Ginette McDonald is good with voices. Now, a new anthology celebrates the long and varied career of the actor who brought us Lynn of Tawa. Just don’t call it a valedictory.
This is supposed to be an interview with the actor, producer and writer Ginette McDonald. It is, I realised swiftly, useless to even attempt interviewing Ginette McDonald. I happily admit defeat. Best just to sit back and enjoy her brand of entertaining stream of consciousness. You might not end up where you planned to go but her road trip is more thrilling. It involves careering head first along off-road detours, skidding through potholes and charging through gates.
It is also akin to attempting to interview a more genial version of the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Queen is given to shouting: “Off with his head! Off with her head!” There were a fair few decapitated heads lying on the floor by the end of my attempted interview.
A lot of things get her goat. Here is a by-no-means-exhaustive list: Hubris. Grandness. Toxic people. That journalist – the daughter of a close family friend – she invited into her house, where they had a good old gossip then some plonk. “Well, she wrote it as if she’d never met me in her life. And then I was this wild woman who drank continuously and smoked. I’m never letting a journalist in my house again.”
I was safely on the end of a phone so she was very nice to me. Phew. I wouldn’t care to be on the list of things and people who get her goat, although there is always the possibility I will have got her goat somewhere in this interview that was not an interview.
You know who Ginette McDonald is, or at least, was. She is still best known, and still adored, sometimes to her chagrin, for being the gum-chewing Lynn of Tawa, the character she conjured when she was just 16 and who became “a blessing and a curse”. Some people thought she really was named Lynn and did come from Tawa. Which you can see might be just a tad wearying.
Her brother Michael wrote the scripts. That nasal, flat-as-a-failed-pikelet New Zild accent was all hers.
She is a genius at accents. Another list: She does, for me, her willing audience of one, a pitch-perfect Helen Clark. The late playwright Bruce Mason, who encouraged her to become an actor: “You’re a bit fat but you might have a career if you get on with it.” She loved him.
One of the accents she most relishes delivering is that of her Chinese hairdresser. McDonald says her daughter, actor Kate McGill, told her: “Mum. No. Don’t do the accent.”
“I told the Chinese hairdresser that I had been told off, and she said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t mind. Do it for me now.’ So I did. She has a patter where she gets any old bag in the chair, does something to their hair and then says: ‘Ooh, very sexy. You get husband now.’” She did the accent for me.
Chop. Plonk. Here roll more heads. A well-known female broadcasting legend who was a complete cow to her.
Some are dead (well, obviously, having had their noggins chopped off) but they have family alive so I’m not going to name them. But, chop, plonk, there is the satirist who undermined her; the high-up woman in telly she regarded as a friend, who was dismissive and condescending about McDonald’s pitch for a show involving the evolvement of a young Lynn of Tawa into an old trout Lynn of Tawa. Which, by the way, is a very good idea and someone high up in telly might well consider it.
Collector’s item
She is now a collection. NZ On Screen has launched The Ginette McDonald Collection on its website as a tribute to her long career. This is fabulous. It makes her sound like a fashion designer. She has always been a designer of her own career. She has always been a collection: of voices, of characters, of contradictions. Some people still think her Lynn of Tawa voice is her actual voice. Her real voice is cut-glassy. She has perfect enunciation. She says her voice is bossy and authoritative. “Everything I say sounds declamatory.”
She’s a keen observer of other people and if she declares you to be a “c---”, which is one of her favourite words – and if that word offends you, you are placed in the category of dull people – that’s you done for, forever. Off with your head.
The late broadcaster Paul Holmes only had his head half-severed because “Paul was all right”. Until he got famous and went all grand. She remembers him picking up a phone and baying at some hapless assistant: “Get me Bolger.” That is the sort of thing she would remember. Elephants may have long memories; she has longer ones. “And he’d throw lavish parties. I remember when he first got really successful, he bought a great big mansion on Gillies Ave and threw a party with a string orchestra by the pool and everybody famous he’d ever met in his life, and his suit trousers were too big for him.”
That too-big trousers detail is pure McDonald. It’s a throwaway line, delivered deadpan. It is dead funny – and deadly.
One of the toxic people she encountered along her way happened to be her mother. When she announced she wanted to become an actor, her mother said: “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not attractive enough.”
Once, when McDonald was about 18, she was in a play that included a scene where she was hurled to the floor. “And I was wearing one of those baby doll dresses, not very flattering. It was opening night and all she could say was, ‘When you went on the floor like that, you looked like a sack of potatoes.’”
If she met a boy she liked her mother would say: “‘Did he see you on stage?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, he saw me on stage.’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, God.’”
