He transported the large, shiny espresso machine after moving here three years ago, following 29 years on his expansive property Piramimma at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains. Staying too long in show business, he reflects, “can be terribly sad. And I don’t want to end up sad, embittered, but it’s easy to see how that happens, especially when you’ve had the success that I’ve had”.

 

The big country-style kitchen looks a lot like the one that used to feature in the Reg’s Kitchen segments during his eight-and-a-half years as a presenter on Nine’s Our House until the show’s 2001 axing. The Livermore of TV lifestyle lore, of course, was always an entirely different proposition to his confronting white-faced stage creatures.

 

It would be presumptuous to ever say we’ve seen the last of Livermore, though some have tried. A case in point: his latest show, Turns, which he has written for himself and fellow veteran thespian Nancye Hayes, found a champion in small independent theatre production house Christine Dunstan Productions after being turned away by the Sydney Opera House.  

 

“We were told by the then programming director that old people were well catered for at the Opera House,” he says, “meaning that we would only attract older people, and that the ballet and the opera and perhaps the symphony [already] served them ... ageism is rampant.”

 

Now, however, Turns is on a national tour, and Livermore is spending almost half the year travelling and trouping the nation’s boards, including six Melbourne suburban and regional Victorian venues before a couple of weeks at Melbourne’s Playhouse. He’s conservatively dressed today in a light blue shirt and jeans, his previously silver hair now white. 

 

His partner, Rob McMicking, 40, has been briefly introduced, working away in the home office on his graphic business, designing posters for theatrical productions.

 

At their driveway entrance, “Tivoli” is inscribed on a cream-painted stone marker. A good word, Tivoli, Livermore says: it covers gardens – this one is lush and bountiful and worthy of the name – as well as the circuit of variety and vaudeville theatre that flourished around Australia prior to television.

 

Livermore’s mother Dorothy, he will admit, was less convinced. She told her eldest child, who left school in year five the day after his school concert turn as Othello to soon join Sydney’s Phillip Street Theatre in 1957 as an understudy: “Oh, I hope you’re not going to turn into one of those awful Tivoli comedians.” 

 

“I don’t know why she said that,” chuckles Livermore, who counts playing the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz at Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre in 1964 a career highlight. As a child, the Tivoli, now long demolished like its namesakes in other cities including Melbourne, had been the first theatre he ever stepped inside. Becoming a Tivoli type was “exactly what I did”.

 

And yet Livermore would eventually turn the conservative Australian concept of a nice night’s theatre on its head. US musical star Hayes Gordon trained the young, headstrong Reg in method acting at Sydney’s fledgling Ensemble Theatre, but it took a liberating epiphany inside the Metro Theatre in Kings Cross in 1969 to set Livermore up to become a phenomenal 1970s star.

 

He’d come to see the much-hyped musical Hair, directed by Jim Sharman. Livermore had dismissed the production for featuring “grubby hippies straight off the streets”, without having seen it, even though the cast included his younger sister, Helen, who had a solo singing spot. What did these “freewheeling kids” who “go to bed with guitars” know about anything?

 

By the time the performance finished and the lights came on, a shamed Livermore would be blubbering. Sharman had to bring him a cup of tea to calm him down. Livermore swung from wariness to love of the shock of the new: he auditioned, became an understudy, grew his hair and eventually took over the role of Berger. 

 

Hair would herald a more liberal society, though when doing the nude scene, Livermore later noted, “I always made it my business to stand alongside the black guy with by far the biggest dick on the stage; consequently, I was as good as invisible”.

 

There would be nowhere to hide at Glebe’s New Arts Cinema in 1974 when Livermore became the first Australian to inhabit the transvestite Frank ‘N’ Furter in the theatrical production of The Rocky Horror Show. He made Frank a grotesque, though he modelled “the walk, the strut, the stance, the voice, the delivery” on Bette Davis.

 

“It was a very consuming role,” recalls Livermore now. He took “terrible liberties” with his Rocky Horror character. “If I’d been the author [New Zealander Richard O’Brien] I’d have been absolutely furious with me. I just felt that [Frank] was so interesting that the audience wanted more. So that’s when I started adding my own dialogue, and ended up with 20 minutes of my own dialogue.”

 

Director Sharman, who had also been responsible for the original London production and the subsequent Rocky Horror movie, says Livermore opted to play Frank as a “tough cookie” but that both Livermore and the actor who created the role, Tim Curry, “played it to perfection”.

 

Livermore however was ready to unleash even darker parts of his psyche and soul, launching a European-style cabaret very novel to staid Australian audiences. Dressed in bonnet and corset, arse bare, he gave us, among many others, Betty Blokk Buster, a crazed ringmaster in a circle of red lights and a “favourite of the Fuhrer himself”.

