From Coal Dust to Stardust

GARY COCKERILL

From Coal Dust

to Stardust

To my mum, dad and sister Lynne, all the strong, inspirational women who I have been lucky enough to work with over the years and to Phill, my husband and the love of my life

ONE Doncaster Dynasty

TWO Drama Queen

THREE Girl Crazy

FOUR Hell on Earth

FIVE Bright Lights, Big City

SIX Love at First Sight

SEVEN Tiffany Towers and Tawny Peaks

EIGHT The Superbabes

NINE My Real-Life Girl’s World

TEN Bailey and Beyond

ELEVEN Legends

TWELVE Celebrity Circus

THIRTEEN Tantrums and Tiaras

FOURTEEN Two Weddings, One Bride, Three Grooms and a Dog

FIFTEEN Heartbreak

SIXTEEN A Midsummer Night’s Scream

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Doncaster Dynasty

I never forget a frock. This one was pumpkin-orange with a pattern of tiny yellow flowers, smocking across the bodice and a flourish of gypsy ruffles. It must have been the height of fashion in early Seventies Yorkshire. It was also far too big for me, and clashed with the frosted pink lipstick that was now smeared across my five-year-old face. My big sister Lynne took a step back and – head cocked to one side – appraised her handiwork.

‘Go on then, Gary, give us a twirl.’

I obliged happily, giggling as I tripped over the flounced hem. Now this was more fun than football …

My sister was three years older than me, a gorgeous, doll-like little girl with the sweetest of natures. I worshipped her – I still do to this day. For her part, Lynne had always wanted a little sister and when she was presented with a rosy-cheeked baby boy she obviously decided that she would just have to make the best of the situation, which is why I grew up with zero interest in cars or soldiers and an obsession with dressing up and dolls.

eauty Pageant was one of our favourite childhood games. I’d make the badges with the contestants’ numbers on them out of old toilet rolls and Lynne and I would take it in turns to be the show’s host.

‘… And here’s the lovely Miss Scunthorpe wearing a very pretty red pinafore dress. Her hobbies are dancing to Abba and watching Rentaghost …’

We’d rope in our cousins on Mum’s side (Lorraine, Julie, Cheryl, Mandy, Kelly – there was one boy cousin, Greg, but for obvious reasons he usually did his own thing) and we’d spend hours putting on concerts and plays and musicals in the garage, a magical place which doubled as Dad’s workshop when it wasn’t playing host to the all-singing, all-dancing Von Trapp children or being transformed into a ghost train complete with sheet-shrouded ghouls.

At the weekend Lynne, me and our girl cousins would troop off to the Saturday morning club at the local cinema together where I’d sit spellbound in front of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Fairytales were a particular favourite of mine, with a film based on the story of Cinderella called The Slipper and the Rose becoming something of an obsession. I must have seen it at least ten times. Even when Lynne wasn’t around to play with, I would sneak into her room to steal her shoes and dressing-up clothes and then dance round the room wearing this big black wig that Mum kept for best, pretending to be Shirley Bassey.

* * *

At the age of six, I begged my parents to get me a Girls World, one of those slightly creepy-looking plastic heads on which budding make-up artists can practise their skills.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a Scalextric set?’ my father asked hopefully, as he did every Christmas. My poor dad. He tried his best to do the right thing by his only son, bless him. He would take me outside and then lift the bonnet on our green Vauxhall Viva as if he was about to share some incredible secret.

‘Right, son,’ he’d say, crouching down by the car, all excited. ‘Now listen closely, I’m going to help you find your way round an engine …’

If it wasn’t cars, it was DIY. Dad treated his toolbox like it was buried treasure, the spanners and screwdrivers as precious as any diamonds or rubies. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I’d rather be lifting the lid of my sister’s jewellery box and watching the little ballerina spin round. He’d drag me along to watch Doncaster Rovers, even though I made no attempt to hide the fact that I was more interested in the half-time bag of crisps and pop, and occasionally he’d even rig up a net in the back garden to teach me some skills.

