First Lady Page 5

  I took a moment to look him up and down.

  ‘Do you mean the pellets injected into my spine?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘A treatment I’ve used to change many lives, to save many homosexuals from going down a wasted path in life!’

  I could not wait to reply and he sat looking quite miffed as I told the group what he’d planned to do to me. At the end of my story he still claimed that he could have helped ‘cure’ me.

  I remember prison as an uneasy place to negotiate; nevertheless some of the staff showed a truly caring attitude to the inmates. Those were the people who made the day to day routine bearable. Then there were the power-trippers who spent their time hoping we’d say something or do something to allow them to place us on ‘charge’, which meant a spell in solitary confinement, or some awful task to perform as punishment. Some were simply cruel-natured characters; others had secrets they were keen to keep. One very nasty officer was moonlighting in a bar in Lyttelton, the British Hotel, which was a well-known haunt for gays and seamen. He told me one night he hoped I would not mention his extracurricular employment to anyone, but unfortunately he was a little late asking for my silence. By then pretty much all the crims knew about his second job.

  After my release I went home to my family for a few weeks, then returned to Dunedin and got a job in a hairdressing salon. I had no way of knowing it at the time but I wouldn’t be there very long; London was calling.

  7

  SLOW BOAT TO LONDON

  The move to the other side of the world, and the beginning of a new life in what would become a new body, started in the most gruesome of ways at Christmas in the Deep South. I was twenty, making a living in Dunedin sewing clothes for ladies, and hairdressing at a salon called Cilla K., where the owner, Lois Heaps, had taken me on as manager.

  At Christmas time Lois had flown up north for a holiday, leaving a house guest behind. The girl’s name was Lorraine — a very pretty little thing who worked as a hotel receptionist — and the poor wee girl had fallen in love with not one but two of the boys who worked at another Dunedin salon. Lorraine was aware of her beauty and had a unique method of making sure of male attention; she would literally trip over and fall at their feet. Although I was never to know the details, they must have both rejected her, and she was devastated.

  I’d been away over the weekend before Christmas, and when I got to the salon on the Monday morning I couldn’t open the door. There was a strong smell of gas right around the building. I called the gas company and they turned off the gas to the street, but we still couldn’t force the door open. Finally the police came in and found her. It was a beautiful old building but the kitchen was tiny, and it turns out she’d fallen against the door when she’d gassed herself in the oven.

  That was enough for me. Try as I might I couldn’t get her death out of my mind, and decided I couldn’t stay. I grabbed the first opportunity, which came in the form of an ad on the radio. A shipping company was looking for someone to replace a crew member who’d fallen and broken their arm. I had some experience at sea and knew what to expect. I put on a suit and tie, and went down to the Dunedin docks immediately to see the ship’s captain, a man called Dembrandt. It was easy: he gave me the job on the spot. The ship left the next day from Dunedin’s port.

  We sailed to Lyttelton first and I had to get a passport for my passage as I’d never had one. I stayed in Christchurch to organise that while the ship tracked up the east coast to Tauranga. Once I’d sorted my papers I joined it there, and off we went.

  The ship was called The Sydland, a large ‘half-and-half’, that is, part passenger and part cargo. My job was Captain’s Tiger which was the seaman’s term for the captain’s personal steward. I looked after Captain Dembrandt’s needs as well as going from cabin to cabin doing hair for the passengers, of which on this particular journey there were only about a dozen, mostly male employees from a New Guinea mining company.

  Our first stop from Tauranga was Papua New Guinea, and then the tiny, beautiful Makatea Island in French Polynesia. I remember a pink stone church right in the middle of the island, with grass huts around it. We stopped there to pick up a businessman called Baron Von Droste, who’d been based in Papua New Guinea investing in chemicals. Apparently he suffered dreadfully from seasickness, and we hardly saw him for the whole of the journey.

