Going Up (20 page)

Leslie took the view that the material retrieved from earlier years was the property not of individual authors, but of the club. As president, he exercised seigneurial rights. We rehearsed the new numbers during the next few days and were all set to try out the invigorated show at the Oxford Playhouse. The day before we left, the results of Part Two of the Moral Sciences Tripos were hung on the Senate House railings. I went with Tony Becher to see how we had done. Against precedent, two Firsts had been awarded: Andor Gomme had one, Tony the other. I was among the three or four who received a 2:1. I looked and looked again and shook Tony’s hand. ‘Well done, Tone, you deserved it.’

I walked away and into King’s and across the bridge onto the Backs.
I walked around for a while, digesting my deserved disappointment. I had been properly found out: I had lacked the resource to dress clever phrases with due scholarly allusion. Had I got a First, the tame horses of vanity might have pulled me towards an academic career. As it was, I had a wallet primed with specie and a warrant to be a writer. I went to meet Beetle for Scotch eggs and salads at the Arts Theatre Bar, which our cast had turned into their clubroom. An old West End chorus boy turned chef, Hedley Briggs, gave us extra-large portions from his glass-fronted buffet.

Beetle acted as dresser and, as Leslie put it, ‘Mum’ during the Cambridge run of
Out of the Blue
. Everyone liked her, including Peter Stephens and Dermot Hoare, who now landed the delectable part of the odalisque in the Ottoman number, and performed it with rouged and mascaraed aplomb. Beetle had resigned from her job at the Appointments Board, to Jack Davies’s disappointment. She was working out her notice during the week we went to Oxford. Our hosts there were the president of the Experimental Theatre Company, Gareth Wigan, and Ned Sherrin, an officer in the OU Dramatic Society. After joining the BBC, Sherrin would become the impresario of
That Was the Week That Was
and achieve lifelong fame within the establishment that he and his crew huffed and puffed and pretended to blow down.

As I walked around Oxford, I was conscious that, had I never written that ill-advised letter to the Provost of Guildford, I might have gone to Christ Church and read Greats, just as I might well have chosen to be British. My old head monitor and tennis partner from Charterhouse Jeremy Atkinson was still in residence. He must have done his National Service and then returned for some post-graduate studies. I was surprised at the warmth of his welcome. There were several old Lockites among his Oxford friends. I was in no hurry to renew our acquaintance.

When Jeremy introduced me to his girlfriend Janet, a fair-haired, comely young woman, she offered to show me Christ Church meadows and the Isis boathouses. One of them had served as a diving platform from which Max
Beerbohm’s
femme fatale
, Zuleika Dobson, made her meta-Sapphic plunge into immortality. Before we left Cambridge, Jim Ferman had told Leslie that he was planning to make a musical comedy out of
Zuleika
. Peter Tranchell was going to write the music. It threatened to be a very good idea. Leslie rather wished that we had had it ourselves. As we set out on our stroll, Janet indicated that I had been a not infrequent subject of conversation among Oxford’s old Carthusians. She had gained the impression that I was a person of rare intuition. That was why she wanted to ask me something.

‘What might that be?’

‘Do you think I’d be a good thing for Jeremy? As his wife.’

‘A good thing? I honestly have no idea. I don’t know you and, if the truth be told, I scarcely know him.’

‘He thinks you’d be able to tell.’

‘You grace me with rarer qualities than I possess.’ I was never more elaborate than when embarrassed. ‘You both know much better than I do. You know…’

‘Yes? What were you going to say?’

‘Wittgenstein said, “The person who asks the question is in the best position to answer it.”’

She said, ‘I daresay he’s quite right, whoever he is.’

O
UT OF THE Blue
was greeted in London by an effusive press. Even Ken Tynan and Milton Shulman were of the same mind: iconoclastic intelligence had alighted at the Phoenix Theatre. We played to sell-out houses. The run was extended to three weeks. We were each paid £15 a week. Danny Kaye, who was filling the Palladium at the time, endorsed Jonathan Miller as Britain’s answer to Danny Kaye. My performance, with pencil-thin moustache and brilliantined hair, as Joe in ‘Joe and the Boys’ was not clever, but it had an unsubtle triumph. One hot afternoon, Leslie and I played several sets of tennis on an asphalt court off Haverstock Hill. I wore gym shoes that did little to protect my feet as I turned and ran and turned and ran again. When I took off my sock, the bottom of my left foot came away with it, in one long white fillet. I did my usual stuff that night on a raw sole and danced off in a shoe tacky with blood.

