The show brought me to important people’s notice for the first time, but my next job, with the great director Joan Littlewood, was the one that changed the nature of my career. After leaving RADA in disgust, Joan worked in radio in Manchester. The BBC there was ruled by Alfie Bradley and Olive Shapley. They were unashamedly revolutionary left-wingers so Joan was very much at home. She was an innovative broadcaster, one of the first to do interviews on location with ordinary people. Her questions were sometimes naïve, as when she asked a miner, ‘Tell me, how long is your shaft?’ She turned to the theatre and formed a brilliant team producing original work in Manchester. Her company, known as Theatre Workshop, then took over the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East. The establishment began taking notice. Fings Ain’t What They Used to Be and Oh What a Lovely War blasted the popular musicals of Ivor Novello out of the water, and her plays like Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey were putting characters on stage which had never been seen there before. And actors. Joan liked real people. She liked clowns and characters. She rescued mavericks from oblivion and made them into stars, then was furious when they moved on to make more money.
22 August
Fabulous Prom. Young Chinese guy, Lang Lang, who no one had heard of. Rachmaninoff’s Third, that old war horse, reborn by this youngster, he radiates joy at his genius. Beams at the orchestra, bounces on his stool and plays like an angel. The audience started indifferent and ended ecstatic. I leaped to my feet and yelped with delight. John tugged at my shirt. ‘Yes, all right, calm down dear,’ but he was thrilled too. A great star is born and we were there. Must get the recording. (I wonder if you’ll hear me screaming.)
I managed to get an audition with Joan and stood on the stage in my best dress, giving her my St Joan speech. Loud laughter came from the stalls. Not what I had hoped for as, with tears in my eyes, I contemplated being burnt at the stake. A square-shaped woman leaped on to the stage, pulling a cap down over her brows, big eyes bulging. ‘Stop, stop that rubbish! You’re a clown, a lovely clown. Let’s have some fun, bird.’ Crouching round me, legs astride, bouncing up and down, she led me into a wild improvisation. From that day on I worshipped the woman. She released my creativity and made me feel clever. She could be a cow because of her dedication to creating exciting theatre – it was absolute and nothing was allowed to impede it.
Joan gave me a small part in a musical by Wolf Mankowitz called Make Me an Offer. The small part grew during improvisations in rehearsal and one day Joan needed something to cover a scene change, so she ordered Monty Norman to write me a song. ‘It’s Sort of Romantic’ stopped the show on the first night. I did an encore and still they cheered. Eventually, in true Theatre Workshop tradition, I harangued the audience, explaining I couldn’t keep singing it over and over so would they please shut up. I stole all the notices. It was my first experience of that sort of success and it scared me. I thought audiences were expecting so much that I would disappoint them. For several nights Joan stood in the wings with me before my entrance, making me close my eyes and imagine ‘you’re in a dark, dark forest and out there is light and warmth and welcome. On you go, you lucky bird.’ And on I bounded with the help of a shove from Joan.
In the pubs and cafés of Angel Lane in Stratford East, Joan’s company talked about politics and I listened. Joan and the people round her were a huge influence in forming my political conciousness. I felt at home with them. When I was fourteen I had joined the Young Communists’ League, unbeknown to my parents, mainly because there were a few long-haired Greek gods in the membership. Stalin, the uprisings in Poland and Hungary and the building of the Berlin Wall had disillusioned me. The Workers’ Revolutionary Party, very important for many people in the profession, did not appeal. My experience of the Blitz, the shock of Royan and the Fricker boy and above all the invention of the H-Bomb gave me, in common with many of my generation, a profound fear that underlay my whole existence. The Bomb overshadowed everything. We knew how close the human race was to annihilation. The Korean war in which two million died, the rattlings of the coming war in Vietnam, and later the Cuban Missile Crisis were powder kegs. It seemed to me the most important issue of our age.
