Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  He was most frightened, he says, when he was taken prisoner in Uganda last year. He really thought he was for the chop that time and while he and three other journalists were in jail, one man was clubbed to death by the guards. Ugandan soldiers don’t have a very good reputation, he says.

  But he actually came nearest to death when hit by a mortar bomb splinter in Cambodia during an ambush. At first he thought his face was gone, but he felt up and could feel the contours. Then he felt something warm running down his leg.

  ‘I was terrified. I thought my wedding tackle had gone. So I crawled to a ditch and pulled my pants down to look how badly injured I was. It wasn’t very bad, as it turned out. That was the worst battle I’ve ever been in, bullets were flying all around us and mortar bombs were crashing about. And, you know what, in the confusion I’d stopped taking pictures.

  ‘That was, I think, the biggest failing that I ever showed. When it was really all happening I was so worried about having been hit that I’d put my cameras away. And it was easily the best scene I’d ever been in. That was my greatest failure.’

  POSTSCRIPT Don McCullin’s fabled luck as a war photographer almost ran out for ever in 1982. While covering the war in El Salvador, he became caught in heavy crossfire between the guerillas and the Salvadorian Army and was pinned down for over thirteen hours before he could crawl to safety. This was McCullin’s first war for six years, during which time he had concentrated on broadening his range to the point of becoming one of the country’s finest photographers of flowers. He has been described by Newsweek as the ‘greatest battlefield photographer of our times’ and has won the World’s Press Photo award three times.

  December 1973

  Sarah Miles

  Husband Robert Bolt thinks that Sarah Miles is self-destructive to a degree. I would refine that a little by suggesting that she is often the bemused victim of her own unconscious aptitude for self-persecution.

  And it would appear that in the collective mind of that section of the British public which spends its Sundays reading comics she is regarded as something of a cross between a scarlet woman, a delectably sensuous femme fatale, and a wilful upper-class bitch.

  For some reason, not altogether readily apparent to me, she would appear to have been selected as a symbol of wanton and extravagant abandonment in woman.

  I’m sure there is a need for this kind of personality: I think women enjoy reading about her, probably secretly envying her apparent life-style while more consciously morally upbraiding her reported or imagined behaviour, while men see in her the sort of wild and exciting personality which she played in her husband’s film Lady Caroline Lamb. Probably both men and women experience some sense of catharsis from the many titillating stories printed about her.

  But it seems to me that, as with so many public images, it doesn’t altogether fit the private persona: in short the much celebrated and castigated ‘life and loves of Sarah Miles’ about which we appear to have been reminded with nagging consistency for some considerable number of years, might, in fact, not be anything like so lively as we are led to imagine.

  Last week after she arrived home from Chicago and had again made the front pages of several newspapers after a temperamental outburst at Heathrow, she told me on the telephone that she felt she might be being persecuted. But on reflection, when I put it to her this week that she might indeed feel she was being pilloried sometimes, she was more benign in her attitude.

  ‘It sounds so silly to say I’m being persecuted. It’ll all be forgotten in a few years. But if I am, and I may be slightly, then it’s probably partly my fault. I’m too open in what I say. I don’t lie when I’m asked questions.’

  It was the first time I had met her, but after dutifully researching through past newspaper cuttings, I had come up with the conclusion that she turned on a somewhat larger than life style strictly for the benefit of journalists or television interviewers, who have got a lot of mileage out of her in the eleven years since she went into films.

  What I was suggesting, I put to her as tactfully as I could, was that she was a bit of an unintentional fibber, with a built-in headline-grabbing mechanism. After some consideration she thought that this could be partly true — but for the very best of reasons. ‘I’ve honestly never contrived to get headlines,’ she said, ‘but I’m terribly aware of boring people because I’m terribly aware of being bored by other people, so that rather than do that, I’ll suddenly say something quite silly to prevent people from nodding off.

  ‘Sometimes when I’m doing television chat shows and the questions are banal and boring, I think that the viewers must be falling asleep and I think: “What can I do that will wake them up?” — and then I’m liable to say anything. It may be the truth or a complete lie, just so long as it’s interesting and entertaining.

  ‘I was on a show in America the other day and the interviewer was saying: “You had a very upper-class background didn’t you?” And I was so bored I said: “No, I’m a Cockney from the East End.” He was completely thrown. I like doing that.’

  I then put it to her that the image she had before her marriage to Bolt was one of a raver, but that this might have been fostered by her own romancing since there was remarkably little evidence of it apart from what she herself was reported to have said. On this matter she thought she had been misquoted (and indeed some of the quotations attributed to her have been so laughable that it’s remarkable that anyone should ever have taken them seriously) but she agreed that she did lead something of a fantasy life.

  ‘My husband thought that Caroline Lamb was the nearest part that I’ve ever played to myself, but I would never be so boastful as to say that because I admired the lady, and I would never be so bold as to compare myself with someone I think was a heroine.’

