Billy Connolly. Pamela Stephenson
The following is an attempt at a sensible answer.
1 ‘Jesus is dead, and it’s your fault!’
Billy Connolly, King of Comedy, Master of Mirth, Chancellor of Chortling, as his children have been instructed to address him, is quivering in the wings of the spectacularly cavernous Hammersmith Apollo theatre.
‘Pamela, what the hell am I going to say to these people?’
Horrified, I turn to face him .Oh God, here we go … he’s not bluffing. Now there are two of us heading for a full-blown fight-or-flight fit. Is it possible that this time, the first in history, he might actually freeze, forget, stammer, storm off stage or batter someone? I do not fancy witnessing his death by four thousand excitable Londoners. They begin to roar as his name is announced, clapping in unison and stamping their feet. It’s the start of tonight’s war, the one he always declares then dreads.
‘You’ll be OK …’
I watch him arm himself mentally with an opening shot. As usual, he’ll take no prisoners. I’m a white-knuckled wimp when the enemy’s battle cry reaches its pitch … then suddenly he’s off. A blinding circle of light assaults him and I see his face change to a fighting calm. ‘Scot of the Anarchic’ is stepping out fearlessly into the front line. He might be gone for quite some time.
The bastard’s done it again. Frightened me to death, and he’s going to win after all. I peer out into the centre of the fray and witness a beautiful armistice, achieved in the first few disarming sentences from his scowling, apologetic mouth. There is always such a peace for him out there in that spotlight, probably the only place he’s truly happy. Each time, it seems he’s given another chance, a chance he’s driven endlessly to re-create; it’s a chance to gain mastery, to triumph over – he can almost see their faces out there in the audience – Mamie, William, Mona, Rosie. I notice that tonight it is especially Rosie who must be slain as he launches into hilariously savage tales of algebra and abject humiliation.
He is strutting, striding, tilting at windmills. I’m thinking, how weird that he is so aroused, furious and vindictive, yet his face at times seems almost beatific. Swathed in disgustingly musty wing velvets, I peek out at the front row. As individuals, these are hardly soldiers: T-shirted people, they are settled in comfortably to be transported to places where petrol prices, the babysitter, the in-laws, are replaced by tyrants and tenement buildings, by little old ladies in fat, furry coats, and the ubiquitous, noisy farts. It will all end in tears and some very sore bellies. I can finally breathe. He is blessed; encircled most brightly not by forty thousand watts but by his own fiery, evangelical fuck-youness.
Ironically, Billy’s very earliest memory is one of being terrified by a circle of light. Until he was three years old, he and his beloved sister Florence slept in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen. One evening she aimed a mirror reflection onto the wall, allowing it to pirouette and chase him until he screamed for mercy.
He had been born right next to that alcove on the kitchen floor, all eleven pounds of him plopping out onto freezing linoleum. The rage that followed this unceremonious introduction to the world has never left him, although it was a serendipitous launching for a future enemy of the bourgeoisie. For eight months he nestled in a wooden drawer with not one Fisher-Price contraption in sight.
His family’s living arrangements were similar to those of thousands of other inhabitants of Glasgow, a city that had come to be defined by row upon row of late-nineteenth-century apartment buildings known as ‘the tenements’. These fine architectural soldiers had originally been created by Glasgow’s Improvement Trust, as model housing for working-class families. But by the time the Connollys moved into half of the third floor of 65 Dover Street in Anderston, many of them had deteriorated into rotting slums that would need more than a spot of paint to ‘take the bad look off them’, as Billy would say.
The classically derived elevations in red or yellow sandstone were usually pleasant enough, but the interiors were thoroughly depressing. A dingy central staircase, stinking of cabbage and cat piss, spiralled upwards to the flats. Two or more poky apartments were squeezed into each floor, usually with just two rooms apiece, and a communal lavatory out on the landing. Some families were lumbered with the ‘coffin end’, or corner apartment, which was even smaller than the rest.
The buildings themselves butted right onto the street and were usually entered via an interior alleyway known as a close. The ‘Wally’ closes, as some were called, were beautifully tiled halfway up the wall, with a leafy motif running along the top. Such finery, however, ended abruptly at the threshold of a darker, often treacherous, tunnel known as the ‘dunny’ (short for dungeon), that dead-ended in an enclosed rear courtyard, itself a veritable assault-course of broken bicycles, flapping knickers, and reeking middens.
Considering it now through a haze of nostalgia, Billy says the Glasgow tenement is a New York brownstone without a fire escape. Some of the buildings certainly had grandeur and, like their New York counterparts, are now sought after by the well-to-do. Billy’s first home was not one of those. The Dover Street flat had only two rooms: a kitchen-living room, with a niche where the children slept, and another room for their parents. The entire family bathed in the kitchen sink and there was no hot water at all. As an enduring legacy of his early cramped existence. Billy is now quite uncomfortable in large living spaces. He sighs over the phone to me from fabulous hotels all over the world: ‘They’ve gone and upgraded me again. Bloody Presidential Suite this time.’
I let him off lightly, because I know it’s a genuine problem for him. Others who achieve renown cannot wait to sprawl sideways on a California King four-poster with a big-screen TV in every corner and a whirlpool on the deck, but not Billy. He has never really liked our Los Angeles house because of its unfamiliar spaciousness, and prefers to hide out in his tiny study for hours on end, drinking gallons of tea and plunking on his banjo.
It is 5.30 a.m. in wintertime Glasgow, 2001. On my way to the airport for a transatlantic flight, I ask Jim the taxi driver to make a detour.
‘You know Dover Street?’ I inquire. ‘It’s around here somewhere.’
The fact that the Hilton Hotel is now in Anderston speaks to the gentrification of the place. We cruise along Finnieston Street, now home of a Citroën dealership, PC World and the golden arches. ‘It’s quite a decent area …’ Jim is eager to be informative. ‘Not as rough as it used to be.’
Argyle Street is now split in two by the motorway. As we approach Singh’s corner shop, on the ground floor of an original tenement building at one end of Dover Street, it becomes evident that all the houses on one side of the street have been pulled down. In their place is a small, grassy square that faces a fashionable business centre on the next parallel street. Several modern buildings have replaced tenements on the other side of Dover Street itself, pale-brick imitations of the sandstone originals.
I search around in the drizzle and I am relieved to find that No. 3 and No. 5 Dover Street are still standing. The grimy, four-storeyed blocks of flats are graced with white lace curtains that deter me from peering into the street-level apartments. While Jim smokes patiently in the cab, I stand in the silent street trying to evoke the past. It’s easy to become fanciful in the early light, seeing the spectre of Billy’s mother, fast-wheeling the rain-soaked pram around Singh’s corner to get herself and the weans into the shelter of the close.
When I arrive in Los Angeles, I describe the scene to Billy. He is unmoved. ‘Yeah, they pulled my first house down and I’m upset,’ he jokes. ‘Now where are they gonna put the plaque?’
As an infant, William Connolly junior was a blond, brown-eyed puddin’ with a face that would ‘get a piece at any windy’, as they say in Glasgow if you look pitiful enough to score free sandwiches. He was a war baby, born on 24 November 1942, just as his father was preparing to leave for Burma.
At twenty-three years old, William Connolly senior had been conscripted into the Royal Air Force, a fate that