It was at school that he first discovered his talent for humour. A boy was reading a poem about a windmill, which included the lines ‘The windmill cuts through the air, cuts through the air, cuts through the air.’ Ronnie commented, ‘He’ll be bald in a minute with all that “air cutting”.’ The master didn’t appreciate the joke, and Ron said that it was almost ten years before he made his next joke. Thank goodness they came rather more quickly in our time together.
He too found that he had a bit of musical talent. While I played the organ in my church, he sang in the choir in his. And while I was queuing outside the stage door in Edinburgh, he was doing the same thing in Oxford. We were both stage-door Johnnies, as such people were known in those days, though I suppose in our case it should be stage-door Ronnies. I actually find it rather moving, now, to think of the two of us, separated by so many hundreds of miles, oblivious of each other’s existence, doing such similar things.
The very first autograph that Ron got was of that great actress Celia Johnson, star of Brief Encounter and much else besides. His brief encounter revealed a very human side to the star. There was a loud explosion near by, just as she signed his programme. He told her not to worry. It was Guy Fawkes night. ‘Heavens!’ she said, ‘I must get home. I’ve got cats.’ John Gielgud’s was another distinguished signature to grace Ron’s book.
We were both thoroughly starstruck and would have been astounded if anybody had told us that one day we would be stars, and that people would want our autographs.
Ron got into the sixth form at school a year earlier than was normal. He was good at languages and studied Spanish, then decided that the things he was learning were going to be no use to him in later life. He hurried out of school as soon as he could and studied to be an architect. In his class at the architecture school were two young men called Ian and Alastair Smith. They were the brothers of Maggie Smith. Ron soon realized that the architecture school was not the Prime of Mr Ronald Barker and resigned, knowing that he would never be good enough.
Instead he went into a bank, inheriting the job of his elder sister, Vera, when she chose to move to nursing. He was no keener on banking than I was on helping to feed farrowing sows in Scotland. He was just treading water. In his case this was not because he was waiting for National Service. He failed his medical due to childhood nephritis and an operation for a tubercular gland.
While he was at the bank he joined a local amateur dramatic company, and made his debut in A Murder Has Been Arranged by Emlyn Williams. There was a play within the play, and Ronnie’s role was as the musical director of this play. This meant that he had his back to the audience for much of the time, which is not generally regarded as a huge advantage to a performer, but it was a start, and might in fact have been quite welcome to him, as his main problem in his early acting days was what to do with his hands.
He was on his way, and before long he was auditioning for the Manchester Repertory Company, which was based in Aylesbury. Well, where else would the Manchester Repertory Company be based? Here he heard some very welcome words, thirteen of them, but they were not at all unlucky. ‘I can offer you two pound ten a week – you can start tonight.’ Characteristically, Ronnie wrote of this, ‘The voice belonged to a middle-aged man with heavy eyebrows and a gammy leg called Horace Wentworth. Or rather, the man’s name was Horace Wentworth. I don’t know what the leg was called.’
His job was as an assistant to the assistant stage manager, but it wasn’t long before he got his first part in the small role of Lieutenant Spicer in J. M. Barrie’s Quality Street. He took to the life like an Aylesbury duck to orange sauce, but it was during his fourth appearance that he had his revelation, his equivalent of my Babes in the Wood moment. He was playing the part of Charles, the chauffeur, in Miranda, an everyday story of a mermaid brought to civilization by a man. In it Ronnie got his first proper laugh, a real belter.
‘The sound of the audience on that Monday night all those years ago is as clear to me as if it were yesterday,’ he wrote much later. ‘The thrill that I experienced on hearing that most wonderful of sounds! I get goose-pimples even now, just thinking of it. This is what I want to do, I thought. I want to make people laugh. Never mind Hamlet. Forget Richard the Second. Give me Charley’s Aunt. My mission in life is now crystal-clear.’
Of course Ronnie had the talent to be a great straight actor, and I know that there are people who thought that he was selling out in doing things like The Two Ronnies. Not at all. He was fulfilling himself, just as much as I was.