  What about the commonly accepted opinion that she used to be a raver? ‘I was only a raver in their heads. When I was supposed to be raving I never went outside my front door. I think my style is that of a raver when I meet people, but that’s a front to hide behind. I know that what nine-tenths of the people assume about me is a lie, so I know I can hold my head up high and continue with a smile on my face because I know I haven’t done what I am accused of. “Accused” is the wrong word. I’ve been misjudged. Although I have no religion, I am religious and I know I’ve done nothing that is bad or evil. And therefore I can go on and face things because I know what I have done and nobody else does.’

  Did she ever see herself in the role of her own persecutor, I asked?

  She was doubtful for a moment: then reluctantly agreed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But I’ve never done anything to get publicity. I just seem to fall into things that other people don’t fall into. I just flounder from one disaster situation to another. I don’t plan it, it just happens that way and I don’t know why it is. It worries me a bit. It can’t all be coincidence so I think there must be something in me that attracts that kind of situation.’

  She’s a tremendously highly strung and, I think, fragile person, a woman of intense energies and irrepressibly high (perhaps super-high) spirits.

  What I found most endearing was the affection she demonstrated unconsciously yet continually to her husband.

  ‘He’s writing a new play, but I can’t say what it is, because it’s a secret. I hope he doesn’t want to direct again.’ (He both wrote and directed Lady Caroline Lamb.) ‘There are so many directors and so few writers. I want him to write books and write for Robert Bolt instead of always writing for somebody else. And I want him to have peace of mind. Everybody’s eager to have Robert Bolt write for them, but I said “Forget it, have the courage to sit down and write what you want to write about, even if it’s for nothing. It doesn’t matter.” So that’s what he’s doing.

  ‘Robert’s a compulsive worker. That’s his problem. Even if he says “Let’s have a game of tennis,” he has to play seriously to win — even though he grazes his knees, because he only learned to play when he met me and I’ve been playing since I
was a baby.

  ‘He gets up at five every morning, works solidly through until two, spends an hour or so thinking and then plays with our son Tom when he comes home from school.’

  She’s been working in theatre in Chicago doing Thornton Wilder’s Skin Of Our Teeth, which was directed by her brother Christopher. They had intended filming Robert’s screenplay of The Plumed Serpent but at the last minute difficulties arose and she was tempted to Chicago by the money being offered and by the challenge of the role. Both she and her brother won excellent reviews, and she goes on next to play St Joan in Los Angeles.

  She needed the money, she explains, to buy a house in Malibu, where she will live during the new year and where her little boy will go to school.

  ‘We’re going to have to sell our house in Surrey because we just can’t afford it. We have five acres of garden and the horses. They’ll have to go. Everyone thinks we must be so rich, but we’re not at all. We’ve talked about buying somewhere in Cornwall. I’m rather excited about the idea of not having any money.’

  During our conversation I was surprised to notice that she had a slight stammer.

  ‘I stammered dreadfully all through my childhood,’ she said. ‘That’s how it all started. How I got into the whole bloody business. My mother decided that I should have elocution lessons and the lady who taught me made me say speeches from plays, and I began to think “Well, I don’t know much about stammering, but I rather like saying the speeches” — and that made me interested. I was stammering a lot in Chicago, but I never do on stage or in films.

  ‘All my family stammer. My brother sometimes can’t talk at all, and Daddy can’t either.’

  But what of her public image, I insisted?

  ‘It’ll all be forgotten in a hundred years time, won’t it? And what you lose on the roundabouts you gain on the swings.’

  She paused: ‘But Christ, I wish I had a swing every now and then.’

  POSTSCRIPT Sarah Miles is the sort of actress for whom tabloid newspapers were invented. It seems that every time she opens her mouth there is a reporter standing by as she reveals all again and again and again. The year after this article was written she really hit the headlines when her business manager was found dead from a drugs overdose in her hotel room while she was shooting The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, and since then she has had a part in only one major movie, The Big Sleep. For seven years she lived in California in virtual seclusion, but after returning to London in 1981 she has played a manic depressive in the telefilm Walter and June, been Lady Macbeth in Islington and has now formed her own rock group. She now lives in Holland Park with her son Thomas. Although divorced from Robert Bolt they remain good friends and are frequently to be seen out together.

  December 1971

  Tim Rice And Andrew Lloyd Webber

  Just over a year ago Tim Rice played the new pop opera he had just composed with Andrew Lloyd Webber to his mother: ‘Well, it’s very nice dear,’ she said, the way mothers do, ‘but do you think anyone will want to buy it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rice. ‘Hope so.’

  As it happens, people did want to buy it. In just a year more than thirteen million pounds’ worth of the album Jesus Christ Superstar have been sold, the show is a big hit on Broadway, opens in Denmark on Boxing Day, Paris and Australia in March and by next summer, when a production will be brought to the West End, there will be about twenty separate production companies around the world.

  And already Rice and Webber are working on the music for the film version, to be directed in Israel next year by Norman Jewison.

  ‘It would seem that both Andrew and I will get about a million pounds pre-tax from Superstar by the time everything’s counted up. It seems incredible, doesn’t it? For so many years I think we were ludicrously underpaid for what we were doing and now we’re ludicrously overpaid. There seems to be no happy medium.’

