The Elephant to Hollywood (36 page)

Christmas is a very special time for me because it was a time I hardly knew as a child. I have no memory of my first three years and for the next three years, there was nothing Christmassy to remember. It wasn’t until I was six years old and evacuated to Norfolk that I really became aware that Christmas existed – and then we were told there wasn’t going to be much of one anyway. Food was rationed, for a start, although we did get the rare treat of an orange and a banana and, wonder of wonders, a bar of chocolate. Sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But there was lots of homemade fun. We made our own paper chains by painting long strips of paper, cutting them into short lengths and then sticking them together with flour-and-water paste – which wasn’t very adhesive and meant that you were likely to be suddenly festooned with gluey bits of paper as you walked round the house. There were no presents, toys or cards. There was a Christmas tree, but because the farmhouse we were living in didn’t have electricity there were no lights on it. Things were better after the war, but money was always short and we couldn’t afford all the traditions and the trimmings that go with a real slap-up Christmas. And then my father died and I became a mostly unemployed actor and so the money was still short. But I already had the fantasy that one day I would have the Christmas of my dreams – and although I can now afford it, I challenge myself each year to outdo the last one.

Christmas Eve always starts for us with music – and it’s always the same song: ‘So this is Christmas’ by John Lennon. It’s a beautiful, haunting melody and it gets us into the mood. It’s followed by Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’, Jack Jones’s ‘Sleigh Ride’, Sinatra’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, Nat King Cole’s ‘Merry Christmas’ and, during Christmas Eve dinner, a CD of carols from King’s College, Cambridge. These songs and carols would probably feature on many people’s lists, but two of them have an extra significance for me: I found myself in Hollywood one Christmas in a room with Jack Jones and Frank Sinatra – and they sang those two songs above. It was an extraordinary privilege to be there and hear these great men, and I was both stunned and star-struck – so the memories and emotions I feel on hearing them again are mixed, but deep and happy.

Christmas Eve dinner for us is always roast goose and the evening always finishes watching a midnight mass on TV.  On Christmas morning I am up early to cook the turkey – a Kelly Bronze, so yes, I finally have my Norfolk turkey! It takes over four hours and the recipe I use and which has never failed is Delia Smith’s. I go for a traditional sage and onion stuffing and gravy, which I prepare in advance, and we always have chipolata sausages and roast potatoes. Shakira, who is a vegetarian, looks at this meat feast with great amusement and is in charge of all the vegetables: traditional Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, aubergines and stir-fried vegetables as well as her own vegetarian stuffed roast.

We used to start the meal with eggnog, until I saw my cholesterol figures, and now we drink champagne until the lunch is ready. After lunch we pull crackers and wear funny hats and listen to the Queen’s speech and then we go and open the presents. The whole place is ablaze with light and colour and family and food and friends and the best wine I can lay my hands on. Finally, I have made up for those lost Christmases past . . .

When we have eaten and drunk and laughed and unwrapped until we can manage no more, we go and watch the ‘screener’ that we reckon will be the potential Oscar winner for Best Picture, which we always save for this moment. Dinner on Christmas Night is what is known as ‘pick and save’ in our house: you pick anything out of the fridge that has been saved. I always like to pick and save a tin of caviar . . . Eventually we retire exhausted, full and happy, knowing that the Boxing Day lunch is still to come. To me Christmas symbolises the value of the family and close friends who have always been the mainstay of my life – and on Christmas Day I sometimes think I am the happiest man on earth. Last year, drinking a great claret with trusted friends and family and with my new grandchildren safely asleep upstairs, I thought – life doesn’t get any better than this. I love Christmas!

18

The Mayfair Orphans

One of the joys of being based back in England is being close to my friends. They mean a lot to me. And while I’ve lost some good ones along the way – it’s inevitable as you get older – it’s made me value the rest of them even more. I am often asked if I have any friends from my early days back in the Elephant and the answer is no. The unspoken but immediate assumption is that I dumped all my old friends when I became a movie star, but in fact the exact opposite is true. My old friends all dumped me when I was an out-of-work actor who couldn’t afford a round of drinks in the pub.

The one exception to this was Paul Challen, my trusty companion in the London party years and the guy who witnessed my first sight of Shakira, when we stayed in for that life-changing quiet night. I met him when we were both fifteen and I went to the orphanage where he lived (his entire family had been killed in the Blitz) with my drama group from Clubland. It was a terrible, depressing place and I couldn’t wait to get outside – where I found Paul waiting for me. He introduced himself and asked if I knew how to get into acting. I didn’t, of course, but it was the first time I’d had a conversation with anyone about wanting to do it myself and it was the beginning of a friendship that would last forty years, during which we supported each other in good times and in bad. In Paul’s case, although he was a willing partner about town in my carefree days, the times were mostly bad. He’d never been healthy – when I first knew him I’d thought I was thin, but Paul was almost emaciated – and he first of all contracted tuberculosis and had to have a lung removed and then, tragically, he developed multiple sclerosis, gradually becoming weaker and weaker. I knew from very early on that he was never going to make it as an actor; but he didn’t have to, because I did. He was my constant and only link to my past in those early years as I was beginning to make it in the movie world, my yesterday’s witness, the only friend who knew me before and after and my anchor in a strange new sea. I am pleased to have been able to make his life as comfortable as possible for him as time went on and I became successful, because he deteriorated very quickly. Paul died over twenty years ago, brave and uncomplaining to the last, and I miss him still. He was always with me then, and he’s still with me now.

As a young actor I made many friends along the way, but few of them were long-lasting. Some of those actors failed and disappeared; two men I knew – Johnny Charlesworth and Peter Myers – took the failure harder and tragically committed suicide. The life of an actor on the way up is tough and many people just walk away, but if you do stay the course you eventually meet a few people whom you get to know, learn to trust and, in some cases, learn to love. I was fortunate enough in my journey to meet a group of friends who fell into this last and most important category. Over the years we have survived the test of friendship and none of us has ever had a row or a falling-out with any of the others; our friendship has been constant. And although our number has been diminished by losses along the way, the survivors remain as tight-knit as ever we were in our younger days.

The group usually meets for lunch or family dinners, or even holidays, whenever we can find time in our busy lives. One day in the early Nineties, we were all having lunch together at Langan’s Brasserie when one of our number, Philip Kingsley, said that it was his mother’s birthday and that she was ninety-eight. We were of an age where we had assumed that none of us had living parents and indeed all of us, with the exception of Philip, were orphans – and so, because we were eating in Mayfair, and because our parents had all gone, we christened ourselves the ‘Mayfair Orphans’ from then on. Philip was made a probationary member until his mother died.

I met most of the Mayfair Orphans in London during the Sixties. Writing this chapter, which charts so many friends loved and lost, reminds me of the era that brought us together and in which we lived life to the full. It was a fantastic time to be young and right at the centre of things and we took full advantage of it. The signs that something really big was happening were there to see in the late Fifties if you knew where to look, but although I could tell something was going on, I was slow to spot what it was. I remember going up to Liverpool in 1959, for instance, with Sam Wanamaker’s theatre company on what, during my leanest period, was a rare job, and having coffee in a bar where a young group was playing, surrounded by teenage girls, all screaming. When I asked the name of the band that was causing so much excitement, someone said they were called ‘The Beatles’. They’re not bad, I thought, downed my coffee and left without a backward glance.

Before the late Fifties there was very little acknowledgement that anyone under twenty-one existed. The pubs were geared for and full of our parents and the restaurants – even if we could have afforded them – insisted on customers wearing suits and ties. But gradually the first dance halls and coffee bars began to emerge and although London was hardly swinging, it was beginning to gyrate slightly. The 2 I’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street in Soho was where a lot of the music stars of the future used to hang out. Coffee was sixpence upstairs, but half a crown downstairs to listen to the music, which seemed a lot at the time, but in retrospect was a bargain to watch the likes of Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan perform. For dancing and meeting girls there were the big ballrooms like Mecca, just off the Strand where they had live bands and played waltzes, quicksteps and foxtrots, although of course none of us knew how to dance, so these places were usually half empty. We didn’t like that sort of music and the sort of music we did like – pop music – you could only get on radio from the illegal Radio Luxembourg or via the American Forces network from Germany. The BBC wouldn’t play it until the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, which broadcast pop music from a ship anchored just outside UK territorial waters, became so popular that they were outlawed and Radio 1 was founded. The very worst thing about the London social scene in those days was that everything shut at ten thirty – pubs, theatres, cafés, buses, tube, everything. I once heard a member of parliament explain that it was to make sure the working classes weren’t late for work the next day. You can imagine how that went down with my friends and me . . .

