by Judith Wills
After one fruitless all-night get together at his house during which I’d managed to keep myself awake on the off-chance that this would be the night he would realise how fab I was, I sat, dizzy with lack of sleep and disappointment, on a train to my sister’s in Perivale, crying my eyes out – having finally realised it was never going to happen and that I had made a fool of myself. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I daresay he used Hal radar to disappear whenever I might be going up to Stoke Newington.
I wanted to be liked/loved and found attractive, but the men I liked and found attractive didn’t want to know. I just didn’t seem to be able to behave around men in any kind of normal way. I wasn’t capable of analysing the problem at the time, but now I can. I was just too needy and lacking in even minimal confidence, which made me act in various types of non-me way. I would be, either in turn or all at once, distant, superior, fawning all over them, coming on strong, trembling with nerves, talking too loud, telling inappropriate jokes, but never, ever, would I just act like a rational human being. I was the original Miranda Hart, but disguised with long hair and miniskirts. I must have freaked them out.
Despite this, I had my standards about the quality of young man I would be prepared to date, which only made matters worse. My married sister Ann set me up on a couple of evenings with people she knew, but unless they were ‘in the business’ (show business or media) I found them all deadly dull. With a dull man I was fine, I could behave normally, but I could never be bothered to see him a second time. One in particular was called Mick, a well-meaning, tubby guy from Yorkshire, a member of the Ramblers Association. I remember thinking that if ever I listed rambling as a top hobby I would cut my own throat.
Jason Eddie had been the exception to these random dating rules and behaviours of mine – but I can see now, it was because although I had enough reasons to want to be with him for the while we were together, I just wasn’t crazy enough about him to act crazy. So by default he more or less got the actual me.
I no doubt could have done with mindfulness therapy, or chamomile tea, or hot yoga, or reiki, but none of that was easily available/heard of in the late ’60s. So I just had to wait and calm down slowly over time in a vaguely organic, one-step-forward two-steps-back kind of fashion.
So, understandably alone in the evenings for weeks at a time, I would go back to the bedsit to watch Top of the Pops and Jimmy Savile on my black-and-white telly with its fuzzy picture, or catch up on writing, or listen to BBC Radio 1 or Radio Luxembourg on my transistor radio. Being on my own in ‘my own place’ was almost a luxury and I was never bored, but often I would wonder when the ‘happening’ times were really going to happen.
That said, I looked forward to going to the office every single day, and I also realised that if I worked hard at improving my look, this might cancel out the negative effect of my personality bypass. So I grew my hair, spent hours doing and redoing my make-up and read all the features I could find on ‘how to improve your confidence’.
While this didn’t, certainly at first, help me get a guy, it had an unexpected bonus. Fashion editor Heather began asking me to model clothes in the magazine. I flattered myself and dared to hope that it was because of my supreme gorgeousness, but in reality it was mainly because I was dead skinny, my services came free, and agency models were quite expensive.
Even so, it was great to get out of the office and be photographed by some of the up-and-coming fashion photographers of the day. No, I never got near Bailey or Donovan (Terence, not the folk singer) but it was still fun – and we did get John Swannell, who later became one of the top celeb and fashion photographers around. I still have the first spread of photos of me in Fab titled ‘Groovy Girl’, and on the back of ‘my’ page was a photo of The Beatles! Gave me quite a buzz.
Sometimes wannabe or nearly-there pop stars would come along and model clothes with me. One of these was a tiny blonde girl with pleasant but not devastating looks, bubbly but not at all sure of herself, who was trying to make it as a singer. I didn’t catch her name on the day but when the photos were published complete with captions, it turned out to be Elaine Paige. Once I did a modelling session with Steve Ellis, lead singer of the band Love Affair, who had a massive hit with ‘Everlasting Love’. You can see on the photos that my eyes were swollen and red – that was because I’d just found out Billy Fury had got engaged to his girl Judith. I knew I never stood a chance myself, but it still upset me.
