Dark times behind the laughter

It takes a brave woman to write about her husband, especially when that man is a hilarious Glaswegian with a foul mouth. MICHELE HEWITSON talks to Pamela Stephenson.

He was born on the kitchen floor in a squalid Glasgow tenement. Abandoned by his mother when he was 3, he was raised by two aunts, one of whom was subsequently removed to a psychiatric institution after years of subjecting him to physical and emotional abuse.

His father abused him sexually for years and, when the boy grew up, berated him incessantly for being both useless and godless. The boy later become a welder who went on benders and married an alcoholic.

Somewhere along that dreary, harrowing way he became Billy Connolly, a famous, foul-mouthed comedian. He divorced his wife and married another comedian he met during a spoof interview in which she was wearing false buck teeth.

A psychologist might have quite a bit to say about that potted biography.

She does. Pamela Stephenson, or Dr Pamela Connolly as she is known to her clients, is the former comedian turned psychologist who married the man who could drink 30 brandies a night and who, when drunk, turned into "a mean, violent, out-of-control nutter with psychotic rage, frequent blackouts and memory loss".

She felt that if she left him he would die. She stayed. He kept drinking. In 1981 she read an AA manual, realised he was about to self-destruct anyway, told him so and said goodbye. He gave up the booze for a year, went back to binge drinking, had a near-death experience which involved a bus, a bad joke, a ravine and Michael Caine.

He finally stopped drinking in 1985. Now Stephenson has written a bestselling biography of her husband called, simply, Billy. You don't have to be a clinical psychologist to be married to Billy Connolly, quipped a British newspaper, but it helps.

On a phone call from LA, the New Zealand-born Stephenson laughs at that one - although she's undoubtedly heard it many times before. But I'm more interested in whether she thinks, when she's wearing her shrink's hat, that their early relationship had what she would describe to a client as a healthy basis.

"No, absolutely not," she says emphatically, "and I think I've alluded to it in the book. Some people have a sort of caretaking part of them and there are different levels of this."

For some people, she says, it [the caretaking drive] can be distinctly unhealthy. For others, well, "maybe there are people who go to university and become psychologists".

Although you might speculate that two comedians in one family is one too many, for Stephenson the decision to move out of comedy and into psychology indicated a desire to avoid the public eye as much as anything.

She is, she says, sought out by clients for her experience of living in that limelight. Her dissertation was on the intra-psychic experience of fame.

She's almost pathologically tight-lipped about her clientele (to the point where she suggests questions in advance, and through her publicist, "along the lines of ... ") but she admits her experience in showbusiness is appreciated. "The fact that I changed my career successfully might be something that people see me about."

It is, of course, part of the code of ethics of the profession that she doesn't talk about her clients. It doesn't help the case for the book that its subject, Mr Connolly, is given to make jokes about being on his wife's couch. "I love it," he has said, "I'm a work in progress. Me."

The dilemma, says Stephenson, was more about whether the book "might negatively affect my patients".

Billy, she stresses, "is not a patient". And Billy, the book, is not a case study, she says. "I mean, there are elements where I've felt it's important to step back and try to look a little more objectively, and my ability to think about him somewhat objectively has come from my training."

Stephenson found the early parts of Connolly's life much easier to write. It became harder from the time she entered his story. Stephenson had to wrestle with reaching a degree of detachment appropriate as both biographer and wife.

The compromise reached has resulted in a book which tells all but reveals much less. Part of the reason the book was written was because "a couple of people have written biographies and never even met Connolly, and there's a lot of crap in those biographies," says Stephenson.

"And I think that sooner or later somebody was going to write another biography. The thing is that I had such a strong feeling, probably stronger than Billy, that his story is a marvellous story, a triumphant story."

The psychologist in Stephenson feels that retelling that story may give hope to other survivors of abuse and other sufferers of learning disorders. But she is also aware that in less sensitive hands it could have been sensationalist stuff.

The sexual abuse at the hands of Connolly's now-dead father is the story which has been seized on. Connolly's gutsy revelation that the most awful aspect of the abuse was that it was faintly pleasurable, physically, was always going to make headlines.

Stephenson, though, believes that "because he had so many other forms of abuse, I don't think that that's been the worst aspect, if you want to look at it comparatively - which may not be such a good idea. But I think it was worse for him to experience his father's betrayal and disapproval, even though it was all bound up together."

She's keen to make the point that "as a society we tend to be so uptight about sexuality, but the focus should be more, I think, on how wrong it is not to appreciate our children and to name-call them and tell them they're lazy and stupid. All those things are really hard to shift in people."

You have to wonder who was braver: Connolly for letting this story be told, or Stephenson for taking on the writing of it.

There was the little problem of memory lapses with a man who spent decades bombed out of his tree. And a man who, says Stephenson, was diagnosed in adult life as suffering from attention deficit disorder.

She tells a story about a family holiday, when their three daughters were all under 5. Connolly reached the airport and discovered he'd forgotten his passport. He had to join a distinctly unimpressed Stephenson the next day. How was he going to remember what he did on a certain day in 1974?

It's tempting to see Stephenson's interest in psychology, which resulted in Connolly seeing his own therapist, as a form of self-preservation.

"I can say to myself more easily: this was pretty predictable and just take a deep breath and know that he's not deliberately trying to make my life miserable."

Not yet, at least. Is there, I ask Stephenson, any danger that Connolly will write a biography called Pamela? "Unfortunately," she laughs, "I think it's a threat which is likely to come true."

* Pamela Stephenson is speaking at the New Zealand Herald/Dymocks literary lunch, at the Carlton Hotel, Monday December 3, 12-2.30 pm. Billy, is published by HarperCollins, $34.95.