My kind of autobiography

Published on Saturday 30 September 2006 00:59

Coming soon to a theatre near you, Michael Barrymore stars in Scrooge: The Musical, playing a man driven nearly out of his mind by ghosts.

It's early evening when we meet at his publisher's London office. Noises off announce that Barrymore's arrived via a side door. Up at reception I'm stifling a small scream of surprise at the sight of a handsome man I presume to be his partner, Shaun Davis, with Zoe Lucker of Footballer's Wives' fame.

Barrymore's ever so tall, slender and exquisitely dressed. He offers a guarded smile. The publicist says, "It's OK, Lee's seen the manuscript, so there's nothing you two can't discuss." I'd planned to lead up to Stuart Lubbock gradually, but Barrymore brings the subject up almost at once, referring back to his book so often it brings to mind the phrase: That's my story and I'm sticking to it. But why not stick to your story when it's the truth?

As we begin, whispers fill the corridor. Barrymore looks up. "Do you mind if my friends sit in?" What can I say? "Of course not." Of course yes. Davis and Lucker make themselves nearly invisible. They're faultless, but I am distracted nonetheless. Distracting, too, is his listlessness. Barrymore is not stupid: the vacancy behind his eyes is absence. I wait for him to spring to life; instead, his emotional exhaustion swamps me.

Why this, why now? I begin. He was approached by the publisher a few years ago, but while he loves the writing process, he needs to be continually pushed. "Books are like having a love affair," he says. "You walk past it and think, oh I hate that thing. Then you get into it and you fall in love with it, and then you don't want to let it go."

Rehab taught him the therapeutic value of pouring difficult emotions into letters you never post. "This is just a longer version of that. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. It's very easy to say this should have happened and that shouldn't have happened, but that's not a story about you, that's about someone venting their anger. When I felt I had been a shit, it meant saying so. What that does is allow you to say, 'I don't think you were fair either'. When somebody makes some statements against me I say, that's neither fair on yourself nor fair on me."

There's been no shortage of statements, I suggest, thinking of his tabloid coverage over the years. He readily agrees. "Also the convenience of, if there's any wrongdoing, let's just use the word Barrymore. Your surname suddenly becomes the open door to everything. Like when I said to the dad, if you don't blame me and know I wasn't anything to do with it, why do you keep using my name?"

As quickly as that, the ghost of Stuart Lubbock arrives. Barrymore's referring to his description of a meeting with Lubbock's father, Terry, brokered by the Sun after Celebrity Big Brother. The meeting seemed amicable, the men united in their desire to see the investigation reopened. But Barrymore describes a more complicated encounter.

At the time of his death the papers reported that Lubbock suffered "horrific" rectal injuries. In fact, pathologist Dr Michael Heath (himself now the subject of an investigation regarding two other cases) wrote that the injuries were consistent with penetration with a firm object. Nurse Stuart Nairn says they probably resulted from his taking Lubbock's temperature 14 times with a rectal thermometer until, eventually, blood appeared on the instrument. There was no blood in Barrymore's pool when Lubbock was found, face up, at the bottom, nor any on his boxer shorts. There was no secondary DNA found to support the contention that he'd had sex of any description.

There were drugs in his system, but he was a known recreational user. An inquest recorded an open verdict and no-one has been charged in Lubbock's death. Most of this information was reported as long ago as 2003, when the entertainer was the subject of several sympathetic profiles.

Barrymore admitted he was drunk and stoned on grass the night he invited a group of people - including Lubbock, a stranger - back to his house to carry on after the nightclubs shut. In Awight he reiterates his recollections, along with a wealth of supporting data, including new information from the police. He reminds me that every word has been examined with forensic intensity by his publisher's legal team.

Meanwhile, rumour has it Terry Lubbock plans his own book entitled Not Awight: Getting Away With Murder. "I don't want Barrymore selling his book and making money on the back of my dead son. How low can you go?" Lubbock recently told the press.

Yet when they met, Lubbock was "chirpy", Barrymore remembers. "He said, 'let me put your mind at rest. I don't blame you for Stuart's death at all'." But he quickly asked Barrymore to sign a document stating that "whatever happened to Stuart, happened at your house". Barrymore refused, and asked if it wasn't equally possible the injuries occurred at the hospital or during the unaccounted-for eight-hour gap after the resuscitation team finished, while the body was unattended? "It was then Terry dropped his third bombshell. 'You see, Michael, I hold the key to your future. I want you to get back on television and back where you were, and I can help you do that. I just want you to write down what I said.' "

They danced in circles. Why keep blaming me in the press if you don't believe it, Barrymore asked? " 'Because I wouldn't get any publicity out of it if I didn't use your name, would I?' Lubbock responded."

Barrymore shakes his head, telling me, "That's unfair. This is about getting addicted to notoriety. Can you see the dynamic that's going on here? In a way, they don't want it to end."

Performing is all Michael Barrymore's wanted to do since he was eight years old. He's the youngest - a mistake, he was often told - after brother John and sister Anne. His mum was Irish, his dad from Yorkshire or Lithuania, or neither, no-one knew for sure. He gambled, drank and lashed out violently. Barrymore writes: "Poor dad. I only found out in later life that it wasn't entirely his fault, that he couldn't hold his drink, that mum hit him as much as he hit her."

It was a mixed blessing when his father left home. Though the family struggled, at least they could get on with their lives. But the scars had formed. "To this day I am convinced dad never really knew I existed," says Barrymore. How, then, do you prove you're alive? Then, as now, the answer is, take to the stage.

As a boy, he first trod the boards as an emergency replacement Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. This success inspired him to join a local amateur dramatics society. "The audiences loved what I did, and I loved what they did, cheering and clapping. I was fast becoming addicted to it. It got to the point where the day just wasn't right for me unless I'd done some kind of performance."

