Parky: My Autobiography (25 page)

When I interviewed Bette Davis for the first time I asked if we might replay the scene and she agreed. When the time came, Harry Stoneham played the theme and, just like Paul Henried, I put two cigarettes in my mouth and lit them before handing one to Miss Davis.

She was about to make the observation that no matter what happened we would always have the stars when I saw her recoil in disgust. Her cigarette had stuck in my mouth and, in disengaging it, I had managed to pull off the greater part of my lower lip.

Miss Davis regarded my bloody offering and, instead of her declaration of undying love, remarked disdainfully, ‘I don’t think so.’

The seventies was a good time to do a talk show. The studio system, which had produced and controlled the great Hollywood stars, was changing and the men and women who created the Golden Era of movie-making were willing for the first time to talk about those days.

Unlike today, where celebrity is stripped bare and picked over by the media on a minute by minute basis, the Cagneys and the Fondas and the Stewarts had only ever been seen as thirty-foot figures on a big screen. When they walked down the studio stairs it was like gods descending from Mount Olympus.

The added bonus was that they were, in the main, interesting people who, because of the war, had experienced life outside acting. To talk to men who had flown missions over Germany as well as played Hamlet was to deal with a more fascinating creature than a mere actor. There was a hinterland, a background, a testimony to having lived a life other than that bounded by a proscenium arch.

James Stewart was not just an actor of great skill and charm, one of the most charismatic of all leading men, but he had served as a colonel in the US Air Force. He had flown in combat. He wasn’t merely a celluloid hero. Not that he ever brought it up. He was the most genuinely modest man of them all with a wonderfully wry sense of humour. Talking about his famous drawling voice, he said he was advised to go to a voice coach so he might be convincing as an Austrian in a stage play. After three lessons the voice coach kicked him out in despair. She said, ‘There is no way I can teach you an Austrian accent. On the other hand, if you would like to learn how to speak English, then I might be able to help.’

When I asked him if he ever analysed his screen image to try to discover what audiences found so attractive, he said,‘I’m the plodder. I’m the inarticulate man that tries. I’m a pretty good example of human frailty . . . I don’t have all the answers, but for some reason somehow I make it. I get through. When I am at the head of the wagon train, for some reason we get across the water.’

His wife confirmed that in real life he was as absent-minded and dreamy as he sometimes appeared on film. She said when she was pregnant and nearing her time, her husband worked out a carefully prepared routine of how to get her to the hospital. On the day, she told him the baby was coming and he said not to panic as he was fully prepared. He drove to the hospital in record time only to find when he arrived that he had forgotten his wife. As he raced back home he passed the ambulance taking her in.

Henry Fonda was keen to talk about his talented children, particularly Jane. He told me, ‘She is one of the most incredible actresses I have ever seen. When I saw
Klute
, as an example, I couldn’t wait to sit and talk to her, not father to daughter, but actor to actor. I realised one scene that particularly knocked me out was improvisation, which I couldn’t do if I was paid a lot of money. It just tore me apart.’

When I interviewed Jane Fonda many years later she told me how distant her father had been, how he seemed unable to communicate with his family. I remembered our interview and told her what he had said.

‘He never told me,’ she said, sadly.

I explained he described her as one of the most extraordinary actresses he had ever seen and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ she said.

We gave her a copy of her father’s tribute. How strange he could have so publicly and proudly praised her and yet not found it possible to tell her himself, knowing, as he surely must have, how much she craved his approval.

One day we received a letter from a man called Leslie Gaynor. He was a fitter for Hovercraft in the Isle of Wight. He said he had the biggest collection in the land of Bing Crosby memorabilia, that Bing was a personal friend of his and if we wanted him on the show he could fix it. We thought he was a nutter. But then why would he say these things if there was not an element of truth in them? So we asked him to come to London and not only did Mr Gaynor get us Bing Crosby, he was also indirectly responsible for Fred Astaire appearing on the show.

It is a mark of Crosby’s unaffected good nature that he made his first appearance on
Parkinson
not because Orson Welles had been on the show or he had anything to promote, but out of friendship for Leslie Gaynor. He was the most relaxed and laid back of them all. He arrived alone at the BBC TV Centre in a black cab. We had sent a limo, which he had dismissed.

When he appeared a second time on the show he also dismissed the limo. I asked him why he preferred London cabs to limousines. He said he had been coming to London for more than forty years and had always used London cabs. I persisted. But why?

‘Well, I must confess that in all the years I have been coming to London and using cabs I have never been charged a fare. The cabbie always says, “Bing, because of all the joy you have given me and the family over the years, the ride is on me.”’

‘That is a true definition of a superstar,’ I said.

Then I thought for a moment and said, ‘But come on, there must have been an occasion when the cabbie didn’t recognise you?’

‘True,’ he said.

‘What did you do then?’ I asked.

‘When I thought they were not sure, I would move that little glass partition, sing two or three bars of “White Christmas” and they knew who they had in the back of their cab,’ he said.

When he arrived at the reception desk at the TV Centre he was carrying a hat box under his arm. He said to the receptionist, ‘Hi, I’m Bing Crosby. Can you direct me towards the gal who’s going to fix my toop.’

His hairpiece was in the box.

He told me his favourite song was ‘White Christmas’ and he never tired of singing it. When he performed it on the show I was astonished to see him reading the words from autocue. He had an effortless style and possessed the greatest gift of all, that of making everyone in the studio believe they wanted to work for him.

That said he wasn’t a pushover. He had very exacting standards and expected everyone else to match them. It is true that, like Sinatra, he didn’t care much for rehearsal, which is not the same as saying he didn’t care about getting it right. Again like Sinatra, when he came into the studio to rehearse he was word perfect and faultless in his delivery. He expected everyone else to be the same.

He ran through his number twice, the band was happy, it sounded good. Then the director asked if he would mind doing it one more time. Crosby agreed. When he had finished, the director pleaded with Bing for another take.

Crosby asked why.

The director said, ‘I think I can do it better.’

Bing smiled and said, ‘I can’t.’

I did a duet with Crosby, which is a bit like saying I danced with Ginger Rogers or opened the innings with W.G. Grace.

Bing said if I was any good he was going to retire and play golf. At the end of our performance, he looked at me and said, ‘Guess I’m back on the road again.’

That reminded me of Jack Benny’s great story about his friendship with the violinist Isaac Stern. Playing violin was part of Benny’s comedy act, but he was good enough to perform with symphony orchestras in concert halls. He told me that after a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he had dinner with Isaac Stern who said, ‘You know, Jack, when you walk out in front of a big symphony orchestra in white tie and tails and violin, you look like one of the world’s greatest violinists. It’s just a damn shame you have to play.’

Bing Crosby returned to England a couple of years later to make a record with Fred Astaire, produced by Ken Barnes. John Fisher, who was a researcher on the show at the time and soon to become the producer, one of the very best I have ever worked with, went to the recording studio at Wembley. Astaire did not like being interviewed. He had never done a major television interview. He was persuaded by a combi nation of John, Crosby and his daughter Ava Astaire, who lived in Ireland and enjoyed the show.

Of all the stars to appear on
Parkinson
, Astaire was the one I was most in awe of. I love dance, admire dancers greatly and have never seen anyone who even comes close to Fred Astaire. Gene Kelly told me,‘I dance like a truck driver. He dances like an aristocrat.’ When I was a kid I used to foxtrot home from the cinema, imagining I had Ginger on my arm. George Axelrod, the American writer, said he once saw Astaire walking across a Hollywood canteen, drop a cigarette on the floor, stamp it out and continue without any perceptible change of rhythm. He said in that moment he invented a new verb, ‘to astaire’, which meant going through life without making an awkward or ugly movement.

We asked Fred Astaire if he would dance on the show. He said his dancing days were over but he would sing a few of the songs that had been written for him. We booked the best session men in London for rehearsal. Fred Astaire arrived, like Crosby, alone and carrying a small case. He met Harry Stoneham, our MD, opened the case and said, ‘I’ve brought the dots.’ The top copy of music was ‘A foggy day in London Town’ and across the first page was written ‘To Fred from George and Ira’.

Harry said, ‘I can’t use these. They belong in a museum.’

For twenty minutes or more, Astaire sang those glorious songs written for him by the most illustrious composers of the Great American Songbook. I was reminded of Oscar Peterson’s statement that Astaire was the greatest interpreter of popular songs of the lot because of the way ‘he danced on the note’.

When he finished, the musicians applauded. That tribute in itself would guarantee him certain entry to the pantheon.

He was nervous about the interview, not sure he was interesting enough to warrant an hour-long show. It wasn’t false modesty; he simply couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Backstage, as we waited to go on, I tried to settle him by telling him how I used to dance my way home from the cinema and, if I wasn’t imitating Fred Astaire, would try to walk like John Wayne.

Then the band started playing and I walked on and fell from the top stair to the bottom. Take 2. When I reappeared at the back of the set, Fred Astaire was laughing. ‘Guess you got mixed up between me and the Duke,’ he said.

When he walked on he seemed not to touch a step. He descended in what can only be described as a graceful glide.

When it was announced that John Wayne was to appear on the show I received a telegram from Carl Foreman, the Hollywood director and scriptwriter of
High Noon
and
The Guns of Navarone
, saying that if I didn’t closely question him about cooperating with Senator Joe McCarthy in the days of the Hollywood witch-hunts, then it would be an insult to all those who had been blacklisted. Foreman himself had suffered from the testimony of people such as Wayne, who had named names in the infamous communist purges.

Wayne arrived on the show looking less rugged than he appeared in his movies, mainly because he had recently been in hospital with lung cancer. He still looked like a star and walked on in that singular style. He didn’t much like being asked about the McCarthy days, and even when we left the subject and moved on to talking about movies he treated me warily and with suspicion. At the end of our interview I asked him to sign his book. It wasn’t until a couple of days later I opened it to see the inscription. It read: ‘To Mike Parkinson. A fellow travels a long way, John Wayne.’

I’m still not sure if he was being folksy or trying to tell me something.

Robert Mitchum was one of my great Hollywood heroes. When I was a kid I wanted to look like Mitchum. I wanted the dimple, the sleepy eyes and the quizzical lift of the eyebrow. Most of all, I wanted the back of his head, which was flat and allowed for a wonderful DA. Mine had a big rear knob, which, when I was younger and skinnier, made me look like a visitor from the Planet Mekon. I decided that, when I was rich and famous, I would have the knob surgically removed in Harley Street, but Mitchum’s other attributes I could work on straightaway. Thus I went to bed at night with sticking plaster over my chin, clamping the flesh into what I hoped would turn out to be a dimple. I would raise my eyebrow with elastoplast and fix it to my forehead. I lay there looking like a road accident and none of it worked.

Mr Mitchum was renowned for his hatred of interviewers, so it came as a shock when he agreed to a one-man show. There was plenty to talk about. Except for the fact he had worked with Jane Russell, his movies were the least interesting part of a man who refused to conform, who did his own deals with Hollywood and life and who had a reputation for being what they used to call in those days a hell raiser.

He also had a reputation for smoking a lot of dope and that was what I smelled before I met him. There was what can only be described as an exotic odour coming from his dressing room at the TV Centre as I approached. Mr Mitchum was surrounded by friends, including dear old Ronnie Fraser, the actor, who told me he had been appointed Mr Mitchum’s bag carrier, which meant he had the bag with the dope in it.

Robert Mitchum greeted me in convivial manner. What he said was, ‘Hi, kid. Wanna smoke?’

I said I wouldn’t mind a cigar.

He looked at me pityingly. ‘Do you wanna smoke some shit?’ he said.

As they say in the tabloids, I made my excuses and left.

It was a fascinating encounter in the studio, mainly because Mr Mitchum answered most of my carefully prepared questions with either ‘Nope’ or ‘Yup’.