We struggled along until I came to the point where I had little else to ask him. In these situations I had planned a coded instruction with the production team. If I asked the guest: ‘Has anyone ever taken a swing at you in a bar?’ it meant this was possibly the penultimate question. If I followed up with: ‘When did you learn how to tap dance?’ it meant start the car because we are shortly heading home.
So I asked Robert Mitchum if anyone had taken a swing at him in a bar. He said ‘Yup’.
This was my chance. ‘What happened?’ I asked, thinking you can’t say yup or nope to that.
He said, ‘I was in a bar having some lunch and a man came up to me and shoved a pen and paper between my fork and my mouth and said, “Sign that.” I looked at him and said, “Do you mind if I finish my lunch and then I’ll consider your request.” So the guy says, “You think you’re a tough son of a bitch, don’t you?” This upset me.’
He paused. The audience was transfixed. It was the first time he had spoken more than four consecutive words.
‘What happened next?’ I said.
‘Well, I took my fork and put it under the guy’s chin, and pushed it through the roof of his mouth and out the top of his head.’
There was an awed silence in the studio as he looked at me begging the next question.
‘Are you pulling my leg?’ I said.
‘Yup,’ he said.
He finished his performance by singing ‘Little old wine drinker, me,’ before heading upstairs to his cronies and a celebration.
As we left the studio, he said, ‘How was it, kid?’
I said something like maybe it could have been better. He said, ‘Let’s go back and do it again.’ I thanked him but said you couldn’t repeat an interview. He might have said, ‘What interview?’ but he was heading for a bar.
Our hospitality room at the time was run by a wonderful Cockney woman called Lil who had seen them all come and go and whose loyalty was such that her opinion of the guests was entirely based on how kind they had been to me.
Mr Mitchum was not in her good books.
‘Would you like a drink, sir?’ she enquired.
‘Vodka,’ said Mitchum.
She reached behind for the optic measure.
‘Lady, the bottle, please,’ said Mitchum.
She handed him the bottle.
‘Would you like ice, sir?’ she asked.
Mitchum nodded.
‘I suppose you would like the bleedin’ bucket,’ she said, and gave it to him.
Completely unfazed, he put two or three ice cubes in his mouth and drank from the bottle. Shortly after, he turned to me and said, ‘OK, kid, let’s go party.’
The last I saw of him he was leading his entourage into the night with that shoulder-led swagger I am still trying to copy.
I liked him a lot. He had a majestic quality and yet there was also a sense he was one of a disappearing breed. As he ambled into the night he reminded me of a melting iceberg.
27
THAT’S SHOWBIZ
Richard Burton was a hero of mine long before I ever saw him act. In the sixties I bought a recording of
Under Milk Wood
with Burton playing the narrator. I knew it almost line by line. It was the definitive reading by the most wonderful voice of them all. I liked the man before I even met him, not because of his acting but rather his kindness to a friend.
Cliff Morgan was taken ill and I went to see him in hospital. Cliff was one of the greatest rugby players of them all, and he followed this with a distinguished career in television. He is a man beloved by all who know him. The illness incapacitated him and meant he would have to spend some time recuperating. I was impressed by the size of his room at the hospital and started teasing him about paying for it.
He said,‘Look in that drawer.’ There was a telegram. The message read: ‘This illness is on me. Richard.’
At the time of our interview Richard Burton was a recovering alcoholic who had just returned from a stay in a clinic in Switzerland. His companion was Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. The interview was to take place late morning and we decided not to have any booze on show in the Green Room. Burton seemed edgy while waiting and, as soon as his girlfriend left the room, asked for a drink. His hands were shaking. One of his entourage produced a whisky, which he brought unsteadily to his lips. It seemed to settle him, the trembling calmed, and he said he was ready for the studio.