‘Come on, Gary, let’s go and have a kickabout!’

On one of the few times he actually got me in front of that net I was so scared of being hit by the ball that when he kicked it towards me I dodged out of the way and it went straight through the picture window at the back of our house, showering my mum and sister with glass as they sat watching Jim’ll Fix It.

I never did get the Girls World. However, my long-suffering parents did buy me the other presents on my Christmas wish list: a little toy Hoover and a pair of ruby red shoes for me to live out my obsession with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

‘Wouldn’t you rather be the Tin Man or the Lion?’ Dad would ask, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice. But no – I was convinced that one day I would go over the rainbow. There weren’t that many boy-sized sparkly red slippers in Armthorpe though, so Dad ended up spray-painting my trainers and covering them with red glitter.

Without a Girls World to practise my make-up skills, I started to steal my sister’s dolls instead. I would stockpile them in secret hiding places around the garden and when Lynne eventually found them stashed behind the hedge or round the back of the shed she would go mad because I’d have felt-tipped on red lipstick and blue eye shadow and tied their hair into plaits.

If I couldn’t get hold of the dolls, I would find other outlets for my creativity. I would get up early in the morning, long before anyone else in the house was awake, and trace women’s faces complete with pouty lips and one spider-lashed eye (I was too lazy to do a matching pair) into the condensation on the large window at the back of the house, sending my houseproud mother ballistic when she came in to make breakfast and saw all these smeary, drippy faces defacing her nice clean windows. I completely destroyed the covers of Dad’s treasured record collection by biro-ing eyeliner, lipstick and false lashes on the already heavily made-up faces of the ladies of Abba and The Three Degrees.

And when I ran out of pop stars to beautify, I started on the Page 3 girls in my parents’ copy of the Sun. I would define Jilly Johnson’s brows or make her lips slightly bigger, and once I’d finished with the faces I would draw bras on them. In my mind I was just making them look prettier, but – as you can imagine – my dad wasn’t best pleased, especially if I got my hands on the paper before he’d had a chance to see it. I would even draw muscles on the men, a skill that would stand me in good stead many years later when I would end up using make-up to shade pecs and abs on a certain singer who would later become one of my clients …

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story really begins in the very early hours of 30 September 1969 at 67 Burton Avenue in Balby, a suburb of Doncaster, South Yorkshire. This was my parents’ first home, a typical two-up, two-down terraced house in an average Coronation Street-style street.

At the moment there are three people in this little house: Ann and Brian Cockerill and their three-year-old daughter Lynne, soon (far sooner indeed than anyone actually realises) to be joined by me. Ann and Brian are childhood sweethearts who met at the age of 16 at the Gaumont cinema in Doncaster. Brian – devilishly handsome, the spitting image of Tony Curtis – was mucking about with his mates throwing popcorn down the top of the curly-haired, bigboobed brunette in the row in front until Ann – beautiful, ballsy, typical Scorpio – turned round to give him an earful, having apparently already given him an eyeful.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Having both come from solid, working-class families with the same family-orientated values, the couple married at 21 after a traditional courtship and my sister was born two years later. By the time I came along, Dad had a secure job working at the Doncaster Royal Infirmary as a painter and decorator and my mum handled the paperwork in a clerk’s office. My earliest memories of her are in a neat pinstripe pencil skirt and a little ruffled blouse, her wild hair shaped into a bubble of curls – a cross between EastEnders’ Angie and Jill Gascoigne from The Gentle Touch.

Mum never did make it to hospital that morning. I made my appearance into the world at 6 a.m. in the chintzy comfort of my parents’ bedroom with Dad panicking outside the door and one of the neighbours roped in to help poor Mum. It was the last time in my life that I was ever to be early for anything.

My parents didn’t have a very good track record with baby names – my sister was called Tinkerbell until she was a good few months old – and similarly Gary wasn’t the first choice of name for their son. For the first few weeks of my life, I was called something completely different. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Dad putting his foot down, the name on the front of this book would read ‘Ivor Cockerill’.

My attention-grabbing arrival into the world was to prove typical of my need to be in the spotlight at all times. Although I was quite small at birth, about 6 lbs, I would take as much milk and affection as I could get and quickly blossomed into a chubby, red-cheeked little cherub. And so, for the first few days of his life, Ivor-turned-Gary and his folks lived in the same blissful, chaotic, exhausting bubble as any other young family with a new baby. But then, just three weeks later, my family’s lives were turned upside down, inside out and very nearly destroyed.

It was a Wednesday and Mum was getting us both up and dressed when she started to get terrible pains in her arms and chest and then suddenly, without any warning, my slim, active and outwardly completely healthy 26-year-old mother suffered a devastating heart attack and collapsed. When it became clear after a few minutes that Mummy wasn’t going to wake up – even with her new baby brother screaming the place down – Lynne (who, remember, was just three at the time) managed to get out into the garden, climb over the fence and knock on a neighbour’s door to tell them that Mummy was poorly. The ambulance arrived just in time.

The attack had been caused by a massive blood clot, which was eventually linked to her being on the Pill. She was one of the first women to try this revolutionary birth control drug – almost a guinea pig. The damage to Mum’s heart was so extensive that the doctors at the hospital in Sheffield where she lay in intensive care warned that her life was hanging in the balance; even after she made it through the first few days they gave her five years, max. With a job to hold down, two very small children to look after and no idea whether his young wife would ever make it out of hospital, my distraught dad moved us all in with Mum’s parents, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Jean.

Just five months later, Mum – with typical bloody-mindedness – proved all the doctors wrong by being well enough to leave hospital, but the attack had left her seriously weakened and she was warned that the slightest physical exertion could kill her. Even today she gets out of breath very easily and has to have regular check-ups. I don’t actually think the doctors really understand why she’s still alive. So throughout my entire childhood my mum’s poorly heart was at the back of my mind. Whatever we were doing, from swimming on family holidays to going on the swings at the park, I was aware that we had to watch out for Mum – well, someone had to because she certainly didn’t seem that bothered about herself.

Far from taking things easy, she became obsessed with TV-AM fitness queen Mad Lizzie, putting on her tracksuit every morning before work to do star jumps in front of the telly. But it was because of Mum’s heart that a few months after her return from hospital my parents sold our two-storey house on that steep street in Balby and bought a new-build bungalow on a private estate in the nearby mining village of Armthorpe, where they still live to this day.

To me, that three-bedroom semi-detached bungalow with its neat front and back garden will always be home. My memories of growing up there are coloured with love, laughter and food; my parents might not have had much money, but they always made absolutely sure we had the best of everything.

Sundays were a particularly happy time in the Cockerill household. Dad would cook a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausage to keep us going until one o’clock, when Mum would serve a traditional roast with all the trimmings. Our modest dining-room table would be crowded with guests. There would be all the cousins, my aunts and of course Granddad Joe (former ICI factory foreman who loved a flutter on the horses) and Grandma Jean (golden-blonde bingo queen).

My grandparents argued non-stop; an outsider would have probably found it upsetting, but to us kids it was better than a sitcom, like Victor Meldrew and his wife.

As soon as Mum had cleared away the lunch things she would tie on a pinny and start baking, so at teatime we would have fluffy sponge cakes fresh from the oven and rounds of perfectly trimmed sandwiches. My sister and I would listen to the Top 40 countdown on Radio One in our pyjamas and then straight after the Number One our mother would swoop.

‘Right, you two, off to bed now.’

She ran a tight ship, did Mum.

Every summer we would have two weeks at the seaside, somewhere like Whitby, Scarborough or Bridlington. Almost as exciting to me as the beach and its many attractions was the prospect of going to see a show. One year we caught legendary drag star Danny La Rue in summer season and I was completely knocked out by this man who was dressed as a fabulously glamorous woman.

Another time we were staying in a boarding house in Scarborough and Barbara Windsor – then a huge Carry On star – was staying in the room next door. I remember walking out on the landing and bumping into this tiny, curvy blonde, probably barely taller than I was back then.

‘Ello, darlin’, you alright?’ she said in that instantly recognisable voice:

Funny to think that she’s now one of my closest friends …

Our summer holidays also provided an opportunity for Dad to indulge in his favourite hobby – painting landscapes. He is an amazingly talented artist and I know he would have loved to pursue it as a career, but he put his family first and stuck to the safer, steadier option of being a decorator. In a way I suppose you could say I’m now living his dreams for him, except that I paint on faces rather than canvas.

I grew up surrounded by Dad’s pictures on our walls at home and he influenced me profoundly. We might have failed to bond over Doncaster Rovers and DIY, but we shared a real love of art and he did everything to encourage my passion, buying me an easel, paints and art books. I would sit for hours alone in my bedroom with my sketchbook, usually drawing women’s faces – whoever was famous and fabulous at the time, be it Joan Collins as Alexis in Dynasty, Lady Di, Barbra Streisand or Madonna.

At the age of eight I won a Blue Peter competition with one of these paintings, and Dad was bursting with pride when I had to go on the show to collect my badge from Peter Purves. (This wasn’t my first taste of TV fame. That was on Calendar News, our local teatime bulletin. The Queen had come up to Doncaster for the Silver Jubilee and as the camera panned over the crowd it stopped on a group of little kids waving flags and there was me in the middle, grinning like an idiot. I remember everyone making a fuss – ‘Ooh, our Gary’s on telly!’ – and I remember how good it felt …)

To this day, Dad is a massive inspiration to me. He’s a real Mr Nice Guy: sensitive, kind and very laidback. He rarely loses his temper or raises his voice. Without a doubt, it’s Mum who rules the roost. She’s a calm, quiet, almost shy person most of the time, but boy can she lose her temper quickly – and God help you when she does. Although discipline was usually of the verbal variety in the Cockerill household, I remember her grabbing a tea towel and giving my bum a good slap on more than a few occasions when I was growing up.

I once brought our class stick insects home from school and hid them in my bedroom, as I knew Mum wouldn’t be keen on having a tank full of creepy-crawlies in her pristine house. Well, I can’t have secured the lid properly and while I was at school they escaped all over the house and got busy breeding in the comfort of our soft furnishings. We were still picking stick insects out of the curtains weeks later; I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the ear-bashing I got from Mum for that particular little episode.

If I get my artistic talent from Dad, I get my determination and strength from Mum – and also my addictive personality. She smoked like a trooper when I was little – despite the heart attack – eventually quitting when I was in primary school. But she quickly found something else to replace her nicotine addiction …

When I was nine, my family went on our first holiday abroad: two blissful, sun-soaked weeks in the South of France. We stayed in a campsite just outside Antibes and went on a coach trip to Monte Carlo for the day, visiting the famous casinos and drinking ice-cold citron pressé with little jugs of sugar syrup in the lobby of the famous Hotel de Paris.

‘One day I’m going to come back and stay here,’ I told my parents. For a little boy fascinated with glitz, glamour and fairytale it was heaven on earth.

Mum, too, was very taken with the French lifestyle – especially their love of wine. At this time in the late Seventies us Brits hadn’t yet taken to vino in the same way as our Gallic neighbours, and the French habit of sharing a bottle over the evening meal proved a revelation for Mum and was one she kept up with enthusiasm long after our holiday tans had faded. She started making her own wine with kits from Argos and very soon was polishing off a couple of bottles of Chateau de Cockerill every single night.

After the first glass she’d be nicely merry, but as the evening wore on and the bottle emptied, her personality would suddenly change. I know she would be horrified at the suggestion that she had a drink problem; after all, she never drank during the day, she didn’t touch hard spirits and she never went boozing down the pub. But even today, Mum can’t leave a bottle unfinished. So whereas most kids grow up thinking of alcohol as something exciting and glamorous, to me it was the stuff that turned my mother into a totally different person – someone who I didn’t want to be around. As a result of her drinking, I’ve been a lightweight all my life.

Mum never used to wear much make-up. Just a touch of lipstick, a bit of rouge and that would be it; not even any mascara. Her two sisters, however, were a very different story. While Mum was the academic one, my Auntie Maureen – or Mo – and Auntie Janice were beauty queens in their youth and even today, Janice treats every day like it’s the grand finals of Miss Doncaster. They wouldn’t be seen dead without full-on make-up and perfectly styled hair and were always disappearing off to the plastic surgeon for sneaky nips and tucks. The pair of them were having Botox before anyone else had even heard of it. I thought they were impossibly glamorous. Auntie Janice wouldn’t think twice about spending a fortune on a designer outfit, whereas Auntie Mo might wear a six-quid outfit from down Doncaster market but, honest to God, she would work it like it was Chanel couture.

Mo was known as The Big Red because of her shock of dyed scarlet hair, fiery temperament and huge boobs. Her signature look was orange-toned lipstick and a slick of eye shadow in iridescent blue or purple, but somehow it all worked. Her sister Janice – the much doted-on baby of the family – had platinum blonde hair and a deep perma-tan that she set off with frilly white dresses, pink frosted lipstick and long nails that were always painted glossy red. When Dynasty first appeared on TV in the Eighties I was instantly smitten, immediately recognising Alexis Colby and Crystal Carrington as a slightly more polished version of Mo and Janice.

But it wasn’t just their flamboyant appearance that made such an impression on me. They were both truly strong women, real survivors who suffered a lot of tragedy and ended up carrying the men in their lives but never losing their fighting spirit.

‘Whatever you want in life, Gary, you go get it,’ Mo would tell me, eyes blazing.

Both Janice and Mo were pub landladies, a real couple of Bet Gilroys, each running a succession of establishments in the Yorkshire area. Their lives seemed full of drama and mystery – especially compared to my humdrum upbringing in Armthorpe.

I actually think one of the reasons my cousins, especially Lorraine and Julie, spent so much time at our house was because it gave them a bit of normality after the craziness of their own lives, but for me hanging out at Janice and Mo’s pubs gave me my first taste of the world of showbiz. Okay, so the Bluebell in Gringley-on-Hill probably wasn’t the most glamorous place on earth, but once I was through those doors it might as well have been Las Vegas.

My aunties would never come down to the bar at the start of the evening. Like the stars of the show they truly were, they timed their entrance for maximum impact – which was when the pub was full and they’d had enough time to make themselves look fabulous. At around 8.30 they would suddenly appear behind the bar, all sequins, big hair and even bigger cleavage, smiling and waving at the punters like they were strutting on stage at the London Palladium.

Once on the floor they’d pull the odd pint, but mostly it was just lots of chit-chat with the regulars, a bit of flirty banter here and there, and then, after just a couple of hours of razzle-dazzle, they’d disappear upstairs again. Although I was obviously too young to be drinking in the bar, during the evening I would always sneak downstairs to get a bag of crisps so I could have a peek at everyone and bask in my aunties’ reflected glory.

Even at that age I gravitated towards the limelight. ‘I’m on this side of the bar with my glamorous Auntie Janice and you lot are stuck on the other side,’ I would think, feeling special and, yes, probably more than a little bit smug. It was the same feeling I got years later the first time I was ushered into the VIP section at some fabulous celebrity party or other.

Sadly Mo passed away a few years ago, although she was so larger than life I still find it hard to accept that she’s gone, but Janice is still with us and just as glamorous as ever, bleaching her hair and dressing half her age (and carrying it off) despite being well into her late sixties. Janice and Mo taught me the power of make-up to transform and seduce – and instilled in me a lifelong love of strong, glamorous women.

TWO Drama Queen