Young Winstone (29 page)

It’s almost like we were going to meet folklore – this terrifying character who was one of the great gangsters of all time. That’s
certainly how I’d have seen it when I was younger, and although I’d developed a bit more of a balanced perspective by the time all this was happening, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to let Joey or Alex Steene see me taking the whole thing too lightly.

So even as I’m having a laugh with Laurie O’Leary, I’m being careful not to let anyone think I’m too relaxed. I’m also bearing in mind that it is a nuthouse we’re drawing nearer to. And not just any nuthouse, but one that’s full of sex offenders and murderers. What do I want to be going there for?

Once we’ve arrived and are going through all the rigmarole of getting in, I’m thinking, ‘In an ideal world we’ll be out of here in a few hours, because an overnight stay doesn’t really appeal.’ In a normal nick you’re surrounded by people who’ve stolen a car or got pissed and hurt someone. In Broadmoor you’re in there with people responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in history.

Every now and then you forget where you are, because it feels more like a hospital than a prison, but then you remember again. There’s one kid serving the tea who it transpires has murdered his entire family. You’re thinking, ‘How did he kill his family again? Not that it’s any of my business, but, just as a matter of interest, was it poison?’ It’s all very English in a way – sitting in a public place having a cuppa while trying not to mention the terrible things everyone around you has done.

One of the big questions on my mind when it comes to my reacquaintance with Ronnie Kray is whether he is going to remember our earlier meeting. He does – either because he’s been primed to remember it by Laurie, or because it’s stuck in his mind for some other reason. I can’t imagine he got pissed on too many times in his life (at least, not in company), and he makes a little joke about it as I arrive, which puts me more at my ease.

Ronnie is very smartly dressed, and looks well in himself, but he’s quite a frail man at this stage in his life. He’s not the same person you would’ve met on the outside fifteen years before, and you don’t know what medication he’s on, but there’s still no mistaking the force of his personality. He doesn’t just look at you, he looks straight through you to the wall behind, and his eyes have that kind of blankness where you feel you can’t lie because he knows everything you’re going to say before you actually say it, anyway. The only other time in my life I’d encounter a stare like that would be a few years later at Lewis Collins’ house, where I met a few of the real-life SAS boys at a party for the film
Who Dares Wins.

There are a couple of additional factors Ronnie is bringing to the table in terms of how intimidating a presence he is. First, he hangs on every word you say with an intensity that you never come across in normal people. Second, he sits very close to you so that his leg is rubbing against yours, and his leg does not keep still – it’s constantly moving back and forth, almost like there’s a twitch in it.

From the moment I’ve sat down he starts talking to me about Bob Hoskins, who I haven’t yet met at the time. Ronnie’s telling me about this play he’s heard Bob’s doing at a pub-theatre somewhere in South London. He says, ‘Do you know this fella, Bob Hoskins?’ His voice is a little bit nasal – almost like he’s got a peg on his nose. I say, ‘I know of him, Ron. He’s just done the film
The Long Good Friday.’

Ronnie nods. ‘Well, he’s been playing me in this play,’ he continues. ‘And this play implies I have incestuous feelings towards my mother.’

Ronnie doesn’t swear very much, if at all, in conversation, because he’s old-fashioned like that, so when he pauses for a moment and then asks, ‘Is it a fucking crime to love your mother?’, it’s important
to take him very seriously indeed. ‘No, Ron,’ I reply solemnly. ‘It’s not a crime to love your mother.’

You can see how angry he is about the whole thing. At this point he starts whispering something to one of the other fellas and I’m getting a bit concerned about the implications for a fellow professional. So I say, ‘Let me tell you something, Ron. Bob Hoskins doesn’t know you. Bob Hoskins is an actor who plays what’s written in the script as close as he can to the way the director wants it. So it’s not Bob’s fault if there’s something in the play that you don’t like.’ At this point Ronnie goes, ‘Right, so who’s the writer?’ So now I’ve taken the heat off Bob and put it on a couple of other people without meaning to.

