Читать книгу Still Spitting at Sixty: From the 60s to My Sixties, A Sort of Autobiography - Roger Law - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSwinging London, so revered in retrospect, was very slow getting into its stride. My own memories of the capital in the early sixties are all monochrome, like the gritty black and white films of the period. Around Fleet Street and St Paul’s Cathedral there was still a profusion of bombsites and half-destroyed buildings, deep in weeds. The city, and most of its citizens, looked decidedly glum.
Eating out for sophisticates not content with fish and chips usually boiled down to a coin-tossing choice between the Golden Egg chain or a Lyons Corner House. The pubs all seemed dowdy and to be woefully devoid of any beer not called Watney’s Red Barrel. Only the locality known as Soho seemed to offer much in the way of variety, which was its main attraction for me.
In Soho there was a sprinkling of Italian restaurants that at least gave bored taste buds something different to think about. The most popular of these was the Terrazza in Romilly Street where Mario and Franco served Cocktail di Mare followed by Polio Sorpreso, a sort of Chicken Kiev with a genuine element of surprise. However the dish was tackled, liquid butter always exploded down the front of your shirt. The pasta washed down with libations of vino tinto was popular with young journalists as it did not hurt on the way back up.
Pubs closed early, and during the afternoons, but in Soho you could still drink practically round the clock. The trail blazed by thirsty bohemians of the Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas variety tended to start at the York Minister pub, better known as the French, in Dean Street, and then lead on to the Colony Room, an easy access club with an afternoon licence, and then on to any other pub of choice before the serious after-hours drinking. This could take place at the Establishment Club in Greek Street. At the Establishment, however, you had to purchase a meal with your drink, so you could easily wind up with a dozen sad-looking, uneaten hamburgers mouldering at your elbow. A better option, especially for music lovers, was Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. Scott had somehow managed to persuade the licensing authorities that drinks could be served in the event of a legitimate birthday celebration. Visiting musicians like Stan Getz would leave Ronnie Scott’s decades older, having had a birthday on every night of their gigs.
At break of day, anyone managing to complete the course could find further refreshment by posing as a meat porter, and frequenting one of the pubs open for their use in Smithfield Market. Looking back, it’s hard to figure out how we ever found the time to earn a crust.
For a short spell my earning power was threatened, not by drink but by a sobering assessment of one of my ‘Almost the End’ cartoon efforts for the Observer. The inspiration was provided by a news story about a man being birched in prison. I illustrated this theme by having the then Home Secretary, Rab Butler, discussing flogging with his lady wife in an English country garden while lopping the heads off tulips with his stick. This brought my work to the direct attention of the Editor. David Astor told me that he rather liked the tulip-chopping image, but he was outraged by the inclusion of the Home Secretary’s wife in the joke. He told me that in attacking public figures I had to learn how to distinguish between the public and private in their lives, but I never did. It was curtains for the ‘Almost the End’ strip but Astor, being an exceptionally humane man, allowed me to stay on. I was put on a two-day-a-week retainer and allocated a tiny attic office on the Tudor Street premises. From this pleasant niche I launched a vigorous assault on the freelance market, though, out of consideration for my kindly employer, I would only do work for his main rival publication, the Sunday Times, under an assumed name.
There was still plenty of work to be done for Queen, though my original patron Tom Wolsey had been let go by Jocelyn Stevens with characteristic panache. Stevens had rushed into Wolsey’s vacated office and set about it with bucket and mop while muttering incantations about washing that man right out of his hair. Wolsey, of course, was far too talented to remain on the cobbles for very long and he bounced back almost immediately as the art editor of Town, another attractive glossy of the day. So I worked for Queen and Town and when Town acquired a stablemate called Topic, a doomed attempt to produce a British Newsweek, I worked for that too.
For a while Town was edited by Nick Tomalin, a superb young writer who would eventually be killed while covering the Yom Kippur War for the Sunday Times. But what impressed me about Tomalin at the time was not his writing skill so much as his ability to inflame Wolsey. I remember walking in on a blazing row between them over some design problem in which Wolsey expressed his artistic dissent by removing Tomalin’s hat and coat from the coat stand, placing them carefully on the floor, and jumping up and down on them.
