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Paul O'Grady
The Biography
By Neil Simpson John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Neil Simpson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84454-577-3
CHAPTER 1
The Boy from Birkenhead
'The Irish families in Liverpool always had the biggest parties and made the most noise,' says Cilla Black, who grew up alongside whole streets of them in the 1950s. Paul O'Grady, later to become one of Cilla's closest friends, could certainly vouch for her story.
Paul James O'Grady was born the youngest of three children into one of those big, noisy extended families on 13 June, 1955. The O'Gradys lived in a three-bed semi in Birkenhead, one of the toughest of Liverpool's working-class districts. And from the start it was the ultimate crowded house. Alongside his mum, dad, elder sister Shelagh and much older brother Brendan, a selection of aunts, uncles, cousins and friends seemed to be with the O'Grady clan almost full-time. Neighbours also took full advantage of the family's open door policy, coming round early in the morning to borrow something from the kitchen and ending up staying all day. Gossip, jokes and wisecracks abounded and Paul was centre of attention from the start. Born more than ten years after his sister, this late miracle baby was passed endlessly from arm to arm as the women gossiped and the men told tall tales of the seas.
Most of the men in those days worked for the Merchant Navy and were away for several weeks at a time – triggering massive, rowdy celebrations whenever they returned. Paul has loved a party ever since and as a boy he was already in his element. 'I grew up loving the days we had a keg of beer in the kitchen and a party all over the house,' Paul remembers. 'At that age I'd never been in a proper bath, let alone in a boat. But water and the sea were utterly alluring to me. I lapped up all the men's stories about monkeys and bushbabies and exotic places. These men were the best storytellers in the world. They were instinctively good entertainers and they taught me how to let my own imagination run riot.'
The men also taught the baby of the family that there was nothing wrong with showing your emotions. He would watch enthralled as the tears started to flow just as fast as the beer. 'My dad in particular was very emotional. He was a typical Irishman who would cry at the drop of a hat,' says Paul, who has certainly followed in his father's footsteps. Recently he joked that he needed help getting off a plane after sobbing uncontrollably through the in-flight movie – the cartoon version of Tarzan.
This ability to be in touch with his feelings wasn't the only lesson Paul learned from his father. Paddy, born and raised as a farmer in Galway, had surprising depths and strong beliefs. He had shocked his own family a generation ago when he had enlisted in the RAF in England during the Second World War and left Ireland behind for good. He did it because he believed that the war in Europe had to be fought. He felt that Hitler and fascism had to be beaten. And he hated that Ireland had decided to stay neutral in what he thought was the most important moral battle of the century. Paddy's unspoken message was simple. Whatever the costs, you have to stay true to yourself and stand up for what you believe. It was a message his youngest son received loud and clear and never forgot.
So while money was tight and times could be hard, Paul says family life was as good as it could be. 'I never once saw my mum and dad fight, and when I look back on my childhood I have no bad memories,' Paul says. 'Our family was loving and full of affection. I never knew what divorce was until I moved to London. I was an indulged child and completely protected from anything bad.'
He was also given a front-row seat for some of the best entertainment in town. 'All the comedy I know I learned as a child in Birkenhead,' he said years later. 'The wise-cracking uncles and the colourful aunts were wonderful. Those women were just fabulous. They were salt of the earth types who smelt of last night's scent with too much make-up and mules that went "clack, clack, clack" on the floor.'
Without realising it at the time, Paul was surrounded by a thousand Lily Savages, not least his extraordinary Auntie Chrissie, one of the city's toughest and mouthiest bus conductors. 'She was very Lily,' Paul would say years later. 'Fag in the gob, head full of rollers and never left you without a one-liner. You had to be quick with Auntie Chrissie.'
You had to be just as fast with his mum Molly's dry, cutting humour and with the caustic wit of his other favourite Auntie Annie. It was Annie who made Paul laugh so much that he cried when she told the story of the real life bushbaby her husband had supposedly brought back from his time on the seas one year. Soft, quiet and adorable by day, everyone had forgotten that bushbabies are nocturnal. 'It was fine when it was light, of course, but when my Auntie Annie went to bed it wrecked the house,' Paul says. What no one remembers is what happened to it – a family secret that Paul jokes may one day shame them all.
As a boy, the other things Paul desperately hoped the sailors would have in their bags were the gaudy American comics he had fallen in love with. He would sit for hours poring over the pictures, dreaming about the characters and the settings. He would wonder if one day he too would get to see the American streets first-hand. His sister Shelagh says Paul was a surprisingly good cartoonist himself, starting off by copying pictures from his latest acquisition and then drawing whole new pictures and storylines of his own. 'Paul was talented but he was a very normal, ordinary little boy, no different to anybody else,' she says. But the extraordinary imagination that would one day give birth to Lily Savage was already starting to become apparent.
