Alma Cogan (3 page)

My escort at the Savoy that day was a friend called Sammy who had started out in the Delfont office and was now working as a song plugger in Denmark Street. It was a job he did well; Sammy was what he described as a ‘people person’. He had
extra-finely-tuned antennae. He had a nose for an opportunity; an unerring instinct for the profit-pulse. And at the Day reception he quickly ingratiated himself with a small boy who was sitting alone and bored at the edge of the action.

It didn’t take a genius to see that the boy was American – his skin was honeyed, compared to the dishwater grey of English children; and he was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt and saddle-oxfords. Sammy still maintains he didn’t work out until afterwards that his new chum Terry had to be the son of Doris Day and her first husband, the trombonist Al Jorden, who committed suicide.

But he was, and for the rest of their stay Sammy did ‘Deedee’, as she almost instantly became, and her husband, Marty Melcher, the favour of keeping Terry occupied. Unlike his mother’s husband, Terry Melcher wasn’t a shlump; he was a nice boy who was remarkably well adjusted for somebody who had grown up on the Hollywood celebrity circuit.

I went with him and Sammy to watch a baseball game at a U.S. army base in Oxfordshire and a couple of nights later to see the speedway at the White City. Both times, Terry fell asleep in the car afterwards, and slept with his head in my lap – I can feel his hair now, smell the soapy, boyish smell – all the way back to the hotel. My instinct all the time was to comfort him for the terrible thing I thought I had seen happen to his mother.

Unlike Sammy, who wasted little time in acting on Marty Melcher’s invitation to give him a call if he was ever on their side of the Big Ditch, I made no attempt to follow through or build on the DD connection.

I followed Terry Melcher’s career at a distance – the records he made in the early sixties as ‘Bruce and Terry’, with Bruce Johnson of the Beach Boys (I was pleased – if mistaken – to be able to vote one of them a hit during a stint on
Juke
Box
Jury
); his successful production work for the Byrds and others who had helped turn his mother and myself into show-business dinosaurs.

It was odd, then, that I should react to news of his narrow
escape from involvement in the Manson murders with such a sense of alarm and personal foreboding.

It emerged that Terry Melcher had been the previous occupant of the house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where Sharon Tate and a number of others were ritually butchered by the Manson ‘Family’ in August 1969. Terry had apparently auditioned Manson for a recording contract and turned him down; it was Terry who the ‘Family’ intended to slaughter that night, rather than Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring and the others.

Terry, I read, had hired round-the-clock bodyguards for himself and his mother; he had suffered a breakdown, gone into the bottle, and had to be given tranquillisers before testifying at the trial.

This was all understandable. What was less easy to fathom were my own feelings of profound unease bordering on panic as a result of events taking place ten thousand miles away, halfway round the other side of the world. It was like a door had opened and the draught had blown out my pilot-light. I was on mood elevators to get me up, Oblivon to bring me down, as well as stuff I took without knowing where it was supposed to take me.

It seemed to me at the time that we were embarked on an unstoppable downward spiral of dementia. That, anyway, is how I rationalised it to the doctors I consulted. And there’s a chance I might even have slightly believed it in 1969.

What I very much believed – I couldn’t
not
believe it, faced with the evidence of depleted date-books and what I saw every time I more than glanced in a mirror – was that I was thirty-seven and over the hill; yesterday’s papers.

When I made the decision to fade away with as little self-pity and as much dignity as possible, I made it quickly, two days into a six-day engagement at an armpit of a club on a newly-pedestrianised shopping street in the Manchester suburbs.

What was the alternative? To hang around until I became the kind of game old dame, the kind of gutsy old
shtarker
who nurses her nervous breakdown on third-division chat shows and whose every public appearance turns into a psychodrama.

In 1969I was so far from being on the crest of a vogue that I no longer registered as even a blip on the drug-fuddled, booze-addled, youth-annexed national consciousness.

I decided to return to a commonplace existence, and cut the pretence. (What am I saying, ‘return’? All my life I had lived in the anticipation, and then the realisation, of being one of those recognised names. The commonplace was virgin territory as far as I was concerned.)

From now on, I told myself, climbing in behind a bombed-looking teenage minicab driver outside The Recovery Room noshery/nitery in Wythenshawe, I was going to wind down from ambition. From now on I was going to live in real time.

The tide is almost out and I am standing at the window watching a man in waders making his way across the river-bed towards a boat called
The
Terri-Marie
. The
Terri-Marie
(the man’s wife? his daughter? his wife
and
daughter? one of the eighties crop of lost-in-the-mix girl singers? none of these?) is lying at an angle in a gully gouged deep in the mud. There are coils of rope, pieces of equipment I don’t have the names for and old paint cans on the weathered and possibly slippery deck (it is close to the end of the year; the year is 1986; it rained loudly in the night).

A bird is pecking at an orange-red berry on the old stone wall directly below where I am standing. Clear water from the surrounding hills runs swiftly along the gullies. Seagulls circle overhead yowling like cats. Other seabirds perch on roofs and on the showily customised cabins of cabin-cruisers, depositing fresh coats of lime. Smoke rises from the pastel-washed bungalows littering the hillside opposite. Something which I now recognise as an aerial root flickers at the top of the window, at the edge of vision, like a hair in the frame.

These are the touches of local colour attaching to my present life.

But my previous life – the life I gave the kiss-off to what seems a lifetime ago, outside The Recovery Room, Wythenshawe, Manchester; the life I surrendered as reluctantly as somebody getting up from a fire to step out into the cold and bring coal – still tugs at me, often when I least expect it. It is tugging at me at this moment, for example, in the form of music that I’m being force-fed down the telephone.

‘I have ——— —— for you. Please hold,’ the voice (I imagined glasses on a plastic-linked chain, tusky Streisand-length nails) had said. The next thing I heard was the click of technology
engaging, a half-second of tape-slip, then over-loud muzak which it took me less than a bar to identify as the Bert Kaempfert version of ‘Bye Bye Blues’.

Virtually the only way I could shift records by the mid-sixties was at personal appearances in those big stores which retained the same older department heads who were in charge in the days when I could be depended on to pull the crowds in for them.

I suppose they went along with the charade out of sympathy and nostalgia and, in a few cases, out of the delight that most of us have taken at one time or another in seeing somebody heading for a fall. This particular form of
schadenfreude
showed itself in a manic eagerness to prise people away from whatever purchase they were considering and force them to witness the spectacle of a career in unpretty decline.

Only two records ever seemed to provide the background to these desultory, progressively unedifying side-shows: ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’ by Horst Jankowski, and Bert Kaempfert’s ‘Bye Bye Blues’. The push was on then to sell stereo equipment and the paraphernalia of home music-centres; and the Kaempfert especially was perfect for demonstrating the bass-to-treble range and fidelity of reproduction of the new audio technology.

In point of fact, I never found it a faithful reproduction at all. It bore the same relationship to music as the heavy wax fruit I associate with my childhood – was there a home that didn’t have its heaped bowl of untouchable, vaguely sinister wax pears and bananas? – bore to the real thing.

The glissando strings, thunking bass and muted trumpets of the Kaempfert orchestra, all existing in their own channels, all separated out in the hyper-real way that they never could be in reality, seemed to point up the dreaminess and sad separateness of the shoppers as they drifted from homely cabinet model to perspex-and-iridium Bang & Olufsen, from spotlit display to spotlit display.

I still find watching people going about their everyday business to a soundtrack that I can hear but they can’t – because I’m
sitting in a car or coach, for example, or standing at a window the way I am now – inexplicably touching, and once or twice – stopping to let an austerely beautiful but unselfconscious (which was the point) mulatto schoolgirl cross at a pedestrian crossing in New Street in Birmingham, while the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ played on the radio and drops of rain shuddered diagonally upwards across the windscreen – physically wrenching.

‘Bye Bye Blues’ has segued (not seamlessly; again there was a couple of inches of tape-slip) into the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’, a song that smooches along at the same clippety-clop, subliminal blood-pulse tempo. And the man in waders is still making his way towards
The
Terri-Marie
in time with the beat, stepping over, occasionally ducking under, the mooring ropes of boats as he goes.

The psychology behind telephone muzak, of course, is so elementary as to be barely worth stating. It’s supposed to divert your attention from the fact that your time is being wasted and you’re being putzed about.

