BILLY
Pamela Stephenson
Overlook Press
Biography
ISBN: 1585673080

Scottish comedian Billy Connolly is hugely popular in the U.K. He sells out venues usually played by rock stars and rates splashy national television specials.

But don't feel bad if you can't quite picture who he is. Despite touring in the U.S., appearing often as a guest on American television shows, and playing character roles in a string of movies, Connolly hasn't cracked the ranks of top comedians on this side of the Atlantic. He may be most recognizable to U.S. audiences for his one-year run on the late '80s sitcom "Head of the Class."

And that's a problem for BILLY, the biography written by his wife, Pamela Stephenson. While the writing is solid, even at times graceful and insightful, this is primarily a book for Connolly fans hungering after a peek into the comedian's psyche. In the U.K., Connolly's popularity has already made BILLY one of the biggest-selling books of the year. But the biography may hold meager appeal for non-fans.

To be sure, Connolly's life story is dramatic. He spent his first few years in a cramped Glasgow tenement with his mother and slightly older sister. At the age of four he was abandoned by his mother and flung into the care of a violent, sadistic aunt. His father returned from the war, but was as unsuited to child nurturing as the other adults in the young boy's life. What little attention Connolly got from his father came in the dark, in the sofa bed they shared.

"Late one night, when Billy was ten, he woke to find his father 'interfering' with him, as he puts it," Stephenson writes. "Then, and for the next four or five years, his father's frequent sexual abuse was a mystery to him, like being in an accident."

Stephenson, a former comedian turned clinical psychologist, returns often to the obvious connection between Connolly's harrowing childhood and the angry energy infusing his humor. It's not a bad point. It's just that the story of childhood hurt reaping comic genius has lost its intrigue through too many tellings. Show us a brilliant, edgy comedian raised in a happy family --- now that would be news.

That heard-it-all-before feeling intensifies as the book progresses to Connolly's adulthood. Talent, ambition, and pure creative joy propel him forward, but not fast enough to elude the insecurities that torture him. A first marriage turns ugly. He soaks his pain in copious amounts of alcohol. The drinking causes more pain. The love of a good, strong woman helps him stop drinking and subdue, if not banish, his demons. He marries the woman and becomes a devoted father. He achieves domestic tranquility, and more career success.

Add a manager who steals his money and you've got an episode of VH1's "Behind the Music."

The book also suffers from two unfortunate tendencies in Stephenson's writing. The first is her incessant name-dropping. One anecdote in the book seems to function solely as an excuse to cram the names Kevin Spacey, Geena Davis, Freddie Mercury, Bill Maher and Patrick Stewart into the space of a single page.

Stephenson compounds the first bad tendency with the habit of enthusing over how much famous people admire her husband's work. This passage, describing a day of filming on Robert Redford's movie Indecent Proposal, is typical: "When Billy performed his bit part as the auctioneer, he improvised to keep the audience interested through the many takes. One of the retakes occurred because Redford had failed to leave the scene as early as he should have. 'But it was so funny!' he protested. 'I didn't want to stop listening to Billy!"

Three paragraphs later, Stephenson reveals that David Hockney sometimes phoned to ask her and Connolly to come by the studio to see his just completed paintings before the rest of the public. A few sentences later, the reader is treated to this encounter with Frank Zappa's widow: "After Frank died, Billy was walking the dogs past Frank's house when Mrs. Zappa came out. 'Are you Billy Connolly,' she asked. 'Frank was your biggest fan.'"

For readers who aren't already Connolly fans, the book would have been more compelling if Stephenson had managed to adopt less gushing tone. Stephenson too often comes across as a combination groupie/doting wife. Connolly fans --- on both sides of the ocean --- tend to be an ardent bunch, so they're likely not to mind the fawning.

   --- Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Holt

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