by Judith Wills
It was also in Buck’s bar that we met our American friends Wyn and Gerry. They collected celebrities like other people collect discount vouchers, and it didn’t take them long to cotton on to the potential of Rules. One day they invited us to their Belgravia mews house for Sunday lunch, with a promise of a ‘real great entertainer’ on the guest list. He turned out to be the comedian Frankie Howerd. Frankie arrived on his own, his latest boyfriend having let him down, and for the first fifteen minutes was very jolly, his TV self, full of ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahs’ and high-pitched squeals and raised eyebrows. But suddenly, and over the course of thirty seconds flat, he did a 100 per cent personality switch, and for the next two hours was so morose that at one point we thought of putting him on suicide watch.
In September The Boss and I finally got the energy to find ourselves a one-bedroom ground-floor flat with a garden in Cathcart Road, on the Chelsea/Fulham borders just off the Fulham Road. This was a giant step-up for me. I was getting further and further along the District line with each move towards the West End – now our nearest tube was South Kensington and we’d walk up there most days to catch the train to Embankment and then walk down The Strand to work.
I still hadn’t begun to take for granted the pleasure of living and working among all the landmark streets and buildings of London. And we now had some famous neighbours. Our garden backed on to a larger garden in the posher Tregunter Road, and if we happened to be outside during the daytime or early evening, there would very often be the most amazing, booming, female voice carrying over the garden wall, shouting at her children. It didn’t take us long to realise that the voice belonged to the Avengers actress, Honor Blackman. Even inside the flat, you could still here her booming on, and I got to feel quite sorry for her kids and the state of their ears.
Valerie Singleton from Blue Peter shopped at the little deli across in Hollywood Road, while popular young actress Judy Geeson was often in the queue at the greengrocery. Judy would shop carrying a small fluffy dog – she was way ahead of her time. Patrick Mower (Tom Haggerty of TV’s Special Branch) would scream around the roads in an open-top sports car, looking as if he was quite fond of himself. And Leonard Rossiter, who became huge in 1974 with Rising Damp, would wander up and down the Fulham Road carrying his shopping in tatty old plastic bags, shooting slightly poisonous looks at anyone who dared to look at him first, which included me, once, but only the once.
After we came back from a holiday to Cyprus in the autumn, I went up to Notting Hill to interview one of the most popular TV stars at the time – Richard Beckinsale. Richard later worked with Rossiter in Rising Damp and became better known as the star of Porridge, along with Ronnie Barker, but at this time he was famous for a TV sitcom called The Lovers, in which he had starred with Paula Wilcox.
The pilot episode of Porridge had been screened and Richard was waiting to discover if it would be turned into a series. I suppose some PR seemed in order for him, and so I arrived at his basement flat in a street off Notting Hill Gate.
As a celeb interviewer you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Sometimes people are as you think they will be, but often, they are not. And, as with any first meeting, some people you get on with better than others. With some interviews, you just both muddle along and hope that when your half hour or hour is up you’ll have enough material to make a decent read, with others, you sit and listen and don’t have to say a word, which sounds good, but often it means that you can’t get a word in, to take the chat in a direction you want it to go. Some celebs who want the publicity but don’t want to talk about their private lives will, quite deliberately, seize on a neutral topic and then manage to hold forth about it without ceasing for the full duration of the interview. And there were – and still are – plenty of celebs who will only answer yes, or no, or just raise an eyebrow to any question, or keep saying, ‘I’m only here to talk about the film/TV show/album.’
I was never the best interviewer in the world but I usually got by – and I did get better at unobtrusively directing the chat and getting what I wanted out of the celebs. Often, a shy, quiet and retiring manner would often get a better interview than any amount of hard-hitting, bullying tactics.
Richard Beckinsale was one of those people with whom I just clicked at first sight – we began chatting and giggling straight away, while he made us a cup of tea. After a few minutes I realised that he seemed to keep looking towards a door off the small sitting room.
