Alma Cogan (14 page)

He reached over, grabbed something wrapped in flaky pastry from Tonya’s plate and jammed it in his mouth. His teeth gleamed momentarily in a face that is lavender-orange from going under a sun lamp every day as well as from the tanning cosmetics Ronnie wears all the time. He had his initials set in rolled gold on his middle finger and a monocle on a gold chain twisted loosely round his wrist.

His hair – the little hair he has left these days: red-grey field stubble on top, blue-grey wings either side – was razor styled. His shoes were ostrich, showily pocked where the quills had been pulled, and the knot in his tie was shiny and very small. (It was later, when we were out on the duster-sized floor, that I saw that the white-on-white stripes in his shirt said ‘Yves Saint-Laurent Yves Saint-Laurent’ like that, which told me it had to be bunce from the barrows, a bit of Korean buy-in.)

Ronnie, if you hadn’t already guessed, is a character with a colourful criminal back-story. (And, from what I could gather last night, a colourful near-criminal present. When he isn’t leaning on the crews of shoeshine boys he currently runs in the City or the gangs he sends to erect stands ‘for the lardee’ at point-to-point meetings, he’s employed as a technical adviser on TV cop-operas and docudramas that can harness his specialised knowledge.)

In the sixties he was a bag man for the Who and other bands,
taking charge of the ‘now money’ they demanded from promoters before they went on, and disappearing with it in carrier bags out the back door.

But when I first knew him, Ronnie was a gofer, fixer, set-up man (it didn’t pay to enquire deeper than that) for Tony Dalligan, who kept the Kray twins out of Soho and the West End.

That was thirty years ago, when the different London worlds of film people, showbiz, sportsmen, Chelsea layabouts, Indian aristocracy (the Maharajah of Baroda – ‘Charlie’, the Maharajah of Cooch Behar), politicians, rag-trade, property developers and the East End criminal element were just starting to run together.

The venues could be anywhere from the society photographer, Baron’s, bottle parties at his studio in Belgravia, to the coffee stalls in Queensway where everybody congregated to swap notes at the end of a long night.

‘Alma, sometimes I wish someone would really hurt you so I could kill them,’ I once recall Tony Dalligan telling me in what was intended to be a romantic interlude.

He was handsome, charming and very pleasant, with that aura of danger about him that Billy Daniels at the time, and many other male stars since, have tried to cultivate.

But what I remember best about him is his abnormal passion for cleanliness. He wouldn’t get into his car without first making certain that it had been recently sprayed with a perfumed antiseptic. He kept his own monogrammed bed-linen in places where he slept regularly and paled at the idea of using a towel more than once.

Naturally such fastidiousness made him an instant hit with my mother. ‘That Tony,’ Fay would purr, ‘he’s so cavalier. An absolute gent.’

When I was away on tour Tony made a point of including Fay in parties for nights on the town. Even when I was back from the road she usually managed to get herself roped in.

As he would only eat at places which allowed him to examine the kitchens whenever the whim took him, this narrowed the choice down to a regular half-dozen: Harry Meadows’
Churchills, Bertie Meadows’ The 21, Bruce Brace’s Winston’s, Harry Green’s The Jack of Clubs (under Isow’s restaurant in Berwick Street, where I had my name painted in gold on the back of my regular chair), Patsy Morgan’s Torch Theatre Club in Knightsbridge, Eric Steiner’s The Pair of Shoes.

Being Tony Dalligan’s guest was never easy, especially when you knew the performance that lay in store when it was time to settle the bill. ‘Wader, can I get the check?’ he’d call out across the room in a terrible B-feature accent. But nobody laughed.

Nobody acted like they’d even heard. The stories about the cut-throat and the sword-stick (also about the blow-torches, electric cattle-prods and concrete kimonos that later emerged) were to be believed.

There then followed a period of drawn-out haggling, at the end of which he’d offer to settle things on the toss of a coin: heads, he’d pay twice what was written on the bill; tails, the waiter would cover the cost out of his wages over the next six months.

The opportunities for embarrassment were multiplied, of course, whenever Fay was along. ‘Do you want a lousy tip,’ she’d ask the waiter, rootling busily in her handbag, ‘or a beautiful picture of my daughter?’ (The memory of this makes me want to get off the train now, cross to another platform and start going back in the direction I’ve just travelled.)

Tony’s dead – offed many years ago by somebody in the same line. Ronnie’s still around to tell the tale, but it’s been touch-and-go, from what I’ve been able to piece together.

‘I had a breakdown not so many years ago, I had two, and was very near to death,’ he was quoted as saying in a Me and My Health feature in a newspaper that the fish happened to come wrapped up in one day.

‘I found my wife dead in a room, my mother had her leg amputated and died, it all piled up and I had a breakdown and a haemorrhage, the house was splattered with blood, all up the walls, over everything. I was taken to hospital a dying man, and I wanted to die. I didn’t care. They were all round the bed and that was the end.’

(I often used to get the feeling that the public thought everybody they heard on the wireless or saw on television all lived in a big house together and loved each other; that we were constantly pouring our hearts out and weeping on each other’s shoulders. The truth is, personal revelation remains even more of a rarity than in straight civilian circles: we know most of what we know about each other the same way everybody else does, from what we read in the papers.)

One of Ronnie’s major pluses as a person is that he hates to dwell on the past. We could, for instance, have jawed about when Seigi’s, the very club where we were sitting, was lined floor-to-ceiling in fake fur and traded under the name Wips. (There was a tank of famous piranha fish just where you come out of the lift which Ronnie plunged his bare arm into more than once and took it as a personal affront when they refused to bite.)

We couldn’t see the view of the night-time city from where we were sitting; but we knew it well and felt it like a breath on the neck – the lemon-bleary winter light, the oily sliver of silver river, the broken grid of cranes, the illuminated contractors’ signs swaying hypnotically in the wind.

We were content to sit and watch and listen to Tonya discuss Christmas shopping, Andrew and Fergie, the pound-against-the-dollar, religion ( ‘I change religions like I change clothes. But I am now in one of the most confused parts of my life. Philosophically,’ I’m almost certain I remember her saying, ‘I’m back at the Socratic “A”’), until it was time for the event that was the excuse for us being there to happen.

‘Woman’ was the title of a book and the name of a perfume being launched by the former wife of a former (dead, in his case) sixties super-swinger. The snappers who had been mooching around looking for ‘faces’ in the shadows were being corralled together in front of a low platform, and the pros took this as their cue to load up on drinks before the free-bar closed and a pay-bar came into operation.

The introductory speech was made by the owner of Seigi’s, whom I had known since he was a child and his father had part
of the Freddie Mills Nite Spot. (Fay would frequently get up on the stage to sing ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’ and ‘This Is a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening’ with the ex-boxer.)

He was wearing his working uniform – a Japanese-style black silk suit with a big brooch made out of fragments of broken mirror in the lapel. Later he would change into cords and a Barbour, collect the lurcher and the pointer that were tethered to a radiator in the back room and go deer-hunting near his house in Sussex.

‘I’m not a lady as you may have gathered’ (this didn’t get the laugh he had been expecting), ‘but I have sniffed the fragrance and
I
think that it’s very, very subtle, it’s very, very gentle, it’s very, very sophisticated and it’s very beautiful. And that is why this particular lady is putting her name to it because she is every one of those things, believe me. Could I invite you to applaud …’

Maureen was that odd phenomenon, a para-celebrity – a celebrity by association. Now, too many years down the road, she was still trying, as the survivor of a ‘heady, frenzied’ era, to make it play for her.

As they closed in for the kill, I saw the photographers exchanging sneaky glances behind the snouts of their Pentaxes and Leicas, which meant they were going to make a monkey of her; she was going to come out with multiple chins, a mean-looking mouth, eyes as wild as a bedlamite’s.

They got her to aim perfume at their lenses in a sticky cascade; then squirt perfume in a crossfire under her nose; then to recline on the black velvet display trestle, scattering books and cheap cardboard boxes, and revealing more of herself than was sensible, including a repair ticket on the dim plastic sole of her shoe.

‘I’ve never sold
my
story and I can’t really understand how they can do it, being beastly to people,’ I heard one of those familiar goo-goo little-girl bedroom voices say behind me. ‘I’d have an amazing list, but you can’t go round shopping your friends, can you?’ Pause, for an inhale or a sip. ‘I might easily change my mind, of course, if things went badly wrong and I was offered staggering bread.’

The towers of books had been reduced to dog-eared rubble;
dozens of pocket-sized ‘flacons’ of the fragrance had instantly gone walkies.

I returned to where I had been sitting and had only been there a couple of minutes when under/around the noise I thought I heard somebody say my name.

‘Alma Cogan, yeh?’

Starting from the feet we had: suede cowboy boots, pressed jeans, Navajo buckle, turquoise Navajo ring, plain T-shirt, linen jacket, inflamed nostrils, pupils like coal-holes, tumbling long blond androgynous hair. A portable phone jammed into his back pocket had the incidental effect of drawing the denim tighter at the front and showcasing his (bulked out?) thing (many hours in front of the mirror evidenced here). ‘Knockout. Well-pleased. Would it be cool to lay my rap on you since you’re like here?’

An expensive education lay close to the surface of the lame-brain rockbiz pose. I saw Sundays at home in the country with the parents; I saw a forest of lovingly-angled family pictures, tiny saucers under the castors on the sofa, brass occasional tables from the service days in India, smelly (‘whiffy’) elderly labs, tepid gin-and-tonics, knicker-blinds, tables with skirts.

He began to tell his story. But before he had got very far I discovered I knew it in outline already from the couple of letters I had received from the desk of ‘Jase’ (this was his name – a corruption of – what? – Jasper? James? Wholly invented? There were no Jasons thirty years ago in his particular neck of the woods).

Written on the paper of his marketing-production-management company, the letters were peppered with
catalysing
a
little
further
evolution
of
s
and
synergising
with
the
psyche of
s and
emblem
of
show
biz
cultures
and
déjà
vu
factors
.

The top-and-bottom of what he was suggesting was to put me together with a client who had recently made a ‘boldacious’ cross-over from the club dance scene and was now coming off a couple of ginormous hits in the pop chart.

The idea, as he had explained it, was to establish a whole new category of pop duets – ‘the epitome of the fifties-eighties pop collision, with shades of sophisticated boystown disco and clear
bright-eyed melody’. I would figure in this as ‘a kind of art statement’.

‘One, with experience, gets this tremendous feeling. We’ve got power play guaranteed on it already. Every hour, on the hour. It’s a potentially enormous entity.’

Jase had just got his feet under the table when he was stopped in full flow by Ronnie, who was a bit fiery by now and wanted to know if he was from the papers.

‘I’ve only got two uses for newspapers,’ Ronnie said before I’d had a chance to explain the situation. ‘To cover the bottom of my budgie’s cage and to train my dog on.’ (Having some deal on the boil that would benefit from a bit of friendly image-tweaking in the tabloids – that was different.)

‘S’funny,’ Ronnie said, plopping a placatory paw on Jase’s shoulder, ‘I went for a Chinese last night. He hadn’t done nothing. I just went for ’im.’

This was a twist on Ronnie’s most famous saying from the old days. Asked what had happened to some individual who had been causing trouble (or who Tony Dalligan suspected was
about
to cause trouble), his answer was always, ‘He became punched.’

After a few more minutes of banter, Ronnie drifted off into the crowd again and Jase (‘Some wild dude’) continued as if there hadn’t been any interruption.

‘What I’m saying is it could add up to a hellacious combination. It’s supposed to be secret. Like, deep graveyard. But already there’s an incredible industry buzz.’ His mouth was so close to my ear now I could feel the consonants popping. ‘He’s so impressed by how primary you remain in the culture. I can send you clips where he talks about what an avatar you are. He grew up with your records. His mother’s always been like a mega-fan. There’d be video product, other cross-media tie-ins … And you’d have points. Which could mean we were talking serious numbers.’ And so on.

But my fingers were exploring the recesses and under-edges of the seat upholstery to find the cigarette-burn that, like the hardened wad of chewing-gum, is always there.

At the same time my mind was fixed on the view that you get from the upper-deck of the coach at a certain point on the Hammersmith flyover: you look down on the raft-like canopy projecting over the entrance to the Odeon theatre and the red plastic letters that have been thrown down among all the crud that has collected there until the next time they’re picked up and hung together on the big white light-box that fills the whole of the façade to spell out the name of a headline attraction.