They took it very well. We returned to the chapel a short while later, this time with Dad’s sister and my cousins and their friends. The same minister took his place at the lectern. He looked down at the congregation and he saw Dad and me sitting in the same row as before. His eyebrows shot up to his comb-over. He must have thought we were professional mourners. I flew interstate to be on a celebrity game show that involved actor and TV chef the late Bernard King, long-legged dancer Jackie Love, and the irascible Bruce Ruxton, who was then head of the RSL.We were all staying in the same hotel following the taping of the show so the four of us shared a cab. Bruce insisted on carrying the bags for the girls. As we walked into the foyer through the automatic doors, he yelled in a huge voice that everyone could hear,‘God, look at all the Japs’. Jackie and I froze. After taping a series of Blankety Blanks in 1985, this time with Darryl Somers as host, I accepted an offer to travel to Bangladesh to do a film for the international charity, World Vision. After a large gamma globulin injection, recommended by my doctor, I flew to the country in early December with the crew from Pilgrim Films, not really knowing what to expect. I had visions of extreme hunger, poverty and desperation. I was not prepared for the beauty of the country and its people. When we drove from the airport we looked out the window of the cab at scenes that could have come from biblical days. Carts full of produce were drawn by lean, handsome people wearing traditional costume. Bangladesh has a vast river running through it and a lot of the country is flood prone and very green. There was certainly poverty, there were many beggars and I was advised never to go outside the hotel on my own. We always travelled in a group and we made sure that we carried some coins to give to the people begging on the street. There were riots on the first morning we were to start filming and we could hear shots being fired so we were 209

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advised to go back to the hotel. We were booked to shoot some of the material in a private house so the government supplied an interpreter, who stood out from the crowd because he was quite fat. The house we were to film was really one dark concrete cell, with no windows and no running water. Everything in the room was neat and tidy and all the family’s possessions were on display. We were each given a cracked cup of tepid tea sweetened with condensed milk, which of course we had to drink to show our appreciation. We were there to film the story of a young girl who was on the World Vision program and to discuss with her parents their wishes for her future. The girl and her father spoke to our interpreter who told me that her ambition was to become a nurse. The father, who was a small thin man shook his head and became agitated. He rushed over to me and said, proudly and in English, ‘No, no. My daughter wishes to become a doctor.’ I wondered what kind of sacrifices would be required to make her dream come true. We filmed women and children breaking bricks to make a roadway, others who had been granted small loans to buy sewing machines or bicycles so they could start their own businesses.We visited orphanages where blind boys were educated by dedicated women and another where little girls were able to attend classes with funds made available from the charity.We were also invited to watch a special musical performance in our honour. The children placed some coloured pot plants in a row between us forming a little stage and they began to sing and dance. There was one tiny girl I could have packed into my suitcase and taken home. An older girl was brought over to us and we could see at once that she was a burns victim. She was very dark and willowy, but her injuries were painfully evident.We were told that she had fallen into a fire when she was small. Her parents were dead and she would have no hopes of marriage and would almost certainly face a life of hardship. Tony and I became her sponsors through World Vision and she was able to complete her education and go on to become a teacher. 210

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We were filming in the congested city of Dacca, which was remarkably free of rubbish and birds, and I caught sight of a hideously deformed young girl. She was with a little band of ragged children and they followed us wherever we went. She had the most dreadful problem with her teeth, causing her face to be contorted. I had difficulty looking at her. As I started to drop my gaze she put her hand up to her mouth and pulled out a set of joke teeth. I grinned and she laughed at me, displaying the most perfect smile in the whole of Bangladesh. A letter came from Barry Creyton some months later. Barry had been busy touring Australia with Gordon Chater in the Gerald Moon two-hander, Corpse!, but he wrote that he had broken his leg badly in a fall from a borrowed motorbike while on his way to a performance in Perth. It was a particularly nasty break and Barry had to stay in hospital for many weeks, so he decided to use his time in traction to start writing a play about a pair of lovers and their ‘on again, off again’ relationship. It was a two-hander, which he had given the working title of Double Act. When Barry recovered enough to return to Sydney, he rang to tell me the play was nearly finished and asked if I would read it. I made a date to meet him at his unit in Double Bay, where I read the script from his computer as he had not yet printed it off. It was not an ideal way to judge a script, scrolling down the screen with the anxious writer peering over my shoulder. I don’t know what I thought of the play during that first read through. I knew I was not always a great judge of a script, but I was carried along by Barry’s enthusiasm. George and Alexandra, the two characters in Double Act, have been married and divorced and suddenly they meet again after a period of ten years. The play follows their relationship after they get together again. Barry continued to work on the play as his leg improved. When he was finally happy with what he had written, he printed it out and we sat in his living room and read it aloud. After some rewriting, Barry decided it was time to take his finished work to a producer. As soon as he could, he arranged 211

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for us to present a reading before the entrepreneur and theatrical agent Harry M. Miller at his rather eccentric home, which had once been a garage, in Woolloomooloo. We sat together on Harry’s couch and I remembered Barry’s instructions that he wanted the performances to be small. He insisted he didn’t want any acting to be visible so I followed his directions to the letter. I don’t think Harry M. Miller heard a word I uttered, as I discovered he is quite deaf. He did brighten up during one of the scenes at the end of the play when the two characters have a big fight and I couldn’t keep my voice down for that. Evidently Harry gave Barry a quick critique,‘Too many words’. Then he said he didn’t want to take the show on.A day or so later, Sandra Bates, the director of the Ensemble Theatre, looked at it, and she did. Barry and I started rehearsals for Double Act in August 1987 at Kirribilli. Barry was constantly rewriting the play at night. He drove me insane when he would bring in changes every morning. It was a difficult enough piece to learn. There were only two people in the play but they had to hold conversations with several imagined ones. Most of our lines were written to overlap. I described the rehearsal process as a bit like Barry having to learn the White Pages and my having to learn the Yellow Pages and occasionally we would cross-reference. It took me over two hours to get to the theatre from the Southern Highlands and even longer to get home again, so I stopped driving to Sydney in favour of taking the train. I had to get up before dawn so I could catch the early morning express but I found I could use the travel time to learn my lines, rather than wasting hours in the car. I was usually fast asleep on the train coming home and was always afraid I would miss my stop. I was constantly tired. Barry would sometimes get angry with me if I got the words wrong in rehearsal and I would shout at him whenever he brought in more alterations. One page in my script had so many changes pasted over it that it looked like a poultice. Things were getting tense.We both came down with colds. Our director, Sandra Bates, was very patient during some quite trying times. I arrived early one morning and as I was 212

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making a pot of coffee, I could see into her office. She appeared to be having an earnest conversation with Barry. I imagined he was having second thoughts about me. I felt very hurt, but kept it to myself. If only I had known that Sandra had actually been giving Barry a lecture about being too tough on me I would not have been upset. My cold was getting worse but I had to keep going.As we were working on a scene, Barry saw tears well in my eyes when I tried to suppress a cough. ‘I didn’t write that in’, he yelled at me. I was a mess. Barry was riding his motorbike again and he took me off to Darlinghurst for supper to make up for ‘being a bastard’. First of all he made sure my helmet was on properly and he sat me carefully on the pillion seat. I was wearing a denim bomber jacket, which I didn’t think to button up. He kicked over the bike and we took off at great speed. My jacket filled with air and I nearly parachuted off the back of the bike. I held on to Barry very tightly and shut my eyes and couldn’t believe it when we arrived in one piece. I never got on the bike again. We were lucky to have a number of previews at the Ensemble and by opening night most of the bugs were ironed out. The press night went very well and the reviews were sensational, especially one from Harry Kippax in the Sydney Morning Herald. He started it with,‘This is infectious entertainment. An examination of a broken marriage, it begins in a blaze-away style with salvos of almost continually funny oneliners’. The notice finished with, ‘Noeline Brown and Barry Creyton, playing at a cracking pace, give us a sense of hazardous circus skills with their concentration, balance, poise and expert timing. Barry Creyton has a hit. So does the Ensemble. So do Noeline and Barry. Their return together is most welcome.’ The Sun-Herald said,‘Australia has a new indigenous comedy that will be revived many times’. The glowing notices kept coming. One of the critics insisted that Barry Creyton should be declared a National Treasure. Somebody compared us to Noel and Gertie. Best of all, Hayes Gordon, the man who started the Ensemble Theatre and brought 213

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Method acting to Australia, told us that ‘no two actors could have done it better’. Barry once described his play to me as a vehicle for ‘two people to show off ’, and that’s what it allowed us to do. It always had a slightly competitive edge, which only helped our performances. Once the play was on, we didn’t have a sharp word to say to one another for the rest of the run, offstage that is. Our friendship was right back to where it had been in the old days of Mavis Bramston. We played eight performances a week, with a matinee on Thursdays at eleven. I found that time just a bit early, but with the aid of the very good coffee available at Kirribilli I would be in the dressing room a full hour before curtain and raring to go at five minutes to eleven. I felt fit and clear headed as soon as the theme started. Barry and I stood together in the dark, tense and poised for action, then out we would go, into combat, to the appropriate tune of ‘March of the Gladiators’. Barry and I would stop talking only for a short interval, when we would go back to the dressing room and talk again.A two-hander can be hell or heavenly and Double Act came into the latter category. I once followed a school group out of the theatre as they were leaving one day and they were discussing the play animatedly with their teacher. ‘I knew they were on television but I didn’t know they could act’, was the rather surprising comment from one of the kids. The Ensemble is such an intimate space that Barry and I could always tell how much the audiences enjoyed the play. One night we noticed two women sitting in the front row with an enormous packet of crisps on the floor between them. As they could see the show was approaching the end, the more furious their chip eating became. We were transfixed. They were shoving them in with both hands. Barry lasered them with his eyes but they still didn’t get the message. There is a bar upstairs and a licensed restaurant below the theatre where patrons can eat before the show. One Saturday night, one of our audience members appeared to have had too much to drink downstairs. She may have remembered Barry 214

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and me from the Music Hall days because she seemed to believe that Double Act required audience participation. She was definitely on the side of Alexandra, the wife. If I had a witty barb to throw at Barry, she would yell,‘Rip into him, Noeline’. It got worse. There were loud guffaws in the serious bits. That night is etched in both our brains as a nightmare, but Michael Baume, who was then Australian Consul General in New York and who happened to be in the house that night, thought it was hilarious. It was the only time I have ever seen Barry Creyton unable to control an audience. He kept looking at me with narrowed eyes, muttering ‘Kill the bitch’. The show broke records for the Ensemble and was taken up by another production company. Mike Walsh’s Hayden Attractions in association with producers Malcolm Cooke and Sue Farrelly took it to Melbourne for the start of 1988, followed by a short tour of Tasmania.We were away for three months. When we came home to Sydney, Sandra Bates asked us back to the Ensemble for a return season. The next production of Double Act was in London, unfortunately without the original cast. Englishman Simon Cadell and New Zealander Lisa Harrow were cast in our roles. Barry was invited to participate in the rehearsal process so he left immediately for London.When he arrived he looked on aghast as he felt his play had been ‘hijacked’ and changed into what was now a turgid melodrama. When he complained, Lisa Harrow insisted that Barry did not know what a great play he had written. ‘It’s a comedy!’ he moaned. Lisa Harrow got her way and managed to convince Barry to write some new speeches into the script. In the end the play bore no resemblance to the one that had broken box-office records in Australia. Barry couldn’t leave England quickly enough. He went to New York. Double Act has been produced in twenty-five countries and in nearly as many languages, including Japanese. It ran for more than a year in Madrid, broke box-office records in Canada, and has featured stars like Keir Dullea, Carmen Maura, Garry McDonald, Jean-Pierre Cassell and George Segal. Double Act 215

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continues to be performed around the world and recently opened in Rome to splendid reviews. And everyone who goes to see the show opens the program and reads,‘First performed at the Ensemble Theatre by Barry Creyton and Noeline Brown’.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

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1988 was a big year in New South Wales and also a big year for Tony and me. The government decided to celebrate New South Wales’s two hundredth birthday and our company was asked to participate in the Royal NSW BiCentennial Concert in Sydney. Wintergreen Productions also accepted a contract from a government of a different hue to work on the Brisbane Expo. The theatrical promoter, Kevin Jacobsen hired our good friend David Mitchell and Tony to help create the concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre and to assist with its production. The expensive and elaborate show opened to a crowd of about 10 000 people. The Prince of Wales and his young wife, Princess Diana, were present with State governors, premiers, the prime minister of Australia and other important guests. It was a glittering event that would be televised live. Everything had to be perfectly executed. The opening production number was a tenminute history of Australia that finished with a fabulous stage full of people on colourful hang-gliders and sailboards. Later a half-sized replica of Kingsford Smith’s plane, the Southern Cross, flew in and disgorged its stunt man. Jeannie Little, dressed in flying gear and goggles looking like a glamorous Amelia Earhart, 217

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appeared to step out of the plane and began to sing a song about flying hero Charles Kingsford Smith. As Jeannie started her number, she missed the first couple of notes. She stopped, put her hands to her face and squealed,‘Oooh, sorry, daaarlings, can we start that again?’ Later in the same show the bearded, bespectacled singer– comedian Rolf Harris danced out on stage in his big production number, ‘Ginger Meggs’, a celebration of the Australian carrot-topped cartoon icon. Suddenly everyone watching was horrified when they noticed that Rolf had forgotten to do up his fly. His starched white dress shirt was poking out in the direction of the royal couple. Rolf was totally oblivious and he went on with the song, although he must have wondered why there was so much laughter. David Mitchell had to spend hours in the studio airbrushing it out for the repeats on television but it definitely went out live on the night. Almost without a break, we started to prepare for Expo in Brisbane. The city came alive during Expo. I noticed the change because I had once spent months in Brisbane working for the Queensland Theatre Company and during the time I was there, the entire city used to close down on weekends. On Sundays there were only two shops open. One pharmacy and a rather ordinary fast-food joint. All you could get that day was a headache or a hamburger. Suddenly the locals were discovering their city and they decided they liked what they saw. No more going to the Gold Coast every weekend and shutting down the entire town: they were shopping and eating and exploring Brisbane. They even discovered they had a river. They sat on the banks. There were smiling tourists everywhere. Our brief was to produce three major concerts, which we discovered would have to be managed on a difficult stage constructed over the river. Tony had to book a ship, to be moored upstream, to house the performers because there were no dressing room facilities. One of our concerts featured the popular bands Crowded House and Eurogliders, so it attracted thousands of young people. Just before the first show was to start there was a sudden, violent electrical storm over Brisbane. 218

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It was obvious we were going to have to cancel as the conditions were too dangerous for the performers to work in. Tony walked out onto the river stage to deliver the news and the crowd booed and yelled abuse. Thousands of people gave him the finger. Cans of drink were thrown across the water. Members of one of the bands stood behind Tony, shaking their heads and miming to the audience that they would go on if only Tony would allow them, when in fact they had flatly refused to perform. It was a nightmare. One of the many people we employed at Expo was a technician called Jack. When he finished work one night he set off to walk back to his hotel.A man in a car stopped at the traffic lights and called out to him, asking if he wanted a lift. Jack beamed and thanked him. He got in the car and the person driving took him to his hotel. When they got there, Jack asked the driver if he would like a drink. They both went up to his room and when Jack opened the door, the man said, ‘You’re a poofter, aren’t you? Well, I’m a cop.’ He flashed his ID which Jack took to be genuine as he had a cousin in the police force in another state. The cop then demanded money to buy his silence. ‘You asked me up here because you’re a poof ’, he challenged. He picked up Jack’s wallet, opened it and pulled out a business card.‘Now I know where you work. Do you think people there would like to hear about what you have been getting up to?’ Jack protested that he didn’t have any money to give him.‘You’ve got a credit card’, growled the policeman. ‘I’m not giving you my credit card’, cried Jack, indignantly. ‘Well, do you want to come back to the police station and we’ll kick the shit out of you?’ Believing that he might just do it, Jack shook his head.‘Now that’s a good boy.We’ll just take this credit card and go and visit an ATM.’ Jack reluctantly made the withdrawal from a machine in a city street while the cop looked over his shoulder. Jack threw the money onto the ground saying, ‘I am not going to hand over any money to you. You can just pick it up and steal it.’Which the other man promptly did. He may or may not have been a genuine cop but just around the 219

