Seventeen - Chapter Two

Chapter 2

When I received a phone-call from Lionel Troy whom I’d met so briefly, a few days later, I wasn’t totally surprised. He wasted no time in making me an offer. I was flattered and excited by the entire idea. Of course he told me how much he admired my dancing and lots of other compliments which went straight to my seventeen year old head and then went on to ask me if I would be interested in joining his show as a dancer. He made promises about the legalities, the money, the conditions, and the safety issues. He waved away every concern I raised, and painted a vision of travel and wealth, which became increasingly irresistible. He told me my friend Barbara would also be approached and suggested I discuss the idea with her if I needed more confidence before making the difficult decision about leaving my home and family to go to Saigon. Barbara Dean was an older experienced dancer with more years in the business than me and I did feel safer knowing that she might be involved. She had been a dancer on the same television show as my elder sister and I was certain she would be savvy towards overseas contracts and touring as she’d been around it all longer than me. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed at the prospect of travelling through a war zone but Lionel had inspired such a sense of confidence in me that I felt confident with what I was thinking of taking on and getting into. I’d already had a taste of travelling having lived in Australia and England and saw this offer as a fortuitous chance to travel even further, which despite the dire war situation became eminently appealing to my imaginative seventeen-year-old brain, which hitherto had remained impervious to treachery and sedition.

Once I’d made the decision to go into Vietnam, on tour, things seemed to fall into place quite quickly. Being under eighteen meant that I had to have my parents’ permission but fortunately my mother was agreeable to the idea. Barbara was going too and we were looking forward to the adventure.

We flew out of Auckland on March 2nd, 1971 and were flown to Sydney where we were installed in a flat in Coogee with Lionel. The contract was signed on March 4th. Lionel was the partner of Mary, who was a singer, and the brother of Dianne, who was the other singer. So there were two female dancers, Barbara and myself as well as Mary and Diane, the singers. We were soon introduced to the rest of the band. Lionel was the drummer and manager, Tommy Hare the saxophonist, and then there was the trumpet player, Kim, Gary the keyboard player, Warrick the bass player, the trombonist, Michael, and male singer, Nick. Eleven of us altogether, four females and seven males. We had a few rehearsals in Sydney and the show came together well. The band played music by bands like Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears in those days and Barbara and I choreographed our own dance numbers. We had our shots and soon set off to Manila in the Philippines where we were to rehearse for six weeks and before travelling into Saigon.

After a long eight hour flight which left Sydney on March 13th, we arrived in Manila and went to our hotel on arrival. ‘The Palace’ did not live up to its name. It was a very basic hotel with guards with guns and a heavy metal gate at the entrance. Our rooms were devoid of any carpets, or televisions. All we had was a radio. That night we went to a discotheque called ‘The Circuit’ which was at the Savoy Hotel because we couldn’t stand staying in our bare room. The following day we began costume fittings with Mary and Diane and starting discussing our plans for the show. Barbara and I worked out our own ideas for the dance numbers. The next day we had a photo shoot which was quite quick and later went to the movies. We were given inoculations which made us both ill but we recovered. Though Nick, the singer was becoming increasingly unwell with an as yet undiagnosed medical problem. He eventually had to go into hospital which was very grim. Visits to him were shocking.

There seemed to be guns everywhere in Manila, then. This was in the days of the President Marcos regime and Manila was a veritable hellhole. It was stinking hot and we had to rehearse in an open space on the roof of the hotel. We were given a small allowance of ten pesos per day for food and otherwise given free reign during our time off. We were beginning to feel apprehensive when there were rumours we were going into Vietnam for twelve months when we had expected three. Then we were told on April 7th that we might be staying in Manila for a couple of months instead of weeks, which we preferred.

Barbara and I didn’t hang out all that much with the others. There was nothing to do at night for us. We had no money and we didn’t speak Tagalog which made us feel very isolated. We felt unpopular with Lionel and Mary who hounded us to stay in our room at night and we were lonely. We would rehearse our dance routines in our room to taped music and swap books with the other band members, but they were in short supply being heavy to pack. There was also a rule that the boys weren’t supposed to be in our rooms which was unreasonable. We used to wash each other’s hair for something to do and wait for letters from our friends and families in New Zealand to arrive.

The boys were keen to explore the seedier sights of Manila. They would embellish us with tales of their adventures on a daily basis. There was nothing you couldn’t buy in Manila in terms of sexual requirements. We kept well away from all of that. Mary and Diane were tight with Lionel and kept to themselves, so Barbara and I used to go to the disco every night at the Hilton Hotel, the ‘1571’, where a Philippine band played called the “Bits and Pieces’.

We at least felt safe at the Hilton Hotel which was air-conditioned and welcoming, though walking through the city streets to get there and back every night was a nightmare. In our sixties style mini dresses, men used to squat down on the footpath as we walked by, trying to look up our skirts, blatantly. We used to hold hands for security and literally stop the traffic when we crossed the roads. It was flattering but scary. The roads were full of jeepneys –buses without windows and colourfully decorated with photos of the drivers and Catholic emblems dangling from the rear-vision mirrors. Sometimes we would travel in them, being careful to keep our hands inside the windowless windows in case our hands were cut off to steal our jewellery. Or so we had been told.

At one point Lionel put a 10 o’clock curfew on us with fines if we disobeyed but we were bored and lonely in our room and the boys had free rein and left us to roam the streets alone. Power cuts were a regular occurance too, often beginning in the afternoon and lasting for twelve hours. We always felt that Lionel was only concerned about us as goods rather than for any personal concern. Furthermore, he withheld our wages and during the entire period we never received our full pay that had been promised to us before we’d left Australia.