Unmasked

24. Tell Me on a Sunday (#litres_trial_promo)

25. “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency” (#litres_trial_promo)

26. Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face (#litres_trial_promo)

27. Mr Mackintosh (#litres_trial_promo)

28. “All the Characters Must Be Cats” (#litres_trial_promo)

29. Growltiger’s Last Stand (#litres_trial_promo)

30. Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers (#litres_trial_promo)

31. Song and Dance, and Sleep (#litres_trial_promo)

32. “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented” (#litres_trial_promo)

33. Miss Sarah Brightman (#litres_trial_promo)

34. “Brrrohahaha!!!” (#litres_trial_promo)

35. Requiem (#litres_trial_promo)

36. Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)

37. “Big Change from Book” (#litres_trial_promo)

38. Year of the Phantom (#litres_trial_promo)

39. In Another Part of the West End Forest . . . (#litres_trial_promo)

40. Mr Crawford (#litres_trial_promo)

41. “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!” (#litres_trial_promo)

Playout Music (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

I have long resisted writing an autobiography. Autobiographies are by definition self-serving and mine is no exception. It is the result of my nearest and dearest, aided and abetted by the late great literary agent Ed Victor, moaning at me “to tell your story your way.” I meekly agreed, primarily to shut them up. Consequently this tome is not my fault.

I intended to write my memoirs in one volume and I have failed spectacularly. Even as things are you’ll find very little about my love of art which, along with architecture and musical theatre, is one of my great passions. I decided the saga of how I built my rather unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art collection belongs elsewhere. The dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully – at least for the moment.

This medium sized doorstop judders to a halt at the first night of The Phantom of the Opera. Quite how I have been able to be so verbose about the most boring person I have ever written about eludes me. At one point I had a stab at shoehorning my career highlights into a taut tight chapter, rather like Wagner brilliantly packs his top tunes into his operas’ overtures. This was a dismal failure. The only thing I have in common with Wagner is length.

So here is part one of my saga. If you are a glutton for this sort of thing, dive in, at least for a bit. If you aren’t, I leave you with this thought. You are lucky if you know what you want to do in life. You are incredibly lucky if you are able to have a career in it. You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

OVERTURE AND BEGINNERS (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

Before me there was Mimi.

Mimi was a monkey. She was given to my mother Jean by a Gibraltan tenor with a limp that Mum had taken a shine to in the summer of 1946. Mimi and Mother must have seemed a really odd couple as they meandered through the grey bomb damaged streets of ration-gripped London’s South Kensington. “South Ken” was where my Granny Molly rented a flat that Hitler’s Luftwaffe had somehow missed which she shared with Mimi, Mum and Dad.

My dear Granny Molly came from the Hemans family, one of whom, Felicia, wrote the poem “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” a dirge which every British schoolchild was force-fed a century ago. Granny was an interesting lady, not least for her strange political views. She was a founder member of the Christian Communist Party, a short lived organization that arguably was rather a contradiction in terms. She had a sister, Great-Aunt Ella, who married a minor Bloomsbury Set artist and ran, I kid you not, a transport cafe for truck drivers on the A4 outside Reading in which she kept hens.

Granny had got married to some army tosser and divorced him asap, which was not what a girl did every day in the 1920s. She told me that she threw her wedding ring down the lavatory on her honeymoon night. But the military deserter must have lurked around enough to sire Molly’s three kids Alastair, Viola and finally my mother Jean. Eventually he remarried some émigré Russian wannabe Princess Anastasia and that’s all I know about him.

Unquestionably Granny had a raw deal. Her only son Alastair drowned in a boating accident near Swanage in Dorset after he had just left school at eighteen. I have a photo of the man who would have been my uncle on my desk as I write. It affected Granny hugely but it particularly traumatized my mother. Mum had a complete fixation on Alastair and was forever proclaiming psychic contact with him. Curiously I think she did have contact with him, although her promise to “get hold of me when she discovered how” made in a letter just before she died has so far failed to deliver.

