by Greg Tesser
At about the time that Charlton was letting the old moggy out of the carrier, Ossie was being interviewed on a daily – sometimes it seemed like hourly – basis. However, one newspaper interview stood head and shoulders above the rest. The journalist was Ray Connolly, the venue was Peter’s house in Windsor and the result was a candid conversation with Connolly that gained Ossie both new fans and new friends in the media.
His ‘Connolly On Saturday’ column in the London Evening Standard was one of the standout showbiz features of the time. Ray had replaced the snooty Maureen Cleave, and despite a truly bad stammer, his career was very much on the up and up.
During his time at the Standard, Ray interviewed many of the most famous people on the planet, ranging from Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Dusty Springfield. Only three sportsmen were included in his impressive list of subjects: Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali and Peter Osgood.
Later in the 1970s Connolly would receive worldwide recognition for his screenplays of critically acclaimed movies That’ll Be the Day and Stardust in which he worked with David Puttnam, the producer of Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire in 1981. He also wrote and directed the definitive documentary about the ’50s screen idol James Dean entitled, James Dean: The First American Teenager.
I spoke to Ray on the phone, and we arranged for the interview to take place at Ossie’s house in Windsor. The Chelsea star had been interviewed many times before, but he fully realised that this one was special. You see, a chat with Ray Connolly in 1970 meant that as a performer you were very much in the big league. This was not lost on Ossie and he performed superbly, as indeed did his wife Rosemary.
Connolly described Ossie thus: ‘At 23, he is possibly the most exciting footballer in the country. So far this season he ties as leading goal scorer in the Football League with 28 goals. With fan mail running up to 200 letters a week he can truly be described as the Golden Boy of Stamford Bridge.’
He was also quick to pick up on Os’ informality: ‘Peter Osgood is sitting in his socks at his Windsor home. Rosemary, his wife, in fluffy new blue carpet slippers, is knitting and listening, and occasionally correcting (almost pedantically), while Gregory Tesser, his agent, supervises from beneath his hair cream.’
Ray never asked me about my hair cream, but if he had done, I would have told him exactly what I thought of this product. It was called Anzora, it had been on the market since before the First World War, and despite its claims, I found it to be bloody awful! It made my hair feel like it weighed a ton, and even though the company was a regular advertiser in The Amateur Footballer magazine, there was no doubt that in the load-of-rubbish-stakes it was number one!
Ossie tells Ray that life has never been so positive: ‘I have an agent to earn me money and to get me known as a name. I’m doing posters. I’m tied up with a sportswear firm, and I hope to sign a contract with a very large advertising agency. And then I have a deal with Ford from which I get a basic salary as an area sales manager – I don’t work, no, they just use my name in advertisements in the local papers, and people who want to buy cars, ring up – and then there’s a column in a national paper. One day I’d like to own a nice boutique, with trendy gear like they have in Cecil Gee.
‘Really, George Best has had it too good up to now. There’s been nobody to challenge him. I will – although I’ve got a different image from him.’
Ray then outlines the persona that Osgood is trying to project: ‘His image is, in fact, almost the complete opposite to Best. There’s no narcissism about Osgood. He is a handsome, regular, old-fashioned-looking sportsman, and his hair is short, and neatly cut away from his ears. He doesn’t like these long-haired types, he says. He’s open and garrulous and honest, to the point of naiveté.’
As his agent, I made sure that Ossie kept to this clean-cut, yet at the same time very modern image. However, as the King’s Road was catapulted into world consciousness as the ‘hippest place on earth’, and sideburns in London became bushier and bushier and longer and longer, so Ossie adapted accordingly, and effortlessly altered his style, without ever attempting to ape Best.
I have already made mention of Rosemary Osgood’s ‘ordinariness’, which is not a criticism; she was literally a breath of fresh air.
As Ossie himself said: ‘No, Rosemary doesn’t like to go out much, she’d rather sit in. She’s a quiet type, you know, she likes to do the gardening.’
