All Balls and Glitter (11 page)

Some of the cast, of course, I had met a week or so previously at the Miss Alternate pageant. Word had naturally spread about my appearance in drag – so I was ribbed viciously for that during the introductions. It was an assault course, but I loved it.

Once the hideousness of the initial meetings was over, it was down to dancing for the first time with the company. I was about to be put into the show: another scary day in paradise. I never really believed that I was good enough to be dancing alongside such legends, but there I was, finally doing what I had always wanted and adoring every second.

I was rehearsed into the show with the full company – and then, that very same evening, it was my opening night.

I can’t tell you how nervous I was when the overture began. It was happening; no turning back. I would leave the darkness of
the wings and burst on to the stage for the first time as a professional. I was so pumped up with adrenalin, I didn’t really contemplate that I was doing the show. It was just happening, and I had no time to think about it.

At the end of the performance, everything was a blur. It wasn’t until after the bows had ended that I realized, ‘Oh my God, I just performed in
West Side Story
in front of thousands of people and got paid for it. I am a professional dancer.’

My joy at landing the job was, unfortunately, short-lived. On my first day of performance, a notice went up on the board to say that the production was closing in two weeks. Even so, I was pleased to have got the job at all and thrilled that anyone would consider paying me for doing what I loved the most. Craig Stevens was no more. Craig Horwood’s theatrical career was finally underway!

As the countdown to the end of the show began, I determined to enjoy the whole experience as much as I could. One night, Leigh, the choreographer, came up to me before the warm-up and said, ‘I’m going to be watching you for another gig.’ I had no idea what it was.

The
West Side
Story
warm-up was a dance routine with turns and a whole jazz combination. We’d perform in groups, dancing in rows, then each row would split in the middle and the next row would come down the stage. Feeling Leigh’s eyes on me, I danced my heart out.

After studying me for a while, Leigh then announced, ‘I’d like to offer you a job. It starts the week after
West Side
finishes.’

Of course, I immediately enthused, ‘Great!’

It turned out to be a touring production of
The Black and White Minstrel Show
, which meant a year on the road, living on a bus and trucking around Australia.

As usual, I turned to Cecily for help. She bought me the luggage I needed, taught me how to pack and which things to keep on the top, such as underwear and toiletries, so that I didn’t
need to unpack at every stop. She told me that I should always have one bag only, and that if I added anything to it, I should take something else away.

She also prepared me mentally with her stories of touring from her own dancing days, for which I was thankful once the production began. Touring is a strange experience because you don’t remember where you’ve been half the time.
The Black and White Minstrel Show
played in these tiny outback towns with no facilities at all, like Mount Isa, Ayr, and all sorts of weird and wonderful places. In one town, Mackay in Queensland, we had to clean all the black make-up off our faces in a horse trough behind a tin shed. I’m not kidding. The audience could see us all scrubbing away as they walked back to their cars after the performance.

Of course,
The Black and White Minstrel Show
these days is not at all PC and I think is perhaps even outlawed in most countries. When I was in it, I never thought of it politically. It wasn’t until after I had left the show and people began to protest their objections outside the front of theatres that I started to consider it in a negative way.

At the time, I simply saw it as a traditional entertainment and, of course, a job – and a laboured and messy one at that. Putting on all that black make-up anywhere there’s a hint of skin, and wearing long white gloves and long black socks, was not my idea of fun. In fact, I went temporarily deaf due to the build-up of make-up in my ears: I had to have them syringed by a doctor.

We travelled all over Queensland, often enduring eighteen-hour bus trips. We’d get off the bus, black up, put on a curly wig and a hot velvet suit from London (which is where all the costumes came from), and dance. Then we’d get back on the bus to travel to the next place. It was mad.

It taught me how to be responsible for my own well-being, psychologically. People get on your nerves to a marked extent when you are living out of one suitcase, and you see only the same
faces. On the bus, in the hotel, on stage – always the same faces. It’s the same choreography in every venue. You just want to scream sometimes.

