Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  For all his down moods, Spike liked to have people, especially young people, round on Guy Fawkes Night, which was always fun with a large bonfire and barbecue. At one of those parties I recall seeing a rather reserved Kenneth Tynan (the great make-or-break theatre critic of his day, and reputedly the first person to say ‘fuck’ on British television) and his then wife Elaine Dundy, author of the bestselling The Dud Avocado. Years later, remembering them sitting sedately on the edge of the Milligan settee, I was amazed to read how this venerated critic would enjoy flagellating the understandably reluctant Dundy.

  At another Milligan Bonfire Night party, this time at Monkenhurst, the beautiful old mansion Spike had moved to in 1974, Carole and I fell into conversation with the singer Lynsey de Paul and her then partner James Coburn, the American film star. Lynsey (whom Spike always affectionately called Lynsey the Small) came to live opposite us some years later, by which time we had formed our publishing company, Robson Books. I would find her name cropping up more and more (often libellously!) in books I was offered about the music industry, particularly in one by the notorious impresario Don Arden, who, exasperated by her behaviour, passed her over to his daughter, Sharon Osborne, to manage. In time, she too gave up, and I had to quietly tone down a number of potentially damaging remarks about Lynsey in Arden’s book. Among other things he wrote that no married man was safe walking past Lynsey’s house, a remark I couldn’t help remembering whenever I cautiously passed her door on my way home of an evening. For all the trouble the prickly Lynsey sometimes caused her neighbours, she deserved a far happier end than the cruel one she suffered, dying of a suspected brain haemorrhage shortly after moving from the area, and only a few weeks since we’d had a friendly chat at a ceremony to unveil a statue of Spike in the grounds of Stephens House, Finchley, where he loved to walk.

  At that event, held in September 2014, Michael Parkinson recalled being in the middle of broadcasting a show from LBC when an assistant rang to say there was a man in reception calling himself ‘Mr Spike Milligan, the well-known typing error’. ‘Send him up,’ said a wary Michael, and in walked Spike in his dressing gown saying he’d been listening to the show and it was so boring he thought he’d better drop in and liven it up!

  Lynsey de Paul did me one great favour in introducing me to Tom Conti, who lived around the corner from us both and who, so Lynsey told me, was writing a book. I’d always greatly admired Tom, ever since he’d starred in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes, the unmissable TV series about a Cambridge generation – and he had, indeed, just finished a book, a novel called The Doctor. Fiction was not normally our territory, but I was nevertheless interested and arranged to meet Tom at his house. Cautious at first, he asked me searching questions about our company and publishing in general, eventually agreeing to email me the manuscript. As I left, I noticed a grand piano in the living room with Beethoven scores on it, and Tom explained that he’d trained as a classical pianist before taking up acting. Perhaps the fact that we published the great Alfred Brendel helped to swing things our way.

  Tom Conti with the singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul at the launch of his novel The Doctor.

  I was about to go on holiday and took Tom’s book with me. Prodigiously researched, The Doctor ranged from the plains of Africa to the operating theatre of a London hospital, and I turned the pages quickly as I followed the many twists of the ingenious plot. There was only one problem: it didn’t have a satisfactory ending, with everything left, surreally, in the air. I wondered how I was going to tell him, but I needn’t have worried, for the minute I got back to the office my assistant said, ‘Do you realise you didn’t print out the last forty pages of the manuscript you took away?’ I crept off and read them at once, and everything tied up perfectly. Chekhov said that if you plant a gun in a drawer in the first act of a play, you must make sure it goes off in the last. In Tom’s book it certainly did!

  He was wonderful to publish, and I enjoyed the literary lunches I drove him to, not just for his speech (he always shunned the mike – with that rich voice he didn’t need it), but for the signing session afterwards, when I’d watch the queues of women of a certain age wanting a photo with him as well as a signed book, some asking jokingly, ‘Can I be your Shirley Valentine?’ (A reference to the film in which he’d played a seductive Greek taverna owner, with whom the middle-aged Liverpool housewife, Shirley Valentine, has a romance.) As a result of Tom’s book, which, incidentally, the BBC recorded despite the sex scenes, we became friendly with him and his multi-talented wife Kara, whose one-woman shows, performed in the theatre-like lounge of their house as well as in public venues, we have greatly enjoyed. Her dramatic portrayal of the art deco portraitist Tamara De Lempicka is especially memorable.

  * * *

  If I was shy of Spike, I was even more so of Harry Secombe whenever I went backstage after a recording, though no one could have been friendlier or warmer. Harry was always considered the sober member of the team, and was often called on to make the peace when Spike had gone off the rails for one reason or another – whether with the producer, the BBC censor, the people responsible for the unusual sound effects that were such an integral part of the show, or whoever.

  Where Spike went, Peter Sellers often followed, and it wasn’t long before he too came knocking on my father’s door. He’d been hypnotised before, and hadn’t been impressed when he heard a voice saying as he came round, ‘Be sure to pay my secretary in cash on your way out.’ But Spike must have reassured Peter he would be in safe hands, and he and my dad hit it off from the start, Peter eventually becoming almost as friendly with my parents as Spike.