Until 1964 there were no colour supplements in the newspapers aside from the Sunday Times, and even that was struggling to master the technique of printing back-to-back colour. So the established independent colour magazines like Queen and Town were really quite influential. Of the two I tended to prefer Town, which was part of the Haymarket Press combine owned by two rising young thrusters called Michael Heseltine and Clive Labovitch (more popularly known as ‘Vaseline’ and ‘Lavatory Brush’). The main part of the empire was devoted to business magazines produced by hordes of young journalists in conditions that would give a battery hen claustrophobia. In contrast, Town was an indulged area, though a shrinking one. It had originally been called Man About Town, which subsequently became About Town, so after the foreshortening to Town it really had no place to go. But before it died it made some forays into serious journalism and I was able to brush up my ‘artist reporting’ skills on subjects slightly less frivolous than those that came my way from Queen.
My most serious assignment, however, came from the current affairs magazine, Topic, which asked me to do a cover showing what life, or the lack of it, would be like after a nuclear holocaust.
None of this freelance activity required neglect of my duties at the Observer, as these were not onerous. Having established to David Astor’s satisfaction that I was not to be trusted in the official mockery squad, I tended to be deployed on pure illustration work, doing the drawings for other people’s articles. As most of the other people were interesting, this was usually agreeable work. The place was full of wise older brothers and uncles who could tell you any number of things you didn’t know, and it was not entirely deficient in a pleasant class of young tearaway. One of the nicest of them, a youngster from Finsbury Park called Don McCullin, was already on the road to becoming the world’s greatest war photographer since Robert Capa.
My own outdoor assignments were, happily, less dangerous but not without their perils. Many of these occurred in association with Jeremy Sandford, an upper-class writer absorbed by what he saw as working-class culture. Sandford later wrote an excellent television play about homelessness called Cathy Come Home, but during my spell with him he was more concerned with workers at play. Thus I would find myself marooned in fun-loving places like Clacton-on-Sea and Majorca, eternally waiting for Sandford to show up.
My worst experience was at a Butlin’s camp, quartered with the young folk. There was a terrible outbreak of ‘chalet rash’ – the camp name for love bites. The noise of after-dark activity got so intense that, after four sleepless nights, I begged to be relocated with the old age pensioners. Next morning Sandford bounced in full of beans and bouquets for the culture – ‘I do love the plastic parrots here, don’t you, Roger? You must have been having the most wonderful time.’ I refrained from throttling him. Sandford’s journeys through the working-class at play were subsequently reproduced in book form, with my drawings as illustrations. I don’t think it a pinnacle of achievement for either of us, but the title wasn’t bad. It was called Synthetic Fun.
My work on the Observer helped me to evolve techniques that best suited my skill. Pencil drawings in newspaper illustrations were almost invariably reproduced in half-tone blocks, and very nondescript they could look too. To get round this I would draw on very thin layout paper spread over a thick cartridge paper with a strong grain in it, and this would give the effect of a broken line, perfect for reproduction for the much blacker line blocks. I also did woodcuts which really took advantage of the line block. One of my woodcuts printed page of the Observer could clearly be seen in reverse page. I was a long way from being the best draughtsman in the newspaper business but I liked to think that nobody else could make their stuff leap so far off the page.
The most significant political event during my time at the Observer was the election in 1964 of a new Labour government. This was a body blow for satire, which had gorged itself on the Profumo Affair and Tory decline. There was a feeling, even on the far left, that with a new dawn of political wisdom satire would no longer be necessary. I did not share the optimism on this point, because there was something that troubled me about Harold Wilson. I couldn’t help it. I just didn’t like his face. In those days I thought it possible that I was being unfair, but I later discovered a powerful precedent for this form of political analysis. While the American Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln rejected an excellently qualified ministerial candidate on the grounds that he did not like his face. When reproved by his aides for vetoing an appointment on such flimsy grounds, Lincoln observed: ‘Every man over forty is responsible for his own face.’
As the Observer was easily the most liberal of the quality Sunday newspapers, it might be thought that it would be the one most energized by the election of a Labour government. This did not prove to be the case. Things puttered on in the old paternalistic way. It was said that there was no human foible that the editor could not understand, so if I managed to stay out of jail I was confronted with the daunting possibility of a job for life.
The sense of security would probably have been less oppressive had it not been for the fact that the Sunday Times, once considered a tired old Tory rag, was acquiring a wildly exciting reputation. Its by now stylish colour magazine easily eclipsed the clumsy new productions of the Observer and Sunday Telegraph, while its news section was becoming famous for something called ‘the beer bottle school of journalism’, which would write, edit and design right through Friday night in order to trounce the opposition. Within the scholastic portals of the Observer all this frantic activity in the enemy camp was rather frowned upon, but the young hopefuls on the payroll all started to twitch.
Peter Dunn, the Observer’s best young reporter, was the first to defect, and he was followed, after a short interval, by Don McCullin and myself. I was enticed to the Sunday Times by Michael Rand, the art editor of its colour magazine, who was already known to me as a man of considerable resources. For one thing he had reached his level of visual eminence with only one functioning eye; for another, he had been responsible for the famous ‘Expressograph’ feature when he worked with the Daily Express, then reckoned the most innovative of the popular newspapers, and undoubtedly the most imaginative. Rand’s ‘Expressograph’ was a skilled compilation of graphs and diagrams which helped persuade the readers of a number of comforting patriotic propositions about the solidity of their Empire, how the British nuclear deterrent was superior to the American one, and so on. At my recruitment interview, a gruelling three-hour lunch at the Terrazza, Rand made it clear to me that I, too, should be flexible. I was to work for both the newspaper and the magazine, and I had to be ready to draw anything from a sampan to a sausage in five minutes flat.
The Sunday Times had a very strong team of news photographers, but there were certain areas that they could not reach or felt disinclined to venture. So I would get to do the news drawings for things like Chinese gambling dens, where the photographers were likely to get their cameras smashed, and big courtroom scenes, where cameramen were not allowed to take pictures. As it happens, drawing was not allowed either, but you could make a fair stab at it by going along and making a few doodles in your pocket and doing the composition from memory later.
On one of these jobs I was allowed to penetrate behind the scenes at the Old Bailey, where I was fascinated to discover a system of light switches as intricate as anything you might find backstage at a Drury Lane theatre. Behind the majesty of the law scrupulous attention was paid to special effects. I was naturally a critic of all the flummery and pedantry of courtroom proceedings, though much less so after I had been sent to draw Myra Hindley and Ian Brady at the Moors Murder trial. On that occasion I was grateful for the artificiality of it all, as a means of taking the edge off the horror under discussion.
I got to know the top brass at the Sunday Times quite quickly, less through my own efforts than because I shared an office with David Hillman, a fantastically meticulous young designer who used to do the ‘Review Front’, the main features showcase of the newspaper that was always vetted at the top level. Hardly a week would go by without Hillman hammering the desk with his metal rule and threatening to resign over how insensitive journalists were butchering his magnificent constructions. I would have to pad along the corridors of power seeking compromise solutions.
Most of my real work was done for the magazine, where my immediate boss was David King, the associate art editor and the real designing genius of the enterprise. King was just 22, a year younger than myself, and unusual in a number of respects. He had an unnerving cackling laugh and spoke with a wheezy Cockney intonation that suggested three lifetimes spent on sixty gaspers a day. Strangers would invariably find him disconcerting. Once, when King was hospitalized after a serious car accident, a doctor told his wife, Philomena, that she should brace herself for a shock when seeing him as it was unlikely that he would ever be the same man again. After seeing her husband, Mrs King was able to comfort the doctor with the reassurance that her husband had always been like that.
On any magazine the relationship between the illustrator and the designer is crucial to its appearance, and mine with King was already good. On emerging from the London College of Printing as the hotshot typographer of his generation, King had done postgraduate studies in obstreperous behaviour by working closely with Tom Wolsey at both Queen and Town. He had even flashed through at the Observer but left after a few weeks, raging at ‘duffle coat designers’ who didn’t know a headline from a hole in the wall. King’s judgements were of a quite astonishing rapidity and for the most part astonishingly acute, though they were assisted by his ability to dismiss vast acres of artistic experience as ‘boring’. He believed that Mark Rothko was the greatest artist since Rembrandt, and possibly before that. I remember one distinguished illustrator, who had shown King his work, making a loud moan about its being dismissed ‘in five minutes’. When King was later reproached for being so abrupt, he also took offence: ‘Five minutes, never. It didn’t take ten seconds.’
King had hung around the Observer just long enough for us to establish an informal freelance partnership, a sort of business within a business, available to clients keen to draw attention to themselves. We did an issue of Vogue together, but our most interesting association, prior to the Sunday Times, had been on Magnet News, billed as Britain’s first black newspaper, for which King devised the biggest logo in creation. The launch was announced from the Commonwealth Institute where we met Malcolm X, the American black militant leader, and I could not help noticing that for a man fond of describing white people as ‘blue-eyed devils’ he had an interesting facial feature – very blue eyes. King and I had lot of fun putting the newspaper together, but after the first issue they let the white men go. Shortly afterwards they let everybody go. But it was the bold design of Magnet News that first led Michael Rand and Mark Boxer, the magazine’s editor, to suspect that we might have something to offer the Sunday Times.
King’s mandate on the magazine was to make it look livelier – a golden opportunity for a man who wanted to smuggle pop newspaper, and later pop art, techniques into the quality press – and a lot more colourful, which was partly where I came in. One of the major problems of the early magazine was that, while it had access to many exciting new colour processes through its press in Watford, most of the best stories would still come in as black and white. This was partly because all the best stock pictures were monochrome and partly because some of the very best photographers, Don McCullin being a prime example, were averse to shooting in colour. As a counterbalance to this, King thought the magazine should inject much more colour into its illustrations. Since I had developed a line in garish woodcuts – more specifically, hardboard cuts – along with my drawing, I was well fitted to assist in this cause. The brash background colour for these works could be effortlessly inserted in the form of instructions to the printer.
King made a point of getting to know the potential of the technology at Watford, and as a result he soon began to come up with ideas for beefing up the appearance of photo-stories that still had to be in black and white. He started introducing four-colour black into the magazine, which would give pictures much greater depth on the page. It was a highly expensive improvement but, as King was fond of pointing out, spending the proprietor’s money to keep the Observer and Telegraph thrashing about in our wake was doing him an enormous favour.
Without realizing my luck, I had moved from boom time for satire to boom time for the newspaper business. Looking back, it is apparent that the mid-sixties period of the Sunday Times was the most creative phase in newspapers since the war. This was the time when the Insight column was born, and when it was at its best, breaking and remaking every traditional rule about how a quality paper should look. Other newspapers were obliged to pay it the compliment of aping its methods. It seemed as if a general advance in the freedom and authority of the press was being made. It was only later that we realized this was a freak occurrence.
Perhaps the most freakish aspect of the newspaper in those days was having a proprietor who did not interfere. Though no moral giant, Lord Thomson knew how to delegate. The other peculiarity was the age range. Aside from a thin layer of avuncular figures who had been in submarines and Spitfires in the war and were located at the very top, it was hard to find anybody there over 35. Indeed, most of the high-pressure jobs in the newsroom and departments like Insight were done by people in their twenties. This was partly a by-product of expansion, but it was also the consequence of a deliberate hiring policy. On the Sunday Times this alliance between the war generation and the new generation was a key source of energy, and I suspect it was the main factor behind many other areas of sixties creativity. While a lot of youths were having their way, there were also some shrewd old buzzards allowing them to have it. The shrewdest of them all was Denis Hamilton, an editor of almost painful reticence who had served on Montgomery’s staff during the war. Hamilton was succeeded by Harry Evans, a more charismatic figure, and newspaper histories tend to give Evans most credit for the emergence of the Sunday Times as a great newspaper. But he only drove the engine, albeit brilliantly. It was Hamilton who built it.
Another stroke of luck from my point of view was that I was getting the best that Australian journalism had to offer without actually going there. Among expatriate Australian wordsmiths in London the Sunday Times was known as ‘the lifeboat’. Bruce Page, London born but Melbourne raised, was the first on board, and very soon afterwards set about hauling on his Aussie mates, in roughly chronological order Phillip Knightley, Murray Sayle, Tony Clifton, Alex Mitchell and Nelson Mews. All of them were excellent journalists – Sayle and Knightley became award-winning feature writers, while Page was the true genius of the Insight operation – but what appealed to me most was their lively sense of mockery about practically everything, not excluding themselves.
Sayle, the philosopher of the group, had written a novel called A Crooked Sixpence about his earlier days as a reporter on the downmarket People newspaper. The book had been withdrawn for libel reasons, but its well-thumbed proofs did the rounds of journalists samizdat-style. I can remember the eloquent frontispiece:
There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile
He found a crooked sixpence
And it wasn’t enough
I became, and remained, good friends with most of these agreeable Aussie characters. Indeed, I began to form a rose-tinted view of the country that produced them. Then the Australian newspaper proprietor in the shape of Rupert Murdoch, the Dirty Digger, arrived, and balanced the picture.
Although the Sunday Times generated a lot of bustle, there were certain still centres. One of them was Godfrey Smith, who succeeded Mark Boxer as editor of the magazine, and who probably delegated even more efficiently than Lord Thomson. Most of the magazine’s ideas emerged from a ‘think tank’ he set up and which usually consisted of Rand, King, the writer Francis Wyndham and the fashion editor Meriel McCooey. In consequence, Smith was able to sit serenely behind a desk without a single scrap of paper on it. If, however, you had to go and see his deputy, you had to take a machete to the stacked files in his office to get at him. Even so, Smith was more than a diplomat. Whenever a difficult decision came up, like whether Don McCullin’s brilliant but harrowing pictures from Vietnam should be allowed to spoil the reader’s breakfast, he almost invariably came down on the side of the radicals.
One of my first major jobs for Smith was a series of drawings for Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians, which was serialized in the magazine. They were done in sombre shades of green, brown and grey, and had a certain delicacy of touch, to my mind. They also managed to catch the attention of a reviewer in the journal of the Hornsey School of Art, where I had done some teaching in my loafing days at the Observer. ‘I feel,’ said the reviewer, ‘that Roger Law has extended himself beyond his resources, rather like someone trying to play Wagner on a Jew’s harp.’
Among writers on the magazine, the one we found most stimulating was Bruce Chatwin, who had done a runner from Sotheby’s to become a travel writer. Chatwin’s returns to home base were always good value. I can remember him, ice-blue eyes blazing, declaiming the works of the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, to a spellbound art department. Hard to imagine such impromptu cultural events happening today in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times.
Critics these days maintain that Chatwin embroidered his exotica, and it is possible that he did not always allow the facts to impede the delivery of a good story. However, his perceptions were often way ahead of the conventional wisdom. At a time when the polarities in the Cold War seemed wholly immutable, I can remember Chatwin explaining to me that Muslim aspirations in the Soviet Union would eventually lead to a solid defensive alliance between the Kremlin, representing the Russian people, and the West.
David King and Chatwin were yoked together by their mutual interest in the Soviet Union. King at the time was like one of Chekhov’s three sisters, always exclaiming, ‘I want to go to Moscow.’ Eventually he got his wish, and he and Chatwin visited Mandelstam’s widow there. I have always had a suspicion that Chatwin’s book Utz (about a fixated collector of Meissen porcelain) was based on King’s obsessively accumulated collection of photographs of the Russian revolution and its after-math.
At the Sunday Times, as on the Observer, King and I managed to keep a sideline going. With the onset of crushed velvet bell-bottom trousers and ever tinier mini skirts, and the general brightening up into the sixties as they are now remembered, this incidental work became more interesting. Our most popular success occurred when Chris Stamp of Track Records commissioned us to do a couple of record covers – one for Jimi Hendrix, and another for The Who.
Hendrix, exhibiting London’s first Afro and a braided jacket emblazoned with the words ‘Don’t Stare’, was easy to work with, and one of the images we created with him became the best-selling poster of the decade. Indeed, our design for his album Axis Bold as Love can still be seen gracing the CD to this day. The Who assignment posed more intricate problems of persuasion. Our concept required Pete Townshend to apply a three-foot replica of a deodorant roll-on to his armpit, while Roger Daltrey was invited to immerse himself in a bath of cold Heinz baked beans to achieve the desired artistic effect. The photo shoot went well enough, but Townshend’s exposed armpit got the album banned from stores in the United States. There was no significant objection to Daltrey’s bathing in Heinz beans, except from the singer himself who developed pneumonia.