In 1938 Granny found herself bereft of her beloved son and a single mum supporting two daughters. The army tosser had never properly supported her so she was forced to sell a big house on Harrow Hill and move to the South Kensington rented flat on Harrington Road, SW7. When Mum met a plumber’s son named William Lloyd Webber, a young scholarship boy white hope of the pre-war Royal College of Music, love blossomed. Soon, despite the Second World War, nuptials could not be put on hold. Dad had close to zero income. That’s why he, Mum, Granny and Mimi shacked up under one roof.

A mere two years after VE Day, this postwar ménage à quatre came to an abrupt end. Mum got pregnant. Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mother’s stomach with bloodcurdling cries. In short, Mimi was the first person to take a dislike to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

A decision was taken that Mimi had to ankle out of the South Kensington ménage on the urgent side of asap. On March 22, 1948, I brought the number of residents up to four again.

CUT FORWARD TO THE 1960s and 10 Harrington Court, Harrington Road redefined the “B” in bohemian. At its 1967 occupational peak it housed Granny Molly, Mum, Dad, plus his huge electronic church organ, Tchaikovsky Prize–winning pianist John Lill, Tim Rice, my cellist brother Julian and me. No. 10 was on the top floor of one of those Victorian mansion blocks where the lift occasionally worked but most of the time you used the stairs. The traffic noise was deafening but I doubt if the neighbours heard it, such were the sounds of music emanating from our household.

One afternoon, Tim Rice and I were descending the stairs out of the menagerie. Julian was practising the cello. A bloke from the flat below leapt out and accosted us.

“I don’t mind about the pianist,” he rankled. “It’s that oboe player I can’t stand.”

However, as bizarrely bohemian as 10 Harrington Court may have been, I couldn’t wait to get out of it, particularly as Mum from time to time threatened my brother and me with jumping out of the fourth-floor window. This got boring after a bit, so enter into this narrative my aunt – my impossibly, adorably, unrepeatably politically incorrect Auntie Vi, Granny’s eldest daughter. She was married to a slightly pompous doctor called George Crosby for whom Granny had worked as a secretary when she was really down on her uppers. Vi had a brief career as an actress. She was hilariously funny and a great cook with several serious recipe books to her name. She knew a few glamorous names in theatre. She was everything my family wasn’t and I adored her. She was my escape valve. Fifty years later I still daren’t print her sayings. In the 1960s she was the author of the first gay cookbook. A chapter monikered “Coq & Game Meat” is headlined:

Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath.

FRANKLY I WAS FALSELY CITED as the cause of Mimi the monkey’s behavioural setbacks. Surely 10 Harrington Court was no place for a simian bent on swinging around the community? However, my mother stood by her initial stance. Ten years later she took brother Julian and me to Chessington Zoo. On entering the monkey house she let out a great cry of “Mimi!” more than worthy of her limping tenor. The simian turned its head, puzzled.

“Look, she recognizes me. It’s Mimi,” said Mum triumphantly as the monkey leapt across its cage and climbed the wire in aggressive fashion uttering the most fearsome sounds.

“I told you it was Mimi.” Mum looked at me pointedly. “She always hated the thought of you, now she’s seeing you for real.” The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.

1 Perseus & Co. (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

I was born on March 22, 1948 in Westminster Hospital with a huge birthmark on my forehead that Mum said was cured courtesy of a faith healer. Others said it faded of its own accord, but Mum’s graphic details had me convinced that it might recur at any time if I was a bad child. My first memory is of being in hospital aged three with acute appendicitis. This Mother told me was undiagnosed until it was just about to burst. My case was presided over by Uncle George, now Auntie Vi’s “partner” (they hadn’t married yet) who had undiagnosed the appendicitis in the first place. As my relationship with dearest Auntie Vi bloomed whilst I staggered into my teens, the saga of the undiagnosed appendicitis would be often recounted to me in increasingly distended detail. Mother also had a serious footnote about my being chucked out of hospital way too early due to my screaming which Uncle George found embarrassing to his standing in the medical profession. Mother was seriously pregnant with Julian at the time, so the saga must have been a pain to her to put it mildly.