Debt and defiance

AN interview with Twink? Hardly a challenge. How could it be when for more than 25 of her 45 years, her life has resembled a big, brash, open book, each chapter defined by a tabloid headline, the scorchingly intimate text rolled out in big, bold type like the words of a sing-a-long in one of her Christmas pantomimes?

So here we are in a city centre hotel, confidently waiting for "Twink" - the boisterous, opinionated larger-than-life comedienne with the "Rose Vylet" accent. Only it is Adele King who turns up gracious, generous with her time, euphoric and terrorised by her latest project, still opinionated but wedded to the inconvenient notion that the past is another country.

And when Adele King is wedded to a notion, she can be formidable. "Look, is it necessary to go into all that?", she asks sternly. Well, yes, it is. Could anyone write about Twink/Adele without putting them in context - or celebrate their latest, triumphant reincarnation without squaring it firmly against the past?

Her greatest concern, it emerges, is not so much about dredging up the past but about being perceived as a "moan". And, children, she is not a moan. She is simply a woman with a "past" like most of us - but unlike us, hers is mediated by court reports, gossip columnists and her own impulse to "tell it as it is".

She can hardly turn around now and shout "Curtain!" because the past will insist on intruding. "The Malocco legacy will see to that."

"I hope you've got plenty of ink in your pen, dear," she recalls telling one journalist about yet another report on her financial woes, "because it won't be the last one of those you'll be ringing me about. Is this a big shock to you9 Ain't to me..."

Yes, the financial problems area ongoing, so much so that when reports emerged of her involvement in the £1.5 million panto at the Point, the first question raised was where Twink had got the money.

As befits the dignified Adele King, she says simply that each of the Panto 2000 directors "had to put money into the kitty" to secure an interest in it. "It was like a down-payment of goodwill and commitment more than anything. With my past over the last few years, it was a big risk for me but one I felt I had to take."

It was a well-calculated gamble and she has taken it in good company. She's in there with shrewd money men such as the owner of the Point, Harry Crosbie, and the promoter Denis Desmond. The other directors are Willie O'Reilly, executive producer of 2FM's Gerry Ryan Show and producer of such diverse recording talents as Finbar Wright and Terence, and Gerry Ryan himself, radio star and an expansive, all-round performer.

The answer to the money question it seems, is that each invested according to his or her strengths, whether in talent, facilities, time or money or permutations thereof.

There are undeniable risks, but these are relative. For the businessmen, if they lose on this one - though it is a biggie - something else will turn up to even the books. Gerry Ryan makes a good living and as the panto's co-star has an ego that has survived many a storm. For Adele King, though, this one show is make or break time.

As producer, scriptwriter and star of one of the most expensive shows ever staged in a Dublin theatre, she has packed enormous quantities of time, chutzpah, tears and optimism into Sleeping Beauty (Sort Of). For her, there is no going back. If it works - and it should - her story could in time, become a fairytale of its own.

Her performing career - goes back to early childhood - first, as talented little dancer and musician getting to grips with harp, guitar and piano, then as talented young singer with the Young Dublin Singers and Jury's Cabaret. After that, she appeared to slot smoothly into the Maxi Dick and Twink trio, travelling endlessly across Europe - "always performing, always on TV, never knowing anything but to look down the lens of a camera" - and finally to Canada.

They should have been exciting, even head-turning times for a young girl but the regretful edge in Adele King's voice suggests otherwise. The fact is that she never wanted to be a performer. "It was never, ever, ever my choice of career and to this day still wouldn't be. My only goal in life from my youngest days was to do medicine - and indeed still is."

The other problem was that the girls in the trio never hit it off. There were two camps and Maxi and Dick were in one. "I always felt the outsider: we never saw eye to eye. We went from being three little girls to being three young women and learned we couldn't live with each other."

And so on to another glamour spot, fronting The Big Eight showband with Brendan Bowyer and Tom Dunphy in Las Vegas. She was 19 then and headed for five "wild, wonderful and carefree years" in Nevada. But they too, were tainted with the fall-out from personality conflicts.

Basically, she says, Brendan Bowyer and Twink did not get on. It broke my heart and my spirit and really and truly crushed me. I remember after that experience, I had hit the floor so hard and was smashed in so many places, that I was determined that nothing could ever, ever put me so far back down again."

AND so - after a spell teaching horse-riding and a newly-minted ambition to study veterinary medicine - along came Paddy Cole with an offer to join him on the Irish showband circuit. "I love Paddy, the boys, the music... but I hated the road and I hated showbands and yes, I was snobby enough to believe they were beneath me, I really was.

