It was the cool house, the place everyone wanted to hang out. A visit to the O'Donoghue home was like stepping into a musical with father Rory on the piano and four kids spontaneously bursting into six-part harmonies.
"As soon as dad walked into the room, the room lit up and the party started," youngest daughter Jessica O'Donoghue said.
To the rest of Australia, this fun-loving dad was Thin Arthur from the ABC's iconic The Aunty Jack Show, a beloved character to a generation, the musical star of a program that revolutionised Australian comedy in the 1970s.
"Rory's character was soft and gentle and lovable," said Grahame Bond who played the eponymous Aunty Jack character. "And women loved him — they adored him. He was very handsome and a beautiful singer."
But despite his ever-smiling public persona, Rory O'Donoghue kept a secret for most of his adult life, a darkness that he hid from everyone including Bond, his musical partner for decades.
He was a man, said Bond, "with 57 different masks".
"He covered up everything," he said.
"I didn't spot a chink in his armour for 30 years, and even then, I didn't quite see it."
From the outside, said daughter Jessica, "It could look like it was the perfect life, but there was definitely more going on that nobody really knew about.
"We never really talked about any of the issues dad was experiencing, we never mentioned it to anyone outside the family."
Gentle, sensitive and immensely popular O'Donoghue was experiencing a severe mental illness that at times engulfed him and which would ultimately claim his life.
The 52-year creative partnership begins
Success had come early for O'Donoghue. He was only 17 when he met Bond "and we just clicked".
Bond was an architecture student at Sydney University who had discovered performing. He invited O'Donoghue to be the musical director of his first Architecture Review. "And he just took it to another level."
Even at that age, O'Donoghue was a seasoned performer and gifted musician who had his own band at high school. Third generation of a showbiz family, he had been entertaining people all his life.
"I used to show him off," said his mother, Sybil, who, aged 99, died just a few weeks after being interviewed for Australian Story.
She and husband Terry were opera singers with the British D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed Gilbert and Sullivan.
Invited to tour Australia, they lived in the back of an old ambulance when the accommodation and childcare they had been promised did not materialise. The family never returned to the UK.
At age of 12, O'Donoghue played the Artful Dodger in a professional production of Oliver Twist and at 14 the eldest Von Trapp boy in The Sound of Music.
Bond recalled the early days in Sydney when he was working as an architect and O'Donoghue as a cartographer.
"We used to get up the front of the ferry and he'd haul out the guitar and say, 'You may wonder why we've gathered you all together'. It's a singalong all the way to Mosman. It was sort of like guerilla theatre."
Rory's 'exploding energy' on stage
The Aunty Jack Show was commissioned by the ABC in 1972.
The character of Aunty Jack was a gruff, cross-dressing pantomime-like bikie who threatened to "rip people's bloody arms off" if they didn't watch the show.
"It was vaudeville," Bond recalled of the show that catapulted them both to national fame.
These were the glory days before O'Donogue's world came crashing down.
"He'd walk out on stage and explode with energy," Bond said.
"He could play, sing, dance, act, play drums, play piano. He was a phenomenal musician.
"The thing I really loved about him is that at the very beginning he was willing to come on a very dangerous ride."
In the late 60s, O'Donoghue married Bernie, whom he met when she was an usherette at a theatre where he was performing with his band.
The first years of their marriage, which quickly produced four children and would last 35 years, were busy and happy.
"It was like having my very own troubadour in the in the lounge room, I'd be just cooking the dinner …. and he'd be playing something on the guitar," Bernie said.
Filming The Aunty Jack Show during the day, O'Donoghue would be performing in the smash hit Jesus Christ Superstar at night and writing advertising jingles with Bond from midnight until 4.00am.
"He [Rory] was young and strong and loved his work," Bernie said.
Like most of their contemporaries, the couple lived an "alternative" lifestyle.
Around the time of Jesus Christ Superstar, Bernie said that: "There was a lot of marijuana smoking and the odd taking of LSD acid. Rory had a couple of acid trips that were not very pleasant. In fact at one point he felt that he hadn't actually come back. I suppose that was the beginning of him not being terribly confident or comfortable about a number of things."
Still, O'Donoghue's star continued to rise.
In 1974, The Aunty Jack Show won a Logie for best comedy, the song Farewell Aunty Jack which he and Bond released was number one on the charts for weeks and then he leapt out of a cake as a nude centrefold in Cleo magazine.
But Bond noticed that O'Donoghue was starting to pull out of his commitments.
"I just thought we were growing apart. I just thought he wanted to distance himself and maybe concentrate on music," he said.
Although they would continue to work together on acclaimed theatre productions like Hamlet on Ice and Boys Own McBeth and despite O'Donoghue being "the sibling I never had", Grahame admitted "I never really knew him".
"We trusted one another. We performed. We were good, great together. But I never knew him."
It was Bernie who bore the brunt of the illness, who protected and shielded her children, who kept O'Donoghue's secret.
Loading...
Rory's debilitating mental disorder
It was 1975, just after their daughter Madeline was born, that O'Donoghue began to withdraw.
"He would just not be able to go anywhere or do anything," Bernie said.
"He didn't talk about it a lot. He didn't want it to be happening. He wanted to be playing.
"But there were periods when he was quite troubled. Sometimes they would result in a hospital stay or at least psychiatric care."
By the time the children were teenagers, his episodic illness could be overwhelming and utterly debilitating.
Said his oldest daughter Danielle, "it was like this visceral heaviness in the house."
Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in the early 90s, there were times when O'Donoghue believed that the devil was interfering with his ability to play music.