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corner from where this happened was the court where they held the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Queensland. A short time after this rather dramatic introduction to the supposed ways of the Queensland police force, the BBC decided to send Alf Garnett to Australia to shoot some episodes of In Sickness and in Health in Sydney.Warren Mitchell played Alf Garnett, the ghastly character he had created for the very popular TV series, Till Death Us Do Part, also written by Johnny Speight. I was very happy to be cast in a couple of the episodes and was really looking forward to working with the English star. I had admired Warren Mitchell for years, having first seen him on television in England during the 1960s. He was an inventive actor and I sometimes thought other performers were jealous of his talents, as he often came in for criticism. I also caught up with John Bluthal for the first time since we had played a season together in The Bramston Show. John reminded me we had once done a sketch together where he was dressed as a woman and I had played a man. This time Bluthal and I were cast as a husband and wife who had the misfortune to have Alf Garnett staying with them in their Sydney home. The show played before a large audience in the ABC studios at Gore Hill and Warren Mitchell gave me quite a surprise when he added some new business as soon as the cameras were on him and I’m afraid I trod heavily on one of his laughs. A friend in Sydney told me my first husband wanted to see me. Derek Taylor was back in town to attend to some family business and he managed to track me down and asked if we might have lunch. Tony was far from pleased when I told him I wanted to see Derek and we had a few cross words about it, but I felt I really had to go. We met at a Chinese restaurant down at The Rocks and I was able to apologise for the way I had treated him. Derek looked much the same, only slightly heavier. He had yet another new woman in his life and he said he was happy. He spoke about coming back to Australia to buy a house one day, but instead he chose to live in Nairobi where he wrote a column for a daily newspaper and had his one and 220

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only book published.When he got back he posted me a copy. Surprisingly, for a man who had spent his life covering serious wars in various countries, Derek Taylor’s book was almost entirely devoted to food. I went into rehearsals over Christmas at the Ensemble Theatre for a season with Linda Aronson’s new play, A Night with Robinson Crusoe. The cast rehearsed downstairs in the theatre whenever it was free. One day we were working on a scene when the building seemed to be hit by a semi-trailer.‘What was that?’ we cried as one. Then we heard loud noises like the rattling of chains. Suddenly all the lights went out, leaving us in a total blackout.As the theatre had once been a boatshed and was built right on the water, I thought a ferry must have run into it. It was December 1989 and it was the day that Newcastle experienced its disastrous earthquake that measured 5.5 on the Richter scale and we had felt it as far away as Kirribilli. When I had first read the script for A Night with Robinson Crusoe I enjoyed it very much and was glad to be working with Victoria Nicholls, Denise Roberts, Judith Fisher and Barbara Wyndon, most of them friends of mine.We opened our play in January with a special performance to celebrate the Ensemble’s thirtieth birthday. On the opening night, I touched Judith Fisher’s hand as she made her first entrance and it felt as cold as ice. Judith was a nervous actor and had warned me that once she had memorised her part she would find it impossible to change her performance. One night Judith and I were sharing a scene on stage and there was a cue for another character’s entrance but the actor failed to materialise. Judith and I looked at each another. I made something up. Judith tried to focus through spinning eyes. Still nobody arrived.A little croak came from Judith as she tried to extemporised.We were left for what seemed an eternity, trying to invent more dialogue before we were relieved to hear the sound of a pair of high heels racing behind the backdrop and a flustered and apologetic actor appeared at last to save the day. For some reason Linda Aronson’s play was savaged by most of the critics. Our audiences, however, loved it and people 221

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would often ask us why the notices had been so bad. Not one of us could explain it. In spite of the reviews the six of us enjoyed the season, although I often thought there was too much noise coming from the tiny dressing rooms. Sometimes the noise backstage was like a chainsaw going through an aviary. My husband and I were in the process of building a new house in Bowral and I was worried because Tony had not been around to supervise it, as he was involved in another project in Queensland. I was alone when the contractors dug a big hole for our cellar. The next day it rained and then it poured for a week till our wine cellar was full of water. We now had a decent sized swimming pool, which was definitely not on the architect’s plans. Our marriage also started to unravel. I was in total shock. I thought I had married for life. Tony and I were fighting. Perhaps we had been apart too long.Who knows what happens in a relationship to change things? Who can you blame? I blamed everybody. It was a terrible time and I don’t know how I drove to Sydney from the Highlands every night and managed to make people laugh in a comedy, but that’s what I had to do.We couldn’t sleep.We both lost weight and were in a terrible mess. When the house was finally built, Tony and I decided to take a holiday, the first one in years. He picked me up from the theatre after our last performance and we stayed the night in a hotel nearby. In the morning we drove off at dawn, heading towards the sun. We came back from the trip with our marriage intact to our brand new home, only to find it invaded by crickets. On the brighter side we opened the mail to find our company had been awarded the contract to provide the entertainment for the first American ‘Indy’ car race in Australia, which was to be held on the Gold Coast early in 1991. We set up a production office and manned it with a small but capable crew. Tony hired a talented twenty-year-old local, Scott Anderson, as the graphic artist for the show and a couple of production assistants. We planned concerts, the dressing of the streets and even the design and decoration of new bridges 222

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used to cross the racetrack. Tony believed that there should be something for the wives of car enthusiasts to do, so he suggested an evening of opera in the park. Culture and motor racing do not necessarily go together but we thought it just might work so two lead singers from the Vienna State Opera and an overseas conductor were booked. It was the 200th anniversary of the death of Mozart and the world was experiencing Mozart fever, so we decided to produce Mozart by moonlight. We also organised a show with rock and roll and R&B singers for another night so everyone would be catered for. The American opera singer Leona Mitchell was also booked. We discovered she would be travelling to Australia with her husband and child and a huge entourage. Dionne Warwick was coming. Then Tony came up with the perfect person to host the night at the opera. ‘Who could be more Gold Coast than Zsa Zsa Gabor?’, he cried. So he rang her agent in America and she was booked. Things were falling into place. My hairdresser friend John Bird was back in Australia from one of his many trips overseas and he was happy to put in some time with us on the Indy show. John is devoted to glamour so he was keen to meet the overseas stars. Tony drove to the airport to collect Zsa Zsa and her husband, the Prince. We had organised police on motorbikes to escort her into town because of a highly publicised incident in the US where the star had been charged with assaulting a highway patrol officer. There were four tough Australian cops on bikes, all lined up keen to be slugged by Zsa Zsa, but she must have decided to behave herself. The first major function was a ball at an international hotel and Zsa Zsa and the Prince were guests of honour. Television quizmaster Tony Barber was booked to be host of the event and he started his welcome speech by saying how thrilled we all were to have such a ‘wonderful septuagenarian from Hollywood with us tonight’.‘Vat did he call me?’ the star shrieked to her Prince as they left the room in high dudgeon, threatening to leave the country the next day. My husband Tony, who is not usually known for his mediation skills, nevertheless went 223

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into damage control. He left our table and followed her out, trying to calm her.‘You fokker’, Zsa Zsa screamed at him.‘You could have got any two-bit has-been whore to open zis show.’ I think that night Tony thought he had. The evening before the first race was due to take place Tony had to work with Scott so he suggested I take John Bird out to dinner.We met a friend of John’s who was living in the Gold Coast and he drove us to a restaurant by the water. John’s friend did not drink, having given it up when he thought he was becoming an alcoholic but John was throwing the wine down, as he often does when he gets excited. He was having a great time. Suddenly he turned pale and excused himself, telling us he was going to his friend’s car to lie down. The friend and I were enjoying a leisurely meal and were almost ready to leave when John suddenly lurched into the room, looking quite dishevelled and disoriented. When he saw us sitting together he smiled with relief. He had woken up in the unfamiliar car and did not know where he was. We decided to take him back to the hotel, so we climbed into the old clapped-out American bomb of a car and started back into the centre of town, driving along the course that the Indy cars would be using the next morning. There were new barricades and high-wire fencing along the sides of the road to protect spectators from accidents. As we approached the official start of the racetrack, John opened his car door and threw up all over the starting line. At that same moment two policemen in a patrol car were about to say, ‘Pull over, driver’ or something similar, when they took one look at John with his head out the door and thought better of it. They drove off in disgust, as did we. Zsa Zsa proved to be a nightmare. She and her Prince were accommodated in a glamorous two-storey apartment in a brand new resort with its own golf course, just outside of the Gold Coast. John Bird was recruited to look after her because he has a wonderful way with celebrities and can put them at their ease. ‘She’s the worst person I have ever met’, he complained to me after their first meeting. Evidently he had just 224

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finished doing her hair and was about to apply some hairspray when she hit out at him, screaming, ‘Careful of zis blouse, darlink, it cost five sousand dollars’. Zsa Zsa ignored most of us and was positively vile to Tony till the night of the opera when everything went smoothly and the huge outdoor audience greeted her with rapturous applause. Her mood changed instantly. ‘You are genius, darlink’, she cooed at him as she rushed to the phone to ring her sister, Eva Gabor, in Hollywood to tell her what a wonderful time she was having. ‘Zey treat me like royalty, darlink.’ I was with the production crew, sitting on the grass behind the large audience discussing the success of the event when a tough, tattooed man with a mullet and a thin beard turned around and hissed,‘Will you shut up? I’m trying to listen to the bloody opera.’ Someone spread a rumour that on their last night at the resort Zsa Zsa and her Prince were caught on film by the security camera, filling their bags with goods from a room service trolley in the hall. It would not have mattered even if it were true as Tony and I had given advice that we would pay for room and board only and the hotel had wisely taken a swipe of their credit card. I returned from the Gold Coast to hear that my father was not very well. I called in to see him on my way home from the airport and when Mum took me into his bedroom he appeared to be hallucinating. He seemed to think I had just flown back from a football game and he was talking about the wonderful young Aboriginal player who was on the winning team. Mum and I looked at each other. I had never shown any interest in football.We rang for a doctor. Dad was taken straight to hospital and operated on the next day. While he was there he developed an infection and we were told he would never recover. We called all the family in to see him and took turns to sit with him around the clock. We were able to tell our father how much we loved him and he was able to do the same for us. He became very weak but he must have had powerful organs because he was hanging on for a very long time. ‘I’m 225

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dying as fast as I can’, he murmured to a nurse who came in to check his vital signs. I asked if he would like to see a priest. His voice was loud and clear and a trifle indignant.‘No thank you.’ Dad was eventually put on a morphine drip and he appeared to be dozing most of the time. Mum and I stayed with him in his room, taking turns to sleep in an uncomfortable chair but we were both wide awake when we heard him speak. A very small voice whispered, ‘Catholic priest’. ‘Did you hear what I just heard?’ asked Mum. ‘Yes’, I replied and left the room to see if I could find one. I rang my brothers and my nephews and our beloved Aunt Nola and the family filled the room as we waited for the priest to arrive. The last person to get there was my Jewish sister-inlaw, Susie, who came into the room just as the priest, in full regalia was giving my father the Last Rites. Sue and I smiled at one another at the sight of the priest getting Dad in the end.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE KING, A

SAINT AND MY MOTHER

A fax churned out of our machine in the office. On inspection we found the message was from Graham Kennedy. In it he asked us to look for a property near our home in the Southern Highlands. He would like to have a few acres around him so he could ‘hug a Clydesdale’ as he put it. He explained it had been a wish he’d had from childhood, when he had spent a very happy time on a small farm in Victoria’s Gippsland. Tony and I inspected a number of places, some very lavish, others not, so Graham could have a wide choice.We spent days with an agent and the star’s video camera. It didn’t surprise us when Graham picked the cheapest property; a hundred and twenty acres of land some distance away, with a pine settler’s cottage—a rough little shack with a loft. Graham wanted some alterations made to transform it into a three-bedroom house with three bathrooms and a kitchen that would contain the latest fittings, but he didn’t want to change the exterior. We offered to supervise the building work and some time later Graham had a desirable little cottage in a lovely but isolated part of the world. In the empty loft space he now had a study opening into a bedroom with a bathroom and a spa. Downstairs were two 227

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guest bedrooms, each with a small bathroom. The rest of the house comprised an open plan kitchen, living and dining area with a wood fire at one end. A coloured photograph of a team of Clydesdales pulling a Carlton United dray had been blown up to an enormous size and took pride of place along one wall. Graham had often admired a picture Tony and I had hanging on our walls at home. It was an oil painting of an old building in Pyrmont, done by the Sydney artist Bill Fish, who might have been influenced by the work of Jeffrey Smart. Bill had knocked on our door when we were living in Pyrmont to ask us if we wanted to buy the picture, which he had in a large bag. We liked it and bought it and Bill sold us some others. Graham asked me if I could get him some of Bill’s work for his new house. He said he didn’t care what the subjects were; he trusted me to know what he’d like. It was a strange shopping list I took to the painter in Sydney but I came home with two small oils; one of a corner shop in Paddington and another of a railway yard. Fortunately, Graham was very pleased with them. One day when Tony was working away from home, Graham invited me to have lunch with him at one of our favourite restaurants in Bowral. He said it was to celebrate his birthday so I went downstairs to our cellar and found a very old bottle of Grange worth many hundreds of dollars, which I thought he would enjoy as a birthday gift. I removed the cork a couple of hours before I was to meet him, to give the wine plenty of time to breathe. Graham was very impressed with the gesture and so was Paul, the young waiter, who told us he had never seen a bottle of Grange before, and was terrified of breaking it. We had a lovely lunch, Graham enjoyed the wine, and I was surprised to find that I also got stuck with the bill. Graham Kennedy christened his new farm, ‘Clydesdale’, after his horse Dave, who was one of the team of Carlton United Brewery stars whose photo appeared in the living room. Graham seemed to be very happy just being able to feed 228

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his horse a carrot or two and pat its great head. He seemed content to spend most of the day on his narrow timber deck sitting in a plastic chair, flicking the ash from his French cigarettes into the revolving ashtray he had on an outdoor table next to a small refrigerator full of beer. Tony and I were amazed when we received an invitation to a picnic at his farm because Graham seldom went outdoors. He said he wanted to take us to a part of the property that we had never seen before. Graham had a new assistant at the time, a young man called Angus, who drove us down to the picnic spot in Graham’s brand new four-wheel drive and then, after a few words with his boss, took off in the car back to the house. We had been driven over rough terrain to a clearing with a little rainforest creek running through it. Two stout logs lay across the watercourse and we noticed that someone had been hard at work with a chainsaw. There were four deep squares cut into the timber, a perfect fit for the red leather cushions from the Chesterfield in Graham’s sitting room.When we sat down, dangling our legs over the tiny stream, we could see four circles had been carved into the logs, just large enough to hold our wine glasses. Sitting on the grass was a handsome strong wicker hamper with leather straps, which Graham went down on his knees to open. First he shook out a navy woollen rug. From the hamper he brought out heavy silver cutlery and fine Wedgwood china, blue napkins and crystal glasses. Bottles of beer and wine were cooling in the stream. Angus returned later with a steaming gourmet pie. It had been ordered beforehand at one of Graham’s favourite restaurants in Berrima and his assistant had been dispatched to collect it in time for our lunch. Tony and I smiled at each other as we both realised that Graham must have rehearsed everything days before to get his picnic absolutely right.Angus must have been exhausted. It was a fabulous occasion and one that I believe, has never been repeated. Graham usually chose to spend his Christmases on his own or with another friend of long standing, the actor Stuart Wagstaff, who also professed to hate the day. They would 229

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sometimes take off on a plane together early on Christmas morning and have lunch in the air somewhere between Australia and New Zealand. One year we managed to talk Graham into coming to our place and he continued to do so for some time. It would often be just the three of us sitting down to lunch or sometimes he would be part of our extended family if they came to visit. One memorable Christmas we convinced both Graham and Stuart Wagstaff to be our guests and their friend, television journalist John Mangos, came along as well. For people who were supposed to hate Christmas they seemed to have a lovely time. When we pulled the crackers and the gifts fell out, Graham actually put the paper hat on his head and left it there all day. It was a crown. When he walked outside for a smoke he took his denture out and grinned through the windows at the people inside. A vet who lived next door to Graham suggested he get a dog as a companion. Graham was undecided, till Harry the vet told him he knew of an animal that Graham could just ‘audition’. Henry was a golden retriever, the runt of the litter, who had been castrated because he was not suitable for breeding purposes. Graham told me he had visited the kennels and the other dogs were picking on Henry because he ‘didn’t have any balls’ so he had taken him home on approval. Henry was a lovely animal and proved to be a great companion. Graham had never had a pet when he was a child because, as he was fond of saying, ‘We were too poor’, but he had shared his adult life with many dogs, one of them being Rover who once famously lifted a leg in one of his television shows. Graham would always bring Henry along to our place in the back of the car and as soon as he let him out the dog would head straight for our compost bin.When they were ready to go home I was always required to prepare a doggy bag for Henry. Sometimes I put in a few items that I thought might just finish up on Graham’s plate that night. Graham was now retired. He bred some Clydesdales and was able to use the fax instead of the phone. He was content and happy not to travel to Sydney anymore, and he would only 230