He left school at 15 without qualifications but with a great deal of sexual confusion. There was a short-lived apprenticeship with crimper Vidal Sassoon, but he left when mates teased that it was poof's work. Not that they were above the odd drunken fumble, so long as it wasn't discussed. "They knew, and I knew, but how could you ever find any answers when nobody was even asking the questions? 'Is he gay?' Or, as it was more often said, 'Is he a bit funny?' Me, I was bloody hysterical."

A stint providing entertainment at a Devon holiday camp left him with a taste for alcohol, even though he'd previously shunned booze and cigarettes. His big break came via a performance on New Faces. At the same time, in 1974, he met a 25-year-old divorce named Cheryl.

"She was a class act: she looked fantastic, had a great figure and a great smile. She had a family, she had money, she'd been very successful [as a dancer] in the business and knew a lot of important people. Great cook, great dresser, great ambition, great ideas, great sex. What was a skinny Bermondsey boy to do? I needed someone, she wanted someone. I liked her, she loved me. In time, my liking turned to love."

Cheryl took over. She picked out his clothes, told him where to go and what to do when he got there. Complicating matters was Barrymore's devotion to her father, Eddie. "There is no doubt he was the dad I was looking for. He was tough and feared no-one and he greeted me with a smile and asked how I was."

Still, the family was puzzled when they married. Cheryl's mum had assumed Barrymore was gay. She was right, but it was years before he could admit it. When he did, Cheryl insisted it was just a phase, like his drinking and drugging, which steadily escalated the more he tried juggling his conflicting desires.

Life with Cheryl involved a lot of denial, I point out: denying your sexuality, your addictions, and, thanks to the family rift she perpetuated, denying yourself a relationship with your mum. Are you done with denial now? "I've had enough of that," he says.

"You think at the time it will deal with the situation, but it doesn't. I was weak, I admit to it in the book. I should have said to my wife, 'Whatever you're feeling, I want to see my mum.' " Cheryl convinced him he had to toe the line or lose both marriage and career. "What was I so scared of? It scares me how far you have to go through your life to actually be confident enough to deal with all the things that have bothered you. But that's how it works."

Barrymore dramatically outed himself on stage at a London club and in an interview that broke even as he attempted a reconciliation with Cheryl. They slugged it out in the press throughout their divorce, and the acrimony gained momentum when Cheryl published Catch a Falling Star, her version of the marriage. After Lubbock's death, she insisted Barrymore had lied about being unable to swim. Yet despite their troubles, he never dismisses this relationship. "I have regrets. One was that I didn't have an amicable divorce. [But] it wasn't 18 years of hell. We had a great time and Cheryl was a huge part of my life."

After so much analysis, do you find it any easier being alone now? "No," he answers immediately. "I still don't sit well with it, but I've been like that since I was a kid. It's a quite sad part of me. I'll be all right for a short while and I mean short as in not much of a day, but unless somebody's around I feel vulnerable."

Watching Celebrity Big Brother, it seemed that even in a crowd Barrymore is tremendously fragile. I teasingly ask if he's in touch with his former housemates. He rolls his eyes. "I started off taking what was coming at me. I let it go and let it go. And believe me, you do forget about the cameras. When you're in the middle of a heavy domestic and [Dennis] Rodman's standing right in front of my face trying to bring it on. I said 'Are you threatening me? I haven't understood one word you've said for the last three weeks. Are you threatening me?' He just walked away. And when George [Galloway] had a go, I thought, this isn't about me, this is about how you feel about being nominated. You're dumping it on me and I am not standing for it."

Everyone enters that house with an agenda. His was simply to be Michael Barrymore. "To be like I would be if I went around to Zoe's," he gestures toward his friend. "When I saw afterwards when Rula [Lenska] and George were talking, and she goes: 'He does have this need to perform and it's very entertaining but it does get irritating,' well, as I wrote in my book, all she had to do was say, 'Michael very good, now shut the f*** up.' Of course I have a need to perform, that's what I do. I feel complete when I'm up there and it's what I do for a living. It's my passion."

Do you have any sense that the public feels you've betrayed them, I ask, or is it the media that rejects you?

"It's totally a media thing. They jumped on my first rehab, when they got into the grounds and blew my anonymity apart - and the public stood by me. Then coming out - and the public stood by me. And then the divorce was messy - and the public stood by me. Then when this happened, it was almost like the press went, 'All right, we didn't get him on the other three, we'll get him on this.' "

Twice I ask about homophobia. He's reluctant, but finally says, "I didn't believe it existed, having lived in the straight world, but having it come at you is quite scary. I just hope that the public can see [this book] for what it is. All I've put down is exactly what happened, the facts, from the others as well, and more detail of what we've been talking about. I had to do it."

If Barrymore is only truly alive on stage, there, he's utterly fearless. Can he reveal the secret of great improvisation, of which he's a master? Have a base structure, he says. "Nobody in the world works improv without it. The trick is to make it look like you've made it all up. A lot of it I do, but you have to have a rough idea, even if you never go there, of what you're going to do. You have to look around, clock everything before you go to move. While you're distracting the audience, making comments about what's going on, the improv will come. Look and look and look behind you. Nobody ever looks behind them. They always work to the audience."

Maybe that's what happened to Barrymore. He forgot to look behind him and tragedy ensued. Sure, a man can drown in minutes, but reading his story it's apparent that Barrymore was drowning for years. Let's hope he's finally reached the safety of dry land.

• Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight is published by Simon & Schuster on Monday, priced 18.99. Scrooge: The Musical is at His Majesty's Theatre in Aberdeen from 21 November to 2 December. Tickets 15.80-32.80, tel: [phone].