People deal with the close proximity in different ways. Some go very quiet, like one girl on tour, Kate Wilson (who later married and became Katie Kermond), who was in
West Side
with me playing Riff’s girlfriend Graziella. She just went silent, completely introverted, which was quite the opposite to her natural character. Some find God. Others steep themselves in books.

I coped with it by turning a critical eye on myself. I thought about what I needed to work on, what I needed to improve. On
The
Black and White Minstrel Show
tour, I was working on my voice, because the show was pre-recorded so I wasn’t using it. I spent my spare time practising my scales.

The show was bizarre – and bad. It was mimed and even the leads were on tape, so there were many hilarious moments. They’d run two tapes concurrently because sometimes one got stretched and it would suddenly start sounding really slow, so they’d go to the other tape. On one occasion, the back-up tape snapped halfway through, which meant there was nothing going on at all.

We played every Returned and Services League (RSL) club in the country. Mainly grotty joints with pool tables and cheap beer, like working men’s clubs in the UK, they were the tiniest little venues and most of them were half empty. The choreography included some sit lifts with the girls (where the male dancer lifts the female up to sit on his shoulder) and the ceilings of the RSL clubs were often too low to accommodate them. In many of the venues, we were dancing on carpet as well. It was ludicrous. I’m surprised we didn’t all go insane.

The smallest thing would crack us up. There was one guy called Peter who, dressed as a bull, once fell down the stairs and, because his arms were inside his costume, couldn’t get up again. He was wearing white tights and a hat, which fell off, and his face was blacked up. He just lay there waving his white legs in the air,
with his blacked-up face and blond hair, while we fell about laughing.

We became so used to the steps that you could draft a shopping list on stage while you were dancing, or chat about what you were going to have for dinner.

The tour went on for a year and I hated it towards the end. It was hard going. I was so desperate to get out of it that I told the producers my mother was having a nervous breakdown and I had to go home. They were happy to release me from the contract as it helped them to save money on the New Zealand leg of the tour, thus it worked out amicably for both parties. I later found out through Magatha that, on the NZ tour, anti-racist groups picketed the theatres with slogans and chants such as ‘Being black is not an act, racist shows don’t go!’ Eventually, the production had to close down.

When I left Melbourne to embark on the tour, I had been seeing a guy with whom I thought I was in love. I kissed him goodbye and went on the road, believing that even while you’re apart, you remain monogamous and that, when you come back, your boyfriend will be waiting. I soon discovered that he had other ideas. The month before I came home, he had gone a bit weird on me, and stopped calling. The next time I saw him was when I bumped into him at a club called Pokies in St Kilda, Melbourne – with his new boyfriend. He was my Superman (he looked devastatingly like Clark Kent with his glasses on); I was heartbroken.

Lovelorn and between jobs, I began to brood over my appearance. At nineteen, I hated my nose with a passion. I didn’t mind it from the front – in fact it was better than it is now – but I hated the profile. It didn’t grow big until I was sixteen, or at least I hadn’t noticed it till then, but after that, whenever I had photographs taken, it drove me nuts. It made me look as though I had no chin and I was all beak. I had major acne too, which didn’t help.

One day, I was whinging about my nose to Cecily and she commented simply, ‘I know a doctor who could fix that.’ I went to see the surgeon on Thursday; by the weekend, I had a new nose.

They wouldn’t make it as small as I wanted because the consultant said that, when I grew older, it would look ridiculous. When you see your nose as huge, you take it to extremes and yearn for a really tiny button one. The last thing I said before the anaesthetic took hold was, ‘Please make it small. Please make it small.’

It’s quite a nasty operation. (Look away now if you’re squeamish.) The surgeon makes an incision on the inside of the nose and then cuts the cartilage away, quite roughly, with something like pinking shears. Afterwards, the nose is stuffed with swabs, which collect the blood and congeal. It’s revolting. The doctor gave me a nose-cleaning kit, to help me to pull all the scabs out from inside my nose. Hideous. But I was young and fit, so it healed quite quickly.

