And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  The nation was becoming tired of post-war austerity. There was a feeling that Clement Attlee’s Labour government had done its job of building a more socialist society; 1951 saw the Conservatives under Sir Winston Churchill back in power. Certainly the London that I was lucky enough to move in showed few signs of austerity. Any austerity was reserved for me and my early career.

  I loved living in London and was determined to make it there and not have to return to Edinburgh in defeat. And I was lucky to have started my London life in style. I spent six months in the basement of Pixie’s beautiful town house in St John’s Wood. She even had a butler, a very posh butler. Edward and I sat at dinner, listening to the conversation of important writers and actors, Ralph Richardson and J. B. Priestley among them. She took us to the opening night of Noël Coward’s show at the Café de Paris. Heady days.

  I couldn’t stay with Pixie for ever and moved, for 37 shillings a week, to another room in St John’s Wood, in a basement at garden level at the back, in a house owned by another actress, Mary Merrall. She was the stepmother of Valentine Dyall, the Man in Black in the radio series Appointment with Fear. She was having a very stormy relationship with an Irish rogue named Chris. Also in the house were Mabbie Lonsdale, daughter of the well-known playwright Frederick Lonsdale, and her husband, the playwright Rodney Ackland, who was very gay, though Mabbie never seemed to resent his boyfriends.

  All this, you might imagine, was rather strong stuff for a young man from a good Church of Scotland family in sober Edinburgh. Did it overwhelm me and discomfort me? I have to say that it didn’t, not at all. I settled into the life with great ease.

  I never had a great deal of money, but I earned enough to get by. I always seemed to have about seventeen quid in hand. My father had lent me £25 to buy my officer’s uniform, but apart from that I only once actually needed to borrow, when I was twenty-three. I went to one of my dear school friends called James Lockhart, who is a conductor of symphony orchestras now, and was then organist at a church near Brixton, and later became organist at All Souls, Langham Place. He was an accomplished organist, and I went to him to borrow money, because I really had nothing left at all, whereas James had a motorbike and everything, so he was obviously better off than me. I asked him if I could borrow some money, and he said, ‘How much would you need?’ I said, ‘Well, if you could manage fifteen quid,’ and he looked slightly shocked, and thought hard, and said, ‘I can manage thirteen,’ and I borrowed thirteen quid from him. Apart from that I got by, I never went into debt, and of course there was no such thing as a credit card.

  After Mary Merrall’s, I lived in two more bedsits in St John’s Wood. It’s a fashionable area, but my bedsits were the exception, and when I moved to Notting Hill Gate and had a fitted carpet, I felt really excited. It was my first-ever fitted carpet. It was pale beige. I had occasional work, summer concert parties and the odd pantomime in the provinces, but I was making no real headway. I had eight very lean years but I never doubted what I wanted to do, and there was never any question of my giving up. I worked as caretaker to a grand house in Hamilton Terrace, I looked after tennis court reservations in Regent’s Park, I sold advertising space for the ABC Coach Guide, and of course I worked as a barman at the Buckstone Club.

  I just about made ends meet, though I did have to move into a less salubrious bedsit, in King Henry’s Road, in Swiss Cottage, with cold linoleum on the floor and a communal bathroom with a terrifying exploding geyser for hot water. And still I persisted.

  The great musical comedy star Evelyn Laye hired a rehearsal room and coached me, taught me how to sing songs like ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ and ‘Have You Met Miss Jones?’ Later, when I began to get bookings, she came to see me at the Stork Club in Streatham. Unfortunately people began throwing bread rolls at me. As a baker’s son I naturally noticed what sort of bread rolls they were. They were a kind that you don’t get these days, with a crispy, shiny outside and a lovely soft doughy interior. In Scotland they were known as Viennas, and they also used to be called ‘dinner rolls’. I loved to eat them, but they were not the kind of rolls that you would wish to have thrown at you. With their hard exteriors they formed quite powerful ammunition.

  Evelyn Laye stood up and tore into them (the audience, not the bread rolls). ‘I’ve come here to see a young artist, in his early days, struggling,’ she told them, ‘and I have never come across such an ill-mannered lot as you.’ What courage. What spirit. What concern for a fellow human being. The stereotype of the performer is as an egotist. Thank goodness it is not always so. Thank you, Evelyn, and thank you for the implication, in the words ‘in his early days’, that I might have a future.

  It didn’t feel very likely at the time. I was what she had called me, a young artist, struggling. But life wasn’t without its colourful and enjoyable moments. I used to go to a pub called the Star, in a mews in Belgravia. I have never been a very pubby person, but this was a pub and a half. It was run by a man called Paddy Kennedy, and there was an upstairs bar which was a kind of inner sanctum or upper sanctum. It would be frequented by cat burglars, jewel thieves, fraudsters and actors, including visiting American stars. Terry-Thomas would pop in after riding in Rotten Row. Here I became friendly with someone called Jimmy Hunt. He was a sweet man, though not above a bit of ducking and diving. He invited me to crew a motor cruiser across the English Channel and through the French canals to the South of France with him.

