First Lady Page 3

  ‘Just turn her dryer back on. They’ll never know the difference.’

  Even as a little boy I had been obsessed by creating things: pretty things. While at primary school my friend Tony and I would go to the chain stores like Woolworths and McKenzie’s on our way home and ask for any broken pieces of costume jewellery, take them to his house, and put them back together. Then we’d go door to door selling them off for holiday money. I would visit the fabric wholesalers and beg for offcuts, which I would fashion into costumes for my puppets. At Training Centre, it was the replica set of the Crown Jewels. By the age of seventeen, I had started pairing my creativity with the sewing skills my mother and grandmother had passed to me.

  I may have been new to the world of dressmaking but I always had my eyes on the prize, and I was not going to use my talents just to have to hide the results at the back of my wardrobe. I bought material at the sales, ran up some sample garments, and took them straight to Peg Johnson, the head of womenswear at Beaths Department Store in Colombo Street.

  Peg appeared surprised to see a young man turn up with an armful of pretty beaded cocktail dresses, but when she took the pieces and examined them, she did not appear keen to argue. We struck a deal, and I began supplying the store with dresses for around 150 pounds each. A lot of money in the 1950s and 60s. Peg told me much later that she was surprised to see that kind of talent in someone so young. She told others that I was a very good-looking boy, and very ‘feminine’ in the way I handled fabric. She became an instant supporter of mine and we are friends to this day.

  Although I was still living at home, I had started to develop a sense of independence and self-determination. I felt bold enough to try something I hadn’t had the guts to do before then — dress as a woman in public. Although I’ve always been tall, I was rail thin and fine-boned; I realised I made a much more convincing woman than I did a young man. There were plenty of partners in crime to work with, too. One of Lorna’s other workers, John — we called him Vulgar Olga — suggested we take a sickie and go to the Cup Day races at Addington, in drag. John had been picking up bits of curled blonde hair from the salon floor for a long time, and he had enough to stick around his face with eyelash glue. He put a black bandeau around that and a black hat on the top. A long shift dress with a ‘V’ neck, pointy shoes, black stockings, long black gloves and a couple of rows of pearls so long they almost hit the floor in front of him completed the outfit. He truly thought he looked like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  I had bought a Balenciaga pattern from Vogue which cost me twelve shillings and nine pence — a hell of a lot of money at the time — and made a black suit with white interfacing so that when you walked you’d get a flash of white from the split in the skirt. I’d got a couple of sunhats at Woolworths: quite nice, made of straw with a bit of Tiffany trim on them. John had the black one, and I had the white.

  We had a great time, walking around the racegrounds with no one the wiser. Late in the day it started to rain, and I told Olga my feet were killing me, I’d have to go home. We were walking toward the gates and suddenly, coming straight towards us across the lawn, was Lorna Hyslop.

  ‘Cripes John, what are we going to do? We’ll lose our jobs! Just don’t look at her, pretend she’s not there!’ We walked past and said nothing, but she looked right at us and out of the corner of her mouth she muttered, ‘Be in my office in the morning.’

  I was certain that was it, I was done for. I spent the whole night in a panic, wandering around making cups of tea and wondering what on earth I was going to tell my parents. I was washed and ready for work by four-thirty in the morning.

  I tried to make myself particularly busy when I got to the salon, making cups of tea like mad for the clients. Anything to avoid Mrs Hyslop’s gaze for as long as possible. I’d just tucked the glamorous Mrs Goff under the dryer with her favourite glass of sherry when Lorna called me to her office.

  ‘Would you make us a cup of tea, Garry? Or would you prefer a sherry?’

  ‘Oh thank you Mrs Hyslop, but I don’t drink.’

  ‘Tea then. Come straight back, will you?’

  I made the tea as slowly as I could, brought it back and she asked me to take a seat. Lord, I thought, she’s going to string this out and we’ll be here until five o’clock.

  She fixed me with a kind gaze and said, ‘Nice day yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, pity about the rain in the afternoon, but at this time of year what can one expect?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Garry.’ There was a pause. I waited to be sacked.

  ‘Darling. At your age you really shouldn’t wear black. Now finish your tea and go and wash Mrs Potts.’

  Nothing more was ever said about it.

  Despite the eye-opening lessons in life, I wasn’t learning much about hairdressing with Lorna. I’d been there about a year and hadn’t so much as touched a pair of scissors; I spent all my time sweeping up, washing hair and arranging flowers. I suppose there were things I learned by watching Lorna work, but young as I was, I thought it was a huge waste of time.

  It was my friend Madge, an elocution teacher, who introduced me to Joyce Jacobs. Joyce was her sister, and when I was looking for someone who could style a wig for me, Madge suggested I take it to Joyce. I’ll never forget walking into her house for the first time and thinking there must have been a party going on. ‘Excuse the smell of booze, darling, I’ve been working!’ she told me as she swept in to introduce herself. She used beer as a setting agent, and the whole house smelled like a brewery. She did a wonderful hairdo for me, and before I left I asked her if she’d consider teaching me. Of course, she replied, just come on down to the salon.

