Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick

by Judith Wills

  And I’m right; a few weeks later Mum and I move into the house in Eynsham with Mrs Hill, Veronica Hill, Clive Hill and Richard Hill. And we stay there for a year or two until we all move to Botley.

  The outdoor thermometer showed 110ºF; I wilted, but I survived. It was dry desert heat. On 31 July Cyril drove me to the airport and I caught the short flight to Salt Lake City where one of the guys from The Osmonds’ office met me and took me to stay at a motel – a come down, to say the least, as it barely had a restaurant – round the corner from the Osmonds’ home, the Riviera Apartments in a small town called Provo.

  Most of the family were still in Vegas, but Mother had come back, along with Jimmy and Marie. We had two days, during which time Olive Osmond showed me everything she could show me at that apartment block – a very modest home indeed for such a famous family. I had the grand tour of Jimmy’s bedroom with his bunk bed and trapdoor, Marie’s bedroom, Donny’s bedroom, the other bedrooms, the small music room and studio in the basement, the kitchen, the sitting room – and that was about it.

  I had the tour of Salt Lake City – clean. The tour of Brigham Young University where a couple of the boys had done a short spell of studying or played sports. The trip to look at the salt lake flats – boring.

  One of the Osmond helpers drove me up to Sundance, the new ski area that had been bought five years earlier by Robert Redford, partly as a conservation project. There was little to see as, ahead of his time, he didn’t want skyscraper hotels and casinos – he wanted wooden lodges and minimal fuss. The original eco-resort. But we did manage to see the man himself – walking across towards the wood-clad reception building, he gave us a wave. Then he seemed to decide that he would come over – the place wasn’t exactly packed with people – and say Hi. And that was how I came to meet, briefly, one of the most famous movie stars of the day, at home in his own surroundings. To be honest, he wasn’t much to swoon over in real life – quite short, quite poor skin – but I was glad to have seen him.

  Apart from these few jaunts out, a lot of the time I was in Utah Olive and I would sit at the Riviera Apartments with a glass of orange juice or root beer, while she told me tales of the early days, and tried to explain their faith to me. She’d also give me recipes – she was an avid cook and would bottle and store and freeze and dry foods and loved to bake. For all their healthy ways – no alcohol, smoking, caffeine, plenty of exercise and a clean lifestyle, Olive was extremely overweight and I think the baking might have had something to do with it.

  On Friday 2 August I flew to LA and caught my return plane to London.

  The rest of the year seemed pretty dull after that. I journeyed down to Barnes in south-west London to visit Alan Price at his home on a boiling hot summer day. I’d been looking forward to this as The Animals had been one of my favourite bands in my teens. He was at home on his own, a small, enthusiastic, motivating kind of person. He had just compiled a tape for his wife – Wiff, he called her (or was it whiff?) – of her favourite music and played me some of it. He was in a great mood. Then we went out into his back garden where there was a quite large swimming pool.

  And this was when things begin to go slightly wrong.

  ‘Why don’t you have a swim, Judy?’ Alan said.

  Now you may remember, from my Tunisian escapade, that I wasn’t much of a swimmer, and the last thing on earth I wanted was to get in his pool. Yes, I was stiflingly hot. But even apart from the swimming consideration, there were other factors. I’d spent ages doing my hair and make-up in honour of Alan Price, and I didn’t fancy getting it all ruined and having my straight hair turn all frizzy in front of him as it dried out. And of course, I hadn’t got a cozzie.

  ‘That’s kind of you, Alan – but I haven’t got a costume!’

  ‘Oh – not to worry about that – there are lots of them in the changing room …’ and Price pointed to a small wooden hut. ‘Go on – off you go! It’ll cool you down fantastic.’

  By this time I was beginning to feel as hot and uncomfortable and embarrassed as I used to in the early Fab days at the drop of any hat. But I held my ground.

  ‘Look, Alan – I’m not a great swimmer and I’ve got to go soon. I think I’ll give it a miss if you don’t mind.’

  I’d snubbed his hospitality and he showed me the door, politely but firmly, within minutes. And for years after I felt bad every time I thought about that – I should have shown willing and got in the damn pool. It wouldn’t have killed me.

  Later that year, I interviewed Kenny Jones of The Faces at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, TV presenter Leslie Crowther at home in Twickenham (during which he explained to me at length his love for collecting pot lids) and Rod Stewart at the Kensington Gardens Hotel. All I remember about that interview with Rod was that he arrived in a dapper brown tweed suit (this, you will remember, was the Rod era of glam rock and the spikey hairdo and platform shoes) and for explanation told me that he had decided to dress to suit the seasons – as it was autumn he was wearing autumn colours, in winter he might wear white, in spring yellow … and so on. Whether he stuck to that I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

  The Boss and I, surprisingly enough still together despite almost everyone we knew having secretly placed bets on how many weeks it would last, spent Christmas at Cathcart Road. We bought a tree and decorated it and on Christmas Eve invited Wyn and Gerry (they of the Frankie Howard lunch) round to go out for a meal at the bistro in Hollywood Road. They had just bought a kitten and for some reason brought it round and left it in the flat while we went out for the meal. When we got home, the kitten had knocked the tree over and eaten most of the glass decorations – but by some miracle, was still alive.

  ‘Waddayaknow?’ said Wyn (who was an ex-New York police department chief) ‘the puddy ate the pine’.

  We’d had too much to drink to worry about the kitten but next time they came round they left it at home. Well, either that, or it died; they never said.

  It was a pretty good Christmas, anyway.

  By early 1975, Betty Hale deemed that Slade were now legendary enough that I was to do their life story in Fab. This entailed spending several sessions with them and as ever they were good fun.

  I was still doing the Dream Come True features most of the time and when I received one from two 13 year olds who wanted to go pony trekking, I decided this one was too good to pass by. I had been a typical pony-mad child and teenager and had only stopped riding when I moved to London from the country. But having met Karen Gill through the David Essex Dream Come True, who was a keen rider, The Boss and I had begun driving down to Epsom, where she lived, to ride at a stables there every Saturday. The Boss had never ridden before in his life but the force of my persuasive powers made him give it a go despite the fact that he couldn’t understand how you could steer without a wheel.

  Anyway, it had re-ignited my love for riding so I quite fancied a couple of days somewhere pony trekking. Sue James, the fashion editor, knew someone who had just returned from a place in South Wales which she said was good. I booked it up for April and five of us – the two girls, the photographer David Porter and his wife Clarissa, and me, drove down to the Half Moon Inn in the Llanthony valley in the heart of the Black Mountains, and spent two wet days trekking around the hills.

  I was amazed to find somewhere so remote and beautiful so near to England. Plus, the Inn was good fun and the people who ran the trekking centre – a busty blonde woman called Janice who would ride around the muddy slopes on a Welsh pony in full hunting gear, and the local farmer called Trevor, were truly mad in the nicest sense. When I got back to London, I suggested to The Boss that we should book our own weekend there later in the spring.

  So in May we arrived at the Half Moon. This time the weather was gorgeous and the first two days of our break were splendid – The Boss’s horse was called Killer and on the first day he learnt to jump logs and had a great time. The first night, after an evening in the Inn’s cosy bar, Trevor and Janice invited us
to go poaching for trout by torchlight in the River Olchon. And so we did, that very minute; probably a mistake in high heels but at least I can say I have been a poacher and not that many people can say that.

  Next day, The Boss, overconfident after day one, and nursing a hangover, fell off his horse up the mountain and got concussion, so we had to skip the last day’s trekking. Instead, we drove north through the narrow mountain pass until at the road’s highest point an amazing view – not quite on the Mojave Desert scale, but impressive nevertheless – lay in front of us. We stopped the car and got out and it was my first view of Wales proper.

  A few miles further on was a little town called Hay-on-Wye, straddling the English/Welsh border, and here we stopped for lunch and a walk around. It was like stepping back in time, with ponies and cattle being driven through the streets to its bustling market.

  In the window of the local estate agent was a pretty cottage, 2 miles from Hay. For something to do, we went to look at it. We’d been contemplating buying a terraced house in Fulham with the little money we had managed to save since we had been together – that is, what hadn’t gone on booze, holidays and fancy vintage cars (for him) and taxis and clothes (for me).

  To get to Yew Tree Cottage you had to go over a ford and down a track that ended in a bridle path. The little stone house was perched on a flat rock above a mountain stream, with a small garden and paddock area, surrounded by hills. Well, we never did buy the property in Fulham. We’d kind of fallen in love. We made an offer, we had it accepted, and that was how, in May 1975, I handed in my notice to Fab. I was to leave on 6 June after eight years.

  I could have stayed on, as we were going to keep the Cathcart Road flat and just use the cottage for weekends. But The Boss had been badgering me for a year or two to leave – ‘you’re getting too old to be doing pop for a teen magazine’.

  Until recently, I had totally disagreed with him – I was still having fun and could do the job without any worry or stress, I was reasonably paid and had several moonlighting jobs to boost the income and make a change – so why leave? But in the past few months I had begun to realise that perhaps it was time for a career move. I felt I might be able to go freelance.

  I felt strangely nervous of going in to Betty’s office to do the deed, once I’d made up my mind. I’d never handed in my notice before except from a Saturday job I’d had for six weeks in Oxford when I was 16, working in a clothing warehouse to save up enough money to go to Great Yarmouth for the weekend to see Billy Fury with my college friend Jenny.

  ‘I wanted to see you because I’ve decided it’s about time I left, Betty.’

  ‘Well, I guessed as much. I’ll be sorry to lose you, but I do agree with you – it’s time you spread your wings a bit. How long have you been here?’

  ‘Eight years, believe it or not!’

  She began to smile and after a few seconds she said, ‘Neither you nor I ever dreamt you’d be here that long, did we? You were nearly sacked so many times … but there was something about you. I did have faith in you. And I was right, you see.’

  ‘Thank you Betty – and I’m sorry I made your life hell for a while. I could never work out if I wanted to be very good, or very bad. So I tried a bit of both. I thank Unity and you, you gave me the courage to be bad when I wanted to.’

  In truth, I think Betty was like a parent – she helped to guide me through a displaced adolescence when I was not only naïve and stupid and over-trusting of people, but also seeing how far I could push her. She had tried all the things that parents do, including giving advice as necessary, being reasonable and forgiving, and then if that didn’t work, bringing on the tough love.

  Well now I was grown up, her work on shaping me was done, and it was time to go.

  The only thing Betty and I never talked about was my home life – in particular, my relationship with The Boss. Having warned me off him all those years ago, I guess she felt it was an area best ignored.

  Once I’d seen Betty and handed in my notice, I panicked, of course. But I had work lined up – Osmonds’ World was still going strong and I had offers of regular freelance from Record Mirror and Woman magazine. I was also going to write a TV column in Fab and become their new agony auntie. I had also, bizarrely, been asked by Tony Hatch – the original Simon Cowell-type mean judge on the top TV talent show of the ’70s, New Faces, and one of the most successful songwriters of the day – to ghost-write his new ‘how to make it in the music business’ column for a monthly magazine. So I wasn’t quite going to be taking my vows or queuing up at the dole office.

  Halfway through my month’s notice I was to spend my last block of time with The Osmonds. They arrived in London to do concerts and promotion and every day I would take a taxi to the large terraced house they had rented in Eaton Square, at the back of Knightsbridge, to see them. As it turned out, I wouldn’t set eyes on any of them again for over thirty years. If I’d known, I might have even had a little cry.

  I had one last freebie jaunt before my leaving party – a day at the Derby on 4 June. One of the PR companies had organised an old London bus to take a bunch of journalists and various pop stars and bands down to Epsom. David Porter and I were picked up along the route and on the bus, I was pleased to see, were all the Mud boys. They gave me a grand send-off with free Derby Day champagne and cake and I got so tipsy and maudlin that I sobbed all the way home.