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go into town if Channel 9 sent a helicopter for him. He had made friends with a few local identities, including a popular butcher from Moss Vale. He even offered to do the butcher’s commercials on the local radio station in exchange for his weekly meat order. I flew off to Queensland early in 1993 to do a season of Katherine Thomson’s Barmaids with Joan Sydney, who was for a long time the matron in the popular television show, A Country Practice. Joan was cast as Nancy, a bosomy ageing romantic and I was her plain and practical colleague,Val. Peter Williams, the director, privately described his two stars as ‘Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’. Graham Kennedy faxed me a message just before opening night: ‘How’s it going? If you’re full of self-doubt and have decided to leave the profession then everything’s quite normal. Not only will it be right on the night, but it will be right on the night before and, very likely, even the night before that.’ Graham showed great admiration for anyone who worked on the stage but shuddered at the thought of having to do eight performances a week. Barmaids played at the Rialto in Brisbane, an old iron shed on the wrong side of town. It was the perfect location for the play, which had an excellent hotel set with a practical bar. Joan and I first had to have lessons in the art of pulling beer, which came easily to Joan as she is a publican’s daughter. During rehearsals, Peter Williams was in touch with the author constantly and made quite a few changes to the original play. Nancy and Val would take turns to drag people out of the audience to sit at the bar or to sing to the karaoke, where they might be lucky enough to win a frozen chook. One night as I was trawling through the audience for a likely candidate I noticed that the embattled West Australian businessman Alan Bond and his fiancée, Diana Bliss, were in the house. I thought about getting the ex-tycoon up on stage but rejected the notion, not wanting to humiliate him further. After the show was over, our director brought the couple backstage.Alan Bond expressed genuine disappointment that I hadn’t asked him to be part of the show. 231

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Joan and I took Barmaids to Sydney where we played at the Opera House. After opening night, the critic Ken Healey awarded the production ‘Two Schooners’ instead of stars and described it as the ‘Dimboola of the 90s’. I was at home listening to the radio when I heard on the news that Frank Hardy had died in Melbourne at the age of seventy-seven. I was amused to read in the paper the next day that he had been found with a pen in one hand and the racing form in the other. At his funeral later in the week, two flags were draped over his casket. They were the Eureka flag and the Aboriginal flag. Some of the Gurindji people, who remembered Frank for the help that he had given them, flew down to be with Hardy on his last day on earth. Frank would have laughed at all the fuss. He was not religious and, as he often said, he was no saint. I couldn’t go to the service because Tony and I had an appointment to discuss a person who was about to become a saint. The Sisters of St Joseph were making plans to celebrate the life of Mary MacKillop, the founder of their order who had died in 1909 after a lifetime of service. The Pope was coming to Australia and Mary MacKillop was to be beatified. The Sisters were planning to build a museum and the contract for designing it was awarded to our company, which evidently surprised a lot of people.‘Why would the nuns have chosen an actor and a comedy writer?’ they asked. Moreover we were not Catholic. The truth is, they had asked many people before we were approached, but nobody knew how to go about it. The Pope was due to arrive in Australia in January 1995 so we only had six months to build the museum, starting from scratch. We had to redesign the interior of the building, organise the displays, plan the computerised and interactive programs, and to create a story around Mother Mary’s MacKillop’s life. At the same time I was booked to appear in a revival of David Williamson’s Emerald City at the Ensemble, which was fortunately almost around the corner from the museum. Our architect friend, Craig Pattinson, started work on the plans straight away. Scott Anderson flew down from Queens232

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land and set up his computer, where he began to design wonderful images for every aspect of the project. Theatrical designers Peter England, James Ridewood and Russell Cohen came on board. We brought our builder friends up from the Highlands because we knew they would work till they dropped. Everyone ate together. Some of them slept together. People spent every day and every night working horrendous hours till they finished, just in time for the Pope to drive through the cheering crowds lining the streets of North Sydney on his way to the museum where he bestowed his blessing on Mother Mary MacKillop, who people believe will one day be Australia’s first saint. Just after we had moved out of the museum and settled back home, Tony and I rather reluctantly agreed to drive back to Sydney to attend a friend’s birthday lunch. On our way back to the Highlands I thought of calling in on my mother, but I could see that Tony was anxious to get home again so I didn’t say anything to him. We were halfway there when my mobile phone rang. It was my brother, Peter. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, as I always do when one of my brothers calls. ‘It’s Mum.’ ‘What’s up?’ I asked. There was a pause, then his voice broke as he replied, ‘She’s dead, darling’. Tony could hear the panic in my voice and slowed the car down. ‘What happened?’ I cried. I had only seen her two days before when I had taken her out for a drive. I had spoken to her twice the previous day when she talked about the cake I had taken her. She told me she had eaten two pieces and felt she could have attacked a third. Mum was well and in good health. I shook my head in disbelief and whispered to Tony, ‘There was nothing wrong with her’. As soon as we got home I packed up my own car and drove back to Sydney to be with my brothers.When I arrived, Mum had already been taken away. I had so many questions.‘Had she hurt herself?’ I was afraid she might have fallen. Peter told me how he had dropped in to see Mum, as he often did, but became concerned when she didn’t answer the door. He was 233

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aware that she and her neighbour each had a key to the other’s house, so he asked if he might borrow Joyce’s from next door. He was worried about what he might find, so he asked Joyce to accompany him inside.When they reached the living room they discovered Mum sitting in a corner of the couch. She appeared to be dozing. The television set was still on. She had been watching the ABC. The crumbs of a piece of cake were scattered on a plate on the coffee table. Peter assured me that she looked incredibly peaceful. Her doctor told us that Mum had experienced a sudden and massive heart attack and would have died in seconds. It was April Fools’ Day. I still think she was just playing a joke on us and if I were to ring her number now, my Mum will pick up the phone.

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Almost a year after the death of my mother, John Howard became prime minister of Australia. My brothers and I agreed that she wouldn’t have been too happy about it. It had come as a terrible shock to me to see Paul Keating replaced by someone I felt would take us back to the dark ages, or worse still, the 1950s, which I could remember only too well. ‘Mr Magoo without the vision’, was how Keating once described him. I knew Howard’s vision was to get rid of the unions, dismantle Medicare and bring in the dreaded GST, a tax on absolutely everything. I felt it was important to become actively involved and decided, after being a lifelong supporter, to actually join the Labor Party. On the night of Paul Keating’s defeat I tried to get hold of someone from the local branch to find out about joining up. At that time the branch did not have a listing in the local telephone directory, so I rang head office as soon as it opened and was given a number to call. The person at the other end of the phone answered,‘This is Rodney Cavalier’. I gave him my name. ‘Is that the Noeline Brown?’ he asked. ‘Is that the Rodney Cavalier?’ I enquired of him, knowing he had been the Minister for Education for a time in the Wran 235

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government. I was unaware that he lived in Bowral with his partner, Sally, and their two young children. I was not the only person eager to join. Membership of the Labor Party increased all over Australia in March of that year. I started to attend regular monthly meetings of the Southern Highlands branch, along with a group of other passionate defenders of Labor Party principles. I knew that we were in the minority, as the area has for a long time been regarded as absolutely blueribbon conservative. As well as being worried about the state of the country, Tony and I also started to have a few real concerns about Graham Kennedy. Every Saturday we would ring and ask him over for Sunday lunch. Even though he came to us most weekends, we still had to issue the invitation. He started to ask, ‘Do you mind if I let you know in the morning?’ So every Sunday, hopefully before I had begun to prepare the meal, he would ring and tell us whether or not he was going to show up. I thought he was just being precious but I didn’t know that he was starting to feel sick and was not looking well. If he felt a bit ordinary or didn’t like what he saw in the mirror he’d cancel the lunch and go back to bed. Graham had always employed somebody to drive him about and do a few odd jobs on his property. One of their duties was to cook breakfast for him and serve it upstairs in his room. It was difficult to get anyone to stay for very long as it was a live-in job and the farm was quite remote. Graham was probably fairly demanding as an employer and I know he didn’t ever like to part with too much money. When the last person left, he decided he could manage on his own. He had stopped breeding Clydesdales and Dave, his original horse, had died of old age, so it was just Graham and Henry, the golden retriever, living together on a lonely farm in Canyonleigh. A neighbour offered to go to his house and cook breakfast for him. Sally Baker-Beall lived almost across the road and she was up and about early, feeding her chooks so she thought she would be able to dash over to Graham’s with some fresh eggs each morning. On her first day at work, Graham gave Sally a 236

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Polaroid shot of his breakfast tray so she would know exactly how he wanted it presented. Sally went to ‘Clydesdale’ every weekday at eight with her eggs and Graham loved her for her generosity and her good sense of humour.‘When Sally laughs, so much of her has a good time’, Graham said to me once, borrowing an old vaudeville line that Sally would have recognised from her days as a young woman in England, where she had been an ardent fan of the many comics who played the concert halls. Graham rang me one day and asked ‘Nurse Brown’, as he often called me, having heard about my time with the clinic, what black spots on the skin signified. ‘Too much alcohol’, I replied. ‘Oh, really?’ he sounded surprised. Graham suffered from diabetes and he thought the black spots could have been gangrene.What I did not know was that Graham had stopped cooking for himself. He was no longer consulting his many recipe books or making his delicious authentic Osso Bucco or cooking up little pots of jam with the aid of recipes from the Australian Women’s Weekly cookbook. Apart from the breakfasts that Sally prepared for him, his state-of-the-art kitchen remained unused. The black spots he had on his skin were actually caused by a vitamin deficiency because he wasn’t getting enough to eat. Graham had always had trouble with his feet, which were extremely long and thin. His constant smoking over many years had guaranteed he would finish up with circulation problems. ‘Will there be any walking?’ he used to ask me, after I had issued an invitation to a meal, knowing that we sometimes liked to set up lunch in the boatshed down by the river. I would offer to load him into the wheelbarrow and deliver him to the site, but eventually Tony and I had to make sure that when Graham came to visit, we only ate in the dining room or outside on the nearby deck, where he could smoke his cigarettes. I was worried. Graham was alone and a long way out of town. He no longer wanted to drive and I wondered what would become of him if he got really sick. Tony and I had a long talk about him. I had to start rehearsals in a new comedy at Marian Street Theatre, which meant travelling to Sydney 237

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from the Highlands every day, so it was up to Tony to keep an eye on Graham. Barry Creyton had written his new two-act play, Valentine’s Day, in Los Angeles, where he had been living for a long while with his partner in the Hollywood Hills. He was pleased to be able to use Marian Street as an off-off-Broadway try-out. I loved the script as soon as I read it. It was a black comedy about divorce and revenge and I was pleased that Barry wanted to work with me again. Barry decided to perform in the play as well, bringing him back to the stage after an absence of some years. Donald Macdonald, our friend and colleague of old, played the central character, a middle-aged and suicidal New York writer. The glamorous busty singer, Maria Venuti, was cast as Mitzi, a voracious Jewish widow who stalks the writer. Handsome British actor Barry Quin and a pretty newcomer from WAPA (West Australian Performing Arts Academy), Judith Wright, also featured. Young Adam Hedditch made the most of a small but sensational part right at the end of the play. The show was co-directed by playwright and Marian Street veteran John Krummel. Barry realised he had taken on a lot as he was rewriting, acting and directing. He also experienced a bad case of jet lag in the first week. I found it a bit disconcerting in rehearsal when the character he was playing would give me the beady look of the director if he thought I was doing something wrong, but it was good to be working with him again. Maria Venuti was perfectly cast in the role of Mitzi, even though she had not had much acting experience. Before rehearsal started she had perfected her Bronx accent with the aid of a tape Barry had sent her from the States. Maria is perhaps better known for her fantastic wardrobe and her work as a singer. She is an exotic, voluptuous half-Italian, half-Middle Eastern woman with a long mane of thick dark brown hair and a pair of sensational breasts. Maria and I shared a dressing room during the run of Valentine’s Day and we both used to get in early to do our makeup. While talking one day, we discovered we had both been romanced, more than thirty years before, by the dashing writer and television personality, Ray Taylor. 238

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I mentioned this to Barry, who remarked, ‘Well of course. You can see why. You and Maria Venuti are so much alike.’ Back in the Highlands the local branch of the Labor Party announced it would be holding a fundraiser at the home of Rodney Cavalier, who had generously thrown open his garden for the event. I apologised as I would only be able to attend for an hour or so because I had a show in the late afternoon. There was to be a barbecue for hundreds of people and two of our members had literally killed the fatted calf. I took my plate of food to the party, as requested, and then left Tony on his own to enjoy the day. The conversation at his table soon turned to the upcoming State election, then about five months away. We were still without a candidate. The State seat of Southern Highlands takes in a vast area from urban Campbelltown in the north to rural Kangaroo Valley in the south. Tony was told it was absolutely unwinnable for Labor, but everyone agreed that somebody should fly the flag. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘Why don’t you ask Noeline?’ The next day I took a call from a member of our branch, asking if I was interested in standing.Without much hesitation, I agreed to put myself forward for pre-selection. The next thing I knew I was the endorsed candidate for the seat of Southern Highlands. I wondered how I would manage the workload. I was doing some voice work for a series of cartoons for Southern Star, playing in a remake of The Toothbrush Family and Ketchup, a funny cooking show for kids. I also had to do eight performances, six days a week in Valentine’s Day and spend over four hours a day in the car. But I knew all my commitments would be finished early in the New Year so I rang my agent James Laurie and we decided not to take on anything else. The election was due at the end of March in 1999 and I had three months to devote myself totally to the task. The premier, Bob Carr, announced my candidature one afternoon following a matinee at Marian Street. He and I sat on two stools in the media briefing room at the Premier’s Department, looking like the characters at the start of 239

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The Naked Vicar Show. Bob Carr was very welcoming and full of encouragement. One of the journalists from Channel 9 asked me if I had been promised the job of Minister for the Arts. I roared with laughter at the suggestion and assured him that nothing could be further from my mind. Suddenly there was an unexpected flurry of media interest. I must admit that I was not prepared for it. My mobile phone was running hot and I had to keep dashing out of the recording studio to take calls. The producer must have been livid. Mike Carlton from Radio 2GB was first on the phone as soon as the news came out. He appeared to be flabbergasted, as Rex Mossop would say. Then Richard Glover from ABC Radio rang. ‘Why?’ they all wanted to know. Why would I want to become a politician? Everyone I spoke to pulled a face as if they had just stepped in something nasty. I felt I had gone from icon to arsehole overnight. Every commentator pointed out the fact that I would require a swing of more than 11.5 per cent to win. I argued that Southern Highlands was a new seat, created after redistribution, so anything might happen. I added that it might be time for a person who had actually lived in the area for over twenty years and had some experience in the real world to bring some of that experience to public life. The local conservative newspaper went into overdrive. The John Fairfax-owned Rural Press printed the two papers in Bowral: the three-times weekly Southern Highland News and the Post, a throwaway. Rural Press also owned most of the other papers in the areas covered by the seat. The headlines on the front page of the News trumpeted that I was ‘not on the electoral roll’. Everyone knew that I had been a local resident and ratepayer for over twenty years but I was on the roll as Sattler, my married name, which I had to change back to Brown for the election. One journalist wrote that while the sitting member, also a woman, ran under her maiden, or professional, name, Noeline Brown was just a ‘stage name’ and invented. I told them I was born Noeline Brown, so that would surely be my maiden name and if I had chosen to invent a stage name, I definitely would have picked a better one. 240