Music wasn’t the only form of popular culture that was booming in those years. The world of drama was changing and with it London’s nightlife. Because all the restaurants and pubs closed so early there was nowhere for actors to get a meal after the show and so they started their own late-night dinner and drinking clubs in defiance of the Establishment’s rules. Theatre itself was no longer the province of the middle classes; playwrights like John Osborne and the rest of the ‘Angry Young Men’ were transforming it with plays like
Look Back in Anger
and they were being championed by critics like Ken Tynan. Working-class actors like Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and me were blazing a trail, too – and we were all taking full advantage of a much freer attitude to sex and booze, to have the time of our lives.

Peter was probably the wildest of us all. During my time understudying him in
The Long and the Short and the Tall
in 1959, my main job was to bring in the drink and find the parties, but I soon learnt to start the evening off with him and then duck out. God knows, I love a party, but I just couldn’t keep up. On one Saturday night after the show we were about to set off when he suggested that we line our stomachs first at a fast-food place in Leicester Square called the Golden Egg. This seemed to me to be perfectly sensible and I was encouraged because Peter’s diet hadn’t to this point seemed to include any food, so I went along and ordered a fry-up. I have absolutely no idea what happened after that because the next thing I remember is waking up in broad daylight in a flat I had never been in before, still wearing my coat. I nudged Peter, who was lying next to me, and asked him what time it was. ‘Never mind what
time
it is,’ he said, ‘what fucking
day
is it?’ Our hostesses, two rather dubious-looking girls I really don’t remember having set eyes on before, told us it was Monday and it was five o’clock. The curtain went up at eight. Somehow we got to the theatre in time – we hadn’t even been sure we were still in London – but instead of being pleased to see us, the stage manager was very cross. It seemed that the manager of the Golden Egg had already been round: henceforth we were both banned. ‘But what did we – ?’ I began. Peter nudged me. ‘Never ask,’ he said. ‘Better not to know.’ The voice of experience. They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. And this was only 1959 . . .

By the time we actually got to the Sixties, I’d wised up a bit. London was buzzing with energy. The Beatles had left that Liverpool café behind and were dominating the charts; the Rolling Stones were unstoppable, Mary Quant had designed the mini-skirt, photographers like David Bailey and Terry O’Neill were chronicling our lives and everything felt new and exciting. Most exciting of all was the feeling that for the first time in British history it didn’t matter where you came from. The only thing that mattered was your talent; the young working class were not going to be deferential any more. A new kind of satire was born and for the first time comedians like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore dared to send up the Establishment – at their club of the same name.  For me and for Terence Stamp, my companion in many an adventure in those days, life was a non-stop party, with dolly birds galore and all the time in the world to enjoy them. My beloved London became a playground for my friends and me – a far cry from the black and white gloom of the Fifties: the Sixties was an explosion of Technicolor. But the scene was also incredibly fast-moving. By the time I’d finished
Zulu
and got back to London with some money in my pocket for the first time, Terry was in love with Julie Christie, Bailey was wooing supermodel Jean Shrimpton and a whole new bunch of groups – many of them produced by my friend and fellow Orphan, Mickie Most – were dominating the charts. And then, it was all change partners once again. The clubs and discotheques came and went at a dizzying speed, too. This was the era when Orphans Johnny Gold and Oscar Lerman came into their own with Ad Lib, at which you really could see the Beatles and the Stones on the same dance floor. There was a creative energy around that I don’t think has been seen before or since, and it was impossible not to be drawn in and swept along by it. It really did seem as if people could become famous overnight – although as someone who took eleven years to become an overnight success, I’ve always felt a bit ambivalent about that!