‘Is anything up?’ I asked.
He looked a bit sheepish. ‘Well, actually – I’m babysitting!’ he said. ‘We had a baby recently (he was with the actress Judy Loe, whom he later married). Would you like to see her?’
‘Oh, yes please!’
I wasn’t that comfortable with babies, having been the youngest, and the memory of trying to set Warren Carter on fire was still in my mind, but not to worry. Beckinsale virtually ran to the bedroom and, beaming from ear to ear with pride, brought out his daughter. While I held her, he went back for her cot. And so we spent the afternoon babysitting together, playing with the baby, who was beautiful and probably around 2 months old. I got well into the cooing and we had a great time swapping baby stories and horror babysitting stories, including the Warren incident which had Richard hooting with laughter.
I left Beckinsale, with what few celeb meetings ever gave you – a warm feeling in the pit of your stomach, like he was a really nice person, he wasn’t just putting it on. How lucky Judy, and the little daughter, Kate, were to have such a lovely guy, I thought, for a husband and a dad. Within a few years he was dead from a heart attack, but the little girl grew up to do his memory proud. Thus I have babysat a huge Hollywood actress.
Around this time I decided I had to learn to drive. The nearest driving school was the BSM just off Trafalgar Square so I went along and signed up for a course of ten lessons. Having been driven around by The Boss for a couple of years, my impression of driving was that it was imperative to go everywhere as fast as the car would let you go, that it was imperative to shout and swear at all who got in your way, whether pedestrian or other driver, and that all women drivers were appalling and should never be allowed into the driving seat.
Although, then, my brain told me I should drive, my heart really wasn’t in it. Quite frankly I was terrified. Thus it was that on my very first driving lesson I was dismayed to find, after ten minutes’ chat, that I was expected to drive the vehicle down a road through Central London, albeit in second gear. We started to move and, to my horror, I saw a car coming towards us.
‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘There’s a car coming … what do I do?’
‘Just stay on your side of the road and you’ll be fine,’ said the instructor patiently.
On my second lesson I found myself driving round Trafalgar Square. On another lesson, I was driving along the Euston Road in the inside lane and, glancing across to the middle lane, found myself staring straight at Jimmy Savile in his open-topped Roller. He waved his cigar at me and nearly had my bumper in his passenger door as he drove off. Whether he recognised me from Top of the Pops I wasn’t sure. As he was at the height of his fame that was another moment I felt I really was right at the centre of the UK pop scene – as I said, I never was a good judge of people. But I did manage to pass my driving test first go.
The rest of the year included my first meeting with the charismatic Marc Bolan of T.Rex at the New Bond Street offices of Warrior Music. I was a huge fan of his music – every single was perfect pop, in my opinion – and he was quite beautiful to look at, in those days.
The next time I saw him, three years later when his popularity was diving and the hits had dried up, he arrived at a press reception near Tottenham Court Road for Dennis Waterman, who made a couple of records for the DJM label on the back of his success in The Sweeney. Why Bolan came to this event, I’m not sure, but I was shocked to see him. Overweight, overbearing, his young fresh looks already beginning to fade, he spent the whole occasion looking rou
nd the room to see who was looking at him, and trying to muscle in to every press shot that he could. In his lifetime, he never had another hit.
I also spent another few days with The Osmonds, who returned to the UK at the end of October for concerts and TV appearances, staying at the Britannia Hotel. By this time they were absolutely huge in the UK, with a string of hits from The Osmonds and Donny all year, and Marie about to release ‘Paper Roses’ in the UK. I went to Heathrow to meet them with photographer David Porter and we watched amazed as thousands of girls screamed and yelled and tried to get near the boys. I later found out that a viewing balcony had collapsed because of the amount of people on it – not even The Beatles in their heyday had received such adulation. Little Bill Sammeth had been right after all …
I was in constant contact with the family not only when they visited the UK, but by phone to Utah, because of Fab and because Osmonds’ World magazine was a monthly sell-out. Olive had a great interest in the magazine and had her own column extolling the benefits of a close family and of having values in life.
As someone who smoked, drank, had had sex before marriage and generally did not live a particularly wholesome life, I constantly amazed myself at how well I interpreted the Osmond line and converted it into copy for the magazine. Everything went back to the States to be approved before going to press, and I don’t recall the family ever wanting to change anything I had written. Perhaps deep down there was an Osmond clone inside me dying to get out …
Also in November, I went along to see Elton John at the Inn on the Park, who was having a press reception for his latest album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. As I had been fixated on David Essex’s legs, so I was fixated on John’s wrist, as it held what was undoubtedly the most expensive watch I had ever seen – more or less the size of Big Ben and completely encrusted with diamonds. The rest of him was, relatively speaking, understated, but that soon changed.
A couple of weeks on, in late November, I was peculiarly nervous as I headed towards Peter Gormley’s Savile Row management offices to meet, for the first time, the King of UK pop, Cliff Richard. As a youngster I had never been a great fan of Cliff – I used to have regular and heated arguments on the school bus with a girl who was an avid Cliff fan, about the merits or otherwise of Cliff versus Billy Fury. Since The Beatles’ days Cliff had struggled to maintain his place in pop, and had been lumbered with a goodie-goodie image via his religious beliefs and his super-clean appearance when all around him were going down the hippie, then glam rock, then punk roads.
Indeed, so uncool was he considered that earlier in the year he had gone for broke and had sung the UK’s Eurovision Song Contest entry, ‘Power to All Our Friends’. In a few years’ time he was to find his way back with a string of much more credible songs such as ‘Devil Woman’ and ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ – but at this time things must have been quiet enough that the interview with Fab 208 was agreed.
As I waited for him to arrive, my nerves grew, and I still didn’t know why as he would surely be a little Osmond-like, and I could get along with them just fine. Perhaps it was like waiting to be have an audience with the mother superior of a convent. But as I waited a little more and watched as people put out the first of the Christmas decorations in a display window opposite, I realised that they had just presented me with my angle. I would talk to Cliff about Christmas.
He gave me a great interview and at the finish I realised I was another convert – not to Christianity (I had never been back to church since being confirmed at the age of 12) but to Cliff. He really was ok.
Now believe me, I don’t have, and never have had, a leg fetish – but a few days later I had occasion to be sitting in the back of another West End office, on a low sofa, opposite yet another pair of strange legs. These were incredibly skinny legs. It was 27 November so it was quite cold, but the legs were bare below a miniskirt. And the legs were covered in long, dark hairs. I sat in my groundhog moment wondering why their owner didn’t either a) shave or wax them or b) cover them up in thick dark warm tights.
The owner of the hirsute limbs, and the owner’s husband, were chattering away opposite me not realising that my mind was on hairy legs rather than the new Wings album they were here to promote – Band on the Run.
Yes, the leg owner was Linda McCartney, and the husband was Paul.
Further on up, Linda had done something strange with the hair on her head, too – think of Rod Stewart in the Faces circa 1970 – long at the sides but short and spikey just at the top – and you have it. The cockatiel mullet. Not a good look. She wasn’t wearing any make-up either.
I don’t have any idea what we talked about that day. I just remember taking in the completely non-babe way Linda was, and then looking at her hubbie, who was nice enough if a bit prickly, and realising he was no looker either (you could think that sort of thing back in those days). Then I got to thinking back to the Albert Hall when I was a teen, there with my dad and Margaret Fox, screaming at The Beatles. Here is one quarter of that phenomenon and he’s got hooded eyes, thin lips, slightly thinning hair, bit of a paunch – what on earth did we all see in him? Ah well. Perhaps he could sing. Perhaps he could write songs. Perhaps he just got lucky. I don’t know.
So by the end of autumn 1973 I was able to cross several members of pop royalty – queens, kings, whatever – from my ‘must meet’ list. Elton John, Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney – pretty good. On 4 December I had my first encounter with a band who were not yet in that league of pop royalty but were obviously hoping to get there, because their name was, indeed, Queen.
I only went along because Tony Brainsby had asked me to go, more or less as a favour. He said he had this group of guys who were very good but hadn’t done as well with their first two singles as had been hoped. ‘There’ll be plenty of refreshment and it will be a laugh I promise you …’.
So I arrived at his SW1 terrace office in the early afternoon and immediately felt as though I had stepped, just like my first moment in the Fab offices but with much less light, into an Alice in Wonderland on speed kind of situation. The house was quite gloomy – Tony’s mood lighting, I guess, or the lightbulbs had all gone – and rich with tobacco-type odours and haze. Fantastic music was blasting around the house from top to toe – and as I stood near the top of the narrow first flight of stairs, a crew of boys – obviously, from the look of them, Queen themselves, bashed their way through the entrance door and we all stood on the stairs, shaking hands, hugging, kissing and, eventually, falling over. They may have come straight from the pub – I know I had.
Tony peered down to see what was going on, realised we had introduced ourselves after a fashion, and just left us to it.
The music turned out to be Queen’s first album. They had released it back in the summer and the lead singer Freddie Mercury, whose OTT behaviour, I finally realised, accounted for at least 75 per cent of the chaos that happened that afternoon, sang along with each track as it came.
‘Come on, Jude, come on – be my backing singer, go on…’.
So I did a few la la las until he got engrossed with his own performance, finally bowing and flourishing as each track came to an end. He put on quite a show and by the end of the afternoon when I staggered away I knew – and this time I wasn’t wrong – that this band would be big no matter what bad start they had had. Freddie had such a beautiful voice and you just couldn’t ignore him. At all.
nine
Judy Teen Grew Sick
of the Scene
1974 AND 1975
Abba win Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’. Pantomime song and pantomime outfits. Then Mike Batt has a hit with ‘The Wombles of Wimbledon’; 10-year-old Lena Zavaroni sings ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’; John Denver bores us all to tears with ‘Annie’s Song’ – we’re not living through the best of times for great pop music.
In fact, January 1974 was pretty boring and depressing all round. We were in the middle of a national State of Emergency called by the Conservative governme
nt under Ted Heath, due to the ongoing miners’ strikes over pay. All kinds of rules meant a three-day working week, and there was a general sense around the Fab office of the good times having come to an end.
The most exciting things I could dredge up, apart from ongoing Osmond phone calls, were interviews with Cozy Powell and Medicine Head, a lunchtime gig at the Talk of the Town for Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s daughter, and a press reception at the old Les Ambassadeurs club for Lulu. I’d bumped into Lulu several times over the years and had always found her pleasant and helpful. One time in particular, in the fairly early days, when I would get embarrassed at any slight thing that went wrong, I went to a press ‘do’ for the NSPCC just north of Oxford Street. Rather than catching a taxi, I went by tube and when I came up from Oxford Circus station, it was bucketing down and I had no brolly. I had no choice but to hurry to the gig, arriving absolutely drenched and with no semblance of dignity or style left.
As I stood at the entrance wondering whether to go in or not, Lulu, who must have been either a guest of honour or patron, or both, appeared from inside. When she saw this drowned rat, rather than turn her nose up and walk past, she immediately turned into a complete mother hen.
‘Och, look at you – not to worry, we’ll get you sorted out.’
‘Rain wasn’t forecast,’ I said feebly.
She led me to the Ladies, opened her bag and produced tissues and whatever else she deemed necessary, and helped me to make myself presentable again. She then walked with me into the reception and introduced me to a few people. After that, I had lots of time for her. Although over the intervening thirty-odd years she seems to have got a bit more grand, I always remember how kind she was.