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A young man drowns in the pool of television’s highest-paid enter­tainer. The star is branded a killer. But, says Mark Simp­son, the case against the ‘OJ of Essex’ doesn’t add up. Now, as fresh evi­dence emerges, Michael Bar­ry­more talks about that tragic night, his demons and why the facts weren’t allowed to get in the way of a good story

(Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, 02/03/2003 — uncut version)

“Fol­low the brown signs,” Michael Barrymore’s PA tells me when giv­ing direc­tions over the phone for the Essex leg of my car jour­ney to the infa­mous “House of Hor­ror” of the for­mer Mr Sat­ur­day Night. “The ones point­ing to Par­adise Wildlife Park,” he adds, with­out a hint of irony in his voice.

The 50-year-old comedian’s Roy­don home may not be an offi­cial tourist attrac­tion, but since the body of 31-year-old Stu­art Lub­bock was dis­cov­ered in his swim­ming pool in the early hours of 31 March 2001, it has become, like its owner, the ‘butt’ of count­less off-colour locker-room jokes. Many of these focus on the seri­ous sex­ual injuries the young man was said to have suffered.

But most of the Bar­ry­more “jokes” didn’t come from the changing-room. They were sup­plied by the Fourth Estate. Most mem­o­rably, Pri­vate Eye ran a front-page pic­ture of Bar­ry­more being asked: “What killed Stu­art Lub­bock?” His bal­loon reply: “Bug­gered if I know!” And also the front page of the Sun­day Mir­ror (15 Sep­tem­ber 2002), two days after the inquest into Lubbock’s death deliv­ered an open ver­dict and the press declared open sea­son on Bar­ry­more, fea­tured a pic­ture of Bar­ry­more and the huge, hilar­i­ously seri­ous head­line: “YOU ARE A KILLER!”

Jokes are irre­sistible ideas, as seduc­tive as they are pre­pos­ter­ous. Laugh­ter, after all, is a very phys­i­cal response to some­thing we are reject­ing and accept­ing at the same time; a reflex located some­where between orgas­ming and vom­it­ing. Over the past few months, this pre­pos­ter­ous idea of Bar­ry­more, the tele­vi­sion fun­ny­man, as a kind of mur­der­ing anal rapist has proved irre­sistible to the British media. It’s been hav­ing hys­ter­ics. Retch­ing, rav­ing, shud­der­ing hysterics.

Bar­ry­more, how­ever, isn’t laugh­ing. “I’m not let­ting that one go. At all,” he says of the Sun­day Mirror’s “Killer” ver­dict. “It’s being dealt with. Action is being taken,” he insists. Writ­ten off only a few months ago, Bar­ry­more seems to be regain­ing the ini­tia­tive. In recent weeks the per­jury inves­ti­ga­tion against him, prompted by his ex-wife Cheryl’s alle­ga­tions, has been dropped and Essex police have reopened their inquiry into Lubbock’s injuries because of fresh claims that they occurred after he was declared dead.

Accord­ing to Bar­ry­more, the Sun­day Mir­ror head­line was a form of revenge. “It only came out because they didn’t get their way,” he says. Appar­ently, the paper rang the day the inquest fin­ished ask­ing if Claire Wicks {Lubbock’s ex-girlfriend} could visit Barrymore’s house with her two chil­dren by Lub­bock as they “wanted to see where their Daddy died”.

“Not a prob­lem, we said. Would be very happy to have Claire and the kids here for the day. But, of course, they wanted pho­tog­ra­phers and jour­nal­ists to come with her so we asked, is this Claire’s idea? And they had to admit it wasn’t. So we said no. Two days later: ‘You Are a Killer!’” says Barrymore.

Pos­si­bly only Iraq or OJ Simpson’s house have been pho­tographed from the air more than Barrymore’s home. He is, after all, by decree of the pop­u­lar press, the Sodom Hus­sein of Roy­don, the OJ of Essex. The bun­ga­low is not as large as it looks from above through a tele­photo lens, but it’s cer­tainly large enough, as are the vast, shiny leather sofas we are sit­ting on. The “death pool”, as the News of the World dubbed it, clearly vis­i­ble through the French win­dows, also looks smaller at ground level but it is also, alas, big enough to drown in.