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The local member had been a Liberal Party staffer before she won the seat in a by-election, after former State Premier John Fahey made his move into Federal politics. She had then had to fight it out with a National Party representative from Goulburn, also a woman, and our Labor candidate, wellrespected local Phil Yeo. She moved into the electorate to qualify and took over Fahey’s old office, located conveniently two doors down from the local newspaper. Tony and I arranged a meeting with the editor of the local paper who had only recently arrived in the Highlands. Nigel Watkin, our campaign director, accompanied us to his office and we thought the young editor seemed quite approachable. Nigel complained that in the past the News had just used the Labor candidate for target practice. The editor assured us that would no longer be the case and he wanted to give both sides a fair go.We left, feeling quite satisfied, but it wasn’t long before we discovered that the new editor leaned to the right of Genghis Khan. The knives were out. Personal attacks came from the Liberals in the ‘Letters’ pages and in a column penned by someone who called himself ‘The Mule’. There was nothing but criticism. I was reeling. Finally, a single letter was printed that actually defended me. ‘The Mule’ ‘outed’ the writer the next day as being a member of the Labor Party. I started to experience panic attacks as I dreamt about what the papers might print next and how it could influence voters. I decided I just had to put it to the back of my mind and go about the task of being the candidate; organising meetings with constituents and making myself known to government ministers. I was kept very busy with speaking engagements, probably because of my theatrical background. A gilded invitation arrived from Ethersey House in Sutton Forest, asking me to lunch with Andrew Lee and Rudy Fabiani, who were organising a ball to launch Bowral’s annual Tulip Time Festival, its major tourist attraction. The lunch was to plan the coming event. I was surprised to be invited and heard some local noses were put out of joint by it. When I arrived at 241

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Ethersey House, quite a few people I knew tried not to mention my candidature in case they might have to use the word ‘Labor’, although Doug Sutherland, the ex-Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney was present and we enjoyed a few pleasantries. At one time I overheard a discussion between two of the guests about Andrew Lee, one of the hosts, being the illegitimate son of Prince Phillip. I had noticed that he had a minder with him at all times, standing alone with his hands clasped behind his back. I looked closely at my host to see if there was any resemblance to the Duke. There was another person with a title at the lunch who handed me his card as he walked past.As he did so, another guest whispered that the man’s wife had come into money and had bought the title for him. We were called into the dining room for lunch and as we sat down to our first course I detected a strong smell of smoke coming from the direction of the kitchen. It was obvious the roast pork was on fire. The waiter came out from the next room, flapping a tea towel and looking quite red in the face. The hosts disappeared to deal with the crisis and most of the meat was spared. The ball did not take place for some reason and I believe Andrew Lee has since left the area. I read an article on him recently in one of the Sunday magazines where I learnt he is now known as Lord Mountbatten and spends most of his time in the Highlands of Scotland. The Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, chose to visit our area to make an important announcement and Grant Newton, the editor of the Southern Highland News, arrived with a camera to record the event. Grant wrote a story about Bob Carr and the Labor government’s investment with the local Wingecarribee Council in a $20 million sewerage scheme. The article informed the public that the first thing Bob Carr did after driving up from Sydney to announce the sewerage scheme was to use the toilet. The paper carried a photograph of the Premier and a headline that read ‘What a relief ’. The Southern Highlands of NSW is often regarded as a privileged area, home to vast numbers of wealthy people. I knew from having lived in various parts of the district that this 242

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was not always the case. Most of our own friends were not wealthy, but were people working in the building trades, families running small businesses, some trying to get a job and others just hoping to make ends meet. I knew people living on pensions and others who were doing it tough. I felt I could perhaps make a difference. Having a high profile helped me enormously during the campaign. My diary was full of speaking engagements. Strangers had no difficulty talking to me. Being in their living rooms for nearly forty years made me seem non-threatening and accessible. I was keen to convince young people to vote, that they should regard it as a privilege and not an inconvenience. I was aware that a lot of young men in the area had never bothered to enrol.We talked one of our friends into registering, but he was told he was three years too late, and was given a fine. Well into the campaign I was approached by a woman to attend a meeting of Kindergarten Union’s Families First Macarthur, which ran a program for families of children with disabilities. When I discovered the facility was in Airds, near Campbelltown, I had to explain that it was not actually in the seat of Southern Highlands but the caller informed me that some of our local families took their children there, because there was nothing like this program in the Highlands. I drove to Airds the following week and when I eventually found the place it was buzzing with activity. There were small children everywhere, crawling, lying on the floor, playing with crayons, banging on drums. They were all very young, some of them babes in arms. The noise was incredible. It was an open day, held at the beginning of every week when parents and friends and siblings were invited to be part of the activities. The only kids with noticeable disabilities were in wheelchairs. All the children seemed to be very happy in this environment. Everyone was having a good time. I was given a couple of gorgeous babies to hold, one a little pink and white bundle I could see had Downs Syndrome. She was beautiful. The parents took me to their tiny meeting room to have a cup of tea and to meet a health professional who was there to 243

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discuss toilet training. She passed on helpful hints involving simple techniques, such as massage. One of the parents told the group about his daughter who had a developmental problem. She didn’t take in enough fluids because she actually tried to chew the water. The group attempted to come up with a solution for him. One of the mothers told us how she and her husband and their other children rewarded their child with special needs if he remembered to use the lavatory. They would flick the light switch on and off, blow hooters, light sparklers, open and shut the doors and yell ‘hooray’. I had such a good time listening to them that I stayed till lunchtime. Shortly after my visit I was asked if I would become their patron and I happily accepted. The organisation is now known as KU Starting Points Macarthur, after a battle over the use of its previous name. In the meantime, I knocked on doors and did what I could to get Labor’s message across on our very limited budget. Scott Anderson and his wife Jodi designed all our campaign material for nothing. We had to raise all our own funds for the campaign, which kept our supporters busy. We had one particularly successful fundraiser because of the special guest speaker Tony had managed to get for the day. Annita Keating had agreed to speak at a luncheon and John Mangos was prepared to drive to the Highlands and host the event. Branchstalwart Jan Merriman organised the lunch and we found we had to turn people away. There was a great deal of interest in Annita at the time, so we were grateful she had agreed to come. Tony wrote a speech for her and she talked about youth suicide and her role as patron of ‘Seasons for Growth’, a program run by our mutual friends, the Sisters of St Joseph. One windy Saturday morning, I was with a group of supporters handing out how-to-vote leaflets outside a Moss Vale supermarket. I offered one to an elderly woman and as soon as I did I realised I probably should not have bothered. She was decked out in tweed from head to ankle and looked more than a little like the English character actor Margaret Rutherford. As I spruiked, ‘Noeline Brown for the ALP’ she 244

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roared, ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ and threw the flyer to the ground. It wafted rather than fell to the dirt, somewhat ruining the gesture. The woman walked away in high dudgeon to her parked Range Rover. She hesitated for a moment, then returned. She stomped over to our group and spat, ‘You Laborites have ruined the country!’ In the latter part of the election campaign I was fortunate to be asked to appear on national television programs like Bert Newton’s popular Good Morning Australia and Denise Drysdale’s show in the afternoon. Radio broadcasters Alan Jones and John Laws discussed my candidature as well. We were pleased that commentators still seemed to find the story interesting. I took one phone call from a journalist while I was in the toilet in the now defunct Ansett Golden Wing Club. I’m surprised it got through all the marble. I started to get the giggles as I pictured myself as the sitting member. I was getting ready to catch a plane down to Melbourne for Bert’s interview early the following morning. In the studio the next day, Bert asked if anyone had given me a bad time during our campaign. I replied that so far everyone had been very courteous, except for one dog, but she had recently had pups and was probably only protecting them. I then went on to describe my encounter with the Margaret Rutherford lookalike.We had a few laughs about it, and Bert joked, ‘Oh, you met Aunt Edna’ or something like that. Our show went straight to air. I flew back from Melbourne later that day and when I arrived home, I took a phone call from The Illawarra Mercury in Wollongong, followed by a similar one from Regional ABC. The two journalists asked if there was any truth in the rumour that I had declared on the Bert Newton show that morning that the people of Bowral were all snobs. I was aghast. ‘Of course not’, I replied.‘Why would I do that? I’m trying to get elected.’ The journalists said they didn’t think there was anything to it, but an anonymous person had rung them with the information and they just needed to check the story,‘to see if it had legs’. 245

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Someone from the local paper rang Bert Newton’s producer, and asked about the show. One of the program assistants called our office to warn us. It appeared the News was going to carry the negative story without seeing the tape. This would be the final edition before the election and would have a great deal of influence on voters. I would have given them a video of the show if I had one but I hadn’t told anyone to record it when it went to air. I didn’t think it would be necessary and I had long ago given up recording my appearances on the box. The News did finally get in touch with our office and told us of the rumour. I vehemently denied it and said that the ABC and the Mercury had heard the same scuttlebutt but had dismissed it as nonsense. Fortunately one of our campaign workers was a Sydney businesswoman who was helping us out while she was between jobs. Sue was a dynamo. She contacted Rehame, the media monitoring company, and had them fax through the complete transcript of my appearance on Bert’s show as a top priority. We were running out of time—the paper was just about to go to bed. We hurriedly photocopied the pages as they arrived and pushed them through to the editor via our fax machine. It was blindingly obvious there was no truth to the story.We talked with the editor and said that he could not, in all conscience, knowingly publish a lie. The next day Tony rushed into town early to get the papers as soon as they came out. There was an editorial, entitled ‘Election Comment. It’s Time to Decide’, warning people about the importance of their vote, and then congratulating the sitting member for all her hard work. The editor then turned his attention to me, reminding people of the paper’s earlier criticism of the Labor candidate, followed by, ‘Miss Brown has also come under attack from local residents for remarks she made on Good Morning Australia last Friday. The News has not viewed a copy of the tape yet and so cannot comment.’ He neglected to say they had in their possession a full copy of the transcript of the show. On the day of the election there were eight candidates to 246

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choose from. I had drawn the seventh position and the local member was halfway down the list. The other candidates included an Independent, a councillor from the nearby Wollondilly Shire who ran a second-hand shop in Picton, a Democrat schoolteacher, a Green from Bundanoon, a One Nation member also from Picton, a person nobody had heard of from Australians Against Further Immigration and the last one came from the Non-Custodial Parents’ Party. I cast my vote early at historic Berrima. There were over thirty booths in our electorate and Nigel and I drove all day to make sure we made an appearance at most of them. The feeling was good in the community and the voters were very friendly. By late afternoon we packed it in and went home to await the results. On the night of 27 March 1999 there was a sudden, fierce localised thunderstorm. The Sydney TV stations had sent along a cameraman, Bruce Lamont, the local stringer to cover the events from our living room. I was miked and waiting by the TV set for the results as our supporters milled around, eating pizza, like the characters in Don’s Party.As I watched the ABC broadcast, Kerry O’Brien announced, ‘There’s a cliffhanger in the Southern Highlands’. I did a double take. That was me. I actually felt my heart freeze. For a giddy moment it looked like we might win. We took the local member to preferences and it was a week before she got over the line. We were thrilled with the results. We had halved the margin. Now it was okay to vote Labor in the Southern Highlands. Nearly half the people in the seat had voted that way. To us, that was a win.

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FIFTEEN

FRIENDS AND ANIMALS My life gradually returned to normal after the State election and then I had to convince people that I was an actor again. In the meantime, I went back to performing my usual chores, which Tony had been doing for me. One day while shopping in Mittagong I saw a tiny black puppy all alone in a pet shop window. I felt sorry for it so I took it home. Tony was in Canberra doing some research at Screensound so I knew it would be a bit of a surprise for him when he came back home. The first night I put the puppy in her new little bed with a sheepskin to keep her warm but she started to bark. I knew I had to train her before Tony came home so I took all her equipment downstairs to the garage and made her comfortable.When I got up in the morning she was sitting on the top step waiting for me. How the tiny little thing ever managed to climb up twenty steps I will never know. She was never sent to the garage again. Little Mini and I met Tony at the airport. She was in a pink satchel I had strapped over my shoulder and when she popped her head up Tony couldn’t believe how small she was.We drove home and roasted a chicken for dinner and the dog was licking her lips at the delicious smell.We set up our meal on the table 249

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on the deck overlooking the river and put a small bowl out for Mini. She sniffed at it and started to eat, then she backed away to attack the dish from a different angle and she fell straight through the rails of the deck onto the hard ground below. The blood drained from Tony’s face. I rushed down the steps, my heart in my mouth. The little dog was crying. I took her up to her bed and we checked her for injuries but she didn’t seem to have any. We rang and made an appointment with the vet for the next morning and we sat down to our chicken dinner. Neither of us could eat. The food was like ashes in our mouths. I moved Mini’s bed to the sitting room in front of the slow combustion fire and Tony and I went to bed. During the night I got up to check on her, wearing an old t-shirt and nothing else. As I bent down to tuck her in, my bare behind made contact with the hot door of the firebox. There was suddenly a rather tasty smell of barbecued meat and I found I had branded myself permanently with a perfect half-moon. The next morning the vet declared Mini to be in perfect health but I couldn’t sit down for a week. Soon after, I left the little dog with Tony and flew to Melbourne to make a short film called Bowl Me Over for Whipcrack Productions. The director was a young woman called Angie Black and we had a hilarious time making the movie. Monica Maughan, Lois Colander and I were lady bowlers and Terry Norris was the president of our club. There were a number of Greek women in the film and one of them was the mother of the standup comic Effie, otherwise known as Mary Coustas. Mrs Coustas baked the cast some delicious almond biscuits for morning tea. The only problem was I had to eat a lot of manufactured Greek shortbread in a scene we shot many times and then I had to eat the ones Mrs Coustas had baked. Greek almond biscuits are delicious but very dry and by the end of the morning I could hardly speak. I came home from Melbourne and I was running in the bush at dawn with little Mini when I was forced to stop by a sudden and agonising pain in my right leg. I thought it was 250

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probably a hamstring injury because I hadn’t warmed up properly beforehand. I booked a session with a masseur but the treatment didn’t seem to work and I was beginning to limp quite badly. The pain made me frown so much I appeared to have an axe wound between the eyes. I went to my doctor and after many sessions of physiotherapy didn’t work, I was sent to a neurosurgeon. I packed a bag just in case. Tony drove me to Sydney to see the specialist, who instructed me to lie on the floor while he rang the hospital to find me a room. I was about to have an operation known as a laminectomy. I thought it sounded as if the kitchen benches were about to be replaced. I was operated on the following morning for the surgical excision of a vertebral posterior arch and put on morphine for some days. I was encouraged to lie on my side in one position till the staples came out of my back. Food tasted disgusting, probably because of the drugs I was taking and I simply couldn’t eat. I was then given more drugs to stimulate my appetite. I came home after two long weeks. Tony picked me up and as we were driving home we had a call from a news service asking if we knew that Graham Kennedy was dead. Tony said,‘Don’t be ridiculous’, and he called Graham at home in Canyonleigh. ‘Are you dead?’ he asked. Graham replied, ‘I don’t know. I’ll just have a look.’ My specialist insisted there were things I should not do after the operation and I was not to drive for a month. Tony was wonderful. He did nearly everything for me, but I couldn’t bear not being able to cook. Eventually I broke all the rules and did forbidden things like cooking a meal and making the bed with the aid of a long pair of barbecue tongs. While I was recovering at home I had a strange dream about Robert Hughes. Nothing really extraordinary happened in the dream. It was like a series of random snapshots of fairly simple moments in the time we had spent together years ago. The next morning I was listening to the news on ABC radio. I didn’t hear much of the lead story, just a few words here and there as I went about making breakfast in the kitchen. All I heard was, ‘aged 61’ and ‘Broome’. For some reason I knew 251

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immediately that the story was about Bob. I knew he’d had a bad car crash. I knew he was near death. In a panic, I rang the Perth hospital where I imagined he would have been taken. I had visited Broome once and I knew it was a small town and that it would not have the facilities to deal with someone with major injuries. I needed to find out about Bob’s condition. I have to confess I told a lie when the nurse on duty answered the phone and asked who I was. ‘His sister’, I answered, knowing the hospital would only release information to a family member. I couldn’t believe the ease with which I had lied. I was embarrassed to find I was put through to Lucy Turnbull, Bob’s niece, and not to a member of the medical staff as I had expected. I hadn’t seen Lucy since Bob and I used to baby-sit her years before, when she was about three years old. ‘Constance’, she began and I stopped her at once. Deeply ashamed, I apologised for the deception. Lucy graciously forgave me and handed the phone to her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, who told me the extent of Bob’s horrific injuries. He described what the doctors had done on the operating table and told me what further procedures would be required. There had been real concern before the operation that Bob might have to lose a leg and maybe part of his right arm. Lucy and Malcolm were grateful that he had suffered only minor head injuries in the crash, so they hoped there would be no permanent brain damage. I managed to speak to Bob on the phone a couple of times during his long journey of recovery. His first words to me were,‘How’s married life?’ He was very groggy but he told me that after the failure of his second marriage he’d fallen in love again with an American woman called Doris and he hoped to marry her when he went back to New York. Bob underwent a series of major operations and was put on heavy painkillers that he will probably have to take for the rest of his life. His lifelong friend, Colin Lanceley, visited him regularly and told me how Bob was approaching the hard business of recovery with a brave heart and an outlook of optimism that amazed 252

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everyone around him. He was determined to get better, even though he must have had very bad days especially over the subsequent court case in the west. He is now able to walk with the aid of a single stick and has gone back to work. He has made new television shows both here and abroad. I enjoyed watching his documentary on Goya and his approach towards the beautiful nude, ‘The Naked Maja’, hanging on a gallery wall.When he turned to the camera and said with a grin that he would just like to ‘hop in there’ and enjoy himself, I thought immediately of little Robert Hughes and his discovery of the Norman Lindsay etching in his pantry. My own health was improving rapidly. I made a complete recovery from my laminectomy as the doctors had predicted. Tony and I were able to enjoy our old lives once more and I decided that I was well enough to do a new play with Ron Haddrick called Labor Day, which had nothing at all to do with my previous political aspirations. During the rehearsal period I was distressed to hear that one of my close friends, Gayle Cousins, had died after a long illness.Tony had known Gayle and her husband Geoffrey since they were all in their early twenties and they had kept up their friendship for thirty years. When Tony and I married, they welcomed me into their lives. Geoff and Gayle later bought a house in the Highlands where the four of us spent many hilarious times together, eating and drinking and playing games with their two children, David and Sarah. Gayle was always a keen sportswoman and the picture of health. When she first became ill we thought it was a temporary thing that would respond to treatment. The four of us went hiking for a week in Tasmania to celebrate when we thought she had been cured. Gayle’s condition slowly started to deteriorate but she lived long enough to see the Olympic Games in Sydney, and to host a small birthday party at her home in the Highlands. ‘No presents’, she insisted. A few days later she was dead. At her funeral I thought of the many people I loved who were no longer with us, and how precious they all had been. Graham Kennedy suddenly lost his beloved dog Henry. Graham felt he had no reason for living and went into a 253

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decline. Every time I spoke to him on the phone he asked me if I knew about Henry. Tony and I suspected that Graham was drinking heavily and Tony suggested we should get him another dog but I didn’t think he would be able to care for a pup. One night at the farm Graham got up from his couch where he had been dozing off in front of the television following the consumption of a few gin and tonics, and headed for his bedroom. He must have tripped and fallen heavily, hitting his head and passing out. He was found some hours later when Sally arrived in the early morning to cook his breakfast. He had injured his shoulder quite badly in the fall so he had to be admitted to the local hospital for treatment. It was just before Christmas so Graham managed to avoid having to ask us,‘Will there be anyone else there?’ He was going to be eating Christmas dinner in a hospital room. I don’t know how the press heard about his accident but they were ready to pounce. Anything to do with Graham Kennedy was news. The hospital grounds were staked out. Our phones at home rang constantly. His property was invaded. Perfect strangers came to our door demanding interviews. A young journalist at the local newspaper was unusually sympathetic.‘He’s retired, mate’, he told the headline hunters.‘Just let him have his privacy.’ When they persisted, he sent them on a wild goose chase. They trawled up and down the main street of Bowral asking questions of the locals but the country blinds went down. Nobody cared to talk. The hospital staff made sure no strangers could get into Graham’s room. On Christmas day, Tony and I visited him and, peeking through the curtains, we caught a glimpse of two men. One was a journalist and the other was a photographer who was aiming his enormous zoom lens at our first floor window. It was a very hot day, with temperatures in the thirties and it would have been even hotter in the concrete car park where they had been forced to spend most of the day. It was obvious they were newspaper men and on the Death Watch.As we left I walked over to their car and asked them to leave. I told 254

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them emphatically that there was nothing for them to wait for. Graham Kennedy was not going to die. He had pneumonia and was receiving treatment and he would be back home in a matter of days. This was true because he had developed pneumonia. I just didn’t think it was any of their business to know anything more. Graham had retired from the limelight years ago. He was no longer public property. What they were hoping for, of course, was a ‘Death on Christmas Day’ story to deliver to their editors. The holiday period is usually a quiet time in their business and the story would help sell a lot of newspapers. They hung around on and off till Graham was taken back to Canyonleigh by ambulance some weeks later. Neither Tony nor I knew that Graham had planned to get back home that way and we discovered later it was because he didn’t want to inconvenience us further.As the ambulance arrived at the front door of his farmhouse and Graham was being helped out on a stretcher, two newspaper hounds appeared from behind the nearby shed. Graham was almost blinded by the flash of the camera but he caught a glimpse of the two men as they ran off to their getaway car. They had trespassed on his property and hidden their vehicle behind the stables. Graham claims his neighbours observed them ransacking his garbage cans. Graham was invited to the Logies not long after he got home but was genuinely unable to go. He had not attended for many years but this time he said he had a good excuse. I was asked to be a judge in one of the categories and was to be flown down to Melbourne for the event. Just before I was to leave home, a representative of Channel 9’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire asked me if I would appear on the show while I was in town. ‘Certainly not!’ I replied. Who would want to be publicly humiliated on national television? ‘It’s for charity’, he said. I thought about it for a moment then asked, ‘Can you choose your charity?’ ‘Of course’, he answered. I wondered if I might play for two of the charities I was involved in. One was the Actors Benevolent Fund and the other, the children’s charity, Starting 255

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Points. He said Channel 9 preferred that it be a charity that helped children. As proud patron, I decided to accept. We were due to be in the studios early the morning after the Logies, not a great time for some of the contestants who had partied long and hard the night before. I decided to have an early night. My date for the Logies dinner was my actor friend John Hannan and we thought we would go back to the hotel early after witnessing the unfortunate sight of a famous film actress slide down the wall, drunk as a skunk. I was philosophical about doing the show and experienced a sort of gallows humour about the whole thing. I asked my mother-inlaw to come along as my friend in the audience.When I have to do a job I usually stay in my hotel room and study my lines, getting more and more nervous as the day progresses. This time there was no script to learn so I decided to join two girlfriends for a proper breakfast in the hotel dining room. Actor and writer Judy Nunn who had toured with me in Don’s Party nearly thirty years before and our mutual friend, agent and publicist Sue Greaves, joked with me as we ploughed through a huge meal. I usually only eat fruit and toast for breakfast, but this morning I was eating like a condemned man. The hire car arrived at the hotel to take me to Channel 9 for the show. I was to share it with the larrikin film and television actor Gary Sweet. The driver and I waited anxiously for the star to materialise. I started to get worried about being late so I called the producers from my mobile phone to find out if anything was wrong. It appeared Gary had been locked out of his hotel room and was unable to find his clothes. He jumped into the car in a bathrobe. He looked like death when he joined me in the back seat. ‘Oh, sorry, Noels’, he said, apologetically. His eyes were maroon. The only other guests Channel 9 had managed to coax into appearing on the charity special were Mary Coustas in character as the hilarious Effie; current affairs veteran Mike Willesee; Tony Martin, the great Ensemble trained actor from Wildside; Gary Sweet, now fully clothed; and a young girl from a kids’ program who was probably all of seventeen. Knowing 256

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that the first part of the show is where you have to hit the buzzer to see who goes first, I thought, ‘That’s great. Willesee and I are the oldest so our reactions will be the slowest. We probably won’t even have to go on.’ Host of the show Eddie McGuire asked the first question and Gary Sweet hit the button instantly, making him the first into the hot seat. I knew that in spite of his mischievous manner Gary was very bright and would do well. I also knew he had a photographic memory and could learn a script as soon as he had it in his hand. In spite of the headache and the bloodshot eyes, Gary perked up as soon as Eddie McGuire started asking questions. He answered everything perfectly till he came to the big money. Then he got cocky and took a gamble. He lost the cash. When it came time to choose the second contestant, I put my hand on the buzzer and was shocked to realise I had pressed it first. I knew the answer. I would be the next in the chair. I took my place in the seat opposite Eddie McGuire with a feeling of absolute dread. The questions were easy at first, as they always are, evidently. I had never seen Who Wants to Be a Millionaire before I was actually on it. The producers had sent me a tape but it arrived the day after I left for Melbourne. I knew that you could insure yourself by ringing a friend and you could gamble, so every time I thought I was right, I would double check. I was not going to lose this money. It came to a point where I had won $125,000 and was going for more, a quarter of a million. The question was ‘Where was Freddy Mercury born?’ Then Eddie went through a number of possible countries, all beginning with Z. I had always believed Freddy Mercury was born in England, so I decided to retire rather than risk my winnings. I pulled the plug at that point. ‘Zanzibar’, Eddie declared was the correct answer. I was happy to take the money and run. Half the money went to Mary, the home viewer who sounded as if she could use it. The rest went to my charity. The families back in Sydney were cheering as they watched the show. They had over $60 000 to add to their coffers, which 257

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would have taken a lot of fundraising to achieve. After some consultation, they thought they would have enough money to build another room onto their facility. They said they hoped I would not be offended, but they had decided to call it the Zanzibar Room.

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Tony rang me excitedly from the mobile in his car. He was at the gate of our property. ‘I am looking directly at a koala’, he said. I raced up the track in time to see a handsome furry animal waddle up the road and take off up a nearby gum tree. We hadn’t known there was a koala colony in the Highlands and were thrilled with our discovery. As we were admiring the animal, the phone went off in Tony’s car. It was Sally’s husband, John. Sally was away in London but she had asked John to check on Graham each morning. When he called in he found Graham at the foot of the stairs. There was blood everywhere. John told us our friend was on his way to hospital again. Tony and I leapt into the car and rushed to Bowral where we found Graham in intensive care. He had concussion and there was bleeding into the brain. He had also broken his leg. He was delirious.We were told he had suffered permanent brain damage and would never be the same again. Graham had lost his memory. Every woman became ‘Sally’, including me. He recognised Tony but had difficulty with anyone else.We were extremely worried about him but a while later he surprised everyone when he began to recover. He 259

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could identify the nurses by reading their nametags. I was greeted again with his usual,‘Hullo, darling’. He was in hospital for a very long time. Inevitably the press found out about his brain damage and stories were being written about Graham Kennedy being a ‘vegetable’. One journalist cruelly wrote in a weekend magazine article, ‘Gra Gra is ga-ga’, not realising he was called ‘Gray Gray’, not ‘Grah Grah’, as Graham pointed out when he read it. The staff at the hospital held meetings with us to discuss Graham’s care for the time following his release. He would require a lot of looking after. He would have to go into a nursing home. He would never be able to make decisions for himself. Tony and I felt Graham was improving and we didn’t want him to go to a nursing home because we didn’t really believe he was ready for one. We were told the staggering cost of round-the-clock nursing care at home. Even though Graham had been careful with money all his life and had a trusted accountant looking after his investments, we could see that he would not be able to afford full-time nursing for more than a few years. He was not an old man. The press was becoming a major problem. Our phone was running hot. Editors were sending crews down to cover the story. Tony and I agreed to be interviewed by Channel 7 News about his condition.We thought if we gave an exclusive interview to one channel the rest would lose interest. Of course no money changed hands, nor was it ever offered. In the interview, Tony mentioned that Graham had always been convinced that Kerry Packer would look after him if anything should ever happen to his health, but when his office had been approached, this did not actually seem to be the case. Fortunately a businessman from Graham’s past heard of his plight and offered to help. That person told us he did not want his name to be made public so we didn’t disclose it to anyone, even Graham. Nobody knew who the generous benefactor was and we were not going to tell. Weeks later, in a weekend magazine story about the life of television supremo Sam Chisolm, the author revealed that Sam was the 260

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mystery man. Sam Chisolm had run Channel 9 for years and had known Graham for a very long time. He told us he was upset that a person who had been the face of the station for so many years and had made so much money for it was now in dire straits. We could now tell Graham that Sam was the Good Samaritan. I think he was more bemused than anything. ‘Good old Sam’, he said. ‘Why would he do that?’ Tony and I then had to face the inevitable, that Graham could never go back to the farm. We would have to sell it for him and buy him a new place to live. I was working in a new play by Paula Vogel called The Oldest Profession so Tony visited the real estate agents on his own. Graham laughed when I told him my play was about old sex workers still on the game.‘Could they pop in here, do you think?’ he joked. Doreen Warburton played the Madam and I was one of her ‘girls’. The others were Betty Lucas, Lorraine Bayly and Carole Skinner. Actor Denise Roberts directed the show and between us we had more than two hundred and fifty years’ experience in show business. None of us cared much for the play when it was offered to us, but it turned out to be one of the happiest shows I have ever worked on. Tony found Graham somewhere to live and when I saw it I agreed that it was perfect for him. It was a solid brick townhouse with a lovely garden, not far from the hospital. The day Graham was discharged Tony and our friend Arthur Wyndham collected Graham and drove him the short distance from the hospital to his new address. I was inside, waiting nervously with a tray of food. The weekend before, I had packed up Graham’s house at Canyonleigh and Tony and I had moved his familiar furniture and paintings in so he would feel at home the moment he came through the door. He smiled as he recognised the pictures by Bill Fish and his comfortable red Chesterfield. Graham seemed to enjoy living in his smart new premises. ‘In the Toorak end of town’ was how he described it to John Mangos, his friend and colleague from Coast to 261

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Coast. Graham appeared to be weak and had difficulty walking so he needed help to get around. We booked carers from a local agency to go to his house in eight hour shifts.We made up the second bedroom so they could sleep in comfort during the nights when there would be little for them to do. I had come across the Polaroid shot of Graham’s breakfast tray when I was packing up the farm so I left it in the kitchen for his carers to study. Breakfast was to be served on his wooden butler’s tray with hinged sides. A small starched white cloth was to be placed on top of the tray, with a blue cotton napkin rolled inside a silver ring that bore Graham’s name. The china cups, plates and pepper and salt shakers he preferred were all small matching pieces he had souvenired over the years while travelling first class with Qantas. I noted also that his small silver butter knife was Christofle from a hotel in France. After a while we discovered that Graham did not seem to require round the clock nursing. He was improving. He could manage with carers in the daytime only. They were there to help him shower, make sure he had regular food, that his shopping was done and that he had his supplies of cigarettes, which he absolutely insisted on. I tried to encourage him to give up smoking, but he was hooked.When he was in hospital and unconscious I used to watch him as he elegantly mimed having a cigarette and once he winced as he imagined he had burnt himself. The first memory that returned to him following his illness was that he was a smoker. He was now able to sit in his favourite leather chair in the evenings, wrapped up warmly in front of the living room fire, watching his once state-of-the-art television set, but eventually, like the indolent Oblomov, he decided to stay in his pyjamas and take to his bed more or less permanently. His carers were forced to tiptoe around and do what housework they could as quietly as they were able because Graham hated noise, particularly the sound of the vacuum cleaner. A lot of the time they spent just hanging around doing crossword puzzles, trying to keep out of his way. They were there to make sure he didn’t 262

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fall out of bed. Graham was getting cranky with them and wouldn’t let some of them near him. John Mangos arranged to have a satellite dish installed so Graham could access more television programs. That worked while he was getting up and watching the set in his living room, but when he took to his bed he could only pick up freeto-air channels. John tried to organise for the system to be connected to his bedroom but Graham would never get up to answer the door when the technician called. ‘I’m disabled’, he would yell. And by then he was. After years of heavy smoking of his favourite French cigarettes, added to his diabetes, Graham’s circulation had packed it in. His legs had become incapable of carrying him about. He had no muscle tone so even a short stagger to the bathroom caused him a great deal of pain. Graham had never really been fond of walking and I used to joke that if he didn’t do a bit of it now and again, he’d get arrested for having no visible means of support. By now the damage was irreversible and his lower limbs looked like the skinny legs of a wading bird. Graham became the entertained now, no longer the entertainer, listening to the radio all day or watching television. I used to call in daily to see how he was feeling and to bring him news from outside. He was very interested when I told him that Tony and our mutual friend David Mitchell had been approached to rewrite some material for Barbra Streisand’s Australian tour. Tony said her show was really just a repeat of the New Year’s Eve concert she had done not long before in America. Evidently the producers thought she should localise some of the original material so they hired two Australian writers for the job. I told Graham how David and Tony were asked to meet Barbra and her manager of over forty years, Marty Erlichmann, and how, after a very brief introduction, Ms Streisand disappeared and left the discussion completely up to him. Marty was a very elderly Jewish New Yorker with tortured crinkly hair and a very bad comb-over. He discussed his client’s wishes with the two writers and at one point he looked at them seriously and warned, ‘Barbra doesn’t like 263

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self-defecating humour’.When Graham heard this he laughed till he almost needed oxygen. Tony built some handrails into the hall of Graham’s unit to ensure that he was able to get out of bed, stagger to a chair, then pull himself along the rails to the bathroom or to the kitchen and living areas, but in time he even stopped doing that. His bedroom was now his world. I took Graham his newspaper one morning and left early as I was to turn the first sod for the extensions to Starting Points’ building, which had been made possible by the money I had won for them on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? When I arrived I was immediately surrounded by children and parents. The kids looked even more gorgeous than ever and their mothers were all very fashionably dressed. Most of them seemed to have been to the hairdresser. I felt a bit dowdy in grey and regretted that I had not added a bit of colour as I could see they had someone with a film camera recording the event. I was given instructions to gently lift the prepared sod and it would come away quite easily. One of the fathers handed me a special silver spade he had borrowed from the local council. The camera rolled as I attempted to lift the sod. Nothing happened. The earth was as hard as a rock. I tried again and again and I started to sweat. I was looking down at the hard ground when I felt someone arrive, I hoped to give me a hand. I looked up and saw a face I recognised. It was Mike Munro. I thought, ‘What is he doing here?’. He was probably there for one of the parents who had done such wonderful work with children. Then I looked again. No, he was here for me. My jaw went slack. I couldn’t believe it when he said,‘Noeline Brown. This is Your Life’. Graham Kennedy was starting to be difficult. Some of his carers chose to leave and others were told not to come back. In the end only a few favourites remained but he was becoming increasingly cranky even with them. One day he refused to get out of bed at all. Then he decided to stop eating. He looked awful. He wouldn’t allow anyone to shave him and he had developed a ruff of pale hair around his neck that made 264

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him look like a cartoon sailor. I didn’t think he was drinking enough fluid to survive so I pleaded with him to see a doctor but he flatly refused.We took meals to him every day to try and tempt him, things we knew he would enjoy, but often the food would remain in the fridge uneaten. Eventually we contacted Bert Newton, Toni Lamond, Stuart Wagstaff and his other close friends to discuss a possible memorial service and even where it should be held—Melbourne, we all agreed, where Graham was born and where he had done In Melbourne Tonight for thirteen long years and where he had enjoyed being crowned King of Moomba. Each day we asked him if he would agree to see a physician but he would not hear of it. Tony and I were becoming increasingly anxious and we finally decided we had to get a doctor in to see him, as morally we couldn’t leave him in such a sorry state. His doctor, Simon, worried that Graham could refuse to see him, that was his right. However, he agreed to visit him the following morning. I had a key to Graham’s house so I let us both in. Then I knocked quietly on the bedroom door. A weak voice called,‘Come in’.When Graham saw the doctor he brightened up.‘Hello, Simon’, he chirped. The doctor took one look at him and said, ‘Graham, I think you should go to hospital. If you stay here I think you might die.’‘Oh, shit!’ said Graham and within a very short time two ambulance paramedics arrived and began the difficult job of removing him from his bed and getting him onto a stretcher. I was amazed that after everything he had done and said, Graham obviously wanted to live. No hesitation; he was ready to go to hospital. Graham was in so much pain when the two men started to move him that they considered giving him an injection of morphine to help get him through the ordeal, but when they measured his blood pressure it was too low for them to take the risk. It was awful to witness his distress and my heart went out to him, but the paramedics were wonderfully patient and considerate. Even so, it seemed to take an eternity for them to get him on his way to the hospital. I packed a couple of bags for him and arranged for his house to be cleaned. Then I drove 265

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around the corner to the hospital and arrived just after he’d been taken to his room. ‘I’ll never forgive you for today’, he said as I walked into the room. My eyes started to sting. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ I asked. ‘No’, he murmured, ‘but I’ve had a terrible time.’ Weeks passed, then months and he surprised us all again. After constant nourishment his health started to improve but it was now obvious he would never be able to go back home again. When Graham’s stay at the hospital finally came to an end and he was going to be discharged, Tony and I had to find somewhere suitable for him as a matter of urgency. It was clear Graham would have to accept full-time nursing care. He had become used to having his meals arrive magically every couple of hours in the hospital and he was eating well so we hoped we could find him a facility where the food was to his liking. We had registered Graham’s name with a number of nursing homes but we had not had any success. During all of this there was suddenly a voice from my past on the answering machine. My old boyfriend Ron had managed to trace me through the local branch of the Labor Party.When I rang him back he told me he had written a book about his early life and adventures and he wondered if I might be able to launch it as, he joked, I was the only celebrity he had ever known. I travelled with my brother Leo all the way to Wallis Lakes on the NSW mid-north coast where we were met by Ron and his wife, Bernadette, who took us to lunch by the water. Amazingly Ron had hardly changed in more than forty years. He was still tall and rangy but now sported a rather fetching black eye patch, which made him look like Basil St John, the romantic hero from the Brenda Starr cartoon strip of my youth. Over lunch Ron said he was thrilled that I could be with him on his special day and went on to say how much he admired me for running in the State election. When he asked if I would run again I had to tell him I thought I had done as well as I ever could when I stood in 1999 and would leave it to someone else to do better in 2003. That is not what happened, however. 266

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A month later I rather reluctantly agreed to stand one more time. Before I committed myself, I approached other members of the branch to see if they wanted to take on the job but their eyes rolled skywards. I knew it was going to be much more difficult this time. I wouldn’t have the help of the people I had around me four years ago. Nigel Watkin, our tireless campaign director, had started a new job that took up nearly all of his time. My husband Tony, who managed the previous campaign as a major production with his notorious attention to detail, was busy on a new project that took up his every waking hour. Our friends who had been between jobs and able to devote their time to us were no longer around. Scotty and Jodi were overseas. My brothers were busy. Peter was studying and Leo was travelling. I also had Graham to look after. I really just wanted to stay at home and play with my dog. It was going to be more than hard. It was going to be just about impossible. I realised that my candidature for the 2003 State election would not generate the same media interest it had four years before so we couldn’t count on any free publicity. However, I was pleased to find there were new faces working for the local paper. They had a new editor and most of the coverage I thought was fair. Sleep came easier. We had to raise our own funds for the campaign with raffles and trivia nights—all the usual devices. Tony took time out from his job to organise a function with the assistance of our friend Jan Merriman, who had just survived being the Labor candidate for Hume a short while before in the Federal election. Members of the public were invited to join us for lunch at the Manning, a fine restaurant in Bowral. Comedian Gerry Connolly was willing to fly from Brisbane to take part, so Tony planned to drive up to Sydney and collect him at the airport. Gerry would stay with us overnight, write his script and appear as the Queen the following day. John Howard, the versatile Sydney actor, was also willing to lend a hand. So we placed an advertisement in the local paper, informing the locals that the Queen and John Howard would be coming to town to help Noeline Brown win the seat of Southern Highlands for the Labor Party. 267

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A local real estate agent was one of the first to book for the lunch, not because of his leaning towards Labor, but out of reverence for John’s character, realtor Bob Jelly in the ABC series Seachange. John wanted to know where I stood on a few matters such as preservation of the public school system and refugees which were dear to his heart. He gave a very funny speech and followed it with an hilarious parody of the children’s song,‘Clap Your Hands’ which called for audience participation. All the verses finished with ‘Bomb Iraq’ as the answer to everything. John was wonderful and the audience loved him. The Queen appeared, dressed in a little floral number with elbow-length gloves, pearls and handbag. Her speech was a triumph. She told the gathering that ‘it was rare for a sovereign to travel vast distances to insignificant parts for a single function’. She also talked about how England was battling high unemployment, adding,‘In the royal family, it is around 98 per cent’. Later on, after a very fine meal, Gerry changed back into his business suit and delighted us all with a couple of other characters, one of them being a brilliant Paul Keating. He wasn’t allowed to leave the stage without trotting out the hilarious Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. We had a fabulous day and everyone agreed it was a very happy occasion.We also made a good deal of money from a raffle of two prints, kindly donated by the painters John Olsen and Peter Hickey, who had lived in the Highlands for some years. We couldn’t wait to see how the lunch was reported in the local paper. There was a rant in the ‘Letters’ page from a Mr Landon Burch, an ardent Monarchist, who castigated us for sending up the royal family and the British people. The event was covered by an English journalist from the paper, and he had been laughing out loud with the rest of us. Headed ‘Noeline’s Lunch Offensive to Brits’, his story quoted Mr Burch, who admitted that he had not attended the lunch but was offended anyway. ‘I’ve been living in Australia for more than fifty years, serving in the Australian Army for twenty of them’, thundered Mr Burch.‘These comics like to ridicule the British but you can bet they wouldn’t get away with ridiculing say, the Vietnamese.’ 268

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The story was followed by an editorial written by the same reporter, encouraging Mr Burch to ‘lighten up’. As the election date drew closer there were only three candidates running, Liberal, Labor and a Green. Then, only a day or two before the draw for our positions on the ballot, two more contenders came out of the woodwork. One Nation threw up a nineteen-year-old security guard from Hilltop, and a mystery woman from Bundanoon claimed she was standing as an Independent. The One Nation candidate had drawn number one position and Labor was the last with number five. I was happy with that. Either the top or the bottom was fine with me. The local member was again half-way down the card. On election day, 22 March 2003, the feeling in the community was encouraging. Supporters who had manned the same booths for years were thrilled with the reaction from voters. Labor was obviously popular and Bob Carr was considered unbeatable. Smiling people greeted us wherever we went. My campaign crew really thought we were in with a chance in the Southern Highlands and so did the Liberal Party, which had spent a fortune on advertising and had brought in hundreds of workers. The results from the first booth came in early and showed a swing of thirty per cent to Labor. The young people who were checking the figures in my office were ecstatic and predicted a landslide, but it was only a tiny booth and we realised the result was an aberration. By mid evening we could see the Liberals would retain the seat. Once again, even though the locals believed that Carr would and should be returned, the people of the Southern Highlands just could not bring themselves to actually vote Labor. The Tampa incident had caused many Labor supporters to leave the party over what they had judged as inaction by their leaders. We had debated the issue hotly. Members had stormed out of branch meetings, threatening to join the Greens. The prime minister, John Howard, knew that Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers would divide the Labor Party. He was able to tap into people’s worst quality: their xenophobia. The Greens picked up the protest vote. 269

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I decided on election night that I would not stand again. My brother Peter said he would never talk to me if I did repeat the experience. He said he had seen what it had done to me both times. Elections certainly do take a huge toll on the candidates and on the people around them. I was fortunate to have had the total support of my husband, who ran our campaigns and organised our lives, but it was very hard on him trying to juggle so many jobs as once. I was grateful for all the things that Tony had done for me and for the people who had worked so hard on my behalf. I just wish I had been able to give them what they wanted. To have a voice in Macquarie Street.

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CHAPTER

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GOOD HOME AND A GHOST

Slim Dusty brought good luck to Tony and me. Our production company was asked to work on a museum to honour the life of the Australian singer and to recognise his amazing contribution to country music. Slim was still alive at this time and very much part of the planning process. Tony discovered at one of the meetings that one of Slim’s closest friends was in the business of running aged-care facilities. He was able to do the impossible and find us a place for Graham in a nursing home in the Highlands. The major problem was it only had one double room available, and Graham would have to share his accommodation with another man. For a private person like Graham, I could see this as being a possible disaster. I knew what he could be like. What if he refused to stay? Tony and I were in a difficult situation. Graham couldn’t spend any more time in the hospital. We had put his name down on the list of every nursing home in the district and even some as far away as Sydney. This was the only even vaguely suitable room that had come up.We had turned down the only other offer of a room when we were told Graham would have to share it with an elderly woman. Tony and I shook our heads, ‘I don’t think so’. 271

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When Tony and I arrived to talk to the staff at the new home, we were informed the man in Graham’s room had suddenly become ill and had been taken to hospital. He would be there for a while, according to the doctor, which was a shame for him but we felt this would give us a bit of time for Graham to adjust to the idea of sharing. I noticed an oil painting of an old World War Two Lancaster bomber engaged in a dramatic sortie hanging on the wall near the other single bed. It was most likely the property of an old exfighter pilot type. I was worried that Graham might hate him on sight and demand to be taken out of there. But Tony calmed me down, reminding me that Graham had done his National Service as a twenty-year-old and had spent his time in the Air Force. What’s more, he’d actually enjoyed it, because, as he told us, the food was so much better than at home. Maybe it would be all right after all. Graham left the hospital by ambulance. As soon as he was wheeled into the room he saw there was another bed in it and remarked that he would be really unhappy if someone else were to use it. Miraculously, two days later, a single room became available.We took one of our own little paintings that Graham had admired to hang on his wall. Graham told me he was a bit disappointed that he didn’t have a politician for a friend but he was happy enough with his new room, which had a large window with views of the garden where he could see people walking along the paths outside. I arrived early the day he was moved and had to wait in the hall while he was being bathed. One of the nurses came out, saying Graham had asked for me to come in to see the marvellous machine they were using. It was a small crane-like contraption that plucked him up from one place and put him in another, like one of those games you play in a penny arcade. In his recent biography, King—The Life and Comedy of Graham Kennedy, Graeme Blundell quotes from an interview Kennedy had with the print journalist Kevin Sadlier on the occasion of Graham’s sixtieth birthday. They had been talking about the prospect of getting old and Graham had been doing 272

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some hilarious incontinence jokes, of which ironically a number have come true, when he remarked that when that time came, ‘It would be nice if someone would say, “Come on old boy, we’re taking you to a lovely place where you’ll be looked after”’. He added that all he’d need to be happy was a little telly and a room with a decent bathroom. He had the bathroom so Tony and I went shopping for a new little television set to hang on the wall. Graham seemed very pleased with it so I gave him the instruction book and left the remote on his bedside table. The next time I visited, Graham seemed to have gone downhill. He appeared to be confused and withdrawn and I started to get very worried about him. I could see that his TV set was dark so I offered to turn it on for him. I pointed the remote at the screen and was more than a little surprised to see the picture on his new television set was completely upside down. I consulted the instruction book and managed to get it round the right way again.‘Wow!’ he said,‘How did you do that?’ He must have been stabbing at every button on the remote and this had been the result. I think he thought he’d had a stroke. Graham started to recover. His health began to improve dramatically and he was eating like a horse. He chose to sit by the window in his room, near the heater, looking out at the garden, but he was really more interested in the people who occasionally walked by. ‘Look how he’s getting around on that thing’, he remarked one day with a certain amount of admiration as a well-dressed old chap did his daily constitutional with the aid of his Zimmer frame. I took Graham’s binoculars in so he could have a closer look. Tony and I brought Graham Kennedy home for Christmas in a wheelchair. There were about a dozen people with us that day, a big crowd for Graham, and most of the guests he had never met before. I was nervous and was waiting for him to complain. He pulled the crackers and put on the silly hat. He had champagne and red wine and roast pork and a smoke. As we were taking him home he thanked us for one of the happiest days of his life. *** 273

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A stranger rang one morning a few months later with the news that the Sydney restaurateur Vadim had died and his funeral service was to take place the following Friday. She thought I should know. I went along to pay my respects and was glad to see a few old familiar faces: Margaret Fink, the film producer, looking very chic; the psychiatrist Jim Durham and his friend Bob Fry; also Richard Neville and Martin Sharp, from the now defunct and much lamented satirical magazine Oz. We met outside the chapel and swapped stories about nights at Vadim’s and of the man who ran it.We all agreed that Vadim was a bit of a mystery man. It was only when the service started that we discovered his real name. I had always known him to be Vadim Kerr; some people called him Steve. He was actually born Vadim Kargopoloff to Russian parents living in Shanghai. His mother and father both died in China and when he was about ten years old,Vadim was brought to Australia by foster parents escaping yet another revolution. At the time, immigrants to Australia were often advised by officials to Anglicise their surnames, so Vadim Kargopoloff became Steve Vadim Kerr, dropping off the ‘gopoloff ’. He grew up to be a handsome man with a winning smile and a flirtatious manner, holding on to just the slightest trace of an accent for most of his life. He went to work on the Snowy River Scheme and took a series of well-paid jobs over the years that enabled him to save up enough to put a down payment on the old Corroboree Coffee Lounge in Challis Avenue. To the many people who found their way to his restaurant he was known simply as Vadim. We talked of the performers who used to arrive at Vadim’s around midnight. The ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was seen there more than once when he came to Australia. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once drank vodka and ate caviar at the top table with a smiling Vadim. The stars of the Old Vic Theatre Company dropped in when they were on tour. In his autobiography Out in the Open the poet Geoffrey Dutton talked about visiting the restaurant late at night with the painter Russell Drysdale and sitting at Harry Kippax’s table. He 274

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wrote with a touch of envy and regret, ‘There was nothing elsewhere in Australia like these sessions at Vadim’s’. Frank Moorhouse also mentioned the place in his book, Days of Wine and Rage. ‘All the good people of this country started at Vadim’s’, a character remarked. After closing down the restaurant that had been his life for more than a decade,Vadim fell in love with Patsy, the girl who changed his life. They eventually moved to Tea Gardens where they lived together for thirty years. As he was being cared for after a long illness,Vadim told Patsy that his one regret was that they had never married. She arranged their wedding for a couple of days later. It was held in his room at the hospice, with their much-loved pure white terrier, Pasha, in attendance. The same dear little dog was sitting in the front row on Patsy’s lap at Vadim Kerr’s funeral. As we were leaving the chapel, Rosemary Penman, who I suspect might at one time have been an old girlfriend of my first husband, asked if I had heard that Derek Taylor was dead. I had no idea. I thought surely not the indestructible Derek? Somebody else remarked that Bob Hughes had just married again. Too many doors were closing for one day. I drove home.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Richard Walsh for his initial guidance in the writing of this book, and Rebecca Kaiser and Joanne Holliman of Allen & Unwin for steering me in the right direction. Thanks to Patrick Jones for his lovely cover shot and the many beautiful photographs he has taken of me over the years. Thanks to my parents for their precious gift of happiness; to my dear brothers Leo and Peter for their loyal support; to Nola, Susie, Julie-Anne, Pat and Annie for their wise counsel; and to Josh and Ben, my two gorgeous nephews. Welcome back to my nieces, Belinda and Yolande. Special thanks should go to our surrogate family, the gifted Scotty and Jodi Anderson and their daughter Hannah, for their enormous generosity and good humour. Also Francesca Charteris, who guided me as a teenager; to Norman McVicker, who encouraged my interest in the theatre; to my agent James Laurie; and Barry Creyton, who has shared much with me over the years, both on and off the stage. And to Nigel Watkin, our dedicated campaign director for two elections. Lastly, thanks to my darling husband, Tony Sattler, the man who can do anything, but has always made it possible for me to do what I want.

