Being Boycie, page 6
Like most young men achieving this critical rite of passage, I found it had released a flood of pent-up sexuality and a colossal sense that now, finally, I was a man. The most noticeable effect of this was the change it produced in the reactions of the other girls in the troupe. And the one I’d been fancying for months without requite started suddenly to notice me. This provoked swift retribution from Frances, who told me at the first plausible opportunity that she was pregnant by me. As a ploy for retaining the interest of a callow nineteen year old, it couldn’t have been less effective. I was shocked, smitten with guilt and appalled that my very first encounter should result in such a potential disaster; I fell instead on the tender mercies of the eccentric – and frankly voracious – sexual appetite of a girl in the troupe called Carmen.
By the end of 1962 after two very full tours where I’d learned more in six months about acting by working on the hoof than I’d have learned in three years at drama school, I felt the set-up closing in on me, and knew that it was time to move on. I didn’t have much of a clue what I was going to do next, but somewhere along the way someone had told me I should get in touch with Vincent Shaw. I went to London and found my way to his chaotic office on the corner of Greek Street and Old Compton Street.
Vincent was a would-be actor who had gone on to become a well-known agent. He continued to harbour his own thespian ambitions, however, and would sometimes put himself up for auditions under a bogus name. On one occasion a producer who’d auditioned him rang him later in the day – in his agent persona – and asked, ‘Who was that useless twit you sent me? He couldn’t act to save his life!’
Vincent didn’t own up; nor did he send himself to many more auditions.
His speciality was finding work for young actors; as a result, whenever any provincial rep or small company had an urgent space to fill, he was the first agent they called. He could always place an actor prepared to play any part that came along, who was also ready to act as assistant stage manager (euphemism for furniture mover), provided they could work for a wage that hovered somewhere just around or below the poverty line.
After giving me a minimal interview, Vincent made up his mind I’d be ideal for the fairly demanding and quite high-class company currently at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and the incumbent tough actor/manager, Charles Vance.
In early 1963 I took myself off to Cambridge, settled into a set of gloomy digs and got stuck in. Charles was a hard taskmaster who did little to bolster one’s confidence. This trait was probably made worse by the fact that, for no obvious reason, he was putting on a play, Two Stars for Comfort, which had already toured, had done a West End run, and flopped – despite starring Trevor Howard. I played one of four troublesome ‘youths’, or sat in the prompt box. We took the production up to the Empire in Sunderland, a massive and grand Edwardian theatre. In the week we were there, we seldom filled more than 100 of the 1,500+ seats. It was in a very subdued mood that we returned to Cambridge.
I liked the old university city, though, and had made a few friends in the pubs, but I hadn’t got involved with any particular girl, I wasn’t too well, I wasn’t looking after myself or eating enough. While in this weakened condition, my life was thrown into mayhem when, out of the blue, Carmen, the sexual acrobat from the Argyle Theatre Company, turned up. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d left the company a few months before, and I was pretty glad to see her again, despite knowing how disruptive and heavy maintenance she could be.
It was only after she’d stayed with me for a couple of hot, steamy nights, furtively dodging my landlady, that she told me she was pregnant... by me.
‘That was a bit quick!’ I said, startled by this second paternity claim within six months of my first Full Monty.
‘No, no. I mean from last time, when we were at Bedford.’
I was puzzled. ‘But wouldn’t you be a bit, you know... plumper by now?’
‘No, not necessarily.’
I wasn’t surprised when she said she didn’t want to have the baby, and could I help out with some cash. Obviously, on wages of £12 a week, I didn’t have any cash, but, appalled and feeling hideously guilty, I managed somehow to rustle up the enormous sum of £100 from friends, so that she could take whatever course of action she deemed best; my own instinctive preference was that I should not become a father – at least, not yet – and it was already clear that I was not going to become Carmen’s husband. I guess she agreed; she took the money and disappeared as suddenly as she’d come.
