showed up with two lyrics. The first was the auction song which he had called “Going, Going, Gone!” The first lot to go under the gavel was a parrot. The first couplet I read by my future collaborator went thus:
Here I have a lovely parrot, sound in wind and limb
I can guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him.
How could I not smile? To this day only Rice would come up with a parrot sound in wind and limb. The quirkiness and simplicity of Tim’s turn of phrase grabbed me immediately. By some strange osmosis with “Going, Going, Gone!” we had written a plot driven song that was a harbinger of the dialogue-free style of our three best-known shows. Tim titled the other song for the lovestruck subplotters “Love Is Here.” The first verse went:
I ain’t got no gifts to bring
It ain’t Paris, it ain’t Spring
No pearls for you to wear
Painters they have missed it too
Writers haven’t got a clue
They can’t see love is here.
Desmond Elliott however was not best pleased when I broke the news that I had decided that Tim should be my writing partner for The Likes of Us. A with it pop lyricist should stick to with it pop lyrics, was his opinion. That was, until I played Desmond the songs. Very shortly Tim too was managed by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books.
DESPITE THERE BEING STILL no plot outline from Leslie Thomas, Tim made some song suggestions and we started writing. Desmond co-opted a “producer” who was in fact another book publisher, Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press. Ernest Hecht was a Kindertransport émigré from Nazi Germany who once told me that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent. He had dabbled in theatre and in 1967 presented the farceur Brian Rix in Uproar in the House. What qualified him in 1965 to present a musical is anyone’s guess. But it was Desmond’s gig and I presumed he knew best.
Meantime I acquired a music publisher. During my skiving off school days I had got to meet some of the guys at Southern Music, an American-owned publisher with a big country and western catalogue and a very active London office in Tin Pan Alley. Soon I was taken under the wing of the CEO, a guy called Bob Kingston. Bob was later to give me one of the greatest pieces of advice of my career, thanks to which quite a few people have made a considerable fortune. He spotted that I was an oddball seventeen-year-old with a curious appetite for musical theatre – the pariah of my generation – and that my passion just might rub off on other people. So he did a deal with Desmond to publish The Likes of Us.
Bob was very enthusiastic about our embryonic score but felt we lacked a killer ballad. He kept banging on about another “As Long as He Needs Me.” The consequence was a string of tunes, all with three long notes, as per the “he needs me” bit of Lionel Bart’s mega hit. Proof, if needed, that it is unwise to create songs by formula can be found in “How Am I to Know” which made it through to the recording of The Likes of Us at the Sydmonton Festival many years later. I suppose it got included because Tim and I thought it the best of many attempts to emulate Bart’s classic. It would have exited were the show to have made it to rehearsal because it had been usurped as pole position banker by another putative winner “A Man on His Own.” Guess what? The tune was “Make Believe Love” (the song that failed to launch my career as a lyricist). Bob pronounced we had a smash hit on our hands and the score was complete.
A demo recording with bass, drums and a very ancient pianist was made featuring a couple of session singers and Tim and I filling in gaps. The ancient pianist had only one style, stride piano. Even the big ballads acquired a honky-tonk sheen. The sound engineer had an addiction to his new echo machine. So bits of the demo were helpful, others emphatically less so. All of them sounded as if they had been recorded in Penn Station at three in the morning. No matter. Back home I was able to render friends soporific with my first show LP. Surely the West End was a matter of months away.
The summer of 1965 wasn’t exclusively taken up with The Likes
Ronnie had been David Lean’s cameraman and producing partner on classic movies like Great Expectations. I was enthralled when he told me how, in an emotional scene with co-star Dirk Bogarde, Judy Garland had without warning veered totally off script into a supercharged autobiographical monologue. Ronnie feared the cameraman might stop shooting this unrehearsed pure gold so he eased the guy off his camera and took over himself. Ronnie tightened the shot and, by inching the camera slowly back on its track, lured Garland to keep monologuing her way forward into his retreating lens. Thus he created a seminal Garland moment in a not particularly special movie.
Also that summer I met Tim’s parents for the first time. I had just failed my driving test, so Tim drove me in a pre-World War Two Austin car that his parents lent him to their converted farmhouse near Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London. Joan and Hugh were very kind and asked me a lot of questions about my family and what my ambitions were. They asked me quite a bit about Oxford and I, maybe wrongly, thought there was a question too many in front of Tim on the subject of university. I didn’t tell them of the role of Professor McFarlane’s cat in my academic achievements.
There are songs you vividly remember when and where you first heard them. I first heard Richard Rodgers’ “Something Good” at the home of John Goodbody, an aptly named Westminster boy as he was Britain’s junior weightlifting champion, not necessarily the first achievement you would think of in a Westminster boy. John was a trainee journalist and during his long career in newspapers he became the highly respected Sports Editor of the London Times. He shared my huge love of the Everly Brothers and it was at his parents’ house in North London that I turned up one Saturday night clutching my unplayed newly purchased soundtrack LP of The Sound of Music film. John’s friends were slightly older and more cynical than I, so they doubtless shared the view of the New York Times that The Sound of Music was “romantic nonsense and sentiment.”
I wonder if they noticed me turn colder than your average Austrian ski slope during my first encounter with the stupendous overture. Out of the glorious modulation at the end of “My Favorite Things” burst one of Richard Rodgers’s most brilliant and characteristic melodies. And it was new! Rodgers hadn’t written anything to touch it for at least five years. “Something Good” is right up there with his very best, complete with his “Bali Hai” tritone,* the halfway note in the scale that hits the word “Hai” and is there in some of his most typical greats. Hearing this melody for the first time is as vivid a memory as my debut encounter with Sgt. Pepper.
THE CLOCK TICKED TOWARDS October and my first Oxford term. However any qualms that I had over the daunting prospect were somewhat hijacked by another of Mum’s domestic dramas. This time she burst into my bedroom at four in the morning proclaiming that something terrible had happened to John Lill and that she could feel his pain. Later in the morning it transpired he had fallen off his motor scooter. Maybe there was something in Mum’s psychic claims or, perish the thought,
