O’Keefe appears to have long held an urge to take centre stage; he appeared as an actor in amateur theatre in the early 1950s (a production of Death of a Salesman in 1952, for instance),89 and he would later be a driving force behind a branch of the community group the Younger Set’s drama activities on behalf of the Spastic Centre.90 He became associated with the controversial American promoter Lee Gordon, undermining Gordon’s assumption that only American acts would attract Australian crowds: O’Keefe went on to tour Australia with Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran in 1957; with Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1958;91 and with Chuck Berry and Bobby Darin in 1959.92 In 1958, he facilitated the creation of the song ‘The Wild One’, arguably his longest lasting legacy (though he is also remembered for his boisterous version of ‘Shout’ as well as other hits). His contribution to ‘The Wild One’, on which he is credited as a co-writer, was the absurd, sexual line ‘Shake it till the meat comes off the bone’. Sydney DJ Tony Withers was also credited as a co-writer – purely as an incentive for him to play ‘The Wild One’ on his program on 2SM – which he naturally did.93 Long after O’Keefe’s death, Iggy Pop would cover the song, having heard Albert Lee’s 1982 version while on David Bowie’s yacht, on a tape compiled by the painter George Underwood. The song was known in the USA as ‘Real Wild Child’; Lee’s version added, in brackets, ‘Wild One’. Pop would re-record it with the Melbourne group Jet in 2008 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, and praised it for what he saw as its immutable value – its ‘tiny idea’ and ‘simple premise.’94
O’Keefe worked with musicians of a high standard, but his records are generally dull. He knew his abilities lay elsewhere. In the early 60s, as he moved towards a damaging series of nervous breakdowns and prescription drug dependency, O’Keefe travelled throughout the United States to further his career while simultaneously making a statement about Australian talent and ability. ‘Anyone can see that Johnny O’Keefe is the king of Australian rock ’n’ roll,’ a TV Week reader calling him or herself ‘OK O’Keefe’ wrote in 1960. ‘He has more personality and is a better singer than pudgy-faced [New Zealander Johnny] Devlin will ever be.’95 His ostentatious tastes were also a thrill for many: ‘Johnny doesn’t look sloppy like most rock ’n’ roll artists, either,’ cooed two of his biggest Adelaide fans, teenagers Kaye Stewart and Joan Kennett in Young Modern:
‘With that cute hairdo and sophisticated suits, he looks really SOPHISTICATED and SMOOTH.
‘Mmmm . . . did you know he bought a pair of 8-carat gold shoes worth £50?
‘Ohhhh . . . GORGEOUS!’96
Part of his decadence, however, might also have been that he was rumoured to be ‘a pig socially,’ as a 1962 Young Modern piece put it.97 Popular rock and roll singer Betty McQuade also called him an ‘ignorant, arrogant pig’.98 His first wife, who suffered appallingly at his hands, described him as ‘horribly untidy,’ – probably one of the lesser of his unpleasant characteristics that she experienced.99
Combining delusion with berserk optimism, O’Keefe constantly advertised his far-reaching plans; to a degree, rock and roll seemed as much his franchise as his career. He manufactured his own publicity.100 When it was reported that he was Australia’s highest-paid entertainer, his answer: ‘Those reports are way out, man’, may have been a denial – or else a clever use of beat-speak.101 He planned an alcohol-free restaurant for teenagers in ‘down town’ Sydney.102 He put some old green gloves from the ABC prop room on John Hurley for Six O’Clock Rock, thus creating Jade Hurley.103 The same show gave Noelene Batley to Australia: her song ‘Barefoot Boy’ was a hit.104 Batley had won a talent quest at Ling Nam’s Chinese Restaurant in Sydney105 and – according to one of its organisers, Festival A&R man Ken Taylor – was ‘a most docile and co-operative young artist, and one of the loveliest human beings that this industry has ever produced.’106 She would go on to work in cabaret in Japan and the US.
Six O’Clock Rock began in 1959, and had a jazz element;107 each instalment began with the Paddington Town Hall clock striking six,108 and ended with O’Keefe and his manager Peter Page vomiting (off camera) from nerves and relief.109 In Koch’s The Doubleman, for which the author no doubt drew on his experiences working at ABC, a show called Eight O’Clock Rock is the locus of a decadent, sexually exploitative and simmeringly gay party scene; O’Keefe’s environment was possibly less sophisticated and camp, but probably just as venal.110 ‘Before it erupted on our screens,’ remembers one viewer, the writer Denise Young, ‘parents and kids watched more or less the same movies and listened to more or less the same songs.’ The emergence of ‘the first oppositional show’, Six O’Clock Rock, saw the creation of a public rebel: ‘Johnny O’Keefe yawped our barbaric yawp.’111
O’Keefe wanted to translate his yawp into American112 by recrafting Six O’Clock Rock as ‘a big budget international show’ and pitching it to television stations in the US; TV Week reported O’Keefe saying ‘he has made negotiations with “certain people.”’113 He certainly thought big: ‘Biographies of O’Keefe and about 100,000 wallet-sized give-away photographs’ were, it was said, ‘distributed among America’s 4,000 radio stations’ during his promotional blitz there in early 1960. O’Keefe was promoted as ‘Boomerang Boy’,114 having obtained rudimentary skills in boomerang throwing from residents of the urban Aboriginal settlement of La Perouse, in Sydney’s south.115 He appeared on the TV show American Bandstand116 and also ‘sent 200 three-minute colour film clips to theatres and TV stations’; gave ‘boomerangs to every U.S. radio station’; and hired ‘rock and roll pioneer, Bill Haley, as his manager’. It was announced that ‘as a gimmick – he plans to stand on the ledge of the 80th floor of the Empire State Building and threaten to jump off, unless every New York disc jockey plays his records.’117 One sarcastic TV Week reader suggested that someone give him a push – to help him find ‘the only smash hit he will ever make.’118 Yet the last of these soundbite-style claims actually suggested a desperate and perhaps ailing man. In April 1960 he was reported to be suffering from nervous tension.119 There are conflicting reports of how many copies his American single “She’s My Baby,” on Liberty, sold: a few hundred, two thousand,120 or a hundred thousand.121 He later claimed to have sold many records in New Orleans by pretending to be black122 (that is, he limited publication of his photograph in the media, thus keeping his whiteness a secret), and that the reason he was dumped by Liberty was because he’d been fraternising with black musicians123 in that city. It is clear that the truth of these assertions is entirely secondary to the value they had in promoting Johnny O’Keefe.
A car accident outside the NSW town of Kempsey in June 1960 led to operations (reputedly, twenty-seven) to restore his face,124 which he nevertheless stated was not important in a career sense.125 Guitarist Johnny Greenan, and his wife Jan, were also injured in the accident; O’Keefe’s defence counsel tried to imply that Johnny Greenan had been driving O’Keefe’s Plymouth Belvedere. O’Keefe made his facial operations a feature of Six O’Clock Rock, inviting viewers to observe his changing visage over the months. His next album was called I’m Still Alive, and its cover showed the wreck O’Keefe and the Greenans had emerged from.
Later, pursuing his dreams of fame in Britain, O’Keefe found himself in a mental institution in Tooting Bec, having overdosed on his numerous prescription drugs (and others); on regaining consciousness O’Keefe, virtually a walking cliché by this time, told doctors he was Christ.126 Returning to Sydney, he heard Martians’ voices in his head.127 In 1961 he moved to commercial television with The Johnny O’Keefe Show;128 a title that was later changed to Sing, Sing, Sing to downplay its identification with a figurehead who was often too unwell to compere. His frequent replacement – who had once told O’Keefe to ‘stick his show in his fucking arse’ when faced with a demand that he have his hair cut for television129