Nothing like a Dame

Kafka was right: ‘Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ But Barry Humphries, at the age of 76, manages much of the time to control his vacillating schizoid tendencies in nice equipoise. In his autobiography More Please, he stated that Edna Everage was a figment of his imagination. In this new ‘unauthorised’ biography of Dame Edna there are Kafkaesque indications that he believes she actually ‘has her being’, as he might put it. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, she has long enabled him publicly to deride others in malicious innuendo that he would not have uttered in his less frivolous role of kindly Barry Humphries. However, as in other authenticated cases, the subterfuge is fragile: the creation sometimes dominates the creator, no matter how earnestly he attempts to maintain a semblance of normality.

At what may be described as the southernmost extremity of bipolar mood-swings, Humphries writes: ‘I wonder how I could ever have allowed one seemingly shy and uneducated woman to ruin my life.’ In fact, of course, she enhanced his life far beyond his most ambitious fantasy in the days when he was a Dadaistic transvestite student prankster at Melbourne University.

‘Melbourne was bisected by a class barrier,’ Humphries recalls. ‘Nice people lived south of it.’ He was brought up in the middle-class suburb of Camberwell. North of the River Yarra ‘dwelt nobody we knew or wished to know’. Yet Edna, a resident of Moonee Ponds, ‘a drab working-class suburb’, succeeded in persuading him by girlish postcard (green ink, circles over the i’s) to cross the barrier to witness her as Mary Magdalene, in a church-hall Passion Play. ‘One of the leads,’ she said, ‘along with God and Jesus.’ She sought Barry’s advice on acting and wanted him to manage her. After her performance, he thought:

If I could hire her for next to nothing to appear in one of my satirical stage shows she would be hilarious, even if she only read the telephone directory… This Edna could be the Eliza Doolittle to my Henry Higgins.