Keith Moon Stole My Lipstick

by Judith Wills

  It all worked out rather well for a time – he got to record a single, ‘Heart and Soul’, which was actually played on the radio and wasn’t too bad at all. He did some gigs, became a kind of 1960s Z-list celebrity, and I had plenty of fun off the back of his success.

  Riding round town in his Zodiac (or whatever similar car of the day it was; I only ever noted the colour) beat the bus any day, and I also had the kudos of taking Billy Fury’s brother home to visit Mum, who by this time was living with my grandmother back in Buckingham, and who had always been almost as big a fan of Billy Fury as I was.

  Because of Jason, I also got to know Billy and his personal manager, Hal Carter, Hal’s wife Sam and his team of helpers and other artistes.

  Hal and Sam lived in a small flat in Osbaldestone Road, Stoke Newington. By the time their first baby, Warren, was born, we were quite good friends and I began babysitting for them from time to time; an arrangement which came to an abrupt and understandable end one winter evening a while later. Warren was asleep in the bedroom, being kept warm with a gas stove, and I was in the living room engrossed in TV as usual.

  When Hal and Sam returned I could hear her screaming before they even started up the stairs. I hadn’t noticed that the gas stove had somehow gone wrong, the bedroom was filled with smoke and any moment would have been alight. I was still sitting there in front of the TV surrounded by the escaping, choking fumes, and I hadn’t even noticed.

  Little Warren was ok, as it turned out, but I was quickly bundled from the apartment and Hal and Sam found themselves a new babysitter.

  They were still, charitable people, happy to be friends with me, and I was even invited to baby Warren’s christening in July 1969 – along with my new friend Gordon Coxhill from the New Musical Express, and Billy and his new wife, a woman called, irritatingly, Judith. One of only two photos I have of myself with Fury was taken at this event, outside the church at the top of the Carter’s street. There I stand, just behind Fury and Judith, wearing my Biba velvet floppy hat and a rather stupid faraway expression. The other photo of me with Fury was taken when I was 16 years old, four years earlier.

  I’ve just had the best news anyone could give me. Billy Fury is appearing this Christmas in pantomime! He’s going to be Aladdin. BUT guess where? Can you believe – he is going to come here, to our New Theatre at Oxford!! This is just amazing. I can’t really believe it’s true.

  Precisely 1.5 miles from where I live, in our caravan at Botley Road Estate, Billy Fury himself is going to come every day for weeks and weeks and weeks, and be Aladdin. Right through until February 1966. Of all the places his manager could have chosen, he chose here. Thank you, God! Thank you Larry Parnes! Thank you world and life.

  You’ve made me a very, very, happy person.

  So I stand, shaking with nerves, at the stage door sometime early in December as he is due to arrive for rehearsals. This I have discovered because his backing group, The Gamblers, who are also in the show, have rented a houseboat on the Isis for the duration of the gig, from Salter Brothers – whose manager happens to be my brother, Rob! The Gamblers have told him all the dates I need to know …

  And the Vanden Plas car arrives and there he is – medium tall, very slim, wearing a trilby with a feather in it – Billy Fury. And there is just one fan waiting … me.

  Oh – and my mother, armed with camera. I just manage to speak,

  ‘Please Billy will you pose for a photo!’

  ‘Yes of course,’ a low, quiet voice with an almost American accent. So the deed is done, then Billy disappears inside the stage door.

  My mother gets the film developed and I am sure the photo of Billy and I will be blurred, or not come out – but it does, and it’s perfect. Except for the stupid expression on my face.

  A long time afterwards my mother says he had birdshit on his hat, but I didn’t notice that.

  Once or twice Jason and I visited Billy and Judith at her home in North London – usually because Jason, whose real name was Albert, was short of money or wanted Billy to help him further his career.

  The first time, we were ushered into the sitting room and after a few minutes Billy appeared, as shy and quiet as ever. Every time we went, I would sit there spellbound to be in the same room, as an acquaintance, with Billy, his girl and his brother.

