Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (9 page)

BOOK: Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown
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Danny Wilde and Sir Brett Sinclair doing what they did best on
The Persuaders!
. As you might imagine, Tony and I had a great deal of fun on and off set.

As part of the package of luring Tony to make a TV series, Lew Grade bought him a house in Chester Square in London’s fashionable Belgravia for an astonishing £49,000 – and it was Tony’s to keep. A few years later he sold it for £250,000 and thought he’d made a pretty good deal, but a couple of years after that, when he returned to England and looked at buying a similar property, he discovered the asking price was nearer £2 million.

Throughout the fifteen-month shoot, or at least most of it, Tony’s wife Leslie was pregnant. She was already ‘well endowed’, but was now even more ample of bosom. Tony had always been what you’d call a ‘boob man’, and so he liked Leslie to wear low-cut dresses that exposed as much as possible. One evening I was at his house for a party and, as his wife walked into the room, Tony said to the assembled throng, ‘Look at my darling Leslie, doesn’t she have the most wonderful tits?’

In between set-ups one day on set Tony said, ‘Dear sweet Roger, Burt Lancaster once told me that if you’re in your dressing room at the studio with a young lady and your wife should walk in, continue with what you’re doing and when you get home deny it, and say, “But they have people who look like me”.’

I was never tempted into such a situation, though a year or two later I found myself filming in South Africa, and in one scene my character was to bed a rather attractive young lady in her apartment, demonstrating his Bond-like masculinity
no doubt, and in a very thick Afrikaans accent the young actress said to me, ‘I really wish there weren’t all these people around’, referring, of course, to the crew.

‘Oh, why?’ I asked innocently.

‘Because I could show you a really good time!’ I thought about Tony’s words for a split second, but that thought soon turned to my (then) Italian wife, who was sitting downstairs and who knew my stunt double was off that day!

The Persuaders!
was scheduled for a twelve-month shoot but ended up taking fifteen. You see, not only did Tony like to wander off script and improvise on occasions, meaning we found ourselves taking a little longer to shoot a particular sequence, he had a total aversion to overtime.

The British Trade Unions were all powerful at this time, and the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians) had very strict rules about working hours, with the only exception being you could ‘call the quarter’ (an extra fifteen minutes) if the red ‘shooting’ light was on at 5.30 p.m. and you needed to finish a certain scene.

Tony got wise to this, and would never start a scene after 5.15 p.m.!

We also found it particularly difficult to persuade him to come in for looping. This is the process undertaken at the end of all movies to make sure the soundtrack is consistent in each scene or to add music.

‘But why do we need to do it?’ Tony – a veteran of twenty years in movies – asked.

‘Tony, in the last set-up in the gardens there was a close-up of me talking, and then it cut to you but an aeroplane was flying over at that point. So when we edit it together it’ll go from no background noise on me, to noise on you, to no noise on me again ... we need to re-record your dialogue,’ I explained.

‘Audiences are sophisticated,’ he replied in all seriousness. ‘They understand these things.’

Knowing he didn’t want to stay back after 5.30 p.m., when it was usual to loop any such scenes, I suggested we might do it during our lunchtime for half an hour.

‘Okay, okay,’ he conceded. ‘But I want champagne and smoked salmon in the theatre.’

The next day, he arrived at the theatre in Pinewood and a few moments later Johnny Goodman, our Associate Producer, just happened to walk in.

‘Tony!’ Johnny shouted. ‘Smoked salmon and champagne! You’ve never had it so good!’

‘Goddam son of a bitch!’ Tony shouted. ‘You’ve just blown your half hour!’ and he stormed out.

Tony was what you might call ‘very careful’ with his money, to the point you might have actually wondered if his trouser pockets were sewn up. One Christmas, we were shooting
The Persuaders!
over the Festive period and he invited my (then) wife and I to join him and Leslie for dinner one night. I’ll never forget it: he produced the tiniest roast chicken, which, we discovered, was not only to serve us four, but his two household staff as well. Talk about trying to pick the meat off the bones!

Just then a group of carol singers arrived outside the front door and piped up with ‘Once In Royal David’s City’. At the end of it, they rang the bell in expectation of receiving a little Christmas offering. Tony started waving his arms and screamed like a banshee, ‘Get away, get away or I’ll call the cops!’

Leslie, who obviously felt pleased at having picked up a little English, said, ‘No, Tony! It’s Bobbies, honey,
Bobbies
!’

His meanness was demonstrated further at the end of
filming, when it is customary for the leading actors to be offered some of the items of clothing they had worn in the production. Tony took absolutely everything, and then held a sale for the crew to come over and buy it all off him!

He next called Johnny Goodman to his dressing room.

‘Well, Johnny, we’ve been working together for fifteen months and I’d like to give you something in appreciation of everything you’ve done for me.’

Johnny, being somewhat surprised at this out-of-character generosity, thanked Tony profusely – and was duly presented with a bottle of the cheapest sherry you could buy from the local supermarket.

‘Now, what shall I write on it?’ Tony pondered aloud. ‘I know ...’ and he scribbled ‘Best wishes, Tony’.

Johnny has never opened it, and often stares at it ... in disbelief.

But you couldn’t help but love Tony, he was a terrific character and a gift as a co-star.

Meanness is not an attractive trait in actors, and I remember a production accountant telling me he had been working with a certain thespian of Scottish origin and had arranged for his
per diem
(agreed daily out-of-pocket expenses) to be dropped in to the actor’s dressing room each morning.

‘Keep hold of it until the end of the week, would you?’ the actor said each morning. Then at the end of the week he said, ‘I don’t need it at present, so keep hold of it until I come and see you.’

A couple of months later, with filming complete, there was a stack of these little brown envelopes in the safe, and together they amounted to a considerable sum. The actor came to collect them with a large briefcase.

The following week bills started arriving from restaurants, theatres, car companies – the actor had charged everything he should have paid with his
per diem
to the production and pocketed the cash!

Whatever his eccentricities, though, Tony ensured that there was never a dull day when we were making
The Persuaders!
. Over our fifteen-month schedule we filmed in every nook and cranny of Pinewood and the adjoining Black Park.

Cubby Broccoli was a regular in the Pinewood dining room and always made a point of introducing me to his guests. He sat at the large round table – the same one that had been reserved for Emeric Pressburger all those years earlier – where he entertained backers, sponsors, royalty and visiting journalists over sumptuous lunches. It was a magical environment in which to impress visitors and inveigle finance. Stars such as Bette Davis, James Caan, Peter Ustinov, Katharine Hepburn, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Stewart Granger, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor could all be spotted at the tables. Liz would be showing off her latest jewel, and they’d talk about who was doing what next and for how much, or what offers they’d refused, or gossip about who was sleeping with whom, all often punctuated by the unmistakable laugh of Sid James and the
Carry On
gang on neighbouring tables.

‘How many set-ups did you get in this morning?’ Sid would shout across, inducing a sort of friendly rivalry to anyone in earshot (he’d no doubt taken side bets on it).Tony Curtis was once prompted to boast that we’d managed ‘five’.

The
Carry On
films were in their early days when this shot was taken in the 1960s, but Barbara Windsor and the gang were always around at Pinewood, and we enjoyed a friendly rivalry in the dining room.

‘Oh, we slipped in eight,’ Barbara Windsor chuckled back, much to Tony’s chagrin.

Meanwhile, the
Carry On
producer Peter Rogers locked the stage doors at lunchtime to prevent any of his artistes or crew claiming overtime.

Kenneth Williams starred in more of the
Carry On
films than any other actor, though he never stopped complaining about what he felt were poor scripts, terrible money and co-stars with whom he didn’t get along. However, his
moaning and bitching aside, he was without doubt one of the funniest raconteurs you could ever meet. When I started on my first book tour in 2008, I was reminded of the story Kenneth told about attending a store signing in Australia – though actually he stole the story from Monica Dickens, to whom it actually happened, but we won’t let that detract from my tale.

‘Who’s it for?’ he asked the lady at the front of the queue.

BOOK: Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown
10.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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