“I’m actu­ally quite quiet,” says Bar­ry­more, talk­ing about how peo­ple expect him to be the hoot­ing extro­vert they see on telly. There does appear to be a low-energy shy­ness to him. He’s sit­ting diag­o­nally across from me, ini­tially with his arms and legs crossed and his body quarter-turned away. But then, I am, after all, a journalist.

“This is not a trial,” the coro­ner had declared at the start of the Lub­bock inquest. The inquest, how­ever, was turned into a media show trial of epic pro­por­tions, and set the cli­mate for oth­ers that were to fol­low, such as that of John Leslie and Matthew Kelly. As with all show tri­als, Bar­ry­more was guilty until proven inno­cent and then still guilty any­way — or “morally respon­si­ble”, if you’re a broad­sheet reader.

I sug­gest that there has been an almost play­ground spite­ful­ness in some of the press cov­er­age. “Yeah,” he says, now look­ing at me directly, “but what have I actu­ally ever done to them? In the play­ground, or any­where? What have I done to them?” His gaze doesn’t waver. “Say they suc­ceed in fin­ish­ing me off, what good does that do them? They haven’t got you any more to exploit, have they? What do they gain from that? Tell me?”

***

IF YOU’RE GOING to drown in a celebrity swim­ming pool, choose care­fully. Not all celebrity swim­ming pools are equal. In March last year Daniel Williams a 23-year-old fire­man drowned in another male celebrity’s pool. But while Lub­bock, a butcher by trade, became a house­hold name, Williams became yesterday’s news.

As with the events sur­round­ing Lubbock’s death, there was a party, Williams amused him­self in the pool at the Lon­don house, while the other guests drifted indoors. No one saw him drown. He was found sub­merged dead, or dying, in the early hours of the morn­ing. The toxicologist’s report showed that Williams had con­sumed the same quan­ti­ties of alco­hol (nine pints), ecstasy (four or five tablets) and cocaine (a line or two) as Lub­bock. Like­wise, there was no foren­sic or wit­ness evi­dence of any struggle.

Unlike the Lub­bock case, the press didn’t find Williams’s death mys­te­ri­ous or even par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. They accepted the results of the police inquiry (which, as with Lub­bock, ulti­mately pro­duced no charges) and the Home Office pathologist’s con­clu­sion was that he had died by drown­ing. They didn’t splash each day’s (care­fully selected) inquest “high­lights” across their front pages, print­ing spec­u­la­tion as sci­en­tific fact, or con­stantly inter­view Williams’s fam­ily and friends. Nor did they lynch his host’s career from the lamp­post of pub­lic indig­na­tion. Instead they treated the death for what it was, a ter­ri­ble accident.

Why? What was the dif­fer­ence? Was it in part that Williams drowned, acci­den­tally, in a swim­ming pool belong­ing to a mar­ried film celebrity — the actor Art Malik — instead of a very famously gay and off-the-rails tele­vi­sion celebrity called Michael Barrymore?

There was how­ever another ‘fun­da­men­tal’ dif­fer­ence: the injuries to Lubbock’s anus, described as seri­ous and sig­nif­i­cant by the pathol­o­gists, “fear­ful”, “night­mar­ish” and “hor­rific” by the press. These injuries, com­bined with his hosts very pub­lic homo­sex­u­al­ity, pre­sented an irre­sistible idea — arous­ing all those col­umn inches and mak­ing the inquest one of the most heav­ily and excit­edly reported — and dis­torted — of recent times.

For exam­ple, the papers, tabloid and broad­sheet, told us repeat­edly how Lub­bock was found float­ing face down in Barrymore’s pool. Untrue. All the wit­ness state­ments agree that Lub­bock was found at the bot­tom of the pool face up. Appar­ently, the image of a “hand­some”, “het­ero­sex­ual father-of-two” float­ing dead, face down, and arse up — lit­er­ally drown­ing in pas­siv­ity — in the pool of Britain’s most famous ‘arse-bandit’ was just too seduc­tive for the press to resist.

