Be Careful What You Wish For (38 page)

As well as the imminent approach to what I saw as a critical season given the cost implications involved, I also had the added distraction of my approaching fortieth birthday and a lavish party I had chosen to mark it.

I had invited 600 people and sent out invitations with ‘Oh Shit, I am Forty’ on the front and on the back the strapline: ‘The only present required is your presence.’ Inside it had a collage of images from a newspaper shot of me taken after Palace had scored the
winning
goal in the 2004 play-off final, to pictures of the Club Bar and Dining, images from
Telstar
and
Octane
magazine, Aston Martins and Ferraris, The Specials and glamorous women, all the supposed components or interests of my life.

The party had a budget of £600,000, and was held at a venue alongside the Thames. I hired a £35 million boat to take my guests to the event, and had organised a fireworks display in the middle of the Thames, taking place against the backdrop of a lit-up Millennium Dome, which resulted in the world trade boat being forced to stop for fifteen minutes waiting for the display to finish.

The venue was the last working lighthouse on the river, which had been used for television shows and celebrity events. The theme was music, as it is one of my great loves. I hired Kid Creole and the Coconuts to sing on the boat taking us to the fireworks display and the venue.

Inside the lighthouse, each room was decorated in the style of a different decade. A sixties lounge full of Mary Quant-dressed waitresses, a seventies kitsch lounge with hanging chairs and an eighties lounge with power drinks and so on. Each lounge served the drinks of the time, and each environment was revealed at the same time as a musical act of the decade played. The Boot Leg Beatles for the sixties, Imagination played for the seventies and Curiosity Killed the Cat for the eighties. We had the largest video bank screens in Europe and a pre-recorded video hosted by Nick Moran talking about each decade with messages from friends. As my
pièce de résistance
, I had two acts. All summer I negotiated with Bryan Ferry to play and after agreeing to £90,000 for forty-five minutes, he promised to do me a favour, after initially refusing, and sing ‘Avalon’, my favourite Ferry song.

Finally four years after I first mooted the idea and twenty-six
years
since they last played, my friends The Specials started my much-dreamed-about re-formation in earnest and played for me for free. The guest list included movie and television stars, footballers and models, all the people from my life, from Kevin Spacey to one of my dearest friends, Deano, a builder from Sheffield who I had known for twenty years. My most special guest came to the party and was very quiet, but she was there, my soon-to-be-born beautiful daughter!

I had come a long way: I had built myself up from starting a small business to owning a football club, a restaurant group, a magazine, a film company, a Spanish property company. I had investments all over the world and was able to throw a party like this attended by A-listers from media to movies to money. This party showed where I was in the world. One thing I should have remembered: as quick as things come, they can go!

Telstar
, the film, was in production during this time. Set in the 1960s,
Telstar
is a biopic of the music producer Joe Meek who gave the world the song ‘Telstar’ and a host of other hits. Nick Moran came on as the director, and I hired Guy Ritchie’s producers Adam Bohling and Dave Reid to work alongside me to make the film. The six-week shoot kicked off in July 2007 at Twickenham Studios.

It was the first British movie in forty years to be independently funded and produced. I had decided that I would approach the film world in the same way as I had approached the football world: trying to ‘knock the world out with my chin’. By making the film in the manner that I wanted I did not want to involve ‘sales agents’, nor partner up with an investor or film distributor. I backed myself and my project, and took all the risk, believing I would produce a successful film.

The original budget was around the £800,000 mark but by the time I had looked at it and understood what it took to make it high quality it was up nearer the £2 million mark. Not only did I take on two top producers, I wanted a great cast and we set about hiring one. Con O’Neill, an Olivier- and Tony-winning star, took the role of Joe Meek in the play and was so startlingly good he was a shoo-in for the lead.

