Biggins

by Christopher Biggins

  ‘Thank God, I wore trousers,’ Liza said as we walked over the vast mirrored floor to greet the other guests. And from then on the surprises kept on coming. From the urinal in the men’s loo – what a clever idea – to the beauty room with a sink, hairdryer and massage table for each of the three sisters. And the closets? ‘This one is for day wear, this one is for evening wear, this one is for Chanel, this one is for shoes, this one for handbags,’ our hostess trilled as we had our tour. And when I say ‘closet’ I mean a room the size of the entire ground floor of my London house. There was a tenpin bowling alley and not so much a ‘panic room’ as a ‘panic apartment’ in the basement where the sisters could hide out in a crisis.

  Best of all, Phyllis wasn’t bragging. She was so matter-of-fact as she walked us around her world. This was simply the way she lived. I absolutely adored it. Our tour continued, and as we headed outside she said, ‘This is the lake for the black swans.’ Which indeed it was.

  ‘This is the lake for the white swans.’ Indeed it was.

  ‘This is the lake for the black and white swans.’ And indeed they all were.

  It was fabulous. And there was no need to ask why a white swan didn’t stray into a black area or vice versa. It wasn’t even the small army of staff Phyllis had. It was the sheer force of her personality. She wanted the lakes the way she wanted them. No swan would have dared disrupt her. At the end of the vast garden was a sort of restaurant with a grill and a bar with optics and that’s how that Rat Pack lived in Las Vegas. Frank, Dean, Sammy, all of them. Perform all night, sleep all day. This lavish compound suited their climate and suited their lives. I was thrilled to have seen it first-hand, before it fades away for good.

  Racing ahead a bit, it’s clear that Liza has had her problems and made her fair share of mistakes. The worst of which was David Gest. When she met him she dropped out of all our lives. Me, Peter, her PA, her musical director, everyone who cared for her and loved her and helped her. We lost her almost overnight. Her numbers changed. Messages weren’t answered. It was so sad, and knowing her as I did I knew it was so dangerous.

  Just as worrying was Liza’s decision to forget the old and rush headlong towards the new as her wedding approached.

  Two old pals of mine, Lee Dean and Toni ‘Petal’ Nelson, were at the Ivy one night and found themselves sitting right next to Liza. ‘Thrilled’ is not the word. ‘I think, Miss Minnelli, that we have a mutual friend,’ Petal said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Biggins!’

  Apparently, Liza turned to David with a huge smile on her face. ‘Biggins! That’s the man I was trying to tell you about! What’s his first name again?’

  After just a few more words, Liza gave Petal two invites to her upcoming wedding. Now Lee and Petal are wonderful company and scrub up very well. But neither Liza nor David had met them more than half an hour before inviting them to what should have been the most important, personal day of their lives. If that’s not a warning sign, I’m not a panto dame.

  No invitation ever came to me. Nor did one come to Peter, the man who had buried Liza’s mother and had been a family friend across the generations. When I read the tacky lists of who had been at the ceremony – had Liza known any of them for more than half an hour? – I nearly cried at the tragedy and the waste.

  She has seen past David now, thank God. But I don’t think she’s the girl I used to know. Seeing the performance she gave at Bruce Forsyth’s 80th-birthday party almost made me cry. I’ll carry on trying to see her because, of so very many dear friends in my life, she is one of the very few who have slipped through the net. I relish and cherish all my friendships. I never discard people and I’m lucky to have very rarely been discarded myself. In time I hope Liza and I regain our old momentum.

  In the late 1980s the best job I did was the UK tour of Frank Loesser’s fabulous Guys and Dolls. I was cast alongside the mighty Barbara Windsor, who, unusually, was at a low ebb. Although the great comedies and the CarryOn films loomed large in her recent past, new film and television work had dried up. She was touring in theatre and doing great work, but still this business seemed to dismiss her. ‘Oh, it’s only Barbara Windsor’ was the general attitude of producers and directors alike. Just as the phrase ‘Oh, it’s only Christopher Biggins’ was haunting me. So in 1988 it was little wonder that we became such close friends so quickly. We both recognised who and where we were.

  We also knew how lucky we were to be cast in a tour of the wonderful Guys and Dolls. I was Nathan Detroit, Babs was Miss Adelaide, and we got marvellous reviews. Barbara proved to be such a generous performer, just like Liza Goddard. And, like Liza, she was happy to let me do all the organising and the nest-building when we were on tour together. I found our hotels, did our deals and tried to smooth our path.

  But in Scotland it all went just a little bit awry. A dear pal of mine, William Mowat Thompson, had a marvellous house in Edinburgh where we could escape the bad hotels and dodgy lodgings for a while. But there was only one spare room. ‘Don’t worry, Barbara, because we’ve found a flat for you just around the corner,’ I told her.

  ‘No, I don’t need it, darling. A friend of my hairdresser has a place, so I’m staying there.’ But as we left the King’s Theatre in Glasgow for our Edinburgh engagement Babs wasn’t quite at ease. I was with Vincent McGrath, another dear friend who was lighting up my life at the time. ‘When we meet the guy, will you follow me to where we’re going? Just in case,’ Babs asked us.

  So after her luggage had been piled into this stranger’s car we began our watching brief. We drove away from the city centre. And we drove. And we drove. About 45 minutes later we were on some dreadful council estate in the absolute middle of nowhere. I’d never seen Barbara’s eyes so wide. She was horrified.

  ‘Now, you’ve got my number? You absolutely must ring if you need anything. I can leap in a cab and be here in no time at all,’ I said as loudly as I could, to warn Babs’s host that at least someone knew where she was and who she was with.

  ‘I’ll be fine, darling. Don’t you worry about me,’ Babs said, not too convincingly.

  After I had gone it turned out that the lift wasn’t working, and it was about a thousand steps up to the flat (not that dear Barbara would ever exaggerate). And I know she wasn’t exaggerating about the final detail: the fact that the flat itself was a shrine to – you guessed it – Barbara Windsor. That night she rang her husband, he rang me and I set off to rescue her. We got her into a box room in William’s house, which wasn’t up to her usual standard but was most certainly better than where she had been. It was the last time she ever organised her own lodgings.

  One of the many things I love about Barbara is her belief that everything always comes right in the end. It did that night and she’s the living proof that it does in life as well. Her lovely husband Scott is adorable and totally right for her. And her career in EastEnders has finally shown the world what I always knew. ‘It’s only Barbara Windsor’ indeed. At last everyone now knows that that’s enough.

  Back in London after the Guys and Dolls tour, I had been at yet another London dinner party where the introductions didn’t quite go to plan. Penny Keith had introduced me to the trichologist Philip Kingsley, whose shampoos really are the only ones I’ll use. I then introduced him to Dinsdale Lansden, the hugely successful actor.

  ‘Dinsdale, this is Philip, the famous trichologist,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, marvellous. I used to ride a bike when I was a child,’ said Dinsdale, to everyone’s total confusion.

  It took quite a while, and a bizarre conversation where everyone was at cross purposes with everyone else, to work out what he was on about. ‘He’s a “trichologist”? I thought you said he was a “trick cyclist”,’ Dinsdale explained. So a trick cyclist was what Philip would always be to us.

  Back then I fell in love with Philip’s wife, Joan, as well. She loved theatre and organised some wonderful concerts. The three of us clicked. We had years and years of won
derful holidays together. They had a marvellous apartment in New York, as well as other homes on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were generous with all of them. Over so many glorious years of friendship we spent Christmases together and built up so many memories.

  One early highlight, at their apartment just across from Central Park, was the night Tennessee Williams came to dinner.

  Now he was my idol. A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are classic texts with marvellous roles. Which actor hasn’t wanted to play Blanche Dubois? And I do include all the men in this question. The thought of meeting Blanche’s creator made me shiver. I wanted an evening of bons mots, words of wisdom, poetry, ideas, a celebration of language and literature. This I didn’t get.

  The outrageous Dodson Rader had set up the supposedly literary dinner. He was a very political writer, a great friend of the Kennedy clan and as off the wall as his name sounds. The evening promised to be a corker. Joan had made one of her usual wonderful meals for our big night. We had all boned up on literature. And then Tennessee himself arrived. That was when it all started to go downhill.

