by Judith Wills
By March, as correctly predicted by me – for once – Queen at last had their first UK top 10 hit with ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ and a hit album, Queen II. They were on their way.
And by March we had a new prime minister, Harold Wilson, back for his second term after a four-year break. After the most depressing winter I could ever remember, there was small cause for hope. Not that I ever was a fan of Wilson – shallow as I was, I just couldn’t cope with his appearance, having never warmed to pipe-smoking, overweight, Gannex-mac-wearing men. Christ, the guy was only in his 50s at this time – younger than I am now – and he looked so old and out of touch with youth – the very people that the Labour party needed to win over.
I spent most of the summer getting Mud on my shoes all over the place because I was writing their life story for Fab. Once Dave Mount had realised I wasn’t going to go out with him, he was fine about it and since our first few meetings in 1973, we had become good friends within the band/work context. When they finally had their first monster smash hit, ‘Tiger Feet’, early in 1974, I was delighted. Even after that, and as the hits – ‘The Cat Crept In’, ‘Lonely This Christmas’, ‘Oh Boy’ – continued and they began buying the odd trapping of wealth – Dave bought a Pontiac car with the number plate MUD 401 – they would still bend over to help you get your story or photo. There was never a tantrum, a sulk, a sarky word from the boys – kind of like the UK Osmonds, but without the religion.
Doing their life story entailed visits to their own patch of London – the Mitcham area of Surrey. The boys had more or less grown up together – no one could accuse them of being a ‘manufactured’ group – and one or other of them had been playing together in bands since their teens. It was fun to visit their modest little terrace and semi-detached homes – most of them, bar guitarist Ray Stiles who was married, still lived with Mum and Dad. Rob, the quietest, shyest one of the band, still had his soft toy collection in his little bedroom at Hackbridge.
We went to their old schools, the shops they used to visit for guitar strings, the patch of green where they used to play football, and to St Mark’s Church Hall where they played their first-ever gig, and then to the local pub to sit over a few drinks.
Seeing their background and hearing about some of the early jobs they had before turning pro – Les Gray had been a messenger in an advertising agency, Dave an apprentice electrical fitter, Rob Davis a wages clerk – I realised why I liked their company so much. They really were working class lads who got lucky – albeit with some talent to help them along – and just carried on and on feeling great about life because wasn’t pop the best thing, didn’t it just beat 9 to 5 at the factory and earning a tenner a week? Mud played pop because they loved the whole business, I wrote about it because I loved it. We were all escapees from a life that could have been so much worse – and that was why we all got on so well.
Ronnie Scott’s Soho club was still one of the main venues we’d arrive at if we wanted some fun, and it was still playing host to the best press receptions in town.
In June we saw a guy called Ed Welch at Ronnie’s. Ed was a talented songwriter and keyboard player who had released an album called Clowns back in 1973, which was one of my all-time favourite LPs. He’d signed my copy for me at his first press reception and he was another of those people you just get on with.
Unfortunately he just didn’t have the right pushiness or aplomb or look to make it as a chart star but his musical talents and his knack of getting along with everyone were ensuring that he was never out of work. We met up several times in the early ’70s but the one I remember best was a boozy lunch in the upstairs room at the Henekey’s pub in Kingly Street, at the back of Regent Street. I’m not sure how we all ended up there – I’ve a feeling we’d been to a late morning reception in the area (it could even have been yet another one for Welch himself) and had then decided we were all ravenous – but anyway there was Nigel Hunter, Rodney Burbeck, Ed Welch, a couple of others, me – and Spike Milligan.
Just off the Bayswater Road, near where my sister lives, there is a posh block called Orme Square. When I come up from Oxford to visit her at her small flat in Talbot Road, we sometimes walk up Hereford Road, past Orme Square and over the traffic lights into Hyde Park via Black Lion Gate.
