I first met George when he was on his way to superstardom and at the epicentre of what constituted Manchester’s party scene in the sixties. He wasn’t handsome; he was beautiful – blue eyed, black haired and slim as a railing. He was designed for the sixties. He could have made a living on looks alone but what set him apart and made him special were his gifts as a footballer. He was, and is, the best all-round player I ever saw. He had more ways of beating an opponent than could be imagined. He had speed and agility, was two-footed, good in the air and was the most certain finisher of them all. Those were his virtues as an attacker. As a defender and creator, he was a fearless tackler and a precise and imaginative distributor of the ball, either long or short.
Sir Matt Busby said he was probably the best player he had in any of the outfield positions and maybe a better keeper than Harry Gregg, though he dare not try him out in goal for fear of Gregg’s renowned and awesome temper. Sir Matt was, of course, exaggerating but only to make a point that among all the players he had nurtured and watched, George Best was the most complete of the lot.
So where did it all go wrong? From the start really. The problem of being the first rock’n’roll footballer was that no one knew what was required to protect the athlete from the rock’n’roll life. By the time people came to understand that George needed shielding it was too late.
Whenever he felt like getting away from his life in a goldfish bowl in Manchester he would come and stay with us. He would always bring a mixed bag of balls for my three sons to play with and needed no persuading to arrange a game of soccer with them on the lawn by the river. One day, Michael, my youngest son, was asked at infants’ school what he did over the weekend. He replied, quite truthfully, that he played football with George Best. He was made to stand in a corner for telling fibs.
Sometimes George would bring a girlfriend with him. He would always ring and ask if he could come down for a few days. When I put the phone down I would count to ten and it would ring again.
‘Mike, it’s George again. I forgot to mention I’d like to bring a girl with me. Is that OK?’ he would say.
I never worked out why he didn’t tell me in the first place. On one occasion I thought I would tease him.
‘And what’s this one like George?’ I said, after he had made his request.
‘Oh you’ll like her, Mike. Tall, slim, blonde hair and great knockers,’ he said.
‘George,’ I said. ‘You have just described every girl you ever went out with.’
One night he went clubbing and the next morning Mary and I were in the kitchen when a pretty girl, dressed as if she was on her way to Ascot, suddenly appeared. She said she had met George at Tramps and hoped we didn’t mind that he brought her home. Then, addressing Mary who was washing up, she said, ‘Would you like me to help with the hoovering?’
When Nick, my son, opened his gastropub, the Royal Oak in Paley Street, George came down and we decorated a corner with a photograph of George and David Beckham taken at the
Parkinson Show
. Many of Nick’s customers have a soft spot for Manchester United and every year the old boys, mainly the team George played in, would come down and have a charity dinner. One day a sponsor said he would give an extra ten thousand quid to charity if I could persuade George to turn up. I called him and, typically, he said yes. In all the years I knew him he never refused a charity request, nor did he ever let me down.
He wasn’t drinking at the time because he had lately been confined to hospital with his liver problems. He had never been to a reunion and he had a wonderful time. All his friends were delighted to see him and all were unequivocal in their opinion he was the greatest of them all. The next day he called to say he’d had the best evening for years. I said he should try being sober more often. He told me to fuck off, but pleasantly. I said to Mary that maybe George was going to stop drinking, that maybe he would recover and save himself.
A week or so later he was taken to hospital and shortly thereafter died.
The picture of George and David still hangs in the Royal Oak and he is never far away from my thoughts.
I asked him once on the programme, given the chance to live his life again, what he would change.
‘Not a thing. I keep reading people who describe my life as a tragedy and I don’t see it like that at all. I have no regrets,’ he said.
But he left us too soon and I still miss him.
While defending him as a soak was sometimes difficult, admiring him as a great athlete and loving him as a friend never was. Whenever I interviewed George I would wonder if it might be for the last time.
I had the same feeling when I interviewed Luciano Pavarotti. I had interviewed him a couple of times in the seventies when he was young and charming and possessed a voice of incomparable power and beauty. To sit near him as he sang was one of my most privileged moments. That was then. The Pavarotti who was assisted into the studio in 2003 was a sad parody of a great singer. He had come to plug his new album but wasn’t really in a fit state for public appearances. He had been ill, there was talk of financial problems, and he looked very much like a man performing out of desperation rather than joy.