  Peter had bought a lovely country house, Chipperfield Manor, in Hertfordshire, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, and it wasn’t long before we were invited on Sundays to join his circle. Oddly, I never remember Spike being there, but Peter’s cronies always were – Graham Stark, David Lodge, Max Geldray and also Peter’s agent Dennis Selinger (‘The Silver Fox’). A shy and reserved man, forever hiding behind one voice or another, Peter seemed only comfortable with this inner circle of friends he’d known for years, though I do remember the Boulting brothers being there once, as well as Stanley Kubrick and Richard Attenborough. Peter was proud of his house and liked to show it off – and why not? He’d come from a humble show-business background and had made it the hard way, though he never seemed secure. It was said he changed houses as often as he did cars, which were his passion. On one occasion, detecting a slight squeak or rattle in his car, he summoned his actor mate Graham Stark in the early hours of the morning to come over at once and help him detect it. What Graham hadn’t expected was to be asked to climb into the boot with a torch while Peter drove around the neighbourhood – slowly at first, with the boot ajar, but when a sports car cut him up he responded by putting his foot down on the accelerator, causing the boot to slam shut… Graham had to remain in there amidst the fumes until, forced to stop at a red light, Peter suddenly remembered he was locked in the boot and let him out!

  Of more interest to me then was the fact that Peter’s lovely wife Anne liked to play tennis, and playing tennis was one of the few things I could do well in those teenage years. So while Peter entertained his court, Anne and I would rally on another court at the end of the garden. It seemed like heaven.

  One memorable Sunday, when Peter was in the middle of filming The Millionairess, he announced that he had a special guest – and in sailed his co-star Sophia Loren, all elegance and sophistication, wearing a lovely light summer dress and hat and cutting a swathe through the other guests, who were sitting around in their shorts and swimming costumes, more than a little stunned. I stared in silent wonder, thinking I must be dreaming, for such visions belonged on the silver screen, not in someone’s garden. In that film Peter played the part of an Indian doctor and he and Sophia performed a song together in which the flirtatious ‘patient’ Loren sang, ‘Oh doctor, I’m in trouble,’ and Peter, flustered by her advances, responded in h
is best Indian accent, ‘Oh, goodness gracious me.’ (Lyrics by the esteemed Herbert Kretzmer, whom we were to publish many years later.)

  That brief encounter with the staggeringly beautiful Loren was a one-off for us, but Peter’s infatuation with her was eventually to lead to the break-up of his marriage to the long-suffering Anne. My father quickly found himself in the firing line when, a week or so after the swimming party, the doorbell in our house rang and there was a visibly distressed Peter on our doorstep, wearing a turban and the full Indian regalia in which he’d been filming all day. ‘I need your help, Joe,’ he proclaimed without waiting to be led into the privacy of my father’s consulting room. ‘Sophia’s in love with me and I’m in love with her.’

  Years later, after Peter’s death, my father told me how he’d tried to reason with him, warning that it would break up his marriage and devastate his children, telling him not to be a silly boy and that the worldly Sophia, who was married to Carlo Ponti, the director who had discovered her, would be up and away and out of his life once the film was finished. Not, I imagine, what Peter wanted to hear. But my father was a blunt speaker and he was soon proved right.

  Much has been written about this so-called ‘affair’, but those close to Peter (we’ve published books by two of them) always maintained that while Loren liked him and found him amusing, it was a one-sided infatuation and never a physical relationship. But who knows? What I do know is that one night my father was summoned to Chipperfield Manor, where he did his best to mediate and help mend the fences that Peter had insensitively knocked down. But, as is well known, there was no happy ending to this part of the story and eventually Anne and Peter split up, she going on to marry the architect Ted Levy, and he remarrying three times.

  * * *

  From time to time I would go to the recordings of another hugely popular show that I also loved, Educating Archie, which starred the ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. If that doesn’t sound like a very promising line-up, let me add that the show attracted an average of fifteen million listeners (many coming to think of Archie as a real person, he seemed so lifelike on air), and that the show featured an incredible list of future stars, including Tony Hancock, Julie Andrews, Benny Hill, Beryl Reid, Bruce Forsyth, Warren Mitchell and Max Bygraves. The latter had the programme’s most popular catch-phrases: ‘I’ve arrived and to prove it, I’m here’, and ‘That’s a good idea… son’ – pronounced slowly with a strong emphasis on the ‘son’. There were huge cheers from the audience whenever Max declaimed them, and they became part of the lingua franca of the day.

