The Two of Us (11 page)

My parents were terrified by my political goings-on. They were worried that I would jeopardise my growing success. Actors
were expected to keep their opinions to themselves lest they offended sections of their audience. To stand up and be counted
was new and dangerous behaviour in the theatre. Corin Redgrave and many others, including Vanessa, suffered professionally
for boldly fighting for what they believed.

My ideal scenario was to change the world or maybe just one or two minds with my work. That was the crusade of the people
working in the new television and newly emerging British film industry. The writers at the Royal Court Theatre, too, were
intent on overturning the status quo. Joan’s manifesto summed up her objectives:

The theatre must face up to the problems of its time; it cannot ignore the poverty and human suffering which increases every
day. It cannot with sincerity close its eyes to the disasters of its time. If the theatre of today would reach the heights
achieved 4,000 years ago in Greece and 400 years ago in Elizabethan England it must face up to such problems. To those who
say that such affairs are not the concern of the theatre or that the theatre should confine itself to treading the paths of
beauty and dignity we would say, read Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Calderon, Molière,
Lope de Vega, Schiller and the rest.

12 September

Not easy chairing a meeting when everyone is so distraught.
I pointed out that we were powerless over the big consequences
but here we had an opportunity to make some
small gesture. We are dealing with young people caught up
in violence and anger. The men that perpetrated these
appalling acts were fuelled by a similar rage surely. We have
got to try and understand why people do such things before
we can stop it. Can’t wait to get back to France to talk to
John, Jo and Matt about it all. It’s a time to cling together
and value what is good and gentle.

In the next revue I appeared in was a young man who has since lived his life by a credo just like Joan’s. In 1962 the renowned
socialist director Ken Loach was Kenneth Williams’ understudy in
One Over the Eight
. He may have been planning the revolution in the wings, or just praying for Kenneth’s good health – only Kenneth could milk
lines like ‘Bleeoomin’ great war clouds are leeoomin’ on the horizon’ for laughs. The chief joy of
One Over the Eight
for me was meeting and becoming friends with the writer of the show, Peter Cook, and Kenneth, the maverick star. We ran for
some months, egged on by our dance captain Irving Davies’ exhortation, ‘Come on, darlings, eyes, teeth and tits,’ in the West
End of London, which the American
Time
magazine declared to be the most happening city on earth.

The swinging sixties were upon us.
Children’s Hour
with Uncle Mac ended in 1961 in the same year as the contraceptive pill went on sale. We grew up with a vengeance. I went
to the King’s Road and bought my regulation Mary Quant miniskirt at Bazaar, one of the new boutiques full of sparkling new
fashions. I got myself some Courrèges white boots to wear with it. They were a bugger to clean. In my late twenties I was
a bit old for it all, but my Vidal Sassoon fringe came over my eyebrows and covered my forehead lines.

On the face of it, I was in there swinging with the best of them but somehow I didn’t feel very dizzy. Neither did Kenneth
Williams. One night after the show, when I gave him a lift back to his chaste flat on the back of my Lambretta, he waved his
furled umbrella at Eros as we circled Piccadilly Circus, crying, ‘Where is it? Where is it all happening? Where are all these
orgies? Why haven’t we been asked?’

8

The Young Man

REPERTORY THEATRE WAS STILL thriving in England in the late fifties and sixties, a lot of it featuring Sheila Hancock, most
of it pretty tatty, but Liverpool had been one of the best. By the time John arrived in 1960 to start his one-year RADA contract,
Willard Stoker, who ran the theatre, was old and tired, and the repertoire had become jaded. A local powerhouse called Maud
Carpenter had a disproportionate say in the choices. When a Chekhov was suggested she wailed, ‘
The Seagull
?
The Seagull
? I’m havin’ no more of them bird plays. When we did
The Wild
Duck
we emptied the house.’

John’s first play must have slipped past her guard, for she surely would not have liked Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Paycock
. One of the local paper reviews hints that from the start John’s style was at odds with the rest of the cast: ‘The only performance
which gets outside the bounds firmly established by thirty years of English acting is John Thaw’s Joxer. He makes the character
a little old man out of Lowry. Sprightly, shoulder-shrugging and sniffling little man whose only permanent terror is Juno.’

20 September

The world feels a much dodgier place. Going through the
Channel Tunnel was a bit scary. With terrorism you don’t
know where it will strike unlike the wartime raids with
nice sirens to get you ready to be killed. Lots of dire warnings
of possible attacks, gas, smallpox, tanks at Heathrow,
etc. But I am more concerned with my little personal drama.
What is this new-sounding cough John has? Will they be
able to operate? What will the next scan show? Bugger
Osama bin Laden. What about John Thaw?