There was no muzak in the factories I visited for shows like
Workers’
Playtime
for a long time; then suddenly it was there as an airy rinse in all of them, all the time, ‘psychologically programmed’, round every corner you turned. The only refuge were the boardrooms where we were given lunch after the broadcasts and presented with examples of the factories’ output – spectacle frames, nylon lingerie, brush-and-pan sets, glass tumblers, continental sausages – as a token of their appreciation.

Personally I find all kinds of wallpaper music about as relaxing as the yammerings of the happy snappers who used to turn up to take my picture in those days. ‘You know me. This isn’t going to hurt. I’m not going to try anything violent or unflattering. I’m just going to make you look beautiful … Super … Hold it there … And again … One more … Relax. Marvellous. Don’t look so … Did I ever tell you I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin? … Better. I’m not one of them that’s going to poke the camera up your skirt or down your throat … Think happy. Wet the lips. Think top-ten … A little less
grin
, sweetheart … Better.
Skirt up just a little. We’re getting it … This new record’s top-five. Cert.’ And so on.

The result was pictures I could only bear to squint at at the time and haven’t been able to make myself look at for almost thirty years.

There has been a single cursory ‘Sorry to keep you’ in the three or four minutes that I have been holding for ——— ——. Almost involuntarily, I hang up on Karen Carpenter in mid-trill, bored with the arrogance of the nothings and nobodies who think a job in publishing or journalism, of either the print or broadcast varieties, is a licence to jerk the strings and watch you jump.

The telephone down here hardly rang at all for years. On days when I was feeling particularly laid-by and out of things, I’d pick it up whenever I was passing, just for the purring reassurance of the tone.

The phone still doesn’t ring very often. But when it does these days the likelihood is that it’s one of the people who seem to have got together and, with striking unanimity, decided that Alma Cogan is once more somehow
viable
.

No longer merely a washed-up relic of the past, apparently; a piece of pop marginalia of interest only to the unyoung, the untrendy, the unmoneyed and the terminally whacko. But – and I have it here in black-and-white – ‘an iconic performer’, ‘a leisure icon’, redolent of happier, less complex times. She is an ‘emblematic’ figure ‘reflecting the historical moment’; ‘irrefutably part of the fifties Zeitgeist’. Not to mention the fact that she had a colourful reputation in the past for keeping rough as well as more salubrious company, and turns up increasingly in the biographies of dead contemporaries.

I should feel flattered. Instead, it makes me feel like one of those villages that were flooded to make reservoirs at the end of the war and that then miraculously reappeared during the long, parched summer of 1976. They became popular tourist attractions, drawing picnickers like flies, and provided an excuse for a great deal of misty-eyed, inter-generational reminiscing: there was the dairy and over there the Big House; there
was the steeple that seemed to reach miles into the sky. All of course only identifiable now as mossy scabs and stunted earthworks.

There’s a national characteristic you must have noticed: if there’s one thing people in this country like better than pulling somebody down, it’s putting them back again. They beat you about the head then pass you a bandage. It’s so British.

I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have welcomed the gesture at certain moments in the past, when I was finding the applauseless life an inconsolably hard one to live.

To be famous, it was once put to me, is to be alone but without being lonely: like Achilles in his tent; like Lindbergh in the
Spirit
of St
Louis
, flying over the Atlantic, while the world waits for him to land.

An alternative definition, of course, is the inability to be alone or be yourself without an audience; to be unable to exist without constant, positive feedback.

‘Do you know who you are!’ a man cried out in excitement once, rushing up to me in the street. ‘And you’re standing
here
! I can’t believe it! You’re here.’

‘Well I have to be somewhere,’ I said, and he seemed to find that a satisfactory answer: it seemed to confirm for him that I wasn’t merely made up of light and Ben-Day dots, equal parts cathode ray and newsprint; that somewhere behind and beyond all that I was in fact flesh and bones

It’s a long way from that day to the point I am at now where – to risk sounding like one of the new Armani mystics, the ‘designer Buddhists’ you currently read so much about in the papers – I have adopted a tranquil, uneventful life of passive acceptance. I live in pleasant, unembittered obscurity and feel at ease for the first time in my own skin. Cleansed of fame and its unquenchable cravings.

