Fancy a trip through an Aladdin’s Cave on Geelong’s Western Beach? Geelong’s new mayor DARRYN LYONS opens the door of his Esplanade inner sanctum to the Geelong Independent and it’s fair to say there are one or two surprises. NOEL MURPHY reports …
“HA! That was a great drunken afternoon’s cricket,’’ laughs the purple-plumed, mohawk-capped host, eyeballing a series of photographs on the roof of his billiard room.
“O’Toole out, caught Botham, bowled Lyons. At Lords!’’
Darryn Lyons loves his cricket. The bats and caps and pictures and other paraphernalia he’s garnered down the years are solid testament to that.
Willow weapons are emblazoned with the signatures of numerous Australian Test skippers _ Chappell, Lawry, Taylor, Hughes and more. Another’s signed by the 1972 Aussie team that took on the Windies, and the Windies too. Max Walker’s baggy green bought at auction … the man likes snapping up sporting treasures.
It’s clear Lyons is pretty chuffed about the items in the treasure trove collection he calls home.
And why not? Boxing gloves signed by world heavyweight champs Norton, Holmes, Foreman, Frazier and the greatest of the lot, Ali. A Galveston electric guitar owned by U2’s The Edge he snaffled at The Dorchester. Seventeenth-century brass beds, Napoleonic urns, leopard hides, Gallic and English antiques, zebra-skin throws, gilded chandeliers …
Darryn Lyons’ domestic enclave is a menagerie, a museum, a showcase and a wonder-world _ his own personal dragon’s den.
From the Trafalgar Square-like lions at the front gate to the provocative life-sized bronze nude at the back door, it’s a sensory sensation.
Every turn, left, right, up or down, presents the visitor with a new curiosity _ a hand-painted globe of the world, antlers and stag heads, a harking horn of Titanic metal, snowshoes, figurines, oil paintings, erotic etchings, snow shoes, massive gilded mirrors, exquisite carved chairs, thrones, tables, crystals, marble, sideboards, pedestals, polished timber, canopy beds, furs, walnut dining settings, and photographs, photographs and more photographs.
It’s a shrine to celebrity, too, with images of movie stars, rock stars, TV stars, sports stars, supermodels, the famous and the infamous, everywhere. In the billiard room overlooking Corio Bay, in the garage housing a Lamborghini and a Ferrari, along hallways _ even in the toilet.
Lyons Central is bold, brash, opulent.
It’s inhabited by an extraordinary array of figures he’s tripped over in a two-decade journey from Geelong to Fleet St to media mogul.
“There’s Sharon and Ozzie, Liz Hurley, Katie Price,’’ he rattles off the names like just another day at the office.
“Pamela Anderson, Michael Cain, Posh and Becks, Beckham’s first shirt at Real Madrid, Danny De Vito, Steffi Graf, Boris Becker, Selma Hayek …
“You know, the whole cult of celebrity, what the general public doesn’t realise is that many celebrities are really quite normal people, with a few eccentrics.
“But I don’t like those celebrities who forget where they’ve come from.’’
The former paparazzi boss/TV celebrity/entrepreneur – and now mayor — has always made a racket about where he comes from.
And he’s been a few places, not just behind the lens chasing Royals or covering wars.
Think the BBC series that followed him about for a year, the UK’s Big Brother and the surgically-enhanced abs, the autobiography titled My Life as the World’s Most Outrageous Celebrity Photographer, TV’s The Dragon Den, Excess Baggage.
The two-storey Lyons mansion features four bedrooms, a gym, pool, steam room, cellar, dining, lounge and living/kitchen, billiard-room and office. It’s a kaleidoscope of styles and creature comforts.
You’ll find ornate fireplaces, gleaming hearth tiles, mantles loaded with objets d’art, paintings of reclining nudes, cherubs and cheeky-bottomed cyclists in St Tropez, intricately hand-crafted and sculpted furniture including a pair of magnificent three-metre high Belgian thrones guarding the foyer like Gog and Magog.
A large striking painting of Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral rises above the media hub of London’s Fleet St. An odd-looking tie collection of Robert Doyle, former State opposition leader and current Melbourne lord mayor, sits in an upstairs wardrobe _ he babysat Lyons’ house for a year at one stage.
Nineteenth- century images of Geelong’s Moorabool St, leadlight windows, ruby-red crystal glass horns, a dangerous-looking fully-loaded bar, sumptuous maroon carpet, photographs of racehorses, Italian urns … the eye is constantly drawn from one article to the next.
Step outside, across the rocky swimming pool, into the carport/cellar and you’re reminded again where it all began. And Lyons is in his element again, too, as he casts a pictorial editor’s eye across the hundreds of photographs over the walls and the names of the glitterati roll off his tongue once again.
“Angelina Jolie, Hugh Grant, Beyonce, Brittany Spears, Jason Donovan, Wayne Rooney, Jodie Kidd on my plane, Kelly Brook, the girls from the Playboy mansion … ”
The girls from the Playboy mansion? Well, not everything in life is cricket, you know.
