Michele Hewitson Interview: Ray Columbus

Ray Columbus says he's had a wonderfully rewarding life. Photo / Dean Purcell

Here he comes, Ray Columbus, 67, "bred to be an entertainer", survivor of heart attack and stroke, adulation and heartache and defamation and what might have looked, at times, like indifference.

Look at him now, bouncing and grinning along the chilly Westmere street wearing the most wonderful pair of fire engine red corduroy trousers. What cheerful trousers. Just looking at him warms the cockles of your heart.

And how lovely to see him looking so happy because he'd given up, really, performing professionally, after his stroke in 2008. Then he got a call, from Jesse Peach, the young director, who wanted him to be in his latest show, Sweeney Todd (at the Maidment Theatre from June 3).

He has a cameo, as the narrator. His great friend Max Cryer phoned him and said, "Dear boy, I know Sweeney Todd, and I don't think there's a storyteller." He has known Cryer for years, and, having met him, I can vouch for the accuracy of his impersonation - that "dear boy" is bang on.

What did he say to Cryer? "Well, apparently it is the prerogative of the director!" He is famously good natured. The two once did an act together, on television: he sat on Cryer's knee and played his ventriloquist's dummy.

"He's a foot taller than me, exactly."

He's famously petite. "I'm five foot six and a half. But I've probably shrunk." The clip will be shown again this week as part of a celebration of 50 years of NZ telly.

"They interviewed me, for the 60s, because I was all over television in those days." He says this without any bitterness, or nostalgia, for what he cheerfully calls his "heyday".

He says he was a "little runt" who is now an "old fart". His voice - "my husky, Nasal grunt, I've always called it" - is more recognised these days than his face. "I can't call The Warehouse and say, 'Has that thing gone on sale?' without them saying, 'I know your voice,' if they're over 29. The great thing today is that most people under 29 don't recognise me. And I find that quite a nice change."

He looks wonderful. "Well, thank you. You are very kind." He says he can tell that there are lingering effects from the stroke. He says he has "stroke moments" and loses his way in conversation. But "I've always been a control freaker of myself".

He is in rehearsals for Sweeney Todd and loves the discipline, because "I've never been very disciplined". I don't believe that for a moment. He has always worked hard, in a hard business, but what he means is that he's enjoying the discipline of working with the cast and the chorus and of being directed, because he's mostly managed himself.

"When I was a rock, pop star, I was doing me all the time, and as soon as I went on television [C'Mon, That's Country, Give Us a Clue], I was being directed but I was a mini me. That's what I love about the show. I said to Jesse, 'I want to be directed. I don't want to be that little guy with the big eyes. I'm not that guy anymore'."

He hasn't changed, really, despite not being "that guy any more". He is still "straight and true. I'm strong and I'm also weak. I don't suffer fools." Quite recently a critic said to him: "You've had a confused career." He told me this after we left the cafe. It took a while to get to it, because it took a while to leave.

He stopped to duck behind the counter to help himself to a paper bag to take the remains of his cheese scone away in (he is frugal; those trousers are from Keith Matheson but he got them in a sale), then to talk to a big, white poodle. Then he had his picture taken. He managed to stop talking for that, in between frames.

He wondered, after his stroke, whether he'd be able to talk properly again, let alone sing. He wasn't, he says, depressed, "it was more despair". Well, yes, because - how to put this nicely? - he does like to talk, doesn't he?

"Ha, ha! I like talking and singing and, yeah, you got straight to the nail there! I have verbal diarrhoea, I know. I did a radio interview for New Year's Eve last year and ... the host said to me, 'It was wonderful. I only had to ask you two questions'!"

He, eventually, told me about the critic - I'd asked what he felt when people said his career had never quite measured up to his early successes - because he remembered that he had been really quite miffed. Anyway, what he said, in response, was that he had been "bred to be an entertainer", and that he'd never stopped being just that. And quite right too.

I bet he said a bit more than that. He has always liked talking (I managed a few more than two questions but only when his mouth was briefly engaged with his coffee cup), but he says that since his stroke, "the memory cells, the floodgates, have just opened, and while I've been recovering that's been even more important".

