The Rocky Horror man
The Rocky Horror Show creator is enchanted by the world - and the world is equally fascinated by him, writes Bridget Jones.
"I was the most caned boy in my school. They thought it was character-building, they wanted to make a man out of me - well that worked!" Richard O'Brien
He’s a vision in black as he calls for us from the top of the staircase. Black jeans, black leather jacket, black cowboy boots. He warns the photographer to dig out some vaseline for the camera lens. His 75-year-old face might need softening this morning. But there is undoubtedly something fluorescent about Richard O’Brien.
He slips into accents and funny voices, talks with hands and arms waving, shooting off on tangents, but always coming back to the matter at hand. He natters about startling Prince Phillip at a charity event, of running away from what would become The Crystal Maze after just a day of filming, of the truth behind Noah’s Ark and the beginning of man.
‘‘I don’t have a big brain, I was never an academic,’’ O’Brien says, but he is certainly interested in where we came from and what makes us tick. ‘‘What makes us the way we are, is curiosity.’’
The process of discovery is part of what he loves about hosting DNA Detectives, which sees famous Kiwi folk discover their own origins. The second season is about to start, and is the reason for this audience with a man who is actually pretty private these days.
The story of Richard Smith (O’Brien was his mother’s maiden name) began in Gloucestershire in
1942, and his family moved to New Zealand 10 years later. After years of red tape, he was finally granted citizenship in 2011.
It’s clear he sees his New Zealand homecoming as a transformational moment. Maybe the first of many.
‘‘We arrived at Franklin station [in Hamilton] at about two o’clock in the morning. We were picked up by our sponsor, and there we were. The first day, after about eight hours of sleep, I ran along that bank at the top of the Waikato River, under the railway bridge. There was dappled light coming through the trees and I thought, ‘I’m home, I’m free’. People are smiling and talking to you, there are no divisions. It was healthy.’’
What would life have been like if he hadn’t woken up in the land of milk and honey that morning in
1952? ‘‘I dread to think, actually,’’ he says, maybe with a hint of a shiver. There were struggles though. His childhood wasn’t always a simple one.
‘‘I was the most caned boy in my school. If I was talking in class, I’d get the cane and the other guy would get 100 lines. Why? Because they thought it was characterbuilding, they wanted to make a man out of me – well that worked!’’ he says with a howl of laughter.
O’Brien had a tricky relationship with his parents too. He calls his mother ‘‘a silly lady, a snob’’ who wanted to forget her working-class roots, while his accountant father was distant until late in his own life. ‘‘Then he started to worry about me being transgender, but I told him, ‘don’t worry. If anybody f.... with me they are f...... with the wrong tranny’.’’
O’Brien spoke about identifying as transgender, or a third gender, in 2009 and later explained that he feels 70 per cent male, and 30 per cent female. As a child, confused about his sexuality, he says he kept the truth hidden – it was the only way he felt he could stay safe.
‘‘If you were gay, you couldn’t tell anybody – you’d get prison time for getting a bit of rock and roll. And being transgender was worse because you don’t fit into anything, you couldn’t explain it to anybody. So, I lived in my head and developed my imagination, to some extent. And now, here we are.’’ O’Brien knows he was lucky, because keeping things bottled up can only go on for so long. ‘‘I think if you are not careful, you’d go mad. It’s not healthy, just look at the suicide numbers among the young, and the not-young, men who couldn’t take it any more. I think it’s so much nicer now. I pick up the paper sometimes and read a tale about parents with a young child who is obviously more feminine than he is masculine, and they support him. I think that’s healthy. There’s a better outcome from that, eventually, isn’t there?’’
He’s not melancholy about his lot, far from it. He is, by self-proclamation, the luckiest man in the world. And he doesn’t look backwards often.
He says he would never accept a knighthood (‘‘It would go against everything I believe’’) and he doesn’t believe in pride either.
‘‘Pride comes before a fall,’’ he reminds me. But he’s happy with The Rocky Horror Show. Happy that something he made all those years ago to entertain, has helped people.
‘‘That it has enabled them to come to terms with their own sexual problems and dysphoria, and that it’s given them a reason to carry on and it’s been helpful in their lives. That’s very nice because it has nothing to do with me, it wasn’t the intention. But of course, I would have thought there would be a certain amount of catharsis in writing that, yes,’’ he says, given his own struggles. The runaway success might never have happened though, if not for a bit of that luck. O’Brien, fed up with his life cutting hair in Hamilton, returned to England for what was meant to be a year’s working holiday in 1964. He was still living in his head, still confused about his sexuality.