I enjoyed modelling so much that I toyed with the idea of leaving Fab and becoming a model. My biggest coup was appearing on the cover of the young woman’s glossy magazine, Honey – seeing myself on the newspaper stands down Fleet Street was a boost to my ego, for sure, and occasional moonlighting modelling stints for the national press followed. For example, I became one of the Daily Mirror’s Gorgeous Girls. Every day, a ‘gorgeous girl’ – in theory spotted walking around town, but in truth offered a fiver to pose – would appear in the paper, on, I think, page 7. I guess it was the pre-cursor of all the tabloid page threes, except we were all fully clothed. They got my name wrong, which prompted my dad to write to them from his headquarters – a council flat in Oxford – to complain, about which I was very embarrassed. Wills, Wallace? Who cared? Well, I cared a bit, but I wasn’t going to admit it. At least it gave Sally Cork, the new Fab beauty editor, a smile.
She, too, had been photographed for the same feature, but it was my photo they used rather than hers. I never spoke to her about it but she would have been justified in being a bit miffed, especially as she was prettier than me.
Kent Gavin, the photographer on that assignment, took a marginal shine to me, perhaps mistaking my habitual silence in his presence for a Greta Garbo kind of allure, rather than my habitual ‘being terrified’ mode. I thought he was quite good looking and suave in a tabloid-photographer dirty cuffs kind of way. I also liked the attention he gave me as he was one of the first well-known Fleet Street photographers, knew everyone who mattered in the media, was an ‘older man’ (probably in his mid-30s which is ancient when you’re 18 or so), and I felt a bit of his aura of fame and supreme confidence warming me, too. But on one occasion when we were at a party in someone’s house and found ourselves in a bedroom, it was not Mr Gavin who warmed me, but his then girlfriend who arrived breathing fire and had been downstairs all along, unbeknown to me. I mean, I had no idea he even had a girlfriend. And at least I was still fully clothed, if a bit disillusioned, once again.
But one fantastic thing came out of all this modelling work. Because I had been a Gorgeous Girl I was invited to the Gorgeous Girls Gala at the Royal Albert Hall. All Gorgeous Girls who accepted would take part in a stage presentation during the event. Now this really did send me up to the clouds. THE ALBERT HALL. ME! ON STAGE! ONE OF THE PERFORMERS IN THE SHOW! AND BACKSTAGE! Backstage at the Albert Hall …
It’s late 1963. I’m 14, and Mum and I have just moved into a house in Weston-on-the-Green with Dad and I’ve somehow persuaded him to drive me and my village friend Margaret Cox all the way up to London in his little Ford where we are to go to the Albert Hall and see a pop concert.
Playing at this pop concert will be The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and several other bands which will include The Hollies, Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits. The Beatles are big, the Rolling Stones just coming along, having had their first chart hit. We’re not that bothered with The Stones – they look a bit scruffy and they aren’t all that good looking, compared with The Beatles. It’s The Beatles Maggie and I want to see.
Every Saturday for the past few months we have met up in the front room of her parents’ cottage, at 11 a.m. precisely, wearing our best make-up and our best clothes, and we have adorned the walls with our Beatles posters and we have played each and every Beatles track (their first LP has just been released) while dancing The Twist. We’ve even made Beatles badges to wear. Our Beatles Saturday Club only ever consists of Maggie and I (few other kids live in the village anyway).
So we get to
the Albert Hall, giggling and nervous. Dad manages to park the car right next to Manfred Mann’s van (big excitement and cue for a photo) and we run round the hall looking for the stage door.
Here! Hundreds of girls already here, some screaming. We wait and then through a large glass wall, inside the building we see five scruffy boys walk down a stairway to the left of the stage door. Someone says it’s the Rolling Stones! And I look as hard as I can, and I see an ugly one with dark hair, a slightly less ugly blonde one and, waving cockily to us, a lippy one. There are two more but they are both boring and are wearing ties, so I take no notice of them at all.
I am not a fan of any of these boys really – but I scream anyway. That’s what you do. You see – or maybe hear – a pop star in real life, and you scream.
