The Evening Standard phoned. A woman said she was keen to ‘do a diary item’. A telex had alerted her office to the whereabouts of a ‘notorious satirist from Sydney’. I showed Mary Kenny into the living room. Louise sat poised and at ease in a red-striped mini-dress on my sister’s regency chair, while I pontificated on the state of dissent in the colonies, stressing the revolutionary role of Oz in sweeping aside the Fifties.
‘Why were you sent to jail?’
‘The magistrate was mentally ill – the result of his deep sexual repression.’
‘When it comes to sex, you Aussies are pretty stitched up.’
The hide of her, and Irish to boot. ‘Not my generation, Mary. The students rose up in protest. We were acquitted.’
‘Oh, come on. Look what happened to Jean Shrimpton in Melbourne.’
The supermodel had shown a little knee; the matrons called for their smelling salts, the tabloids huffed. ‘The Melbourne Cup is a snob fest. At a party in Sydney, Shrimpton could wear a fig leaf and nobody would blink.’
She asked what I planned to do here, as the photographer crouched on the floor to take another shot of Louise.
I panicked – not wishing to betray the slightest uncertainty.
‘Start Oz of course – this town needs a bomb under it.’
Jill happened to be going to a smart dinner party at the home of her publisher, Barley Alison, and little brother tagged along. The hostess lived among her impressive art collection in Chelsea and she placed me at the table next to Paul Johnson, the editor of the New Statesman. His socialist weekly was then at its polemical peak. I devoured it. In Johnson’s diary pieces, his lefty rhetoric was often undermined by his Tory taste: a loathing of the Beatles, a nostalgia for the Oxford Rowing Club. That week, Johnson had recalled how, during an anti-Vietnam march, he had noticed a button missing from his jacket. He had dropped into the Ritz for afternoon tea, where a ‘kindly waiter sewed it on’. As I was tucking into the first course, my sister burbled, ‘Please excuse my brother, everyone, he’s just arrived from Sydney’ – all eyes bore down on me – ‘where they still eat pâté like scrambled eggs.’ Paul Johnson asked why I had come to London. ‘To learn how to eat goose liver,’ I said, glaring at Jill, ‘and to start a rival magazine.’
Over the main course, I asked why a militant socialist would take his jacket to be repaired at the Ritz, ‘of all places’. A hush. ‘I don’t understand all the fuss,’ he said, reddening, ‘it was there.’ Why savage the Beatles? – ‘They’re getting better all the time.’ Again, Johnson blushed. His reply was naïve and out of touch, as though the Fab Four headed a revolt of the unwashed.
As the guests were leaving, I was approached by a bearded American with a thick leather bag slung over his shoulder. ‘What gall,’ he said, handing me his card. ‘All of us were dying to ask him that.’ His name was Ed Victor, an editor at Jonathan Cape, and he suggested lunch.
The next day, the bare-thighed Louise, the ‘Oz secretary’, dominated the page of the Evening Standard’s Londoners’ Diary. I was described as ‘coolly ambitious’ and reported to be aiming my mag ‘at something between Private Eye and the New Statesman’. In addition, Oz would subvert the image of the rugged surf-riding Australian, of which ‘Neville was thoroughly sick’. The phone rang hot with writers, illustrators, investors . . . all wanting a piece of the (so far) illusory action. I took names, made appointments. One printer, bedazzled by the Standard item, agreed to accept Oz on spec. It was all happening so fast, I could hardly keep up.
In the New Statesman Paul Johnson announced that I was ‘itching’ to get my hands on the British scene. ‘Oz won’t cater for Earls Court Australians – it will be written in English.’ He noted that Neville’s intention was ‘to avoid the narrow obsessions of current British satire’, a dig at Private Eye, and how much he was looking forward to the first issue, due in January.
Through my sister’s network, I began courting notable bylines: Colin MacInnes, Peter Porter, Elizabeth Smart. Out-of-work Aussies knocked on the door, eager to assist. At parties I chatted grandly about editorial philosophy, making it up as I went along. Soon, I had recruited a designer, a business manager, assistants.
Germaine Greer dropped by Clarendon Road for afternoon tea, wearing a cashmere twinset, a string of pearls, a tartan skirt and a beehive hairdo. She seemed bored and lonely at Cambridge, where she was completing a PhD in English literature. She found her fellow students infuriating.
‘Filthy and smelly,’ she said, referring to the state of undergraduate underwear, ‘like old dish-cloths.’ Their sexual habits were no more gratifying. ‘When I told one suitor to extend his variation of intercourse beyond coitus interruptus, you know what he called me? A strumpet!’ She giggled.
Louise served the tea as Germaine paced the carpet and described the sexual shortcomings of the English. ‘No, you haven’t got syphilis, I told one student who was scratching his scrotum with the look of death. You’ve got lice.’
Why didn’t she explore beyond the campus?
‘Don’t be silly, Richard. It’s no different. The poms all try to look like Michael Caine but it’s a con. They’re either queer or kinky.’ She recounted how one London Lothario had wanted to squeeze her blackheads; and another had declined an amorous engagement on the grounds he only liked flat chests. The last bloke she had met not only failed to achieve an erection, but insisted on stroking the scar on her abdomen . . .
I asked Germaine to write about her exploits for Oz.
‘I’d love to. I’ve already got a title – “In Bed With the English”.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Isn’t it great? You know what the last pom said to me?’ She looked to the heavens. ‘ “Let’s pretend you’re dead.” ’
After she left, Louise kept muttering, ‘Incredible, incredible.’ It was not her first encounter with Germaine. She had once been with me in Sydney when we met her by chance at Repins in King Street. Germaine enthralled us, the patrons and the passers-by with her views. Louise later remarked that it was the first time she had heard a woman say fuck in public.
For the forthcoming Oz, Martin Sharp inked out a gatefold-sized caricature of Lyndon B. Johnson, his head rayed with rifles, and cradling Ky, the puppet Saigon general, as a baby in Nazi uniform. He called it ‘The Madonna of the Napalm’.
When Louise and I needed to retreat from the fray, Jill lent me the keys to a gamekeeper’s cottage she rented in Norfolk. On a Wednesday morning in October, we took the train to Beccles, planning to stock up on provisions there before the long hike to the cottage. But we were caught unaware by ‘early closing’. The village was deserted, and not a skerrick of food could be found, apart from a large bottle of crimson boiled lollies. The concept of ‘swinging London’ caught on, because the rest of the country was a graveyard.
Jill’s cottage stood in the thick of an oak forest. It was made of stone and topped with a tower where the pheasants and hares had been hung. The walls were lined with books. We lit the hurricane lamps and a wood-burning kitchen stove and later sank into a long hot bath. It was my first encounter with the distinctive aroma of coal tar soap. Lying in bed, I asked, ‘How many men beside me have you slept with?’
The number was few but it turned out that the gambler she had dated on Saturday nights was more than a platonic escort.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
The age-old line: ‘I didn’t want to hurt you . . . and anyway, you never stopped ogling other girls. Don’t pretend you’re Mr Faithful.’
I went crazy. Shouted, screamed, told her to piss off, that it was all over. Suddenly she grabbed her coat and was away into the freezing night. God, she had nothing else on. I came to my senses and ran after her. She was fifty yards into the oak forest.
‘Please, Louise, I’m sorry. Darling, I’m sorry.’
She took some convincing before I got her back inside. I scurried about with a pot of black tea, wrapped her in blankets, filled a hot water bottle. Neither of us ever referred
to the incident again, though the fact that she had misled me was useful for my own self-justification later when I felt like playing the field as a sexual revolutionary.
From his Chelsea studio, Sharp was beginning to personify the debonair King’s Road glitterati. With his arty sense of style, late hours, prodigious talent and a timely inheritance from an aunt, the upper echelons of the pop/fashion élite drew him to their bosoms. While I plodded through industrial backwaters, inspecting offset technology, Sharp traded joints with the hip aristocracy at all-night parties in tapestry-hung town houses. When he took a taxi back to his studio in the early hours, he was intrigued by the bustle of Sloane Square. What could these people be doing, he wondered, as they swarmed to the tube. Returning from nightclubs?
I have many complaints against the way the world is run, he wrote to his father, and how uncivilised a majority of people are – many never think for themselves, but drift on watching their TV, reading their papers and having their brains washed out. Very sad. The new Oz would be much more serious than the Sydney one – all in all a mag to look forward to – no obscenity cases, so don’t worry.
Strangers and familiar faces appeared at Clarendon Road. Peter Grose, my erstwhile co-editor, was as affable as ever, offering to write a comic appraisal of Fleet Street. Why not? He’d served a term in exile. Economics lecturer Paddy McGuinness submitted a bitter column on the cockeyed optimists of the peace movement. Former fellow Arts student Alex Popov dropped in on his way to Copenhagen, where he was pursuing an architect’s daughter, and donated a hundred pounds towards the start-up. A cropped-cut med student burst through the door, tongue-lashing the cruelties of capitalism, the torpor of Swinging London and the absurdity of my toothy Tibetan pendant. David Widgery was a perpetual fire-cracker, whizzing with views on the music of Bessie Smith, the beacon of International Socialism and the love life of Allen Ginsberg. The ardour was thrilling; his eyes wild, his humour bitter-sweet. Over tea, David recited rousing extracts from André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto – the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason . . . Describing himself as a ‘libertarian Trot’, his outfit was downmarket stylish. ‘Fleet Street is loathsome,’ he said, ‘but Private Eye is worse.’ Widgery slammed the satirical weekly for its gossipy upper-class youth-hate, public school bigotry and self-satisfied pomposity. ‘Write it all down,’ I said, ‘maybe we’ll send them up in our first issue.’
The BBC phoned. Could I join a panel discussion on maverick media? Try and stop me. On Late Night Line-Up, a live-to-air chat show, a long-haired, laid-back American announced the imminent appearance of a weekly underground newspaper, IT (International Times), a local version of New York’s East Village Other. Damn! The co-founder, Jim Haynes, a tall American from Louisiana, exuded the charm of a Civil War cavalry officer and took me to the Indica Bookshop to meet Barry Miles, another member of the IT board. This slight, translucent-skinned Englishman in a black suit was pleasant but aloof, in a way I had not yet understood to be indigenous.
IT was launched in October 1966 at a stoned-out party in an abandoned railway shed, the Chalk Farm Roundhouse. A tray of sugar cubes was distributed at the door. Benefactor Paul McCartney milled among the masses dressed as a sheik and Marianne Faithfull danced in a nun’s habit exposing her bottom, winning the prize for ‘shortest/barest’. Pink Floyd played their first big gig, Soft Machine were reportedly brilliant, and thousands goggled at their first light show.
Meanwhile, on a windy green in Hastings, students rigged up as medieval soldiers struck helmets with broadswords, filled the sky with arrows and charged each other with jousting lances – all under the supervision of the person who had invited me – Lady Anne Neville. Yes. During London’s seminal Underground event I was busy attending a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings. 1066 and All That.
Those early ITs, with their stodgy letterpress layouts, drug-sodden jive-talk and uncritical embrace of the avant garde, were ripe for ridicule. Sharp and I created the character Mervyn Limp, a bank clerk who visits Indica, reads IT, tries a joint (‘are you sure it’s trendy?’) and is instantly transformed into Frisco Ferlinghetti, the beat poet, ‘happening’ artist, underground film-maker and space cadet who gets himself trepanned and hitch-hikes to Katmandu, where he finds nirvana and dies of dysentery. Instead of a cartoon, we used real-life characters (friends dressed up) shot on a series of ‘Swinging London’ locations by Bob Whitaker, Sharp’s studiomate. Chester, a former star-writer for Honi Soit, was decked out in my pot-trail finery to play the anti-hero. This poignant parable, which ran across a three-page gatefold, not only expressed my own ambivalence towards the emerging counter culture, but was a portent of my subsequent transformation.
Again, the BBC phoned. They were planning a chat show aimed at youth. Could I come to an audition? Plus (1) Without their help, bring a celebrity of contrary opinions into the studio for an interview; (2) Prepare a short piece to camera, and (3) Interview myself on air.
While there was so much about London that was inefficient and infuriating – broken phones, unreliable public transport, unnecessary queuing – I found the city strangely welcoming. Perhaps it was the timing. Any earlier, Oz and its frontman would have sunk into the bedsit mire that had claimed so many of my hustling predecessors. Later, the shadow of ’70s cynicism would have pipped me at the bedpost. But on the threshold of ’67, the yeast was rising on the London scene, carrying me along so swiftly that Sydney seemed unleavened and stale. During my last year there, I had repeatedly proposed TV ideas for the ABC, without getting a foot in the door. Here, the BBC was my lunch voucher.
The London columnist I most despised was Robert Pitman, a right-wing fantatic from the Daily Express. When I phoned to entice him to my BBC pilot, he accepted with grace. On set, he was charming and helpful, and I was mystified. How could anyone with such obnoxious opinions be so benign? Later, I was to learn that the reverse is also possible.
I met Tony Rushton, the business manager of Private Eye, who set up a meeting with Moore Harness, the Eye’s distributor, and arranged for Sharp and myself to meet Richard Ingrams, the editor. In his Soho office, Ingrams loomed from a cluttered desk flanked by reference books – Burke’s Peerage, the Britannica Year Book, Who’s Who.
‘Are you pooves?’ he asked abruptly. Sharp and I flashed glances, deciphering the word. Surely a variation of perve or poof, Sydney slang for a homosexual. Martin left the talking to me.
‘Pooves? Why does it bother . . .’
‘You must be pooves.’ A mischievous tone, a sly smile. ‘Men with hair below their collars are pooves.’
‘Where’ve you been? At rock concerts, all the guys . . .’
‘I like organ music.’ Ingrams was reputed to be a regular churchgoer. ‘What will the Oz boys do that we don’t?’
The cue for my rave about a thrusting new culture of youth.
‘Youth culture? What’s that?’
‘Anti-war demos, the Rolling Stones, mini-skirts, the pot trail . . .’
‘Pot? Anyone who smokes pot should be shot.’
‘You can’t mean that.’ Although I still didn’t partake, marijuana seemed harmless enough. ‘Maybe LSD is a bit dicey . . .’
‘Timothy Leary is a lunatic.’ The Harvard professor’s plea for people to turn on, tune in and drop out had just been published in Playboy, and I had posted a tearsheet to Richie Walsh at Sydney Oz. ‘Leary’s evil. It’s enough to justify capital punishment.’
The more Ingrams spoke, the more unlikely it seemed that our magazines would overlap. Again, I tried to get him excited about the forthcoming ‘youthquake’, but he was unconvinced.
‘Preposterous. A passing fad. Human nature never changes.’
‘But you don’t like the way things are now,’ I said, ‘aren’t you inspired by the wave of protest – all the new ideas?’
‘Mankind rarely inspires – that’s why we have the Church. Are you sure you’re not pooves?’ He stood up, still smiling, no visceral warmth,
but not unfriendly. ‘If you must go ahead with your magazine, then you have one obligation, editorially speaking. It should be in your first issue.’
We paused at the top of the stairs.
‘Take the mickey out of your betters.’
He waved. Little did he know.
7
TEN MILLION LIGHT YEARS OVER the MILKY WAY
In January ’67, the proofs of the first issue were delivered to Clarendon Road, showing eighteen pages on a single sheet. I spread it on the carpet and thought, Oz has it all – satire, sex, Sharp and ideological perversity. Paul Johnson, New Statesman editor, was probed to the core by tyro journo Alexander Cockburn, who managed to be both scathing and reverential; Colin MacInnes foresaw the rise of London’s black activist Michael X (Abdul Malik), whom he found ‘impressive, if unorganised’. David Widgery denounced Private Eye, claiming its editor had succumbed to pressure from ‘establishment celebrities’ to serve up milder satire in return for a less sensitive response to libel. The mock Eye cover was Sharp’s caricature of Richard Ingrams eating his own words, a feast of genuine retractions, corrections and apologies.
By this time, Oz had attracted a core of volunteers. Paul Lawson, a former contributor to Sydney Oz, lived nearby and threw himself into the first issue. A few days before Oz hit the streets, Paul and a trainee sub, David Reynolds, fresh out of boarding school, rode the Circle Line with a tin of white paint to daub the word Oz on station steps, under bridges and on public buildings. Some were still visible at the end of the decade. Repeating the Sydney lark, I put out an ad for ‘girls in mini-skirts to earn a bundle’. On publication day, 24 January, a West End flat was loaned as a base of operations, and dozens of ‘dolly birds’, including comely graduates of the Sydney launch, turned up to help hawk the magazine as a stunt. When told ‘the bundle’ was a commission on a bundle of Oz, they laughed.
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