Anything Goes Read online

  Anything Goes

  Praise for Anything Goes

  ‘Anything Goes is a refreshingly honest, funny and engaging read that hooks readers from the opening chapter.’

  Woman’s Way

  ‘The book has the right saucy, sassy, somewhat overexcited quality for an afternoon on the sofa with a box of violet creams.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Multi-talented John Barrowman, the star of the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, tells of behind-the-scenes celeb high jinks, hilarious memories and the sometimes moving story of his two decades of work in the film, TV, music and theatre industry in this open and entertaining autobiography.’

  The Herald

  ‘Buy this out of curiosity, buy it for the insight into the worlds of stage and television, but most of all, buy it for his absolutely hilarious stories of a Glasgow childhood with a granny you’ll just adore.’

  Daily Record

  ‘John Barrowman is on a bit of a roll at the moment. Everything he touches seems to turn to gold and his heartfelt autobiography is no exception … This is a charming read that really gives us insight into John Barrowman.’

  Beige

  JOHN BARROWMAN

  Anything Goes

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  with Carole E. Barrowman

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  This electronic edition published 2009

  ISBN 978–1–84317–425–7 in EPub format

  ISBN 978–1–84317–426–4 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © John Barrowman 2008, 2009

  The right of John Barrowman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All pictures courtesy of John Barrowman, and reproduced with his kind permission, apart from page 20 (above) and page 24: © BBC

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Designed and typeset by e-type

  Plate section designed by www.envydesign.co.uk

  www.mombooks.com

  Contents

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  ‘I Hope I Get It’

  ‘Milly, Molly, Mandy’

  ‘Defying Gravity’

  ‘Journey of a Lifetime’

  ‘Don’t Fence Me In’

  ‘New Ways to Dream’

  ‘The First Man You Remember’

  ‘That’ll Show Him’

  ‘No One is Alone’

  ‘High Flying Adored’

  ‘Love Changes Everything’

  ‘Anything Goes’

  ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With Us’

  ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’

  ‘Putting It Together’

  ‘There’s No Cure Like Travel’

  ‘Being Alive’

  ‘Together Wherever We Go’

  ‘Live, Laugh, Love’

  Timeline

  Index

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their daily routines if they burst into song at significant moments. So, if you’re reading this while travelling on the Tube, standing at a bus stop, queuing at your local bookstore, or even sitting on the loo, don’t resist the urge. As Mama Rose famously said in the musical Gypsy: ’Sing out, Louise!’

  Musical theatre gave my professional career its start and musicals remain one of the unifying passions in my life, which is why I’ve organized this book according to songs from some of my favourite shows. As you’ll soon discover, each chapter has a song for its title, representing a significant event, a life lesson, or a tale or two from a particular time. Like many of my favourite musicals, the narrative of my story avoids a straight chronology and shifts backwards and forwards through my life. When you’ve finished reading, I hope you’ll have a clearer, more detailed picture of who I am as a person and as a performer than from anything else you’ve read about me.

  To be honest, here’s what I really hope – that by arranging the book in this way, you’ll feel as if you and I are lounging in our pyjamas on the couch in my Cardiff living room, sharing a bottle of champagne or a pot of tea, with music on in the background, having a blether and a laugh about my life so far.

  This book has been a collaborative effort with my sister Carole. She spent most of a summer and lots of iChat time listening, laughing, enquiring and reminiscing with me. I recorded my stories and memories on my iPod, and Carole gave them structure and shape. In order to achieve this, though, she thoroughly neglected her family for a while. As a result, Carole and I would like publicly to thank Kevin, her husband, the Associate Dean of Humanities and Professor of History at Alverno College, as well as the Barrowman Casey household’s backbone and the one who keeps all of them in clean socks and hot meals. Carole also wants to give lots of hugs and many thanks to Clare and Turner, who have learned to put up with having a writer for a mother with humour and aplomb, and who can live without her for weeks without hurting each other or their dad.

  Of course, like all good musical productions, this book owes a great deal to a supporting cast that I’d like to acknowledge before this show begins. Firstly, I’d like to thank warmly all the folks at Michael O’Mara Books for their patience, their commitment to the project, and their hard work in helping achieve its vision, especially Kate Gribble, Ana Sampson and Alison Parker. Thank you to my manager Gavin Barker, for all he does behind the scenes, and to my partner Scott, for keeping me grounded with a generous supply of love and support.

  For their contributions to this production and all that they add to my life, a special thanks to my big brother Andrew, his wife Dot, and my nephew and nieces Andrew, Yvonne and Bridgett; to all the Gills; and an equally deep thank you, as always, to Bev and Jim Holt.

  To my driver Sean, thanks for always getting me to the show on time, despite the distraction of yellow cars.

