THE BEST MEDICINE
HUMOUR IS HELPING THE CONNOLLYS COPE WITH BILLY’S CRUEL DIAGNOSIS
Despite Billy’s illness, the Connollys cope with humour
Billy Connolly was in a restaurant with his daughter Daisy the other night. It was the sort of Australian steakhouse that serves deep-fried onions cut in two to look like flowers. Daisy (33), who has learning difficulties so continues to live with Billy and his wife Pamela Stephenson, loves the restaurant. Billy doesn’t.
“It’s terrible. I have to sit there and pretend I’m enjoying myself,” he says with a merriment about his face that suggests he doesn’t have to pretend too hard. Billy adores his five grown-up children. So much so, you sense he’d pluck every hair from his distinctive lion’s mane of flowing locks to see them happy.
“So I’m sitting there and
I got a pain in my left side,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to get up from here and Daisy can’t help me.’ So I was working out a way to say to the waiter, ‘Excuse me, can you help me out of the seat?’ I was concerned. It was a thing that had never arisen in my life before.
“It was just one of those moments. In the end, I found the table was fixed to the floor so I could use it to pull on. But it was a question I’d never asked before. I was wondering what kind of words I should put it in: Should I tell him I’ve got Parkinson’s or will I just ask him to help me?”
Billy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder that affects the nervous system, three-and-a-half years ago. Last year, when we met in New York to mark a National Television Awards Special Recognition Award for his 50 brilliant years in comedy, film, music and TV, the effects of this cruel disease were barely noticeable. Today, his left side shakes uncontrollably. Pamela (67) has come with him to the hotel in which we meet, which is a few blocks from their home in Florida, where they moved four months ago.
The change has been swift. A week ago, he explains, he was put on some medication that’s “shaken me up a bit. This is actually the first medication I’ve been on. The specialist here in America kept me off it until I got to a certain point and then she put me on it. There’s a whole lot of shaking going on. It’s kind of weird, this instability. The only time it stops is when I’m in bed and then I can’t roll over.” He pauses and laughs, “I’m like a big log.”
Billy’s humour is a ridiculously contagious thing that’s kept many of us laughing for most of our lives. He loves being funny. As a wee boy, he’d sit in puddles to make people laugh. He’s now 74 but still likes nothing more than to plonk his bottom in the funny stuff of life. “I bought my kids a book at Christmas, The F*** it List:
All the Things You Can Skip Before You Die,” he says.
“It’s the things you have on your bucket list but have no intention of doing, like skydiving. I always wanted to skydive because I parachuted, but I’m not going to do it now.
“A sense of humour is absolutely essential. It’s the only thing that gets you through. Sometimes I get kind of dark about it. It’s because it’s forever, you know. It’s not like having pneumonia and you’re going to get better. You’re not going to get any better. A Russian doctor said, ‘It’s incurable.’ I said, ‘Hey, try, we have yet to find a cure.’ Incurable is so static and terrible. There’s no escape.
“It’s the first thing I think about in the morning because getting out of bed is quite hard. It’s a weird thing because it stopped me playing the banjo and
it stopped me smoking cigars. It seems to creep up on everything I like and take it away from me. It’s like being tested, ‘Cope with that, cope with life without your banjo.
Now I’m going to make your hand shake so you can’t tie your fishing flies any more.”’
Does he ever get angry? “Aye,” he says. “I apologised to Pam yesterday. I said, ‘I’ve been a bit gruff.’ She said, ‘Oh, you’re okay.’ I just get fed up.” Pamela and Billy met on the set of Not the Nine O’Clock News in 1979 and married ten years later.
She’s now an eminent clinical psychologist and bestselling author, but mostly, she worries about Billy. She stopped him “going down with the ship” with his heavy drinking when they first fell in love, and would move heaven and earth to be able to do so now.
So much so that last year, she decided they should leave their home of ten years in New York for a warmer climate in Florida. He likes nothing more than to spend his days “on the boat fishing” or drawing. “This one doesn’t shake,” he says, holding up his right hand. “So I can draw. I’ve had exhibitions. The other day, I drew a half man, half frog. It’s lovely here, it makes me feel good, plus when we moved it was winter in New York and I didn’t want to be sliding all over the sidewalk. I’m not very good with balance. I walk like a drunk man. You have to take that all into consideration. Pamela arranged it.”
