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6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice

It was just before Christmas when my agent Desmond Elliott unleashed a project that was to dominate the next two years. Desmond ran a small publishing company called Arlington Books which specialized in niche areas such as cookbooks. He also represented Leslie Thomas, an author who a year later had a huge success with his novel The Virgin Soldiers. Leslie was a “Barnardo Boy,” in other words an orphan raised in a Barnardo home. These “homes” were founded by a Victorian philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had witnessed the plight of orphaned children in London’s Dickensian East End and, future wife on arm, started a rescue home that mushroomed into one of the world’s leading charities for homeless kids.

Desmond immediately divined in the Barnardo story a massive post-Oliver! musical. Kids, jolly cockneys, Dickensian locations, a hero who nearly lost the love of his life in his crusade against the Victorian establishment – this, Desmond decided, was stuff that would make Oliver! look like Salad Days. Leslie was supposed to come up with a storyline and I was to knock up a few tunes so Desmond could stitch up a producer. It was to be called The Likes of Us. Connoisseurs of musical theatre disasters will already have twitching noses. Years later a musical about Dr Barnardo (not mine) did reach the West End. Tom Lehrer was in the audience and was heard to mutter “a terminal case for abortion.”

There was a minor snag to creativity. I was still at school. Nowadays nobody would dream of having pupils who had outlived a school’s usefulness hanging disruptively around the cloisters. But January 1965 saw me back in College one more time. I simply had to get out. So I invented a story that I had been offered a part-time job by an antiquarian bookseller. It was an elegant solution for all. In February I was free and I wanted to start work on the musical. The trouble was there was not a lot of input from Leslie Thomas. With hindsight I wonder how much he knew about it. Leslie is a novelist not a scriptwriter.

IT WAS A WEIRD feeling suddenly having time on my hands, waking up not knowing how to fill the day. When you are old you fill blank days by doing pointless things like writing autobiographies, but that wasn’t on my radar at the time and Oxford was months away. So I spent the early part of the year looking at buildings. It was then that I cemented my knowledge of Britain’s inner cities.

Today there’s much talk about the new generation looking forward to a worse future than their parents. Based on some of the things I saw in 1965, it would have been hard for the new generation not to have had a better future than their forebears. It was common for four families to be stuffed into a clapped-out small terraced house sharing one toilet at the back of a stinking misnomer of a garden. If the era of Rachman, whose name was so toxic that “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was supposed to have been over I didn’t notice it. He was the notorious British slum landlord who bought run-down properties in rough neighbourhoods and packed them with immigrants before in 1962 he did something unusual, i.e. not for profit – he dropped dead.

Coming from a protected, albeit bohemian environment, I admit to being shocked and not a little frightened by how quickly large city areas were changing character out of recognition. Once I was backed onto the rickety railings of one of the terraced houses that surrounded St Mary Magdalene in Paddington by a not particularly threatening, if extremely large, Jamaican guy pushing me “de weed.” A gang of three passing white yobs surrounded us, opining articulate bon mots such as “He may be a fucking poncy posh nancy-boy but he’s white and you take your fucking black hands off him.” Something told me this was not the moment to engage in conversation about High Victorian Gothic. Today the houses around St Mary’s are long gone. It’s odd to reflect that those that survive in Notting Hill and Paddington now sell for millions of pounds.

I SPENT EASTER WITH Auntie Vi at La Mortola which was in full Mediterranean flower mode. She was spending a lot of time in the kitchen from which emanated cries like “God bugger the Pope,” followed by a lot of meticulous writing up of recipes in a notebook. I tinkled away dreaming up tunes for the Barnardo show on her blue piano while I gazed at the virulent purple bougainvillea that had flowered early on her terrace that spring. But still there was no story outline from Leslie Thomas and I began to concoct one myself. Back in London, out of the blue I received the following letter.

11 GUNTER GROVE LONDON SW10

April 21, 1965

Dear Andrew

I have been given your address by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books, who I believe has also told you of my existence.

