Stardust

by Ray Connolly

  Despite their lack of experience, or perhaps because oi it, the Stray Cats as a group had stage vitality. Their act had balls. As soon as the lights went down and the kids were up and dancing they knew how to keep them moving. J.D. worked like a dervish in the background, hitting everything in sight with his whirling drumsticks, while Johnny, Stevie and Jim sang their hearts out. By the interval their throats were parched but there was only time to drink a bottle of beer each, secreted in their instrument cases since the club didn’t have a drinking licence, and they were off again. Normally they would have gone through all the rock hits of the period like Some Other Guy. She Was Just Seventeen or Shop Around, but on impulse Jim decided to try something different. Going to the centre of the stage he coughed and then addressed the audience: ‘Now we’d like to do one of our own songs … Make Me Good…’ Instantly he realized his mistake. It wasn’t that the audience moaned. It was just that so many of them sat down. Nervously he looked at his co-writer Stevie. ‘One-two-three-four …’ he shouted, and studiously avoiding Johnny’s supercilious smirk made his way into his song. It was a disaster. If there was one thing an audience of kids didn’t want to hear it was a home-made song. They paid to come in and hear hit songs, songs they knew, songs they could dance to. That was what Johnny had always said. And the audience reaction seemed to be proving him right. But if that was the case how on earth did people like the Beatles ever get round to doing any of their own stuff. They didn’t sing Twist and Shout all night. People listened to their songs. Jim couldn’t understand it.

  ‘Now I’d like to do an old Everly Brothers hit … When Will I Be Loved?’ Johnny’s voice broke into Jim’s daydreaming and with a ripple of applause the dancers took to the floor again, and Johnny’s nasal whinnying began again.

  ‘Sod ‘em,’ shouted Stevie into his ear during Johnny’s solo part, ‘the song’s too bloody good for them.’ Jim would like to have believed that to be the truth, but in his heart he knew there must be another reason.

  ‘Right, you lot. This is all the tight bugger thinks you’re worth.’ Mike threw open the back door to the van and Alex, Stevie, J.D., Johnny and a girl climbed awkwardly down. ‘Just go to the door and tell them Nolan sent you. They’ve got a room for you. You’re expected.’

  Jim began to climb down from the passenger seat to join the rest of the group.

  ‘Stay here, you silly sod.’ Mike had closed the door again, and as the four Stray Cats plus one made their cautious way into the foyer of the dingy little hotel, refuge mainly for commercial travellers too tired to make the last lap to London, he quickly accelerated away into the darkness.

  ‘What’s the idea of giving the others the hotel-room?’ Jim was beginning to protest at Mike’s high-handed organizing of him.

  Mike regarded him cynically: ‘Are you mad? Who wants to sleep three to a bed in a smelly boarding house having to watch your mate Johnny going in and out of that bird like a fiddler’s elbow all night?’

  And without further explanation he drove quickly back to the wasteland, pulled into the shadow of the rear of the cinema, parked, and climbing quickly into the back, set about making himself comfortable for the night, with the aid of some blankets he’d retrieved from his caravan, a torch, a copy of Playboy and a pencil.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Jim was watching him in some fascination as he drew on the centrefold of the magazine.

  ‘Doodling.’ Mike was too involved in his work to want to talk.

  Jim changed the subject: ‘You know, I really think that with a bit of luck we can make it …’ He looked at Mike for encouragement, but receiving none, carried on. ‘You know … into the big time.’ Mike was still showing no interest. ‘All we need are the right breaks, Mike. What would you do if you made it big?’

  Mike paused in his drawing, irritated by Jim’s continual nagging: ‘I’d get an orchard.’

  Jim was nonplussed.

  ‘That’s it. I’d get an orchard of pudenda trees … or are they bushes?’ And seeing that Jim still didn’t know what he was talking about Mike sardonically opened up the centrefold of Playboy to show Jim where he had been re-pencilling in the lady’s pubes, so carefully painted out in those days. ‘Looks more familiar now, doesn’t it?’