But this rel­a­tively minor kind of kinky dis­tor­tion was just the begin­ning. For exam­ple, in the space of his first few sen­tences, (13 Sep­tem­ber 2002) the Sun’s res­i­dent sodomy expert Richard Lit­tle­john, forced all the impor­tant facts to sur­ren­der them­selves to the impa­tient heat of his pas­sion: “The inquest is finally under­way into the death of the man found float­ing face down [false] in Michael Barrymore’s swim­ming pool. Stu­art Lub­bock was pumped full of drink and drugs [false: in fact, he helped him­self to Barrymore’s drinks and tox­i­col­o­gist reports showed he was a long-term user of cocaine and/or ecstasy], and had been rogered sense­less [fan­tasy]. Pathol­o­gists agree he suf­fered a seri­ous sex­ual assault [false].”

In fact, the pathol­o­gists were divided as to how the injuries were caused. It was not even estab­lished that the injuries were caused by sex­ual activ­ity. Indeed, DNA test­ing showed that Lub­bock had not had sex­ual con­tact in the hours before he died.

Since it seems to have been such an impor­tant part of the cov­er­age, I ask Bar­ry­more if he fan­cied Lub­bock when he met him in the Mil­len­nium, the night­club in Har­low that the star attended with his then-boyfriend Jonathan Ken­ney before return­ing home in a taxi with Lub­bock and two other party guests, Kylie and Jonathan Mer­ritt, who he had met that evening (Ken­ney fol­low­ing later). “I spoke to that many peo­ple at the Mil­len­nium that night. I wouldn’t have picked Stu­art out. It was reported that I couldn’t even remem­ber his name. Well, I didn’t know his name. He jumped in the taxi with Kylie and Jonathan and I thought he was with them. When he was here he did what­ever he was doing, like most of the other guests; I just said here’s the drink and here’s the music. Most of the night I was with James Futers and Simon Shaw, who I knew from the vil­lage. If I was try­ing to chat Stu­art up, I think I would’ve spent a bit more time with him. Besides, my boyfriend at the time, Jonathan, was here.” Bar­ry­more adds, “It just doesn’t tally up.”

Bar­ry­more is con­vinced that the papers built the story the way they wanted to build it. ‘That’s why most of them didn’t men­tion that there were three girls at the party, because it got in the way of the “Gay Sex Orgy” headlines.’

How many of the guests were actu­ally gay? “None. Just me and my boyfriend,” says Barrymore.

So not much of a gay orgy then. “Nope. Not much of an orgy of any kind. No sex­ual activ­ity took place what­so­ever,” insists Barrymore.

I ask him about the only indis­putably cul­pa­ble thing he did that evening: his depar­ture from his house after Lubbock’s body was retrieved from the pool — and catch a glimpse of the eva­sive­ness that irri­tates many. “Yeah, well, it was wrong,” he says quickly, “but I’ve answered that. I didn’t run away… imme­di­ately — I ran into the house and got Jonathan who knows about resus­ci­ta­tion, while the lads {James Futers and Simon Shaw} were get­ting Stu­art out of the pool. I wouldn’t have know what to do… there were four peo­ple work­ing on him… it wasn’t my idea to leave the house. James and Simon said, ‘Come away, there’s noth­ing you can do here.…’

“I’ve admit­ted it was a stu­pid thing to do,” he con­tin­ues, sound­ing irri­tated, per­haps with him­self as much as the ques­tion, “but no one knows how they’re gonna react… it was just a night­mare. I rang my PA to tell him where I was going so that I could be con­tacted. Why would I do that if I was run­ning away?” Barrymore’s call to his PA, which was reported in some papers as a call to his PR (“some­thing I’ve never had”) was taken as fur­ther evi­dence either of his guilt or his celebrity arro­gance: “I’m a celebrity, get me out of this!” Of course, it was pre­cisely his celebrity sta­tus which meant that his fears about what the press would do were well founded.