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INDEX Shows and films featuring Noeline Brown are shown in boldface 2JJ, work for, 164–66 2SM radio programs, 93 729 Club, 134–35

Bader, Terry, 199 Baker, Edna, 50 Baker, Tony and Lili, 136 Baker-Beall, Sally, 236–37 Bamberger, Hilary, 77 Bangladesh trip, 209–11 Barber, Tony, 223–24 Barbola work, 29 Barmaids, 231–32 Barrett, Ray, 153 Barry Creyton Show,The, 117 Bates, Sandra, 212–13, 215 Baume, Eric, 89–90 Baume, Michael, 133–34, 215 Bayly, Lorraine, 261 Beard, Robina, 174 Beauty and the Beast (pantomime), 81 Beauty and the Beast (TV show), 89–91, 201–2 Beer, John, 177–78 Behets, Briony, 152 Bernard, Jeffrey, 102–3 Bert, Great-Uncle, 30 Bert, Uncle, 11 Bertram, Zoe, 204 Biddell, Kerrie, 174 Big Red (friend), 129–30 Bird, John, 149, 202, 223–25 Birds in Paradise, 137 Black, Angie, 250 Black Diamonds, 51–52 Blackman, Charles and Barbara, 107 Blakemore, Michael, 153 Blankety Blanks, 183–84, 189–90

ABC work 2JJ, 164–66 Bob Hudson’s show, 200–201 first auditions for, 40–41 In Sickness and In Health, 220 radio work, 169–70 This Week in Britain, 106–7 Would You Believe?, 133–35 acting career, see shows and films Adcock, Danny, 174 Adelaide, married life in, 136–37 Agutter, Jenny, 127 Aitken, Michael, 180 Alam, Bernadette, 79–80 Anderson, Scott, 222, 232–33, 244 Angela (friend), 27 Anglican Press, Packer takeover bid, 64 Ann (office manager), 188 Applause, 202–5 Arnie, Uncle, funeral of, 207–9 Arnold, Ronne, 80 Arthy, Judith, 162 Ashley, Craig, 161 Askin, Robin, 116 Australia, return to, 109–10 Australian Broadcasting Commission/Corporation, see ABC work Australian Writers’ Guild Awards (AWGIEs), 183

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NOELINE Blundell, Graeme, 272–73 Bluthal, John, 220 Bond, Alan, 231 Bottom, Bob, 143 Bowering, Robin, 161 Bowers, Raymond, 82 Bowl Me Over, 250 Bowles, James H, 152–53, 156, 172 Bowley, ‘Pop’ and ‘Snow’, 28 Bowral, see Southern Highlands Bradley, Sheila, 158 Brass Monkeys, 202–3 breast-fondling, false report of, 190–91 Brisbane Expo, 218–20 Brown, Casey (uncle), 15 Brown, David, 160 Brown, Dyra Mabel (mother) death of, 233–34 housework by, 9–10 tuberculosis, 18, 34, 36–38 wedding, 25 Brown, Janet, 74–75 Brown, Leo (brother), 7–8, 266 Brown, Leo Clifford (father) appearance, 18 at second wedding, 178 at Uncle Arnie’s funeral, 207–9 enjoys Don’s Party, 152 illness and death, 225–26 joke played on, 33 shoots horse, 22 takes leave to care for wife, 38 war injuries, 17 wedding, 25 work for Post Office, 15 Brown, Michael, 54 Brown, Peter (brother), 143 books read to, 14 in childhood, 8 on election campaigns, 270 tells NB of mother’s death, 233–34 Burch, Landon, 268–69 280

burglary, 129–30 Bursill, Tina, 180 button boxes, 29 Byrne, Mike, 165, 170–71 Byron, Marie, 58–59 Cadell, Simon, 215 cafès and restaurants 729 Club, 134–35 Elizabethan Room, 101–2 Elizabethan, The, 48 Feathers, 116–17 Galleria, The, 56 Home Cafe, 47 Jools Theatre Restaurant, 172–74, 181 Lucio’s, 67 Music Hall Theatre Restaurant, 78–79 Speakeasy, The, 174–75, 181 Vadim’s, 1–4, 61 Ziggy’s restaurant, 178 Cahill, David, 77 Camille (waitress), 62–63 Cantrell, Lana, 119 Carlton, Mike, 240 Carmichael, Stuart, 114 Carr, Bob, 239–40, 242 Casey, Peter, 203–4 Cavalier, Rodney, 235–36 Chandler, Geoffrey, 48–49 Channel 7 work, 78 Beauty and the Beast, 89-91, 201-2 Daily at Dawn, 199–200 Jonah, 76–77 Mavis Bramston Show, The, 85–87 Channel Ten work Blankety Blanks, 183–84 Charles (grandfather), 16–17 Charteris, Frances, 45, 50, 58 Chater, Gordon, 119–20 depression, 122 in Mavis Bramston, 89

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INDEX Chisolm, Sam, 260–61 christening of Brown children, 24–25 Chubb, Paul, 199 Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, 165–66 Churm, Mr (librarian), 44–45 Clark, John, 151 Clift, Charmian, 56 Club Show,The, 118 clubs, see cafès and restaurants Cluff, Jennifer, 162 Clune Galleries, 69 Clydesdale (farm), 228–29 Cobb, Dita, 90 Coburn, John, 54 Cohen, Russell, 233 Colander, Lois, 250 Colby, John, 174 Coleman, Rona, 158 Collier, Marie, 99 Collins, John, 124 Connolly, Gerry, 267–68 Connolly, Tony, 189–90 Constantino, Romola, 161 Cooke, Malcolm, 215 Cotterill, Ralph, 162 Cousins, Gayle, 253 Coustas, Mary, 256 Coustas, Mrs, 250 Cowardy Custard, 157–59 Craig, Ted, 160 Creyton, Barry Barry Creyton Show, The, 117 engagement story, 114–15 first meeting with, 74 in Cowardy Custard, 158 in Don’s Party, 153 in Double Act, vii in How the West Was Lost, 84–85 in Lady Audley’s Secret, 78–80 in Noises Off, 205 in Son of Naked Vicar, 180 LPs made with, 93, 96–97

motorbike accident, 211 moves to McMahon’s Point, 112–13 New York trip, 119 on The Mavis Bramston Show, 111–12 piano accordion skills, 81 rewrites Double Act, 215 sketches written with, 76 songs in The Mavis Bramston Show, 89 writes Double Act, 211–16 writes Mrs ’Obbs, 114 writes Valentine’s Day, 238–39 Crothall, Ross, 54 Crouch, Peter, 99–100, 102 Dacca, child in, 211 Dad, see Brown, Leo Clifford (father) Daily at Dawn, 199–200 Dale, Alan, 204 Dearth, Harry, 76 Dence, Maggie, 74–75, 95–96, 113, 174 Dench, Judi, 100 Deveson, Anne, 90 Dickerson, Bob, 54 Dinnen, Janice, 100–101 Doctor Jim, 62–63 Doctors and Nurses, 169–70 Don’s Party, 150–53, 156–57 Dorgan, Arlene, 75, 92 Double Act, vii, 211–16 driver’s licence obtained, 195–96 Drysdale, Denise, 202, 245 Drysdale, Russell and family, 55–56, 138, 275 Duckworth, Eric, 71, 74 Duncan, Alistair, 158 Dunne, Clive, 99 Duparc, Raymond, 158 Durack, Fanny, 6–7 Durham, Jim, 274 281

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NOELINE Dusty, Slim, 271 Dutton, Geoffrey, 78, 274–75 Early Kooka stove, 10–11 earthquake, 221 Edgecliff flat, 138 education, see schooling Edwardian house in Stanmore, 26–27 Edwards, Doug, 185 Edwards, Mr, 6 elections, 239–47, 267–70 Elizabethan Room, 101–2 Elizabethan, The, 48 Elkner, Maureen, 174 Emma’s War, 206 enema, 13 engagement to Ron, 46–48, 51 England, Peter, 233 Ensemble Theatre, 214–15 Erlichmann, Marty, 263–64 Europe, honeymoon in, 188–89 Evans, Len, 133 Evil Men Do,The, 81 Ewart, John, 97, 151–52, 156 Expo in Brisbane, 218–20 Faassen, John, 79, 81, 87 Fabiani, Rudy, 241–42 Fairweather, Ian, 54–55 Falk, Ronald, 162 fan mail, 191 Farr, Judi, 119, 195 Farrelly, Sue, 215 Farson, Daniel, 103–4 Fawcett, Hudson, 143 Feathers nightclub, 116–17 Ferrier, Noel, 90 films, see shows and films Finch, Stuart, 92 Fink, Leon and Margaret, 156–57, 274 Finlayson, Jon, 88 ‘Fiona Wintergreen’, 200–201 282

Fire on the Snow, 52 Firman, Pat, 89–90 Fish, Bill, 228 Fishburn, Jimmy, 116 Fisher, Judith, 151, 221 Fisher, Peter, 195 Fission Chips, 52 Fitzgerald, Tom, 2–3 Fitzpatrick, Neil, 76 Fitzsimon, Jill, 174 Ford, Julie-Anne, 170 Fort Street Girls High, 38–40 Foster, David at ‘It’s Time’ campaign, 142–43 first meeting, 141 trip to Rottnest Island with, 155 understudy for Don’s Party, 151 Fourth Wish,The, 159–60 Foxcroft, Les, 119 Frank, Lillian, 149, 202 Frank the Injurer, 130–31 Fraser, Ann, 161 Fraser, Malcolm, 169 Frazer, Ron, 172–73 Friend, Donald, 57 Front and Backside of Barry Creyton and Noeline Brown,The, 93 Fry, Bob, 274 funeral mix-up, 207–9 Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 223–25 Galleria, The, 56 Gallic Symbols, 54 Genesians Theatre Group, 50 Georgy Girl, NB invited to audition for, 101 Gertsch, Ludwig, 172 Gesch, Gregory, 203 Gillam, Reg, 162 Ginn, Stuart, 119–21 Girls’ Brigade, 34 Girls’ Night Out, 172–74 Gledhill, Bobby, 73

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INDEX Glover, Richard, 240 Glynne, Fernande, 87 Golsby, Kev, 170, 171, 179, 185 Gordon, Hayes, 213–14 Gorman, Colin, 74 Gorman, Reg, 74 Goss, Robert, 158 Grace Bros, work at, 43 ‘Grandma’, 29, 31 Gray, ‘Ugly’ Dave, 189–90 Greaves, Sue, 256 Greer, Germaine, 62, 189 Greggs, John, 153 Gulpilil, David, 126–27 Haddrick, Ron, 253 Halliday, Hugh, 203 Hancock, Tony, 123–25 Hannam, Ken, 77, 91–92 Hannan, John, 256 Hannay, David, 206 Hardy, Frank Black Diamonds, 51–52 death of, 232 on Would You Believe?, 133–35 signs his book for NB, 176–77 Hardy, Mary, 134 Harris, Martin, 151, 156 Harris, Max, 63, 78 Harris, Rolf, 218 Harrow, Lisa, 215 Harwood, Ena, 90 Hay, Ronnie, 75 Healey, Ken, 232 Hedditch, Adam, 238 Helen (friend), 27 Henderson, Rupert, 124 Henry (dog), 230, 253–54 Hepple, Ted, 92 Heygarth, Tony, 153 Higgins, Ross in Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, 165 in Doctors and Nurses, 170

in Kingswood Country, 195 in The Naked Vicar Show (radio), 171 in The Naked Vicar Show (TV), 185–87 Hinch, Derryn, 201–2 Hobart, 144–47 Holt, Harold, 110–11, 115–16 Home Cafe, 47 Horton, Mervyn, 56–57 Hotel Paradiso, 161–62 How the West Was Lost, 84–85, 87–88 Howard, John (actor), 267–68 Howard, John (medical student), 93 Howard, John (PM), 235–36 Huber, Bob, 117 Hughes, Robert (actor), 199 Hughes, Robert (artist and critic) dream of and accident, 251–53 exhibits at Clune Galleries, 69 exhibits at Hungry Horse, 66–67 family background, 61 finds another partner, 92 first meeting, 3–4 goes overseas, 82 Lindsay etching, 57 marries and moves to US, 121 meeting at State Archives, 196 meeting in London, 104–6 relationship with, 53–54 remarriage of, 275 separation from, 111 writes The Art of Australia, 77–78 Hughes, Tom, 66 Hughson, Bernadette, 174, 202 Hungry Horse Gallery, 66–67 Hunter, Bill, 147–48 Hunter, Gillian, 145 Hutton, Ric, 158–59 283

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NOELINE ice chest, 11–12 Ikin, Jan, 59 Illawarra Mercury, phone call from, 245 illnesses and accidents broken bones in foot from car crash, 72–73 fire at The Speakeasy, 179 laminectomy, 251 oophorectomy, 198 passes out from hunger, 141–42 scarlet fever, 12–14 sunburn, 98 In Sickness and In Health, 220 Indy car race entertainment, 222–23 Ingram, Robin, 161 ‘It’s Time’ campaign, 142–43 Jack (technician), 219–20 Jack, Uncle, 17 Jackson, Kevin, 162 Jacobsen, Kevin, 217 Jaffer, Melissa, 169 James, Brian, 77 James, Clive, 62 James, Francis, 63–64 Jarratt, Suzie, 202 Jessop, Clytie, 206 jewellery shop, 33 Joffe, Eddie, 124 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 115–16 Johnston, George, 56 Jonah, 76–77 Jones, Alan, 245 Jools Theatre Restaurant, 172–74, 181 Joyce (neighbour), 22–23 Juliffe, Bill, 50 Kane, Eden, 130 Kants, Ivar, 160, 162 Kargopoloff,Vadim, 176, 274, see also Vadim’s 284

