Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  While Jack worked silently at his plays from home, frequently interrupted by Zelma whenever she was staying with them, Maureen was on everybody’s screen as Beattie in the brilliant British Telecom commercials created by the larger-than-life advertising guru Richard Phillips. The mini-scenes of those memorable commercials were tailormade for Maureen; they won every award going and the catchphrase ‘You got an Ology?’ was on everybody’s lips. Needless to say we made a book of them. In due course, Maureen decided to call time on the adverts, as there were plays to appear in, books to write, and fancy-dress parties to arrange, and no actor likes to be typecast. Talking of parties, one book, Thank You for Having Me, nearly caused a domestic bust-up when, for the cover photo, Maureen decided not merely to festoon her front door with party balloons and streamers, but to have it ‘marbleised’ with blue acrylic paint to match her dress. It took the door – and Jack – some time to regain their normal colour.

  Maureen Lipman at a Selfridges book signing with her watchful son Adam.

  Our publicity manager at the time, Cheryll Roberts, specialised in getting authors on to more programmes than they knew existed, and for this book she arranged a trip to Manchester which included a literary lunch, a television appearance and umpteen local radio interviews. The only problem was that on the day before, Cheryll had gone hang-gliding, crashed and hurt herself badly. Thus her panicky Sunday night phone call resulted in my being on the station platform to greet and escort our author when she arrived with just a few seconds to spare, since, as always seemed to happen, the minicab hadn’t turned up. Maureen had saved the day by rushing to the Underground station and coming by Tube. Well, we didn’t do too badly. I clung to my piece of paper listing all the interviews, and to Maureen, who knew her way around Manchester. We only missed one programme, which was pretty good in the circumstances, and there was no pork at the lunch where Maureen spoke with her usual panache and signed lots of books.

  However, we were exhausted and peckish by the time we’d done the rounds, and Maureen was up in arms when, just as the train was pulling out of Manchester Piccadilly Station, a disembodied voice smugly announced that there was food available on the train only for first-class passengers; everything else was closed. Now, Maureen would never allow us to book first-class tickets for her, but that didn’t mean she considered herself a second-class passenger. Double-checking that there wasn’t even a sandwich to be had, she was on her feet in a flash, marching the length of the train, drumming up support and leading a revolt that finally resulted in the first-class restaurant being open to all. Only a couple of thespians on the train refused to support her. (Doubtless they had first-class tickets.) Having won the day but lost her appetite, Maureen hopped off the train as it waited at a station and bought us both a couple of sandwiches. It always pays to travel with a star!

  Food seemed to play a recurring part in our relationship with Maureen – whether discussing which Lebanese restaurant we should all go to for dinner, or how to cater for her various book launches (or where to hold them that was unusual and didn’t break the bank). I said earlier that there was no fooling her, and we thought we had handled the situation tactfully when, after she’d very reluctantly agreed to go on Des O’Connor’s then popular (but by no means high-brow) television chat show, they cancelled at the last minute, on the very eve of our launch. Our publicist made some excuse about it never having been a firm booking, and Maureen seemed to think nothing of it, relieved at not having to do the show, but at the launch, mid-speech, she announced that she’d actually been dropped from The Des O’Connor Show. It was, she said, ‘like being refused entry to Bejam’ (a then popular low-price store selling frozen food), a quip the press quoted with delight.

  When it came to speeches, Maureen was every publisher’s dream, and I recall our being amazed at the apparent ease with which she walked into a packed Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester one lunchtime and talked for an hour, moving from anecdote to anecdote with seemingly effortless ease, something I’ve now seen her do again and again. She is a born raconteur and hones her many stories to perfection. It seems she has only to go out in the street, drive her car, have her nails done, go on holiday, have a sauna, for incidents to seek her out – or is it rather that she seeks them out? Wit and humour pour out of her, and when it comes to charity or a good cause, she is, as she says, the girl who can’t say no. It’s no wonder people will bid decent money at charity events to have dinner with her.