Because it was taking place in the morning we had been unable to round up the usual audience. Instead, we tannoyed around the BBC that Richard Burton was to be interviewed and asked anyone who was interested to come along. The majority of people free at that time were chefs and kitchen staff so, when I introduced Richard Burton, he was faced with an audience of people in white coats. ‘Christ, I thought I was back at the bloody clinic,’ he said.
It was a memorable interview. He told of playing Hamlet with Winston Churchill in the audience speaking the lines with him.
‘I couldn’t shake him off, whatever I did, wherever I went. “To be or not to be”, he was with me to the very end. Afterwards I thought he might come backstage. We waited but he didn’t come, so I thought I might as well have a drink, get sloshed. I was just about to start when the door opened and there was Sir Winston. He bowed very graciously and, very courteously, said, “My Lord Hamlet, may I use your lavatory?”’
Burton told me that when the drinking was at its worst he was consuming up to three bottles of hard liquor a day. He said, ‘Trying to get some food into my mouth was an extraordinary business. I was in a Roman Catholic hospital in Santa Monica and I insisted that I fed myself. I held the spoon but my hands would not obey me. They flew all over the place. A friend of mine who was there said, “I know you’re in a Roman Catholic hospital, but there is no need for you to make the sign of the cross every time you eat.”’
He said he had been on the edge of a ‘terrible precipice’ but had survived and had decided to regain control of his life. He didn’t. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1984 aged fifty-nine. He was one of that tiny handful of men I met who possessed an indefinable power of personality.
Looking at him was to understand how much drink had ruined his looks, diminished his physique and reduced the range of that great voice. And yet his charisma remained powerful and compelling.
James Cagney was also a real star, one of the truly legendary figures of Hollywood. He was the man who defined the gangster movies of the twenties and thirties, the street dancer who never had a lesson in his life and who Fred Astaire said was the greatest of the lot, and the actor whose strutting walk and cocky, optimistic persona epitomised America surviving the Depression and becoming the most powerful nation on the planet.
Billy Wilder, the director, also told me he thought Cagney the greatest star of them all, and fulfilled an ambition to work with him when they made
One Two Three
. He said that Cagney, renowned for the speed at which he learned his lines – ‘one take Cagney’ – and for professionalism on set, found it difficult to master a long speech that Wilder had saved for the end of the shoot. He struggled so much that instead of one take, Wilder devised a means of breaking it into three sections.
When filming was finished Cagney told Wilder he was retiring. When Wilder asked why he said he was no longer ‘one take Cagney’ and didn’t want to be second best. He left Hollywood and bought a farm where he remained for twenty years or more before he was persuaded out of retirement by Milos Forman, who cast him in
Ragtime
, a movie he was making in England.
Pat O’Brien, who played opposite Cagney in the Hollywood glory days, accompanied him, and the two of them agreed to do our show together. For the first twenty minutes or so, Cagney was wonderful, recalling the gangster movies that made his name, telling me the origin of his famous shoulder-shrugging, arm-jabbing trademark gesture, denying he ever said ‘you dirty rat’. Then he became agitated, wriggling in his seat, giving every indication he would rather be elsewhere. His friend O’Brien stepped in and we hobbled to the end of the show.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked Cagney as the music played.
‘Fine, but I’m dying for a pee,’ he said.
When I met Milos Forman, I asked him what it was like working with Cagney and he said just to have been in his presence was sufficient reward.
I felt the same way.
Forman said he became friendly enough with Cagney to persuade the great man to attend a prestigious television show where he would be introduced at the end of the evening as a very special, surprise guest. This would be one of the first times Cagney had ever made such an appearance. Even in his heyday he avoided the spotlight, ducked publicity. Forman said by this time Cagney was so frail he was in a wheelchair. As the show approached its climax they wheeled Cagney into position, awaiting a cue that never came. The show had overrun and, with the closing credits being shown and Cagney sitting in the wings, Forman said he felt anger, despair and frustration that one of the truly great motion picture stars was being treated in such a careless manner.
He looked in desperation at Cagney, who smiled, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘That’s showbiz.’
