Most Likely to Succeed
By Philip Matthews
New Zealand Listener (March 24, 2001)

Russell Crowe was always going to make it. Up for Best Actor at this week's Oscars, he has come a long, long way from suburban Mt Roskill and his original dream of being a Rock Star.

Russell Crowe has a superstitious relationship to his own fame. He believes that to talk about one's dreams dissipates the energy required to fulfill them. Success must be a plan nursed in secret. There is something sensible about this, but something very lonely as well: no one ever knew what he really wanted.

"I'm hugely ambitious and this is the thing that you could never discuss with people," Crowe said to the 'Listener' in 1997. This was the last time that Crowe did New Zealand press, hawking his US break-through film 'LA Confidential'. We are many floors up at the Centra hotel in Auckland. There are journalists all through the place and a TV crew downstairs, anxious because he has gone over time - his answers are long and vivid and articulate. He is smoking and bearded and wearing a Cricket Max cap (for the new, TV-friendly form [of cricket] invented by his cousin, Martin Crowe). He has a strong, dominating presence. The dynamic of fame, the relationship between star and acolytes, seems nakedly obvious and he is giddy and pumped-up because of it.

"People get offended by ambition. That to me is such a bullshit thing. You've got to have ambition, regardless of what your job is. Shit, if the guy that's going to operate on me for heart surgery isn't ambitious to be the greatest surgeon, then get the f--- away from me! If the guy that's playing with your teeth as a dentist is so-so about his job ... it's ridiculous. The only problem is, in my job, ambition from a public's point of view is seen as this nasty, narcissistic pastime. But that's the public getting it back from a magazine. That's got nothing to do with the artistic drive in the first place."

Talk to anyone who knew Crowe and you get a singular impression, honed like a mantra - he always wanted to be a star, he was adamant and vocal, he would stop at nothing, he would endure ridicule and poverty. Certain adjectives recur: driven, focused, ambitious. Sometimes, arrogant. There is a school of thought that says ambition and arrogance, self-belief and single-mindedness are somehow antithetical to the New Zealand spirit, and in this sense, to say that Crowe stood out during his five years on the edge of showbiz in Auckland is a gross understatement.

"When I saw Russ, I thought 'There's something about this guy,'" says Raymond Eade, an older musician who worked with Crowe when he was 18-19. "I thought he was obviously going to get somewhere." Is that easy in hindsight, though? Actor Paul Minifie, who toured with Crowe in the 1986 production of The Rocky Horror Show, remembers, too, that "he had a huge amount of personal confidence about his talent."

Again and again, confidence. The young Crowe had "more confidence than the rest of the people I was dealing with put together," say Terence O'Neill-Joyce, whose record company, Ode, released early Crowe music under the deathless moniker Russ le Roq.

Simon Prast, an old school friend, now director of the Auckland Theatre Company, remembers that Crowe was struck by something pinned to Prast's wall. It read: 'How badly do you want it?' Prast: "This was, of course, a reference to becoming an actor. Clearly, he wanted it reasonably badly!"

He could be taken negatively, as well. "The Russell that I remember was extremely arrogant, very driven," says singer and musician Mark Rimington, who also worked with Crowe in Rocky Horror. "Whatever he was focused on, it was at the expense of anything else. The women fell by the way-side pretty quickly. If people had a use, he would certainly find it. I wouldn't describe him as the most caring person in the world."

This is the star as Machiavelli, but O'Neill-Joyce also remembers someone young, fresh and keen. "He had an innocence about him ... he was just a nice person."

If Crowe mentions this era, the Russ le Roq years, at all now, it is usually with shame or defensiveness. The semi-official biography -- the long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll -- begins with Crowe in Sydney in 1986, busking to feed himself, sharing cheap hotels with alcoholics, auditioning for everything. It is a romantic image, but it ignores the version of Russell Crowe that preceded it.

"I never told anybody here what I really wanted to achieve," he said in that 1997 interview. "There's a lot of guys I started out with in bands, they've got straight jobs now, because there ambition was to get on the cover of Rip It Up [the main NZ music magazine in the 1980s]. And they may have done that. But that was really about a street-level cool association, it had nothing to do with the music, nothing to do with what they were saying as an artist. It had to do with looking cool to their school friends."

