A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  He looked amazingly young and fresh-faced, with a lovely linen suit and a rose in his button-hole, floppy fair hair, very public schoolboyish. He had gone to Sherborne and Balliol, just the sort of background I would normally have been prejudiced against, someone who seemed to have had it easy in life, the looks, the charm, the exclusive education, with contacts and confidence, able to land a job on the Sunday Times straight from Oxford, while I had had to sweat it out for two years in Manchester and then on the Sunday Graphic.

  That did not actually worry me. I just thought lucky Tim. What concerned me was whether he could do the job or not – and he clearly could. We got on well, though I did get annoyed when he insisted on calling me Edward. Somehow he had found out it was my real first name and it amused him to address me as Edward or write me notes and letters addressed to Edward.

  It did of course amuse me, with my background, to be hiring someone from his background, something I never thought I would be in a position to do. That year, 1964, when I became Atticus, was the end of my silly obsession and persecution complex, feeling that people were prejudiced against me and always would be. It had all been in my head of course, seems so ridiculous now. Ever since, if anything, they have been prejudiced in favour of me, partly because of my background, which of course is equally unfair.

  It was not just me, in my own little world with my own little phobias. It was also happening out there. Suddenly, the world seemed to have reversed its old class prejudices and someone like me, with my interests, was now being given all the advantages, benefits of the doubt, space and encouragement.

  So much has been written about the sixties, mainly by people who were never there, and the image has grown up that it was all drugs, sleeping around, wild living. Not where I was, not in the circles I moved in. Ordinary people did none of those things. It only happened, if it happened at all, among a handful of pop stars or in Soho clubs. It was only in the seventies that the drug culture began to trickle down to ordinary young people doing ordinary jobs, in ordinary parts of the country.

  The big noticeable change in the sixties was one of attitude and deference, rather than drugs and sex. And I would say it began around 1964–65. The fact that I was being allowed to interview, even encouraged, to write about people from the so-called traditional lower social classes, as long as they had done something, achieved something, was a reflection of what was happening generally in society.

  In Britain, there had been strict class and professional hierarchies for so long, right up to and throughout the fifties, the sort of deference that the war had failed to eradicate, that in fact had made worse because the military mind had taken over, making people not questioning but accepting the status quo.

  In so many careers and professions, you had to come from the right background, or at least appear to have the right background and accent, hence people assumed the right accent, believing it was the way to get on. You can see and hear all this in those old pre-war and post-war films with even humble secretaries and receptionists having unbelievably posh accents.

  Even in the so-called creative professions, where you might assume it was talent that mattered most, people had to look and talk the part. Not just actors and actresses but photographers. I could not believe it when I interviewed Cecil Beaton just how posh he was, yet all he did was take snaps of women in frocks.

  Along with no longer having to have the right accent it became acceptable, and even fashionable, not to have had any proper training or education. You could take photos, cut hair, make clothes, make music, write novels, without having had to put in the years and pretend you were grander, more experienced, better educated than you were.

  Fashion designers just out of art school, or even those who had never been there were starting their own lines and had people rushing to buy their products.

  Art designers, on newspapers and magazines and in publishing, had traditionally been rather upper crust, or so they appeared. Many of them of course were just pretending, putting on airs, assuming graces. At the Sunday Times in the sixties a very grand, immaculately besuited art designer and typographer called Robert Harling used to wander in, as if straight from his club, at the end of the week and supervise the overall design of the paper. I could not see what he added, but I could see he was awfully smooth and sophisticated. He was a friend of Ian Fleming’s and had been a distinguished naval officer in the war.

  And then I met Alan Aldridge, someone of my age, who became a friend and neighbour and work colleague. He had the impressive title of Art Director of Penguin Books, traditionally an important position. Yet he had never been to art school and always talked about drawing as if it had an r not a w in the middle.

  He was one of the new breed of young people who got promoted to important jobs in the fashion and art and design world at a young age and became flavours of the month, got written about in the quality papers, people wanted to meet them and talk to them.

  I had always been fascinated by such people, along with gritty northern novelists, Merseyside pop groups and footballers. These were the people I wanted to meet, talk to, and write about. I had never wanted to interview bishops or ambassadors or cabinet ministers who had been the staple diet of columns like Atticus, and similar ones in the Telegraph and Times and other so-called Establishment papers, forever, or so it seemed to me.

  Gritty novelists had been around for some time, and jumped-up fashion designers, but the Establishment had largely ignored such people. They were not deemed worthy of our attention. Now suddenly they were fashionable.

  And so, once in charge of Atticus, I was able to rush around seeing people I wanted to see, for my own interest and amusement, knowing I would get space in the Sunday Times, of all papers, to indulge them, and myself, and probably annoy quite a few readers.

  In 1965 I went up to Manchester and interviewed a nineteen-year-old youth from Belfast called George Best who had just got into the Manchester United first team. He assured me he didn’t drink or smoke, though on a rare occasion he might have a lager. He was in digs with another boy and got very bored in the evenings as most players in the team were married, such as Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. He had been in awe of them from afar but now he found they were just ordinary blokes.

  His basic wage was £50 a week but that week he had earned £175, as he had three games, one of them an international for Northern Ireland. ‘What I’d like to be is a millionaire. If it means not playing football again from this minute on? Well perhaps I don’t want to be a millionaire after all.

  ‘I would like to have a flat of my own. But the boss, Mr Busby, thinks there might be temptations. Perhaps when I’m twenty-two. I’ve got no complaints, I like my landlady.’

  David Hockney seemed the sort of bright, chirpy northern lad made good, still with a strong Yorkshire accent. In 1966 he was twenty-seven and had just won a Gold Medal at the Royal College of Art. I went to interview him at an enormous but rather rundown flat in Bayswater.

  While staying recently in the USA, he and a friend were watching an advert on TV which said ‘Blondes have more fun’. So at two o’clock in the morning, slightly drunk, they both went out, bought some hair dye and became blonde. David had decided to remain blonde from then on, despite having naturally dark hair.

  In his lavatory I noticed a cut-out photograph from a newspaper of Denis Law, scoring a goal. I asked if he was a football fan. He said no, he just liked Denis Law’s thighs.

  The subs cut that remark out of the story, to save any gossip or legal problems. In 1966, homosexual activity could still be an offence. It was not till July 1967 that the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, as long as both were over the age of twenty-one.

  As a teenager I had always been a fan of the Goon Show, as most of us were, so I indulged myself by going to interview Spike Milligan in 1964. Spike recounted, using funny voices, that when Peter Sellers had got married to Britt Ekland, Spike had sent Peter a telegram saying: ‘You rotte
n swine, Bluebottle. You promised to marry me. Send me back my ring – Eccles.’

  Today, it would take too long to explain the names, and the funny voices, though I am sure Prince Charles would still laugh.

  Spike also remembered, in the days when they were hard-up and struggling after the war, how Peter Sellers had come to his flat door one night. ‘He was standing there stark naked with a tray of matches. In a Jim voice, he said, “Can I interest you in a thriving timber and sulphur business?” ’

  One of the modern young writers I interviewed in 1964 was James Baldwin, over from the USA. He was gay, but again this was never talked about. I walked round Bloomsbury Square with him. ‘I suppose I am exotic. A dancing doll. A Negro who is a writer.’ I complimented him on the Beatles-style suit he was wearing. He said he had bought it in Germany and had not heard of the Beatles at the time. ‘Perhaps it does look like theirs. But I could never follow their hair style.’

  I was always keen to do young writers and playwrights, fancying myself as one of course, and went to see Dennis Potter in 1966. He had come down from Oxford and become an angry TV playwright, causing lots of controversy with scenes about sex, violence, politics and the royal family. I was worried about doing him as I had met him when he was at Oxford, acting with Margaret in a university production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

  I always felt he didn’t like me – as I suspected he fancied Margaret. I was probably jealous of him. I did a fairly cheeky, mocking interview with him in 1966, which I was beginning to do, though telling myself I was just trying to amuse the reader. I described how he was working on a play called Message for Posterity, which was about a senile Tory Prime Minister, a bit like Churchill, which the BBC was worried about broadcasting. The play sounded a bit pretentious and self-important to me, but of course did not quite say so.

  I finished the piece with just one sentence. ‘You can’t keep these lads down, can you . . .?’

  Nothing he could object to, but he was not best pleased at being teased.

  In 1965 I interviewed Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn Waugh, who was seething after some bad reviews for a novel. He had listed all the names of his enemies in a black book. ‘I am incredibly vindictive. I have none of the humble acceptance of the civilised man.’

  As I left, he asked me to give a plug for his new book, but not in his words, put it in my words. Naturally I quoted him verbatim, as follows: ‘Can’t you slip in somewhere that my new book is brilliant? Oh, and if you have room, say furthermore it is selling very well . . .’

  He never forgave me for that. Years later he regularly got his own back in his Private Eye column with nasty remarks about me.

  I went to a see a new young playwright called Tom Stoppard in 1967, one of the first interviews he had given. At the age of twenty-nine, he had just had his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead put on at the National Theatre. He too, like George Best, said his ambition was to be rich. ‘Naturally I won’t be corrupted. I will sit in my Rolls-Royce, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.’

  I discovered he had not been to university and since leaving school at seventeen had worked as a local journalist, spending eight years on papers in Bristol. For a while, his ambition in life, so he said, so he maintained, had been to be me. I didn’t quote him saying that, as that would have been far too self-indulgent, even for me. But I believed him, of course. Which young provincial journalist in the mid 1960s would not have fancied having the space and freedom and fun of running the Atticus column in the Sunday Times?

  7

  FILM FUN

  I find it hard now to believe that both our novels got turned into films, appearing almost at the same time. They did not happen suddenly, all decided in a day. Talks and meetings, discussions and plans, went on for ages, appearing not to be going anywhere. Films creep forward incrementally, so there is not really a moment when they can say yes, it will be made. Only when I look back does it seem to have happened quickly, smoothly, inevitably, perhaps even miraculously, but at the time, the films seemed something of a distraction, not real, not our proper concern, keeping us from other things, involving us in meetings which we did not really want to go to and were glad when they were over, half hoping it would all collapse so we could get on with our real work.

