In 2011, the Robson Press was born.
25
SOME YOU WIN…
As I mentioned earlier, I always welcomed late summer offerings, but the one Harry Secombe brought to us in around June 1994 when he was ‘ruling the world’ on tour in Mr Pickwick was a heartbreaker: the autobiography of Roy Castle, one of the best-loved and most versatile performers in show business. When Harry steered him to us, Roy was already very ill and much in the news, having gone public in an exceptionally courageous way about the lung cancer that finally took his life. He had never smoked and maintained that it was the result of passive smoking during his many appearances in smoke-filled clubs over the years. The way he faced his illness, launching a £12 million appeal to build a centre for lung cancer research in Liverpool and embarking on a 1,200-mile Tour of Hope to raise money for it, not only made him a national hero but eventually led to the banning of smoking in public places.
I arrived at the Castles’ home apprehensive and expecting a difficult conversation, but it wasn’t at all, Roy and his wife Fiona putting me at ease at once. Roy was still bravely performing (he continued to host the TV show Record Breakers until two months before his death), and putting the finishing touches to his autobiography, about which he was positive and enthusiastic. It was hard to believe he was so ill. I took the manuscript away and read it overnight. Beautifully written in longhand, with great style and hardly a comma needing to be changed, it conjured up the highs and lows of his career since first treading the boards as a child performer, a career that took him to Hollywood before he starred in his own TV shows back home in England. He didn’t shy away from talking about his illness. It was a truly inspiring book, funny and moving by turn – without doubt, as well as being able to sing, dance, play a multitude of instruments and make people laugh, Roy was a natural writer.
Sadly, although we moved quickly, Roy did not live to see publication. He died in September, just a month or so after handing me the completed manuscript, but he saw the jacket and proofs, and we were in close touch all the time, giving him constant feedback, so as he travelled the country on his Tour of Hope he was aware of the excitement the prospect of his book was generating in both the trade and the media. Indeed, our rep Keith Humphrey reported that when he told booksellers in his area that we had that autumn’s bestseller, the reaction he repeatedly got was, ‘Don’t tell me Robson Books have Roy Castle’s autobiography.’ We had, and with Fiona’s help it became the bestseller it richly deserved to be. And nobody was more delighted than Harry Secombe.
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Of course, many late-season offerings weren’t right for us and not all of those we did take on hit the jackpot – far from it. We learned to proceed with caution. Over the years, many of our most successful books came through our own initiative rather than the approaches of others – books such as The Glums, tied to the hilarious TV series of the same name, which had been adapted from the extremely popular radio series of the ’50s Take It from Here, written by the legendary comedy writing team of Frank Muir and Denis Norden. The Glums were a ‘truly awful family’ – the son Ron, as thick as a post, seemingly engaged for ever to the very plain Eth. (‘Engagement in those days’, wrote Muir and Norden in the preface to their book, was ‘like being given a present for Christmas and not being allowed to open it until Easter’.) The scenes featuring the Glums had entertained a whole generation on radio and did so again twenty years later when they surfaced on television. For us, The Glums was a natural follow-on from our bestselling Goon Show book, and so too were The Best of Steptoe and Son and the two Hancock’s Half Hour books we published with their creators, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The second Hancock book contained ten scripts the BBC were reported to have ‘lost’ and which their authors were willing to reconstruct for a book. A bonus was the fact that the Little Britain stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams agreed to contribute a foreword. Such was their admiration for Galton and Simpson that they even offered to interview them for a paper if we lined one up, and so on a Saturday morning the four of them gathered in the upstairs room of a Soho club, with a Times writer present to record the interview and me as the proverbial fly on the wall, their conversation ranging widely as they recalled writers, programmes, shows and artists that had meant a great deal to them (and to me!), and doubtless to many Times readers. A real treat.
Frank Muir and Denis Norden, the legendary scriptwriting team and TV panellists.
