Echo Profile: Oh, Boy

The middle-aged man who appeared briefly in a Manhattan court last week displayed little evidence of his flamboyant past. Soberly dressed in a black suit and long coat, slightly overweight and pale-faced, the 44-year-old left the court without speaking to reporters.
The reporters were there, of course, because the man in question was George O’Dowd, infinitely better known as Boy George, the pop star who came into fame and fortune as lead singer of 1980’s sensation Culture Club.
O’Dowd was in court on drugs charges. His case has a bizarre genesis. Though Boy George suffered a much-publicized heroin addiction almost twenty years ago, he broke the habit and claimed to have abstained from drug use ever since. Even close friends do not appear to be aware of him slipping back into the use of heavy narcotics.
Be that as it may, George was arrested at his Manhattan apartment in October. Police were called to his home after reports of a possible burglary. When they arrived, they immediately saw cocaine near a computer. In all, prosecutors say the police found 13 plastic bags of the drug, weighing about 3 1/2 grams.
Boy George vigorously protests his innocence. His lawyers have claimed that the drugs were not his, and must have been brought into the apartment by a guest or guests. A great deal hangs on whether that explanation is believed. If the singer is found guilty on possession charges, he faces up to 15 years in prison. The case was adjourned at last week’s hearing. Boy George must return to court on March 8.
The current case is just one more bizarre episode in an Anglo-Irish life that has had more twists than a dime-store mystery. The bare bones are relatively well-known: Boy George was born into a rambunctious Irish family living on the outskirts of London; in his teen years he became a fixture on the British capital’s club scene; Culture Club, powered by their “gender-bending” – how anachronistic the term now sounds — frontman, blasted to transatlantic superstardom; then came George’s love affair with heroin, then recovery, then, for the past decade-and-a-half, a series of adventures that have included a short-lived Broadway musical, and a continuing successful career as a club DJ.
The really interesting elements in Boy George’s existence, however, lie in the little details rather than the broad-brush strokes.
Boy George’s Irish origins are not in doubt, but the specifics are hazy. Most reports contend that his family roots lie in County Tipperary, though others have contended that his late father, Jeremiah O’Dowd, hailed from Cork. Unconfirmed accounts also suggest that his mother, Dinah, was forced to leave Ireland after becoming pregnant as an unmarried 18-year-old.
The O’Dowd home was in Eltham, Southeast London. It was a large family — Boy George has four brothers and one sister — and one in which rows and physical confrontation were commonplace. The fey George, who has said with characteristic flourish that he realized he was gay at the age of 5, was hardly made to feel comfortable. Asked in 2002 who were the first people he remembered calling him derogatory names like “poof” and “fag”, he replied, “My brothers, probably.”
To describe George’s relationship with his father as complex does not begin to do it justice. Jeremiah O’Dowd, universally known as Jerry, was a construction worker who had also been an amateur boxer in his day. He was macho and prone to expressing dissatisfaction by throwing his dinner plate across the room. Boy George often encouraged his mother to leave his father. The couple eventually divorced after 43 years of marriage.
Yet Jerry O’Dowd was not just a boor. Despite their often-troubled relationship, the singer noted that his father was unexpectedly supportive when he “came out” as gay:
“When I came out, he was brilliant,” Boy George told The Mirror, a British newspaper, last year. “I thought he was going to kill me. Literally. But he just went, ‘I don’t care. I love you. You’re my son’.”
The older man in due course developed unlikely enthusiasms for therapy and Reiki healing — things that had helped his son overcome his drug addiction. It was through these activities that Jerry O’Dowd met his second wife. He was with her when he died, on holiday, in 2004. George’s second autobiography, published the following year, is dedicated to Jerry.
Dinah O’Dowd is still alive and George appears close to her, albeit with occasional moments of friction. In 2004, the singer declined the offer of a medal — an MBE — from the British crown. His mother was apparently furious and told him he was spiteful.
“Too bad you didn’t give birth to Cliff Richard,” her son shot back.
The story of Culture Club’s rise and fall is well known by now. Their two first singles, released in 1982, barely dented Britain’s Top 100. The third, “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” was a massive hit, eventually going to Number 1 in 23 countries. The following year, the band’s best-known song “Karma Chameleon” helped power their second album to six-times platinum status in the U.S.
Boy George was, of course, at the heart of it all. His heavily made-up appearance, replete with long, braided hair and lashings of eye shadow, got much of the attention. As one of the first openly gay pop stars, Boy George was deemed “significant” enough to make the cover of Newsweek at the height of the band’s fame. One of the things that was rarely mentioned, sadly, was that he possessed perhaps the most silken pop voice of his generation.
The band’s last major hit, “Everything I Own” came in 1987. The previous year George’s narcotic habit had led the Sun newspaper to run a famous story headlined “Junkie George has only eight weeks to live.”
After breaking his addiction to heroin, George drifted for a while, before ultimately launching a deejay career. He can command a fee in the thousands of dollars for a single night’s work and has released several well-received mix albums. But he has never again reached the heights that he scaled with Culture Club.
The musical for which he wrote several songs, “Taboo,” enjoyed some acclaim in London. When it moved to Broadway, however, it received critical brickbats. It closed after three months, a painful experience for George, who also had a part in the production, and, presumably, an even more painful one for Rosie O’Donnell who put up $10 million of her fortune to bring “Taboo” this side of the Atlantic.
Truth be told, in recent years — at least until his current brush with the law — Boy George has hit the headlines more often for his cattiness about other celebrities than anything else.
Among those to feel the lash of his tongue have been O’Donnell herself (“a Pottery Barn lesbian”); Madonna (“a living breathing cash register”) and George Michael (“People saw me as the benchmark queer while George was passing himself off as a straight stud. In fact, he was loitering in public loos like some pre-war homosexual. It’s one thing to keep quiet. It’s another thing to pretend to be someone you’re not.”)
Elton John’s decision to duet with Eminem, who has been criticized for homophobia, received equally short shrift: “It’s like me singing with Pol Pot,” Boy George mused.
Despite all the flamboyance and the defiant bitchiness, however, Boy George remains at some level, an enigma. His public pronouncements — perhaps his most famous being that he would prefer “a nice cup of tea” to sex — might have fascinated an earlier generation, but they also served as an effective way of evading more soul-searching inquiries.
One interviewer put it well: “While he is blindingly open, you do not get close to him,” Penny Wark wrote in the Times of London. “It is like a performance; it is not a conversation.”
Boy George himself, however, continues to suggest that the surface appearance and the reality of the man within really may be identical:
“I’m a daicon, not an icon,” he told another interviewer. Noting her bemusement, he explained that daicon was “Japanese radish. Bitter, but nice.”