  I once asked him if he would mind my using his name when I told stories about him.

  ‘You can use Jimmy,’ he said, ‘but not Hunt. I’d rather you called me Jimmy La Chasse.’

  Jimmy owned a lot of greyhounds, and I used to go around the bookies putting bets on for him, because he would be recognized. Terrific! I’d been years in the profession and I was getting a job because nobody would recognize me.

  Jimmy died last year at the age of ninety-two. At his funeral the collection was for the Home for Retired Greyhounds. What a lovely footnote to a colourful life.

  But I digress. Back to my career. At last I got a break, and it happened in that very lucky place for me, the Buckstone Club. One evening, I was polishing glasses and pretending not to listen to the conversation, and I heard a pretty good club comedian called Digby Wolfe telling Harry Fowler, the cockney actor, that he could get anybody on to television if they were clever enough. ‘How about Ronnie?’ asked Harry. I tried to look extremely clever, though there wasn’t a lot of scope for that really behind the bar of the Buckstone. Anyway, I succeeded. Digby took up the challenge, got me into a show he did on television, called, very reasonably, The Digby Wolfe Show and for good measure also got me on to The Yana Show on Saturday nights on the BBC. Even more importantly, as it turned out, he got me into the show at Winston’s. Danny La Rue was the star there, but he was away for two months doing panto, and Digby, who was writing the new show, put me in it with Anne Hart – yes, the very same Anne Hart who would become my wife. I had a bit of financial security at last.

  It was while I was at Winston’s that I met Laurence Olivier. At the time I was playing Othello to Danny La Rue’s Desdemona. That was about the nearest to Shakespeare that I ever

  With all the gang at Danny La Rue’s club. Danny cutting the cake with Toni Palmer on his right and Jenny Logan to his left, followed by Barry Cryer. I’m at the back next to Toni, who is sitting opposite Anne.

  came. It was not a Shakespeare performance that Olivier would have recognized. But, during the run of our piece, an actor friend, Robert Lang, gave Anne and me tickets to see a production in which he was Iago to Olivier’s Othello. After the play we went for supper to Chez Solange, a lovely French restaurant but perhaps too traditional to survive in today’s world. We had a wonderful evening of sparkling conversation, and then Robert, to my horror, turned to Olivier and said, ‘Shall we go on to the club?’

  My blood ran cold at the thought of the man, fresh from his triumph, seeing my send-up of the role. Luckily Olivier said he was too tired
. They drove us to the club and I was terrified that he would change his mind, but he didn’t. As they dropped us off, he gave me a friendly smile. It wouldn’t have been so friendly if he’d known what I was going to do to Othello a few minutes hence.

  I did get occasional film parts, not all of them bad – I played a West Highland fisherman in Whisky Galore – but not all of them good either. In 1961 I thought my big break might have come. I was driving south along Tottenham Court Road – you could in those days – in my Austin Healey Sprite, and a taxi overtook me with the passenger gesticulating frantically at me. It was Terry-Thomas no less, and when I had stopped, and he had got out of his taxi, he said, ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am to bump into you,’ and he said he had a part in a film for me. I was very excited. This could be my big break.

  I telephoned Terry-Thomas that night as requested, and he said that the director of the film, Robert Day, wanted to see me. I began to get even more excited.

  Robert Day told me that they were making a film called Operation Snatch, set in Gibraltar. It was said that as long as there were Barbary apes on the Rock, it would remain British. In order to convince the Germans that the ape colony was thriving, they were going to dress up small British soldiers as apes. This was not the kind of star part I had anticipated.

  I needed the money, so despite my bitter disappointment I took the job. It wasn’t fun being an ape when actors like James Villiers and Dinsdale Landen were strolling around as officers, and I have to admit that the situation got to me and I felt my lack of dignity rather too keenly. The assistant director came to call us on to the set one day, with the cry of ‘Apes’. I got on my high horse. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I do not respond to “ape”. I’d like to be called “artiste” at least, or perhaps you could use my name.’ A bit pompous perhaps, but can you blame me?

  In 1962 Anne was cast to play Dorothy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Shaftesbury Theatre, with Dora Bryan. She was married at the time, but it was quite a disastrous marriage. She had married quite young; he was in a vocal group and was away on tour the whole time, and when he came home she cried, and ironed his shirts, then he went away with his clean shirts, and came back again, and she cried again. She got fed up with being on her own all the time. She says that one day she came to work in the club and I said, ‘You look terrible,’ and she said, ‘Thank you’– I can’t believe I really said that, but if she says I did, who am I to argue? – and I discovered that she had about three hours between her theatre show and her night-club appearance. I asked her what she did to fill the gap, and she said she hung around at the theatre till they threw her out, so I suggested that she come down to the Buckstone to see me.

  We’d known each other for about seven years, working together, admiring each other’s work, but suddenly we began talking, and there was a relationship that hadn’t existed before. At which moment, as a result of her brilliance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she was offered a six-month tour of New Zealand as Annie in Annie Get Your Gun (with a very young Kiri Te Kanawa in the chorus).