  Joyce had been in charge of the salon at Beaths, and, like Lorna Hislop, was known as one of the best hairdressers in Australasia. She’d had a falling out with the manager and one Friday afternoon told him to ‘stick his job up his arse!’

  ‘Mrs Jacobs!’ the poor man spluttered ‘You are NO lady!’

  ‘Never fucking said I was,’ said Joyce, and out she walked. She went straight to the wholesalers, bought herself a dryer and set up a salon in her back room. I was thrilled to be away from the Hyslop salon, but Lorna was not so keen on letting me go.

  ‘You can’t break our agreement!’ she insisted, and I know she rang Joyce Jacobs on several occasions to protest.

  ‘You can’t make him come back, Lorna.’ I heard Joyce tell her in her most reasonable voice.

  Joyce, outrageous in her velvet mumu dresses and foul language, was nevertheless a peerless teacher. I spent the next year learning all I could from her (about hair and about life), and then one day I arrived at work and there was Joyce with her arm in a sling. We’d been out to see a film the afternoon before, and she’d talked me into a drinking session after the movie. I’d gone home a little drunk; Joyce had fallen out of the car and broken her shoulder badly. That was it for hairdressing for quite some time, she told me, she was off to a specialist hospital in Rotorua for physical therapy.

  ‘What will I do?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’ve got a friend who’s got a shopfront they’ve turned into a salon. They want to rent it out — go and run that,’ she said briskly, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for an eighteen year old to be running his own business. And in the end it was. Joyce sent all her clients to me while she was in hospital, and that was enough to get me up and running.

  In spite of the echo of my father’s favourite words ‘You’re hopeless, you’ll never be able to do that!’, it appeared I could. And I did.

  4

  LYTTELTON: HAIRDRESSING AND DRESSMAKING

  It turns out much can change in the course of fifty years, particularly a society’s willingness to tolerate change. Now boys can marry boys, girls can marry girls, and people can assume a new gender even without surgery and certainly without having to fear for their freedom.

&
nbsp; Not so in the early 1960s. If you were a man who liked to dress like a lady, then you were always afraid of the law.

  In 1962 I was in the port town of Lyttelton, running a salon of my own. There were no other hairdressers there at the time, so it was a great little business.

  Right across the road from the salon was the Lyttelton Police station, and over time a strange game of cat and mouse developed between the police officers and me. After a full Saturday’s work at the salon, I’d get into drag to go for a night out in Christchurch. One of the detectives would always wait until I’d locked the salon door and was in the middle of the street, getting into a taxi in some ball gown of my own creation, then stride over and place me under arrest for masquerading as a lady.

  The process was always the same. Down to the nick we would go, I would be made to take off my wig and lift up my dress to reveal my knickers. If I remember correctly, that was their yardstick; the shoes, the dresses weren’t the clincher, but if you were wearing women’s knickers then you were really telling lies. Pretending to be a woman in a proper sense, beyond help I guess. I was well aware of this and made sure I was never caught in that way — I just wore the briefest jockeys I could find. On one occasion they thought to look for a bra as well, but the ‘bust’ was always built into the gown and concealed by the lining, so there was no joy for them there. After about an hour and all sorts of questions I would be released back to the salon to readjust myself.

  I was dressmaking as well as hairdressing at the time, and kept all my work in progress at the back of the salon, behind a curtain, with the dryers. In the floor to one side of the salon door there was a manhole, which led down a steep set of stairs to a basement.

  One Friday three officers from Christchurch came into the salon, with a warrant, to spring us.

  ‘Righto Roberts, where are the dresses?’

  ‘What dresses?’

  ‘The ones you’ve nicked from Ballantynes and Beaths.’

  Someone had obviously been spinning stories about me. I told them where to find the dresses, but that they belonged to my clients. They pulled back the curtains and looked through the racks, saw the clothes, none of which had any tags or labels on them, but that plainly wasn’t enough for them. They decided to check the cellar.

  I had a woman working with me, Dorothy McCormick, who was a bit of a hard case. As they trooped down the stairs, she shot me a sly look and flicked the lid over with her foot. Bang! They were trapped. Then she just wound up the volume on the radio, and turned back to her work without a word. We could hear them tapping on the door for release, but Dorothy just muttered, ‘Fuck off,’ under her breath, and the Friday afternoon clients tapped their feet to the music to drown it out.

  They were down there the best part of an hour, no lights or anything, full of rats, and chemicals left over from when the salon had been a chemist shop.

  When she finally opened the trapdoor, feigning surprise, they clambered out and asked where I’d gone.

  ‘He left for lunch about half an hour ago.’

  They never came into the salon after that but, funnily enough, all of their wives remained my regular clients.

  At that stage I had dresses and suits, shoes even, but no wigs. I desperately wanted one, and not the type they sold in Christchurch stores either, so I rang David Jones in Sydney to ask them to send one over. I told them to address it to The Queen, c/- Garry’s Salon, Lyttelton. It was a little piss-take of course, but the Queen was coming to New Zealand, so bizarrely they didn’t question the address.