Nothing happened to them in the end, so presumably Ronnie thought better of it, but this wasn’t the last time that day I’d inadvertently end up putting someone else in the frame. One of Ron’s more upbeat topics of conversation was telling me about how when he got out he was going to go on a round-the-world cruise. Whether he meant that last word in both its usual senses Ronnie didn’t make clear, but he did announce – leg twitching particularly forcefully at this point – that he was planning to take me with him.

I didn’t think this was too good an idea for obvious reasons, but because I was still excited about the fact that this film seemed to be happening, I did mention a mate of mine who I thought might be good for a part in it: ‘You know the family, Ron. It’s Terry Murphy’s boy, Glenn Murphy.’ My old mate Glenn from the Repton was getting started as an actor around that time, and I knew he’d be perfect for the film, but afterwards I realised I had kind of dropped him in it. He’s a good-looking man, Murph, and I think he did have a meet with Ronnie in the end which proceeded along very similar lines. There’s not too much else to do in Broadmoor, after all, so talking to
actors must’ve been a distraction. Our conversation was reasonably amicable apart from the leg thing and the Bob Hoskins thing (which I enjoyed telling Bob about years later – there was a smile on his face at the time, but you could see the cold air hitting the back of his neck). I was watching and listening to Ronnie very closely to prepare myself for the role, and the thing that most struck me about him was how different he was to the way people normally portray gangsters. His voice had that kind of old London sound to it where you could almost feel his mouth making shapes around the words.

Another person I ended up spending a fair bit of time with who talked like that was Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery. He was an absolute gent, but I think I’d better save that story for another time.

As the Krays film got closer to getting the green light – I was gonna play both Ronnie and Reggie by that time, with the whole thing being done in split screen – Don Boyd also put me in touch with the Krays’ mum, Violet. She’d moved out of the house on Vallance Road by then and into some flats at the back of the Repton. I had a really good day with her and she gave me some blinding photos, which I sadly can’t find, of the twins with Billy Hill, who was an early face from Brighton Races. As far as Violet was concerned, she was just a normal East End mum and they were her boys. She didn’t really want to think too much about all the people they’d hurt or killed.

The Krays film didn’t happen in the end. Well, it did, but in another form. I think there were some financial complexities of some kind and the project changed hands. Ray Burdis from the Anna Scher mob took it over and he wanted it to go in a more glamorous direction, so he cast the Kemp brothers instead of me. I had no regrets about it – these things happen and I actually thought the two Spandau Ballet boys did a blinding job in the end.

I didn’t come out of that Broadmoor trip empty-handed either. I’d hit it off quite well with Alex Steene, and when the film didn’t happen he asked me, ‘Do you need a few quid, son, because work’s not that good at the moment? Come up West and answer the phone for me.’ At this point, given that you’re talking to someone who’s a very well-respected face, you’re wondering what the fuck you might be getting yourself into. But it turned out to be a straight business, albeit a straight business that I always thought would make a great sitcom.

Alex’s set-up was called The Unobtainables, and they were essentially high-class ticket touts. They traded out of an office in Panton Street, just near Leicester Square, selling city debentures at Wimbledon or the best seats at the rugby.

Anything you wanted The Unobtainables – as the name suggested – could get, and they’d pay a good price to get it as well. The ticket justified the means. Alex gave me a desk and a phone, and I soon found that I was pretty good at it. Basically it was the same thing I’d done on the markets – buying and selling commodities – only this time you were dressed a bit smarter, and there was less chance of being hit on the head with a flying cauliflower.

What I liked about working there was that you weren’t hurting anyone. You were giving people something they wanted, and if they could afford to pay the money you were asking, that was up to them. Most of the clients were big companies in the City who were writing it all off, anyway. It was getting towards the mid-eighties by then, and there was a bit more money around.

The really funny thing about the job was the other people who worked there. As well as me, we had a couple of other actors. First there was Patrick Holt, a tall veteran of the Rank era who also played one of the old boys in the Roger Moore film,
The Sea Wolves.
He was a lovely stylish fella, very well spoken – in fact I once remember
him telling me, ‘You could’ve been my batman during the war’. He also gave us a fantastic recipe for goulash, which Elaine still cooks to this day.

Then there was Derren Nesbitt, who’d been quite a big star in the sixties and seventies, and played the sadistic SS officer in
Where Eagles Dare.
But the guv’nor when it came to selling tickets was a guy called Michael, who’d never acted in anything. He loved a drink so much that one night he went out for a beer in the West End and woke up on a boat in Norway. We had murders trying to get him back that day because there was a big deal depending on him. It was quite a high-pressure job in a way, because if you fucked up you knew who you had to deal with.

One day, a load of police swarmed the office. They were top-level Old Bill from Scotland Yard, and I assumed it was nothing to do with The Unobtainables because we were all working in the other room and we never got touched. But when I poked my head round the door to see what had happened, I found out that someone had sold two tickets for the Trooping of the Colour that were right next to where John Nott was going to sit. Given that he was Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Defence at the time, this was a major security breach.

All they wanted to know was who had sold the tickets, but no one would admit to it, so I put my hand up and said, ‘I did it’, even though I didn’t know if I had or not. The police said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Alex rents me the office next door and I do a bit of buying and selling for him.’ When they asked me who I bought them off I just said, ‘A couple of geezers came in. I didn’t know who they were.’ It turned out that it had been a couple of soldiers who’d come in with the tickets hoping to make a few quid, but it wasn’t me they’d sold them to.

Alex’s other business interests did sometimes make their presence felt in Panton Street. He was a Yorkshireman who was known for his tact and discretion, so that marked him out from the crowd for a start. And he was so good at not so much sitting on the fence as bringing people together that his office functioned almost like a relationship counselling service for London’s biggest faces. He’d summon all the different firms to try and stop things getting nasty when there was a difference of opinion. It was fascinating to watch him in action, but sometimes when I’d hear Alex calling ‘Ray-mond’, because he wanted me to sit in on one of those meetings, I’d think, ‘I’d rather not, thanks.’ If it all went pear-shaped, I might end up being the patsy.

Sometimes you’d feel like you needed a blue helmet from the UN just to go into work. Notorious adversaries like the Richardsons from South London and Johnny Nash from North London would come in and sit round his table together. The interesting thing was that on the face of it, nobody wanted a row. Everything seemed to get resolved and they’d all shake hands at the end, but you’d never be quite sure if the handshake was proper or not.

These guys were the last of the old guard by that time – a lot of them had done their bit of porridge, and all they were after was a quiet life. It was the younger fellas coming through who’d tend to be more hot-headed and throw threats around, and the carnage you’d hear about in later years suggested that Alex’s softly-softly way of reconciling gangland factions might have died with him.

CHAPTER 25

THE APOLLO STEAKHOUSE, STRATFORD

One of the best trips I ever went on for The Unobtainables was to Salzburg in Austria, where they filmed
The Sound of Music.
Alex wanted me to get tickets for a Leonard Bernstein concert for some geezers in the City. So I flew out there all suited up with twenty large distributed in various different pockets and set up a meet with the concierge of one of the best hotels in town. I’ve always had this feeling that if you really look after a top-notch concierge, he can probably sort you out with pretty much anything you want. So it proved on this occasion, as I gave him his bit of dough and he got me twenty prime tickets for the opening night, all at face value, which was a touch.

It was very
The Third Man
– swapping envelopes on the continent – and I got back to London expecting Alex to be ecstatic, which he was. I was waiting for him to give me my drink, or whatever other kind of bonus he thought was appropriate. It never came and it never came, until eventually he tried to slip me a measly few quid. I said, ‘I think you’d better keep that, Alex. You probably need it more than
me.’ I suppose it was just that old face’s mentality of ‘Give someone just enough and they need to come back, give them too much and they’ll be gone.’ But whatever the reason, it was point taken at my end.

As it happened, the dates I’d been given were wrong, and that’s why I’d been able to buy the tickets so easily. Luckily, it was the City boys’ fault not mine, so there was a bit of a scream-up about that and everyone went potty back at the office. That’s not the point of the story, though.