You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (12 page)

There’s still a negativity seeping into his tone, as Eric never was wrong about what worked for Morecambe and Wise, so that he should imply he
might
be wrong is representative of the apathy these New York trips were invoking. It’s even more interesting when put into the context of his health. No one, including Eric, knew that he had ten months of this annual ritual before his massive, near-fatal heart attack that coming November.

In further entries we see a continued strategy developing to keep Eric interested in making it big in the States, matched by his continued apathy towards the notion:

New York January 1968

We went to the Sullivan off ice today to meet the girl who is doing the ‘Wall’
*
bit with us. She’s called Michelle Lee and was one of the leads on Broadway and this film
How To Succeed
. She is very pretty and also is keen to do it. (The Wall bit, I mean!) Bob Precht, Sullivan’s director, asked us if we would stay over until the weekend to do another show on Saturday. It’s a tribute to Irving Berlin’s 80th birthday. So we said we would. It’s also with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

My father would have been particularly keen to meet Hope and Crosby, who had been such a successful big-screen double act over the previous two decades.

This reveals the incongruity of his dislike for everything that side of the pond alongside his great love, respect, and curiosity for the star names America had produced (even if Hope hailed from Lewisham, in London).

The undated entries of that week continue with Eric becoming more and more unable to be part of the New York world:

I was taken out to the Playboy Club by Fred
[Harris]
.We went to see a young comic. Fred thought he was good. I didn’t rate him.Although it was a free night, the food was terrible.

The next day:

Rehearsed all day with Michelle.Went to bed early without Michelle!!

The next day:

The day of the show. 9.15 at the theatre, saw our name outside. Must say it gives one a kick to see your name up on Broadway. At 9.30 we had a music call, then did what the Americans call ‘Blocking’, which is a camera runthrough. Back at 12 in the afternoon for make up. At 1, a complete dress run, with the people out front. It went very well.They had no notes for us. Next show would be showtime at 8.

The show went great for us. It really did well.

The next day:

I didn’t do much today. I got up late and had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. People knew me from the show the night before. I felt like walking about saying, ‘Yes, I was on last night. Glad you liked it!’ However, one can’t do that. Although I know one or two that almost do that.

I stayed in most of the afternoon. Fred
[Harris]
rang up at about 5pm and came over to the hotel at about 6.30pm. He had nothing lined up, so rang the George Abbott theatre to see if we could walk over and get tickets for
Darling of the Day
. It was very easy, so we went.The theatre was half full. (A pessimist would say half empty!)…The show was lacking somewhere. Mind you, that is always easy to say. I know I couldn’t have put it right.After the show, Fred and I went for a bowl of soup at some Broadway café. Home after, and a few drinks and kip.

I find it interesting how in these entries my father apparently becomes aware of his own negativity as demonstrated in that marginally defensive line ‘A pessimist would say half empty!’ One of his greatest strengths, in my opinion, was that he was always so positive. Certainly he could get spiky at times, and was by no means someone you would have described as tolerant and patient, but he saw the world, for the most part, through sunny spectacles.

The next day:

This morning I had to meet Pat Kilburn
*
, in Saks on Fifth Ave. Or, as the Americans say, Fitavenooo. Pat came at 11 as arranged. She wanted to shop and buy some shoes and matching handbag.Which we did. I noticed while waiting for her in the shoe department that the American women treat the sellers like dirt.To me they do have a class distinction. But it’s all of their own…The more I’m over here, the more I am glad I’m English—even British.

Pat and I went to the top of the Pan Am building for a quiet drink, which in New York is impossible.Then we caught a cab out to the airport to meet her husband, Mike, who was doing some biz there.Then we drove to their home in Wilmington, Delaware.

The next day:

Wilmington Delaware.

Mike isn’t too well. Probably run down with the strain of the move over here. Pat, Erika and Amanda
*
seem fine, and the kids are well now, going to school and becoming very quickly a part of the scene out here…

Pat drove me around the Dupont country…I should imagine in Spring and Summer it must be very lovely. I only stayed the one night. I caught a train back to New York. Never having been on an American train I found it most interesting.They seem to run much more quietly than ours.The porter, just before we got into New York, made a speech:‘Ladies and Gentlemen, in a few moments we will be in Pennsylvania station New York. Please could I have your tickets and complaints. I’ll take the tickets first.‘Then he took our tickets and left, never to be seen again!

The next day:

New York.

Just rehearsed today. Spent a lazy day and bought a hat,
*
one of the Russian types, which is very popular out here, but will get laughs at home. But it’s so cold here that it’s necessary.

The next day:

New York.

