American on Purpose (13 page)

E
very year, usually the last three weeks in August, Edinburgh hosts the biggest arts and entertainment festival in the world. The normally sleepy Presbyterian city becomes a riot of color and noise, its dignified old buildings crammed with theater companies and circus troupes and performance artists. Every available venue has some kind of a show running 24/7. There are any number of amazing and unusual acts performing from all over the world. Russian mime artists, Italian jugglers, Belgian comedians, Finnish punk-rock balloon sculptors, and a fucking Peruvian flute band on every street corner. There is opera and ballet, and there is obscure international cinema, and because this is still Scotland, there is drinking.

The festival has given rise to some of the greatest comedic minds in Britain. Most of the Pythons honed their skills in Edinburgh. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore started here in the 1960s. Some of the great American stand-ups of the eighties made it in the U.K. through the festival: Bill Hicks, Denis Leary, Lewis Black, along with groundbreaking improvisers like Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie who went on to create
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
for U.K. and U.S. television. Every young hopeful in show business heads to
Edinburgh every year. The rich kids from the Footlights Society of Cambridge University, the grimy sarcastic snaggle-toothed stand-ups from London, and the pompous pretty actors from the Drama schools. All of them. It’s a thrilling hybrid of Carnival and St. Patrick’s Day. If you’ve never been, then go.

By August of 1986, Bing Hitler had gained enough notoriety, even if it was mostly because of the shocking name, to secure me my first Edinburgh appearance. The gig was at one a.m. in a function room above the Cafe Royal bar and restaurant. It was not one of the more prestigious venues, and it was a dog of a time slot, but the location was in central Edinburgh and it was every night for three weeks, so there was a remote possibility that I could make some money if a few people turned up. My overhead was low, just my Bing outfit and travel expenses. I couldn’t afford lodging in Edinburgh, so after the show I had to wait for the first morning train back to Glasgow: the 6:15. This was fine by me since I was still sharing the house with Anne and it meant I got home after she left for work and I left before she returned. It was kind of perfect.

At the festival I was part of a double bill with a four-piece acoustic guitar band from Dundee that played Django Reinhardt covers and was actually pretty good, but it’s the kind of act that has limited appeal. I was scheduled to go onstage after them, and they were following a play—a dark farce called
Grave Plots
by the Scottish writer David Kane, who went on to become a rather successful film director. (Later on he even cast me in a couple of his movies, but they turned out okay anyway.)

The regular traffic jams that resulted from all of these different performers sharing the tiny backstage area made for a sort of repertory company feel, as if I were part of a troupe. It was like being back in the Dreamboys or among the arty people in black from Gunka James’s record store, and I loved it.

Because I was on so late I had plenty of time to get drunk beforehand, which was necessary because I suffered horribly from performance anxiety. There was always at least one drunken heckler in the crowd, and although I had learned already that it was unacceptable to hit one of them, it was still essential that I best them verbally. I always thought I would fail at this, though I rarely, if ever, did. Bing Hitler was an angry drunken character played by an angry drunken man, so I had plenty to draw on. I could just shout someone down and it would be true to the performance. Might even have improved it.

I’d built up to about a half hour with rants and routines and had added another song. On the first few nights, the room was pretty empty, it had a capacity of about 150 and as few as twelve or thirteen tickets sold. I was too hammered to notice.

All the festival shows get reviewed in the local papers, but given the sheer volume of performances that have to be covered, hordes of local journalists who don’t usually cover the arts are drafted to help. Therefore you may have a review of a serious play written by the fishing correspondent, who will moan about the show having a disappointing lack of trout, etc. The dearth of qualified professionals doing this job might be the only reason for the glowing coverage I got in the
Scotsman
and the
Edinburgh Evening News.

Whatever the explanation, the reviews had a startling and dramatic effect. I arrived at the show five nights into the run to find a line of people waiting to get in. I asked the ticket-taker girl at the door what had happened, thinking perhaps the fire alarm had gone off during
Grave Plots
or something. I was astonished to hear they were waiting to see me and my acoustic-guitaring buddies, since I assumed them to be jazz aficionados, but I finally felt it when I went onstage—they were there to see
me,
or at least Bing.

I was then, and remain now, bewildered by how funny people find material once a newspaper has given them permission to laugh at it. Jokes that had only got titters before now got guffaws. This
is tremendously encouraging to a performer, leading to more confidence and improvisation as he or she feeds off the positive energy of the crowd, which in turn leads to more laughs. I started to enjoy myself like when I was drumming or tending bar.

The show quickly became the hip, late-night find of that year’s festival, drawing an audience that included other performers, as well as people from the media. The Glasgow
Herald
ran a profile of me. The local BBC TV station put me on their news roundup of the festival—my first television appearance—and the independent Scottish Television featured me on a show that they broadcast to the entire U.K. Called
Acropolis Now
, after one of Edinburgh’s notable buildings, which mirrors its more famous namesake in Athens, it highlighted the hot shows from the festival and was cohosted by Muriel Gray, the very clever and fashionable Scottish journalist, and by Jimmy Mulville, a superconfident and acerbic Liverpudlian comic who was on the way up.

Bing’s five-minute spot on
Acropolis Now
went well, and after that, the Cafe Royal shows got even busier, so that we were turning people away at one a.m. It was an odd first brush with success because none of the attention had translated into money. The Cafe Royal promoter would theoretically write me a check at the end of the run and I was now playing to packed houses. So after my nightly triumph I would be kicked out of the bar after my act ended at 2:30 a.m. and have nearly four hours to kill until I could get on the train home at 6:15.

Usually I’d grab a crappy cheeseburger at the all-night snack bar in Waverly Station and then sleep in the Photo-Me booth next to the closed passenger waiting room. I’d try to make myself comfortable by adjusting the spinning stool, mentally blocking out the smell of pee as much as I could—the booth’s or my own, I’m not sure which. I pulled the little curtain over for privacy, but it certainly wasn’t the Ritz.

One night toward the end of the festival, waiting in line for my salmonella burger and fries at three a.m., the drunk guy in front of me recognized me from the show.

“Hey. You’re Bing Hitler!”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re doing great, man! It must be fantastic to be the big hit show.”

“It is,” I said, while casting anxious glances over to the photo booth, hoping that no one would steal my accommodations.

Another night, Jimmy Mulville, whom I’d met at the TV taping for
Acropolis Now
, came along to see my show at the Cafe Royal with his fiancée, Denise O’Donoghue, a very classy woman who was at that time becoming one of the more successful television producers in the country. After the show, I went to their hotel to sit and drink in the all-night bar with them rather than sleep in the train station. Denise gave up at around three and went to bed, and then Jimmy explained his resilience and capacity for alcohol. He reintroduced me to an old friend I hadn’t seen since New York City.

Cocaine.

There was no coke in Glasgow that I knew of, but Jimmy assured me there was a plentiful supply in London. I made a mental note to get to London more often.

It was almost the last night of the festival when a very sweet, adorable English girl, blond and bookish, looking about twelve years old, cornered me after my show.

“I’m Rachel Swann,” she said in a Mary Poppins voice. “I’d like to be your agent.”

“Do I need an agent?” I asked.

“You do if you want to work in London, dear.”

I thought about what my new friend Jimmy had told me about London and cocaine. I told her to sign me up.

And so Rachel Swann became my first agent. I was with her for five years, until she left to get married to a minor rock star whose name I can’t remember.

T
he Edinburgh Festival in 1986 changed my life. I haven’t had a real job since. The TV appearances led to me playing bigger venues in Scotland. John McCalman, the man who had first put me on local radio, suggested we record a comedy album for the independent record label he owned. I jumped at the chance. Over two nights I recorded
Bing Hitler—Live at the Tron Theatre
. It became something of a cult hit, which means lots of people heard and liked it. But no one seemed to make any money off of it. Certainly not me.

I wasn’t aware then that my career was moving forward, I wasn’t actually aware that I had a career, but I realize now that things were happening very quickly, despite my shortcomings offstage as a viable human being.

Michael Boyd asked my old Dreamboys cohort and friend Peter Capaldi, who was now writing as well as acting, to create a Christmas show for the Tron. Michael also wanted me to write on the project, so Peter and I came up with a sort of alternative pantomime we called “Sleeping Beauty,” very loosely based on the fairy tale. The script turned out very well (thanks for the most part to Peter’s diligent efforts; I just tagged along, clinging lazily to his
coattails once again) and starred me, or rather Bing Hitler, as prime minister of the far-off land of Vulgaria, and the camp comedy duo Victor and Barry, as the ugly stepsisters. Filling out the cast were a host of well-respected Scottish stage actors who had been persuaded to enlist, thanks to the reputation of the director, Michael Boyd himself. The piece was a big success, and I put the final nail in the coffin of my marriage to Anne by having a scandalous affair with the actress who played the part of Beauty.

During the same holiday season, Scottish Television decided they wanted to attempt a Live New Year’s Eve show that would, for once, not be the usual tartan-and-bagpipe cheesefest. This year, wanting something younger and hipper, they enlisted Peter Capaldi and me, along with Jimmy Mulville and Muriel Gray, the team that had done well with the
Acropolis Now
program only months before.

Our plan was to put on a live show of music and comedy acts that would be interspersed with some sketches, basically a rip-off of the
Saturday Night Live
format. It is difficult enough to make live television under the best of circumstances, but when you’re in Scotland on New Year’s Eve (or, as the natives call it, Hogmanay—a time of unbridled drunkenness in a country not renowned for its restraint involving alcohol on any day of the year) it’s damn near impossible.

Add to this a nasty trick by the network: at the last minute they drafted my brother Scott to be the show’s director. Scott had, in his career as a journalist, climbed the ladder to producing and directing the news shows, and then to an executive position at Scottish Television. He actually ended up running the company for a while before leaving in the early nineties.

Scott was not really interested in directing light entertainment—he’s a news guy—but he had been put in this uncomfortable situation by the suits, who believed he would be more effective at
bending us to their will, a ridiculous notion, as anyone who has or is a little brother will tell you. The bosses were desperate, though, because my fellow castmates and I were getting very upset and were shouting about it to anyone who’d listen.

This was because the network had gotten cold feet with their “edgy” and “hip” stance when there were rumbles of disapproval in the Scottish press that this new show would betray the tradition of Hogmanay.

The network compromise was, basically: “To hell with any initiative of a different show. Let’s not bother with any
ideas
. We’ll do the same we always do, but with younger people.” This put me in a very awkward position, because I would end up performing the type of stuff I was making my name lampooning.

I have seen this a million times since in show business. In TV, movies, and the music business you get executives who start out with a radical notion, but as the moment of truth approaches they lose their nerve and go back to what they are familiar with.

Scott and I butted heads, it was just like when we were kids. He wanted me to do as I was told, and I wanted him to fuck off. We didn’t speak for a while afterward, but not for too long. There was beer to be drunk, and we both support the same pathetic soccer team, Partick Thistle. We were back to our regular bullshitting within six months.

The New Year’s Eve show was a miserable experience, but not without its moments. During rehearsals Jimmy Mulville and I became friendly; we would sit in his hotel room, doing lines of coke and drinking beer and talking rubbish for hours. On one memorable night, an eager, tubby, and rather gauche network executive called Sandy McDougal decided to join us. He claimed he had “done tons of coke” in his “extensive world traveling,” but that seemed a little doubtful to Jimmy and me seeing that when it was his turn to snort a line off the mirror with a rolled-up banknote he exhaled instead of inhaling, blowing the precious white powder all
over the carpet. Even now, when I bump into Jimmy, who has been clean and sober for a million years and about as far removed from that world as anyone can be, he still seems a little annoyed at Sandy for this. I am, too.

After the Tron Christmas show and the New Year’s Eve debacle, my professional commitments in Scotland were over. It had been almost five months since the Edinburgh Festival, and Rachel Swann insisted that I come to London to meet the rest of the staff at the unfortunately named Noel Gay Organization, which was, as it turned out, a large and hugely prestigious theatrical agency in the heart of the city’s West End. I had, it seemed, landed on my feet.

Rachel started booking me some club dates in London. Ten minutes at the Comedy Store in Leicester Square, fifteen at the Hackney Empire. I had heard of these places and I was impressed. Real people in real show business had played there.

But I still wasn’t making real money, so I would travel the four hundred miles from Glasgow to London by “luxury” coach, “luxury” meaning that the vehicle had a little bathroom at the back. It was a horribly uncomfortable trip, like taking a Greyhound, only slower and damper, and once I got there I would crash on Peter Capaldi’s couch.

Peter and I had stayed close since the Dreamboys and by now he had moved to a little house next to Kensal Green Cemetery in Northwest London, a stone’s throw from the site of the gruesome Dennis Nilsen serial killings. The strange, creepy environment suited him to a tee and we spent some smashing-cold winter afternoons together, wearing big black coats and smoking cigarettes while walking round the preposterously overdone Victorian tombs of that colossal graveyard. Our own little
Withnail and I
period.

Peter was unfailingly kind and supportive to me, and I repaid him by taking advantage of our friendship, turning up at his place
unannounced and leaving a terrible mess in my drunken wake. I thought that because I could make him laugh we were good and was genuinely mystified when he told me that unless I treated him and his life with a little more respect I was no longer welcome. Only years later did I finally find the sense to apologize to him, an apology which he took with his usual generosity and class. Of all the truly remarkable and impressive people I have been lucky enough to know, Peter is surely one of them.

Rachel Swann teamed me up with another comedian she represented, an English chap named Harry Enfield. Harry was chubby and schoolboyish and astonishingly talented. He had invented the character Stavros, a send-up of a typical Greek kebab-shop owner in London, and performed it to great success every week on Channel Four Television’s
Saturday Live,
Britain’s version of
Saturday Night Live.
Harry and I met for the first time when I appeared on that show. We got along well and started playing on the same bill around the country at university and college gigs. It was like touring with a band except we got our own car and a driver and had no cumbersome equipment to schlep around, though we did stay in the same shitty B and B’s. Harry was a quiet, introspective guy and I was a loud, boorish inebriate, and we were never very close, but we were comfortable with each other.

Rachel was very excited when she called me on the road one day and asked if I had a passport. Harry and I had both been invited to the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, and while it wasn’t America, at least it was on the right side of the Atlantic.

Harry brought along two of his buddies, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. Charlie had been the singer of the Higsons, an indie rock band. I had heard them, and they were pretty good, but Charlie had no love for the music world so he had left for writing, which was his real passion. He wrote science-fiction stories, along
with jokes for Harry. He was a taciturn fellow but once his natural reservation ebbed away and he got to know you, Charlie turned into a convivial and witty comrade in arms.

Paul was a plasterer from Harry’s neighborhood and not really in show business at that point since there was more money to be made in London just then working construction, but he loved the comedy scene and would write the occasional gag or come up with character ideas for Harry. Without doubt, Paul was the most co-medically talented of any of us on the Montreal trip and it seemed inevitable he would end up performing by himself.

Early one July morning we left London—Harry, Paul, Charlie, and myself, along with Rachel Swann, the Truly Scrumptious of London agents—and with a few entertainment journalists and managers in tow. It felt like a school trip.

These were the early days of the Montreal festival, long before it became an institution. No one had even heard of it yet. We were the pioneers, canaries in the coal mine for the British comedy world. We had a blast, boating on the rapids of the St. Lawrence River and hanging out with the gregarious and hilarious American comics, not to mention the festival’s staff of beautiful, young French-Canadian girls.

I struck up a friendship with Rick Siegel, a talent manager from New York City who at six-five and two-forty was one of the biggest humans I had ever met. Steve Kravitz, the San Francisco comedian, calls him “the mutant Jew.”

Rick was a little worried when he heard that I worked under the name Bing Hitler but was placated when he saw there was nothing anti-Semitic about the act. At one time Rick had been a comic himself and won the annual “Mr. Peanut” new comedian competition, whatever that was. He told me it was quite something. He also told me that if I wanted to succeed in the U.S. it might be a good idea to drop the whole “Hitler” thing. I said I’d think about it.

Because New York was just an hour away by plane I made a detour to my old East Village neighborhood before returning to London, but it turned out to be an awful, cold bucket of water after the high jinks of Montreal. I met Jamesy on the plastic chairs in front of the Vintage Furniture Store on Avenue A. He expressed some surprise at the forty or so pounds I had gained since I had last seen him. That made me feel fucking great, but it was just the beginning.

He told me the neighborhood was changing beyond recognition because the property developers had moved in and all the old characters—along with most of the street crime—were moving out. That wasn’t such a bad thing, he said, but there seemed to be a great loss that went along with it. Something was dying, Jamesy said. It just wasn’t the same. And he was right, it wasn’t.

He also told me why I hadn’t been able to find my old actor buddy Roswell, the guy who suggested I go to my first acting audition and who was my doorman partner at Save the Robots.

Ros was dead.

He had loved heroin more than it loved him. I was shocked beyond imagining; he was the first of my friends to fall.

I went to O’Tooles uptown but no one I knew was there. It was all manicured hedge-fund pricks in those shirts that have different-colored collars.

I went to the Last Resort Bar to look for my old theater buddies. The bar was deserted and half of the clientele and staff were gone. The AIDS epidemic was scorching its path through the world. In fact, the entire town of New York seemed consumed and obsessed with it. All anyone would talk about in that town in the late eighties was their HIV tests or how frightened they were of contracting AIDS or already having it. By the time I got on the plane to leave I was terrified and depressed. I have never been so happy, before or since, to leave New York City.

Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn’t much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good.

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window.

Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.