In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  Janet and I made this our nightly tryst because of the food and the romantic sunsets, but our private seraglio was soon to be discovered, our caprice cut short, for two tables away from us sat none other than that zaniest of British comics, Tommy Cooper. He was with his wife and was waving madly at Janet. He obviously recognized her from her films and was signalling us to come over and as we were both admiring fans, there was nothing to do but join them. Tommy summoned the maître d’, a White Russian whom he immediately christened Rachmaninoff, and we ordered sumptuously. That was it! From that moment on we were never alone—we became the Four Musketeers. With his outrageous Cockney humour, his silly stories and his spur of the moment improvisations, Tommy never stopped entertaining us. And the thing was—we couldn’t get enough of it! When Janet and I hit the sack at night we were too exhausted to even think of making love.

  Every toddler in England could have told you that Tommy’s famous act was that of a magician whose tricks never work. But instead of acting angry or hurt, as many comics might have done, he greeted each disaster with wonder and joy as if they had been major triumphs. Only he could have got away with this, for there was about Tommy Cooper an inexplicable bravery and pathos that made him one of the very few great clowns of the twentieth century. Of course he had to have been a skilled magician in the first place to be able to effect such glaring and difficult mistakes, but he was away from the stage now, and we were being treated to his real-life magic, as indeed were the peasants in the streets who followed him wherever he went. This tall, kind jolly man who always wore a little fez much too small for his big head, became overnight the Pied Piper of Tangier. Beggars followed him, not just for money, but because he made them laugh. Street children in rags clustered about him screaming for more tricks as he gave away all his brightly coloured handkerchiefs. He would stand on top of the city steps looking down upon the masses of Muslims below him dressed in their turbans and djellabahs and yell out, “Awright then, spray the extras!” He would joke about the hundreds of carpet sellers who pestered one everywhere and never took no for an answer. “One followed me up to me ’otel room last noit,” or “When I get back to bloody London there’ll be one of ’em waitin’ for me in me flat!” And then, in a flash, as swiftly as he and his long-suffering wife had taken over our lives, as swiftly had they gone. Saddened yet relieved, Janet and I wondered if we should check into a hospital for a long, much needed sleep, but we opted for Marrakesh instead.

  France no longer ruled Morocco, but there was still an inherited formality that intruded upon life there. The Hotel La Mamounia, outside Marrakesh, was a massive elegant Edwardian-cum-Moorish pile which stood all on its own in the middle of the desert with nothing around but a few scattered mosques and minarets and far away in the background the deep blue hint of the majestic Atlas Mountains. With its high ceilings, Moorish arches, columns and glittering chandeliers, the dining room of the hotel belonged in a palace. At night people moved silently about like graceful shadows; most wore evening dress—black tie was still, upon occasion, mandatory. Year after year, Winston Churchill had come there to stay and to paint. There was a suite named after him. It was all quite incongruous really—all this grandeur, in the center of nowhere. But the climate was ideal, particularly in January, hot and dry in the day, cool at night, fanned by the sensual desert winds. The jaunts through the souk in Marrakesh, a thriving bustling throwback to the past, and our excursions to the hills beyond, home of the Berbers, were romantic adventures set amongst stark but staggering beauty. I was to go back there many times in the years to come, drawn by the haunting deep magenta colours at sundown as the high-pitched wail of the muezzin ushered in the impenetrable African night.

  Janet and I, by now copper toned, reluctantly flew back in our time machine to twentieth-century London, feeling decidedly out of epoch and quite unprepared for what was to greet us. The so-called swinging sixties had already begun!

