Parky: My Autobiography (27 page)

Sammy took me to a cocktail party Sinatra was hosting. He introduced me as his best friend from England who did the greatest chat show in the history of television.

Frank said, ‘Good to meet you, Mike.’

Sammy said, ‘Now he knows your name you’re halfway to getting him on the show.’

As I was leaving I said goodbye and thank you to my host.

‘Goodbye, David,’ said Frank.

He was the one I most regretted never having interviewed. In my opinion he was, and remains, the greatest singer of popular songs there has ever been and his recordings contain collaborations between songwriters, musicians, arrangers and the singer that will stand for all time as the classic repertoire of twentieth-century popular music.

If Sinatra was the man I most wanted to interview and failed so to do, then the female equivalent was Katharine Hepburn. Richard Drewett wrote to her every year and she would reply that one day she might come to England and appear on the show. When Richard left
Parkinson
to work with Clive James he kept up the correspondence, which is how Clive ended up interviewing Ms Hepburn. I envied him that. She was a fascinating woman who captivated every leading man she starred opposite.

Peter O’Toole said that when they starred together in
Lion in Winter
he fell in love with her. ‘I would have killed for her,’ he said. Their first meeting had been unusual. Ms Hepburn came backstage to congratulate O’Toole on a stage performance and caught him peeing in the sink.

I asked why actors peed in the sink and O’Toole said because it saved time, and besides most dressing rooms in theatres were toilets. Yul Brynner offered a more plausible explanation. He was telling me about how he sacked a stagehand during a run of
The King and I
because the man whistled backstage. He did so, he explained, because backstage you have to concentrate and not be distracted from the job ahead.

‘It’s like flushing toilets. It’s the only thing the audience can hear. That’s why backstage an actor always pees in a sink,’ he said.

The other female star I would have loved to have talked to was Marilyn Monroe. Sadly, she wasn’t around at the time, so I pursued my interest vicariously by interviewing people who had worked with her.

Jack Lemmon said she could be a nightmare sometimes, going more than thirty takes to get a scene right. When they starred in
Some Like It Hot
he would save himself during the first dozen or so takes, knowing that she would take her time getting it right. When it came to the famous sleeping berth scene between Marilyn and Lemmon, he said she did it first time and Billy Wilder said, ‘Print it.’

‘What happened? I wasn’t ready,’ said Jack.

Tony Curtis told me what Billy Wilder said to them – as soon as Monroe got a correct take, that was the one they would print. Wilder said, ‘You guys had better know what you’re doing. Don’t be caught with your finger in your ear.’ Curtis said she was a ‘fruitcake’. He went further.‘Billy Wilder said she was a mean seven-year-old girl and that’s as good a description of Marilyn as any,’ he said.

My favourite Tony Curtis story was of the very early days in his career when the young Bernie Schwartz with the thick Bronx accent found himself plucked out of acting school and taken to Hollywood where his good looks quickly established him as the new glamour boy of the movies. He left behind in New York some wonderful actors, incuding Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who had to prove their ability on stage before Hollywood beckoned. Lemmon told me he was walking through New York one day when he heard his name called. On the other side of the road, across four lanes of traffic, was Tony Curtis, at the time Hollywood’s hottest property, in town to promote his latest movie.

‘Hi, Tony. How’s it going?’ shouted Jack.

‘Great, just great,’ yelled Curtis.

‘How’s Hollywood?’ bellowed Jack.

‘It’s great, Jack. I’ve got something to tell you,’ shouted Curtis.

Lemmon cupped his hand to his ear and Curtis shouted across four lanes of traffic: ‘I’ve fucked Yvonne de Carlo.’

28

DUST IN THE CREVICES

In writing this book I have discovered how many times in my life I have sought mentors; older people, men and women, to give me the benefit of their experience. When I first played club cricket it was in the company of older men. When I started my career on the
South Yorkshire Times
, I was educated by an older and experienced journalist, Stan Bristow, who diligently and patiently taught me the ground rules of my trade. Throughout my life in journalism – both in newspapers and television – I chose the company of those people who had already achieved what I aspired to, and much more besides.