Mr Elliott told me you “were looking for a ‘with it’ writer” of lyrics for your songs, and as I have been writing pop songs for a short while now and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wondered if you consider it worth your while meeting me. I may fall far short of your requirements, but anyway it would be interesting to meet up – I hope!

Would you be able to get in touch with me shortly, either at FLA 1822 in the evenings, or at WEL 2261 in the day time (Pettit and Westlake, solicitors are the owner of the latter number).

Hoping to hear from you,

Yours,

Tim Rice

Naturally I was intrigued. I thought it might be unwise to call his work number so I dialled the FLAxman. In those days all phone numbers were prefixed by abbreviations in letters of names or towns. The numerical equivalents still survive, for example in London 235 is short for the “BEL” of BELgravia. A school friend’s uncle had a 235 phone line which until his death in the noughties he answered with “BELgravia whatever the-number-was.” He also referred to Heathrow Airport by its 1938 title the London Aviation Station and pronounced the Alps “the Oorlps.” Once he moaned to me that a sojourn in his country house had been upset by his company holding a board meeting on a Wednesday. “It will ruin two weekends!” he fumed. But I digress.

A very well-spoken young man answered and explained that he did write pop lyrics – in fact he had also written some “three-chord tunes,” as he put it, to go with them. He had done a course at La Sorbonne in Paris and was now 22, working as an articled clerk in a firm of solicitors and was bored out of his skull. The Desmond Elliott connection was that he had an idea for a compilation book based on the pop charts. He thought Desmond might publish it. Apparently Desmond had declined this opus (Tim was later to resurrect it as The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles). Clearly Desmond had thrown me into his rejection letter as a sop. We arranged to meet one evening after Tim got off work.

I spent some of the in-between time pondering what a “with it” aspiring pop lyricist with a public school accent who had been to La Sorbonne looked like. Somehow I imagined a stocky bloke with long sideburns and a Beatle jacket, possibly sporting granny glasses. Consequently I was unprepared for what hit me when I answered the Harrington Court doorbell three days later. Silhouetted against the decaying lift was a six foot something, thin as a rake, blond bombshell of an adonis. Granny, who had shuffled down the corridor after me, seemed to go unusually weak in the knees. I felt, how shall I put this, decidedly small. Awestruck might be a better way of describing my first encounter with Timothy Miles Bindon Rice.

VERY SOON IT DAWNED on me that Tim’s real ambition was to be a heartthrob rock star. I learned that he had been to Lancing College in Sussex, that he was born in 1944 and was therefore nearly four years older than me, that his father worked for Hawker Siddeley Aviation and his mother wrote children’s stories. He brought a disc with him of a song he had written and sung himself. Apparently there was tons of interest in it and also in Tim as a solo pop god answer to Peter and Gordon. I was wondering where on earth I could fit into this saga of impending stardom.

So the first song and lyric I heard by Tim Rice was “That’s My Story.” It was a catchy, very appealing demo with Tim singing his three-chord tune in a laid-back, folksy way, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. But it instantly struck me that the simple, happy, hooky melody seemed at odds with the rather bittersweet lyric about a guy dumping his girlfriend except the story was a charade. The guy had been dumped by his girlfriend. The punchline was “That’s my story but, oh Lord, it isn’t true.”

Anyway, I thought it would make Tim a huge star by the end of the year. I reckoned that it would be nice to say I had met him before he was world famous and that was about it. I somewhat diffidently broached that although I loved pop and rock, my real love was musicals. To my surprise Tim said he’d been brought up on his parents’ cast albums and he actually liked theatre songs. I didn’t sense that he had an overpowering passion for musicals but he certainly didn’t rubbish them like most of my friends. I don’t think I mentioned the Dr Barnardo project and The Likes of Us but after he had met my parents, who were both charmed by him, we arranged to meet each other again.