Like­wise his reported silence at the inquest was seen as cal­lous and sus­pi­cious. In fact, he answered all the ques­tions put to him — save those relat­ing to ille­gal drug tak­ing in his house. Barrymore’s exer­cise of his legal right to refuse to incrim­i­nate him­self was seen as dou­bly incrim­i­nat­ing. Much was made in the press of the alle­ga­tion that, dur­ing the party, Bar­ry­more tried to rub cocaine on Lubbock’s gums; how­ever, leav­ing aside the fact that Lub­bock was a long-term user of drugs, the small amount of cocaine — a stim­u­lant — in his sys­tem was not iden­ti­fied at the inquest as a likely fac­tor in his death.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that per­haps that the most unbe­liev­able thing about that night for some was the fact that television’s highest-paid celebrity would attend a night­club in Har­low, and invite working-class strangers back to his house for a ‘chill-out’ party sim­ply because he might enjoy their com­pany, and that he might not want to treat a butcher like a piece of meat. “It wasn’t unusual for me to have peo­ple back for drinks. Wasn’t a reg­u­lar thing. Just not unusual. It’s partly my Irish back­ground and it’s partly that I don’t like being alone,” explains Bar­ry­more. Much of the broad­sheets’ hos­til­ity to Bar­ry­more, their almost uni­ver­sal fail­ure to crit­i­cise the tabloid gang-bang of his rep­u­ta­tion, and indeed their com­plic­ity in it, was down to class: Bar­ry­more was a vul­gar man who enter­tained vul­gar peo­ple in a vul­gar way. Worst of all, he was paid vul­gar amounts of money for doing so. (A senior edi­tor on a lib­eral broad­sheet, explain­ing shortly after the inquest why no, he def­i­nitely would not be run­ning an arti­cle anatomis­ing the press’ dis­tor­tions, told me in no uncer­tain terms that Bar­ry­more was ‘low life’.)

Born Kier­nan Michael Parker into a work­ing class fam­ily in Bermond­sey in 1952, this Nor­man Wis­dom fan and for­mer Redcoat’s adopted stage moniker (‘there were too many Parker’s on Equity’s books’) became a house­hold name with his mad­cap com­edy per­for­mances on the TV game show Strike it Lucky in 1986. Bar­ry­more brought the phys­i­cal, audi­ence involve­ment com­edy that he had per­fected on the workingmen’s club cir­cuit to the rel­a­tively up-tight and staid world of prime-time com­mer­cial TV with great suc­cess. By 1992 Bar­ry­more was one of TV’s high­est paid enter­tain­ers, and a prime tar­get for tabloid gos­sip. After many run-ins with the press over his drink­ing, drug abuse and sex life, this mar­ried work­ing class hero finally came out as gay in 1995 — the first fam­ily enter­tainer to do so. ‘I thought I was fin­ished,’ he says. In fact, more awards and hit TV shows fol­lowed, and he remained ‘Mr Sat­ur­day Night’ — even after Lubbock’s death in his swim­ming pool in 2001. It wasn’t until the uni­ver­sally damn­ing cov­er­age of last September’s inquest that his career finally ran aground.

How­ever, the real inquest into Lubbock’s death, rather than the vir­tual one reported in the media, largely went well for Bar­ry­more. It emerged there was no evi­dence that he, or his guests, were respon­si­ble — even indi­rectly — for Lubbock’s death or injuries. How­ever, the sum­ming up of the coro­ner, Car­o­line Beasley-Murray, seemed to assume, despite evi­dence to the con­trary, that Lubbock’s injuries must have occurred at Barrymore’s house, and appeared to crit­i­cise the par­ty­go­ers and the host for not being able to explain them. This and the open ver­dict — itself not uncom­mon in inquests — pro­vided the press with enough rope with which to hang Bar­ry­more again and again.

“If his injuries occurred here,” asks Bar­ry­more, “why was there no blood on his boxer shorts? Why is there no blood in the house? Or in the pool?”

