There was a pause and then he said, ‘I just can’t walk on as myself.’
So I said, ‘Well, walk on as someone else.’
He said, ‘Can I?’
I told him he could walk on disguised as a tomato if that was what it took – which is how Peter Sellers came to walk down the stairs on his one-man show dressed as a German soldier.
Once he removed the disguise and became Peter Sellers he was brilliant, giving the audience an astonishing display of his virtuosity and so obviously enjoying every minute, it begged the question, what was all the fuss about in the first place?
I have spent a lifetime talking to actors, asking why they chose such a strange and risky profession, without ever finding a consensus. Why would anyone seek a job where the majority of practitioners are out of work for the greater part of their careers, and even when lucky enough to be in work, spend most of their lives pretending to be someone else? Beats me.
Robert Redford was one of the most famous and glamorous actors in the world when I first interviewed him.
Butch Cassidy
and
The Sting
had taken him to the stratosphere of stardom and recognition. I met him in his dressing room and offered to escort him into the studio, which was bulging with his fans. He said he would make his own way there. We waited for a while, then began to worry. Something had obviously gone wrong.
We found Redford at the door to the studio, trying to persuade the commissionaire that he was on
Parkinson
. He didn’t have a pass, so the official said he couldn’t enter. ‘They’re hanging from the rafters in there,’ he said. ‘He’s interviewing Robert Redford, that’s who,’ he added, by way of explanation.
‘But I’m Robert Redford,’ said Redford.
‘They all say that,’ said the commissionaire.
He told me that shortly after making
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and feeling mighty pleased with life, he was waiting to cross a street in Los Angeles when a group of kids drove by and started waving. He gave them a big smile and as he did so they wound down the car window and said, ‘Robert Redford, you’re such an asshole.’
An even bigger question than why be an actor is what is acting?
Robert Redford said James Cagney was his hero, a man who told me he never took acting lessons. ‘Why take lessons when acting is a perfectly normal thing to do? You hit your mark, say the words and that’s it,’ Cagney said.
Robert De Niro came on the show after playing the boxer Jake Lamotta in
Raging Bull
, and told me he had to be the part to play it. He put on sixty pounds to make the movie, and when he made
Taxi Driver
he worked as a cabbie in New York. Sir Ralph Richardson said that in order to act you had to dream yourself into the part and James Stewart said that movie acting was about creating moments. Sir Alec Guinness said he learned about acting by watching a bird in a zoo – every time he looked away and then looked back, the bird had changed its position – while Dirk Bogarde said he made a film with Alan Ladd and at the end of the shoot asked Ladd if he’d had a satisfactory day. Ladd replied he had had the best day an actor could have. Bogarde asked what had happened. ‘I just did a great look,’ said Ladd. Dirk said from that point on he built his film career on one thought: create a relationship with the camera, a look.
Sarah Miles talked about the kind of acting that required nude scenes. She said she had only one rule. If she stripped off, so did the crew. She said, ‘In fact everybody becomes very happy when they’re all stripped off. We have a lovely time.’ Sarah caused a sensation by appearing on the show in a see-through top, which I endeavoured to ignore while the director struggled unsuccessfully for a shot that would not enrage one half of the population while arousing the other half.
David Niven said he enjoyed acting because it meant having a good time. Of all the stars I interviewed, it seemed to me that Niven made the best of what it had to offer. He was in Hollywood in the years between the thirties and the sixties when eight hundred million people every week bought tickets to go to the movies worldwide. He returned to Britain to join up at the outbreak of war. It changed him, as it did the entire surviving generation, but he didn’t lose his debonair approach to his craft. His book
The Moon’s a Balloon
is one of the funniest and most engaging memoirs ever written by an actor and his appearance on the show to talk about it gave us one of the most entertaining one-man shows.
