Fame Can Wait

By David Scheel

Most books about people in showbusiness focus on stars, on people who, through talent, sheer luck, or a combination of both, have become household names.

 

David Scheel could have been one of those. While still in his teens people everywhere who saw him either act or play the piano, were saying "that boy is destined for stardom." And it almost happened, several times. Almost, but not quite, as time after time fate stepped in and showed she has a cruel sense of humour.

 

This is the story of someone who, despite innumerable obstacles, finally achieved success - if not fame - not only in his native Australia but also in the West End of London and from coast to coast across the USA.

 

Actor, concert pianist, satirist, writer and composer, David Scheel is the creator of arguably the world's longest running solo musical comedy performance, Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Piano Player. New York's Broadway magazine recently called David "the funniest pianist in the world", whilst the prestigious BBC Arts Review wrote: "He is as funny as any, wittier than most, and, uniquely, a concert pianist of international stature." Small wonder that for more than 20 years Scheel has been regarded worldwide as the successor to the legendary Victor Borge.

 

He is also a respected writer and campaigner on environmental issues, and can therefore be accurately described as a Renaissance man when that term is these days over used, and all too often inappropriately applied.

 

This is a refreshingly candid memoir, sometimes alarmingly serious, frequently deliciously funny; a story of one man's 40-year journey through the wild jungle of theatre, TV and music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Scheel
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393858003

Book preview

FAME CAN WAIT

For Tatiana

1. MICK

There is no animal which altered its whole way of living, indeed its whole sphere of interests, as the dog

[Konrad Lorenz]

That dog is drinking from the font!

Thus spoke the Reverend Terry Fenn, parish parson, source of wisdom and general inspiration to our tiny church community.

And the congregation heard, and was duly impressed by such a firm pronouncement in the sight of God. It was also more than a sniff offended, because the pronouncement was true. The dog was drinking from the font.

To begin this journey with recollections of a dog may seem simplistic, but this was no ordinary dog: he could easily have ranked alongside Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, except that they were fictions, and his exploits were real, so forming some of my earliest concrete memories.

To return to the story:-

Perhaps he’s thirsty, ventured my father, calmly continuing to play the ingoing organ voluntary. After all, he’s been on one of his rutting sessions. I’ve not seen him for the past three days. He must be knackered. Literally.

Please, hissed Reverend Fenn, as Handel surreptitiously replaced Bach, let’s get him out of here!

And so the cleric and the cynic joined forces to lead the defiled from the presence of the devout. 

And the congregation saw, and was duly impressed. Impure thoughts and deeds had been exorcised before its very eyes. A minor miracle had been witnessed, and the Congregational Church of Stirling, South Australia, smelled a lot better for the remainder of the service.

It was all Eric Penberthy’s fault. Mick would not have hauled himself down the aisle and partaken of the baptismal waters if he had been hell-bent on becoming a born-again Christian. He found his way to the church only because my father was there, and my father was only there to stand in for Eric, the incumbent organist, who was ill.

But then, Mick had a way of turning up in unexpected places.

Such as the maternity ward.

It is rightly fashionable these days for fathers to be present at a birth. When I was born it was more de riguer for the father to be chewing fingernails in the ante-room, and  - if Hollywood clichés are to be believed - smoking six cigarettes at once, only to be ushered in once the blood-letting had been let, the smack delivered, umbilicals severed, and the sex of the child determined.

It was definitely beyond the bounds of medical etiquette and social custom, then as now, for the family pet to indulge in a bonding session eight minutes after delivery. But Mick managed it.

You have a visitor, said Ward sister Miljanovic. No, don’t bother to comb your hair. It’s not your husband. The dog had beaten my father by over a minute.

My parents had acquired Mick some three years earlier, from an opal miner’s widow in Coober Pedy. No-one quite knew his pedigree, though the widow’s assertion that he was an Airedale terrier was suspect in the extreme. In an outback opal mining town, where the heat forces people to live in underground dug-outs, not unlike Andalucian, Troglodyte or Sinagua cave rock dwellings, dogs sweat it out on the surface. Any combination of animals was possible, and in the absence of woolly Airedales the best we could figure out from Mick’s appearance was that he was the result of a pairing between a sheepdog and a large rat.