  Two days later I was given my leaving card and I was out of there. It had been a good blag. But it was time to go and grow vegetables, rediscover my inner country bumpkin, be Tony Hatch, and see what else life had to offer.

  Epilogue

  Some Time Later …

  So now fast forward. I’m on the train heading to Cardiff, Wales. It’s nearly thirty-one years since my last day at Fab magazine and it’s thirty-one years since I saw the people I’m on my way to visit. I’m looking forward to it.

  The last time I heard from them was in October 1975, when I was in the intensive care unit, Princess Margaret Hospital, Swindon, after a car crash on the M4. They sent me a large bouquet of flowers and a telegram. In the years after my recovery, I moved on to other things, their star waned for a decade or two, and we lost touch.

  I’m clutching a few tatty old photos of them and me, and of them taken by me, to jog their memories about the times we spent together. I expect they’ll need it.

  And now I’m in the foyer of St David’s Hall, waiting for their PR, Jackie, to come and find me and take me backstage. It’s amazing – these boys have a huge crowd of fans arriving at the hall, chanting and singing. Not quite like the old days – then they were screaming teenagers, now a lot of them are middle-aged with a few extra pounds round their middles – just like the guys they’re shouting for.

  Now I’m backstage. And here they are – Merrill, Wayne, Jay and ‘little’ Jimmy Osmond – the Osmond Brothers, hugging me and greeting me and we’re all laughing and of course we all remember each other and of course after a few minutes in each others’ company the wrinkles and those extra pounds and the grey hairs fade away and we’re young again.

  I show them that old Book of Mormon given to me by their mother, Olive, during my US visit in 1973 and signed by all the family except Jimmy. He puts that right – he autographs it three decades late. And we have the obligatory backstage photo taken.

  I could have chosen to seek out one of the many other icons of the ’70s who are still working and still popular today, to round off this tale. But I chose The Osmonds – just because they sum up my ’70s rather well.

  I watch them perform, and when they strike up with ‘Crazy Horses’, a ghost of that old, pit-of-the-stomach feeling I used to have touches me. I remember what it was all about.

  As Joni Mitchell once sang – give or take the odd word – you don’t always appreciate what you’ve got till it’s gone. We did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

  It wasn’t all good. It was by no means all good.

  But it wasn’t half bad,
was it?

  Appendix

  And What

  Happened to the

  Cast …

  Fab 208 magazine, with Betty Hale still editor, folded in 1981 after an admirable run of eighteen years. Betty celebrated her 80th birthday in 2007 – and we shared a ‘fab’ lunch in the Oxo Tower, London in December of that year.

  Unity Hall continued writing novels and biographies until her death in the early ’90s.

  Billy Fury’s 1969 marriage to Judith Hall broke up a few years later. Fury sent his friend Keith Moon to collect his luggage from the marital home. Fury went into semi-retirement in the late ’70s and early ’80s due to poor health, and shared a farmhouse in Wales with his partner Lisa Rosen. He died on 28 January 1983 aged just 42.

  Jason Eddie lived in Liverpool until his death in September 2011 after several years of poor health. We were in touch again by email in recent years and made our peace.

  George of Edison Lighthouse died in the early ’80s. Two of the band, Stuart Edwards and Dave Taylor, were still performing as an Edison Lighthouse duo as recently as 2003.

  Hal Carter went on to build up one of the biggest music management businesses in London – the Hal Carter Organisation, specialising in ’60s and ’70s artistes. Hal died in July 2004 aged 69 and his daughter Abbie took over the business.

  Jimmy Campbell, despite his seminal album Son of Anastasia (1969), never achieved huge fame at the time, and died in 2007, but his old material is now recognised for its brilliance.

  Biba moved to the old Derry and Toms Kensington department store in 1973 but was never the same, and it closed in the mid-’70s. The Biba name was revived in 2006 as a new fashion collection.

  Tony Prince left Luxy to start up the DJ bible, MixMag and the international Disco Mix Club or DMC, the world’s leading company, label, magazine and website for DJ culture. He lives in Buckinghamshire.