Being Conchita Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Letter from Jean Paul Gaultier

  Prologue

  Chapter One The Green Cave

  Chapter Two Trouble in Paradise

  Chapter Three With Needle And Thread

  Chapter Four Coming Out

  Chapter Five The Walk to Canoss

  Chapter Six Starmania

  Chapter Seven Take the Stage!

  Chapter Eight Guapa, Conchita, guapa!

  Chapter Nine The Letter

  Chapter Ten The World is your Oyster

  Chapter Eleven Meeting the Himba

  Chapter Twelve Tour de Force

  Chapter Thirteen The Number 11

  Chapter Fourteen Rise Like a Phoenix

  Chapter Fifteen The Days that Followed

  Chapter Sixteen Paris, ooh-la-la

  Chapter Seventeen Off to Cannes!

  Chapter Eighteen KL & CR

  Chapter Nineteen My Life as a Nomad

  Chapter Twenty Jean Paul and Sisi

  Chapter Twenty-one Us versus me

  Chapter Twenty-two It’S all in the Doing

  Chapter Twenty-three Girls Just Want to Have Fun – And Boys as Well!

  Chapter Twenty-four Homeward Bound

  Chapter Twenty-five Kids? Kids!

  Chapter Twenty-six Pierre and Gilles

  Chapter Twenty-seven Crazy Horse

  Chapter Twenty-eight Heroes

  Chapter Twenty-nine Of Chancellors, Presidents, and Secretaries-general

  Chapter Thirty Conchita Goes Banking

  Chapter Thirty-one The Road Ahead

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  Plates

  LETTER FROM JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER

  Paris, 12 December 2014

  Dear Conchita,

  The first time I saw you was on the internet when you were in the selection process to be the Austrian representative of the Eurovision Song Contest. It was like a jolt, like a shock to me and also a revelation. The look, the voice… I was seduced and wanted to get to know you immediately. I invited you to come to Paris and see my show and when I met you and talked to you I became your unconditional fan. It was a coup de foudre. And I also discovered that your name had a double, even triple meaning.

  Two years later you sang for Austria and the rest is history. I voted for you seventy-three times! Your victory was not only for a song, a singer, an incredible voice and a fantastic interpretation, but also a victory for the values in which I believe in and for which I fought throughout my career: tolerance and humanity. This was a victory for all those who are different, as well as a message of encouragement to them to express their difference, to manifest it and to live it. You are a unique human being, positive and generous, smart and straightforward.

  Like Madonna who is a real macho in a woman’s body, you are a Wonder Woman in a man’s body. You erase boundaries between masculine and feminine like no one did before. You succeeded, coming from the avant-garde and the underground, to become a popular icon, and a fashion icon forever. I look up to you for how you break the fashion codes like I did throughout my career: the male and female duality, male object and strong woman.

  Conchita, you are a true inspiration and I am proud to know you and to be your friend.

  Jean Paul Gaultier

  PROLOGUE

  The night before the grand final of the Eurovision Song Contest, I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room. For the first time in many hours I was completely alone – well, almost. Getting ready for a short night’s sleep, my face half free of makeup, I gazed into the glass at the shape-shifter I knew so well. At someone who inspires joy, tolerance and love in so many, and yet who also stirs up hatred, anger and fear of the most important question there is: who am I? It was a question I asked myself that night. Who am I, and who will I be for the time it takes to sing a song, when I take to the stage tomorrow night with the eyes of the world fixed upon me? Who will I be for those three minutes? Those three minutes that could become an eternity in the unlikely event that I win. ‘If that happens, then you and I have a problem,’ I told the hybrid in the mirror. ‘If that happens, we have to come up with something intelligent to say.’

  Conchita gave me a smile. Or was it Tom Neuwirth, the country boy, the boy who grew up far from the glare of the spotlights? The boy from a place where people take their holidays, where all’s still right with the world – or so they say. If that were really the case, though, then how do you explain Conchita?

  I reached for another piece of cotton wool and carried on removing my makeup. Conchita retreated with every dab, making way for Tom. Going round in my head was the song I’d be performing the following day. It tells of the ancient legend of the phoenix, a mythical bird that bursts into flame at the end of its life only to rise again from the ashes. The phoenix is itself based on the ancient Egyptian bird god Bennu, a deity who represented eternal life and was hence also known as the ‘reincarnated son’. It’s him I see in the mirror as Conchita disappears along with her makeup: it’s the rebirth of Tom, the boy from the sticks. By this point my wig has long been put aside; my dress hangs from the clothes rail. A few more dabs and Conchita will be gone.

  ‘We have to come up with something intelligent,’ I repeat.

  Perhaps a spot of eye-shadow fell into my eye. Perhaps it was some of the mascara that Conchita so likes. Whatever it was, tears started streaming down my face, and suddenly Tom was a young boy again, a boy in shorts and rolled-down socks, with a T-shirt pulled over his skinny frame. The air was filled with the fresh scent of pine and the sound of water from a trickling stream. Little Tom jumped across the stream and ran on as fast as his legs could carry him, and running along beside him was happiness, a happiness known only to those who’ve experienced one of those country summers that seem, in the eyes of a child, to last forever.

