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Big Boy's Blouse
------------------------------------------------------------------------ BY LYNN BARBER
------------------------------------------------------------------------ When I used to work for Penthouse magazine, one of my duties was 'researching the parameters of sermality' which meant interviewing people with unusual sexual tastes. Most of them were fascinating but I always sighed when it was time for a transvestite, they were so pretematurally boring. Married, middle-aged, with tidy suburban homes and safe white-collar jobs, they would show me their drab array of frocks and aprons and tell me how thrilling it was to wear them. It seemed about as thrilling as ironing - and, indeed, they tended to enthuse about ironing, too. So I have always had great difficulty getting my brain round the idea that Eddie Izzard can be so brilliantly funny and original, while being a transvestite. In fact, I thought maybe he was making it up - especially when I saw him on a flight to Edinburgh the other day, looking entirely masculine. This was also true when I met him this time, apart from his long, manicured (but unpainted) nails and some highlights in his hair. His manner is ultra-straight, too: there is absolutely nothing camp about him, though perhaps his honesty in discussing emotional subjects is unusual in a man. But anyway, he is a transvestite - though now I am totally confused about what that means. We met in his office in Soho, which is packed with groovy je-suis-un-rock-star toys - inflatable furniture, revolving lamps, a lip-shaped telephone, arty porn books and a packet of giant Rizla papers posed carefully beside the silver ashtray. I bet he summoned a designer one day and said, 'Do it trendy.' When I asked what his house in Notting Hill Gate is like, he said he hadn't done it up yet (he bought it 18 months ago) but he wanted it to be 'kind of cottagey but twisted, with lots of trompe l'oeil, reverse clocks, sort of Heath Robinson or Alice Through the Looking Glass effects.' Obviously, being a transvestite does not include the traditional feminine home-making skills. He tells me he has done a lot of po-faced interviews lately because people tend to ask him serious questions and then he answers them seriously. (He recently gave an interview to the Evening Standavd entirely about his pro-European political views.) So he says this time he should 'talk more rubbish'. Fine - I could listen to his rubbish all day. We both keep saying, 'This interview mustn't be all about transvestism,' 'Oh no, it mustn't be all about transvestism,' but neither of us can wait to get on to the subject, and in the end it is he who broaches it. But first we must do the statutory plug... He is doing a new stand-up show called Glorious, starting in New York and Paris, coming to London in late October, then touring the regions. There will also be a video of the show released in time for Christmas. He describes the concept as 'kind of a Fall of the Roman Empire when the Huns were about to come in, or like Ozymandias (that poem by, is it Shelley!) like a dying planet type thing. And I'm talking about the creation of the world, and the Grim Reaper, but there's also stuff on toasters and lawn mowers and modern computer ecluipment.' In other words, the typical coherent Izzard mix. Nothing is scripted, often a quarter of the show is improvised and it evolves night by night so that the end ofa tour bears little relation to the beginrring. He calls it 'molten material' and likes the adrenaline rush of walking on stage with no idea what he'll say. Audiences tend to assume that his bizarre mental jumps are drug-induced and he says he doesn't mind if they do assume that, but actually he can't perform on drugs and just gets terribly boring if he tries. He thinks, rather, that the mental leaps are connected with his dyslexia - he is a poor reader - and the sort of sideways logic that decrees that obviously elephants are good at skiing because they have more momentum. I can't begin to describe Izzard's humour and, since he refuses to do his stand-up act on television, you will either have to see him live or buy the video. (Good plug!) He is 35, but comparatively new to fame - it took him ages to arrive. A middle-class boy from a minor public school, he discovered his gift for stand-up while he was reading accountancy at Sheffield University and dropped out after one year to take his show to Edinburgh. 'ln 1981 I was raring to go, I had the energy, I could work hard and I felt I could make people laugh. But nothing happened really till I993, and it was a pain having to survive all that. I was always thinking, "Well, maybe next month...", but for years and years nothing happened. You just think you're mad, but you hold on to this idea in your head. Most people kill it and go and work for the council or something, but I didn't. But I was so long out in the cold.' He made a patchy living as a street entertainer, while taking any stand-up gigs he could get. The first glimmer of success came at the I991 Edinburgh Festival when he was nominated for the Perrier Award. Then, in 1993, he brought his show to the West End, and won the British Comedy Award for Top Stand-up Comedian. (The video of that show, Live at the Ambassadors, reveals a strangely chubby, blokeish Izzard, dressed in sports jacket and Hush Puppies, though with a little flash of ruby varnish on his nails.) Since then, he has piled success on success, with a 'world tour' including New York, Paris and Amsterdam and two bestselling videos, Unrepeatable and Definite Article. Last year, he won another British Comedy Award and a New York Drama Desk award for Best Solo Artist. He has explained his urge to perform very simply: 'My mum died when I was six and she was a very affectionate mother. When that happens, an individual seeks to replace the affection that has been lost. The audience has become that for me... So I think it's quite a healthy way of dealing with an emotional problem.' It also accounts for the irresistible charm of his act. He basks in the audience, apparently totally secure in their love. The trauma of his mother's death goes very deep - his video company is called Ella Communications after her. She knew she was dying (of bowel cancer), so Eddie and his older brother, Mark, were suddenly dispatched to boarding school when they were six and eight respectively - unfortunately, a Dickensian school which rang to the thwack of the cane - and it was there that they heard the news of their mother's death. Eddie claims he cried solidly for a year. His teacher once recalled, 'He was a very timid little boy and obviously completely lost without his mother. His brother was very protective of Eddie. They both just seemed very lonely.' The next year, their father (who worked as a top accountant, ultimately chief auditor, for BP) moved to Bexhill, where he had relatives, and switched them to a nicer boarding school nearby, but they were still a very shattered family. The boys said they wanted a stepmother and Mr Izzard tried hard to find one, putting out ads and going to dating agencies, but it was seven years before he remarried. When he finally introduced the boys to their prospective stepmother, they took her round the garden and told her all about their mother. At the age of 11, Eddie decided to stop crying.'How to survive boarding school. Do not express emotion, do not feel emotion, do not have emotion. If someone hits you, hit them back; if someone argues with you, argue back - never give an inch, never look vulnerable and you will survive. I stopped crying after I lost this fight with another kid and I fell over and cried, and therefore I'd lost. And I thought, "Oo, mustn't do that, because it makes you a loser."' He almost deliberately started crying again at 19, when he saw a cat being run over and couldn't think how to react. Nowadays, he cries quite readily, especially at any mention of his mother's death. He says he must 'do analysis' on it one day, because he knows 'there's still a lot of emotion in there that's got nowhere to go. It doesn't really get better, you just don't think about it so much.' He does not believe that his transvestism has anything to do with the loss of his mother. Her clothes disappeared from the house when she died, and he has no memory of them. He recalls that before she died, when he was about four, he heard ofa boy dressing up as a girl and thought, 'Oo! That sounds nice!' He believes he was born a transvestite. 'lt isn't a whim. It is a built-in urge.' Many people assume that he's gay but he is perfectly clear that he's not. 'I'd be very happy to be, but I don't fancy men at all. I'd be up for it, but I haven't seen one I fancied.' And, in fact, he has had quite long relationships with women, one lasting four years, though he is unattached now. He says that, far from women being put off by his transvestism, they tend to say,'Could you wear a skirt tomorrow?' He claims he can't remember when he first dressed up (I bet he can really), but by his teens he was using his stepmother's make-up and also shoplifting make-up - once he was caught, but let off with a warning. He wore women's clothes when he could, but 'I didn't have much access to clothes. I tried to get girls' roles in plays... It's quite difficult to work out how to start, how to do it. And you're just trying to repress all that. It wasn't until I came out... And then I did and I bought some bad clothes - because you have to go through your frumpy transvestite stage, where you buy things out ofa catalogue.' Was he fancying girls at the same time? 'Yes. All the time. And wondering how to deal with it? 'Yes. I thought basically I'd just not have to tell anyone ever. It would just be some sort of big dark secret.' As an accountancy student at Sheffield University, he was so worried that he went twice to his GP who promised to refer him to a psychiatrist, but the appointment never came. Then, when he was 2I, he thought, 'I've got to come out with it,' so he told an old girlfriend and she was fine. Then he told his brother a year or two later, and he was fine, too. And at 23, he found a transvestite support group in London and was able to come out in public. He also learned, early on, to face his attackers. Once he was followed down the street at night by a gang of kids asking, 'Hey, man - why are you dressed as a girl' and instead of panicking, he turned round and said, 'All right - I'll tell you,' and they all ran away. 