  The water was so beautiful, deep but clear, and full of sharks, which made the seamen very nervous indeed. Most of them were both religious and superstitious, so as a ritual they caught one, pulled it up and beat it to death with whatever they could get their hands on right there on the deck. It must have been a mother shark, about five feet long with a little baby shark stuck on its side. I was appalled; the violence was horrendous but when I objected they just shrugged and said that’s how it’s done to get rid of ghosts and bad spirits.

  Plainly it didn’t work, as we had plenty of bad luck on the journey to England.

  The ship sailed under the Swedish flag, and I had no knowledge of the Swedish language at all, which made communication a challenge. There were around 45 men making up the crew, some of them very strange people indeed. The Chief Steward was a real prick who never, ever bathed; he’d just throw another coat of Old Spice on. I remember he was in charge of treating a gorgeous young guy who was hospitalised for the whole trip. We heard he’d caught syphilis, and all they could really do was fill him with morphine and try to keep him calm until we got to London.

  I got on well with Captain Dembrandt, who was a lovely man. His constant companion was a little brown bulldog called Bella who’d spent her whole life at sea, never setting foot on land. The captain must have known I was gay, probably heard about it from the other Kiwis on board, but he didn’t appear to have a problem with it. I never ‘fruited around’ and plainly this was a good thing — the timmerman (ship’s carpenter) one day gave me the strangest compliment. He said, ‘Mr Roberts, everyone like you, because you not force yourself on everybody.’ They had quite a few gay men working the ship and perhaps they were the promiscuous type. I was only propositioned once, when a seaman used the excuse of wanting a haircut to get me to his cabin, but I simply told him he was wasting his time.

  We got to the Panama Canal and took the ship through the locks from one end to the other, and on into the Caribbean. The water was the most beautiful and clear I’d ever seen, full of little flying fish which would pop up onto the decks. I would often come up to the bridge and talk to the captain as I took in the view.

  So far, smooth sailing, but as we got out into the Azores, the shark’s curse started to take effect. Earlier in the journey we’d stopped at Nauru and filled the hold with phosphate. As we moved into the Azores we’d had a night of rough weather and the phosphate in the hold of the ship moved in the rolling seas, putting the entire ship on a list. I always slept with the porthole of my cabin open, and the shift happened so suddenly that I literally stood straight up in bed, and looked out of the porthole to find the water level just skimming the bottom of the rim. I slammed it shut, screwed it down, and pulled myself along the wall of the corridor to Phillip Money’s cabin — a man I had befriended on the journey — to find he was busy doing the same thing in a right panic. All the crew, superstitious lot they were, prayed and panicked; they were terrified.

  The ship stayed like that for at least a week — there was no question of being able to dock as we were out at sea in the Devil’s Triangle. The crew used high-pressure hoses to try to force the phosphate back to level but nothing worked; I told them the ship was cursed and it was their fault for killing the sharks. Not surprisingly they were unimpressed to hear it.

  Eventually the crew righted the ship by pumping out the very front hold, which they’d filled with water to create a swimming pool, but we were fortunate as it could easily have been a disaster. Everyone was morbidly thinking of the Italian cruise ship Andrea Doria, which had overturned and sunk in 195
6 after colliding with another ship.

  The final straw was at Aberdeen when we were trying to enter the harbour. They must have judged the tides wrongly and the ship stuck on the bar. Once again we were high and dry, and were forced to wait it out a couple of days until the tides were right again. I’d truly had enough, and vowed to get off the ship and never go to sea again.

  The agreement I’d signed was for a round trip, and getting out of it would be tricky. I approached Captain Dembrandt and was all but on my knees begging him to let me off. He was unmoved: ‘Mr Roberts, I have no intention of repatriating you to New Zealand.’ It looked like I would have to stick to the contract, but in a stroke of luck I thought to check with the authorities in Aberdeen. They told me that because the ship was now in British waters, I could pay my way off. I told the captain that my friend Phillip and I were both just too scared to continue, and after much pleading, eventually he let us disembark and go.

