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3 Auntie Vi

A quick reminder. Auntie Vi was mother Jean’s elder sister. She married Dr George Crosby, the dumpy somewhat pompous doctor for whom Granny Molly had once worked as a secretary. Vi called him “Potto” which was really rather appropriate. That glorious word “panjandrum” could have been invented for him. Vi and George plus a marmalade cat named Cooper lived in a top-floor flat in Weymouth Street above his medical practice, close enough to the centre of London’s medical hub Harley Street, but the location was cheaper and actually rather nicer. I used to escape there as often as possible. The flat or maisonette, as George puffed it up – seemed impossibly glamorous (my aunt would have said “chi-chi”) after the seldom cleaned haven for traffic noise addicts that was Harrington Court.

There was an upstairs drawing room which had been knocked into the room next door by means of an ever so “chi-chi” arch. Therein lurked a stereo record player on which Auntie played those Fifties Latin American records which showed off the marvels of stereo with question-and- answer bongo solos panned left and right only. There was a dining room with a bar underneath and a wine rack containing George’s collection of Barolo. Up to that time the only wine bottles I had seen had candles in them. There was Vi’s kitchen where there were herbs, onions, garlic and wine and where she cooked her recipes for the modern woman. In 1956 she had written and had published a hit recipe book The Hostess Cooks, under her maiden name Viola Johnstone. Its premise was that in the Fifties no one could afford home help any more. The recipes were designed so that our hostess could emerge from the stoves, mascara intact, to entertain out front as if an army of sous chefs had been slaving since dawn and she had had a decent post-lunch siesta. It was a far cry from the over-boiled brussels sprouts of Harrington Court.

Then there were Vi’s friends. There was Tony Hancock of TV’s iconic Hancock’s Half Hour sitcom. Vi introduced me to him in his flat where he was teaching a parrot to say “Fuck Mrs Warren.” Mrs Warren was his cleaner – whom he loathed – so he had embarked on a strategy to get her to quit. She didn’t. Auntie told me that one day the parrot mysteriously cried, “Hancock has no bollocks.”

There was film director Ronald Neame who had been David Lean’s legendary cameraman on classic British movies like Great Expectations. One day I was to work with him on The Odessa File. There was Val Guest and his glamorous actress wife Yolande Donlan. I was in total awe of her as she was the lead in the movie Expresso Bongo with Cliff Richard. Ballet nuts might be intrigued to know that the rock’n’roll sequences in this epic were choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, another name who would cross my professional path. A few years later, Val discovered Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C. It was Val who created the iconic image of Miss Welch in a doe-skin bikini which he used as his Christmas card. I’ve still got mine.

Finally there was Vida Hope, the theatre director who had a huge hit with The Boy Friend, one of the few Fifties British musicals to hoof it to Broadway. Julie Andrews was the young lead and it was in The Boy Friend that she was headhunted for My Fair Lady. I remember Vida railing passionately against a Broadway musical she had just seen. “A nauseating show with a fifty-five-year-old woman pretending to be an eighteen-year-old nun, plus a load of saccharin cute children.” She was referring, of course, to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music.

It’s hard today to understand just how low the reputation of Rodgers and Hammerstein had sunk in the eyes of the British intelligentsia. I still remember the father of a school friend thinking I was a congenital idiot for loving the “sentimental twaddle” called Carousel. He collected cuttings of ghastly reviews and with great pleasure showed me one by John Barber describing the show as “treacle.” Of course I was taken to The Boy Friend and frankly I’m still agnostic about it. It was yet another nostalgic British musical burying itself in the sand against the tide of rock’n’roll. However it was a lot better than Salad Days. I was dragged to this concoction by my godmother Mabel, who disowned me after Perseus the cat destroyed a fox fur stole she left in my care when she was dining with Granny. I remember thinking that if ever I worked in the theatre Salad Days was the sort of show I had to eliminate.

THE ATMOSPHERE AT 28 Weymouth Street was everything home wasn’t. Aunt Vi had a real eye for interior design, two words my parents hadn’t heard of. And it was Vi who taught me to cook. In the process I learned a few choice bon mots that hardly any boys of my age knew, let alone understood. However what really forced me into Auntie Vi’s not inconsiderable bosom was Mum’s latest obsession which affected the family deeply. Certainly the family was never the same again. Its name was John Lill.

