My date with The Millionairess

I first heard the name of Bill Tuttle, who has died aged 95, when Sophia Loren mentioned it to me during an interview more than 40 years ago.

She was making a movie called Lady L co-starring Paul Newman and David Niven and was required by the script, written and directed by Peter Ustinov, to age from 18 to 80.

Looking 18 was no problem for La Loren (she was 30 at the time) but progressing through six more decades required all the ingenuity of Mr Tuttle, who was MGM’s top make-up man. He had been assistant make-up artist for The Wizard of Oz in 1939.

The ageing process on Loren’s face and neck took hours every morning as layers of rubber were overlaid and etched with wrinkles and crows’ feet, capillary tubes simulated prominent veins, and bags were created beneath her stunning brown, green-tinged, almond-shaped eyes.

How accurate his work was can be judged by comparing pictures of the 80-year-old Lady L character with recent pictures of the former movie star who will be 73 next month. To me – but I am biased – the basic effect was to make the then most beautiful woman in the world look like the most beautiful woman in the world with tons of stage make-up.

I saw her on TV recently and she looked less like the aged lady in the movie and more like she had looked when we met in 1965.

In those days there was no Oscar for best make-up – this wasn’t to be introduced until 1981 – but earlier in 1965 the Academy had created one just for Bill Tuttle – to commemorate his work on the 7 Faces of Dr Lao, starring Tony Randall in the title role.

Sophia Loren was born in the same month and the same year as Brigitte Bardot, and I don’t wish to appear ungallant, but…

Anyway, did I ever tell you about the date I had with Sophia Loren? No? You must be the only one, then.

I was working the airport beat mainly interviewing celebs, except that, in 1965, they were called stars and were, in fact, real celebrities who were recognisable on an international scale. We would meet at least twice a week as she flitted between home in Rome and the main set in Castle Howard, Yorkshire, and we’d chat in the departure lounge. All I had to do was provide a few lines to give the papers an excuse to carry another photograph of her. There was plenty of different subject matter: her marriage to Carlo Ponti had been denounced by the Vatican; she had a natural gift for one-liners (‘everything you see, I owe to spaghetti’); sometimes we even talked about the movie which was totally forgettable, except by me.

I can picture her now (ok, I have a photograph of us both on my desk).

She was not a conventional beauty: her nose was perhaps too aquiline, her nostrils too flared, her mouth perhaps a little too wide and her lips too prominent. She looked and moved (she told me this and I of course refuted it) like a giraffe – ‘a pretty dumb animal!’ – because she thought her neck and her legs were too long.

I was well qualified to argue because, as a schoolboy five years earlier, I had sat and gawped at her performance with Peter Sellers in The Millionairess. Well, not so much at her performance as at her figure, for she wore a basque. And a hat. And gloves. Stills from the movie were published in almost every newspaper and magazine in the western world. Like every kid of my generation I knew more about La Loren than about any other Italian from Julius Caesar to Garibaldi. She was 5ft 8ins, 120 pounds, 38-24-37. I had no idea what Garibaldi looked like.

Nevertheless she insisted: ‘I am not a sexy pot. Sex appeal is 50 per cent what you’ve got and 50 per cent what people think you’ve got.’

So there we were, sitting in familiar intimacy in departures, the most lusted-after woman on the planet, and your correspondent. On this occasion she had sent her driver from the Dorchester to the door of the Terminal Two press room to ask for me and invite me to join her in the lounge. She actually did that. She was about to appear on the front cover of Vogue and they’d given her all the transparencies of the shoot so she could choose the photos she preferred and eliminate any she didn’t like. She invited me to help her make a choice.

‘We’ve seen a lot of each other recently,’ she said, as she drew a chinagraph line across a photograph of her face. ‘But I am going to be in Italy for a few weeks so you won’t see me for a while.’ Sheets of trannies slid from my knees to the Cyril Lord carpet. I must have appeared crestfallen, for she immediately removed her glasses, fixed me with those exotic eyes, smiled with those luscious lips, and said: ‘But I am coming back!’ And she dictated the details of her return flight on Alitalia for me to enter in my notebook.

‘I’ll be here,’ I promised.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘So we have a date!’

And that was it, really. But look. I was a dreamy starry-eyed youth of 20 and she was Sophia Loren. And we had a date. She had said so herself with those fantastic fleshy lips.

I floated back to the press room and said: ‘Hey – who’s got a date with Sophia, then?’