He rode horses in movies to break into show business, while studying at drama school at night. There, he became friends with Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton.
‘‘And I was a dustman,’’ O’Brien recalls. ‘‘Chrissie introduced me to the rock-ocracy of the sixties – there wasn’t a better place to be.
‘‘My life changed... I got more confidence, self-education takes place, I began to read more voraciously. It’s a drip, drip, drip effect.’’ He began writing songs because there was no one telling him he couldn’t. And when he got to England, he bought a guitar and knocked on people’s doors. He had songs to sing, and he wanted to sing them to people who made records. What’s wrong with that? ‘‘When I went back, [being from New Zealand] was a card I held that allowed me to go anywhere because I wasn’t over-educated, so I kept my mouth shut. I was a polite boy. I wasn’t terribly handsome, but I was good-looking in a boy-next-door kind of way, and as a consequence, I didn’t have to explain about myself – I came from New Zealand.’’ Eventually, he was cast in Hair, and then joined Jesus Christ Superstar as King Herod, before being fired. He wasn’t a good fit. But he was a new dad – he has three, now-grown, children – and packing it all in seemed like the sensible choice.
‘‘I thought I had better get home to New Zealand and get a proper job. I’d seen too many actors sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. I didn’t want to do that – I had responsibility now.’’
He set himself one final test – if he could do an entertaining 20 minute performance at EMI’s Christmas party, he’d stick it out. He wrote a song, cracked some jokes and got the laughs that let him carry on for a little longer.
The song sparked something – an idea about B-movies, sci-fi and horror shows. The song was Science Fiction/Double Feature. Some of those doors he’d knocked on earlier got another visit, and in the summer 1973, The Rocky Horror Show opened in a cosy, 62-seat theatre up a long flight of stairs.
During the first show, a thunderstorm erupted, a crack of lightning hitting the skylight above the audience and framing horror movie maker Vincent Price, who was sitting below. ‘‘If that isn’t an omen, I don’t know what is,’’ O’Brien remembers saying at the time.
‘‘It was astonishing the people who climbed those stairs to see our show. On the last night of that run, Elliott Gould and Mick Jagger were turned away because we couldn’t do our last performance. Rocky had got glitter in an uncomfortable region – a swelling took place and the show was cancelled.’’
These days, O’Brien is happiest doing nothing. As long as his ‘‘divine’’ wife, Sabrina, is by his side, simply shutting the gate of their rural Bay of Plenty home brings the greatest joy.
‘‘I love doing the cryptic crossword. I write a song occasionally, if I feel moved to do so. I drink a bottle of wine a day.’’
He favours a red (‘‘but the holy grail, is finding the best wine at the cheapest price’’). He likes television, but loves David Attenborough, a man who, he says, can ‘‘can reach through the screen and entertain us without shouting at us, or being over dramatic’’. Takes one to know one, maybe. O’Brien had been married twice before he and Sabrina tied the knot at home in 2013 but he says this time it’s different. He didn’t expect to find this kind of love, at this stage of life.
‘‘I’d never been in love. I’d been married, I’d had relationships, but I’d never been in love, deeply in love. The kind of love that you’d kill for the person.
‘‘I’m happier, nicer. I know that I’m, I don’t know, I know that I mean something. To be needed is wonderful. I am the luckiest person on the planet. I could do with a face lift, though, maybe a head transplant.’’
He’s happy, still working, and madly in love with a woman 32 years his junior. But at 75, he knows he’s also getting old. And he hates it. He hates his failing eyesight, his hearing that’s starting to pack up, his back that goes on him an awful lot, and that his self-described vanity is not being satisfied like it once was.
But, perched atop the bar of his hotel, there’s not a smear of that vaseline he requested in sight. His face, his limbs, folded up, under and over, and his eventual dismount, do not suggest we are looking at a pensioner. O’Brien is a man who still wants to entertain, and be entertained.
‘‘If there was a life after death – if – I wish we would be sat down in the most comfortable chair, with a wraparound screen of the universe, and they go, right this is how it happened. We’ve got eternity, so we could sit there forever, with someone refilling the popcorn,’’ he says.
❚ DNA Detectives returns at 8.30pm, November 7 on TVNZ 1