by Pip Granger
The club was run by Molly Balvaird Hewitt, a formidable elderly lady who was the daughter of the founder. There was also a residential house for theatrical ladies in the original premises in Soho Square. In an article in the Soho Clarion, Derek recalled that ‘Auditions were held in the theatre by repertory companies, Joan Littlewood, the Royal Shakespeare Company, etc. Tuesdays were set aside for the Tuesday girls, a mixture of actresses and chorus girls of a certain age, playing bridge, gossiping and all mad keen on tennis and Wimbledon.’
The residents also had lives typical of jobbing actors. ‘We were always skint,’ Derek remembers, ‘but managed to make ends meet by doing odd jobs or working backstage on musicals like Flower Drum Song and Sound of Music.’ The Interval Club moved to 63 Frith Street in 1962, when the Dean Street buildings – once a coaching inn run by Thomas Gainsborough’s brother – were demolished, and it closed for good in 1965.
Once an actor had got a part, the chances were that he or she would be back in the West End to be fitted for costumes, shoes and wigs. Monty Berman was the best-known film costumier of his day. Berman’s father founded the business, and was initially famous for dressing stage productions, a tradition that his son was also happy to carry on, although film was his main interest. Berman’s was based at 18 Irving Street, just off Leicester Square, and was a Mecca for actors. Berman took his work very seriously, and by making everyone from the star to a lowly extra feel important, he helped actors get into character and to feel more confident in their work. Sir Richard Attenborough is quoted as saying that Monty Berman ‘loved our business and was an integral part of it’. In fact, Berman occasionally provided the costumes for little or nothing in order to get a production off the ground.
Pat Jones went to work at Berman’s, as a theatrical milliner, when she was just fifteen. She did the ladies’ hats for Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Importance of Being Earnest, among others. ‘We were right on the top floor,’ she remembers, ‘the milliners, alongside the tailors. The showrooms, of course, were on the ground floor. Monty Berman’s father took a shine to me, and got in to the habit, when anyone he thought I’d be interested in was in the showroom, of ringing up and asking me to bring something down, so he could introduce me. I never knew who would be there until I got there. So I met all the stars, which was lovely, until one day I saw Great Expectations, where Finlay Currie [as Magwitch] comes out of the graveyard, and that petrified me. Soon after, Mr Berman invited me down. There was this great big posh chair, in leather, like a throne. So I came in, and this person in the chair turned round when I was almost on top of him, and it was Finlay Currie. I just went “Aaargh” – really screamed. Monty came running out. When I explained, Finlay Currie said, “My dear, please don’t apologize. It’s a very great compliment.”’
While Berman specialized in movies, another firm of costumiers, B. J. Simmons in Covent Garden, supplied the local theatres. Simmons, founded in 1857, dressed well over a thousand stage productions before they closed in 1964. They were bought out in 1941 by a local costumier and perruquier, Charles H. Fox of King Street, whose business was supplying wigs and costumes for fancy dress and theatricals.
After leaving Berman’s, Pat Jones went to work for Simmons. ‘I met some stars there. Robert Newton rolled up; he could hardly get up the stairs. I stayed there until I had trouble with my eyes, and they advised me not to do any close work.’
As it is today, the West End was the heart and soul of London’s theatreland, with Shaftesbury Avenue, Drury Lane and the Haymarket the equivalent of New York’s Broadway. Stage actors came there for the same business reasons as their film colleagues – agents, networking, costumes and so on – as well as to be dressed and shod, for work and for play. Jeff Sloneem remembers that, ‘My uncle had a tailor’s shop in Old Compton Street until 1954, 1955. Robert Morley was one of his customers. I remember him, because he wanted me to be in a film, when I was five or so. About that time there was an Italian film, Bicycle Thieves, and apparently I looked exactly like the kid in that, and Robert Morley wanted me to be in a film with him, but my mother didn’t want another member of the family in show business.’
Gamba and Anello & Davide were the two main theatrical shoemakers. Gamba, founded by an Italian waiter in 1894, was just down the road from where I lived, on the corner of Old Compton Street and Greek Street. I loved to press my nose to Gamba’s window and dream of being a prima ballerina like my heroine, Margot Fonteyn. Seeing that I danced with all the grace of a two-legged pony, my dreams came to nothing. Gamba was particularly renowned for making pointe shoes for ballet dancers, and in their window was a display of satiny pointe shoes in various colours, although a fleshy pink appeared to predominate. I seem to remember other items of ballet costume, too, including tights, swansdown bits and bobs for the cygnets in Swan Lake, and fake diamond tiaras, but it is more than possible that two entirely different shops have coalesced in my memory over the intervening years. Those who danced for the Sadler’s Wells company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, wouldn’t dream of getting their shoes from anywhere else. Pavlova and Nijinsky were customers in their day. Later, Robert Helpmann and Dame Margot Fonteyn made the trip across Charing Cross Road from Covent Garden to Soho, to be measured up. Later still, so did Rudolph Nureyev.
I remember Anello & Davide’s shop at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street, not too far from the tube. I dreamed impossible dreams when I passed Gamba, while Anello & Davide’s shop brings jewel-like colours to mind. They made street shoes as well as tap-dancing and theatrical ones.
In the fifties, most women’s shoes came in one of three basic colours, black, brown or navy blue. Just occasionally, oxblood and olive green made an appearance, but they were rare finds, unless you went to Anello & Davide, where a world of colour suddenly opened up before you. I distinctly remember tap-type shoes, only without the taps, for street wear, in at least three shades of green – lime, bottle and olive. Reds came in pillar-box, flame, maroon and scarlet, and then drifted off in to orange. To our colour-starved eyes, Anello & Davide was a truly wondrous Aladdin’s cave. The shop’s famous customers included David Niven, who liked suede shoes, and Marilyn Monroe, who had them make some of her stiletto-heeled numbers. Later, in the sixties, they made ‘kinky’ boots, and distinguished themselves by supplying the Beatles’ ankle boots.
Fred Astaire, famed among his peers for ‘having class’, was often clad from balding head to twinkling toes by West End craftsmen and women. George Cleverley made Astaire’s street shoes, and Gamba his taps, while Lock’s fashioned his hats and Savile Row tailored his shirts and suits: in fact, there were days when only his accent was American.
When plays settled in for a long run, their stars became part of the local scene. Mike O’Rouke remembers meeting actors from the Cambridge Theatre in his local pub, the Mercer’s Arms. People like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay used to go in there for a pint. My dad told a story about Tom Courtenay. He was in Billy Liar over at the Cambridge, and there was a scene where he had to go upstairs and make out he had a gammy leg. My dad was in the pub one night and he pulled him over and said, “You don’t go up the stairs like that,” and Tom said, “How do you know?” like, and Dad knocked on his artificial leg. I think me dad gave him a couple of tips, helped him with his performance.’
The theatres provided a handy source of extra income for many who lived and worked in the West End. The firemen from the Shaftesbury Avenue station – well versed in the mysteries of ropes and ladders – would help out in the flies, and were joined by many who lived locally. ‘A lot of people in the Bedfordbury used to do a second job in the theatres,’ Ronnie Mann explains, ‘particularly in the Coliseum, which backed on to us. You had the showmen and the daymen. The showmen were full-time theatre workers – used to do the curtains and so on – and the daymen used to shift the scenery. I worked on the flies for two years: that was dropping the curtain, going in after I finished work in Covent Garden flower market around lun
chtime. I used to do matinées. Sometimes you’d go to other theatres and move the store. There wasn’t much you had to do, but somebody had to do it, or nothing worked!’
Some of the supporting crafts in the area were highly specialized. The scenery and backdrops moved by Ronnie Mann were almost certainly painted at Elms Lesters in Flitcroft Street, just off Tin Pan Alley. In this long, tall, thin workshop, painters, many of them just out of art school, clambered over scaffolding to work on backdrops that hung from huge rollers running along the spine of the building, just under the roof ridge.
Another very good reason for actors to haunt the West End was to play, in nightclubs or private drinking or gambling dens. Ronnie Brace remembers nights out at Winston’s, his uncle’s club, when he was a teenager in the fifties. ‘They all came to that club. Anita Ekberg, my father said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Elizabeth Taylor, my father always said he’d asked her for a dance, and she was the only one – because he was a very good-looking man, my father, very good-looking – who ever refused him.’
While hard-drinking artists and bohemians tended to favour Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room, show business types were more likely to congregate at one of a succession of private members’ clubs owned and run by the actor Gerald Campion. Campion was a local, born in Bloomsbury in 1921 to a show business family: his father was a screenwriter and his godfather, Gerald du Maurier, was a famous actor, manager and producer.
As a jobbing actor, Campion knew that actors need a place to go late in the evening in order to come down after a show or a day in front of the cameras, as well as a place to hang out in the day to make contacts and friendships. His first club, the Buckstone, opened in 1950, and was handily situated right opposite the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. It soon became a favourite haunt of the theatrical, television, radio and film crowds. Resting actors worked behind the bar. Ronnie Corbett first met Ronnie Barker there, when he was serving and his future comedy partner was supping.
A few years after the Buckstone opened, Campion became one of the first ‘superstars’ of television after landing the lead in the series Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School. When the series began in 1952, the BBC was the sole television channel, and everyone with access to a television watched it. Campion played the portly schoolboy until 1961, when he was forty.
In 1956 he opened the Key Club, near the London Palladium, so-called because every member had a key to its door. Acting in Bunter and running the Key Club must have been exhausting, and rumour had it that amphetamines helped him keep pace with it all. The irony of TV’s most prominent fictional glutton subsisting on diet pills was not lost on Campion.
Gerry’s in Shaftesbury Avenue was the last of his clubs. Its members included Michael Caine, Keith Waterhouse and Tony Hancock. Everyone seems to have loved Campion for his generous nature. Show business types down on their luck could always count on him to provide food and drink on tick for as long as it was necessary. Owen Gardner’s job in Page’s catering supply shop next to Gerry’s remembers it well. ‘You went downstairs in the basement there. It was there for donkey’s years, a drinking club where theatrical people could go and know that they could have a drink with their own type, their own kind, and not get bothered.’
Gambling also brought stars and supporting players to Soho. Harry Fowler, a stalwart of British cinema and television who rarely starred, but turned up in virtually everything that featured a cheeky London chappie or a bit of a spiv, could usually be tracked down to a smoky spieler (illegal gambling club) or snooker hall, or to the kitchen of our flat, where he’d play cards with Father and his cronies.
Dennis Shaw, the ubiquitous heavy in any production requiring a really scary villain, was another Soho habitué. I remember him vividly, because he always frightened me into hiding behind my father’s legs when we met in the street, although he was never, ever unkind to me – in fact, quite the opposite. I realize now that his ability to terrify small children just by standing there must have upset him, despite the fact that his looks were what earned him his living. He was a large man with dark hair swept straight back from a low, low forehead and a heavy, warty, moley, jowly face that could frighten the dead into life. Dennis was also a gambling man, who, like Father, enjoyed a punt on the gee-gees. He could often be found propping up the counter in the betting shop, once they were finally made legal, his ugly mug buried deep in the racing pages.
Soho also attracted the stars of the sporting world. Freddie Mills’s distinctive, much-broken nose marked him out as a pugilist immediately. He was the light-heavyweight world boxing champ between 1948 and 1950, and this made him a darling of the media and a sporting hero to millions. He stayed in the public eye long after his boxing career was over, thanks to the newspapers, Pathé News, and small parts in several films, including two of the Carry On series. He was a jewel thief in Carry On Constable (1960), and Lefty in Carry On Regardless (1961). Just about everyone knew Freddie’s face, whether they liked boxing or not. His ownership of Freddie Mills Chinese Restaurant, at 143 Charing Cross Road, made him a West End ‘face’. Later, he turned the restaurant into a nightclub, called, with great originality, Freddie Mills Nite Spot.
Father knew him fairly well from the snooker hall and various spielers, nightclubs and drinking clubs in the area. Freddie seemed to like children. He had two daughters of his own, Susan and Amanda, and he always slipped me half a crown whenever he saw me. Freddie’s life ended tragically early in Goslett Yard at the rear of his club. He was found dead in the back of his Citroën, shot in the head with a rifle. His death was ruled a suicide, although there was no note and his business partner and his family testified he had seemed fine just hours before. Nobody ever discovered any reason why he should take his own life, although there were a great many rumours at the time and more have surfaced since. His good friends, the Kray twins, always maintained that he was murdered by members of a Chinese tong who were intent on taking over his nightclub.
Another well-known sportsman and Soho habitué was Bert Assirati, who was very famous in his day as a British and European wrestling champion. Although he fought as a heavyweight, he was short and stocky, a professional strongman, who worked from time to time as a bouncer in Soho. He was unpredictable, and could turn from edgy affability to charging bull in the twinkling of an eye, a character trait that unnerved not only me but those he faced in the wrestling ring, as well as the local hard men. He was such a ferocious competitor that many potential opponents refused to wrestle with him.
Despite his enormous strength and frightening temper, his wife, Marjorie, a small woman, was able to keep him under control. Father reported that, on another occasion, he turned a corner just in time to see tiny Mrs Assirati, hands on hips, berating Bert. He had picked up several stone paving slabs from a pile waiting to be laid and had raised them above his head ready to crown some cowering unfortunate who had displeased him. After a choice mouthful from his spouse, he lowered the slabs sheepishly and placed them tidily back on the pile before allowing himself to be led away like a naughty schoolboy.
One day in the mid fifties, I was out walking with Father and some of his ‘business associates’. One of them, Campanini, said something that hit Bert’s top note, and the wrestler lifted him way above his head and tossed him over a high wall. A crashing, tinkling sound was followed by startled shrieks, a spluttered ‘I say,’ and gabbled apologies in charmingly broken English. Campanini’s head appeared above the wall, festooned with bits of hard-boiled egg, cress and cake. He’d landed in the middle of someone’s tea party. As he jumped down in to the street, apparently unharmed, pieces of shattered china rained from his ruined clothes and a pair of sugar tongs clattered to the pavement.
‘Momento,’ muttered Campanini, who picked up the tongs and heaved himself up the wall again. With another apology, he dropped the tongs in to the garden, saying, ‘I return these to you.’
By this time, the host of the party had barged through a door set in the
wall ready to remonstrate with the perpetrator of this outrage, but reassessed the situation when he clapped eyes on Bert. The sight of Campanini dripping with tea had, though, done much to restore Bert’s good humour, and after a hasty whip-round he paid for the breakages with a crisp white fiver and change.
Primo Carnera, who became heavyweight boxing champion of the world in 1933, was another sporting hero whose face was well known in the West End. He was not easy to overlook, as he was 6’ 6” tall and muscular with it. When Primo’s vast frame was spotted ambling through Soho’s narrow streets he drew the local children – especially the Italians – like a magnet. After his boxing career ended, he turned to wrestling and to acting. His role as Python Macklin in the popular A Kid For Two Farthings in 1955 made his face familiar to many a British household. His nephew, John Carnera, distinctly remembers having an unscheduled, fascinating day off school to visit his uncle on the set.
Among the West End’s Italian population and in his native Italy, Primo was revered in much the same way as top international footballers are today. He would visit Soho every year to see his brother, Secundo, and his family. John remembers his Uncle Primo as a prodigious drinker: much to John’s mother’s distress, he always led Secundo astray, dragging him around too many West End watering holes while he was in town. Primo died in America, aged sixty, of kidney and liver failure, although he outlived his hardworking younger brother.
12
A Matter of Tastes