  But after a few months of being, there is no other word for it, pestered, Billy, quite understandably, began to get slightly peeved with his brother. I remember once Jason receiving a letter in the post from Billy, which he showed me, incensed.

  I read the note, which gently pointed out that Billy had helped Albert several times and hadn’t a great deal of spare cash at the moment. He suggested Albert return to Liverpool, get a job, save up some more money and return to London another time. And he signed it, love Ron (his real name). I actually found myself near tears when I read that letter, in Billy’s scrawl, as I agreed with every word he said but I couldn’t say so as Albert was there ranting over it and calling his brother every swear word in the book.

  ‘What’s the matter with him – he’s got plenty of money, what’s the matter.’

  In fact, Fury didn’t have a lot of money – his career had nosedived since The Beatles had revolutionised the pop world and he was struggling to earn money by gigging in smallish places, while battling severe ill health and a weak heart. He used to come off stage near collapse.

  Not long after, Albert did what Billy had suggested – went back home, and later I found out from Hal that Albert had never officially left his wife, he’d simply been given ‘leave’ to try his luck in London for a while. I was quite shocked as I’d never intended to be ‘the other woman’ and yet so far since moving to London the only male contact I’d had had been with an engaged man, a married man and, of course, a would-be rapist.

  Luckily, I didn’t care about Jason enough to be that sad at his departure. It took me about two weeks to realise I was quite glad he’d gone, on several levels.

  I realised that he was not appreciative of his brother in the slightest at the time. I believe he was jealous of the Fury success and incredulous that it hadn’t happened for him. I was also mildly annoyed that he’d lied to me (or at best, avoided telling me the truth) about his situation back home.

  Did Jason Eddie have talent? Well, he had nowhere near the looks or charisma of his brother. He could sing a bit – but put him in X Factor today and he would probably be lucky to make the live shows.

  Because of my acquaintance with Hal and through my own career, which was ever so slightly on the move itself, I met Fury several more times after Jason left.

  Yet I never could get over the fan/star thing – once a fan, always a fan – and I don’t recall ever having one sensible conversation with him. I never did interview him for Fab or any other publication because it would have been a disaster. But he was a lovely, lovely man – gentle, nature-loving and very un-starry. He even ended up, before his very early death at 42, living just a few miles from me, down in the Welsh Borders. He had a farm and used to spend his time birdwatching (yes, mother, it probably really was bird poo on his hat) and rounding up sheep. We should have got on really well – pity I just couldn’t make that leap from fan to true friend.

  three

  The Good, the Bad –

  and the Bizarre

  1968

  1968 is racing along. The Shadows have split up. London Bridge has been sold to America. Cliff’s got religion – he’s been delivering sermons with Billy Graham. Bobby Kennedy and Tony Hancock are dead. Hell! Mickey from The Monkees has married Samantha Juste of Top of the Pops, and the fans are crying into their colas. And I’m in need of a friend.

  These were Monkee days – Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, the English one who had once been in Coronation Street as a kid, and Mickey Dolenz – were the first huge boy band from America, the first ‘manufactured’ pop band ever, brought together, via an advert, for a fun-and-music TV series. Perfect for 13 year olds. Because of them, the
magazine offices were besieged with teens and the phone rang off the hook.

  I spent many an hour reading the mail begging us to get autographs, arrange meetings and so on. I realised how much better I felt, working in the business rather than being a hopeless fan. However, while they made nice, bop-able pop music singles like ‘I’m a Believer’, I couldn’t get that excited over The Monkees myself.

  Apparently I met Davy Jones, who must have made such a great impression on me that I can’t remember a thing about where we met, or indeed anything about him at all except he was very short and quite harmless. Certainly not hearththrob material in my book. And I only know for sure that I met him because I announced, importantly, in my fan club biography under the heading ‘claims to fame’: ‘I have dined with Davy Jones’.

  Yes, by this time, Judy Wills didn’t have a real friend, but she had her own official fan club. Because of the huge interest in The Monkees, and because I was sometimes photographed modelling clothes in the pages of Fab, I started to get a lot of letters addressed not to the editor, but to me. Letters that would spell out how wonderful I was, how pretty, how nice, and so on. Being naïve, and with huge potential to be big-headed, I truly believed that the readers thought I was great.

  So it was that a couple of girls called Tina and Vivienne from South London started up a fan club for me – I still have a copy of the biography of myself that I sent them listing my fave colours, film stars, food etc. I have no memory at all of ever liking Volvo cars, Julie Christie, or Gilbert and Sullivan – but apparently, I liked them all enough to record the fact in my biography along with my dinner date with the Jones boy.

  Not long after the setting up of my fan club, Tina and Vivienne wrote to me again, asking if I knew anyone who would like to be a member. They were obviously having recruitment difficulties and, I believe, the enterprise folded not all that many weeks later.

  Now of course, rereading the few letters I’ve saved down the years, I can see that all the readers wanted was to butter me up and get me to get them an autograph or, optimistically, a meeting, with their fave Monkee, or a pair of their dirty underpants.

  Still, not many nonentities can boast having once had their own official fan club so I feel quite proud.

  Another reader with whom I became friendly was a woman of about 35 called Leni Coster who ran the Richard Chamberlain UK fan club from her home in Cowes, Isle of Wight. Chamberlain had long been one of my heroes – in fact he was the very first person on TV on whom I had a crush as soon as I saw him in the long-running US series Dr Kildare; the first male I ever fancied before Billy Fury came along. I’ve always been a sucker for a good bedside manner and he seemed to have that in spades and was unthreateningly clean cut and good looking with dyed blonde hair, perfect teeth and a square jaw – just the job, all of that, when you’re 11 and 12.

  I’d look forward to Dr Kildare every week on BBC, counting down the days and hours until it came on at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. But every week it was a tussle between Richard Hill and me to see who would be triumphant in the sitting room – would I win and be allowed to watch it, or would he win and send me crying to the bedroom?

  Mrs Hill had three children still at home – Clive, who was around 20, Veronica, who was about 16, and Richard, who was about 15.

  I wish we didn’t have to live here. It’s not our house and all I get is nasty whispered words from all three of her children when they think no-one else can hear. ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’ ‘This is OUR house – what are you doing here?’

  Richard hates me the most. He finds ways to upset me. Any way he can. And when it works he grins his horrid grin and I hate him too. Why did I ever let him know I like Dr Kildare? He always wants something on the other channel now.

  Last week he put salt in my tea, and salted my supper so much I couldn’t eat it. He sneaks into the room I share with Veronica and hides my stuff or tears the pages of my magazines. The worst thing is, he kicks Christopher Columbus because he knows I love that cat more than even I love Dr Kildare.

  By the time I was 13 in August 1962, I was beginning to change from complete tomboy to someone with the first traces of femininity. My mum bought me my first pack of two bras.

  My dad, who lived in Banbury and was allowed to have me to stay for a weekend once a month, had bought me a couple of dresses and paid for my first visit to a hairdresser, where I had been given a (truly horrendous) cut and perm, and had also allowed me a tube of pink lipstick and a mascara wand, these last three much to my mum’s disgust. Not that I ever went out anywhere.

  Around this time Richard’s manner towards me unexpectedly changed and I’d notice him watching me, watching me.

  He’s tall now, he’s very tall. Lately he’s tried to be nice to me and I don’t know why. Where’s Mum? Where’s Mrs Hill even? Why am I here in this house with just Richard bloody Hill?

  I’ve come in the sitting room to find the Radio Times and he’s followed me and he’s shut the door. And I want to avoid looking at him but as I aim for the door he grabs my arm.

  ‘You look nice today!’ he says in his best sarcastic tone.

  And he grabs my newly formed left breast encased in its new bra and he squeezes and squeezes until it hurts so much, tears of pain and anger come.

  I’m like a rabbit, caught in the headlights of his gloating, taunting, blue steel eyes. I can’t move, I’m frozen, I can’t stop him, I can’t speak. But I can feel, inside, I can feel hate.

