The queen of drag Lily Savage, who strutted the stage in waist-high leather boots and a coat the length of an anaconda, with more hair than Marie Antoinette, was a gruesome sight.
Any member of the audience who angered her could face chilling threats – “Don’t let me get up there and break your legs. ‘Cause I’m gonna rip your head off and . .’
The rest is not printable. Her fans howled with laughter and begged for more.
But Lily’s creator, comedian Paul O’Grady, who died suddenly on Tuesday aged 67, was a helplessly soft-hearted man, a devoted volunteer at Battersea Dogs Home, where he was known for not resisting the adoption of strays could.
And before his showbiz career took off, he worked as a care officer for Camden Social Services in north London, where he provided relief to families caring for people with Alzheimer’s or mental health issues.
Lily blazed a trail as a chat show host: before Graham Norton and Alan Carr built their careers on camp badinage with celebrities, O’Grady interviewed stars on a double tiger skin bed for Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast.
Lily blazed a trail as a chat show host: before Graham Norton and Alan Carr built their careers on camp badinage with celebrities, O’Grady interviewed stars on a double tiger skin bed for Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast
He went on to host his own daytime show after filling in for Des O’Connor – but interjected it and claimed he loathed celebrities. Most of them, he said, were like ‘a relative you felt obligated to visit: don’t mention this, don’t mention that. Well, what are we going to talk about? The weather?’
But fame also attracted him hopelessly. His closest friend was Cilla Black, and his eulogy for her at her memorial service in 2015 was both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Another close friend was Queen Consort Camilla, who took well to his outrageous banter. At a fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 South Asian tsunami, shortly after Charles and Camilla’s wedding, he announced, “It’s about time he married her — he’s been shagging her for the last 40 years.” Luckily no one was present.
He was such a notorious party freak at A-list venues that Mick Jagger revealed he had to warn Rolling Stones lead guitarist Ronnie Wood to stop hanging out with O’Grady. There were three things the Stones had to avoid, Mick said: “Drugs, alcohol and Lily Savage.”
These two completely different sides of his personality stemmed from a working-class upbringing in Birkenhead after the war. The third of three children, he was born in 1955 when his mother, Molly (maiden name Savage), was in her forties: “I was described as the last kick of a dying horse.”
Another close friend was Queen Consort Camilla, who took well to his outrageous banter
His closest friend was Cilla Black, and his eulogy for her at her memorial service in 2015 was both hilarious and heartbreaking
Wicked one-liners
“I got a review that said if Donald Duck was born in Birkenhead, smoked 60 Capstan Full Strength a day, drank a bottle of whiskey and sniffed helium, this is what he would sound like.”
“I don’t believe in marriage. Why buy a book when you can join the library?’
‘After the poll tax riots, the police come and pound on my door. They said, ‘We have video of you walking down Oxford Street.’ I said, ‘I very much doubt it. You can’t run if you’re pushing a stroller with two washing machines and a TV in it.”
‘I’ve just been to the Wirral for my sister’s wedding. This is a very big opportunity in Liverpool to catch up. Usually you just get shagged at a bus stop.”
‘Never use that perfume, Impulse. In commercials, men will give you flowers if you splash them all over themselves. I tried, I got chased down the street by a Triffid.’
“My microwave is broken at the moment. I can’t bring it back to the store because I can’t find the receipt. Which isn’t unusual, because I stole it.”
“Hello magazine wants to come by and photograph my house. Over my corpse! Sorry, they don’t step over my garbage bags.’
“I hate that word ‘celebrity’. I call it “turn”. “Celebrity” – makes you sound like you grin a lot and date Bonnie Langford.”
His father, Paddy Grady, was an Irishman who moved to Liverpool in the 1930s and joined the RAF when war broke out. A misspelling of his name made him an O’Grady, and he stuck. The family scraped together enough money to send Paul to a private Catholic elementary school “because it was a waste of time [run by the] Christian brothers. They only talked about religion and hit us.”
He looked back on his childhood “spoiled and completely protected” and surrounded by strong women. “They were all funny,” he recalled in an interview last year. “My Aunt Chrissie was nervous on the buses. She was very glamorous, a tall blonde.
“They were all very resilient, that was the other thing. Aunt Chrissie left the buses and got a job managing an off-license. Two guys walked in, “It’s a stick.” She said, “I’ll just open the safe for you, love,” went out the back, got a brush, and smashed it in. They were.’
