September 29, 2002 — 10.00am
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Last week Ruby Wax sat and watched six hours of home-movie footage from her childhood that she had never seen before. What she saw astonished her. There were her parents kissing one another, fooling about, plainly enjoying themselves. This could hardly have been in more marked contrast to how she remembered them: the beatings, the rows, the persecution, the general madness and misery. Yet once, it seemed - albeit long ago - they had been happy.
So what went wrong? Wax doesn't know exactly, only that the effects were catastrophic for all of them. "I don't think there was any one thing," she says. "It was just a gradual wearing down of whatever it takes to make an earthquake." With hindsight, she reckons that her mother was an undiagnosed depressive whose spiral into insanity might easily have been halted by drugs.
"I honestly believe that if someone had put something in her food we wouldn't be in this state. She clearly had some chemical disorder that they didn't deal with, so she became more and more crazy and savage. Her violent behaviour, her persecution complex, these are the typical reactions of a depressive. If she'd been in her right mind, she would have said, 'Right, I'm out of here'. Instead she stuck around and was made to feel useless."
Just as her parents had once loved each other, so they once doted on her, their only child. "If anything I think they loved me too much, at least to begin with. I was this cute little doll, this toy, but then I began to talk, and along came the disappointment. It was as if all their hopes were pinned on this next generation and I wasn't coming up with the goods. I wasn't bright, I didn't look like my mother and I wasn't a boy, so there was a lot to apologise for."
Throughout her television career Wax has almost always been the interviewer, cajoling, charming and browbeating her guests into revealing more of themselves than they can ever have intended. It's clear that she doesn't take comfortably to being on the other side of the fence. Dressed in black and sitting very upright in a basement room of a hotel in Notting Hill, London, she is much more nervous than I expected, speaking in a slightly breathless staccato, punctuated by long pauses.
Did she feel in any way disloyal, I wondered, writing about her parents with such candour?
"A little," she says, "but when I made a film about them 15 years ago, they loved it. They just saw it as a film about my insanity. They'd go, 'Look how crazy she is, and the fact she thinks we're crazy is even funnier.' Obviously they won't read my book" - both parents are now in advanced stages of dementia - "but if they did, they'd say, 'This is typical Ruby, always accusing her parents.' And they'd probably have a good laugh and go, 'That's how she is - she's showing off again."'
It could be argued that, however hellish it was to live through, Wax's upbringing did at least give her a rich stock of neuroses to draw on as a comedienne. She, however, shakes her head emphatically. "I've worked very closely with Jennifer Saunders and seen how a brilliant mind can come from a perfectly normal background. So I don't think you need all this convoluted stuff. I think my material would have been different, certainly, if my upbringing had been more stable, maybe not so dark, but the quirkiness, the ability to observe a certain viewpoint would have been the same."
What's evident from her dark and dazzling memoir (How Do You Want Me?) is that although both her parents were violent and oppressive, Wax, even as a child, always stood up to them. Yet, while her professional persona is possessed of extraordinary nerve - extraordinary chutzpah - she's adamant that this, too, owes little or nothing to her childhood.
"If anything, I think my upbringing gave me lack of nerve. To begin with at least, I was really frightened to push myself, full of self-doubt. I feel it held me back by 10 years. If, say, I'd had the confidence and ability to utilise university" - she studied to be a psychiatrist, but dropped out - "and if I hadn't been too confused to settle on anything for a long time, I honestly believe that I would have been successful faster. Maybe not as a comedienne, maybe someone in finance. I don't know. But I'm sure I would have been successful."
However, she does concede that her desire to perform was, at least in part, a reaction to life at home. "When I was in my teens, I learned a trick - that I could get into other people's homes if I opened my mouth and danced. It's like an animal knowing that if it sits up and begs it will be booked on the Ed Sullivan Show. But it didn't mean that I wasn't full of self-doubt: when someone takes the centre of attention, they're invariably full of self-doubt. For the first time someone had said to me, 'We like you.' It didn't matter who. And I thought, everything is OK now."
In her early twenties she moved to England where she played assorted nuns and crones with the Royal Shakespeare Company before starting to write and perform comedy sketches - first on stage and then on television. "Gradually I perfected my act, although I never refined it. If I'd refined it then I'd be a professional writer, not a television personality. Being a television personality is a really crude act; it doesn't need refining."
Wax hit the soft world of British television like a tornado. Along with her brass neck, she had an electrically fast brain, an instinctive understanding of what makes people tick and an unerring ability to home in on their weak spots.