 

Who could forget Betty’s co-stars? Beryl Wyatt, a plate-smashing housewife literally chained to the sink; Vaseline Amalnitrate, the footballer ballet dancer with the mouth of a taxi driver; and Leonard, a chauvinist and bigot who yelled at hecklers: “This is my show! Go and hire your own fucking hall!”

 

Betty and the troupe’s antics have finally been released on CD and DVD. Livermore says he’s his own hardest critic: he watched the 35-year-old film recently and cringed when he saw what didn’t work. He’s a perfectionist? “Well, yeah, but I’m not perfect, that’s the trouble, you see.”

 

While his parents earlier worried about whether he’d make enough money to survive, they supported his choice. Livermore’s father, Bert, who managed cinemas and worked in newspaper advertising, “was always proud of me, so I could do no wrong”. That’s not to say Bert was always comfortable: whenever Vaseline hit the stage, Livermore’s father would suddenly have to leave the audience to take a leak or go chat with the theatre manager in the auditorium. 

 

But it was Leonard who riled an angry female audience member in Adelaide so much she stormed down the aisle and began lecturing the performer in character on stage for failing to promote understanding between men and women; by which, Livermore inferred, gay men and lesbians. 

 

“I’m standing there,” Livermore recalls, “and I said to her, ‘What lovely eyes you have’.” (He denies one audience member’s recollection he actually said, “You’re a lovely little lezzo”.)

 

“I put my hand out, and she just dragged me into the audience. Fortunately, one of my hench people escorted her out.” 

 

Was he trying to challenge audiences? “You don’t work out ‘this will lead to that and you falling on your arse in the aisle’ because someone’s dragged you off stage,” he says. 

 

“No, no, no, I never set out to shock anybody; I’d decide what my topic was and then I’d give my character free reign and full voice and then let them go where I thought they would go in real life.”

 

In his own life, at 18, Livermore, uncertain about his sexuality, was advised by another actor, June Salter: “Get off the fence, dear.” He climbed down on the wrong side: in 1971 he briefly married his long-time friend Sandra McKenzie, the Hair stage director, and would later write he had wanted to “call our friendship and close camaraderie by another name”. 

 

But the theatre, not his sexual preference, was what they had in common, and he was “ashamed” he had “wounded her deeply”. (She was the daughter of his old Knox Grammar principal Ross McKenzie, who’d advised the school theatre club students not to play the girls’ roles in Othello because it “only encourages homosexuality”.)

 

He found true love with chef Gary Edwards. They moved in together in 1990, and ran the restaurant Cleopatra at Blackheath, but Edwards died after a long illness in 1995, just shy of his 33rd birthday. “I now seem to be inordinately suspicious of life, much too wary,” Livermore later wrote.

 

His relationship with Rob McMicking has lasted the longest. “He’s very good for me because he’s more level-headed than I am,” says Livermore. Is McMicking in control? Livermore laughs. “He doesn’t control me so much but I think he [begin italics] advises [end italics] me through a process of control. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t go this way’ and ‘I shouldn’t do that’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that’. Because I do things that come off the top of my head, which possibly I’d regret.” The entertainer’s eyes have moistened. “No, he’s good for me.”

 

Perhaps, if McMicking had been around in August 1980, he might have advised Livermore to try his show Sacred Cow out of London first before placing it in town at the Phoenix Theatre, when some in a preview audience booed and walked out. The character Vaseline prompted one angry man to shake his fist and shout: “I’ll give you two weeks in this town!” 

 

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph editorial on Sacred Cow tut-tutted: “There was a time when Australian talent was clean and wholesome … performers such as The Seekers made their name without destroying ours.” (Sir Ian McKellen and Julian Clary, incidentally, who had been in the audience, were Livermore supporters.) After he moved onto the lead role in Barnum, the big productions came to an end in the mid-80s, though Livermore would regularly stage small scale shows in the Blue Mountains.

 

In 2008, Livemore appeared in My Fair Lady with Nancye Hayes, prompting him to write Turns for them, in which Hayes plays a 95-year-old woman who’s had a life in show business – or so she says – while Livermore plays her son and carer, who sets the record straight. It’s the second time in three years they’ve played mother and son, which is cute casting considering Hayes is six years younger than Livermore. 

 

The long-time friends are using every bit of their respective talents. “We like to dance, we like to sing, we like to make people laugh,” he says. “So we devised this story that’s quite simple, but it’s the treatment that gives it its distinction, I believe.”

 

When his makeup kit is all packed up, Livermore says performing is “just a job” and that he’s a “gifted amateur”, almost as if the occasional critical hiding has cowed him against making immodest claims for himself, despite a career of a great many laudatory notices and an amassed fan base still loyal to this day.

 

“In fact, you know, sometimes I think how stupid it is at one’s certain age,” he says. “You think, ‘Why am I getting up there like I’m pretending to be something I’m not?’

 

“But then you do have to remember the people you do touch, somehow, somewhere in that darkened theatre, that it is having a particular impact on maybe just one person for the good.”