His entourage shunted him into position on the set. He was hugely overweight, heavily made up and wearing a hat he refused to remove. It was suggested I take the interview to him rather than ask him to walk on to the set. But the most disappointing decision of all was that he would mime and not sing live. When I talked to him he was sweating heavily and the dye from his hair was threatening to streak his brow. It was like watching a great monument disintegrate before your eyes.
On the other hand, there is nothing more gratifying than the great artist who adapts his talent to accommodate the advancing years and in old age remains as popular and revered as when he was a young shaver. Tony Bennett is a favourite singer of mine and a man who, although now in his ninth decade, remains the benchmark for any aspiring interpreter of the Great American Songbook. I have been friendly with Tony Bennett for more than thirty years. We met first at Doug Hayward’s where he was a customer, and then consolidated our friendship through the ubiquitous Sammy Cahn.
I was staying with the Cahns in Beverly Hills at the time of the Oscars. In fact, I was doing a profile for
The Sunday Times Magazine
on Faye Dunaway, who had won an Oscar for her performance in
Network
. I met her in one of the bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, along with photographer Terry O’Neill. Not only did Terry photograph Ms Dunaway, he ended up marrying her. We were not invited to the Oscars ceremony, so Sammy Cahn asked a group of his friends to his house for an Oscar television viewing party.
Sammy Cahn’s friends included Billy Wilder, Angie Dickinson, Jack Lemmon, Jack Jones, Tony Bennett, Sidney Poitier, in fact, most of the Hollywood stars who were not, for one reason or another, at the Oscars. I asked Billy Wilder why he wasn’t there.
‘Because I wasn’t nominated,’ he said.
‘How many times have you been?’ I asked.
‘Six times,’ he said, with a smile. Mr Wilder won six Oscars.
Later when the name of a famous song writer came up and Sammy said he was anti-Semitic, Billy Wilder said the definition of an anti-Semitic was someone who disliked Jews just a little more than is necessary.
The highlight of the evening came when Jack Lemmon sat at the piano and played some Gershwin tunes for Tony Bennett to sing. If Tony Bennett was simply an outstanding singer it would be enough, but he is also a generous and modest man with firm convictions and principles, particularly about race relations. He told me, during the BBC interview, of being demoted during the war because he had been seen having a drink with another soldier, who was black. In those hideous days of segregation this was an offence that resulted in him being reduced in rank and given the job of digging graves for dead soldiers.
Some time after the interview, on Tony’s eightieth birthday, I went with Mary to his birthday party at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I sat next to Harry Belafonte who told me that during the anti-segregation marches into the Deep South in the fifties there was no more committed supporter than Tony.
‘He marched with us and, you know, the risk was great. I mean, forget what it could do to your career. Just being a white man marching with all those black people could get you killed. Tony never wavered,’ he said.
Shortly after the birthday bash I was asked to present Tony with a Lifetime Achievement Award at Ronnie Scott’s Club. The presentation took place after Bennett had treated the audience to a definitive reading of the Great American Songbook. It was one of those special moments when you know you are witnessing a performance that could not be equalled by any other human being. Everything was flawless, his musicality, his phrasing, the way he told the story in the lyrics. It was a masterclass. I said as much when I gave him his award.
I was having a drink at the bar later when I was approached by two young men who said they were actors and singers learning their trade and could they ask me a question. ‘Of course,’ I replied. One of them said, ‘How long will it take me to sing like Tony Bennett?’
I looked at his guileless face and the eager anticipation in his eyes and said, ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’
I took them to Tony’s dressing room where he was as accommodating and friendly as I knew he would be. I remember thinking, and not for the first time, of the privileges the job afforded me and how lucky I was to meet my heroes.
On the other hand, there was still one great man left on my wish list whom I had not encountered.