It cost A$1,500 (£700), which I didn’t have, so I put it all on my credit card. Luckily, I got A$990 (£465) back from Medicare Australia, which meant it only cost me about A$500 (£235) all in, for the drugs involved and the time spent in hospital. I checked out after just one day because I couldn’t afford another A$500. The staff told me I could go home as long as I cleaned everything properly and came back for check-ups.

It was incredibly painful to begin with. I had to sleep bolt upright for two weeks and I looked a complete fright, with black eyes and a big plaster across my face. There was only one thing for it – I threw a hospital party!

It was fantastic. Everyone came with bandaged limbs, on crutches, or in doctors’ and nurses’ outfits, and we had such a fun time.

Even before the plaster came off, I could tell that I was going to love it. Ever after, I always made a point of looking away from
the camera so it would capture my profile. In truth, hardly anyone else noticed the difference, but to me it was a massive improvement. It was something I did on a whim, but it changed my life enormously. It gave me so much more confidence that I haven’t regretted it for a second.

After I’d recovered from the operation, I went into rehearsals for
The Danny La Rue Show
, which was another touring production
.
In one number, we had to roll our hats down off our heads. About a month after the nose job, I was practising this routine when the hat hit my conk. The pain nearly killed me. It was
so
sore.

In the show, I was one of four boys singing and dancing with Danny, and feeding him lines for his jokes. What I remember most about the experience – and it makes me shudder to this day to think of it – was an attack of the most awful stage fright. It was a horrible incident that has haunted my entire career.

I was on stage in Perth when it struck. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the script. I just went into a total panic because I was the last boy to deliver the feed line for a joke. The lad before me said, ‘How many boyfriends have you had?’ and all I had to say was, ‘How many husbands have you had?’ Not a lot to memorize at all.

I walked up to the front alongside Danny and I just stood there. All I could think was, ‘What’s my feed line?’ I went totally lifeless, to the point where he had to turn me and push me off stage. I don’t know what happened. There was nothing going on in my head at all.

Afterwards, I went backstage and knocked on Danny’s door. I blurted out, ‘Dan, I have to talk to you about this. I’m so, so sorry. I was blank.’

But the next night, the same thing happened. And the next night. On the fourth night, I put huge cue cards in the wings that said: ‘HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAVE YOU HAD?’

By this time, Danny was getting pissed off with it,
understandably, because I only had one bloody line and I couldn’t say it. The third boy went up, said his piece and went off. I walked on, went blank, walked off, read the cue card and came back on. Then I said the line that the guy before had just delivered.

After that, I was scared to death of going on stage. On the fifth night, I just kept looking at the cue card until it was time for my entrance and, when I opened my mouth to speak, luckily it came out.

From then on, I didn’t freeze again – until we were live on national television. Then it happened once more, in front of millions. It is the most cringeworthy thing.

I don’t really know how I got over it, but it has always worried me that it might come back. Stage fright has ruined many a promising career.

Sadly, while we were on the Australian and New Zealand tour, Danny’s manager, Jack Hanson, died. He had a cerebral haemorrhage at the bar one night and just dropped to the ground, dead. He was Danny’s life partner and Danny was understandably devastated, so it ended the tour.

We were in New Zealand by then and we got a note sent to our hotel rooms, saying, ‘Tour’s been cancelled,’ and explaining that Jack had passed away. Jack was Danny’s right-hand man and he found it very difficult to carry on without him. It was a big moment for us, and a traumatic time for Danny, who went back to London after that.

For me, it was back to the audition circuit.

I
t may be my job to dish out the criticism these days, but as a young dancer, I faced my fair share of put-downs. In 1985, after
The Danny La Rue Show
, I flew to Sydney to try out for
La Cage aux Folles
,
where I was told that my arms were way too wild. The producers asked me to come back for the next audition, but said they wanted to see that I could keep my extremities in check.