The Two of Us

by Sheila Hancock

  But in 2003 Geoffrey was walking by Camden Lock when he saw a familiar figure coming towards him. Recognisable even beneath a long black beard and shoulder-length hair, dressed in flowing robes obviously worn by a religious cult of some sort, was their friend of old. He was still enraged, ranting as they had when rubbishing their fellow students’ performances: ‘They’re all wankers, kid, they’ve got it coming. The end of the world, fire and bloody brimstone. It’s all coming to an end, kid. That’ll show the fuckers.’ Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.*

  11 November

  Very low and frightened. The world is a mess. Wonderful disillusioned quote from Albert Camus on the Spanish Civil War seems to fit: ‘Men learnt that we can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.’

  John’s domestic life was transformed from his Highbury days; Ken Parry was rendered redundant by Sally: ‘When they got married my job was done.’ Sally was making their Notting Hill home comfortable, and when their baby, Abigail, was born, they enjoyed a period of great happiness. John adored his daughter and was happy changing nappies and helping in the house. He was patient, gentle and loving with the child. When his old friends came round to carouse there was now a baby upstairs, and it could be awkward. Sometimes Sally felt left out when they talked about their ambitions for she had none. If she did ever mention pursuing her acting career, John would say, ‘I’m the actor in the house.’ On rare occasions when he was out of work he became morose and unapproachable and she didn’t know how to help him. At other times his love was overwhelming. She was only twenty-two, with no experience of this kind of volatile temperament.

  Not long after they were married, John’s Z-Cars friend, Ian Kennedy-Martin, came up with an idea for him to play the lead in a military police series, Redcap. John Bryce and Lloyd Shirley, the producers, nurtured him in the role and this, his first big series, was a success. People started to recognise him in the streets and he found it difficult to cope with.

  John began to realise that his future would be mainly in the medium of television. An interview appeared, showing a certain arrogant defensiveness, ‘I asked John Thaw if he ever doubted he would be a successful actor. He just said, “No. Unlike some actors I have no ambition to play Hamlet or Romeo. What bores they were. Didn’t even get the girl in the end. I prefer meatier roles.”’

  Sally thought that he should pursue his theatre career and he accused her of being an intellectual snob, only interested in reviews in the Sunday Times from Harold Hobson. She wanted him to do more jobs like the one at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in La Musica by Marguerite Duras. (A later colleague, Oliver Ford-Davies, saw John in the production and, when he worked in Kavanagh, blackmailed him with the threat, ‘If you’re not careful I’ll tell the film crew you’re very good in avant-garde French drama.’) But John earned virtually nothing in Edinburgh whereas he could make good money now on television. He berated Sally for having no idea what it was like to be poor. She became alienated by his rage. Eventually, she turned to someone else who was kind to her. It was a meaningless relationship, but it destroyed what was left of their three-year- old marriage. Walk away. Turn your back. As with his mother, John did not question why this had happened. He, like Sally, was devastated, but too hurt and inexperienced to put it right.

  18 November

  Molly Mae’s birthday. Lovely party at Abs and Nigel’s. All Sally’s family there. I left John to talk to her for a long time. It must be awful for her to know how ill he is but not be part of his life. Although thankfully they are now good friends. Life is too short, God knows, to hold grudges. How can people who have been married and have kids together manage to walk away and never contact one another? It’s beyond me. To be that close and then just say I’m never going to see that person again. But then I’m hopeless at goodbyes. I’m an awful clinger.

  Like Jennifer, Sally came out of her relationship with John wiser and stronger. He opened her eyes to the inequalities in society and the importance of politics, even threatening to lock her in the lavatory if she didn’t vote for Wilson in 1964. Very soon she pulled her life together, went to university and became a much-respected socialist feminist historian. And of course they had their beautiful daughter Abigail.