  Just before setting off to New Zealand, Anne developed a bad dose of ’flu. On the night before she was due to go, I was really very concerned as to whether she would be fit to fly. I went round to her place at about three o’clock in the morning, peered in and saw her busy ironing and packing. I think it was probably at that moment that it fully dawned on us that we meant quite a bit to each other. There were some wonderful letters exchanged between London and New Zealand in those six months, and the romance not only survived but strengthened.

  I suppose I’m not the right person to say how gifted Anne was. Let someone else say it, then. A book on Broadway musicals, discussing people like Ethel Merman and Howard Keel, described Marilyn Monroe as ‘the world’s most magnificent woman’, rivalled only by ‘the spectacular Anne Hart’. This of the woman who would soon give up her career for me, and who had also been, incidentally, a brilliant and spectacular fully trained ice skater.

  Things were really looking up now. I was offered, after several auditions, the part of one of the Dromios in the London production of The Boys from Syracuse at the Drury Lane Theatre. The show was a Richard Rodgers musical based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. On reflection I think I was wrong to suggest that my Othello at Winston’s was the nearest I came to Shakespeare. This was nearer, but still not very near. There were two Dromios, twin servants to the twin Antipholus brothers. This was my first part in a real West End show. I was appearing at the time in a summer show in Yarmouth, and on the train I happened to share a compartment with Anthony Fell, the Member of Parliament

  With my dear wife Anne.

  for Yarmouth. He was very pleased to hear that I had got the part at Drury Lane, almost as pleased as I was, and we went to the buffet car to celebrate. And of course I was very pleased that he had been elected, almost as pleased as he was, so we had to celebrate that too.

  After he had congratulated me a few more times on getting the part, and I had congratulated him a few more times on getting elected, it dawned on me that I had had a few congratulations too many. And I had two shows to do that night.

  Fresh air was the only possible answer. I don’t expect I looked a pretty sight, hanging my head out of the window near the loo in order to get as much fresh air on to it as I could, but it worked. Thank goodness trains still had windows that you could open. Here’s a piece of advice that you may find valuable in life. If you ever find that you need fresh air rapidly, go to Great Yarmouth. They’ve got more air than they know what to do with.

  On the strength of my part in The Boys from Syracuse at Drury Lane, where shows always ran for years, I felt secure enough to borrow £4,000 from the bank, and £500 from my father, to buy a large house in New Cross, with room to rent out three bedsits at £19 per week.

  The show closed after six weeks. Never mind. My stock was rising, and I was soon in work again. This was in the aforementioned Twang, whose failure proved so important to my success. I had served my apprenticeship at last. The Frost Report beckoned.

  4

  Like me, Ronnie B. spent his childhood in a great university city. In his case it was Oxford. Like me, he never even considered the possibility of going to the university. Like me, he knew what he wanted to do and went for it.

  He was actually born in Bedford, on 25 September 1929, so he was fifteen months older than me. I think you’ll agree that his background was really very similar to mine. His maternal grandfather was a gas plumber. His father’s father was a master… no, not baker, but butcher. His father was an oil clerk. Ronnie reckoned that this made his family upper working class, which had a better ring to it than lower middle class. I think mine would fit into the same category.

  Like me, Ronnie was one of three, though in his case he came between two girls. His mother worked in munitions during the war but otherwise was happy to be a housewife. Most women were in those days.

  His father was named Leonard, but everyone called him Tim. His mother was called Edith but was always known as Cis. His was a happy, relatively uneventful childhood.

  Where did his talent come from? Well, there had never been an actor in the family, but his father loved to put on a straw boater and perform an old music-hall song entitled ‘I’m Not All There’. Much later Ronnie discovered that this had been Eric Morecambe’s party piece as a child.

  Ronnie did exhibit, very early on, an interest in dressing up. He would creep into his father’s wardrobe and don a pierrot costume which his father kept there, and he recalled that his elder sister, Vera, used to put on shows with some of her friends in local back gardens. They charged a farthing a time. Perhaps I should explain, for younger readers, that that amounts to about a tenth of a penny in today’s money. Ronnie did feel that something of the acting bug may have got into him during these shows.

  He began to go to theatres at a much younger age than me. His father would take the family to stand in long queues for tickets. There would be a queue for tickets at ninepe
nce and another for tickets at one and threepence. If the nine-penny tickets ran out, they went home. People brought up in the last forty years can have no experience of how short money could be in Britain even in respectable working families in what are so often called the good old days.

  The very first play that Ronnie saw was Cottage to Let by Geoffrey Kerr. It starred my mother’s old classmate, Alastair Sim. A tiny coincidence, perhaps, but one of many. Later, the great man went to see a performance of Ron’s, and afterwards called on him backstage to offer him a job – which, sadly, he was not free to take.

  Ron’s schooldays were scarcely more spectacular than mine, but he did at least manage to be naughty on one occasion. He actually played truant, though it was one of the most academically respectable truancies in the history of British education. He bunked off school to go and see Olivier in the film of Henry V. He only missed games, never his strong point, and in fact he had already seen the film on a school trip and been so excited by it that he felt he must see it again.