Celebrating Les Girls’ 25th anniversary in 1988. Credit:Fairfaxsyndication.com Fair enough. The confusing thing for a journalist invited to write about her is that Carlotta (presumably with Carol's knowledge) has already blabbed about a lot of flamboyant bedroom action in a 2003 autobiography, including this account of a pre-sex-change fling with a famous British rock star: "We chatted and laughed and then we were on the bed kissing and cuddling, and the next minute he threw it up me. It hurt. I never liked homosexual sex and this was no exception. But I guess I was flattered." Not must-have information, perhaps, and the book is out of print, which is why I don't end up reading it until after the interview with Byron. As it turns out, the "tell-all" autobiography contradicts various things I'd been told by its now determinedly discreet author, and adds much she failed to mention about the harsher realities behind the so-called glamour of her career. The book, Carlotta, was ghost-written by Byron's friend Prue MacSween, who suggests in a foreword that her subject has "deliberately or subconsciously rewritten some of the painful moments of her life", and that her "glamorous, brassy public persona ... is a decorative wall she erected to block out the pain of her search for herself". The only memento of Byron's wild old days on display in her tastefully subdued home is a single framed snapshot of a semi-clad Carlotta vamping before a mirror in the Les Girls dressing room in the late 1960s. This was the seedy Kings Cross club where Byron and other young female impersonators found refuge from the harsh laws and generalised "poofter-bashing" of the era. They had the time of their lives, despite a regime of violence and intimidation by nightclub bosses and their hired muscle. No hint of these ordeals appears on Carlotta's face in the snapshot on Byron's sideboard. The young transsexual who longed to be a "complete" woman stares into the mirror as though hypnotised by her own beauty and potential. The same photo, clearly a favourite, appears in Carlotta, the upcoming telemovie on ABC1, along with another picture of the star on stage with boa feathers clutched to the breasts she had implanted in Hong Kong. "No wonder men loved me," runs the caption on this one. "What happened?"

Backstage at the famous Kings Cross nightclub, 1988. Credit:Fairfaxsyndication.com As her spaghetti sauce simmers in the kitchen, Byron – with an almost visible effort – wrenches her mind back to the troubled Sydney childhood that shaped her destiny. Born in 1943 to an 18-year-old "party girl" named Evelyn Byron and an unknown father, Richard Lawrence Byron was given over, while still a baby, to the care of a big-hearted woman she called Aunty Hazel. "Her name was Hazel Roberts," Byron recalls. "She was a wonderful woman who tried to adopt me, but my mother – who turned up from time to time – wouldn't agree to it. I think she was being paid some sort of [allowance] for me by the government, and didn't want to lose that money." On stage with the Les Girls troupe in 1988. Credit:Fairfaxsyndication.com Byron grew up in then working-class Balmain thinking Roberts' two daughters and three sons were his brothers and sisters. But when he was 12, his birth mother – "a stylish little thing with dark hair, big tits and a face like the young Jane Wyman" – insisted he leave the family he loved and return to live with her and her new fiancé, John, whom the boy hated on sight.

Ridiculed at school, where "everyone said I looked like a girl", and abused by John, who became his mother's third husband, Byron ran away from home at 16. Gay friends (or "queers" as they were then known) helped him get a job as a window dresser at David Jones, and a tiny apartment in Potts Point. Carlotta with Danny La Rue in 1983. Credit:Fairfaxsyndication.com "I just loved dressing the mannequins," Byron enthused in Carlotta. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. And it stood me in good stead later when I went into drag and had to paint my own face." (MacSween tells me later that Byron has "the attention span of a gnat", and that getting her to recall salient details of her life was gruelling work.) But when we move from the despised theme of her origins as a male to the female impersonator period, Byron's mood changes from guarded to girlish. Her new friends taught her how to dress as a woman, introduced her to the movers and shakers, and opened her eyes to the thrill of the Cross. "Darling, I thought I was in Hollywood!" she shrieks in her famous Carlotta tones. "There were all these big nightclubs where all the race crowds used to go and the gangsters hung out. All the women were in furs, and they had all these beautiful showgirls ..."