His life changed at the age of 12 when he saw the musical Gypsy, starring Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood, about stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The double shabbiness and glamor of showbiz infatuated him. At the same time, he discovered the appeal of being able to make classmates laugh.
When he fooled around in church, pretended to show his knuckles and giggle during a funeral, the priest dismissed him as an altar boy. The two sides of his personality were already parting.
After leaving school with poor qualifications, he tried his hand at a range of jobs – taking respectable clerical jobs behind desks in Liverpool’s shipping offices and serving drinks in sleazy pubs like Bear’s Paw, a gay bar, and the notoriously rowdy Yates’s wine shack on Moorfields .
For a few months he was a clerk at the district court, whereby his red corduroy jacket and pink tie caused consternation: “The scholarship holder sarcastically inquired whether my job title was court clerk or court jester.”
Serving drinks at Yates’s wasn’t that different from Court 3, he added: “The same regular clientele of Winos and Prozzies walked through its doors.”
Although he knew he was gay from an early age, he also had an affair with an older woman, Diane, who worked at the court register.
She told him she was pregnant that same week in 1974 when both his parents suffered heart attacks. His mother survived, his father died. Paul didn’t dare tell his family he was a father until the baby was born. He wanted to name the baby Gypsy. Her mother refused: “That sounds like a poodle’s name.”
They chose Sharon instead. He agreed to pay £3 a week to support them and moved to London hoping to find a better paying job.
Instead, he ended up living with a gay couple, paying the rent whenever he could, doing the housework, and busking around Camden. “It felt like begging to me. . . that is, until people started tossing coins into the cap. There was money in that lark!’
Lily never smiled, never laughed, and had an acidic tongue. As a divorced woman, she never tired of telling the audience about her useless ex-husband
O’Grady was a devoted volunteer at Battersea Dogs Home, where he was known for not being able to resist adopting strays
He told the story of those years in four best-selling autobiographies, beginning with the witty title At My Mother’s Knee. . . And other low joints. The books show an effortless ear for dialogue – he recreates conversations, breakups, rants and screaming fights with vivid realism.
He threw himself into the London gay scene before the onset of the AIDS crisis and developed his drag personality. Although he had gentle, almost pretty features, his face took on the hardness of a hatchet when he became Lily Savage.
Lily never smiled, never laughed, and had an acidic tongue. As a divorced woman, she never tired of telling the audience about her useless ex-husband. “I’m sick of men,” she said. ‘I don’t believe in divorce. . . just murder the bast**ds.
“Tell you what, I could give up men and become a lesbian. I know it’s an acquired taste but I’m sure I would get used to it.
As HIV spread in the mid-1980s, O’Grady was dismayed to see friends die – and angry at being pursued by homophobic police. One night officers burst into the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a gay pub, to conduct a raid, wearing thick rubber gloves to protect themselves from the virus. “Looks like we got some help washing up,” Lily joked. A sergeant asked for her full name. “Lily Veronica Mae Savage,” came the reply.
After two heart attacks and the death of his longtime partner and manager Brendan Murphy from brain cancer in 2005, he suffered from depression
O’Grady had a ten year streak of success through his work at Battersea, For The Love Of Dogs
As Cilla belted out the number, hearts flashed on her breasts and below her belt. “Be careful not to burn yourself,” Lily scoffed and Cilla burst into tears. “You said you wouldn’t, Savage,” she growled.
She and Paul were notorious in the nightclubs of New York and London, where they drank gallons of champagne and partied until dawn. “After Bobby [her husband] died, she said she had been sent a guardian angel except with two hooves and a tail. We go away together three times a year. I never liked Barbados, never told her that, just went to her,” O’Grady once said.
After Cilla’s death, he revived her game show Blind Date, claiming she left it to him in her will. The speed of recording exhausted him. “No wonder she was on cocaine,” he joked.
By then he had retired Lily – sometimes he claimed she was a nun in a convent in Brittany, sometimes she worked “in a managerial capacity” in an Amsterdam brothel.
After two heart attacks and the death of his longtime partner and manager Brendan Murphy from brain cancer in 2005, he suffered from depression. “After Murphy died, I calmed down,” he said.
With the success of his writing career and a ten year winning streak through his work at Battersea, For The Love Of Dogs, he has been spending more time on his farm in Kent with husband Andre (they married in 2017), their six pigs, three alpacas and numerous Dogs.
“I don’t care about sex, money or fame,” he once claimed. “But in Namibia I was attracted to a wild baby mongoose and fell in love. I just want a mongoose.”