Billy by Pamela Stephenson

From the Publisher

With over 800,000 copies of the hardcover sold in Britain alone, Billy is the biography of the manic Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, written by his wife Pamela Stephenson. In an account by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, and evoking the poignancy of the Ireland of Angela's Ashes in its descriptions of Scottish tenement life, Stephenson tells how hard luck beginnings and an idiosyncratic talent made Billy the man he is. Filled with riotous anecdotes from Billy's shows, stories about his films (Mrs. Brown) as well as harrowing tales from his childhood, this is the book Connolly's adoring public has been waiting for.

Book Magazine

Comedian and actor Billy Connolly (Mrs. Brown, White Oleander is the subject of this blandly written biography, a No. 1 bestseller in the U.K., penned by his wife. A clinical psychologist, Stephenson analyzes her contradictory husband and chronicles his impoverished childhood and rise to stardom. The author is a name-dropper who bores listeners with endless lists of famous people, including Mick Jagger and Frank Zappa, who admire her husband. Those not already enamored of Connolly probably won't enjoy the book.

Publishers Weekly

The most celebrated comedian in the U.K., Billy Connolly makes headlines and sells out arenas like a rock star. But he's barely cracked the recognition barrier here in the U.S.: the closest he's come to American fame is a one-year stint as the teacher in the 1980s sitcom Head of the Class. This book, written by the comedian's wife, tells the story of Connolly's life, beginning with an Angela's Ashes-esque childhood. Raised in Glasgow's slums, Connolly was abandoned by his mother, abused by his aunt and later by his father. His future fame as an outrageous, hard-drinking, banjo-playing, absurdly dressed hippie-comedian is constantly measured and contrasted against the poor sense of self that the author roots in his childhood. Former comedian Stephenson (she was a Saturday Night Live cast member in the mid-'80s) is now a psychologist and Connolly's most ardent fan. She fills the text with glowing anecdotes and humorous quotes, not to mention a large dollop of name-drops. The only real problem with this audiobook is Stephenson's gentle tone. Her soft voice tells Connolly's highly dramatic story in the quiet way that a mother may read a bedtime story, which is odd considering the wild and crazy behavior she describes. Based on the Overlook hardcover (Forecasts, July 1, 2002). (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In the United States, comedian/actor Billy Connolly is best known for playing the teacher in the sitcom Head of the Class. In the U.K., however, he's a superstar, and this book was a huge best seller there. While it could use a subtitle and some tweaking for the U.S. market, it remains a candid (more matter-of-fact than melodramatic), sympathetic, and insightful biography. Credit "the unlikelihood of his extraordinary life," as well as the author: Stephenson, a performer turned psychologist, is Connolly's (second) wife. Growing up in Glasgow, Billy suffered poverty, abandonment, and abuse. His worldview expanded in the shipyards and the army. As a banjo player on the folk scene, Billy discovered his gift for verbal and physical comedy and gained fame especially as a song parodist. Stephenson was the first to challenge him about his drinking which "turned him into a mean, violent, out-of-control nutter with psychotic rage" but he not only cleaned up, he and his new wife took custody of his two children from his first marriage. Billy, writes the author, doesn't appreciate "beige people," and, as a man who got his nipples pierced after he turned 50, he certainly isn't one himself. For most performing arts collections. Norman Oder, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Clinical psychologist and former comedian Stephenson balances wifely affection with professional analysis in her biography of Billy Connolly, who survived abandonment as well as physical and sexual abuse to become a noted musician, comedian, and actor. The narrative alternates between the couple's current life in Los Angeles and Billy's early years in Glasgow, where he was born in 1942 as his father was about to leave for the battlefields of Burma. The Connollys were Catholics who had left Ireland to make a better life in Scotland, but they still could only afford a squalid tenement apartment with two rooms and a communal washroom. When Billy was three and older sister Florence not yet five, their mother walked out, leaving the kids alone in a cold apartment without food. His father's two unmarried sisters eventually took them in, but one of the aunts regularly beat and belittled Billy. Things only got worse when his father came back from the war and began sexually abusing the boy. School was no better; teachers were free with physical punishment and verbal abuse. In his teens, Billy began playing the banjo and singing and eventually left his job as a welder at the Clyde shipyards. He overcame a horrendous childhood to become famous, first in Scotland as a musician and comic, then in London, and now in the US. As Stephenson notes, "Billy's real story is an utterly triumphant one." Known for his outrageous wit and costumes, he initially had difficulty coping with fame. His first marriage failed, he took drugs and drank heavily. Stephenson, who met him while she was acting on British TV, details all the low moments as well as the highs: his doctorate from Glasgow University in 2001, hisacclaimed role in the movie Mrs. Brown, and his friendships with stars like Judi Dench, Michael Caine, and Dustin Hoffman. A loving case study, meticulously researched, best on the early years before the accolades began to accumulate. First printing of 75,000; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060537310
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060537319
• Format: Paperback, 304pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: November 2003

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Billy Connolly, King of Comedy, Master of Mirth, Chancellor of Chortling, as his children have been instructed to address him, is quivering in the wings of the spectacularly cavernous Hammersmith Apollo theatre.

