Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘Is that the same girl that you went to school with?’ Mam said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I thought I didn’t like her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As soon as she walked in the room, I took an instant dislike to her.’

  ‘What’s she done to you?’

  ‘Not my type. Watch her. She’s evil, her. She’s got devil eyes. And she’s full of herself.’

  I ignored my mother’s warnings. What with Shirley on the side and Sandra back on the scene, I didn’t care what my mother had to say. And I was preoccupied with something else: a third woman. After the Beryl–Maureen–Pat farce, I’d vowed never again to get involved with three women simultaneously. But my success in the theatres had gone to my head, I thought I was invincible and for the second time I’d got myself into a three-sided mess.

  The first I heard of Linda was shortly after I arrived at the Royal Theatre at St Helens with Ronnie, my driver at the time. ‘Have you seen the manageress here?’ he said. ‘She is stunning.’ A few minutes later, there was a knock at my dressing-room door and I clapped my eyes on Linda for the first time. Ronnie wasn’t wrong. With long dark hair, olive skin and a beautiful face, Linda was dazzling. She told me that her real name was Loretta but everyone called her Linda, and that she did a bit of singing in a duo.

  ‘Are you married?’ I said. There seemed little point in beating about the bush.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I was living with a bloke, but we recently parted. I’d had enough of him.’

  She told me she was Miss St Helens. Looking at her, I could well believe it. She kept talking and from what she said there was very little that she hadn’t done.

  She could have been a big star, she told me, but she’d turned it down. She’d been lead singer with a band, she said, but they’d dumped her in the middle of nowhere when she’d refused to sleep with any of them. Then, apparently, a West Indian fella had picked her up, so she’d started living with him. I wondered if everything she told me was true, but she was so gorgeous that I didn’t care. Thinking she was way out of my league, I told her I thought she was beautiful. She smiled and kept talking.

  A couple of evenings later, I was playing at the Pleasuredome in Birkenhead. Ronnie stuck his head around the dressing-room door. ‘You know that bird you were talking to on Tuesday night?’ he said. ‘She’s here with two friends.’

  ‘Really? Is she?’

  ‘Wait till you see her.’

  I’ll never forget the moment Linda walked into the dressing room. Wrapped in a low-cut black dress that flaunted a top pair of cheps and which was slit up the side to show off her fishnet-stockinged legs, she was totally fuckable. ‘Hi, I hope you don’t mind I came over to see you,’ she said.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said, lost for words and hoping I wouldn’t blush. ‘No, no, no. You’re all right. No, no, no.’

  Ronnie and I went back to her mate’s flat in Liverpool. Linda cracked open a bottle of whisky and one of her friends made herself scarce, leaving the four of us drinking and laughing until the early hours, when Linda and I went to bed.

  After about four weeks of meeting up whenever we could – mainly when I didn’t have an appointment with Sandra or Shirley – Linda and I became a regular thing. Once or twice a week I’d drive from Redcar to St Helens to see Linda, sometimes stopping off in Leeds to see Sandra and often making a detour to Aintree to drop in on Shirley. It was exhausting. I was shagging myself to death. Desperately in need of a holiday, I suggested to Sandra that we took a week off.

  The day before Sandra and I jetted off to Tenerife, I acted on the qualms I had about Shirley and rang her up. ‘I’m sorry, Shirley,’ I said. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You’re not dropping me like that.’

  ‘Shirley, we are just fun. It’s just friends having a good time, but there’s nothing serious.’ But Shirley wouldn’t accept being jilted, so I told her about Sandra, thinking it would convince her that our affair was over. ‘I’ve got somebody else,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Shirley … I don’t want to see you any more. You’re a lovely girl, but you deserve better.’ Everyone always say things like that, don’t they? And everyone who hears it knows it’s bullshit. ‘Get somebody who will really appreciate you,’ I said.

  Sandra and I had a great holiday in Tenerife. Tanned and relaxed, we returned. We pulled up outside my house in Redcar to find Shirley sitting on my step with three suitcases beside her. Fortunately she had left her kids with her sister in Liverpool. That really would have been the trump card.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Sandra said.

  ‘Er … that’s the woman next door,’ I said. ‘She must be looking for someone.’ Talk about thinking on your feet.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’

  ‘Erm … we’ll drop these presents off at me mother’s,’ I said, pointing at a stack of souvenirs on the back seat. ‘Then we’ll come back.’

  My mam lived about a mile away. As soon as we got round there and Sandra had put the kettle on, I made my move. ‘Me mam wants something from the shop,’ I said. ‘She’d like some scones.’

  I jumped in the car and flew back round to my house. Shirley was still sitting there.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ I said.

  ‘I am coming to live with you.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You can fuck off now. My wife’s here.’

  ‘You’re not married.’

  ‘I am married,’ I said. ‘We got married on holiday.’ Quick thinking again. ‘Shirley, you’d better go. I can’t do owt about it now.’

  ‘You fucking bastard’ she said, starting to cry.

  ‘Come on, I’ll pick the cases up. I’ll take you to the railway station.’

  Shirley stood up. Swinging round, she kicked her foot through my glass front door. ‘You can fuck off,’ she snarled straight into my face.

  I grabbed the cases and threw them on the pavement. ‘I am going to pick up my wife now,’ I said. ‘I’ll be coming back then and if you are here … woe betide you.’

  It was all too much. I’d had enough of Shirley and her drinking and the photographs that John had shown me and her lies and her kids who she pretended didn’t exist and everything else. I had Sandra and Linda. That was enough for any man. It was certainly plenty for me and I knew I had to get rid of Shirley once and for all.

  By the time I returned home with Sandra, Shirley had gone. ‘Eh, that Marion next door, she’s a one,’ I said to Sandra. ‘She couldn’t get in, but it’s all sorted now.’

  But it wasn’t sorted. Shirley started sending me poison-pen letters, full of bile and hate and bitterness. I’d made the mistake of introducing Shirley to my mam, so she asked my mam if I’d got married. And my mam told her the truth: Sandra was an old flame from school and we weren’t married.

  A few weeks later, Sandra opened an envelope over breakfast. ‘What the hell’s this?’ she said, her face turning white. She held out a letter and a sheaf of photographs. There in all her glory was Shirley, legs apart for the lads, sitting in a jacuzzi.

  Look what you’re missing, Shirley had written on the photos. I was in the deepest shit.

  ‘Why’s this girl sending you pictures of herself naked?’ Sandra demanded.

  ‘This was long before I met you,’ I said, fearing my luck was about to run out.

  ‘According to this girl, you’ve been going out with the pair of us at the same time.’

  ‘She’s saying that because she wants me back.’ I needed to pull out all the stops to rescue the situation. ‘Sandra, you know I take you everywhere and buy you jewellery and clothes. When I went out with Shirley, I did the same thing. Shirley is a bit rough. She’s got nothing and she comes from the worst part of Liverpool. She dumped me before we met, but now she wants me back because nobody is spoiling her any more. She mis
ses her sugar daddy.’

  ‘Oh … right.’

  ‘Be honest, Sandra, I didn’t know you still existed until your daughter walked in that dressing room. Shirley was before you, so …’ I was running out of words and excuses.

  ‘I’ll have to think about this,’ Sandra said before leaving. A couple of weeks later, we met up for dinner. We talked about our holiday and I eventually persuaded her that Shirley belonged to the distant past. But I could sense that it would take one final grand gesture to convince Sandra that I hadn’t two-timed her with Shirley.

  ‘Get in the car,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to Liverpool now and I will prove to you that I am telling the truth. We’ll go to Shirley’s house and she can tell you herself.’

  ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I pleaded. ‘Get in that car, we’ll go to Liverpool,’ I said, knowing that if she said yes, I was up the creek.

  ‘All right – I believe you,’ Sandra said. Phew!

  My love life returned to relative normality – Sandra as the main dish with Linda on the side – and the comedy went from strength to strength. Shortly after appearing on TV-am, George suggested that I should stop playing clubs. ‘There’s no money in it,’ he said. George was right, but what he really meant was there was no money in clubs for him. He took twenty per cent of my earnings in a club, but thirty per cent when I played a theatre.

  I didn’t really care how much George was taking from me. I had more than enough in the bank and in 1987 bought Sunnycross House, a large detached property in Nunthorpe with a couple of acres of garden. Very well-to-do, Nunthorpe was where anyone from Middlesbrough moved if they’d made a decent bit of money. I put down a deposit, and employed joiners and decorators to renovate it before I moved in. I also applied for membership of the local golf club, which was about a mile down Brass Castle Lane from Sunnycross House. Walking into the bar, I was stopped by a bloke in a blazer. ‘You’ll need a tie if you want to come in here,’ he said. ‘And would you mind removing your hat?’

  It wasn’t what he’d said that riled me. It was the pompous manner in which he’d said it. I was sure he wouldn’t have spoken to anyone else in the same way. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘It’s a hat, not a hand grenade.’

  ‘If you don’t remove your hat, I won’t ask you again, you’ll be asked to leave.’

  ‘If I remove my hat, mate, I will stick it so far up your arse the peak will stick out of your mouth,’ I said and left the club. Two weeks later, I got a letter. They’d refused my application for membership. Once again, I’d been judged by the reputation of my Chubby stage persona rather than as plain old Royston Vasey, something that was becoming increasingly the case as I became well known.

  A short while later, I was in a fish shop in Hemlington. ‘Oi, Chubby, you fat cunt,’ one of the customers said.

  ‘Eh, do you mind? This is the fish shop,’ I said.

  ‘Ah … you fucking fat cunt.’

  ‘Hey! I told you once, there’s women in here. Do you mind?’

  ‘Chubby Brown’s just told me to stop fucking swearing!’ the lad shouted to everyone in the shop.

  ‘If you want to swear at me, go outside and swear,’ I said. The lad mouthed off a bit more, but I ignored him as I waited for my fish supper. As I left, he muttered something. ‘What did you say?’ I said.

  He muttered another obnoxious insult. Putting down my wrap of fish and chips, I grabbed him by the throat and pushed him towards the door. The lad tried to swing at me, so I raised a plastic lemonade bottle I was holding. Hitting the lemonade bottle, he looked at me slightly shocked that he’d not made contact with my face, then ran off. As I drove off, I spotted him loitering in the street with two other lads. ‘You fucking cunts,’ I shouted from the car window. It wasn’t like me, but he had me riled.

  I’d just finished my fish supper when there was a knock at the door. The police were outside. ‘I have reason to believe you caused a disturbance in the fish shop,’ the constable said.

  ‘Who’s told you that?’

  ‘The woman said you were effing and blinding.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman behind the counter.’

  I saw red. ‘The bitch. It was for her benefit that I pushed that lad out of the shop,’ I said.

  The policeman accepted my explanation and let me off with a warning. But the lesson was clear. My success wouldn’t buy me an escape from my background – in fact, it would make things worse. I’d grown up and started to put my house in order but, like anyone, I still had faults. And my failing was that I could take only so much abuse or aggression or conflict. Inside I’d be boiling, but most of the time I could keep a lid on it. But if it went too far, I’d snap and then whoever was in my way wouldn’t know what was coming.

  About a year after I’d dumped Shirley, both Sandra and Linda made it clear that they wanted to marry me. I couldn’t believe my luck, but I also knew it meant facing a difficult choice. Linda was more beautiful and a better shag, but she was wayward, whereas Sandra was relatively calm and relaxed.

  I was becoming increasingly well known and I knew it would take an understanding woman to put up with me. I thought of it as a simple contract – I’d spoil rotten any woman who was with me (I bought Linda jewellery, dresses and a car) but in return I expected them to give me a loose rein. Being very busy and living in the public eye, I needed a woman who wouldn’t get jealous or possessive or uptight if I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Linda certainly wasn’t that type of woman. And it didn’t help that whenever she walked into a room, every pair of male eyes turned to her and every male mouth drooled. I didn’t like that.

  Although not as glamorous or as attractive as Linda, Sandra was clean, smart, attractive and good company. She was a typical housewife, which was what I needed. I thought Sandra was the better bet, but put off a final decision until, passing Leeds one day, I thought I’d drop in on her. My car parked, I knocked on the back door and walked in to find a bloke sitting on the sofa. Sandra’s face went bright red and he left as soon as I’d said hello.

  ‘Who was that?’ I said.

  ‘Just a fella.’

  ‘What do you mean, “just a fella”?’

  ‘I put an advert in the lonely-hearts column for companionship.’

  ‘You are fucking joking. What about me?’

  ‘I’m just a bit of fun to you. You’ve got women all over the place.’

  ‘I haven’t. I packed them all in for you.’

  ‘I know you. You’re having affairs all the time.’

  I was jealous. It surprised me, but it also made up my mind. I now knew which woman I really wanted. ‘Look, to prove my point,’ I said to Sandra, ‘let’s get married.’

  Sandra accepted immediately, but first I needed to deal with Linda. I decided to drop her gently by taking her on a week’s holiday to Cyprus. We stayed at the Grecian Bay Hotel in Ayia Napa. We went out every night and Linda always looked stunning. One night, she was asked to dance by two German lads. When she accepted the invitation, I saw my chance. ‘You’re right out of order,’ I said. ‘I brought you to Cyprus, you’re on holiday with me and you get up and dance with another lad. When we get back, you can take your bags and fuck off. I don’t want to see you again because you are nowt but a fucking cow.’

  Sandra moved into Sunnycross House when I got back to Nunthorpe. And straight away Linda’s phone calls started. ‘Who’s that woman ringing up all the time?’ Sandra said.

  ‘She’s just a friend.’

  ‘She said you took her on holiday.’

  ‘She’s lying.’ Once again, I was ducking and diving with a piece of skirt. I knew I might as well come clean because in the end I’d get caught out simply because women are not daft.

  Fortunately Sandra knew what I was like, so the wedding still went ahead. Maybe she liked a bit of rough. A lot of women have told me that it makes them feel protected.

  As for my wedding day, even now a shudder goes down my bac
k when I think of it. 28 July 1988 – it pissed down all day. How appropriate.

  Sandra and I didn’t stand on tradition or ceremony. Sandra spent the night before the wedding with me and I didn’t have a stag night, mainly because I’d played too many stag nights to be able to enjoy my own. I hired a vintage car to take us to the registry office in Middlesbrough. Stopping at Sandra’s mother’s house to drop off some flowers for the buttonholes, I was ushered into the back kitchen by Sandra’s mum, a small silver-haired chain-smoker called Gwen. I’ll never forget what she said to me. ‘Son, you do know what you’re doing, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘It is our Sandra.’

  ‘I know it is. I love her very much.’

  ‘Well, be it on your head, then, son.’

  We got to the wedding. Peter Richardson was my best man and everyone I knew from Teesside clubland was there. We had a lovely day and a party that night at the house. We went on to a club later on and somehow I couldn’t get Gwen’s words out of my head. She had a wise old head of her own on her.

  The Evening Gazette was doing a cheap offer of a cruise to New York on the QE2 and a flight back on Concorde. I’d booked us two tickets for our honeymoon. It cost me seven grand and was worth every penny.

  When the ship pulled away from the dock in Southampton, a brass band was playing on the quayside and Sandra burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘This is one of my dreams,’ she said. ‘Going away on the QE2. I never thought this would happen to me.’

  Seeing Sandra display her emotions so openly was a rarity. As the matron of a psychiatric unit, she’d been stabbed several times and had glass thrown at her. It had made her hard and self-protective. ‘You do know what you are doing, getting involved with Sandra?’ one of her nurse friends once said to me when we were out having a drink.