By now, I was at a pretty low ebb. Our director, Rolf Kruger, castigated me for not being more engaged with all aspects of theatre. Besides acting, he said, I should take a passionate interest in the sets, lights, costumes and props – everything to do with a production. But then, at just twenty, I simply couldn’t; I only cared about the acting, and I didn’t have it in me to fake an interest in the rest of it.
The last straw was laid on my cargo of woes when Charles Vance flew at me in a rage after he’d performed the lead in Edward My Son, a play heavy with opportunities for him to strut and pose. I’d been in the prompt box – ‘on the book’ – and he’d been on stage when he obviously and completely dried. I sang out his line, loud and clear, as I’d always been told to do. (Mumbling from the prompt box could lead to even greater confusion and embarrassment.) Charles gave me a hell of look, very grumpy about being shown up for forgetting his lines, and no doubt had carried on fuming for the rest of the performance. He came off stage looking murderous. He charged round and took out all his pent-up fury on me for making him look an arse.
Two days later, I was stuffing my paltry possessions and a lot of unwashed laundry into my case before taking the train to Liverpool Street, on to Epsom and home. I was in no doubt that this was the end of my theatrical career.
I’d been summarily sacked with no other prospects of work in sight. I wasn’t expecting a sympathetic reception from my father, and I didn’t get one. With lips pursed, he made it clear that all his worst fears had been realised. He was more bitter than ever, it seemed, and ready to tear into me for my lack of perseverance and discipline.
He was appalled that his useless son couldn’t even keep a job that paid £12 a week, and made it clear that he considered me a colossal failure.
I went straight to London the next day, with my tail between my knees, to tell Vincent Shaw the terrible news.
To my amazement, he wasn’t remotely fazed.
‘Oh, so you’ve left that one, have you? They haven’t been doing well; I expect they’re running out of money. Well, we’d better see what else we can find for you.’
He flipped through his Rotadex, picked up the phone and, after a brief conversation, put it down. ‘How do you fancy going to the seaside?’
I nodded dumbly, and was told I had a job as ASM and actor, as cast with the Penguin Players, a company based at the De La Warr Pavilion, a 1930s modernist extravaganza on the seafront at Bexhill.
And so I spent the summer and autumn of 1963, and my 21st birthday, in the balmy, ozone-laden air of one of England’s most placid seaside resorts.
But before heading for the coast, I spent a short time at home, where my mother tried to feed me up after my self-neglect in Cambridge. While I was there, I escaped my father’s brooding disapproval one evening to have my first experience of something that became an integral part of my life, and more or less laid down the soundtrack to it. My friend, David Smith who lived by the RAC Country Club, had a car – a mildly flashy convertible, maybe a Hillman – and I persuaded him to drive me and a couple of other mates to a club I’d heard a lot about.
The Crawdaddy Club had groovy little lino-cut posters up all round the area, advertising the appearance of rhythm & blues bands and a few American blues singers who knew they were more appreciated here in England than in their own country. This groundbreaking venue was in the middle of the cosy, wealthy, West London suburb of Richmond, housed in the unlikely Station Hotel, opposite the Southern Railway Station.
We had to park some way off, but we could feel the tension and excitement of the place when we were still a hundred yards from it. There was a cluster of terrific looking girls and outlandish guys around the entrance and a great sense of expectation. We squeezed our way in and had the back of our hands stamped with some luminous stuff. Inside, the sticky, tobacco-stained function room was packed to bursting point, hot, smoky, sweaty, and very exciting even before the band came on.
When a voice over the PA system announced the Rolling Stones, the place erupted, and six young, skinny men, dressed variously in cord jackets or leather jerkins, with tab collar shirts, narrow ties and hi-heeled Chelsea boots, walked onto a makeshift stage cluttered with battered black speakers, a piano and a drum kit. Three held guitars, one – Ian Stewart, the sixth Stone – sat at the piano, one sat himself behind the drums, and in the middle, Mick Jagger, still only nineteen, stood and stared moodily at the audience before bursting into a driving, irresistible version of Route 66.
I was completely seduced by the urgent pulse of the R&B, and Mick’s strange skippy, clappy, snaky movements as he delivered the songs, shaking his maracas over his shoulder, pouting and prancing in a way I’d never seen or heard. As the set went on – I’m a King Bee, Down the road, down the road, down the road apiece – I wondered why I felt so cold until I realised… it was the music that was chilling me. I’d only ever heard this kind of rock’n’roll played by American singers on records. Now everyone else was feeling it in a tribal sort of way, all transported, taking off bits of clothing and waving them over their heads.
At the end of the set, Mick just stood there with one hand on a cocked hip, the other clutching a tambourine, while we all went mad.
‘I s’pose we’ll have to do another little number,’ he said in a nasal drawl, ‘seein’ as you all seem to be enjoyin’ yerselves.’ And Keith Richards broke into the opening riff of Chuck Berry’s Memphis, Tennessee …
It was the most exciting gig I’ve ever been too, before or since, and we drove away mesmerized and high as larks – just on the music. We’d hardly drunk a thing, and we knew nothing about dope or Purple Hearts.
But on the way home in the convertible, with the roof down, me playing the guitar and all of us singing our heads off, David lost it on a corner, and the car took off down a bank, tipping us all out like peas from a pod, before rolling on down to the bottom of the slope, flattening itself on the way. I landed on top of my guitar, and it shattered – Down the road down the road in several pieces.
A few weeks later, the Stones released their first single, 1 minute and 45 seconds of Come On. Forever after, I was a committed Stones fan.
The De La Warr Pavilion arts centre in Bexhill was a bold piece of public architecture – a white monolith with glass inserts and embellishments. It was pretty advanced for the 1930s, and a great project undertaken by the 9th Earl De La Warr, former Mayor and grandee of the town.
In the Pavilion Theatre which it incorporated, Dickie Burnett’s Penguin Players ran a busy and well-supported summer season of safe, undemanding Agatha Christie plays, with the odd racier item by William Douglas-Home or even Peter Shaffer. The company was composed of good quality if not highly celebrated actors, including Dickie’s wife, Peggy Paige, then generally reckoned to be the oldest Principal Boy in the business.
I was allocated digs in a handsome Victorian villa a few streets back from the sea. It was run by Mrs Crossman, who often put up one or two of the players. There was no Mr Crossman in evidence, but by lucky chance her lovely daughter, Janet, was also ASM/actor with the company, and I soon found myself spending a lot of time with her, at the theatre and at home. I stayed for six happy months in her house, where they held a party for me on my 21st birthday. It was here, a few months later, on November 22nd, that we heard the shattering news of John Kennedy’s assassination. Janet, Mrs Crossman and I looked helplessly at each other, shocked and unable to comprehend the sudden elimination of this huge world figure. It seemed to me that the world was coming to an end.
The Penguin Players were, I suppose, a step down from the Cambridge Arts, but it was a much jollier company. I was given a few good parts and soon began to believe that I could be an actor after all. I was encouraged in this by one of my colleagues, Oliver Fisher, a lovely old chap who was neither tall nor especially handsome, but had a good strong voice. He was also a consummate actor who knew a great deal about the nuts and bolts of theatrical performance.
Generally cast as a bumbling old colonel or eccentric detective, week after week, with the subtlest of changes, he produced an absolutely different character. I would watch with awe, whether from the wings or on stage playing opposite him. He would use little props – a fob watch, a cigar holder, a monocle – or small tricks with make-up or his physical stance to present a new character each week to the regular punters who made up the bulk of the audience. I cherished all the tips I gleaned from him, and stored away in my head all the little tricks and techniques he pulled out of the bag. He was a kind and thoughtful man who was happy to take me under his wing. He would sometimes invite me for a drink in a little club in the town, where he would share his experiences.
When I told him my ambitions to play the West End, he shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t, my dear boy. With your talent, you’ll always find work in the provinces. And I can tell you from my own experience that it is better to be someone in Bexhill, than no one in London. And repertory will suit you best; you’re a good actor, but you’re too tall to tour.’ He also added, less enigmatically and with some prescience, that as a character actor, I would probably have to wait until I was forty before I got my just rewards. Among the several parts I played in Bexhill was my first and last all-black appearance, when I was covered on every visible part of my body with the blackest make-up on the trolley in order to play the Nubian Steward in Death on the Nile – not quite as absurd as Peter Sellers playing an Indian doctor, but it wouldn’t happen now.
The audiences at Bexhill did not always demand the most rigorous of intellectual standards in what they came to see, and indeed for some matinees I got the impression we were simply providing a kind of background noise, as alternate rows of seats would be taken from the auditorium and replaced with tables. Here the old things who made up much of the audience could sit and have tea, and make quite a racket asking for sugar, clattering their cups and saucers, while whispering about their granddaughters’ misdemeanours.
In one of these matinées, the leading lady, Vilma Hollingbery, had come over from the senior company in Eastbourne and was quite a formidable presence. Sitting down, stage left in a lengthy drawing room scene, Vilma felt a tug on her dress. She glanced down and saw a little old lady looking up anxiously; she haughtily ignored the woman, until the third tug.
‘What is it?’ she whispered brusquely.
‘I just wanted to say.... you were very good last week,’ said the fan.
Besides my acting, my value to the company was that, like Janet, I was a multitasking dogsbody. In a single production I could be ‘on the book’, producing a glass crash or some other offstage sound effect, shifting scenery and furniture, and coming on stage in costume to say, ‘Your carriage awaits, m’lord.’ The company, I realised, was getting two or three people for the price of one.
Another of my jobs was to rush around the dressing rooms, knocking on the doors to deliver the ten- and five-minute calls. One of the actors – a regular Penguin Player – would sometimes call out, ‘Come!’ When I walked in, he would engage in a bit of camp banter and, as I went out, flip up the back of my jacket and with a loud intake of breath, gasp, ‘Oooh... ten out of ten, my dear,’ which always got me out a bit quicker.
The Penguin Players also appeared in two other theatres, the Devonshire Park in Eastbourne and the Assembly Hall Theatre in Tunbridge Wells. I was excited to get the chance to play in the two men/one woman cast of Peter Shaffer’s new and very successful brace of plays, Public Eye & Private Ear when it transferred to Eastbourne. My mother came to see me (without my father) and told me that it was the first time she had watched me in a play and completely forgotten she was looking at her own son – a compliment which pleased me very much.
I had great time with the PPs and was sorry to go, but Vincent Shaw had managed to get me my first role in a film, Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? – written and directed by Gerry Levy. My boss at the Penguin Players, Dickie Burnett, seemed genuinely disappointed when I told him I was going to do the movie.
‘You don’t want to go to London and do that,’ he insisted. ‘Stay here – I’ll always have something for you!’
After Charles Vance’s bollocking at the Cambridge Arts, it was great to feel wanted again, but I couldn’t resist the chance to be in a film.
I was cast as Tim, one of four unruly youths in the movie. It was a slightly macabre fantasy, in which the youths are chucked out of a nightclub before going off and breaking into a magic shop, where they try to bully the owner, an Italian magician played by Warren Mitchell (before Till Death Us Do Part had raised his profile). The magician starts to use his magic, and the boys get their creepy comeuppance.
I loved the excitement of filming on location around the streets of Soho, and in studios in Maida Vale as much as I expected to. My agent, Vincent Shaw had also put himself up for a bit part as a club bouncer, and thus received his only film credit. Ottilie Patterson recorded an original song for it, and I thought it was going to be pretty good.
Unfortunately I’ve never found out, because I’ve never seen it. Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? didn’t get a release or distribution, although I was very excited when a friend rushed round to tell me when it popped up as a support for a bigger feature in Kingston. Since then it has sunk without trace and hasn’t even been released on video.