"I absolutely abhorred being a matchmaker for the Would ya like to dance Mary? thing."

The spark finally died one night in Cavan: "I had to change in a cowshed out the back of a marquee with rats running around and an oil lamp above, in the perishing cold of January - and I thought, `this is it . . . I just can't do it'."

The late 1970s were tough times for everybody in the business. Those years marked the hiatus between the death of the showband era and the rise of cabaret. Then Noel Pearson - "bless him" - brought the London production of Oliver to Dublin and Adele King was cast in the role of Nancy. She was lifted to a new plane, into radio comedy, on to The Live Mike (with Mike Murphy) and to her own TV special in 1980 for which she and John McColgan won a plethora of awards.

She got a series of her own, giving birth along the way to the Bernie and Rose Violet characters, leading on to toilet-roll commercials - "bless them" - and into Play The Game, RTE's celebrity charades show. For 10 years Play The Game was rarely out of the TAM ratings, but she says someone neglected to tell her or Derek Davis (the two panel leaders) or presenter Ronan Collins when it was over. "No word, no polite note, nothing. It was the staple part of my income at the time and it all stopped around the time of the Elio thing. It was devastating."

And well, she sighs, you know how troubles come in threes ... there was of course Elio Malocco's misplacement of a large sum of money belonging to her representing the sale price of her old home. A year after the sale she discovered that not a penny had been lodged by the solicitor for the new home she had traded up to in Rathfarnham. "It was particularly distressing insofar as I had put a considerable amount of my life's work and earnings into upgrading for my family - something I hoped to leave my children. Elio's offices were closed down and I was completely in the dark.

"No one could tell me anything except of course that the funds had been gazumped and that there had never been a penny put into the building, society. Gone, gone, gone ... I still don't know where," (though privately, she can make a shrewd guess).

She has not spoken with Elio Malocco since, though she would if he made the effort. "I believe the ball is in his court, I really do. I believe I was magnanimous in the media when I went through the hell of the potential of losing my home. I know it's probably happened to other people but they don't have to wear their grief on the front pages of the dailies. It caused enormous heartbreak in my home. It nearly broke my home, my marriage, everything - and remember, we lived through it for five years before eventually it all came to court.

"And of course, it was almost like the Doubting Thomases of the media were, you know well, you wouldn't know, it might be that."

Then, when he was sent down for what I thought was a very severe seven years, they were like God, so it did happen. It was as though it needed that for them to believe me, to believe that he really was the baddy..." And no, this is not "a moan". Nor, amazingly, is she nursing any bitterness. In fact, she says she is "grief-stricken" for Malocco.

"Elio was - well, I considered him - a terrific friend; good-looking, debonair, drop dead sexy, hopelessly witty, one of the best storytellers - better than a lot of professional actors - a bon viveur, the most fun to be out for an evening with, absolutely knew his wines, knew his food ... I loved him to bits and I still do. It's very hard to replace that in someone. I had enormous respect for his dashing, pzazzy personality and I really think it's a crime . . I mean loads of them are doing it, one or two get caught, and it's a pity he got caught.

"He blew a great career, I think he had the potential to become one of the world's most colourful, leading lawyers. He could have been a Johnny Cochran.

"To think that a fine mind and great talent like that is sitting in Mountjoy Jail does my head in."

Her capacity for forgiveness is astounding, given that the financial disaster was a major factor in her marriage problems with musician David Agnew. Piling on the pressure were her trips to Turkey, a country she fell in love with. "Being out of Ireland put an enormous stress on our marriage. Long-distance marriages don't work. When you're miles away, it's easy to stray into the arms of bothers - it was the same for David. It's the family that lives and works and cries and holds hands together that makes it.

"There was a lot of stress and strain on our marriage, a lot of damage had been done, and it was nearly too late to pick up the pieces.

It's clear she despises certain sectors of the media - those journalists who jumped across her hedges to take photographs during the court cases; the gossip columnists who rang to say they heard her marriage was over; the media person who attended her wedding to David - "Judas at the wedding feast" - and rang a newsdesk to supply it with snide, distorted wedding gossip (about which the Agnews later sued and won); the banner headlines "Twink to lose Home" which led to her daughter getting offers of shelter from little school friends.

