Читать книгу Still Spitting at Sixty: From the 60s to My Sixties, A Sort of Autobiography - Roger Law - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG YOB

For my advance on London I wore my Cuban-heeled boots which elevated me to a shade under 6 foot 7 inches. My other accoutrements became a lime-green silk shirt with flounces and a grey herringbone-weave suit with silver buttons, flared trousers and trumpet sleeves. I may have been a shade florid, but I was eager to make an impression.

There are a number of theories about the effect of great height on personality, but none, I think, is wholly satisfactory. Perhaps the most informed exchange on the subject was that between the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith and General Charles de Gaulle, both men in the 6 foot 8 inches league. On the occasion of their first meeting de Gaulle asked Galbraith to explain his theory of height, to which the economist replied that very tall people, feeling very conspicuous from an early age, were usually better behaved than their peers and for that reason better fitted for leadership in later life. De Gaulle, though evidently pleased with this reply, said that Galbraith had forgotten just one thing: ‘Show no mercy to small men.’

Perhaps because they have a few inches on me, I have been inclined to see the matter differently. It always seemed to me that if you are going to be conspicuous regardless of what you do, you might as well enjoy the phenomenon by being very conspicuous. At the same time, I’ve never found it particularly advisable to be merciless to small men, as they are often the ones most likely to give you paying work.

One of the first people in London to take my work seriously was a very small man called Tom Wolsey, then the art director of Queen magazine. In those days he held the unofficial title of England’s Best Magazine Designer, though he was born in Aachen. Apart from being small he was abrupt and inclined to be waspish, but he gave me a start with a few freelance illustration assignments.

As an introduction to the more surreal end of the communications world, Queen in those days could hardly be excelled. Though relatively small in circulation, it was an advertising Klondike with a readership once described as ‘the fresh upper crust – crumbs held together by a lot of dough’. But between the glossy motoring ads it managed to insert some very good journalism. The boss and Editor-in-Chief was Jocelyn Stevens, an outstandingly insensitive and energetic young man who had already been highly praised by Lord Beaverbrook, the grand old man of the popular press. Beaverbrook had told a party of dinner guests, ‘I hear that Jocelyn Stevens bites the carpet. Now that’s no bad thing.’

In fact Stevens used to bite a lot more than carpet. The atmosphere in the Queen office often verged on hysteria, as Stevens raged over the Tannoy system. Debby ladies were always leaving in floods of tears, to be replaced by new debby ladies, presumably attracted by the prospect of saying over the phone, ‘This is the Queen speaking.’ When firing his fashion editor, Stevens affirmed the finality of her departure by hurling her four-drawer filing cabinet out the window, from three floors up.

One of my assignments was to illustrate a feature article about ‘The New Rich’. I had assembled a wide range of sensitive studies of stockbrokers, bookmakers, estate agents, auctioneers, barristers and the like, and these were laid out for inspection on the art room floor. Stevens came lunging in and, with extraordinary precision, managed to imprint a boot mark on every single drawing. You can do wonders with fresh bread to efface marks of this kind, but not complete miracles. The drawings went to press with traces of the proprietor’s feet still lingering.

It did not seem likely that Queen would be a steady enough enterprise to support me and a heavily pregnant Deirdre, even in the gypsy manner to which we had become accustomed. For the time being we were pleasantly holed up in one of Richard Fletcher’s renovation projects in Drayton Gardens, Kensington, but things became a bit cramped when a load of other mates from college came piling in. As we could pay most of the rent by illustrating Fletcher’s diatribes against the Labour right wing, it was all very much like old times. But it was not the kind of place, at least from our parents’ point of view, for bringing up baby.

As an adult, there was a possibility that I might qualify for a student grant, a more generous subvention in those days than it is now, and if I could combine that with some freelance work our circumstances could improve. Ed Middleditch, one of my tutors at the Cambridge school, had urged me to go on to the Royal College of Art. Middleditch was a strange, tortured man of the post-war Kitchen Sink school of painters. At college he had me drawing galvanized tin buckets against a white background for what seemed like decades. Never party to the fashionable enthusiasms, Middleditch tried to impress upon me the need for a high seriousness in my approach to art. He was kind enough to fix up my interview at the Royal College, even though he had reservations about my ‘seriousness’: ‘You have the talent to do more than facile knitting, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to help yourself.’ A couple of years later I saw an exhibition by Middleditch at the Beaux Arts gallery – powerful charcoal drawings of the wild mountain landscapes of Grazalema in southern Spain. It was the only time an exhibition of drawings moved me to tears, and rather belatedly I got the point.

I did go to the print department of the Royal College to show my work. I could tell that academically the place had much to be said for it, because while I was waiting I fell into the company of a vague-looking young student with a most striking piece of work on a zinc plate entitled ‘Me and My Heroes’. It would later feature in all the reference books as David Hockney’s first etching. My interview with the print-making tutor Julian Trevelyan went very well, and he asked me to start the next day. I was absolutely thrilled to be accepted by the Royal College, but even as I was confirming the time I should show up I felt all the enthusiasm for actually going there draining away. I never did show up.