Yet before the show, I doubted if he would make it down the stairs. We had adjoining dressing rooms and with about ten minutes to go, I heard the sound of Niven being violently sick in the next room. The retching lasted for about five minutes and sounded so bad that when it stopped I knocked on Niven’s door. He looked pale and I asked him if he was all right. He said he felt marvellous and why did I ask? I said I had heard him being sick. ‘Oh that,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. I throw up every time before I go on.’
I had a lunch or two with him and he was the most marvellous companion. After one meal we were driving back to his hotel when he ordered the driver to stop opposite Charing Cross Station. He said, ‘I want to show you something.’ We left the car and stood looking back at Trafalgar Square.
‘Look at Nelson and tell me what he has in his right hand,’ he said.
From where I was standing it looked like Nelson was holding something other than his sword, and that instead of keeping a watchful eye on London was engaged in an altogether more absorbing activity.
We were soon joined by a group of tourists.‘What are you looking at?’ asked their shepherd.
‘Something you won’t find in the tourist guides,’ said Niven.
His last appearance on the show was a sad event. When I visited him in his dressing room he confessed he was having a bit of difficulty speaking. He said he was slurring the odd word and sometimes sounded as if he was pissed but hoped I would understand it was due to tiredness and not drink. When we came to do the interview it was worse than I had imagined. There was obviously something radically wrong, something that could not altogether be accounted for by fatigue. Sitting next to David, willing him to answer in that fluent, self-deprecating manner that had become his trademark, I felt a terrible sadness and an awful foreboding.
After the interview had been broadcast I received a call from a nurse who said she thought David had suffered a slight stroke. Predictably, some viewers called the BBC complaining he was drunk. It was, in fact, the early manifestation of motor neurone disease, which eventually killed him.
Unlike David, who was far too professional to drink before a performance, there were those who sought drink or other drugs to give them the confidence to walk down the stairs. Shortly after making the marvellous Robert Altman movie
MASH
its two stars, Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, appeared on the show. At the same time we booked Al Capp, the creator of the comic strip
L’il Abner
, who was also a political commentator of great skill and conviction. It was the time of Vietnam and Capp was on one side of the political divide and Gould and Sutherland on the other.
They told me they were eagerly awaiting the moment they could confront Capp and challenge his views, but they made the mistake of partaking of a substance that, whatever it was, might have given them confidence but also rendered them soporific. Consequently, they treated their interview with me as a casual encounter before the main event, and were in no fit state properly to challenge Capp, who wiped the floor with them while I looked on in quiet satisfaction.
Thirty years later I interviewed Donald Sutherland on my BBC radio programme. When he came in the studio, he asked me if I recalled the last time we had met. We laughed at the memory. He said, ‘I guess I owe you an apology. It wasn’t me, it was Gould who was to blame.’
Oliver Reed was another who felt the need for a drink or two before an interview. Somehow I always managed to handle him, except for one occasion when, demonstrating his prowess as a boxer, he punched a hole in the set. When he played the part of Flashman in the movie, he had to fight a bare-knuckle champion played by Henry Cooper. Henry told me that they carefully choreographed the sequence and then broke for lunch, with a view to completing the filming in the afternoon. Henry said that when Oliver reappeared he was wearing a mischievous look and it was obvious he was tiddly.
They started filming the fight and straightaway Oliver ignored the choreography and planted an unexpected right hook on Henry’s chin.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
Henry said, ‘I gently chastised him.’ A magnificent euphemism for the actor being knocked on his back, a sadder and wiser man.
Oliver Reed was a wonderful screen presence, an actor with a powerful star quality, and it was a pity he allowed drink to dominate his life. He was once misbehaving on Michael Aspel’s talk show when another guest, Clive James, asked the question we all wish we had asked. He said, ‘Why do you drink so much?’ The look of bafflement and confusion on Oliver’s face was not an answer, but an unforgettable moment.
