Comedian Max Gillies thought he’d never find out what happened to his father — then trucking magnate Lindsay Fox called

Max Gillies has been making people laugh all his life and his irreverent send-up of former prime minister Bob Hawke is the stuff of legend.

The Gillies Report was a ground-breaking runaway TV hit when it went to air in the mid-80s and made the comedian famous.

The program was a revolutionary fusion of song, dance and satire. Gillies dressed up as a range of famous people from the Queen, to the Pope, to countless presidents and prime ministers, exaggerating their mannerisms and imitating their voices.

And many of his subjects took it on the chin.

“He was one of the funniest guys on television,” former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone tells Australian Story.

“It would be a whack and a biff with a smile as opposed to taking a rusty bayonet and putting it through you,” former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd says.

“When you stick your hand up for public political life in Australia, it’s an informed adult decision; it’s like submitting yourself to a rolling 360-degree public colonoscopy.”

Although not all agree.

“Why would I revel in seeing my kind being sent up, even if sometimes we deserved it?” former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott says.

“And that’s why it’s important to try as hard as you can not to give the satirists too much ammunition.”

But comic acting was an escape for Max Gillies.

Offstage, he is a deeply private man still grappling with a traumatic childhood, even as he nears 80.

War veteran father disappears

Gillies has a murky memory of his father coming home from war. He was four years old and barely knew his father.

Frank Gillies had enlisted in 1942 when the Japanese bombs started to rain down on northern Australia.

“There was a great, great anticipation,” Gillies tells Australian Story.

Frank burst through the front door and threw down his rucksack before giving Gillies and his younger brother Don an emotional hug. He then reached into his bag and took out a hand grenade.

“He took the pin out and threw it to the back of the backyard and the entire backyard was a sheet of flame and quite a loud bang.”

Don Gillies was barely two years old but has heard the story so often that it has become family folklore.

“We wonder if he was a bit sort of disturbed like a lot of [the returned soldiers] probably were,” he says.

According to his war record, Frank served in New Guinea with the Australian Imperial Force, but was discharged before the war ended, because he was “medically unfit for military service”, and diagnosed with “anxiety state”.

Frank didn’t stay at home long. His marriage to Gillies’ mother Doris quickly fell apart.

It was a terrifying time for the two little boys tucked up in their beds.

“The fighting had been the stuff of nightmares; it was all you’d hear up and down the corridor,” Max says.

One night Frank came into Gillies’ bedroom to tell him he would be leaving.

“This is why he wouldn’t be around when we woke up in the morning and why we would probably not see him in future,” Gillies says. “He wanted to make sure that I understood that my brother and I had nothing to do with this matter.”

By the time Gillies was eight and his brother was six, their father had disappeared from their lives. Their mother made it clear she didn’t want them having any contact with him.

It would be decades later — when Gillies is at the peak of his television career — before he gets a surprise phone call that revealed what happened to Frank.

‘More Hawke than Hawke’: Max’s famous impressions

In the 1980s, Gillies’ satirising of governor-general Sir John Kerr, as well prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke in the ABC’s hit comedy, The Gillies Report, was beamed him into lounge rooms around Australia.

Cast member Tracy Harvey says: “It was such good timing when it came onto our television screens. It was like, ‘God, that’s Bob Hawke! Oh, that’s Russ Hinze. That’s [Joh] Bjelke-Petersen! Can he do that? Oh, he is’.

“It was so good to have a laugh.”

When Gillies played US President Ronald Reagan, Tracy played his wife Nancy Reagan.

“I didn’t get to say much; I just reminded him [the Reagan character] of a few things he’d forgotten. It was making Reagan endearing but pointing out how dangerous he was,” Harvey says.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see the like of that kind of production in comedy in this country again,” comedian Wendy Harmer says.

There was an opera about the dismissal of Gough Whitlam called II Dissmale.

“Nobody thinking about who to vote for, would not vote for Bob Hawke, having seen that,” writer and cartoonist Patrick Cook says. “How many prime ministers can do a forward roll and come up and do the splits.”

The Gillies Report wasn’t the sit-behind-a-desk kind of satire that comedian Shaun Micallef has popularised.

Micallef learnt his craft from watching Gillies. His favourite moment was when his mentor did his take on Hawke while sitting next to the real Bob Hawke on the legendary Parkinson interview show.

“I remember being completely blown away and just in awe of the balls of the man,” Micallef says.

Gillies boys rally around their mother

Gillies first got a taste for making people laugh in high school when he and a mate gathered a crowd around them whenever they did send-ups of teachers.

Playground antics soon turned to school productions. And suddenly Gillies realised that on the stage he could be someone other than the “overly serious” teenager that he was fast becoming.

Life at home had gone downhill since Frank left home.

Doris Gillies worked long hours doing secretarial work to support her two sons and she worried incessantly about how she would pay the bills.

She became convinced that colleagues were out to get her. Gillies remembers her telling him one day that as she had left the office, she had seen the flag at the train station was at half-mast and knew her boss was sending her a message.

Alarm bells rang in his head.

“I suddenly sensed this isn’t just an anxious person who’s weighed down with the cares of the world. This is somebody who’s left us. She’s gone somewhere else,” he said.

