Murder Unprompted: A Charles Paris Murder Mystery (2 page)

The young producer’s name was Paul Lexington, and he then set about finding a theatre that would put the play on.

The Hooded Owl
was an expensive production for the average provincial company. Though it only had a cast of eight and its contemporary setting limited the Wardrobe costs, it did require three solid representational sets, a very big outlay for a three-week run. Whereas a theatre might spread its budget to allow that kind of expenditure on a certain crowd-puller like a Shakespeare or the annual pantomime, it was very unlikely to invest so much in the uncertainties of a new play by an unknown playwright. Money was tight enough, and no provincial theatre wanted to hazard its local authority or Arts Council grants by rash speculation.

But this was where Paul Lexington had something to offer. He had money. No one quite knew where it came from; he always spoke airily of ‘my investors’, but he gave no clue to their identity. And no one knew how much he could raise, though from the confidence of his tone the amount seemed to be infinite.

So this was the deal that he offered round the provincial theatre companies during the spring and summer of 1979: if they would put on a production of
The Hooded Owl
, a good play for which he held an option, he would invest the necessary extra production costs for the expensive sets and, ideally, the import of a star name. Then, if the play did transfer to the West End, his production company would present it and the originating company would be credited and receive a small percentage. If it didn’t transfer, then the theatre would have had a more expensive production than their normal budget could run to, and Paul Lexington and his investors would have lost their money.

Only Paul Lexington himself knew how many companies had been offered the deal and turned it down before he got to the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton, but common sense dictated that he must have tried the better-known ones nearer London first. The chances of getting all the people necessary for a transfer, the London theatre managers and the big investors (whose aid, in spite of Paul Lexington’s confident assurances, would almost definitely be needed), diminished the further one got away from the metropolis.

However, the producer was determined to get the show on and was confident enough of the property to think it could make the transfer, even from this West Country base, whose record of getting shows into the West End was not remarkable. (In fact, it had never in its history had an original production transfer, though a few shows had passed weeks there during their pre-London tours.)

But there was a new Artistic Director at the Prince’s Theatre, a young man called Peter Hickton, whose confidence at least matched that of Paul Lexington. He had got the Taunton job some six years out of Cambridge and was determined to maintain his whizz-kid image and make a mark on the theatre nationally. He was ambitious to make the Prince’s Theatre a power-base and incubator of productions for London, in the way that the Royal Exchange, Manchester, and the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, had become in recent years. So, when Paul Lexington arrived with his proposal, Peter Hickton was already looking for a show with transfer potential.

His one condition for backing the production was predictable: that he should direct it. If that was agreed, he was prepared to put all his energies, even down to the
enfant terrible
tantrums that his track-record required of him, into persuading the Plays Selection Committee that
The Hooded Owl
should be one of the productions in the 1979–80 season at the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton.

Paul Lexington at first demurred. He had hoped to get a director of greater stature for his production, but he soon had to face facts. Peter Hickton was the only Artistic Director who had shown enthusiasm for the project and, if Paul Lexington Productions were to get their first major show under way at all, there would have to be compromises. (And it was not lost on the producer that Peter Hickton’s residence at Taunton meant directing the show would be part of his job. Sure, he’d have to be on some percentage when the play got to the West End, but at least a director’s fee would be saved for the try-out.)

So the two ambitious young men came to an agreement, and Peter Hickton set to work on the Plays Selection Committee. His success was not total. He managed to get a commitment that the Prince’s Theatre should do
The Hooded Owl,
but he could not persuade them to do it in the 1979-80 season. He tried all his tricks, being sarcastic, going dead quiet, shouting, walking out of the meeting, even threatening (carefully) to resign: but the best date he could come up with was September, 1980. Seeing that to protest further would be pushing his luck, he agreed with bad grace that
The Hooded Owl
should be the first production of the 1980–81 season.