  THE SECOND WE TOUCHED DOWN on English soil we were swept up in Beatlemania and Rolling Stonery. Suddenly London was leading the world in fashion, pop music and theatre. The fashion headquarters was Carnaby Street. For women’s designs, Mary Quant was all the rage. For men, winkle pickers and drainpipe trousers (required dress for “Teddy boys”) were out and bell-bottoms were in! We abandoned ties in favour of flowing scarves, grew our hair and sideboards long in order to affect a Byronic look and merely succeeded in resembling rather revolting early Britons. Following Warhol’s dictum that a Coke bottle was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, Yoko Ono, chalking one up for freedom of expression, rigged together a few brightly painted ladders, stuck them in a shop window and called ’em Art. Musicals no longer belonged to Broadway. London’s own Lionel Bart gave us Oliver!, Tony Newley and Leslie Bricusse Stop the World: I Want to Get Off, Joan Little-wood’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and Oh! What a Lovely War were the latest in musical satire, and Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and Engelbert Humperdinck were among the new hot songbirds.

  The sedate, old carpeted and panelled restaurants were giving way to sparklingly clean tile floors. The trattoria takeover, institutionalized by those creative Italians Mario and Franco, Alvaro and San Lorenzo’s very own Myra, was teaching Londoners that bright atmosphere and light fare could make eating decidedly more attractive. The King’s Road, Chelsea was the hip street on which to cruise with its trendy outward facades but little substance within. Discos for the hoi-polloi began to thrive from Pimlico to Soho and the Garrison, the Saddle Room or the Society in Mayfair were their upgraded versions for “Hooray Henrys” to let down their hair and their upturned noses. Gambling which took place mostly in the privacy of drawing rooms was coming out of hiding into the limelight of Crockfords, the Curzon Club and the Clairmont.

  It was the decade of offshore accounts and discretionary trusts. Chubby Checker’s Twist was the preferred dance, and two young ladies called Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, using the corridors of power as their beat, jumped into bed with a few “toffs” from Top Brass, not to mention a couple of spies, and together they brought down the entire Tory government.

  PATRICIA AUDREY LEWIS (TRISH) was a leading entertainment columnist working for the Beaverbrook Press in London. Her column was prominently featured in the Daily Express; she was a favourite of the Old Beaver himself, and as a writer of talent far beyond her requirements she was as popular with her readers and her fellow workers as she was with her competition, reporters such as Marjorie Proops and Jean Rook. American and European stars loved being interviewed by her, not just because she was attractive, witty and fun to be with, but because she never once printed anything that was, in any way, salacious. By that I don’t suggest her column was tepid or dull—au contraire— it fairly sparkled with edge and bite, but never went out of its way to sting.

  She had already written a more than flattering piece on me when I first joined the Royal Shakespeare and I like to think we hit it off from the start—I know I was very much taken with her. Trish was half Welsh, sported a permanent golden tan, had thick black hair and two of the most enormous dark pools for eyes. Exceptionally well read, she was as fully cognizant of the opera, ballet and theatre world as she was of politics, pop music and film. She had met and interviewed many a famous author, some of whom had become her friends, as loyal to her as she to them. She was as much at ease with Robert Ruark, James Mich-ener, James Clavell or the poet Robert Graves as she was with Hope, Crosby or Sinatra. Through the influence of her column and by regularly confronting producers, she had helped a considerable number of talented artists—amongst them a young Sean Connery, whom she ceaselessly pushed for Bond, going as far as insisting that Saltzman and Broccoli watch a kinescope of his performance in Requiem for a Heavyweight. That was one of the clinchers. A grateful Mr. Connery sent her a case of glorious “bubbly” when Bond came his way. In short, Trish Lewis could with ease sniff out London town blindfolded.

  I soon discovered we had a lot in common, food and win
e near the top of the list, and together we enjoyed culinary solace at the White Tower or L’Etoile restaurants on Charlotte Street and for simple steaks and chops (the best in London) at the Guinea on Bruton Place. She could whip up a mean Lancashire hot pot at her flat when the mood struck her, but most of the time we hit the town.

