THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: BILLIE BARRY:The success of the infamous 'Billie Barry kids' is testament to the lifelong work ethic of this 'living legend' with high standards and a passion for Man Utd, writes Róisín Ingle.
WHEN I tell people I am going to meet Billie Barry, the comments range from “I bet she is a diva” to “how many times do you think she will do jazz hands?” Actually, the home of Miss Barry, as the students of her stage school who knew and, by all accounts, loved her, is a cheesy grin, jazz-hand-free zone. She does possess a gigantic telly, the kind you see in the homes of rappers, but apart from that nothing about her screams diva.
I had imagined, what with 40-odd years spent transforming thousands of small children into highly polished song and dance merchants – you don’t do that kind of work without knowing how to command a serious amount of respect – that she’d be slightly domineering, if not completely terrifying. In truth, she is a laidback kind of person, albeit one who is not afraid to call things exactly as she sees them. She is not an admirer of former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, believing he hams up his Dublinese for the electorate. “Bertie with his dis, dat, dese and dose.”
We meet in her home in Marino, north Dublin, where the studio from the original stage school set up by her sisters in the 1940s still stands in the back garden. She is wearing a pale pink trouser suit with an elegant scarf and, even though it’s a bit of struggle, she gets to her feet to meet me. She must be nearing 80, although she could pass for a decade younger and she still giggles like a girl.
She won't admit to her exact age. She never has, as far as I can make out from the press cuttings over the years. "If I say what age I am, then I have to start acting like that, and I don't want to," she says, which is fair enough. As her mother Ann used to say, when Billie would wonder about the exact ages of her 12 siblings; "Never mind them, you know what age you are yourself and that's all you need to know." This deliberate obfuscation was taken to heart by a young Billie and now her age is none of The Irish Times's or anyone else's business, in the nicest possible sense.
As the youngest of 13 children, the only surviving one now, she cheerfully describes herself as “the last hurrah”. She was the youngest of the brood by a good few years; the second-eldest was married the year before she was born, so she had a clutch of nieces and nephews who were around her age.
“The family doted on me,” she says. “I was always the special one.” Being lavished with attention for all of her life seems to have given the young Billie confidence and self-assurance rather than an inflated self-regard. We are talking a few weeks before she is to be honoured by Variety with a Living Legend award at the National Concert Hall, but she is almost shy about it.
“They’ve told me I just have to walk on stage and walk off again, and that’s it. I hope they keep their word,” she says, seeming pleased and bemused but not unduly impressed by the thought of the impending accolade.
Her daughter Lorraine is here today too, in case Billie needs prompting about dates or the detail of events, which she doesn’t really – or not much, anyway. She is still as sharp as the points on a gold star on a dressing room door.
There is, though, a moment during the interview when Lorraine has to tell her mother to speak up. The irony of Billie Barry being told to “project” when she spent half her life saying that to legions of little people, is not lost on her. The giggles spill out of her like a waterfall and not for the last time.
HER EARLY LIFE was spent in a fine house in Drumcondra, North Dublin, “two doors down from the Archbishop’s Palace, you have to put that in,” she says. The family had “every kind of fruit” in the long, well-tended back garden – and even still her brothers used to scale two walls to steal the Archbishops’s grapes. “It was sort of a one-upmanship thing,” she says.
Billie’s father, her “papa”, was the musician John Clarke Barry, or simply Clarke-Barry as he was known in the grand houses around Ireland. He ran three orchestras which played at hunt balls “before hunt balls deteriorated into bun fights”, she says.
He wrote a waltz for the late Queen Mother, and the score is framed on the diningroom wall. When the decline came, with jazz musicians arriving to take the place of the classical orchestra, it turned out that the legendary Clarke-Barry’s finances were in bad shape. “Papa was an utter disaster at business; the family discovered we were in trouble financially so that was the end of the big house in Drumcondra.”