  After the break-up of his marriage John first fled to stay with Nicol and then moved in with Ken Parry. He went back to his bachelor existence, bitterly disappointed. He hated seeing his beloved daughter only occasionally. Sitting glumly in a launderette with Jimmy Bolam, watching their washing go round, he muttered, ‘Look at us, Stars on bloody Sunday.’ Ken drew the line at doing his ironing, wailing, ‘I’m only an amateur poof, dear, I may be a mother but I can’t iron, I just can’t do it.’ John always liked a neatly ironed shirt so he invested in an ironing board. When he became moody Ken would confront him with, ‘Now listen up, Mr Piss Quick, you behave,’ and remind him ‘You have the privilege of going to your bedroom if you’re depressed. I never inflict discipline on anyone.’ He proved a rather better mother than Dorothy Thaw, keeping his sex life apart: ‘Not one of them ever saw me with a man.’ All John’s energy became focussed on his acting and he was getting very good at it, but he didn’t know how to achieve his dream of perfect love and a safe family life. Ian Kennedy-Martin and his wife Barbara befriended him at this time and he observed how happy they were. He wanted some of that.

  John was doing telly in Manchester when his agent called to say that one of his wild friends, Victor Henry, had gone AWOL before starting rehearsals on a West End comedy called So What About Love? Victor was another brilliant young actor set on a path to destruction. Not long after, his car hit a lamp-post, leaving him in a coma for three years before he died. Arnold Wesker, who had a difficult time with him, said: ‘Victor came from Yorkshire, one of that generation of working-class actors who strutted cockily through the profession scorning everyone middle or upper class and dismissing with contempt anything such as intellect or genuine emotion with which they couldn’t cope . . . He had wit and was possessed of a kind of passion albeit contaminated by that most insidious of all psychological states – the inferiority complex.’

  Some of that description makes it clear why John’s name came up to replace Victor. John, obviously, was different. He came from Lancashire.

  Michael White, the producer, and Herbert Wise, the director, wanted him to take over the lead but Sheila Hancock, the star, was insisting on meeting him before it could become an official offer. John’s initial reaction was to say, ‘Piss off.’ Some bloody sitcom queen, loud mouth from the Seven Stars, vetting an actor with a track record of non-stop success seemed a liberty. But they were willing to pay his fare from Manchester and he could see his mates. Besides, Beattie and Dad thought she was lovely on the telly.

  Sheila Hancock was late and he was livid at being kept waiting. Eventually she burst in with a flurry of ‘Darlings, I’m so sorry,’ and dropped shopping bags everywhere. She was wearing a full-length red fox fur coat over a miniskirt up to her arse. He was buggered if he was going to kow-tow to her. She drew up a chair and sat down too close to him; he hated people invading his space. She crossed her legs and out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed her knickers.

  28 November

  John went to a reception at Buckingham Palace. He had a blood transfusion to pep him up. Then had to go up a huge flight of stairs in front of the cameras. The Queen asked very fondly how he was.

  * I have since discovered that Michael Blackham appears in his own one-man show, The Tree of Life.

  9

  The Woman

  IN 1962 TOM STOPPARD wrote of me, ‘Sheila Hancock fits into the new clutch of toughened individualists now ousting the tradition of sweet young things who once conquered all with a wistful lift of a false eyelash.’ So there, Snow White. I think it was a compliment when Stoppard went on to liken me to ‘a tired chrysanthemum, who could put on a cruel blue look that could freeze a hummingbird to an
oven door’.

  When that was written I was playing the lead in a hit show in the West End, thanks to a young impresario called Michael Codron who was challenging the old guard with new plays and new actors. While John was heralded as a ‘young lion’ of TV, I was breaking new ground in the theatre. Michael cast Edward Woodward and me in a virtual two-hander play written by Charles Dyer, who like Pinter had been a fellow actor in rep. It was designed by Vic Symonds, but he never invited me home to Highbury. None of us was the usual West End fare. The play was called Rattle of a Simple Man. At last my name was up in lights above the title. The first night was a triumph and, of course, my father wept with joy. After the champagne, at one o’clock in the morning, we read the rave reviews. It should have been the glamorous night of my dreams. Instead it ended with Tony and his friend Barry helping Alec and me push my Morris Minor, which had replaced the Lambretta, up the Charing Cross Road, when it refused to start.