We auditioned many people including James Corden, who read for the part of Clem Cattini, the famous drummer. When Corden came in he was great in the read-through, which I sat in on, but I felt he was slightly too heavy and suggested, to the horror of the producers and director, that he train with the fitness instructor at Palace to lose weight. The horrified response was that he was an actor not a footballer! We asked him politely to drop some weight if he wanted the part, and it was an indication of how much Corden wanted the role that he duly did – that is, until the on-set catering kicked in!

As well as Corden we hired Ralf Little, Pam Ferris and JJ Field, who went on to appear as Union Jack in the
Captain America
film. We took on some well-known British actors: Rita Tushingham, Jess Conrad and John Leyton. The young Leyton actually featured as a character in the film and was played by another actor. We hired Jimmy Carr, Marcus Brigstocke and also took on two big-name musicians – Justin Hawkins from the Darkness and Carl Barat of the Libertines – to play pop stars of the era.

Finally I wanted some gold dust, a marquee ‘signing’. We looked at a host of top-name actors, including Tom Hanks who had seen the play, loved it and actually came backstage to visit the cast. Tom considered it but he had scheduling issues, as did Anthony Hopkins and Bill Nighy. But one of my favourite actors, and someone I had met through Nick Moran, was pursued with vigour. I made it clear
in
a terse call from Spain to Nick and the producers, that no headline name, no film. Within an hour Nick came back and said he had secured Kevin Spacey. I can only imagine what Nick had to do for that! But Spacey was whom I really wanted and we were now in business.

As well as the on-screen talent, you need talent behind the scenes and we hired some of the best. We had a brilliant production manager in Russell De Rozario, the BA Baracus of production design. He was able to build anything from anything and if we forgot something in a particular scene he would go and ‘procure’ it; his only shortcoming was that he was a Chelsea fan.

The film business has a great number of similarities to football. Your manager in football is your director in films and your players are the actors. Like their footballing counterparts they are well paid, often very young and full of themselves.

And the similarities don’t end there. As with football you have an endless amount of back-room people from cameramen, production designers, make-up artists, line producers, electricians, grips, best boys to runners; a bit like physios, fitness trainers, masseuses, sport scientists and kit managers. And then you had my favourite similarity, the line: ‘We don’t do things that way.’

As I had in football, I had a desire to make something I was involved in the very best it could be but at the same time ‘sweating the asset’. I have told stories of big monies being spent and sometimes wasted but behind every pound I spent was an intensity in other areas to generate the best we could from everything we did. Along with Dominic I drove every aspect of commerciality at Palace: we monitored and analysed every part of the business, from ticket sales to merchandise, from programmes to hot dog sales, and the operation was slick and dynamic.

I wanted to do the same with the film: there was significant
investment
from me, from the cast assembled on to the excellent personnel hired and even the film we shot on. As always I backed myself on this film, believing in Nick Moran as a first-time director, and in the story as being compelling and powerful. I had the added advantage of knowing some extremely influential and powerful people in the film business including Paul Higginson, MD of 20th Century Fox, a big Liverpool fan who I had got tickets for whenever they played Palace; Stuart Till, soon to be head of Icon, one of the biggest film distributors and a former director at Millwall; and Peter Rice, head of Fox Searchlight in America, an Englishman living in LA who was a big Palace fan. And I believed this would enable me to fast-track this film. All I had to do was ensure we shot and edited it well, and bingo!

I decided that I didn’t need the dreaded agents – this time sales agents in the film world – and I didn’t overly need distributors from the outset. I thought that I would deal with them after the film was shot. I made my life on this film, as I had sometimes in football, very difficult, as there was an established way of doing things. Sometimes you just have to accept it is not always about ‘breaking eggs to make omelettes’, sometimes the established way of doing things is the right way.

We took an ambitious, take-no-prisoners approach to making the film, from the fluidity of having the producer/money on set so decision-making was easy, to guerrilla filming, where we filmed without licences or stayed eight hours when we were licensed to film for two; doing such things as getting people to dress as policemen and illegally stopping traffic on the Holloway Road whilst we filmed a key scene that had overun by many many hours. There is a better way of doing things than just always going ‘balls out’ and I was to find that the film business is even more brutal, unforgiving and disingenuous than football.

