Letters from the King

A carefully hoarded cache of letters, documents and photographs by television legend Graham Kennedy has been released by Kennedy’s “longest living friend”, Henry Gay, who had once worked with the comedian in radio in the early 1950s.

In a long and devoted article by Kennedy biographer, Graeme Blundell, extracts in The Australian show a private side to the otherwise public figure. True to form, almost every quote ends in a punchline.

Of one of his final Coast to Coast shows in the early ’90s, Kennedy says: “We had a charming but deadly quiet studio audience. I mean, they didn’t even laugh at, ‘What do bulldozers and orang-utans have in common? They both f..k up trees.”‘

The letters are also often sad and sometimes bitter when Kennedy speaks of his family, his father in particular, and confronting when he tells Gay of the gradual erosion of his health in his later years.

There were many new pieces of information, too, particularly in relation to Kennedy’s retirement to 50 scrubby hectares at Canyonleigh in NSW’s southern highlands in the late ’80s, where he delighted in acquiring clydesdale draught horses.

Many of Kennedy’s former colleagues felt that in retirement he wanted to preserve an image in aspic, to be seen as always in his prime, not a crumpled old man in ancient clothes. But he was always honest with Gay.

“I’m sure I’ve told you that my mind retains nothing written. Perhaps an unknowing self-discipline caused by learning three sketches and eight commercials a night for all those years?”

Kennedy refers to his exhausting regime of nightly variety shows and often highly physical TV in which he constantly ignored, or subverted, boundaries. “I don’t think the brain can cope with all that without an ‘unlearning ability’. For instance, I know I’ve read the Bible but I can’t, for the life of me, remember what the f..k it was about.”

He was admitted to Sydney’s St Vincent’s Private Hospital in late November and looked after by cardiac surgeon Victor Chang, his wit in better shape than his body.

“The tests proved what they always prove: I eat, drink and smoke too much. F..k ’em. My floor was full of Chinese because the famous Dr Chang has a special package for Hong Kong sufferers: airfare, accommodation, three nightclubs in two hours and a triple bypass for $5000. True.”

He talks frankly of his medical procedures, the disgraceful ignominy of ageing. “I found the ultrasonic biopsy of the prostate to be a gross assault upon my body. The doctor fires ‘shots’ up the arse, which is very painful, and you watch the entire operation on a screen — a kind of appalling and bizarre video game.”

On another occasion in 1996, he jokes about his forgetfulness again. “Dementia has set in. I’m often standing in front of an open fridge or in another room, totally forgetting why I’m there,” he writes. “At 62, I was hoping that this would be my last address but now I’m not so sure. Glad you’re getting SBS — every time I tune in there’s a root going on in one language or another.”

Gay says that on Boxing Day of that year, Kennedy rang him and informed his friend that his doctor had given him Viagra tablets. He took one and sat on the bed “waiting for the best erection” he had ever had. “He was very disappointed,” says Gay.

Kennedy died in 2005, aged 71, after a long illness.

Source: The Australian