  ‘Why make it up?’ I heard Conchita ask. ‘Just tell them your story. There’s no point trying to say something intelligent unless you’ve experienced it for yourself.’ And so, as she’s usually right, I wrote myself a note: If I win, I tell my story. But only if.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE GREEN CAVE

  ‘I want to make magic,

  I want to electrify the place’

  FROM THE MUSICAL FAME

  My life is a musical, I often say. For one thing, it began where so many musicals begin: in the countryside. What’s more, it features music and singing, drama and comedy – and then there’s my love of cabaret, with all its costumes and mesmerising stories. One of my very first memories feels as though it was lifted straight from a musical: I was four years old, and we were living in Ebensee, a romantic little town on the southern bank of Traunsee lake, in the centre of the Salzkammergut region of Austria. In this memory of mine, I can see boats sailing across the water, while a cable car wends its way up to the plateau at Feuerkogel. Further up is Rindbach waterfall, which turns into a raging torrent in spring, and the stalagmite cave at Gassenkogel, its entrance a thousand metres above the lake.

  Yet there was another cave, one that existed inside our house, an enchanted villa the size of a fairytale castle. In real life, our house was a youth hostel run by my parents, with a common room upholstered from floor to ceiling in soft, forest green. The whole room was like a moss-covered cave, and it was where the groups of school children that filled our house held their parties. When no one else was around, the cave belonged to me. It then became a space in which to play and to dream, somewhere that was home to giants and dwarves, fairies and elves. It was there that I sensed the existence of a life that went beyond the ‘reality’ of which the adults loved to speak. Whole worlds could be created in the blink of an eye, worlds that only a child could see. Years later, when I re
turned for a visit after we’d moved, the cave had disappeared. Somebody had torn the upholstery down from the walls and set to work with a paintbrush and paint. Now it was merely a room that was inoffensive enough, but totally devoid of creativity, of the possibility of travelling to other worlds. This sort of thing happens a lot: we renovate a place to death and are then surprised when our inspiration runs dry. There’d never been any chance of that happening to me in the Green Cave. No wonder it had been so hard to say goodbye. My father had set up his own restaurant and so we’d had to leave Ebensee. Back then, I had no way of knowing that another cave of fantasies lay waiting for me in my new home, one that was also resplendent with green, with the colour of hope and of immortality. It’s the sort of thing that usually only happens in musicals – or in my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  ‘Hiding away,

  There’s a little bit of gypsy in me’

  FROM THE MUSICAL ANYTHING GOES

  We moved from one paradise to another: our new hometown of Bad Mitterndorf was, just like Ebensee, situated in the heart of the Salzkammergut region, surrounded by mountains, meadows and forests. Once again, we weren’t far from water, being close to the Salza reservoir and the thermal springs of Heilbrunn, where the Romans used to bathe. In winter, people would come from all over the world to go skiing on the Tauplitzalm. Those who were really brave would cross to the Kulm, the world’s largest natural jumping hill, where jumps of over 200 metres are not out of the ordinary. I spent my childhood playing out in the fresh air with my brother Andi, who’s one-and-a-half years my senior, and our friends. On returning home breathless, hungry and thirsty, we’d be allowed to pick a meal from the menu at my parent’s restaurant. At the time, I didn’t understand why our playmates looked so envious – it was something we just took for granted. Looking back on this period, it seems like one long childhood dream. Quite recently, my mother told me how sorry she was that she and my father had had so little time for us as children. They’d been busy knocking the restaurant into shape and building up their business. I was able to put her mind at rest, because I’d had a completely different experience of things: whenever we’d needed our parents, they’d been there for us. That never changed, not even when my life in Bad Mitterndorf took a turn for the worse and trouble began to brew in paradise.

  It all started at puberty. All of a sudden, my life contained an element of uncertainty that I had never known before. I can no longer say who was the first to notice that I was different to my classmates: me or them. Teenagers have a sixth sense for ‘otherness’, and, at a stage in life when everyone still wants to be the same as everyone else, the term ‘different’ is a form of insult. I started to hear more and more of these, since sooner or later most of the boys in my class came to the conclusion that there was something not quite right about Tom. Exactly what that was remained unclear, but there was a term for it nonetheless: gay.

  It was a word flung around in every conceivable variation, even though none of the loudmouths who used it actually knew what it meant. This isn’t so surprising when you consider that, even today, we don’t know for sure when or why this word became synonymous with homosexual. I did look it up once: the German word for gay (schwul) is thought to be derived from Rotwelsch, a dialect that originated in the Middle Ages among travelling merchants, craftsmen, tinkers and pedlars. And homosexual? A word coined in 1869 by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl Maria Kertbeny by combining the Greek word homós with the Latin word sexus. It translates roughly as same-sex, which explains some things, though by no means everything. But the boys at my school weren’t bothered about all that: for them, the main thing was to point the finger at the gay. As I now know, this often reflects a great fear of being gay oneself.