Had a band call this morning and rehearsed. Hung about the theatre till
Fred came with his nephew. Spent the afternoon with them in a bar on Broadway. Told stories about Jack Hylton.
*
At 5 we came back to the theatre to get ready for the show.This show is the Ed Sullivan tribute to mark Irving Berlin’s 80th.

Bing Crosby went on first and kept going wrong.They had to do his bit three times. Even then he sang White Christmas wrong. But they let it go.We followed Bing Crosby and did our Fred Astaire skit. It was one of the best things we have done out here. Bob Hope followed us and started to do jokes about heart transplants. Not really in good taste.Also had idiot boards all over the front rows.

The next day:

Flew back to England with David Frost who fell asleep as soon as he sat down and I woke him up about five minutes before landing. He was coming home for three hours then flying back to New York!

And so, unbeknown to Morecambe and Wise at this time, ended their American extravaganza. Not that the drama stopped on Eric’s return. His final entry in the New York section of his diaries reads:

Brian
*
met me in and took me home. I was sat down watching TV in the afternoon…when at 4.15 Gary runs in to tell me Gail had fallen off her horse and the horse had kicked her in the face knocking out her two front teeth. She looked a terrible mess. Joan got the doctor round and Mike (Doc) got Gail’s dentist and had an X-ray done. She had one tooth splintered and the other one has been pushed up under her nose, and her top jaw had been fractured…She couldn’t talk and looked one hell of a mess. However, it was arranged for her to go to hospital as soon as the swelling went down, which when you looked at her you thought it never would.What a black Sunday it’s been.

‘Arrived back from Portugal, and our villa over there is in a worse state than the house over here. Somehow you can’t win.The weather was very nice—in the eighties. Over there we met some nice people—the Baron and Baroness Osterman [sic] of Germany.And a man called Christopher Wren, who is a direct descendant of the Christopher Wren. All were charming and live in the Algarve. But I feel that most of the other residents are mostly failures out there.They only seem to be scratching a living.They are the ones who say,‘Isn’t the weather wonderful—you can’t get this at home!’ You won’t get me going back. Not unless they are deported, and I feel some of them will be. No! At the moment I’m one of those unfashionable people who happen to love England. It’s great to be back—weather and all!’

T
he above diary entry for 15 October 1967, made by Eric one month before he and Ernie went to New York, emphasizes my father’s

distrust of anything remotely foreign. He was without doubt someone who never allowed himself to be particularly influenced by the weather, although naturally he didn’t rejoice in constant winter rain and cold; but he never really complained about it because he felt very safe and secure in his home country. England is the country that made him—he made a marked distinction between England and Britain (as we saw in an earlier diary entry)—and he never would forget that, and consequently did not fully feel at ease when away from it. It contrasts with his more cosmopolitan lifestyle, so removed from his northern upbringing, this belief that the UK was the only place in which he could feel secure. How ironic he would find it to know that in my lumbering middle age I try to spend several months of each winter in the Algarve to escape the British winters, and much of this book was penned while there.That’s just the sort of quirky little thing that would tickle him.

The diary entry dates from about a year and a half after my parents bought the land on which their villa was built. It never was supposed to happen. It certainly wasn’t planned. We were on holiday there—the family’s first visit to the Algarve—when some friends, Cyril and Muriel Coke, who owned a property virtually opposite this piece of land, encouraged my parents to buy.The location was beautiful, the weather perfect (as even my father agreed), so it is easy to understand why, within the two-week stay, papers were drawn up and they found themselves on the verge of owning a small piece of picturesque Portugal. A recent conversation with my mother reveals that is was Eric’s spontaneity that made an idea a reality.

My brother, Steven, who was not born until five years after my parents built their villa, grew up, like me, with fond childhood memories of long summer holidays in the Algarve sunshine. Fast forward to winter 2006 and the two of us are making a nostalgic trip to see what the villa looks like now.

We were staggered. My father had always warned us that it was destined to ‘do a Spain’, as he put it. Not only had the coastline been submerged beneath a wave of whitewashed houses, hotels, and other developments, but the villa—our little piece of Portuguese paradise—was now lost in a large town that had appeared like some ghastly mirage across the landscape of this former tranquil farming commune. Pubs, clubs, restaurants, guesthouses, hotels, neon lights constantly flashing day and night, traffic pouring down streets that once had been our open pastures and a haven for all kinds of wildlife. Different wildlife now! This is what had happened to paradise. It was a considerable shock.