Despite that, the bond between cast and crew was great to see. Everyone shared the same desire: to make a great British film. On the first day of shooting I called everyone together, from actors and directors down to runners, gave everybody a glass of champagne and made a speech about ensuring that this project was the best it could be. I made a toast to: ‘The good ship
Telstar
and all who sail in her.’ My words had the desired effect and the commitment from everybody on this project was 100 per cent.

The 2007–08 campaign was fast approaching and I was a busy boy with plenty of things to occupy my mind like parties, films, court cases and the arrival of my first child. But, as it had for the last seven years, football took centre stage. I had grown over the pre-season a little disinterested in Peter. This sounds like a strange observation to make but I think I knew that it was only a matter of time before I fired him.

At the end of every season senior players would come and have a chat with me. It was not something I encouraged, but I listened to their views and made up my own mind. Dougie Freedman was a player who usually came to see me. We had known one another a long time. I wonder how Dougie would feel now, given he is the manager at Palace, if his players were going off to see the chairman without his knowledge!

This summer Freedman was scathing about what was going on at the training ground and pleaded with me to come and see for myself. He said that there was no discipline, the training was poor, Peter was not involved and the fitness regime was a joke. I took it all on board but I couldn’t go to the training ground as it would be undermining the manager. I would see the endeavours and abilities of the training ground at 3 p.m. on Saturday. But as Freedman left it did strike a chord as the team had been poor the previous
year
. The players didn’t appear as fit as they had under previous regimes and we also seemed to be getting more than our share of soft muscle injuries. So whilst I appeared to ignore it, Freedman’s complaint stuck firmly in my mind and it was not going to take much for me to take drastic action.

Just before the new season was underway we were faced with a very curious set of circumstances. Gabriel Heinze the Manchester United and Argentinian international defender wanted to leave Old Trafford and was being publicly courted by their arch-rivals Liverpool. Alex Ferguson, supported by his board of directors, said he would never consider selling Heinze to Liverpool. Phil Alexander received an approach from someone called James Green who purported to represent a South American football agency caller Soccer SA.

The gist of the conversation was that this agent wanted Crystal Palace to buy Gabriel Heinze from Manchester United and then immediately sell him on to Liverpool, thus circumventing United’s position, and we would be paid £1 million commission or in my eyes receive a bung for participating in this unsavoury affair. My stance was no way were we getting involved and I told Alexander to contact David Gill, Manchester United’s chief executive, and tell him of these attempted shenanigans, which he duly did. Of course I took the opportunity to get Phil to advise Gill we would like them to remember the favour. The upshot was there was an ongoing Premier League dispute between Heinze and United and we were required to give evidence and this strange and murky set of affairs was resolved by others!

Our opening game of the new season was away to Southampton and brought a convincing 4–1 victory. Miracle of miracles, Jamie Scowcroft scored a hat trick. As I left St Mary’s I got waylaid by a group of disgruntled Southampton fans who wanted to tell me that: ‘Palace were shit and not fit to grace our pitch.’ The fact that
we
had just trounced their team 4–1 seemed to elude them. The perverseness of emotional fans never ceased to amaze me. Of course, I told them if we were indeed as bad they thought then God only knows what it made their team, or words to that effect. That made for a very brisk stroll to my car.

That was the last time we were to record a win for nearly two months and by September normal service resumed under Taylor’s uninspiring leadership and we were languishing in sixteenth place having already been as low as twenty-first. My relationship with Peter was cordial but I had lost my faith in him and rumours were circulating in the newspapers about Neil Warnock coming in. When I invited Peter to my birthday party along with Steve Bruce, Trevor Francis, Steve Kember, and Neil Warnock, Peter declined to go, and that said everything about where our relationship was.