The Two of Us Page 7

  One night we were told the Prime Minister was coming. The show had started when I noticed a lone man hiding in the shadows at my entrance. Mr Attlee refused to go in during an act and disturb everyone, saying he was happy to wait and have a little chat with me. Hard to imagine that happening with later prime ministers.

  I grew very fond of the circus folk, admiring their camaraderie and vagabond life, and was tempted to stay, particularly when I became friendly with a man who did a motorcycle wall of death act in a contraption up in the roof of Olympia. One night his clown trousers caught in the wheel of his bike and I watched in horror as it spluttered to a halt. He floated down and died at my feet on the edge of the ring. I left soon after.

  20 June

  Bloody hell. The press office say a journalist is sniffing round about John. Advised to give a statement to get them off our backs. I resent this. It’s like when I was ill. I don’t want him to have to undergo this ordeal under the public spotlight but I drew up a short announcement. The press are usually pretty good if you are straight with them and they know I, and particularly John, have never sought publicity in a way that makes a plea for privacy hypocritical.

  The nomadic circus life would have suited me. Having moved around all my childhood, I have never regarded one particular place as home. During my RADA holidays and early career I often took off and travelled. Ahead of the times again, I was a hippy before it was fashionable. In the late forties and early fifties, at every opportunity, I put a Union Jack on my knapsack, which in those days so soon after the liberation of Europe opened all doors, and hitchhiked, finding work where I could. I dug ditches in Holland to convert what had been a concentration camp into a holiday home for children. I washed up and waited on tables in Paris. Young wanderers congregated on the steps of the Sacré Coeur and sang songs to a guitar. People willingly gave us money and it didn’t feel like begging. I slept rough in haystacks and barns or stayed in primitive hostels. In Paris I was delighted to discover a proper lavatory – I never enjoyed the holes in the ground – in the Mona Lisa gallery of the Louvre. As a result of my daily visits, I could write a paper on the beauty of La Gioconda. I stayed in Ibiza when there were only a few artists and dreamers there and sat at the feet of Robert Graves in Deya in Mallorca.

  Despite these trips in the holidays, I worked hard at RADA. The biggest advantage of drama school training is the exposure to future employers and agents. But you need the right part to display your talents. In my final show I was allocated some old lady in a costume drama that has slipped from my memory. In those days there were dozens of prizes apart from the top Kendal and Vanbrugh awards. You could get one for merely walking across the stage with Grace and Charm. In 1951 I left RADA having achieved the near-impossible feat of winning nothing at all.

  21 June

  Filming Bedtime. I got Andy Hamilton to tell the cast and crew about John’s diagnosis, so they don’t read it first in the paper. They were wonderful. We just carried on shooting in a businesslike way. One or two clasped my hand and gave me a hug – some of them have worked with John but we didn’t discuss it, just went on trying to be funny. Christ!

  6

  Another Student

  JOHN ARRIVED AT RADA one year before the dawn of the swinging sixties. When he first got there it was stuck in a time warp. Even though Sir Kenneth Barnes had been replaced by John Fernald as principal, things had not changed a lot since I was there in 1951.

  The Academy and the theatrical world were still trying to shut their ears to the rude hammerings on their doors. In 1955 the critics lambasted Waiting for Godot when it opened in London and in 1956 most were shocked by Look Back in Anger, in some cases merely because there was an ironing board on stage (although Kenneth Tynan declared in the Observer that he could not remain friends with anyone that didn’t like it). Joan Littlewood, director of the revolutionary Theatre Workshop, riposted with A Taste of Honey. Shelagh Delaney, its writer, had seen a Rattigan play in John’s home town of Manchester and hated its lack of relevance to life as she knew it. Littlewood said Delaney was ‘the antithesis of London’s angry young men. She knows what she is angry about.’

  Olivier, John’s idol, had dipped his toe in the New Wave playing Osborne’s Archie Rice in The Entertainer at the Royal Court in 1957, but nicely spoken actors like Donald Sinden, Gielgud and Tony Britton were still the norm. RADA was doggedly preparing students for classical theatre for which Received Pronunciation was deemed essential. No one questioned yet why the majority of the people who received it didn’t talk like that, particularly not the audiences whose knowledge of drama was through their new TV sets.

  To the old guard at RADA, Marlon Brando’s inarticulate performances were a temporary aberration and James Dean had died in his speeding car in 1955 in the nick of time – before he could subvert any more young actors into mumbling their lines. The famed voice supremo Clifford Turner had survived his struggles with me and continued to persuade students to concentrate on ‘the tongue, the teeth and the lips’. John tried valiantly to take it all in. In one of his first lessons with the silver-haired, golden-voiced Turner each member of the class was forced to render the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. When his turn came John, in best-elocuted Burnage, got no further than ‘too hhawoozoolds booth alayk en dugnuhtee’ before Turner howled, ‘Oh sit down, you’re driving me mad.’ Later, a much-used Thaw catchphrase, but pretty offputting at the time.

  23 June

  An avalanche of wonderful letters for John. We are not reading the papers but the girls say they are full of him. We caught the end of discussion on TV about his illness, saying there is only a 1 in 10 survival chance with oesophageal cancer, so we can’t watch TV either. John doesn’t even want to read the letters. He just wants to get on with the treatment and not think about it too much. Give it the Back Treatment. I show him the ones, quite a few, from people who have survived for twenty-odd years. His main concern is getting his voice back.

  John withdrew into himself at RADA and snarled like a wounded animal. He made no attempt to make friends and no one dared to approach him. He went back alone every night to the YMCA, where he was living, to lick his wounded ego. His talent was admired in Manchester, here he was a joke. He missed his father’s gruff love and his brother’s devotion. Ray too was bereft. He cried for three days after his brother left, causing his Uncle Charlie to reprimand him: ‘You’ve got your bladder be’ind yer eyes, that’s wot’s ter do with you.’ Auntie Beat sent a biscuit tin of goodies to London every week and John ate little else. The choice of plays for the first end-of-term show didn’t help. He was cast as landed gentry in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The sound of the teacup rattling against the saucer in his shaking hands was the most memorable aspect of his first performance in front of the principal of the Academy. He was a failure and he went back to Manchester after his first term on the verge of a breakdown.

  Back home he met up with his friend Harvey Bryant. Harvey reminded John that everyone had faith in him no matter what the lardy-arses down south thought, giving him the strength to drag himself back for a second term of purgatory and isolation.

  The first person to battle through John’s defences was Tom Courtenay. Acclimatised to London by having been at London University before RADA, he recognised the fear in the glowering boy and tried to talk to him in the canteen queue. All he got in response was a grunt. He persevered and eventually was rewarded with a few terse words. When death ended that friendship he said in a tribute to John in the RADA magazine, ‘Were someone to ask me if I knew at RADA that John would become such a loved and famous actor, I would have to say I only knew there was something about him I liked, loved even.’ Not many found him lovable to begin with.

  25 June

  Feel terrified. Sent copy of tabloid with the headline: Can Sheila’s Love Save John?’ Perlease.

  Tom introduced John to others from similar backgrounds to himself. In the 1950s only a few bold souls from the working class thought of acting as a possi
ble career, rather than the docks, mines or factories of their fathers. My Kent scholarship in 1949 had been one of the very first and it was still quite rare for local councils to give education grants towards drama school courses. At RADA Albert Finney paved the way just before him, although John was later to complain, ‘Bloody Finney’s dad was a bookie, and Tony Hopkins’ a baker, they’re not fuckin’ working class.’ John clung to a small group from the north. Tom was from Hull where his father worked in the fish docks. The gangling Geoffrey Whitehead was from Sheffield. His father had been killed in the war, so he was on an RAF benevolent grant which had also sent him to a minor public school. Michael Blackham, an enigmatic figure with black curly hair and wild eyes, whose father was a dance band leader, was from Leeds.

  This intimidating gang would attend shows given by the finalists and ‘rip the poor buggers to shreds’. ‘Wankers!’, ‘Bloody rubbish!’, ‘What does he think he’s doing up there?’, ‘Well, kid, if we can’t do better than that . . .’ They couldn’t bear sentiment or flowery performances in drawing-room dramas, especially those in costume. John’s pet hate then, as ever, was easy tears. They would tut-tut or stare silently as the cast bounded into the canteen after their shows. It was their churlish reaction to the bombardment of criticism they received from the tutors.

  They fought a rearguard action against the eradication of their roots. A whole class on A Winter’s Tale was spent trying to persuade the bolshie four that it was shepherdesses, not shep-herdesses. Tom and John’s raw passion seemed to compel their arms to windmill and much time was spent pinning them to their sides at the expense of their bursting energy. Many of the tutors had been at RADA for years and had lost touch with the real world. Mr Froeschlen the fencing master was still there. He had a harder time, nine years on from me, persuading this awkward squad in saggy tights to go ‘down, down lower, and sit.’ The exception to their scorn was respected as a working actor. Peter Barkworth taught Technique and found all of them lamentably lacking in discipline. To John, much as he admired Barkworth’s nimble trips and double-takes, it felt like a contrived approach. His sullen lack of co-operation drove Peter to threaten, ‘You’re unemployable.’ He would have been in the Shaftesbury Avenue of the day, but not in the new drama that was fast approaching. A couple of the other teachers, Adam O’Riordan and Milo Sperber, discerned rough clay that could be eased gently into shape. John worked diligently on his voice and arms and comedy trips. He shed his teddy boy image for jeans and a grey sloppy joe sweater embellished with a red and white kerchief, but clung to his thick crêpe brothel-creepers. He smoked roll-ups and kept his head down but his eyes open.

  There were a lot of beautiful girls at the Academy but the lads were shy of approaching them. Many were middle class or considered out of their reach. Sarah Miles fascinated them all, lovely and vague, with a large alarm clock tied round her midriff to cure her chronic lateness. One day John’s eyes lighted on a tall, willowy blonde who joined the Academy a term after him. She was standing bewildered in the canteen queue. Jennifer Hilary took John’s breath away. He had not been so drawn to a girl since his schoolboy passion for Alison Liu. Her vulnerability – and his growing confidence – helped him to approach her. She was the first middle-class person he had ever been close to. He discovered that they were not all arrogant idiots, but could be as sensitive and scared as he. He visited her comfortable home and her parents welcomed him, revelling in his rough-diamond honesty. It was a salutary lesson. She too learned from him. He was better educated from library books than she’d been at her expensive school. John taught her a lot about literature, politics and the world. He fell in love with her and she became part of his charmed circle of friends.

  27 June

  A prison visit to Brixton. It’s a ghastly place but they’re trying to improve it against the threats of privatisation. The men were so sweet to me. Asking after John. Saying how much they loved his work, especially The Sweeney.

  Now that John had a girlfriend, he found the restrictions of the YMCA irksome. He left and drifted around London, kipping at the home of anybody who’d have him. He managed to worm himself into some pretty glamorous places, such as Cheyne Gardens, and at one point lived with Terry Rigby, who was later to have a very successful career in America and the UK, in Soho. Here they held all-night card sessions and relieved the routine of RADA by attending workshops with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. This rootless existence didn’t help John’s insecurity. Tom Courtenay came to his rescue again.

  Tom was living in a large maisonette in Highbury. His landlords were Vic Symonds and Terry Bicknell. In the fifties and sixties Vic, a scenic designer, became successful on television, as did Terry, a cameraman who later married Rita Tushingham. Vic was doing a design job at the Tower Theatre, an amateur theatre in Islington where he had been told there was a lot of crumpet. There wasn’t but, more interestingly, there was Tom. Courtenay was struggling to get practical experience in a play at the Tower while studying at RADA, but loathed the effete director who kept picking on him. Vic befriended the lost soul and Tom moved into 9 Highbury Crescent. Soon after, Tom persuaded Terry to let John Thaw join them. Tom’s warning, ‘He’s not really frightening, he needs a friend,’ was slightly alarming. When John arrived, at first sight Vic felt he might indeed be full of violence. In fact, he was never any trouble. Occasionally, in his cups, he would snarl, ‘That fucking butcher.’ They assumed it was something to do with his mother. But even if he had it in for butchers, he was sweet with everyone else.