'Pamela, what the hell am I going to say to these people?'

Horrified, I turn to face him. Oh God, here we go ... he's not bluffing. Now there are two of us heading for a full-blown fight-or-flight fit. Is it possible that this time, the first in history, he might actually freeze, forget, stammer, storm off stage or batter someone? I do not fancy witnessing his death by four thousand excitable Londoners. They begin to roar as his name is announced, clapping in unison and stamping their feet. It's the start of tonight's war, the one he always declares then dreads.

'You'll be OK ... '

I watch him arm himself mentally with an opening shot. As usual, he'll take no prisoners. I'm a white-knuckled wimp when the enemy's battle cry reaches its pitch ... then suddenly he's off. A blinding circle of light assaults him and I see his face change to a fighting calm. 'Scot of the Anarchic' is stepping out fearlessly into the front line. He might be gone for quite some time.

The bastard's done it again. Frightened me to death, and he's going to win after all. I peer out into the centre of the fray and witness a beautiful armistice, achieved in the first few disarming sentences from his scowling, apologetic mouth. There is always such a peace for him out there in that spotlight, probably the only place he's truly happy. Each time, it seems he's given another chance, a chance he's driven endlessly to re-create; it's a chance to gain mastery, to triumph over -- he can almost see their faces out there in the audience -- Mamie, William, Mona, Rosie. I notice that tonight it is especially Rosie who must be slain as he launches into hilariously savage tales of algebra and abject humiliation.

He is strutting, striding, tilting at windmills. I'm thinking, how weird that he is so aroused, furious and vindictive, yet his face at times seems almost beatific. Swathed in disgustingly musty wing velvets, I peek out at the front row. As individuals, these are hardly soldiers: T-shirted people, they are settled in comfortably to be transported to places where petrol prices, the babysitter, the in-laws, are replaced by tyrants and tenement buildings, by little old ladies in fat, furry coats, and the ubiquitous, noisy farts. It will all end in tears and some very sore bellies. I can finally breathe. He is blessed; encircled most brightly not by forty thousand watts but by his own fiery, evangelical fuck-youness.

℘

Ironically, Billy's very earliest memory is one of being terrified by a circle of light. Until he was three years old, he and his beloved sister Florence slept in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen. One evening she aimed a mirror reflection onto the wall, allowing it to pirouette and chase him until he screamed for mercy.

He had been born right next to that alcove on the kitchen floor, all eleven pounds of him plopping out onto freezing linoleum. The rage that followed this unceremonious introduction to the world has never left him, although it was a serendipitous launching for a future enemy of the bourgeoisie. For eight months he nestled in a wooden drawer with not one Fisher-Price contraption in sight.

His family's living arrangements were similar to those of thousands of other inhabitants of Glasgow, a city that had come to be defined by row upon row of late-nineteenth-century apartment buildings known as 'the tenements'. These fine architectural soldiers had originally been created by Glasgow's Improvement Trust, as model housing for working-class families. But by the time the Connollys moved into half of the third floor of 65 Dover Street in Anderston, many of them had deteriorated into rotting slums that would need more than a spot of paint to 'take the bad look off them', as Billy would say.

The classically derived elevations in red or yellow sandstone were usually pleasant enough, but the interiors were thoroughly depressing. A dingy central staircase, stinking of cabbage and cat piss, spiralled upwards to the flats. Two or more poky apartments were squeezed into each floor, usually with just two rooms apiece, and a communal lavatory out on the landing. Some families were lumbered with the 'coffin end', or corner apartment, which was even smaller than the rest.

The buildings themselves butted right onto the street and were usually entered via an interior alleyway known as a close. The 'Wally' closes, as some were called, were beautifully tiled halfway up the wall, with a leafy motif running along the top. Such finery, however, ended abruptly at the threshold of a darker, often treacherous, tunnel known as the 'dunny' (short for dungeon), that dead-ended in an enclosed rear courtyard, itself a veritable assault-course of broken bicycles, flapping knickers, and reeking middens.

Considering it now through a haze of nostalgia, Billy says the Glasgow tenement is a New York brownstone without a fire escape. Some of the buildings certainly had grandeur and, like their New York counterparts, are now sought after by the well-to-do. Billy's first home was not one of those. The Dover Street flat had only two rooms: a kitchen-living room, with a niche where the children slept, and another room for their parents. The entire family bathed in the kitchen sink and there was no hot water at all. As an enduring legacy of his early cramped existence, Billy is now quite uncomfortable in large living spaces. He sighs over the phone to me from fabulous hotels all over the world: 'They've gone and upgraded me again. Bloody Presidential Suite this time.'

I let him off lightly, because I know it's a genuine problem for him. Others who achieve renown cannot wait to sprawl sideways on a California King four-poster with a big-screen TV in every corner and a whirlpool on the deck, but not Billy. He has never really liked our Los Angeles house because of its unfamiliar spaciousness, and prefers to hide out in his tiny study for hours on end, drinking gallons of tea and plunking on his banjo.