Feature

The Fame of the the Dame

When the reporter giggled a nervous giggle, Edna added that while many actresses are close to their psychics, she talks to her gynecologist daily. "Something a lot of people don't know about me is that I have an exploratory every night before I go onstage," Edna said. "Yes, one minute I'm getting an exploratory and the next minute I'm onstage singing. And dancing. And my gyno is still washing his hands."

The studio fell silent. The reporter looked at her shoes. Humphries's press agent, Kevin McAnarney, suggested the photo shoot resume, and Edna was on her feet and throwing shapes in time with the motor drive. She raised her hands in front of her, palms out, in a showgirl's pose.

"Great," said the photographer, Joan Marcus, as the shutter clicked.

Edna raised an eyebrow. "And . . . great," Marcus said.

Edna put her hands at her waist. "And . . . great." When they finished, Dame Edna asked Marcus to pose with her for one shot. She wrapped Marcus in a tight embrace. Marcus beamed and hugged back. Just as an assistant was snapping the picture, Edna made a face like she was smelling a really nasty smell.

Humphries achieved campus fame in his undergraduate days at Melbourne University in the early fifties for his Dada sculptures of perishables -- meat and cakes and custard. "The Meatscape," he calls it. "It struck me as an amusing comment on the concept that a work of art is to be something permanent, a monumental challenge to the artist." John Lahr's 1992 biography of Humphries tells of a recurring stunt involving a group of female friends whom he dressed in schoolgirl uniforms and groped and kissed on street corners until police showed up. The object of the game was to observe the range of reactions from the public, which was never -- not even at the end -- let in on the joke. "It was an experiment I performed for myself," he explains.

Humphries grew up in Camberwell, a "garden suburb" of Melbourne, on a subdivided golf course his father, an architect, had helped to build. As occupations in postwar Melbourne went, his father's was about as bourgeois and pregnant with national ambition as could be. Hence Humphries's obsession with residential architecture, and Edna's constant references, he explains in his autobiography, More Please, to "burgundy wall-to-wall carpets, lamington cakes and reindeers frosted on glass dining-room doors." Before Edna came along, he writes, so much of Australia's culture had not been subjected to satire, and "Edna's simpering genteelisms and her postwar, house-proud rhapsodies had a kind of thrilling novelty."

Mostly, Humphries was bored by Australia -- an ahistorical and culturally dead place, "the land where nothing happens," in the lyrics to Edna's version of "All Things Bright and Beautiful." And so in 1959, Humphries set off for London. Within months of his arrival, he was joined by a handful of Australian expatriates. "We had sort of a Melbourne group and a Sydney group," he says. "Most of the people from Melbourne were painters -- Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, Brett Whiteley, and me -- and the Sydney University group were generally writers and filmmakers: Bob Hughes, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Bruce Beresford. And what all of us had in common was a desire to not be in Australia."

Though Humphries hasn't lived in Australia in decades, Dame Edna is perhaps the most famous "person" in the country, and Humphries's influence on the vernacular is still in evidence. A couple of weeks ago, for example, shuffling through the photography section at the Strand bookstore in a three-piece tweed suit and sharkskin boots, he opened a Jock Sturges book full of nude photographs and said, "There are a lot of maps of Tasmania in this." He was using a common Australianism that likens a woman's pubes to the triangular island. "Did you know," Humphries said, "I invented that expression?"

A number of his coinages, he claims, have ended up in the Australian vernacular. Most of them are crass, laddish euphemisms for bodily parts and functions introduced by Barry McKenzie, a very Australian cartoon character he invented for the English satirical magazine Private Eye. "Pointing Percy at the porcelain, for urinating, that's another one. The word chunder, for vomiting. Pillow biter, for pooftah, you know, homosexual.

"Barry McKenzie also popularized an obscure drink that was only served in Melbourne called Foster's lager," he went on. "At the time I introduced Barry and really all these characters" -- Edna; Sandy Stone, the world's most boring suburbanite; Sir Les Patterson, an Australian diplomat interested in bedding anything that walks, utilizing his "frequently felt tip" -- "Australia was in the midst of this terrible paranoia. The country was interested in promoting this image as a land of refined people on yachts having wine and cheese. They didn't want the place to be known as some old place where people were yabbos and actually used colloquial speech."

Humphries's American audiences tend to bring their own set of cultural references to the show. Some of the most common misconceptions: That Edna is played by a woman. That she is English. That Barry Humphries is English. That Edna is a drag or cross-dressing act. "The terms cross-dressing and drag imply to me the idea that the performer is doing something furtive and projecting his true self by dressing up as a woman," Humphries says, adding with some irritation that the audience is built upon "a lot of old people and tour groups of gay men."

While Humphries has made Edna's routine more topical and geared to New York (and to the constituents he calls his "unmarrieds") -- there are references to Balthazar, Big Cup, and James Levine, and he's considering a line about how Larry King, Henry Kissinger, and Liz Smith have all proposed to Edna -- the fact remains that Edna is an essentially Commonwealth character. "There's a lot of educating about Edna that's had to be done," he says. So why bother starting over in the U.S. practically at square one? Because he's still smarting over his "rather dissatisfying shot at New York in October 1977," he says. "It's the theater center of the world. I didn't want to live any longer without knowing whether I could be a success on Broadway." Not long ago, Humphries was curious about Richard Eder, the Times critic who'd panned his Off Broadway debut in '77, and had a friend look up Eder's name in the Library of Congress catalogue. "I did gain a certain satisfaction to see that Mr. Eder has no words to his name," he says. "And Edna, Humphries, and Les Patterson have thirteen."

At the penthouse apartment Humphries is renting near Sutton Place, he waited for his agent, Bob Duva, to take him to a lunch with some TV executives who are keen to develop another network show. Humphries's fourth wife, Lizzie Spender, whose father is the British poet Stephen Spender, brought coffee onto the terrace. Humphries and Lizzie met in 1988, at a Groucho Club party ("and I called her a few years later, when I was in a less married state," Humphries says).

Duva showed up, an industry-looking guy with candent silver hair, purple-lensed sunglasses, and a black T-shirt, sport jacket, and pants with give. Humphries disappeared to use the phone. "I've been getting tons of calls from TV people," Duva said. "And the idea I have is maybe to incorporate Dame Edna in a TV series, just partner Dame Edna with -- I'm going to pull a name out of the hat just because it's there -- Joan Rivers. Duva represents Joan Rivers. Like maybe Dame Edna and Joan Rivers are playing sisters-in-law on a TV series. It could be Tracy Ullman and Dame Edna. Or you take on -- who's the guy who took over NewsRadio?" He paused. "Help me." Jon Lovitz. "Jon Lovitz and Dame Edna. You know what I mean? Something kooky like that could work."

Lizzie reappeared. Duva's ideas were presented to her. "Hmmm," she said, surprised. "I'm not sure if Edna's right for a sitcom."

"I definitely think there's a way to do it. Maybe we'd do Dame Edna running a charm school," Duva said. "You know, alternative television didn't exist when Dame Edna had her show the last time. It's actually a millennium market. It's a new thing, if you know what I mean."

Back inside, Humphries was ready to meet the TV industry, a different pocket square under each lapel. He looked at Duva optimistically and said, "So, lunch, then?"

Duva's dual-star-sitcom proposal was again discussed, and for once, Humphries's face went blank. "I don't know about that yet," he said. "I'm surprised. I guess it's okay to have a show with someone else as long as I'm the funniest."