Larry was charming and friendly and came to our house several times and always brought wonderful presents for our children. One day he brought some high-class wooden toys from Galt, which I knew were expensive, very educational and sustainable, greatly desired by caring, concerned middle-class parents in the sixties.
I had a slight disagreement with him at the end when the final screenplay had been completed. I discovered that his name was going down as co-writer. I protested, knowing I had written almost every word, under Clive’s direction. I appealed to the Screen Writers Guild, which I quickly joined. I had to produce all the various versions I had done of the scripts myself – and they agreed with me, that I was the screen writer.
Larry then came to me almost in tears. He explained that his future was in films, this was his big break, he desperately needed as many screen credits as possible, whereas to me it did not matter, and my future was going to be writing books and journalism. In the end, I did get solus credit for the screenplay, but underneath it said: ‘Additional dialogue by Larry Kramer’. I was not totally happy with that wording, but accepted it and it pleased Larry. (Later, back in the USA, Larry went on to be a notable playwright and gay rights activist.)
I had hoped my film would be shot in Carlisle, where it had been set in the novel. I looked forward to impressing my old neighbours on our council estate, especially the ones on my paper round who had never given me tips at Christmas. But it was felt there were already too many gritty North of England films, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey. Instead it was decided the whole location of the film would be moved to a New Town. It was an interesting idea, and I could understand the reasoning. There had not been a film so far with such a setting, yet more and more New Towns were being planned.
The New Town chosen was Stevenage, just less than thirty miles from London. That meant costs were kept down. If the location had been any further away, they would have had to pay all the actors and crew overnight rates.
Margaret’s film was full of stars whereas mine had nobody of note. It was of course a teenage film, so most of the actors and actresses were young, apart from Denholm Elliott, in a minor role. Instead they tried hard to make a feature of introducing an unknown Barry Evans, as the hero, and Judy Geeson as a star in the making. I thought Barry looked attractive enough, but he did not convince me in the part. He came to our house one day, we had a walk on the Heath, and he told me his ambition in life was to have a herd of white horses. Oh help, as my other used to say. I much preferred the actor who played a lesser, wideboy-type character, Spike, who was Christopher Timothy, later well known for playing the vet in the long-running TV series, All Creatures Great and Small.
I didn’t think much of Judy Geeson either, who was supposed to be so alluring, panted after by everyone. I didn’t think she could act. But what did I know about acting. Nor was I pleased with my own screenplay. Despite all those meetings and rewrites, when it came to them acting the lines it all seemed so corny and banal. I had always felt the novel itself was funny, and touching, but that seemed to have been lost on the way to the screen. The dialogue was clunky and obvious. I can’t blame anybody but myself.
But the music was brilliant – with Traffic and Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group – who produced excellent tunes and background music all the way through. There was also an original element, thought up by Clive. In the novel, I had moments of fantasies, like many teenagers, imagining how things might turn out. Clive cleverly introduced moments of animation into the film, when Jamie, our hero, is having his reveries, created by the brilliant animator Richard Williams. It was unusual for the period to have animated scenes in a feature film. They did not quite work or fit, but they were imaginatively done.
Margaret’s film Georgy Girl was in black and white. Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which came out in January 1967, just six months after her film, was in full, glorious, state-of-the-art colour, and featured all those clichés of the sixties such as miniskirts, kipper ties, psychedelic shirts.
My novel, when it had been first published in 1965, had been seen as quite racy at the time. For many years, I used to meet people who had been in the sixth form and had read it on the back seat of school buses, under a plain cover. Can’t believe now there was anything rude in it, or sexy, but then I haven’t read it since I wrote it. Couldn’t face it. I still have not reread any of my books. Now and again I have had to look up a page or paragraph, when some reader has pointed out some glaring stupidity, but I have never sat down and read the whole thing again. I always find it a slog reading proofs, of anything, articles or books. I am always more pleased when I can move on to writing something new.
I did go on location to a river somewhere near Stevenage one day when they were filming a nude scene. Barry and Judy had to strip stark naked and go for a swim. Barry kept on getting an erection, till eventually they had to tie down his manhood with Sellotape. It might have been the freezing cold water that caused it, or of course the sight of the luscious naked Judy. Probably the former, for it turned out later that Barry was gay. That particular scene, with them naked, was cut out of the versions shown in the UK or USA, but was shown in Sweden. In the sixties we believed that all Swedes were stripping off naked and doing naughty things all the time. Hence the popularity of Swedish au pairs.
My film got rather snotty reviews, the critics feeling that it was vulgar and commercial. Margaret’s Georgy Girl got excellent reviews. It was in black and white and seen as an art film, while mine was in lurid colour with pop music and trendy clothes, which I tried to maintain was the reason the critics did not like it. Snobbism really, so I argued, but without much conviction.
All these decades later, each of them gets occasionally shown late at night on TV. There now seems to be more affection for Mulberry Bush, seeing it as a piece of amusing nostalgia, a good example of an awful sixties teenage film. In fact a year or two ago there was a retrospective evening at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. They showed the film and I answered questions about it. Not that I could remember much about it.
