Unmasked

5 “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?” (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

Come 1964 Swinging London was really taking off. I had a bit more freedom at school now. Carnaby Street spewed out “mod” clothes. Beatlemania and Beatle boots lurked everywhere. Even big American pop stars were making desperate attempts to sound hip in Britain. Two Yanks in England was the latest Everly Brothers album offering. Even Bobby Vee experimented with The New Sounds from England, albeit with an occasional Buddy Holly hiccup.

In January I somehow got a ticket in the cheap seats for the theatrical event of the year – for me perhaps of all time – the opening performance of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Tosca with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. So much has been written about the few legendary performances they gave that all I will say is that it was life-changing for me. I saw just how much two world-class opera performers at the top of their game can bring to an all too familiar work.

It certainly opened the eyes of many opera critics. Because Puccini was the commercial backstop of every opera company he had become devalued as a composer. To serious opera buffs his stock was similar to the Sixties intelligentsia’s view of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Every time an opera house needed bums on seats they wheeled out a tired old production of La Bohème, Tosca or Madame Butterfly played by a disinterested orchestra and regarded by the management as a necessary ill to pay for the real stuff of opera which unfortunately the ignorant public had no desire to see.

Everyone had a Tosca story, e.g. the fat soprano who threw herself off the rooftop of the Castel Sant’Angelo only to bounce up over the ramparts from the trampoline stationed beneath. Tosca had been called a “shabby little shocker.” The Oxford Companion to Music (Seventh Edition by Percy Scholes) had this condescending entry – about a third the length of Bartók’s – about Puccini. It speaks volumes.

The music is essentially Italian in its easyflowing melody . . . his harmonies just original enough to rouse the attention of the conventional opera goer . . . he employs not so much his own system harmony as that of his immediate predecessors served up with new condiments.

Here at last was a production that took the music seriously, gave it first-class production values and proved what a master theatre composer he was. Parenthetically, much as I love Tosca the only other Puccini opera I know well is La Bohème. For some reason, I have never got to grips with Madame Butterfly or Manon Lescaut. In fact my knowledge of opera is not as deep as all that. One of my problems is that I can’t hear the words. It’s worse when they’re unintelligible and supposed to be being sung in English.

IN FEBRUARY 1964 TWO ex-Westminster boys joined the Swinging London party. Peter Asher and Gordon Waller were both prefects during my early days at school. Gordon had fronted various Elvis-type school acts and had definitely been the school’s hot dude. Little then did I think that only a few years later he would play Pharaoh in the first stage production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Peter’s claim to fame was that his sister Jane was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. This was helpful as far as Peter and Gordon’s debut single was concerned since Paul wrote it. “A World Without Love” went to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the first time anyone from a British public school had done such a thing. I thought Westminster needed to commemorate this momentous feat. I booked up to see Headmaster John Carleton who heartily agreed that once again Westminster was ahead of the curve.

Not only did he give me complete use of the school theatre but he allowed the whole school a special holiday to see my celebration. My enterprise was much abetted by Desmond Elliott. Whether he or I came up with the abominable title Play the Fool, I can’t remember so I’ll blame him. What I do remember is that the invites were sent out to random key people whose addresses I stole in envelopes that looked like writs. The response was astonishing. Soon people who hadn’t been invited were clamouring for tickets to this happening under the nose of Westminster Abbey.

There wasn’t much musical content from me apart from a showstopping bid with my Wes Sands song “Make Believe Love” which completely failed. It was much upstaged by an outfit called Twinkle and the Trekkers, Twinkle being a rather posh girl in a wafty dress who had been drafted in by one of the boys to front his house band. She had written a death motorcycle epic called “Terry” with incisive lyrics like: “He rode into the night / Accelerated his motorbike / I cried to him in fright / Don’t do it, / Don’t do it.” A motorbike was an essential part of the staging but we couldn’t find one. Nonetheless “Terry” went fine. Shortly afterwards Twinkle had a big UK hit with it on Decca Records. I think somewhere along the line Tim Rice had a short association with Twinkle but I may be misinformed.