The attitude of his fellow rep actors appalled John. Tired out and often disillusioned, they struggled just to get the shows
on, whereas in an interview to the local paper he said, ‘You know, it rather horrifies me. I’m so single-minded about acting.
I worry a good part to death, stay awake at night thinking about it.’ He continued studying anything he could lay his hands
on to learn his craft. The girls in the local library in Liverpool fought to stamp his books and overlooked his fines, having
become fans of this bad boy of the local rep. He had an edge that disturbed and thrilled them. Alma Cullen, then one of the
girls from the library, writes: ‘He was part of the wave of actors, writers and directors – mostly from the North – that was
then sweeping away so much dead wood from literature, theatre and film. It’s hard now to convey the thrill of seeing, albeit
from the sidelines, the strongholds of the privileged falling to tough invaders like John who didn’t talk posh but confidently
offered their work as the outward expression of a political vision. What an inspiration they were, even to the girls at the
library.’

The girls in the library were the first of many women drawn to the mysterious centre that they felt they could understand
and comfort given a chance.

John struggled to bring something to second-rate material, knowing that elsewhere exciting things were going on without him.
At the Cavern, in the same city, the Beatles were causing a stir with a new sound and he was stuck doing old-fashioned plays
in dated productions.

Jennifer came up to see him and, John, adrift again and away from all his friends, begged her to commit to him. She had not
yet finished at RADA and marriage was the last thing she wanted. They had night-long anguished talks, but could not resolve
the issue of their conflicting ambitions. When John returned to London on visits to Vic in Highbury, he was often in tears
about his dashed dreams of perfect love and companionship.

He was not completely friendless in Liverpool. While most of the actors found him a pain in the arse, with his moods and critical
attitude, two men saw his worth and supported him. Freddie Farley had come over from Australia as a protégé of Frank Thring,
a larger-than-life actor whose success was overshadowed by his outrageous behaviour. The rampantly homosexual Thring went
through with a grand wedding with all the trimmings, including Vivien Leigh as maid of honour, and as he sashayed down the
aisle with his new wife on his arm, he spied a young man in the congregation and squealed, ‘You’re prettier than the bride,
dear!’ Freddie, in contrast, claimed he was asexual, ‘an old virgin’, but replaced this lack with genuine devotion to his
friends. A learned man, he gently took John under his wing, directed his best performances and generally held his hand.

Freddie’s compatriot and dearest companion, Barry J. Gordon, not only helped John but laid to rest another of his prejudices.
With his belligerently male upbringing, it is understandable that John had no tolerance of homosexuals. Indeed, I was told
by a gay friend that he had been mentally bullied by John and some of his friends at RADA. The victim was elegantly middle-class
and it was before Jennifer infiltrated John’s barrier of class hatred, so he was no doubt doubly heinous in John’s eyes.

Regardless of John’s prejudices, Barry offered his friendship. The approach he chose, as befitted his brash Aussie personality,
was to be utterly open about his sexual orientation with John, as he was with everyone else – a brave move when most homosexuals
in those days lived in dread of discovery.

Barry was the first openly gay man that John had ever got to know and, once Barry had assured him he had no designs on his
body, John was surprised to discover that he could like and respect him. It is a measure of his trust that one day he asked
Barry to accompany him from Liverpool on a trip to seek out his mother. She was working in a dingy pub isolated on a bomb
site in an insalubrious part of Manchester. Barry sat discreetly in the corner, watching John perched on a barstool holding
an awkward conversation with a bosomy blonde. She was a far cry from Jennifer Hilary.

The two men left the pub in silence. Eventually John blurted out, ‘I’m glad I came, but I don’t think I’ll be bothering again.’
Barry knew better than to probe further and the visit was never mentioned again. His tactful handling of this difficult youth
was rewarded when one night in the wings, waiting with John for an entrance, Barry whispered that he was nervous. John looked
him straight in the eye and said, ‘You shouldn’t be. You’re unique.’

22 September

In Lincoln to raise money for a Quaker home for troubled
boys. I looked out of my hotel room window when I woke
and saw a cross in the sky. Like a vision. After a while I
realised there was a heavy mist concealing the cathedral it
was on, so it seemed to be floating. Very odd though. I
hope it’s a good omen or is it a signal of the agony of the
Cross? It is certainly a suffering old world and I’m not
exactly dancing with joy.

A little later, while still in Liverpool, John met Ken Parry. A rotund, Dickensian figure with no neck to speak of, he is
known in the profession as Campari, partly because that was how J. G. Devlin, the Irish actor, pronounced his name, but mainly
because he is blatantly and joyously the campest thing on two legs. Someone defined camp as the trait of trivialising the
important and dramatising the frivolous and Ken is queen of the genre. He will declare, ‘I’m a nasty washer-up’, as if admitting
to mass murder, whereas when he was diagnosed with a deadly illness, he threw a jolly ‘suicide party’. He has fed, watered
and pampered numerous young actors and actresses who call him ‘Mother’ whilst he calls them, regardless of sex, ‘Alice’. Before
he took John on as an ‘Alice’ he solemnly warned, in his posh Wigan accent, ‘You want to be careful what you say to me or
if you befriend me – I’m an awful old poof.’ John assured him that Freddie Farley and Barry J. Gordon ‘had brought me up,
so forget about all that’.

For many years Ken fussed over John like a mother hen, giving him a bed when he needed it, taking food up to Highbury or feeding
him in his flat in Russell Square and, later, Islington. ‘I’ve a beautiful home. I call it the Immaculate Conception, it’s
so clean.’

