Over the Moon Page 8

  In truth, I was underwhelmed by this chart placing but Derek and Mike were delighted and Mike volunteered to produce a follow-up, to be released on both sides of the Atlantic. We settled on a song by US songwriter Randy Newman, which suited me: I liked his sarcastic slant on everything, and the fact that he can hardly sing.

  Newman’s ‘Love Story’ was a typically quirky little number and one of the first times I felt as if I was singing in my own voice, rather than trying to impersonate a black American blues belter. Released in May 1968, it failed to chart but had the distinction of being the first and last record of mine to be played by the BBC’s arbiter-of-hip DJ, John Peel. But Mike Leander expected success, so that was the end of our relationship.

  Another experiment saw me twinned with a black girl called Rozaa by a three-man songwriting team called Arnold, Martin and Morrow. We recorded a duet with the catchy title of ‘You Are the Spark that Lights the Flame’, but while Rozaa was a nice girl, our flame remained resolutely unlit and I had another non-hit under my belt.

  Derek also put me in touch with a composer and producer called Tony Macaulay and we recorded a number called ‘Just for Tonight’, which didn’t do anything. Tony then asked me to sing another tune he had written, ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, but I turned it down out of hand, without even hearing the song. ‘It’s a stupid title,’ I told Derek. ‘It sounds like something you might sing to a cow.’ Undeterred by my rejection, Tony recorded it with the Foundations, who took it to number two in Britain and number three in America. Thinking back, that wasn’t my best snap decision.

  Derek was still arranging a few live appearances and showcase gigs to get my name around and earn a bit of money. I did a couple of jazz-club gigs, singing standards with the Dudley Moore Trio. Dudley was friendly enough: he was working with Peter Cook, but wasn’t yet the huge name he later became.

  I also sang a residency at the Valbonne Club, a painfully hip venue in the West End with an inside swimming pool and a vast fish tank by the bandstand. It didn’t work out. The loud music killed off the poor fish and when the band messed up the filter system by leaping into the pool fully clothed, our residency was terminated.

  Somewhat more foreboding was a show at the El Morocco club in Soho owned by the legendary East End twins and villains, Reggie and Ronnie Kray. I was apprehensive but the show went well, and Derek and I were relaxing afterwards when the summons came back: ‘Ronnie Would Like a Word.’

  The stocky, impassive figure awaiting me certainly had an aura about him. Ignoring Derek standing next to me, he cut straight to the chase: ‘Do you want a manager?’

  ‘I’ve got one, thanks,’ I told him.

  ‘Is he any good?’ Ronnie asked me.

  ‘Yeah, he’s great.’

  ‘Well, if you need any help, son, you know where to come,’ he concluded, indicating that the conversation was over. Derek suggested that it might be a good time to leave.

  Even if the offer of being managed by a legendary gangster had appealed to me – which it didn’t – I wouldn’t have jettisoned Derek. His belief in me remained immense and passionate and even when things were going badly, like now, I was still grateful for his efforts.

  My faith in him could easily have been slightly shaken by my next booking, though. After an audition during which I sang a Mood Indigo song that I had written, ‘Any Day Now’, I secured the juvenile lead of Prince Zelim in a Christmas show – to all intents and purposes, a pantomime – called The Magic Carpet in Guildford.

  This was a bizarre experience. The Magic Carpet cast were a bunch of overwrought thespians and the director was a luvvie determined to eradicate any trace of an East End accent from his Prince Zelim. As his withering admonishment ‘Vowel sounds, David!’ echoed around the rehearsal studio for the fiftieth time, I knew how Eliza Doolittle must have felt.

  My time on stage was mostly spent wearing a turban and acting opposite a thirty-foot dragon. It was a bit of a slog, although I did enjoy the night that the principal dancer, reacting against the boredom and banality of it all, danced his big solo with a paper bag over his head.

  Socially, I was seeing a lot of Frank. We went on holiday with a couple of other mates to a chalet in Leysdown in Kent. It was a typical English holiday in that it rained all week. The sole highlight was Frank, trying to impress a girl, tearing around the campsite in his souped-up Mini with go-faster stripes, losing control and demolishing the front wall of our chalet, coming to rest by the sink, where I was washing up. ‘Cup of tea, Frank?’ I asked him.

