by Judith Wills
But honestly, you would never have thought …
Towards the end of my first year at Fab, the pop group of the moment – The Herd – were given the job of ‘editing’ the magazine one week so they spent quite a lot of time in the offices. I’ve still got an old issue of Fab, the cover of which is a series of twelve photos of The Herd ‘editing’ the magazine, and in one, I am there with Sue the office junior and Gary Taylor, one of the band members. The Herd’s lead singer was 16-year-old Peter Frampton, ‘The Face of ’68’, who soon left them to form a more legitimate band, Humble Pie, with Steve Marriott, ex-Small Faces.
By 1969 I had two out of a maximum of three official warnings about lateness in the mornings, lateness of copy etc. Betty and I had a meeting at which she laid on the line that if I had one more warning I was out, so I promised to improve.
I tried up to a point to comply but eventually skipped off work for the day with a monumental hangover. That evening I was at 35 Avonmore Road when Mrs Filipinski shouted up the two flights of stairs to me.
‘There’s a phone call for you’.
So I crawled down the stairs to the hall phone and before I had even got it to my ear I could hear high-pitched ranting of which I could make out bits along the lines of: ‘… been today … you’re not ill … how dare you … last chance … let me down … copy always late … you always late …’.
It was Betty. The first and last time she ever phoned me at home, it was that serious.
As I didn’t dare put the phone down on her I stood there half listening to it all until she had finished – and by the time she had finished, I was actually crying. What she said had upset me because I knew that it was all correct; that I had let her down in a big way. I wasn’t so much crying for the loss of the job but because it was my own fault. It sounds stupid but until she actually told me to my face how bad I was being, I hadn’t realised. In those moments I felt my early youth ending and second-stage youth beginning.
She ended the conversation with a curt, ‘Come in and see me in the morning.’ This, you recall, after I’d already used up all my warnings so I knew I was out.
Next day I pulled myself together to go in and face her in the office where I had taken so much crap dictation in the past.
Realising I would have to go a long, long way to find another job that held so much scope for fun and amusement, and realising that turning up at 10 a.m. and working for about five hours a day in between freebies of various kinds was a small price to pay, I felt crushed. I really, really didn’t want to lose this job.
‘Do you know why I gave you the job of beauty editor?’ she began.
‘Er, no.’
‘It was because you were the worst secretary I have ever had,’ she began. There was a long pause. I stared at the floor. My legs felt like jelly and I wanted to go to the loo – I had never had the sack before, well it was my first job so I suppose that was why, but I had never been in trouble before like this. At school I had been a goodie goodie, hated being told off. This reminded me of being in the headmaster’s office and being given the only detention I ever got, but much worse.
‘I didn’t want you as my secretary any more. So I decided to give you a chance as beauty editor.’
Ah! Truth will out! And I had thought it was because of my natural and wonderful writing talent.
‘And while your copy as beauty editor is good, your behaviour in all other respects, particularly your lateness in the mornings and your lateness of delivering copy, has been more than poor.
‘I believe that you are now behaving like you are because you find being a beauty editor boring,’ she continued. How right she was. Was it so obvious? This was her cue to say the ‘sack’ word.
‘And so I am going to give you one last chance on this magazine.’
WHAT?
‘I am going to give you a job as a part-time feature writer as well as your beauty. You have three months to prove to me that you can be a responsible member of staff here. Right, off you go.’
WOW, double WOW! Job saved and an end to bloody beauty in sight. From that day on, I had a great deal of respect for, and gratitude towards, Betty and I don’t believe I ever let her down again. I began taking some responsibility for myself and my work and began suggesting features and turning into a Proper Person. I was never going to be a Betty Hale clone but I could at last see things from her point of view and as she’d given me so many chances I didn’t want to let her down.
As it turned out, I continued doing a few beauty features for quite a while longer, right up until 1971. But at last I could do some ‘proper’ writing and interview some celebs.
And so not long afterwards, John Fearn, who’d been promoted to Ass Ed, told me who my first celeb interview was to be: Jim Dale. Jim had been, and still was, a huge hit in the Carry On films and was trying to make his name in other roles and in theatre and music. I still today have a recording of Jim’s with his own spectacular version of Des O Connor’s ‘Dick a Dum Dum’ on it. Now that must be worth a few pennies.
Anyway I was delighted that my breaking-in was to be with Jim, whose on-screen jovial-chap persona led me to assume that he would be just as nice in real life, so as I made my way to his home I wasn’t as nervous as I might have been.
I was to get to his house in the Pembridge Villas area of Notting Hill to interview him on 23 July 1969. I went there on the tube clutching my A–Z, found his street and was just about to turn into the entrance to his very large semi-detached house when behind me I heard a big engine roaring up the road. I stepped back as the cause of this row veered wildly into the short driveway of Jim’s front garden and then proceeded to continue across towards the front steps and crashed into three large dustbins. Steaming, the pristine Jaguar came to a halt amidst the most tremendous din of metal bins and lids rolling and flying and careering everywhere. And out of the driving seat leapt Jim Dale. Grinning wildly but sheepishly. ‘You must be Judy – sorry about that. I didn’t want to be late …’.