I really liked Tim. He had a laconic turn of phrase and a quick wit I had never found in anyone before. He met my school friends who liked him too, particularly the gay ones. Eventually I tentatively broached Desmond Elliott’s Dr Barnardo musical and played him two tunes. Tim seemed quite taken. All I had was the rough synopsis I concocted in the absence of anything from Leslie Thomas but at least it was a start. One melody was meant for two teenage cockney lovebirds who were the basis of a subplot. The other was for an auction told in song. In it Dr Barnardo, after a few fun lots to set things up, saw off all bidders and bought the Edinburgh Castle Gin Palace in London’s cockney epicentre, the Mile End Road. This he would turn into a temperance centre for general do-gooding. It was that sort of show.

A few days later Tim showed up with two lyrics. The first was the auction song which he had called “Going, Going, Gone!” The first lot to go under the gavel was a parrot. The first couplet I read by my future collaborator went thus:

Here I have a lovely parrot, sound in wind and limb

I can guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him.

How could I not smile? To this day only Rice would come up with a parrot sound in wind and limb. The quirkiness and simplicity of Tim’s turn of phrase grabbed me immediately. By some strange osmosis with “Going, Going, Gone!” we had written a plot driven song that was a harbinger of the dialogue free style of our three best-known shows. Tim titled the other song for the lovestruck subplotters “Love Is Here.” The first verse went:

I ain’t got no gifts to bring

It ain’t Paris, it ain’t Spring

No pearls for you to wear

Painters they have missed it too

Writers haven’t got a clue

They can’t see love is here.

Desmond Elliott however was not best pleased when I broke the news that I had decided that Tim should be my writing partner for The Likes of Us. A with it pop lyricist should stick to with it pop lyrics, was his opinion. That was, until I played Desmond the songs. Very shortly Tim too was managed by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books.

DESPITE THERE BEING STILL no plot outline from Leslie Thomas, Tim made some song suggestions and we started writing. Desmond co-opted a “producer” who was in fact another book publisher, Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press. Ernest Hecht was a Kindertransport émigré from Nazi Germany who once told me that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent. He had dabbled in theatre and in 1967 presented the farceur Brian Rix in Uproar in the House. What qualified him in 1965 to present a musical is anyone’s guess. But it was Desmond’s gig and I presumed he knew best.

Meantime I acquired a music publisher. During my skiving off school days I had got to meet some of the guys at Southern Music, an American-owned publisher with a big country and western catalogue and a very active London office in Tin Pan Alley. Soon I was taken under the wing of the CEO, a guy called Bob Kingston. Bob was later to give me one of the greatest pieces of advice of my career, thanks to which quite a few people have made a considerable fortune. He spotted that I was an oddball seventeen-year-old with a curious appetite for musical theatre – the pariah of my generation – and that my passion just might rub off on other people. So he did a deal with Desmond to publish The Likes of Us.

Bob was very enthusiastic about our embryonic score but felt we lacked a killer ballad. He kept banging on about another “As Long as He Needs Me.” The consequence was a string of tunes, all with three long notes, as per the “he needs me” bit of Lionel Bart’s mega hit. Proof, if needed, that it is unwise to create songs by formula can be found in “How Am I to Know” which made it through to the recording of The Likes of Us at the Sydmonton Festival many years later. I suppose it got included because Tim and I thought it the best of many attempts to emulate Bart’s classic. It would have exited were the show to have made it to rehearsal because it had been usurped as pole position banker by another putative winner “A Man on His Own.” Guess what? The tune was “Make Believe Love” (the song that failed to launch my career as a lyricist). Bob pronounced we had a smash hit on our hands and the score was complete.

A demo recording with bass, drums and a very ancient pianist was made featuring a couple of session singers and Tim and I filling in gaps. The ancient pianist had only one style, stride piano. Even the big ballads acquired a honky-tonk sheen. The sound engineer had an addiction to his new echo machine. So bits of the demo were helpful, others emphatically less so. All of them sounded as if they had been recorded in Penn Station at three in the morning. No matter. Back home I was able to render friends soporific with my first show LP. Surely the West End was a matter of months away.