Some of my most memorable and fulfilling encounters have been with so-called senior citizens. More often than not they bring to the interview a capacity for plain speaking, having passed the point where they care about professional or personal inhibitions. Most importantly, because they feel ignored by society, they welcome any chance to be heard.

I am currently an ambassador for the government’s ‘Dignity in Care Campaign’, which aims to improve the way old people are treated. As we become more and more obsessed with ‘yoof’, so we tend to brush aside the older generation, relegating them to a foot locker of priority, hoping they curl up quietly and die. What we ignore is the link between young and old, seen at its most important and profound in the relationship between child and grandparent, and at its most practical in the way the older generation can act as an inspiration and mentor to the young.

As I write, there is debate in the media about whether or not Harrison Ford, aged sixty-five, is too old to play Indiana Jones in the latest adventure epic, whereas the real lesson to be learnt from Mr Ford’s longevity as a film star is how he has kept at the top of his profession for so long. What has he absorbed about his craft that might prove useful to the young actor hoping to make the grade in a tough business?

In my life I have been lucky enough to meet men and women who have not just been successful in their chosen professions, but have led full and vigorous lives and often felt able to explain their experiences in the most inspiring manner. One such was Professor Jacob Bronowski, a member of the team who developed the atom bomb and who went on to write and present one of the towering achievements of television documentary,
The Ascent of Man
.

Professor Bronowski was my only guest when I interviewed him. His use of language was so precise that if you took a transcript of our talk and removed my questions it read as beautifully constructed prose. At the end of the interview, which held the audience spellbound, I asked him if we should take any notice of anything he had said.

He replied,‘Should you listen to me? Yes, you should. Not because you have to believe any single thing that I say, but because you have to be pleased there are people who have lived happy and complete lives, who feel they can speak out of a full heart and a full mind, all in the same frame.’

It seemed to me that thought precisely explained and justified my fascination with older people.

Dame Edith Evans was another who put to shame many younger actors with her unflagging energy and optimistic disregard of growing old. She triumphed over advancing years by refusing to be ignored. Mind you, it would be a brave man who even attempted to deny Dame Edith her rightful place in the order of things.

Whenever we had her on the show she would arrive in a Rolls-Royce, wearing a new dress from Norman Hartnell and a fur cape. She looked and behaved as what she was – a star. Having arrived, she would immediately head for the elderly BBC commissionaire treatment of old-age pensioners. If only Mr Parkinson could one day wangle it so she appeared on the same show as the prime minster, Harold Wilson, she would give him a piece of her mind.

On about the second or third time I had witnessed this performance, I gently ventured the thought that there was perhaps a discrepancy between the picture she painted of herself as an impoverished pensioner and arriving in such a regal manner. She fixed me with a disdainful glare. You had to be careful with Edith. She could become terribly imperious.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked in that marvellous voice.

‘Well, whenever you arrive you go on about the old-age pension and yet you are wearing a new dress by Norman Hartnell and a fur stole,’ I said.

‘Yes?’ she said, her look daring me to continue and, like an oaf, I did.

‘Well, I suppose what I am trying to say, Dame Edith, is that you complain about the pension and yet arrive in a Rolls-Royce,’ I said.

She glowered at me for what seemed like an eternity; the look she reserved for blithering idiots. Then she said, ‘Would you have me arrive in a Mini?’ She gave Mini the same emphasis as she did ‘handbag’ in
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

She was eighty-five years old when she made her talk-show debut on
Parkinson
. She told me, ‘I don’t like to be noticed, you know, except when I want to be noticed. If somebody raises his hat when I get out of a car, I bow in turn, but I don’t like being looked at because I’m not acting, you see. But when I’m acting to be looked at, then you must look at me.’

We didn’t manage to get her on the show with Harold Wilson but she did appear with Ted Heath.

Before the show Mr Heath asked if we could arrange for him to see an interview he had recorded that was being shown on BBC2. We showed him into a viewing room and Dame Edith followed on behind. She wasn’t invited but who was going to tell her?