If a boy she liked hadn’t seen her on stage her mother would say, “Oh, thank God.” By which she meant that on stage, her daughter could pretend to be attractive. Off stage, she couldn’t.
Did she like her mother at all? “I think I liked her as much as she liked me.”
Her mother, despite not having a maternal bone in her body, had seven kids ‒ five boys and two girls. She didn’t like children. Why did she have so many? “It’s all a huge mystery. I think they gave her status.”
The boys might have. Girls weren’t status-enhancing. People say to McDonald, “Oh, I know you’re not a hugger.”
“But my god, you know we got no affection at all.”
She once went with her mother to visit “the marvellous old Austrian lady next door who was dying in hospital … She stroked her brow, she got a flannel and wiped her tenderly. You know, the way normal people do. I was gobsmacked.”
She and her sister have a sort of competition where they “argue about who was the more neglected. We think it’s a miracle that we’ve formed any relationships at all, really.”
She was hopeless at school, despite always being told she was bright. Teachers would drone on and she would “float away in my head. I think I was rather difficult, but I used to get upset that people were accusing me of being difficult or obstructive when really, in my mind, I wasn’t.” She thinks now, grudgingly, that it was probably ADHD.
Old and doddery
Her former partner, Kate’s father, is the writer David McGill. As to whether she has a bloke now, who knows? I asked if she lived with anyone and she said, gnomically, “from time to time”.
I asked how old she was and she said, “How old are you?” Sixty, I replied. “Well, I know you feel old now. I’m in my very early 70s. For a while there in my 60s, I was playing the old woman card. And it was sort of working. You know, in supermarkets, I’d say, ‘Excuse me. You look rather a tall young man. Would you mind reaching?’ And I thought, this is really going well, being old and doddery. But … be careful what you wish for.”
She also used to tell people she was semi-retired. Then she came to the realisation that if she went about pretending to be old and doddery and semi-retired, people would believe her and so wouldn’t offer her work. She retired that particular character.
Does that sound a bit mad? There is nothing mad about her, which has come as a great relief, not least to her, because there is a strain of madness in her family – which can create worry. Her grandfather “married up. Well, sort of. He married into a respectable Catholic family. And he married a woman who was quite beautiful but, unfortunately, insane.” This was passed on to at least two of her progeny – fortunately, not McDonald’s father but he “always lived in terror of it”.
McDonald used to get called mad by horrible children, which, of course, did make her mad, as in furious. They did it because they could and because children are innately horrible. Was she also a bit different? “Well, obviously.” She may have said this sardonically. Who could be certain? She says she is often accused of being sardonic when she is not being sardonic. Hmmm.
She hates bad manners. Bad manners include attempting to humiliate her. She once shared a stage with a “drunk” comedian who “ran out of material … and suddenly pointed at me, in front of a largely workingmen audience and said: ‘Look at her. Past her use-by date. This is what I’m stuck with.’ And you’re reduced to a level of vulgarity in order to respond. And my response to any insult like that is to say: ‘Don’t you worry. I wouldn’t fuck you either.’ Even for me, too coarse, but you have to nip it in the bud.” Hmmm, again.
Does she sound a bit cranky? It would be easy to make her sound that way. She isn’t; she just has strong opinions and expresses them forcefully. “People always misinterpret what I say.” If you can’t withstand the force that is McDonald, get out of the way, you wet flannel. Let’s settle for declamatory.
You imagine that she always had very sharp elbows to go with her very sharp wit. Still, there is a slight melancholy in the way she has described her career. She has said that she feels as if it was defined by men judging her. And, “I’ve always had people kind of underestimate me.”
She might at times underestimate herself. On the NZ On Screen tribute, she says, “I am still quite overwhelmed. As I said to my sister: ‘I mean, it’s like I’m dead.’ And she said: ‘I know. I couldn’t help thinking that should you die, the eulogy is going to be very easy to write.’”
That’s funny. But then there is this: “I suppose … there’ll be people who will go, ‘Why has she got an anthology when there are other people who have done huge amounts?’ But I guess, because I’m old, I was among the first.”
Honestly, people aren’t going to think any such thing. People will love the collection because people love her, even if some of those people actually love Lynn of Tawa. A blessing and a curse. Of the curse half of that equation, serves her right. That’s what you get for creating a fictional character that has endured and endeared for more than 50 years. That’s what you get for being a larger-than-life character in real life who has also endured and endeared.
She had just one request. “The main thing is, I don’t want it to sound all valedictory, like I’m in the depths of retirement in my dressing gown, because I still have to keep working.” That’ll do for the headline, I say: Ginette McDonald is Still Alive. “And kicking.” No kidding.