  Of course I never said a word because I didn’t want to put my mother in the position of deciding whether to tell and get chucked out.

  My obsession with Kildare faded a little over the next couple of years as Billy Fury became my No. 1 hero, but only ended when the TV series did in 1966 and Richard Chamberlain disappeared from my small screen forever – or at least until The Thorn Birds came along many years later.

  Six or seven years on, Leni and I struck up a correspondence – again we both had something to offer the other – I organised for details of her fan club to appear in Fab, while she took me on a fan club jaunt to meet Richard Chamberlain. Somehow or other she had wangled an invitation to take a few members along to Richard’s debut as a serious Shakespearean actor, playing Hamlet in Birmingham rep. I found the production – and I have to say Chamberlain’s acting – boring as hell and nearly went to sleep but rallied when the call came along the stalls that Richard would meet a few of us backstage after the performance.

  So off I went, bleary-eyed, but still oddly excited to meet my one-time hero. He was standing in the centre of a large communal dressing room, still in his full make-up, talking to a young male companion. As he turned round to greet us, I saw straight into his eyes, which seemed to say, ‘I’ll put up with this but that’s about it,’ and it came to me in that one thunderstruck moment that my teenage crush had been completely wasted on this man. Not just because he was bored and distant (actors who meet and greet fans should always be good enough actors to at least appear to be pleased to be meeting them) but because he was, quite obviously, gay or, as I would have put it in those days, homosexual.

  Why had I never realised it before? Why did it matter? I just felt I had spent the first two years of my pubescence lusting after someone who could never have returned the feelings even if I had been ten years older, ten stars more gorgeous and ten times more intelligent. Let’s be honest, I hadn’t been his ‘fan’ because of his acting talent, or his integrity, or his intelligence. I had been a fan because of the sex thing or, at least, the ‘love’ or ‘infatuation’ thing.

  I felt disappointed without yet even having spoken to him. I felt sorry for all the millions of fans like me who had wasted hours fancying a guy who could never fancy them back.

  We exchanged a few stilted pleasantries, shook hands, then I left the room and got the coach or whatever back to London; I don’t think Leni ever realised how my early teenage dreams had been crushed that night.

  In later years I spent several fun e
venings with my gay workmate Richard at his club in Victoria, where gay couples of both sexes would dance the night away and I would be upset only because I hadn’t got anyone to dance with. But I didn’t feel any more awkward than I had done when, on several occasions as a young teen in Oxfordshire, I had similarly been a wallflower at hetero dances.

  So why was I so disappointed about Chamberlain? I suppose a bit like in the days when George Michael pretended not to be gay because he (or his team) was worried it would affect his fanbase, Richard Chamberlain or his press office had, apparently, concealed his sexual preferences with fabricated stories of which woman he was ‘dating’ planted in the press, and so on, and I felt cheated. I’d rather have known the truth so I could choose whether to stay loyal to him or to give my virgin adoration to someone who might, eventually, have wanted it. Well, stranger things have happened – Gary Numan married a fan, after all.

  Work acquaintances aside, I really still didn’t have any proper friends or a boyfriend after Jason disappeared, and was, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, quite lonely.

  As I was still babysitting for Hal Carter from time to time, I would bump into Jimmy Campbell, another of Hal’s small stable of music acts. Jimmy, like Billy, came from Liverpool and having been with a band called the Kirkbys was trying to make it on his own. He was a fantastic songwriter, played guitar and had a plaintive little voice. He was the Ed Sheeran of his day, except he never really took off at the time.

  Now he is regarded by many as a ‘lost’ talent and has a cult following of his own – just Google him. Anyway, he looked lovely and I went to his home a couple of times when he had parties or friends round, and did what I could to attract his attention (which probably consisted of wearing too much make-up, too few clothes and overlong false eyelashes), but he was completely disinterested in me, though at the time I refused to believe it. I kidded myself he was just very shy (which he probably was too).