Amazing to recount that we didn’t lose our audience and got through the night without any lightning strikes. Health and Safety would have had a field day.
We had a lovely company on that show. Verity Anne Meldrum was Christopher Robin, Norma Dunbar was Kanga, David Glover was Eeyore and Michael Staniforth, whom I’d meet again in Rentaghost, was Tigger. We had great fun on that tour. I’m proud that I’m a good company leader. If I’m playing the lead I love to lead a company off stage as well as on. I love being in charge of people’s welfare. In her autobiography All of Me the wonderful Barbara Windsor says she told none other than Joan Collins, ‘Every actress should have Biggins in the small print of their contracts as an essential.’ I think I know what dear Barbara meant. I can make people’s lives more comfortable because I enjoy making nests.
When you’re on tour it can be hard, as you’re away for weeks and months at a time from the people you love. I try to replace all the families, all the people we’ve left behind. The camaraderie of theatre is so strong. It’s like no other industry in the world. When you work with someone for just three weeks, perhaps in rehearsal for a production that never comes off, you still feel the intensity of friendship. You may not see that person again for years and years. But there’s something about showbusiness. When you do meet again, in some green room or some theatre tour, you start right back where you left off. It’s as if you never went away.
Some tours can also enrich you in other ways. When the gorgeous Paula Wilcox and I were on the road alongside George Layton way back in Touch of Spring (one of the first plays Cameron Mackintosh did, before he gave the world the mega-musical), we made it a gastronomic tour. We would drive for miles each day to find great restaurants. We called it our great eating tour of England. We had so much fun and it’s amazing, bearing in mind how close I feel to Paula and George today, that this was some 30 years ago.
Of course, all those years ago the other thing that was very different to today was the quality of the accommodation. Sometimes we got lucky and found half-decent hotels. But most of the time we were in the long-lost world of theatrical digs. It was a world of extraordinary landladies who offered rooms to all the touring companies. With these redoubtable ladies you never quite knew what you might get. You certainly never got bored.
My favourite story of the era – often told and probably apocryphal – is of the two actors who boarded together and shared a glass of dry sherry each night after the show. After a couple of nights they take a look at the bottle. Did they really drink that much the night before? A couple of nights later their suspicions are aroused again. Their precious sherry is disappearing far too fast. ‘The landlady must be drinking some,’ they agree. So they decide to take their revenge. They decant the sherry, hide the new bottle and pee in the old one.
‘That’ll teach her,’ they laugh.
They laugh even more when they see that the subterfuge doesn’t stop her. Every night the level on the new bottle has fallen just a little bit more. So when they leave at the end of the week they decide to confront her. ‘I’m afraid we have something to ask you. Have you been drinking our sherry while we’ve been at the theatre?’ they say.
‘Oh no, dearies, I haven’t drunk any. But I did mean to tell you that I’ve been putting it in your trifle every night,’ she says.
While I never suffered quite such an indignity I do remember plenty of other horrors, including the time my digs were next door to a huge poster in an Essex churchyard that screamed out: ‘Our God’s Alive. Sorry About Yours.’ I had a few sleepless nights thinking about that one.
Then there was the time when Maev Alexander and I joined a company called the Portable Theatre. The clues were all there in the title. Everything was done on a shoestring. Our set, props and equipment were all moved around in a van and we set up in whichever hall we were booked for and then packed up again afterwards. Which was when the fun began. Each night the company members had to go to the bar. We then stood around, like Roman slaves, while the locals looked us all up and down and decided which they wanted to look after for the night. Maev had a low point when she was selected by a pair of lesbians who chased her round their house all night. My low point was a bit different.
It came on the night I was the last to be chosen. Oh, the embarrassment. It was sports day at school all over again. ‘Well, I’ll have to take him, then,’ said my charm-free host with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. I followed him sheepishly to his home. What was I letting myself in for?
We had a drink, then I admitted I was exhausted. ‘I really must get some sleep. So where is my bed, exactly?’
‘Right there,’ he said. And he pointed to a patch of worn carpet in front of the fire.
Unfortunately, even if I did get a bed it wasn’t always Savoy standard. One time I slipped right off the mattress and on to the floor because of the nylon sheets in a guesthouse in Brighton. Now it’s cotton sheets only for me. I’d sleep in linen, if they weren’t so expensive. Whatever tour I’ve been on, the big dream has always been the same: a transfer to the West End. I love travel. But London felt like home. And in 1975 I was about to move right to the heart of things.
Veronica and her husband Gerald owned the Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It’s a theatre that’s somehow easy to overlook – though it had just the kind of pedigree I loved. It opened in 1930 with Noel Coward playing alongside Gertrude Lawrence and Laurence Olivier in the premier of Private Lives. Noel and Gertie were back again later that decade with Tonight at 8.30 and apparently they referred to the place as ‘our theatre’. I wanted to make it mine.
I had the chance because what very few people knew was that above the theatre were 25 small studio flats, all available to rent for just £14 a week. I had to have one. I’d moved on from Ifield Road and tried living with a fellow actor and his girlfriend in a flat in Oxford Circus. But it was a tense, tricky little household, and I soon realised that love triangles really aren’t my thing.
I begged Veronica to let me know if any of her rooms ever became available – and I moved in the moment one did. It was just wonderful to be so close to the heart of London – and for an actor it was amazing to live, quite literally, above the shop. I loved my Phoenix rooms – well, room. I had a sofa bed and put throws over the tiny kitchen area to hide the fact that my whole world was in one single space. Overall I was convinced that I had created theatreland’s most glamorous room. It seemed that word had got around.
We had a wonderful old prostitute in the building, living in the flat above me. She was in her fifties and had a gammy leg, but she was a game old bird. Off she went to work every day and she always wanted to see the inside of my flat. ‘They say it’s beautiful. Let me look,’ she’d say.
‘Come in, then, and have a drink,’ I said one night.
She could hardly speak when she looked around. ‘Oh, oh, oh, this is gorgeous. You see, my flat’s all bed.’ She said. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
Opposite I had another wonderful character, the mad woman across the hall who worked on the markets. Her tiny flat was chock-a-block with rubbish. She stacked up anything and everything she could sell – my dad would have loved her. One of my new pals, the actress Georgina Simpson, heiress to the Simpson’s of Piccadilly clothing fortune and the woman who would marry Anthony Andrews, certainly fell under my neighbour’s spell. She was round one evening and didn’t have anything to wear for a party. So we went across the hall, knocked on the door to see if my neighbour had any dresses. Georgina got one for £3 – and she looked a million dollars.
Georgina soon turned into the sister I never had. We met through Jonathan and Vivien in Fulham. They had been invited to a ‘society’ party at some country pile and I was determined to come too. So determined that I offered to do the driving. Even though my dad had offered me plenty of flash, refurbished cars over the years I always stuck with something a lot less glamorous. A white van. I’d needed it when I was propping and had to help move the sets around on vario
us tours. So I still drove it. And it certainly set us apart from the other guests out in the country. We pulled into a vast driveway, past Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Maseratis. ‘They’ll think we’re the hired help,’ I screeched.
The three of us were laughing so much as we parked that I nearly hit one of the fancy cars. And that of course made us laugh even more. As soon as we got inside I nipped to the loo to try to calm down. But I couldn’t. And because I couldn’t stop laughing I peed all the way down my left leg – leaving a huge wet stain on my light-brown suit.
‘Got to hide it, got to hide it.’ But how?
I’m dancing around, as if movement will make a difference. ‘Dry, dammit, dry.’
‘Sorry, I’ll be just a moment.’
Damn. Someone was knocking on the door. I imagined a long queue forming outside. Disaster. Then salvation. There was a beautifully patterned silk scarf hanging behind the loo door. I picked it up, did a bit more mopping and headed out into the vast hallway using the scarf as cover. But who should I see first but the lady of the house, Georgina’s formidable mother, Heddy Simpson. I soon realised she was a woman who doesn’t mince her words and doesn’t hide her feelings. She was also a woman who owned a beautifully patterned silk scarf.
I’m not sure I’ll ever forget how Heddy looked me up and down that evening. And my humiliation wasn’t quite complete. As I tried to scarper a waiter bumped into me and spilled a tray of champagne down my right leg. It was a near-perfect match for the stain on my left leg. ‘So sod it.’ I left the scarf on a hall table and headed off to find Jonathan and Vivien.
It was quite a party. The rich are different – as I’ve been constantly reminded, all around the world, ever since. ‘Time to go swimming!’ The cry went up sometime around midnight. I was handed a pair of trunks, which I had to stretch almost to breaking point to fit my frame. I put my clothes in a neat little pile behind a tree in the garden. I might have just peed on the lavatory floor and tried to steal a scarf from the lady of the house. But I was still too well brought up to fling my clothes around.
We all splashed around wildly for a while – Christine Keeler, eat your heart out – and then everyone got dressed again. Everyone except me. Try as I might, I couldn’t find my tree, or my clothes. So I spent far more time than I wanted (and probably more time than anyone else wanted) walking around half-naked that night. But by then I was feeling pretty comfortable at the party. I had been introduced to Georgina, the daughter of the house. We clicked straight away. I had made a friend for life.
Back at the Phoenix, the theatre itself was booming. Veronica had signed up a season of huge American stars for a series of very high-profile plays. Not surprisingly, the box-office managers were making the most of the stars’ potential. Their names – from Rock Hudson to Charlton Heston – were all up in big letters outside the theatre, just below my bedroom window. I was ill with jealousy.
‘Could you put my name there instead, just for a joke?’ I asked Veronica one day. She set it up. So for a few blissful hours ‘Christopher Biggins’ got top billing, in big capitals. Rock, Charlton and the others were all relegated to lower-case letters below.
By now I had upgraded myself from my studio room – I was renting the flat next door as well. So for £28 a week I had ‘rooms’ in Covent Garden, right in the heart of theatreland. It was practically a ‘salon’ and I lived there for five very happy years.
When I did decide to leave I had one lovely moment with dear Lily, the lady who ‘did’ for me every week. Lily was always a gem – and a chancer. She was supposed to do two or three hours, but if I popped out just after she arrived and needed to dash back for something I had forgotten I almost always found she was long gone herself. But still, she was always ready for a laugh and a gossip and I would miss her. ‘Lily, I need to tell you that I’m leaving at the end of the month. I’m moving out.’
She started to cry. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ she said.
‘Oh, you’ll be fine, I’m sure,’ I said, flattering myself that it was my winning personality that she would miss.
‘No, I can’t do without you. I don’t know how I’ll pay the electricity bill,’ she said through her tears.
Now I got it. ‘How much do you owe, Lily?’
‘A hundred and eighty-four pounds and seventy pence.’
I wrote a cheque for £184.70.
‘And I just don’t know how I’ll pay my gas bill.’
‘How much is that, Lily?’
‘Seventy-two pounds and fifty pence.’
I wrote a second cheque.
‘Christopher, I will miss you. Would it be possible to have a memento of you?’
‘What would you like?’ I asked, looking at all my signed playbills, photographs and theatrical memorabilia on the walls.
‘Can I have your Kenwood mixer?’ she asked. That’s when I finally learned to say no.
Of course, Lily wasn’t the only person I was going to miss at the Phoenix – the building was stuffed with racy neighbours and great pals. The Daily Mail’s legendary theatre critic Jack Tinker was another resident – I had helped him get the flat there after telling him about the building at some first night or other.
He was one of my finest friends. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as I did back then. He was so small, so bright, so quick. And his reviews were brilliant.
The two of us were forever in and out of each other’s flat, having coffee, gossiping and getting into scrapes and confessing all if we had been naughty boys the night before. Jack’s lover Adrian Morris had a house in Brighton where Jack’s three great daughters lived, and they were all like an extended family to me. As if I didn’t already have enough wonderful people around me as it was.
But there was some tension – from some of my colleagues in the industry. People said I shouldn’t spend time with Jack, not because he was older and not because he had a lover but because he was a critic. It was a bit like Bristol, when some people thought it odd that I spent so much time with Joan, the wife of our principal. But, just like Bristol, I carried on regardless. People are people. Who cares what jobs people do?
And I didn’t want to lose Jack’s friendship because, as I said, we shared so many laughs. The time we went to see a production in Stratford-upon-Avon was a key example. We had booked into a local hotel and arrived to find that all they had was a tiny room with a big double bed. ‘Ah, so that’s your game, Jack. You get young, impressionable actors out of London on false pretences and then play innocent about sharing a bed,’ I joked. We laughed at that. We laughed even more after the play when it was finally time for bed. Jack was first into the bathroom, and while he was cleaning his teeth I got every piece of furniture in the room – including lamps, occasional tables, chairs and a chest of drawers – and lined them up down the middle of the bed as a sort of buffer zone.
We laughed so much we cried. We could hardly have made more noise. Then we had to move the furniture all back. God knows what the people in the next room thought was going on.
8
The Real Me
By the time I met Jack Tinker I was wonderfully comfortable with who I was. I don’t have some angst-ridden tale of sexual awakening, nor do I have any terrible stories of prejudice or discrimination. But that’s not to say it’s all been easy. I look back on a world where attitudes to sexuality have changed dramatically. There have been times when things got much better, and times when they got much, much worse.
I grew up in a different age. Being gay wasn’t thought of, let alone discussed. There were no role models, no good examples and no road map to follow. Yes, I mucked around just a little bit with a couple of other boys at school. I think on a hugely exciting school trip to Paris there were some rustles with none other than our head boy one night – I always did set my sights high. But even that wasn’t really about sex, it was about boys being boys, I thought. Like I say, I always had this feeling of being different. And the other boys, the sporty boys and, yes
, the head boys, all recognised it as well. But it wasn’t discussed. The word ‘gay’ hadn’t really been used in this context, still less as a term of abuse.
At Salisbury Rep I still didn’t really understand what was going on in my head, or all around me. Though I can’t exactly say I didn’t have plenty of clues. I barged in one door backstage carrying an armful of props and found two men having sex in front of me. And being brought up as I had been, I simply apologised for not knocking, put the props down and said I would come back later.
I certainly wasn’t troubled. I didn’t agonise over my sexuality. I simply never gave it any thought. I saw how easily Raymond and Geoffrey fitted into the Rep’s social scene in Salisbury and by the time I got to Bristol I had plenty of other friends who were gay. No one batted an eyelid about them, so I didn’t worry about it myself.
Of course, one reason why I coasted through life so calmly was that I hadn’t actually suffered in love myself. I’d been married and I had seen my short marriage end. But, like a Jane Austin heroine, I hadn’t met the right man to make me really feel things. Well, I hadn’t until Penelope Keith introduced me to him.
Penny and I had met back in my London Assurance days, well before her big television roles in The Good Life and To The Manor Born. She was so special and so sophisticated and we had a great chemistry – from the start we would talk ten times a day and meet up four or five times a week. She’s a wonderful cook and had a lovely home in Putney where I spent a huge amount of time. It was there that she introduced me to another theatrical pal of hers: a fascinating, talented box-office manager called Robert Burns. Every successful theatre needs a brilliant box-office manager. So every producer in London wanted Robert to work for them. He could make money out of nothing. He would move seats and whole rows of bookings to squeeze in extra paying punters and keep his productions in the black.
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