23. Really Useful
25. “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency”
26. Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face
28. “All the Characters Must Be Cats”
30. Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers
32. “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented”
39. In Another Part of the West End Forest . . .
41. “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!”
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
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.