Christmas was always a good example. Every year the staunchly Roman Catholic family would put a nativity set in the lounge and Paul would send the Three Wise Men on a bizarrely unconventional journey. They would go all around the house until the big day, creating whole narratives to explain each part of their trek. 'One day they would be on the stairs, the next in the loo, the next the hall,' he says. But in one of his favourite memories he says Auntie Chrissie destroyed the magic in typical Lily Savage fashion.
'Ya bastard, I'll kill you!' she yelled at the eight-year-old Paul, after nearly breaking her leg tripping over one of the Magi on the stairs.
'But they're travelling on their way to the manger,' he told her.
'They're from Woolies!' she screamed, bursting his bubble and storming out of the house.
As if the larger than life characters of Birkenhead weren't enough for Paul, he had plenty of new ones to observe during the summer school holidays when he was packed off to stay with his dad's family in Ireland, as his parents couldn't get enough time off work to look after their youngest son. And he thrived on the boat journey from Liverpool to Dublin and then the train trip to Castlereagh, where the real entertainment would begin.
There were no rules about children going in to pubs back then, and Paul loved drinking lemonade cider and listening to what the adults said and how they said it. The way older people talked already fascinated him. He couldn't believe how fast their minds could leap from subject to subject, how quickly they could come up with a joke, a put-down or a whole new anecdote. Paul also loved the fantastic characters he met in Ireland, not least his wonderful Auntie Bridget who drank poteen, loved wrestling and could swear like a soldier.
It seemed as though everyone in the Irish branch of the O'Grady family owned a pub and Paul reckons he got drunk for the first time on his first Irish summer when he was just eight years old – not least because the youngsters would wander around the bars all night, nicking the Guinness out of the drip trays and trying to swig the dredges of any forgotten pints left around the bars. On other nights, he and his cousins would happily sup Cidona, a kind of cider for kids that he still loves today.
The farm itself where Paul stayed was tiny. Lost in the middle of nowhere in Galway it felt, even then, like going back in time. 'There was no electricity, no lights, no real plumbing, no toilets, and it was a two-bedroom farmhouse with about eleven children in it. I slept on a sofa and had a ball,' Paul remembers.
Today, looking back at old photographs, Paul can't believe how young and healthy he looks. 'I was totally wild, like a gypsy's kid,' he reckons. He and his cousins spent all their days outside, roaming the bog lands, helping the adults cut the turf, devouring huge doorstep butties for lunch and then heading off for another adventure. It was a taste of freedom and a chance to feel grown up while retaining all the benefits of childhood. Once more there were wonderful visitors to the tiny farmhouse – Paul's grandparents had a seemingly vast gang of pals who came round and proved that you didn't have to be in Birkenhead to have a proper party or spin some fantastic stories.
And on his way home at the end of each summer, Paul would beg to be allowed a fried breakfast at the famous Bewley's Café in Dublin's Grafton Street – a place he still rushes back to every time he returns to Ireland.
Back in the three-bed semi in Birkenhead there was one key repercussion from the trip he would make for nearly eight years: the language that Paul would always get into trouble for. The swearing was second nature in Galway, but when Paul effed and blinded at home a few clips round the ear from his parents told him he needed to clean up his act. The other thing Paul got from those summers was an Irish passport. So to this day, Paul James O'Grady can also travel under the name of Padraic Seamus O'Grady, if he so chooses.
Religion was the next big influence in Paul's life. The blond, mop-headed kid was an altar boy, sang in the choir and played a big part in local church life, even though the spiritual side of the services tended to matter less than their sheer theatricality and stagecraft. 'It was all going to church, stations of the cross, novenas, and Union of Catholic Mothers' coach trips to Lourdes, Knock or Pantasa, which was a place Our Lady appeared in Wales,' Paul says. 'She was a very busy woman, Our Lady. She was all over the gaff.'
And it was just as well. Because these visitations triggered vast, noisy charabanc trips that Paul thrived on. 'We'd all go and do our penance and go to church and all that. But basically it was a coach full of mad women and their kids – the kids at the back with the pop, the mums at the front with pale ale. And on the way back someone would always get a bit bevvied and sing I Get The Blues When It Rains.'
Once more, Paul was taking everything in. He was watching how these brave and sometimes maudlin women acted, what they said, how they dressed and how they got through their days. He had no idea why it all mattered so much to him, or whether it would ever be useful to him. But still he lapped it all up.
