BIOGRAPHY: STEPHEN DIXONreviews
Handling Edna: The Unauthorised BiographyBy Barry Humphries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 339pp. £12.99
EDNA EVERAGE, the housewife and mother from Moonee Ponds who was to become the global icon that is Dame Edna, tends to be evasive when asked to disclose her age, though history shows she made her stage debut in Australia as long ago as 1955. Birthdate apart, she has always seemed so open, prattling endlessly away on television and in her one-woman shows about the most intimate details of life with her invalid husband, Norm, and unsatisfactory children; the triumphs she has enjoyed and the tragedies endured, such as the time baby daughter Lois disappeared forever, thought to have been carried away and eaten by a rogue koala.
Even so, some of us felt she was holding back; that dark secrets festered behind those diamante-encrusted upswept glasses. Now, in this searing book, the squalid truth has finally been laid bare by her embittered confidant, former manager and occasional stand-in Barry Humphries: the heartlessness, the narcissism, the cruel humiliation of her personal assistant, Madge, the shocking hints of infanticide, the faithlessness (it transpires that the father of her son, Kenneth, was not the urologically-challenged Norm but Frank Sinatra).
I’ve never particularly liked the shrill and macabre confection that is Dame Edna, but I’ve long been a fan of the polymathic Humphries, whose impressive other achievements are often overshadowed: novelist, essayist, actor, expert on all manner of subjects, from Australian kitsch to surreal and decadent art, champion of the writings of the mentally deranged. And it would seem from this book that Humphries, now 76, has himself finally tired of the woman who has dominated his life for more than half a century: “Was it possible – could it be? – that my friend Edna wasn’t really a very nice person after all?” he asks.
Perhaps it really is time for the dame to hang up her mauve wig; she is properly part of a 1950s Australia of stultifying parochialism, and a national inferiority complex that manifested itself as strident philistinism, where the country’s only movie star was leathery old Chips Rafferty. Nicole, Russell, Cate, Kylie and even Mel hadn’t been born; Sydney Opera House hadn’t been built.
Handling Ednatells the story of the anarchic young Humphries, just beginning to make a name for himself as a satirist in makeshift Melbourne nightclubs when he was contacted by Mrs Everage, shy but determined, begging for advice on the best way to start a career in show business, albeit lacking any conspicuous talents beyond steely determination and a blessed lack of self-awareness.
Amused by her naivety, Humphries struggled into a frock and incorporated her sayings and mannerisms into his nightclub act. He impersonated her for laughs, but when she saw the performance she took it to be genuine homage and insisted on going on herself, to show Humphries how it should be done.
Before long he had been relegated to the functions of agent, manager and general factotum as Mrs Everage, unaware that audiences were laughing at and not with her, climbed to new heights of squirm-inducing self-revelation. Humphries fled to Britain and was building a career as a performer and Private Eyesatirist when, to his consternation, she unexpectedly arrived in London, demanding that he procure gigs for her. Such was the force of her personality that he weakly capitulated, and he has been in her thrall ever since.
Handling Ednais a most entertaining read and perhaps says more about the real Humphries than his previous memoirs; there is a palpable wistfulness about what might have been had Dame Edna not entered his life, although he concedes that he would have been considerably less well off.
It’s quite a trick he manages in this book: standing apart from the voracious old bat, articulating his resentment about the way she has used him. But, of course, it’s a variation on a trick he’s been pulling off for a long time now, isn’t it?
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist
