The Elephant to Hollywood

18 The Mayfair Orphans

One of the joys of being based back in England is being close to my friends. They mean a lot to me. And while I’ve lost some good ones along the way – it’s inevitable as you get older – it’s made me value the rest of them even more. I am often asked if I have any friends from my early days back in the Elephant and the answer is no. The unspoken but immediate assumption is that I dumped all my old friends when I became a movie star, but in fact the exact opposite is true. My old friends all dumped me when I was an out-of-work actor who couldn’t afford a round of drinks in the pub.

The one exception to this was Paul Challen, my trusty companion in the London party years and the guy who witnessed my first sight of Shakira, when we stayed in for that life-changing quiet night. I met him when we were both fifteen and I went to the orphanage where he lived (his entire family had been killed in the Blitz) with my drama group from Clubland. It was a terrible, depressing place and I couldn’t wait to get outside – where I found Paul waiting for me. He introduced himself and asked if I knew how to get into acting. I didn’t, of course, but it was the first time I’d had a conversation with anyone about wanting to do it myself and it was the beginning of a friendship that would last forty years, during which we supported each other in good times and in bad. In Paul’s case, although he was a willing partner about town in my carefree days, the times were mostly bad. He’d never been healthy – when I first knew him I’d thought I was thin, but Paul was almost emaciated – and he first of all contracted tuberculosis and had to have a lung removed and then, tragically, he developed multiple sclerosis, gradually becoming weaker and weaker. I knew from very early on that he was never going to make it as an actor; but he didn’t have to, because I did. He was my constant and only link to my past in those early years as I was beginning to make it in the movie world, my yesterday’s witness, the only friend who knew me before and after and my anchor in a strange new sea. I am pleased to have been able to make his life as comfortable as possible for him as time went on and I became successful, because he deteriorated very quickly. Paul died over twenty years ago, brave and uncomplaining to the last, and I miss him still. He was always with me then, and he’s still with me now.

As a young actor I made many friends along the way, but few of them were long-lasting. Some of those actors failed and disappeared; two men I knew – Johnny Charlesworth and Peter Myers – took the failure harder and tragically committed suicide. The life of an actor on the way up is tough and many people just walk away, but if you do stay the course you eventually meet a few people whom you get to know, learn to trust and, in some cases, learn to love. I was fortunate enough in my journey to meet a group of friends who fell into this last and most important category. Over the years we have survived the test of friendship and none of us has ever had a row or a falling-out with any of the others; our friendship has been constant. And although our number has been diminished by losses along the way, the survivors remain as tight-knit as ever we were in our younger days.

The group usually meets for lunch or family dinners, or even holidays, whenever we can find time in our busy lives. One day in the early Nineties, we were all having lunch together at Langan’s Brasserie when one of our number, Philip Kingsley, said that it was his mother’s birthday and that she was ninety-eight. We were of an age where we had assumed that none of us had living parents and indeed all of us, with the exception of Philip, were orphans – and so, because we were eating in Mayfair, and because our parents had all gone, we christened ourselves the ‘Mayfair Orphans’ from then on. Philip was made a probationary member until his mother died.

I met most of the Mayfair Orphans in London during the Sixties. Writing this chapter, which charts so many friends loved and lost, reminds me of the era that brought us together and in which we lived life to the full. It was a fantastic time to be young and right at the centre of things and we took full advantage of it. The signs that something really big was happening were there to see in the late Fifties if you knew where to look, but although I could tell something was going on, I was slow to spot what it was. I remember going up to Liverpool in 1959, for instance, with Sam Wanamaker’s theatre company on what, during my leanest period, was a rare job, and having coffee in a bar where a young group was playing, surrounded by teenage girls, all screaming. When I asked the name of the band that was causing so much excitement, someone said they were called ‘The Beatles’. They’re not bad, I thought, downed my coffee and left without a backward glance.

Before the late Fifties there was very little acknowledgement that anyone under twenty-one existed. The pubs were geared for and full of our parents and the restaurants – even if we could have afforded them – insisted on customers wearing suits and ties. But gradually the first dance halls and coffee bars began to emerge and although London was hardly swinging, it was beginning to gyrate slightly. The 2 I’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street in Soho was where a lot of the music stars of the future used to hang out. Coffee was sixpence upstairs, but half a crown downstairs to listen to the music, which seemed a lot at the time, but in retrospect was a bargain to watch the likes of Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan perform. For dancing and meeting girls there were the big ballrooms like Mecca, just off the Strand where they had live bands and played waltzes, quicksteps and foxtrots, although of course none of us knew how to dance, so these places were usually half empty. We didn’t like that sort of music and the sort of music we did like – pop music – you could only get on radio from the illegal Radio Luxembourg or via the American Forces network from Germany. The BBC wouldn’t play it until the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, which broadcast pop music from a ship anchored just outside UK territorial waters, became so popular that they were outlawed and Radio 1 was founded. The very worst thing about the London social scene in those days was that everything shut at ten thirty – pubs, theatres, cafés, buses, tube, everything. I once heard a member of parliament explain that it was to make sure the working classes weren’t late for work the next day. You can imagine how that went down with my friends and me…

Music wasn’t the only form of popular culture that was booming in those years. The world of drama was changing and with it London’s nightlife. Because all the restaurants and pubs closed so early there was nowhere for actors to get a meal after the show and so they started their own late-night dinner and drinking clubs in defiance of the Establishment’s rules. Theatre itself was no longer the province of the middle classes; playwrights like John Osborne and the rest of the ‘Angry Young Men’ were transforming it with plays like Look Back in Anger and they were being championed by critics like Ken Tynan. Working-class actors like Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and me were blazing a trail, too – and we were all taking full advantage of a much freer attitude to sex and booze, to have the time of our lives.

Peter was probably the wildest of us all. During my time understudying him in The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959, my main job was to bring in the drink and find the parties, but I soon learnt to start the evening off with him and then duck out. God knows, I love a party, but I just couldn’t keep up. On one Saturday night after the show we were about to set off when he suggested that we line our stomachs first at a fast-food place in Leicester Square called the Golden Egg. This seemed to me to be perfectly sensible and I was encouraged because Peter’s diet hadn’t to this point seemed to include any food, so I went along and ordered a fry-up. I have absolutely no idea what happened after that because the next thing I remember is waking up in broad daylight in a flat I had never been in before, still wearing my coat. I nudged Peter, who was lying next to me, and asked him what time it was. ‘Never mind what time it is,’ he said, ‘what fucking day is it?’ Our hostesses, two rather dubious-looking girls I really don’t remember having set eyes on before, told us it was Monday and it was five o’clock. The curtain went up at eight. Somehow we got to the theatre in time – we hadn’t even been sure we were still in London – but instead of being pleased to see us, the stage manager was very cross. It seemed that the manager of the Golden Egg had already been round: henceforth we were both banned. ‘But what did we – ?’ I began. Peter nudged me. ‘Never ask,’ he said. ‘Better not to know.’ The voice of experience. They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. And this was only 1959…

By the time we actually got to the Sixties, I’d wised up a bit. London was buzzing with energy. The Beatles had left that Liverpool café behind and were dominating the charts; the Rolling Stones were unstoppable, Mary Quant had designed the mini-skirt, photographers like David Bailey and Terry O’Neill were chronicling our lives and everything felt new and exciting. Most exciting of all was the feeling that for the first time in British history it didn’t matter where you came from. The only thing that mattered was your talent; the young working class were not going to be deferential any more. A new kind of satire was born and for the first time comedians like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore dared to send up the Establishment – at their club of the same name. For me and for Terence Stamp, my companion in many an adventure in those days, life was a non-stop party, with dolly birds galore and all the time in the world to enjoy them. My beloved London became a playground for my friends and me – a far cry from the black and white gloom of the Fifties: the Sixties was an explosion of Technicolor. But the scene was also incredibly fast-moving. By the time I’d finished Zulu and got back to London with some money in my pocket for the first time, Terry was in love with Julie Christie, Bailey was wooing supermodel Jean Shrimpton and a whole new bunch of groups – many of them produced by my friend and fellow Orphan, Mickie Most – were dominating the charts. And then, it was all change partners once again. The clubs and discotheques came and went at a dizzying speed, too. This was the era when Orphans Johnny Gold and Oscar Lerman came into their own with Ad Lib, at which you really could see the Beatles and the Stones on the same dance floor. There was a creative energy around that I don’t think has been seen before or since, and it was impossible not to be drawn in and swept along by it. It really did seem as if people could become famous overnight – although as someone who took eleven years to become an overnight success, I’ve always felt a bit ambivalent about that!

So it was in those incredibly exciting times that the group that became the Mayfair Orphans had its roots. You would be hard pressed to find a more respectable bunch of elderly blokes these days – but underneath it all, we are still that same rebellious tribe of young men, and proud to have been part of that extraordinary era.

I met the first of the group who would become the Orphans in the late Fifties and it was Roger Moore. I didn’t know, when he accosted me on Piccadilly and told me that I was going to be a star, that he would also become one of my closest friends. Roger is one of the most genuine and trustworthy people you could ever meet, and very, very funny. He is also a generous man and we spent many fabulous holidays in his beautiful villa on the French Riviera, although sadly those privileges were lost to us when he divorced. As a tax exile, these days, Roger has to be classed as an Overseas Orphan and so because of that and his many duties as an official ambassador for UNICEF, he’s too busy to turn up to many lunches, but he distinguishes our organisation in his absence and when he is with us he makes us laugh.

The second Orphan I met was my incomparable agent Dennis Selinger, who gave me such wise counsel in the course of my career and became my guide, confidante and friend. Dennis was diagnosed with cancer in 1998. He would never explain what it was in detail, but he assured us all it was survivable. Dennis – perhaps for the first time in his life – was unfortunately wrong. I had to go to Hollywood to do a film and went to visit him in hospital before I went away. He insisted to me that everything was all right and that he would be out of hospital before I got back. I left and was just walking down the corridor when it suddenly occurred to me that I had not actually said goodbye, which seemed rude. I went back to Dennis’s room, opened the door and there was Dennis on his way to the toilet, wheeling his own portable life support system with needles in his arms and pipes up his nose. ‘I forgot to say goodbye,’ I said lamely. He smiled. ‘See you when you get back,’ he said. I said goodbye and shut the door. That walk down the passage was one of the longest of my life. I was trying not to cry because I knew I would never see him again. He died while I was still in Hollywood and I couldn’t even get home for his funeral. We all miss him still.

It was through Dennis that I met another Orphan, the press agent Theo Cowan. Despite his vast number of show business contacts, his glamorous social life and his great sense of humour, Theo always seemed to me to be a lonely man. There were rumours of an unrequited love affair with the great British screen actress of the Forties, Margaret Lockwood. Whether or not this was true, I don’t know, but he always appeared to be holding some torch for an imaginary woman. Theo’s passing was as quiet and measured as his life had been. He had lunch with the rest of us Orphans on the Thursday at Langan’s as usual, on the Friday he had a business lunch and then he went back to his office, made a pillow of his hands on his desk to have a little nap and never woke up. As one of us said at his funeral, ‘They’ve started bowling in our alley,’ and for the first time, our group faced the fact that we were all mortal.

The music scene in London in the Sixties was famously vibrant and one of the greatest icons of the period was one of our Orphans, Mickie Most, who produced records as varied as The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’, Donovan’s ‘Mellow Yellow’ and Lulu’s ‘To Sir with Love’. Mickie was the fittest of all of us: he regularly ran ten miles a day, whereas most of the rest of the Orphans probably couldn’t walk ten miles a day. One day at lunch he told us he wasn’t feeling great and had had to cut his daily run down to just five miles. We all laughed at the idea of someone who was running five miles a day thinking he was sick, but Mickie was right: he was sick. In fact he had lung cancer. It was a terrible shock; Mickie had never smoked. What was worse was that his lung cancer was the most virulent kind, totally incurable and had come about because of a lifetime of working in a sound studio, where, unbeknownst to anyone, the sound ‘baffles’ were made of asbestos.

The last time I saw Mickie, we had lunch, just the two of us, and I asked him what they had actually said to him when they told him the bad news. He smiled. ‘They told me not to send out any dry cleaning,’ he said, and we both laughed. And then I told him the Henny Youngman joke about the patient whose doctor told him he had only six months to live. When he said he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill, the doctor gave him another six months. We were both laughing as we left the restaurant. People must have thought we were having a great time, and the expression ‘dying with laughter’ came to my mind. But as we stood there on the pavement, Mickie said, ‘Unfortunately, I can pay that bill…’ We shook hands, walked off in opposite directions, and I never saw my friend alive again.

When the next spring came round, a camellia bush that Mickie had given me for my garden had died. I just couldn’t pull it out and throw it away and the following year it came back to life and is now thriving. A horticulturalist would probably give you a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, but, as I’ve said, actors are a superstitious lot and I know Mickie is out there in my garden every time I go for a walk. He is also with me when I am in one of my favourite places in the whole world: the French Riviera. Chrissie Most, Mickie’s lovely wife, who is a great friend of ours, told me that Mickie had asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered in the bay of Cannes, in a spot they could see from their villa in the hills above. Every time I look across that bay, I can see Mickie and feel his presence with us again.

The next Orphan I met was through the director Bryan Forbes. Genius tailor, Doug Hayward, was known by the rest of us Orphans as the ‘Buddha of Mount Street’ and he became our rock and his Mayfair shop became our base. In fact it was because he would only ever give himself an hour off for lunch that we always had to eat in Mayfair. The rest of us travelled all over the world, but the one place we all came to first when we got home was his shop, where we would listen to Doug – who never left London – tell us what had happened while we’d been away, dispense wisdom and tell jokes.