Success rolled in. She married the television director, Ed Bye, had three children and moved into a large house in London's trendy Notting Hill Gate. But far from having exorcised the past, she came to realise it was present in everything she did, particularly her interviews.
In her confrontations with celebrities, and male celebrities in particular, she was re-enacting her own relationship with her father. One moment she would be doing whatever she could to topple them from their perches, the next she would be desperately seeking their approval. "The buck-teeth were out and it was like I was back aged 13," she says.
Increasingly, she came to dislike the public "Ruby Wax" - to feel that this was a cruel distortion of her real self. At the same time she found the strain of keeping her home life and her professional life together ever more difficult.
"I just ... I just didn't want to feel exhausted all the time. That's how it felt." Exhausted by what? "By myself."
In the end she had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Priory clinic. In one sense, she says, having a breakdown came as a huge relief; finally she could start to dismantle this manic creature she had created. "What I found in the Priory was that you didn't have to be in showbusiness to feel that way. There were great businessmen there who had devoted their lives to one slipstream. There were women whose sense of self-worth depended on what their husband thought of them. People were sick of living in their own stereotypes. We had all just narrowed ourselves.
"I really do think that if I hadn't been in showbusiness I would still have this disease of spreading myself too thin. Showbusiness hasn't ruined my life. In fact, I think I would be dead if I hadn't done this job; I would have killed myself."
Yet Wax insists that public popularity and fame have never meant that much to her. "Applause doesn't make me feel good. Being successful was never that much of a rush for me. The real rush was having lots of women around me; that was like a safety net. Men didn't have the same effect; they scared the shit out of me. Getting out of the house and being with large groups of women, that was the fix. And that does go right back to childhood."
When I ask her what pleasure she finds in being on television, there's such a long pause that my tape-recorder switches itself off.
"After all these years? There is no pleasure," she says quietly. "Oh, I like editing. I like making a story. But when the cameras are on, you're concentrating too hard for it to be pleasurable."
These days, she says, she's learned to keep herself in check; to try not to be so shrill, so frenetic, the whole time. "You can never shed your skin completely. Of course you're still who you are. Tiny little chunks drop off, that's all. I needed to switch off the motors."
The danger here is that she ends up casting aside precisely what made her successful in the first place. "I don't think so. I'm still going to be funny, because I am funny. But now I'll think of other possible places to go before I go onto automatic pilot. For instance, Tom Hanks came to this place I was at last night. The old me would have got on the table, showed my underpants, tap-danced and wrapped my legs round his head. But now I've learned that if I pull back the reins and just shut the f... up, that man will come to you. It's that simple. There's no great philosophy to it."
In her book, Wax writes about her fear of passing on her own rage to her children, and about how she feels that she was never given the genetic equipment to cope with motherhood. She remembers once being with her mother in a restaurant where a baby was screaming at a nearby table. Mrs Wax advanced on the table where the baby's mother plainly thought she was about to coo appreciatively over it. Instead, Mrs Wax let rip in her thick Austrian accent. "If you don't shut that moron up, I'm going to slam it against a vall!"
I wondered how Wax felt that she had managed as a mother. "Um, I can't do it. At least I know there's a blank zone, so you can compensate for that. It's like an amputee learning to run."
You can't do what?
"I can't do certain things naturally. I'm not naturally maternal. I mean, to my kids I am. But, like sitting and saying, 'That's an interesting doodle you've done,' I'm faking it and they know I am. I get bored around kids. I couldn't have been a professional mother."
One of the many paradoxes about Wax is that she claims to loathe all manifestations of British upper-class life, yet has sent her eldest child, Max, to Harrow school. What made her buy into something she apparently despises?
"I didn't want him to go to Harrow. I begged him not to go, but he insisted. As for hating the British upper classes, hah! You ought to hear me on the working class. Actually, I don't hate them; it's more to do with not liking people when they are stereotypes. It's when they break the stereotype that they become fascinating."
Throughout her book there's a constant sense of Wax yearning to belong, to be a part of something. But when she gets there, of course, it's never as good as she wants it to be. The horizon just keeps on receding. "That's life, though, isn't it? Where is this Utopia?"
So what does she think she'll be doing in 10 years time?
"If I'm sticking my arse in the air and I'm 55, then that will be a tragedy. What will I be doing? How about living in Montana and being a cowgirl? You talk about pleasure. Well, believe me," she says, grinning broadly now, "you can't get better than that."
-Sunday Telegraph
