Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Nothing happened to them in the end, so presumably Ronnie thought better of it, but this wasn’t the last time that day I’d inadvertently end up putting someone else in the frame. One of Ron’s more upbeat topics of conversation was telling me about how when he got out he was going to go on a round-the-world cruise. Whether he meant that last word in both its usual senses Ronnie didn’t make clear, but he did announce – leg twitching particularly forcefully at this point – that he was planning to take me with him.

  I didn’t think this was too good an idea for obvious reasons, but because I was still excited about the fact that this film seemed to be happening, I did mention a mate of mine who I thought might be good for a part in it: ‘You know the family, Ron. It’s Terry Murphy’s boy, Glenn Murphy.’ My old mate Glenn from the Repton was getting started as an actor around that time, and I knew he’d be perfect for the film, but afterwards I realised I had kind of dropped him in it. He’s a good-looking man, Murph, and I think he did have a meet with Ronnie in the end which proceeded along very similar lines. There’s not too much else to do in Broadmoor, after all, so talking to actors must’ve been a distraction. Our conversation was reasonably amicable apart from the leg thing and the Bob Hoskins thing (which I enjoyed telling Bob about years later – there was a smile on his face at the time, but you could see the cold air hitting the back of his neck). I was watching and listening to Ronnie very closely to prepare myself for the role, and the thing that most struck me about him was how different he was to the way people normally portray gangsters. His voice had that kind of old London sound to it where you could almost feel his mouth making shapes around the words.

  Another person I ended up spending a fair bit of time with who talked like that was Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery. He was an absolute gent, but I think I’d better save that story for another time.

  As the Krays film got closer to getting the green light – I was gonna play both Ronnie and Reggie by that time, with the whole thing being done in split screen – Don Boyd also put me in touch with the Krays’ mum, Violet. She’d moved out of the house on Vallance Road by then and into some flats at the back of the Repton. I had a really good day with her and she gave me some blinding photos, which I sadly can’t find, of the twins with Billy Hill, who was an early face from Brighton Races. As far as Violet was concerned, she was just a normal East End mum and they were her boys. She didn’t really want to think too much about all the people they’d hurt or killed.

  The Krays film didn’t happen in the end. Well, it did, but in another form. I think there were some financial complexities of some kind and the project changed hands. Ray Burdis from the Anna Scher mob took it over and he wanted it to go in a more glamorous direction, so he cast the Kemp brothers instead of me. I had no regrets about it – these things happen and I actually thought the two Spandau Ballet boys did a blinding job in the end.

  I didn’t come out of that Broadmoor trip empty-handed either. I’d hit it off quite well with Alex Steene, and when the film didn’t happen he asked me, ‘Do you need a few quid, son, because work’s not that good at the moment? Come up West and answer the phone for me.’ At this point, given that you’re talking to someone who’s a very well-respected face, you’re wondering what the fuck you might be getting yourself into. But it turned out to be a straight business, albeit a straight business that I always thought would make a great sitcom.

  Alex’s set-up was called The Unobtainables, and they were essentially high-class ticket touts. They traded out of an office in Panton Street, just near Leicester Square, selling city debentures at Wimbledon or the best seats at the rugby.

  Anything you wanted The Unobtainables – as the name suggested – could get, and they’d pay a good price to get it as well. The ticket justified the means. Alex gave me a desk and a phone, and I soon found that I was pretty good at it. Basically it was the same thing I’d done on the markets – buying and selling commodities – only this time you were dressed a bit smarter, and there was less chance of being hit on the head with a flying cauliflower.

  What I liked about working there was that you weren’t hurting anyone. You were giving people something they wanted, and if they could afford to pay the money you were asking, that was up to them. Most of the clients were big companies in the City who were writing it all off, anyway. It was getting towards the mid-eighties by then, and there was a bit more money around.

  The really funny thing about the job was the other people who worked there. As well as me, we had a couple of other actors. First there was Patrick Holt, a tall veteran of the Rank era who also played one of the old boys in the Roger Moore film, The Sea Wolves. He was a lovely stylish fella, very well spoken – in fact I once remember him telling me, ‘You could’ve been my batman during the war’. He also gave us a fantastic recipe for goulash, which Elaine still cooks to this day.

  Then there was Derren Nesbitt, who’d been quite a big star in the sixties and seventies, and played the sadistic SS officer in Where Eagles Dare. But the guv’nor when it came to selling tickets was a guy called Michael, who’d never acted in anything. He loved a drink so much that one night he went out for a beer in the West End and woke up on a boat in Norway. We had murders trying to get him back that day because there was a big deal depending on him. It was quite a high-pressure job in a way, because if you fucked up you knew who you had to deal with.

  One day, a load of police swarmed the office. They were top-level Old Bill from Scotland Yard, and I assumed it was nothing to do with The Unobtainables because we were all working in the other room and we never got touched. But when I poked my head round the door to see what had happened, I found out that someone had sold two tickets for the Trooping of the Colour that were right next to where John Nott was going to sit. Given that he was Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Defence at the time, this was a major security breach.