And then he laughed and said, "Maybe I went to too many schools."

Russell Ira Crowe was born in Wellington in April 1964, but moved to Sydney with his parents, Alex and Jocelyn, and his older brother, Terry, at the age of three. His parents managed pubs. Aged six, he got an acting job on a Australian TV show called 'Spyforce', on which his mother was the caterer. When he was 14, the Crowes moved to Auckland. The pubs they ran included the Albion in the city and one in New Lynn that would play a crucial part in the story.

At Auckland Grammar [High School] for the fifth form, he was a year behind his cousin, Martin. "Marty was well-established at Grammar as a bit of a hero," Crowe said to the New Zealand Herald in 1991. "It was very inspirational in a way, the school also had Grant Fox [who later became a well respected All Black rugby player]. Crowe was in the mid-low stream 5F. His form master was Graham Henry, now the celebrated rugby coach [currently coaching Wales' national side]. Others in his class included cricketer March Greatbach, and Simon Prast's younger brother, Andrew.

"We all caught the Waikowhai bus together," says Simon Prast. "At school, Russell was a bit of a ruffian, I guess. He seemed to live happily in the shadows of his over-achieving sporty cousins. He enjoyed taking the piss out of me as a prefect and did it in such a way that I couldn't help laughing along."

Crowe won his class's English prize that year, but the next year he and Terry transferred to Mt Roskill Grammar. "He got out [of Auckland Grammar] before he was asked to leave," says Warren Seastrant, former head of English at Mt Roskill. "He was unhappy at Auckland Grammar, but he wasn't expelled. It was decided that he had to go into my class because he had a little bit of form. And he teamed up with another fellow who became a DJ in Auckland, Mark Staufer. [Russell] was a fairly willful student. Into image-making. He had a bit of a career of disruption. He would do enough to get by, usually at the C-plus, B-minus level. He was capable of much more."

Still, he was also "good fun, basically a decent guy." And the famous arrogance? "There was a measure of it. The hooded eyes and the cool disengagement. He had a great deal of self-assurance -- superficial self-assurance at least. A lot of the prescribed arrogance was a part of the image that he was projecting."

Too cool for school? Russell Crowe was starting to become quite busy with his other life.

On the promotional brochure of rock'n'roll revival singer Tom Sharplin, the quote "consummate professional" appears, an endorsement from Crowe. It says a lot about the qualities that Crowe values -- discipline and endurance, perspiration rather than inspiration. Sharplin has been in the business for around 30 years, he is now in his early 50s and still performs regularly.

Not long after the Crowes settled in Auckland, the entertainment one night at the pub in New Lynn was Sharplin and his band. Crowe was 14, he watched awestruck by minor stardom, by the showbusiness machinery, by the strangeness and beauty of fame. He wanted in. "He used to come into the dressing-room and chat with us," says Eade, then Sharplin's bass player. "He was a nice little kid, I thought. Then I found out he was very interested in the music and very interested in the show."

Very, very interested. Crowe gravitated towards Sharplin, and Sharplin gravitated back. There is 15 years between them, but they remain close friends. Sharplin spotted a spark -- that others, not even Crowe's parents, had seen. He encouraged him to work on songs and perform.

Crowe formed his first band, The Profile, while still at school, with school mate Staufer on bass. The boys always acted the part, Seastrand says. When other bands played at Mt Roskill, "he and Mark used to ostentatiously sit in the front row and turn their backs on them." So, when Crowe's band played, "the seventh form, to a person, turned up and did exactly the same. The first three rows turned their backs on him. But even that didn't faze him."

He left school early in the seventh form to work for an insurance company, while pushing for a bigger showbiz break. After five months in the day job, he talked his way into a gig as DJ at Sharplin's new inner-city club, King Creole's. He was 17, he quit the day job for late nights in a licensed venue -- his parents weren't ecstatic. Back then, being a DJ didn't have the cachet it does now: you were just a guy in a booth who played records. "I don't think he particularly wanted to be a Dj," Eade says. "He just wanted to be in showbusiness of some sort. That was a opening, because he couldn't get a job in a band."

