The Lady Is a Vamp: Dame Edna Returns

In his one-(wo)man show, Barry Humphries delights in flaunting the good life and slamming the middle class.

By: HUGH HART | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Posing for pictures, Barry Humphries peeks from behind a room divider in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, eyes widening like a 6-year-old playing hide-and-seek. The Australian-born actor, 67 but still full of mischief, is here to talk about his equally naughty alter ego for nearly half a century, the tart-tongued, name-dropping Melbourne housewife from whose mouth flies unsolicited advice on fashion, family and money. That would be, of course, Dame Edna.

To promote his one-man show "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour," which plays the Shubert Theatre Tuesday through May 27, Humphries settles into the suite, hoists a cup of tea and provides, in perfectly parsed sentences, an update on his longtime fictional companion. "I put Edna in a box every couple of years, and when she comes back there's always something new. Edna has fallen very strongly for the jargon of caring, and at the moment, it's the prostate she's taken up. Since the death of her husband, she's established this charity called Friends of the Prostate, a worldwide organization for prostate sufferers and the friends and family of prostate suffers, and she's started a 12-step program, called Prost-Anon. And she's organized the Prostate Olympics in Australia next year, mostly water sports, oddly enough."

On the plastic surgery front, Humphries says, "Edna of course claims never to have had cosmetic surgery--she's had a few crow's-feet actually put in; she had herself cosmetically aged because she was in such good shape.

"Edna now dresses more fashionably than anyone in the audience--not so difficult these days when people are in the habit of wearing leisure clothes to the theater. She deplores the dress sense of her audience. She wore her oldest dress in her wardrobe, but apparently not old enough."

Edna also serves as fashion advisor to Barbara Bush and is preparing for sainthood. "If she were only Roman Catholic, it'd be practically automatic," Humphries quips.

In short, Humphries explains, "Edna's very busy and she's extremely rich. You see it in the best hotels, most people chase money; their neediness is painfully apparent. Edna feels her appeal is that she clearly doesn't need to do these appearances. She's actually doing the audience a favor by just turning up. They're lucky she's there, hanging out with them for 21/2 hours, sharing a bit of her experiences, giving them hope, strengthening them."

Pausing for a sip of tea, Humphries glances at his suite and gives vent to an Edna-like critique of the decor, mocking the ornate pair of chandeliers as "a bit over the top, don't you think?" But Humphries insists any similarity between his sensibility and Edna's is strictly coincidental. "I think it must be truly a schizophrenic relationship because we have nothing in common; I don't share any view with her. None of her political opinions on any matter coincide with my own." He pauses then adds slyly. "And yet, she is persuasive."

There are other differences between creator and creation. Humphries favors tasteful blazers and taupe slacks. Edna scurries onstage wearing a gaudy gown and rhinestone-encrusted spectacles. Humphries collects antique books, counts David Mamet as a friend and for many years enjoyed brainy chats with his father-in-law, the great English poet Stephen Spender, who died in 1995. Edna's interest in literary matters seems limited to the self-help books she plunders for New Age lingo. Humphries, married for the fourth time, is father to four children. Edna, mother of three, is a widow.

Even before Edna sprang to life, Humphries delighted in shocking the middle class. The actor grew up in Melbourne. Unlike Sydney, which was founded by convicts and, he says enviously, had a wild reputation, Melbourne was "the Switzerland of the Southern hemisphere. It was sort of snooty and there was this obsession with cleanliness and propriety."

Humphries attended private schools and was expected to pursue a conventional career. Instead, he found himself at Melbourne University staging conceptual art pranks inspired by the Dadaist movement of the '20s. Humphries created sculptures of rotting meat. He filled a rubber swimming pool with secondhand books covered in custard designed to look like vomit. And, in 1954, he created Mrs. Everage for a college revue. Edna Everage soon acquired a first name and a ritual all her own. During one show, Humphries became annoyed when a member of the audience seemed to pay more attention to a vase of gladioli on the piano than to his performance. "I threw the entire bunch of flowers at this woman, and she then passed them along the front row, rather generously. So when I sang my final song I noticed the women were twitching their gladiola, kind of in time to the music."

Humphries knew a finale when he saw one and made the Gladiola Chorus a fixture of his live act. "Now I spend thousands of dollars, out of season, importing these gladiola, which are accepted greedily by the audience members, and there is actually a waving sea of flowers in the front row. This has become a kind of signature. It's comical, it's childish, it's joyful, it's absurd, it's part of this slow process of bringing all these people from different walks of life who have come to see the show into a kind of unity, and then reducing them to happy children."