  Another comedian who was a regular in the show, and whose ability to do a huge variety of comic voices helped to bring it to life, was Dick Emery. It was through Spike that Emery became a regular on my father’s couch and in our home, and it was through Dick that I got tickets for Educating Archie recordings. Later, he had his own popular television show in which he appeared in a host of hilarious guises, among them Hetty, the man-mad spinster; the Bovver Boy, a young aimless heavy; Lampwick, the doddering but proudly independent relic of World War I; Mandy, the well-endowed flirt, naughty but nice (‘Ooh, you are awful – but I like you’); and many other colourful characters. He was to become a cult figure, but at that time he was very much second billing, despite his huge talent. Even at my young age, I could sense Emery often had his down moods, despite his very attractive lady friend, Vicki. I used to love watching Dick skilfully warming up the audience, telling them that he’d just come from a sick bed – ‘My girlfriend’s got the flu’ – and continuing with one of the few jokes I’ve ever remembered, about two old Chelsea Pensioners reminiscing about the war. ‘’Ere,’ says one, ‘do you remember them pills they used to give us during the Boer War to stop us thinking about women?’ ‘Yes,’ says the other one, ‘of course I do.’ ‘Well,’ continues the first, ‘I think mine are just beginning to work.’

  4

  POLY BOUND

  My brief spell at the Ham and High led me to feel that journalism might be the way ahead. Looking around, I discovered that the Regent Street Polytechnic (now Westminster University) had a one-year course in journalism, so I applied and somehow managed to scrape a place. But it was now June and the course didn’t start until the autumn. As I had several free months, I enrolled for a summer course at the Alliance Française in Paris with a view to brushing up my hesitant French, and was delighted when Tony Stalbow decided to join me. For some reason he couldn’t get away until after the course had started, so I went on ahead.

  One night I was sitting alone in a café in the Place St Germain, nursing a glass of red wine and struggling with a rather difficult novel by Henry de Montherlant that was recommended on the course, when a smartly dressed woman of a certain age, also alone, sat down opposite me. Noticing the book I was wrestling with, she began to say something about de Montherlant and his attitude to women. I did my best, but she was speaking quietly and at great speed so I couldn’t grasp the point she was trying to make, though it was clear she had strong views on the subject. Eventually she gave up and turned her attention elsewhere. Later, I realised that this was perhaps another of the many catches I’d already managed to drop in the course of my short life, so I went back the next night, but she was nowhere to be seen. Doubtless she’d gone to another café and struck up conversation with someone altogether more responsive. ‘Happiness writes in white ink on a white page,’ wrote de Montherlant. I wonder what my mysterious lady would have made of that!

  In Paris, and trying my best to look like a poet.

  Summer in Paris can be hot, and the summer of 1959 was very hot. Having studied French literature for A level, I’d formed a strong attachment to the French poets and I’d also read a fair amount about the writers who’d converged there before and after the war. So, naturally, with books by Sartre and de Beauvoir in my bulging pockets, I made a beeline for the famous cafés I knew they’d all frequented – the Café de Flore, where they’d settle down to work, rarely addressing a word to one another, and where Juliette Greco had made her startling entrance, and then the nearby Deux Magots in the Place St Germain, where they would go later to converse with those they had previously ignored. A strange daily ritual. I found it invigorating to be there, sipping coffee, making notes, scribbling away, lines of Baudelaire, Lamartine, Hugo and de Vigny swirling around my head, as well as the more modern ones of another Café de Flore regular, Jacques Prévert, whose poem ‘Barbara’ I have always loved, which starts:

  Rapelle-toi Barbara

  Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour-là.

  The romance of Paris was overwhelming.

  I had a memorable ‘first’ in Paris, though not of the kind normally associated with that romantic city – Venice had had the privilege of hosting that particular performance. No, this was a religious matter: I’d been raised in a traditional (though not overtly Orthodox) Jewish home and brought up to eat only kosher meat. But as I sat down resolutely in a restaurant near the Place de la République, I eyed the steak frites on the menu and decided my moment of liberation had come. Scraping the butter off quickly with my knife (you are not meant to mix milk and meat, and old habits die hard), I took my first bite, then another, and another. Nothing happened. No thunderbolts, no applause, the earth didn’t move. Nothing would ever be the same again. Mind you, to this day I have been unable to eat such forbidden delights as pork, or rabbit, or shellfish. That would still seem to me a kind of betrayal of my heritage. Come to think of it, the earth didn’t exactly move in Venice either, probably just as well given the city’s fragile infrastructure. No wonder really, since it wasn’t exactly a romantic affair, but a night out with my Venetian friends whose hospitality I was enjoying and whose Saturday nights often took in a ‘social’ visit to one of the city’s high-class bordellos (then licensed but subsequently abolished). As I put it in a poem, ‘Postmark Venice’, a few years later:

  Why, they’ve even closed Rosina’s

  since ’59, leav
ing a legend: Hemingway

  in Harry’s Bar would have raged.

  In my recollection, I was far too nervous and overcome by the jaded surroundings, overpriced liquor and fake jollity to have moved a pillow, let alone the earth. At the time, I prided myself on the fact that I virtuously declined the offer of a return visit the following week. As I saw it, the first occasion had been a kind of professional assignment, an experience no red-blooded would-be writer could possibly have ducked, but to go back for an encore would have been an indulgence. How prissy! For all that, I recall, afterwards, strolling cock-a-hoop with the others past lines of empty gondolas and, under an indifferent Venice moon, joining their loud chorus of ‘O Sole Mio’. It always amused me in subsequent years, when I met up again with my now respectably married Venetian friends, how they would hush me up immediately if I even hinted at the name of the legendary Rosina.