Her new friends told her she was gay, and she - with no real idea of what that meant – assumed it described artistic people who dressed outrageously and liked to party. (From the book Carlotta: "It wasn't until some guy tried to put his penis in my backside in the toilet of the Carlton Rex [Hotel] ... that I found out another side of what being gay actually meant. I didn't like it one bit.") For Carol, as she began calling herself, it was all about dressing up like various famous women of the day, and copying their styles and mannerisms. Like her fellow "draggies", she became a make-believe beautiful woman at precisely the time that male revues became internationally popular. Her group of female impersonators was discovered by local promoter Sammy Lee, who opened Les Girls in 1963 in a Kings Cross building owned by the enigmatic crime figure – or "identity", as Byron prefers – Abe Saffron. Charmed by her encounters with Sydney's "Mr Sin", Byron is still indignant about being called before one of the royal commissions investigating Saffron's business activities. "I didn't lie," she tells me. "I just said, 'Well, he was always a very nice guy to me!' And I never saw ... I knew he, you know, was part of the underworl- ... well, the underground or whatever, and I knew certain things. But I never speak out of school." At first, the Les Girls cabaret show drew mainly gangsters and slumming socialites, who, Byron says, felt they were being very daring and bohemian. But after Carlotta starred in a 1964 TV documentary about Kings Cross nightclubs called The Glittering Mile, audiences broadened to include wide-eyed heterosexual blokes and couples from the outer suburbs. "And thank God for that," says Byron, "because the western suburbs' leagues clubs were where I made my money later on." By the late 1960s, Carlotta was known as the "Queen of the Cross". Less-worldly males tended to react to the show with a tortured mix of lust and denial. "Half the time they didn't believe we were boys. It was like, 'No way! Look at the legs on 'em!' And, 'Where do they put it?' And blah, blah, blah. Men with a few drinks on board would try to pick you up. And you'd go – or I did, anyway – [shaking her head] 'Uh-huh.' I wasn't into the homosexual side of it at all."

Later, MacSween scoffs on hearing this. "Oh, she was so into it," she says. "And a lot of blokes wanted her, some of them quite celebrated household names. In fact, one of the household names was the last person she had sex with as a bloke, and the first one she had sex with after the operation!" From Carlotta: "Some men I had sex with wouldn't have known I was a fella at the time. Even if they did, most men didn't care, they just wanted a root. I can't remember one man saying he didn't want to do it after I told him." The "household name", who remains unnamed, was a TV journalist introduced to Carlotta at a dinner party by her friend Germaine Greer, whose just-published The Female Eunuch had made her an international celebrity. Greer's match-making was intended as a practical joke, but "backfired" when the smitten journo became Carlotta's lover even after being told she was still, technically, a male. "He was very well hung and we went all night," she wrote in Carlotta. Her ardour cooled when the hard-drinking hack took to waking her at 3am for sex. "I eventually told him to piss off as I was sick of being used as an empty." While Byron dodges the theme these days, her book abounds with descriptions of apparently heterosexual males coupling enthusiastically with drag queens. Among her own lovers were football players – "In those pre-Pill days, none of their girlfriends would come across. The only way to do it was to f... a drag queen"; a motorcycle cop – "He was married and he absolutely adored me"; singer Peter Allen – "He wasn't gay then, but maybe I pushed him along"; and Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham – "I got a Christmas card from John every year [before his death in 1980 aged 32]." "Fascinating, isn't it?" says MacSween. "It seems there are a lot of men who ... may harbour homosexual tendencies but have never been game to explore them. This was a sort of happy compromise where they could say, 'Well, it's not really a bloke!' And they didn't seem to give a damn what was hanging off the other side." Byron's sex-change operation was performed by a visiting English surgeon, here to demonstrate the procedure to local doctors, at Sydney's Prince Henry Hospital in 1972. "I'd thought about it for ages," she says. "I knew the risks, but I wanted more than anything to become a total woman. I tried to do it on the quiet, but a little gay orderly at the hospital rang the bloody newspapers, and when I woke up the next day the press was trying to get into the room. I was furious."

Yet the publicity helped her career, especially after promoter Sammy Lee cashed in by erecting a sign outside Les Girls falsely claiming his star performer as the recipient of "Australia's first sex change!" Carlotta tried out her "new equipment" with the boozy TV journo, then – freed of her earlier inhibitions – turned into a "real root rat ... I was so proud of my new pussy [and took] every opportunity to show it off". Over the next decade, she became a TV personality in her own right, popping up on all the variety shows and appearing as a showgirl with a "secret" in the daring '70s soap opera Number 96. Her longest on-air stint came later as a panellist with Foxtel's remake of Beauty and the Beast, in which the ever-charming host, Stan Zemanek – "who didn't take me seriously as a woman" – would interrogate her over whether she kept her missing "dicky dock" in a jar. But despite her much-publicised status as a "legend" and the "Aussie icon" who inspired the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Byron never managed to accumulate much money. She attributes this partly to her own carelessness but mainly to "crooks, spivs and arseholes" within the entertainment industry who cheated her over the decades. "Otherwise," she tells me, "I'd probably be in one of those big mansions down on the [Gold Coast] canals, not that I really like them." In her early years, particularly, the perceived glamour and excitement of Kings Cross concealed a sordid reality in which the so-called stars were beaten and controlled by the gangsters who exploited them. "Most of us were terrified of putting a foot wrong," she confessed in Carlotta. "You wouldn't dare complain about the bad working conditions [or] you'd soon be on the receiving end of a beating by one of the boss's thugs ... Once they broke a chair over a girl's head. Some girls who were caught stealing had broom handles shoved up their backsides." In the late '70s, Byron decided she'd had enough of all this ugliness and gave in to her long-sublimated "normal side". She quit Les Girls, pledged undying love to a heterosexual mechanic she identifies only as "Peter" in a civil ceremony, and went off to live with him in the suburbs. She did the housework, worked part-time making sandwiches at a deli, and prepared dinner for her man "just like any other couple".

But in the end, she tells me, she left Peter because she knew he wanted to have children. "I left him with strict instructions that we had to cut all ties, because I didn't want his [future] kids going to school and being told, 'Aw, your dad used to be on with Carlotta!' That was the sacrifice I had to make. Now he's happily married with his own family." She must have thought a lot of him. "I did, I really loved him. And I haven't been with anyone else since." Really? "Yup. As [her friend] Ita Buttrose said, I've turned into a virgin again. My hymen's grown back!" Alas, the Carlotta book reveals that she and Peter parted mainly because she wanted to rejoin Les Girls, and he'd found someone else. Soon after they split, she toured New Zealand with a Les Girls troupe bonking various Maoris, a musician she met in Queenstown, a football team and players from a golf tournament with whom she and the other dancers experienced what she calls "one of the biggest orgies I have ever seen" in an Invercargill resort's indoor pool and spa. Byron left Les Girls for good in 1992. She formed her own revue called Carlotta & Her Beautiful Boys, but got into financial strife and ended up declaring bankruptcy. "After that," she says defiantly, "I decided I wasn't working with drag queens any more, so I formed my one-woman show." It's a mix of singing and stand-up comedy, and she still performs in clubs and pubs from coastal cities to the outback, and at Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The next big thing on her horizon is the broadcast of Carlotta the telemovie, co-produced by Story Ark and the ABC and directed by Samantha Lang, with Jessica Marais (Packed to the Rafters) as Carlotta – "one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but not a woman at all", as the publicity has it. "I rang Jessica when I'd watched it," the old trouper says, between puffs on a now-rare cigarette. "And I said, 'I told you I was right picking you [for the role]!' Because she absolutely nailed it." (Previewed by Good Weekend, the 90-minute film, screening on June 19, presents a romanticised perspective that offers only hints of the harsher realities of Byron's complex life.) She hopes, though, that it will help young transsexuals struggling to find their place in the world. "Because although it's a lot better these days, there's still a lot of them out there who are too frightened or confused to talk about their feelings." The spaghetti sauce is ready, but before the gracious Carol Byron serves lunch, her rambunctious alter ego serves notice on all those who've wronged her over the decades. "I'd love to write another book," declares Carlotta, "and I've already got the title: The Pricks I've Known and the C...s They Still Are!" Lead-in image: Tim Bauer.