Parky: My Autobiography (19 page)

I asked him for an example and he told me a bizarre story of making a cricket tour to India when, during a seemingly never-ending journey by rail, the train made an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere. Fred alighted to be greeted by the station master. In need of a pee, Fred asked him for directions to the toilet, whereupon the station master escorted Fred to a room where he drew back a red velvet curtain to reveal a Victorian chamber pot mounted on a plinth. What is more, the pot had the legend ‘F. S. Trueman’ painted on it. Fred could offer no explanation as to why it was there or how on earth the station master knew that one day his hero would arrive in need of such a facility. All Fred would say by way of explanation was, ‘It’s one of life’s great mysteries. I seem to attract them.’

I thought a great title for the book would be
A Pisspot in India
, but Fred had other ideas. I advised him the title should be snappy and, if possible, have Fred in the title. He told me he had just the thing:
Fred: T’Definitive Volume On T’Best Fast Bowler That Ever Drew Breath
he said, in triumph.

I said it wasn’t so much a title, more the first chapter of the book. We had a couple more meetings but it became obvious that he was too busy to concentrate fully, so we agreed to part.

John Arlott wrote the book instead and called it
Fred: Portrait of a Great Fast Bowler
. It was excellent and I called John to tell him so. I was also intrigued how he managed to get Fred to sit down long enough to tell his story.

‘Oh, I didn’t bother speaking to him,’ said John.

The difference between a poet and a hack.

Shortly before Fred died I went to a dinner where he was selling off some of his memorabilia. I bought his last touring blazer, but with a heavy heart. Gods shouldn’t trade their laurels, but maybe they have to because we are careless with our heroes.

When Fred Trueman died he had earned his place in the pantheon. He was one of the greatest fast bowlers of them all, in my view in the top six of all time. He had instructed Veronica, his wife, not to hold a memorial service. When she asked why he said he didn’t want those people who criticised him when he was alive saying nice things over his grave. He departed displaying two fingers to his detractors, and those of us who thought he had lost his appetite for the fight were shamed by our doubt.

Having lost the book, I had time to spare. I was wondering what I might do next when John Bromley, a journalist I had met in my Fleet Street days, and now head of sport at the newly franchised London Weekend Television, asked me if I fancied a job producing a programme about sport that looked at serious issues, such as drugs and corruption. It seemed to me this was the perfect opportunity to blend my work at
The Sunday Times
with a job in television. I didn’t stay long, but it was fun while it lasted.

21

PAID TO WATCH MOVIES, FOOTBALL AND CRICKET

London Weekend Television came into being with a shedload of stars and a solemn affirmation of particular emphasis on ‘quality programming’. Where had we heard that before, and how many times have we heard it since? My own title was executive producer in charge of sporting documentaries, which sounded grand. In fact, I was like a captain in Fred Karno’s Army – bags of orders but no one to give them to. Not quite true. I was able to work with one of my favourite sportswriters, Ian Wooldridge, and together we endeavoured to produce an antidote to the public-relations promotion of sport, which was as prevalent then as now.

We did one of the first exposés of the effects of anabolic steroids on athletes, interviewing a Scandinavian shot-putter who had developed secondary female characteristics, including breasts approaching those of my beloved Jane Russell. We tried to challenge the orthodoxy of television sports journalism, but without too much enthusiasm from the management. We were promised a prominent spot in the schedules, which turned out to be Sunday afternoon.

What the department lacked in opportunity it made up for in jollity. Jimmy Hill and John Bromley were hospitable bosses, former Olympic athlete Adrian Metcalfe an enthusiastic and talented lieutenant, and another Olympian, Liz Ferris, was also a doctor whose supply of emergency oxygen in her office proved an indispensable aid for curing hangovers. We chugged along, going nowhere really; nor was the company as a whole. Ratings overall were not special. The bosses, mainly BBC men, thought they were still working for a public service broadcaster, and there were outbreaks of skirmishing in the corridors. We avoided most of it and simply kept sniffing the oxygen.