It’s a vital ques­tion. Lubbock’s anal injuries, lac­er­a­tions as well as bruis­ing and dila­tion, would have involved a sub­stan­tial amount of bleed­ing and even small blood­stains are noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to erad­i­cate. More­over, since the inquest, Stu­art Nairn, one of the A&E nurses who worked with­out suc­cess to resus­ci­tate Lub­bock for over two-hours, has pro­vided a detailed sworn state­ment to Barrymore’s solic­i­tor which has sparked the new inves­ti­ga­tion by Essex police and thrown the coroner’s pre­sump­tion about where the injuries took place into even more doubt.

Nairn’s assigned task for the entire two-hours was repeat­edly tak­ing Lubbock’s tem­per­a­ture rec­tally with a small, thin, ther­mal probe. Nairn per­formed this oper­a­tion 16 times, pulling apart Lubbock’s but­tocks and open­ing his sphinc­ter each time. His state­ment makes clear that he saw no evi­dence of the injuries described at the coroner’s inquiry. Indeed he noticed no dila­tion or sig­nif­i­cant bruis­ing (accord­ing to the pathol­o­gists’ report, even if Nairn’s small tem­per­a­ture probe were actu­ally quite large, he would not have needed to open Lubbock’s sphinc­ter mus­cle at all). “I am sure that I would have noticed this,” says Nairn. “More­over, I would have reported this to the doc­tor.” He also men­tions that aside from a small smear of blood on the probe towards the lat­ter stages, which was not unusual given the num­ber of inser­tions, there was no evi­dence of bleed­ing. (Per­haps this level of infor­ma­tion is dis­taste­ful to you — per­haps, like Yas­min Alibai-Brown of the Inde­pen­dent, you are keen to assert it makes you ‘want to throw up’; but Lubbock’s anus has been made an object of such fas­ci­na­tion and sym­bolic impor­tance not by Bar­ry­more but by the Great British Press and its readership.)

Nairn was due to appear as a wit­ness at the inquest but the police say they lost con­tact with him. A sim­i­lar state­ment by Nairn was read out at the inquest, but it was dis­missed by Pro­fes­sor Crane, one of the pathol­o­gists, who claimed that some­one in A&E would not have had time to notice such injuries, and would have been pre­oc­cu­pied with other things any­way. Nairn’s sec­ond state­ment makes it clear that he would have noticed. In fact, he prob­a­bly spent more time observ­ing Lubbock’s anus than any pathologist.

If, as now seems likely, the injuries to Lub­bock occurred after he was finally pro­nounced dead at Har­low Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal and Nairn’s treat­ment ended, then they must have occurred in the seven hours between this time and the body’s exam­i­na­tion by the Home Office pathol­o­gist, who was the first per­son to record them. Essex police are unable to con­firm that the body was guarded dur­ing this time. Instead they can only say that this mat­ter, and the issue of who had access to the body dur­ing this time, is “part of the cur­rent investigation”.

Does Bar­ry­more have any idea how the injuries occurred? “Well, I have my ideas about it, but it would be wrong for me to spec­u­late,” he declares. “That’s for the police to inves­ti­gate. I’m not about to point fin­gers at anyone.”

If those injuries did occur after Lub­bock was pro­nounced dead, it seems pos­si­ble it was Barrymore’s spe­cial kind of fame, which was to blame. At the inquest, Emma Bowen, another for­mer girl­friend of Lubbock’s, who was at the Mil­len­nium in Har­low that night, stated that when club­bers spot­ted Bar­ry­more with his part­ner Jonathan, they “were shout­ing out: ‘That’s Barrymore’s boyfriend!’ ‘Up your bum!’ and other such com­ments.” Per­haps “for a laugh”, some­one couldn’t resist stick­ing some­thing up the bum of the dead man who had been found in “that Michael Barrymore’s” swim­ming pool?