‘Do you know who lives there?’ she asks me, pointing at the huge terraces of Orme Square. ‘Spike Milligan!’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Oh, everyone knows. He spends a lot of time in the park, near the kiddies’ playground. I think he’s restoring the carved elves, and things!’
And we walk over to where she’s talking about and there he is. And one minute he’s smiling and nice and joking with the dozen or so people who are watching him. And next minute he’s shouting and telling us we’re ruining his work, his concentration. We’re all bastards and what are we doing here anyway? Why don’t we go away?
So we do.
Today at lunch we’re all laughing and joking and Spike is telling stories then Ed’s telling stories and it’s a wonderful lunch. And I look at Spike and I remember, back at home in our semi down the Middleton Cheney Road, Banbury, in the ’50s, my brother Rob was the biggest Goons fan in the world. Every week he tuned in to them and we’d listen. I didn’t get the humour myself, but I was only about 7.
If my brother could see me here today, having lunch with Spike Milligan, he’d go wild! Wait till I tell him … So I sit there and do my best to chat to Spike but all the while I’m thinking … go carefully, be careful …. he could just turn.
I found out later that Ed and Spike were to begin collaboration on an album called The Snow Goose, based on the book of the same name by Paul Gallico, and that’s why Ed had brought Spike along for lunch. The album, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, was eventually released in 1976, and after that Spike and Ed worked together at least once more.
Though I’d been to the States in 1973 for a week with the reader Judi, that visit had been so short and so focused on giving her a good time, and we packed so much in, that I hadn’t really had what I thought of as a proper USA experience. So when Betty suggested that I should fly over for two weeks in July, and combine filing stories in LA with a week or so with The Osmonds in Vegas and in their home town of Provo in Utah, I was more than happy to agree. By this time I had been abroad so many times, for work and for private holidays, that travelling around on my own held no fear.
In fact, my long-term problems with feelings of inferiority, always wanting to please, never being able to say no or stick up for myself and worrying myself into a frazzle about the most basic of interviews or meetings had, I realised, just about all faded away. I was beginning, at last, to feel happy in my own skin and to have the inner confidence that, apparently, I had always appeared to have on the outside.
So I got organised, packed plenty including a bikini or two, and left Heathrow for LA on July 21st. Once again, Cyril met me at the airport and we headed to my hotel, the Holiday Inn, Wilshire Boulevard. I was coming up in the world! This was a bit better than the manky old Roosevelt and the area was much, much better. This was much more like the America of my young teenage dreams – modern, sleek, dynamic.
Okay, nowadays the Holiday Inn is synonymous with bargain basement naff, but in those days it was swish.
I was on my own, and Cyril was on his own, so our intention was to have ourselves a good time for the first four days in LA. With the help of our reporter in LA, Janey Milstead, he had set up for me a few interviews with ‘ordinary’ LA teens, so one day we headed south for miles and miles and miles – God how sprawling and boring South LA was – and eventually arrived about two hours late at a rather basic and dilapidated hut of a house where the ‘typical teen’ lived, and she gave us a run down, and a series of photos, all about her life and times. At the end of it, I realised that all those years ago when I dreamed of living the American dream, in truth, I had been much, much, better off where I was.
Another day we headed up t
he coast through Santa Monica to Malibu beach where we photographed a girl who more closely matched my long-ago idea of what a Californian girl might look like, and how she might spend her time. She surfed a little, sunbathed a lot and had the blonde hair and good figure. But I still found the lifestyle depressing and I couldn’t really figure out why except that it was all, somehow, a bit pointless.
Back in LA, though, Cyril knocked himself out to show me the bits of the city that he enjoyed – so we went clubbing on Hollywood Boulevard, dined at Benihana, had supper with some friends of his in West Hollywood, and drove up into the hills one night to dine at a ‘typical British pub’ – not very good but the view was fantastic. To stand there, finally, and see for myself all the lights of LA stretched out for miles, and then the Pacific Ocean – it was worth coming all that way just for that.
I was due to fly out to Las Vegas next – but Cyril had a better idea.
‘What do you want to fly for?’
‘Well, I’m booked.’
‘I’m driving over – why don’t you come with me? It’s a great drive – I’ll cancel your ticket.’
Not being a huge fan of driving long distances, I wasn’t sure about this but didn’t want to hurt his feelings after he’d given me a great few days, so I agreed, thank goodness.
We set off very early in the morning so that we could get quite a long way before the temperature in the Mojave Desert, which we had to cross, got too hot.
We drove through all the suburbs of LA that I only knew via song titles – Pasadena, San Bernadino, and so on. Before we’d even got out of that city, I was excited. We drove east as the sun rose towards us, and within an hour we were cruising just within the speed limit along highway Interstate 15 with gigantic vistas of deserts, flat-top mountains, cacti and sands every way you looked. It was phenomenal. I was speechless. It was the best thing.
‘See up to the left?’ said Cyril as we passed a town called Barstow – ‘that’s Death Valley. Pity we haven’t got time to go up there!’
Now how many movies have you seen, the old Westerns, with Death Valley in them? Cyril was giving me my own personal ride though every one of my dreams and it just couldn’t have been better.
In Vegas we checked into the Tropicana again, and an hour or two later we were with The Osmonds, who were doing three weeks of cabaret in the same hotel. By now worldwide Osmondmania was such that Vegas was overrun with fans intent on seeking out Donny and the brothers.
The family had suites at the hotel, which made my working life great. First, I had to file the LA stories and photos– in those days you had no email, no internet, no fax even … I took along the smallest portable typewriter you could get in those days, quite a heavyweight thing lent to me by Betty, plus typing paper and envelopes, and literally typed out my stories in the hotel rooms, then Cyril would add his rolls of film to my bits of paper and we’d drive to the airport to send them off back to the UK by courier.
But once I’d filed the backlog of copy, I had two hours to myself every morning before I would have to get ready and see one or other of the Osmonds for yet more stories and pics to fill the Osmonds’ World magazine and the pages of Fab.
By this time I had got the hang of sunbathing. For years I had been a pale-skinned, blue-eyed redhead and every time I had tried to sunbathe I had burnt or not changed colour at all. I’d also been put off sunbathing, and indeed, heat, by Veronica Hill.
We’re lying on towels in the back garden and she’s covered in olive oil and she’s already as brown as brown. God how I hate lying next to her, it makes my own skin look awful. I look like a ghost, a pink-tinged ghost. And I’m roasting and sweating and I’m bored, and she’s said I’ve got to stay here until she says I can get up and go. So I do.
And next day, as the heatwave continues, she makes me get on the bus with her into Oxford and then she makes me take off my shoes and walk barefoot on the pavements, which are so hot I can hardly bear to put even a toe on the ground, let alone take my whole weight on my thin, bare, pink-skinned soles. But she makes me. And she laughs. And she calls me a baby for minding.
Back home my feet are burnt so badly I can’t put my shoes on, or even walk, the next day. Mum isn’t too pleased. Mrs Hill can’t believe her daughter would do such a thing. I must be lying, she says. And Mum’s too frightened of annoying Mrs Hill to disagree too long or too loud.
I eventually found out that if I sunbathed very, very gradually, just a little bit at a time building up, just like they tell you in all the sensible beauty articles every summer, then I could produce a pleasant, light tan. And I couldn’t wait to try out how much of a tan I could get without burning during my time in Vegas. So I would get up early every morning, put on my bikini, tie my hair up, put on my robe, my sandals, my sunglasses, my hat and my sun cream, and head out of my room down through the gardens of the hotel to my favourite spot on a sunbed in a secluded corner. At this time – from around 8 to 9 a.m. every morning – there was hardly anyone about as people would stay up all night in the casinos or seeing shows or drinking; no one but a mad person would be sunbathing this early. And that was me.
