‘Now then, Harold lad, what’s tha’ been up to?’ was Fred Trueman’s classic line to Pinter when they were introduced.
The combination worked beautifully and we realised we were on to something. Our secret plans were working. Booking the show grew easier as word got around but we were still searching for the big solo star to impress the agents. Our ideal was Orson Welles, then a man of towering reputation in the world of movies and theatre. We were certain he would deliver a performance that would impress the critics, delight the audience and, most of all, convince our bosses to give us another series. Richard, a clever and tenacious booker, finally managed to persuade him to come on the show and I spent a week or more worrying and fretting over the structure of the interview. It was our first one-man show and it had to work.
Come the day, I was still fussing over the interview when there was a knock on my dressing-room door. I opened it and came face to face with Orson Welles, an enormous figure, blocking out the daylight.
‘Mr Parkinson?’ he said, as he swept past me into the room. He was dressed entirely in black – including a black shirt, black bow tie and a large black fedora.
He looked around the room and saw my questions on the dressing table. ‘May I?’ he asked, and gave them the brief sweep of his gaze. Then he looked at me and said, ‘How many talk shows have you done?’
I told him this was the eighth.
‘I’ve done rather more than that,’ he said. ‘That being the case, would you mind a little suggestion?’
I nodded.
He indicated the questions. ‘Throw those away and let’s just talk.’
And we did. Everything from the making of
Citizen Kane
to the innate good manners of peasants in a remote part of Spain. He was exceptional, not just in the scope of his intellect and knowledge, but in his use of language. If anyone guaranteed the future of the show, it was Orson Welles.
The first series had been a success. One critic said it showed such certainty of becoming a long-running show he wished he could purchase shares in me. The same writer, five years later, said he was glad he hadn’t.
The last show of the first series brought together Shirley MacLaine and an extraordinary old woman called Sylvia Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak. In any list of English eccentrics she would have pride of place. She was consort and, by custom, slave to Sir Vyner Brooke, an Englishman who ruled the jungle kingdom of Sarawak, on Borneo, during the last decades of the British Empire. In her time she shocked polite society by her behaviour. She did the conga with prostitutes in Sarawak, causing a visiting MP to observe, ‘A more undignified woman it would be hard to find.’ She proposed marriage to J.M. Barrie; George Bernard Shaw was in love with her; the press called her ‘the most charming of despots’ and her own brother called her ‘a female Iago’. Now, aged eighty-six, she had put it all down in an account of her life and played to perfection the part of the loveable oddity.
When I called on Shirley MacLaine in her dressing room and told her I would like to interview the Ranee first and have her stay on during MacLaine’s own interview, she shook her head. She said, ‘The deal is I go on first, then I disappear.’
I asked why she wanted it this way. ‘Because I have read the book. Do you think anyone can follow that?’ she said.
She was right. The Ranee was a gilt-edged gift for a talk show, funny and indiscreet.
Talking about her husband’s bad habits, including his incontinence, she recalled the time when, while entertaining guests on the verandah of her Sarawak palace, there appeared to be a sudden downfall of rain. ‘Not the rainy season, is it?’ asked a guest. ‘No, it’s the Rajah peeing over the balcony,’ said the Ranee.
She was sensational. As we came off, Shirley MacLaine was waiting in the wings.
‘Was I right?’ she asked. She was.
Shirley MacLaine became a regular on the show over the years and one of my favourite guests. She was talented, smart, funny and an outrageous flirt. One time, in the middle of answering a question about President Nixon and the meaning of life, she stopped and began staring at my navel. Most disconcerting.‘What?’ I said. Then she poked her finger into my belly button and said I had a button missing. ‘We pop ’em off, wives sew ’em on,’ she said.
Some time later when I interviewed her brother, Warren Beatty, he came on set, shook hands and said, ‘So you’re the guy who’s trying to make out with my sister.’
I couldn’t deny it.
Paul Fox wanted a second series and he wanted it more or less straightaway. He suggested that we might start it with a replay of the Orson Welles interview. When we told him it had been wiped he said he would willingly find the money for a rematch.
Richard Drewett had become friendly with Welles and was discussing making a film with him to elaborate on their fascination with the art forger Elmyr de Hory. Out of their collaboration Welles made
F for Fake
. Richard told me that one morning Welles asked him to visit him in a warehouse on an industrial estate in North London to discuss the movie. Welles was filming a sequence in the dimly lit warehouse. Richard asked him what the sequence was.
‘We are standing in Chartres Cathedral,’ said Welles, demon strating his well-known theory that all film directors are illusionists.
He was editing
Don Quixote
in Madrid when Richard asked him for a return match. Welles demanded a fee of £2,000 to do another one-man show. The standard fee in those days was £500 but we wanted him badly and he knew it.
On the day of the interview we received a call from Spain saying Mr Welles was at Madrid airport and not boarding his plane to London until we made two guarantees. First, his fee of £2,000 must be paid to him in cash upon arrival at London airport. The second demand was that, because of his large size, three seats must be removed from the first-class cabin so he might be accommodated in style and comfort.
Given all we did to get him to the Television Centre, Mr Welles did not let us down. He made a grand entrance carrying a staff and looking like Moses about to part the Red Sea. Once more I encountered his powerful personality, his overwhelming presence. It wasn’t just about his size – although he was so big we had to find a special chair for him to sit on – there was something else that emanated from his personality. I have experienced it since but only with a handful of people. Muhammad Ali had it, so did Richard Burton, Billy Connolly and Nelson Mandela. I have pondered for a long time what makes them remarkable without coming to a satisfactory conclusion except to say that much of what they exude is willpower.
With Orson Welles in our sights, we needed another big name to start the second series. Someone suggested Muhammad Ali.
Not bad, we said.
23
ALI, THE GREATEST
The first boxer I ever saw was an old stumblebum, a local pugilist who had his brains scrambled in the ring and shuffled down the street as if wearing snow shoes. We used to call after him, ‘Jackie Pace, Jackie Pace; all ears and no face’. He would turn and assume the fighting pose and draw his thumb across his snotty nose.
My father took me to a boxing booth when I was a teenager and the spieler convinced us the young lad with the skin like milk chocolate and the rippling physique was worth a look. We were told he was a world champion in the making. They asked for volunteers to take him on and a big navvy about three stone heavier took his shirt off and stepped into the ring. The young lad circled him once, avoided a haymaker and hit him in the centre of his forehead with a left hook that knocked him out. Later, the loser came round with his cap, hoping for money from the spectators. He had a large lump where he had been slugged. He looked like a unicorn.
The fighter’s name was Randolph Turpin and it would take a while before he beat Sugar Ray Robinson, the best all-round fighter I ever saw, and became world champion. Not long after that, I went to interview him. He was on the skids, grunting instead of talking, reading
The Beano
. Shortly after, he put a gun in his mouth and killed himself.
I am not dewy eyed about the so-called Noble Art. Quite the opposite. You cannot make one sensible argument in favour of boxing as a sporting spectacle. As Muhammad Ali once put it, addressing a press conference: ‘Do you ever ask yourself what all you white boys are doing watching two black men try to kill each other?’
If you remove Ali’s racial propaganda from the quote, it is the question every person who ever watched a fight must ask himself.
That said, in a lifetime of observing sporting contests, I have to admit that none matches the visceral joy and excitement of a great boxing match. And if required to offer examples of what I mean, I would say that the two fights I witnessed between Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden displayed a balance of skill, bravery and sheer bloody willpower, as well as grace and endurance, that was as aesthetically pleasing as it was profoundly moving.
Long before I met Muhammad Ali, I admired him as much for his political convictions as his fighting ability. He refused to join the draft because of his belief the war in Vietnam was a mistake.
‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger’ might not be seen by military historians as a reason for not fighting the war, but it was a conviction Ali upheld through three years when he was refused a licence to fight. During that time he was offered all manner of deals, but he was steadfast in his decision. There was much more to this pugilist than a good punch. All else apart, he was a master showman. No one promoted a fight, or himself, with greater skill and enthusiasm. Best of all for me, he was God’s gift to the talk-show host.
Whenever I am asked the inevitable question to choose the best from the thousands of people I have interviewed, then I don’t have a single answer. I loved interviewing old people: Dame Edith Evans, Catherine Bramwell-Booth, Ben Travers,Artur Rubinstein. Comedians were among my favourites: Les Dawson, Jack Benny, George Burns, Jimmy Tarbuck, Tommy Cooper, Billy Connolly, Spike Milligan and many more. What about the great Hollywood stars: Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, James Cagney. Then the great talkers: Orson Welles, Jonathan Miller, Peter Ustinov, Professor Jacob Bronowski, Stephen Fry. And don’t get me started on musicians, beautiful women and my sporting heroes.
But if I am asked who was the most remarkable human being I ever encountered, it would have to be Ali. I interviewed him four times and lost on points on just about every occasion. If you put the four interviews together they span a decade in which he not only became the most famous man on our planet, but went from being world champion to Jackie Pace. How that happened, more pertinently how it was allowed to happen, will be debated so long as Ali casts his shadow over boxing, but anyone seeking the story of his decline need only contrast our first meeting in 1971 and our last ten years later.
The first encounter came about mainly because of Richard Drewett’s genius as a booker. Ali was in London promoting a soft drink and had planned a visit to a bottling plant in the Home Counties. The entrepreneur behind the scheme agreed Ali should appear on the show, but advised that the drinks people be kept in the dark because they might raise objections. They would be told that, while on his way to the factory, Ali would make a short detour to the TV Centre to record a five-minute news item. Meanwhile, we had a studio ready and waiting for the great man.
He was smuggled into the studio where we discovered his chair was too small. We sent for the Orson Welles furniture. Ali was the sort of man you didn’t so much look at as inspect. In those days, he was a beautiful human being. He had a bonny face (no other word will do) with perfect teeth and merry, amused eyes. His hands were narrow with long tapering fingers, hands that should be holding a paint brush or a bow instead of being used to batter people. He was tall and slender but didn’t look unusually big until, having sat down, he then stood up and we found the chair clinging to his back like a carapace.
This was the time of the capricious Ali, explaining how he watched a wrestler called Gorgeous George selling tickets and decided he would promote himself in the same way. ‘So I talked and talked and told them, “If you talk and jive, you’ll fall in five.” And I told them I was the best in the world and the best of all time. Better than any Americans or Russians or Chinese or anyone else. I could whup any man on earth. And I kept telling them I am beautiful, I am the greatest until they said, “The nigger talks too much,” and bought a ticket just to see me beat.’
He told how he came back from the Olympic Games with a gold medal and was given another medal stating he was a freeman of his home town. Wearing the medal, he went into a diner and the owner said, ‘We don’t serve nigras.’ Ali replied, ‘That’s OK. I don’t eat ’em,’ and threw his medal in the river.
In that moment were sown the seeds of disaffection that would lead to the politicising of Muhammad Ali. It was then he became a Muslim.
The hour or more we talked flashed by, except for the minders in the car park, who kept looking at their watches and thinking it must be the longest news interview ever. The viewing figures were enormous. Indeed over the years we were to discover that the only guests who would guarantee adding an extra two million or more were Ali and Billy Connolly.
Two years passed and Richard had another brainwave. Ali was to fight Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden – a rematch of their classic encounter when Frazier beat him.
‘Wouldn’t it be fun,’ Richard mused, ‘if we could persuade the two fighters to appear together on our talk show on the eve of the fight?’
I thought it a great idea but unlikely to happen.
The BBC also thought it was a great idea until it was pointed out it would have to be done in the United States. Too expensive, they said. Richard suggested we try a joint production with an American TV company.