Evelyn Laye had described me as a young artist, struggling. And that was what Ronnie was too, in his very different environment. In weekly rep you did a different play every week, and rehearsed next week’s play in the set of that week’s play. It was tiring, ill-paid work, but Ronnie enjoyed it very much. With the number and variety of the plays that he learnt and performed, it seemed to me to be like a degree in English, and a lot better perhaps. He estimated that he had appeared in 350 plays before he made it to the West End. And most of those had to be learnt in less than a week. I’m sure that the experience contributed greatly to Ronnie’s love for, and mastery of, the English language.
A company called the Manchester Repertory Company could hardly stay in Aylesbury for ever, and they didn’t. They moved to Rhyl, in North Wales. Ronnie’s last performance at Aylesbury was his first starring role, playing a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in The Guinea Pig, by W. Chetham Strode. It was a good part, played in the film by Richard Attenborough, and Ronnie went to Rhyl to reprise it there.
The theatre company didn’t last long in Rhyl (the setting for Les Dawson’s inspired night club, ‘The Talk of the Groyne’). In 1949 Ronnie went back home to Oxford for his first spell of unemployment, or rather, of ‘resting’. He worked as a hospital porter at the Wingfield Hospital. There he came into contact with polio victims and found himself so disturbed that he couldn’t eat – an unusual circumstance. He was, of course, barely twenty. What’s particularly interesting to me about this experience is that he found, in his stress and distress, that he needed a character for himself as the hospital porter. Suddenly, and without any premeditation, he announced that his name was Charlie, and he never told anybody at the hospital that he was an out-of-work actor. Being himself would be a problem for him much later, in our shows together.
Ronnie used humour to bring a laugh to those sad polio sufferers. With a male nurse, he did routines with bedpans, empty and full. The mind, I have to say, boggles. But if Ronnie ever had doubts about the value of comedy, I’m sure that the memory of his work at Wingfield Hospital would have reassured him.
After about six months he did get another job – with the Mime Theatre Company. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of this mildly overweight young actor, who admitted that he hadn’t yet learnt what to do with his hands on stage, and who would become such a master of verbal dexterity, trapped in a mime company. Maybe it would all have gone better if this mime company’s repertoire hadn’t consisted largely of folk songs and dances. Mimed folk songs? Maybe these folk songs and dances would have gone better if they hadn’t been performed largely in schools. And maybe these schools would have been more fun to perform mime to if they hadn’t been in the wilds of Wales and then in the poorer parts of the north-east, where mime was not hot on the agenda. ‘It’s not a bad cold, Mam. I just can’t miss school today. We’ve got mime.’ Anyway, not surprisingly, the company began to fail. Bookings fell away. Payments dwindled. Finally, the company folded.
Maybe it would have been easier if it had folded in London, not between Penzance and Land’s End. Even then, things would have been more comfortable for Ronnie if the company could have afforded six rail tickets home, not five, and if he hadn’t drawn the short straw. It’s a long walk, Land’s End to London. It beats hard bread rolls hands down in the Struggling Artists’ Humiliation Stakes. True, he did manage to hitch the occasional lift, but it still took him three days to get home.
After that, Ronnie n
ever looked back – certainly not towards Land’s End. He got a job at the Playhouse in his beloved Oxford, ‘city of dreaming spires and lost bicycles’ (his words). Here he did excellent work in a variety of roles, came to the attention of Peter Hall, later of course to become Sir Peter Hall, and through Peter Hall he got his first parts in the West End.
But before I leave the subject of weekly rep, in trying to give a complete picture of the man who was to become my dear friend, I have to emphasize that he really was good-looking and dashing then. In fact he was frequently dashing from the theatre into the arms of a willing young woman. If I tell you that he was engaged twice, that a young lady from a very respectable upper-class family took all her clothes off to dance for him in a cornfield, and that on two occasions, due entirely to the persistence and eagerness of the young women concerned, he found himself having affairs with two
Ronnie performing for the Mime Theatre Company, 1950.