I think I had stumbled on the difference between an aspiration and an ambition. I genuinely did aspire to the Royal College, but my ambition, an altogether more red-blooded creature, was to get my work into the newspapers. And, as it happened, the circumstances for realizing this ambition suddenly became highly propitious.

By late 1961 the beginnings of boom time for satire had arrived. From its high point in 1959, with the ‘You’ve never had it so good’ election, the Macmillan era was on the slide. It was clear that Harold Macmillan, the once accomplished old showman, was losing his touch, and the tittering in the aisles had swelled to a chorus of mockery. A revue called Beyond the Fringe, in which Peter Cook featured prominently, was en route for the West End where it would provide inspiration for the BBC programme That Was the Week That Was (later TW3), with David Frost as its anchor man. Private Eye opened for business in feisty fashion and, although it would fall on hard times, Peter Cook would alleviate them by buying it up. Another Peter Cook venture was the Establishment Club in Soho, billed as London’s first satirical nightclub. Cook’s partner in the club was Nicholas Luard, another recent Cambridge graduate. As co-owners of the Establishment they become known as Peter ‘Crook’ and Nicholas ‘Lewd’.

Knowing Peter Cook may not have been the only qualification for advancement in the satire business, but it was certainly no drawback. By the end of the year I was very agreeably employed as the official artist to the Establishment, responsible for filling a 14 foot by 18 inch space opposite the bar every week with a succession of monstrous ideas. Some had religious themes, like St Francis of Assisi being devoured by crows. But most were political. One of my favourites was of Sir Roy Welensky, then the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, and a hero to that strange type of British person, happily more prevalent then than now, who used to rage on about the country being overrun by blacks before announcing that they were off to Africa to be among an infinitely larger number of blacks. For seven days I had Welensky, depicted literally as ‘Going the Whole Hog’, driving the customers to drink.

The club achieved its greatest notoriety when the American comedian Lenny Bruce appeared there spraying four-letter words like confetti, which failed to conceal the fact that he was a very funny man. On one occasion a famous actress, accompanied by an early version of the toyboy, gave him a hard time, so Bruce invited her to leave, and take her son with her.

One club regular was my old friend Tom Driberg, the left-wing Labour MP, suspected at various times of working for every secret service outfit on the planet from MI5 to the KGB, and known to be the most voracious homosexual in British politics. I had first met Driberg at the Scarborough conference in 1960 at one of those hotel functions that let the agitators in. We got on famously, though I was not entirely unaware of the reasons for Driberg’s interest in me. Nor, it appeared, was Barbara Castle, who happened to notice there was a handbag left on a chair behind where I was standing. She picked it up, turned to me with the sweetest smile, and said, ‘Is this yours, dear?’

As it turned out, Driberg became a very good friend to both Fluck and myself without being granted any sexual favours. We used to say that the great thing about him was that he was so corrupt he was completely incorruptible. In any event, he would supply me with a never-ending stream of funny ideas for my space on the wall. I even had some left over to decorate the walls of another club called Wip’s in which Nicholas Luard had an interest. I remember the competition for attention being particularly fierce there as each table was imaginatively equipped with a glass tank in which piranhas swam around, ever ready to help the diners with their leftovers.

There were certain penalties to pay for the Driberg friendship. It was impossible of course to go anywhere with him without it being assumed that you were his boyfriend. But I always thought this was a very modest price to pay for the pleasure of his company. However, I would start to pay a bigger price, particularly when Driberg came to look to me for companionship when he ventured into places that made him slightly apprehensive. I was often in demand when he went down to the East End at the invitation of his gangster mates, the twins Ronald and Reginald Kray. I can remember the first time very well as the twins thoughtfully came round to the House of Commons in a Rolls-Royce to pick up Driberg and myself. We were installed in the back seat with our hosts and the man next to the driver turned to me and said, in deepest guttural Cockney, ‘Would you like a scar?’ Luckily, Driberg was able to translate the threat as a friendly offer of a cigar.

These events in the East End were jolly but more than slightly unnerving. There would be a lot of sports and showbiz people being encouraged by the Krays to have a good time. So a good time was a smart thing to have. Around the twins themselves there was an extraordinary air of impending violence, and of course, as the lurid details of their trial would eventually reveal, there were many individuals against whom the violence did not merely impend. But with Driberg they were models of solicitude. There would always be a young man, usually of a slightly effeminate nature, assigned to keep him entertained. The tragedy of it was that Driberg never did manage to summon up the nerve to tell the Krays that he did not much care for effeminate men. He liked lorry drivers and policemen, the hunkier the better.

I also became friendly with one of the Krays’ enforcers called Teddy Smith who had literary ambitions, and who acted as part-time crime adviser for BBC’s Softly, Softly cops-and-robbers series. I once asked him whether, as part of his day job, he had ever shot people for the Krays. ‘Naw, Rog,’ he said, ‘only through the kneecaps.’ He was hoping to obtain a sabbatical from the Kray firm which would give him time to finish his musical, provisionally entitled Cosh, but there was some kind of disagreement and Teddy Smith disappeared totally from the scene. Many years later I had occasion to visit Reggie Kray in prison while in pursuit of an authentic quote to promote a sketch I was developing about two puppet gangsters called ‘The Crows’. We drank vodka together out of the Coke tins I had taken in to lighten the occasion. Emboldened by the vodka, I inquired about what had happened to my mate Teddy Smith. ‘I fink he emigrated to Australia,’ was the terse reply.