  We didn’t hang around long in Aberdeen. Phil and I boarded a sleeper train to London, neither of us knowing where we’d stay, but full of the joy of adventure and relief at being on dry land. We got off the train at Victoria Station on a Saturday morning and went for breakfast at the station cafe, grabbing a newspaper for the ‘Flats to Rent’ section. We were clueless as we scanned the ads, not really knowing one end of London from another, but we spied a notice for a little half house in Fulham. I had no idea where or what Fulham was, and it was certainly nowhere near as posh as it is today, but it sounded good to us. We went straight off on the Tube to see it.

  It was a dear little house at 7 Colehill Lane, off Munster Road. We loved it immediately, signed the agreement that day and moved in the same afternoon. I think I remember paying £7 a week for the two bedrooms on the ground floor, and a share of the bathroom upstairs. We did, thankfully, have our own loo.

  It all looked as though it was going to turn out perfectly, but I guess the ship’s curse was still with us. Around lunchtime the next day there was a knock at the door and there was a little Spanish boy, looking to speak to the previous tenants. We had less Spanish than he had English, and we had not a clue about the vanished tenants anyway, but in broken English and gestures he said he would show us around London. He wrote our names into his diary, and off he went promising to be back the following day.

  My first thought on Monday morning was to find work, and on the corner of Colehill Lane just down from our new digs was a little group of shops: a cobbler, a baker, and a hairdresser. I went into the salon and told them I’d just arrived from New Zealand and could they give me some advice as to where I should look for a hairdressing position? I had the job by lunchtime. In those days it was an easy process really, they took me on straight away.

  Back home that evening I was in the kitchen starting dinner and there was once again a knock at the door — this time two policemen, looking for Phillip. When I called him to the door they asked him to come down to the local police station. I was a little concerned; Phil was quite the ‘lad’ and I silently hoped he’d not been up to anything too naughty while I’d been out that day at work. Phil protested that he’d only been here the weekend and didn’t know anyone or anything about London, but went along with them anyway.

  In a room at the station was a shrouded body lying on a gurney. The policemen peeled back the sheet, and there on the table was the Spanish boy from the day before; the poor lad had been murdered in a particularly brutal attack with a steam iron. He’d been beaten so badly his face was obliterated, and the only way Phillip could tell it was him was by his distinctive PVC coat and the scarf he wore around his neck. Although we were not under suspicion for the crime, it was one experience too much for Phil. He packed his bags, got on a plane and went straight back to New Zealand. Once he left, I was completely and utterly alone.

  Having a job and money was an enormous boost, and I started to feel much more at home. Unfortunately the couple who ran the salon, Anne and Ron, were frankly awful. Ron was a vile little man who was always chatting up the clients and making sexual comments, the kind of stuff that would never be tolerated these days. One night when we were out for dinner at a very posh golf club he leaned over and scratched an overly tanned and bleached lady on the bottom with a novelty key ring he always carried, shaped like a little plastic hand. Ron was very short in stature and I am close to six foot, so when the lady turned around she saw only me — I got my face slapped without knowing what I was supposed to have done! Ever the fashion critic, my reaction was to tell her that ladies with figures like hers should never wear horizontal yellow stripes and obviously fake pearls. She left the bar in a huff and returned later in the evening in a Thai silk suit (ever so slightly too tight).

  Right next door to the salon was the cobbler’s shop and the owner’s wife, Wynn Bedford, started to come to me to get her hair done. We’d chat, as you do with clients, talking about clothes and things, and as we talked she told me she was a seamstress and every year would go and sew for the atelier of Pierre Balmain during the shows. I remember sighing and saying, ‘One day I’d love to do that.’ She looked surprised, but said if I wanted to pursue my dressmaking, she could help me.

  Her daughter was an actress, she explained, and Wynn was sewing all the period costumes for the series the BBC was making on the life of Queen Elizabeth I. Would I like to help, she wondered? Next thing I knew a huge truck was pulling up outside the Colehill Lane house and lads were loading in a heap of stuff, fabrics, trims, headdresses, so much stuff we could barely move around the house. I worked in the salon by day and sewed at night, feeling very grateful for Wynn’s help, and her friendship.