When CND was formed in 1958, the idealism stirred up by Joan and her friends found an outlet. I sat in Grosvenor Square and marched and chanted and petitioned all over the place. In 1962 I made an LP with the folk singer and composer Sydney Carter, curiously named Putting Out the Dustbins considering it was all about CND and pacifism. As a filler I recorded a song of Sydney’s about giving up smoking called ‘My Last Cigarette’ which to my chagrin and, I am sure, Sydney’s was issued as a single and eclipsed the passionate political message of the rest of the LP. Love and peace were the aspect of the coming sixties that appealed to me more than the King’s Road hype. To ban the Bomb didn’t seem foolish, it seemed essential before it got into the hands of some maniac like Hitler. The arguments about the balance of power seemed not to take into account the rogue element in the human race. Not everyone is sensible enough to say this must never happen. It already had. Twice.
11 September
Horror. Driving to Oxford to chair a conference on the treatment of young people in prisons. Heard on the news that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York. Thought what an awful accident. Then there was a second. Couldn’t comprehend what was going on. It didn’t occur to me that it was deliberate. Turned on the TV in my room at the Randolph and the full dawning nightmare had me shaking and weeping. Phoned John and Jo and Matt in France. They knew nothing so I told them to turn on the telly. Went to the college to a session and everyone was stunned and disbelieving. Quite a few Quakers so we had a silent meeting. Words are useless anyway. The images of people floating down having jumped from the windows and what must be happening inside that hellhole are eating into my brain, I am appalled at the implications of what could follow. I fear the reaction of the Americans led by that idiot Bush. It is as shocking an occurrence as Hiroshima or Nagasaki and like them could change the world for ever.
My parents were terrified by my political goings-on. They were worried that I would jeopardise my growing success. Actors were expected to keep their opinions to themselves lest they offended sections of their audience. To stand up and be counted was new and dangerous behaviour in the theatre. Corin Redgrave and many others, including Vanessa, suffered professionally for boldly fighting for what they believed.
My ideal scenario was to change the world or maybe just one or two minds with my work. That was the crusade of the people working in the new television and newly emerging British film industry. The writers at the Royal Court Theatre, too, were intent on overturning the status quo. Joan’s manifesto summed up her objectives:
The theatre must face up to the problems of its time; it cannot ignore the poverty and human suffering which increases every day. It cannot with sincerity close its eyes to the disasters of its time. If the theatre of today would reach the heights achieved 4,000 years ago in Greece and 400 years ago in Elizabethan England it must face up to such problems. To those who say that such affairs are not the concern of the theatre or that the theatre should confine itself to treading the paths of beauty and dignity we would say, read Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Calderon, Molière, Lope de Vega, Schiller and the rest.
12 September
Not easy chairing a meeting when everyone is so distraught. I pointed out that we were powerless over the big consequences but here we had an opportunity to make some small gesture. We are dealing with young people caught up in violence and anger. The men that perpetrated these appalling acts were fuelled by a similar rage surely. We have got to try and understand why people do such things before we can stop it. Can’t wait to get back to France to talk to John, Jo and Matt about it all. It’s a time to cling together and value what is good and gentle.
In the next revue I appeared in was a young man who has since lived his life by a
credo just like Joan’s. In 1962 the renowned socialist director Ken Loach was Kenneth Williams’ understudy in One Over the Eight. He may have been planning the revolution in the wings, or just praying for Kenneth’s good health – only Kenneth could milk lines like ‘Bleeoomin’ great war clouds are leeoomin’ on the horizon’ for laughs. The chief joy of One Over the Eight for me was meeting and becoming friends with the writer of the show, Peter Cook, and Kenneth, the maverick star. We ran for some months, egged on by our dance captain Irving Davies’ exhortation, ‘Come on, darlings, eyes, teeth and tits,’ in the West End of London, which the American Time magazine declared to be the most happening city on earth.
