Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick

by Judith Wills

  One day, I am going to go there. It’s got to be the most exciting place on earth. Imagine – living in the city where all the movies are made, where the TV shows are made. Where you might bump into people you see on the screen, just walking around, just shopping, in the bars …

  In my early teens, I truly thought that Los Angeles was the holy grail. Even at 15 to go there was my main ambition. I recently found an old school essay book and in it, an essay we’d been asked to write titled ‘Castles in the Air’. The only teacher I liked at Bicester Grammar School was the English teacher, whose name, sadly, I can’t recall. He had had polio so his body was in a pretty poor state, but he was a wonderful man, the kind of teacher schools should hope and pray they find, because he was encouraging, patient, and with a wicked humour. I loved him, actually – he saved my school life, he really did, as well as giving me the confidence to believe that one day I really might be able to write for a living. So I put all my energies into giving him essays he could enjoy. Extract from ‘Castles in the Air’:

  I for one, hope to have many years before me in which, after dreaming, I can attempt to make each dream come true. Most ambitions are possible … to take a defeatist attitude from the start is to squash any hope of fulfilling them.

  After analysing each one of my secret hopes, I find that they are all possible. For instance, I want to visit the USA more than anything else. I also want to work in Fleet Street, write books, and meet a well-known person who shall remain anonymous [this was Billy Fury but I was too embarrassed to say so in this essay, prompting the teacher to write ‘spoilsport’ in the margin].

  Many people work in Fleet Street, so why not me? Then I could go to America, to work as a correspondent, for example, and write books as a side interest. From such a position, I would meet many famous people.

  I know that most of us dream of wealth and happiness. Happiness I would gain from my work, and I never want to be overloaded with money in any case [that was a good job, then]. This all sounds very boastful now, but even if it is only wishful thinking, in about fifty years’ time I will be able to look back with some amusement at my young ambitions…’.

  ‘Some amusement’ is a bit of an understatement; the earnest and pompous way I wrote was hilarious. But every bit of it came true – even down to looking back on the predictions years later. Thank God for castles in the air, I say.

  The States trip, which was planned for 14 to 21 April, was for two main reasons. Firstly, it was to see The Osmonds in their own country, performing, and to spend enough time with them all to enable me to begin writing articles for the forthcoming Osmonds’ World magazine, which I was to spend the next few years compiling virtually single-handed (with Osmond help, of course).

  Secondly, it was the prize trip of a lifetime for a young girl who had applied, via Dream Come True in Fab, to meet Donny Osmond.

  When we had announced the competition, we had received thousands of entries (at that time, what teenage girl didn’t want to meet Donny Osmond?). After sifting through and coming up with a shortlist of ten or so likely candidates for the trip, I talked to them on the phone or visited them in person to find the ideal reader to take to America to meet Donny. This wasn’t the normal way competitions worked, but it was a ‘dream come true’ rather than an actual competition, so we could make the rules up as we went along – and the last thing I wanted to do was take with me a reader who wouldn’t enjoy the trip, who would find it daunting, who would get to meet Donny and then not say a word to him – you know the sort of thing. I had had enough experience by this time of wanting to strangle readers who, when faced with their idol, would just stand there and look dumb. (Anyone seen the photo of me at 16 with my idol Billy Fury, just standing there and looking dumb?)

  I also wanted someone with whom I could rub along for the duration. Judi Matthews, who was around 14 at the time, turned out to fit the bill as well as anyone and thus on 14 April, The Boss kindly drove us to Heathrow for our Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight to LA.

  Having spent nearly six years working for Fab, having been abroad several times and having met everyone on my wish list, it took quite a lot to get me excited, but I remember so well, thinking, at last, I am going to the States. I am going to LA!

  The fact that I wasn’t having to pay a penny for the trip, that I was getting paid to go, and that I was going to be seeing a sheaf of stars while out there was all rather good.

  We were met at LA airport by Cyril Maitland, Fab’s long-serving photographer out there. Cyril was a short, bearded man probably in his 40s, who obviously knew LA inside out. We arrived at our hotel, The Roosevelt in Hollywood, and in my spacious room there was a big bowl of fruit and a note saying, ‘Welcome to LA – love from The Osmonds’. Nice.

  During three hectic days in Hollywood and LA, Cyril took us to Disneyland, to the beach, to various authentic American diners, to meet Ben Murphy (who was the star of a huge ’70s TV series called Alias Smith and Jones) at his condominium block apartment, to meet Mark Spitz, the swimmer who had just won a chestful of golds at the 1972 Olympics, and to the American equivalent magazine of Fab which was called Sixteen.

  On Wednesday 18th we took the short flight to Las Vegas and checked into the Tropicana Hotel, where we stayed for two days and met up with Betty Hale, who had flown out from the UK. She’d arrived on the pretext of having a business meeting with the Osmond parents re. Osmonds’ World, but I have the feeling she may have felt the need to check up on how I was coping with everything – looking after Judi, doing interviews, finding my way around, and so on. I think the verdict was favourable, which was no surprise – I was more or less grown up.

  It was in Vegas, at Caesars Palace, that Judi finally got to meet Donny Osmond before the show, and had a front of house seat for The Osmonds’ performance, during which Donny sang to her. It was during this short run that Marie Osmond was finally given her chance to take to the stage – she sang a duet with Donny and although she was nervous she got through it okay. She was wearing a long gown, with full heavy make-up and an old-fashioned hairdo, and I remember wondering if the whole look was such a good idea. Within weeks she was topping the charts in the USA and UK with her first single, ‘Paper Roses’.

  One of my tasks on Osmonds’ World magazine was to write the Marie Osmond problem page, a feat that took some dexterity of thought and pen, as Marie was a 13-year-old virgin; had never dated a boy – in fact, had hardly even seen any boys apart from her brothers, as far as I could tell – and wasn’t going to be allowed to date until she was 16 in any case; had never been to school (all the Osmonds were taught by correspondence courses in between gigs) and had a mindset as far removed from the average UK teenager as you could imagine. But I got by.

  Next day we drove with the Osmonds up to Lake Tahoe, a leisure and gaming resort near San Francisco, where the family rented a lakeside villa. It was at this villa that Olive Osmond suddenly produced for me a paperback copy of The Book of Mormon, and, after reading a few passages from it for me, proceeded to round up as many members of the family as she could to sign it. She managed to get all the signatures except for Jimmy, who had disappeared down to the lake to get up to some boyhood mischief. I wasn’t sure if it was an unsubtle hint that I should read the book (they can’t have failed to notice by this time that I drank alcohol and caffeine and smoked tobacco and was in definite need of saving) or simply a nice gesture from Mrs Osmond with no strings attached. I took it as the latter. And spent a while wondering how they reconciled their religion with the gambling, drinking, fast-living town of Las Vegas that they chose to perform in so often.

  After a couple of hours chatting to the family and gazing out at the expanse of ice-blue water, which reminded me, in its boring beauty, of the lakes of Sweden, Judi and I headed by taxi down the coast a few miles to the Sahara resort where we were staying, and watched The Osmonds perform there in the evening. Finally, on the Saturday we flew back to LA and caught the flight home. Judi had been a real trouper, she�
��d enjoyed herself and we had had no arguments, and although the trip had been too crammed to actually take much of it in properly, for me it was a taster.

  Once home I realised that, in fact, I would not like to live in LA, my initial impression being that it was a rather one-horse town of little charm; I would not like to spend much time in a resort like Vegas or Tahoe – where every time I touched the elevator buttons I got an electric shock, that’s how wired the places were. Little Jimmy Osmond’s hair literally stood on end as he got out of the lift at the Tahoe Sahara to walk through the side of the casino area, which, luckily, he found hugely funny, but I was annoyed that my camera wasn’t to hand.

  As soon as I got back to London from the States, The Boss and I flew to Portugal for a late spring holiday, and when we returned I received two press tickets for the forthcoming David Bowie concert at Earls Court on 12 May. On the day, we walked from Avonmore Road down the Warwick Road to the Earls Court Exhibition Centre and as we approached we began to see dozens and dozens of fans, male and female, all dressed in slightly different versions of Ziggy Stardust.