There is a word for what I have come to regard now as my first life. Nabokov used it once: ‘
A
stranger
caught
in
a
snapshot
of
myself
.’ ‘Alma Cogan’, a fantasy of beehive hair and bouffant skirts, ostrich plumes, Leichner colours and tarmacadam lashes,
is something I no longer feel able to associate with me. It feels as far away as the doodlebug and the Victrola.

So how is it that the letters and calls from the the-way-it-was, way-we-were, return-with-us-now, kiss-and-tell franchisers and packagers are able to get under my skin and breech my defences so effectively? Why do they hit my system like the first drink of the day (a
big
gin-and-tonic at 6.30 on the nose, in the present regimen)?

If this was a different medium I could use computer graphics to show you: there’d be cartoon crowds, cinemas, taxi-cabs, power stations, chefs’ hats, VDUs and supermarket trolleys all spilling out of envelopes and pouring from the earpieces of telephones to indicate city energy; city chaos; the invigorating unfakeable urban clang and clamour to which I confess to being helplessly addicted. Caught off-guard, it can sometimes tear me up with longing.

The usual form, I’ve been discovering, is a letter carrying a vogueish logo – Art Deco, constructivist, cleverly mismatched hieroglyphs – followed by a call from a person whose position usually advertises itself through one of the ‘fast-track’ Telecom technologies.

There’s the long hold accompanied by muzak, as demonstrated; the cordless model – good for mobility and giving an acoustic impression (not necessarily accurate) of the executive dimensions of the room the call is coming from. Lastly, there is the increasingly popular car-phone.

Calls from car-phones always sound as if they’re being made at eighty miles an hour on the motorway or from halfway up a cliff-face, which I suppose is part of their appeal. Every time I pick up the receiver and hear the now-familiar wh-o-o-oosh, I have to know where the caller is
as
we
speak
.

The replies – heading up Park Lane towards Marble Arch; crossing the Hammersmith flyover going to Chiswick – are always evocative enough to haul me out of my immediate surroundings for the duration of the call: I’m not in the world of tide-tables and seagull droppings, but in a place where the ‘in-car
environment’ of thrashing newspapers and swirling ash perfectly replicates the outdoor environment of sweet diesel and graffiti and blinding grit. Ο city lust!

I have not met Cat from the Nostalgia Book Club, or Shale or Linzi from
Not
Forgotten
magazine; Brick from Charm records, Gully from Star books, Devora from Penguin, or Roxy, Tawatha, Gun, Dyck, Kaff, Swoosie, Chicken or Jalet from Bonham’s, Christie’s (there is apparently unprecedented demand these days for pop-related knick-knacks and memorabilia), the BBC and Channel 4. But the names themselves, neither entirely natural nor entirely invented, not quite kosher and at the same time not really smile-when-they’re-low showbiz, seem to sound a warning.

Read them and you find yourself looking for the tell-tale white wart of Tipp-ex. Roll them round your tongue and you get an idea of what having a split-palate must be like. Say them aloud and the result is queerly cracked; disconcertingly off-centre. They are names that suggest the kind of ambiguities and complexities I have become unused to, hunkered in my bunker, buried in my ‘healthy grave’ (the Rev. Sydney Smith) down here in the country.

The man on
The
Terri-Marie
by this time is doing something which, in boating language, is probably called ‘slopping out the bilge’. He’s standing on the deck of
The
Terri-Marie
throwing water overboard from a plastic bucket.

And now the phone is going again. It’s going to be ——— ——, oozing apologies and the usual charming horse manure. I know without meeting him that, if I ever did meet him and offered a straightforward ‘How do you do?’, he would shift his glass from one hand to the other, tilt his head to what he considers its most pleasing angle (expertly-cut slabs of hair realigning themselves impressively in the light) and say: ‘I do fan
tas
tic!’

I’m tempted. Of course I’m tempted. My idea of happiness is the Happy Hour: a bare-brick bar with the office-bound straggling in wall-eyed after a trying day; the Nat Cole and Swingles tapes being swapped for Elvis’ ‘Suspicious Minds’ and the volume
simultaneously going up; cold beaded bottles and expensive nibbling bits going on to some no-questions business tab.