38
MANDELA’S COUNTRY
I had tried for many years to meet Nelson Mandela. As well as all the obvious reasons, there was a personal significance in my ambition. In the sixties I was made aware that I would not be welcome in South Africa because of what I had written and broadcast during the debate about whether or not we should play sport against the apartheid nation.
When I finally got the chance to meet him it was through Sport Relief, who asked me to interview Mr Mandela as part of a film about South African children orphaned by Aids. In 2002 I travelled to South Africa with Peter Salmon and Kevin Cahill, the tireless Chief Executive of Comic Relief, and a film crew. This is my diary of what happened:
Day 1:
The approach to Cape Town takes in both the beauty of Table Mountain and the unending miles of tin-shack townships. It is an ideal introduction to the extremes of South Africa. The Bay Hotel is on the Atlantic seaboard, overlooking a tempting beach. Soon, we are in another land of tin lean-tos and shebeens where children play on the earth floors and their elders stand outside, smoking a mixture of marijuana and mandrax – a sedative. It is their escape from reality.
We have been brought here by two fifteen-year-olds to see the kind of environment that is creating South Africa’s appalling crime problem. There are fifty-five murders every day in this country and a rape every thirty seconds; in the Cape Flats, where we are filming, thirty thousand young men are involved in crime. Without the prospect of work, and often missing a male role model in their lives, the gangs are their families. Prison is their school, ideal preparation for a future career.
Initiation ceremonies involve murder and rape. The gang members we talked to thought nothing of describing how they shot someone, yet they were uneasy when I mentioned rape. I pointed out that, in the argot of gangster culture, women are referred to as ‘bitches and whores’ and asked if that is what they thought of their mothers and sisters. They seemed shocked at the thought.
To film in one block of flats, we needed permission from the local gangster chief. He was a tense twenty-eight-year-old, who had spent fourteen years in jail. He showed us his gun wrapped in a duster. He had a crown tattooed on his forehead between his eyes and four of his front teeth were missing. I was told he had had them pulled to be replaced with gold teeth. We were informed on the quiet that the real reason was it made him a better kisser.
The regrettable truth was that he was beyond saving, but the boys who took us to him are not. They are part of what is known as a diversion programme, using mentors – often former gangsters – for lessons in survival skills, a period spent in the wilderness, a vigorous schedule of sport and six months’ community service to demonstrate that there is another way. Any young person seeing the programme through has his criminal record wiped clean.
I asked one of the boys, who had completed the course, what his ambitions were: ‘To marry, have children and mow the lawn,’ he said. A mundane ambition until you realise this was someone who, only a year or so before, had taken an axe to school to settle an argument.
Day 2:
That ever-present contrast between those who live in the land of luxury and those who live on the very brink of existence is nowhere more stark than in Johannesburg. The Saxon Hotel is where Nelson Mandela edited his memoirs upon release from Robben Island. By any standards, it is a sumptuous and luxurious place. Twenty minutes away, in our crew bus, accompanied by an armed guard, we drive alongside the Alexandria township, where more than three million people live in a hideous shanty town of bric-a-brac and tin. It looks like a gigantic scrap-metal dump.
We are stopped by a roadblock and politely but methodically searched by the police. Our guard’s gun is taken away and then returned because his permit is in order. He is a big man, wearing a Newcastle United beanie. He asks me if I know Bobby Robson. I say I do and that he is one of the good guys. He asks if Newcastle United might adopt his club in the South African town of Newcastle. I say Bobby Robson is a nice man, but not that nice.
All this as we drive into the shanty town of Zama Zama. We are here to film a team of women looking after victims of Aids, not just the sick but also the children orphaned by the ghastly pandemic. Nearly five million South Africans are infected with HIV/Aids. That is ten per cent of the population. Every day, 1,500 more people are infected. In the hut where the women meet, an undertaker’s list of coffin prices is pinned to the wall. Grace Sibeka heads the team. She was a cost clerk before she was made redundant at the age of forty. Since then, she has dedicated herself to working in her community. She takes us to the tiny rented room in a dilapidated garage that is used as a nursery for children aged between two and six who have been orphaned by Aids. The disease has orphaned eight hundred thousand children in South Africa; Grace has fifty of them. More than two-thirds of them are HIV positive.