Unmasked

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,* 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.”

7

Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas

My unanticipated time off from Oxford equalled a newly blank diary until October when I was supposed to restart at university afresh. Clearly with me based in London again, The Likes of Us was unlikely to happen that summer in the Oxford Playhouse. The songs had been demoed. There was still no script. My father arranged for me to have a few lessons at the Royal College of Music. I made several trips to Vi and George in Italy and got taken to the Sanremo Song Festival by Southern Music’s American owner where I met Gene Pitney. I hung out with old school friends, revisited David Marks in Oxford, saw Tim a bit who was still working at Pettit and Westlake, got my driving test at the third attempt, dropped my brother to school, that’s about it, i.e. not the sort of stuff to grip reader or publisher apart from possibly one anecdote which I have many times told elsewhere. The problem is that all these years I’ve been disseminating fake news.

The story as previously told goes as follows. Back in 1966 I used to frequent a shop in the nether regions of the Fulham Road which sold cheap copies of current LPs that somehow had fallen off the back of a lorry. Nearby was a bric-a-brac shop. One day I saw a filthy dirty canvas in its window which looked remarkably like Lord Leighton’s Flaming June, probably one of the most famous of all Victorian paintings. Even though Victorian pictures were still considered nearly worthless, the £50 that the shop owner was asking for it seemed cheap to me. (Today £890.) So I begged Granny to let me borrow the money. When she asked what it was for she opined that she wasn’t going to have Victorian rubbish in her flat.

The way I have been telling the story is that it was bought by the pioneering Victorian picture dealer Jeremy Maas. He then sold it to a Puerto Rican cement baron called Luis A. Ferré who was starting a museum in Ponce, his home town on the south of the island. Apparently Ferré had a policy of never paying more than $5000 for anything. In those days you could buy several acres of Victorian canvases for $5000 and consequently Mr Ferré hoovered up some great paintings such as Burne-Jones’s masterpiece Arthur in Avalon. It is ironic that such important “aesthetic movement” paintings created in the pursuit of beauty should have found their home in an island so cruelly treated by nature. Today Flaming June is billed as “The Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere,” has been in the Tate Gallery, the Frick, you name it, and is worth millions. Thus Granny denied me a Victorian masterpiece. I’ve been writing and dining out on this for decades.

Unfortunately I was wrong. I recently learned that Jeremy Maas bought the real thing from his barber a few years earlier. So I take this opportunity to grovel with apology for a falsehood that I even perpetuated in a Royal Academy exhibition catalogue and revel in the fact that I didn’t lose out on a great deal after all.

IT WAS AROUND EASTER when Bob Kingston, boss of the London office of Southern Music, called me into his office. I am not the only one who should be eternally grateful for what he told me. Everyone from Tim Rice to all those who made tons of money out of our early shows should erect a monument to him. Without it the rest of this book would be completely different, not to mention the rest of my life – and probably that of countless others. Bob Kingston was the first person to tell me about Grand Rights. The meeting came about because either Desmond Elliott or Ernest Hecht had had a faintly encouraging response from Harry Secombe’s management to The Likes of Us demo disc. Harry Secombe was a very successful British comic who was unusual in that he had a more than OK, if slightly strangulated, tenor voice. This propelled him into occasional flights of light opera and the title role in an Oliver! influenced musical called Pickwick which had opened in London in mid-1963, directed by Peter Coe and designed by Sean Kenny, repeating a partnership they had begun with Lionel Bart’s classic. Both these had, of course, also been approached about our epic.

Based on an over optimistic chat with the excitable Desmond, Bob felt it was time to sit me down and explain the music business facts of life. In those days income from songwriting came from three sources. First was record sales. Second were fees from performances on radio, TV and public places. Third was “sheet music” sales, i.e. printed song copies. The publisher split the income from the first two categories 50/50 with the writers and doled out 10% of the proceeds from the third. Income from international sources was split 50/50 based on what the local publisher remitted to the UK publisher. Naturally all the major publishers set up their own local firms who skimmed off a big cut of a song’s income with the result that the publisher in practice could end up with a far bigger share of the income than the authors. For example, a song earns $100 in the US. The US publisher (owned by the UK publisher) takes a 50% cut, remits 50% to the British publisher who splits that 50/50 with the writers. Thus many writers at that time only received 25% of the gross international income. This practice has long since been challenged, but it was the norm in 1966. Bob explained that these three income streams are called Small Rights.

What Bob then spelt out was that there is another rights category, Grand Rights. He told me that Tin Pan Alley publishers rarely understood what they were. Grand Rights are the royalties that arise whenever an entire dramatic work is performed on the stage or on film. Bob felt it was not morally right for a pop music publisher to participate in this income. The agreement Tim and I had been given for The Likes of Us was a standard contract whose wording implied that we had signed away absolutely everything to Southern Music. Bob proposed giving us back our Grand Rights. The Likes of Us was never to earn a penny, but the advice Bob gave me that morning was unquestionably the most precious of my entire career.

THAT MAY TIM’S BOSSES at the law firm Pettit and Westlake told him to destroy some highly sensitive legal documents. Unfortunately he shredded the wrong ones. This caused Tim’s law career to come into question and so his father Hugh lent on some contacts he had at electronic giant EMI with the result that in June Tim joined EMI Records as a management trainee. Almost immediately Tim was assigned to the A&R department, A&R standing for artists and repertoire, the department responsible for finding artists, choosing their songs and overseeing their recording careers.

Today the initials EMI mean little even in the music business. But in 1966 EMI was the undisputed giant of the record industry. It owned a vast litany of artists headed by The Beatles, an unequalled roster of classical musicians, a huge manufacturing base not only of the software but the hardware of the music business, plus the world’s most famous recording studio complex at Abbey Road. It is hard to believe that today this once proud company’s initials survive only in the names Sony/ATV/EMI Publishing and Virgin/EMI Records. In 2012 the then owners, venture capitalists Terra Firma, became infamously infirm as the giant turned into a munchkin. After complex shenanigans, Japanese giant Sony acquired the music publishing and the record division was swallowed up by Universal Music, who merged it with the Virgin label.

At almost exactly the same time as Tim started at EMI I got a letter from Magdalen. It got straight to the point. The college bigwigs had heard that I was working on a musical. They wished me luck but hoped I realized that when I returned I was expected to concentrate on my studies. If I wanted I could discuss changing the course I was reading, but if I returned they expected me to live up to my exhibitioner status.

Reality had caught up with me big time. I thought about switching from History to Music. My father knew Dr Bernard Rose, the highly regarded director of Magdalen College’s fabled choir. But Dad was hugely against my studying music. He felt that the Oxford course would be far too academic for me. So my only future at Oxford was to return and read history seriously. Even give or take a little bit, realistically I would have to take a three-year break from musical theatre or at least from attempting any professional involvement.

Meantime Tim, nearly four years older than me and understandably ambitious for his own future, was starting a job in the creative department of the world’s top record company. Even if Tim was at the bottom of the ladder, he had his foot in the door. Tim could easily have a hit on his own or with another writer. He might easily lose interest in a younger hopeful whose real interest was theatre, a world far away from chart-obsessed EMI and the white-hot heat of Swinging London. Furthermore I knew full well that Oxford offered nobody who could hold a candle to his lyrics.

Should I go back to Oxford or leave? It was the biggest decision of my life and there was nobody I felt I could turn to for advice. My family would point to two dismal A-level results as my only academic qualifications. I had the odd music grade, but no way was I a performer so there was no hope down that alley. The most anyone could say about me was that I wrote tunes, had an oddball love of musicals and a bizarre love of architecture and medieval history. I knew that my family would be appalled if I chucked in the lifeline that Magdalen had offered me.

I took myself away to agonize. What if musicals were on the way out? What if I was no good at them anyway? I knew I was no lyricist. So was it not lunacy to try a career where my music was greatly dependent on the words that went with it and stories that might be lousy? What if the writer of those words, in this case Tim, no longer wanted to work with me? What if that writer didn’t come up with the goods? Most musicals are flops. Why should mine be any different? That is, if I ever got one on.

I went over and over in my head what an Oxford degree would mean for me. I couldn’t imagine a career I’d enjoy where it would do me any good. But my family had no money; they didn’t even own the Harrington Court flat. I would have to make a living somehow, someday. But with or without a degree at what? At least staying at Oxford would stave off a career decision for three years. True I would have to knuckle down and work to get a decent class of degree. But on the flip side of the coin I fretted that I was an exhibitioner who was taking up a college subsidized place that would probably have gone to someone far worthier than I had it not been for Professor McFarlane’s cat. Should I not let that worthier someone have my place?

However, there was the certainty of what a decision to leave would do to the family. Granny Molly would be consumed with anxiety. Aunt Vi and Uncle George would be livid. Mum might just take it on the chin, but I couldn’t tell what Dad would make of it. Of all the family I was closest to Molly. I strongly sensed that my increasingly frail Granny would regard my leaving Oxford as an insane, suicidal move. Could it somehow rekindle in her a myriad of associations with the loss of her son Alastair? She cared that much about me. But then what if I lost Tim? The thought went round and round in my head and drilled into it like an unmelodic earworm. Finally I made my decision. On July 17, 1966 I wrote to Thomas Boase, Magdalen College’s admission tutor, informing him that I did not want to continue as a History exhibitioner.

I thought my bombshell was received pretty well; a few long faces, a bit of muttering, as far as I was concerned that was about it. I took three school friends to stay at Vi and George’s. They seemed on the sombre side of OK, but pretty soon Vi and I were experimenting with olive-oil recipes in her glorious seaview kitchen. It’s only recently that I learned things were not quite as I thought. First my brother Julian remembered that he had never witnessed such a family row as happened after I told Mum and Dad of my decision. Then I discovered among some of Mum’s papers the outline of her autobiography. It seems I was dead right about Granny equating what I was doing with the loss of Alastair. In her view I was throwing my life away and she felt appalled that Dad was doing nothing to stop it. Vi and George were safely out of the way in Italy. It was difficult and costly in 1966 to make international phone calls, you had to book them via the operator, but they made their views patently clear in letters that were kept from me.

Years later, according to Mum, I was staggered to learn that it was Dad who not only defended me but supported my decision. Apparently he strongly argued that in all his experience with students at the Royal and London Colleges of Music he had not come across anyone with such determination to succeed and that it would be completely counter-productive to put roadblocks in my way. With hindsight this is borne out by a conversation that Dad and I had before I took off with my school friends to Italy. First he reiterated that he would not support my trying for the Royal College of Music. I remember his reason, “it would educate the music out of you,” quite a statement from the senior Professor of Composition at the Royal College and the head of the London College of Music to boot.

Secondly he strongly felt that I should take a course in orchestration. The orchestra, he opined, provided the richest palette of colours in music if you knew how to use it. I was thrilled when Dad said he would fix for me to take a part-time course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was fascinated by the tone colours of composers like Britten and how a high romantic like Richard Strauss could take the orchestra to ever more overripe extremes. I remember thinking that learning orchestration is like learning the basics of cooking: just as I knew from Vi how to make a soufflé or a mayonnaise, now I would learn how to make my orchestral ideas a reality. That Guildhall course has stood me in good stead. It is the only academic course I have taken seriously.