  Having achieved the success of my childhood ambitions, I was working far too hard to enjoy any of Kenneth’s orgies, even if I’d known where they were. As well as my theatre work, I was doing the TV sitcoms that John was so snooty about. An innovative BBC producer called Dennis Main Wilson, affection-ately known as Dennis Main Drain, had seen me in revue. He was a wiry, scarecrow of a man with brown mouth and fingers from his habitual smoking. A wild enthusiast, he would often literally fall off his chair laughing at rehearsals. His antennae detected much talent for the BBC. He was behind many of their biggest successes, from The Goons on radio through to Steptoe, Hancock, Till Death Do Us Part, and numerous other classics. He discovered many artistes, often from the theatre, of which he was an avid fan. This was where he saw Ben Elton, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. He put Kenneth Williams into Hancock’s Half-Hour after seeing him play the Dauphin in St Joan. After seeing me in One Over the Eight, he suggested me for a new sitcom that took place in the unpromising setting of a clothing factory. The Rag Trade, written by Ronnie Wolfe and Ronnie Chesney, was an instant success.

  It was the first show in which women got most of the laughs. We were a motley crew. Tiny Esma Cannon, fluttering with confusion, doing a lot of falling into boxes. Myself as Carole, flirty and daft, frequently running around in my undies as the factory model. Also draped around the sewing machines were Wanda Ventham, Ann Beach, Barbara Windsor and many other colourful lasses. Miriam Karlin, as our union leader, started a national catchphrase when, every episode, she blew her whistle and shouted, ‘Everybody out!’ A succession of sitcoms followed; they might not have furthered my desire to change the world, but they raised my public profile. I specialised in dizzy blondes regarded as kooky, which was then considered an attractive thing for a woman to be. The titles Mr Digby, Darling, The Bed-Sit Girl and Now Take My Wife, show that The Female Eunuch had not yet been written.

  If we girls were stuck in a rut, the boys were charging through taboo barriers in comedy. It was said of the Oxbridge Beyond the Fringe boys, who changed the course of revue, ‘They don’t know the meaning of good taste.’ That was what a lot of us found refreshing but also disturbing. In 1963 cricket got rid of the snooty gentlemen players, and the Great Train Robbers were admired for cocking a snook at authority – the old values were being vigorously shaken. Sacred cows were shot at in the theatre and on telly. In That Was The Week That Was our leaders were mocked. In 1963 the Profumo scandal exposed the murky goings-on of the gentry. They were shown to be sleazy liars. Or spies. The establishment had been home to public schoolboys and Oxbridge graduates Philby, Burgess, Maclean and later Blunt, who now proved to be traitors, or idealists according to your point of view.

  4 December

  The US has withdrawn from anti-ballistic missile treaty. Well, that’s helpful of them. Elizabeth Fry on the banknotes. Is it the first woman? Certainly the first Quaker. A gutsy lady. I knew all about her prison work but I didn’t know she had eleven children. How did they do it, these women?Same as Mary Livingstone who trekked all over the place with David, setting up schools, planning his trips whilst dropping babies all over the place. Mind you, she ended up in a lunatic asylum.

  In 1968 stage censorship was abolished. It had become very foolish and had to go. On the night after Princess Margaret’s marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, I changed the lyrics of my song in Make Me an Offer to: ‘It’s sort of romantic, like Margaret and Tone.’ We received a stern reprimand from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 was a farce. The prosecution counsel, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones complained of ‘bouts of sexual intercourse with the emphasis always on the pleasure and the satisfaction of sensuality’. That was exactly what everyone, apart from poor Mervyn, was after in the sixties, with the liberation of the pill. His case was lost when he asked, ‘Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servant to read?’

  There was a backlash to all this new-found freedom. I did a television play in 1964, with Thora Hird, called Say Nothing, in which there were some off-screen huffing and puffing noises depicting sexual intercourse. There was a leader in the Express the next day and dozens of letters leading to Mary Whitehouse forming her campaign of cleaning up the media.