"He used to watch Tom playing at King Creole's," says Graham Silcock, former guitarist in Sharplin's band, and still in the business, working at a music store in Greenlane. "He was DJing and I used to see him standing at the side just looking. That look as if, some day, man..."

Silcock wasn't aware then that Crowe had singing and playing aspirations of his own. In 1982, Sharplin helped Crowe put together a band, mostly of his own players, to record a single. The A-side was Crowe's 'I Just Want To Be Like Marlon Brando', which seems uncannily prescient now, yet it was apparently written as a Sharplin tribute or even in-joke. It was recorded at a studio in Pakuranga [an Auckland residential suburb]. It was released on Ode. It was played twice on 1ZM and sold 500 copies.

Crucially, it was not credited to Crowe, but to Russ le Roq, a Sharplin inspired stage name, a persona as suave rock'n'roll guy, that was doggedly maintained, on and off stage -- Russell Brown, then editor of Rip It Up, had frequent dealings with le Roq and never knew, until years later, that he was a Crowe. Was this the first big acting job of Crowe's career? "There wasn't even a glimpse of the Russell Crowe now in Russ le Roq," Brown says. "You couldn't imagine the guy in a singlet." Equally, though, some can't even square Crowe with Crowe. Peter Urlich [NZ music producer, famed for putting together the television-made 'Popstars' concept that produced NZ's 'True Bliss' and Aust's 'Bardot' bands] missed out on le Roq, and got to know him only seven or eight years ago. "I found him hilarious," Urlich says, "because I always felt that he was putting on this very tough, hard-man image, like he hadn't dropped out of a film role."

If you want to be it, fake it. On the back of the single 'Pier 13' -- released on 100 'limited edition' copies in early 1983 -- le Roq appears into the Auckland sunlight, wearing a white jacket, black shirt, white tie and sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. Behind him is a bellboy with luggage, following him through the sliding doors. This picture is legendary and definitive among his friends -- Crowe stood outside the hotel, waited for a bellboy to appear and yelled at photographer Trevor Coppock to shoot at just the right moment. The idea was to look "cool and successful", Sharplin has said. It was a threadbare way of being worth millions.

He put together his own group, Russ le Roq and the Romantics, a four-piece that included Silcock. He designed a uniform, with each lad's name emblazoned on the jacket, 1950s-style. He ran his own fan club, but no one knows now if anyone joined or what they might have received ("newsletters etc" were promised). Image is crucial and an aspect of image is the illusion of success. People used to hear things, but who knew what to believe? "He used to say he was doing really well and the other guys and I looked at each other -- if you say so, great." Silcock says. "If we were doing that well, we never made much out of it. We used to see the records in these old bins for 50 cents. My friends used to remind me of that."

The sleeve of the third single, 'Never Let Ya Slide', was a bright, optimist pink. It was credited to Russ le Roq and the Romantics and in the notes, the singer played up the cod-French even further: musicians were listed as 'Le Playerz', and there was 'Le Warning' that 'This is not a rock'n'roll revival disc. Anyone caught saying it is [sic] will be murdered by death. or shot by hanging or ... forced to play a session on my next record!!!' It was signed, 'Moi'.

He was desperate to break out of the rock'n'roll scene. Audiences were middle-aged, they were office parties. It was 'Happy Days' [the US TV show], it was Sha Na Na, and in 1983 it wasn't particularly cool for a 19-year-old. Outside that scene, though, responses ranged from disbelief to ridicule. "A lot of people couldn't get a handle on him, because he was so out of left field," say Brown. "I don't think people really disliked him. They were just puzzled by him."

"He was so uncool that he was actually cooler than most of the so-called cool people,ä says Trevor Reekie, who was one of those cool people, working with the electronic group the Car Crash Set. "He was kind of a freak, but he used to get away with it." This was as age of goths and new romantics, posers and the po-faced. If you were serious, your music was funless. If you were pop, you were frivolous. And here was Russ le Roq with a bouffant, a self-promoter in sparkling jackets. "It was a bullshit time and Russ was for real," Reekie ways. "He used to walk around with this jacket that had 'Russ' on the back. He had so much bottle."