Right now, Pamela is off fetching him some tea and honey. This morning, she brought him breakfast in bed. “I’d already got up so I had to get back into bed, so I had to get out twice just to be nice.” He laughs fit to burst. Again, it’s contagious. You just can’t help yourself around Billy. Then he stops. Pauses. Reflects for a moment.
“It’s kind of drawn us together,” he says. “I’m really dependent on her, you know physically, whereas I used to be the strong guy. Which is kind of pleasant. It’s a pleasant thing to
lose the strong guy. You don’t need it. So it’s nicer.”
Billy, born the youngest of two children in a tenement in Glasgow, was four years old when his mother Mary upped and left the family home. He and his sister Florence were bullied by two aunts who raised them and when his father William returned from serving in the
RAF in Burma, Billy was physically and sexually abused by him too. Such is Billy’s way of looking at life, he’s never really wallowed in self-pity. “There’s no need to be bitter about anything because there are great examples all around you,” he says. “I always remember going to my friends’ houses and how different the atmosphere was there. So there was always hope... in the distance.”
Again he stops and thinks. “This Buddhist thing [Billy, who was raised a Catholic, explored Buddhism after
‘ There’s no need to be bitter about anything because there are great examples all around’
meeting Pamela], this living in the moment is very good for that. This is all there is. The past doesn’t exist. You have to make it exist by thinking about it. Moments are all created.”
These moments have, by any measure, been pretty extraordinary even for a man gifted with an imagination as huge as Billy’s. Take, for example, the “pals” he’s made along the way: legends such as Eric Clapton, Sir Elton John and Eric Idle, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, the Duchess of York. “Prince Charles is a nice bloke. He’s got a soul,” he says. “Most of the royals I’ve met have been really nice. I like toffs. It’s like meeting P.G. Wodehouse.
“I remember Fergie’s two girls Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice were in our house in Los Angeles where we lived before moving to New York. They were with my girls playing in the dressing-up box. They both came into the room and said, ‘Look, we’re princesses.’” He rolls his eyes in humour.
His eyes soften. “Aye, fame’s great but if you’re not careful, you forget what your aim is in life because you’re under such tremendous pressure. When I was about 40, I did this deal with myself. I wrote down the things I wanted on a card and stuck it in my wallet. Things like where you would like to live, how you would like to live, what you would like to have. You have to give it a good deal of thought before you write it down and then you leave it sticking up so you can see it when you open your wallet. You don’t read it but it’s there poking you in the forehead. Remember, remember.”
He says he began “to relax a bit more” after the success of
Mrs Brown, the Oscar-nominated film about Queen Victoria’s relationship with her Scottish servant, in which he co-starred with Dame Judi Dench. “It was Judi Dench who sort of showed me. It was a lovely moment. We were doing the eight-some reel. She was opposite me in the circle and she was looking at me. I thought, ‘F***, she fancies me. What am I going to do?
Judi Dench fancies me.’ Then the penny dropped. She was acting. She was just being that person. You have to give your own self and I did it after that.” He pauses. “Where was I?”
Billy is beginning to tire.
He thinks. Continues. “I was looking at the card three weeks ago. Everything worked, so things have worked out pretty well. It happens because of the effort you put into your work. It pays off. Aye, moments are all created. They don’t just happen. I always like it when I walk on stage and they laugh when I say hello.”
Will he walk on stage again? “Aye, well...” he stops. Starts the sentence again. “I’ll have to see how this medicine works out. Life’s good fun. You must never forget it’s good fun as well. We used to say in Scotland, ‘We never died a winter yet.’ Winter comes and winter goes, and it never killed us before, so let’s get on with it.”
Billy smiles at the thought of this. It’s time for him to go. He needs to eat and rest. But as Pamela moves to help him up from his chair, he says he’ll try it himself. He manages it. Perhaps the medication is sorting itself out? “We live in hope,” he says. We do.