  I had a friend called Katie Hogg, a lovely gay lady who I trusted to help me out. She had really short hair and would always sport a beanie hat, which made her look a bit as though she might have been bald underneath.

  ‘Can you come to Customs with me?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They’re going to ask me why I need this wig. I want to tell them you’re a client who has cancer, and I’ve bought a wig for you.’

  Katie agreed straight away, so we went to the Customs office in Christchurch and told them our story.

  ‘Can you prove it?’ the Customs officer asked me, at which point Katie whipped off her beanie and gazed at him with the most woebegone look on her face. It worked like a charm. They didn’t even charge us import duty, and I finally had my first proper wig.

  Of course I went to see the Queen when the Britannia berthed in Lyttelton in February 1963. The father of a friend was a professor at the university, and had two tickets to the Royal Concert at King Edward Barracks in the city, a huge airplane-hangar of a building across the road from the police station. My friend Lex was delighted.

  ‘We’ll have those!’ he told his dad.

  Lex was a good-looking boy, stunning really, and a very nice person. We got all dressed up, him in a suit and me in drag, went for dinner at a posh restaurant called the Swiss Chalet in a little arcade off Hereford Street. I’d made myself a beautiful brown duchess satin gown, hair flicked out, make-up just so. All was very convivial until halfway through our meal we were approached at our table by a waitress who was plainly very angry.

  ‘How dare you come in here posing as a man!’ she spat at Lex. ‘You shouldn’t be in here, I think you should leave!’

  She turned to me: ‘Sadly, madam, you’ll have to go as well.’

  She was not the only one who would have been offended by anyone cross dressing back then, it was seen as highly offensive, but the fact that she’d got it so wrong made for a hilarious start to the evening. We’d almost finished our meal yet hadn’t paid, but the waitress was so anxious to hustle us out of there that we left without insisting. Up Hereford Street we walked, until we reached the King Edward Barracks and the milling crowd of people in the street, waiting to go in for the performance. I stopped dead.

  ‘Lex, I can’t go in there.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘What if we get caught?’

  ‘Stop being such a worrier. We’ll be absolutely fine.’

  We took a few steps towards the door. Once again I stopped.

  ‘I can’t do it!’

  Lex shrugged, and as we turned to leave a policeman stepped towards us. He looked at my face.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘No,’ I replied quite truthfully, ‘I don’t feel very well. I think I should be going home.’

  He smiled sympathetically and told me to travel safely, then turned away. I went limp with relief. It had been a close shave. That feeling wouldn’t last — there was trouble ahead for the special sin of dressing up.

  Every sin has its delicious moments, though. A memory special for its humour and sheer drama is worth relaying here, and it started with one of my pet hates — being late. In October 1969 my fiancé Tim and I were due at Christchurch’s Theatre Royal for the Vice Regal opening of The Pajama Game. By this time I’d had my surgery and was, of course, finally dressing as what I legally and bodily was: a woman. I had made myself an evening dress from a piece of chestnut and gold brocade, with a matching coat. Tim looked handsome in a black dinner suit that had once belonged to me, and had luckily been found still hanging at the back of the wardrobe at my mother and father’s house. Infuriatingly, though, Tim thought he’d just finish the Sports Page, then have a shave. We were going to be late and it was driving me to distraction.

  Finally we stepped onto the marble staircase at the Theatre Royal, passing a couple of nurses who dipped to their knees in a low curtsey. Ah, recognition at last, I thought with a little smirk, but it did strike me as strange.

  As we stepped into the Circle the auditorium was suddenly swamped with bright light, a drum roll sounded and the orchestra struck up ‘God Save The Queen’. A little much, I thought. An usher stepped forward and showed us to our seats and as we settled in the penny dropped; right behind us were the Governor-General Lord Cobham and his Lady wife.

 
Turns out we weren’t too late after all.

  Grandad Davies.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  Nana Davies.

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  Me, aged 18 months.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  My mother, Eileen Roberts.

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  My father, Alex Roberts.

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  That moment on the bridge . . . ‘no handbag, no go’.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  At Aunty Barbara’s wedding, after the handbag incident.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  Faye and I with Santa in Christchurch during the early 1950s.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  With two of my fellow stewards, Brian (left) and Warwick (middle) on my last ferry trip.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  The Sydland, which carried me safely to London in 1963.

  Ian Farquhar Collection

  A lovely story about my early days in London, which appeared in the Christchurch Star newspaper.

  Liz Roberts Collection

  5

  WORKING ON THE FERRIES

  After a year in Lyttelton and Garry’s salon, fate stepped in to change my course again. I’d hired a junior, a girl about the same age as I was, to shampoo the clients, sweep up and that sort of thing. Her name was Lucille, a pretty little girl about five foot three or four. Her mother was a client of mine, and would often talk about setting me up in a bigger salon in the city. I think that’s where it all started to fall apart.