Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  Did he have a special girl —

  ‘No. Not really. I’ve got maybe five or six special girls.’

  Had he ever had a homosexual experience?

  ‘I went through it, you know, I experimented and found it didn’t appeal to me and that was the end of it. I was about sixteen or seventeen. I grew up surrounded by homosexuals in Hollywood so it was never a mystery to me. It was just a facet of life — the same as you run into a hundred things that you want to do before you die.’

  He took the name Rosko out of sheer admiration for a disc jockey he used to listen to when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, and who would speak only once in maybe twenty minutes.

  Currently he’s on an enormous slimming campaign, which has made him look considerably younger and he’s even cut down on the amount of alcohol he drinks during his gigs. ‘Last year I was getting through a bottle of Bacardi every two days, but now I’m just drinking white wine.’

  His life is a mad pell-mell existence of gigs and train journeys, but at the BBC he’s never less than one hundred per cent effective.

  ‘In five years I’ve only missed two shows and both times it was compulsory. I’d get in there at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning if they’d let me. Really, if I’ve done a late gig the night before I’d rather get straight into the studio.

  ‘You never know what I’m going to say between records, but once I get in there the adrenalin just starts flowing.’

  POSTSCRIPT Records may come and records may go, but good disc jockeys go on for ever. After working for a while in the States in the mid seventies Rosko returned to Britain to resume his career.

  June 1973

  Jane Seymour

  If there’s one thing that James Bond and I have in common it’s that we don’t come across many twenty-one-year-old virgins in our lines of business.

  They are, it would appear, a dying race, so the prospect of actually seeing one in the celluloid in the new James Bond film Live and Let Die should add a certain academic value to the film. Already legions of anthropologists are, I understand, making plans to extend their fieldwork to the West End when the film opens next month.

  The object of all this attention (and there will be a great deal more before the picture opens) is a girl called Jane Seymour. Of course she isn’t a proper virgin, since she’s a married lady, but when Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli spotted her in television’s ‘The Onedin Line’ they knew that their long search for a girl who looked pure enough to play a virgin was over.

  ‘I play Solitaire,’ said Jane this week. ‘I must be the only actress who didn’t go up for the part because I’d never considered being a Bond girl as part of my career.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve played a virgin. It’s very unusual for Bond too, since most of the ladies he meets are well in tune with the situation. But Solitaire is a very particular type of virgin. It isn’t as though she’s just been left on the shelf. She’s been locked up in a room in a big castle and kept well away from all men and possible temptation and she spends the whole day giving out mystical answers over the intercom.’

  Playing Bond’s first virgin did, however, have its limitations.

  ‘I even offered to take my clothes off for the bedroom scene, but no way — they made sure I wore my tights, socks, pants, trousers and nightie.

  ‘So I said that nowadays ladies who were in bed, and particularly ladies who were having it for the first time and not ladies who’d been married for twenty years, were naked. But still they said “no”. It’s apparently something to do with getting a general rating in America. They allow violence there, but no sex.

  ‘Before Bond I was always being asked to take my clothes off, but I never did and then when I was prepared for it, they wouldn’t let me. In the Frankenstein film I’ve just finished they said: “You don’t want to do it, do you?” and they got a model girl in. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Anyway I’m sure the model had a much better bottom than I’ve got.’

  Jane Seymour was born Joyce Frankeberg and brought up in Wimbledon. Her father is a Harley Street gynaecologist.

  ‘I never liked the name Joyce, so I chose Jane. And then everyone in the business said that Frankeberg would never do, so we eventually hit upon the name of one of Henry VIII’s more obscure wives — Jane Seymour.’

  All would have gone well if there hadn’t been a great Henry VIII revival — with films and television series, so that in the end people began to imagine that they’d actually seen our Jane Seymour playing her namesake on television.

  Educated at Arts Educational, she gave up the prospect of ballet as a career after some cartilage trouble. Then in her final year at school she got her first film role in Oh, What A Lovely War. It was while she was working as a chorus girl in Brighton where they were filming that she met her husband Michael Attenborough, son of the film’s director Richard Attenborough.

  ‘We met when he was reviewing a line of chorus girls. I believe his phrase was “Is there anything for me here?” Having just broken up with his girlfriend he was looking for a new lady.

  ‘And of course, I looked like an old tart with all that chorus girl make-up. When he saw me without it a couple of days later I looked about twelve and very virginal. I was a virgin too.’

  That was when she was seventeen and they’ve been together ever since. When he eventually plucked up courage to speak to her he asked her if she’d like to go to the theatre and when she said ‘yes’ he took her diary and filled in each Saturday for the next six weeks. They’ve now been married for two and a half years.

  ‘I can’t think of any man who would want to be married to me, actually,’ she says. ‘Michael has spent all his life being Dickie Attenborough’s son and now he’s Jane Seymour’s husband. I think you need a lot of character to stand up to all of that.’

  Michael is assistant director at the Gardner Arts Centre — a professional theatre on the campus at Sussex University.

  ‘We have a very modern marriage in that I’m not sitting by the kitchen sink all day and we don’t see that much of each other because we’re both very busy people. When he’s not working he does the house and when I’m not working I do it. We don’t follow each other around. We’re quite free socially, as we are work-wise. One has to be to a certain extent.

  ‘He used to be very jealous when we first met. But he’s not obsessively so now. That’s probably because he’s watched me grow up. He knows me too well.

  ‘I’m not jealous of him at all when it comes to other ladies. I know that he’d never do it. And if he did he’d be so subtle that I’d never know. Should he be out in Jamaica for ten weeks and desperately need another lady — then it wouldn’t worry me at all. It’s odd.

  ‘I rather like the idea that other women will fancy him. I think that’s his attitude, too. He probably likes to think that, knowing that he’s got me twenty-four hours a day.’

  To my recollection she’s quite the most beautiful girl there has ever been in a Bond film, with huge languid eyes perfectly set in a classical oval face. She looks fantastic. And you know what they say about girls with big eyes, don’t you?

  Already the Bond publicity juggernaut has turned her into a fantasy figure and her mail is piling up every day — despite the fact that no one has yet seen the film. She’s just so fanciable.

  Why did she take the part if she considered the image of a Bond girl to be totally at odds with the direction in which she had envisaged her career?

  ‘Well it’s fabulous for being seen, isn’t it? Probably more people will see this film than any other this year and if one does one’s best one can’t really come out of it badly. But I would never do another Bond. It just isn’t what I want to do. It doesn’t satisfy. Bond is an action film with two-dimensional characters. It’s a director’s and stuntman’s film.

  ‘But it’s a marvellous part to get known in. After this everyone will know who Jane Seymour is.’

  POSTSCRIPT Not everyone knows who she is no
w, and the Bond tag must have got in the way for a while, but after playing the part of Kathy in the US television mini series of East of Eden, Jane Seymour began to be taken seriously as an actress. Unfortunately her marriage to Michael Attenborough didn’t survive, and nor did the one that followed it.

  June 1973

  Michael White

  Today Michael White has six shows running in the West End: next week there will be seven.

  By any standard he is a remarkably successful producer: but when you remember that he is still only thirty-seven and has, since he became an impresario twelve years ago, had his name on between fifty and sixty shows, one realises that his energy and drive are truly prodigious.

  ‘Yes it is quite a lot,’ he says in his unusually laconic way, ‘particularly when you consider that David Merrick hadn’t started producing in America until he was forty. But I don’t think there’s any virtue in having more shows on than anybody else.

  ‘When you start producing it’s very difficult to get a play, or a theatre, or a director or actors. There’s a kind of wall which you have to break down, which was quite difficult for me, particularly since I’ve never been in the Shaftesbury Avenue kind of world. I mean I never knew Binky — I only ever met him once.

  ‘But although I’ve had terrible times where I was owing the banks enormous sums of money and juggling money from one bank to the next, I survived. And I think I did survive by sheer perseverance, by never stopping, and by always doing play after play no matter how bad things were.’

  He survived, as I’ve already pointed out, with spectacular results, reaping mammoth success with Sleuth and Oh! Calcutta!

  Currently he is also presenting A Doll’s House, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Rocky Horror Show which opened this week at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs; he is also involved with Robert Stigwood in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream-coat.

  ‘I also invest in quite a lot of other shows now — like Grease, Jesus Christ Superstar and No Sex Please, We’re British…and one or two others which I prefer not to name, because people who are presenting them don’t know I’m an investor.

  ‘One problem is that I find it very difficult to say “No,” and have wasted quite a lot of money on the wrong things and the wrong people.’

  The son of a Scottish businessman, Michael White describes himself as being ‘a rich kid, but not a rich teenager. I mean the money had gone by the time I was grown up’. So there wasn’t to be any family money to help him.

  ‘Nobody in our family had any interest at all in the theatre. So I didn’t inherit it. As a boy I went to school in Wales, during the war, and then because I had terrible crippling asthma I was sent to school in Switzerland. The result was that I left England when I was ten and didn’t really come back to live here until I was about twenty-three.’

  At the Sorbonne he read comparative literature, which he considers was a very good way of reading a lot of books, and then in his early twenties he went to work in New York, firstly as a runner on Wall Street.

  ‘I was something of an oddity being English in the New York Stock Exchange, but although I met a lot of very interesting people, I had no interest at all in being a broker. I didn’t learn anything because I wasn’t interested in money. So then I took a job as a stagehand in a summer theatre in Connecticut, and by a series of coincidences I ended up running the place. I think that was the only time in my life that I worked really hard.

  ‘I used to work about sixteen hours a day, and sleep behind the box office. And with that I got the theatre bug.’

  Theatre, however, wasn’t his only interest. He had already become passionate about painting, and now has a large collection, and between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five he wrote five novels — none of which were published. Interest was shown in the last one, but when asked to do some rewriting he found that he couldn’t be bothered. Now he thinks he might try writing again some time, and has great sympathies for the problems of loneliness faced by the writer.