  Every so often Peter Finch, the Australian actor, would join us. I suspected he had once been a lover of Trish’s so I hid my jealousy as best I could. Trish adored driving and driving fast. She took her little Triumph Herald convertible to the very limit, tearing through London streets at hair-raising speeds. Once, on our way home, the three of us packed like sardines into her “machina” as she called it, I picked a fight with Finchy. “Stop the car,” I slurred. “We’ll settle it right here on the street.” “Roit, mate! You asked for it, punk!” snapped Finch. Fed up, Trish stopped the car and ordered us to get out. Ready for battle, we clambered out and blimey! if she didn’t drive off leaving us stupidly gaping at each other in the pitch dark somewhere outside Hyde Park—the nerve of the woman! Finch broke the tense silence. “There’s no point in going through with this without a fuckin’ audience. Come on, let’s have a drink instead!” From that moment we were friends!

  Trish was always dragging numerous visiting VIPs to see me in Becket. Anthony Mann, the Hollywood director, was about to make a film in Spain and dear Trish began her campaign on my behalf with a vengeance. She also introduced me to David Pelham, an American living in London who had produced John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. David was a vastly amusing entrepreneur-party animal who loved sprinkling his evenings with the likes of Judy Garland, his great friend whom I first met at his flat; the two Margarets, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll and HRH Princess Margaret (though never together); Noël Coward; Cecil Beaton and whatever film star happened to be in town. Through Trish I met and made friends with one of my very favourite “bad boys”—the talented Scots author, James Kennaway, who, along with his novels The Bells of Shoreditch and Country Dance, had written a stylish film about a Highland regiment, Tunes of Glory. I would soon become part of Jimmy and his wife Susan’s lives.

  Through Joan Collins and Trish I came to know Leslie and Evie Bricusse who one Sunday organized an excursion to visit Beatrice Lillie and her manager, John Phillips, for lunch at her house on the Thames. Miss Lillie had, by that time, become more eccentric than ever, and didn’t appear until lunch was almost over and when she spoke, which was seldom, it sounded like some foreign code. We spent the rest of the day on the water in her tremendously long and narrow electric canoe, Bea pressing buttons and steering from the stern, reclining on a fur rug, looking very much like a slightly tipsy Queen of Sheba.

  THE ESTABLISHMENT in Soho was the latest, hottest club to hit London. It offered a bill of provocative entertainers, political satirists and review artists—it was out of the ordinary, clever, upscale cabaret. Trish and I went almost nightly, usually joined by Peter Coe, the director, and my mad Irish friend Sean Kenny. Far and away the most fun, it was run by Peter Cook who, with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, had written and performed Beyond the Fringe, their witty evening which everyone in the city was clamouring to see. At the club I met Dudley and Jonathan. Dudley, who had his own combo, played jazz and classical piano with equal zest. Sometimes he took pity on me and allowed me to strum the keys, but only if everyone was too pissed to listen.

  It was there I saw Lenny Bruce perform his one and only British engagement. He was certainly the most original, uninhibited, off-the-wall messenger of derision England had seen and perhaps ever would see. All his dark humour and ugly cynicism was simply a screen which masked the awful truth behind. One critic summed him up by saying he had the heart of an unfrocked evangelist.

  Trish and I attended his second night—his opening the night before had been even more sensationalized when an outraged Siobhan McKenna and her noisy party got to their feet and loudly protested his attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church. As they stomped out, Peter Cook tried to calm her down but only got slugged for his pains. Trish and I had been waiting at our table at least two hours for Mr. Bruce to appear. We wondered if he would ever show up again after the first night debacle. Peter Cook assured us that sort of thing only whetted his appetite and added that the reason for his lateness was that he was finding great difficulty in getting his “fix.”

  At long last he walked out onto the stage carrying a tape recorder which he promptly turned on, explaining that he was playing us last night’s show in case we had missed it and that a great part of it featured “one of your country’s most distinguished actresses.” The irony was not lost on us as we all listened to a tipsy Siobhan venting her self-righteous vitriol. It was a cunning way of getting the audience on his side. When he’d had enough he turned the tape recorder off and began improvising on religion, politics, sex, the inhumanity of his fellow man—any subject that was open to destruction. He was obscene, vulgar, unforgivably out of line and absolutely brilliant. At one moment, entirely missing the point of Bruce’s harangue, a rather stiff British army officer type accompanied by his wife and children, rose in outrage, shouting, “I’ve never heard such filth, it ought not to be allowed—there are decent people present!” With that they made their exit, loudly protesting all the way. Bruce waited patiently till they reached the back of the room before calling out: “Be careful! There are twelve Doberman Pinchers outside waiting to bite your balls off!”