Reekie met le Roq when the singer cruised Auckland's embryonic club scene, looking for a way to update his sound. Reekie produced the next single, 'Shattered Glass', putting a synth-pop spin on proceedings. "We tried to jazz this piece of shit up and it didn't work at all! But he was a laugh." But there is an obvious question: Ambition or not, did the guy have actual musical talent? "Yes and no," offers Reekie, adding that the quality of musicians was such that le Roq's limitations were disguised. Rimington is less circumspect: "Talented? Musically? No. I had to shadow sing him when we were doing the tour, to keep him in tune. He never said he was a great singer, but he was a great frontman. He knew how to do a show."

The title of an Auckland Star profile in December 1983 was typical: "Russ' hunger won't let him give up." But by now, le Roq must have been starting to look like a doomed enterprise, an expensive public fantasy. "I figure I've spent about $7000 in the last year on the whole thing," le Roq is quoted as saying. "Yeah, maybe I'll do another single. There's always another $2000 somewhere to send down the drain." The word 'Crowe' appeared nowhere in that story, or in career updates in Rip It Up.

He found a new way of spending money -- in February 1984, he opened an unlicensed night-club called The Venue at 134 Symonds St (the building is now demolished). "We used to rehearse there with the Car Crash Set sometime," Reekie says. "It was an under-age nightclub and it was in the wrong part of town, so cool people didn't go there. It must have been hard work. I doubt if he made any money out of it."

A battle of the bands competition resulted in a compilation LP of young, unknown groups, called all 'Dressed Up and No Place to Play', produced by le Roq. A nice idea, but not a seller. Despite regularly hosting bands such as the 'Mockers', the 'Dance Exponents' and new romantic wannabes 'Katango', The Venue didn't make the year. In November 1984, Rip It Up broke the news: "Financial problems have caused The Venue to go under, nine months after it opened ... le Roq said lower than expected numbers caused initial problems in covering overheads and when The Venue had to close down for two weeks in August, because of violence from outsiders, it dealt finances a death blow leaving him facing bankruptcy court -- not a pleasant experience." The problem seemed to be that street kids, driven out of Aotea Square by police, were looking for somewhere to hang out. "It would be easy to become racist running The Venue, le Roq said to Rip It Up. "Which would be odd, seeing as I'm part Maori myself." It was also noted that The Venue had been a mere holiday, a year off from le Roq's bigger dream -- "I still want to be a pop star," he said, ominously.

Despite the question mark over Crowe's musically talent, Reekie enjoyed his sense of humour. "Sometimes it was absolutely puerile, but it was always genuinely funny." It was around this period, then, that a short lived stint as an entertainment officer at a Pakatoa Island resort [just off Auckland harbour] apparently ended when Crowe offered the bingo call "Number one: up your bum." But that story is apocryphal, first cited by Crowe himself.

He formed yet another band, Roman Antix, in 1985, with Dean Cochrane, who Crowe took with him. Cochrane lives in Sydney and plays guitar in Crowe's current, successful band '30 Odd Foot of Grunts'. There was the inevitable single, 'What's the Difference?', which indefatigable le Roq reviewer Brown praised for it "messy smear of guitar" preferring Cochrane to the old pros that le Roq had used. But by now, "What's the point?" may have been a better title.

He was surely due a serious break, and it arrived in 1986. The production of The Rocky Horror Show that toured New Zealand that year ran for nearly five months, breaking attendance records from Auckland to Dunedin. In the cast was Minifie as narrator, with Rob Muldoon [an infamous former prime minister of NZ] fill-in in for a week in Auckland 9 Minifi: "He was my understudy, that's how I viewed it."), Andrew Binns as Brad, Rimington as Rocky, Englishman Danny Abineri as Frank'n'Furter and Russ le Roq, as he still insisted on being billed, as Dr Scott and Eddie.

Rimington met Crowe when they both jumped the queue at the auditions. They became friends: they were the same age, had the same goals. After the Rocky Horror tour, they took a combined show on the road, doing Roman Antix songs and covers on a long rock'n'roll tour. "It had two really successful nights and twenty-something really crappy ones." Rimington also saw the famous arrogance up close: "He wasn't scared of talking to someone in charge of something we were doing, for instance, and telling them they were a f---in' wanker. At any time. Within earshot or to their face. He rubbed people up the wrong often. He rubbed me up the wrong way and I nearly snotted him one, told him to pull his head in. We got on really well, because I understood where he was coming from. I knew he was an arrogant prick and told him so."