  The house was full of media folk coming and going. Vic and Terry welcomed one and all. Slightly less welcome than some was a fellow student from RADA, Nicol Williamson, who on his occasional visits would be mournful and drink a lot of their gin.

  Vic and Terry were quite happy to forget about the rent and provide the bulk of the food in return for their pleasure in watching this motley crew mature into their obvious potential. They realised all of them were ‘potless’ but Vic was sure that John would crack it. He was grimly determined. When Room at the Top came out in 1959, its hero Joe Lampton wanted ‘an Aston Martin, three-guinea shirts and a girl with a Riviera suntan’. Yes, thought John, I want some of that. Vic had never met anyone with such fury, such fire. Tom, on the other hand, smouldered and sometimes seemed in danger of going out completely. He was morose and worried a lot of the time. He lived a life of enjoyable torment. Nevertheless Vic was sure that Tom, too, would make it. And Geoffrey and Jennifer. He was less sure about the wild-eyed Blackham.

  Settled with his friends in his new pad, John allowed himself a bit of fun. None of them had much money and in any case clubs, apart from ones that played jazz, didn’t interest them. They didn’t drink a lot, not only because they couldn’t afford it, but because of their typical young man’s ongoing anxiety about their erections, which, judging by the visiting girls, was unfounded. Cinema was an obsession. John delighted in spotting continuity mistakes. The boys and Jennifer visited the café of the ever-patient Mr Olivelli, who was still keeping a slate for impecunious students, as he had for Tony and me. They talked for hours over one coffee about their futures and the films and shows they had seen. They read library books voraciously and listened to records.

  One lasting joy of the Highbury Crescent days was John’s deepening appreciation of classical music. He had heard popular classics on Family Favourites on radio and the Halle at Belle Vue, but Tom listened to serious stuff and introduced John to it. He suggested the Sibelius Fifth Symphony to help John into the world of Webster’s Faust, which they were working on. It blew John’s mind. He progressed to Bach’s unaccompanied cello music, which had John transfixed, lying for hours with earphones clamped on his head.

  ‘Are you all right, John?’

  ‘Mmmmmmm.’

  On Sundays John, who knew how to cook, unlike Tom, who had a devoted mother who had done it for him, popped a joint and potatoes in the oven while they went to The Cock in Highbury for a drink. There they usually met Arthur
Mullard, a cockney actor who looked like a wrestler. They were impressed because he was well known – a face. Arthur was happy to regale these young actors with theatrical anecdotes in return for a beer. On completing a season with the Royal Court he said, ‘Good – done me art for this year’, and returned thankfully to his sitcoms. They loved his down-to-earth approach.

  28 June

  Unknown to John, getting some second opinions on his case. He has such faith in his doctors he is not interested in looking elsewhere, but I feel I must explore every avenue. All seem to think the treatment right. He is bearing up to it amazingly. Poison is being pumped into him but apart from a few days in the middle of the cycle, which he calls his nadir, he carries on a normal life. He is a sturdy little northerner.

  In the relaxed atmosphere of Highbury Crescent, John lightened up. He and Tom shared silly repetitive jokes and routines which gave them endless amusement.

  Tom: ‘Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw.’

  John: ‘And dissolve itself into a dew?’

  Another jest was speaking to each other as though they had no teeth. It probably started from a visit to see Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1960, with which they were very taken, particularly by Donald Pleasence as the tramp. Their dialogue owed something to the radio comic Rob Wilton as well: ‘Well, you schee, the ththing ish, Tchommy . . .’