Thirty years later, I was invited to a dinner party because the guest of honour, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar, was eager to meet me. Since he had recently debunked the pseudo-scientific casuistry of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I looked forward to a philosophical soirée. He had perhaps seen some of my recent critical essays. A quadruple paraplegic of
philosophical good humour, Medawar wanted only to have me know that my performance in ‘Joe and the Boys’ was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

Free of the Appointments Board, Beetle resumed her popular place backstage, where Judy Birdwood, the very, very large and always smiling daughter of a field marshal, acted as wardrobe mistress and den mother. Judy was married to the stage designer Oliver Messel’s cousin Rudolph, who had been at Oxford with Evelyn Waugh. Both were members of the legendary, because notorious, Hypocrites Club (a coven, it was said, of homosexuals). Encyclopaedic sources claim that Judy and Rudolph lived an idyllic life in their large country house. In truth, by the early 1950s she was pining cheerfully while he amused himself with young men in foreign parts. His fellow Hypocrite John Betjeman also married a field marshal’s daughter; so did Hugh Trevor-Roper, although he was no sort of a known hypocrite.

The success of
Out of the Blue
opened doors; Leslie made sure that we went through them. Willie Maugham had said that he was unsurprised by fame; once achieved it seemed no great achievement. We were invited to a Ken Tynan party, in some borrowed mansion north of the park. Annie Ross, who was born in Scotland but whom I took to be American, was cool before her time and sang in a syncopated fashion that sounded dangerous and subversive. Ken took me to meet Frankie Howerd, who was an outrageous, but never outed, BBC television star. Ken said, ‘This is F-Freddie Raphael. One of the most b-brilliant young men in the F-Footlights show at the Phoenix.’ Howerd looked without appetite at my outstretched hand. ‘I hate talent,’ he said.

One evening towards the end of our run at the Phoenix, Leslie called out to me to come into his dressing room. A man wearing a grey, wide-brimmed fedora was sitting in the low armchair. Jock Jacobsen was an agent with MCA, in those days the most powerful transatlantic talent agency. He had come to see the show because of Jonathan Miller, but he had been more impressed by Leslie, both in the monologues that we had written together and in a
number in which he and Brian Marber did a nifty song-and-dance routine that began, ‘We have the Time of our Life in America / Good old USA’.

Jacobsen was an ex-drummer who, with one of the boys in his band, saxophonist Norman Payne, had started a variety agency. It had recently been absorbed, to their enrichment, by the American conglomerate (at that time MCA’s president, the legendary, quasi-omnipotent Lew Wasserman, also controlled Universal Studios). They had big offices at 145 Piccadilly. Leslie told Jock Jacobsen that, thanks all the same, he had no wish to be a performer; but he did want to write musicals and things, with me as his partner. Jock Jacobsen agreed to sign me as well as Leslie as a client of MCA. It had a literary department run by Elaine Greene, the sister of the novelist whom I flattered by my lampoonery every night (‘Religion is my pigeon’) and twice on Saturdays.

Having got word of my little number about Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, which ended with ‘Victor Gollancz?’ ‘No thanks’, V. G. asked Beetle to get him tickets. He invited us to dine with him and his wife Ruth after the show. In the taxi on the way to a dining club in Hill St, Mayfair, he asked what I was going to do. I said that I wanted to be a writer. He thought that a very bad idea; it was no way to make a living. It turned out that it was his and Ruth’s wedding anniversary. If she was not pleased to be celebrating it in our company, she showed no sign of it. V. G. was sixty-one years old but, like my British grandfather Ellis, he seemed a venerable old gentleman.

The Footlights’ success brought us to the attention of the BBC. Leslie, Jonathan, Brian Marber and I took part in the popular TV programme
What’s My Line?
, which was presented by Peter West, a nice, rather nervous ex-soldier who blinked a lot. Whether or not we were put up to it by the producer, we demonstrated Cantab insolence by lifting West’s chair from behind its desk and carrying him off the stage on it. Such was iconoclasm in the summer of 1954.