And as a performer? "He had a fantastic energy and a great sense of daring," Minifie says. And Rocky Horror is the point at which Crowe finally gave up on the pop star idea, and became interested in the acting one.

The show required both talents, and he surprised himself with his gift of acting. "He wasn't very flash when he first did Rocky," Rimington says. "But the guy built actor chops very quickly." Mark Philips, who now works for a record company in Australia, saw le Roq through significant career changes. As yet another review for Rip It Up, he panned the 'Marlon Brando' single and was accosted in the street by an angry le Roq. That's how they met. As manager of Katango, he "used to spend a bit of time out the back with Russ drinking beer" ([The Venue] was not an unlicensed venue for everybody, then. He never rated Crowe as a singer, but when Crowe gave him tickets to Rocky Horror, he checked it out. And? "I was astounded even then at how good he was as an actor."

The show was the end for le Roq. He moved to Australia, and after a few small acting jobs -- a commercial, the lead in a Seventh Day Adventist religious film, a children's pantomime that fired him after a day -- he got into an Australian production of Rocky Horror, under his own name, with singing as just one string in his acting bow. Rimington stopped in Sydney on his way to England, he saw that production and thought Crowe was just getting better and better, head and shoulders even above the rest of the cast. And he knew that, by day, Crowe was auditioning for everything that was going, no matter what it paid. "I'm absolutely certain he always wanted to be a star," Rimington says. But why did he want it? "I don't know why," Rimington says, sounding genuinely puzzled. "I don't think it was money. He could have always done a job at any time that could have made him more money. So, as to what actually drives a person to do that ... I have no idea."

Rimington stayed in the music business. It's a job: he does commercials, has a band that plays functions, has a digital studio. "The older I got, the less desire I had to be famous." That very day, news broke that the FBI was investigating the Crowe kidnap plot, he heard it on the radio and for a second he actually thought, thank God that wasn't me.

Crowe never told anybody here what he wanted to achieve ... Brown remembers that be seemed 'stoic' in the face of failure. His demeanor suggested 'misunderstood'. As though only he knew what was going to happen, had the long-range forecast.

"There was this guy who used to hate Russell, thought Russell was a little smartass prick," Eade says. "And he said to me, 'Gee, I saw your mate Russell today in his movie 'Romper Stomper' and he's really good.' Russell was shit for this guy, but he was very impressed."

The records that wouldn't sell for 50c now fetch hundreds on the Internet auction E-Bay, and when it comes to recording for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, Crowe isn't concerned about throwing away his last $2000.

"Tom Sharplin came into the shop the other day and mentioned that Russell said he'd like to do a Santana feel for a song," Silcock says. "Tom apparently said, 'You want someone who plays like Santana?' Russell said, 'No, we'll get Carlos Santana.' He was serious about it. Now that he's got the power and the contacts, I guess he can do what he always dreamed of."

Sharplin is among those who still see him. He hold exclusive premieres of his films in Auckland for friends and family, hiring out cinemas. He is famous for all-night parties in his hotel suites. And stories about Russell Crowe usually cite alcohol. Prast remembers seeing him last at the opening of the Sky City casino [in Auckland] in 1996. It was a debauched scene, a drunken shambles. "Much, much later we went back to his hotel with all the other Crowes for more 'bevvies'. Although I had a 6.30am start on 'Hercules' [the TV series] the next morning, I went along. We drank, remembered our Grammar days. He spoke of 'Death of a Salesman' and how much he had enjoyed it. He gave me a CD of his band. A great time was had by all."

But not everyone can operate at Crowe's superhuman level. Prast got to bed at 5.30am and woke at 7.30am. He arrived on set two hours late and 'Hercules' never hired him again. On that day, he gave up drinking. "For this gift, I thank Russell," Prast says. "He's a good guy -- I'm proud of him."

Illustration: Daron Parton

(Thanks to Adrienne)