  Tennessee was so drunk he was incoherent. He was paralytic and didn’t string two words together all night. Worse still, he hadn’t arrived alone. His sober, calculating companion turned out to be a male escort. When the boy kept excusing himself from the table to go to the loo we all assumed he must be taking drugs. He wasn’t. He was rifling through all the bags, coats and drawers around the apartment, stealing money. The pair took off just after midnight, leaving us all in shock – and much the poorer.

  Fortunately, the boy got his comeuppance. Tennessee had installed him at the Plaza Hotel, but somehow snuck out and left town without paying the bill. The rent boy, so we heard, wasn’t allowed to leave without handing over all his cash to cover it.

  15

  My Golden Girls

  By the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had pretty much disappeared from the television screens. I still did panto every year, and I was on tour in countless marvellous musicals and plays. But what I mainly did was have a good time. I was still more focused on meeting an extraordinary cast of characters than I was on climbing up any theatrical career ladder. In 1992 I met two of the best: Joan Collins and my ultimate golden girl, Bea Arthur.

  Joan and I met in New York. I love that city – and very many of the people I know there. In more than 20 years of visits I’ve never once stayed in a hotel. I’ve always had dear friends who have offered me their hospitality. One dear American pal is the theatre-loving and dryly hilarious Weston Thomas. She always persuades me to have a manicure when we meet up in the city. She’s a fabulous, sophisticated lady with a marvellous daughter. And, like me after a visit, she has great nails.

  I may well have been looking at my nails in the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel when an extraordinarily handsome man came up to me. He was mesmerising. Just drop-dead gorgeous – and, better still, he seemed to know who I was. ‘We’ve met before,’ he said, after shaking my manicured hand.

  Perhaps for the only time in my life I was (almost) speechless. I couldn’t imagine how I, of all people, could have forgotten someone as good-looking as this.

  ‘Come and join us,’ he said, with a relaxed, open friendliness. And by ‘us’ he meant he and his girlfriend, Joan Collins. She was looking fabulous and I was so excited it wasn’t true. Joan Collins! With me! I talked non-stop I was so thrilled to meet her – and fortunately I was able to say all the right things. Joan had been working in the US for a while and was desperate for gossip about the industry back in London. Who better than me for a gossip?

  It turned out that we were all at the Carlyle for the same reason – to see the new cabaret act there. Joan and I ended up sitting next to each other and very naughtily we carried on gossiping right through the performance. I remember thinking that Joan was an absolute riot. As gloriously dry and as wonderfully sharp as I had hoped. What an absolutely marvellous evening, I thought all the way back to my friend’s apartment. But would it be repeated?

  A few days after I had got back to London I got a call from Stella Wilson, Joan’s PA. ‘Joan loved meeting you in New York and would love you to go to a charity event with her,’ Stella began.

  I was beside myself with excitement. Perhaps there is always a lonely child in all of us, an insecure figure who craves affirmation that people like us. My inner child was certainly in a good mood that day. Joan liked the man I had become. Her PA was telling me so. My bubble only burst when Stella got to the end of the conversation.

  ‘It’s £100 a ticket,’ she said of the event in question. Well, hell. For an evening with Joan I’d have happily paid double.

  Being close friends with Joan and her partner Robin opened up a whole new world for me. He was an art dealer who knew everyone in London and pretty much everyone in the rest of the world as well. And Joan, of course, was Joan. They were a couple made in social heaven. The pair moved in the most exalted of circles. Or, should I say, they glided in those circles. Everything seemed effortless, though the actor in me always knew how hard Joan had worked to get everything that she had.

  We had wonderful times in the South of France in the beautiful house Robin had found for his lady. He had decorated it as well, with impeccable taste. And they were my hosts in the hills of Los Angeles as well. My classic Hollywood moment came at the iconic Mr Chow’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. When we arrived Tony Curtis was at the bar. Then, suddenly, across the room came Spartacus himself – the incredible, unmistakable Kirk Douglas. I’m just a boy from Oldham, by way of Salisbury Rep, I kept thinking. The cheek of it that I should end up here. The joy of it. The sheer wonder of life.

  As usual, from one new friendship sprang another. Sue St John lived above Joan Collins in Belgravia and through Sue I met Michael and Shakira Caine. We would all spend lots of weekends at their house in the country – Michael does an amazing roast.

  ‘What’s going on? What are you girls laughing about now?’

  Michael always ended up on the mezzanine level of the house watching sport on television in the afternoons while ‘the girls’ sat below gossiping. No prizes for guessing that I was one of the girls driving him mad with loud giggles.

  From Michael Caine to Michael Winner – Joan and I were in the film of Stephen Berkoff’s Decadence with Winner and I adored him. What a character. What a zest for life.

  Someone else I met through Joan was dear Tita Cahn, whose husband Sammy Cahn had written all those Frank Sinatra and Doris Day songs. I accompanied Joan to the shiva for Sammy and as I didn’t know that many people I was trying to be quiet, and staying at the edge of the room. It was then that I saw Tita struggling, of all things, to get a stereo to work. I tried to help and, amazingly, succeeded. And, as a result of that tiny event, I made a dear pal that day.

  Two others who had been at the shiva were Barbara and Marvin Davis, the billionaires who owned MGM. I was at Joan’s house when Barbara called the next day. ‘Hello, Christopher. We’re having a 97th-birthday party for George Burns. We’d like you all to come,’ she breathed.

  So Joan, Robin and I all did just that. It was the night of a thousand stars, all squeezed on to just six tables of eight. And I was on the top table. I was sitting with Frank Sinatra, Sidney Poitier, Carol Channing, Shakira Caine, our hostess Barbara Davis, Frank Sinatra and, of course, George Burns. Dan Aykroyd, with whom I chatted just before we took our places, could clearly read my mind. ‘Pinch yourself, Biggins, you don’t often get evenings like this,’ he whispered with a wink.

  Indeed you don’t.

  The only thing the evening lacked was a microphone for George Burns himself. His stories, all night, were pure Hollywood and comic gold. But only our table could hear them.

  There was one other thing that only I could hear that night – though I soon repeated it to all my friends. It was what Frank Sinatra said to me. I was in awe of that man. Sure, I’ve met plenty of queens in my time. But he was a king. Pure, solid showbusiness royalty. N
ot only was I unsure what to say to him, I didn’t know what to call him. Christopher Biggins doesn’t do tongue-tied or shy or false modesty. But I came close that Hollywood night. The first time we spoke I think I called him ‘sir’ – the way Americans often do. Then I tried ‘Mr Sinatra’. Then he interrupted.

  ‘Christopher, call me Frank,’ he said. Four words I wish my parents could have heard. They would never, ever have believed it.

  ‘A few years ago I played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls,’ I said, thinking back to that wonderful tour with Barbara Windsor.

  ‘Christopher, so did I,’ he replied, as if I really needed to be told.

  Then Frank asked me to be his bodyguard. The man infamous for mafia links, heavies and strong men wanted an old fruit like me to protect him. Though it was from no ordinary enemy. ‘Christopher, will you come out and guard me from my wife while I have a cigarette?’ he drawled.

  From Frank Sinatra to Bea Arthur via Darlington. Years ago I had been doing panto up north with an ambitious, starstruck and supremely talented dancer called Jeff Thacker. He loved Cilla and he loved me because I knew her. From such superficial connections great friendships can be born.

  One of the many things I admired about Jeff was his ambition. He was focused and hard-working – he soon left Darlington behind and had become a huge producer in America. His partner, the singer Robert Meadmore, is just as good a pal and just as talented a performer. But it was Jeff who opened a brilliant social door for me.

  ‘Biggins, I’ve met this woman. It’s Bea Arthur,’ he told me by phone. I had roared with laughter over The Golden Girls. And the tall, gravelly Bea was my favourite actress in the group. ‘She’s over here renting Jerry Hall’s flat and I want to throw her a dinner party. You have to come. Bring friends,’ Jeff instructed.