Doug was always as sharp as a needle, so it was a long while after the silent enemy of Alzheimer’s had made its permanent base in his brain that we noticed there was anything wrong – and it took a lot longer than that for us to accept it as a fact. Alzheimer’s is so slow that you have masses of time to pretend, hope or believe that it’s not happening, but it is unstoppable. Eventually he was diagnosed with the disease and we all started our long farewell as we watched him walk slowly away from us. Over a period of three years, one by one we waited for the time when he wouldn’t know who we were, and one by one our much-loved friend’s brain cut us out of his life, leaving us to watch him make that journey to his eventual lonely but welcome end. Like the others, I waited anxiously for the time when he wouldn’t recognise me and when it came it was quite a gentle blow – although a blow none the less. I had gone up to his apartment above the shop and Doug was watching television as usual. ‘Michael’s here,’ said Audie, his long-standing friend and assistant who knew him better than anyone else. Doug looked up from the TV and mumbled ‘Hello’, before going back to watching a programme he couldn’t understand. I stood there stunned as it sank in that he really was gone from my life forever. I waited until I knew I could speak steadily without crying and then I said in a very clear voice, ‘Goodbye, Doug.’ He didn’t even look up from the TV.

Doug died in 2008, quite some time after this meeting, but I could never bear to go and see him like that again. I spoke at his wonderful funeral in Mayfair and got the chance to say how much I loved him and to say a last quiet ‘Goodbye, Doug,’ as his coffin was carried past. He was a man we would never see the like of again. Hayward’s, Doug’s business, has survived – I still order suits from them – and I feel Doug’s continuing presence in the shop, which was sold but which Audie still runs with the same staff. But Doug’s death broke our hearts and for a while we didn’t want to visit our Mayfair haunts ever again.

The Mayfair Orphans are down, but we’re far from out: the group now comprises club owner Johnny Gold, photographer Terry O’Neill, composer Leslie Bricusse, Roger Moore, new recruit Michael Winner, tricologist Philip Kingsley, and me – and we make the most of our times together. We’ve lost Dennis and his wisdom, Theo and his press contacts, Mickie, our link with the world of rock and roll and constant source of free CDs and concert tickets, and Doug, our heart and soul, but we still have Philip, to save us all from going bald, Johnny, our permanent disco and social connection, Terry, our great official photographer, Roger, to lend us some respectability and Leslie who knows all there is to know about food and wine. Michael Winner is only an occasional Orphan as he travels constantly, but we’re glad to have him around when he turns up, battered and bruised, to recount the havoc he’s caused. He’s also the only one of us who is capable of being both nice and nasty, and he’s the only trained lawyer amongst us, so he’s an essential member of the group: if we want anyone or anything done, we send Michael. As for me, I am the joker and the most travelled, so I’m the storyteller. We haven’t done so badly.

I first met Terry O’Neill when he took my photograph. By the time we met he had already photographed the Queen in her palace at Sandringham and Frank Sinatra in his palace – the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where he was surrounded by his version of palace guards – and we became firm friends. Terry frightened the life out of us with a bout of colon cancer a few years ago, but he recovered, thank God, and is working as hard as ever.

Leslie Bricusse is another Overseas Orphan like Roger Moore. He, too, has a villa on the French Riviera and he, too, is generous with it. Some of the best times of our year are spent there with him and his wife Evie. They have just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, so there are no worries that we’ll lose out on another favourite holiday villa in any divorce… Two-times Oscar winner Leslie is not only the composer of such songs as ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ and ‘The Candy Man’, he also wrote (although he didn’t know it at the time), the semi-official anthem of the Mayfair Orphans: ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. We’re all Londoners and mostly from humble origins, so it just feels right.

Leslie is a great wine connoisseur and lover of French food and part-owned the Pickwick, the restaurant where I was eating with Terry Stamp the night Harry Saltzman offered me the leading role in The Ipcress File. Leslie had spotted the meeting during the course of the evening and winked at me and gave me the thumbs up. When I told him later what had happened, it was he who suggested we went on to celebrate at a new disco, the Ad Lib, not far away – and it was there that we met two more people who would become a big part of our lives, the Ad Lib’s owner and husband of Jackie Collins, Oscar Lerman (who unfortunately would die before we officially named ourselves the Orphans), and his business partner, the incomparable Johnny Gold, one of the great nightclub hosts of all time. Oscar and Johnny went on to open Tramp, one of the most successful discotheques ever, which became the Orphans’ night shelter for many years – until we started meeting our own grandchildren there.

And so at last the Sixties, which had been so good to us and such fun, faded. But that decade didn’t die. It lives on in the memories of those of us who were there and especially in the hearts of the Mayfair Orphans who did so much to make it happen. Whether gathered together in our old haunts, sharing holidays together in our favourite places abroad, or just enjoying ourselves sitting round the table in Surrey, for me, home and happiness is all about friends and family.