Her answer to them all is that 3 years later, she and David are still together - "in fact, I'm the only one of my girlfriends still on the same marriage 13 years later" and that they are more in love now that when they met. But she passionately empathises with Sarah Ferguson's media problems and sees mainly how they could destroy a marriage.

"We've weathered a lot of storms and they ain't over yet. I know for a fact they ain't over yet but I think we'll see it through together

She also dislikes a certain craven Irish attitude that has some apologising for their existence - Michael Flatley for one: "an extraordinary talent which is always, "a problem in Ireland - I told him you owe those media guttersnipes nothing so stop apologising"; Fine Gael for another after she did her famous ard fheis sketch - "they came out with the dreaded Irish thing of the cap in hand ... I'm sorry Father, I'm sorry Bishop, I'm sorry Gay Byrne..."

As for her role in that sketch, she is sanguine: "I've nothing to apologise for - I'm a comedienne, I'm supposed to make them laugh and I did. It was hysterical that night; the media had me pinned up against the wall in the RDS and I was saying `find the man who booked me'." Eoghan Harris, she jokes, could have been in Barbados for all she knew.

"As a matter of fact, I was going to write a book about all the political dinners I've done and I was going to call it `From Ballsbridge to Barbados'".

No moaning, no apologising, move right on along. It could be Twink's Theme. But the woman who describes herself as a "hermit, a female Howard Hughes who hates parties" has had to develop broad shoulders.

Only three years ago, she hit the highlight of her career - a guest spot with her great idol, Perry Catch A Falling Star Como, in a show beamed into 500 million American households. The price she paid was her role as panto star of the Christmas circuit. The producers of the Gaiety panto that year - Comet Productions - finally gave her the night off she needed on condition that she paid £11,500 to cover the box office, to be deducted from her wages every week, along with advertising costs incurred.

"What could I do? I had to do it. This was hot on the heels of the Elio Malocco debacle. Was I in a position to be paying anyone £11,500 for a night off? Not only that - but having the added publicity that would make it look like this was nothing to me? It was just another huge blow that diminished all possibility of making any money out of that panto and further depleted our finances. So it was very, very, painful..."

But perhaps, she now thinks, it was the kickstart she needed.

The following year, she attended the Gaiety as a member of the audience and out of that grew the conviction that pantomime in Dublin was sorely in) need of a gear change. It was David, her husband, who suggested that Barney might be just the guy to fill the shoes of the big international star she needed.

The story of how she stood in the FAO Schwartz toy store in New York apprehensively asking for man who was "in charge of, eh, Barney buying" reads like something from A Star Is Born.

The Barney-buyer and his father, it transpired, had seen her on the Perry Como show and loved her. Beyond that, doors began to open, albeit tortuously slowly. It all culminates in the extravaganza that opens on January, 3rd with a cast of 145, including the boy-band OTT, 15 living Barbie dolls, 35 Irish dancers, 20 baby ballerinas, five male "Action Man" rappers, fairies, illusionists, horsemen, trapeze artists and special effects that cost the earth but will apparently have them gasping at the Point.

The classic fairytale of Sleeping Beauty remains but is interwoven with scenes from a modern household, giant screens, an inter-galactic Nanny and a levitating Twink. And Barney of course rules supreme - perfect manners and morals, no cheap exploitation, a character now reckoned to be "up there" with the classics like Mickey Mouse.

Panto 2000 hopes to seat more than 4,600 for each of 22 performances in January.

BACK down here, Adele King looks back on the years and the events that have brought her to this. She is justifiably proud of the fact that of the three costliest shows ever produced in Ireland - Riverdance, Lord Of The Dance and Sleeping Beauty (Sort Of) - two have been produced by women, herself and Moya Doherty. She had no wish to perform in this one and only. took a part after the other directors made their strong feelings known.

"I was never one of those people who was dying to be a star and this has taken me down a new avenue. And the wonderful thing is that I don't feel that my entire contributions to these shows is based on performance. I really see the rest of my life as being involved in production and writing."

She admits she and David are still playing catch-up with the finances and will be for a long, long time. "I'm not frightened - well, some days I am, I'm not made of iron. Some days I'm fearful of the future and I think I've got two children to put through school and the mortgage never goes away...

She has a passionate interest in needlework - expressed mostly in beautiful tapestry - and is a voracious reader of works about "life, philosophy, religions". She is comfortable with her own company which is just as well as she has clearly become more guarded about those she admits to her friendship. Too often, confidences shared have turned up as gossip fodder. The difference is that 20 years on she, Maxi and Dick are now firm friends.