  To my fellow cast members, crew and production staffs, past and present, whether on stage or on screen, thank you for sharing your stories, your talents and your friendship with me over the years. You’re all the tops!

  Finally, and most importantly, Carole and I would like to dedicate this book with love and gratitude to our mum and dad, Marion and John Barrowman, without whom there would never have been any stories to tell.

  Now, turn the pages and sing along.

  John, 2008

  ‘I Hope I Get It’

  The scene opens with a high shot of Covent Garden. Tourists are clustered around a street performer who has a sword balanced on his forehead and tea plates spinning on a tray in each hand. The weather is unseasonably warm for June, so a few of the foreign tourists wandering in the crowded, cobbled square are carrying colourful umbrellas for shade. From this lofty angle, it looks as if someone has tipped a box of Smarties on the ground below.

  Enter
our leading man stage left.

  That would be me.

  A soprano’s voice rises from the cafe tucked underneath the open-air market, a cocky vendor scolds a shopper for ignoring his patter; all around, laughing children, honking taxis, boisterous students and the release of air from the brakes of a nearby double-decker tour bus blend to create a cacophony of sounds. This is summer in London’s West End.

  A teenage girl accompanies our leading man.

  That would be my niece Clare, my sister Carole’s daughter. Every year since they were quite young, she and her brother Turner have spent time with me during their school holidays; an invitation that’s open to all my nieces and nephews when they’re old enough to travel on their own.

  The leading man and his niece are chattering away, despite the fact that she has to skip every few steps to match his stride.1 After a beat, it becomes clear from the way our leading man is weaving through Covent Garden’s busy marketplace that he’s on a mission.

  Oh, I was. I was between performances of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Anything Goes, which was in full swing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. The matinee usually finished around five and that gave me an hour or so to myself before the evening performance. After nearly twenty years in theatre, doing eight shows a week, down time is personal time and personal time for me means shopping.

  The camera zooms in for a close shot on our leading man and his niece, who are carrying packages while eating sandwiches from Marks and Spencer’s.

  Clare was devouring a chicken with lettuce on white, a bag of crisps and a Crunchie. She’s short, but despite her sweet tooth, she’s in good shape. I was scarfing down two avocado-and-spinach sandwiches, prawn crisps, and a bag of Percy Pigs. I’m tall and I was hungry.

  The shot widens on the two as they approach Endell Street. We hear the leading man’s phone ring. He fumbles his food trying to answer quickly. He stops frozen in his tracks. His niece walks up his heels. She looks at the leading man anxiously because he never stops moving ever, especially when he’s shopping.

  Cut to close-up of leading man looking stunned.

  I was, in fact, gobsmacked. It wasn’t so much the nature of the call itself that was shocking, but that it had come through so quickly. I’ve been to hundreds of auditions over the years and one of the basic tenets an actor can count on is the wait between the audition and the decision to give you the part or not. The time between you leaving that audition room and ‘Congratulations, you’ve got the role,’ or ‘I’m sorry, but you’re too young / too old / too good-looking / too tall’2 can drag on for days or even weeks. Hours was simply unheard of.

  Camera follows Clare setting the packages down on the pavement in front of a tea stand.

  ‘Uncle John, are you okay?’

  Leading man nods.

  It was more of a grunt and a mad bob of my head, but that doesn’t sound nearly as suave. In fact, I have very little memory of Clare talking to me at that moment, but she remembers everything in crisp detail. She said she could hear Gavin Barker, my manager and close friend, talking excitedly on the phone. She claims I was not responding coherently. She remembers hearing bursts of applause from the crowd gathered around the street performer and working hard to block it out.

  What I remember is ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’ because my brain stopped working at Gavin’s first line: ‘John, they want you to be Captain Jack!’

  Camera cuts quickly to our leading man jumping off the ground, punching the air with his fists and letting out a rebel yell.

  Actually, what I screamed was, ‘I’m going to be in the TARDIS!’

  Camera zooms in on Clare, who has no clue what the hell is going on, but is used to her uncle’s antics and joins him in his manic celebratory dance. They leap and laugh and holler for a few minutes, and then the angle widens on our leading man performing a stunt that would make Keanu Reeves ask for paracetamol.

  Here’s what I did. I let go of Clare and I took a running leap up the side of the wall, did a kind of half flip and landed on the kerb, nearly knocking over an old-age pensioner, who was watching the scene from the tea stand. I managed to catch her before she toppled off her chair, and despite my heightened emotions and frenzied behaviour, I remember thinking that I was lucky she hadn’t fallen, because I’d be late for the curtain if I had to wait for an ambulance.