'Which just shows that, if you confront it, people will back off.' This has always been his way of dealing with 'remarks' ever since - though recently his opponent didn't back off but swung a punch and Izzard floored him and took him to court successfully. He didn't bite the final bullet - telling his father - till he was 29. They had gone to a football match together, as they often do, and it was in a greasy spoon cafe afterwards that Eddie broke the news. John Izzard's reaction (as recounted to the Daily Express) was everything he must have hoped: 'I can't say I was best pleased. But then, what really was there to be displeased about? I looked at Eddie and realised, "He is my son, I love him, and this is who he is." There are so many worse things he could be.' But what actually is a transvestite? It seems almost meaningless today, when most women wear trousers and many men dye their hair. Whatever taboo was meant to be broken barely exists any more. But Izzard explains that clothes are really a minor part of it - what it is really about is identifying with women, while also being attracted to them, and rejecting all the givens of masculinity. It sounds almost more like transsexism - would he really like to be a woman! 'I'd be quite happy to be a woman. But I seem to have this very blokey body. If I had more of a Sharon Stone body, then I wouldn't bother with clothes and make-up so much because they're more external things, and if I was a woman, then I wouldn't need to act like that in order to realign this very male exterior which means you get treated by society in a certain way. And the reason why people end up with these exterior interests in clothes and make-up is that that is all that's really there if you have that body - everyone is going to say you're a bloke, and everything you do is supposed to be in the confines of a bloke, and that's too constricting and really boring.' The analogy he favours, and keeps coming back to, is that he is like a teenage tomboy - a girl who plays football and climbs trees but also likes wearing make-up - though I find this pretty unrealistic. But he has to somehow square his own love of football (he was in the first team at school) with his passion for dressing up, and he can only do this by comparing himself to teenage girls, presumably virgins. Because if he thought on, about what women of his age (35) are interested in, he would come to marriage and motherhood which would be difficult. He says he's never read a book on transvestism, though he's often been given them. I told him I used to read them at Penthouse, but they were decades out o fdate. Still, he was interested, and asked what they said. I was a bit nervous of telling him - they bracketed transvestites with fetishists, as people who would find their greatest sexual fulfilment in masturbation. Izzard was obviously familiar with the theory but said, 'People get hung up on this idea of clothes and make-up and men getting turned on and the role of masturbation and lalala. But they've got to remember that these are male lesbians. And we know from gays and lesbians, especially gays, that men fancy men, but they also like their own bodies. They like their own look, and they like that look in other men, which is why there's a lot of very similar looks going round. So you have to understand that these male lesbians wear make-up and whatever, because they can create a look that they're actually attracted to. And therefore it can be an arousing thing.' This seems to confirm the theory rather than deny it. But there are signs that he is moving on - he says his interest in dressing up has lessened over the years because now he can get any clothes he wants, 'It's much more humdrum. Like with teenage girls - when they can buy all the make-up they want to buy, and wear all the heels and skirts, they start saying, "Do I have to do this every day? What a shag!" So you can dress up and get sexy on occasions, but you're not going to do it every day.' And whereas in the past he used to feel different when he was wearing women's clothes, now, 'I'm trying to centre myself more and not have this difference between the way I talk, the way I behave. I don't change my voice, I don't become camp - there isn't a difference.' He has described himself as 'a lesbian trapped in a man's body' and explains this is not a joke: 'That is the easiest way to look at it. I'm not really "trapped" in a man's body - I'm happily cohabiting, but I'm a male lesbian.' In other words, he feels like a woman, but a woman who is attracted to other women. I'd sort of taken this on board, or thought I had, when he explained that he meant not just any women - he was attracted to lesbians. Aagh! So now it becomes transcendentally complicated - he wants a relationship with someone who by definition doesn't want a relationship with him because he is a man. Perhaps he just wants a platonic relationship - when I asked what he and a lesbian would do in bed, he was uncharacteristically vague. 