by Stephanie Theobald
Stephanie Theobald is a British journalist for publications including The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and The London Evening Standard. She has also published four novels. Her third, Trix, about a road trip across America, was inspired by her close friend Tutu Tedder. Tutu Tedder, a performer who died of breast cancer in March 2012, is the subject of this article.
“Even if you’ve lived your life like a complete slob, you can still die with terrific style.”
— Design for Dying by Timothy Leary (1997)
Life’s not a rehearsal, the cliché goes, but actually it is. We spend our whole lives preparing for our last scene, our span’s last inch, when, as John Donne said it: “gluttonous death will instantly unjoint” our bodies from our souls. Whether you believe that life after death is some glorious stage dive into the cosmic beyond, a plug pulled abruptly from a socket, or an encounter with a bearded man in a long white robe, thinking about dying is vital. (And those who say death is a “morbid” subject are condemning themselves to a bad school play ending, as opposed to the Larry Oliver production we all hope for).
Timothy Leary kept up this Broadway extravaganza image of death in his last book, Design for Dying, when the LSD apologist said that dying was the most important thing you’d ever do because, “It’s the final scene of the glorious epic of your life. It’s the third act and, you know, everything builds up to the third act.” How we do the dying thing may be just as, or more important, than anything else. So here I am writing about dying.
It used to be sex that inspired me to write. Sometimes it was love. And then the person who taught me to love as well as a thing or two about sex, started to die from breast cancer. In the course of life, Tutu (born Kristen Tedder in California in 1966), was a nanny, a dominatrix, a club runner, an epic pot smoker and specifically, a deranged and incredible showgirl who died in March 2012, aged 45. Her Courtney Love/Doris Day Schizophrenic strip tease show became legendary at Kabaret in Golden Square with the likes of the Gallagher Brothers and Damien Hirst because she was a stickler for a good show. I remember going with her to see Moulin Rouge. She hated Nicole Kidman. (“What kind of courtesan is that?” she groaned. “Looks like she hasn’t been fucked in years”). At the same time, she understood the problems of being female. “It’s hard to pull off being a woman,” she used to say. “That’s where the drag queens come in.”
Tutu was a dazzling presence. In 2002, I wrote a novel inspired by her called Trix – a kind of Thelma and Louise meets Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas. But when I happened to be present at her bedside last March when she died, I was poleaxed with horror and fascination as I watched the last vestiges of life ooze and shudder their way out of her. Even the Palliative Care guy from St Thomas’ hospital conceded it had been a ‘dramatic death.’ When she was gone, I thanked her for giving me a front row seat at the most amazing show I had ever seen. I think I then laughed hysterically, then cried, then observed the other four people who’d witnessed the dying scene, reeling around the flat. If some junkie had peeked in that morning, looking for a little something for the weekend, he would have licked his lips and assumed that there was an exotic variety of drugs circulating from fantastic E to paranoidy skunk to weird ketamine.
I decided to write a play about the whole unfathomable experience. I’m calling it Pre-Disco Tension in reference to that time before a party when you are getting ready for the night and ‘spazzing out’ with nerves, as Tutu would say. In the same way preparing for death can be a mind bogglingly terrifying time or horribly exciting time, depending on which way you look at it.
Pre-Disco Tension is about a group of queer friends who take recreational drugs. They’re used to finding themselves tripping in outer space, half in love with easeful death, claiming afterwards that if they’d died at that very moment, flying up there in the sky with diamonds, they’d have been fine with it, etc, etc. And then one of them, a charismatic showgirl, finds out she is going to have to do death for real. And if you’re going to perform your own death, as we all must, then what is your performance going to be like?
I’m not saying that Tutu’s dying performance was easy. There was a lot of stage fright involved. Not for her the famous Five Stages of Grief of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). The night before Tutu died she screamed, “I don’t want to fucking die!”
But she did her best. Some of her last days were grim, but some of them were surrounded in a mysterious type of glamour, as if this was all part of some demented David LaChapelle shoot. One time I visited and witnessed the tableau vivant of Tutu sleeping in her bed, surrounded by a group of Weeping Women as Superman flew overhead through the clouds on the TV. In her final days, there were so many odd-looking friends crowding into her house to give her a final send off that some of the locals on her Elephant and Castle housing estate believed a crack house had set up.
Tutu didn’t go quietly. The last year of her life was spent sitting for a series of photographs taken by her friend Ashley Savage, who’d documented her various showgirl personas throughout her London life. The ensuing show, called ‘Punk Cancer,’ aimed to smash the whole “pinkification” of breast cancer. Photos range from a beaming Tutu posing Bettie Page-style on a radiation table, to an anarchic hair-shaving session pre-chemo and a pot-puffing love-in with her childhood teddy bear (“Teddy”) who was always by her side during the last months.
“It’s not a perfect world,” she said towards the end, “but you just have to get up, sing your song, keep your helmet on and things will get better. Things will always change, remember that. Things will be good, things will be bad.”
The thing about death, though, is that you never know how you’re going to react when the time comes. If you want more of a sense of Pre-Disco Tension, listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. The song was written by John Lennon in response to his reading of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book advises that the feelings you experience when you take LSD are similar to the dying process, and need similar guidance. But mainly I love this song for its thrashy, trippy, incredibly modern sound which is perfect for the short, mad cabaret numbers that intersperse Pre-Disco Tension (because unlike death, theatre can be so boring). Right.
Photo Credit: The picture of Tutu Tedder was taken by Stephanie Theobald circa 2000.
“Demystifying Breast Cancer” is formatted as a PDF for you to print easily and share. Click here to download.