Inside the hall you can’t hear anything on stage for the screaming. We are sitting as you face the stage, halfway up from the stalls, halfway back from the stage on the right. Dad’s there too, but he doesn’t scream.
Paul McCartney’s singing but you can’t hear anything except the ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ bit. George, George is my favourite, he looks so sweet.
I think, as I stand there screaming though no sound is coming from my mouth now as I have screamed myself hoarse, there is no place else in the world to be at this minute except here – and here I am. Let me stay in this minute for always, God, please.
Pop music and the pop culture was my main survival method from the first time I saw Billy Fury’s face on the magazine throughout my teens. Yes, there were other things I enjoyed – cats, horse riding, writing poetry, cycling – but if you had asked me what one thing I couldn’t live without, it would have been pop.
In most ways I was a very ordinary teenage girl, getting through school and life as best we all could. But my boredom threshold was, perhaps, lower than many other of my schoolmates. And I often felt extremely sad and lonely. I needed to dream, I needed to plot and plan for a more exciting life, and for a world full of colour and light and laughter and people. Pop, as well as giving me a regular injection of excitement, gave me something to aspire to – for right from the age of 13 I knew that all I wanted to do was listen to pop music, and that later on, I wanted to write about the celebrities, and be part of their world. I played the piano up to grade 3 but it was never playing the music that interested me – it was all the rest.
I didn’t go to a pop concert until The Pop Prom at the Albert Hall, and after that I didn’t go to another one until Gene Pitney came to Oxford when I was about 15, and then not to another one until I went to see Billy Fury sing live for the first time at Leighton Buzzard a few months later. Much as I loved these concerts it wasn’t totally necessary to go to them to enjoy all the excitement and fun of that world. The BBC’s Top of the Pops and ITV’s Ready Steady Go! every week brought it all right into our sitting room at home; Fabulous gave me titbits of news, and Radio Luxembourg provided a long-distance air of part-mystery, part-sharing.
Why was it so important to me? Why is it important in almost the same way to the teens of the twenty-first century? In many respects nothing has changed in fifty years. Pop was the light, pop was fun, pop demanded nothing of me but my time and devotion. Pop was slightly impersonal – you could stay uninvolved if you so wished, Billy Fury or The Beatles on the Dansette wouldn’t ask you to kiss them if you didn’t want to. You could worship from afar and everything would be fine.
Then if you felt like it, you could dash round after them like an innocent groupie and try to steal an autograph, a smile, a moment or two, even a hug or a peck on the cheek and you could feel special because some of the stardust was yours.
All this depended, also, upon the pop stars having – or at least making a show of having – a glamorous, desirable lifestyle. So you wanted to see the cars, the pretty girlfriends, the expensive guitars, the swish apartment, or at least to know they existed. And you wanted to know that underneath all this there was also an element of ‘just like you’. So it was good to read that Billy Fury loved birdwatching and was shy or that George Harrison had lived in a grotty area of Liverpool. It made you like them all the more. And it made you think, ‘Well if he did it from there, I can make something of myself too.’
And of course there was the music. In the first ten years of my life the only music I listened to was the music my family chose to listen to, either on the BBC radio or on the old gramophone. Brother Robert liked Perry Como, my sister liked Pat Boone, and my mother liked Frank Sinatra. I don’t know who my Dad liked, he never said (until many years later, he announced he was a fan of Susan Maughan singing ‘Bobby’s Girl’, but I think that must have been a single aberration). All this was pleasant but unmoving to my ears. Unimportant background to a life of horse riding and cycling. As I neared 10, you could sometimes here occasional snatches of more interesting music on the radio (it was probably early Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley) but my parents always turned the sound down as soon as they started.
I remember clearly the first time I heard a song I truly loved on the radio. It was The Everly Brothers singing ‘Cathy’s Clown’. It was beautiful, it was immediate gratification, it was easy, it was pop. I was 10 years old. Shortly after that my parents split up.
