Is Dame Edna star embroiled in a family feud?
The son of comedian Barry Humphries has publicly declared that he is dropping his famous surname after being disinherited
WHEN Oscar Humphries was 13 his father Barry took him to Venice. One day the two art lovers sat in their hotel room, side by side, and painted the same view of the church on the other side of the Grand Canal. “His painting was better,” Oscar conceded in a recollection of the episode 12 years later.
This touching vignette tells us at least two things. The pair had shared interests and their relationship had survived a bitter divorce five years earlier during which Oscar’s mother had “spoken pages of bile” about his adulterous father and taken him for almost everything he had.
Which makes it all the more surprising that Oscar and Barry, the man the world knows best as his lilac-haired, social-climbing Australian alter ego Dame Edna Everage, appear to have had the mother of all falling-outs.
“Changing my name,” Oscar, 36, announced in a dramatic message posted online this week. “F*** you for disinheriting me.”
The fine art dealer and journalist claims that he was told the news at an event which should have been suffused with joy: the celebration of his engagement to Sophie Oakley, a beautiful blonde art expert who is the daughter of the explorer Tom Oakley.
“They let me know twice, once at lunch and once at my engagement party,” says Oscar, without specifying who “they” are. Barry has been married to his fourth wife Lizzie Spender, daughter of the late British poet Sir Stephen Spender, for 27 years.
Oscar is the son of Barry’s previous wife, Australian surrealist painter Diane Milstead. His father has another son Rupert with Milstead and two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his second marriage to dancer Rosalind Tong.
Humphries junior is now known as Oscar Valentine on Facebook – a combination of his first and second names – and says by way of explanation: “New name. I never wanted the little bit of money anyway. Liberating after the shock. The feeling is, ‘Well, I’ll do it myself’.”
Oscar later dismissed the row as “an in-joke with a friend” and deleted the abusive message but did not reinstate his father’s name on Facebook and London gossips remain intrigued by the situation.
Oscar became addicted to alcohol and cocaine as a teenager and in July 2002 – aged 21 – was accused of trashing a room in a Suffolk guest house. The following morning he checked himself into celebrity rehab clinic The Priory. “My behaviour and my lifestyle were getting out of control,” he said. “I took my drug use one step too far.”
He added: “It’s a form of insanity. I’m just the sort of person who wants more of everything. I smoke too much, drink too much and I always want more money.”
But the worst was to come. On Christmas Day that year he was rushed to hospital following a suicide bid. The word at the time was that he was depressed over the end of his relationship with Octavia Khashoggi, then 19, daughter of Soraya, the ex-wife of the late billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Within months, however, Oscar had rediscovered his joie de vivre and embarked on an affair with Jimmy Choo tycoon Tamara Mellon, a woman 13 years his senior. After he made the mistake of writing a thinly disguised description of his much older lover for a newspaper, Mellon was outed and their fling made headlines around the world. Oscar fled to Australia to avoid the repercussions.
In the years that followed he rebuilt his life, kicked the drink and drugs and paired up with model Sara Philippidis, who became his first fiancée. By the time they split Oscar had been made editor of art magazine Apollo and after three years there started working for art galleries. His last known post was director of sales for the Stephen Friedman Gallery in Mayfair.
His engagement to Sophie was announced in the Times in May but only after he had posted a picture of them online alongside the words: “Happiness is hearing ‘yes’ from your best friend.”
NOW that happiness has been marred. Only last year Oscar wrote about the addict’s “pangs of guilt that come and go like bad weather” and lamented his inability to dance sober. If he has lapsed into his old ways, no one is better qualified to empathise than his father: Barry’s own troubles with addiction were equally traumatic.
After arriving in the UK in 1959 he began hanging out with seasoned boozers in Soho such as artist Francis Bacon and journalist Jeffrey Bernard. But what started as a Bohemian drinking habit turned into alcoholism. By the time he was appearing in the Lionel Bart musical Maggie May, Barry would leave the theatre every night for a mental hospital where he underwent treatment for psychiatric problems, partly induced by alcohol and partly by serial infidelity. He was, he said later, “a dissolute, guilt-ridden, self-obsessed boozer”.
Things came to a head in 1972 when he was mugged and found face-down in a parking lot. After drying out in various hospitals he went to Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn’t had a drink since. The question is: can this father and son – who have so much in common – regain the bond they had all those years ago in Venice.