Doris was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Eventually, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given electroconvulsive therapy and later drug treatment.

The two brothers were left scrabbling for a reason why their mum had gone from someone who liked to laugh to this.

And when Don chanced on his dad soon after finishing year 12, he turned away.

It was at the Schweppes soft drinks factory where Don had a job stacking crates.

It was also where Lindsay Fox got his first big contract supplying trucks. The now 84-year-old started Linfox logistics in 1956 and is now estimated to be worth $3.5 billion.

Someone called out “Frank” and Don looked up.

“It was Dad alright,” he says. “I could still recognise him. He had snowy white hair at that stage. He was a big man. And so, he just went past me within a few feet.”

Little did he know he had a clue to the mystery that would dog his brother for most of his life.

Character acting an escape for Gillies

For now, Gillies was preoccupied with the doomed attempt to steer his mother from the precipice of madness.

“I think one effect that it would have had was you observe more acutely, people’s behaviour,” Gillies says. “What makes anybody tick? What leads to certain sort of behaviours? So, you become fascinated, even obsessed with behaviour.”

And while he could not save Doris, he became adept at getting inside any of the politicians he impersonated.

In the 1970s, Gillies’ interpretive skills found a ready audience at The Pram Factory in Carlton. It was a radical alternative theatre that produced many well-known writers, actors and directors.

It was a heady time politically with The Dismissal and later the stratospheric rise of a trade unionist.

He says Bob Hawke was an open book.

“He could not disguise [and] didn’t attempt to disguise his feelings. They were manifest down to the tears,” Gillies said.

But prime minister Malcolm Fraser was the opposite.

“It took a while to work Malcolm out, to humanise him. He’s a shy man,” he said.

“I found it fascinating to try to get inside this man who clearly had trouble expressing himself. Because I was like that myself.”

After some initial hesitation, the ABC agreed to Gillies’ dream of creating a weekly comedy show, and The Gillies Report was born in 1984 and ran in various iterations for eight years.

The phone call that changed everything

By the early 90s, Lindsay Fox and his wife Paula began to take notice of Max Gillies. They were struck by how similar the man on TV looked to a fellow they’d known long ago.

Lindsay put a call through to Gillies’ agent, John Timlin.

“I thought it was an enquiry for Max to do an advertisement for Lindsay’s trucking company,” John remembers.

But Lindsay dropped a bombshell.

Frank Gillies had helped to raise Paula who was the love of Lindsay’s life, and his now wife.

Paula then asked a shocked Gillies to the Fox mansion where she and her four sisters regaled him with stories of the man who’d disappeared from his life when he was a child.

A bombshell revelation 

Paula’s parents had separated when she was very young. Her mum had to work around the clock to keep food on the table.

Frank did odd jobs around the house and gradually became a father figure to Paula even though he was never more than a good friend to her mother.

“He spent about maybe eight or nine years as part of our family,” she says. “I was lucky to have known him.”

“The mystery of what happened to my father was suddenly clear,” Gillies says.

“I was very surprised to find how comforting I found the knowledge that he had found a place where his qualities had been valued and mattered. I could tell it was the same person that I said goodbye to all those years ago.”

When Paula and Lindsay married, Frank walked her down the aisle.

“I didn’t have a father and I loved Frank like a father, so when I was getting married, I asked him, would he give me away,” Paula says. “And he was absolutely thrilled to do that.”

The favour cut both ways.

Lindsay gave Frank a job driving a truck at the Schweppes factory.

“[Frank] was a gentle giant, very conservative, very quiet and very much a loner. I never saw him with any mates and I don’t think he had any,” he said.

Gillies was overwhelmed by mixed emotions as he started piecing together a picture of his dad who had been banned from seeing his sons all those years ago.

There was relief that, unlike Doris, Frank’s life had not unravelled completely after the divorce. But also, regret for the father he never had.

“Frank really loved children,” Paula says. “He would have been a great dad to those boys. He really would have.”

And Lindsay is sure Frank thought about them.

“As a father, you think of your family all the time, even if you’re in conflict with them,” Lindsay says. “And if you’re not thinking of them when you go to sleep, you can’t get it out of your mind while you’re trying to get to sleep. I would say Frank would have had a lot of sleeplessness pre switching off the lights,” he said.

Memories uncovered

Frank Gillies died in 1969, 10 years after Paula and Lindsay’s wedding. He was 52. The police contacted his former wife Doris and she asked Gillies to go to his home to collect his belongings.

When Gillies got to the bungalow at the back of a house, he says it was crammed with flotsam and jetsam, including parts of a television he was building, electronics magazines, jazz records and a violin.

There were piles of drawings Frank had done. Gillies remembered his father teaching him how to draw perspective. “All my drawings had roads going into the distance,” Gillies says.

On a desk were some old yellowing newspaper clippings. One was of four boys who cleaned up the school prizes at Melbourne High in 1958. Gillies had won the prizes for drama, art, debating and the school newspaper prize.

Lindsay was right. Frank was thinking about his son.

Watch Australian Story’s Unmasking Max 8pm (AEDT) on ABCTV, iview and Youtube.