So he talked about his vaudevillian, hard drinking father who made him take tap dancing lessons and wanted him to be the next Fred Astaire; and his adored, tiny, tough mother. He told me enough for a book about his wife, Linda, who is "a Tiger and I'm a Horse, in the Chinese horoscope. And we're perfect for each other".

She gave him the silver amulet necklace he wears to protect him from microwaves and cellphones. He's not sure he really believes this, but if it makes her happy, he's happy.

We talked about clothes, because "I've always been a fashionista. In my mind!" He said: "I've chosen what to wear at my funeral!" He wants to wear jeans, maybe Armani; a denim shirt; and probably his favourite cowboy boots, which he'd like to have peeping out of the coffin.

I don't know how we came to be talking about his legs, but they are very good - he showed me - and Linda is envious of them and wants him to leave them to her when he dies. His health is very much on his mind. "You have to be aware, I think."

He would tell me later that he was just going to nip out to his car to get a brochure for me, about some treatment called EECP. He is evangelical about saving lives because he almost died and he wants to save mine, which will need saving because of the fags.

He smoked for 40 years, from the age of 9 when he'd pinch his dad's fag ends and reroll them. I suggested that he might as well have carried on because look what happened despite giving up. He was horrified. "Oh, no! I'd be dead!"

He never took drugs. He was working in San Francisco in 1966 and the first newspaper headline he saw was: Student Leaps Out of 20 Story Building on LSD. "And I said to my ex-wife, 'What would an American student be doing leaping out of a building for pounds, shillings and pence?' I was that naive. Honestly."

He may have once had a puff on a joint but he, honestly, thought it was a tomato plant leaf. "I knew by that time I was totally addicted to cigarettes and I thought, 'If I try a joint or LSD, I'll be one of those people leaping out of a building because I'll lose control'."

Mostly we talked about his health. He manages to not be a bore about this (no mean feat) because he is so jaunty about still being alive.

He has always been something of a Peter Pan figure - that little guy with the big eyes - and he is now, in a delightful way, wide-eyed at the wonder of having survived.

He does tell you the most amazing details, about, for example, how he knew he was having a stroke.

"Well, the first thing was that I started giggling, and Linda said, 'What are the other symptoms?' And I said, 'I keep getting erections and I keep laughing'!"

Fortunately a response wasn't required (I don't think he even noticed me spluttering into my cheese scone) but, crikey, see what I mean about jaunty? But wasn't he frightened? "Oh, no. I've never been frightened at all about it. I don't fear death. I've had a wonderfully rewarding life."

He has, with some rough bits, aside from health scares, along the way.

That he's on his second marriage speaks for itself.

And in 1997 he was defamed by Truth on a newspaper billboard - Columbus Slugs Rugby For $70,000 - which implied he'd billed the Auckland Rugby Union for $70,000 for event management: the size of the budget he was managing.

His fee was $5000. He was eventually awarded $675,000 but it was a rotten couple of years. He had always been the Mr Nice Guy of entertainment, so you can see that it was a blow to be painted a scoundrel.

Still, I wondered whether he'd ever got fed up with being that nice guy, but he hasn't because he believes in niceness. He believes in telling the truth, he hates lies and cheaters. And, "I've always been able to control myself."

What could he mean? He said, conspiratorially: "I could have been a bad guy." Oh, he could not. "I could! I was in gangs when I was a kid." What nonsense. "I was! Motorcycle gangs. I was a pillion passenger! And we used to go to milk bars and have rumbles. I found it quite fascinating. I'd been working in the movies [selling icecreams] since I was 9 and I saw movies that were way beyond my years, you know, and I quite liked all that side of it.

"And I was a heavy smoker already, so I was already an addict. I could easily have been bad. I think, 'God, I could ring that guy's neck,' and I really could!"

I do believe him, because he never tells lies. I believe him, too, when he tells me that he's wearing his red trousers, for the first time, especially for me. Wasn't that lovely? Isn't he lovely? He, and his trousers, are like sunshine on a winter's day.