A voice says softly, “Hello. What’s your name?” and Ruby Wax creeps round the
corner clutching two make-up bags, her black hair still creased from her
bed. It’s 9.10am on a Monday, and I’m on a red sofa in the comedian’s
drawing room, equidistant between cushions that read “Love” and “Peace”.
“Sorry I’m late,” Wax says. She puts down her bags and arranges herself in a
chair. She’s in a tiny black jacket with frilly lapels over a black T-shirt,
and her round blue eyes, gazing up at me from a marvellously plump,
young-looking face, have a curiously childlike expression. She is
disconcertingly different from the Ruby Wax of the Nineties, the loud
televisual scourge of celebrity. In fact she has the air of a trusting
five-year-old.
I’m at her huge, beautiful house in Notting Hill, West London, to hear about
Wax’s new stand-up show. She is performing Live From the Priory
at the Priory clinic in Roehampton, frequently home to Britain’s exhausted A
list and where Wax herself took refuge in the Nineties after a nervous
breakdown at the height of her career. In the years since she has been on a
therapeutic odyssey — undergone analysis, taken medication and trained in
neuroscience and psychotherapy. Hence the sea change in her personality,
which is also reflected in her new career, offering emotional education to
CEOs, and her interview arm, Ruby’s Room, a series of online
films on the BBC website in which she interviews people with different
mental illnesses. Similarly the charity show is aimed at patients and
ex-patients of the clinic and mental health charities.
“It’s been my dream,” she says. “This is for all patients, and people who have
suffered. It’s a charity thing. And the singer Judith Owen and I are going
to take it on tour and to the West End, and give a percentage of the takings
to depression charities. It’s the perfect time to do it — in this climate,
when the numbers of people who are going under is going up. It’s not even
called depression any more. This is about not feeling comfortable in your
skin. And not being able to check in with anyone else. Just a general —
what’s the word? — malaise.”
Wax and Owen have both had depression — for Wax it has been bad. “A lot of
people don’t know how to live life, so they just keep moving it forward, get
busy,” she says. “Busy is our reason for living. I make jokes about women
who have nothing to do who are now doing Pilates five times a week. Or
charity events to save the tuna. And then it never ends. My breakdown
happened because I couldn’t stop making lists.” So what happened? “I think
of it as a gradual depletion of the self. Gradually the lists take over.”
How did she get back from it? “Medication. And insight.” It sounds like a
huge thing to go through. “This is a lifetime’s, you know, work,” she
agrees. “And the idea of our show was not to be funny. But I think it’s the
funniest I’ve ever written.”
Though Wax still has a TV interview show that goes out on the Continent, that
side of her career is mostly over. The documentaries she used to make are
too expensive these days. She misses it. There is no irony about celebrity
coverage today, she complains.
Instead she has been pursuing her training as a therapist at Regent’s College
in London. “Though I’m not a therapist,” she says. “I don’t enjoy therapy. I
talk to businesses, about how their brains work, and how to self-regulate.”
This is the new venture: teaching executives how to manage the emotional
climate of their companies. “For example, somebody may be in the habit of
being a domineering shyster,” she says. “He has to really regulate before he
takes it out on his employees, otherwise he’s made the whole organisation
toxic.”
And what about Ruby’s Room? “Oh, I had more fun interviewing
those guys than I almost had anybody else,” she says. “How come the honest
people are the ones who are sick?” What drew her to that? “Well, if you are
sick yourself you want to help other people who are sick. And they know that
I am. So I’m not talking down to them.” Sick? She looks at me. “I have a
mental illness. Depression. It’s a mental illness.” So what can be done
about it? “See a pyschopharmacologist. Don’t go to a GP. Go to a great
therapist. But that’s almost impossible.” What, to get one? “To know what
one is. Because you’re sick. And to know when you’re not sick is pretty
hard, too.”
So can people get better? “They can, but there are a lot of not very good
therapists out there. Ninety per cent of it is the relationship. If you have
a good relationship. If you don’t mollycoddle them, and you’re not too
cruel, you can start to contain them so that they can reformulate their
opinions and come up with a whole new set, and know that’s closer to making
them feel more flexible — rather than try to satisfy some phantom memory.”
Has that happened for her? “Oh, yeah.” She nods. “You know, because most of
your life you think, ‘Oh, is that really my imagination, and am I a bad
person? And then, what is a bad person and who told me I was a bad person?’
” So she’s found happiness? “Freedom is happiness.” So she’s happy? She
smiles. “Yeah. Happy is a strange word. But freedom’s pretty good for happy.”
Wax has been open about her awful childhood. Her mother, Bertha, who wore
haute couture and had a fixation with cleanliness, kept the furniture
covered with plastic sheeting; her wealthy father, Edward, shouted and
screamed and made sausages for a living. She has called them crazy and
unloving. But she is not sure if they caused her depression. “Well, the
court is out,” she observes. “You could have a gene that would possibly go
toward that. But if you had a very healthy upbringing the gene would never
be turned on. My mother had depression, and her mother, and her mother’s
mother. But if they hadn’t acted it out, I wouldn’t have necessarily had
it.” How bad was it? “I couldn’t rate it from one to ten. Because you can’t
remember. But it’s enough to understand what hell might be like.”
She looks up with mild interest as a teenage girl with bleached blonde hair
trips down the staircase and selects a pair of shoes from the row beneath
the radiator. “Oh, hi!” Wax says. As the girl lets herself out a teenage boy
appears. He may be linked to Wax’s 20-year-old, Max, or possibly her
18-year-old, Madelaine, or Marina, 15. “Guy, hi!” Wax exclaims. “How many
other people are sleeping upstairs? Did you have a nice party?” He nods
blearily and groans, “I’ve got to go to school.” “Remember that thing called
school!” Wax exclaims. “Not my kid!” she tells me with amusement. She
laughs. “We didn’t really have teenagerdom,” she says. “I got a couple of
grunts, but now they’ve realised how funny I am. My boy’s doing quantum
physics. Particle physics. At Southampton. I couldn’t be a happier person on
Earth. And Madelaine is doing sociology and anthropology at Warwick. And
Marina’s still at school.”
How do they all spend time together? “We just do,” she says. “I travel a lot
with my kids. I’m a travel writer. They always go with me. I can’t tell what
we do, but they’re really amusing.”
Ed Bye, her husband, a BBC producer, is famously nice. He has just made a film
called Round Ireland with a Fridge, based on the book by Tony Hawks.
His sister, tragically, died in May after being hit by a train. How do they
spend time together? “Well, we don’t,” Wax says. “He’s making films and I’m
doing this.” They never see each other? “Not much, no.” Right. How about
diet? She shrugs. “It’s not my obsession any more. I don’t drink. I eat too
much dessert. I don’t miss drink. Isn’t that funny?” Guilty pleasures? Her
creamy face goes blank and she tugs a strand of her hair reflectively. “I
don’t have anything like that. I don’t have anything left.” Chocolate? “No.
Watching TV.” Reality TV? “Don’t start me on that. No. House.”
She’s being perfectly lovely, very likeable, but she’s pretty much stopped
talking. Either she’s lost interest or run out of patience. I ask if she
does exercise. “Pilates, three times a week,” she says. “People that come
here. A group of people. Friends.” Does she subscribe to the idea that if
you get things right on the inside everything falls into place on the
outside? She nods. “Totally. I mean, even if you were poor, or whatever, and
you felt OK, you wouldn’t have envy. Once you get rid of envy, then what’s
the difference?” But envy’s not necessarily unhappiness. “Oh, that’s always
envy, a little bit, I think. Or comparison.” She reaches up to shake my hand
and smiles innocently up at me as I let myself out.
My perfect weekend
Family night in or girls’ night out? Girls’ night out
Talk it through or bottle it up? Talk it through
PhD or celebrity? PhD
Full English or fruit salad? Fruit salad
Beer or wine? Nothing. Diet Coke
Jimmy Choos or Converse? Converse
Jackass or Brüno? Brüno
Nanny or family day out? Nanny
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . . Seeing a lot of people.
Or not. Or nobody
What is your comfort food, why is it comforting and when do you eat it? Rice
cakes, because I can eat as many as I want, in bed
