The Elephant to Hollywood (37 page)

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.

19

A Date at the Palace

When an actor’s been around as long as I have, there’s a great temptation to choose a picture for the pleasure of working with old friends, but this can be a mistake. As soon as we had settled in Surrey, I was off again and made three movies in quick succession. In the first one,
Curtain Call
, which was about a camp theatrical couple, my co-star was the incomparable Maggie Smith, with whom I had so enjoyed making
California Suite
, and it was also going to be directed by Peter Yates, a good friend of mine. What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it happened. I never actually saw the finished movie – and hardly anyone else did either . . .

I followed this up with something more serious and dramatic.
Quills
is the story of the Marquis de Sade’s descent into madness while locked up in an asylum. Geoffrey Rush played the Marquis brilliantly with all the stops pulled out; Joaquin Phoenix played the Catholic priest who ran the asylum. Joaquin was a pleasant young man, but somewhat strange. His two brothers were named River and Rain and his two sisters Summer and Liberty. He changed his own name for a while to Leaf (but changed it again before Autumn came . . .). Joaquin was hard to get to know. He was a combination of enigmatic and explosive, which is a difficult one to understand, but he worked incredibly hard – it made me feel lazy just to watch him prepare for a take – and his labours paid off. Kate Winslet, on the other hand, who played the laundry girl, was much more down to earth. Off screen as well as on, she is one of the most brilliant and unpretentious actresses I’ve ever met. I played the man sent by Napoleon to stop de Sade writing his books, which he had continued to do in the asylum, smuggling them out, rather aptly, in the baskets of dirty laundry. It was a great movie to do, and I took it because I wanted to do something prestigious after
Curtain Call
but it never caught on with the public.