The summer of 1965 wasn’t exclusively taken up with The Likes of Us. I toured Italy with a group of school friends and spent loads of time with Vi and George at La Mortola. It was that summer that I properly met Vi’s friend, the film director Ronnie Neame. Ronnie had recently directed Judy Garland in a movie called I Could Go on Singing. This was also the title song. It had an unfortunate lyric since it continued “till the cows come home” which prompted a version on That Was The Week That Was in which the singer was stampeded by a herd of rampant bovines. I had the cheek to play Ronnie a tune I thought better that I had wanted to send him when he was making the movie but Vi had stopped me. He said it sounded a bit “classical.” It later surfaced as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

Ronnie had been David Lean’s cameraman and producing partner on classic movies like Great Expectations. I was enthralled when he told me how, in an emotional scene with co-star Dirk Bogarde, Judy Garland had without warning veered totally off script into a supercharged autobiographical monologue. Ronnie feared the cameraman might stop shooting this unrehearsed pure gold so he eased the guy off his camera and took over himself. Ronnie tightened the shot and, by inching the camera slowly back on its track, lured Garland to keep monologuing her way forward into his retreating lens. Thus he created a seminal Garland moment in a not particularly special movie.

Also that summer I met Tim’s parents for the first time. I had just failed my driving test so Tim drove me in a pre-World War Two Austin car that his parents lent him to their converted farmhouse near Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London. Joan and Hugh were very kind and asked me a lot of questions about my family and what my ambitions were. They asked me quite a bit about Oxford and I, maybe wrongly, thought there was a question too many in front of Tim on the subject of university. I didn’t tell them of the role of Professor McFarlane’s cat in my academic achievements.

There are songs you vividly remember when and where you first heard them. I first heard Richard Rodgers’ “Something Good” at the home of John Goodbody, an aptly named Westminster boy as he was Britain’s junior weightlifting champion, not necessarily the first achievement you would think of in a Westminster boy. John was a trainee journalist and during his long career in newspapers he became the highly respected Sports Editor of the London Times. He shared my huge love of the Everly Brothers and it was at his parents’ house in North London that I turned up one Saturday night clutching my unplayed newly purchased soundtrack LP of The Sound of Music film. John’s friends were slightly older and more cynical than I, so they doubtless shared the view of the New York Times that The Sound of Music was “romantic nonsense and sentiment.”

I wonder if they noticed me turn colder than your average Austrian ski slope during my first encounter with the stupendous overture. Out of the glorious modulation at the end of “My Favorite Things” burst one of Richard Rodgers’s most brilliant and characteristic melodies. And it was new! Rodgers hadn’t written anything to touch it for at least five years. “Something Good” is right up there with his very best, complete with his “Bali Hai” tritone,¹ the halfway note in the scale that hits the word “Hai” and is there in some of his most typical greats. Hearing this melody for the first time is as vivid a memory as my debut encounter with Sgt. Pepper.

THE CLOCK TICKED TOWARDS October and my first Oxford term. However any qualms that I had over the daunting prospect were somewhat hijacked by another of Mum’s domestic dramas. This time she burst into my bedroom at four in the morning, proclaiming that something terrible had happened to John Lill and that she could feel his pain. Later in the morning it transpired he had fallen off his motor scooter. Maybe there was something in Mum’s psychic claims or, perish the thought, John had phoned her after the accident and I hadn’t heard the phone because I was asleep – although I am inclined to believe the former, since Mum was long on psychic contacts. There were two consequences of this bizarre affair: (1) I decided I would find a way to move out of Harrington Court asap and that Oxford was not a bad stepping stone. (2) Mum decided John Lill needed to move into Harrington Court as living in Leyton subjected him to too many hazardous road journeys.

Despite all this it was John who drove me to Oxford on a chilly October night to begin the Michaelmas term at Magdalen, one of those journeys where you wish the distances between villages were just that little bit longer. I had been tipped off that it was wise to get in first and ask in advance if there was a room in the “New Building.” I got one. But I was unprepared for what hit me. After Harrington Court my room wasn’t a room. Today it would be called the Presidential Suite in a country house hotel – a bit of a run-down one maybe, but I never say no to faded grandeur. The New Building was constructed in 1733 and, despite being a mental Victorian Gothic man, I had no objection to a massive panelled drawing room plus bedroom, kitchen and bathroom overlooking Magdalen’s famous meadow, home of a load of deer and Snake’s-head Fritillary, the latter being an extremely rare flower, not a heavy metal band. One gripe. It was a bit on the cold side. And there was no piano.