Ronnie as Poirot, Oxford Playhouse.
Ronnie as Danny in Night Must Fall.
Ronnie as Lieutenant Trotter in Journey’s End.
Ronnie in The Private Secretary, Oxford Playhouse.
at the same time, you will begin to see that Ron sowed his wild oats rather more thoroughly than me.
None of this interfered with his great professionalism on stage, although this did lapse once. Just like me, he once had too much to drink before a performance. Unlike me, he didn’t have a train window out of which to lean. His indiscretion involved a very famous actress, Jessie Matthews, in the later years of her career. There was a pub, the Gloucester Arms, just across from the stage door of the Oxford Playhouse, and a theatre electrician who liked his pint had fixed a buzzer in the saloon bar, warning of the rise of the curtain at the beginning of each act. Ronnie only had a two-minute scene in the play, five minutes after the curtain-up in act three, but he had discovered a new drink, iced red wine with water – very refreshing on a warm summer’s night – and on this warm summer’s night he had refreshed himself a bit too much. When the buzzer for act three came, he realized that he had drunk too much. Being a little unsteady on his feet, he pulled a chair over next to the door to the set, forgetting that Miss Matthews was due out of that door to make a quick costume change. In Ronnie’s own words, ‘She flew out and ran slap-bang into me. She pitched forward and sort of rolled head over heels, her legs going places that they hadn’t been for years, helped by the fact that her evening dress split from top to bottom or rather from hem to bottom, revealing underwear very similar to that which we all know and love from her early films.’ It was no surprise to find, later that year, that he was not on Miss Matthews’s Christmas card list.
Most actors would be grateful for one job in the West End. Very early in his career there, Ronnie had two in one evening. He played a gipsy in the first act of Listen to the Wind at the Arts Theatre and an Italian peasant in the third act of Summertime at the Apollo in Shaftesbury Avenue. He took only four minutes to walk from one to the other, in his composite gipsy/peasant make-up, getting a few odd stares as he went. One can imagine the surprise of an observant newspaper vendor. Why does this gipsy/peasant walk down Shaftesbury Avenue at 8.47 every evening?
It is not perhaps a startling coincidence that Ron and I should both have come across Laurence Olivier. Ron actually found himself in a play presented by the great man – Double Image at the Savoy. He even found himself talking to Olivier at a party given on the stage to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the actress Zena Dare. Ronnie had to inform Olivier that he was leaving the cast to appear in the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real, directed by his old friend Peter Hall. Olivier used only five words in reply, but they were words which showed his style, friendliness and charm. ‘Swine – have some more champagne,’ he said. Many years later Ronnie met Lord Olivier at a BAFTA awards ceremony, and Olivier told him how much he admired him.
No, that wasn’t an extraordinary coincidence, but the next one was. Entirely unknown to each other, Ron and I both went up for the same part of one of the Dromios in The Boys from Syracuse. And I, as you know, got it. This was actually because they had to find two Dromios who could look identical, and they found a match for me but not for Ron. I pretended, however, that the decision was down to a little thing called talent.
I’ve found all these parallels in our lives, great and small, important and trivial, but I haven’t yet mentioned what is perhaps, in the world of show business, the most extraordinary parallel of all.
We both met wonderful ladies, we both worked with these wonderful ladies, we both fell in love with these wonderful ladies, we both had long and happy marriages, both the wonderful ladies gave up their careers for us, and we lived happily ever after with them. It almost defies belief.
Yet it happened.
Funnily enough, as I mentioned, I met the aptly named Joy before Ron, when she was stage manager of a pantomime in Bromley. Ron met her in Cambridge when he was cast to do two one-act plays, Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and The Bespoke Overcoat by Wolf Mankowitz. Another actor had dropped out, Ronnie replaced him, and something that he did at the very first reading, a little bit of comic business over smoking a hookah, made Joy laugh, and she realized immediately that she was attracted to him. The feeling was mutual. All the apparent intensity of those entanglements of Ron’s in the rep days faded. This was the real thing.