  Frank was still running El Grotto, and on a night off from my Prince Zelim turban I went down and spotted Maureen, the girl who had caught my eye on a previous visit, and her friend Kath. I commented on them to Frank. ‘I’m sure they’re lesbians,’ he assured me. ‘They never dance with blokes – only each other.’

  Thankfully, Frank’s instincts were as off-target as his sexual politics (but give him a break, it was the sixties). Maureen and Kath came over to the bar next to me to buy a drink, and Kath greeted me: ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’

  ‘No, I’ve been working,’ I said. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’ I was chatting away to Kath, but it was Maureen that I was really interested in. She quickly joined in the conversation and was just as outgoing as Kath: beautiful, vivacious and with a winning line in funny banter. They were quite the double act.

  We began to hang out and slowly but surely Maureen and I began a proper old-fashioned courtship. At first I was still very focused on my career, or lack of it, but Maureen was fantastic fun and great company. She was also very switched on and with it, which I liked, and ahead of all the latest trends from working in boutiques on the King’s Road and in Carnaby Street.

  She was the daughter of an East End car dealer, Alfie, and I got on well with him, her Irish mother, Rita, and her brother Ronnie. I was puzzled by an early trip to a Wimpy Bar where Maureen refused to eat anything and just sipped at a frothy coffee. She later confessed she was too embarrassed to eat in front of me in case she got messy. We were having a great time, and after a few weeks I realised this was something special.

  Despite this, our relationship was a bit of a slow-burner at first, partly because we were both still living with our parents. They had always been great but I felt ready to move out, and began renting a bedsit in Earl’s Court. I was a child of my time: the décor was all Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix posters and joss sticks. Well, it made sense back then.

  With my music career enduring another hiatus, Derek wanted to skew things back towards the acting side and decided that I needed an agent. We started at the very top when Derek secured a meeting with Leslie Grade, who together with his brothers Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont seemed to run British showbiz at the time.

  The Grades’ empire covered variety, film and theatre, and in between puffs on his giant cigar, the elderly, larger-than-life Leslie magnanimously agreed to represent me for 10 per cent of my earnings. He dispatched me to audition to be an understudy for an American musical called Your Own Thing that was due to open at the Comedy Theatre. I got the job, but the show closed before I got a chance to appear.

  I auditioned for hippy musical Hair at the Shaftesbury Theatre and the producers wanted to use me but Leslie had other ideas. ‘Taking your clothes off and running around in the nude? You don’t want to do that!’ he advised me. In truth, I also had reservations about that aspect, so that was that.

  Derek also secured me a few very minor film roles. This was a new experience and I enjoyed the filming but I think my fleeting appearances were too short even to count as cameos. I wore a brown suit and had a couple of lines in a film called Smashing Time. It was fun, but to this day I haven’t seen the film.

  In a movie called Assault, I played a young man who goes into a chemist’s shop that is promptly blown up. The star was Frank Finlay, who took an avuncular interest in me and brought me a cup of tea in the canteen. Our paths were to cross again years later.

  I spent a long boring day hang
ing around a wedding in a suit as an extra on All Coppers Are, whose title was changed to In the Devil’s Garden for America. I even dipped my toe into the saucy, uniquely British milieu of the Carry On films, although sadly my contribution was never to see the light of day.

  Set in the court of Henry VIII, Carry On Henry was a typical lewd romp starring the Carry On A-team of Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor. As a lowly extra, I had no dealings with these luminaries, and in fact was existing on a different plane entirely: I was so broke that I had to return a pile of empty bottles to afford the petrol to get to the set.

  After hanging around for a couple of days in Tudor dress, my big moment came during a serfs’ meeting addressed by Kenneth Connor, when I had to shout: ‘What about the workers?’ I was pleased with how it went, but this cinematic land-mark was destined to hit the cutting-room floor. Like the failure of ‘Thigh High’, maybe it was for the best.

  My backroom team had a bit of a reshuffle, with Leslie Grade delegating his son, Michael, to be my agent. Michael Grade, of course, was to go on to become chairman of the BBC thirty years later, but as my agent at the dog-end of the sixties he was – as he freely admits himself – bloody useless.

  Michael only ever secured me two jobs and the first was to be the walk-on understudy for Tommy Steele, the veteran British singer and light entertainer, in the London Palladium’s 1969 Christmas panto, Dick Whittington. Prior to this, I had never heard the phrase ‘walk-on understudy’, but it transpired to mean that I would learn the role but only play it if Steele were ill or indisposed.

  The upside to this was that I would have regular money coming in for the three months that the production ran. The downside was that it was monumentally, insufferably boring. I realised I would prefer to have the most minor, inconsequential extra role imaginable in a drama, and actually have something to do, than this sorry, shadowy existence of interminably waiting around for … nothing.

  The understudies would rehearse two mornings each week and then vanish back into the void. Tommy Steele appeared in rude health, yet every day I had to go through the meaningless ritual of turning up at the stage door thirty-five minutes before curtain to report to the stage manager just in case of any mishap.

  I tried to fill the dead time constructively: watching and re-watching the show, intensely observing Tommy’s part, hanging out in the Palladium dressing room with a couple of old lag actors who regaled me with tales of music hall, variety and days gone by. I even took judo lessons at a polytechnic over the road. But lethargy set in, and eventually I wasn’t even bothering to shave before I ambled into the theatre.

  This all changed on 19 March 1970. Sauntering down Oxford Street before the matinee performance ten minutes late and turning into Argyll Street, the home of the Palladium, I saw a gaggle of wardrobe and production people frantically waving at me. ‘Tommy Steele is sick!’ said the stage manager as he shoved me into the theatre and through to dressing room number one. So this was it! My moment had come.

  It was hard to catch my thoughts as people swarmed around me, dressing me in Dick Whittington’s costume and micro-phones, and co-stars such as Kenneth Connor put their heads around the door to wish me luck. But it was not exactly confidence building to hear a Tannoy announcement – ‘Due to Tommy Steele being unwell, the part of Dick Whittington will be played by David Essex’ – being followed by a huge groan of disappointment in the auditorium.

  The dressing room emptied and I had a few precious moments to stare at myself in the mirror surrounded by light bulbs. ‘You can do this,’ I told myself. ‘This is why you’ve been wasting your time here every day for weeks.’ Yet I felt as if I couldn’t remember a single thing about the part, until the sound of the overture jolted me into action.

  The half-hearted understudy rehearsals to rows of empty seats suddenly seemed hopelessly inadequate as I took the stage to a begrudging round of applause. The spotlights beaming down on me felt as bright as the sun, the orchestra blasted from the monitors and everything was overwhelming. My knees knocked and my mind froze. Could I do this?

  Somehow I got my first line out, and grew in confidence as the opening scene unfolded perfectly. This is all going to be fine, I thought, as I exited and headed back to my dressing room for a costume change – en route passing three giant brown bears that were crashing their way to the stage through a specially built tunnel cage, their German trainers prodding them along.

  Now, I knew that Dick kissed one of the bears before going into a song, but the bruins had not attended understudy rehearsal so I had no idea how this worked. What was their motivation in the scene? I soon found out. As I returned to the stage, one of the Germans slipped a Polo mint into my mouth just as the largest of the bears waddled towards me.

  The trick, apparently, was to grip the mint firmly at the front of your mouth between your teeth so the bear could easily remove it, but nobody had told me. The Polo was right at the back of my throat, so as the bear slipped the longest tongue I had ever seen through its muzzle and deep into my mouth, I endured the most obnoxious French kiss imaginable in front of 2,000 people in a sold-out Palladium.

  The reek of the bear’s breath was revolting, and with its saliva plastered all over my face, I was sure I was about to throw up as it lumbered off with its prized mint. Meanwhile the orchestra struck up ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’. You could say that again! The only plus point to this ordeal was that after that, anything else the performance could throw at me was a doddle.