Whether, as we suspected, he was some kind of feral mistake, or whether he had been deliberately bred, his purpose in life, from Day One, was not as some mere adjunct to the family unit. The harshness of the real outback does not permit such luxuries. Dog owners there want an animal to keep down the snake population, and from the earliest, Mick had been trained to the task. City puppies, true pets, might have been indulged with rubber balls and skeins of wool as playthings. Mick’s upbringing was more in keeping with his wild ancestors: he was nothing less than a well-oiled killing machine.

The hills above Adelaide were - and still are - home to a sizeable snake population. Red-bellied black snakes are numerous, as are the more venomous Common Browns. The reptile has occupied a special place in the iconography of evil since long before Hercules executed Hydra. After all, if we are to believe Biblical folklore, it was a snake that was instrumental in bringing about the original sin. But in truth, snakes are more sinned against than sinning, most species being naturally timorous.

A snake can feel the vibrations of footfalls on the earth, and will obligingly slither away, rather than risk a confrontation, and whilst a few people still die from snake bites each year, these are more often than not the result of a defensive, rather than attacking intent on the part of the animal.

Today’s wisdom is more tolerant of the reptile, but in the 1950s the population in general saw animals as creatures to be bred, eaten, or exterminated. It was also a time when Australia was in the backwash of a tsunami of immigrants, almost exclusively from Britain or central and southern Europe, areas which only recently had been subjected to the likes of Hitler and Stalin. Having escaped such genocidal predators, these people were not about to succumb to something as alien as a snake. Therefore, in an era when crimes against property were  virtually  unknown, and   people  left their  doors  unlocked, a

snake-killing dog was the type of home improvement item that a burglar alarm is today.

My parents, however, had not acquired Mick mindful of his murderous capacities. The ability to expunge local vermin was merely a bonus. In truth, all they wanted was a dog, and any dog would probably have fitted the bill: Dachshund, Alsatian; even a barkless Basenji. Nor could they resist the urge to provide sanctuary for an unwanted criminal.

I simply can’t keep him, explained the widow. You watch: in three months’ time he won’t even remember me.

She was right, and proved it by returning three months later to see how Mick was getting on. That in itself demonstrates the loyalty he had inspired in her. However, it appears that the dog greeted his former mistress as a complete stranger.

People say dogs have short memories. I do not believe it. I think there was something in that hard life he endured in the desert that he simply wished to put behind him. The miner’s widow was self-evidently attached to him, but miners themselves are a tough lot. They have to be to survive. Pets, pats, strokes and cuddles form no part of their body language. But in our household all the outward displays of affection were on tap, and  Mick, already nearly a third of the way through his life, knew he had finally found a home.

Not that the change of locale altered his entrenched lifestyle. If anything, his natural snake killing instincts honed themselves even further when he discovered that each conquest now carried the reward of a saucer of milk. He soon began bringing his victims to the front door, and it took some weeks before my parents to realise he was playing them for a pair of saps. As day followed day the dead snakes looked even deader, until my father finally tumbled to the fact that Mick had a cache of them, a kind of reptilians equivalent of

the serapium ancient Egyptians used for burying bulls. And, in the best modern environmental consciousness, he was recycling them. Soon we all began to recognise Young Brown Number 2, and Red-bellied Black Number 4. The milk was duly withheld until the dog fulfilled his obligations.

In a small country community like Stirling everyone knew Mick. To some he was a friend, to most a mortal enemy, and a third group, including the stationmaster, merely tolerated him. The stationmaster knew that Mick would skulk behind my parents on their walk to the morning train, and hop into the guard’s van at the last possible moment, in order to get to the city undetected.

He usually managed it, evading the gauntlet of city traffic, the like of which he must never have seen in his previous life, and duly reported for service at a huge department store, then antiquely known as the Myer Emporium. Even more disorientating must have been the store lifts, not self-operated as they are today, but manned by a kindly lift-man, who soon learned that Mick did not want Second floor: soft furnishings, Manchester and bedding, ladies’ lingerie and children’s wear; crockery and stainless steel cutlery. Mick refused to exit the lift until the top floor; the audit office where my mother worked.

Then came the long walk back to Adelaide Railway Station, in the company of whichever of my parents who could smuggle half an hour off work, or sacrifice a tea break. A threepenny fare, levied on the dog as a piece of unaccompanied luggage, put him back in the guard’s van, with the terse instruction: Chuck him off at Mount Lofty - he’ll find his way home.

