Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Well, we were on our way, so continued, arriving only about ten minutes late (having lost more time than that making the call). I pressed the buzzer next to the tall iron gates, and after a minute someone opened them and ushered me along the flower-lined path leading to the front door, and once inside I was invited to take a seat in the hall. A few minutes later I was given the all-clear to go up a winding staircase to Winner’s study, where he was waiting for me. ‘I’ve just written you this note, and was giving you a couple more minutes,’ he said, handing me a sheet of paper. Glancing at it, I saw the unambiguous message: ‘Fuck the contract, forget the book, have gone to lunch.’

  That might have bothered me once, but I’d weathered enough crises of that kind by then not to be cowed, and I well knew you have to stand up to bullies (and Winner was the arch-bully), so I shrugged my shoulders and told him he could tear up the contract or the note, as he preferred, adding, ‘By the way, when you were young you spent a good deal of time in my grandfather’s house.’ That stopped him in his tracks, and he asked what I meant. I knew he’d been a close friend of my artist cousin, Colin Snowman, who had been brought up in my grandfather’s house after his parents were divorced, and I knew Winner was round there all the time, and though they couldn’t be more different, he and the gentle Colin kept in touch.

  That changed everything, and a suddenly affable Winner said, ‘Let me show you round the house’ – and what a magnificent house it was, on several floors, with a massive master bedroom overlooking the garden, palatial dining and sitting rooms tastefully furnished with fine paintings on every inch of the walls, then, at basement level, his cinema, with photos of the stars he’d worked with all around, and, finally, the large indoor swimming pool with an electric cover he proudly demonstrated for me.

  We then went off to lunch like old friends, and over that lunch I reminded him of an incident involving Colin and him. Every summer there was an open-air exhibition of paintings by local artists along Heath Street in Hampstead Village, and one year, at Winner’s prompting, Colin had exhibited a large, dramatic painting of a Black Mass with a naked woman being sacrificed. It had caused an uproar, and Colin had been forced to remove it, the story making headlines in the local press. Since our grandfather was the Mayor of Hampstead at the time, it didn’t go down too well at home, to put it mildly. The anti-establishment Winner had loved every minute of the furore at the time, and enjoyed it all over again as he poured me another glass of exceptionally fine wine. He even had his chauffeur drive me back to the office in his stately old Rolls-Royce.

  * * *

  That was the prelude to a long saga as far as my ensuing relationship and publishing involvement with Michael was concerned, which lasted until his death in 2013. He wrote an entertaining and reasonably frank autobiography, and Dinah May, his personal assistant for some thirty years, has written her own revealing story of life with Winner, so I will confine myself to my own experiences of him, which perhaps add a little to the overall picture. Right from the start, nothing was easy. Winner’s Dinners did not turn out to be a straight reprint of his weekly column. Restaurants change ownership and collapse with unseemly regularity; chefs leave and are replaced. All these details had to be checked, along with opening hours, phone numbers and so on; also, there was far too much material, so pieces had to be edited down, revised, arranged into geographical areas, and carefully indexed – a big job which meant bringing in an experienced (and thick-skinned) editor to work with Michael. As well as all this, Michael added his own cartoons and quite a bit of fun to the book, so in the end it wasn’t just a stuffy reference book and read as entertainingly and provocatively as his Sunday column.

  On top of this, Michael created the Winner Awards, which he got the Sunday Times to list and which he announced at the book launch – not just dull ones, like Best Restaurant, Best Hotel, Best Hotel Manager, Best Service etc. (though these were among them), but also more Winner-like ones such as Worst Hotel Service, Worst Ambience, Most Wobbly Table I Ever Saw, Phoniest Restaurant Line (‘Your main course will be with you in a minute, sir’), Best Egyptian Manager of a Japanese restaurant – and these are just tasters. When we came to those book launches, of which there were quite a few, we had a deal: he would arrange the venue and the canapés (that is to say, he would bully someone into providing them for free), and we would supply the champagne. Carole and I went to France fairly regularly so it was a reasonable enough deal, since we could then get a decent champagne for as little as £7 a bottle. The fact that we spent £9 for Michael greatly appealed to his amour propre, and he wrote a special piece about it and our French odyssey in the Sunday Times.

