“This is a dirty line of work I do, this performing, accepting all this love, but someone has to do it.”
– Peter Allen
Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen is not only known for his success in the musical realm, but also for who he knew when he was alive. While the start of his life in small-town Australia, the son of an abusive alcoholic was not a glamorous one, he had his eyes set on stardom. Starting his act by copying a blackface performer at the age of five, and transitioning to playing the piano at a bar at the age of eleven, he was ambitious. Once graduating high school he would go on to join Chris Bell to create a duo act, claiming they were brothers who were from England. Through this, he would secure television performances and slowly work show to show to make his way in the competitive world of music.
Unlike many other stories of fame, there was not a quick shot to the top for Peter Allen. He would mostly get fans through persistent touring and concerts. He would say of this:
“Because of the way I look and who I am, I am not one of those people born to be a star, making it happen just by being up there.”
That is not to say he was not given any help on the climb up the ladder. It was on tour that he met the iconic Judy Garland. According to legend, he met her in a dive bar where he was singing Over the Rainbow. Having just returned from a disastrous performance of her own, she joined him and the two became quick friends. This did not take place in one of the upswings of Judy Garland’s career and life, but from the very start of their friendship, Garland planned to help Allen in his climb to the top.
This is not, of course, to say that their relationship was strictly business. They were friends before anything else, and Allen would remember the first night that he met her saying:
“So we went over on a ferry, and we went to this place and had some drinks, and Judy was playing pool, and a man insulted her, accused her of cheating or something. So she hid behind some curtains and threw a pool ball at him and hit him on the head. The man thought Mark Herron had thrown it, because she blamed it immediately on him, so she and Mark had a really big argument. They were almost the first Americans I had ever met. I thought ‘Bizarre people, these Americans’.”
By this point, Allen was already aware of his attraction to men. While in Japan with Garland he would bring her to a gay bar with him. He said of this:
“Judy just stood at one end of this tiny bar in her white sequinned gown and sang “Over the Rainbow” a cappella to this whole bar of Japanese boys who sat on their haunches on the floor and quietly sang along with her. It was quite touching really.”
Garland would take on Allen and Chris as the openers for her own performance, and her influence on Allen can not be overstated. She took the two with her to America, and her name and reputation were enough to open many doors for them. More than that, her talent and artistry would be cited by Allen throughout his life as a major influence for his own music, he would say:
“I always put myself in the audience’s position. I got that from Judy. When you’re on, always give them value for money. Judy never held back once she had decided to go on and do it. I saw every performance she gave for three years and she never ever faked it. I haven’t seen such a total reality in other performers. Maybe the price was too much to pay.”
In America, Allen would meet with everyone who was anyone, but a pattern throughout his career was the influence the women of his life had on him. From Judy Garland and Bette Midler to his mother Marion, the women in his life would play a deep role in both his success and his personal life.
Garland in specific had an intense influence on not only his professional life but also his personal one, as she introduced her family to him in America, including her daughter Liza Minelli.
It is worth noting here that Peter Allen, having spent the latter portion of his life having most of his known romantic relationships with other queer men, was undoubtedly attracted to men. However, he had a long history of relationships with women as well. While he is mostly remembered as a gay man, he would always remember his relationship with Liza Minelli as a genuine one and was remembered as being popular among both genders. He would say of Liza:
“Liza was like my sanctuary.”
And soon, she would become his wife.
“I could see the audience wanted to have a good time, so I stopped singing so many sad ballads and switched to a lot of up-tempo things. We didn’t have a drummer so I got the audience to clap and do the beat to keep time. Then I started to get up and dance around to the stomping of their feet. You would look out and see boys holding boys’ hands and girls holding girls’ hands. When you did a ballad, the most unlikely combinations gravitated towards each other.”
– Peter Allen
Peter Allen has been given many labels as a queer man. Most commonly said to be a gay man, he would within his own lifetime be called pansexual and would name his album Bicostal, after a pun he would make during his act about his sexuality. Still, his own words on the subject are the best source of confirmation. About being an out queer musician he would say:
“I was “out” on stage before anyone else. Everyone automatically knows I sleep with the boys. But I think outing is limiting. I don’t feel like I should be labelled. I don’t have to decide that I only want to do things one way. I think it’s a little bit weird.”
