I thought, as I booked a call to find out what on earth had happened on the Costa Fiore.
The matter had two nubs. Nub one, my uncle George explained, was that poor Vi had very badly broken her leg in three places. She was being freighted back to England by air ambulance and would be ensconced in UCL Hospital in London. Since I was her favourite relative, I was expected to rise to the occasion. So far so good. Hospital visits to see Vi would doubtless be colourful and George, being a doctor, would see she got great treatment.
It was nub two that proved more troublesome. She had started writing a cookbook and wanted me to help her continue with it in her hour of need. The manuscript to date was in the post via registered mail. Had I received it? I hadn’t. No matter, first off after arrival her leg would have to be reset but George was sure Vi would be compos mentis fairly soon after the surgeons had strutted their stuff. Then she would need cheering up and help with the book was the prescribed tonic. None of this sounded unreasonable. I loved nattering food with Vi. Then the manuscript turned up. The title page of the draft in the registered brown envelope said it all.
THE QUEENS OWN COOKBOOK
Camp Cooking for Town Dwellers
by Rodney Spoke
Auntie, no doubt inspired by her many theatrical friends, and maybe Kenneth Williams on the BBC World Service, was writing a gay cookbook.
Before you say “what’s wrong with that?” you have to remember this was more than 50 years ago. London may have been swinging and recipes like Coq Up and her version of Spotted Dick might have hit my funny bone but away from the Kings Road things hadn’t swung far enough for mainstream publishers to embrace this volume wholeheartedly. I quote the introduction.
Running mascara, eye-lashes slipping, nose unpowdered, nails unvarnished and even a hint of stubble. There is no excuse for it. You can stop messing about in the kitchen and come out in the sitting room. Here at last is a cook book for the Bona Viveur.
It struck me there was only one publisher for Auntie. Desmond Elliott. I was right. Soon after Vi’s leg was reset she had a deal set with Desmond’s Arlington Books. Vi had broken her leg very badly and her stay in hospital through that hot summer was a long one. I enlisted my friend David Harington to help Vi concoct chapters like “Game Meat” and we did keep Vi merry as she created the character of Rodney Spoke, whose “graceful hand had been behind so many of London’s leading restaurateurs.” The book eventually was published in 1970 and I spent most of that year and a few years after praying that nobody discovered that Rodney was my aunt or that I had anything to do with it.
THE REVEREND MARTIN SULLIVAN, the New Zealand-born dean of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece St Paul’s Cathedral, was not averse to publicity in the name of Jesus. He inaugurated a summer youth festival called Pop-In at St Paul’s by abseiling down the cathedral’s West Front. Traditionalists were not keen. There are historical connections between St Paul’s School in West London and the cathedral and Rev. Sullivan thought Joseph would be a perfect follow- up to his summer high jinks. Not a few eyebrows shot up at the announcement that a pop cantata was to be performed on November 9 in the church hailed as one of the better consequences of the Great Fire of London.
Unfortunately when Sir Christopher designed his iconic dome he did not have a rock drummer in mind. The St Paul’s Cathedral echo is a good twenty seconds long. And there’s more than one of them, as anyone who has climbed the steps to the Whispering Gallery at the rim of the dome will testify. In short St Paul’s Cathedral isn’t top of the venue list for a highly public performance of a piece which much depends on hearing the words. So there were a lot of heads buried in the words in the programme when the Joseph Consortium, as our massed forces were now named, gave the first performance of Joseph Mark 2.
The dome did a great job of masking the Joseph Consortium’s rhythmical deficiencies and once again the overwhelming feeling was joyous. There was a good review from Ray Connolly, the Evening Standard music critic whom we had come across when we were unsuccessfully trying to propel their Girl of the Year Ross Hannaman into the stratosphere. The sadly now defunct satirical Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph ran a story about a new pop cantata “Mr Moses and the Amazing 200ft Cybernetic Funcalf,” music by old Etonian Adrian Glass-Darkley, which neatly pulled the rug from under any serious thoughts of a sequel in this direction, at least for a bit. When we did fleetingly flirt with the Moses story we thought of starting it with the tune that I had scrawled on a table napkin in Carlo’s Place. What was to become the big Jesus Christ Superstar theme had first-draft words that went “Samuel, Samuel, this is the first book of Samuel.” We became friends of Martin Sullivan, who hugely encouraged us to choose another biblical story as our follow-up. In fact he was the first of many who suggested the story of Jesus, but for the moment the launch of the Joseph album blanked out thoughts of a follow-up.
DECCA’S DECISION TO RELEASE Joseph in the New Year meant that the run-up to Christmas churned through agonizingly slowly. I increasingly panicked that if Joseph didn’t strut the stuff I would have to get a job. It was time to make plans. My mother had got to know a feisty fun ex-model called Pam Richards who had a flat in the block next door. She lived on her own but seemed to have a bevy of friends of whom one of the younger was an aspiring heartthrob pop star called David Ballantyne. David’s singles were all over the pirate radio stations and I was intrigued to discover who was paying for them. He told me he was being supported by a property developer called Sefton Myers with a taste for dabbling in show business. My family became friendly with David and soon Julian and I met his very pretty sister Celia. Julian was very smitten – so much so that a few years later they got married. I noted Sefton Myers’s name.
The Joseph album finally lurched out in January 1969 to a few really exceptionally good reviews, several hailing it as genuinely groundbreaking. But that was about it. I pushed for one more performance to launch the album at the Central Hall and raised a bit of money to advertise it. It was a mistake. Now that Joseph was a major Decca Records release, the stakes were far higher. A third public performance proved to be one too many for the parents of Colet Court. Although we did get quite an audience the atmosphere was totally different. “Forensic” might be the word. Instead of anticipatory celebration the audience wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
The first problem was the playing. Our Decca album performers, bless them, were just what they were, a perfectly nice bunch of amateurs from Potters Bar. Since we could not afford professionals, we got students from the Royal College for our orchestra. They were simply not up to it and Alan Doggett was neither tough nor experienced enough to whip the disparate forces together. The teetotal Methodist Central Hall was not the ideal venue to launch an album that would supposedly transform pop. We were putting a square peg into a round hole big time. I knew it and wanted to cancel the whole thing which was utterly unprofessional as I had pushed for it in the first place.
The fallout didn’t take long. Tony Palmer, pop critic for the Observer, the rival newspaper to the Sunday Times, seized his moment. After castigating the out of tune playing, he concluded that “if Joseph is a new beginning for pop, it is the beginning of the end.” Frankly, based on that performance he had a point. Still 1969 saw Joseph bed down very nicely from Novello’s point of view, a gratifying number of schools performed it and a new piano score was commissioned to include the new songs on the LP. But it was hardly going to support me and both my family and I knew it. It was time to find out a bit more about Sefton Myers. A property man who dabbled in showbiz might just conceivably be a man with a lifeline.
David Ballantyne didn’t seem to know much about Myers other than that he was often seen around Variety Club events. That figured. The Variety Club of Great Britain was then, as it is now, an excellent charity that provides for disadvantaged and sick children through glamorous events where donors rub shoulders with British stars. In the 1960s its patrons were a Who’s Who of the showbiz establishment with a big Jewish contingent. I found out via a contact at the charity that Sefton was seriously stagestruck. So I knocked up a letter.
Throughout life I have found that the best way to get something you want from people is not to dangle your real carrot in front of their nose. Lob it into the