'Well who knows? Who knows?' Hadn't he ever tried it? 'Er... have I? No, I don't think I've ever had sex with anyone who is a decided lesbian and not bisexual at all. Yes, it is kind of confusing, but if you think about it, ordinary sex is quite confusing. I mean, all completely straight sex is horrendous and confusing to someone who is not into sex at all, who is totally blocked in that area... So when he says, as he often does, that he would like to marry and have children one day, there is something a bit never-never about it, as I might say I would like to climb Everest. I notice that his father, when interviewed by the Daily Express, said he wasn't the sort of father who longed for grandchildren - he seemed to assume that Eddie would remain childless. Eddie always responds to questions about parenthood with a stock joke, 'I'd be the ultimate one-parent family!' but when I ask why he couldn't be part of a two-parent family, he gets a bit flustered. 'Oh, I could be... Nothing stops me having kids and I think I probably will... I might adopt, though... but I'm not looking for kids at the moment. I've got my main drive. At the moment, I'm too busy trying to get America and trying to get Europe, and it would be a hellish life for a kid. I think my thirties are going to be very busy - they have been so far. I'm trying to make up for my twenties, which were just crap.' He is a 'strategy nut' who plans his career carefully. He has always refused offers of his own television series, and he doesn't do the telly ads and conference gigs that provide most comedians' bread and butter. What he wants is to find new audiences in Europe and America. He is performing again in Paris (in French) this autumn and planning a six-month off-Broadway season next year - an enormous gamble, given that he won't break even for five months. He also wants to pursue a film career as a straight actor, and keeps going to auditions where inevitably someone says, 'But you're a comedian,' and he explains that, yes, but he wants to do straight roles. He believes he can play weirdos and 'shitheady parts' because there seems to be some sort of link between comedy and psychotics - he admires the way Woody Harrelson went from Cheers to Natural Born Killers. He has three films in the pipeline: Conrad's The Secret Agent, The Velvet Goldmine (with Ewan MacGregor) and The Avengers, in which he plays Sean Connery's sidekick and gets to fight with Uma Thurman. (He wears gloves in the film, but one day he took them off and Connery noticed his nail varnish and did a double take. 'He was cool about it. But we didn't have big chats about sexuality!') He is working very hard indeed to make up for all the lost time in his twenties when he was 'ready' but nobody wanted him. Given the strength of his ambition, he is bound to succeed. He is probably the weirdest person I have ever interviewed, but he doesn't feel weird at all, he feels eminently sane. He knows exactly who he is, what he wants, he is ambitious but realistic and very determined. But perhaps a little joyless, a little too controlled - he admits he is a control freak and deliberately keeps a rein on his emotions. 'I don't get very morose, but I also don't get very ecstatic. It's a sort of safety device, probably because I was so morose when I was a kid, I never want to go back there. Perhaps I should get more elated but I worry about it because I think it's all going to disappear, and I don't want to go too down because it's just so horrible to feel that. So I just put a compressor on my emotions. This is why I want to do more straight acting, because there's a lot of anger and a lot of sadness inside me that I'd like to bring out in roles.' The anger, of course, dates from his mother's death: 'There is a distinct anger about. Why the hell did my mother disappear when I was six? Why did Hitler stick around? Why did he live longer than my mother? But... shit happens, shit happens. There is no answer.' He apologises at the end for talking about his transvestism so much: 'But I only talk about it to journalists, actually, so I find myself banging on and on.' And although he doesn't want to proselytise, he thinks it might help other transvestites to come out. What he wants is a situation where men can go to work in skirt-suits and make-up if they want to - he realises it's much easier for him, working in showbiz, than for someone in a conventional job - and not be marginalised. He is proud of the fact that he was invited to Tony Blair's first party at No 10 and went wearing make-up. 'I am my own positive role model. I do this for me, and if anyone else gets anything positive out of it, that's great. I'm not flag-waving and trying to get transvestites marching down the street; that's not going to happen. But if you push through and you deal with your sexuality, and you come out and are open about it, you get this confidence from having done it, and it means you can create things. Because the people who have gone through it and come out, they have to have been brave to do it, so they will take more risks, creative risks, and people think, "Wow, that's great!"' |