Despite the fact that he must have been worried about what damage he’d done to the car (and I am sure there was some) gentleman Jim gave me the most easy time for my first interview. He must have seen I was inexperienced and I’ve been so grateful to him ever since, and of course madly in love with him because you can’t beat a combination of charm, self-effacement, good looks and intelligence coupled with – as I had witnessed first hand – a dash of recklessness in a man. He was sex on legs … who’d have thought it? Pity he was yet another married man – way out of my league though, married or not.
I got back to the office, floating at the amazing delight at having spent an hour or two talking person to person with a real celeb, and began writing up the piece straight away, beginning, of course, with Jim’s spectacular entrance. It made the perfect opening and if the feature wasn’t called Carry on Crashing then it should have been.
However I soon found that turning an interview into a coherent feature wasn’t quite as easy as I had presumed, and that one-pager took me days of pencil sucking and agony until I considered it good enough to hand in. The feature appeared a few weeks later and I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of anything connected with work, before or after. It had been fun to get my picture in the papers and magazines – but to get your name at the bottom of an article – now that was truly Fab.
Luckily, my writing speed gradually increased with my output but I can still picture myself in that Avonmore Road bedsit, with my old picnic table set up and an ancient portable typewriter on it with some A4 paper and carbon – honing my silly little pieces for Fab as if they were literature, late into the night.
Here’s how it went:
ONE: Transcribe and type up all the shorthand notes (never anything less than traumatic – you will recall that my shorthand was the first thing to go under pressure, and my early interviews were all done using just shorthand. It wasn’t until later that we were all advised to buy portable tape recorders).
TWO: Take the
paper out of the typewriter and cut out all the quotes individually with my nail scissors.
THREE: Lay the quotes all out on the bed, then put a new piece of paper in the typewriter and type out a rough order to the feature in one-line ideas, with big spaces between each. Get paper out of typewriter.
FOUR: Slot the quotes into the various most likely places they might go within the feature, then when happy, sellotape them in place.
FIVE: With yet another piece of paper in the typewriter, type the whole thing out as draft copy, then remove it and go through it with a pen, making any final adjustments.
SIX: Type it all out clean.
It was a long time before I felt confident to write up an interview without this technique, and the worst scenario was if I ran out of sellotape after the shops were shut.
In later years, when I worked for a while as a freelance writer doing day shifts at the Daily Mail, turning out 1,000 word features on subjects I knew little about, from scratch, in an hour, including getting people on the phone for quotes, I would look back at my actual ‘cut and paste’ period and smile.
My features were very rarely returned to me to rewrite or do any work on, but it was laborious long hours after midnight rather than natural talent, I fear, that helped them into print for the first year or so.
I’m 14. I’m at school. It’s Careers Day – when we all troop, in alphabetical order, in to see the careers master to discuss What we Want to Be When we Grow Up. This is, in theory, so that we can match our choice of O levels to our aspirations.
My turn. All I want to do is be a journalist. A writer. On a magazine.
‘DO you know what you want to do, Judith?’
‘Yes – I want to be a journalist. On a magazine.’
Silence for a few seconds. Probably doesn’t help that my name begins with W, he’s no doubt had a dreadful and long day by now.
‘Well, I really don’t think you’re going to be able to do that. That’s more the kind of career for a man. There’s not much scope for you in that direction.’
‘Oh, but …’
‘Why not think about being a typist? Here …’
He hands me a small sheaf of info on how to be a typist or a secretary and what opportunities there are in the factories around Oxfordshire for this great career, and I’m dismissed.
And I’m not crushed by him. My fight-back mechanism comes in. I am even more determined to be a journalist now. There’s nothing better than someone telling you you can’t do something; it makes you ten times more determined. You just have to go and do it to prove them wrong.
So I have to thank that careers guy almost as much as my sister, Unity and Betty – the three people who helped me along in more positive ways. He helped me by default – but it doesn’t matter where you get your motivation from, as long as you get it.
LATE 1969
Around this time we left the offices in New Fleetway and made the short move to much more dingy Old Fleetway next door. I began sharing an office with Georgina Mells who had arrived at Fab straight from Cardiff University and reminded me heavily of myself when I first got to Fleetway, in that she wasn’t cool, hip or gorgeous to look at. But she was much more intellectual and much more self-possessed than I had been – and much, much more posh. It seemed like she’d turned the wrong way out of the lift by mistake and should really have been working at Country Life.
Like me, she soon learnt how to alter her appearance via miniskirts, make-up and a bit of a diet to morph into a real Fab person, and she quickly launched herself into the life of a budding Fab writer – sharing beauty and other duties with me – with all the trappings, and we began a friendship and shared adventure that lasted several years.
Around this time Julie was promoted to chief writer on Rave magazine, which although it was only down the corridor could have been miles away. It was a slightly more serious, ‘in-depth’ magazine, a monthly, and Julie began spending more time with the writers on the New Musical Express – for whom she eventually ended up working – leaving us poor little pop mag people behind except when she would come down and tell us all about who she’d met.