You could see from the outset that Ray had real simpatico with Rosemary. ‘Rosemary Osgood,’ he wrote, ‘is the same age as her husband. She’s terribly house-proud, something that Peter is proud to mention about her. He likes to get home to a spick and span house at night. She hardly ever goes to football, because she can’t get baby-sitters, since all their relatives and friends go to the matches. She won’t be at Wembley today (for the Cup Final) for that reason. She admits, however, that she isn’t really that interested in football, and often wishes that Peter had an ordinary nine to five job.
‘She isn’t looking forward to the World Cup, particularly because she gets lonely sitting in by herself: and she doesn’t like it when Peter goes out at night. He likes to go out to clubs for dinner and a cabaret.’
Some of what she then admitted to Connolly sounds somewhat sad: ‘Course I’m used to it by now. I know he don’t [sic] talk to me when he’s in – just sits there watching television all night, but it is nice to have someone else in the house.’
Peter married Rosemary when both were aged seventeen. Later, two children were born, Anthony and Mark, and as Rosemary once admitted to me: ‘Do you know, by the time Peter’s thirty-five years old, he could be a grandfather?’
As the conversation continued, Os’ frankness about his ambitions and his life in general increased sentence-by-sentence. He told Ray that his number one ambition ‘is to be a rich man’. Connolly, a man so adept (like that great TV inquisitor of the past, John Freeman) at getting behind the façade of the particular celebrity he was interviewing wrote: ‘He wants to make enough money and to collect enough business interests around him during the next six years or so to make sure that he never has to work at a full-time job again as long as he lives after getting out of football.
‘He wants, he says, to be able to sit back and enjoy himself. To be a playboy (‘Well, a married playboy’), to be able to buy racehorses, to be able to go anywhere to play golf, or just to go off to the Continent for a couple of weeks should he feel like it. He never wants to have to worry about money again.’
As for his ‘playboy image’, Rosemary made the point that ‘when he started going out with me, his parents were very surprised because he’d never bothered with girls before’.
Ossie wasn’t slow to highlight past misdemeanours and in an extremely frank admission of his shortcomings when making the breakthrough into the Chelsea first team, he said: ‘It happened so fast then that I didn’t know how to handle it. I had a bad image then, but really I was just growing up and I thought I could get away with pranks and being silly, but I just couldn’t. Docherty fined me about £500 in six months. I was getting fined just about every week.
‘The only thing I’m really ashamed about was when I hung a contraceptive on someone’s back on an aeroplane. I was just a country bumpkin, but I got fined about £80. Docherty went mad. But it really was funny at the time. It was tremendous. It just hung there getting longer and longer.’
Peter Osgood loved being interviewed. He was always articulate, and on this occasion, he was refreshingly honest, as well being naturally amusing. As I glanced at my watch, Ray Connolly rose from his chair. It was nigh-on ten o’clock and Rosemary was in the process of preparing her husband’s Ovaltine. It was almost time for bed. We bade our farewells, and Ray offered to give me a lift. I told him I lived in Hampstead, north-west London, and I think he was residing somewhere near Twickenham, so it was decided he would transport me to a convenient station.
During the comparatively short journey, we
spoke, or most probably I did. However, he was extremely complimentary about Ossie, and when I left his car and gave him a wave and a smile, I felt contented. An interview with Ray Connolly was another feather in our collective cap, as it would, in my view, enhance the Chelsea striker’s reputation enormously. It would also show to the public that unlike so many sportsmen of his vintage, Peter was a real character: a rebel, but unlike James Dean, a rebel with a positive cause.
By this stage my phone – one of those dinky Trim Phone jobs, so popular in the late 1960s and early ’70’s that chirped like a demented garden bird – was chirping almost every second with desperate scribes demanding to get a few quotes on the ‘Little Black Book Affair’. Anyway I asked Ossie more than once about this storm in a teacup. As far as he was concerned, Charlton did have a little black book, and Ian Hutchinson later had his own take on the whole affair with a story of how Ossie pricked more than one nerve of big Jack’s after a benefit match. Thinking that he, Ossie, was in it, he asked Jack about it.Charlton responded by saying: ‘It’s not for you, it’s for that big twat next to you.’ As Hutchinson so succinctly put it: ‘I was that twat!’