As Heath endeavoured to watch the recording, Dame Edith kept up an incessant stream of conversation, mainly consisting of an offer to give Mr Heath elocution lessons. She became aware that Mr Heath was not giving her his full attention.

‘Edward,’ she demanded, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Actually, Dame Edith, I’m watching an interview I did a short time ago which is now being shown,’ he said, relieved that at last he might get some respite from the unending chatter.

Dame Edith looked at the set for a minute or two and then asked, ‘Edward, exactly when did you do that programme?’

‘I recorded it two or three days ago,’ he said.

She looked once more at the box, then turned to the politician.

‘Edward, you are still wearing the same shirt,’ she scolded.

We lunched once at her home in the country. She cooked the meal herself and, in my honour, had made Yorkshire pudding. The slight problem was she forgot the self-raising flour, so it lay on the plate the colour and consistency of a rusty wheel. We ate up, nonetheless.

At the end of the meal Dame Edith closed her eyes and fell asleep. We assumed this was the signal she’d had enough of our company and we were to depart.

After her first appearance on the show we added her face to the list of stars in the opening title sequence. She wrote to me – green ink, blue paper – saying she never went to bed on Saturday night without watching the opening of the show. ‘Just to reassure myself I am still alive,’ she said. She watched me walk down the stairs to see if she approved of my appearance – ‘Get rid of that brown suit, it neither fits nor flatters,’ was one note. Then she would switch off and go to bed. ‘Can’t watch the rest. Past my bedtime,’ she wrote.

She was a joy to interview, although, truth be told, you didn’t interview her so much as follow wherever she led. Once, in the middle of talking about how she feared that when she died she would not be remembered, she offered up this thought on old age: ‘The trouble with growing old is you tend to fall down a lot. I’ve learned the trick though. When you fall down at my age the great secret is not to try and get up too quickly. Just lie there. Have a look at the world from a different angle.’

She died aged eighty-seven and what we who had known her thought of her was marvellously summed up by her biographer, Bryan Forbes. When she was taken ill, Forbes broke the news to his children. One of his daughters asked him if she would die, and Bryan said it might happen. His daughter said, ‘But Dame Edith can’t die, daddy, she’s not the type.’

Another hero I came to know through the show was Alistair Cooke. He was not a modest man. He had a very strong sense of self and a tendency to dominate any conversation, no matter what might be the subject under discussion. But he was not boring. Indeed, he was one of the most entertaining and fascinating men I have ever met. He was also one of the greatest journalists of his time and no one reported more perceptively and entertainingly on an adopted land than Cooke on America. His
Letter from America
on BBC Radio, which lasted for fifty-eight years, was a weekly masterpiece in the art of what might be described as ‘conversational journalism’. His reporting in the
Guardian
was an exemplary demonstration of the journalist’s craft. In fact, in Cooke’s case he turned a craft into an art form.

To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan, if there is a tightrope bridging the gap between being a good journalist and a great one, Alistair Cooke would make the trip in white tie and tails with a cocktail in one hand and a quill in the other. Not only did he hobnob with presidents, but he knew Chaplin, adored Garbo, worshipped Duke Ellington and, most impressive of all, was able to argue the case for Sugar Ray Robinson being, pound for pound, just about the best fighter who ever made the ring.

My admiration for this polymath reached new heights when browsing through a second-hand record stall in Manchester and finding a recording called, I think, ‘An Evening with Alistair Cooke at the Piano’. I struggle to recall the title only because the record was nicked from my collection some time later. My consolation is that the thief must have been a fan of Mr Cooke’s and therefore the record found a good home. On it Alistair Cooke is heard yarning, playing piano, singing and whistling. At one point, while he was whistling and playing a blues on the piano, the recording was interrupted by Buck Clayton, the splendid jazz trumpet player, who put his head round the door of the studio to see who was making the noise and said, ‘Boy, that’s a mean piano and a dirty whistle.’ Cooke regarded this as a tremendous compliment. I saw it as yet further proof of my hero’s versatility and felt a warming pride that I had worked for the same newspaper as one of the few men in the entire world acquainted with the work of both Isaiah and lrving Berlin and able to write about the two of them with the same enthusiasm.