Other books, such as Matthew Parris’s witty and insightful parliamentary sketches, originated as quality newspaper columns, leading to more books from the same authors – in Matthew’s case, to three, including his highly successful Great Parliamentary Scandals and The Great Unfrocked, a book of church scandals. The only problem with his very successful parliamentary book was keeping it up to date, since there seemed to be a splurge of scandals whenever we were about to reprint. Nothing changes. We had a packed launch for that title in the Churchill War Rooms, and quite a few of the book’s subjects were sporting enough to come. I well remember Jeffrey Archer saying to me as I was about to attempt a few introductory words, ‘Don’t be nervous. You are only about to address some of the finest speakers in the country.’ When the compelling TV dramatisation of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, A Very English Scandal, was showing, I was intrigued to see Matthew referring back in his Times column to his Scandals book and his chapter on Thorpe – and rather frankly, too. Good books, it seems, live on! We had fun too with his Read My Lips, a collection of the things politicians wish they hadn’t said, an idea inspired by a book I picked up in a New York bookstore. It was a privilege to publish him.
After Matthew came another sparky Times writer, Ann Treneman, whose two collections of brilliant parliamentary sketches were followed by a very different but very successful, quirky book for which she travelled widely: Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die, which we sold to a TV company. At one stage, it seemed as though we had a monopoly on Times writers, given that we also published Derwent May’s Times Nature Diary and Feather Report, his weekly bird column… and why not, since nobody else seemed to be mining this rich source of fine writing – until recently, that is, when we lost out on The Times Diary at 50, an anthology compiled by the excellent Patrick Kidd, whom I would love to have published.
Another book that got away was Longitude, the story of the search for a reliable method of locating a ship’s position at sea. I found it enthralling though I can’t honestly say I thought it had great sales potential; nevertheless, we offered for it, one of only two British publishers to do so. Our rival offered just a few hundred pounds more and scooped the pot: it became the bestseller of the year. I don’t believe that anyone actually foresaw that.
I was also disappointed that, after a promising start, I was never able to tie down the sprightly Ken Dodd – but who could? I had gone to a special lunch in Liverpool at the invitation of broadcaster John Keith, who had written a couple of successful Liverpool-related football books for us and knew ‘Doddy’ well. This was an annual lunch for elderly artistes which Dodd always chaired, calling on the old-timers to perform bits of their acts and throwing in the odd snatch of his own. It was warm, nostalgic, touching and great fun – rather like an improvised Old Time Music Hall. Some of those present had been stars in their day and still knew how to work an audience, relishing those few minutes in Doddy’s generous spotlight. Halfway through the lunch, the great man, who’d been told by John that I was there, signalled for me to come and sit next to him so we could talk. We spoke often after that Liverpool meeting, swapping ideas, and he would phone me from time to time and talk away at great length. If only I’d attached a tape recorder to the phone, I’d have had half the book, but regretfully I never managed to get even that.
It was a similar scenario with Warren Mitchell, star of Till Death Us Do Part and Alf Garnett’s alter ego. Having published several Garnett books with the show’s creator, Johnny Speight, and followed Warren’s career from his early days on radio,
I felt we were the perfect publishers for him, especially since I understood his Jewish background. The only trouble was that he didn’t want to write a book… but when he came to the launch of Jack Rosenthal’s posthumous autobiography he seemed sympathetic to the idea, suggesting we meet for lunch. He’d had a stroke and walked with great difficulty, so I called for him and drove him to a restaurant he liked in Highgate, dropping him off afterwards at his GP’s surgery. We got on well and I visited him several times after that, listening as he sat back in his armchair and talked entertainingly about his childhood, his parents and their fish and chip shop, his early career. I kept urging him to write it down and he’d promise to start next week, but those next weeks came and went and eventually I gave him a pocket tape recorder, telling him that if he’d just talk into it (and I would prompt him with questions if it would help), then we could get it transcribed and he could rewrite it at will.