The tabloids were given more ammu­ni­tion by the scorn of Barrymore’s ex-wife and for­mer man­ager, Cheryl, and her book Catch a Falling Star about her mar­riage. It was pub­lished imme­di­ately after the Lub­bock inquest and was luridly seri­alised in the Daily Mail with front-page head­lines includ­ing “The Night Michael Tried To Kill Me”. Her claim that Bar­ry­more lied to the inquest when he said he couldn’t swim, sparked a per­jury inves­ti­ga­tion, which has now been dropped.

Barrymore’s views on his ex-wife’s inter­ven­tions are clear. “She jumped in on the drown­ing affair, demand­ing, ‘I wanna know what hap­pened!’ when it was noth­ing to do with her what­so­ever, but she started to get involved as if she cared about Stu­art and the Lub­bocks and that, and yet has never been to see them once, yet made all these state­ments. What for? To sell a book. And then in the mid­dle of it turns round and tries to get me done — pos­si­bly seven years — for per­jury, say­ing that I lied in court about not being able to swim! The police went to speak to the list of friends of hers that she said would cor­rob­o­rate her state­ment and not one of them did. They just said, ‘I’ve only seen him stand in the shal­low end.’ That’s why they dropped it. They didn’t even get as far as ques­tion­ing me.”

What about her alle­ga­tions that he was vio­lent towards her in their final years together? “It got heated some­times,” he admits, “but I’ve never ever punched her. I pushed her away. If she comes fly­ing at me then I’m not going to stand there and get scratched to bits. I’d push her away. The way she drama­tises it, well, it just makes you sick,” he says.

Bar­ry­more com­plains now that she wanted to con­trol him, but I put it to him that per­haps the things that drove him away from Cheryl were the things which attracted him in the first place. “Yeah, well I was quite happy to hand over the con­trol, and most of our 18 years together were very happy. But the con­trol got com­pletely out of con­trol. I couldn’t make a move with­out her say so, even if I went out fish­ing it would have to be with some­body who worked for us. Some­body who could then give her a run down of every­thing that hap­pened. That’s one of my weak­nesses, I allowed it to hap­pen. It suited me.”

How easy has it been to live with­out it? “Well, I’ve got free­dom from that. It was the thing that was killing me. Or one of the things that was. I just couldn’t live with it any longer.”

But free­dom doesn’t appear to have cured Bar­ry­more of his addic­tions. “Being in a rela­tion­ship or being free, drink­ing and drug addic­tion is entirely dif­fer­ent — it’s the dis­ease which takes con­trol.” Bar­ry­more says he attends AA meet­ings almost every night. “It’s all or noth­ing. One drink’s too much, 1,000 isn’t enough. You have to keep it in check on a daily basis. I’ve had 21 months of sobri­ety now, have got involved more [with AA] and become secretary.”

One of his dogs, a Jack Rus­sell, jumps on my lap. “JD! Get down!” says Bar­ry­more. His dogs are called JD and Sprite, his for­mer favourite drink. Since the police inquiry was reopened, Bar­ry­more has had a few offers of work. It was only in Novem­ber of last year that Granada finally released him from his exclu­sive con­tract, hav­ing put him on ice for over a year. “‘We’re not using you,’” they said. “‘We’re not pay­ing you. And you can’t work for any­one else.’”

Given the head­lines, can you blame them? “I’m not respon­si­ble for what the press has done — but the net­work made me respon­si­ble. So that means that they base their busi­ness on, on…”

What’s pop­u­lar?

“Even if it’s incorrect?”

If Bar­ry­more is feign­ing inno­cence of the ways of the world, he’s con­vinc­ing. “That’s a bit sad isn’t it? They were the ones who sug­gested in car­ing tones that I go to rehab. I haven’t had one phone call from them since. Haven’t phoned me to ask if I’m well, or have kept off the drink. They haven’t phoned once to ask my office or me, ‘Is this or that true?’”

Maybe they’re not inter­ested. Maybe they’re only inter­ested in what sells.

“If I don’t sell, then why is Strike It Lucky on twice a day on Chal­lenge TV? If I can’t be on fam­ily time, as they said in one of their let­ters, why was I on GMTV the other day at eight in the morn­ing? I was on The Salon the other day on C4.”