John Lill was sixteen years old and Julian only nine when they met at the Saturday junior school of the Royal College of Music. John Lill was the school’s star concert pianist and destined to be the first Brit to win the Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow. Although Julian was seven years John’s junior, somehow they had become friendly enough for Julian to ask him back to Harrington Court where John met Mum. It was a meeting that was to change all our lives. It’s easy to understand why John plus his back story so grabbed Mum. John Lill was born into a working-class family who lived in the then run-down deprived northeast London suburb of Leyton in one of those slum houses that today sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, such is London’s housing crisis. John was selected for the local grammar school but it was at the piano that he excelled. He won a scholarship to the junior Royal College and scraped together his train fares there by playing pub piano in one of the East End’s tougher bars. The owner would introduce John with gems like:

“Do you know your balls are hanging out?”

To which John would reply, “No, but sing the tune and I’ll vamp.”

At last here was the young musical genius Mum had been looking for. Better still, from a background that salved Mum’s conscience big time about hours spent teaching privileged brats at the Wetherby School. Soon Mum was driving John back to Leyton from college and had befriended his parents. Before long Julian and I found ourselves in Leyton to see for ourselves John’s family terraced house “in the slums” as Mum unmincingly chose her words.

There was another life-changing consequence to all this. Whilst Mum was up to good deeds, Julian and I were let loose on the streets of Leyton and we soon discovered the local football team, London’s “Cinderella” soccer club Leyton Orient. Although for one brief season the O’s did reach English soccer’s top flight, we Orient supporters are a small bunch unsullied by success, principally because there’s never been any. However once you have pledged allegiance to a soccer club, that’s that. Julian and I support the O’s to this day, although tragically as I write this, the club has gone out of the Football League.

Years later, it was at the O’s that I was given some truly sage advice. Around the time the “Jesus Christ Superstar” single came out in the UK, I was invited to lunch in the O’s boardroom by the club’s then chairman Bernard Delfont. Bernie, later Lord, Delfont was half-brother to Lew and Leslie Grade. Between the three of them they controlled British show business. Bernie owned the theatres, Lew owned the top film and TV outlets and Leslie was agent to the stars. It was what is today called a 360 degree arrangement. So I was pretty overawed to be asked to watch a home game by the most powerful man in British theatre. Leyton Orient lost of course. But it’s the conversation after the debacle that I recall most.

“My boy, can I give you some advice?” said Bernie, drawing me to one side.

“Of course, Mr Delfont.”

“Just call me Bernie.”

“Yes, Bernie.”

“I’ve heard that song of yours, I’ve got this feeling you could go far. I’ve got some advice for you, my boy. You’re not Jewish are you?”

“No I’m afraid not, I’m . . .”

“You’re not one of the tribe?”

“No, I er . . .”

“Never mind, I’ll give it to you anyway.” He paused. “Never, my boy, never buy a football club.”

From that day onwards Bernie became a friend I could always count on. It was Bernie who years later came to the rescue of Cameron Mackintosh and me when we couldn’t get the theatre we needed for Cats.

NOT VERY GRADUALLY MUM imported John into the family. There were plusses here too. As John increasingly practised chez Harrington Court, I sometimes turned the pages of his piano scores and discovered a huge amount of music I would never have known otherwise and John’s technical ability was inspiring to witness. But there were three boys going on the summer family holiday now. I am sure it must have been very awkward for John too but he seemed to accept everything Mum threw at him. Whatever Julian and I felt, we had acquired an elder brother. We had no choice in the matter. Nor did Dad. He admired John and recognized his exceptional gifts, particularly as an interpreter of Beethoven. But it must have been hard for this quiet, reserved man to stomach that his wife’s attentions and ambitions were focused on someone else.

THE JOHN LILL SAGA was still in its embryo when, in the autumn of 1960, aged twelve and a half – a year younger than my contemporaries and frightened out of my skull – I started my first term at Westminster School. The school, circa 1960–65, was a bit like me, a curious mixture of rebellion, tradition, bloody-mindedness and neurosis, glued together by academic excellence, although the latter was arguably not strictly applicable in my case. It is supposed to have been founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560. In fact the school long predated the throne’s most famous redhead. It was Henry VIII who did one of his rare decent deeds, apart from allegedly writing Greensleeves, by sorting out a chaotic Abbey school. After he annexed and plundered the monasteries in 1536 he found himself in a quandary about Westminster Abbey because this was where the monarch was crowned. Its destruction would have made the operation awkward. So the school became part of his Westminster scheme of things.

The school’s location greatly defines its character. Westminster is at the epicentre of British tradition. It’s where the monarch is crowned. The Queen’s Scholars are by statute the first voices to shout “God Save Whoever” the moment after he or she is crowned. Westminster scholars are to this day allowed to attend debates in the mother of Parliaments. If you were a Scholar in my time you could have skipped the queues at Winston Churchill’s lying in state, witnessed the vote that legalized gay sex and watched the Profumo Affair bring down the Macmillan government.