Brian Marber had use of his father’s large black Austin Princess. One
very early morning, after the show, he drove me and Frankie Francis (our drummer and son of the millionaire owner of a Caribbean island or two) and others of the company down to Charterhouse. We rolled in over Bridge, under the arch of Brook Hall, around the perimeter of the main school and up to the headmaster’s house. My double-act partner David Conyers wound down his window and called, ‘Bring out your lovely headmaster!’ No light went on. No face appeared. We drove back to London. Before
Out of the Blue
closed, in late July, the committee met to decide on Leslie’s successor as president. Brian Marber was the obvious candidate. Leslie was doubtful whether Brian was good-looking enough, but he was elected without prolonged discussion or any mention of the Jewish question.

A senior radio producer called Roy Speer invited Leslie (and me) to put together a satirical half-hour broadcast. We adapted some of the old numbers and wrote some new ones. However callow our comedy, it must have gone down quite well. Roy was sure that he could find us work at Broadcasting House. He introduced us to the radio talent agency run by Kevin Kavanagh, the son of the unfairly forgotten genius who wrote all the
ITMA
scripts and paved the way for
The Goon Show
. We were welcomed onto their patch by other BBC scribes with a generosity that we were smug enough to take as our due. Frank Muir told us that he and Denis Norden had recently received a letter from Broadcasting House accounts department saying that they had been overpaid for repeats of
Take It From Here
by £12.10s. Their cheque for that sum would be appreciated. ‘We wrote back,’ Frank told us, ‘saying that we regretted that we had no machinery for repaying money.’

‘And never heard another word,’ Denis said.

If Beetle dreaded my departure on my Harper Wood travels, she had the style to insist that I should go alone. Dreading it myself, I clung to the romantic notion that solitude fostered genius. On my own, my responses to the Europe I had never seen would be keener and more authentic. Leslie may have wished that I was going to be there to tickle up the
Lady at the Wheel
book yet again, but he had been approached by the Tennant organisation, which then dominated the West End theatre, to take part in
An Evening
with Beatrice Lillie
. Suitably revised, the two monologues that we had composed for him to deliver in
Out of the Blue
were very much what was needed to give Bea Lillie a breather between her numbers, most of which she had done on pre-war Broadway.

The most famous was the one in which, in the course of drinking copious drafts of gin, she telephoned an order for ‘two dozen double damask dinner napkins’. The comedy derived entirely from the garbling effect of the alcohol as she repeated the order for what turned into ‘danner nipkins’. Another old favourite had Bea telling how she sat with her friend Maud in the lobby of a louche hotel, where she announced, ‘I’ve come here to be insulted and I’m not going home until I am.’ The number ended with, ‘We’re rotten to the core, Maud / And Maud agreed’. The show was due to open in early December. Jock Jacobsen had me sign a contract stipulating that I should receive a £6.10s royalty for every week in which Leslie performed our material in London. Showbiz appeared to be a very easy touch.

In early October, on the eve of my departure, Beetle and I had supper chez Victor in Soho. Perhaps we went to a film. I so hated the thought of leaving her that I wished the evening to end. We walked down to Hyde Park Corner, where she could catch a 52 bus to Willesden and I a 74 or a 30, to Putney. As we stood there, someone came up to me and said, ‘Fred? Hullo.’ It was Robin Jordan, with whom I had been at Lockites and who was given the scholarship to Christ Church that I had craved. As the witness of my humiliations at Charterhouse, Robin exercised a watchful, if not morbid, neutrality. Now he smiled at Beetle and seemed unaware, and yet somehow entertained, that he had intruded on our last moments together.

Beetle’s bus came and I kissed her, in front of Robin, and she got on and was driven away. I smiled and laughed with Robin, as if Beetle’s departure had been a relief. I read the gleam in his eyes, a sort of admiration, as close
to voyeurism; it flattered and displeased me. Trading on an intimacy that was never cordial, he played on knowing my schoolboy secret. He was planning to leave England soon and go to South America. I had the feeling that there was something that he wanted from me. I suspect that it was nothing personal: he practised his seductive competence with no intention other than to be sure that he still had it. Robin Jordan was never a star, but he had a stellar aptitude for turning on a certain provocative charm.