During the filming of Kicking and Screaming, Hutch was very candid about Leeds. ‘They’d stand on your foot,’ he stated. ‘They’d say “you’re only a youngster, come over here and I’ll break your leg”. And, “You go past me again and you won’t do it again”. But it’s not like one or two of them, there’s like eight or nine of ’em all doing the same thing. As soon as you started giving it back to them, then they started what we called “crying”. They used to shout, “Referee, referee”. They were terrible.’
Ossie was often dismissive of the Leeds’ football philosophy, telling me that ‘they were a machine, and when it came to a one-off cup-tie we were so much better than Leeds because we were capable of enjoying ourselves, whereas they always stuck to the same plan. They were rigid.’
It had a build up like no other, this FA Cup final, which without knowing it, displayed in a sporting context the new landscape of this ‘sceptred isle’.
On 11 April 1970, the ill-fated Apollo 13, commanded by Captain James Lovell Jr, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ – their swansong, so to speak – was number one in America. The weather was murky with strong northerly winds and smacked more of John Keats (his ‘face hath felt the winter’s wind’) than of spring and gambolling lambs.
Just prior to the big day, I had spent a relaxing afternoon in the company of Peter Osgood strolling along the King’s Road. Our main port-of-call had been that temple of the trendsetters, I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. Ossie, who often complained that the shirts he bought were always ‘far too short for my very long arms’, really liked this emporium, this epitome of 1960s’ style, and because of my association with the company – our family business supplied them with a seemingly endless supply of ‘personality posters’ – I was able to obtain a selection of sleek shirts for him, gratis of course.
The whole chic King’s Road sartorial scene never really came naturally to Ossie. Alan Hudson was a natural cool dude, whose every garment displayed impeccable taste, whereas Os was not a King’s Road natural in the fashion stakes.
Now, discretion is something you learn very early on in the PR business, so when Ossie asked me to ‘sort out a few shirts’ for a guy called Stan Flashman, I didn’t ask any questions as to why. The only problem about this was that Flashman had, in Ossie’s words ‘a massive neck’, so my task was far from easy. Twenty-odd inch collars back in 1970 were rare, to say the least.
Some people would maintain that Flashman was, in every respect, larger than life. Others would be just a shade more jaundiced in their opinion of the man. He was, to all intents and purposes, a ‘successful businessman’. As he himself said: ‘I call myself a ticket broker. Some people call me a ticket tout, and some people call me a spiv. They can call me what they like if the colour of their money is right.’
‘Fat Stan’, as he was known, claimed he could provide a ticket for any event, from the men’s singles final at Wimbledon to a Buckingham Palace garden party. It was even said – probably by the man himself – that he had sold an invitation to Princess Anne’s wedding!
He operated out of a seedy office in King’s Cross, and there was no doubt that football was his bread-and-butter, major Wembley finals and the like in particular. He relied heavily on players ‘supplying’ him with these tickets, and to be fair in an era when professionals were paid just a mere drop in the ocean compared to today’s £100,000 a-week-plus stars, surely no blame should be attached to these players for attempting to garner just a few extra quid.
He was always a shadowy figure, and later he gained a fame of sorts as chairman of Barnet Football Club, this fame later turning sour as his whole dodgy business operation placed this once-famous amateur football club in the mire. By the early 1990s, his ‘empire’ had crashed and he was a broken man.
The son of an East End tailor, his first attempts at making money involved selling pots and pans and sheets and ties in Houndsditch. It was during the early 1960s that he had his ‘eureka moment’.
‘I was a Spurs fan and saw a bloke selling tickets outside White Hart Lane,’ he later recalled. ‘So, I bought a couple and then sold them on to a punter and made a quick tenner. I soon realised that if you go up to someone offering to sell something, there are only two things he can say – yes or no. So I hung around buying and selling for a couple of hours and made £40. That was more than a whole week’s wages for me in those days.’
He soon adopted the archetypal gangster persona, prowling the mean streets of the capital in dark glasses, dealing solely in cash. There were rivals out there, and these hard-nosed individuals soon became so worried about this new kid on the block that they became determined to thwart him before he was able to rule any kind of roost. Once they even resorted to handcuffing and gagging him, as they rifled his pockets and took wads of FA Cup final tickets plus £1,000.
But he had staying power – that there was no doubt. He was an extremely volatile character, and I suppose the only similarity with the other famous Flashman, the character created by Thomas Hughes in his classic novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was the fact that both were infamous bullies.
One such example of Flashman’s ‘erratic behaviour’ was when he screamed at a female fan: ‘Do you want me to permanently mark your face?’
One-time Barnet boss Barry Fry, who had an ongoing love-hate relationship with ‘Fat Stan’ summed it all up like this: ‘If you didn’t know Stanley you would think he was an ignorant pig. He’s certainly a Jekyll and Hyde character.’
Judging from the brief conversations I had with the man, I would say there was definitely more of the latter than the former!
The first time I was introduced to him, I must admit I felt more than just a tad nervous. He was an intimidating individual; a great hulk of a man, coarse in his habits and lacking all those natural social graces we take for granted. His massive neck – bulbous gargantuan mounds of greasy looking flesh – wobbled every time he uttered a few words. I immediately likened him to the actor Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, for despite his bulk and lack of class, he seemed to move like some grotesque ballet dancer.
He didn’t actually ever directly thank me for obtaining those elegant shirts from I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet; he just grunted his version of thanks. A bit like Rik Gunnell back in ’64, he gave me the willies. I always made sure that on the rare occasions I met him, I was the typical fawning sycophant! What a coward!
Much, much later when all kinds of cats exited a variety of different bags, and the game was up for Flashman, he was declared bankrupt, undoubtedly avoided being a guest of Her Majesty because of ill health, and disappeared to suburban normalcy in Ilford. The million dollar question was: ‘Where had all the money gone?’
He died, aged just fifty-nine in 1999, following a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
> I must say you soon find out that all the many acquaintances you have made all want to be ‘matey peeps’ when it comes to tickets for a big occasion. Taxi drivers and taxi controllers and trades people of all shapes and sizes bombarded me with incessant phone calls, and it was always the same patter: ‘Hello Greg, how are you? Hope you’re well? How’s Ossie – looking forward to the final, I guess. I forgot to mention, by the way, I have this case of wine or this suit or this bundle of LPs or don’t worry about that trip to Slough or Windsor or wherever, I’ll put it on the office account.’ Then came the punch line: ‘You couldn’t do me a favour, could you? I’d be so grateful: any chance of a ticket for the final? I’ll pay you, of course, and I don’t mind paying well over the odds.’
Time and again, I had to bite my tongue, pretend to be ‘ever so sorry’, and somehow say no. Even a mere twenty-four hours before the final, I was taking such calls. By this time I was thoroughly cheesed-off with the whole thing.
Unlike so many of the surfaces that the professional player of the late 1960s had to contend with, Wembley Stadium was known throughout the world for its playing area. There was always a beautifully manicured bowling green; a green swathe so perfectly produced that even the most mediocre journeyman of a footballer would surely be capable of at least trapping the ball in one movement. Yet, this was not the case on 11 April 1970, and it was all down to some deranged individual’s madcap idea and a load of horses.
Having collected my ticket – left for me by Ossie – I took my seat and gazed in bewilderment at the sight before me. Gone was the elegant green pitch with its broad brushstrokes of uniformed patterns, and in its stead was something that resembled Brighton beach following a particularly nasty Mods and Rockers rumble!