In the weeks before I went “up” to Magdalen, I mooted to Desmond the idea of getting our show staged by one of the Oxford University dramatic societies, OUDS being the mainstream one, the other the Experimental Theatre Company or the ETC. This was an extremely arrogant thought for a seventeen-year- old freshman. Both societies were widely recognized in the theatre and appeared outside Oxford frequently, sometimes internationally. Desmond was rather sniffy but he didn’t entirely perish the thought. So I rented a tinny upright piano from Blackwell’s in Oxford High Street. Nobody in the college minded. Next I wrote a letter of introduction to the presidents of the two drama societies, fairly crawling stuff, I recall, but tinged with a faint hint that I was God’s next gift to the West End and they would be wise to meet me whilst they still could.

Lady Luck dealt me a great card at my first lunch in Magdalen’s pleasingly Gothic hall. I found myself sitting next to a fellow freshman law student called David Marks. His ambition was to be an actor. He turned out to be no ordinary hopeful. After winning every acting prize Oxford offered he went on to become President of OUDS. Less than a year after we met he premiered the role of Rosencrantz in the first production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. David never pursued a career as an actor and became a successful barrister, saying he found acting too repetitive. He also agreed to be the first person to play the role of Dr Thomas John Barnardo.

Very soon I had met all the student top brass. OUDS was headed by Bob, now Sir Bob Scott who was to become the arts and sports czar of Manchester. David Wood honchoed the ETC. David has had a successful career as actor, writer and lyricist and it was the ETC that became the most likely home for The Likes of Us. We had several meetings and it was even mooted that as he could sing he might usurp David Marks and play Dr Barnardo. A plan developed that it could be staged after summer term 1966 in the Oxford Playhouse. There was, however, one outsized snag. There was still no script. As it was Desmond’s project I obviously couldn’t suggest he ditched his best-selling novelist Leslie Thomas for some unknown budding dramatist Oxford student.

Thus The Likes of Us was in remarkably different shape to a play that was the big talk of Oxford. Written by a second year undergraduate, When Did You Last See My Mother? was staged by OUDS and a production in London quickly followed. It rendered its author the youngest to have a play produced in the West End. The author’s name was Christopher Hampton, he had been to the same school as Tim Rice and the play is said to have been influenced by homosexual activities at Lancing College. This is a subject I have not raised with Sir Tim as I sense that he might be exceptionally unqualified to contribute to this topic. Chris is a couple of years older than me but clearly The Likes of Us couldn’t hang about if I was to grab the “Youngest Author in West End” title myself. I didn’t of course, but 25 years later Chris and I would get Tony Awards for Sunset Boulevard.

Meantime word was dribbling through Oxford’s dramatic community that there was a socially awkward seventeen-year- old with an outsize room overlooking Magdalen meadow and a piano in it to boot. So, aside from The Likes of Us, I met with several budding writers and lyricists, some of whom have subsequently had respectable theatre careers. But I quickly became rather too aware that absolutely none of them had Tim’s rhyming dexterity and, more importantly, his highly individual turn of phrase. Years later I sometimes notice a similar turn of phrase in Chris Hampton’s work. I wish I had met their Lancing College English master.

1965 was decades before mobile phones and the only contact with the outside world was a coin phone box outside the porter’s lodge which invariably had a big queue. I started to make too many day trips to London. I was already a little fearful that Tim would forget about his junior Oxford collaborator. I simply wasn’t allocating my time properly and I was trying too hard to do too many things. My History tutor asked to see me. He said I had been admitted to Oxford a year too early at seventeen. I should take the rest of the academic year off. He really couldn’t have been kinder and even offered to look after some of my things if I couldn’t take them home. I immediately thought how was I to get The Likes of Us on in Oxford if I wasn’t there, but my attempts to say I really could cope were greeted with the reply “See you next October.”

1. A tritone is a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones.