asleep – although I am inclined to believe the former, since Mum was long on psychic contacts. There were two consequences of this bizarre affair: (1) I decided I would find a way to move out of Harrington Court asap and that Oxford was not a bad stepping stone. (2) Mum decided John Lill needed to move into Harrington Court as living in Leyton subjected him to too many hazardous road journeys.
Despite all this it was John who drove me to Oxford on a chilly October night to begin the Michaelmas term at Magdalen, one of those journeys where you wish the distances between villages were just that little bit longer. I had been tipped off that it was wise to get in first and ask in advance if there was a room in the “New Building.” I got one. But I was unprepared for what hit me. After Harrington Court my room wasn’t a room. Today it would be called the Presidential Suite in a country house hotel – a bit of a run-down one maybe, but I never say no to faded grandeur. The New Building was constructed in 1733 and, despite being a mental Victorian Gothic man, I had no objection to a massive panelled drawing room plus bedroom, kitchen and bathroom overlooking Magdalen’s famous meadow, home of a load of deer and Snake’s-head Fritillary, the latter being an extremely rare flower, not a heavy metal band. One gripe. It was a bit on the cold side. And there was no piano.
In the weeks before I went “up” to Magdalen, I mooted to Desmond the idea of getting our show staged by one of the Oxford University dramatic societies, OUDS being the mainstream one, the other the Experimental Theatre Company or the ETC. This was an extremely arrogant thought for a seventeen-year-old freshman. Both societies were widely recognized in the theatre and appeared outside Oxford frequently, sometimes internationally. Desmond was rather sniffy, but he didn’t entirely perish the thought. So I rented a tinny upright piano from Blackwell’s in Oxford High Street. Nobody in the college minded. Next I wrote a letter of introduction to the presidents of the two drama societies, fairly crawling stuff, I recall, but tinged with a faint hint that I was God’s next gift to the West End and they would be wise to meet me whilst they still could.
Lady Luck dealt me a great card at my first lunch in Magdalen’s pleasingly Gothic hall. I found myself sitting next to a fellow freshman law student called David Marks. His ambition was to be an actor. He turned out to be no ordinary hopeful. After winning every acting prize Oxford offered he went on to become President of OUDS. Less than a year after we met he premiered the role of Rosencrantz in the first production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. David never pursued a career as an actor and became a successful barrister, saying he found acting too repetitive. He also agreed to be the first person to play the role of Dr Thomas John Barnardo.
Very soon I had met all the student top brass. OUDS was headed by Bob, now Sir Bob Scott who was to become the arts and sports czar of Manchester. David Wood honchoed the ETC. David has had a successful career as actor, writer and lyricist and it was the ETC that became the most likely home for The Likes of Us. We had several meetings and it was even mooted that as he could sing he might usurp David Marks and play Dr Barnardo. A plan developed that it could be staged after summer term 1966 in the Oxford Playhouse. There was, however, one outsized snag. There was still no script. As it was Desmond’s project, I obviously couldn’t suggest he ditched his best-selling novelist Leslie Thomas for some unknown budding dramatist Oxford student.
Thus The Likes of Us was in remarkably different shape to a play that was the big talk of Oxford. Written by a second year undergraduate, When Did You Last See My Mother? was staged by OUDS and a production in London quickly followed. It rendered its author the youngest to have a play produced in the West End. The author’s name was Christopher Hampton, he had been to the same school as Tim Rice and the play is said to have been influenced by homosexual activities at Lancing College. This is a subject I have not raised with Sir Tim, as I sense that he might be exceptionally unqualified to contribute to this topic. Chris is a couple of years older than me, but clearly The Likes of Us couldn’t hang about if I was to grab the “Youngest Author in West End” title myself. I didn’t of course, but 25 years later Chris and I would get Tony Awards for Sunset Boulevard.
Meantime word was dribbling through Oxford’s dramatic community that there was a socially awkward seventeen-year-old with an outsize room overlooking Magdalen meadow and a piano in it to boot. So, aside from The Likes of Us, I met with several budding writers and lyricists, some of whom have subsequently had respectable theatre careers. But I quickly became rather too aware that absolutely none of them had Tim’s rhyming dexterity and, more importantly, his highly individual turn of phrase. Years later I sometimes notice a similar turn of phrase in Chris Hampton’s work. I wish I had met their Lancing College English master.
1965 was decades before mobile phones and the only contact with the outside world was a coin phone box outside the porter’s lodge which invariably had a big queue. I started to make too many day trips to London. I was already a little fearful that Tim would forget about his junior Oxford collaborator. I simply wasn’t allocating my time properly and I was trying too hard to do too many things. My History tutor asked to see me. He said I had been admitted to Oxford a year too early at seventeen. I should take the rest of the academic year off. He really couldn’t have been kinder and even offered to look after some of my things if I couldn’t take them home. I immediately thought how was I to get The Likes of Us on in Oxford if I wasn’t there, but my attempts to say I really could cope were greeted with the reply “See you next October.”
My unanticipated time off from Oxford equalled a newly blank diary until October when I was supposed to restart at university afresh. Clearly with me based in London again, The Likes of Us was unlikely to happen that summer in the Oxford Playhouse. The songs had been demoed. There was still no script. My father arranged for me to have a few lessons at the Royal College of Music. I made several trips to Vi and George in Italy and got taken to the Sanremo Song Festival by Southern Music’s American owner where I met Gene Pitney. I hung out with old school friends, revisited David Marks in Oxford, saw Tim a bit who was still working at Pettit and Westlake, got my driving test at the third attempt, dropped my brother to school, that’s about it, i.e. not the sort of stuff to grip reader or publisher apart from possibly one anecdote which I have many times told elsewhere. The problem is that all these years I’ve been disseminating fake news.
The story as previously told goes as follows. Back in 1966 I used to frequent a shop in the nether regions of the Fulham Road which sold cheap copies of current LPs that somehow had fallen off the back of a lorry. Nearby was a bric-a-brac shop. One day I saw a filthy dirty canvas in its window which looked remarkably like Lord Leighton’s Flaming June, probably one of the most famous of all Victorian paintings. Even though Victorian pictures were still considered nearly worthless, the £50 that the shop owner was asking for it seemed cheap to me. (Today £890.) So I begged Granny to let me borrow the money. When she asked what it was for she opined that she wasn’t going to have Victorian rubbish in her flat.
The way I have been telling the story is that it was bought by the pioneering Victorian picture dealer Jeremy Maas. He then sold it to a Puerto Rican cement baron called Luis A. Ferré who was starting a museum in Ponce, his home town on the south of the island. Apparently Ferré had a policy of never paying more than $5000 for anything. In those days you could buy several acres of Victorian canvases for $5000 and consequently Mr Ferré hoovered up some great paintings such as Burne-Jones’s masterpiece Arthur in Avalon. It is ironic that such important “aesthetic movement” paintings created in the pursuit of beauty should have found their home in an island so cruelly treated by nature. Today Flaming June is billed as “The Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere,” has been in the Tate Gallery, the Frick, you name it, and is worth millions. Thus Granny denied me a Victorian masterpiece.