  As for the launches, they were packed with celebrities galore, and Michael would get his famous friends (Michael Caine always first among equals) to present the awards, which he announced. Each winner received a certificate of some kind that he must have knocked out on his computer. Shakira Caine eventually told him he couldn’t go on handing out tacky bits of paper and that he should splash out on something a little more special. For us, as for those who lived and worked with him, the parties were a nightmare (ask Geraldine, his partner then and later his wife; ask Dinah May), for once his celebrity friends appeared he was impossible to talk to, charging around like a bull, making sure the paparazzi got the photos he wanted them to get. Although we spent quite a bit bringing in sound equipment and, at his insistence, a large rostrum, he rarely made any mention of the book, and if by the end of the evening we’d managed to get him to sign a few copies, we were doing well. The focus was entirely on the awards – and Michael Winner. For all this, Michael could be generous, but he could also be vengeful: at the time of the first book launch he was having a public spat with Cliveden House Hotel – not because they hadn’t provided him with a swimming pool and Christine Keeler waiting for him in the deep end, but because he claimed to have been served orange juice in dirty glasses (the head waiter claimed it was orange juice residue, which didn’t wash with Michael). So, for our launch at the Café Royal we were commanded to lay a special table with dirty glasses and a placard proclaiming ‘Cliveden’. Our author thought this was an hilarious jape. He’d also invited representatives from Cliveden to come and receive their award, without revealing that it was for the Worst Service. At first they accepted, then twigged and stayed away – and who could blame them?

  Generally, those Winner book launches took place at the Belvedere in Holland Park, then owned by his mate Marco Pierre White, and I remember Michael being quite put out on one occasion there when I presented Geraldine with some flowers, which I thought she well deserved. Clearly, he didn’t – or perhaps he was irritated because he hadn’t thought of it himself. I enjoyed watching the famous chefs he’d invited quaffing the cheap champagne we’d brought and remarking how good it was. Little did they know, though Geraldine, who had lived in France, did, and winked at me. Towards the end of his life, Michael fell out with Marco for some reason (at one time or another, he fell out with most people, though never to my knowledge with the Caines, with whom he seemed to walk warily). So close had he been to Marco that he gave him and his fiancée their honeymoon as a wedding present – and went with them, which only goes to show there’s no such thing as a free honeymoon. When Michael came to write his autobiography, I pointed out that he hadn’t mentioned any of the famous chefs he knew or had known. His response was, ‘They’re all far too boring to write about.’ He always said he couldn’t stand boring people, and when invited as a special guest to a prestigious Foyles literary lunch, he demanded to know who he’d be sitting next to before accepting – and when told this wasn’t possible, he turned the invitation down.

  Michael never sent ordinary emails: they came shrieking through the computer in capital letters like battle orders, and when he left phone messages they were a three-word-long command: ‘Call Michael Winner’, like a summons to the headmaster’s study. Realising quickly that our tiny publicity department would not be able to take the strain, we outsourc
ed the promotion for the first book to Midas, Tony Mulliken’s PR company. I took Tony to meet Michael, and all was sweetness and light, Tony being his usual charming, professional self. But the peace didn’t last long: whatever Midas did, ever more aggressive emails began to assail Tony, whose name Michael never seemed to get right, calling him ‘Terry Pelican’ (a story Tony loves to tell). Unruffled, Mr Pelican responded calmly and politely to every email, thanking Winner for pointing out what he should be doing. Michael had met his match, and Tony’s refusal to rise to the bait must have made him see red as he set about composing his next email onslaught. It didn’t take much to infuriate or upset Mr Winner, but I suspect he was far more sensitive than he cared to admit, even shy. He was obviously annoyed by the fact that we were invited to Joan Collins’s wedding and he wasn’t (and that, Joan told me, was because he had offended her by failing to go to see a play she was in). They must have mended their fences, though, since she and Percy were in the glamorous party of friends he invited to Venice to celebrate his 70th birthday (we weren’t!). Then there was his refusal of an OBE for his work in setting up the Police Memorial Trust, saying it was the kind of award given to those who cleaned the toilets well at King’s Cross Station. After that, in his correspondence he typed in capitals under his signature, ‘MICHAEL WINNER MA (CANTAB), OBE OFFERED AND REJECTED’. In fairness to him I should add that, following the uproar caused by his remark, he invited a Jamaican cleaner who worked at King’s Cross Station to tea at his house with her daughter, and when, in the course of conversation, he discovered that the daughter had never been to Jamaica, he paid for them both to go there on a two-week holiday. There were several sides to the Winner coin.