On one occasion, Ken went to Brighton to stay with a friend and Tom and John pestered him with phone calls about how hungry
they were. Eventually he came home early to be greeted at Victoria station by the two herberts in dirty raincoats holding
a bunch of dandelions. Once they caught him without his teeth; he swears their toothless jokes started from there.

Campari’s advice to young actors was, ‘Always do every job that is conceivably possible. Keep working.’ John did his best
to stick it out in Liverpool, but he was hating every minute. Auntie Beat went to a matinee of
Round the World in Eighty
Days
. People were ambling in late after the interval, still drinking their tea. She was mortified when John came on for the second
half and, seeing this, said, ‘Stop. If they can’t finish in time, neither can I,’ and ordered a cringing assistant stage manager
to bring on a mug of tea, which he drank slowly, sitting on the stage, before continuing with the action.

The final straw was a Christmas production of
Brer Rabbit
. Barry greatly enjoyed bouncing around as a frisky bunny, but John was far from happy in his furry fox hat. At one point,
for some reason, they were jammed in a box together on the stage while children in the audience were being very rude, catcalling
and running to the loo. Rising above the insults, the rabbit perkily washed his whiskers, while the fox cowered behind him
quietly groaning, ‘I can’t put up with much more of this – this is fucking embarrassing.’ Shortly after, he broke his contract
and left the company.

It was a wise move. He had been spotted by people from Granada Television, but he still had his RADA-induced belief that theatre
was the thing. In press interviews he talked of his preference for a live audience. He did a play at the Royal Court in which
he was rather grumpy about the size of the part. Lindsay Anderson’s comment to him, that there are no small parts, only small
actors, became John’s benchmark, but he didn’t practise what he preached. When television offered him longer parts, the theatre
lost its charm.

Now, back at Highbury Crescent, life was becoming exciting again. When Tom and John were filming
The Loneliness of the
Long-distance Runner
they were picked up in a battered Rolls-Royce, chauffeured by Bert. He would ring with their time to be picked up the next
day and on to the message pad would go, ‘Bert rang’. Eventually, Bertrang became his name and the message read ‘Bertrang rang’.

John dated several attractive girls but he still hankered after Jennifer. He played the field a bit, but with no great pleasure.
Being deeply in love was more his style. Tom had an involvement with a delectable French actress who used to sigh, ‘Oh, ze
life’, and when they rapped at the bathroom door would enchantingly call, ‘Ahm in ze bas.’ Both were added to their shared
repertoire of sayings. John started to go to decent restaurants, and frequented Gerry’s, a haunt for actors, and the more
sleazy Jack’s Club, favoured by the Joan Littlewood crowd and Alec Ross.

1 October

John had a breathing crisis. I was out. Jo drove him to the
Harley Street Clinic in a panic. He couldn’t breathe, was
gasping and choking and then she realised he was also
laughing. Had seen a restaurant on the Edgware Road with
the name ‘The Beirut Express’ in neon lights. The man is
extraordinary. They sorted him out at the clinic and all the
while he was making them laugh about the incongruity of
the café’s name. He’s so bloody brave.

John and the Highbury gang visited the Seven Stars Restaurant, part of the Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street. It was the
most popular place for actors to go and let their hair down after the show, a huge room where you could help yourself to salads
or have slices of juicy beef, accompanied by jacket potatoes with the chef’s unique sour cream and chive dressing. The main
attraction, however, was not the food but the clientele. Sir John Gielgud held court, scattering his famous faux pas to the
delight of all: ‘Oh, I thought you were that dreadful old bore, Ernest Milton.’ It was. John considered the Kenneth Williams
and Sheila Hancock table overly theatrical and raucous. Campari knew them all. One night Tom and John were falling about with
laughter and, when challenged, did an impersonation of him greeting everyone in the restaurant with royal hand gestures and
silently mouthed, ‘Hello, how
are
you?’

To Alan Plater, one of Tom’s friends from Hull, the inmates at Highbury Crescent seemed the height of sophistication. That
said, he was bemused when he showed them the model of a Jaguar he had bought for his son and they were happy spending hours
pushing it round the floor making ‘Vroom, vroom’ noises. Alan was to become one of the leading new TV writers. A grammar school
boy like so many of them, he had seen the film
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and it had set his brain on fire to realise he was not the only one to feel like that. Very soon everyone was flattening their
vowels and dropping their ‘h’s and claiming to be common; in fact Alan suspected that there were workshops on the subject,
but he and his ilk were the real thing. Writers were given their head on television. If they were good they just had to produce
an idea on a scrap of paper and they were commissioned. The only stricture was that they were not allowed to say ‘fuck’ or
show explicit sex. These restrictions proved no obstacle to truthful drama like
Cathy Come Home
in 1966 which opened everyone’s eyes to the problem of homelessness. Before Thatcher’s children took over, with their obsession
with ratings and budgets, a programme could be any length, no fitting in a slot between adverts. Say what you’ve got to say
and then stop was the order of the day. The preoccupation was with quality and the audiences lapped it up. The thought of
dumbing down never entered the writers’ heads. They respected their audience. These guys – and they were nearly all men –
wanted to change society.