  Every book of Maureen’s had a clever title, an inventive cover and an unusual launch. On the jacket of You Can Read Me Like a Book she is pictured wearing an outfit hand-painted to look like the spines and fronts of old leather books. Stupidly, we had a printed sticker on the cover saying ‘Free jacket with every copy’ – a joke that some punters took seriously, writing in for a jacket to be sent! For the cover photo of Lip Reading, Maureen lay on a Dalí-esque red sofa shaped like a pair of lips, glancing up from a copy of her own book. And for Past-It Notes – well, naturally, she had Post-it note reminders stuck here and there on her dress, telling herself things like: ‘Glasses are on nose, phone is in hand’, or ‘Learn new language… you may even be able to say No in it’.

  Just as witty as her book titles were Maureen’s quirky lists of acknowledgements: among those she thanked were Clint Eastwood ‘for leaving me alone for long enough to write this book’; Margaret Thatcher and Edwina Currie ‘for teaching me that some women’s place is in a home’; her fax ‘for my fiction’; her homoeopath, analyst, radionics practitioner, osteopath, gynaecologist, Alexander teacher, regular doctor, allergy specialist, optician, iridologist, reflexologist, acupuncturist and shiatsu masseur ‘for my natural good health’; her children ‘for saying “How’s the book coming on?” when they meant “Is there a chance of a meal?”’; and, in How Was It for You?, her mother ‘for saying “How was what for you?”’

  For her most recent book, It’s a Jungle Out There, a collection of her ingenious iPad images of famous people as animals with punning titles such as Mick Jaguar, Spaniel Craig, Harry Otter etc., Maureen turned up at the launch as… a moorhen (of course). The show goes on.

  To return now in a more sombre mood to Jack and his autobiography. The year was 2003. He was clearly unwell and in pain but nevertheless felt up to coming with Maureen to join us at our local couscous restaurant. In fact, he was in good spirits, bringing up the question of the autobiography and to my surprise saying he was considering it seriously but hadn’t yet worked out quite how to approach it. Obviously it wasn’t going to be a conventional ‘I-was-born-in’ memoir. Both Carole and I expressed our delight, and then Maureen came up with an inspired suggestion: ‘Write it as you do your plays,’ she said. ‘Write your life as a screenplay.’ The idea galvanised him, and he started to do just that, Act One being his childhood, and so on. Following Shakespeare’s lead, there were to be seven acts – seven ages of Jack. He wrote compulsively, biking each act to me as soon as it was finished. I would read it immediately and go over to discuss it with him. (What was there to discuss? It was dazzling, and totally original – funny, moving, compelling and a powerful evocation of time and place. Only Jack Rosenthal could have written it.) But he was increasingly unwell and growing weaker, and sadly never got beyond Act Six. It was a devastating time for his family, and it was a long while before Maureen had the strength to open the pages of Jack’s not-quite-finished book.

  Once she had, she decided that it must be published and that she would try to finish it, continuing in the same playscript vein, and their daughter Amy (by then an award-winning playwright herself) volunteered to edit the book and introduce it. At first Maureen did try to write in the form Jack had chosen but gave up after a while in despair. Nobody, not even Maureen, could write like Jack. It was a hard moment for her, but, summoning all her strength, she went on to complete the book, most movingly, in her own voice. It was a dreadfully hard and emotional thing for her to do, and for Amy too, who contributed a poignant foreword.

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bsp; Jack had wanted the book to be called By Jack Rosenthal, since that was how his name always appeared on the screen at the end of his plays, and under that title – with extreme pride – we published it. Maureen, Amy, Adam and some actor friends arranged to give various dramatic readings from the book (it was after all written as a kind of play), including a platform reading at the National Theatre. Since then, Maureen has continued to spearhead various events to raise money for research into the myeloma Jack finally succumbed to. The book sold extremely well, the hardback being quickly followed by a paperback, and the reviews were everything Jack could have wished for when we sat down for that couscous dinner.

