Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson
and I looked at each other. ‘What the hell are they going to do to him?’ I wondered aloud on our way to our seats. ‘Lip gloss?’ ‘Dunno,’ said Billy. ‘Forty years of heroin use can’t be powdered over … Does something irreversible to your skin. But he looks brilliant, doesn’t he?’ Billy glowed like a seminary novice who’d just seen the Pope. He had taken care to wear his skull ring just like Keith’s and, the second they met, they clicked rings together. ‘He was the first to wear those rings,’ said Billy, ‘well before they were trendy. And he liked my python cowboy boots! When he said that, my heart danced a wee jig!’ Seriously?
Regarding Billy’s fifth life’s ambition, to learn to sail, his manager Steve Brown presented him with a lovely boat called Big Jessie. Billy has had a few lessons but has yet to tame her. And as I discovered when I tried to engage Billy in my personal dream of spending the rest of our days aboard the sailboat Takapuna (on which I had many adventures from 2002–07, some of them shared by my husband), Billy is really not too fond of boats. ‘They’re like prison,’ he complains, ‘with the possibility of drowning.’ He recently learned to scuba dive, but considers being under the water with sharks (a favourite pastime of mine) ‘the best laxative known to man’.
The final item on Billy’s list is a strange one, because I believe he fulfilled that ambition from the moment he walked out of the shipyards: to change his mind as often as he damn well pleases. Perhaps Billy is unaware how self-determining he really is, although his family and work-mates certainly know. There’s hardly a person on this planet who would dare try to stop him doing something he’d set his mind to. Perhaps this was really a way to articulate his essential single-mindedness in a user-friendly fashion, a kind of Glaswegian gauntlet-throwing couched as a plea from a helpless dreamer.
I suppose it’s natural that, at this point in his life, Billy might reflect more and more on his time on earth. ‘What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t become a comedian?’ I once asked. ‘I think I would have been a welder,’ he replied. Then, as an after-thought, he said: ‘But I would have been a drunk one. And I would have been unhappy, because I always nurtured a wee dream I’d promised to myself.’ It is remarkable that Billy had a secret belief, even in his darkest days, that he would eventually find a way out and become successful. I suppose idiodynamism, the tendency of an idea to materialize into action, is what actually kept him going.
Although Billy sometimes complains about being on the road too much, I can’t see him retiring. He once foresaw his final years as those in which he would ‘sit on a porch playing the banjo and telling lies to his grandchildren’, but he is not really the type to settle into his rocker. He adores both his grandchildren (Cara’s son Walter has been joined by Babs since Billy was written) but, rather than lying, prefers to tell them truths – including ones their mother would rather they didn’t hear just yet. His five thriving children – Daisy, Amy, Scarlett, and (my stepchildren) James and Cara – are all old enough to laugh at their parents and remind them how ridiculous they are.
Since Billy was written, quite a few beloved pals have gone forever. The biggest loss for Billy was his long-term close friend Danny, whom he had known since their folk-singing days. ‘He was my best friend and I miss him,’ says Billy. ‘But he’s still in my show. I try to make a point of talking to the audience about travelling on the train with him, and playing practical jokes – like the time we started singing “Green Door” to a guy who was sleeping. We sang, “One more night without sleepin’ …” Danny was pretending to play the drums. “What’s that secret you’re keepin’ …” And when we got to “There’s an old piano, and they play it hot, behind the green door …” we screeched it at the top of our lungs, so the sleeping guy wakes up suddenly and takes off like a rocket, then collapses in a heap. “What’s going on?” he cried. We got uppity. “You gave us the fright of our lives! We were just about to summon a constable!”’
Several of Billy’s chums from his welding days are gone, too, including his pals Mick Quinn and Hughie Gilchrist. Billy’s long-term sound engineer Mal Kingsnorth died a few years back, and Billy sorely misses him. ‘I still wait for him to come to my dressing room after a show and give me a report.’ Billy’s Uncle Neil died in Scotland after a struggle with prostate cancer, while Billy’s former babysitter, Mattie Murphy, passed away a year or two ago in London, Ontario. Mattie had turned up to see Billy in concert in London several times over the years. He had always been so happy to see her sitting in the front row with her pal, all dressed up, smiling, and eager to see him.
Billy’s ex-wife Iris died in Spain in 2010. Their children Cara and Jamie had been sporadically in touch with their mother over the years. Billy had felt great compassion for her struggle with alcoholism and, although he had not seen her for many years, he was greatly shocked and saddened by her passing. ‘It didn’t really strike me till this summer when I put her ashes in the River Don and little Walter saw me crying,’ he told me. ‘Iris’s father had given her a wee book about Russia called And Quiet Flows the Don so I thought it might be nice to actually fl oat her there.’ Personally, I had not understood that Iris had suffered from a serious ‘hoarding’ disorder (we all learned this after her death), and felt very sorry that she had struggled so much without receiving the kind of psychological treatment that might have greatly helped her.
Billy’s former stage mate, the singer and songwriter Gerry Rafferty, passed away in 2011, after a long struggle with illness and alcoholism. Having been more or less alienated from each other for years, Billy was in touch with him throughout his final few months. He tried to help him in a number of ways, and felt enormously sad and helpless when Gerry’s decline proved inevitable. Those two were unstoppable in their day, a couple of highly talented pranksters with matching ambitions to make it as solo artists. According to Billy, they had enormous fun travelling around the country, womanizing, playing practical tricks on each other and navigating the unfamiliar landscape of show business.
Gerry’s passing had a profound effect on Billy. ‘I loved him very much when he died,’ said Billy. ‘I was texting him, and the sicker he got the more deeply I loved him and realized all the good he’d done me in my life. He was so helpful for my head, and the way I thought about myself. It gave me great pleasure to make him laugh when he was sick. I reminded him of some of the funny things we had done when we were performing together, and he was laughing on his death bed. I’m very, very proud of that. I saw him off and said my goodbyes properly, laughing on the phone. I knew that he knew I loved him. And he told me he loved me. He said I was the funniest man in the world. It was Gerry who made me think like an artist. He said: “What you do is art. You’ve got to think of it like that. So when you apply Oscar Wilde’s ideas, it’s for you, and not necessarily for everyone else. If you do it for yourself, that’s where you hit the heights.” When I lose control on stage and start laughing I’m at my happiest as far as the art goes. If I think it’s funny, it fucking is. It’s very selfish; I’m doing it for me. That’s what Gerry taught me.’
But how on earth did Billy, a welder in the Clyde River shipyards, manage to break out of the life he was expected to follow, leap onto the folk scene as a banjo player and singer with Gerry in The Humblebums, then segue into a comical banjoist, before his metamorphosis into Billy Connolly the stand-up comedian? And on top of that, how did he then find his way to American television, thence to some of the top film jobs Hollywood had to offer? Marry the prettiest cast member of Not the Nine O’Clock News? And now a visual artist no less? Astounding. I can only reiterate what I penned to end the original Introduction:
Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one. Not a day has passed since I met him thirty years ago without my shaking my head and marvelling at his miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma. His ability to sustain himself beyond those days is equally impressive, for once he was known to the world, another challenge presented itself: to survive the trauma of fame. Every person who comes to public attention experiences an alienation of self, the formation of a deeply unsettling chasm between his true inner self and his public persona. The danger lies not in the confusion of those two, as is commonly thought, but in the widening gulf between them. Fortunately, Billy’s survival skills ever sustain him. When I first asked the essential, penetrating question of how he always managed to summon the resources to turn trauma