Karlin, Miriam, 122 Kaye, Norman, 160–61 Keating, Annita, 244 Kee family shop, 32 Kellermann, Annette, 7 Kenna, Peter, 50 Kennedy, Graham, 171 becomes unwell, 236 concussion, 253–55 death rumours, 251 fax from, 231 first meeting, 111–12 friendship with, 192–94 gift for comedy, 189–91 in Kingswood Country, 195 move to nursing home, 271–73 moves to townhouse, 259–66 on Blankety Blanks, 183–84 Southern Highlands home, 227–31 Kennelly, Sheila, 87 Kent-Hughes, Miss, 39 Kerr, Bill, 97 Kerr, Steve Vadim, 176, 274, see also Vadim’s Kessell, Norman, 76, 93–94 Killen, Jim, 201 Kindergarten Union, 243–44, 264 King, Bernard, 209 Kingsman, Doug, 158 Kingswood Country, 187, 194–95 Kippax, Harry, 275 at Vadim’s, 2–3 Double Act review, 213 pictures bought for, 55 political views, 143 Kirk, Izobel, 145 Klippel, Robert, 54 Krummel, John, 238 KU Starting Points, 243–44, 264 Kurts, Alwyn, 91 Labor Day, 253 Labor Party, NB joins, 235–36

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INDEX Laine, Cleo, 100 Lake Eyre, filming at, 127–29 Lake, Zoe, 162 laminectomy, 251 Lanceley, Colin early paintings, 54 meets Tony Sattler, 189 NB rooms with, 105 thrown out of Lucio’s, 67 visits Bob Hughes after accident, 252 Lanceley, Kay, 108 Lander, Allan, 152 Lane, Don, 112 Lang,Veronica, 153 Langton Clinic work, 139–41 Lansdowne, Ted, 58–61 Lardner, Robert, 159 Laws, John, 90, 245 Lawson,Valerie, 172 Lazar, Peter, 134 Lee, Andrew, 241–42 Leigh,Vivien, 59, 67–69 LeMesurier, John, 103, 124 Lesslie, Freda, 90, 202 Levis, Robert, 161 library assistant job, 44–45, 73 Lindsay, Norman, 56–57 Little, Jeannie, 217–18 Livermore, Helen, 97 Livermore, Reg, 92 Lloyd, Bobby, 158 Logie awards, 191, 193, 255 Lomas, Eric, 202 London, see United Kingdom, trips to London School of Economics work, 107 Love, Jackie, 209 Lovell, Trish, 90 Lovett, Barry, 81 Lowe, Chica, 138–39 LPs with Barry Creyton, 93, 96–97 Lucas, Betty, 119, 261

Lucio’s, 67 Lynn, Elwynn, 55 McCallum, Alison, 179–80 Macdonald, Donald, 80, 82, 180, 238 McEwan, Colin, 180, 185–86 McGowan, Laurel, 195 McGregor, Julie, 180, 185, 187 McGuire, Eddie, 257 McGuire, Kerry, 152 McKellar, John, 73, 157 Vesta TV ads, 184–85 writes Girls’ Night Out, 172–73 McKern, Leo, 119 McLean, Angus, 158 Macleay, ‘Pip’, 72 McMahons Point apartment, 112 McPherson, Grahame, 202 McVicker, Norman, 58, 69 Mallos, Tessa, 92, 143, 174, 178 Mangos, John, 230, 244, 261 Margaret, Princess, 105–6 Marian Street Theatre, 158 Marilyn (neighbour), 167–69, 206 Marinos, Lex, 195 Marree (town), 125–27 Marrick Players, 50–51 Martin, Joe, 149 Martin, Tony, 256 Mary McKillop Museum, 232–33 Mason, Ingrid, 161–62, 189 Mathilde (friend), 27–28 Matlock, 141 Maughan, Monica, 250 Mavis Bramston Show,The, 93 pilot for, 85–87 popularity of, 113 preview, 88–89 regular work on, 111–12 Max (friend), 51 Meadmore, Clem, 54 Meale, Richard, 50 285

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NOELINE meals egg diet, 109–10 fresh salmon, 103 picnic at Clydesdale, 229 tripe, 46 Meillon, John admitted to hospital, 100 at Bramston pilot, 88 drinking problem, 121–23 in My Name’s McGooley,What’s Yours?, 119–20 in The Fourth Wish, 159–60 in The Recruiting Officer, 91–92 in They’re a Weird Mob, 134 in Walkabout, 126 meets NB at Heathrow, 97 Mendoza, Dot, 73 Menmuir, Ray, 82 Merivale, John, 67–68 Merriman, Jan, 244, 267 Miller, George (doctor and writer), 177 Miller, George (restaurateur), 78–79 Miller, Harry M, 212 Milligan, Spike, 121, 124–25 Mini (dog), 249–50 Miss Marrickville Olympics, 47 Mitchell, David, 200, 217, 263 Mitchell, Leona, 223 Mitchell,Warren, 220 Mitchell, Yvonne, 92 Mohammed Ali, 101, 193 Money, Angela, 65 Monroe, Marilyn, 59 Moorhouse, Frank, 275 Morley, Robert, 153 Mossop, Rex, 91, 118–19 motorbikes, Paddy’s thing about, 22 Move Over Mrs Markham, 144–46, 154 Mr Giraffe, 168 Muldoon, Thomas, 97 286

Munro, Mike, 264 Munster, George, 3 Murphy, Roger and Jan, 188 Murray, James, 80, 87 Music Hall Theatre Restaurant, 78–79 My Name’s McGooley,What’s Yours?, 119 My Sister Eileen, 72 Naked Vicar Show,The on radio, 170–72 on stage, 174–75, 179 on TV, 185–86 Nana (Dad’s mother), 13–16 Nation, 3 Negus, George, 92 Nelson, Dusty, 123 Neville, Richard, 274 New Theatre, 51–52 Newbould, Julieanne, 162, 199 Newcastle earthquake, 221 newspapers, false claims in, 190–91, 240, 245 Newton, Bert, 194, 245–46 Newton, Grant, 242 Nicolls,Victoria, 204, 221 Night With Robinson Crusoe, A, 221–22 Noises Off, 205 Norman, John, 145–47, 150 Norris, Terry, 250 North Sydney Therapeutic, 187–88 Northside Theatre, 158 Not So Wet and Dry Side of Barry Creyton and Noeline Brown,The, 96–97 Nunn, Judy, 152, 155, 256 Nureyev, Rudolf, 274 O’Brien, Denis, 84 O’Donnell, Dawn, 172 O’Grady, John Jnr, 134 Oldest Profession,The, 261

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INDEX Olive (Great-aunt), 30 Oliver, Tom, 82 Olivier, Laurence, 59, 145 Olsen, John, 54, 107 Olympics, Miss Marrickville, 47 oophorectomy, 198 Op Art Christmas stockings, 108 opera in the park, 223 O’Reilly, Bridie, 168 Orr, Bill, 71, 74 O’Toole, Peter, 102 Overdog,The, 99–100 Packer family, 64–66, 260 Paddy (dog), 21–22 Parkinson, Doug, 171 Parkinson, Michael, 200 Pasha (dog), 275 Patricia (friend), 20, 27 Pattinson, Craig, 232 Pearl, Cyril, 133 Penman, Rosemary, 275 Perjanik, Michael, 171 Petersham Musical Society, 49 Peterson, Ralph, 119, 122–23, 137, 183 Phillip Street Theatre, 49, 71–74 Phillips, Hazel, 90 Phipps, Max, 153 Plant, Michael, 85 plays, see shows and films Pocket Playhouse, 57–61, 68–69 Pooley, Dorothy Gladys (‘Grandma’), 29, 31 Pooley, Dyra Mabel, see Brown, Dyra Mabel (mother) Pooley family, 29–30 Potter, Sir Ian, 107 Priest, Jane, 202 Prince Henry Infectious Diseases Hospital, 12–14 Pritchard, Terry, 93 protest rally for Hunters Hill, 47–48

Punch, Angela, 162 Pyrmont house, 166–67 Quin, Barry, 238 radio, favourite shows on, 14 Rapotec, Stan, 54 Rattle, Nancy, 46 Ray (friend), 45–46 Raymond, Bob and Marion, 56 recordings with Barry Creyton, 93, 96–97 Recruiting Officer,The, 91–92 Reeves, Tony, 143 Reg Grundy, 183 Reilly, Gary, 164–65 Doctors and Nurses, 169–70 proposes doing Naked Vicar on stage, 174 wants to play golf, 196 Remick, Lee, 206–7 Removalists,The, 156 restaurants, see cafès and restaurants reviews Applause, 205–6 Barmaids, 232 Don’s Party, 153–54 Double Act, 213–14 Hotel Paradiso, 162 How the West Was Lost, 87–88, 93–94 Naked Vicar Show, The, 172 Night With Robinson Crusoe, A, 222 Recruiting Officer, The, 92 Right Thing, The, 84 Sleeping Prince, The, 60–61 Three Men on a Horse, 161 What’s New?, 76 Rice, Patricia, 49 Ridewood, James, 204, 233 Right Thing,The, 82–84 Rita and Wally, 122–23 Robert (friend), 19–20 287

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NOELINE Roberts, Denise, 221, 261 Robertson, Clive, 185–86 Roeg, Luc, 127 Roeg, Nicolas, 125, 128 Ron (boyfriend) engagement broken off, 51 first meeting, 43–48 reappearance of, 266 recommends Vadim’s, 1 Ronald (friend), 25–26 Rose, Bill, 54 Roslyn (house), 5–6 Rottnest Island trip, 155 Royal NSW Bicentennial Concert, 217–18 RS Productions, see Reilly, Gary; Sattler, Tony Rubin, Harold de Vahl, 69–70 Rural Press, political views of, 240 Rushton,Will, 75 Ruxton, Bruce, 209 Ryan, Johnny, 17 Sadlier, Kevin, 272–73 sailing, 45, 198–99 Sale, David, 111, 115, 117 Salisbury Hotel, 33 Salter, June, 88, 110 Sattler, Mark, 178 Sattler, Pat, 179 Sattler, Tony Antarctic trip, 202–3 Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, 163–65 desire for ‘retirement’, 196 Doctors and Nurses, 169–70 love affair with, 175–79 marriage to, 177–78 proposes doing Naked Vicar on stage, 174 writes for Barbra Streisand, 263–64 Saw, Ron, 87–88 scarlet fever, 12–14 288

schooling Fort Street Girls High, 38–40 Stanmore Girls School, 40–41 Sean (boyfriend), 129–31, 133 Shadie, Ken, 110 Sharp, Martin, 112, 274 Shields-Brown, Mark, 159 Short, Gwenda, 8–9, 20, 36 Shorter, Ken, 118 shows and films, see also reviews Applause, 202–5 Barmaids, 231–32 Barry Creyton Show, The, 117 Beauty and the Beast (pantomime), 81 Beauty and the Beast (TV show), 89–91 Birds in Paradise, 137 Black Diamonds, 51–52 Blankety Blanks, 183–84, 189–90 Bowl Me Over, 250 Brass Monkeys, 202–3 Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, 165–66 Club Show, The, 118 Cowardy Custard, 157–59 Daily at Dawn, 199–200 Doctors and Nurses, 169–70 Don’s Party, 150–53, 156–57 Double Act, vii, 211–16 Emma’s War, 206 Evil Men Do, The, 81 Fire on the Snow, 52 Fission Chips, 52 Fourth Wish, The, 159–60 Girls’ Night Out, 172–74 Hotel Paradiso, 161–62 How the West Was Lost, 84–85 In Sickness and In Health, 220 Jonah, 76–77 Kingswood Country, 187, 194–95 Labor Day, 253 Marrick Players, 50–51

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INDEX Matlock, 141 Mavis Bramston Show, The, 85–87, 88–89, 111–12 Move Over Mrs Markham, 144–46, 154 Music Hall Theatre Restaurant, 78–80 My Name’s McGooley,What’s Yours?, 119 My Sister Eileen, 72 Naked Vicar Show, The, 170–72, 174–75, 179, 185–86 Night With Robinson Crusoe, A, 221–22 Oldest Profession, The, 261 Overdog, The, 99–100 Petersham Musical Society review, 49 Recruiting Officer, The, 91–92 Removalists, The, 156 Right Thing, The, 82–84 Rita and Wally, 122–23 self-written play, 35 Sleeping Prince, The, 58–61 Son of Naked Vicar, 180–81 Sticks and Bones, 144, 146–49 This is Your Life, 264 This Week in Britain, 106–7 Three Men on a Horse, 160–61 Valentine’s Day, 238 Walkabout, 125–29 What if I Died Tomorrow?, 157 What’s New?, 75–76 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 255–56 World of Suzie Wong, The, 147–48 Would You Believe?, 133–35, 146 You Can’t See Round Corners, 117–18 Siberry, Michael, 148 Skinner, Carole, 261 Sleeping Prince,The, 58–61

Smart, Alister, 82–84 Smith, Arnold, funeral for, 207–9 Smith, Jenni, 147 Smith,Val, 86, 120 Somers, Darryl, 209 Son of Naked Vicar, 180–81 Southern Highlands houses in, 193, 222 move to, 196–97 NB runs for State seat, 239–47, 267–70 Speakeasy, The, 174–75, 181 Stafford, Miss, 31 Stanmore changes in, 31–33 early life in, 5–18 Edwardian house in, 26–27 Stanmore Girls School, 40–41 State elections, 239–47, 267–70 Stephens, Babette, 74 Stewart, Janie, 72 Sticks and Bones, 144, 146–49 Street, Mr Phillip, 50–51 Streisand, Barbra, 263–64 Sutherland, Doug, 242 Sweet, Gary, 256–57 swimming scene, 82–84 Sydney, Joan, 231 Sydney Opera House appearance, 160–61 Szeps, Henri, 199 Tabberer, Maggie, 90 Tallawalla (house), 193 Tasman-Smith, Bob, 203 Tasmanian Theatre Company, 144–47 Taylor, Derek car accident with, 72 finds someone else, 176 meets NB for dinner, 220–21 NB learns of death of, 275 proposes, 136–37 Taylor, Ray, 75–76, 238 289

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NOELINE Taylor Sisters, 88 Teyssedre, Roger Claude, 172–73 Theatre Royal, Hobart, 144–45 Theroux, Paul, 125 This is Your Life, 264 This Week in Britain, 106–7 Thomas, Al, 161–62 Three Men on a Horse, 160–61 Thurston, Madeleine, 67 Torme, Mel, 149 tripe, 46 tuberculosis, mother treated for, 36–38 Tucker, Albert, 54 Turnbull, Lucy and Malcolm, 252 Turner, Geraldine, 202 Tycho, Tommy, 87 Tynan, Kenneth, 59 Unicomb, John, 87, 145 United Kingdom, trips to, 95–108, 188–89 Upward, Peter, 54 Vadim, 176, 274 Vadim’s, 1–4, 274–75 chess set, 62 NB among last to leave, 61 partying at, 82 Valentine’s Day, 238 Veitch, Jock, 162 Venuti, Maria, 238 Vera (chef), 2 Vesta TV ads, 184–85 Volska, Anna, 82, 91–92 Wagstaff, Stuart, 113–14 Christmases with Graham Kennedy, 229–30 on Beauty and the Beast, 90 on Blankety Blanks, 189 Walkabout, 125–29 Wallace, Rowena, 118 Walsh, Mike, 101 290

Walsh, Richard, 89 Warburton, Doreen, 261 Ward, Tony, 92 Warwick, Dionne, 223 Waterside Workers’ Federation, 51 Watkin, Nigel, 241, 247 Way, Ron, 120–21 weather girl job, 78 Weaver, Jacki, 133, 157, 202 Webster, Jimmy, 9 weddings to Derek Taylor, 136 to Tony Sattler, 177–78 Whaley, George, 162 What if I Died Tomorrow?, 157 What’s New?, 75–76 White, Patrick, 56 Whiteley, Brett, 106 Whitlam, Gough campaign and victory, 142–44 sacking of, 169 works for Francis James’ release, 64 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 255–56 Willessee, Mike, 65, 256 Williams, Peter, 231 Williamson, David, 154 Williamson, Nicol, 99 Winterbottom, Cecil, funeral of, 208–9 Wintergreen Productions Expo in Brisbane, 218–20 foundation of, 201 Indy car race entertainment, 222–23 stages Bicentennial Concert, 217–18 World of Suzie Wong,The, 147–48 World Vision Bangladesh trip, 209–11 World War II, effect on family and friends, 17–18

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INDEX Would You Believe?, 133–35, 146 Wright, Judith, 238 Wyndham, Arthur, 164, 170, 261 Wyndon, Barbara, 161, 174, 221 Yarrows (neighbours), 23–24 Yelland, Carol, 154

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 134, 274 You Can’t See Round Corners, 117–18 Young, Brian, 147 Ziggy’s restaurant, 178

291