by Pip Granger
I expressed my surprise that both the waiter and Angel were out in those tricky times. ‘They didn’t mind us knowing,’ Gary explained. ‘We were easygoing. We were an odd society of people, and when you say we were bohemians, in a way we were, and we were very broad-minded, so . . . Angel came down to my coffee bar a lot. She wasn’t a poet or a musician or anything – her fame was her transsexuality.’
Several factors have led Sohoites in particular, and West Enders in general, to take a ‘live and let live’ attitude towards unconventional sexual tastes and orientations. For one thing, the area has a long association with theatrical, artistic and bohemian types, known for their tolerance, and celebration, of difference. Most importantly, Soho’s population includes the descendants of refugees from all over Europe, who, having known persecution themselves, show a marked disinclination to persecute anyone in their turn. And, of course, Britain was the only country in Europe to make a crime of homosexuality. The waves of French, Italian, German, Swiss and Greek immigrants had no history of legalized homophobia and therefore neither did their descendants.
It was 1967 before the law was finally changed in Britain, and consenting adult males were, at last, no longer committing a crime when they enjoyed sex with each other. This reform, based largely on the conclusions of the Wolfenden report into homosexuality that had been commissioned a decade earlier in the wake of the Montagu/Wildeblood case, was seen as a keynote piece of legislation in defining the liberalism and ‘permissiveness’ of the sixties. All it did in reality was codify a ‘live and let live’ philosophy current in the West End for decades – even centuries – if we remember Frenchman Chevalier d’Eon, aka Mademoiselle de Beaumont and her friends.
11
The Entertainers
In the forties, fifties and even into the sixties, almost anyone could bump in to their favourite stars of stage, screen, radio, music hall and sporting arena in the West End. Star-spotters simply had to stroll around the streets, sip a pint in a pub or have a coffee in one of its many coffee bars. What’s more, having spotted someone famous, you would not be blinded by flashbulbs or shouldered aside by a phalanx of men built like gorillas, but without the apes’ charm or hair. In fact, you’d almost always be greeted with a smile and graciously given an autograph while the exalted one would chat amicably to you about this and that.
My father was friendly with the Goons, for example. I remember Michael Bentine vividly: he had mad hair and one of the most expressive faces I’d ever seen. He was fond of children, I believe, because he’d amuse me with his funny voices and walks while he waited for Father to finish one of his lengthy telephone calls. Spike Milligan obviously really liked children, but his moods were more unpredictable than Michael Bentine’s. When he was ‘up’, though, his store of voices and ditties were magical. My brother and I would laugh until we cried.
My main memory of Harry Secombe is of his accent, so similar to that of one of the ladies around the corner at the Welsh Dairy. I also sensed that he was a gentle, even-tempered man who was unfailingly pleasant to children. He had a comforting presence that the other Goons – and my father – did not possess. Something about the fourth Goon, Peter Sellers, unnerved me. I think it was that he seemed utterly indifferent to children. To be honest, I don’t think that he ever even noticed us.
It’s extraordinary to remember how accessible stars were to their public, by today’s standards. By the simple expedient of diving in to a phone box, pennies at the ready, you could call the reception of any one of the West End’s luxury hotels and find out if the likes of Tyrone Power, David Niven, Ingrid Bergman or Laurel and Hardy were in residence.
Owen Gardner, who lived in St Martin’s Lane, was an inveterate autograph hunter. ‘We used to find out where they were staying,’ he remembers, ‘and then you would ring them up. You see, in those days, there weren’t the dozens of hotels there are now; they stayed at the Savoy, the Dorchester – maybe the Ritz, but not very often – and you could ring ’em up.
‘You’d see their pictures in the evening paper, and you knew they’d be there, there or there, and you’d just ring them all up and say, “Can I speak to Mr So-and-so, please,” and they’d put you through, and you could speak to them.
‘They never had minders in those days. If they were going out for the theatre, you could go down to them and you could say, “Hello, how are you? Good evening” and you’d give them a piece of paper for the autograph. They were the nicest people. I saw Elizabeth Taylor every night for six weeks while she was in England making Ivanhoe, because she stayed at the Savoy, and she’d come in of a night-time and say, “Hello, Owen,” because I was a fan of hers at the time.
‘There was a Lyons Corner House opposite the Paris Cinema in Lower Regent Street, where the BBC used to record a lot of shows. Well, we were always in there, because the show business journalists were in there, as well. They’d come in and say, “Did you know so-and-so was in town?” “Oh, thanks. Do you know where they’re staying?” “Not absolutely sure, but try so-and-so.” You’d get tips like that.
‘People I tell now won’t believe how approachable the big stars were. You’d ring and say, “Are you going out tonight?” and they’d say “Yes, we’re going out at about seven o’clock to the theatre.” “Do you mind if we ask you for your autograph?” “No, no, of course not.” You’d be there, and they’d come down and they’d come over. It was so good-humoured as well. Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Bob Hope, they would all come and chat to you.’
Owen is right, it does seem unreal now, but in those days the famous weren’t afraid of crazed stalkers. Words like ‘paparazzi’ and ‘stalker’ hadn’t even entered our vocabulary, and ‘mobile’ simply meant you were still on your pins or knew a bloke with a motor. The notion that, one day, anyone would be able to take candid pictures, and with a telephone of all things, was the stuff of pure fantasy.
This is not to say that it was no big deal to meet a star. Mike O’Rouke, who lived in the Seven Dials, but went to school in West London, has a vivid memory of a meeting that would have red-blooded males of all ages beside themselves with envy. ‘I collected autographs when I was a boy, and one of them made me the most famous boy in the school. When I was thirteen, Brigitte Bardot came over to a première down in Charing Cross Road, the Cameo, and I went over there because, well, I was 13 and in love with Brigitte Bardot. I got her autograph and actually met her. She was sitting at a desk in a little cubicle in the cinema and the queue was all the way up the Charing Cross Road, and I queued up with the rest of them. When I took it in to school the next day, and showed it to them, and said I’d actually met her, and shook hands with her, and she’d said “Hello” to me . . .’
Sometimes the autograph hunters had to try a little harder. Owen recalls that, ‘Around the Royal Variety Performance, they used to bring in stars specially from America at the last minute, so that nobody would know they were there, and introduce them, but they would have to do some rehearsals, and they would rehearse in all kinds of theatres. Although the show was taking place at, say, the Palladium, they’d be rehearsing at the Whitehall Theatre or even the Dominion Cinema in Tottenham Court Road, or the Odeon Marble Arch, and we would shin up a drainpipe and go in through the toilet window.
‘We used to chase them in taxis! We’d stand at the Savoy, and if they were in a hurry, or just didn’t want to stop and sign at that particular time, three or four of us would jump in to a cab at a rank in the Strand, right opposite, and say, “Follow that car!” Sometimes there would be two or three cabs chasing them.
‘We would follow them to the theatre, you know, wherever they were going. I remember we chased William Holden and his wife to the St James’s Theatre, but we couldn’t get him before he went in, so we went off and had a cup of tea and came back, and as everybody was piling out through the exits at the end of the show, we pushed our way in and got their autograph in the front row of the stalls of the theatre.’
Almost everyone I talked to had stories of encounters with the famous in everyday situations. Some of these occurred because the children lived or played around theatres. Olga Jackson remembers that ‘We used to play outside what used to be the Winter Gardens Theatre in Drury Lane, and there was a show on there called It’s Time to Dance, I think, with Fred Emney – big chap. It was a very hot summer, and he’d come out by the stage door, because it was so hot in the theatre – you know, during the breaks. He was a lovely man, used to talk to us children very ordinary. You took it for granted. You never thought about them being stars.’
When he was a teenager, Ronnie Mann would hang around outside the Palladium and the Coliseum, on a Sunday, because that was where the girls were: ‘I remember Dickie Valentine walking out and chatting to everybody and having a cigarette or something outside.’
Dickie Valentine was also a friend of my father, as were Petula Clark, Alma Cogan, Lita Roza and her sister, Alma Warren. Where Father, the most unmusical of men, with two tin ears, got to know so many singers and musicians I can only guess, and that guess would be the canteen at Broadcasting House, just across Oxford Street from Soho, and a real showbiz melting pot if ever there was one. Other probable meeting places were the late night drinking clubs that performers went to in order to come down after a show, or on the set of an international variety show called Chelsea at Nine (later known as Chelsea at Eight, for the obvious reason that its time slot changed), which he sometimes wrote for. It ran on ITV between 1957 and 1960.
Dickie Valentine was a good-looking man with, as Ronnie suggests, a charmingly easy manner, but the singer who made the deepest impression on me as a child was Lita Roza. I thought she was so glamorous that I was in awe of her. Also, she sang ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’ and being a scrap who was deeply enamoured of anything hairy with four legs, I was mightily impressed with this. One of the things that made the deepest impression on me was that she gave me some of the chocolates left for her by stage door Johnnies, a generosity I appreciated greatly – chocolates were such a wild luxury. I didn’t realize then that one of the reasons she gave them away was that she was diabetic and couldn’t eat them.
Another thing that stuck with me was a hairstyle that I’m sure Lita pioneered. Years later, there was a huge fuss when Mia Farrow had her hair cut just like it by Frank Sinatra’s barber, but I remember Lita doing it first. I was so impressed by her stylish cap of short, highlighted hair that when I grew old enough to decide for myself what sort of hairstyle to have, I chose to copy Lita’s. In the fifties and in to the early sixties, women tended to have long hair arranged in a variety of ways, or perms, but a very short, straight, boyish and layered cap was unheard of for women or, indeed, girls. Back then, when women had few choices and men virtually none, Lita’s innovative hairstyle really was startling and wonderful.
Billie Holiday appeared on Chelsea at Eight in 1959, but I am convinced that the first time I saw her was on the stairs to our flat in Old Compton Street, some time before that. Annie Ross, the jazz singer, and her partner at the time, the drummer Tony Crombie, lived in the flat below ours, and I distinctly remember almost knocking down a slender, black woman who was staggering up the stairs as I was running down ahead of my father. I apologized, and she told me, ‘That’s OK, honey,’ in a funny little voice laced with an American accent.
The incident impressed itself on my memory because she appeared to be almost falling-down drunk as she lurched from side to side, but there was no smell of booze coming off her. The stairway was very narrow and, had she been as drunk as she appeared, I definitely would have got a face full of fumes. I knew all about drunkards, as both of my parents were alcoholics at the time, and so were many of their friends. I simply couldn’t understand why the lady was so unsteady on her feet if she hadn’t been hitting the booze. She called me ‘honey’, too, a term of endearment I had never heard before, and she told my father that I was pretty, before carrying on her long stagger upwards. Of course, I didn’t realize who she was and could kick myself now; a Billie Holiday autograph would be a real prize to be treasured.
Sometimes you bumped in to a star on the street. ‘When I was a small baby in my pram,’ Mike O’Rouke recalls, ‘my mum was pushing me around up Long Acre. She’s turning the corner and more or less crashed in to this bloke who’s turning the corner the other way. It was Tyrone Power. This was in his heyday, and he was one of her idols. She was gob-smacked, never said a word and always regretted it.’
Casual encounters could lead to friendship. Sonia Boulter remembers Tommy Cooper. ‘I had a step-uncle who used to sell newspapers – a street vendor – and he knew Tommy Cooper because when he played the Prince of Wales Theatre, he bought a paper from him. One day he introduced us and Tommy said, “Where do you work?” and I told him, “Boots in Piccadilly Circus.” He said, “I’ll come in and see you one day,” and he did, a few times. There was a coffee bar in Piccadilly Underground station, and he would take me in there and we would sit and chat and have coffee.’
In their schooldays, Pat and Barbara Jones both did part-time jobs at a tobacconist in Denman Street, just down the road from the Piccadilly Theatre. ‘One day,’ Pat remembers, ‘Fenella Fielding came in to buy cigarettes. Players, Capstans, Senior Service, all those were under the counter in those days – 1s. 9d. for ten, 3s. 6d. for twenty – so you helped people out. I said to her, “What a lovely perfume, don’t you smell nice,” and a couple of days later she came in and plonked a bottle on the counter. I think it was called Tabu. After that, she always used to come in and chat.’
Pat’s jobs led to several encounters with film and theatre stars. ‘Bertoni’s was a hairdresser who served all the stars, in Denman Street,’ she remembers. ‘I started working in there on a Saturday, and the first person I met was Audrey Hepburn, who came to London. She didn’t have her fringe then. Mr Bertoni did her fringe.’
It wasn’t just home-grown talent that flocked to the West End. As Owen Gardner pointed out, visiting Hollywood stars only had a few first-class hotels to choose from, all in the West End. Film stars came to talk business in Soho, to play the theatres, to eat at the restaurants and to be amused in the various nightclubs, just like their British counterparts, but they also came for the shopping. Those with a taste for fine tailoring went to Savile Row to stock up on bespoke suits, shirts and hats.
Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor and their many friends, colleagues and rivals only had to step daintily in to Mayfair to buy stunning creations and the shoes and handbags to go with them. Or they could pick up a few sparklers from Garrard, Asprey or Cartier. Of course, any film star worth her salt would send the equivalent of a stage door Johnny to collect her purchases, while she stood around looking gorgeous and signing autographs for adoring, but respectful, fans.
Celebrities came to the West End in the fifties and sixties for a whole host of reasons. Film actors came because those years were a boom time for the British film industry (it tailed off in the seventies) and the offices of all the major film companies were located in Soho, mainly in Wardour Street and Soho Square. Established stars, along with those that were rising, or hoping to rise, would make their way to those busy offices and the surrounding restaurants and bars, to discuss projects, to schmooze and be schmoozed.
‘Many business deals are talked over round the little marble tables,’ Penelope Seaman wrote about Maison Bertaux, in her book Little Inns of Soho (1948), and indeed show business deals were talked over most of the tables in the area, and from bar stools as well. Agreements were hatched that concerned all aspects of showbiz, from ‘the talent’ to the frocks, scenery, shoes, locations, catering, wigs, hats, makeup, suits, music, stunts, special effects and technical bods. Anyone you could possibly need for a film, a play, a variety show or even for the newfangled telly, could be found in the West End somewhere.
As there have always been far too many actors for the number of parts available, it behove agents to locate their offices in the sa
me areas as the film companies, the better to pick up news of upcoming opportunities as quickly as possible. The plethora of fine restaurants, pubs, clubs and bars round and about played host to producers, directors and money men, and were hotbeds of rumour, hint, whisper and gossip about new films. Naturally, diligent agents would frequent the very same places, ears tuned to scoop any news that would benefit their clients and their respective bank balances.
As a result, some show people chose to make their home in Soho, as Jeff Sloneem, who grew up in Old Compton Street in the years after the war, remembers. ‘My father was a variety artist. I think he fancied himself as a song and dance man, but he couldn’t really sing or dance, so he ended up as a whistling ventriloquist. He did a bit of singing, and he literally travelled the country. We only saw him about three months of the year.
‘He was in a show called Soldiers in Skirts, which, after the war, went for about eleven years. It was continuous employment; he was about the only one in show business who could say that. He was known as Fred Sloan, sometimes with an E, sometimes without, depending on who was doing the poster. He was billed sometimes as the King of the Jungle, or the Whistling Songbird. After the show, he had reasonable work I think, for a couple of years, and then it just . . . petered out. Rock ’n’ roll killed variety! He went and worked in insurance, but he still kept his hand in, and he was always off on the odd gig that he did.’
Generally, the stars did not live in Soho – there simply weren’t enough mansions and posh flats to go round. The ones who lived in Soho were usually the minor players or those who worked behind the scenes, or in the chorus. Various small hotels and hostels catered exclusively for theatricals. ‘Jobbing actor’ Derek Hunt remembers one of these. ‘The Interval Club at 22 Dean Street was an old Georgian building right next to the Soho Theatre. It was cheap and convenient, three guineas full board. It was set up in 1926 in Soho Square for Catholic theatricals, although I was a Protestant and nobody seemed to mind. There was a hardware shop below, a small theatre on the first floor, a long dining room with a billiard table, snack bar and TV room on the second floor. Most of the residents were on the third floor, which had the sole bathroom.’