"Every time he picked up his guitar something would happen. There would be a noise that someone stirred up, a lawn mower," Bernie said.
"Things like that just put him right off and he would say, 'Are you the devil?'.
"He was very, very distressed because his music was everything to him."
Bernie would come across evidence that he had tried to take his own life.
"He was just so desperate, I could see that, but I kept telling him that wasn't the answer," she said.
"It was unpredictable because sometimes he was fine and then, bang, he wasn't fine. What I had to do was keep him alive, it was very stressful."
In 1991, O'Donoghue was launching a comeback as the lead in the musical Return to the Forbidden Planet.
"It was a big deal," daughter Jessica says. But then O'Donoghue suddenly pulled out mid-show. It was a major breakdown.
He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a lengthy stay and put on lithium, which caused him to balloon in weight.
He came and went from his relationship.
"I was very, very unhappy," Bernie admitted.
Finally in 2000, in an act of "self-preservation", she left him.
Alone for the first time, daughter Danielle said her dad was "quite manic and psychotic".
"He was really, really passionate about how the world was going to end," she said.
"We would get together as a family quite often to talk about what we could do."
Extreme exercise transformed Rory
In an astonishing turnaround, an incredible force of will, O'Donoghue took up extreme forms of exercise, changed his diet and took himself off medication.
He ran marathons, he taught himself to swim so he could compete in triathlons. He represented Australia in a duathlon. He would compete in at least one Ironman a year. He outran his illness, all of the pain and energy had a healthy place to go.
And when he and son Ben were playing in a cafe he met Carolyn Bennett and fell in love.
"He was the most different person I had ever met," Carolyn said.
"He was all muscle and it was like he was reversing the process of ageing. Rory became more and more competitive and pushed himself harder and harder."
For 15 years he was stable, able to go back to work teaching music in private girls' schools, where, said Carolyn, "He was very loved and respected".
When O'Donoghue wasn't exercising, he was composing music. His adult children saw a dad who was productive and content, relishing in his passions.
"He was always happy," Carolyn said.
"He was funny. He was smart. He adored my kids. I loved him and I never got the sense that there was anything wrong with him."
But the illness was always lurking, waiting to drag him back.
In 2017, he got a cataract in his eye and he had a problem with his leg.
O'Donoghue was no longer able to exercise and use endorphins to keep his illness in check. He spiralled and fell into a delusional state.
"The first episode [I witnessed] was extremely distressing," said Carolyn, who had no idea of his past history or any experience of mental illness.
As it progressed, O'Donoghue started seeing things that weren't there, the devil was in the water so he couldn't swim anymore.
"He pulled away from everyone, even me."
Carolyn wished she had known about his illness but O'Donoghue's children didn't feel it was their place to tell her and O'Donoghue didn't speak about it.
"I think Rory was in denial that there was anything wrong, and I think he might have been ashamed that there was something in his past and that's why he didn't tell me."
At the end of 2017, O'Donoghue was admitted to North Shore Hospital with bipolar depression. His treating psychiatrist recommended a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is highly successful in the treatment of this sort of illness.
The day before his first treatment, when a patient came in urgently needing a bed, O'Donoghue was moved from a high security unit short-stay unit to a pre-approved ward, where surveillance was generally less frequent but where the environment was thought to be more therapeutic.
On the night of his first treatment, daughter Danielle received a call to say that Rory O'Donoghue had taken his own life.
Everyone was devastated.
"He was greatly loved," said Bond, who hasn't been able to pick up his guitar since his friend's death.
O'Donoghue's children raised questions with the coroner about the circumstances surrounding their father's death, particularly the move to the lower security unit so close to the time of his first ECT treatment.
But the coroner cleared the hospital of any wrongdoing and found that they had complied with their protocols.
Two-and-a-half years after his death, O'Donoghue's family are speaking to Australian Story to trigger a conversation around complex mental health conditions like their father's, the kind of illnesses that are still so often hidden away.
"The thing that amazes me is how much joy dad brought to us as a family and to so many other people in spite of everything he was experiencing," his son Ben said.
"And how much more could he have been if he didn't also have the shame and the stigma and the secrecy around all of that as well."
The family said they didn't have the language to deal with O'Donoghue's illness.
"We couldn't seek out a support network because it wasn't allowed to be talked about," Jessica said.
"I feel passionate about destigmatising issues around mental health and really breaking open the conversation to make it more acceptable and to normalise it.
"I think that would really help not only the people suffering, but people experiencing and supporting those people, being able to reach out for proper help and support."
O'Donoghue's children choose to remember the cool house, the music, the laughter, the beautiful man that he was.
Said his daughter Madeline: "It's a beautiful story and so much of what dad did was incredibly positive and he touched so many lives.
"That element, his mental health is not his story, it's not everything. It is just a small part of it. So why let that overshadow everything else that he was?"
Watch Australian Story's Keeping Up Appearances, 8:00pm (AEST), on ABCTV, iview or Youtube.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiYGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEwLTA1L2F1bnR5LWphY2stc3Rhci1yb3J5LW9kb25vZ2h1ZXMtY3JpcHBsaW5nLXNlY3JldC8xMjY4MTk1NtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjY4MTk1Ng?oc=5
2020-10-04 21:24:00Z
CBMiYGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEwLTA1L2F1bnR5LWphY2stc3Rhci1yb3J5LW9kb25vZ2h1ZXMtY3JpcHBsaW5nLXNlY3JldC8xMjY4MTk1NtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjY4MTk1Ng
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar