INTERVIEW:'IF YOU DON'T make me look nice," purrs Pamela Stephenson, as she breezes into her suite in the Shelbourne hotel. "I will find you and I will hurt you." There's a twinkle in her eye, yet it doesn't sound entirely like an idle threat.
Happily, she segues directly into a very funny anecdote about a man who posted a Craigslist ad looking for a nemesis. (One of the conditions is that, when their paths cross, the nemesis must greet his counterpart with the words “So . . . we meet again.”)
Photographs taken care of, the bonhomie again diminishes somewhat. Pamela Stephenson is tired. The comedian-turned-celebrity psychologist has flown here directly from Buenos Aires, where she stayed up to catch a late night tango show. (This interest in dance dates back to her participation in a celebrity dance contest on BBC television last year.)
New Zealand-born, Stephenson made her name in the UK as one of the stars of Not The Nine O'Clock News, alongside Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. In 1979, she met comedian Billy Connolly. A decade later, the pair, by then married, relocated to Los Angeles with their young family.
This was when she decided a major career change was in order. “It was just expedient,” she recalls. “Billy had signed a contract with Warner Brothers. He was in a TV series and he’d signed up for eight years. I was bored with comedy and had a young family. I had to decide, what am I going to do here?”
It took five years of study to qualify as a psychologist. But she insists it wasn’t as radical a change of direction as it sounds. “Comedy and psychology are both about examining human behaviour. One is a little more cerebral than the other. But they’re both basically about observing human behaviour.”
Might her husband’s ultimately successful battle with alcohol abuse have stimulated her interest in personal improvement? “I read the Big Book [the Alcoholics Anonymous guide] from cover to cover,” she admits. “I learned what I had to do for him. But I also learned that you can’t change somebody who doesn’t want to be changed.”
When she first met Connolly, she explains, she failed to appreciate how severe his addiction was. “I had no idea things were so bad, that he was so self-destructive. By the time it dawned on me, I was already in love with him. So it was going to be very hard to walk away.”
The decision to quit drinking, she insists, was entirely his. “He saw an opportunity for personal happiness that he wanted to take. He knew I wasn’t going to be with him if he didn’t stop drinking.”
Was it a wrench to turn her back on comedy? "No, I'd already done it all. All the comics I met in LA, their biggest ambition was to get on Saturday Night Live. Well, I'd already done Saturday Night Live. I had children now. I wanted to do something else."
Stephenson's stint on SNL, during the tumultuous 1984-1985 season, was brief. "The show had not been doing well. So they brought in a whole raft of new people, some of them already big stars like Billy Crystal, Martin Short and Christopher Guest. They'd never had a non-American on the show and I didn't even know what they were talking about most of the time. I really had to work hard to catch up."
Her tenure coincided with one of the least distinguished writers in the show's history. Larry David only produced one script that made it to air in the entire season. Back then, could anyone have foreseen the untold millions David would go on to earn as executive producer of Seinfeldand star of Curb Your Enthusiasm?
“No way. That was absolutely shocking. But I can’t say that I knew Larry very well. He was always in a corner writing for Jim Belushi. A lot of people thought Jim was only on the show because he was John Belushi’s brother. But Jim was determined to have some success in his own right. Larry seemed to write exclusively for him.”
Today, Pamela Stephenson is in Dublin to promote her book Sex Life: How Our Sexual Encounters and Experiences Define Who We Are, a 500-page meditation on all things carnal, punctuated every paragraph or so by quotations from such sexual luminaries as Mick Jagger, Mae West and Neil Kinnock. "I wanted to do a book on sex for a very long time," she says. "But it's such an enormous subject. I had to figure out how to approach it."
What she eventually settled upon was to break the subject down on a decade-by-decade basis. It’s a fascinating read, although this approach does make for some awkward reading in the book’s early and later pages.
The first chapter is entitled Baby Boners. “I think a lot of parents are very uncomfortable when it comes to evidence of their children’s sexuality. Of course, if they really think back, they will remember that they too had sexual feelings from an early age. But we conveniently forget about this.”
So at what age should parents start to talk to their children about sex and sexuality? “It should be led by the child. There’s always a moment in a child’s life when something will present itself that has to be explained. It might be images on the internet, images in advertising, walking in and catching their parents engaged in sexual activity.
“If we cut them off, if we don’t answer their questions in an age-appropriate manner, then we give them the message that sex is unspeakable, that it shouldn’t be discussed. I don’t want to make people feel bad. I know how hard it is to talk to children about sex. But we must prepare ourselves not to hit the roof when they ask ordinary, innocent questions.”
The book’s closing chapters also delve into areas that have previously been seen as taboo. “The advice I always give is to ask about sexual policy before you go into a retirement home. Because if you do meet somebody in there, or if there’s somebody outside that you might want to be sexual with, it could be a problem.”
In some retirement homes she has visited, a specific room is set aside for sexual activity. In one case there was a settee outside where interested residents would gather to observe who was using the room. “I happen to think it’s a quality of life issue,” she says. “We know that sex is good for us, so if you’re suddenly unable to enjoy a sex life, that isn’t a healthy thing.
“There’s a sexual process going on even before we’re born. Some people think you have to retire your pelvis when you reach 45. Well, you don’t have to.”
As far as her career goes, she is reluctant to retread old ground. There is an oft-repeated anecdote of how she, Sarah Ferguson and Princess Diana crashed Prince Andrew’s stag dressed as policemen. How, I wonder, did she even knew any of these people? She shrugs. “I just did.”
But of her current work, she could talk all day. She discusses at some length some of the questions she's most often asked, both in her practice and in her role as sex columnist for the Guardian.
In fact, at one point, she completely misinterprets one of my questions as an admission of sorts. “Don’t worry about it,” she advises, even as I’m disappearing down the hall towards the lift. “It happens to a lot of guys. The most important thing is not to stress about it . . .”
Sex Life: How Our Sexual Encounters and Experiences Define Who We Are, by Dr Pamela Stephenson-Connolly, is published by Vermilion (£20/€23)
