Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

He was born the youngest of thirteen children to a poor South Carolina family.

  ‘My father only had one arm on account of how they had to amputate one after a car crash, so as a boy I was always my daddy’s left hand. He was really a hustler. I mean he’d cut wood, or chop cotton or be a junk man, collecting old cars and cutting up the metal. I was his baby and he took me everywhere, and consequently I was like a mature man by the time I was thirteen.

  ‘For my daddy I never could do no wrong. Momma would go fussin’ and give him the devil and say he was ruining me, but he didn’t mind. But I never took advantage. He taught me to be a good man and a strong man. He passed away in ‘65. He knew I was fighting but he never got a chance to see me as big as I am today. I wish he could have lived to enjoy himself and have some fun. I’d like to have shown him what living is really like — and to have shared the things I enjoy doing with him.’

  He talks very softly and with a slight nasal intonation, caused no doubt by the flattened, scarred nose. He is affable and pleasant, quite unlike his surly image.

  ‘I’ve always been singing. I’m a Baptist and I was in the church choir. My daddy and me would sing always when we were working together. When I was fourteen I volunteered for the army, but I flunked the tests. They give you all those blocks and squares and rangle-tangle triangles, and I couldn’t do all of them. In ‘64 they passed me 1-A but by then I had a growing family, so I didn’t have to go.’

  At fifteen he married Florence, a distant relative who was two years older than himself, and they moved first to New York and then on to Philadelphia where he worked butchering cows in an abattoir. Then at sixteen he took up boxing because he wanted to lose weight, and soon found that he could make a good living out of it.

  ‘No, I never feel any pity for any man I beat. But I respect any man who signs that contract to fight me, because he knows I’m gonna go out there to take him apart. When I punch a fellow and see him crumble from the power of my hands and fall on to his back I feel great excitement. There’s a great thrill to it. But you don’t become champ by misusing yourself, by drinking and smoking and chasing after women. I’ve never done that. What I’ve got I’ve had to work for.’

  He’s a strange old-fashioned figure with a rather touching regard for respect and the chastening virtues of honest labour and in the couple of hours or so I spent with him, he neither criticised anyone else nor uttered anything which might have been considered profane in any way. He is truly the gentle giant, the twenty-seven-year-old father of five who is looking forward to getting home so that he can keep the kids out of mischief during the summer holiday, go riding on his Harley Davidson motorcycle with his friends and get back to more regular training.

  He believes in a rigorous, Spartan schedule, and at six o’clock yesterday morning after driving back from a performance in Wakefield all through the night he decided to change into his track suit and go for a run right round Hyde Park — ‘You know, past that statue of some king or something you have over there.’

  In America he was accused before his victory over Ali last March of behaving with toe-scraping humility, but I see no sign of it, just an honest, if possibly blinkered, view of his own surroundings.

  ‘People ask me why I don’t help with the Civil Rights movement. Well, to be honest I really don’t understand all the details involved. I’ll help with money where I can, but before stepping into something like that you have to know more about it so you don’t get involved with the law or go upsetting black or white brothers. Nobody in my family has ever been in a movement of any kind. We’re not politicians and just because I’m champion of the world I don’t think it’s right that I should get up and start talking about things I know nothing about. Why should I make a fool of myself?’

  For a man who was reputed to have been paid more than £1,000,000 for his one fight this year he is not living in any kind of grand style in London. His hotel room is small, almost poky, although it is in a new luxury block, and is littered with suitcases from which the contents are trailing in all directions. Under contract to a syndicate called Cloverlay in Philadelphia, the percentage he keeps of his earnings is a well kept secret. Still he reckons that with his investments he will have enough to live on for the rest of his life.

  ‘The most exciting thing I ever knew was to realise that I could have all I wanted and live a comfortable life. That was my dream when I was young. I didn’t want to live like daddy and mom. I understand that they didn’t have the opportunity, but they did for me what they did and I’m gonna do better for my kids. They’re all musical so maybe we’ll be a family of entertainers.’

  But first he has to prove himself an entertainer, and no amount of setbacks are going to stop him, he says. He’ll just go on and on and in three years when he retires from the ring, he’ll become a full time singer.

  But when will he fight next? ‘I don’t know. I might even challenge you next. What d’you say?’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare fight me. I’d kill you,’ say I, clenching my fist to show him just what a lethal threat I can be when roused.

  ‘I believe you, man. You sure got big hands. Now don’t you go hurtin’ no one.’

  POSTSCRIPT They say that boxers and writers always get on well together, and although I had always been an Ali fan I found myself drawn to Frazier because of his basic niceness. I was pleased when he retired, because I suspect that his second fight with Ali did them both irreparable harm. Of course he never did prove himself as a singer. He couldn’t sing.

  June 1971

  Spike Milligan

  Spike milligan reckons he was born a clown — just as some people are born with funny shaped noses or whatever. In fact one of his earliest memories has him as a little boy of seven playing a clown in the school Christmas play.

  ‘I remember it so clearly,’ he says. ‘They’d given me blue to put on my face and I thought it should have been black. And then in the last scene, when all the other children were crowded round the Virgin and Child I wasn’t supposed to go on, but I did anyway. It didn’t seem fair. So I went on and stood alongside the manger with the others. I thought the clown had a part in life.

  ‘It’s strange, but that little cameo in my early life says it all.’

  Spike Milligan lives, sleeps and works Mondays to Fridays from a cluttered, jammed yet neat little office in Bayswater. There’s so much work to be done he just has to be there, he says, and when he is there, he isn’t inflicting his neuroses upon his family. Then at the weekend he can go home to Finchley to his semi-detached, four children, wife, au pair, nannie and dog.

  Yesterday he was getting over a boozy night out — the result of a reception held for him by the publishers of his new book, Adolf Hitler-My Part in his Downfall and suffering from a miserable bout of catarrh. He looks so gentle and fragile that a jolt might shatter him.

  At fifty-four, his mind continuously races in as many directions as a mind can go at any one time, and the room is crammed with box files where he’s collected odd thoughts which might someday be useful. He calls these thoughts ‘mind furniture’.

  What is he working on right now? I ask, and he grabs a pile of letters, circulars and scribblings.

  ‘Today?’ he asks. ‘Well, people write to me all the time asking me what I can do to help them, so I do what I can. I’m a member of all the anti-cruelty and anti-vivisection societies there are, for instance. You wouldn’t believe how much cruelty there is to animals in the manufacture of women’s cosmetics.

  ‘Then here, you see, I’m a vegetarian. Then here’… and he picks up a pile of drawings… ‘I’m a member of the Finchley Society, which was formed because in Finchley there is no attempt in any way to preserve things of architectural interest.

  ‘Basically, I’m working for the human race. And when I’ve time I try to get a bit of work done for myself. Every day I try to write down some comedy. I’m under contract to the Marty Feldman Show as a writer and a performer, so I’ve written masses of stuff for that.�
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  On the shelves there are files which say God! Ha! Ha! — ‘I thought of writing a comedy version of the Bible: it must have been a very happy occasion when the world was created’ — and others devoted to children’s poems. One Christmas he taped masses of children’s conversations. It would, he thinks, make a lovely book.

  He’s everything — from serious poet, to songwriter, to cartoonist, and as he talks his hands wander through sheaves of paper haphazardly.

  His new book is an autobiographical account of his own youth in the army during the Second World War. It is very funny indeed. It is also, he insists, a true account of the way things were.

  What of the complaints, which have already been made, that the war was nothing to laugh at?

  ‘Well, you expect some people to complain, don’t you? It’s the dead soldier syndrome. These people live permanently being humble about the war as though it were a medal of respectability. But for the dead it’s a private thing. I lost mates in the war, too. I still get a pension because of the war.

  ‘I got wounded in the leg and became a neurotic with a chronic anxiety state. I got shakes — and like you I got a stammer. Every time a gun went off I started to stammer. Even now when I get very uptight I stammer.’

  His injury, which was caused by a shell blast, changed his life tremendously. Before it he was very nice and easy-going and people took tremendous advantage of him, and consequently he tried to do as much for everyone as he could.

  ‘Somehow when I got blown up it made a positive decision about whether or not I was a neurotic, and it eventually resulted in my nervous breakdown in 1956.’

  ‘I just went on working and going until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I don’t want it to happen again. I’m much more aware now. I won’t let them screw me up again. Sometimes when it gets on top of me I just take a whole pile of letters and throw them away rather than answer them.

  ‘I hate doing it, but I have to. It’s the only way.’

  In a strange way he believes that the war saved him from what he might have been — ‘probably a foreman by now at Woolwich Arsenal and wondering why I was unhappy.

  ‘Adolf was my salvation.’

  Before he received his ‘cunningly worded invitation to partake in World War II’ Spike (christened Terence) had been a quiet, protected lad from South East London, who had a passion for playing the trumpet and a seemingly dull future ahead of him.

  The war changed everything, and by the time he was demobbed in 1947 he was a different man, making his living playing with a little jazz trio and touring the armed forces bases all over Italy.

  ‘Eventually when I came back to England in 1949 Val Parnell came to see us, but he wasn’t interested and after a miserable time touring I left the others and went to work as a barman in Westminster. As it happened, the owner of the pub used to write scripts for Derek Roy and when he heard me cracking jokes he invited me to help him.’

  Later came the Goon Show, and then the rest.

  ‘But it wasn’t until I played Oblimov on the stage that I realised I was a very good clown. I was forty-four. Maybe it was too late. I’d very much like to have done comedy in films, but I haven’t. And I wonder how people who are less funny than I am have got into it. I’m not sorry for myself. Just puzzled.’

  He is funny on virtually everything he talks about and his bright blue eyes just smile away kindly all the time, but he’s funniest of all when he recounts tales of his troubles with his bank (despite an income of something like £40,000 a year).

  ‘You know,’ he says, ‘they sent me a letter saying it had come to their notice that I was £5000 overdrawn on my current account and would I like to drop in and see them. So I answered “How dare you?” and pointed out that in my deposit account I had eighteen shillings but they noticed that I was still £4999 2s overdrawn, and would I like to go to lunch. £5000 overdrawn.

  ‘So they duly answered saying “yes” they’d transferred the eighteen shillings but they noticed that I was still £4999 2s overdrawn, and would I like to go lunch.

  ‘So I answered “How dare you!” but if they were to put the cost of the lunch to my overdraft it would reduce it still further. Then when they wrote again I answered that it was my habit of putting the names of all my creditors into a hat once a month, and if they didn’t stop pestering me with their letters I wouldn’t put their name in next time.’

  POSTSCRIPT It was during my meeting with Spike Milligan that I discovered the way to avoid having a nervous breakdown, having coasted pretty close to one some months earlier. After explaining all my symptoms to him, just as though he were a doctor, Spike nodded kindly and said ‘it gets easier to handle once you know what’s wrong with you’. It’s true.

  I still think Spike is one of the funniest men on television, and like him, I cannot imagine why he never had a career as a film comic.

  July 1971

  James Baldwin

  Achat with James Baldwin can be a pleasant, jokey, easygoing relaxed affair, but an interview with him can be very hard work. He differentiates between the two encounters. Not I.

  As soon as he believes an interview has begun he switches on a new persona, forgets that it’s he, Jimmy, who is being interviewed, and discusses race in a series of esoteric polemics, turning every question back to the interviewer, and then watching him wonder how to answer with a piercing gaze out of those great round eyes.

  The trouble is that it gets very difficult to know what to say, and worse, before long you find yourself playing his game of turning his statements over and tossing them back towards him, hoping that he’ll carry on and eventually illuminate us all.

  When I went to see him I was determined not to get caught up in the matter of race, as virtually everyone else who has written about him in the last ten years seems to have done. But it is impossible. There are, I know, many, many things he can discuss other than race, but he appears to assume that since he has become so famous as an articulate black man, then it is colour that he will be expected to talk about.

  He was sitting in the corner of a Grosvenor Square hotel lobby with his brother, David, an actor and wit, and representative of his publishers. A strangely fey man of forty-six, his hands butterfly around his face as he talks.

  In the last ten years, since the overwhelming success of his early novels Go Tell It On The Mountain and Another Country, Baldwin, the Harlem child and eldest of nine, has seemingly accepted without dissent the cloak of being a black symbol. Yet he continues to live outside America, at present working from a home in the South of France.

  Does he not feel alienated from Harlem by his success, I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Success depends upon your point of view.’ Long pause. ‘I don’t feel alienated. I find Harlem everywhere. Here in London if you like.’ Longer pause. ‘It’s all over. In the music. You call it rock and roll. That isn’t what we call it. I know the price paid for it. How it got here. And why it’s here.’

  ‘You once described yourself as “a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelligent and hungry black cat”, — I’m not sure why.’

  The Baldwin brothers smack their hands together and hoot: a family enjoying a private joke.

  ‘I’m not modest. I can’t afford to be. You called me a world figure. I have to accept that. And whoever that happens to has to go through some very difficult changes. I’m a very arrogant man. I’ve had to be. But between me and my work I’m very modest … I know I’m not equal to what I see.

  ‘The piece of paper is a terrifying thing. You can be arrogant with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. But you can’t be arrogant when you’re trying to do something which is impossible to do. Then you lean towards humility.’

  Those eyes, about five inches away from mine, seem to be burning right through my skull.

  ‘Some reviewers have suggested that they are tired of seeing you making your private hell your public persona,’ I say, and inwardly shelter from the inevitable reaction
. Baldwin looks at me with a cool toleration.

  ‘My dear, I’m not talking about my private hell. I’m talking about something else altogether in my work. And I’ve used myself as a witness. I’m not talking about Jimmy Baldwin. I’m talking out of him. There’s no reason for you to care how Jimmy Baldwin suffers. I’m not so abject. I’m not a beggar. But I’m using a technique to make you use something …’

  At this moment an American tourist passes through the lobby with a Stars-and-Stripes handbag. The Baldwins laugh again, grasping hands momentarily.

  He goes on: ‘I know I’ve been condemned for being self-pitying, but I’m happy that I haven’t stopped in my work. I’ll never know whether being labelled as the angry, young, articulate, black man has helped or hindered my career. Time has proved that I had something to be angry about. And I’ve never been bitter. If I had I would have been much less talkative.

  ‘You think that black people come out of the skull fully grown. And that when you’ve heard of us we should be happy that you’ve heard of us. I don’t mean you personally, and when I talk about “I” I don’t mean Jimmy.’

  Why do you live so much in France, I ask. An obvious diversion.

  ‘The French left me alone which was what I needed. I wanted to be able to make it or not. The English are like Americans. And that may become truer than you think.’ Long silence.

  ‘I’m not talking about racism. The French are equally as racist as the English. But you have a different attitude towards your own flesh. It’s part of your puritanism. That’s what makes you so problematical.’

  We’re interrupted momentarily as a couple of middle-aged white American tourists walk over and shyly ask Baldwin if he’d care to autograph a copy of his new book. Certainly, he smiles.

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ says the man, and Baldwin goes on with his dissertation.

  ‘The French haven’t got the same sort of sexual paranoia that you have. If I’m walking down the street in London with a white girl there’s a certain reaction from your, shall we say, working class. I wouldn’t get the same reaction in France from their working class. The Frenchman assumes that no one can take his woman away from him. But you assume that I’ve only got to beckon and she’ll come running to my bed. That’s your madness, not mine. And it’s true of all of you. I don’t know why. That’s a question you must answer.’