Managing a grand old dame

Dame Edna: 'Australians have always viewed me with a mixture of affection and distrust.'

Barry Humphries on Dame Edna: 'I get a special kind of companionship from Edna that I don't get from anyone else, and I imagine we will grow old together.'

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BARRY HUMPHRIES sounds genuinely perplexed. Why is it, he wonders, that so many people assume he and that gaudy galah of Australian show-biz, Dame Edna Everage, are one and the same person?

"I can only assume that the fact that I've been so close to Edna for so long confuses people," he says into his cellphone on a crowded Sydney street. "I am her manager, nothing more. And I'm really very different from Dame Edna. In fact, I disagree with almost everything she says. I even dispute the fact that she's a dame."

Yes, but surely Humphries can see how such confusion arises. He and the alleged dame bear a striking resemblance to one another, and have never been seen in the same room together.

Humphries maintains this is mere coincidence, and to clear matters up once and for all, he has written a book, Handling Edna, in which he charts the trajectory of his relationship with the matriarch of Moonee Ponds, from reluctant mentor to jealous understudy to unwilling manager and finally, a peculiar sort of friend. We watch their tempestuous relationship bloom, not like a flower but rather, like mould.

"She was one of the least attractive women I ever met, but she reminded me of someone," writes Humphries in the opening chapter, and it's all downhill from there. In this book, Everage is portrayed as something of a monster, though a monster with considerable charm. It's clear that Humphries admires her determination in the face of what he considers an overwhelming lack of talent, and he is miffed that her career has soared – declared a national treasure in Australia, hostess of TV talk shows and sellout stage shows around the world, a globally recognised fashion icon – while his own has fizzled like a frozen snarler on the barbie.

He paints a picture both poignant and hilarious of Edna in the 1950s, when he first met her. At the time she is still just a suburban frump marooned in a sun-scorched cul-de-sac of Melbourne's Moonee Ponds. Her days are spent standing at her kitchen sink, a fetching "Venomous Spiders of Tasmania" apron laced over her pink seersucker frock, her suspiciously large hands scrubbing congealed mutton fat from the dinner plates as she dreams of a theatrical career and gazes out through avocado green venetians onto a backyard littered with broken plastic toys. She'd do any thing to get away from this place, and no wonder.

To call her family "dysfuctional" is to say the surface of the sun is "quite warm". Edna's demented mother is kept locked in the front room for her own protection. Her grubby brats Bruce, Kenny and Valmai wrestle over half-eaten honey sandwiches in the hall, under a faded photograph of Edna's favourite child, little Lois, who was abducted by koalas while still a child.

In the master bedroom, Edna's elderly husband Norman is hooked up to his "prostate governor" machine, nursed by New Zealander Madge Allsop, a perennial bridesmaid whom Edna kindly took in after Madge's late husband Douglas was "tandooried" in a Rotorua mud pool on their honeymoon. "She was a New Zealander, of course, but Madge also had other disadvantages," writes Humphries.

And then – stardom! Wondrous wealth! Unimaginable glamour! Unfeasible frocks! Gratuitous gladioli! After a disastrous biblical play involving Jesus and a jar of Vicks Vapo-Rub, Edna's career suddenly takes off like a particularly gauche rocket. She goes scorching up into the show-biz stratosphere, first at home in Australia, and then Britain and America, too.

And now, after more than 50 years on stage, the self-proclaimed "gigastar" is probably Australia's most globally recognised cultural export.

"I believe the reason so many people have embraced her around the world is that she's rather honest," says Humphries. "She describes the world as she sees it. She makes people laugh, and her humour is unencumbered by political correctness, which I'm sure is why she goes down so well in America. She says things no one there dares say. The new puritanism has got a grip over there, but she couldn't care less."

Edna does care, however, about this new book, and has threatened to sue. She would rather her romantic liaisons with Leonard Cohen and Frank Sinatra had remained private, and she strenuously objects to being portrayed as "a woman of limited talent and unlimited ambition". Her lawyers, says Humphries, have been in touch. "I hope it doesn't happen, but there's a very real possibility that this book will be recalled and pulped. The best thing a clever investor could do is to buy in bulk and resell on eBay."

In truth, Handling Edna is a very cunning autobiography. The fictional elements closely follow real events in Humphries' life, and the book is packed with sharp-eyed observations of the evolution of suburban Australia over the past 50 years.

"Yes, well, it's not all about Edna. I also wanted to write a social history of my period. It's about the changes that have taken place since the 1950s when Edna first came into being. There's a lot of period detail, and close attention to the language and slang expressions of different periods."

The book is also stuffed with priceless photos: Edna at the Royal Ascot Races in 1976 in a huge hat portraying the Sydney Opera House, complete with circling sharks. Edna walking a wombat on a leash outside Windsor Palace. Edna meeting a delighted Queen Elizabeth II. Edna modelling the kind of architecturally impressive bouffant subsequently adopted by Margaret Thatcher. Edna descending to the stage sitting side-saddle on a gigantic pair of glittering horn-rimmed glasses.

HUMPHRIES IS now 75, and his own life has been nearly as eventful as Edna's. Born and raised in Melbourne, he has struggled with alcoholism, survived a 150-foot fall off a cliff, married four times (a friend once memorably described him as "maritally incontinent"), befriended chortling royals, Hollywood stars and fellow comic geniuses Spike Milligan and Peter Cook. He is a father of four, a floppy-fringed dandy who favours bespoke clothes, collects rare books, is an accomplished painter and novelist, and one of the most gifted satirists of his generation. He's rich, with homes in London, Switzerland and Sydney, paid for by his jostling crowd of alter-egos, among them randy drunk Sir Les Patterson, the endlessly reflective Sandy Stone, and of course, Dame Edna, whom he first "discovered" in a university comedy sketch in 1955. She has been both his nemesis and his meal ticket ever since.

Humphries is looking forward to coming to New Zealand next week for the book launch. "I used to come there often when I was married to a Kiwi, and once stayed the night at the very uncomfortable youth hostel in Ponsonby in 1958. A youth hostel! When I get there I'm having dinner with two very old friends, Max Cryer and CK Stead. I'm also looking forward to drinking some Lemon and Paeroa, sampling some Oak tomato sauce, and eating a tin of Wattie's asparagus."

Humphries takes comedy very seriously. His work offers a sustained, focussed and devastating critique of suburbia, class, fashion and the cult of celebrity, and once the laughing dies down, you realise there's as much pain in it as pleasure.

Humphries was once asked if a comedian's role was ultimately to tell the truth, and he replied: "No. They distort it to tell a more accurate lie." His own role, he added, was "inventing Australia", which struck me as a particularly lovely idea. "Well, thank you. And it's true. I've fictionalised my past over the years and come up with something as revealing as it is ridiculous. I think Edna represents an Australia that's imaginary, but, in its way, a bit more real than the real thing. Consequently, Australians have always viewed me with a mixture of affection and distrust."

Affection and distrust. These words also describe Humphries' own relationship with Dame Edna as portrayed in the book. He's appalled by her on so many levels, but when he's in a rehab facility, it's Edna who comes to sit by his bedside. Even now, with the Matriarch of Moonee Ponds threatening to litigate over this tell-all tome, Humphries begrudgingly admits that she is his friend. "Certainly, I get things from our relationship other than money. I get company. When you're out on the road and you're in Miami or Cincinnati or Vancouver, there's only a pianist and her and me. Les Patterson shows up every now and then, too, of course, but he's mostly drunk. Edna, for all her faults, can be quite good company, which is probably why we've been together for so long. I get a special kind of companionship from Edna that I don't get from anyone else, and I imagine we will grow old together."

Handling Edna by Barry Humphries is published by Hachette, rrp $60.

Barry Humprhies will host a book launch lunch in Auckland on Friday, October 30, at the Stamford Plaza. Tickets from Auckland's Whitcoulls stores, $65 including lunch. More information, www.whitcoulls.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News