Pop gave my teens brightness and excitement, and hope and oomph. Without it my life would have been dull, dull, dull, sad, sad, sad. Years later I still remember that buzz and when I see today’s youngsters and teens screaming, just like I did, but at One Direction or Justin Bieber, or some other twenty-first-century equivalent of my teen heroes, I see pop is still a crucial part of life at that age.
Even now, I can’t drive past the Royal Albert Hall without giving it an imaginary salute. OK, even if some of it was 100 per cent naff, I can think of worse memories to have than watching The Beatles and The Stones on the same bill at the Albert Hall.
Classical music, opera, jazz – I like some of all of those very much indeed but for me pop is king. One of the best autobiographies I’ve read in recent years was that by the Rolling Stone man himself, Keith Richards. In his book Life he told in detail of his young life and how much music meant to him, how a new life began for him when he first heard tracks by the old blues men of the USA. He may have been the ugly one with dark hair back in the day at the Albert Hall, but my goodness, if you want to know what popular music meant to us in the ’50s and ’60s – you’ll never get a better insight than his. And he’d grown into his looks quite considerably by the next time I saw him, when I was about 22.
So you see why the Albert Hall was always a place of mystery, excitement beyond expectation, almost iconic to me. The Gorgeous Girls ball had to be one of the highlights of my year. I went to a boutique near Barkers in Kensington High Street, long since disappeared, and bought my dress – a short straight crocheted red dress and a flesh-coloured petticoat to go underneath it. A similar style of dress is right back in fashion now, but without the petticoat. I made myself up with shaking hands (it was a happy day when I finally stopped shaking enough before I went out to put my make-up on properly) and The Daily Mirror sent a car for me.
And I went in the stage door. That was the proudest moment of my life up until this point with the possible exception of getting the job at Fab. I’d imagined it all a hundred times and it wasn’t much different – miles of curving corridors, wide and low, few windows, peeks through the curtains to the stage, hospitality room, chatting with some of the other Gorgeous Girls.
Looking back at the photos, I have to say the title ‘Gorgeous Girl’ was no great accolade, nor very accurate, as most of us were little more than ok-looking. No doubt the Mirror photographers had arrived at high streets all over the country on wet Saturdays looking for Gorgeous Girls to photograph. Cold, wet and wanting to get back to their women or their pubs, they’d photographed the first girl they had seen who possessed two legs, a bust, long hair and a short skirt.
Never mind, I got to meet Tom Jones. He was quite famous by this time so we all gathered round him for the
photo call and after an audience was in place (who? how had they billed the event? – I have no idea, I guess Tom Jones could fill the hall though) and after a few drinks and as far as I recall no rehearsal, we were all called onstage to be announced as the Gorgeous Girl winners. We each felt like Miss World, which at the time wasn’t actually a bad thing.
Not long after this, the photographer Beverley Goodway (later the most famous page-3 photographer of all time) rang the office and asked Unity if I could go and have my photo taken for the News of the World who were running a competition looking for Britain’s Sexiest Girl and wanted me to model as an example of the kind of girl they were looking for. No doubt Beverley had chatted to his friend Kent Gavin on the Mirror who had passed on his old list of Gorgeous Girls, but even so, I allowed myself to be flattered.
I turned up at the studio, round the back from the offices, in black skinny-rib jumper, black hotpants and a belt, with long Biba suede boots, hair well ironed, and full warpaint (as Dad used to call it) in place. This was the first time I had done a proper studio shoot on my own with people other than the Fab team around so I felt nervous, but Beverley cracked some jokes and clicked away at the right moments and all thanks to him, the photo which eventually appeared made me look quite nice, considering there was no airbrushing in those days. I have a memory of him asking if I wanted to take my top off but as far as I can recall I didn’t – I would have died of shame. These were (just) the days before page 3.
I also did a shoot for the Sunday Mirror. Again, Unity got the call from one of her cronies there asking her to send along a couple of Fab girls for a shoot. I went with Sue, the office junior, and up at the Mirror we found about six other girls in the studio and a tall, dark-haired guy whose autograph I knew I had to get. For it was Engelbert Humperdinck, my mother’s idol and the top singing sensation of the day.
