Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер
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, John had phoned her after the accident and I hadn’t heard the phone because I was 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