A huge array of lower echelon radio and TV producers turned out to see the first show I had masterminded and so it was as a producer rather than composer that these guys first heard of me. Nothing like this had happened at Westminster before and I was very proud of it.

Even masters mouthed “Well done.” I had promoted the show, cast it, found the technicians, found someone to light it, sorted the sound system, chosen the music and created a decent running order out of a ragtag potpourri of bands who ranged from hormonal teenage girl sulkbags to a rough North London mob oddly named Peter and the Wolves who wanted to smash the Merseyside boys. Their songs were pretty dire but their cover versions had the whole school rocking and Compline (evening prayers) was abandoned in St Faith’s that night. All those episodes of Jack Good’s Oh Boy! had rubbed off on me. Soon, I presumed, someone would take me on as an apprentice at a TV company and I could leave Westminster just like that! It’s nice to dream.

THE SUMMER TERM WAS when we took A levels. The results of these determined whether you tried for a university. At Westminster there were a series of “closed” places to Oxford and Cambridge, i.e. scholarships and the like which are charitably funded and only open to Westminster boys. I don’t know if this monstrously unfair system applies today but in my day these “closed” places siphoned off the best Westminster talent. Rarely did a Westminster boy enter the “open” exams that pitted you against all comers.

My A-level results were appalling. I had only two passes, a D grade in History and E in English; the worst ever result by any Westminster Scholar. My songwriting and producing activities had finally caught up with me. I sat the Christ Church exam along with everyone else, but knew I had no hope of getting a place. I went to the interview like a zombie. Needless to say, I was told to try again next year. Suddenly it hit me. All my friends would be leaving for Oxford and I would be left skulking behind, trapped in a school I was bursting to get out of. Now all my friends seemed to be talking in groups about what would happen when they left. Should they travel round Europe together? What about a trip to New York before Oxford term starts? They were talking about New York, the home of musicals! And they were talking without me. I had blown it big time and it was all my fault.

There was only one tenuous hope. Talk about Last Gasp Saloon time but I realized that the “open” exam for entrance to all the Oxford colleges took place a fortnight later and there was still time for me to enter. Dear Jim Woodhouse took pity on me and the entry forms were signed and dispatched but not without a resigned look from both Jim and my history master Charles Keeley. I resolved to take myself on a kamikaze crash course of the medieval history I loved and to pray that I got an exam paper with the right questions for me to heroically bluff my way through.

It was coming up to the end of term and the other boys were already university bound so lessons were token. I asked permission to skip them. I threw myself into book after book for twelve hours a day and spent the remaining hours dreaming up historical theories that were so ludicrously at odds to accepted academic thinking that at least I might interest an examiner. Perhaps if I backed my outrageous ideas up with enough facts, I might stand a chance of blagging my way into one of the smaller colleges. But it all depended on the questions in the exam paper and whether I could twist them my way.

The college you chose as a preference was another major consideration. I chose Magdalen College as my number one. I knew a lot about its architecture, it had a Pre-Raphaelite connection through Holman Hunt and its Senior History professor was the medievalist K.B. McFarlane whose books I had read. My number two choice was Brasenose College because I liked its name.

IT WAS MID-NOVEMBER WHEN I sat the exam, all alone as I was the only Westminster boy to enter the “open” exam. The paper was a dream. I waffled on about how Edward II was a far better king than Edward I, how the Victorian additions improve the medieval original at Cardiff Castle (I can personally vouch that this view is not shared by HM The Queen), that Keble College, for years wrongly considered a red brick Victorian eyesore, is in the top three of Oxford’s best buildings; that the classicist Christopher Wren had advised that Westminster Abbey’s tower be finished in the Gothic style (it is still an unfinished ugly stump by the way), etc. I doubt if such an outpouring of muddled factual diarrhoea has ever hit an examiner. At least I had given it my best shot.