Even the real thing doesn’t always run entirely smoothly, though. A large amount of chopped liver had to be consumed by Ronnie in The Bespoke Overcoat. He loathed the stuff. He could barely get it down. Joy thought long and hard about ways to ease the misery of this man to whom she had become instantly attracted. She worked out that stiff chocolate blancmange would look like chopped liver at a distance. Every day, she made one for Ronnie to eat on stage. When they were married Joy promised to make him a chocolate blancmange, and Ronnie had to confess that it was the only other dish that he detested. He hadn’t dared to admit it before, because she was going to such trouble.
It wasn’t long before they were married – just about nine months, in fact, although there is absolutely no significance in that figure. Ron proposed to her over drinks in the club at the Royal Court Upstairs, in Sloane Square, and in the morning, when she realized that he remembered doing so, she accepted. They were married in July 1957. It was a very quiet wedding. In Joy’s witty words – she is a very witty woman – ‘We had it on a Monday so that nobody could come. There were eleven people there. There’s always one person who will take the day off when you didn’t really want them there.’ They went to Shipston-on-Stour for their honeymoon, because Ron was working at the weekend, and because they had very little money. They began married life in Ron’s tiny flat in Hampstead. Actors do not get rich from stage work. I think the public would be astounded and shocked if they knew how low salaries are in the theatre for all but the greatest stars.
With women like Joy and Anne behind us, and with all the similarities that I have listed between us, how could Ronnie and I have failed to get on well? How could we have failed to succeed, if you see what I mean?
5
In 1966 Britain announced that it would adopt decimal currency within five years. Neil Armstrong and David Scott completed the first successful docking operation in space, and the Russians sent two dogs into orbit. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was re-elected with a 97-seat majority, Britain and France agreed a compromise plan for building a Channel tunnel, in South Africa Prime Minister Verwoerd was stabbed to death on the front bench of parliament by a messenger who said he was doing too much for non-whites, and The Frost Report began.
I was by now a married man, and Ron was a father with two children. Larry had been born in 1959 and Charlotte in 1962. Their third child, Adam, would be born soon after the programme had run its two-year course. We were starting a family too. Anne had actually got pregnant before we were married. I think we both worried that our parents would be upset, but not a bit of it, they were delighted for us. This was 1965,
after all, and attitudes were changing. In fact I never actually proposed to Anne. I didn’t need to. It was an assumption. As she put it, ‘If he hadn’t married me, my dad would have been around with a shotgun.’ We married very quietly, in the unglamorous surroundings of Brixton Register Office, with just our mums and dads and two witnesses present.
We worked hard. Anne used to double, doing the Crazy Gang show in the evening and the club at night. At one glorious period I was doing three jobs in a day. I did the afternoon show of the Enid Blyton Noddy in Toyland, the evening show, also of Enid Blyton, of The Famous Five, both at the Shaftesbury Theatre, and then cabaret at the Côte d’Azur in Soho at night.
I sold my house in New Cross in 1965 for £13,000, and we bought a huge, red-brick Victorian house in Upper Norwood for £7,300. It was not exactly cosy or bijou. In fact I kept thinking I saw bits of it in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Anne continued working at Winston’s well into her pregnancy. ‘More feathers, darling,’ Danny La Rue would say. Steadily, until it was time to give up, more and more feathers were needed to hide the growing bulge.
Nobody’s life is a fairy tale, and our happiness was cut short. Andrew was born in April 1966, the year of the beginning of The Frost Report. It was obvious from the first moment that something was very wrong. His heart was on the wrong side and he had several holes in it. He was allowed home for a while, but it was clear to us that he wasn’t going to make it. Maybe today something could be done, but not then. I continued in the show at the club, but it was strange and emotionally very difficult to make one’s living from laughter at that time. I kept thinking of Anne at home with the poor little thing. He was taken back into hospital, and operated on, but it was not a success. He lived just six weeks. We still think of him, and of the life that he might have led. He would have been forty this year.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 4