  21

  RUMBLE IN THE CITY

  Harry Richley, the rep Maureen Lipman woke from his slumbers when she presented her first book to our sales force, had a number of special accounts and one of them was Lonsdale Sports. Lonsdale, a big name in the world of boxing, had been planning a boxing manual and Harry approached us on their behalf to see whether we would be interested in taking it on. Since we already had a number of boxing titles on our list, it seemed a natural fit and we went ahead, and thus I became friendly with the man who was Lonsdale and very much at the centre of the boxing world: Bernard Hart. In addition to running a successful sports business, Bernard is the most generous of men, forever arranging charity dinners to raise money for various causes, often related to boxing, but also for RAF ex-servicemen and others who have fallen on hard times.

  As a result, I soon found myself invited to black-tie charity dinners, often sitting at a table with one ex-champion or another – Henry Cooper, John Conteh and Lennox Lewis were three whose lively company I was lucky to find myself sharing – and the leading sports writers and boxing promoters were often there too, Mickey Duff and Jarvis Astaire in particular. There was always an auction, for which we’d gladly contribute signed books by our authors, and I was staggered by the generosity of those present, some of whom didn’t look as if they could afford to fork out the large sums that would win them a holiday for two, or a round of golf with a star player. Sometimes Bernard’s wife, the singer Stella Starr, would head the cabaret.

  I had actually met Henry Cooper once before in embarrassing circumstances that he luckily didn’t seem to remember, when he agreed to write a preface to a biography of Joe Frazier called Come Out Smokin’, published while I was still at the Woburn Press. He had in fact suggested that we find someone to interview him about Frazier and then work that up into the preface. Vernon Scannell had agreed to do this and he and I duly went to Cooper’s house with a tape recorder. But for some reason the machine just wouldn’t work, so Henry sportingly hunted around and eventually found an old one under the stairs, which saved the day. Ever the gentleman, there wasn’t a word of criticism or complaint. It certainly wasn’t the most professional of our operations, and how ironic, in view of what follows, that it should have been a book about Frazier.

  Years later, after we’d published his nemesis Muhammad Ali, we published Frazier’s autobiography Smokin’ Joe, and I met the once fearsome Joe in New York, at a Lonsdale dinner to honour the artist LeRoy Neiman, held at Madison Square Garden. I found him friendly and charming, and did my best to persuade him to come to London to promote his book, but he told me he was afraid of flying. Imagine!

  Other than Cooper, although we had published books on most of the great champions, until those charity dinners of Bernard’s the only one I had met face to face was Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, and that was because he took strong exception to a claim in one of our books that he was a dirty fighter. Berg was a colourful figure: Jewish, born in the East End, he was known as the Whitechapel Windmill, and also for his love of women (he was said to have dated Mae West and, when fighting in America, he had to be locked in his hotel room the night before a fight). He was also friendly with the East End Jewish gangster Jack Spot, who, incidentally, was sometimes present at those charity dinners. Berg had been the world welterweight champion, so when he phoned the office angrily and said he was coming round to talk to the editor, we awaited his visit with some trepidation. Fortunately, we managed to calm him down, and ended up publishing his tumultuous life story. I’d call that a win on points.

  Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, the Whitechapel Whirlwind and former lightweight champion of the world, flanked by Lonsdale CEO Bernard Hart, and his wary publisher.

  When, in the spring of 1991, we took on a remarkable book, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, written by Thomas Hauser with Ali’s full cooperation, I naturally turned to Bernard for support and advice, since we had paid a great deal of money for the UK rights. I should add that Hauser was a writer of real class, the author of Missing (on which the film starring Jack Lemmon was based), and an acclaimed writer on boxing, whose The Black Lights we’d published several years earlier. We went on to publish several other outstanding books by Tom, including one about Mark Twain.

  Hauser was in close touch with Ali and his wife Lonnie, and through Hauser we started to make plans to bring him and Ali to London. We didn’t begin to have the resources to do that, but working with Bernard we found a way. I approached American Airlines, waved the magic name of Muhammad Ali, and they agreed to fly him, Hauser, and several of Ali’s associates, including a close friend, the Time Life photographer Howard Bingham, to London. Through his contacts, Bernard managed to get us complimentary accommodation at a London hotel. The Entertainment Artistes’ Benevolent Fund also came on board with a view to bringing Ali back as a special guest on the Royal Variety Show, Peter Stringfellow generously offered to host a launch at his club in Covent Garden, and Bernard arranged a big charity dinner at Grosvenor House, to be hosted by Henry Cooper. As no boxing fan will need reminding, Cooper had a famous fight with Ali in which he’d caught him with his trademark left hook (known as ‘’Enry’s ’ammer’) at the end of the fourth round and knocked him down. Ali’s swift-thinking cornerman and trainer Angelo Dundee gained his man time to recover by convincing the referee that Ali’s glove was split and needed changing. (Whether or not Dundee’s agile fingers had anything to do with that large split has long been a matter for debate.) There were, in fact, no substitute gloves to be had, but enough time had been gained for Ali to recover his senses and come back with a vengeance.

  A September date was set, the dinner – to which we’d invited the buyers from the main stores – was sold out, and signings were arranged around the country. There was one problem: we were warned that because of the affliction from which he suffered (Parkinson’s disease) and the fact that his speech was impaired, the once-loquacious Ali couldn’t appear on television or give live interviews or make speeches. How then, we wondered, could we get publicity? The answer came back: ‘Just take him to places and you’ll see.’ We were also advised by Ali’s wife Lonnie to produce bookplates and to send them well in advance for her husband to sign, since this would save time and effort at signing sessions when the queues were long. That seemed like good advice, and we looked forward to the queues.

  Ali and his retinue were due to fly in on Sunday 22 September, and the night before I went round to my friend Anthony Stalbow’s house to watch a world championship fight between two British boxers, Chris Eubank and Michael Watson – a dramatic fight no one who saw it will ever forget, when a virtually beaten Eubank somehow pulled himself off the floor at the end of the penultimate round to land one punch, an upper cut, that sent Watson flying and was to cause him near fatal brain damage. It was horrendous, and one of the great tragedies of modern boxing. We realised at once that we would need to shield Ali from the press, since he would doubtless be bombarded with questions about the dangers of boxing and his own problems with Parkinson’s. But we needn’t have worried – not on that score, anyway – for while everyone else (and even Ali’s dinner suit!) arrived the next morning at London Airport, there was no Muhammad Ali, which threw us all into a real panic. As a small publisher with so much at stake, it was a heart-stopping time, especially when we learned that Ali was in Abu Dhabi, where he
’d been taken by his former manager, Herbert Muhammad, to help raise money for a mosque in Chicago. And although the promise was that he’d get Ali to London in good time for the book tour, that promise was not kept. According to Hauser, the reason was that Herbert had taken exception to the way he was portrayed in the book, which may well have been the case.

  Next day, I received a message from Lonnie Ali in Chicago saying Ali was on his way, which is what she had been led to believe, and that happened again the following day. She herself was at her wits’ end and worried for her husband, since, as Tom Hauser later revealed, he had only a limited supply of the medication he took to control the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Howard Bingham had more of the medication in London, but there was no way of getting it to Ali as he’d been cut off from the world in Abu Dhabi – even his own wife was unable to speak to him. Howard was extremely upset that not even he, Muhammad’s closest friend, could get through to him, and very concerned for us, realising we had been let down by someone he cared for deeply. I’d never met Howard or Tom before, but they rallied round and within a few days we were all firm friends, Tom doing a number of radio and press interviews and both of them covering for the missing Ali as best they could.

  Ali doesn’t turn up for the launch party for his book at Stringfellows… but others do!