Rene, Roy. Mo’s Memoirs

Description

Mo’s Memoirs
by Roy Rene.
Ghosted by Elizabeth Lambert and Max Harris.

Reed and Harris, Melbourne, 1945.
First Edition, hardback. 200 pp.

Includes numerous personal, stage and publicity photographs.

‘I used to like to listen to “McCaughey Mansions” because that was the end of Australian vaudeville on radio. It was Roy Rene’s last gasp … very funny because there was a tremendous underlying vulgarity. You’d hear Roy Rene make a dreadful sound and you’d hear the studio audience laugh and you didn’t know what he’d done but you imagined some­thing absolutely terrible. It was this puncturing of the Australian gen­tility that was somehow cathartic even to a child listening.’

Barry Humphries in interview with Murray Bramwell, Adelaide 1991: https://murraybramwell.com/?p=1477

Condition: Printed on cheap war-time paper, aged and tanned. No dustjacket. Cloth boards have a few stains and there is a small tear to spine. There is also an inscription ‘To John for a successful 1948, best wishes Don’ and a couple of outraged underlinings in pencil to a point made by theatrical entrepreneur Ben Fuller, in the preface, saying Rene turned up to his shows on time. Who was John? This copy is an intriguing mystery, as much as the book is a surprise venture into comedy by the ever-earnest publishers John Reed and Max Harris.