The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer

Chapter Fifteen: The Big Time

     Having had this revelation sprung on me, I was already quite emotional as the very hyper presenter took me through to another room in the hotel, followed by the cameras, to meet Steffi. She was obviously shocked by just how good I looked too. I hadn’t exactly been looking my best at our previous meetings and it was a nice feeling to see her expressions of surprise and pride at how sexy her mum was.

     When she hugged me I started crying, which must have looked like I was acting but actually I don’t know where it came from. I was as shocked by the tears as everyone else. The cameraman obviously loved it because he was getting in really tight and I hoped that I wasn’t streaking the make-up. Steffi was crying too and I wanted to comfort her at the same time as composing myself for the scene. Maybe there was still a slither of maternal instinct lurking in the most primitive recesses of my brain, who knows? Maybe, I thought, I should do one of those in-your-face with a psychiatrist or psychologist shows, talking to Pamela Stephenson or someone about all the stuff I’ve had to repress over the years. Q could probably set that up. The problem would be finding the time for all the projects I wanted to get started on now that I had the opportunity.

     The producers were fawning all over Steffi as if she had done us all a tremendous favour by even turning up, which I suppose in a way she had. She could just as easily have said she wanted nothing to do with me from the start and I was proud of her for being bigger than that about the whole thing. I liked to think it showed that she understood why I did what I did when I had her. We were both professionals and knew that the show had to go on, whatever the personal costs might be.

     Although I had learnt to use the Internet in recent months, I was by no means skilful at it and sometimes didn’t look at it for weeks on end. I suppose most people of my age have someone young around the house to help them get linked up and work it all out. So when people told me they had seen ‘pirated’ versions of our tearful reunion on YouTube I had to take their word for it. At first I thought ‘pirated’ sounded like a bad thing, like we had been robbed of something, but Q assured me it was good, that is was ‘viral marketing’ and that it showed there was an interest out there which the programme would build on.

     He was putting a lot of effort into the staging of my live comeback concert. They had decided to put it on at Madame Jo-Jo’s, which made the event all the more nostalgic for me because it was just round the corner from the Raymond Revuebar and had been part of Paul’s property empire. Mostly it had been famous for staging drag acts in its hay-day, but sometimes they would use some of us older girls to pad out the numbers in the chorus. It had always reminded me of the Kit-Kat club in Cabaret, even more than the Revuebar itself had, and I liked the idea of going back there, even though times had moved on and Paul was no longer on the scene. He was still alive at that stage but living pretty much like a hermit in his apartment just down from the Ritz. I don’t think he ever really recovered from losing his beloved daughter, Debbie, from a drug overdose. It was all very tragic and now that I had Steffi back in my life I had a much better idea of how devastated he must have been by the loss.

     I would have liked to have had more say in how the show was staged, after all I had had many years of experience of this sort of thing, but there were far too many people involved already and everything was so rushed no one seemed to have time to consult me, or to listen to anything I might have to say. I knew Q had his eye on all the arrangements and decided to leave it in his capable hands. It was going to be a full-length cabaret show and they were going to film it straight through, with a view to possibly screening it in its entirety at a later date, if the make-over programme did well. They were going to be taking out about ten minutes of highlights to act as the finale to the make-over show.

     The audience was going to be filled with Q’s celebrities and music business contacts, with Steffi being given a table right at the front, close to the stage. She arrived with her friend, Gerry, who seemed to tag along behind her wherever she went, hardly saying a word as everyone fussed around my little girl, making sure she had everything she could possibly need, cameras surrounding her every move. There were more hairdressers and make-up artists hovering around her than there were around me, even though it was going to be me standing in the spotlight.

     The designers did the place out like an old-fashioned nightclub, with little red shaded lamps and champagne bottles on the tables. They gave me a Gucci dress and as I slid into it I realised how long it had been since I had worn anything really expensive and new.

     Q and I had spent an evening at the Ivy brainstorming about songs to sing and decided to go for half a dozen or so covers of Sixties classics like Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain and Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do you Go To My Lovely?, add in a few country and western classics and then finish with Pearl’s a Singer which Elkie Brooks had had such a big hit with. They were all songs that were well within my vocal range and evoked an era that would be familiar to many people and hopefully interesting to younger people in a retro-way. Q kept using the word ‘retro’, which I guess was a polite way of saying he understood that my niche in the market was as an old-fashioned kind of all-round entertainer.

         As I waited backstage while the rest of the audience was brought in, listening to the band warming up while I was being fussed over by everyone, I felt a strange sense of calm settle over me. My stomach was still tight with nerves, and my hand was shaking so much the ice in my glass rattled every time I lifted it to my lips, but inside my head everything seemed light and right, like this was the moment I had been working towards ever since I walked out of my parents’ house nearly forty years before.

     I had paid my dues and earned my stripes and every other show business cliché and now I had reached a place where I had something to say that people were going to want to listen to. I wasn’t some manufactured little pop star thrown up by a television freak show with nothing more than a pretty face and tuneful voice. I was a true star in the old fashioned sense of the word. I’d had a hard life, drunk and smoked and lived a great deal more than I should have done and the public would be able to identify with that. I was like Piaf and Judy and Marianne and Liza and all the other hard living bohemians. I had a history, a back story and now I had a platform too, so nothing was going to stop me from becoming the legend I had always deserved to be.

     Everyone else went about their business, leaving me to prepare myself and suddenly they were moving me towards the red velvet curtains that I was to make my entrance through. The lights were dimming, the cameras were rolling, the music was building and suddenly I was out in the warm glare of the spotlight. It felt like I was flying. Every fibre of my body ached with happiness as the room erupted into applause. Every eye was on me, even the waiters and waitresses became still as they watched and listened to me perform. Every song made them all cheer with pleasure as soon as they recognised it and then fall silent in admiration at the emotion I imbued the lyrics with. I could see Steffi sitting in the front, staring up at me with wide, astonished eyes and I felt like the proudest mother in the whole world.