What Paul also loved was the sheer irrationality of many of those around him. He loved his parents for having such strong opinions about life and for letting everything out rather than keeping things inside. So he cheered inwardly when his staunchly republican dad ripped pictures of the royal family out of encyclopaedias and when his mum threw anything she had to hand at the television whenever Ian Paisley appeared on it. He also loved the times when the whole family were laughing like drains at their comedy heroes. To this day, Paul still adores the likes of Frankie Howerd, Not On Your Nellie star Hylda Baker and the music hall and radio comedian Robb Wilton. But there is far more to Paul than the indulged child who loved to watch when the adults were being dramatic. At heart he is a true child of Merseyside, so he has always been much tougher than he might have appeared.
When he was ten years old Paul was first taken to boxing training by his dad. By the time he was eleven he had become taller than most of his peers, was winning fights and learning important lessons about how to conduct himself. Even as a grown-up he says the boxing classes gave him confidence – not least because so few people are aware that he ever took them. 'Dad made sure I was no wimp. He was jolly and loving but he was Irish and a tough man, and he did it because he knew it was important.' Paddy was thrilled when his young son won boxing trophies – because he wanted to be certain that Paul would always be able to get out of trouble if required.
Paul's religious upbringing meant that his parents had no problem choosing his secondary school, the boys-only St Anselm's Catholic school on the Wirral. Set up by the Congregation of Christian Brothers in 1933, it had a tough academic focus and Paul did well there. He escaped the attentions of any bullies and had a decent network of friends, including several from the years above him. Careers advice wasn't exactly plentiful but the dreamer in Paul was thinking he should follow the neighbourhood lead and go to sea. That way he could see the world, he thought, having already decided he needed to look beyond the Mersey for adventures.
But for all their emotions and domestic dramas, his parents weren't always keen on dreams. When it came to the world of work they were deeply serious. They told Paul he needed a safe, secure job, ideally with a good pension, which was his mother's pet obsession. While they wanted him to stay at school for as long as possible, the key idea was that he would ultimately work for a company like Shell, where his dad was working, when he left. The thought of breaking free, of becoming an actor or an entertainer, was simply out of the question. It wasn't just that his parents wouldn't have approved; it was also that it wouldn't have occurred to Paul or anyone else to give this gamble a try. There hadn't been any drama classes or acting lessons in his childhood. When the family had stayed at Haven Holidays' caravan parks over several summers, there had been plenty of talent shows on stage. But Paul had never even considered taking part – after all, he was the boy who had won cups for boxing, not singing.
'No one in my family has ever done anything like this,' Paul told a reporter from The Times years later. 'It's an old joke but if one of our names was in the paper it was in relation to a minor offence.'
One thing Paul does remember about his childhood is the first time he ever saw a man dressed as a woman appear on television. It left him completely cold. 'Look at that! It's a man!' However, Paul remembers that his mum screamed out and pointed at the television when the rival to Danny La Rue made his flamboyant appearance. There was never any question that this sparked some latent desire in Paul to follow suit. 'I've never actually liked drag and I'm not a drag artist. I'm a comedian, Lily is my armour,' he would say years later. 'As a kid I was never in my mother's wardrobe, trying on her wedding dress and singing into a hair dryer.'
What he was doing was having fun. By the time the 1970s were underway, Paul had grown into a tall, good-looking teenager with plenty of friends and the gift of the gab. He wanted to see how far it could take him.
Having moved on to study at Birkenhead Technical College, Paul's academic record suffered as he focused more and more on the parties taking place around him. Today he talks about his French O-level and his biology A-level, but he doesn't want to discuss how his other exams went. What he was concentrating on was illustration, and he considered a series of courses at art college. The classic American comics he had been given by neighbours as a boy were still in his room at home and he had subsequently built up a hefty collection of others. But Paul, even then, was a perfectionist. 'If I can't be as good as Walt Disney then there's no point in trying,' he reasoned. And despite more than ten years of drawing practice he knew Walt had nothing to worry about. So Paul set off on some other career adventures – and suffered his fair share of disasters.
A day-release course as a clerical assistant with the Department of Social Security in Birkenhead was one of the latter. 'The course would rot your brain quicker than heroin. It was just dreadful – and I'd not wanted to work for the DSS anyway. I thought I was applying to the Ministry of Defence, and I only wanted to do that because I had some idea that it would be a bit like living in an episode of The Avengers,' he told friends.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paul O'Grady by Neil Simpson. Copyright © 2008 Neil Simpson. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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