1989
DRAFT
My Gorgeous Life
Dame Edna Everage
Macmillan
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Despite having become more global than ozone since her first appearance in 1956 (at the behest of playwright Ray Lawlor), Dame Edna Everage has rarely committed herself in print. Virtually silent on the page since the Coffee Table Book of 1976, her recently released memoir My Gorgeous Life candidly and caringly reveals details that have somehow escaped the tungsten glare of publicity in which she is perpetually bathed.
Seasoned Edna watchers will be surprised, even shocked by some disclosures. The editors of New Idea will be spitting teeth not to have scooped these revelations before they hit hardback. Dame Edna might well claim a gorgeous life, but it has not been without setback and heartbreak. Who could have known that her first child Lois had been taken by a rogue koala in the late 1950’s or that Edna’s own brother Laurie was bitten by a tiger snake- “My mother immediately panicked, took out her teeth, nicked his leg with an old Gillette, and tried to suck out all the poison. By the time Dr Vaughan Williams arrived it was too late, and he told me in the strictest confidence that I would ask readers of this mega-seller to also respect, that poor Mummy had spent an hour on her knees on the cold lino sucking the wrong leg.”
But like Bert Facey Dame Edna counts her life a fortunate one as she recalls her early days in Moonee Ponds at Number 32 Humoresque Street. Her memories richly recreate the Melbourne that Ava Gardner knew and social historian Robin Boyd so exactingly described. Dame Edna takes us back to Enid Gilchrist knitting patterns, Reckitt’s blue, Keepegg and Rawleigh’s Men, brunchcoats and Bex ;when bliss was a Jason Recliner and sandblasted reindeer and Tretchakoff’s Chinese Lady with Green Face graced the doors and walls of the discerning.
It is the Proustian precision of even her earliest recollections that strikes even the casual reader. Everage is an incomparable stylist – “My earliest memory is looking up through the flyproof net of my basinette. I must have plonked down in our back garden under the old peppercorn tree and the net was very important in case any of those big green quilted emperor gum caterpillars dropped off the tree on to my pillow. I was a beautiful baby you will not be surprised to hear and I clearly remember an enormous face looking down at me from the other side of the net with another big face over its shoulder. ‘I think she is focusing, Glad,’ said a loud voice, `I wonder what she will be when she grows up ?’ If only my rusk-encrusted lips could have spoken I would have cooed one simple word -Megastar. Instead I distinctly remember smiling a gummy smile and releasing a thick dollop of curdled Farex.”
Perhaps it was an early brush with death that so shaped the young Edna Everage and prompted her to seek the heights of celebrity. Vividly she reconstructs the scene of her near drowning at a Melbourne beach – “”Only when I was out of my depth with the salt water searing my throat did I remember that I could not swim ! I tried to make my life flash before me but it wouldn’t. I remembered some of my favourite poems appropriate to the situation.’The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck and `Not Drowning but Waving’. How I wished I was only waving ! On the beach I had been perusing, spookily enough, a book called The Waves by my idol Virginia Woolf. It was a bit above my head but not a patch on the real waves which were by then sucking me out towards shark-infested waters. was Virginia a good swimmer ? I wondered.”
Dame Edna is not without a tetchiness on occasion -“My memory of the Big Move down to Melbourne is vague. I was probably `traumatised’,to use an expression my daughter’s therapist doesn’t seem to be able to leave alone. There is a stupid school of thought which says that if you cannot remeber certain things that happen to you as a kiddie, you have to spend an arm and a leg lying on a couch in some Harley Road surgery tearing your parents to shreds. Twaddle! The fact is children have memories like sieves and I am sure my readers will be grateful that I don’t remember every blessed thing that happened to me or this mega-selling book would use up half the forests in Finland.”
However, Everage is unsparing in her account of her courtship with Norman Stoddart Everage before the Prostate Years, the first meeting with Madge Allsop, her New Zealand-born bridesmaid and Constant Companion in later life (many have suggested that Allsop is the Alice B. Tackless to Everage’s Gertrude Swine) and her father Bruce’s tragic death at the Somme -he fell backwards into a trench in 1955 while photographing the exact spot where he almost lost his life forty years earlier.
Dame Edna’s mother slow decline into the mists of Oldtimer’s Disease in the Dunraven twilight home is also lovingly depicted as is Everage’s fabled philanthropy- “From time to time , I have given a part of my increment towards the Dunraven Refurbishment fund and they had, in a pathetic attempt to please me, named a ward after me. Once again my healthy hatred of elitism reared its ugly head and I persuaded them to name other rooms after famous female Achievers, hence the Dora Carrington Ward, the Virginia Woolf Incontinence Wing, the Diane Arbus X-Ray Unit and the Zelda Fitzgerald Fire Escape; all women who had done something with their lives.”
At this point it is necessary to consider the vexed connection between Dame Edna and Mr Barry Humphries, the eminence mauve who has been likened to Diaghliev, Colonel Tom Parker, even Graham Richardson. Everage puts the record straight on Humphries’ early forays into female impersonation, including his ill-fated appearance at Peter Cook’s Establishment club in London in the mid-sixties. Edna Everage, by any standards, has had a meteoric rise from winner of the Lovely Mother Quest to Royal Command performer- yet she is adamant that Humphries is only marginal to this success.
Indeed, she tells of an early Humphries performance where she gave fully of her critical insights – “`Barry asked me for my opinion and I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t speak my mind, I declared in a voice which could be heard clearly in every corner of the Assembly Hall. `He is correct in thinking that Australian womenfolk and their way of life have a right to be recognised, but it is an insult and obscenity within the social infra-structure as we know it per se should be cynically promoted by a man en travestie who mocks and denigrates all that we stand for and hold sacred.’ Between you and me, readers, this is roughly what I said, but it had an electrifying effect on those little amateur theatrical folk.”
One wonders if this deconstructive note signals some changes for Dame Edna. Having Revealed All and buried her beloved Norm perhaps she preparing to go into seclusion. Thirty five years is a long time even for a household word and now, having enshrined many of her most trenchant thoughts in print, Everage may,like Prospero and Melba, be abjuring her art .She has given us much but as decades change and tyrannies crumble maybe it is time for us to all buy copies of My Gorgeous Life and let Dame Edna and Mr Humphries take a well-earned rest.
The Adelaide Review 1990.