All went quiet, then Warren phoned to invite me to lunch at Langhams to thank me for what he called my ‘loyalty’. But just as I thought we were getting somewhere at last, I realised we weren’t. Yet I still persisted, since although he wasn’t at all well physically, mentally he was as sharp as ever. When I began visiting him again, I’d hear what sounded like a record of Louis Armstrong singing from somewhere upstairs, only to find it was Warren imitating him, keeping his voice ‘in trim’ as he put it. And away he’d go again, giving me a private one-man show, telling the stories, doing the voices, remembering the heyday of Alf Garnett and all the controversy surrounding the character. Alas, the book never materialised, Warren dying before we could get his engrossing story on paper.
Susan George, co-star with Dustin Hoffman of the psychological thriller Straw Dogs, which included a controversial rape scene, was another would-be author I was never able to pin down, despite long phone calls and friendly lunches, and the fact that she was keen to write – indeed, had approached me through an agent. The dynamic Susan, a star in Hollywood at an early age, who was associated over the years with a number of famous men (among them Prince Charles, George Best, Jimmy Connors and Jack Jones), had written several enticing draft chapters for her proposed book, including a frank discussion of that famous rape scene, but somehow she could never afford the time to continue, and because she wrote so well herself, getting someone to work with her never seemed to me to be a necessary option. At one of our last meetings, for tea at the Wolseley, she was joined by her handsome and very charming husband of some twenty-eight years, Simon MacCorkindale, then still starring as a doctor in the popular TV series Casualty while battling cancer. Simon too was writing a book about his life and illness, and he gave me some chapters to read in confidence. Sadly, he died soon after, leaving a bereft Susan to continue running the world-class Arabian horse stud farm they had developed together, which remains her passion. When we next met, Susan had the classy Caroline Michel, CEO of Peters Fraser + Dunlop as her agent, and although I enjoyed a lively lunch with the glamorous duo, we were never able to get the book off the ground. However, Susan, more than ever involved with her prize-winning horses, still calls from time to time, so maybe one day we will. She still has an intriguing story to tell, and if anyone can get her to write it, it’s Caroline.
Barbara Windsor did get her story on paper, but sadly not for us. We had originally met at a recording of Terry Wogan’s TV talk show to which I’d accompanied Maureen Lipman, also a guest on the programme that night. Barbara was friendly after that and we kept in touch, with vague thoughts of a book always in the air. One day, her accountant contacted me to ask if I could advise on how to get the rights back on an early ghosted autobiography of hers – she obviously had a new one in mind. I was pleased to be able to help, and the rights were reverted.
Barbara was now starring in EastEnders and a new book by her would be highly commercial, as she knew. Getting together with an experienced writer, she produced an outline for a full-scale autobiography which went out to several publishers and for which I made a substantial offer – six figures, as I recall, with higher than usual royalties. Not surprisingly, we were outbid by a large publisher and Barbara, understandably and full of apologies, went with them (though she later regretted it). When the book appeared, she sent me an early copy and her inscription was some compensation: ‘Thank you for all your kind advice, even though I didn’t do it with you (pardon the expression).’ The following Christmas, we received a card with a lovely photo of Barbara, perfectly coiffed and in a long white skirt, apparently taken in front of Niagara Falls. Inside, she had written, ‘Happy Christmas’ and, above her signature, ‘Viagra Falls’. Irrepressible as ever.
* * *
Sometimes, however, the dice rolled the right way. I’d seen a headline in the Mail on Sunday announcing ‘JOAN LEAVES PUBLISHER’. It could only be Joan Collins, and reading on I learned that the publisher who was about to release her new book was in financial difficulties and she was claiming the rights back. Since Joan had been part of our family circle for a considerable time – that is to say, we never missed an episode of Dynasty, recording them all when we went on holiday and binging on them en famille when we got back – I thought how exciting it would be to publish her. A little research led me to her agent, Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, with whom I’d often dealt, and, while explaining that there were still legal entanglements to unravel, he allowed me in confidence to see the book, which was just about ready to go to press. Inevitably, once again it was late in the year.
