for everyone else. If you do it for yourself, that’s where you hit the heights.” When I lose control on stage and start laughing I’m at my happiest as far as the art goes. If I think it’s funny, it fucking is. It’s very selfish; I’m doing it for me. That’s what Gerry taught me.’
But how on earth did Billy, a welder in the Clyde River shipyards, manage to break out of the life he was expected to follow, leap onto the folk scene as a banjo player and singer with Gerry in The Humblebums, then segue into a comical banjoist, before his metamorphosis into Billy Connolly the stand-up comedian? And on top of that, how did he then find his way to American television, thence to some of the top film jobs Hollywood had to offer? Marry the prettiest cast member of Not the Nine O’Clock News? And now a visual artist no less? Astounding. I can only reiterate what I penned to end the original Introduction:
Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one. Not a day has passed since I met him thirty years ago without my shaking my head and marvelling at his miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma. His ability to sustain himself beyond those days is equally impressive, for once he was known to the world, another challenge presented itself: to survive the trauma of fame. Every person who comes to public attention experiences an alienation of self, the formation of a deeply unsettling chasm between his true inner self and his public persona. The danger lies not in the confusion of those two, as is commonly thought, but in the widening gulf between them. Fortunately, Billy’s survival skills ever sustain him. When I first asked the essential, penetrating question of how he always managed to summon the resources to turn trauma into triumph, I was hoping for insight and a lucid explanation. What I got was: ‘Well, I didn’t come down the Clyde on a water biscuit.’
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