Three days later I got a letter from Magdalen inviting me for an interview. It said that I might need to have a second one and to come prepared to stay overnight at the college. I pitched up late morning at the porter’s lodge and was shown to a rather nice Victorian bedroom and told my interview would be at 3 pm. I didn’t know Oxford that well but I had time to check out that I was right about Keble College and, importantly, that Gene Pitney was top of the bill at the Oxford New Theatre that night. That was my evening sorted out.

After lunch with a lot of nervous young men who for some reason didn’t want to make conversation about Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity,” I joined a small group of the about to be interviewed outside a sort of common room and took a seat. It was then I noticed the Siamese cat. Or to be accurate, the Siamese cat noticed me. Now it takes two to know one and the cat was in no doubt. It jumped on my knee, purring loudly, and butted against my fist whilst engaging in the sort of intelligent conversation and occasional rub against the face that only proper Siamese cats do. After a while it settled down and kneaded my leg for Thailand.

When the door opened and someone said, “Mr Lloyd Webber, will you come in please?” I obviously couldn’t put the cat down. So I carried it in. I was invited to sit down and my new best friend settled contentedly on my knee. Facing me across the centre of a medium sized dining table was Professor McFarlane, flanked by various dons one of whom asked an easily answered trick question about the date of the nave of Westminster Abbey. I am to this day a genuine fan of McFarlane’s books and it was actually a joy to be interviewed by this great medievalist. It took a while but eventually he got around to serious questioning.

“Mr Lloyd Webber, do you like cats?”

I didn’t reply “how long have you got?” but the nub of my answer caused him to end the interview by saying that that would be all and that I didn’t need to stay overnight for another interview.

I was a bit alarmed, but on balance I thought things had gone pretty well. I bade farewell to the cat who followed me back to the little room I had been given. The big issue now was that I was told I wasn’t needed the next day and I wanted to see Gene Pitney. What if they wanted the room for some poor blighter who had to go through the hoop a second time? I decided to wing it. That night I heard “I’m Gonna Be Strong” for the first time.

I took the train next morning and went straight to my parents’ flat. Granny really wanted to know how I had got on. I explained about the cat. She looked exasperated and muttered something about how one day cats would be my undoing. I naturally took a different view. But I was masking huge jitters about the outcome of my interview. It wasn’t exactly textbook. So I phoned Magdalen College and asked if there was by any chance a list yet of new undergraduates for next year. Eventually I got through to a very important-sounding woman who said she was the bursar’s secretary. I asked her if the list of next year’s undergraduates was ready yet.

“I am afraid we only have the list of scholarship winners but the list of the names of the new undergraduates will be published in two days’ time.”

Two days was a long time to wait. “By the way to whom am I talking?”

I mumbled my name.

“Oh wait a second,” she said, “you are Mr Lloyd Webber, just let me see. Ah yes. Mr Lloyd Webber, congratulations. You have won a History exhibition.

We so look forward to seeing you at Magdalen next year.”

I was speechless. Granny blinked back a tear. Here was I, a boy who had wasted a complete year at Westminster and I had won the only open award Westminster had to Oxford that year. I said goodbye to Granny, ran to South Kensington station where the train to Westminster took an eternity to arrive. I ran down Tothill Street into Dean’s Yard and to my long-suffering history master’s classroom. He had just finished a lesson. I told him the news and he went ashen. All he said was “Bless you, my boy.”

It was then that I realized just how far he had stuck his neck out to get me a scholarship to Westminster and how terribly I had betrayed his trust. I spent the rest of the day contemplating the ineffable powers of the cat.

1. Magdalen College’s terminology for a junior scholarship.

6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

It was just before Christmas when my agent Desmond Elliott unleashed a project that was to dominate the next two years. Desmond ran a small publishing company called Arlington Books which specialized in niche areas such as cookbooks. He also represented Leslie Thomas, an author who a year later had a huge success with his novel The Virgin Soldiers. Leslie was a “Barnardo Boy,” in other words an orphan raised in a Barnardo home. These “homes” were founded by a Victorian philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had witnessed the plight of orphaned children in London’s Dickensian East End and, future wife on arm, started a rescue home that mushroomed into one of the world’s leading charities for homeless kids.