After Eric died my mother had kept the villa until the end of the eighties and nothing had really changed. Following an eighteen-year absence I discovered that a villa that had stood in the open countryside with distant views of the sea from its rooftop was now just one house in a town that hadn’t before existed. The back garden, which once had allowed hundreds of grapevines to flourish at its far end, was now supporting an apartment block, with another one quickly going up near by. My father got it right: it had done a Spain.

‘Eric and Ernie were still metamorphosing when they made their films.’

In between the holidays in Portugal that punctuated my father’s working trips to New York, something else also developed that was perhaps just as inevitable as Eric and Ernie’s wish to test their humour in America on Americans. They were serenaded into making movies. Not that they needed much serenading. Ever since my father had gone to the cinema as a kid and been dazzled by Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy et al., and Ernie had been considered the British equivalent of Mickey Rooney, the glamour and glitz of the big screen had appealed greatly to them. Even today comedians who have a good TV shelf life soon enough end up in movies—Cannon and Ball,Ant and Dec, Lee Evans, Ricky Gervais, Mitchell and Webb—and, in the past, Eric and

Ernie’s peers Tony Hancock, Norman Wisdom and others also went the cinematic route to a greater or lesser degree.Tragically, most of them fail. It doesn’t seem to stop them all from trying, which is to be congratulated even if those on the outside can’t help but feel they are allowing the doubts to be suppressed by the sheer challenge.

For Morecambe and Wise, still Lew Grade’s top comedy stars atATV, it was sooner rather than later that it happened.With that wonderful thing called hindsight, I can’t help thinking that the whole three-movie affair for Rank at Pinewood Studios would have been just that bit better—more polished and more complete—had Eric and Ernie ended up on the cinema screen
after
the changes brought about by scriptwriter Eddie Braben and described in the previous chapter.That is the problem I have: Eric and Ernie were still metamorphosing when they made their films. Fundamentally they were captured by the big screen five years too soon.Accepted that the films work on various levels—
especially zest, innocence, location—and the boys were still very funny together; that hadn’t changed since childhood. But they weren’t the finished article they could have been. And when the chance eventually came around again, both men were too old to present themselves as they had been at their BBC peak.Their film
Night Train to Murder
did not receive cinematic release and would disappear virtually unnoticed except by their true fans. Eric himself died shortly before it was first shown publicly, on television, in 1984.

The fact that, back in the early and mid-sixties, Eric and Ernie had missed out on becoming the Morecambe and Wise of their peak years wasn’t anyone’s fault.They weren’t to realize they would leave Lew Grade in 1967 and move to the BBC, where a new scriptwriter they’d never before met would be instrumental in reinventing and redefining them. Or that a massive heart attack at the age of just forty-two would make the idea of doing any further big-screen outings a matter of little or no interest to Eric. Sometimes I’d ask him if he intended to make another movie, but he was evasive and uncertain. ‘Might get round to it,’ he would say, but you could tell that he was a man safe in his own environment—the TV studio—so why take any chances? Also, he felt they never were given any really decent film scripts, and by way of example he cited the
Pink Panther
scripts which had been so successful for Peter Sellers. So in a way it is a kind of blessing that Eric and Ernie made it to the big screen at all: that they had their opportunity to do
something
, however limited.

‘As a very spontaneous act they were dependent on audience reaction.’

It should be noted that these were not bad films.Admittedly they do little justice to Eric and Ernie, but that is because the Eric and Ernie they became—the ones we grew to know and love through their fantastic Christmas shows—had still to be created.The Eric and Ernie of the films were still more akin to the acts of the music-hall era like Abbot and Costello.Their transformation into the

new Laurel and Hardy had not happened, yet nowadays the films do tend to be judged on who they became rather than who they were when they made them, which is slightly unfortunate.

Furthermore, Eric and Ernie’s humour was not the type to transfer to the movies.They were not comic actors in the mould of the brilliant Peter Sellers or Ronnie Barker or David Jason.As a very spontaneous act they were dependent on audience reaction.They were never as visually frantic or character-based as the Marx Brothers: qualities which might have allowed them to be really brilliant without the intimacy of the audience and the studio that their brand of humour and technique demanded.

They kicked off with
The Intelligence Men
(1964) and rounded it all off with
The Magnificent Two
(1967). And in between was a little gem of a film, which has a big following to this day, called
That Riviera Touch
(1966).

All three films were produced by Hugh Stewart and the first outing,
The Intelligence Men
, was directed by RobertAsher. One of the film’s guest stars was Francis Matthews, who not only worked with Eric and Ernie several times over many years but maintained a friendship with them both over many decades.

I caught up with Francis at his home in Surrey before he was leaving for yet another performance in the West End play
Cabaret.
I’d always been eager to meet him, for he had been a childhood hero of mine from nearly forty years

earlier when he starred in BBC’s first drama series in colour,
Paul Temple.
He had fond memories of both the Morecambe and Wise double act and the times they spent and worked together.