I was greeted by a barrage of telephone directories, coffee cups and beer bottles. But the lads were just jealous. They could not destroy the magical moment.

When she returned she was on the arm of Carlo Ponti. She wore her sunglasses, like always, and he was so small I thought he looked like her guide dog. She introduced us and as we shook hands he just snorted, in that way Italian millionaire film directors do.

I guess she had decided that she preferred older men. But I’ll get over it, one day. I really will.
#

The Queen and I

Tomorrow (August 4) would have been the Queen Mum’s birthday. World War I broke out on her 14th birthday. It’s the sort of information that only those closest to her are aware of, I suppose.

I was in France when she died and learnt about it from the morning paper, which referred to her as ‘la Queen Mum.’

Not la reine mere, or even la reine maman. Such was her popularity, even among the Anglophobe Froggies, that she was The Queen Mum, world-wide.

Long before Diana, she was everybody’s favourite royal.

We had a chat, once. Well, not much of a tete a tete, but we conversed. She was about to board a Royal Flight and the photographers stood respectfully at the foot of the aircraft steps waiting for her to start posing or waving. She beamed, and the shutters clicked. Then her face fell as she looked along the rank of artists-in-light and asked: ‘Where is Mr Wallace?’

Tony Wallace, the Daily Mail resident photographer at London Airport was absent from the usual line-up.

In those days photographers knew their place. And it certainly did not include talking to their betters. They shuffled their feet a bit and re-checked the settings on their lenses, and shook their flash-battery packs, but none of them spoke. It fell to me, the token reporter in the company, the caption writer, to respond.

‘He’s off sick, today, Ma’am,’ I said.

‘Oh dear. I am sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘No Ma’am. I believe it’s just a cold.’

‘Then please,’ she asked me, ‘give him my best wishes for a speedy recovery.’

‘Certainly, Ma’am. I will do that.’

I thought our little conversation was getting along swimmingly. I was tempted to tell her that I had recently been at Gibside, in County Durham, where she had spent a significant part of her childhood, and maybe to tell her that the colliery railway wagons still bore the name of her family, which had owned the Bowes Colliery.

She might be pleased to know that, I thought. Then I thought better of it. Maybe next time; it would keep.

After we had exchanged our waves, I hastened back to the press room in Terminal Two and performed my loyal duty, as I had promised my sovereign’s mother – in whose husband’s coronation, I could have told her if the conversation had really got going or the subject had come up, my father had been proud to march.

The message had its desired effect. Tony Wallace made an exceptionally speedy recovery. But first he asked me to phone the Mail picture desk and pretend I didn’t know his home number, and ask them to pass the message from the Queen Mum on to him.

Of course I was delighted to do that.

‘The Queen Mum,’ you say… ‘She asked after Tony Wallace?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘As you probably know, she thinks the world of him. She was really upset to find he wasn’t there waiting for her this morning. She told me so.’

‘The Queen Mum…’ said the Picture Editor. ‘Asking after Wallace. That is wonderful. Thanks awfully.’

But, as interviews go, not awfully significant, you no doubt reckon.

No? Oh really.

Listen. You will learn something.

When Tony Wallace returned to harness, miraculously cured, he bought me a drink and asked: ‘Do you know the last time the Queen Mum actually spoke to a reporter?’

Of course, I didn’t.

‘In 1923.’

1923… And then me.

‘She made a bit of a faux pas, you see,’ said Tony, ‘and vowed never to speak to a reporter again, about anything, for the rest of her life. She wasn’t even Queen then, of course, just Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – and a descendant, as you know, of the Thane of Glamis.’

Thane of Glamis... I said yes I knew, but I’d forgotten.

‘She was engaged to the Duke of York and while talking to a reporter during a photo-session for the engagement she referred to him, just a slip of the tongue, I’m sure, as Bertie. Yes: our future King George VI (although of course nobody knew that then)… Bertie! His father, King George V, was furious about what he considered to be lese-majesty – and she was upset that the reporter had dropped her in it, and not amended her quote more formally before publication.

‘So she spoke quite frequently to members of the public, but never to a reporter, after that.

‘All we’ve ever had out of her, since that day, was that smile. Her special smile…

‘But she spoke to you,’ said Tony. ‘...About me!’

So everything we have learnt about her, about her feelings, and even her quotes, we have got from third parties.

Hating her brother-in-law, briefly King Edward VIII, for not sticking to the job he was born into and marrying ‘that woman’, Wallis Simpson, and landing her sensitive, stammering husband with the crown he had never expected to wear, nor been prepared for.

As the last Empress of India (and indeed last empress of anywhere) she apparently believed that Mountbatten gave up India too early and that Britain de-colonised everywhere before the Commonwealth nations were able to cope.

Ringing below stairs and telling her staff: ‘When one of you old queens has a moment, this old queen would like a gin and tonic.’

Of Jimmy Carter: ‘That man was the only person, following the death of my beloved late husband, to have the effrontery to kiss me on the mouth.’

But none of that came from a reporter.

I know she spoke once to Hugh Cudlipp (but he doesn’t count as a reporter), at a Garden Party. She told him she was going to Balmoral that night and – sod security – said that the Royal Train always left Kings Cross but travelled only as far as Doncaster where it stayed overnight in the sidings. Whether this was so that she could have a more comfortable night’s sleep, or so that she could arrive at her destination in daylight for photos, was never satisfactorily established by Cudlipp, to my mind.

Anyway, he’d had a brainwave and sent Jimmy Wallace, the Mirror’s northern circulation boss, to Donny with a set of the first editions. Jimmy found the Royal Train and reached up to hammer on the door. It was opened by a (presumably surprised) lady-in-waiting, in a nightie.

He handed over the bundle of papers and told her they were for Her Majesty, with Mr Cudlipp’s compliments. She told him to wait.

When she returned she said: ‘Her majesty has asked me to thank you, and to ask you to pass on her gratitude to Mr Cudlipp. But she has also asked me to ask you – do you not have a copy of the Sporting Life?’

I wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.

But then, you see, our relationship was rather different.
#

Namedropping with Niven

When I worked the airport beat (this was London Airport, before it was known as Heathrow) the two people I saw and interviewed most frequently, by a long chalk, were David Niven and Sophia Loren, each passing through at least once a week to Geneva and Rome respectively. And of the two of them, I saw much more of Niven.
Airports are boring, soulless places. Holidaymakers may find a bit of excitement in anticipating their annual ten days on the Costas, but frequent travellers – and those poor benighted sods who work in these mini-townships – find none. For the airport’s ‘resident press’ corps of about a dozen hacks and snappers, there’s the additional frustration that everybody is going somewhere, and you are stuck there.
So Niven always lighted up my life. He’d check in and then, if I hadn’t been waiting for him, come and seek me out. During the long waits in the departure lounge he would regale me with stories about his life, his co-stars and about Hollywood. Years later, I discovered that he had been rehearsing the tales that were to form his best-seller, The Moon’s A Balloon, and create for him a reputation as one of the funniest and most engaging and entertaining chat-show guests of all time. He needed to talk and I was always delighted to listen; in that way we were the perfect couple.
He always came through Arrivals without luggage. Somehow – and I never figured out how – he managed to get somebody to collect his luggage and take it out to the waiting chauffeur. He still had to wait, like everybody else, but while waiting for it we could at least get a drink.
He spotted me wading through the dense Easter Saturday crowd to meet him as he emerged baggage-free from Arrivals, spotted my face above the travellers, waved a walking stick in the air, and shouted, across maybe 50 yards: ‘There you are, dear boy! Tell you what, come and have a pee with me… Got to have a piss, otherwise I’ll flood the fucking concourse!’
The thing was that, with his exceptional accent, it didn’t sound like swearing. So people said, ‘Ooh, look, that’s David Niven’, rather than ‘Ooh, did you hear what he just said?’ He had hurt his leg during filming, when thrown from a horse. Explaining the stick, he told me, in a voice that could be heard by maybe a hundred people: ‘An aircraft flew so low over us, it virtually passed between the horse’s fucking ears.’
He was due later that day to return as a celebrity guest at the Open Day of his old school, Stowe, and introduce a special screening of Guns of Navarone. I remember wondering in what terms he would explain the stick to the parents and boys.
Niven always expressed an interest in who else was travelling and to where, and one evening I passed my notebook across the table to show him a fairly impressive list of that day’s eminent arrivals and departures. I also told him that the list formed most of the text of my weekly letters home to my childhood sweetheart – people still wrote letters in those days – but said I was a bit embarrassed about having become such a blatant name-dropper.
‘As I said to David Niven today,’ I joked, ‘I really must stop name dropping!’
‘Don’t worry on that score,’ he assured me. ‘When you have just had tea with Sophia Loren [as he knew I had, that afternoon] people don’t expect you to tell them about the fucking waiter.’
Late one afternoon I told him that Trevor Howard and Rod Taylor would be flying out to Nice, shortly after he had taken off for Switzerland. ‘Be a pity to miss old Trevor,’ he said. ‘And Taylor’s such a pleasant young man…’
I told him I’d been talking to Taylor who’d said he understood that Howard was a big drinker. He planned to put him to the test in Nice, ‘by showing him how Australians can drink.’
‘Really?’ said Niven. ‘Trevor is going to enjoy that!’ He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Isn’t there a later flight to Geneva tonight? Maybe I could change my booking.’ So I walked him to the BEA desk in Departures and he switched to a late night flight.
They all missed their flights that night.
I kept waking up to find bottles of light ale that had been ordered for me stacking up on the table. I gave them my best shot; however I was but a callow youth and I was playing here with world-cup standard drinkers. And they were all three on top form, drinking short after short and never faltering in their tales or reminiscences about Hollywood greats. I reckoned I could catch up on all their stories from Niven, at a later date.
In the morning I showed them where they could take a shower (Executive Club lounges hadn’t been invented), made sure they knew which flights they were supposed to be on to complete their journeys, and went home.
I awoke when it was time to return to LAP for my next shift. I tapped my jacket pocket confidently to ensure that my notebook was safe and when I reached the airport I went straight to the coffee bar in Departures (‘resident’ press could walk freely through passport control: there was no other form of security apart from an always-bored Special Branch man) and reached for the little blue book.
Sometime late during the previous overnight session I’d had the inspired idea to interview three of the world’s most experienced drinkers about their and their friends’ favourite cures for a hangover. It would make a great feature, I knew, and in my mind’s eye I could already see it in print in either the Express or the Mail.
I sipped black coffee and opened the notebook. There was page after page, headed DN, TH, RT… then HB would be Humphrey Bogart, RB Richard Burton, EF Errol Flynn...and then DN, TH, RT again as they had come up with second thoughts and suggestions. It was all written in quite beautiful, almost copperplate, Pitman’s shorthand. The trouble was that not a single line of it made any sense whatsoever.
When, eventually, Niven’s book came out I immediately bought two copies – one for me and one for my mother. She’d enjoy reading it, I reckoned, not least because she’d already have heard most of the stories in it, as related to her by me on my rare weekends spent at home in Leeds. She’d be able to tell her friends: ‘This story was in David Niven’s best-selling book, but our Revel told me about it, ages ago.’
She never got to see it. Immediately I started reading, it seemed that every time in his life Niven had used, or heard somebody else use, the word ‘fuck’ he had put it in his book.
Mum, I thought, would not have approved of the famous company I was keeping, if she knew how it talked.
#

An American in London

I’m invited for dinner at the home of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador in London. House rules are no discussion of politics and I am told that a fellow guest, who is arriving later to help ensure that the rules are kept, is Larry Adler.
Do I know him? Oh yes. Does the ambassador know him? Certainly. In that case, does he know his story about Rhapsody in Blue? He doesn't, so I tell it to him.
First time I meet Larry Adler is in Newcastle upon Tyne and he plays Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, one of my all-time favourites, in a concert at the City Hall.
Early in 1930, he tells me afterwards, he is just turned 16 and travels from Baltimore to New York where he hopes to make his fortune with his mouth organ (never, he insists, a “harmonica”). He has little luck, and is reduced to busking for the Broadway queues when he somehow bumps into a musician called Frankie Tromboni. Plays the sax. Well, with a name like that, what would you expect him to play? Adler’s stories are full of such diversions. Mr Tromboni plays at New York’s Roxy Theatre and is married into a family from Naples called Arena.
Trombini tells young Adler that Paul Whiteman is holding auditions for his new orchestra. There are 125 musicians in it so, as he explains, it is as good a chance as he is likely to get, and somehow he procures the kid an interview.
“I walk into his office. It is like walking into City Hall. At the far end, behind a desk, is Paul Whiteman. There is another guy, sitting in an armchair in a corner, reading a paper.”
The impresario eventually looks up from his desk and says: “Well, Alder… I agree to see you as a favour but I have to tell you I don’t need no harmonica player.”
“That’s fine, Mr Whiteman. Because I ain't no harmonica player; I play the mouth organ. And, by the way, it’s Adler not Alder. You should remember the name.” The little man defiantly produces the instrument from his trouser pocket, and waves it.
Whiteman smiles indulgently. Then he shrugs. Give the kid a chance. “OK. What can you play?”
“I’m a virtuoso, Mr Whiteman. I can play anything.”
Now the impresario laughs. “Fine. Let’s hear you play Rhapsody in Blue.”
But the problem here is that Adler hears people talking about this composition, but he never hears it played. If he hears it, even only once, he can play the whole thing out of his head. He has a gift. Worse still, he can see a copy of the sheet music on Whiteman’s desk and doesn’t want to admit that he can't read music. So he rashly says: “I could play it, Mr Whiteman, but I’d rather not. Truth is, I don’t actually like it.”
At which Whiteman laughs again, turns to the guy in the corner and says: “Hear that, Gershwin? This boy don’t like your Rhapsody in Blue.”
He doesn’t get the job.
He also learns later that the piece is specially commissioned by Whiteman.
Fast forward two decades and Gershwin is in France on the set of the Gene Kelly movie, An American In Paris. In the meantime Adler buys the record and learns to read music. He crosses the Atlantic, somehow contrives a meeting, and persuades the composer to listen to his interpretation of the great work.
“You play that Goddam thing so well it sounds like I write it for you to play,” says Gershwin. “It’s yours, now. You can play it whenever you like. And say I give it to you.”
Now... It’s just a good story, ok? Not hilarious. But when I get to the end the Ambassador is rocking on his heels with laughter. I look round, and down, and see little Larry standing behind me, a broad grin on his face, too. I don’t know how long he is standing there, listening. He blinks up at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. “You tell that Goddam story so well it sounds like it is written for you to tell,” he says. “It’s yours, now. You can tell it whenever you like, and say I give it to you.”
So I do.
#

One shot still echoes around the world

They say you always remember where you were when you heard the bad news, even if you rarely remember the actual date.
But Thursday, 3 June 1982 was already shaping up into a memorable evening for me. I was at a ball I had helped organise at the Savoy and had spent dinner discussing the on-going Falklands war – especially Prince Andrew’s role in it – with the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Then I danced with the Duchess.
As I escorted her back to our table a messenger arrived from the office and at that moment glitzy trivia (and name-dropping) ended as a new chapter of world history opened.
Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, had been gunned down leaving a diplomatic banquet at the Dorchester. His bodyguard had chased the gunman along busy Park Lane (it was just after 11pm) and, incredibly, shot him in the back of the head. Two accomplices were in custody. Shlomo was in hospital, but the bullet had passed right through his brain…
I knew him fairly well – I’d met him at receptions and been entertained by him at his home, his embassy and his club – and I liked him a lot. Educated in Washington and London he was an intellectual giant, a quick-witted, urbane and brilliant public speaker and also a fine teller of amusing tales who seemed to like little better than to relax, glass in hand, swapping yarns with a few friends. The burden of never being able to move outside the door without a team of bodyguards failed to daunt his constantly high spirits. He would take “the lads” jogging with him each morning in the streets north of Regents Park. All that protection didn’t help him in the end, though.
The assassin’s bullet took more than 20 years to kill him. It blinded and almost totally paralysed him. After a couple of years he was in a virtual coma, but he didn’t die until March 2003.
A potential peacemaker, he deserved – some said he was destined for – the best and the highest jobs but his memorial, now, is likely to be only as a sidebar in history books. For Shlomo’s shooting changed the modern world.
In the middle of 1982, while most of the rest of us looked towards the South Atlantic, Israel had contrived a temporary cease-fire with the PLO. Prime minister Menachem Begin interpreted this as applying to all Palestinian groups, including the dissident Abu Nidal faction, which was behind the attack in London that night. Begin described the shooting as “a direct attack on our state”, ordering immediate air strikes on PLO ammunition sites and training camps in and around Beirut. Yasser Arafat retaliated with 24-hour artillery and rocket fire on unarmed Israeli villages and kibbutz settlements.
On Sunday June 6, Israel’s defence forces invaded Lebanon, and laid siege to the capital, eventually forcing out Arafat and his supporters. The shooting hadn’t made many big headlines – after all it wasn’t, at the time, an actual killing, merely “an assassination attempt”. However the incident had already developed into a full-scale war and the Middle East has barely enjoyed three consecutive days of peace thereafter.
In one of his few lucid moments during his last 21 years – all of them spent in hospital – he told a friend: “If those who planned it [the war started in his name] had also foreseen the scope of the adventure they would have spared the lives of hundreds of our best sons… We are tired of wars. The nation wants peace.”
But, by then, nobody was listening.
In his native Jerusalem, where seven generations of his family had been born, Shlomo died, aged 73 - according to doctors as a direct consequence of his wounds. Only after all those years did his “attempted murder” finally become an “assassination” – and that single shot reverberates around the world, even today.
#

Sez Les

Les Dawson was one of that very small band of comedians – now, I think, totally extinct – who were naturally funny. Jimmy James, Robb Wilton, Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper… and Les. They didn’t need to speak to make you laugh: their entire skeletons were made of funny bone.
He had done a TV sketch, a monologue delivered in character as a lavatory attendant in Burnley, and had invented a name for him that would have been something like Latrine Shufflebotham. The plot was about the queer goings-on in the cubicles, and the punch-line was “when anybody comes in here to use the lavatory, it’s like a breath of fresh air for me.”
Granada TV received a letter from an employee of the Parks Cemeteries and Sanitation Department of Burnley Borough Council complaining that he had a name remarkably similar to Dawson’s character and was therefore being lowered in the esteem of right-thinking members of the community. It sounded to me like Granada’s publicist was experiencing a slack day, but I was also having a slack day so went to interview him at Tyne Tees TV, where he was appearing.
I ambushed him in the foyer and conducted the interview, at his insistence, with him standing on the fourth step of the staircase and me still at ground level so we could, as he put it, see eye to eye. There wasn’t much he could say about the obviously invented name, so we went across the road for a drink, and he told me that he had more or less started his career in the working men’s clubs of Tyneside.
In those days the club Concert Secretary ran the entire evening entertainment.
Les remembered sharing the bill at a club in County Durham with a young singer who had appeared on Top Of The Pops. When he noticed that some members of the audience were talking during her performance, the Secretary had switched on his own stage-side microphone and called: “Order! Can we have order round the room, purleeze… Give the little cow a chance… Carry on, pet.”
Shirley Bassey had been presented at a club in Yorkshire with the words: “She’s a bit on the dark side, as you’ll likely notice. But she sings none the worse, for that.”
A famous American quarter was introduced as being “not particularly to my liking, personally, but I was out-voted in committee so give them a big hand.”
The Concert Secretaries’ pomposity and their power was frightening, said Les. He had appeared one night at Felling [on Tyneside], and done his story-telling routine - he didn’t tell “jokes”, as such, but actually composed literature, like: “I was sitting alone last night, deep in contemplation. In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebon void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought...I really must fix the roof on this lavatory.”
But, at Felling, nobody in the audience had laughed.
“In fact, I thought I heard somebody clapping, but it was just a bald man, slapping his head to keep awake,” said Les.
He suspected that the lack of appreciation might not have been unrelated to the fact that the introduction to his act had gone like this:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, PLEASE. Now, before we start tonight’s entertainment, I know that some of you have noticed that you are eating your pies with plastic spoons. There is a very simple explanation for this. Last night, when the steward counted the cutlery, five spoons were missing.
"Now, spoons do not go missing on their own! Somebody has those spoons.
"And the situation is that, well, if you are going to behave like children, you must expect to be treated like children. I would like to see those spoons returned, please! And now, without further ado, your entertainment for tonight, Mr Les Dawson!”
After his performance, thoroughly humbled, Les had climbed up onto a bar stool and waited for the Concert Secretary to bring the brown envelope that would contain his fee.
“Well, Leslie... we didn’t go down very well tonight, did we?”
“No, Mr Concert Secretary, sir, I am afraid we didn’t.”
“Well, Leslie, I have had them all here, you know. Jewell and Warris, Ted Ray, Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin, Archie Andrews AND Peter Brough. And I wonder, Leslie... you are a young man... are you the sort that might appreciate a little constructive criticism from an old hand in the entertainment business?”
“I am, Mr Concert Secretary, sir. Not only am I that sort of man, I am indeed that very man. Any pearls of wisdom that you might bestow upon me will be treasured by me for life.”
“Well, Leslie,” the great impresario told him. “Your act’s crap.”
#

Meeting Muhammad

When we met, Muhammad Ali was – after, or along with, Elvis and The Beatles (who John Lennon had claimed to be ‘more famous than Jesus Christ’) – probably the most celebrated man in the world. Certainly, ‘the greatest’.
Correction: “I'm not only the greatest; I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round that I do it.”
He was 23 years old, and I was 20. But I was a young reporter and he was the Heavyweight Boxing Champion Of The World, having twice beaten Sonny Liston (knock-outs in the seventh and first rounds) thereby removing the sport from the clamp of control by the mafia. It had been replaced by Ali’s own mob – who would eventually persuade him to persist in the sport he loved, long after the world knew that he should have packed it in.
Outrageously handsome in a blue blazer and grey flannels he stood apart and aloof from his minders who were encumbered by floor-length fur coats and dripping with chunky jewellery. We shook hands (his was a gentle grip – he had nothing to prove) and opening my notebook I asked him, just to get things right, which of the many spellings of Muhammad he actually preferred. He had been born, in January 1942, Cassius Marcellus Clay, a Christian Baptist named after a (white) Kentucky politician, one of the founders of the Republican Party, who had fought for the emancipation of slaves. But ‘Cassius Clay was my slave name – I don't have to be what they want me to be; I'm free to be what I want.’ His change of name and adoption by the Nation of Islam had been well documented, but it was something he had been thinking about for years, he said.
He made a joke about the answer to my question, as he did about almost everything. “You know, last time I was asked, the guy says to me, ‘Mr Ali, how you spell you Christian name?’” His brow creased with pretend anger. Then he was off again, and beaming, educating a non-believer. Islam, he said, allowed him to have four wives, and he was going to get one who would shine his shoes, one to feed him grapes, one to massage oil into his muscles and ‘the fourth one, well, she’ll just be named Peaches...’
On a serious note, he told me – the first time he had told the story or, at least, the first time it was to be reported – that after his 1960 Olympics triumph he had been welcomed home to Louisville, Kentucky with a 30-car motorcade. There had been speeches but no dinner because the local chamber of commerce ‘just didn’t have time’. So he had gone, nevertheless much elated, into a restaurant in town, only to be told: ‘We don’t serve niggers!’ to which the former Cassius Clay told me he had replied: ‘And I don’t eat ’em, neethah!’ And he had felt so depressed about his home town and nation that he had walked to a bridge and thrown his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River.
‘You really did that?’ I asked him. ‘Honestly? But it must have been your most cherished possession!’
His eyes widened and rolled at the thought that anyone might doubt him. ‘Muhammad Ali don’t tell you no lies.’ But again it was only pretence at taking offence. ‘Listen – if Ali say a mosquito can pull a plough, just hitch it up, don’t ask him how!’
The Louisville Lip. This was the days before rap, and he was inventing it. He spoke fluently and fluidly and often poetically, always with infectious humour. He had a winning smile. It was impossible not to like him.
Emboldened, I asked him about his immortal ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ line.
‘You seen me in the ring. Well, that’s how I move.’
I’d never seen a butterfly move like that, I told him. I’d have said he floated more like Fred Astaire…
Ali touched me on lightly the shoulder. He was measuring the distance between us. He said: ‘Don’t move.’ Then he threw a punch at me.
Here I digress to tell the joke about a cowboy reputed to be the fastest gun in the west. A stranger asked to see the man’s quick draw, so the gunman’s hands hovered above his holsters for a second, then he asked: ‘Wanna see it again?’
What had just happened in the departure lounge at Terminal Three of what’s now Heathrow Airport was exactly similar. Ali’s great fist had sped to my jaw, and been withdrawn, without my actually seeing it. I was vaguely aware that he had moved. I’d felt the draught as his knuckles mercifully stopped, possibly half a centimetre from my chin, and fell back to his lap.
His face was iridescent with merriment. ‘Now…’ he asked me, ‘Wanna go for “sting like a bee”?’
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She’s the real thing

Living on a remote island, I hadn’t heard about Britney Spears, who I think is an actress [No: apparently she’s a singer. –Ed], getting $65million to promote Pepsi until I read it in the on-line Daily Telegraph leader column.
But 40 years ago, as a young reporter, I heard a possibly better story from David Niven about Sophia Loren doing it for nothing.
La Loren was hosting a live - remember that: it’s important - concert on TV called something like A Night Of A Thousand Stars, sponsored by Coca Cola (remember that, too).
At rehearsals the director said that, at the end of the show, she should go on stage, clapping. She should kiss Frank Sinatra, who was top of the bill and would still be receiving applause, then take the mike off him and ad-lib. It always sounded better if it was unrehearsed, he told her.
All she had to do, using her own words, was thank all the performers - she didn’t need to remember all their names - and thank the sponsor, also in her own words, for making it all possible, then say good night.
So she did that. She went on stage and kissed Sinatra, and took the mike and thanked all the stars “too many to name individually” then said:
“And a special word of thanks to our sponsor, without whom this wonderful night would not have been possible. I have to say that, all my life, I have been a great fan of Coke. I drink it every day... Although in Italy, of course, we call it Pepsi. Good night, everybody!”
Like a lot of Niven’s stories, it might not have been totally accurate. But one would dearly like to believe that it was.
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Philip Nicholson remembered

Two years ago today (July 10), my old mate and drinking partner Philip Nicholson died. Here’s the obit, as it appeared in The Independent.

Philip Nicholson used to sit with both elbows on the bar of Gleneagles, his favourite watering hole in Gozo, Malta, and watch with amusement as tourists entered in search of the best-selling author who used the nom de plume A J Quinnell. Often an English or American tourist would put himself forward, sometimes it would be a local Gozitan fisherman; Nicholson himself would keep quiet, although chuckling with joy as the pretenders wrestled to answer intricate and detailed questions from his passionate readers.
Nicholson, born in Nuneaton in 1940 during an air raid and educated mainly at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Wakefield, had adopted an alias chiefly as a means of distancing himself from the public in the event that his books became successful. As a teenager spending holidays with his parents in Tanganyika he had met a party of white hunters surrounding his then hero, Ernest Hemingway. When he asked to meet the great man he was rebuffed with the message: “I have no time for fucking kids.” Young Nicholson considered this to be bad form. Already convinced that one day he too would be an author, he decided on the spot that he would never behave in a similar way with his public.
But first he had to earn some money. After school he worked for a shipping company in Liverpool and at 20 became a trader in textiles working out of Hong Kong. It was while there that he met the characters who would form the basis for his thrillers –mercenaries, former members of the French Foreign Legion, journalists and crooks.
Once, on a flight between Tokyo and Hong Kong, a fellow passenger, an Italian, suffered a heart attack. The crew was about to order an ambulance from the General Hospital but Nicholson intervened and told them to contact a private hospital, where he had connections, and where he convinced the stricken man’s associates he would receive better attention. The following day he was visited by a group of Italians who expressed their eternal thanks, and promised him help if ever he needed it.
When he started researching the plot for Man On Fire, a book based on the increasing number of Mafia kidnappings in Italy, he made contact with the man’s family. They were eager to help, and provided introductions to lawyers, to anti-Mafia investigators, and to Mafiosi who were happy to assist and who even asked to be named in the novel. Published in 1981, it became an immediate best-seller. Searching for a nom-de-plume, and looking for an unusual name, he took the surname of Welsh rugby forward Derek Quinnell, and the initials, A J, from the son of his local barman.
In 1987 the book was made into a lack-lustre movie starring Scott Glenn and Joe Pesci with Jade Malle as the young girl kidnap victim. The screenplay went through several transitions under Italian-French direction. At one stage, reading the script, Nicholson mentioned that it did not appear to be following the line of the book. The script-writers replied: “You mean, there’s a book…?”
Nicholson, who had imagined his hero as looking like Robert Mitchum, was unimpressed by the outcome, as was the majority of the cinema-going public.
When Hollywood remade the film last year the director Tony Scott cast Denzel Washington as the hero, and Dakota Fanning as the young victim but he used Mexico as the location because of the inordinately high number of kidnappings in Mexico City. It received high critical acclaim, not least from Nicholson himself who was happy that it used a lot of his original dialogue.
By this time the book had sold more than eight million copies in paperback and had been translated around the world. The most ardent fans emerged in Japan where readers admired the samurai-style dedication of the hero. Although the book notes said only that the author lived “on an island in the Mediterranean”, Gozo figured extensively as the hero’s home base. His local was named as Gleneagles and many of the local fishermen in the bar – many of whom could not read fluently in English – had cheerfully agreed to be featured as characters. The Maltese islands thus received their first influx of Japanese tourists, who came on specially organised literary jaunts in search of the author, and Nicholson (as Quinnell) was invited several times on lecture tours and book signings in Tokyo.
Many of his novels are now out of print and early copies are much sought after and highly prized. Paperback copies of Snap Shot are offered on the Internet at more than £130; Message From Hell at £68, an early edition of Man On Fire at £63.
Nicholson, married to Danish novelist Elsebeth Egholm, was working on what he had already decided would be his last novel, a “prequel” to Man On Fire, when he died at home in Gozo where he had lived since the early seventies.
Revel Barker