The swinging sixties were upon us. Children’s Hour with Uncle Mac ended in 1961 in the same year as the contraceptive pill went on sale. We grew up with a vengeance. I went to the King’s Road and bought my regulation Mary Quant miniskirt at Bazaar, one of the new boutiques full of sparkling new fashions. I got myself some Courrèges white boots to wear with it. They were a bugger to clean. In my late twenties I was a bit old for it all, but my Vidal Sassoon fringe came over my eyebrows and covered my forehead lines.
On the face of it, I was in there swinging with the best of them but somehow I didn’t feel very dizzy. Neither did Kenneth Williams. One night after the show, when I gave him a lift back to his chaste flat on the back of my Lambretta, he waved his furled umbrella at Eros as we circled Piccadilly Circus, crying, ‘Where is it? Where is it all happening? Where are all these orgies? Why haven’t we been asked?’
8
The Young Man
REPERTORY THEATRE WAS STILL thriving in England in the late fifties and sixties, a lot of it featuring Sheila Hancock, most of it pretty tatty, but Liverpool had been one of the best. By the time John arrived in 1960 to start his one-year RADA contract, Willard Stoker, who ran the theatre, was old and tired, and the repertoire had become jaded. A local powerhouse called Maud Carpenter had a disproportionate say in the choices. When a Chekhov was suggested she wailed, ‘The Seagull? The Seagull? I’m havin’ no more of them bird plays. When we did The Wild Duck we emptied the house.’
John’s first play must have slipped past her guard, for she surely would not have liked Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. One of the local paper reviews hints that from the start John’s style was at odds with the rest of the cast: ‘The only performance which gets outside the bounds firmly established by thirty years of English acting is John Thaw’s Joxer. He makes the character a little old man out of Lowry. Sprightly, shoulder-shrugging and sniffling little man whose only permanent terror is Juno.’
20 September
The world feels a much dodgier place. Going through the Channel Tunnel was a bit scary. With terrorism you don’t know where it will strike unlike the wartime raids with nice sirens to get you ready to be killed. Lots of dire warnings of possible attacks, gas, smallpox, tanks at Heathrow, etc. But I am more concerned with my little personal drama. What is this new-sounding cough John has? Will they be able to operate? What will the next scan show? Bugger Osama bin Laden. What about John Thaw?
The attitude of his fellow rep actors appalled John. Tired out and often disillusioned, they struggled just to get the shows on, whereas in an interview to the local paper he said, ‘You know, it rather horrifies me. I’m so single-minded about acting. I worry a good part to death, stay awake at night thinking about it.’ He continued studying anything he could lay his hands on to learn his craft. The girls in the local library in Liverpool fought to stamp his books and overlooked his fines, having become fans of this bad boy of the local rep. He had an edge that disturbed and thrilled them. Alma Cullen, then one of the girls from the library, writes: ‘He was part of the wave of actors, writers and directors – mostly from the North – that was then sweeping away so much dead wood from literature, theatre and film. It’s hard now to convey the thrill of seeing, albeit from the sidelines, the strongholds of the privileged falling to tough invaders like John who didn’t talk posh but confidently offered their work as the outward expression of a political vision. What an inspiration they were, even to the girls at the library.’
The girls in the library were the first of many women drawn to the mysterious centre that they felt they could understand and comfort given a chance.
John struggled to bring something to second-rate material, knowing that elsewhere exciting things were going on without him. At the Cavern, in the same city, the Beatles were causing a stir with a new sound and he was stuck doing old-fashioned plays in dated productions.
Jennifer came up to see him and, John, adrift again and away from all his friends, begged her to commit to him. She had not yet finished at RADA and marriage was the last thing she wanted. They had night-long anguished talks, but could not resolve the issue of their conflicting ambitions. When John returned to London on visits to Vic in Highbury, he was often in tears about his dashed dreams of perfect love and companionship.