It’s slightly pathetic that Bar­ry­more, once the unchal­lenged king of prime-time, should be invok­ing re-runs on cable tele­vi­sion, or an appear­ance on an exploita­tive real­ity tele­vi­sion show, as proof of his pop­u­lar­ity. But then, this is a man who, after the inquest, was pub­licly branded by TV exec­u­tives as “fin­ished”. Ques­tions were asked about him in Par­lia­ment. His auto­bi­og­ra­phy, com­mis­sioned long before Lubbock’s death (though por­trayed in the press as a ‘cash in’ on it) was dropped by BBC Books. Daily Mail colum­nist Lynda Lee Pot­ter declared that she would “rather stick pins in her eyes than watch Bar­ry­more on TV again”.

Bar­ry­more thinks the tele­vi­sion bosses should go with him on his trips to Tesco. They can take him four hours because so many peo­ple greet him with smiles and laughs and hand­shakes, ask­ing when he’s going to be on the telly again, and then call up their mums, dads and kids on their mobiles and ask him to bark “Awoight!” down the phone. “They feel that they can approach me,” he says. “With some­one else famous they might say, ‘Oh look there’s so and so over there,’ with me they come up and shake my hand. It’s what my act is based on. If you tried to fake or con­trive that you’d be sussed out straight away.”

I sug­gest though that these are the very peo­ple that buy the papers which have attacked him so viciously. He doesn’t dis­agree. ‘It’s gos­sip, isn’t it? The tabloids save you chat­ting over the gar­den wall.’ I press the point fur­ther: couldn’t their casu­al­ness towards him be because, like the press, they con­sider him their prop­erty? “They con­sider me part of the fam­ily,” he cor­rects. “Because of the way I work on telly, which is about approach­a­bil­ity and vul­ner­a­bil­ity. And because,” he adds, resignedly, “yeah, because much of my pri­vate life has been acted out in the tabloids.”

How much of Bar­ry­more, or for that mat­ter of Michael Parker (his real name per­haps offer­ing an anonymity which he might be for­given for miss­ing now), is left after all of this? Has his lat­est and dark­est expe­ri­ence of the celebrity cycle taken the edge off his appetite for ‘success’?

He comes up with a para­dox­i­cal and pos­si­bly self-deluding reply. “You ask your­self, do I need all this? But thing is, what they’ve done this time in being relent­less is they’ve allowed me to get well. Because what used to hap­pen before was I’d go straight into rehab then come back out, go straight into a stu­dio and be ill again. But this time that hasn’t hap­pened, so I’ve had a chance to get well prop­erly this time.”

Oddly, for all the accu­sa­tions of self-pity, Bar­ry­more hasn’t played his main vic­tim card. He has not cried “homo­pho­bia”. Sev­eral times in the course of this inter­view I’ve given him the oppor­tu­nity to men­tion it, but he hasn’t taken the bait. Per­haps it’s down to his wish to reclaim his stake as a main­stream enter­tainer; per­haps it’s down to pride. What­ever, it’s clear that the way the press played the Lub­bock story was in large part, a delayed but appar­ently highly sat­is­fy­ing back­lash for his com­ing out sev­eral years ago (a move which, if noth­ing else, deprived the gen­tle­men of the press of one of their favourite sports: bul­ly­ing the clos­et­ted gay celeb).

Bar­ry­more, whose act and pop­u­lar­ity depended on cross­ing bound­aries of taste, class and genre (and sex­u­al­ity), grab­bing and man­han­dling mem­bers of the audi­ence, male and female, was cast as the preda­tory gay rapist of the public’s night­mares, and his deceased guest as an awful exam­ple of what hap­pens when a homo­sex­ual man­ages to get between a straight-man’s back and the wall. This, against the evi­dence of the case and also, iron­i­cally, despite the fact that pen­e­tra­tive sex, accord­ing to Bar­ry­more, ‘is not my bag’. As Dr Freud pointed out, we like to laugh at what we fear, and by the same token we also fear what we laugh at. One irre­sistible idea can lead to another. In the same way that laugh­ter pro­vides a socially accept­able way for peo­ple to vent their anx­i­eties, the Barrymore-Lubbock affair pro­vided an accept­able route for the media and the pub­lic to ‘out’ pent-up fears about male homo­sex­u­al­ity, that ‘gay-tolerant’ con­tem­po­rary Britain oth­er­wise might feel slightly embar­rassed about.

He may not quite realise it, he may not want to realise it, but Bar­ry­more, the nation’s most pop­u­lar, most ‘loved’ funny man, has just been star­ring in his lat­est, biggest, if pos­si­bly final, hit show. The cur­rently ongo­ing police inves­ti­ga­tion at Har­low Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal may or may not show con­clu­sively that the injuries to Lubbock’s anus occurred after he arrived there. But what­ever the out­come, it will most likely prove dif­fi­cult for Bar­ry­more to reha­bil­i­tate him­self — after all, his ‘crimes’ were com­mit­ted in the minds of the great British pub­lic, and they will be unlikely to fully for­give them­selves such thoughts, or him for pro­vok­ing them.

The writ­ing was on the toi­let wall as long ago as 1995. After he had outed him­self, the front page of the new, ‘gay-tolerant’ Sun joked, “WE’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU MICHAEL — BUT NOT TOO CLOSE!’ In fact, they were there all along — and much too close. Just wait­ing for Bar­ry­more to drop the ball.

Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, 02/03/2003

POSTSCRIPT 3/10/2006

• A month after this piece appeared Essex Police con­cluded their (reluc­tant) inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the injuries to Stu­art Lub­bock occurred at Har­low Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal or not by say­ing: ” We are as sat­is­fied as we can be that the injuries did not occur at Princess Alexan­dra Hospital.’
• The Home Office Pathol­o­gist, Michael Heath, the man who first dis­cov­ered the anal injuries and the only pathol­o­gist to exam­ine them in per­son resigned this year after it was estab­lished that he found foul play in at least two other cases when there was none, lead­ing to inno­cent peo­ple being charged for crimes which had not occurred.
• It seems pos­si­ble now, accord­ing to The Sun report, that, con­trary to what was stated at the time of the inquest the injuries to Lubbock’s anus may not have been quite so ‘seri­ous’ after all and might have been caused by the rec­tal tem­per­a­ture probe used repeat­edly by Stu­art Nairn.
• Whilst Bar­ry­more was in the BB house Stu­art Lubbock’s father, Terry, Barrymore’s neme­sis appeared almost daily in the papers denounc­ing him and tried to obtain per­mis­sion to bring a pri­vate pros­e­cu­tion against Bar­ry­more relat­ing to the death of his son (it was even­tu­ally thrown out of court for lack of evi­dence). Shortly after Bar­ry­more left the house in tri­umph Terry finally agreed to meet him and told him ‘I don’t blame you, Michael’ (accord­ing to The Sun’s front page head­line). Though he later retracted this. And then un-retracted it. Now he has report­edly penned a book with well-known homo­phobe Anthony Ben­nett called ‘Not Awight: Get­ting Away With Mur­der’ due for pub­li­ca­tion later this month and is pick­et­ing Barrymore’s book-signings call­ing him a ‘liar’ and con­demn­ing him for ‘mak­ing money off the back of Stuart’s death, how low can you go?’.
• Shortly after Barrymore’s CBB vic­tory and The Sun’s volte face, Essex Police announced they were ‘rou­tinely’ re-opening the inves­ti­ga­tion into Lubbock’s death. Both Bar­ry­more and Terry Lub­bock have wel­comed this, though for appar­ently dif­fer­ent reasons.
• Essex Police inves­ti­gated but declined to charge one of the wit­nesses from the fate­ful party for per­jury, fol­low­ing her retrac­tion of her sworn state­ment that Bar­ry­more had rubbed cocaine on Stu­art Lubbock’s gums that night. She made this retrac­tion when faced with a lie-detector test organ­ised by Barrymore’s new ally — and long-term abu­sive co-dependent in this celebrity mar­riage from Hell — The Sun.

© Mark Simp­son 2006