Then came another one of those phone calls. This time it was Sir Denis Forman and he came straight to the point. He asked me if I recalled his parting words about not being welcome back at Granada. I said I did.

‘Well I want you to forget you heard them,’ he said. ‘I want you to return to do
Cinema
for us.’

This was the programme I had lusted after more than any other. The idea of being paid to see every film ever made and to interview my heroes (not to mention my fantasy figures) seemed to me a definition of the perfect job, particularly when my other job at
The Sunday Times
allowed me a free ringside seat at all the great sporting events. I was being paid to watch movies and football and cricket. The job the hobby, the hobby the job. Paradise.

And so it turned out. My producer on
Cinema
was my old Granada colleague Johnnie Hamp, who not only shared my love of movies and the stars who appeared in them, but allowed me to take a humorous and irreverent approach to what had hitherto been a straightforward presentation.

We had to submit the clips we intended to use to a censor. In those days the IBA was very strait-laced about what could be shown at 8 p.m., after
Coronation Street
, which was our spot. After having several clips rejected on the grounds they were titillating and might cause fundamental disruption to the British way of life, Johnnie and I came up with what proved to be a cunning plan. If we had a scene that we knew would upset the censor – and it could be something as inoffensive as a shot of a woman’s bare back – we would precede it on the show reel with a clip from a hardcore porn movie. By the time the censor had recovered from the shock, our questionable scene had flashed by unnoticed. The porn clips became a feature of our shows to the censor and proved very popular.

The scripts only occasionally caused adverse comment. Sidney Bernstein once called Johnnie after reading my script to ask what the word ‘puddled’ meant. Johnnie said it was a north country slang word describing a confused state of mind.

Sidney said, ‘Take it out. They won’t understand in Tooting.’ We left it in.

Sidney loved Tooting. It was the home of one of his most profitable cinemas and therefore had a spiritual significance in the Bernstein empire. Ever after, I tried to work Tooting into the script. Recalling a movie called
Land of the Pharaohs
, a biblical epic, I featured a clip of Jack Hawkins playing a pharaoh unveiling his latest masterpiece. He drew back a curtain to reveal a glorious panorama of glistening palaces and gleaming domes.

‘Behold, Tooting,’ I said, whereupon the camera I was addressing started shaking as the cameraman was convulsed with laughter. Take 2. The same result. Ditto with takes 3, 4, 5 and 6. By this time the studio was overwhelmed by the condition known as corpsing hysteria. There is no known cure except a break in proceedings, which we took.

During the delay I decided I couldn’t say Tooting again without corpsing myself, so when it came to take 7, and Jack Hawkins drew back the curtain, I said ‘Behold, Stevenage.’ This set off an even greater hysterical outburst than Tooting had done. We settled for Stevenage in the end, but only after many more takes.

With an audience of ten million or so we didn’t find it too difficult to persuade the great Hollywood names to be interviewed for the show. The frustration was talking to someone as substantial as Alfred Hitchcock and using just a few minutes of the interview. On the other hand, a few minutes were far too many for some I interviewed. Sam Peckinpah appeared in front of me looking like he would rather be elsewhere. He was supposed to be promoting his masterpiece,
The Wild Bunch
.

‘You started life as a scriptwriter,’ I said.

‘No, a director,’ he said.

Take 2.

‘You started life as a director,’ I said.

‘No, a scriptwriter,’ he said. We ploughed on to no great purpose.

Jack Nicholson appeared in what could best be described as a mellow condition and obviously feeling no pain. He appeared not to remember too much about the movie he was plugging, nor to be quite sure which country he was in. But he smiled a lot in winsome fashion.

The interview took place at Granada’s London offices in Golden Square. At the back of the building, in a cul de sac called Kingly Court, was the Tatty Bogle Club. This was run by Joan, a formidable woman who loved movies and was constantly encouraging us to introduce our interviewees to the joys of her establishment. Lee Marvin had such a good time he asked Joan which was her favourite movie of those he had starred in. She said
Cat Ballou
and she particularly loved the scene where, as the drunken gunfighter, he went to draw his guns and his pants fell down.

‘Let me show you how I did it,’ he said, and proceeded to reenact the scene to the point where a great Hollywood star was to be found standing in a drinking club in London with his trousers round his ankles.

Jack Lemmon also took to Joan and spent a while chatting and drinking. We were both smoking cigars and I noticed he trimmed his with a lovely filigree silver cutter. I admired it and he said it had been given to him by Billy Wilder after they finished making
Some Like It Hot
. I thought no more of it. I saw him back to his hotel and we parted in the manner of brothers in drink. The next day I checked my jacket before sending it to the dry cleaner’s and discovered the cigar-cutter. He had slipped it in my pocket. I called the hotel but he had left.

About a week later I had a note from him that started: ‘Dear Michael, this is the first time I have been allowed by my doctor to put pen to paper since we met.’ He was a funny, warm man and I remember hoping at the time I would meet him again, and I did, sooner than I imagined, but in another part of town.

When I look back at the interviews I did for
Cinema
, it’s clear that many of those people came to be regulars on the talk show. Ralph Richardson was one. He was plugging
The Battle of Britain
and arrived in motor-cycle leathers astride a high-powered bike, which he wheeled through the doors at Golden Square and parked in the foyer.

One guest I had on
Cinema
whom I could never persuade on to the talk show was Sir Laurence Olivier. I interviewed him in the office of the building site that became the National Theatre. He started the interview in formal suit and ended up with loosened tie and jacket removed, revealing red braces. He was promoting a film of Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
but I wanted to talk to him about working with Marilyn Monroe on
The Prince and the Showgirl
.

I had once employed a driver who took Marilyn to and from the studios when she was making the film and he told me that every night when he picked her up she sobbed all the way home. I mentioned this to Sir Laurence. He said she was unhappy and that made her difficult to work with. He wondered what made her happy and the answer came when together they travelled to America to promote the film. As they left the plane they were faced with a phalanx of photographers and immediately Marilyn came alive. As he watched her posing, flirting with, and teasing the stills cameras, Olivier suddenly realised she was a model, as in command in this situation as she was discomforted and forlorn in front of a movie camera.

Cinema
worked so well I starting getting offers of other jobs. A BBC producer, Cecil Korer, offered me a quiz show,
Where In the World
, based on a knowledge of geography. Travelling to Manchester by train to record the show, I sat in the same compartment as a stunning young woman, Shella Baksh, runner-up in the recent Miss World contest. Cecil had booked her as a guest on the show. She was as vivacious as she was beautiful and he brought her back several times. As he remembers it, he was sitting in his office one day when he received a call from Michael Caine, asking how he could contact the beautiful girl he had seen on the show. Shella became Shakira, then Lady Caine.

I also received a call from the famous American agent, Mark McCormack. He said he would like to represent me, particularly when I told him my salary from Granada for writing and performing a programme that regularly made the top ten in the ratings was £200 per show. He explained that with some of his clients he took up to forty per cent or more of the monies he negotiated, but the deal he would offer me was ten per cent of my earnings if I delivered Geoffrey Boycott and George Best as clients.

It took me five minutes to arrange and not much longer for the two of them to fall out with Mark’s organisation. Geoffrey liked the thought of having a high-powered agent but could never come to terms with the fees. George simply chose to ignore Mark’s advice.

McCormack’s plan for George was to negotiate a deal in America that would set him up for life. I sat in while Mark told George that a move to America could earn him enough money to guarantee a comfortable future. He would make him a dollar millionaire. All George had to do was sit tight and await a call from Mark telling him the deal was done. Whatever he did, he must not get into conversation with other people who might tempt him with deals for America.

A month or two later Mark rang me at about midnight to tell me he had heard that Best had signed for an American club and not the one Mark had been negotiating with. Could I find out? I rang George’s nightclub in Manchester. He wasn’t difficult to find in those days. I told him about Mark’s phone call and he confirmed he had an agreement with someone else.