The family moved to the house in Marino. Was it a come-down? “Well, Papa didn’t come down,” she laughs. “He still walked out of the house with his cloak and his hat – he would swish out the gates and to the shop. Everyone thought he was mad.” Was he? “No, he was just a showman – he wouldn’t come down to the level of the ordinary person,” she says.
He demanded red-carpet treatment when he travelled around the country by train. Clarke-Barry would never alight from the first-class compartment until the local mayor or appropriate bigwig was in place to greet him on the platform. He’d spend the journey in cattle class with his band, playing cards, but would head back to first class at the journey’s end – the illusion of grandeur had to be preserved at all costs.
Billie used to stand and listen to his stories for hours – more than anybody else in the family. There is a picture of him on a shelf, a brooding, enigmatic figure.
Billie’s mother, an amateur opera singer with a keen vision when it came to theatrics, “kept everything together”. Responding to an ad for Harry Lynton’s touring Hippodrome, she formed a stage act of her youngest daughters, who were all trained as dancers. She made the costumes herself, choreographed the routines and came up with the content of the shows.
Was she one of those bossy showbiz mothers? “I don’t think so,” says Billie. “You just did it because it felt like a natural thing to do. If Mama said put your hand in the fire you would, because you had such belief and faith in her . . . facts are facts, somebody had to earn the crust and this was the only way she could see to do it”.
Billie – she was christened Lillian but always known as Billie – was only five and couldn’t be left alone at home while her sisters toured, so she went on the road with them too.
“I had my own billing,” she smiles. Her sisters were known as “Madam Nanette’s Dainty Dots” and she was . . . “stand back, wait for it, Little Billie, The Wonder Child” . . . cue loud chortles from Billie before she launches into a rendition of her song Dream Mother, which used to have grown men crying in halls around the country.
THEY WERE ON the road for five years. It meant never settling anywhere, getting an education in dozens of different schools. “We would walk into the classroom and people would look at us as though we were Michael Jackson,” she says. All the other entertainers on the Hippodrome bill spent hours passing their tricks of the trade on to the Wonder Child: it was the kind of training in stagecraft that money could not have bought.
"That tour kept a roof over our heads," she says. When Madam Nanette's girls came back home, the older sisters set up a stage school in the back garden and kept the money coming in that way. The sisters also toured Ireland and Britain with a harmony act, "The Barry Sisters". Billie went on to star in Noel Purcell's Anything May Happenin Dublin, and then in Belfast for seven years. By the time she came home again, it was to marry her chemist husband – she met him when he came to learn ballroom dancing at the Barry sisters' school – and set up home in nearby Fairview behind the Hayes Cunningham Robinson pharmacy where he worked.
Adjusting to life away from showbiz took some getting used to. “I couldn’t cook, I was useless in the kitchen,” she says. “Learning to boil potatoes was a big step.” She fully believed that her life in showbiz was over at that point. She would dedicate her life to being a wife and a mother and when she eventually learned a few recipes – “soups and stews mostly” – from her sisters, she would be a proper housewife, one with a colourful scrapbook of memories and some interesting showbiz stories to tell her grandchildren. But then her husband got sick with multiple sclerosis and with four children to care for, she was soon faced with the same financial challenge as her mother had been.
The Billie Barry Stage School was set up in 1964, a year before her husband died. “Even though his health was failing, he would still go out for a drink with his brother every Friday. That night he went to a different pub than usual. He had a massive heart attack in the pub. His brother came to the door and said ‘he’s dead’. Which was hard, to hear it just like that, nothing to prepare you.”
Her son was having a party in the house at the time to celebrate finishing secondary school. All the female guests knelt to do a decade of the rosary when they heard. “I thought that was awfully good of them,” she says softly.
Billie threw herself into the new career. She had a family to rear: “that’s what it was about from the start,” she says. Local parents sent their children to be taught ballet and tap and jazz and singing and she started classes for the adults too. “There was a really miserable woman who worked in the post office, she never used to talk to anyone, and when I saw the likes of her wheeling her bike to the class, I thought, ‘I’ve arrived’,” she says.
The first break for the Billie Barry kids, as they became known almost immediately, came when they won a slot on the popular programme Seoirse agus Bartley. Soon afterwards they had their first audition for the Late Late Toy Showwhich gave the school a prime time audience. They became regulars on the panto at the Gaiety theatre, a tradition that endures today.
Lorraine, who started training with her mother when she was three, was part of the original team of dancers back in the days when Maureen Potter was the panto queen.
When in the 1970s the West End came calling looking for the star of a new production of Annie, one of Billie’s pupils, Jacinta Whyte, was chosen. She speaks fondly of all her former pupils, who include singer and underwear model, Samantha Mumba, and comic actress, June Rodgers. Of Westlife star Brian McFadden, now a solo artist, she says: “He was very keen, I think it was a good place for him to meet girls.” His sister Susan has also done well in musicals in the West End. She was clearly fond of all her charges but it doesn’t mean she can’t point out their weaknesses.
On the rare occasions she goes to London, a group of former Billie Barry kids always get together to meet her for lunch. For anybody who was trained by her and still works in theatre, dance or music, she is a touchstone for that intense time when they fell in love with the business called show.
But, from Barry’s perspective, it was never just about succeeding in showbiz. She talks about building self-esteem and confidence, about inspiring the shy children to take those first shaky dance steps on their own.
HER AMBITION WAS always to produce “grounded” children, whether they became accountants or stayed in the business. “You have to keep your feet on the ground, people can see it through the footlights when you’ve lost touch with reality,” she says. She had a method to deal with any pushy stage parents – “there weren’t too many” she says – who tried to interfere with the way things were done at the Billie Barry school in order to push their children forward.
“I would say, if you don’t like the way I do things you are very welcome to send them to any of the other stage schools.” You can imagine the delivery, the hint of steel behind the smile.
She retired from the school in 1999 and let her daughter take over. “I remember the exact moment. I was looking at a little girl in the front row of one of the classes and I thought, ‘I bet she has a nana who is younger than me’ and that was the decision made,” she says. It must have been a wrench, I suggest. “Not at all, no, I just left them to it,” she says.
But behind her mother’s chair, Lorraine, who took over as director of the school, is shaking her head. “It was hard for her, she had put so much into it. It wasn’t easy to let go,” she says. “But she is our mother and we didn’t want to see her worked to the bone as she got older”.
Billie keeps busy, and is still a regular at the school on enrolment days or parents’ events. The big telly that dominates one corner of the sitting room was bought so that she can watch her beloved Manchester United play. “I’ve been to Old Trafford but that television is even better than being there, you can see every blade of grass,” she says.
Before I leave I try to wheedle Billie’s exact age out of her again but she is having none of it. There’s a picture of some of her grandchildren on the wall, I point out that they look a bit like her and she says: “Oh, don’t tell them that, I was always told I had a nose like putty”.
She laughs about the possibility of plastic surgery. “I am waiting until I am older,” she giggles. “Actually, I don’t know why people get things like that done. Now Fred Astaire, as a dancer he would be my beginning, my middle, my end . . . he got it done when his dancing days were over and he was going to be an actor. His face all shrivelled, it was desperate-looking; it seemed to collapse and go back into little wrinkles that you wouldn’t have had before.
“Ah no, I think I’ll leave things the way they are”.
BORN: Dublin – she is coy about exactly when
EDUCATION:Various schools around the country while she toured as "Little Billie, The Wonder Child" in a variety act with her family
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:Billie Barry stage school opening in 1964; Winning auditions for the Gaiety pantomime and the Late Late Toy Show, which have featured her Billie Barry kids for decades; One of her star pupils, Jacinta Whyte, being plucked from obscurity to star in a West End production of Annie. The success of past pupils including former Westlife star Brian McFadden, his sister Susan – a West End performer – and various cast members of Fair Cityincluding Hilda Fay
*Billie Barry will be honoured by the Variety Club of Ireland with a Variety Living Legend award at a celebration concert in the National Concert Hall on Monday, April 26th