  For his autobiography, Winner Takes All, published in 2004, I invited Michael to our autumn sales conference in the Chrysalis building in Holland Park, a mile or two from his home. We had a full agenda, starting in the morning, and Michael asked what time we’d finish. When I told him it would be around 5.30 p.m., he said, ‘Bring all the reps here and we’ll give them a glass of champagne and talk about the book,’ adding that we should get someone to take photos. But nothing ever went smoothly with Michael. It was an extremely hot day, and the air conditioning was fully on in the impressive home cinema in the basement of his house, which is where he received us, greeting everyone affably and handing round glasses of champagne. The only problem was that, to save money, our publicist had brought a young photographer with her, an Italian, who was wearing an open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and no jacket… and he was cold. Stopping Michael in mid-flow, he asked him to turn the air conditioning down – and at that, Michael flew into a rage. ‘He comes here dressed for the beach and asks me to turn the air conditioning down – what a fucking cheek! When it’s his house, he can turn it down, but it is my house and I’ll have it as I want it.’ Then Michael switched the charm back on, poured more champagne and regaled the reps with stories from his forthcoming blockbuster. But by then the temperature in the room had fallen several more degrees.

  The selling of serial rights for that book also produced a little drama, since Michael had a high figure in mind and we had been offered a relatively modest sum by the paper he wanted. ‘Tell them you’ve had a higher offer and to get real,’ Michael barked at me down the phone, but I warned him that since we didn’t actually have a higher offer that could be a risky business, as they might walk away and leave us stranded. ‘If I actually had a higher offer, or one that came close, that might be different,’ I told him.

  ‘Then go to your fax machine,’ Michael commanded, and five minutes later, on his headed notepaper, came a formal, substantially higher offer from… Michael Winner. ‘Now you can tell them you have a higher offer,’ he said, laughing.

  Fortunately, shortly afterwards another paper put me out of my moral dilemma by entering the ring, and I was able to get a legitimate auction going, ending up with the kind of figure Michael had wanted in the first place – and with my honour intact.

  When it came to promoting his book outside London, Michael always chartered a private jet – even to Birmingham and Manchester – which he paid for himself, charging us the equivalent of a first-class rail ticket. Fair enough in theory, but when he went to Ireland for a TV chat show and they not only stumped up for the air fare but also paid him a large fee, I didn’t take kindly to receiving a bill from Michael of around £6,000 for the overnight stay in a hotel, and I refused to pay it. Michael said he would sue, but I pointed out (having checked) that you could get a suite in the hotel he’d stayed at for £1,000, and that’s what I would pay. Eventually, he accepted that, provided the cheque was delivered by messenger the same day – but he would never deal with us again. However, some months later he was on the phone as if nothing had happened, asking, ‘What are we going to publish for Christmas?’

  ‘But Michael,’ I responded, ‘I thought we weren’t talking to each other, let alone doing another book together!’

  ‘Life’s too short, Jeremy,’ he replied. And away we went again.