  We sat feeling rather old and boring, as Ziggy acted and sang and played on stage in front of 10,000 crazy, shouting, dancing fans. It wasn’t my favourite music, he wasn’t one of my favourite performers either – but I had to admit, he had brought himself a long way since the day I first saw him up at Fab.

  A few weeks later, I saw another very popular David – the latest star of pop and the West End stage, David Essex. Like Bowie, Mud and several others, he had spent several years trying to find elusive chart success but had finally ‘cracked it’ when he won the lead role in the musical Godspell which had been a sell-out at Wyndham’s Theatre since November 1971. He was also the star of the pop culture movie That’ll be the Day – a story about a fairground worker who becomes a pop star – which also starred my old friends Keith Moon and Billy Fury, and had been released just a few weeks before our meeting.

  I met him, and his long-term manager, Derek Bowman, backstage before his performance and David, bless him, was trying as hard as hard could be to be laid back about his sudden huge success both in the movie and stage worlds. He bounded into the dressing room like a lanky puppy and began his role of the afternoon – to charm me and impress upon me how natural and ordinary and East End he was.

  I sat there taping his replies but was too transfixed by his lower legs to pay any real attention to what he was saying at the time. The expanse of skinny, hairy, ghostly pale-fleshed ankle exposed below half-mast trousers, the white socks, the huge black shoes which almost filled my line of view as he sat, legs crossed, in front of me, held a strange and bewitching fascination. Legs and feet that were a complete turn off on the hot sex symbol of the day. It was so weird. I found, when I could tear myself away from his lower regions, that he did have a beautiful face with these huge blue sad gypsy come-to-bed eyes. They were a close second to Nimoy for twinkle rating, too, when he smiled – but they didn’t do a thing for me because, unlike Nimoy, all his twinkling and all the rest of it just didn’t seem sincere. Probably mean of me, but that’s the way I felt. And you know by now what a good judge of men I’ve always been.

  Forgive me, David, I am sure your legs are just lovely now. I don’t think you’d grown into your looks at that time, you were just too young.

  A few weeks later I came back to the same place to see the same person, but this time with a reader, Karen Gill, for a Dream Come True meet and greet. To be fair, Essex was very pleasant to, and patient with, the young fan and it was a date she remembered for decades – a fact I know because she was still writing to me talking about it well into the ’90s.

  Around the same time, I interviewed Chris Jagger, in my opinion the nicer of the two Jagger brothers, who was trying to make it as an actor, and I also had the chance to observe Bianca Jagger up close, at a reception at The Ritz. She strode in as if she owned the place, beautifully turned out in a very sharp black trouser suit, with short, perfectly groomed black hair, and holding a walking cane (for show, not use) with a gold handle. There were also two gay men trailing in her wake. She shook hands with two other men, and they all sat down at a table about 5ft from me. The talk was obviously business and I wasn’t interested in the subject – but what fascinated me was her self-confidence, her attitude and her manner. She was sharper than her suit and dominated her companions throughout. I realised that she must wear the trousers at home as well.

  The Boss had his own busy social and business life but, because his office was just a few doors from mine, in Maiden Lane, right next to Rules restaurant for whom he worked as the PR, we often saw each other at lunchtime and would also meet in Rules after work. Sometimes I’d take him to one of my freebie bashes – in June, for instance, we sat and yawned our way through Applause at the Haymarket Theatre, starring Lauren Bacall. Miss Bacall was one of the last of the great Hollywood stars, but in our opinion, her stage acting career was something she should have reconsidered.

  Later in the year, we went to one of the best parties ever – a bash at The Dorchester held by Bell records for Gary Glitter in recognition of all the records he had sold. The bit that sticks in my mind is Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the disc jockey, wearing some kind of female fancy dress and sitting on a ‘throne’ near the stage area, surrounded by young, handsome male fairies dressed all in white robes. Freeman was the guest of honour because, so the story went, he was largely responsible for the Glitter phenomenon because he was the only DJ who had spotted the potential of the first hit, ‘Rock and Roll Parts 1 and 2’, and played it non-stop on his Radio 1 show. Freeman thus had a lot to answer for.

  The Boss remembers going to the (male) loo and finding Suzi Quatro in there, shouting and kicking a locked door ‘Come on, Len, what the fuck are you doing ….’. Len Tuckey was her guitarist, and her husband, but they divorced a while later. The place was actually heaving with all the stars of the day, you’d tread on them every time you moved – so much so that when we got home it was a great relief to sit down with a cup of tea and watch TV. Z Cars or Z-list stars? Take your choice. Maybe I was suffering the beginnings of disillusion with the whole pop scene. You can have too much of a good thing.

  In return for these freebies and fun, The Boss would treat me to unlimited drinks in the bar of Rules. Rules restaurant was supposed to be a bastion of fine and discreet English dining. ‘London’s oldest restaurant’ according to the PR blurb that was always handed out (this claim, still bandied about today, was totally invented, I have to say, by The Boss).

  However, the barman, Buck, ran his little bar area just inside the main entrance as an independent state. If you were prepared to pay his prices, you could just pop in for a drink like it was your local pub without having to have a meal. Plenty of people – including the stars from nearby West End shows at The Savoy, the Vaudeville and the Adelphi, most of the staff of Woman’s Own magazine from Southampton Street round the corner, an assortment of Fleet Street photographers, hacks and cartoonists, including Jak of the Evening Standard and Frank Dickens, spent more hours than any of them would care to recall at ‘Buck’s bar’, as it was always known. Whoever was there, Buck would introduce you; it was his own daily cocktail party.

  Buck was a superbly entertaining barman as well as a good-hearted man, a shoulder to cry on at times, and at others, a wily guy who had every trick in the book for making a few extra pennies out of his little empire and for keeping you there as long as possible – not that anyone ever complained. Sometimes he would get out a game called Shut the Box, or he’d start a game of spoof, and it was fun to sit on the bar stools and just see what would happen next.

  What happened one time was that a female snake charmer arrived, hot from one of the local shows, clutching a case which, indeed, contained a python. The Boss, having had a few drinks by this time, persuaded her it would be fun to let the snake out. She did and off it slithered amongst the tables and diners. The mayhem that followed within seconds was wonderful, and the inc
ident made the Evening Standard. Whether this gave The Boss, who was being paid plenty to do Rules’ public relations (in an ironic sort of way, obviously), brownie points or not, I am not sure. The owner at the time, John Wood, veered between being delighted that he made so much money out of the bar, and being annoyed that his straight-laced restaurant seemed at times more like the rowdiest boozer or wildest circus in town.

  Another time I caused the stir. The tables in the bar area were laid with large thick linen tablecloths, and that day The Boss, a couple of people from Woman’s Own and I had ordered a large jug of buck’s fizz and four champagne glasses. They all arrived, and suddenly one of the WO people remembered that old trick, where you pull the cloth off the table and leave everything else in place.

  ‘Which one of you is going to attempt this feat?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, that’ll be easy – I’ll do it!’ I replied. And before The Boss could stop me, One … Two … Three … I counted, gripped the edge of the tablecloth and pulled, as hard and as fast as I could, with my eyes shut. When I opened them – the champagne, the glasses, everything, were still on the table.

  ‘There! No problem …’. I said, nonchalantly. That story had a long run.

  It was in this tiny bar that I bumped into Liza Goddard again, and it was here that I met Joe Brown and his wife Vicky, Jean Simmonds the film actress, Millicent Martin, Anna Massey and Max Wall, the music hall comedian who was plotting his career revival in a new stage version of The Entertainer. The Boss and I would often have lunch with him and listen while Max monologued in that distinctive voice about his miserable life, his dreadful marriage and anything else on his mind. Eventually, once I had got over the slight thrill of lunching with a legend, I came to dread Max arriving unnannouced at our table and asking if we’d mind if he joined us – he was a nice guy, I guess, no harm in him, but boy, he was self-centred. Max did always seem depressed – like so many of the great comics.