Eventually I had such a nice tan I could have cried with joy. So there, Veronica Hill – so there! The bikini marks didn’t look so good – no way was topless sunbathing an option then and in that place – but you can’t have everything.
As soon as the days began to get really hot, I was indoors, showering and changing to do my work with the family. Alan Osmond had just married his girlfriend Suzanne so everyone was bubbling – it was a good week. By this time we all got along very well, and the members of the family seemed to forget I was there, at least some of the time, which, from my point of view, was ideal.
By this time I had stopped attempting to get underneath ‘the façade’ and down to the ‘real’ Osmonds. Either they were superbly controlled actors – which conjures up the scenario that every time I left the room for the day, within seconds they’d all be letting out their breath, and would be cussing and swearing, breaking open the brandy, hitting each other and generally being the other-planet Osmonds. Or they were genuinely whiter than white people who truly believed in their faith, their morals and really did feel that it was of the utmost importance to be nice to their fellow man, no matter who.
I had to believe the latter was true. I didn’t think it would have been possible to maintain a front for every single one of the hundreds of people they met every week of their lives. And no dark stories about them ever came out in the press at all – it wasn’t until many years later, when some of the Osmonds themselves began to admit that everything hadn’t always been exactly perfect, and they hadn’t always enjoyed every minute of that mad life of theirs, that you could read anything other than corn about the boys and the whole family.
Anyway, whatever – I had grown to like each one of them very much, and to respect them and their beliefs. I certainly respected their work ethic, their professionalism and their ability to work as a team, and have a laugh as well. Before most shows, they would line up backstage and do some rehearsal, rather than sit around and chat or read or watch TV. I found this rehearsal time more fascinating than the actual shows – five tall, strong, young men practising dance moves to ‘Crazy Horses’ on a wooden floor, making a beat, singing, with all the intensity of a battalion getting ready for war. It was like the whole room might explode any minute but it was also a bit like the Indians are waiting to attack just behind that horizon over there. You can hear a drumbeat or a rhythmic noise and you’re not sure what’s going to happen next. It got the adrenalin going, anyway.
In the evenings Cyril and I walked downtown and I would almost literally walk into lamposts, people and cars because my head was swivelling in every direction trying to take it all in. You look at photos of ’70s Vegas now and it looks like a little hick town – but at the time, it seemed wondrous in its glamour, glitter, tackiness and sheer American pizazz.
The one thing I didn’t do was place one bet in
any of the casinos. I don’t like to bet. I was maybe the only person ever who spent a week in Las Vegas and wasn’t even tempted to part with a nickel for a fruit machine. That is, of course, apart from The Osmonds themselves.
Dad has stolen all my brother’s savings. My brother Rob is 19, ten years older than me and he had been working at the local cinema and gradually he managed to save £100; he told us over Sunday lunch, and I’d never seen him so proud. And now he has been called up into the Air Force for his National Service, and Dad has forged his signature on his Post Office book, and stolen the money. Turns out Dad has been borrowing money from Mother’s friends the Williams, and mother has found out, and Dad stole the money to pay off the Williams, and has admitted that he has run up debts gambling. No one will tell me anything, I just found all this out by keeping my ears open. If you’re quiet, people will say things and they don’t remember you’re there.
So now Mum’s in the Ashurst Clinic (with depression – no one told me but I heard), Dad and Rob are fighting in the kitchen and there’s a knife and my Dad’s face is bleeding, and I run across the garden to Mrs Licorice the neighbour and she comes and shouts at them and stops them fighting and Rob leaves home. He never comes back again.
I’m nearly 11 and things aren’t a lot better. Now my older sister Ann is leaving home, too; she’s living at a hotel in Banbury where she has a waiting job while she finishes at college. And when Mum comes back from another spell in the clinic we’re leaving home as well, and I have to go and stay with Gran in Buckingham for a few weeks and go to the Latin School there, while Mum finds us somewhere to live. I bet it is going to be with Mrs Hill.