  The producer who bought the rights to Georgy Girl was always going on about cinema noir and wanting long intellectual discussions, driving Margaret mad. It did sound to me like total pretentious time-wasting. Film producers have to be obsessive, to believe in the project day and night, whereas the writer is more like a hired hand, wanting to get on to the next thing.

  Margaret had been pregnant with Jake when it all began, so she had enough to think about, plus the house was still being knocked into shape. It was a while before a director was on board, Silvio Narizzano, and then finally a leading Hollywood company, Columbia, agreed to make it.

  Margaret was asked to do the film script, which she agreed to, thinking it can’t be hard, she knows the story. She did several versions but at the very end, Peter Nichols the playwright was brought in to do work on the final screenplay, which was quite a relief. They were given joint credit for the screenplay, with Margaret’s name first. These things matter in films.

  We got to know Peter Nichols and his wife, as they lived not far away. He was very funny, cynical and caustic, moaning about the new young playwrights like Tom Stoppard who seemed to be getting all the critical praise and best jobs. But Peter did go on to write some very successful plays, such as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, first produced in 1967, which was based on his experience of having a handicapped child, and then later the extremely funny army play Privates on Parade.

  Vanessa Redgrave was going to star in Georgy Girl at first but it clashed with some other job so her younger sister Lynn got the part, her first break, and made an enormous success of it. Charlotte Rampling was also relatively new and she played Meredith who in the film has a baby. Charlotte had never had a baby and didn’t appear to know what one looked like, or how to hold one, so the producer insisted she came to our house for tea to meet Margaret and hold baby Caitlin. Charlotte did not seem at all comfortable, rather austere and cool.

  James Mason had been a big star for decades and was utterly charming, and so was Alan Bates. James Mason had been Margaret’s mother’s favourite film star, so once we had met him, we had to tell her every detail. We both got invited on to the set at Shepperton to watch them filming, meet the cast and crew, but we only went once. It seemed such a faff, getting there, then standing around when nothing much was happening, except the same thing over and over again.

  Margaret did not go to the world premiere of Georgy Girl in the West End in July 1966. I am not even sure she got invited. Once a film is at that stage, they have lost interest in the original creator. Not that she was bothered. Or would have gone anyway. She did not see a future for herself in writing scripts and was just glad not to be involved any more.

  The film was a huge success, won a prize at Berlin and Cannes, and was particularly successful in the USA. It had cost only $400,000 to make but in a year had earned $7 million. The theme tune played by the Seekers was in all the charts. I read somewhere at the time that Jim Dale, who wrote the vocals – i.e. wrote the words for the song, not the music – earned £20,000 from the song, whereas Margaret, who had created the whole project, the novel and the original script, earned just £3,000. Which seemed unfair, but the film world has a different set of priorities to the book world. The writers get involved at a very early stage in a film, when there is little money, little hope it will ever get made. But when the paperback of the novel was later published, once the film was out, and the stars were on the cover, it did of course sell loads. Not that Margaret was at all interested.

  I got a lot more up front for the film version of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush – around £20,000 altogether. Unlike Georgy Girl, it was acquired from the very beginning by a big Hollywood company, United A
rtists. The director was Clive Donner who had directed What’s New Pussycat? and he had done a successful film version of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.

  I too was hired to do the first screenplay, which I jumped at, not realising how much time it would entail, having to fit it in with my work as Atticus. Luckily I had Tim Heald helping out by then. He probably felt the same about me as I had about Nick Tomalin, leaving him in the office to do all the boring stuff while I swanned off to attend script meetings.

  I had to go once a week or so to Clive’s flat off Marylebone High Street. It was like a tutorial, arriving with my essay. Clive would read what I had written, go over it, discuss it, make suggestions, and then I would have to go away and do it again. Very often he would want me to write a brand-new scene, not in the book, which he had just thought of. I would struggle with it all week in the evenings after work, and then duly bring it back to Clive. He would say fine, that is interesting. Oh no, we are not going to use it, I just wanted to see what you would do with it, so thanks. Which would leave me spitting. I have always hated unused copy.

  A young, handsome, Ivy League American called Larry Kramer began to appear at these film script meetings. I could not at first work out who he was, what his role was. I thought perhaps he was Clive’s boyfriend, yet on the other hand, Clive did appear to have a girlfriend, Penelope Mortimer, the first wife of John Mortimer, who herself was a very good novelist.

  Clive eventually explained that Larry was simply an assistant producer, called in by the American film-makers in Hollywood, to keep an eye on the script, make sure it did not become too English and therefore hard for Americans to understand. The only thing I remember Larry querying was the word knickers, as in ‘oh knickers’, a very mild English expletive, or one boy asking another boy: ‘Did you get into her knickers?’