  Camera cuts to a close-up of the leading man apologizing to the elderly woman, while Clare gathers up the old lady’s messages that have fallen over. ‘Messages’ is Glaswegian for groceries; as I am a Glaswegian by birth, it’s one of the many Scottish words and phrases that, even after all these years, remain in my vocabulary.3 However, of all the things I remember from this day – the time, the place, the going all Matrix on the wall – this pensioner’s response to the entire scene still makes me smile the most.

  She looked up at me and said, ‘Must’ve been good news, eh, son?’

  It was the best bloody news ever and it was the result of another phone call a few months earlier. I’d been lounging between scenes in my dressing room at the Theatre Royal, where I was playing Billy Crocker in Anything Goes for the third time in my career,4 when the call came in. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is London’s oldest theatre and, because of this, its dressing rooms are bigger than most of those in younger theatres. Mine had enough space for a couch, a few comfy chairs and a full bar, which – despite what the tabloids may sometimes have fans believe – was actually used sparingly. I was watching the end of a DVD, something I often did to pass the time, while my dresser, John Fahey, was preparing my costume for the next change, when Gavin rang.

  ‘Andy Pryor just called me. He thinks there might be a role in the new Doctor Who you’d be perfect for,’5 he said.

  At this point in my career, I’d been on television in the UK and in the US. I’d been a presenter on Live and Kicking and The Movie Game, and I’d played a John F. Kennedy Junior type in Darren Starr’s drama Central Park West, and a similar character in Aaron Spelling’s short-lived night-time soap Titans; however, I was most known for my work in musical theatre. I’d starred in a number of Broadway and West End musicals, including Stephen Sondheim’s Company, Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s Miss Saigon and Lord Lloyd-Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, and, in 1998, I was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Performance of an Actor in a Musical for my role in The Fix, directed by Sam Mendes. I’d recorded two solo albums and a number of cast recordings, sung ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in Mel Brooks’s film of The Producers, and performed ‘Night and Day’ in the biopic about Cole Porter, De-Lovely. To many West End producers, I was considered musical theatre’s quintessential leading man and I loved all that this allowed me to do, but a part in the new Doctor Who would top all of that.

  My sister Carole, who is eight years my senior, and my brother Andrew, who is older by five, had been fans of the Doctor since his inception on the BBC in the sixties, but I was too young to remember those original early episodes. I became a serious Whovian when I watched the series on WTTW Channel 11, Chicago’s public television affiliate, in the late seventies and early eighties.6 In case you’re unaware of such things, Who fans are ‘Whovians’; and I like to call Torchwood fans, ‘Woodies’. Doctor Who ran on Sunday nights in a British package that included Dave Allen at Large and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but for me it was the Doctor I enjoyed the most … and I loved them all. Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and Peter Davison ruled my Sunday evenings. I’d avoid homework, imagine eating Jelly Babies7 and let myself be carried off to other galaxies. To this day, I’m a terrable (oops) terrible speller. I blame the Doctor.

  The Brigadier and Sarah Jane, Autons, Cybermen and Daleks all flashed in front of me while Gavin gave me the details of the audition for Captain Jack.

  Andy Barnicle, my acting teacher at the United States International University in San Diego, once told me that for an audition the key is to remember that producers don’t always know how they want a character to be read, therefore the actor’s job is to sell the
m his or her interpretation. So I imagined who Captain Jack might be.

  I almost got it right.

  The audition was in a room at the BBC in Shepherd’s Bush, and the script from which I’d been asked to prepare was ‘The Empty Child’, written by Steve Moffat. The scene was the one where Jack first explains to Rose that he’s a con man. Russell T. Davies, the executive producer and the creative force behind the new series, Phil Collinson, the show’s producer, and Andy Pryor sat across the room from me at the audition.

  After introductions, I began. I read the first part of the scene as an American, but when Jack reveals to Rose that he’s not who he appears to be, I switched to a Scottish accent and finished the scene that way. My reasoning was that a British character might have more impact and, therefore, I’d stand a better chance of being chosen for the role; after all, as far as I knew, there’d never been an American male cast as a regular character in any of the classic series.

  ‘Can you do it again with an English accent?’ asked Andy.

  I could have done the entire bloody scene in an ancient Babylonian dialect if they’d asked. That’s how badly I wanted the role. In the end, I performed the scene three times using three different dialects. Top that, Hugh Laurie. Eventually, the audition ended, but instead of leaving the room, the four of us ended up in a conversation sharing stories about the original Doctor Who, our favourite assistants, our scariest villains, our pick for best episode.8

  From its start, I had a really good vibe about the audition and I knew my performance was strong – well, at least one of them. However, as any actor who’s ever been in this situation will tell you, sometimes good isn’t good enough. Plus, I was still a relative unknown in the British television market. Would they take a risk on an American? Would they see beyond the limitations that producers too often put on musical-theatre performers when it comes to working in another medium? More importantly, would they take a chance on me?