He was not completely friendless in Liverpool. While most of the actors found him a pain in the arse, with his moods and critical attitude, two men saw his worth and supported him. Freddie Farley had come over from Australia as a protégé of Frank Thring, a larger-than-life actor whose success was overshadowed by his outrageous behaviour. The rampantly homosexual Thring went through with a grand wedding with all the trimmings, including Vivien Leigh as maid of honour, and as he sashayed down the aisle with his new wife on his arm, he spied a young man in the congregation and squealed, ‘You’re prettier than the bride, dear!’ Freddie, in contrast, claimed he was asexual, ‘an old virgin’, but replaced this lack with genuine devotion to his friends. A learned man, he gently took John under his wing, directed his best performances and generally held his hand.
Freddie’s compatriot and dearest companion, Barry J. Gordon, not only helped John but laid to rest another of his prejudices. With his belligerently male upbringing, it is understandable that John had no tolerance of homosexuals. Indeed, I was told by a gay friend that he had been mentally bullied by John and some of his friends at RADA. The victim was elegantly middle-class and it was before Jennifer infiltrated John’s barrier of class hatred, so he was no doubt doubly heinous in John’s eyes.
Regardless of John’s prejudices, Barry offered his friendship. The approach he chose, as befitted his brash Aussie personality, was to be utterly open about his sexual orientation with John, as he was with everyone else – a brave move when most homosexuals in those days lived in dread of discovery.
Barry was the first openly gay man that John had ever got to know and, once Barry had assured him he had no designs on his body, John was surprised to discover that he could like and respect him. It is a measure of his trust that one day he asked Barry to accompany him from Liverpool on a trip to seek out his mother. She was working in a dingy pub isolated on a bomb site in an insalubrious part of Manchester. Barry sat discreetly in the corner, watching John perched on a barstool holding an awkward conversation with a bosomy blonde. She was a far cry from Jennifer Hilary.
The two men left the pub in silence. Eventually John blurted out, ‘I’m glad I came, but I don’t think I’ll be bothering again.’ Barry knew better than to probe further and the visit was never mentioned again. His tactful handling of this difficult youth was rewarded when one night in the wings, waiting with John for an entrance, Barry whispered that he was nervous. John looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘You shouldn’t be. You’re unique.’
22 September
In Lincoln to raise money for a Quaker home for troubled boys. I looked out of my hotel room window when I woke and saw a cross in the sky. Like a vision. After a while I realised there was a heavy mist concealing the cathedral it was on, so it seemed to be floating. Very odd though. I hope it’s a good omen or is it a signal of the agony of the Cross? It is certainly a suffering old world and I’m not exactly dancing with joy.
A little later, while still in Liverpool, John met Ken Parry. A rotund, Dickensian figure with no neck t
o speak of, he is known in the profession as Campari, partly because that was how J. G. Devlin, the Irish actor, pronounced his name, but mainly because he is blatantly and joyously the campest thing on two legs. Someone defined camp as the trait of trivialising the important and dramatising the frivolous and Ken is queen of the genre. He will declare, ‘I’m a nasty washer-up’, as if admitting to mass murder, whereas when he was diagnosed with a deadly illness, he threw a jolly ‘suicide party’. He has fed, watered and pampered numerous young actors and actresses who call him ‘Mother’ whilst he calls them, regardless of sex, ‘Alice’. Before he took John on as an ‘Alice’ he solemnly warned, in his posh Wigan accent, ‘You want to be careful what you say to me or if you befriend me – I’m an awful old poof.’ John assured him that Freddie Farley and Barry J. Gordon ‘had brought me up, so forget about all that’.
For many years Ken fussed over John like a mother hen, giving him a bed when he needed it, taking food up to Highbury or feeding him in his flat in Russell Square and, later, Islington. ‘I’ve a beautiful home. I call it the Immaculate Conception, it’s so clean.’
On one occasion, Ken went to Brighton to stay with a friend and Tom and John pestered him with phone calls about how hungry they were. Eventually he came home early to be greeted at Victoria station by the two herberts in dirty raincoats holding a bunch of dandelions. Once they caught him without his teeth; he swears their toothless jokes started from there.
The Two of Us Page 10