She was very possessive about her stars. She would preface their names with the word ‘my’, as in ‘My Status Quo’, ‘My Showaddywaddy,’ ‘My Neil Diamond’, ‘My Slade’… but Georgina and I fought back when Edison Lighthouse came along in 1970. They had one massive hit called ‘Love Grows Where My Rosemary Grows’. Sweet boys – Georgina fancied George who I believe was the drummer, while I liked the tall blonde lead singer whose name was Ray Dorey. Julie had eyes for Ray too and when she began calling the band ‘My Edison Lighthouse’ I felt panic and fear.
She scored points off me when they were supposed to meet up with me at a pub for an interview and they all arrived minus blonde boy. She had detained him with a promise of a bigger interview and photo in Rave. I was near tears relating this to Georgina, who took pity on me and plotted a new interview a couple of weeks later on another pretext. We both went along and blonde boy was there in all his gorgeousness, as was George. After the interview Georgina, who had a grand flat in a mansion block in West Hampstead bought for her by her parents, invited the whole band back to her place for tea.
Thus it was that we and Edison Lighthouse, who had been at number one for several weeks by this time and on Top of the Pops every week too, took the Northern Line in the rush hour. One or two commuters may have recognised them but luckily most teenyboppers would have been back home after school doing their homework. It just wouldn’t have happened with a number one band of today, who, so I’m told, usually arrive with PRs, managers, stylists and hangers on, and would think you were completely bonkers if you suggested they get on the tube and pop over for a cuppa at your place.
Back at Georgina’s pad we made them cheese sandwiches, gave them tea and played a few tunes on her hi-fi. It didn’t work out well for me and the blonde one – it was yet another case of him being quiet and shy, and me being too overcome to do anything but watch as, replete with Hovis and Tetleys, he disappeared off back down the underground to wherever he lived. I believe Georgina had a bit more luck with George but, reticent for once, she didn’t divulge too many details.
We shared the beauty features and interviews more or less randomly – pop, TV, films – and often both turned up together if we felt like it.
Occasionally other perks came along – and it was at the grand old age of 20 that I had my first flight in a plane. A freebie had come in for Heather Kirby, who was still the fashion editor, and she decided to let me have it – a trip to visit a factory in Northern Ireland. (You can see why she let me have it.)
Well, okay, it wasn’t the most interesting of actual visits but I can vividly remember the huge excitement of travelling to Heathrow, boarding the little plane, being given a window seat and watching spellbound as we took off and headed up into the clouds. It rained non-stop during my few hours at a plant somewhere to the west of Belfast in the middle of Irish nowhere, but I didn’t care … at last I had been off the land or sea for the first time in my life, I had been in the air. I had looked down on the land from an aeroplane. I felt great, I felt free. And I hadn’t even paid for it!
For a so-called glamorous pop magazine, Fab didn’t have its fair share of male talent working in the office. There was John, the little letters page boy, but he was about 17 and looked it. Phil from the art department was quite nice to look at but stroppy. John Fearn was a smashing guy but with his bowtie and glasses, he always reminded me of the old TV star, Harry Worth. But most of the staff were female.
So one day when a new sub-editor arrived, and he was tall and slim and definitely under 30, most of us were quite thrilled, especially Betty, who had obviously employed him as much for his testosterone as his ability to spot typos. His name was Richard, and she was so enthused that she devoted a large part of that week’s Ed’s Letter to his arrival.
Unfortunately, his sharp sub’s eye didn’t extend to that first Ed’s Lette
r. When the issue was published, Betty’s missive read something like, ‘This is a great week – we have something new up here. Six foot of dark, handsome dick…’.
‘Dick’, whose actual name was Richard Girling, never did quite live that one down. He was an unassuming, quite intense young man from Hertfordshire and we had a mild flirtation for a few weeks which culminated in me heading to St Albans with him one evening for a walk around the historic sights (he was that kind of a guy). But I didn’t really fancy him that much and when I found out that he had a girlfriend in Hertfordshire whose name was Rose, that was the end of that.
By now I had met Gordon Coxhill, a young writer on the NME. He took a fancy to me and for a year or more pursued me quite hard. Sadly although he was a lovely guy, I didn’t fancy him in the slightest. So I spent the year trying to juggle being nice enough to him so that he would invite me along on some of the (much higher-class) freebies that came his way, courtesy of the country’s most respected music journal with a circulation of over 250,000 (and proudly described on its cover as a ‘newspaper’), but not so nice that he got the ‘wrong idea’ – the phrase used in those days for a guy who thought you wanted sex when you didn’t.
I would sometimes accompany him to interview stars – there was the occasion when we went to Blackpool to ‘do’ Cilla Black and The Walker Brothers – then attended a posh dinner with Cilla after her show. At the time both acts were huge and it was always fun to observe the stars off-duty, and after a few drinks. Even if journalists were present, if it was a private occasion everything that was said was always off the record, and this rule was never broken. Cilla liked to act the star even when she was off-duty and visibly riled if she wasn’t the centre of attention at all times, but she had a great sense of fun and some fantastic tales.