  He came back to live in London originally to work with an American company, but the job fell through before he even began, so he wrote to Peter Daubeny and worked for him for five years.

  ‘It was a great job. I met everyone in the European theatre, read scripts and then worked backstage when he brought a company over.’

  Eventually he became Daubeny’s assistant, and would have been happy to stay with him, had he not always wanted to work for himself.

  ‘Before I left Peter I did The Connection with him — we were co-presenters. It was my farewell to him but The Connection was a commercial failure — I think because it was ten years ahead of its time.’

  He went to live in France then and tried writing again, but came back and became involved in the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, at a time when Joan Littlewood was taking a year off.

  ‘During the next few years I presented a lot of plays — some of which were very good — but all of which shared a common denominator — they were all far too difficult, highbrow or controversial in the wrong way to appeal to large audiences.’ Possibly the most controversial was Hochhuth’s Soldiers. After that some people refused to speak to him.

  There were, however, two commercial successes: Cambridge Circus, which he brought to London after seeing a Cambridge Footlights show involving John Cleese and Tim Brooke Taylor, and Son of Oblomov with Spike Milligan.

  The first big money came with Sleuth, however, which had already been turned down by four other producers before White bought it.

  ‘I remember getting it at breakfast and reading it, and then agreeing to buy it before lunch. It was just like that. Just like the real Hollywood stuff. But it then took me a year to find a theatre and put it on. I always thought it would be successful, and never wavered in the way that I have done with other things. The really amazing thing about Sleuth is the way that it’s been such a success everywhere… all over America, in the Deep South, and in the Mid-West. It’s remarkable.’

  The least of his problems, it would seem, is in finding people to invest, which I would have thought would have been of paramount difficulty. He says: ‘I think I know as wide a range of people as anybody in that I know people who sleep rough, and others who are millionaires, and I’m friendly with both people on the Left and the Right.

  ‘I get money through people I know, who invest either because they like me or because they know they’ll get a fair deal. And on the whole, even the people who have lost money have always had a fair crack at the whip, which is why I can never understand why people bother to swindle, because they’re always bound to get found out, particularly in something as tightly knit as the entertainment world. It’s not only criminal, it’s stupid.

  ‘When I want to present something I write a short letter to people I think might be interested, and then leave it up to them. Some of the people who invest I’ve never actually met. I never pursue them though. It’s always on a take it or leave it basis. But the way I try to do it now is to tell people that if they have £1000 to invest then they are safer in putting £250 in four plays instead of the whole lot into one. In that way they spread the risk.

  ‘I’ve never found raising money a problem. The most difficult thing is getting the play right.’

  Did he feel any embarrassment when a play was not a commercial success, I asked. ‘No, I feel upset. There’s an emotional thing about putting on a play. It’s like having an affair, in that you feel you’re involved, and if it fails then you’ve failed.

  ‘But I’m not embarrassed about the money. When a play makes money the investors make a great deal of money — more than in any other thing they could have invested in. For instance, someone who put £1000 in Sleuth will have made something like £30,000 so far. And it isn’t finished yet.

  ‘My company, Michael White Ltd, takes a percentage for doing the work, and then the investors take a percentage for investing. It’s really a very traditional way of doing things in that it’s just splitting the cake. Some o
f the small plays, however, I do myself.’

  Money, he thinks, is really one of the major problems of the theatre in that if you spend a lot on something you’re naturally very anxious for it to be a success, but if you do something for very little, then the commercial pressures are so much less exacting.

  ‘That’s what’s wrong in America. There’s so much money involved there that people sit around all year waiting to do one play.’

  Married and with three children, White lives in Notting Hill Gate. If it weren’t for the children he doesn’t think he’d care about making money at all.

  ‘Sometimes I feel quite guilty about having made money, although you don’t really make that much in this country. I’ve always lived in very much the same way. Even when I was poor and living in New York I would have the best tickets at the theatre even though I couldn’t afford to buy lunch.’

  And what will he do next?

  ‘Well, I’m quite worried about the state of the theatre in that I think it’s in danger of reaching a very kitschy level of comedies and musicals. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to do anything serious in the West End.

  ‘I already have about six things I know I’m going to do in the next year, but I find I have to turn things down, not because I don’t like them, but because I haven’t got the time. I think I’ve got between another five and ten years left in the theatre, after which my creative juices will probably dry up. And when that happens I’ll have to go into something quite different. I don’t quite know what.’

  POSTSCRIPT Although Michael White has spent many years claiming that he has good artistic judgement but bad business sense, this has not stopped him from becoming one of the most successful producers in the West End. With a substantial list of successes to his name in both theatre (Pirates of Penzance and Annie most recently) and cinema (Moonlighting) he has now moved into independent television production by way of Channel 4 for whom he produced the Comic Strip series. Now divorced he lives in South Kensington and appears at all the best parties, including those not thrown by himself.