‘I was a bachelor actor in the fifties and sixties, living inWest Hampstead,’ he told me. ‘I was invited to some party in Bayswater—there were always parties going on back then—and I didn’t really know anyone there. But Eric and Ernie were there. They arrived late because they were on a show at the Palladium, I think. I’d seen them in panto when I was even younger. So as soon as I saw them at this party I had something to talk to them about.We got along really well, but the next time I saw them was a few years later when I took the offered role in
The Intelligence Men.
’

Francis remembered the film vividly because it gave him the opportunity to work alongside not just Eric and Ernie but also his two closest friends in show business,Terrance Alexander and Bill Franklin. ‘This was like an accolade. I was gobsmacked with joy,’ he recalls. ‘When we started working with Eric and Ernie at Pinewood, Robert Asher, the director, and the film’s producer, Hugh Stewart, who was also producer of the Norman Wisdom vehicles, were always

keen to under-crank all the time, which basically makes people on film look like they’re moving quicker than normal speed. Eric would say to Robert, “Please don’t do that. It’s not very funny. It’s all right for Norman, but not for us.” I thought that was a particularly perceptive observation.’

The thing that struck me as Francis reminisced is how friendly the set clearly was. ‘We were all friends from the beginning,’ he said. ‘Bill,Terry, Me, Eric and

Ernie all gelled. I suppose it was because we were having such fun. Eric was a huge generator of good energy. Every one had to have a good time.’

Francis recalled talking to Eric about the late Bill Franklin, who will for ever be remembered by those old enough as the man who suavely delivered his lines in the Schweppes ad on television, spreading the catchphrase ‘Shh, you know who!’ ‘Eric told me that he found Bill really funny,’ said Francis. ‘And Bill was a funny man, by the way: a great sense of humour. But it was very black humour and often quite cruel and dismissive.And Eric continued by saying, “Bill doesn’t really do Funnies, he does Hurties!” That expression has always stayed with me. Wonderful! But they got along really well—they loved each other. It must be the thing of opposites attracting.’

Then Francis told me about rehearsing the film’s debriefing scene, where Eric did a routine that became famous through their ATV shows in the sixties: he puts his hand under the other person’s chin (mostly Ernie’s) and says, ‘Get out of that—yer can’t, can yer?’

‘I was the MI5 man, called Grant, I think,’ explained Francis. ‘I had a briefcase on a desk, and Eric, as a spy, came in for debriefing and started saying things like, “I want that thing…the thing with the gun; and the shoe thing…”Then he started doing the can’t-get-out-of-that bit, saying, “Now if you were holding that briefcase…I’ll show you. Can I borrow your briefcase, Mr…er…?” And I at once say, “Do, do,” and go to fetch the briefcase. And Eric ad-libbed, “Thank you, Mr Do-Do!” This stuck, of course, and Robert kept it in for the final take.And Eric took it a stage further. If you watch the film, every scene I’m in after that scene, he calls me Mr Do-Do.There’s one line he ad-libbed where Eric has to go somewhere and he says, “Can Mr Do-Do come?” He was instinctively funny.’

Lunch on the first day of filming was another event Francis recalled. ‘Eric made me smile because he said to me, “Are you going for lunch?”“Yes!” I told him. “Can I come?” What a question! The co-star of the film asking if he can come for lunch with me! So off we went to the main dining room for lunch, and as we go in Eric says, “Where are the stars? Show me all the big stars. Point them out, Fran.” He
was the kid in the sweet shop. But of course Eric expected to find the room crammed with the likes of Cary Grant, but other than Richard Harris there was nobody. I turned to Eric, who looked a bit despondent, and said the truth, “You and Ernie are the biggest stars in this room.” Eric wouldn’t have it, though. “No, no, no…I mean the film stars.” “But Eric,” I said,“You
are
a film star. You’re here making a film, and you’re the one every one else wants to meet.”’

Francis had been telling Eric a lot about his wife,Angela. ‘By a happy coincidence she was at the same time filming an American TV series at the studios with Peter Graves called
Court Martial.
I’d pop over to her set every now and then, and on one occasion she was able to join us all for lunch. When she arrived for lunch, Eric walked straight up to her and said, “Oh, hello, love!” Then to me, “Is this the Elizabeth you keep talking about? Oh no, it’s your wife—I’m sorry.” And of course when he went to shake her hand as he said all this, he did the thing of pulling his hand back and prodding the centre of his glasses. Do you know, he did that every time we met up!’