The premiere of Mulberry Bush was a swish affair at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus in January 1968. Lots of celebs of the time came, such as Paul McCartney and his fiancée Jane Asher. I did make sure I got invited, unlike Margaret to her film, as she did not care. I also got invited to the party afterwards which was at Tramps, the night club. Nobody talked to me or Margaret and we left early.
Very recently, I met Alan Johnson, the Labour MP, former Home Secretary, and he told me that he had christened his son Jamie, the name of my hero in Mulberry Bush, having just watched the film. No, he hadn’t thought much of it either, but he had loved the music.
The writing and making of the film had been spread over two years, since the novel had first appeared in 1965, by which time I had finished two more books, both published in 1966.
The first was a non-fiction book for Heinemann called The Other Half. I wonder now why I did not do another novel, to follow up the success of Mulberry Bush. Perhaps I was too well aware of my limitations as a novelist, compared with Margaret.
The Other Half was semi-sociological, consisting of interviews with the New Poor and the New Rich. I defined the New Poor as people who had to have a long and proper education and training, who contributed greatly to society, but were earning comparatively little money. My examples included school teachers, nurses and social workers. The New Rich had little or no education but were making small fortunes, such as a barrow boy working in a street market, or a hairdresser in a fashionable West End salon, such as Vidal Sasson. I did not make any heavy moral judgements or draw conclusions. Just presented their lives, as they were living it now, in 1966, alternating the chapters, the New Poor then the New Rich, deliberately of course highlighting the contrasts in their work and values.
The other book, The New London Spy, was one I edited for a new, young, thrusting, amusing Old Etonian publisher called Anthony Blond. It was
a guide book to underground or hidden London that most people did not know about, written by people in the know, or so we proclaimed. I had to find the writers, explain it all and brief them, then edit their work. Anthony Blond assumed that as Atticus I would have contacts everywhere.
One of the sections was about London vicars and London churches, which was quite scathing. I got John Betjeman to write it. He must have been hard up at the time to agree to it. I had interviewed him, for Atticus, which helped me approach him.
I went to see him in his lodgings, a very small and crowded flat in the East End. When I mentioned I was from Carlisle, he insisted on pressing upon me a two-volume antiquarian book from 1814 called Border Antiquities. I protested it was too valuable but he insisted, saying he had too many books and wanted an excuse to clear his shelves. I asked him to sign it. He wrote ‘Tae Hunter Frae John MacBetjeman’, a dedication which probably won’t make much sense, if anyone ever comes across it in the future.
Once the film was out, I did get approached about a couple of other film scripts, but I turned them down. I did not want to go through all those meetings and tutorials again. I had enough work with my full-time journalism job, plus my books. Looking back, I can’t believe that I managed to fit so much in during the sixties. Constantly cutting corners, that is probably the answer.
But I did agree to do a TV play. I was approached by Tony Garnett from the BBC who was a producer of the Wednesday Play, the most prestigious slot in original British TV drama. He was a cult figure in TV at the time, having produced two social classics, Up the Junction in 1965 and Cathy Come Home in 1966, which was directed by Ken Loach. Tony said he had liked the dialogue in Mulberry Bush, which was a surprise to me, and asked if I had an idea for a TV play.
I couldn’t think of anything at first, and then remembered my stage play, which had so nearly got performed a few years earlier, about the young man with two wives and two families. I rejigged it, changed the title from Where the Dragonflies Play, which was awful, and made it simply The Playground. It got made, got shown, got decent reviews, and had a good director and some decent actors – all of whose names I have now forgotten. It was one of those early BBC Wednesday Play dramas which was performed live, played at the time you were watching it. Most records of them were destroyed. If some viewer did have an early video machine, and managed to copy it, they probably wiped it off soon afterwards. I never managed to get a copy. So my TV career came to a dead end.
But my non-fiction book The Other Half got very favourable, encouraging notices. Despite not very good sales, the publisher asked if I had any other similar ideas. Imagine such a thing happening today. You are smartly dumped by almost all publishers if you don’t immediately make them money on your last book.
You would also find it hard today to persuade any half-decent publisher to publish a book of interviews. They would be more than likely to dismiss it as purely journalism, not worthy of a hardback. Unless of course you were a big name, such as a newsreader or a reality TV star.
Charles Pick, the boss at Heinemann, and I devised a book to be called The Class of ’66. In it I would interview a selection of people at British universities – students as well as lecturers, Oxbridge as well as Redbrick.
Charles’s own son Martin had just started at the new University of East Anglia, so I decided to do him. I also did a girl student at Sussex University, Buzz Goodbody, and went to Manchester and interviewed a young girl called Anna Ford who had become the first female president of their Students Union.
Halfway through working on the book, when I had done six interviews, a better, more exciting, book project came up. I immediately decided to stop interviewing any more university people. Not forever. Just for a year or so, as I still thought it was a good idea. In my mind, I planned to return to it, when this other, new project was completed, perhaps changing the title to The Class of ’68.
8
THE BEATLES
What had come up was the Beatles. In September 1966 I went to see Paul McCartney for an Atticus interview. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ had just come out and it seemed to me the words, not just the tune, were wonderful, possibly the best poetry we would hear in 1966, not that I am an expert on poetry.