  Everything about Jesus Christ Superstar is almost too big to be true. In Britain the record was very slow to take off, notably, I think because Radio One decided not to play it, but in America it became the biggest-selling record of the year, and has been followed by black Jesus Christ Superstars and country and western Superstars. Now there’s even a record called ‘Richard Nixon Superstar’, and a tasteless pastiche of the opera which has Christ walking about heaven singing ‘Me-ee-ee, Me-ee-ee’, to that well-known opening refrain.

  In truth the whole Superstar monster has run completely amok, spurred on by the inexplicable boom in Jesus fervour in America.

  ‘Our timing couldn’t have been better,’ says Rice, ‘although we’d no idea that there was going to be a revival in religious interest when we first started writing it. It was just incredible luck. But now the thing has got so big over there it can’t be controlled. We have this absurd situation where people are merchandising Jesus Christ Superstar T-shirts and watches and just about everything you can think of.

  ‘It’s just so distasteful. There are Superstar rubber stamps, patches for your shirts and jeans, stick-on things for your cars, sunglasses, jock straps — you name it. All that in itself is bad enough, but what is worse is that people think that we started the whole thing ourselves — when really we wish we were able to stop it.

  ‘Also a lot of people imagine we wrote the opera simply for money, but that isn’t true either. We like to look at it as though this may be the only really great success we’ll ever have, although we hope not, and that we’re earning our lifetime’s money in a couple of years. And now we’re busy buying ourselves houses — I’ve bought my grandmother a flat — and investing in insurance schemes and things like that.’

  I first met Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber about four and a half years ago when I went for an interview to the Evening Standard. I’d just been offered a job, when these two blokes wandered in having just recorded Ross Hannaman, the ‘Evening Standard Girl of that Year’ at that time. I remember I didn’t think much of the record, and as it turned out neither did they or the record-buying public.

  A few months later, however, we met again, when their first major project —Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — was produced at St Paul’s. Although it had only a qualified success, it was, I thought, a superb piece … and a very good omen of what was to follow.

  Tim Rice, at twenty-seven, is the lyric writer of the pair. Educated at Lancing, he ducked out of going to university and instead spend six months at the Sorbonne, before coming back to London to become an articled clerk in a solicitor’s office.

  Then he moved on to working with Norrie Paramor at EMI as a record producer, writing bits of songs on his own and about that time he met Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  Andrew’s background had been seriously classical (his father is director of the London College of Music and his brother a cellist), and his education had been Guildhall, a term at Oxford (‘I left because I was so bored’) and a year at the Royal College.

  ‘I didn’t complete any course, because all I really wanted to know were things like the techniques of orchestration. And there isn’t really a great deal you can teach a composer formally. I suppose I was really the odd one out in the family. I’d always been fascinated by pop, and really wanted to work in that medium.’

  At first they tried a few songs together, but they didn’t get very far, and only when they began working on big projects, like the cantata Joseph or the opera Superstar, did they bring out the best in themselves.

  ‘There was no moment when we went “pow” like when Lennon found his McCartney, or Rogers found his Hammerstein,’ says Rice. ‘It seemed to come more slowly. Basically we think of an idea for a theme, then Andrew goes off and thinks up some music for it, and then brings it back to me and I try to put lyrics to it. Then we both get together and go over what we’ve got.’

  The theme music for Jesus Christ Superstar came to Lloyd Webber in the Fulham Road. ‘I’d been told that there was a certain shop there that had an original copy of an old Ricky Nelson album and I went d
own to buy it. And I was so excited to get hold of it that I came out with this music running through my head.… rushed into the nearest restaurant, demanded paper to write it down, and then telephoned Tim to say I’d thought of the most fantastic tune.’

  The tune — Jesus Christ, Superstar, who are you, what have you sacrificed will probably earn them both a considerable income for the rest of their lives, and there are now more than ninety separate recordings of the music from the show.

  Their one big stroke of luck was when David Land, the head of a much diversified industrial company, became their personal manager, paying them £25 a week each while they worked on their opera. Even he wasn’t sure about its commercial value, but he was prepared to back them anyway. Then MCA Records took to the idea and provided £14,000 for the recording of the album, which was a fortune to invest in two complete unknowns.

  It will probably turn out to be the best £14,000 MCA ever invested in anything with three and a half million copies of the double album already sold, and sales still building up around the world. Which isn’t bad for a record which was made basically as a demo-disc for a show.

  ‘It is,’ says Rice, ‘one of those once in a half-decade records.’

  The record itself didn’t promote too much controversy, but when the show opened on Broadway, Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of everything from money grabbing and tastelessness to anti-Semitism. That just makes them mad.

  What makes their version of Christ’s passion so individual is that they see it from the point of view of Judas. Do they believe in God, I ask?

  ‘The short answer,’ says Rice, ‘is yes. But I don’t believe that Christ was God which I think makes his story all the more amazing.’

  It’s good to see people you know suddenly have enormous success, but it’s particularly nice when one notices how little they’ve been altered by it. ‘I heard the other day that Elvis now sings Superstar in his shows,’ says Rice. ‘What is there left…? I might as well retire.