  All they wanted to know was who had sold the tickets, but no one would admit to it, so I put my hand up and said, ‘I did it’, even though I didn’t know if I had or not. The police said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Alex rents me the office next door and I do a bit of buying and selling for him.’ When they asked me who I bought them off I just said, ‘A couple of geezers came in. I didn’t know who they were.’ It turned out that it had been a couple of soldiers who’d come in with the tickets hoping to make a few quid, but it wasn’t me they’d sold them to.

  Alex’s other business interests did sometimes make their presence felt in Panton Street. He was a Yorkshireman who was known for his tact and discretion, so that marked him out from the crowd for a start. And he was so good at not so much sitting on the fence as bringing people together that his office functioned almost like a relationship counselling service for London’s biggest faces. He’d summon all the different firms to try and stop things getting nasty when there was a difference of opinion. It was fascinating to watch him in action, but sometimes when I’d hear Alex calling ‘Ray-mond’, because he wanted me to sit in on one of those meetings, I’d think, ‘I’d rather not, thanks.’ If it all went pear-shaped, I might end up being the patsy.

  Sometimes you’d feel like you needed a blue helmet from the UN just to go into work. Notorious adversaries like the Richardsons from South London and Johnny Nash from North London would come in and sit round his table together. The interesting thing was that on the face of it, nobody wanted a row. Everything seemed to get resolved and they’d all shake hands at the end, but you’d never be quite sure if the handshake was proper or not.

  These guys were the last of the old guard by that time – a lot of them had done their bit of porridge, and all they were after was a quiet life. It was the younger fellas coming through who’d tend to be more hot-headed and throw threats around, and the carnage you’d hear about in later years suggested that Alex’s softly-softly way of reconciling gangland factions might have died with him.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE APOLLO STEAKHOUSE, S
TRATFORD

  One of the best trips I ever went on for The Unobtainables was to Salzburg in Austria, where they filmed The Sound of Music. Alex wanted me to get tickets for a Leonard Bernstein concert for some geezers in the City. So I flew out there all suited up with twenty large distributed in various different pockets and set up a meet with the concierge of one of the best hotels in town. I’ve always had this feeling that if you really look after a top-notch concierge, he can probably sort you out with pretty much anything you want. So it proved on this occasion, as I gave him his bit of dough and he got me twenty prime tickets for the opening night, all at face value, which was a touch.

  It was very The Third Man – swapping envelopes on the continent – and I got back to London expecting Alex to be ecstatic, which he was. I was waiting for him to give me my drink, or whatever other kind of bonus he thought was appropriate. It never came and it never came, until eventually he tried to slip me a measly few quid. I said, ‘I think you’d better keep that, Alex. You probably need it more than me.’ I suppose it was just that old face’s mentality of ‘Give someone just enough and they need to come back, give them too much and they’ll be gone.’ But whatever the reason, it was point taken at my end.

  As it happened, the dates I’d been given were wrong, and that’s why I’d been able to buy the tickets so easily. Luckily, it was the City boys’ fault not mine, so there was a bit of a scream-up about that and everyone went potty back at the office. That’s not the point of the story, though.

  The thing I’ll never forget about that Salzburg trip were these Hare Krishna geezers who were talking to me in this park where I was waiting to see the concierge. I’ll have a chat with anyone when I’m bored, and they were nice enough people. They were trying to sell me their way of life – saying I’d never want for anything if I joined them – and I was smiling to myself thinking, ‘I’ve got twenty large in my pockets. How much cash can that robe hold?’

  I don’t know if what they were telling me about reincarnation got in my head – the same way that thing my mate at school told me about the tape rewinding did – but I had a really strange moment of déja vu as I walked around the corner out of that park. It was almost like I knew where everything was going to be before I’d even got there . . . This clock on the right, that shop on the left . . . I’d never visited the place, but I knew exactly where everything was. The only rational explanation I could come up with afterwards was that it was a location I remembered from The Sound of Music.

  When I was a kid watching films like that one or Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge on the River Kwai on the big screen, I never dreamed I’d be up there myself one day. Sometimes it can be disappointing when you come across the people who’ve made the movies you’ve loved in real life. I met the director David Lean (the man behind those last two films) early on in my career when he was gonna do Mutiny on the Bounty. I normally get on well with directors, but he was quite a rude man.

  You know as soon as you walk into the room whether they want you or not, and it was plain he didn’t like the cut of my jib, but I persisted because I was such a fan of the things he’d done in the past. I asked him, ‘What’s this one all about then, David?’ He said, ‘Why do you want to know?’ So I told him how much I’d loved his work and that I was really interested in what he was going to do this time round, but he just didn’t want anything to do with me.

  The only thing that made me feel better about it was a few years later when I went to a talk Alec Guinness gave in a small room at the Young Vic. Guinness had been in a lot of Lean’s films so I asked him what he thought of him and he said, ‘A wonderful film-maker, but what a horrible nasty man!’ So it wasn’t just me then . . .

