The girl was the spitting image of Veronica Lake, but her name was Vanessa.
She would take the train from Ferntree Gully to Flinders Street station and conduct a glamour shoot in the black-and-white photo booth. Flash, pout, flash, over-the-shoulder pout, flash, removing a black leather glove. She called herself Vanessa but she was born Peter Davies. Although everyone came to call her Troy.
Directed by Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn, Ecco Homo is a documentary about the life of the artist and performer, which premieres at Melbourne film festival. The pair started working on the film in 2003, before their acclaimed documentaries about Father Bob Maguire (In Bob We Trust) and the Birthday Party musician Rowland S Howard (Autoluminescent).
Davies’ voyage from the suburbs is told through a montage of those original photo booth shots and mixed-format moving imagery. The timeline of his life is underscored by the progress of technology, from VHS, to mini DV, to digital video, which Troy used for his video diaries, bringing to life his inner world.
Nobody fully understood that inner world. In various incarnations, Davies was a man, a woman, an artist, a fashion designer, a pop star and a muse. Most of all he appeared to be different things to different people, free and easy with confabulation.
“Troy was a remarkable pioneer in the field of freedom of sexual expression,” says Milburn, explaining their desire to make such an intricate film. “He dealt with life with razor-sharp wit. He carried a dark secret, yet he never acted as a victim.”
The embodiment of contradiction, Davies had once been a skinhead in the West Side Sharps gang, while moonlighting as a prostitute. Later in his teens he became one of the first contenders for gender reassignment and underwent three years of psychological testing before being accepted for surgery. But then he changed his mind. “The last two years were for art’s sake,” he said later.
Davies recast himself as a bovver-boy auteur, working on videos for U2 and INXS, often gravitating in front of the camera. He enjoyed fleeting pop stardom himself, through his band Ecco Homo. In the clip for their song Motorcycle Baby he’s wrapped around INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, wearing a blonde wig and winged shades.
Later there was his electro single, New York, New York, with a guest appearance by Bono. Yet he’d sabotage every opportunity he got, by testing people – including those at his record label – to their limits. He was the superstar who never was.
Milburn met Davies in 1980. “Troy lived in a great old building in St Kilda on Mitford Street and I remember walking through the sash windows and seeing him there,” she recalls. “There was a song around at the time that went “spooky little boy” and Troy just epitomised it to me. He was a strange dichotomy of creativity and menace.”
“At that time in the post-punk scene there was a lot of lemon-sucking posing going on,” says Lowenstein. “You would adopt an English accent and pretend to be something you’re not. Troy didn’t have to prove he was cool – he knew he was. Not cool in the Nick Cave sort of way, but just himself, charming and yobbish. He burst those balloons around him and it was hilarious.”
The film-makers have gathered a fabulous cast of witnesses from the worlds of film, art and music, Bono included, for their documentary. One thing seems evident: they all had their hearts broken by Davies.
“Probably when too much of himself existed in Vanessa, that’s when he threw her away,” observes close friend Sarah Gilbert of Davies’ tendency to switch identities.
This dissociation could be viewed as self-preservation. The film gets darker a third of the way in, with revelations of domestic violence and incest.
Davies’ many pasts caught up with him in 1985 when he contracted HIV, although he became one of the world’s longest-surviving Aids patients. Used to his tall stories, many friends thought he’d made up the illness, particularly when he’d turn up to clubs in his hospital gear.
“His attitude was ‘I’m very special … AND I’m ill’,” remembers the film producer Michael Hamlyn.
Towards the end of his life, Davies found spiritual redemption in Buddhism – and love, too. He died in 2007, aged 47, from liver failure and hepatitis C-related causes.
“It’s an epic story of Doctor Zhivago proportions,” Lowenstein says of the documentary. “We ask some fundamental questions about what truth is – how some people are too scared to show the world who they really are, so they create these different figments.” It’s also a lesson, he says, about how we should treat artists and appreciate eccentricities.
“None of the Davies brothers could hold a relationship down and they all had their lives ruined in some sort of way,” Lowenstein says. “Troy saw it as material. He actually said: ‘I can do something with this.’”
• Ecco Homo will screen at the Melbourne international film festival on 14 and 16 August
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