  Now that he had tasted blood, he was on fire. No philistine, prig or bigot was safe in that room. On a soaring, inspired flight of language he carried us away with him with his biting truths and made us laugh at our shameful selves till it hurt. He finished the exhausting evening by changing his mood completely. We sat in shock as he profusely thanked us for being there in the sweetest, gentlest curtain speech in my memory, and then with such a heartfelt, beatific smile that a Carmelite nun might have forgiven him anything, he told us all to go fuck ourselves!

  ONE EARLY MORNING, around 2 a.m., several weeks later, Trish and I had just left the Establishment and were heading home to her flat. She was driving. The roads were still slick from a late-night rain and as we sped down the Mall far too fast to make a left at the circle in front of Buckingham Palace, the little Triumph Herald went into a skid and lost all control. Nature takes over at moments such as these and, in a way, prepares one for what’s to come. A sinister calm prevails, which enables you to see things with slow-motion clarity. “We’re going to have an accident. Don’t worry. Just hang on,” I heard myself saying as in a trance. “The big light posts are quite far apart; there’s lots of space between—we’re going to miss them and go straight up onto the pavement. You’re all right.” I was wrong.

  The next thing I remember, I was standing on the street staring at the figure of Trish lying facedown in a pool of blood. The police and medics were taking charge and administering to her. They must have been right behind us all the time. I looked over at what was left of the little Triumph. It was squashed up like an accordion; to this day I cannot fathom how we ever got out of it. I must have been thrown clear and had unbelievably escaped disaster, for I only had a scratch on my neck. Trish, on the driver’s side, had collided smack into one of the pillars, receiving the full impact of the crash. A policeman came up to me and gently took my arm. “We’re taking her straight to St. George’s Emergency—come along please.” We all crowded into the ambulance.

  It seemed forever before someone came out of the emergency room. “We think you should call her parents.” My heart sank. “She’s broken her jaw in many places and has an overly large clot on her brain. We can’t do anymore here. We’ll have to take her to Atkinson Morley to set the jaw and remove the clot.” I called her parents in Brighton. I’d never met them and they didn’t know me from Adam. I had my work cut out. I rang off and went with Trish in the ambulance to the suburbs, terrified that every jolt on that bumpy ride would dislodge her jaw all over again. Atkinson Morley looked like a temporary Quonset h
ut in a military outpost on foreign soil. No one could imagine that some of the world’s best brain surgery took place within its shabby walls. The morning brought her parents with it—an ordinary decent aging couple who were justifiably proud of their daughter’s journalistic prowess but not so enamoured of her life in the fast lane, as they conservatively thought of it. As for me, I was a total stranger to them for whom they had no knowledge and less trust. Nevertheless, as I was Trish’s only friend present, they had no choice but to accept my credibility. As Trish lay there in a deep coma, I could see that one ear had been severed and was hanging by a thread of skin and her face, still covered in dried blood, was so misshapen and swollen she was virtually unrecognizable. This was the sight that greeted them. Of course, they were understandably distraught, but the mother soon became quite hysterical and it took all my courage to persuade her to think positive thoughts so that Trish, comatose though she was, would not sense negative vibes that might challenge her will to live. My improvised Zen lecture worked and from then on, both parents behaved like good soldiers.

  The nurses bandaged her ear onto its proper place. “It’ll grow right back—you’ll see—good as new,” a nurse chortled rather cavalierly, I thought. But there was a problem. The blood clot had now covered her entire brain and had to be removed before any work could begin on her jaw. This delay might cause the jaw to set in that unfortunate position and make it impossible to restore it to its natural shape. All we could do, the three of us, was to wait and pray.