  As I have said, Michael could be generous, and on the various occasions we had lunch together he always ordered the best wine, and it was impossible to pay. He simply wouldn’t allow it – except on one occasion, when he gave a talk at Waterstones in Hampstead and accepted our invitation to dinner afterwards at a popular restaurant near our house. I warned the proprietor that we were bringing Michael and Geraldine, and he was thrilled, but things didn’t go well from the start, since instead of taking the order himself he had unwisely given the task to a young waitress who had only worked there for a few weeks and couldn’t answer Michael’s questions about the menu. Not clever. Still, Michael held back, perhaps because he was our guest. Then he leant over to me, recorder in hand, and asked, ‘What’s your wife’s name, dear?’, whereupon Carole, who was sitting next to him and whom he’d already met several times, said, ‘Don’t you talk to women?’ The atmosphere suddenly froze. ‘Carole,’ I interjected quickly, ‘with an “e”,’ wanting to slide under the table. Somehow the conversation and meal continued, Geraldine and I trying to get things back on an even keel. However, when it came to the mandatory photo at the end of the meal, the chef took ages to appear and when he did the increasingly irritated Michael excluded Carole and Geraldine, handing his camera to Geraldine and telling her to take the picture. I dreaded the piece he would write, but when it appeared a few Sundays later he recalled the incident just as it happened, making the point that Carole had an ‘e’ at the end of her name and adding, ‘She was quite right, I could have asked her.’ As a result, Carole received quite a few congratulatory phone calls. Sometime later, in March 2010, the volatile Winner phoned to invite us to dinner at his house and to watch the preview of a new TV series he’d made, Michael Winner’s Dining Stars. A number of his usual cronies were there, including Andrew Neil, Terry O’Neill (whom Winner had cajoled into taking the cover photos for several of our books), Steven Berkoff (whose graphic memoir of his East End childhood we published) and lyricist Don Black, so it was a lively occasion, if not exactly an intimate one (and the Thai dinner was ‘historic’!). He followed this up by sending us a signed photo of himself with Carole, Geraldine and me, so it seemed all was forgiven.

  After that episode, Michael went to speak at a Yorkshire Post literary lunch in Harrogate, calling from the plane to say he’d forgotten his pocket tape recorder and asking for someone to go out and buy him one, which he promptly paid for when he arrived. I was going to fly with him and Geraldine, but fortunately he decided it was too complicated (‘You’re bound to be late, and I wouldn’t wait’ is what he actually said), and so I went alone – and calmly – by train. He spoke entertainingly at the lunch, although he was on edge – perhaps because Geraldine had been placed next to the witty Simon Hoggart, who was also a guest speaker, and whose conversation she seemed to be very much enjoying.

  After the lunch, we’d arranged a signing for Michael in a shopping mall, and he became irritable when our driver stopped the car at
the entrance to the mall, telling Michael he couldn’t drive right up to the bookshop. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been pouring with rain. One thing was certain: Michael wasn’t going to get wet, and he grumpily ordered the driver to escort him to the bookshop under the large umbrella he kept in the car, striding off and leaving Geraldine and me to fend for ourselves. Luckily, I had a small pocket umbrella, so Geraldine clutched my arm stoically and we followed carefully in Michael’s wake. I thought back to the previous year when, at Michael’s invitation, the Queen had unveiled the National Police Memorial in the Mall, a triumphant day for him and the result of over ten years’ planning. It was raining that day, too, and next morning pictures in all the papers appeared to show Michael safe and dry under the Queen’s umbrella while she stood unsheltered in the rain. This caused much mirth in the Winner household, if not in the Palace! If Michael wasn’t bothered about the Queen getting wet, he certainly wasn’t going to bother about Geraldine and me.

  After that rather damp signing, I slipped away, leaving the Winners and taking a local train to visit my old friend Vernon Scannell, who lived on the outskirts of Leeds and had been battling lung cancer for some time. We sat in the cosy, book-lined kitchen of the small grey-brick house Vernon shared with his caring partner Jo, drank beer and talked about old times – the poetry and jazz concerts, the occasions he’d stayed with us just after our twins were born. I made him laugh by reminding him of the time an actress was reading some of his poems and, introducing the one she was about to read, unwittingly proclaimed, ‘Taken in Adultery by Vernon Scannell’! I also reminded Vernon of the time we read together one Sunday in Wales in what was then a dry county, and he persuaded me to take a local train with him to the neighbouring county so he could have a drink or two before returning just in time for what was a very spirited evening reading. We had many shared memories, which Vernon seemed to enjoy recalling, among them the weekend we’d come with my cousin Ted and his future wife Gill to stay with the Scannells at Folly Cottage, their aptly named house in Nether Compton, Dorset, strolling across the tall fields to the Griffin’s Head, where we drank far too much of the deceptively strong local cider before staggering back for some much-needed food, as the sun sank behind the surrounding hills.