I had earlier interviewed the Beatles, or at least tried to, in 1964 on the set of A Hard Day’s Night at a theatre in Charlotte Street. The girls in the audience screamed all the way through, so I couldn’t hear a word, but I managed to get myself on stage after they had finished playing and had a few words with John. He was making some complicated joke about a sign which said ‘Sound On’ by repeating the words ‘Sounds On, Sounds On’, which was a sixties phrase meaning something was good, something was possible.
My little piece never appeared. Either I failed to explain the joke, Nick Tomalin didn’t think it was amusing or the hierarchy had no interest in reading about the Beatles. Even in 1964 there was a feeling we knew everything we wanted to know about the Beatles.
By 1966, this was still a general feeling, that everything to do with Beatlemania was known, had been done, there was boredom in many quarters – outside of course the fans – which very often happens in Britain, when an initial and intense manic stage is over. But by going to ask Paul about the lyrics of one song, how he had written them – if indeed they were all his work – instead of asking them yet again about their hair or why they said ‘Yeh Yeh’ not ‘Yes Yes’, it seemed to me to be a chance to break some new ground.
I can’t say I remember, back in October 1962, ‘Love Me Do’ coming out, being too preoccupied with other excitements, such as looking for a house. ‘Twist and Shout’ seemed to be too shouty. But I could see how totally different they were from all the bubblegum mid-Atlantic pop groups we had been brought up on during the fifties. They did have a voice of their own and most importantly, every album was always an enormous development, moving on, trying new things, new sounds and instruments, unlike the normal pop groups. I rushed out for each new album, amazed they had done it again, wearing out the tracks by constant playing till I had memorised every note, every pause between the tracks so I knew what was coming next, even when there was silence.
This still must happen. Impressionable youth still fall in love with music which seems to be aimed at them, which takes them over, which they play constantly. Or does it? You always try to ascribe unique qualities to things you love, believing that it must be special, just because it speaks to you.
I don’t think the mass popularity, and mass acceptance, and mass love for the Beatles, from all sorts of people, all over the world, has quite been equalled. They were indeed a phenomenon. Today there is so much diverse music, coming from so many sources, listened to in so many different ways, that the overall impact of one song or one group is not quite the same and does not last as long.
I went to see Paul at his house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, which he had not long moved into. He still has it today, being at heart a conservative sort of feller. He appeared to live alone, apart from a housekeeper, no sign of his girlfriend Jane Asher, whom we had all read about in the papers. He seemed mature and confident for a young man of only twenty-four, not someone you might take liberties with. After three years of worldwide fame, he had clearly become used to the limelight, but he did not appear arrogant or bigheaded. There was something of the teacher about him, liking to explain things and make things clear.
The house was quite untidy, clearly lived in, which I felt was partly deliberate, to show he was not the sort of young millionaire obsessed by designer glitz and expensive glitter. It was vaguely arty, indicating he was artistic, appreciated the modern art world. There were pieces of modern sculpture around and on the mantelpiece in the main living room I noticed a Magritte – not the sort of painting you would normally associate with a lad from a Liverpool council estate. The garden was overgrown, again a statement that he was above the normal suburban mania for neat lawns and flowers. The other three Beatles had already moved out into the London suburbs, with lush
gardens and rolling lawns, while Paul was in the heart of London in an old period house.
‘People think we are not conceited – but we are,’ he said, when I complimented him on the house, and admired his possessions.
I remarked on the number of girls permanently outside his house, waiting for a glimpse. He said he did not despise them. ‘I don’t think they are humiliating themselves. I queued up at the Liverpool Empire for Wee Willy Harris’s autograph. I wanted to do it. I don’t think I was being stupid.’
I then got him to explain where the words of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ had come from, which was the point of the interview. He enjoyed taking me through his whole thought process, how the name which first came into his head was a woman called ‘Daisy Hawkins, picking up rice in a church where a wedding had been’. He had no idea where that line had come from. In Bristol, where he had been visiting Jane who was acting there, he was walking round and saw the name Rigby on a shop, and thought that would be a better name. ‘You got that? Quick pan to Bristol.’ This was quite a witty, self-aware comment to make, very sixth form-ish.
I wrote the interview in short sentences, rather staccato, working in all his best, smartest remarks. I referred to Mr McCartney and Mr Lennon, not Paul and John, without being satirical or mocking. That was being polite in print in the Sunday Times, back in 1966.
I got a note after it appeared from Ken Tynan, the star of our rival paper, the Observer. He agreed with me that the words of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ were indeed poetry, probably the best which would appear in all the sixties.
About three months later, in December 1966, I went to see Paul again, this time with a different hat on, as a screenplay writer. I went with Clive Donner in the hope that Paul might write the theme tune for the film we were working on. At the end of our chat, Paul said he would think about it, but he later said no.
But during the time I was with him, I suggested there should be a proper biography of the Beatles, a full-length hardback. I was surprised there had not been one, just a couple of fairly flimsy paperback books, one produced by the fan club and the other a slice of life on tour by an American journalist, Michael Braun.
A Life in the Day Page 8
