Title: A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King Author: Stephanie Clifford-Smith Publisher: Random House The only time I ever met Bernard King, queen of the kitchen and the kitsch, was after seeing him star alongside Hannah Durack in a production of The Tempest, featuring a musical number accompanied by a drag queen, at Bondi Pavilion. Afterwards King wandered past me with a bouquet of some sort; I turned and sang, "You don't bring me flowers" to which he replied in kind, "You don't write me love songs." Funnily enough, Clifford-Smith writes that the Barbra Streisand-Neil Diamond duet (two a's, two r's if there's going to be a reprint - Bernard would be howling from his grave) was playing at his funeral in 2002. Ever the dramatist, whilst picking herbs from a high-set garden King had a massive stroke, causing him to collapse and in doing so, plunge to the driveway, 5 metres below. It's difficult to explain to non-Australian readers the particular charm of Bernard. Whilst the Brits have Jamie Oliver ("food presented in a battered aluminium tray by a very cute young man who is sadly not naked…I don't give a fuck about him) and the US has Martha Stewart, in the 1970s Australia decided to elevate a bush-born star-stunned queen to the post of Celebrity Chef. Never mind that King had no formal cooking qualifications (though he did have an arts degree), never mind his daily meal was a bowl of red jelly and ice cream, never mind "King's Kitchen" was arranged year round to maximise the potential freebies from advertisers and the moolah from advertorial - King combined Oscar Wilde's wit with Dame Edna's camp, cut it in quarters and flambéed with a liberal splash of ribald egg jokes. Housewives loved him, the men of the house spluttered in their beer but asked the women to cook his recipes, and young queers across the nation gathered in front of the telly and wondered what exactly was so intriguing about this man who kept setting things on fire. Clifford-Smith's biography serves a number of purposes - firstly to chronicle the life of an Australian personality. Secondly, and thankfully, to not hide the fact that King was a racist, misogynist conservative-voting reactionary. Thirdly it shows, rather than explicates, how King got caught up in an idea of himself at his peak, an idea that to all around aged like he did. So instead of saving for his future, he died penniless in a house he was living in rent-free, used and abused by a number of lovers and brought out to perform shtick like a gay pride bake-off, bun jokes obligatory of course. He wasn't a selfish man, but his self-importance did not take into account how much Australia had changed. Or, when Sydney-siders fucked him over and off, how little it had changed. Finally A Marvellous Party includes several of King's recipes, almost-all involving a variation of a cream sauce. Still, King taught a generation or two that food could be more than meat and one veggie, and wouldn't trap us in the kitchen, the recipes allowing "time for social intercourse; and perhaps an extra-marital love affair between entree and main course." And sometimes, in the name of a good time, it was OK to set the kitchen on fire.