  By the interval I was enjoying myself, and the matinee audience seemed to appreciate me belting out Tommy Steele hits such as ‘Little White Bull’, ‘Flash Bang Wallop’ and ‘What a Mouth’ (which I first sang to my nan, aged five). By the curtain call, I was delighted to find that their disappointed groans had been replaced by enthusiastic cheering, and shouts of ‘Bravo!’

  After this triumph, I felt elated. It had made up for the weeks of kicking my heels that had preceded it. The next three days’ performances went from strength to strength, partly because I knew to grasp the Polo between my teeth, and Tommy Steele rose from his sick bed to return earlier than his doctor advised, possibly because he heard I was going down rather well.

  Michael Grade then produced his sole other booking for me as my agent: another pantomime, in Manchester. I was less than thrilled, and it reflects well on Michael that forty years on, when I occasionally bump into him, he still apologises and tells me: ‘I’m so glad you left me. I would have ruined your career.’

  However, Derek talked me into taking the part by telling me the Manchester producer had seen my Dick Whittington and been impressed, and at least I wasn’t an understudy this time: I was to play Dandini in Cinderella, alongside music-hall legend Arthur Askey and singers Lonnie Donegan and Mary Hopkin.

  I decamped to Manchester for a few weeks, renting a bedsit just outside the city. It was a rudimentary, student-digs sort of place, and so cold that when I took a bath, the steam in the bath-room was so thick that I couldn’t see myself in the mirror.

  Cinderella was a bit of a bore. Dandini was a wet character who didn’t do a fat lot except carry round a glass slipper and sing the occasional duet with the prince, Tony Adams, a friendly guy who later went on to play Adam Chance in Crossroads.

  I might not have been going to the ball on stage but I had a good time in Manchester. I befriended two fellow cast members and northern comics, Dailey and Wayne, who both had superhuman capacities for alcohol, and our nights off frequently seemed to descend into a drunken stupor.

  One evening they invited me with them to watch the opening night on tour of legendary British rocker Billy Fury. The nightclub was pretty packed but we had places reserved at a table with one of their mates, a livewire that I had not met before called Freddie Starr.

  Freddie seemed fairly manic but Dailey and Wayne were more interested in pointing out the people sitting at the table in front of us, who they said were
feared local gangsters known as the Quality Street Gang. As a man who had hobnobbed with the Krays, I was hardly likely to be impressed by hoodlums named after a box of chocolates, but I kept an eye on them as the lights dimmed and Billy Fury appeared.

  Billy was doing fine until his third song when a familiar-looking figure materialised uninvited on stage next to him, a cushion rammed up the back of his jumper like Quasimodo, and began a very decent impression of the perplexed singer. Bored of sitting at our table, Freddie Starr had decided to make himself part of the entertainment.

  Freddie’s appearance intrigued the Quality Street Gang and a couple of them jumped up to take a closer look, obstructing their boss’s view. Grunting ‘I can’t bloody see!’, he grabbed a candle from their table and set fire to his sidekick’s Afro hairdo. It was quite an inferno, and his mates all started smacking him around the head to try to put it out.

  A proper trouper, Billy Fury soldiered on through ‘Halfway to Paradise’, but with Freddie Starr capering alongside him and gangsters knocking hell out of each other in the audience, he was forced to beat a tactical retreat. Watching him go, I got flash-backs to Shipman County, Daddy Dines and his massacred bees.

  On a similar note, as Cinderella limped to the end of its run, I also decided to liven up proceedings. The highlight of my role as Dandini was the panto’s final scene, when I marched onstage with the glass slipper, slipped it on the delicate foot of Cinders, played by Mary Hopkin, and uttered the immortal words: ‘It fits!’

  Mary was taken aback one night to see me appear bearing not the slipper but a Wellington boot, which I gently eased on to her foot. The audience roared with laughter as Cinderella and her handsome prince sang their love duet with Cinders clumping around the stage in a huge welly.

  Mary Hopkin, who was a good laugh, took the jape in her (Wellington-booted) stride and even thanked me afterwards for livening up the evening’s finale, but Big-Hearted Arthur Askey was disapproving. I guess that I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I had learned from Tommy Steele, sometimes the biggest stars like to keep all the laughs for themselves.