Titled Star Quality, the book was a novel on an epic scale, a theatrical family saga about three generations of alluring women who all become stars – and who better to write it than Joan, not only a glamorous star herself, but coming from a theatrical background, her father having been a leading showbiz agent. Joan’s book had a strong storyline with all the ingredients – sex, jealousy, violence – to make it a page-turner as it moved from London to New York to Hollywood. As well as drawing on her own experience, Joan had done a considerable amount of background research on the various periods she covered in the story, from Victorian times on, which she brought vividly to life.
Jonathan was still sorting out the legal side of things and we couldn’t progress until he had, but finally he phoned to say things were unravelling and he’d arranged for us to see Joan at her Belgravia apartment. He made it clear that she had to be happy with whichever publisher he recommended, irrespective of the terms. Aware that she had been involved in a major lawsuit with Random House in America (which she’d won), and given the trouble she was now having, I could well understand her concern. I looked forward to our meeting with some trepidation. Was she really real? I was about to find out.
Jonathan and I arrived a little early, having arranged to meet up outside her flat, and he wisely suggested that we wait a few minutes before ringing (later, Joan told me she thought arriving early was ruder than being late). We were led into a dim sitting room, the light obscured by half-closed curtains, and I peered at the various photos that surrounded us as Jonathan and I chatted. Then, like a gust of wind, Joan Collins swept in, her first words to us being ‘Look at my legs!’ Surprised but quick to obey, we at once realised it was not a flirtatious invitation as she pointed to the bruises she had sustained the night before at the theatre she was appearing in, having stumbled down the narrow flight of stairs that led to her dressing room.
Wondering why the curtains were still drawn, she went and opened them before sitting down and, fixing me with her large green eyes, saying almost accusingly, ‘Jonathan tells me you’ve read my book. Do you like it?’
‘Yes, I have read it, Miss Collins, and as I told Jonathan, I do like it, very much, but…’ The word ‘but’ hung in the air as her eyes zeroed in on me even more intently.
‘But what?’ she challenged. ‘But I wonder whether you would be open to a little editing. I’ve noticed a few things.’ ‘What kind of things?’ I’d started so I had to continue. ‘On page 95, Miss Collins, you talk about the Cotton Club in New York and mentio
n a hot young trumpeter called Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington played the piano, Miss Collins. Perhaps you meant Louis Armstrong?’ There was a pause, then she thanked me for pointing out what was an obvious slip, cursed the publisher who’d let it through, smiled graciously and said, ‘Yes, I’d be glad to consider any points you may have. I want the book to be as good as possible.’
We talked on in general about the book, and that was that. I seemed to have passed my audition, and we struck a deal. We worked closely together, Joan making quite a few changes and welcoming suggestions as we went along, though rewriting in her own words. Thus it was a creative, two-way process and it quickly became apparent that Joan was a perfectionist and that she loved to write, rising early to work and taking as much trouble with the words she put on the page as she did with the clothes she wore. She certainly has ‘star quality’ as she herself defined it in a note she sent me to add to the text of her book in the voice of one of her characters: ‘When you’re on the screen, honey, no matter who you’re with or what you’re doing, the audience can only look at you – that’s star quality.’
By then it was late August, and we all decided that rather than rush the book out in our usual headlong way, we should wait until the spring, especially as it had been subscribed and advertised to the trade by another publisher and with a different jacket. Another reason was that Joan was getting married the following February and would be very much in the news then. Born in Peru, her charming husband (her fifth) Percy Gibson is a theatre producer and thirty-two years her junior. When asked how she felt about marrying a man so much younger, she laughingly quipped, ‘If he dies, he dies!’
Under Cover Page 36