Local farmers feared him, as his sexual proclivities made the Kama Sutra look like a Victorian Ladies’ manual. No matter what it was, Mick would have it: male, female, canine or any other convenient species.  To this day  there is probably  some  descendant wandering the Adelaide Hills; half sheepdog, half sheep – a Centaur with an identity crisis.

But if most people harboured negative feelings about our mongrel, some admired him for his sheer guts, and loyalty.

None more than me. My parents had been worried that Mick might turn rogue when I was born, given his zero tolerance vis-á-vis strangers. They had a precedent in Sandy, our cat, who openly resented my arrival. To all accounts Sandy had hitherto been a docile creature, fond of sleeping and not much else. Mick’s arrival had made him aggressive, and mine utterly transformed him into a biting, scratching, hissing pariah, who never even bothered to clean himself.

Mick viewed himself as Eisenhower to Sandy’s Kruschev, then the two potent political adversaries of the time.  He tolerated the cat grimly, awaiting his chance to exact upon it the kind of revenge he normally reserved for the toxic and venomous. He only needed an excuse, and before long Sandy provided it by catching a bird. My father, who would not see anything killed on the property, blew up.

Drop it! he yelled, his voice projection reminiscent of his days on stage, in a youth which had not yet seen the invention of the microphone.

Mick needed no further prompting. High Command had issued orders, and what followed looked like an illustration of a food-chain gone horribly wrong. At one end of the chain there was a cat with a bird in its mouth; in the middle, a dog with a cat in its mouth; and at the end, looking utterly ridiculous, a fully grown man desperately trying to hang onto the dog’s tail. If Hieronymous Bosch had ever painted a Conga, this would have been the result.

Sandy disappeared soon after, and so, for my first seven years, Mick was to be my constant companion. Far from resenting me he saw, I think, a chance to capture the puppy hood that had been denied in the unforgiving sands of the opal desert. We romped, played, foraged in the undergrowth, discovering wondrous things of no importance, except in the summery pre-glow of childhood.

We went so far as to swap biscuits. Even at age three I did not much like sugar, and preferred Mick’s dog biscuits. It was a good deal in his terms - he loved my Arnott’s Maries.

It is no small measure of Mick’s loyalty to, and surrogate adoption of me, that any casual flip through my childhood photo album would reveal not a single picture of myself alone. Even the posed portraits have a smidgeon of mongrel whisker on one of the perimeters. To Mick, kith was kin, and anyone, even a friendly photographer, was to be viewed with as much suspicion as a heathen amongst the Amish.

Our boy-meets-dog relationship was cemented on our increasingly long walks through the bush. For my first three years Mick was my Lord Protector, a permanent sentinel, and invaluable aide-de-camp to my parents. But once I could walk properly, the two of us could have fun!

Like all children, I was intensely curious about my surroundings, and when those surroundings were utterly wild, and filled with fascinating creatures such as wombats, goannas, possums, and even rare bandicoots, the urge to wander became insuperable.

At weekends I was confined to the property, my father maintaining strict surveillance at all times. But during the week, even with my mother having given up work to look after me, there was no shortage of opportunities for truancy, especially if my mother happened to be engaged in one of her telephone conversations with her sister (who lived only a few hundred metres away!), which often lasted an hour or more.

Then Mick and I would steal off into the bush to discover El Dorados yet unknown. We were a pair of sniffer dogs; one trained, the other a neophyte, and, apart from the odd parrot, or croak of a possum, little would divert my eyes from the ground. For this was where the action would be: most Australian animals live in a world below knee-high, and I rapidly learned to distinguish the difference between a native burrow and a pesky rabbit warren.

Mick was as curious as I, constantly uncovering living treasures for me to wonder at. Amazingly, he seemed to know why I held nature in such awe, even at this early age, and he never once attempted to molest or harass any of his discoveries. On one occasion I sat down on a tree-stump that had been split by a lightning strike. I felt something wriggling beneath me. I rose to see a black snake contorting its way into the undergrowth at great speed1. Mick raised an eyebrow, looking for instructions.

No, leave it! I commanded, with all the authority a reedy four year-old can muster. And he did.