Desmond immediately divined in the Barnardo story a massive post-Oliver! musical. Kids, jolly cockneys, Dickensian locations, a hero who nearly lost the love of his life in his crusade against the Victorian establishment – this, Desmond decided, was stuff that would make Oliver! look like Salad Days. Leslie was supposed to come up with a storyline and I was to knock up a few tunes so Desmond could stitch up a producer. It was to be called The Likes of Us. Connoisseurs of musical theatre disasters will already have twitching noses. Years later a musical about Dr Barnardo (not mine) did reach the West End. Tom Lehrer was in the audience and was heard to mutter “a terminal case for abortion.”

There was a minor snag to creativity. I was still at school. Nowadays nobody would dream of having pupils who had outlived a school’s usefulness hanging disruptively around the cloisters. But January 1965 saw me back in College one more time. I simply had to get out. So I invented a story that I had been offered a part-time job by an antiquarian bookseller. It was an elegant solution for all. In February I was free and I wanted to start work on the musical. The trouble was there was not a lot of input from Leslie Thomas. With hindsight I wonder how much he knew about it. Leslie is a novelist not a scriptwriter.

IT WAS A WEIRD feeling suddenly having time on my hands, waking up not knowing how to fill the day. When you are old you fill blank days by doing pointless things like writing autobiographies, but that wasn’t on my radar at the time and Oxford was months away. So I spent the early part of the year looking at buildings. It was then that I cemented my knowledge of Britain’s inner cities.

Today there’s much talk about the new generation looking forward to a worse future than their parents. Based on some of the things I saw in 1965, it would have been hard for the new generation not to have had a better future than their forebears. It was common for four families to be stuffed into a clapped-out small terraced house sharing one toilet at the back of a stinking misnomer of a garden. If the era of Rachman, whose name was so toxic that “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was supposed to have been over I didn’t notice it. He was the notorious British slum landlord who bought run-down properties in rough neighbourhoods and packed them with immigrants before in 1962 he did something unusual, i.e. not for profit – he dropped dead.

Coming from a protected, albeit bohemian environment, I admit to being shocked and not a little frightened by how quickly large city areas were changing character out of recognition. Once I was backed onto the rickety railings of one of the terraced houses that surrounded St Mary Magdalene in Paddington by a not particularly threatening, if extremely large, Jamaican guy pushing me “de weed.” A gang of three passing white yobs surrounded us, opining articulate bon mots such as “He may be a fucking poncy posh nancy-boy but he’s white and you take your fucking black hands off him.” Something told me this was not the moment to engage in conversation about High Victorian Gothic. Today the houses around St Mary’s are long gone. It’s odd to reflect that those that survive in Notting Hill and Paddington now sell for millions of pounds.

I SPENT EASTER WITH Auntie Vi at La Mortola which was in full Mediterranean flower mode. She was spending a lot of time in the kitchen from which emanated cries like “God bugger the Pope,” followed by a lot of meticulous writing up of recipes in a notebook. I tinkled away dreaming up tunes for the Barnardo show on her blue piano while I gazed at the virulent purple bougainvillea that had flowered early on her terrace that spring. But still there was no story outline from Leslie Thomas and I began to concoct one myself. Back in London, out of the blue I received the following letter.

11 GUNTER GROVE LONDON SW10

April 21, 1965

Dear Andrew

I have been given your address by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books, who I believe has also told you of my existence.

Mr Elliott told me you “were looking for a ‘with it’ writer” of lyrics for your songs, and as I have been writing pop songs for a short while now and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wondered if you consider it worth your while meeting me. I may fall far short of your requirements, but anyway it would be interesting to meet up – I hope!

Would you be able to get in touch with me shortly, either at FLA 1822 in the evenings, or at WEL 2261 in the day time (Pettit and Westlake, solicitors are the owner of the latter number).

Hoping to hear from you,

Yours,