Authors: David Essex
The hospital had no news by the early evening and so it was in to the second show of the day. It was impossible to define what I was feeling: I was nervous, excited, distant and running on adrenaline, all at the same time. Midway through the first act, my antennae sensed a change of mood on stage and the cast’s eyes all seemed to be on me.
Julie Covington passed me a note under the wire fence. It read:
You can be a father to a son, but you have to be a father to a daughter.
A daughter! I had a daughter! My next line went clean out of my head as the actors all crowded around me, crying, kissing me and slapping me on the back, the script momentarily forgotten. What a moment! I would have loved to be there for the birth, but as I couldn’t, there was no better way to celebrate becoming a dad than with these friends to whom I had grown so close.
The show over, I leapt back into the Mercedes and raced to the hospital, jumping a red light en route in my haste. A police car pulled me over and I admitted to the officer that I had not seen the light. I was about to explain why I was in such a hurry when he cut me short. ‘Well, Jesus wouldn’t lie, would he?’ he reasoned. ‘Off you go.’
Maureen was waiting for me on the ward, our baby in her arms. Everything people say about becoming a parent is true. I had never seen anybody or anything so fragile and beautiful, never felt an emotion so profound. As I held our daughter for the first time, I realised exactly what life is about.
Her name came to us fairly easily. We wanted to call her Verity, for Truth, because truth is so important in life. For her middle name, we went back to my mum’s maiden name, Lee, for all of its gypsy connotations, but we decided to spell it Leigh. Verity Leigh Cook.
Having had a hard labour, Maureen stayed on the ward to recuperate for a few days as I saw off the last few pre-Christmas
Godspell
shows and readied the house for my family’s return. The three of us had a wonderful, special Christmas together in Seven Kings, punctuated by daily visits from Verity’s doting, delighted grandparents.
The New Year brought the news that
Godspell
was to transfer from the Roundhouse to Wyndham’s Theatre on 25 January. I would, after all, become the first actor to play Jesus on the West End stage, but I also felt a small sadness at leaving Chalk Farm, where it had all happened for us.
Every night I would take the fervent applause of the audience, transported by my crucifixion, then bid the crowds of well-wishers good night and head home at midnight to my new family. After a few words with Maureen I’d pause at Verity’s room to watch her breathe for a minute before going to bed.
Exhausted, like any new mum, by a hard day’s childcare, Maureen would find it hard to get up for the 4 a.m. feed and nappy change so this became my task. It was always hard to drag
myself
out of bed, but being with Verity in the twilight hours was a joy. It felt as if we were the only two people in the world.
It was probably good that Verity had come along to help keep me grounded because I could easily have been getting very bigheaded.
Godspell
’s switch to Wyndham’s went seamlessly and triggered another batch of reviews of the show by critics who would never have deigned to go to Chalk Farm.
The fourth estate wasn’t the only institution to do a U-turn when
Godspell
got successful. The Church had initially viewed us with suspicion, wary of our motives, but when they realised our simplistic, childlike interpretations of the teachings of Christ were attracting 2,000 people a night, compared to the twenty or so scattered round the pews of their empty churches every Sunday morning, they also wanted a piece of the action.
We were invited to perform a section of the show in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral. We did so, and the BBC came along and filmed it (rather badly, as it happened). It was a big deal to some of the cast members but, if I am honest, I viewed it as a bit of a nuisance.
The
Godspell
phenomenon had been, if you’ll pardon the pun, a godsend to me, and with an eighteen-month contract I no longer had to worry about providing for Maureen and Verity, but there was still something itching at me: I was missing making music. A random encounter was to put that right.
Liz Whiting, a
Godspell
understudy, had an American boyfriend named Jeff Wayne who had visited London with his dad to work on a musical,
A Tale of Two Cities
, fallen in love with the country and stayed. Jeff, who was a big fan of
Godspell
,
now
worked writing and producing music for TV adverts, and asked if I would like to sing on an ad.
Even though it was only a TV jingle, I jumped at the chance, which I suppose showed how much I was missing making music. Jeff set to work to hymn the merits of Pledge furniture polish and I joined him in the studio to record the following immortal words for posterity: ‘
Let the sun come into your life / Bring in the sun / Pledge
.’ Another advert had me adopting an American accent to plug Chrysler cars: ‘
Chrysler has the answer / Boo-boo-boom
.’ For these half-day jobs, I was paid more than I would get for playing Jesus for two years. No wonder Jeff lived in a mews house off Baker Street.
Jeff and I also formed a hobby band for a bit of fun: I sang, Jeff played keyboards, we recruited a couple of session musicians, and Marti Webb and Julie Covington sang backing vocals. We only played a couple of gigs, so it was sod’s law that when we did a half-empty show at the Revolution Club, Paul McCartney should be there, scrutinising us closely as we sang the Beatles’ ‘Long and Winding Road’. No pressure, then. Luckily, he clapped.
Godspell
also enjoyed a degree of musical success, with the cast album and a single from the show, ‘Day by Day’, both going Top Ten, but these were slim pickings. Increasingly, I knew that my aim was to release records under my own name – and to write my own songs.
Yet this was for the future. For now,
Godspell
continued to dominate my career and my life. In fact our media profile went up a notch, if that was possible, when Tim Rice and Andrew
Lloyd
Webber’s musical
Jesus Christ Superstar
opened down the road from us at the Palace Theatre, with Paul Nicholas as Jesus.
There was very little similarity between the shows –
Godspell
was a sparse, simple affair while
Jesus Christ Superstar
was a huge, epic production – but this didn’t stop the media trying to fabricate rivalry between us. The BBC even staged a TV debate,
Box Office Christ
, but their hopes for friction between Tim Rice and I were dashed when we agreed on everything and got on like a house on fire, as we still do forty years later.
As
Godspell
continued to sell out every night, there were more and more fans gathering at the stage door wanting photos and autographs, a new experience for me. I found it awkward to deal with, preferring the piss-taking banter of the porters in Covent Garden fruit and veg market, which would be springing into life as Jeremy Irons and I walked to an Italian restaurant, Luigi’s, for an after-show meal.
Because we were dealing with sacred subject matter that was so important to many people, the cast tended to play
Godspell
very straight with no high jinks such as Cinderella’s Wellington boot in Manchester. There was one exception. One night, Jeremy materialised to baptise me at the start of the show, as usual. He had his back to the audience, his eyes were closed, and on his eyelids he had written a distinctly un-Christian message: ‘F*** Off’.
I would love to report that I kept a straight face. But I didn’t.
WITH
GODSPELL
MY
career had crossed the Rubicon. The entire dynamic of my working life shifted. After years of poor Derek slogging away and hitting brick walls as he tried to interest people in his young actor and singer, his previously silent phone was suddenly ringing off the hook with offers of work and media interviews.
Nevertheless, we tried to be selective. After all, I wasn’t just a hot new star with a big hit behind him: I was also a newlywed and a doting dad with a wife and baby to care for, and I wasn’t about to neglect them. Plus, of course, I was still doing eight shows a week of
Godspell
.
It needed to be a pretty special offer for me to take on another major, non-musical project at that juncture – and it was. David Puttnam, who was then no more than a little-known, upcoming film producer, phoned Derek to invite me for a screen test for a film he planned to make, called
That’ll Be the Day
.
The film was to be about a working-class London lad, growing up in the fifties, who became obsessed with music and wanted to be a rock star. It resonated with me for obvious
reasons.
After a screen test on Hampstead Heath one afternoon with Puttnam, director Claude Whatham and an actress, David sent me the full script. I read it and was hooked straight away.
It wasn’t just the story that excited me. The proposed cast was exceptional: former Beatle Ringo Starr, the Who drummer Keith Moon and rock ’n’ roll singer Billy Fury (this time without his unwanted sidekick, Freddie Starr) had all signed up already. When Puttnam offered me the lead role, I had no hesitation. I was in.
Unfortunately, things were not that simple. Filming for
That’ll Be the Day
was to take place on the Isle of Wight that autumn, and I was less than six months into an eighteen-month contract on
Godspell
. If I were to make the movie, I would need a leave of absence from the hit show – and why would they give me that?
Derek and I visited the office of Hugh ‘Binky’ Beaumont, the plummy and patriarchal impresario behind HM Tennant, the UK producers of
Godspell
. Binky (I wonder if he knew Bunny?) heard us out then hatched a possible plan. He would give me three months’ leave from the musical if I would agree to add six months to my contract on my return, which basically meant I would spend two years playing Jesus.
Binky stressed that the scheme would need the agreement of
Godspell
’s American co-producers and promised to put it to them. Derek and I were in two minds, with Derek in particular feeling the deal had an element of blackmail to it, but when the US bosses agreed, we felt we had no choice but to go along with it.
Ultimately I felt the sacrifice – if that was what it was – was worth it because
That’ll Be the Day
appealed to me on so many levels. The script was by a former
Liverpool Daily Post
and
Evening Standard
rock journalist named Ray Connolly, and was about teenagers growing up in the late fifties to a background of the first flush of youth culture and of rock ’n’ roll.
The genius of Connolly’s script lay in locating the edgy glamour of
Rebel Without a Cause
-era James Dean and relocating it to a Britain where kids were growing up intuitively wanting more from life than the straitlaced, conventional existence that their parents’ generation had been forced to lead. It was a rock ’n’ roll movie that belonged in the John Osborne lineage of post-war working-class kids trying to escape a dreary destiny.
Maureen, Verity and I bought a ticket to Ryde on 23 October 1972 and decamped to a little house in Shanklin for the seven-week shoot. It was the best of both worlds: we got a precious family holiday, plus I had a fantastic time working on a project that felt personally meaningful and very significant.
The parallels between my life and that of my character, Jim MacLaine, were notable. Jim was a working-class suburban lad, restless and possessed of a visceral urge to find excitement in his life. A scene where he hurled his schoolbooks into a river and boycotted his exams vividly reminded me of scrawling Popeye all over my Eleven Plus paper.
It was equally hard not to identify with the scenes where Jim eschewed a conventional career, working as a casual labourer on a travelling fair, then married and became a young father. It was probably my affection for him that made me able to portray him as a lovable rogue, even when he became a cheating sex maniac. The movie ended with Jim abandoning everything to pursue his rock ’n’ roll dream.
Despite my
Carry On
cameo of a few years earlier, taking the lead role in a movie was a new experience for me and there was a lot to learn. The early starts were a shock to the system, after being used to evening
Godspell
performances, and not even my weeks of early-hours nappy sessions with Verity could prepare me for the jolt of 5 a.m. alarm calls.
I learned to scale down my acting from the declamatory style of theatre – after all, if you raise an eyebrow on a cinema screen, it jumps twenty feet in the air – and I enjoyed the opportunity to give subtler, more nuanced performances. I also honed the crucial movie actor’s skill of being able to sit around in a caravan for hours on end waiting to be called without going mad with boredom.
That’ll Be the Day
was a joy to make both because of the high quality of the script and the camaraderie of the cast. Claude Whatham was a skilled and helpful director, and any advance nerves I may have had about working with one of the Beatles vanished when Ringo proved easy-going, funny and warm.
Keith Moon’s hell-raising reputation preceded him and he did his best to live up to it. He made a textbook rock star entrance to the proceedings, arriving via a helicopter that alighted on the hotel roof, scattering the tablecloths that had been laid out to mark the landing area on to the beach below. Keith emerged from the chopper to announce: ‘The only way to travel, dear boy! I was in my front room in Chertsey twenty minutes ago and now I’m here. Where’s the bar?’
Moon was aware that people expected him to be the life and soul of every party, swinging from chandeliers, so that was what
he
did. In private, though, I found him to be a decent, steady and very intelligent guy.