  Jim smiled his due appreciation of Mike’s joke but he wanted to be serious. With Mike he found he now had somebody in the group with whom he could talk, and he was going to talk even if Mike didn’t want to listen.

  ‘No … seriously,’ he said, stumbling for words, ‘I think if I ever really made money I think I’d like to put some of it aside, maybe open a ladies’ hairdressers. You know, something to keep me after I finish with the group. And you know what I’d do? I’d buy a bungalow for my mum.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Mike was virtually snorting with disgust.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Jim felt almost offended.

  ‘A bungalow for your mum. You’ve been reading too many interviews with the stars in Reveille. It’s all a lot of cobblers, all that crap. Anyway, you’re never going to get anywhere so long as you’re stuck with that loser.’

  ‘What loser?’

  ‘What loser?’ Mike did a perfect imitation of Jim’s gormlessness. ‘That knee-tremble Johnny. The rest are all right, and you’re not bad, but he wants to tuck the whole world safely up in his jock-strap. You’ll never be able to buy even a pre-fab so long as Johnny’s playing at being Troy Donahue. He’s a real loser. Honest. I can see it in his eyes.’

  And with that Mike summarily ended the discussion by putting out his torch and shouting: ‘Good night, Jim.’

  The hotel landlady wasn’t too sure what to make of the four Stray Cats and one girl who had turned up. Certainly Mr Nolan had ‘phoned, she said, but he hadn’t said anything about a girl, not that it was any of her business, she was sure, and if Johnny insisted that the young lady was his sister, well of course, she’d just have to take his word for it. But it certainly didn’t seem right, she wanted them to know, a young girl going up there with four boys all on her own. Still she looked old enough to look after herself, and as she said it wasn’t any of her business …

  And so that was that; for the first time in weeks the Stray Cats would have beds to sleep in. That is, everyone except Stevie. Once inside the room Johnny pulled his new girl down on one bed, and with the authority of a general instantly decided who would sleep where. Stevie being his oldest friend, was naturally the one to suffer.

  ‘We’ll have this bed,’ he said, sliding his hand up the little lady’s sweater, to the envy of his colleagues. ‘J.D. and Alex can have the other. You don’t mind being on the floor do you, Stevie? J.D.’ll lend you his sleeping bag.’

  ‘Sodding hell,’ said Stevie.

  ‘Oh, come on. I’d do it for you. You know I would.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ said Stevie.

  But by that time the fiddler was getting into tune.

  Chapter Five

  Mike never explained to the group how he managed to row poor old Ronald Harrap into the path of their shared fortunes. And neither, when the time came, did he explain his departure. He never felt he had to explain anything to anyone, and although Johnny held him in high suspicion he didn’t let that deter him from his mission in life-which was to make himself, Jim and the Stray Cats (in that order) rich.

  He hadn’t been with the group very long before he realized that what they desperately needed was a manager, someone with some muscle who could give them that extra push up the ladder. Mike could do all the manoeuvring and fiddling once they found themselves on the right rungs but he didn’t have the contacts to make the leaps on his own. That was where Ronald Harrap came in. Harrap was a walking tragedy: nearing 44 when he met the Stray Cats, he was a lonely, self-made man, an owner of a chain of launderettes in towns along the south coast, a man for whom life had everything but a hobby. Unmarried (the group liked to think he was queer and baited him no end although there was no actual evidence to support such a belief) he was rich and lonely a
nd bored. And then along came Mike and before he knew it he was managing a pop group - and had found himself with six new lodgers.

  Both situations suited him to a certain extent. He had a large house, bought really because he thought that someone with his wealth should have the biggest and the best of everything, so there was ample space for the group, although since there was a bed short Stevie had to sleep on the floor of Johnny’s room. And he actually did have some contacts in show-business, dating back to the time before he went into launderettes when he Worked the boards as a ventriloquist. He’d never been much good (critics pointed out rather unkindly at the time that there seemed more life in his dummy, Geronimo) but to him at twenty it seemed not an unglamorous way to make a living. And remaining single, he’d kept in touch with his contacts through the years. He was like that. He kept in touch with everyone, despite their hints.

  He was an honest person and he never expected anyone to treat him with less than one hundred per cent honesty and loyalty. And he was a man who believed very much in trust: ‘I won’t sign a contract with you boys because I don’t want you to feel that I’m tying you down,’ he would tell the Stray Cats. ‘If ever you think that I’m holding you back or not doing my job then you know you’re free to leave.’ To which Mike would always throw up his hands in horror, as though the idea of the Stray Cats leaving Ronald Harrap were too ridiculous to believe. Which at first it was because as it turned out Harrap was good at his job. As a landlord he was perfect in that he gave the group the complete run of his house, and as a booking agent he and his secretary were hives of industry and oils of efficiency compared with the organizations with which the group had previously been connected. So by February 1964, while the Beatles were beginning their winter conquest of America, the Stray Cats were getting a neat little reputation for themselves up and down the south coast resort towns. And this, Harrap never tired of saying, was only the beginning.

  On the afternoon of February 25 conversation among the Stray Cats was whether or not Sonny Liston would allow Cassius Clay out of the ring alive in their first fight to take place that night. Clay was the complete enigma, and apart from the fact that he had beaten Henry Cooper in London a few months earlier and once been an Olympic champion, no one knew too much about his boxing prowess. The world however, was certain that Sonny Liston was unbeatable. The papers had been saying that with certainty ever since he took the title off Floyd Patterson and then knocked him into smithereens in the rematch. Like all champions before and since, Sonny Liston was, in the eyes of sports commentators everywhere, invincible - that is until someone had the temerity to beat him. But tonight was not going to be that night, of that the morning papers were certain, and it had been with some pique that Mike had earlier thrown them aside and gone off to Harrap’s office to check on a late booking earlier that morning. He would just love it if Clay could win. The world needed a giant-killer. He needed an idol.

  Breakfast for the Stray Cats was between two and three in the afternoon. They had never been early risers but now, living in luxury they had never known not even at their mothers’ knees, they were wallowing in sloth and idleness.

  ‘A quid says that Clay ends up a quaking wreck on his arse after two rounds.’ Stevie was reading the Daily Express with interest.

  ‘Don’t let Mike hear you say that, he thinks he’s God,’ said Jim, taking out his mouth organ and playing the theme from the film Genevieve.

  The Beatles are top in America.’ Johnny was reading the Billboard charts in the New Musical Express, while noisily eating a dish of Sugar Puffs.

  Jim didn’t comment. He’d already read the N.M.E. five times that week. Everybody had except Johnny. He really was naff.

  ‘Fancy a game of cricket, Alex?’ J.D. had finished his breakfast and grabbing an empty milk bottle, tossed a soggy peach to Alex. ‘You bowl, I’ll bat.’

  Alex giggled and threw the peach towards him. J.D. lashed at it, and hit it hard so that it splattered against a picture of Ronald Harrap standing outside one of his launderettes. The whole of the large, ultra-modern pine kitchen was decorated with pictures of Ronald outside the capitals of his widespread soap-suds kingdom.

  That’s six!’ shouted J.D. leaping in excitement as the piece of peach dripped from the photograph: ‘Six if you hit a photograph, four for the walls. Bowl again Alex!’

  And with the rest of the group sheltering behind whatever objects came to hand, a perpetually blushing Alex picked up the remnants of peach from the floor and bowled carefully down to the manic J.D. Once again the batsman lashed out at it with his milk bottle, but this time the peach failed to become properly airborne and was driven hard right back at Alex, hitting him firmly on the zip at the front of his jeans and splashing obscenely around the tops of his thighs. Alex giggled and gingerly wiped the remains of the wet fruit from his trousers with a Holiday in Madeira tea cloth.

  By now J.D. had assumed the voice and mannerisms of cricket commentator John Arlott: ‘And Clover drives that tempting googly right past square leg towards the boundary and into the crutch of the Bickerstaffe Dairy Queen of 1928. A superb innings ended by a magnificent crutch.’

  At that moment the sound of the front door being slammed broke into his schoolboy dreams and theatrically retreating against one wall, he held his milk bottle in front of him as though to protect his virtue: ‘Careful lads, here comes Laundrette Lil. Backs to the wall.’ By common and unkind usage Ronald Harrap had come to be known as either Laundrette Lil or The Washerwoman.

  The other Stray Cats were still giggling childishly when Ronald Harrap, closely followed by Mike, came into the kitchen. The two surveyed the mess that the Stray Cats had made with some distaste, but rather than reprimand his lodgers Ronald moved instantly to the waste-disposal unit and began to rid his kitchen of bacon rinds and eggshells and cigarette butts, the squalid remains of the various breakfasts.

  ‘Picnic time for teddy bears?’ Mike looked at the mess and shook his head derisively.

  ‘You trying to be funny?’ Johnny was already spoiling for a fight.

  Mike dismissed him completely: ‘Not really,’ he said and sitting down at the table began to read the early edition of the afternoon newspaper, gloating over the front page picture of Cassius Clay.

  ‘You caught us unawares. We were having a wonderful time today.’ Stevie was trying to be witty but it wasn’t really working. Everybody ignored him.

  ‘I think Ronald has something to tell you,’ said Mike deliberately not looking up from his paper. Sometimes he just felt disgusted by the adolescent behaviour of the Stray Cats. They really ought to know better at their age.

  The group all turned to Harrap.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing yet. Nothing at all, boys …’ These were the moments when Mike really did wonder if Harrap might not really be a pouf. He always wanted coaxing so much. No one was interested in hearing about nothing, but from the way Harrap had denied it, everyone knew there was indeed something. The Stray Cats looked at their manager and landlord coldly, willing him to carry on talking.

  Harrap glanced round to Mike for warmth or encouragement but finding none he decided to bash on alone: ‘Well, there’s just a chance that I might be able to introduce you to …’ he was becoming shy now … ‘to a friend of mine … in the business … a music publisher.’ He stopped and looked at the Stray Cats. Their faces remained expressionless. They had heard stories like this before. Harrap blundered on: ‘I think he might be able to help.’

  ‘Fan-bloody-tas-tic!’ It was Johnny’s wilful sarcasm that came as the first reaction. The first emotional punctuation. Harrap looked round at the other boys, already hurt but not knowing how to best please this bunch of youths who appeared to have no thought for anyone other than themselves. He decided it was best to carry on.

  ‘I’m going to London tonight for a meeting … you never know.’

  Having said everything Ronald Harrap now felt he could breathe again. He looked round his little audience for thanks. Their fa
ces had remained impassive.

  ‘Well it’s about time you started earning your ten per cent,’ said Johnny.

  Johnny was possibly the most ungracious person Ronald Harrap had ever met and for once he began to defend himself: ‘Well, you are living here rent free, you know. I think that ought to be worth something.’

  J. D. Clover, still standing with his back against the kitchen wall, grinned and nodded his head vigorously: ‘I can honestly say my underpants have never been cleaner.’

  Hurt and embarrassed Harrap turned away from them all. He really couldn’t understand what it was that drove them to bait him all the time. He was certainly doing his best for them. Thank God Mike was grateful.

  At that particular moment Mike was feeling particularly disgusted with the Stray Cats. He sometimes felt years older than they were and although Jim never joined in the childish bantering he wished that he could get his colleagues to grow up. Putting down his newspaper Mike turned to the group: ‘For anyone who’s interested, you’re playing the university tonight as a replacement for the Peacemakers. You’re on last … after those birds with the tits and arses from Birmingham … you know, the Femettes.’

  Jim’s face lit up: ‘You mean the Thunderthighs. That’s good news.’ Now what’s he up to, thought Mike.

  Hands, knees and bumps-a-daisy went the Femettes (although not necessarily in that order) as they drove their bodies into a highly mechanized muscular display of jerks and grinds more or less in rhythm with the lines:

  I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still