  I only lasted at the Munster Road salon for a few weeks, couldn’t stand the owners any longer, then got another hairdressing job at a place in Kensington. It was a fabulous salon, and although I can’t remember what it was called when I first went there, they soon changed the name to Salon Rikki. The job of the moment was hair, but it was about to lead to something very different and much, much bigger.

  8

  LONDON DRAG SCENE

  For most of the four years I spent in London I was simply too busy working to socialise, so there wasn’t much of the ‘high life’ to be had.

  There was one man I met at the menswear store on the Kings Road who got me involved in the drag show scene, but once again it was for work. His name was Derek Redcarr, he was a shop assistant, and one day he asked me out for a drink. I agreed but turned up on the night with some friends and in a dress, which he was plainly not expecting. At first he didn’t recognise me at all. Eventually I went up and made myself known and he did a massive double take. Recovering quickly, he told me that he and his friend Norman ‘dressed up’ sometimes, and could they come in drag to the party I was holding at my flat that night?

  They rushed off and were back in under half an hour, completely transformed. To this day I don’t know how they got it all on so quickly. By contrast, I’d spent hours getting ready that afternoon, and had to be very careful as I was wearing one of my clients’ dresses, and a wig that Lola had loaned me.

  We became quite friendly after that night. Derek and Norman told me they did a drag show at the Vauxhall Bridge Tavern. It was a very average drag show indeed, but it had all the favourites: Shirley Bassey, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich. Norman Barnes, who was tall and gangly and looked a bit like David Walliams although not nearly as handsome, was very camp, even when not in drag. He would go whoring during the week, giving blowjobs at the gay bars on Brompton Road to make money, as the shows didn’t pay very well.

  They also performed at one of the Old Brompton Road gay bars, The Coleherne. The show was called Cable and Carr, and they soon roped me in to be part of it; not dancing or miming, but I did appear on stage in full drag as the compère for a time. We played a pub in Westham one night, and after the show I was approached by a tall, well-built young man, a footballer with the Westham team.

  ‘Time to explain,
’ he said, ‘what on earth is someone like you doing in a show like this?’ A nice pick-up line for a very nice young man. We dated a few times, but ‘Cable and Carr’ were distinctly unimpressed, and threw me out of the show. The friendship survived, but not for long. Redcarr had a photographer friend and Derek suggested he come and take some photos of me, so I invited her and Jamie over for dinner, with the photo session to take place afterwards. I’d rushed in from work at the Eylure salon, and when they arrived I got them a drink and retired to my preparations in the kitchen. As I was putting the final touches on the food I heard the photographer say, ‘So where’s this transvestite you’ve got me here to see?’ He’d met me but hadn’t imagined for a second I was, in fact, a man. Derek Redcarr nearly chomped off the rim of his wineglass.

  ‘That’s her there!’ he said.

  ‘Christ, that’s almost unbelievable!’

  I realised that night I’d pretty much dug my grave as far as that friendship with Derek Redcarr was concerned. Not the first time ‘drag queen envy’ cost me friends, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  There were other, unforgettable people who, to put it delicately, broadened my understanding of life. I met Pat Reid, always known as ‘Miss Reid’. She was in her late forties, tall, slim and blonde-wigged — a most interesting person. She had seven gorgeous Pekinese dogs, much adored, which often resembled a fur rug on the floor as they moved from one place to another in unison.

  Miss Reid had been a showgirl and told great tales from her days on the stage. She told me she was in a show called ‘Birds of a Feather’, which was the launching pad for a new drag act, a man called Danny La Rue. Now known as one of the greats of drag, of course. Danny was kind, fun and an absolute blast to be around, and not at all pretentious.

  I received an urgent call one afternoon from Miss Reid.

  ‘Darling, put yourself together and be here at my house by two-thirty.’