My worst experience with a drunk occurred early in my career. When interviewing an MP for Granada Television, he fell asleep. It was the last part of the show so I couldn’t link to another item. I ploughed on, both asking and answering the question. I would say, ‘What kind of a week has it been for the party?’ and then follow up with, ‘I suppose if I was the prime minster, I would say that the economic situation is not good and the prospect of a three-day week a potential disaster,’ and so on. The MP’s only contribution was the sound of gentle snoring.
There were only two occasions I can recall on
Parkinson
when we had a debate about whether or not a guest was unfit to appear on the show. The culprits were the newscaster, Reginald Bosanquet, and the football manager, Brian Clough. Brian had been at some presentation lunch in his honour and my producer asked me to visit him in his dressing room to see what I thought. I both liked and admired Brian far too much to allow him to go on television and make an ass of himself, and I told him so. It worked. He got a grip of himself and we got away with it.
Reginald Bosanquet said he was going to interview me on the show and ask me all sorts of personal questions. I said he could try but all I had to do was sit there while he misbehaved. ‘I won’t help you out. You’re on your own,’ I said. He took the point and we struggled through without incident.
I cringe whenever I see that notorious encounter between Terry Wogan and George Best. I think Terry was badly served by his producer, who allowed George on to the show when he was clearly stupidly intoxicated and incapable of making any sensible answer. The people who thought it funny should understand they were laughing at a sick man, an alcoholic, in the throes of an illness that eventually killed him.
That said, I must admit that another demonstration of Oliver Reed’s drunken behaviour did provide me with a great deal of merriment. Sadly, it was on radio and not television and the full impact of what happened could only be properly enjoyed by those who saw as well as heard it. It was a show, to celebrate the opening of a London radio station, which I was presiding over in the company of special guests, among them the American entertainer Elaine Stritch and Oliver Reed.
Oliver wasn’t on time for the opening of the show and we were told there had been a snag with transport. The problem was that Oliver had persuaded the driver to stop at a pub en route where he was having a few drinks. The next bulletin involved Oliver meeting up with a group of workers digging up the road and inviting them to join him in another pub. A further report had him fifteen minutes from the studio in a car full of labourers who were coming to the studio as his guests.
I was talking to Elaine and she was in mid-flow when the studio door burst open and there, naked except for a pair of green wellies, stood Oliver Reed. Elaine looked up in mid sentence, smiled and said, ‘Dear Oliver, I must tell you I have seen bigger and better,’ and continued her story.
Apart from checking for sobriety, the only other concern I have before an interview is in finding out what the guest might not want to talk about. If it is something I judge to be mere tittle-tattle or deeply personal, then I am happy to go along with their request. There are times, however, when I have to point out that the matter they don’t want asking about is a necessary part of the interview.
When I asked Rex Harrison the question, he said he didn’t want to talk about his wives. I said he had been married eight times and if we didn’t talk about this it would leave a big gap in the conver sation. He agreed.
When I talked to Julie Andrews I questioned her about working with Harrison. She said he was inclined to flatulence. I asked her to elaborate and she said that there were times when performing
My Fair Lady
that she was reduced to helpless laughter because every time she opened her mouth to speak he farted.
Mary, my wife, was often mistaken for Julie Andrews. One evening I arranged to meet her in the BBC bar. I was late and Mary was cornered by a man who mistook her for Julie and went rambling on about how he worked with her mum and dad and how much he enjoyed her in
Mary Poppins
. Mary was too polite and good-natured to put him right and, in any event, he was the sort of fan who never paused for breath. I arrived in the middle of this, completely unaware of what had gone before. I went up to Mary and said, ‘Come on, let’s go home and have an early night.’
The man looked at her in horror and said, ‘You’re not having it off with him, are you?’
When I asked Charlton Heston what he would prefer not to talk about he said, ‘The chariot race in Ben Hur.’ I thought this was most strange.‘Why on earth not?’ I asked. He looked conspiratorially around before beckoning me closer.
‘It was fixed,’ he whispered.