  If you’ve grown up watching films starring the Alec Guinnesses and the Richard Burtons and the Peter O Toole’s of this world, you can’t help seeing that as the gold standard everyone should aim for. But then you look at yourself and you know you can’t even speak the Queen’s English. So you think, ‘Well, how is that gonna work?’ In the phase of my life when I was one of The Unobtainables, it still wasn’t really working yet. In fact, I don’t think I’d look at a performance I’d done and think it was good enough until Nil by Mouth more than fifteen years later.

  But I was learning, however slowly. I saw a lot of things go down in those two years I worked for Alex Steene. That guy Alan Lake, who used to knock about with Diana Dors – he came in a lot. They really loved each other those two, and Alan was a blinding bloke – a bit of a nut-nut, but I did like him. He used to come in the office and do handstands. Anyway, a terrible thing happened one night when we all went down the Lyceum together. Diana was there – she knew all the chaps and she was good friends with Alex. But when Alan walked in the room, the whole audience booed him. I never knew why – there must have been something in the papers – but those are the kind of things that stay with you.

  It’s weird the way people think at times. I was indoors at the maisonette in Enfield once (it did happen sometimes) when a policeman came round. He told me that a guy who’d attacked an old car-park attendant on the King’s Road in Chelsea had claimed as part of his defence that he wasn’t there because he was having a drink with Ray Winstone. I didn’t even know the guy – he must’ve seen me in a film or on TV and thought, ‘Oh, he’ll vouch for me.’ Like you’re gonna vouch for a geezer who’s beaten up some old car-park attendant, anyway!

  It was a fucking joke – even the copper was laughing. I think he knew it was all cobblers. He was a nice copper, actually – I could accept that they existed now, thanks to Sergeant Alan. This was just one of those shock realisations which were dragging me kicking and screaming into the world of the adult. It’s hard to look back and pick out one moment when you really started growing up. But I’ve got to do it, otherwise I can’t really justify calling this book Young Winstone and finishing it before I become the international Hollywood love god who Matthew McConaughey knows and envies today.

  I’m not one of those dads who’ll tell you that they suddenly understood everything about the world the moment they had their first child. As I’ve said already, my approach to parenting as a younger man – certainly with my first daughter Lois, hopefully a bit less with Jaime – was more in line with that of an earlier generation. Mum’s job is to be at home with the kids, while geezers go out and get the bread and butter then go to the pub because they’ve been working all week and they deserve it. The catch is, sometimes even if they haven’t been working all week, they still go to the pub anyway.

  I was still out and about a lot in East London. My eating place of choice – where I’d now go with Tony Yeates or some of the other boys – had graduated two stops down the Central Line from the Venus steakhouse in Bethnal Green to the Apollo in Stratford. Steakhouses often have classical-sounding names because they’re usually run by Greek fellas, and Panny and Gilly, the two geezers who owned the Apollo, kept a blinding gaff. They did great grills and made lovely margaritas. You’d see all the East End glamour in the Venus over the years: Page 3 girls and West Ham’s Frank McAvennie – old Mackers – he was a good mate of mine. There was a party atmosphere and the grub was great – we took Phil Daniels in there a few times, and Perry Fenwick who plays Billy Mitchell in EastEnders.

  Given how keen I always was to be back in the East End as a teenager, I suppose it’s strange I wasn’t moving heaven and earth to persuade Elaine that we needed to live there. I’m not going to say East London had become a state of mind for me, because that would sound a bit poncey, but the sense of belonging which endured from my childhood there was definitely something I carried with me – off-screen and on: a kind of happiness, in a way.

  It was important for me to have that, given that I was working in a business where I didn’t always feel I belonged. And the sense of me being someone who knew who they were was probably something casting directors were picking up on once I started to get a bit more work. The ability to fully inhabit a place you don’t actually live in is what actin
g’s all about, after all.

  I came out of the job with The Unobtainables to another regular gig, this time as Will Scarlett in the ITV series Robin of Sherwood. It lasted three years and was a big breakthrough in terms of knowing what I was doing and all-round professionalism. But some very serious things happened while I was going back and forth to Bristol playing one of Robin’s Merrie Men, the kind of things that don’t really leave you any other option than to grow up.

  The first sucker punch was my mum getting cancer. She had it for two years before finally dying when she was fifty-two and I was twenty-eight. The reason cancer is such a very cruel disease is because it leads you down an alley of thinking, ‘Oh, you look alright today, you look good – maybe you’ve turned a corner’, but then you go round that corner and there the cancer is waiting for you again. I was looking at all these special diets for her and places she could go to maybe have another chance – even fucking faith-healing starts getting into your head because you will grab at any old twig in the hope that it might turn into an olive branch.

  To be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve ever got over my mum’s death. You’ve got your five basic senses in life – smell, taste and the other three – but on top of that there’s a more general sense of yourself and the place you occupy in the world. Some people get that from religion, but as far as I’m concerned it comes from the people you love and the people who love you. And that higher sense kind of went from me a bit for a few years after my mum died. I lost it, and I’m not sure I’ve fully got it back, even now, because the connection a person has with their mum is like no other. You’re from your mum, you’ve come out of her; two thirds of our bodies are water, and it all flows in the same direction.