St John’s College gave me a tranche of £75 of the Reverend Harper Wood’s bursary. When I had got through it, I was free to apply for another slice. I bought a BEA ticket to Paris. One had to begin somewhere. I went, with too much luggage, to catch the Royal Sovereign flight. It was the first time, since my infancy, that I was ever in an aeroplane. When we were living in St Louis in 1934, Jimmy Doolittle – who in April 1942 led the first bombing raid over Tokyo – worked for Shell Oil. He took my parents and me for a baptismal spin around the city in his plane.

Sir Bernard and Lady Docker were at the bar in the lounge, drinking whisky. He was a tallish man in a grey suit; his chin receded into his collar, giving him an air of genial imbecility. Norah wore a little black dress, a beaver-lamb coat and a flat fur hat. An elderly secretary held a glistening hank of silver fox, fine as candy floss, in case madam’s rich shoulders felt cold. Lady Docker had poise, if not breeding: she might have been one of Colette’s courtesans. They were escorted to the plane ahead of the rest of us and were greeted with salutes by the crew.

I found a spare seat adjacent to where they sat, with their backs to the engines. Food came to them first, with a bottle of complimentary champagne. As we throbbed towards Paris, Sir Bernard said that he had heard that BEA had helicopters these days. His aide said, ‘You could have one, Bernard,’ rather as if he were selling picture postcards. ‘Not safe enough yet, in my opinion.’ They were met on the tarmac at Orly by a large Daimler, with an attendant van for their seventeen pieces of luggage.

I could have wished not to go to places that reminded me of Beetle, but silly homesickness took me back to the Hôtel des Deux Continents. I went to La Hune, the bookshop adjacent to the Café des Deux Magots and bought two volumes of the plays of Jean Anouilh and sat, wearing my black corduroy existentialist trousers, in the Rendezvous des Intellectuels in the hope of election. After a solitary while, I crossed the Boulevard St Germain, went to Raffi, in the rue du Dragon, and had a sorry
chateaubriand
.

I spent the late evening at Les Halles, the great central food market that Emile Zola called
Le Ventre de Paris
. Putes of various aromatic flavours thronged the
trottoirs
. The most attractive stood, hair piled in individual red lights, on high platform heels, in
décolleté
advertisement for
plaisirs
tarifiés
. I watched, and lusted, but I did not approach any of them; none approached me. I was naïve enough to be surprised when a tall French army officer, in képi, with polished riding boots and leather-sleeved swagger stick stopped and spoke, at length, with a tempting tart. She listened to his requirements, which I was unable to hear, and must have named a price for their satisfaction that he found too high. He took a step away. She called out an offer. He followed her into a dark building, slapping his tall boot with his swagger stick.

A couple of days later, I used the last of my Métro
carnet
to go to the Porte d’Italie and started to hitch-hike southwards. Several short lifts took me to the far side of Melun, beyond the
pavé
. From there, a quite large grey corrugated iron Citroën van took me onto the N7, towards Saulieu. After a few kilometres, my driver pulled out to overtake a
poids lourd
just as, without warning, it began to turn left. We were driven across and off the road, slid between two plane trees, and bounced across the furrows of a ploughed field. We stopped and did not start again. The driver said, ‘
Faut
trouver une autre voiture
.’

My last lift of many reached Lyon as the light was fading. He dropped me on the far side of the bridge across the Rhône. I walked, with my clumsy
bag, into and through the city. I skirted the long wall of the railway station and trudged on towards the southern suburbs. I dreaded the loneliness I should meet when I stopped. At length, I went into a small hotel restaurant with a bright bar that was blue with what I took to be honest
travailleurs
. As I waited to hear if they had a room, I heard one of them say, ‘
Ce n’était pas une vraie défaite. La France était vendue en Quarante. C’était les juifs. Ils ont vendu la France. Que voulez-vous? Ces gens-là, chez eux, ce n’est que l’argent qui compte
.’ The salt of the earth lost its savour.