The Secret History of Entertainment

The Secret History of Entertainment

David Hepworth

To my wife Alyson and our children Clare, Henry and Imogen

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

ELTON GOES SHOPPING

ROCK AND ROLL WAS INVENTED BY A LOOSE LUGGAGE STRAP

THE MAN WHO DIED ON A TV CHAT SHOW

THE MAN WHO WAS MEANT TO BE BOND

THE MYSTERY OF ‘WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?’

ALEC GUINNESS’S STAR WARS PENSION

KENNETH WILLIAMS’S LAVATORY

DAVID BOWIE’S EYES ARE DIFFERENT COLOURS

THE VOICE OF GOD

THE POCKET SUPERSTAR

THE BABYSITTER WHO INVENTED COUNTRY ROCK

MONKEE MOMMA MAKES MILLIONS

ENGLISHMEN WERE THE GODFATHERS OF AMERICAN ROOTS MUSIC

WHICH ONE’S PINK?

BROWN M&MS AND OTHER ROCK STARS’ RIDERS

DELIA SMITH MADE THE LET IT BLEED CAKE

CHANGING SEX IN SHOW BUSINESS

‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ IS STILL IN COPYRIGHT

SOME OF THE BEST LINES ARE MADE UP ON THE SPOT

JACK NICHOLSON GREW UP THINKING HIS MOTHER WAS HIS SISTER

THE TRAGIC LIFE AND LONG DEATH OF JACKIE WILSON

THERE’S ONLY ONE MANCUNIAN IN FRASIER (AND IT’S NOT DAPHNE MOON)

KEVIN COSTNER MADE NICK LOWE A MILLIONAIRE

MADONNA CO-WROTE A HIT WITH A DEAD MAN

HARRISON FORD HAS THE RUNS

BRUNO BROOKES, BOB HARRIS AND 35,000 RECORDS

FARGO IS NOT A TRUE STORY – BUT THIS IS

THE ROLLING STONES ACTUALLY HAD SIX MEMBERS

THE WORLD’S ONLY CELEBRITY DOG

THE HISTORY OF FUCK AND THE MOVIES

ICI ON PARLE HIP HOP

RICHARD GERE OWES HIS CAREER TO JOHN TRAVOLTA

WORKING TITLES

THE LONESOME DEATHS OF FRANKIE HOWERD AND BENNY HILL

THE TERRIBLE EARLY LIFE OF RAY CHARLES

THE AMAZING STORY OF ‘BITTER SWEET SYMPHONY’

LITERARY ANCESTORS

I’D KNOW THAT SCREAM ANYWHERE

THOSE AREN’T JULIA ROBERTS’S LEGS ON THE PRETTY WOMAN POSTER

THEY KNEW IT WAS DIRTY BUT THEY DIDN’T KNOW HOW

NOBODY LAUGHS IN THE SIMPSONS

THE NUDES IN THE DISNEY CARTOONS

CHOLLY ATKINS IS THE TRUE FATHER OF MODERN POP

ICI ON PARLE HOLLYWOOD

THE KENNY G PAT METHENY SPAT

A BAD DAY TO DIE

WHY ELVIS NEVER TOURED OUTSIDE THE USA

THE LOST WORDS OF STAR TREK

SORRY, BUT THEY NEVER SAID IT

DYNASTY

SHIRLEY MACLAINE AND WARREN BEATTY ARE SISTER AND BROTHER

WHO WAS ‘YOU’RE SO VAIN’ ABOUT?

HIT MOVIES ARE DECIDED IN THE FIRST WEEKEND

BOB DYLAN’S SECRET SECOND WIFE

THE MOST CONNECTED ACTORS

THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND RIFFS

HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITHOUT HAVING A HIT

THE SIMPSONS AND THE GROENINGS

WHEN THE BBC CLOSED FOR BATHTIME

DOWN ON HIS LUCK, SINATRA PLAYS BLACKPOOL

THE OSCARS REHEARSAL

AMERICA DOESN’T GET BRITISH COMEDY

PEOPLE WHO COULDN’T LEARN LINES

ROCK STARS WHO SERVED THEIR COUNTRY

THE ALBUMS PREVIOUSLY KNOWN AS…

NOBODY THOUGHT THE WALKMAN WOULD WORK

THE FOUR TOPS’ FIFTY-YEAR CAREER

MOM IN A BOX

HOW TO RENT A SUPERSTAR

JUMPING THE SHARK

RHYMING SLANG

THEY DIED WITH THEIR SLAP ON

GOT THEM ALT.NEO BREAKBEAT HANDBAG LOUNGECORE BLUES

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

The expression ‘anorak’ has become the standard way of describing any individual – generally a male one – who takes an excessive interest in minutiae.

But why ‘anorak’?

In the 1960s, during the heyday of pirate radio in the UK, devotees of the stations would take pleasure trips out into the North Sea to photograph the boats from which they broadcast. These radio fans were instantly identifiable by the brand new weatherproof gear they had purchased for their voyage. Hence ‘anorak’ became the noun to describe anyone with the kind of chemical imbalance that would lead them to undertake that kind of expedition for no reason beyond the satisfaction of their own curiosity. Or, indeed, to know any of the stories that follow.

The Secret History of Entertainment is a collection of stories that not a lot of people know, stories that explain something of how the entertainment business functions and why some huge and familiar things are the way they are. It touches on the strange lives of stars, the exotic language of the business, the unimaginable wealth of the few, and the hard, complicated struggles of the many. It encompasses huge triumph, utter tragedy and some farce. It deals with everything from why there are no laughs in The Simpsons to the economics of hiring The Rolling Stones for your birthday party.

It started life as a feature in Word magazine in 2003. This in turn grew out of a conversation in the pub. It was the sort of conversation where people who know too much about nothing very important swap entertainment anecdotage to keep each other amused. If there were two people there who hadn’t heard the story before, it went in. This book has been put together in the same spirit. If you know it all already, then bully for you. After you with the anorak.

ELTON GOES SHOPPING

Every Monday if he’s in the UK, or Tuesday if he’s in the US, Elton John buys three copies of the major new record releases, one for each of his homes in Atlanta, Windsor and the South of France.

ROCK AND ROLL WAS INVENTED BY A LOOSE LUGGAGE STRAP

On 5 March 1951, while on their way down Highway 61 to a recording session in Memphis, touring R&B band Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm lost an amplifier off the roof of their Oldsmobile. At the session, producer Sam Phillips attempted to repair the damaged speaker cone with a piece of cardboard. The resulting distorted sound, the musical equivalent of a folded piece of cardboard jammed in bicycle spokes, became the key element of ‘Rocket 88’, the Jackie Brenston side cut at that session which is now widely regarded as the first rock and roll record.

The accident that befell guitarist Willie Kizar’s amplifier on the road to Memphis can be considered the father of every subsequent attempt to electronically manipulate sound in the name of excitement.

THE MAN WHO DIED ON A TV CHAT SHOW

Jerome Rodale was a pioneer of the health and fitness movement of the late 1960s. His publishing company, Rodale Press, launched the very successful magazine Men’s Health. On 5 June 1971 Rodale, who had predicted he was going to live to be a hundred (‘unless I’m run down by a sugar-crazed taxi driver’), was recording an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show when his chin dropped to his chest and he appeared to be asleep. ‘Are we boring you, Mr Rodale?’ Cavett enquired with unseemly levity. It transpired that Rodale had died of a heart attack. The show was never broadcast but the incident later inspired an unforgettable Alan Partridge show in which the eighty-four-year-old Lord Morgan of Glossop expires on the Partridge couch.

THE MAN WHO WAS MEANT TO BE BOND

Sean Connery established the physical type for James Bond with his appearance in the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962. But Bond’s creator Ian Fleming had someone rather different in mind when he first unveiled his character in the 1953 book Casino Royale. In the original description of the agent, Vesper Lynd, first in a long line of Bond girls, describes him as ‘very good looking’ and says ‘he reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael…there is something cold and ruthless about him’. At the time, Carmichael’s career as a composer of such cosy classics as ‘Stardust’ and ‘Georgia On My Mind’ was winding down. He was sixty when the first Bond film was made. He did make a few film appearances, as in To Have And Have Not, but remained more comfortable straddling the 88s than wielding the Walther PPK. ‘There are other things in life besides music,’ he once remarked. ‘I forget what they are but they’re around.’

THE MYSTERY OF ‘WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?’

One evening in 1986, Dan Rather, one of the best-known figures in American network news, was assaulted while walking down Manhattan’s Park Avenue by two well-dressed men he had never seen before. One man punched Rather and kicked him in the back while loudly demanding, ‘Kenneth, what’s the frequency?’ The victim took refuge in a nearby office building and the men ran off. Rather’s account of this puzzling incident was widely disbelieved, given his flair for self-dramatisation (he once took to signing off bulletins with the word ‘courage’), and his alleged assailant’s question was adopted in some quarters as slang to denote cluelessness. In 1997 it was concluded that the man who had set upon him was a disturbed individual named William Tager, by then serving a prison sentence for the murder of an NBC stagehand. At the time, this unfortunate individual was under the impression that the media were beaming messages to him and presumably thought such a prominent member of the media as Rather would know the actual frequency. The incident – or possibly Game Theory’s 1987 song ‘Kenneth, What’s The Frequency?’ – inspired REM’s song of almost the same name on their 1994 album Monster. Dan Rather, who is as averse to personal publicity as most news anchors, subsequently appeared with the group on backing vocals when they undertook a Saturday Night Live appearance.

ALEC GUINNESS’S STAR WARS PENSION

Throughout his career the venerable actor Sir Alec Guinness remained obsessed with the fear of losing his new-found prosperity and tumbling back to his very humble origins. (He was born Alec Cuff, the product of a brief liaison between a barmaid and an unidentified toff. ‘My mother’s a whore,’ Guinness once said. ‘She slept with the entire crew on Lord Moyne’s yacht at the Cowes Regatta.’) Even when firmly established as one of the greatest cinema actors of his generation and constantly in demand for work, guests at his Sussex home were horrified at how parsimonious Guinness could be in everyday matters like food and central heating.

In 1975 Guinness had a meeting with an unknown director called George Lucas who wanted him to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a film he was planning called Star Wars. The initial offer made to him was a fee of $150,000 plus two per cent of the producer’s profit. This was the kind of generosity they needed to show to get a respectable name like Guinness to put on the marquee. The favourable critical reaction to the film’s release cheered him considerably, though he had no inkling of what a monster he had helped spawn: ‘This could bring me in $100,000 if it does Jaws business as predicted.’

Unprompted and encouraged by the early box-office returns, George Lucas then asked him to take another quarter per cent, and Guinness’s diaries record his satisfaction at this ‘temporary fortune’. ‘The bank telephoned to say they’d received £308,552,’ he wrote on 1 February 1978. More money followed, but the publicity attending the movie’s success attracted the Inland Revenue, who subsequently made life hard for Guinness. For the rest of his life he was indignant about claims made in the press about his Star Wars earnings. Even though he found the films irritating and the experience of making them dull, he signed up to do cameos in the next two movies and cheques kept appearing throughout the early 1980s. In November 1983 he greeted one for $250,000 with rare delight: ‘That will pay for our daughter’s schooling, our Italian holiday and our prefilming holiday in India.’ His co-star Harrison Ford, who was one of the few members of the Star Wars cast with whom he struck up a rapport, used to refer to him as ‘The Mother Superior’ behind his back.

KENNETH WILLIAMS’S LAVATORY

A walking parody of fastidiousness, the late Carry On actor and radio performer was neurotically suspicious of human society and utterly obsessed with hygiene. He lived alone in a flat in the West End of London where he kept clingfilm over his cooker to ward off germs. He never invited his friends round for dinner because, he said, ‘I can’t stand the idea of another bottom on my loo.’ On the rare occasions that people did drop in on him unexpectedly they were asked to use the facilities at the hotel across the road from his flat.

DAVID BOWIE’S EYES ARE DIFFERENT COLOURS

When the young David Jones of Bromley was thirteen he was involved in a fight over a girl with a school friend called George Underwood. This resulted in his taking a blow to his left eye from a fist (and not a pair of compasses or a toy airplane propellor as some more lurid accounts have it), which caused him to be hospitalised for over four months. At first he was in danger of losing his sight altogether, but ultimately he was left with a permanently enlarged pupil in his left eye. This still shows predominantly hazel, in contrast with the natural blue of his right eye. (The rim around the iris is still blue in certain photographs, although the issue may be clouded by Bowie’s occasional use of contact lenses.) Bowie and Underwood, who subsequently played in bands together, have remained close friends since the incident.

THE VOICE OF GOD

If you’ve ever sat in a cinema and felt the speakers shaken by a voice like a gravel and honey cocktail intoning a script which generally begins with the words ‘In a world…’, then you have probably heard the work of Don LaFontaine, Hollywood’s foremost voiceover artist for the last forty years. Starting as a sound editor, LaFontaine lucked into his multimillion dollar profession one day back in the 1960s, when the actor supposed to voice Gunfighters of Casa Grande didn’t show up for the date and Don was called upon to speak the line ‘In a blur of speed their hands flashed down to their holsters and came up spitting fire’. Since then LaFontaine has done more than 4,000 trailers and is known as the ‘Voice of God’, a role he has actually performed live from behind a curtain at his local church. LaFontaine still works as often as he feels like today, ferried from date to date in a white stretch limousine. A decent job will make him $2,000 and may take as long as half an hour. However, like most voiceover artists, he has the latest state-of-the-art ISDN technology installed in his home and can work without leaving the house.

THE POCKET SUPERSTAR

Alan Ladd, Hollywood superstar of the cowboy era of the 1950s, was remarkably small for an action hero. He had been malnourished as a child and once burned down the family apartment playing with matches. His mother called him ‘Tiny’, and when an interviewer once asked what he would change about himself he replied, ‘Everything’.

Estimates of Ladd’s precise stature begin at five foot four, but even the most generous go no higher than five foot six. Love scenes were always a problem. When he appeared with Sophia Loren in the 1957 movie Boy on a Dolphin he had to stand on a fruit box for the love scenes. James Mason made it clear that if he was to co-star with Ladd in the film Botany Bay he was not going to do what many of Ladd’s male costars had done, which was to stand in a trench to save the lead’s dignity. Ladd died in 1964, apparently after an accidental overdose of pills and alcohol.

Even at five foot six he was still an inch taller than Dustin Hoffman and the same height as Al Pacino, and would have fitted in with many of the biggest names in Hollywood today. Tom Cruise’s official height is five foot seven, while even Tobey Maguire and Joaquin Phoenix claim no more than five foot eight. Michael Caine, who’s six foot two, has been around long enough to note the change with what he calls ‘the emergence’ of ‘a generation of very talented small people. Maybe they are more ambitious because they are more angry because they are short.’

THE BABYSITTER WHO INVENTED COUNTRY ROCK

In 1972 Emmylou Harris was a twenty-four-year-old single mother singing folk songs by night in a Washington club called Clyde’s. One night Rick Roberts of The Flying Burrito Brothers happened to hear her perform ‘It Wasn’t God That Made Honky Tonk Angels’. He was so impressed that he returned the following evening with fellow Burrito Chris Hillman. Two nights later, The Burritos were preparing to play a show fifty miles away when they were joined backstage by former member Gram Parsons. He told Hillman he was planning a new record for which he needed a featured girl singer. Hillman said he had heard a fine singer a couple of nights earlier but couldn’t remember her name and didn’t have her number.

At that very moment a girl fan who happened to be backstage with the band announced that she was Harris’s babysitter and obviously had her number. Introductions were made. Parsons and Harris met and sang together. Harris recorded Parsons’s first solo album G.P. with him and country rock was born. ‘I lucked into this whole thing,’ said Harris years later. ‘One little millimeter would have made the difference. If my babysitter hadn’t been at that Flying Burrito Brothers concert and given Gram my phone number, if Gram hadn’t come into my life, who knows what would have become of me?’

MONKEE MOMMA MAKES MILLIONS

Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as a typist in Dallas in the early 1950s when she came up with the idea of a white correction fluid that she initially called Mistake Out. She began manufacturing it herself, at first in her kitchen, using her son Michael and his friends to bottle and sell the product to office supply dealers. She changed the name of the product to Liquid Paper and moved into larger premises in 1968, by which time Michael had become a member of the chart-topping Monkees and made more money in a year than her business had done in the previous ten. She eventually sold her share of the business to Gillette in 1979 for $49 million plus a royalty on every bottle for the rest of the century. Sadly she died the following year at the age of fifty-six, leaving her son with a significant amount of money, an important collection of the work of women artists and a charitable organisation called The Gihon Foundation.

ENGLISHMEN WERE THE GODFATHERS OF AMERICAN ROOTS MUSIC

Don Law was born in comfortable circumstances in London in 1902. He sang with the London Choral Society. Young enough to escape conscription in the First World War, he packed his bag in 1923 and emigrated to the United States where he sold etchings in New York and ranched sheep in Alabama before becoming first a bookkeeper and then a talent scout for the American Record Corporation in Dallas, Texas. In those days the northern-based companies were looking for interesting performers in the emergent blues and country fields and would set up their recording equipment in southern hotel rooms, where they would make acetates, buying all rights in exchange for a fistful of dollars.

This Englishman was in charge at a session during Thanksgiving week 1936 in the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio, Texas when one young artist came in, sat facing the corner and played his entire repertoire of blues songs. The young artist was Robert Johnson and the songs recorded that day, ‘Crossroads’, ‘Me & The Devil’, ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ and others, announced the blues equivalent of a Miles Davis or Mozart.

Law went on to have one of the most successful A&R careers in country music, working with everyone from Johnny Cash down. But neither he nor his subsequent boss at Columbia, ‘Uncle Art’ Satherley, made much distinction between blues, hillbilly and other forms of southern music.

Arthur Satherley was born in Bristol in 1889. He emigrated to America in his twenties and found work in a Wisconsin furniture factory that made cabinets for record players. Moving into the record business, which was starting to flourish in the prosperous years following the War, he graduated to spotting and recording talent such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Alberta Hunter and King Oliver before becoming hugely successful producing Bob Wills and Gene Autry. According to Donald Clarke’s book The Rise & Fall Of Popular Music, ‘Satherley loved American rural music and regarded all of it as country music, whether white or black, but according to the institutionalised racism of the era it had to be divided into “race” and “hillbilly” music.’ Both Law and Satherley were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in later years.

WHICH ONE’S PINK?

The name Pink Floyd may nowadays be associated with psychedelia and the pulsing colours of liquid light shows, but it owes its origins to a very different tradition. Floyd founder Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett put together the names of two completely unconnected and very obscure bluesmen, Pinkney Anderson and Floyd Council, to make a name for his band. The two men, who both laboured in obscurity in the Carolinas and died in the 1970s, never played together and were never featured on an album together, but for the foreseeable future their names remain yoked in the public imagination.

BROWN M&MS AND OTHER ROCK STARS’ RIDERS

‘There shall be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the shows with full compensation’ was the line that Van Halen had inserted into their agreement with promoters of their live shows in the 1980s. This wasn’t there because the band had particular confectionery preferences so much as to provide them with a stick with which to beat promoters who failed to provide more important things like satisfactory access to a venue or adequate power supply.

But since those simple days the supplies and services stipulated in contract ‘riders’ tell their own story of the increasing cynicism of the music business and the Napoleonic delusions of some of its bigger names. The following examples were culled from the excellent Smoking Gun website (www.thesmokinggun.com) and come from actual contracts.

Luciano Pavarotti’s contract stipulates ‘there must be no distinct smells anywhere near the Artist’.

Whitney Houston’s need for accommodation knows no bounds. ‘We need all available rooms in the building,’ says her rider.

Christina Aguilera will brook no impediment between her and her adoring public, which is why she demands a ‘police escort to facilitate band’s arrival at venue’ and warns that ‘under no circumstances are vehicles to encounter any delay due to traffic’.