On arrival, new boys had to choose two special subjects to top up the usual diet of Maths, French etc. Annoyingly history was not an option. Westminster kids did not take the lower history grades as the senior history master rightly considered them useless. So I wound up doing Ancient Greek which I hated and biology (you had to choose a science-based subject) which was Greek to me.

For your first two weeks at the new emporium you were allocated a boy a year older than you, who was tasked with sympathetically demonstrating the niceties of the institution in which you were to spend the next few years. In fact you were regaled with tales of the headmaster’s legendary beatings and the sadistic antics of the gym master, Stuart Murray. I was familiar with this bastard. He had practised minor versions of his craft at the Under School and drilled into me a loathing of exercise and sport that was only partially sorted out by a Californian swimming instructress called Mimosa in the 1970s. I don’t think I’m vindictive by nature but when I read in the school magazine one morning years later that Mr Murray had died, I wrote two tunes and had a bottle of wine for lunch.

I LAY LOW FOR my first term but a plan hatched when I saw the house Christmas pantomime. This struck me as awesomely sophisticated stuff. But none of the music was original. I let the following Easter term pass by but come the summer it was time to strike. I played the card that I had played before. A highlight of the summer term was the annual house concert. I put myself down to play the piano, programme to be announced.

As the end of pre-Beatle days drew nigh, the British charts were home to a few local curiosities, none more so than Russ Conway. Mr Conway was a rather good-looking gay guy. He played pub piano on TV with a fixed grin, despite having lost two digits in an incident in the Royal Navy which need not detain us. He also wrote several chart-topping instrumentals, most famously “Side Saddle.” John Lill featured a few of these in his pub gigs.

My offering at the annual house concert was a tune I had knocked up in his style. It had the desired effect. After two encores the housemaster declared that it would make everyone’s fortunes. Next morning I was summoned to see the Head of House. He told me that another senior boy was writing next term’s annual pantomime. He needed some songs. Would I like to meet him? That’s how I met my first lyricist and came to compose my first-ever performed musical. Its name was Cinderella up the Beanstalk and his name was Robin Barrow.

Any cockiness I acquired was short lived. Buoyed by my belief that I was God’s gift to melody I wrote a fan letter to none other than Richard Rodgers, courtesy of my father’s publisher Teddy Holmes at Chappell Music. Rodgers actually received it and, to my amazement, invited me to the London opening of The Sound of Music at the Palace Theatre. So on May 19, 1961 I found myself at my first premiere. On my own in a back row of the upper circle, I was overwhelmed by the melodies. However, arrogant little sod that I was, I wrote on my programme, “Not as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ ” beside “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in the songlist. Even so, I knew I was hearing melodies that would become evergreen from a genius at the top of his game.

Unfortunately my marvel at this first night tunefest was not shared by the London critics. This was rammed home to me by my so-called school friends when I pitched up the following morning. They had considerately laid out all the reviews for me on the common-room table. “Look what they’ve done to your idol, Lloydy,” they crowed. That’s when I first experienced a feeling that’s taken the shine off many an opening night. But at least I learned my first lesson in creative advertising. One of the reviews read, “If you are a diabetic craving extra sickly sweet things inject an extra large dose of insulin and you will not fail to thrill to ‘The Sound of Music.’”

“You Will Not Fail To Thrill To The Sound Of Music” adorned the front of the Palace Theatre for eight poetic justice infused years.

NEXT TERM REHEARSALS FOR Cinderella began. I found myself a junior boy rehearsing the seniors in a show with words written by a school prefect. Unsurprisingly, the first two rehearsals were daunting. In those days the seniority code at any school was quite something. But it was amazing how once we got into the swing of things all this was forgotten. Melodies were offered up, criticized, rewritten, discussed. Songs were tried out, cut, reinstated and cut again. It turned out that the Head of House had a rather good voice, so creepily I gave him a couple of wannabe showstoppers. For the first time I was where I was to discover I am happiest – working on a musical. We did three shows. I played the piano backstage and every night I took a proud little bow.

Two incidents dominated Christmas. The first was news from Italy that Auntie Vi had been slung out of Pisa Cathedral for showing her tits to a sacristan who had said her dress showed too much of her shoulders. The second happened on Christmas day. Mum had propelled Julian and me towards the morning Christmas service at the Central Hall, Westminster, unwisely leaving Granny Molly in charge of the Christmas turkey. I suggested that I manned the stoves and that Molly went to hear Dad and his choir strut their stuff, but this suggestion fell on deaf ears. Throughout the service I was gravely concerned about the fate of the turkey and keen to get back to Harrington Court as soon as decently possible. So Mum volunteered to drive me home, leaving Dad and Julian to cadge a lift with a neighbour after the post-service teabag and packet mince-pie party.