Before Dame Edna's following flowered fully, Humphries tried on several different hats. In the early '60s, he emigrated to London and hooked up with a circle of young British comedians including Spike Jones, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. He starred in West End musicals, playing Fagin in "Oliver" opposite a young Phil Collins as the Artful Dodger. For a monthly satire magazine, Humphries penned a comic strip featuring an oafish Australian named Barry McKinzie. In 1972, Bruce Beresford made his feature debut directing "The Adventures of Barry McKinzie" based on the character. Humphries wrote himself into the script as Dame Edna. When he began dressing up as Edna to do promotional interviews for the movie, Humphries says, he realized "she is transportable. But not in the States. Not yet."

Humphries brought Dame Edna to New York in 1978. She flopped. What did he learn from the experience? "I learned never to come back to America," Humphries harrumphs. "I learned, 'Oh, Dame Edna is a regional joke; it amuses the English, it amuses Australia but America's a different place.' It was very popular in Britain to say, oh, 'They're like Martians, the Americans; they have no sense of irony.' "

But the Dame proved indomitable. In the '80s, Edna surfaced on cable TV and made a few appearances in Canada. For a couple of years in the early '90s Humphries lived in Los Angeles while his Edna hosted TV talk shows for NBC and Fox. By the late '90s, Humphries was back in England but growing weary of London, which he felt had grown "rather dull and overpriced."

Sensing that Americans might finally be eager to share an evening with Dame Edna, Humphries phoned Joan Rivers for advice on how to crack the market. Rivers' agent booked Humphries/Edna into a San Francisco theater. "I thought, it'll be a gay audience but that's all right. Who patronizes theater more than gays and Jews? Theater, like opera, would not exist without these two minorities! So I went there and sure enough the village people came along, but so did their mothers and fathers as well, and their children, and I did four months in San Francisco."

A Broadway run followed last year, earning Humphries a special Tony Award for a live theatrical event. Then, "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour" hit the road, beginning in Minneapolis. Edna, it turned out, was indeed "transportable." "I normally have a stable of characters that I do," says Humphries, pushing back an unruly forelock from his brow. "A drunken diplomat, an old man who's a ghost, a trade union leader, folk singer, a Chinese businessman. And yet this loquacious, bigoted, paradoxically rather likable woman happens to be the one audiences respond to most joyously, I suppose. She's able to transcend these geographical boundaries. She says the unsayable."

For each venue, Humphries gleans gossip from bellboys, asks taxi drivers, "Who's the Fat Lady in town?" then peppers his jokes with local references. "The audiences do feel that the show is addressed to them. Edna is there, and she can see them."

Edna invites audience members on stage to eat pasta, assaults their wardrobe choices, grills them about how much they pay their baby-sitters. "It's a game, you see, that the audience is invited to play," says Humphries. "It's part of the cheering-up process that the theater is really all about and also sharing a view of life for a couple of hours with a disparate group of people who after all have gone to a lot of trouble.

"Television is easy. They can switch you on and switch you off. You are, as it were, in their control. When you're on the stage"--Humphries leans forward and whispers conspiratorially--"They're in your control. And that's how they quite like it. They like this dominatrix on the stage, this person who's calling the shots, who's surprising them, wrong-footing them, sometimes embarrassing them, and finally forgiving them, empowering them, sending them out slightly changed and altered. As Edna said the other night in Phoenix to a group of women who'd been chosen from the audience, and then disguised as members of the British royal family on the stage and then sent back into the audience, she said 'How sad to think that the rest of your lives will be an anticlimax.' And the women looked gratefully back at Edna for this rather double-edged benediction.

"I'll ask somebody, 'What style is your house?' and she says 'Well it's three bedrooms.' 'Well, how are you going to find it tonight? Do you go around knocking, is this a three-bedroom home, do I live here?' Then Edna will ask, 'Well, what color is it?' 'I don't remember.' I draw them out, and then they sort of gradually become involved and they are the show. What I like is that by the end of it, some members of the audience are asked by others to sign their programs. They've become celebrities in the true Andy Warhol tradition."

* "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour" at the Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Opens Tuesday at 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays and Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 27. $30-$60. (800) 447-7400.

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