Paul Lexington didn’t welcome this delay to his plans, but he was a realist and he wanted to get the show on, so he accepted it. He rang Malcolm Harris to say he had some good news and some bad news: the good news – that the play would definitely go into production at the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton; the bad news – that it wouldn’t happen for another year. He did not mention to the playwright that the six-month option he had bought on the play would be some eight months out of date at the proposed production date, nor did he offer more money to renew the option. He knew that Malcolm Harris was still in a flush of naive excitement about the play actually being produced and wasn’t thinking about money.

So for a year Paul Lexington continued with his other activities, whatever they might be. Nobody knew. Maybe he mounted another Music Hall tour, maybe a pantomime. Maybe he involved his investors in some other production; maybe he made contacts with London theatre managements, so that the delay should be kept to a minimum when the production actually happened.

The one thing he was known to have done during that period was to try to get a star name for
The Hooded Owl
. As with theatre companies, only he knew how many he approached with the script, how many refusals he got, how many tentative agreements dependent on dates and money. There were two main male parts and one female, so presumably stars of both sexes were approached.

All that was known was the result of his machinations. A fortnight before rehearsals were due to start, which was the time when Charles Paris was engaged to play the second male lead, it was bruited about in the business that the female lead was to be played by a young lady who had recently, ‘in order to concentrate on her career as a serious actress’, left the cast of the interminably-long-running television soap opera,
Cruises
.

The fact that she wasn’t much of an actress, serious or any other sort, was irrelevant. The audience would flock to see her. It didn’t matter if she just stood on stage, they would still love her. (In fact, people who had worked with her thought it might be better if she
did
just stand on stage; they knew the hazards of trying to push her beyond her range.)

Once Paul Lexington had his star name, he was happy to fall in with Peter Hickton’s suggestions for the rest of the cast. So long as they were cheap, competent and available in the event of a transfer, he didn’t much mind who they were. As a result, Peter Hickton cast largely from his regular Taunton company; he knew them, they worshipped him, and he fancied himself in the role of star-maker.

In the lead he cast Alex Household, an actor in his late forties, who had had early success then a rather bad patch culminating in a complete breakdown. but was now coming back, in the view of Peter Hickton, twenty years his junior, ‘stronger than ever’.

In the part of the daughter, Peter Hickton cast Lesley-Jane Decker, an actress eight years his junior, who he thought had ‘enormous potential’. And the way he looked at her didn’t suggest he thought that potential was limited to the stage.

For the part of Alex’s failed brother, Peter reckoned he had had a brainwave. There was no one in the regular Taunton company of the right age, but he remembered an actor he had worked with when Assistant Director at Colchester, who had exactly the right ‘smell of failure’ that the part required. Peter rang the guy’s agent and found, to his delight, that he was free.

To the agent in question, Maurice Skellem, his client’s ‘freeness’ was no surprise. Charles Paris’s engagement diary was a joke on the level of all those corny old lines about
The Kosher Book of Pork Recipes, Britain’s Economic Miracle or The Pope’s Book of Birth Control
. ‘I’ve sorted out a great job for you, Charles,’ the agent asserted when he rang.

‘Oh yes?’ Charles had replied sceptically.

‘Sure. Great new play called
The Head Owl
.’

‘Where?’

‘Taunton.’

‘Ah.’

‘Director asked for you specially.’

‘Oh.’

‘Said he wanted someone who really smelt of failure.’

‘Thank you, Maurice.’

So it was that Charles Paris joined the cast of
The Hooded Owl
.

It was the day before rehearsals started that the agent of the former
Cruises
star rang to say that she had just signed up to do a series for West End Television of a new sit. com. set in a lingerie shop and called
Knickers;
so, because that was going to keep her very busy, she had flown off the day before to Kenya for a safari holiday. And no, sorry, she hadn’t actually signed
The Hooded Owl
contract.