Mum turned on the car radio and out of the tinny mono speaker came music that catapulted thought of the turkey into the middle distance. Mum had tuned in five minutes after the start of Puccini’s Tosca. I was completely and utterly captivated. I couldn’t understand a word of it (probably a good thing as the more you understand the plot of Tosca the more unpleasant it is) but I had never heard such theatrical, gloriously melodic music in my life. Mum did explain what was going on when we got to the Act 1 closer, the “Te Deum,” as she parked in the mews by the French Lycée. I realize now why that “Te Deum” hit every nerve in my body. My love of Victorian church architecture equalled an affinity with High Church decadence and if ever a piece of theatre is that, surely it’s the Tosca “Te Deum.” To this day it remains the only piece of theatre I secretly would love to direct. Just that bit though. Sadly, you probably wouldn’t see much of my directorial debut due to excess incense clouds.

Unfortunately Mum clocked Dad and Julian being dropped off home across the road and opined that, Tosca or not, it was time for Christmas presents. I begged her to let me stay in the car. She said something like, “I suppose music is more important than Christmas” and told me to lock the car door after I had finished with the keys which she left in the ignition. With that she ankled towards the family festivities. I listened spellbound to the second act, as the car got colder and colder, and I went as cold as the outside air when I heard what I later discovered to be “Vissi d’arte.” By the time the third-act bells of Rome were chiming I was totally wiped out. This was truly theatre music that I never dreamed possible. And there were no words! It was then that my reverie was interrupted by ferocious banging on the car windscreen.

You have to think of things from the police officer’s point of view. Here was a thirteen-year- old boy in floods of tears at 2 pm on a freezing cold Christmas Day seemingly in charge of a car and listening to opera on the radio at full volume, not everyday stuff for a police officer, let alone on Christmas Day. Furthermore the thirteen-year- old boy seemed extremely indignant, even aggressive at being asked to turn the music off and explain himself. Eventually the policeman sort of accepted my story with an “I suppose I’ll believe you this time because it’s Christmas,” and let me go on condition that he walked me to the flat front door.

A week later Dad gave me a highlights album of Tosca. I resolved to save every penny of my pocket money so that one day I could buy a boxed set of the whole score.

I SAID WORKING ON a musical is when I am happiest, but that Christmas a present proved once again that this isn’t quite true. I was given a book about ruined abbeys and once more I was off into my world of history and architecture. From then onwards every school half term was taken up with a train ride to somewhere I wanted to see. Without this stabilizing passion my life could have been very different.

Easter 1962 found me on my one and only school holiday trip. A bunch of us, including my new-found lyricist Robin Barrow, were taken to Athens and Rome, where we duly marvelled at the antiquities. I added a diet of churches. It was in Rome that the misreading of a street map led me to a building that truly changed me. With hindsight I suspect the essay I wrote when I got home, which cogently argued that the American Church in Rome with its mosaics by the great Victorian artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones was Rome’s finest building, may have been my first written attempt at being provocative. If so, it had its desired effect.

My art master was furious. “How can you write such garbage?” he screamed. “Don’t you realize that church is full of Victorian tat?”

It must have been galling for a 1960s art teacher to think he’d hauled a troop of teenagers around the marvels of ancient Greece and Rome only to find one of them had fallen in love with Victorian art.

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER TERM was the occasion for the annual Westminster scholarship exam called the Challenge. Eight boys are chosen to enter College, the house reserved only for scholars. This was the exam that was deemed pointless for me to try when I was at the Under School. However I was still young enough to have a crack at it. So I did. The first few papers, Greek, Maths etc., suggested that my decision to have a go was extremely unwise. History was the last paper and, secure in the knowledge that everything I had done so far reinvented the pig’s ear, there was nothing for it but to let rip. My paper was a eulogy to medieval Britain, with the added thrust that the Gothic Revival improved it. I argued that, superb as the medieval glass in the clerestory of Westminster Abbey is, the glass by a Victorian named Kempe in the south transept eclipses the lot.

I sauntered out of the exam room that bright summer’s day certain that I wouldn’t be hearing more from the powers behind the Challenge. Next day I was summoned to an interview. Behind a desk was the bursar, the headmaster and the senior history teacher, a wonderful man called Charles Keeley. For some reason it was the bursar who asked the questions. Curiously we got onto the subject of the castles of the Welsh borders. Quite why I talked about Clun Castle escapes me but, if ever you find yourself stuck on this subject, the thing to remember is that Oliver Cromwell blew up its “keep” or main tower which duly slipped intact down the hill it stood on. I mentioned this. It transpired the bursar’s family came from Clun.

That night I was told I had won a Queen’s Scholarship to Westminster.