In that same vein, this article will not put a single label on Allen, and will just say he was a queer man. This is something that Garland knew and Liza Minelli’s father were aware of, not something Minelli herself said she was aware of before they were married. While Garland went back and forth for a while on whether she approved of the marriage, she would end up giving her blessing and Allen would say:
“She’s one of the best mothers-in-law a fellow could have. She can give us advice no other parent in the world could give.”
As it was, in marrying Liza Peter would be marrying into her family and was considered to be a member long after their eventual divorce. Taking the place of her mother, Minelli would become a driving force in Allen’s career, with the two staying in New York City. They would be large parts of the celebrity scene there—something that rankled Allen slightly as he became known as Minelli’s husband rather than a musician in his own right.
Still, he respected Minelli, and would say:
“Liza always said she wasn’t interested in becoming a superstar, but she worked very hard towards it. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard.”
At this time in his life, he was known as always being on the move from one party to another, and there are a number of anecdotes remembering him as falling asleep in one place or another. He would say two things about this:
“I used to fall asleep. I wish now that I could go to Noel Coward’s and know what was going on, but I was at Noel Coward’s asleep on the couch. I was so bored. I didn’t know he was one of the fabulous wits of the twentieth century. I didn’t know or care anything much about celebrities.”
“When I fade, I fade quickly”
While his marriage was undoubtedly a leg up in his career, he was still not seeing the success he had hoped for and was mostly opening for Minelli. He would begin to write his own songs around this time. Still, he was not by any stretch of the imagination failing. In a fickle business like music, he would later say:
“Show business is weird, because say you were a carpenter; you can make very nice things and go home to the wife and be happy because you enjoy what you make. But in show business you have to be the best carpenter in the world, otherwise you’re classified as a failure.”
Things could not stay as they had though, and two major changes came about in 1970: he and Minelli would separate, and he and Chris Bell would break up their act to each go solo. In the case of his marriage, a large factor was his continued relationships with men. Liza Minelli would say:
“The betrayal was so huge. When I found out… it’s that terrible thing of the first lie leading to other lies, like “It was the first time”, “I’ll never do it again”, “I was just curious”, or “I was drunk”.”
With each change, Allen would dive into his writing. Garland had died a year prior, and a part of his writing was dedicated to her. He would say of her:
“To me, she was the epitome of everything good about this country. Warm, frank and funny, she possessed the spirit to win. Judy didn’t win all the time but she never stopped trying. I’ll always remember our years together.”
Life would continue on, and Allen's writing would very slowly grow in success. He would eventually find the most success in writing songs for others, winning a Grammy for one of his works. This was not entirely satisfying to him though, and he would say:
“If you wrote the song, then you know more about the song than anyone else. So you kind of know how it should be sung.”
Another woman would enter his life though—not a romantic partner, but a writing one. Carole Bayer Sager would write with him, as they had met through work, and their songs together would be among Allen’s most successful. His career, though taking a slight downturn, would reach heights it never had before as the backlog of songs he wrote began to be released and shared with the world.
He would look back at this part of his life later writing:
“Now I have a nice house, my career is going fine, I’m not lonely. What am I going to write? ‘It’s lovely here by the ocean, I took the boat out?’ People are going to say ‘He’s so boring’. But my old songs are applicable to today, so I guess I am ahead of my time. In a weird way. Everybody goes out all night dancing, does poppers, sleeps with anyone.”
It was also during this time in his life that he would meet Greg, a model and the man who would be remembered as the love of Peter’s life. Their relationship was far from perfect, but it was a deeply impactful one for Allen. Greg would become Allen’s lighting man after he quit his career to focus on Allen’s. Allen would perform for queer audiences more and more at this time, though his relationship with them was not entirely smooth. They were often more critical of him than straight audiences.
Still, he slowly moved back into his performing lifestyle, now armed with his own songs and leaving behind the more buttoned-up act that he had perfected with Chris Bell. He now was leaning more towards dynamic performances and dramatic costuming. Who he was off stage would not change as much though, and he would say:
“The downfall of most performers is that they think they have to be as interesting off stage as they are on. When I look in the mirror before I go on I can’t believe people are paying to see this man up there in sequins, dancing around in space. I hate people to come into the dressing-room the minute I get off, because they think ‘What happened? Where’s this fabulous person? This person’s so short and sweaty.’”
Of his performances and how they resonated with audiences he would say:
“I get up and do things that women normally do. I was out there singing about emotions that women usually sing about in intimate surroundings. If you look at my songs you’ll realise there is no female, no true male.”
While singing his own songs would undoubtedly be more successful than his time with covers, his relationship with this material was different.
“Going on stage was never traumatic to me until I started singing my own songs. Now it gets worse and worse. Before I go on I’m saying ‘I hate this, I don’t want to do this’. Before my first concert here I could see my heart thumping. The flower on my lapel was jumping up and down.”
Still, critics and audiences would love him, and his acts would get more and more personal. While this made the content resonate more and would increase his popularity, there were downfalls to this, even if Allen himself didn’t see it that way. In a portion of the show where he would discuss his childhood, he would again don blackface, which was even then known to be racist and unacceptable. While there are excuses made on his behalf—then and now—his decision to put on blackface was not one he was pressured into, or needed to do in any way. It was an unnecessary and blatant display of racism that is rarely mentioned when discussing his life and legacy.
Still, his success would not be hindered by this racist behaviour, and he would grow in popularity both in America and internationally. In his early career, Australia wasn’t the place he was most well-loved. However, as he grew in renown and wrote an ode to the country, he found true stardom there. As time passed, his friend group and close circle of friends would grow more and more to include other queer men, though he would remain close with Liza Minelli up until his death. It was during this time that the AIDS epidemic was starting to become well known within the queer community, and Allen would experience many loses because of it—not only personal close friends, but also his own partner Greg, who kept his condition close to his chest until his death.
Following his example, Allen did not tell many people when he discovered he had AIDS. Instead, he began setting his affairs in order. As a child his father had died, leaving their family with little—Allen made sure to take care in this aspect. He spent the later years of his life working as much as he possibly could to earn as much money as possible to keep his mother and sister comfortable after he died.
He would die on 18 June 1992. While in his own life he would try and mount an unsuccessful musical, after his death his life was memorialized in a musical that would go on to become the first Australian musical to open on Broadway. Hugh Jackman would play Peter Allen and win a Tony award in 2004.
Far from a perfect man, Peter Allen would leave behind a mark on the musical scene, which is something he spent his whole life working tirelessly to do. Not only that, but he was and is thought of with great fondness. His fellow song-writer Carole Bayer Sager would remember him saying:
“My mother adored Peter because Peter got her. He always allowed her to be a free spirit. I remember one day when she was leaving for Florida and Peter was helping to clean out her closets. And she’s throwing things around, ‘Here, Peter, you take this hat!’ and I’m like, humiliated, this is my mother’s behaviour, and he’s like, ‘Let her be, let her have a good time.’ He just allowed people to be who they were. He accepted people for who they were and found something to like about them.”
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Arrow, M. (n.d.). Allen, Peter (1944–1992). In Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol. 1–18). National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved August 28, 2022, from https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/allen-peter-17370
Loretta Barnard — Peter Allen: The boy from Oz | Australia Explained. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2022, from https://australia-explained.com.au/music/peter-allen-the-boy-from-oz/
Peter Allen. (n.d.). The Official Masterworks Broadway Site. Retrieved August 28, 2022, from https://masterworksbroadway.com/artist/peter-allen/
Peter Allen biography. (n.d.). Last.Fm. Retrieved August 28, 2022, from https://www.last.fm/music/Peter+Allen/+wiki
Simmonds, D. (n.d.). Peter Allen (10 February 1944—18 June 1992) | Stage Noise—Diana Simmonds. Retrieved August 28, 2022, from http://www.stagenoise.com/feature/2012/peter-allen-10-february-1944-18-june-1992
Summers, C. (2012). The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance, and Musical Theater. Cleis Press Start.
‘The Boy From Oz’ celebrates Allen. (n.d.). TODAY.Com. Retrieved August 28, 2022, from https://www.today.com/popculture/boy-oz-celebrates-allen-wbna3226673
Young, G. (2004). ‘So slide over here’: The aesthetics of masculinity in late twentieth-century Australian pop music. Popular Music, 23(2), 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143004000145