In the summer of 1962 the Observer gave its grave accolade to satire by a establishing a new page imaginatively called ‘Satire’ to differentiate it from the rest of the product. Peter Cook and Michael Frayn were the main writers, while Cook and I produced a running cartoon strip under the prophetic title ‘Almost the End’. My first cartoon strip in a national newspaper was directed at a brace of soft targets, Hugh Gaitskell and George Brown. We had a frazzled-looking Labour leader imploring his hard-eyed henchman to stop calling him ‘Brother’ because, ‘it reminds me so much of the Labour Party’. After such a modest start, the Observer was convinced we were bound to improve. And we did, quite rapidly. It was not long before Cook produced his deathless critical observation: ‘I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction – I can get all that at home.’

The progress of the new satire page was keenly watched by the Observer’s patrician editor, David Astor, though most of my practical dealings were with George Seddon, one of the livelier executives. On the strength of Seddon’s commission, Deirdre and I moved to a flat of our own in Peter Street, Soho, with baby Shem. To judge by the nature of the surrounding establishments we would not have to waste much time teaching him the facts of life.

My orderly progress into journalism nearly came unstuck with the Cuban missile crisis. For a few weeks in October, as the Russians and the Americans played their lunatic game of nuclear ‘chicken’, there was virtual mob rule in parts of the West End of London. What were conceived as orderly demonstrations soon degenerated into free-for-alls. There were reports of extreme hotheads going around torching police motorcycles, which I knew to be true as I set one alight myself. More perilously, I got involved outside the American Embassy when two youngsters darted into the street to stop a police wagon. A police sergeant got out and really laid into these two kids, so I laid into the police sergeant and knocked him down. Then a load of other policemen came piling out of the wagon, tripping over one another like Keystone Cops. I must have clumped another four of them before I legged it down the street. They caught me and took me to Cannon Row police station, by which time I was blubbing on a grand scale. Assault and battery of five police officers was not going to be just another £5 fine coupled with an admonishment to behave in future. But the police were in a funny mood, not just about the incident, which arguably they had started, but about the whole situation. I realized with some surprise, though it should have been obvious, that the cops were as scared about the nuclear showdown as anyone else and that, on one level at least, they were glad that people were demonstrating against it. I blubbed on for a couple of hours before they decided to drop the assault charges and do me for rioting, which then carried a nominal fine. At the court hearing I saw one of the policemen, all strapped up. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘If I’d known what you’d done to me I wouldn’t have dropped the charges. You’ve cracked two of my ribs.’ But their leniency, if regretted, was not entirely misplaced. For the first time in my relations with the police I felt I seriously owed them one. I never waded into them with the same relish again.

This was not quite the end of my fighting days, however. In fact I was involved in a major brawl only a few weeks later with one of the rather unsavoury heavies that were infiltrating the Establishment Club in increasing numbers. Ostensibly I got the better of it but when I got home Deirdre said, ‘What’s happened to your coat?’ I took the coat off and it was like a Chinese lantern, with long slashes all down the front. I had never even realized my opponent had a razor. I had just learned another important lesson, which was that London brawlers have much less respect for the Queensberry Rules than their country cousins in Cambridgeshire. Not long after I was told that some large men in Italian suits had dropped by at the club looking for me. I was advised to send in my cartoon strip by post.

What with one thing and another, pastures new were beginning to look more and more appealing. Neither my satirical drawings nor my direct action in Grosvenor Square had made much impression on the Government. Nuclear weapons, it appeared, were here to stay despite my best efforts. Meanwhile life on the Observer was proving to have limitations, best expressed by its deputy editor, John Pringle, who had previously been editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Pringle explained that while Leon Trotsky had invented the permanent revolution, it was the Observer which had invented the permanent deliberation, an ongoing angst-ridden seminar that often had little relevance to what appeared in the newspaper. It had its charm, but Pringle felt there was more excitement to be had elsewhere, which was why he was heading back to Australia to edit the Canberra Times. He thought he could probably find work for me on one of the magazines out there.

I was within a whisker of emigration until I stumbled upon a forceful counter-argument. This, somewhat paradoxically, was provided by a cultural official at the Australian Embassy. By way of introduction to the mores of his country he showed me a film of Australian shipbuilders wearing shorts and asbestos gloves catching white hot rivets and exhibiting quite a lot of what I was brought up to call builder’s bum. I explained that I had nothing against dockyards, but my preference was to work on a magazine. The embassy man slumped back aghast into his chair. ‘Christ, have you seen our magazines?’ he exclaimed. He then handed me some copies, which did look a bit old-fashioned, before imparting the clinching advice, ‘Look, mate, it took me years to get this job in London. Believe me, going to Australia is a one-way ticket to hell.’ On the strength of what seemed like top-quality inside information I put the Australian experience on hold for quite a while.