The Freshly-Iced Sponge

Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography, by Barry Humphries; Hachette, 2009, 387 pages, $49.99.

Surely Australia’s greatest, certainly most monstrous, comic creation, Dame Edna Everage has been inspiring and challenging, entertaining and insulting the public for more than half a century. Such is the Dame’s pull on reality that when her memoirs, My Gorgeous Life, were published in the UK they appeared on the non-fiction best-seller list. It was surprising then to find that, when recently approached for an obituary of her on file (all famous women have them in wait; the Queen Mother’s was being updated for sixty years) the Times demurred, suggesting instead that the Features pages were a more suitable spot.

Pre-empting the demise of a legend may seem outrageous, if not offensive, but the subject herself would be the last to protest, having parried with the squeamish and the unspeakable all her career. In any case, any obituary would be premature—she has never seemed so alive. This is remarkable given the fact that Dame Edna must, in human terms, be close to ninety. When she first emerged from Moonee Ponds in 1955 she was a young mother in her thirties. Yet in My Gorgeous Life she admits to being born to Gladys and Bruce Beazley in Wagga Wagga’s “Bethesda Hospital in 1930-whatever”. One suspects she has taken a tip from her friend Zsa Zsa Gabor, who, if her admitted birth date is correct, was nine when she entered the 1936 Miss Hungary contest. Edna’s great-grandmother and namesake, Edna Beazley, was apparently convicted of stealing a gladiolus from a Covent Garden florist and transported, not on the First Fleet, but in 1770 on the Endeavour with Captain Cook. (History is apparently not one of the Dame’s many strengths; but, she has always lived for the moment, and it was, after all, herstory.) 

Humphries’s first encounter with Edna occurred in June 1955. By then she was, by her own account, “an unhappily married woman”. She was more than slightly resentful that Norm Everage was considerably older than he had led her to believe. A slight, khaki-faced, ill-looking man, Norm would soon be permanently confined to his room, strapped to a hideous machine to deal with his dicky prostate. They had managed to produce three children, Bruce, Valmai and Kenny, who had earned Edna first prize in a “Lovely Mother” contest, despite her abiding dictum, “I’ve decided to put my family last. It’ll be best for them in the end.”

Edna’s potential came to Humphries when he attended a performance of a Passion Play at the Moonee Ponds Holy Trinity Hall in 1955. Edna, as a mauve-haired Mary Magdalene, opened the scene at the House of Simon the Leper with the words, “Christ your feet look awful. Let me give them a bit of TLC.” She proceeded to massage Jesus’s feet with Vicks VapoRub then remove it with her wisteria locks. Humphries left at interval, despite the pleas of Edna’s bridesmaid, Madge Allsop, “Are you staying for the Crucifixion?” He left with the impression that Edna would be hilarious “even if she only read from the telephone directory”. She could be Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins. And the rest is his/herstory.

Handling Edna is his and her story. Barry Humphries wisely insisted on the subtitle, The Unauthorised Biography, and it remains clear throughout that he is the author and the Dame his subject. His story has already been told—twice—in More Please in 1992 and My Life as Me in 2002. His role as biographer is necessarily complex, making it impossible for him to remain out of the picture, but he is resolutely modest and self-deprecating—so unlike his subject. His attitude to her is a tortured mix of intense frustration and reluctant wonderment. Before his eyes, and ours, this suburban housewife transforms herself into a gigastar.

The Dame has lived her life so publicly since 1955 that there is little in this biography that we did not know. The disappearance in Wagga of her first child, Lois, at the claws of a wild koala was shared twenty years ago. Her artistic son Kenny’s parentage—the result of a date-rape by Frank Sinatra at the Boulevard Hotel—has surely also been shared before. At times one teeters on wondering whether Handling Edna should not really have been called More Please of My Gorgeous Life as Me.

And yet, no one has Humphries’s ear for dialogue or his eye for the prosaic detail. His only rival in the English-speaking world is Alan Bennett. So even if, at times, one thinks one has been served an old sponge, Humphries’s brio, his instinctive sense of the ridiculous, his genius for evoking the past and divining the present, provide sufficiently delicious icing to make it eminently edible.

It would be a pity if this were to be the last tasty confection from his creative pantry. The greatly under-appreciated Sandy Stone is already the subject of his own biography (The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, 1990) so one wonders if the author’s enterprising literary agent has not exhorted him to pen an unauthorised life of Sir Les Patterson, the knight who put the hose back into hosiery. But whatever the future of Barry Humphries’s brilliantly unique ensemble, one hopes Dame Edna’s obituary is a long way off.