  For my parents it was difficult to adjust. For me too. I was torn between the uninhibited new world opening up and the more restricted structure of my upbringing. Exciting things were happening for me, which I had to play down for fear of upsetting Alec, for whom work was thin on the ground. Rattle of a Simple Man was the hot ticket in town. The story of a football fan visiting a prostitute during a trip to London for a match was considered daring for the West End. There was a lot of talk about me undressing on stage; considered particularly risqué was the removal of my make-up. I got a lot of press coverage. Many big stars came backstage to praise me, although Joan Littlewood was so bored she left in the interval. Famous people asked me out to the Savoy Grill, Le Caprice or The Ivy, and I found it hard to resist, but felt obliged to go straight home. I could have been the toast of the town, instead I was in my kitchen, having my toast with baked beans.

  When I returned home after the show to find Alec out with his mates, sometimes till the small hours, sometimes all night, I felt resentful. Nor was I best pleased when I found our home full of his carousing friends. The poor man could not win. They were entertaining company though, including Patrick Magee, rollicking Irish actor, Ruskin Spear, Royal Academician and rabble-rouser, Johnny Briggs, young, perky, up-and-coming actor, and Alan Lake, passionate gypsy, who later married Diana Dors and shot himself when she died. On one occasion I too let loose. I did a charity appearance with Peter O’Toole one afternoon. He invited me back to his dressing room where he was holding court during the run of the rather melancholy Brecht saga, Baal, in which he was appearing. As a tediously earnest young actress I was struck by what a lark he seemed to be having with his friends. For a couple of hours I joined them. I staggered back to my theatre and, according to a bewildered Teddy Woodward the next day, spoke most of the right lines, but not necessarily in the right order and never from the plotted position. It was the only time I ever went on stage very, very drunk,

  Like my dad, Alec was jovial when drunk. I understood why he did it and felt guilty about it; he had to stand idly by while his young wife’s career blossomed. The war had interrupted his career and now his looks and style were out of fashion. Rumour had it too that Rattigan’s vengeful cronies had impeded his progress. I had gone through years of tat and poverty and now longed to enjoy a bit of the high life, but Alec had no wish to trail along as my shadow. It was a dilemma.

  5 December

  John woke in the night. Couldn’t breathe. ‘Help me.’ Jo was staying the night, thank God, and phoned 999 while I held him. Lovely ambulance men who didn’t turn a hair when they saw who it was, just wonderfully efficient. Charing Cross Casualty whisked him in and got things under control. Jo and I shaking with fear. So here we are in another hospital. Ray Whiting convicted of Sarah Payne murder. That poor woman. How does she bear it? One’s min
d would forever be polluted with images of what happened. She looks frenzied when she appears on TV. And some people believe in a merciful God. Well, he’s not very good at his job, that’s all I can say.

  My mother was worried lest I was neglecting my private life and she was right. I had to make up my mind where my priorities lay. For women then there was often a choice between career and marriage. When it was mooted that I should go to New York in Rattle I opted for my marriage and declined, much to the amazement of David Merrick, the high-powered American producer. No one turns down New York. To have a baby? Oh, for Gaad’s sake. For all our sakes I did. Melanie Jane, Ellie Jane – or Smelly Drain to Frankie Howerd – was born on 15 July 1964. My best production to that date without any doubt.

  Alec and I were now living in a better class of basement in St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith. It was a lovely area where all the kids could play in the square’s garden. Lots of actors and artists lived there and the flat was much more cheerful than the one in Pimlico despite the all-pervasive smell of dirty nappies in a bucket of Napisan – this was before the days of disposables. We were quite content, but our window-cleaner Charlie Jackson was not. He thought the two rooms were too small for the three of us. One day he shouted through the window that the little cottage next to him was up for sale. It was run down and had no bathroom or proper kitchen but plenty of potential. We had never thought of buying property. Actors did not saddle themselves with mortgages. We were rogues and vagabonds. Charlie twisted my arm, marched me to the council offices and fixed up a mortgage and conversion loan. Thanks to him we put our nervous feet on the property ladder. Alec and Ellie Jane and I moved rather belatedly into our first real home. I had settled for family life with the obligatory loans and tea-drinking builders.