Peter Allen is the greatest songwriter this country has ever produced. He was famous for his maraccas, his Hawaiian shirts, his calisthenic piano-playing (seated or standing, one foot on the pedals, the other stretched over the top of the grand piano) — his cabaret show was a one-man Mardi Gras long before the Sydney suburbs knew what Mardi Gras was. His first album was out in 1971 (Sydney’s first Mardi Gras was in 1979).
Yet for all his showmanship, he was at heart the archetypal country boy from Tenterfield, northern NSW, and he defiantly referenced this in song after song, expressing the struggles of growing up gay, and just growing up, in country Armidale.
On stage he was as flamboyant as Liberace — who insisted right up until he died, in 1987, of AIDS, that he was straight. Not even Liberace's boyfriend could convince him to come out.
Allen on the other hand was proudly gay, in an era when it wasn’t so easily accepted. Mostly, it wasn’t accepted at all.
His life is a well-worn story. It was told by the late Stephen MacLean in his excellent biography, which became a TV doco, then a stage musical in Sydney which was to star Hugh Jackman replaced at the last minute by Todd McKenney, then off to Broadway originally to star McKenney, replaced at the last minute by Jackman.
And now the book has been made into a two-part TV movie, though Seven insists it’s a mini-series, part one debuting Sunday, September 13, at 8.30pm.
Allen was the master of understatement. He could use a phrase to convey so much, like the powerful lines “why a son ever has need of a gun” and “something was wrong but it’s easier to drink than go crazy” and “all that’s left of the singer’s all that’s left of the song”.
Generally speaking, the movie is not so much understated as unbalanced — focussing on the high points of the story, not fleshing out the person at the heart of it all. But it is very entertaining.
There’s a lot of story and lots of wonderful characters to fit into two episodes and it’s not easy to do that when the secondary characters include Judy Garland, who for a while would manage him, and Liza Minnelli, who for a while would marry him.
The TV movie relates the time Peter Allen told off Judy Garland for calling Liza Minnelli "fat". Peter was furious, Liza was forever grateful. She tells Ian Horner all about that incident here in this interview for Liza's 2009 Sydney concert . . .
Sigrid Thornton is a revelation as Garland. On paper, it just couldn’t work, but on screen Thornton is wonderful as the larger-than-life Hollywood child star turned movie icon who struggled to live up to her own legend all the while trying to live down her own demons. When her daughter, the relatively unknown singer Liza, announced her engagement to Allen, Garland was over the moon, or the rainbow.
But, as everyone now knows, the dream marriage was doomed from the start and one of the most powerful sequences comes at the end of part one, as Allen, played by NIDA graduate Joel Jackson, is intercut singing to his boyfriend and to his wife.
Maybe I hang around here a little more than I should, We both know I got somewhere else to go, If we both were born in another place and time, This moment might be ending in a kiss, But there you are with yours and here I am with mine, So I guess we'll just be leaving it at this
Heartbreaking stuff. And a good example of how the whole movie comes alive with heartache and passion and yearning the moment Allen’s songs are on the soundtrack. Without his songs, the movie borders on ordinary.
The presentation of his early days as a miniature showman tinkling the ivories and belting out a tune in the country town hall are a little far-fetched. To prefigure the grandstanding piano-playing which would later become his trademark by putting it onto him at age 9 or 10 is, frankly, a bit much to take, as entertaining as it may well be.
Missing from part one is young Peter’s developing sexuality and sense of self. A few fleeting references to how little boys should play and act does nothing to convey the repression which Allen would later so powerfully write about in Don’t Cry Out Loud — ironic words of advice to any young Australian boy told to man up and learn not to show his feelings.
Not to show his developing attraction to blokes also glosses over a vital part of his teenage years when he was trying to learn how he would fit into the world and which must have contributed immeasurably to the personal battles he’d later face.
The movie does capture the razzamatazz of Allen’s life in showbusiness. From Brian Henderson’s Bandstand where Allen crossed paths for the first time with Olivia Newton-John (her single of his I Honestly Love You — lyrics quoted above — was No.1 in the US and won two Grammys) to the Allen Brothers who were neither brothers nor named Allen (really Chris Bell and Peter Woolnough) to the Hollywood links beginning with Garland and going through to Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross with whom Allen would share an Oscar for the Arthur theme.
The sequence with Allen being told to tone it down so he matches the other Allen brother is a hum-dinger, rather like Robin Williams teaching Nathan Lane to "walk straight” in The Birdcage.
All the actors are very good, including Rebecca Gibney as his mum Marion Woolnough, as difficult as it is to portray characters whom many viewers know so well. And the story is truly astonishing. Yet it skirts around the man at the heart of it all, and not for want of a great performance by Jackson.
Ironically, Allen's last great effort, the Broadway musical Legs Diamond (with Harvey Fierstein), was a flop. His last concert performance was in Sydney on Australia Day in 1992. He died, at 48, of AIDS, five months later.
When will you write your autobiogaphy? “I already have. It’s in my songs.”
One of the questions Peter Allen was asked most during the last stage of his career was when will you write your autobiogaphy? He always answered: “I already have. It’s in my songs.”
That’s where you should go if you want to feel and know the man’s heart. ❏
■ Part 1 of Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door screens on Seven on Sunday, September 13, at 8.30pm. Part 2 screens the following Sunday, September 20.
■ Read Ian's interview with Todd McKenney here.
■ Read Ian's other interviews and reviews:
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