  The mess in which we humans find ourselves stems from having rules we don’t understand. Homosexuality was banned in our culture from the time of the early Christians, leading to persecution, execution and, ultimately, to the madness of the Nazis, who thought that all gays belonged in concentration camps. For more than 120 years, Paragraph 175 was enshrined in German law, making homosexual acts between men a crime punishable by imprisonment. I didn’t know any of this this back then. Deep inside, I felt that being gay was neither dirty nor wrong. When I stand up for tolerance and love today, what I say is essentially the same as what I already felt all that time ago: we humans come from many different nations and cultures, have many different skin colours and features – and we’re always right.

  My school years in Bad Mitterndorf taught me what happens when we banish this tolerance from our lives. More often than not, it was small acts of cruelty – whispering behind my back, or calling out insults as I walked past. While these experiences left their mark, they didn’t embitter me. But it doesn’t always work out that way: I’ll never forget hearing the following story, one that illustrates clearly where being let down by others can lead. It concerns Muhammad Ali – possibly the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, ‘Sportsman of the Century’, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Otto Hahn Peace Medal for ‘outstanding services to peace and international understanding’. After winning his gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, the eighteen-year-old returned home to Louisville with these words on his lips: ‘I’ve won for my country.’ But it was a country still rife with discrimination and racial segregation and, on entering a milk bar, Ali found himself thrown out to applause from the guests. He knew then what his achievement was worth in the eyes of the whites: nothing. In his frustration, he took his gold medal and hurled it into the Ohio River. He also refused to fight for America in Vietnam, a decision that led to decades of demonisation.

  In 2014, I was offered honorary citizenship of Bad Mitterndorf. It was because I hadn’t become embittered by my experiences that I was able to accept. I sensed that something had taken root in the hearts and minds of those who used to single me out: the realisation that it’s OK to be different. None of us can tell what the future holds, and it’s probably better that way. Maybe we would just give up if we saw the difficulties that life has in store for us. Every morning when getting ready for schol, whenever my thoughts turned to the day ahead, I felt like I was going to be sick. During class, I could hardly wait for the bell to go. I was constantly stressed, and felt defenceless against the mocking stares and torrents of abuse from my classmates. There was nothing I could do to fight back, as the balance of power was clearly in their favour. There were many of them and just one of me – or at least that’s the way it seemed. I later learned that the reality was somewhat different, after hearing enough stories about seemingly normal fathers who’d left their families to finally be true to their nature. Back in my school days, however, it felt like everybody else looked down upon and hated gays. Still, I had an easier time of it than some. I was never beaten up, though this can happen to you for a variety of reasons when you’re young. Florian, my best friend at the time, hit the nail on the head: ‘You don’t need to be gay to have a hard time at school,’ he commented. ‘Having glasses and braces is enough.’

  Nonetheless, I still felt excluded when break time came around and all the other boys ran off to the toilets to lie in wait for me there. ‘What’s gay boy’s one like, eh?’ ‘Is it different?’ ‘Let’s show him a bit of a hard time, boys.’ In the end, I only went to the toilets during class, something which didn’t make me too popular with the teachers – who, I should add, didn’t do much to protect me from my tormentors.

  There was never a lack of opportunity to stare at and make fun of me. Even the yearly fire drill. As soon as the siren on the school roof started to sound, we had to file out of the building class by class and then line up in orderly rows outside. There was always a lot of pushing and shoving going on around where I was standing, around the boy who was different, the boy who was gay. Little by little, I managed to create safety zones, building a cordon of girls around me. My relationship with the girls boiled down to this: I loved them
and they loved me. Lots of the boys at school envied how relaxed I was in my interactions with members of the opposite sex. ‘Why him of all people?’ they would ask themselves, although the answer was obvious: I took the girls seriously, and they did me. I started developing an increasingly close friendship with one girl in particular, Kristin, which has lasted to this day. Kristin and I did duets together, and we were an unbeatable duo. We performed at school fairs, speech days, festivals – you name it – and I became sought after as an organiser, director and performer at these events. I’d jump at the chance to go on stage or to sing, particularly as it gave me the opportunity to pursue a growing passion of mine. I loved materials and dresses, and had a talent for making novel creations with a needle and thread. Add Kristin into the equation and our performances soon became a hit. We usually went onstage wearing the same outfit, and had to hide our laughter whenever someone remarked: ‘You two are twins, right?’

  That we weren’t even sisters can be seen in an old photo taken at our first holy communion. As we stand before our families and the rest of the congregation to receive the gift of Christ’s body and blood – a miracle the adults couldn’t explain away – the photo shows us trussed up in the clothes that are standard for this event. The boys are wearing suits that make them look like miniature men, while the girls are in dresses that look like bridal gowns. I sit forlorn, one hand around my candle and the other on Kristin’s dress, my gaze resting on its delicate lacework. Looking at the photo today, I suspect I was envious. I was probably thinking that I ought to be wearing such a pretty dress too. I put on my mum’s and my grandma’s wedding dresses at home to make up for it, and cut up a dress belonging my aunt so I could turn it into something better.