1990

My Gorgeous Life
by Dame Edna Everage
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Despite having become more global than ozone since her first appearance on December 13, 1955 (at the behest of playwright Ray Lawler) Edna Everage has rarely committed herself to print. Virtually silent on the page since the Coffee Table Book of 1976, her recently released memoir, My Gorgeous Life, candidly reveals details that have somehow escaped the tungsten glare of publicity in which she is perpetually bathed.

It is almost impossible not to conspire with Edna’s claim that she has not only had a real life but a gorgeous one at that- recalled with that imperious, larger-than-life brand of prattle for which she has the patent. To mention the genius of Barry Humphries at this point seems in poor taste, or at least it seems to spoil the monstrous joke that for more than thirty years Edna Everage has been a significant figure in public life. Only Gary McDonald’s equally inspired Norman Gunston has rivalled Edna in becoming a universally believed fiction.

Edna Everage has come through many incarnations since her first stage and television appearances in the fifties when Humphries was only in his mid-twenties and his Moonee Ponds matron was an everyday hausfrau at Number 32 Humoresque St.By the early seventies Edna had become a superstar, a celebrity in the exact sense- someone who is famous because she is famous. And not just for ten minutes as Warhol promised but for as long as she and Barry Humphries cared to nominate. Then Gough Whitlam, eloquently demonstrating what he thought of the idea of bestowing titles, made her a dame and then there was no stopping her. Edna Everage became the Dame of Misrule, and now no chat show, variety performance or media event is complete without her. Never is she mocked or challenged -she sails like a galleon through public life with all of the immunity of Royalty.

None of this would have been possible if Humphries had been anything short of brilliant. He inhabits her identity with uncanny clarity, it seems insufficient merely to call it impersonation although Humphries would doubtless disdain more complex explanation. Suffice to say that Edna Everage is one of the most flawlessly sustained burlesque performances on the twentieth century stage. Through Edna, Humphries has maintained a thirty years war against Australian complaceny and mediocrity finding some very personal targets in the process. Always acute in matters of costume he has her swathed in the silliness of fashion- who could forget Edna’s denim phase for instance – and she takes to fads and hunts down buzz-words like a heat seeking missile.

On the other hand, Edna is never merely vinegary or abstractly splenetic because Humphries is in love with much that he professes to despise. The author of Bizarre cannot contain his fascination with the fading memorabilia and quirky customs of his formative years and it is this mix of bile and affection which makes My Gorgeous Life such a fascinating work. Now in his middle fifties Barry Humphries has become a social historian whose relation to post-war Australia is as complex as Edna’s.It is surely no innocent accident that Edna’s gorgeous life should echo Bert Facey’s fortunate one .

Edna Everage’s Melbourne is the one that Ava Gardner knew and Robin Boyd so exactingly documented. The domestic realm is a tapestry rich in brand-names and period iconography – Enid Gilchrist knitting patterns, Reckitt’s Blue, Keepegg and Rawleigh’s Men, brunchcoats and Bex all provide epiphanies of association as do Jason recliners, sandblasted reindeer and the one true relic of fifties devotion – Tretchakoff’s Chinese lady with Green Face.

The prose is a sumptuous blend of Proust and Judith Krantz as Everage plumbs the mists of consciousness mindful always (like her little American friend Shirl) that there is bound to be a past life or two down there -“My earliest memory is looking up through the flyproof net of my basinette. 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.”

The shadow of Thanatos fell across much of Edna’s early life as the many Previously Unrevealed secrets attest. The heartbreak disclosed is enough to make the New Idea people green with lost opportunity. She reveals for the first time how her eldest child Lois was taken in the early 1950s by rogue koalas and how her 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.”

Vividly Edna reconstructs the scene of her own 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 sucking me towards shark-infested waters. Was Virginia a good swimmer ? I wondered.”

Fortunately, Edna was saved by Norman Stoddart Everage her swain for life and her memoir recalls their fleetingly happy moments before the Prostate Years. Similarly she describes her early times with Madge Allsop, her New Zealand born bridesmaid and constant companion in later life. Everage’s parents also feature -regrettably in unhappy circumstances. Edna describes 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. Her mother’s slow decline into the clutches of Oldtimer’s Disease in the Dunraven twilight home is also lengthily chronicled.

Less is known about Everage’s three children Bruce, Valmai and Kenny as her narrative frequently becomes sketchy, even obfuscating as in this telling instance – “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 able to leave alone. There is a stupid school of thought which says that if you cannot remember 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.’

She is equally reluctant to discuss her eminence mauve, Mr Barry Humphries, the man likened to Diaghilev, Colonel Tom Parker, even Graham Richardson. Considering the curious symbiosis with her so-called manager it is hardly surprising that she insists that in her meteoric rise from winner of the Lovely Mother Quest to Royal Command performer, Humphries has played only a marginal role. Everage even relishes Humphries’ early failure at Peter Cook’s Establishment club when introducing his act to London audiences in the early sixties.

Edna recounts an early Humphries performance where she gave him the benefit of her penetrating 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 clearly heard 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 that our position 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 only roughly what I said, but it had an electrifying effect on those little amateur theatrical folk.”

It is like reading a life of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen written by his puppet Mortimer Snerd. Humphries glories in deconstructing his achievement by providing the very terminology of his denunciation. But he can’t have it both ways and he seems to know it. The Edna shows have been a goldmine in London in recent years and now she has buried what was left of Norm after he’d been divvied up for a variety of organ banks and Revealed All in her memoirs it may be Humphries’ intention that like Prospero, or Melba, Edna abjure her art and lead a life of quiet seclusion. Three decades is a long time for a household word and too long for a misogynist prank, especially a very good one. Edna has been a great laugh at a great many people’s expense but as decades change and tyrannies crumble maybe it is time for us all to buy My Gorgeous Life as a keepsake and let Dame Edna and Mr Humphries take a well-earned rest.

“Looking Back Retrospectively” The Adelaide Review, No.72, February, 1990, p.29.