Frantic phoning ensued. Paul Lexington tried in vain to produce a star in twenty-four hours, but eventually had to accept Peter Hickton’s casting of Salome Search, a Taunton regular, ‘who’s awfully solid, Paul, and, you know, has never really had the breaks, but could be massive’.

So it was that, while the former
Cruises
star pointed her camera at world-weary rhino, her predestined dressing room at the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton, was shared on the first night of
The Hooded Owl
by Alex Household and Charles Paris.

NERVES, LIKE hopes, Charles found, didn’t go away, however long he worked in the theatre. The fact that he had survived a few hundred first nights did not make each new one any easier. In some ways it made it more difficult; he now had more experience of the things that could go wrong than he had in his twenties, and so the dark side of his imagination had more to work on.

But two things delayed the full impact of his nerves about the opening of
The Hooded Owl
. The first was having a large part, a fortune that was not often his lot. He began to realise how stars could remain cool right up till the first night. Their responsibility was greater, but the mechanics of learning all their lines and rehearsing kept them pretty busy. It was those with small parts and long gaps in rehearsal who had time to sit around twitching over endless diuretic cups of coffee.

The other factor which staved off the assault of nerves was the work-rate Peter Hickton demanded of his cast. Because most of them had worked with him so much, they knew what to expect, that he would rehearse every waking hour (and a good few normally allocated to sleep). Equity rules about maximum hours were ignored. There was an Equity representative in the cast, duly elected by the rest, but he was one of the Peter Hickton rep. too, so he made no demur.

Peter Hickton was one of those people who gained ascendancy over others by demonstrating how little sleep he needed. Charles, whose ideal was a whisky-sodden eight hours, found this was a contest in which he did not wish to participate, but he had no alternative. He couldn’t turn up for a nine o’clock call in the morning and complain that he hadn’t finished rehearsing till one the night before, when he knew that the director had been up till four working on the lighting plan.

Charles also found this relentless rehearsal made serious inroads into his drinking time, a part of the day he had always regarded as sacrosanct. He wasn’t an alcoholic (he kept telling himself), but he did enjoy a drink, and he found resorting to a half-bottle of Bell’s in his pocket somewhat undignified. Apart from anything else, it gave his antiquated sports jacket a lop-sided look. And it tended to clink against things. Also it gave the wrong impression. When Salome Search caught him one day taking a surreptitious swig in the Green Room, she gave him a look that showed she had got a completely false idea of his relationship with drink. She obviously regarded it as a till-death-do-us-part marriage, whereas he liked to think of it more as a casual affair, in which either partner could drift off at will (though, when he came to think of it, neither often did).

Peter Hickton’s rehearsal schedule (probably a misnomer for a process that was simply continuous) intensified towards the end. The Monday night’s Tech. Run, which followed a full day in the rehearsal room, finished at three-thirty a.m.. As a special concession, the next morning’s call for notes was not until nine-thirty, then rehearsal of odd scenes continued till it was time for the evening’s Dress Rehearsal, which, though intended to be played as per performance, did not end till a quarter to two a.m.. Because of this, Peter Hickton demanded a second Dress Rehearsal, on the Wednesday afternoon before the first night. This was followed by notes, taking everyone right up to ‘the half’ (the time half an hour before curtain-up, by which all members of the cast have to be in the theatre).

So Charles didn’t even have time for the half-hour in the pub over a couple of large Bell’s, which he regarded as such an essential preparation for the full realisation of his art.

What was more, he was down to about half an inch in his pocket-bottle thanks to the pressures of the previous days. He had been sure there’d at least be time for him to nip out and buy a replacement.

But there wasn’t. And all the A.S.M.s and hangers-on were too busy to have this important commission delegated to them.

It was a serious situation.

And it didn’t improve the half-hour before curtain-up, when all the pent-up nerves came crashing in with devastating force. Normally he could control the incipient nausea and limit the number of rushes to the lavatory by judiciously-spaced doses of Bell’s whisky, but now he felt as if he was having a leg off without anaesthetic.