At that time a child’s vagrancy through the bush represented no threat. Like all children I had been taught not to talk to strangers. But as there were none it was academic. The only dangers were uniquely natural ones. An encounter, perhaps, with something more threatening than a black snake. A tiny redback spider, maybe, or the even more aggressive and fearsome funnel web.

But I had a stick, and that, plus Mick, provided a formidable arsenal. The notion behind the stick was that, by flicking it casually amongst the dry undergrowth, I would give any slithering creatures plenty of notice that I was in the vicinity.

This, if anything, proves my earlier comment about the timidity of snakes. Even you sit on one, it will flee rather than attack.

They would then behave like gentle-snakes, and disappear. If something truly dangerous appeared, such as a male goat in the rutting season (when they will attack anything) I knew Mick could handle it.

In practice, the art of tracking animals is one of stealth, so my stick was rarely used. As I became more schooled in the ways of the wild I learned to test wind direction by watching the slightest sway of the scrub grasses, so that, by remaining upwind of the animals, they could not smell my presence. This skill I acquired directly from my companion, who, having spotted something of interest, invariably approached it in a circular motion, sniffing the air, and ultimately ensuring that his final approach was always into the wind, and from behind the animal in question.

It is a technique I still employ today, whenever time permits me the luxury of a safari, or a simple ramble through rainforests. And it has served me well, whether my quarry be rare birds in Asia, or wolves and Arctic foxes in Northern America. There is a special pleasure in being able to get close enough to an animal to snap its portrait without having to resort to a telephoto lens.

At this remove, and God knows how many pets later, it is hard to assess, objectively, my feelings for Mick. Love is too strong a word, for it is a sophisticated emotion, at least in its self-perception, and one that, in the very young, tends to simmer in the sub-conscious. Children feel and express love in more untrammelled ways than adults, but they do not really know what it is that they are feeling or expressing. Maybe for this very reason the emotional responses of a child are more honest than at any other stage of human life.

Certainly in my small world my dog was second in my affections only to my parents. I was tactile with him, stroking and patting him constantly. He clearly liked this treatment, but never returned it in the way a lap-dog will. No licker he, no nuzzler.

But he was always there, and I think that was his way of showing his feelings. A dog is, after all, not far removed from its wild ancestors, and Mick was wilder than most. Therefore his unquestioning loyalty to the three of us had to be more than a purely Pavlovian kick-back, granted in return for safe haven, meat, and the occasional saucer of milk.

It was a loyalty that was to be tested to its extreme during the bushfire season, and Mick’s unflattering reputation underwent a welcome, and sudden reversal, on what came to be known as Black Sunday.

Australians name major bushfires, much as meteorologists christen hurricanes. Every summer brings hundreds of outbreaks, with, inevitably, a handful of truly serious ones, which stretch fire services, both professional units and volunteers, to the limit. Black Sunday, Black Monday, the eerily coincident Ash Wednesday, the great Sydney fires of 1994 and 2001/2, the ravaging in Canberra the following year, and the Victorian firestorm of 2009 all made international news, quite literally scorching themselves into the memory.

Black Sunday was a monster of a fire, its damage only limited by a happy incident of demographics, in that it burned in what was then an underpopulated area. If a fire of this magnitude had broken out 30 years later, when the Adelaide hills had incorporated themselves into affluent suburbia, the economic - and possibly human - loss would have placed the disaster on a scale measurable against the major apocalypses of modern times.

There is nothing glorious about a full-blown bushfire. City dwellers may gawk at it from afar, even driving as close as they feel safe in order to get a better look. To the protagonists in the tragedy they are a hindrance, and this voyeurism, of the sickest kind, merely underlines how little the human psyche has evolved since homo erectus took his first, tentative steps.

What a bushfire is, is nothing less than nature asserting its dominance over a fragile landscape. A landscape which has lived with the threat for as long as time itself, and which, perversely, needs a periodic injection of fire as replenishment. Some varieties of Australian flora will only reproduce if fire is the catalyst, for only the searing heat of flame will force the seed pods to burst open. The sexual ethics of the bush are harsh in the extreme.

When the fire comes it does so surreptitiously. It sneaks up on you, and not always out of a clear blue sky. The dull and the overcast are the breeders of conflagration, suspended water droplets in sterile clouds concentrating the sun’s rays on the tinder-dry grass like billions of tiny prisms.

So, in this heavy atmosphere, the first warning you have is neither the sight nor the smell. It is the sound. In the far distance you hear a crackling, and the odd hiss. Then you scent the unmistakeable odour of burning eucalyptus oil. By the time you see flames and smoke the fire sirens have already sounded, like World War II air raid warnings, the droning sentinels inciting a fear parallel to that felt during the approach of a flying bomb.

By this time the soundtrack of the fire is an aural panorama of destruction. Trees explode, sap frazzling as it reaches the outer layers of carbonised bark. Anyone who believes that trees cannot feel has only to hear a gum tree in its death throes to rethink radically his view of exactly what constitutes a living thing.

I have heard trees yell, squeal, scream; I have even heard them cry.

Yet, paradoxically, those trees are not dead. They, like the Phoenix, will rise from the ashes. And it is those ashes which bring home the starkest images of a fire, for the event truly pales in comparison with its  aftermath.  When the  fire is raging you do not notice its totality.

You revert to primal, territorial instincts, intent on securing your own particular patch from the flames. You are oblivious to the wider spectrum, as you hose down the roof, don a knapsack (for portable back-packs were all the ordinary folk had in those days), and pray for no wind at all. Any sudden shift in wind direction offers poor odds: a one-in-four chance of the fire blowing back on itself, a three-in-four chance of bringing about a fresh war zone of vagabond butchery.

After the event you take stock, treading, as respectfully as you can, over the charred corpses of snakes, small mammals and other ground dwellers, surveying a once green landscape that is now a valley of spent matchsticks. You know that those gum trees are still alive, that their sap still flows, and that, within months, weeks perhaps, there will be few, if any, signs that on this spot Mars once drew his sword. And you marvel in horror at what nature can accomplish in an afternoon.

One such was Black Sunday. I was only eighteen months old, so my knowledge of the event is in the nature of received, rather perceived, memory. My mother and I were evacuated to the village when it became clear that one of those dreaded changes in wind direction was pushing the bushfire directly toward our house.

Dad stayed on, with a few friends, to fight the blaze. The fire service could send only a couple of men, stretched as it was, with the fire breaking on at least a dozen fronts, and jumping both roads and railway tracks. By now the inferno had taken hold in the treetops, and crown fires, as they are known, perform like pyromaniac simians, acrobatically leaping from tree to tree, with the men on the ground powerless to do anything except watch.

Mick too stayed on. All animals fear fire, and I daresay the rangy mongrel was no exception. But with my mother and myself safely away from the action there was still one family member fully engaged in the hostilities, and Mick knew his place, come what may. It certainly came. The temperature, in the old Fahrenheit scale (still used in the USA), was well over 100 degrees, and for six hours during that afternoon our house defied a wall of flame that left the rest of the property a scarified desert. Being built out of huge rough-hewn blocks of Mount Lofty freestone, the house itself survived. Little else did. Blazing branches toppled from tree to tree, a meticulous sequence that started at the canopy and forced lower branches to commit ritual suti. Some branches fell on Mick, but even with his fur on fire he stood his ground, knowing that eventually someone would turn a hose on him.

George, your dog’s alight again! And so Dad, distracted momentarily from the violence, would turn the water on his faithful friend, who stood there, singed, smoking and motionless, save for the occasional upward glance, as though to reassure his master that as long as he, Mick, was there, all would be well.

In all, Mick caught fire three times that afternoon.

Only after the smoke had cleared did we realise exactly what agony the dog had endured. Apart from burning branches falling on the upper parts of his body, he had spent six hours shifting from leg to leg on  ground  white-hot enough  to boil water. It  took  two months for the blisters on his pads to heal.

From that day on everyone, including the fire fighters, acknowledged Mick as the true hero of Black Sunday. He acknowledged his resuscitated popularity, taking it as an open invitation to rape practically every domestic pet in the region. An opportunist, of course, but to us he was unwavering. We were the only people to have shown him affection in his tough life, and with us he took no liberties, even to the extent of venturing onto a neighbouring vacant property to perform his toilet. Such was his confidence in his complete mastery of the home territory that he never even felt the need to scent-mark, either. Sizeable as the property was he never so much as cocked a leg within the confines of our fences.

In the days and months  following Black Sunday I would gradually commence my real childhood, and  as those months turned into years Mick and I would embark on our great adventure.