I first met Kirk Douglas when being measured for a suit. We shared the same tailor, Doug Hayward, whose shop in Mount Street was a salon for actors, writers, photographers, landed gentry, soccer players, racing drivers, models, royalty and associated layabouts, all of them chosen and approved by a remarkable lad from Acton who left school at fifteen and became one of the great stylists of the sixties and onwards. John le Carré based his character in
The Tailor of Panama
on Doug. He became not simply one of my best friends but part of our family. He was a loveable man with the most engaging manner and became an invaluable source of information about who was visiting town. Doug knew all the people who visited London and who didn’t announce their arrival in
Celebrity Bulletin.
He introduced me to Kirk Douglas, who said he would agree to an interview next time he was in town, which turned out to be for a tribute retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute. To celebrate, I went to Hayward for a new suit. He persuaded me to buy a black blazer with light grey pants and a black and white striped tie.
I didn’t meet Kirk Douglas before the interview (although Hayward said he had popped in the shop) but I did meet one of his PR people, who asked me not to stand up when Mr Douglas walked on stage. When I asked why he explained that because I was taller than Kirk it might upset the star.
As I came to know Kirk Douglas over the years I understood that this request was most likely made without his knowledge because I met few stars more certain of their stature and standing than Mr Douglas.
I arrived at the South Bank, where the interview was to be held, in my new Hayward get-up and, as I did so, a large black limousine disgorged Kirk Douglas dressed in black blazer, light grey pants and black and white striped tie. Hayward’s idea of a little joke.
I appeared on stage wearing my driver’s jacket, which had a pleated back and large brass buttons, and his tie, which had a green palm tree on it. I was glad not to stand up. I would like to have been invisible.
Some time later, when I was a house guest of the lyricist Sammy Cahn and his wife Tita, we were invited to Kirk Douglas’s new home. It was to be a housewarming party and the guests included Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Billy Wilder, Sidney Poitier and Johnny Carson. I was seated between Wilder and Carson.
At the end of the meal, Kirk Douglas stood up and welcomed everyone to his new home, stressing how much smaller and cosier it was compared to the one they had left. It seemed big enough to me. Put a moat round it and you had Dover Castle.
Anyway, Kirk banged on about downsizing and then, to my horror, invited his guests to stand up and say a few words. He started the speeches clockwise around the table, which at least gave me a few moments to try to think of something appropriate, or even witty, to say. It immediately became obvious this was a well-known ritual among the group because the guests had clearly prepared material beforehand and were in competition with each other for making the wittiest speech.
I thought of fainting as a way out of what I was now certain would be a terrible disaster. When Johnny Carson stood up it meant I was next. By now I was almost paralysed with fear.
Carson stood and said, ‘Kirk, I think your new downsized small home is wonderful. That is all I am prepared to say because, as you know, I never play small halls.’
In the ensuing laughter I was forgotten.
ITV had bought the Carson show and was about to run it against
Parkinson
in Britain. I thought I’d pop along and see Carson at work. I had never sat in the audience of a talk show and didn’t want VIP treatment, so I turned up with Mary and the kids at the studios and stood in line. We were shepherded by blazered young men with the wholesome good looks you used to see in those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland college movies.
Our shepherd heard us talking and asked, ‘You guys from England?’
We told him we were and he said, ‘Johnny’s show is going to be seen in England.’
We said we had heard the rumour.
‘Have you ever seen Johnny’s show?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘What’s it like?’
He said, ‘There’s a guy in Britain called Parkinson who does a talk show.’
We said we had heard the name.
‘Well Johnny’s show is like that but with more laughs,’ he said.
Sammy and Tita Cahn became special friends. Sammy was a significant contributor to the Great American Songbook. He won four Academy Awards and, in collaboration with Jimmy Van Heusen in particular, helped sustain the second half of Frank Sinatra’s recording career. It was through Sammy I hoped to get to Sinatra.
We tried, Lord knows how we tried.