Behind the Laughter. Sherrie Hewson

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СКАЧАТЬ it’s possible that it happened now and then but I just didn’t notice. Certainly a few of my contemporaries have since told me there were drugs about, but no one ever offered me any.

      As for sex, the late sixties were supposed to have been a wild time, with everyone at it. Where was I, you ask. Again, I blinked and missed it. But don’t get me wrong: I did like boys, especially if they looked like Robbie or were carrying a guitar, and even further back than that I knew how to get an apple in the playground, or better still, a sherbet dip from a boy. It didn’t seem to take much – a few bats of my eyelashes, an interest in their marbles, even a loan of my bicycle pump or a go on my roller-skates – but when it came to sex I never really understood what all the fuss was about and I’m not at all sure I do yet. All that mess for so little, as I always say on Loose Women.

      At school, I remember boys and girls disappearing behind bike sheds but I could never quite fathom what they did back there. When I eventually discovered what it was about, it seemed such a palaver, too – all that fumbling, groping, sighing and squeaking. Maybe, as Michael Bublé might say: ‘I just haven’t met you yet.’ I was much more interested in being Shirley Temple and, later, Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day. All those stars played the perfect girl-next-door – the kind of girl I wanted to be. For them there were no bedroom scenes, and if there happened to be any brief shots in a bedroom they were with Gene Kelly or Rock Hudson – which was fine by me. And so in the era of ‘free love’ when London was known as the ‘Sexiest City in the World’ I appeared to be living on another planet. Now I’m not saying that I was altogether a Miss Goody Two-Shoes – I certainly wasn’t that. Neither was I falling into bed with a different man every week or off my head on drugs, though.

      In some ways, life was far simpler then. We had no mobiles so I would phone home every now and then from a payphone, and other than that my mum didn’t have much idea what I was up to. We had no computers, so no social networking websites – we just bumped into people and got together for parties. The telly still had only three channels so it was pretty boring and, being drama students, we spent our time either acting in plays or going to see them.

      Anyway, I loved RADA and soaked up the knowledge passed on to us by all the brilliant teachers, actors and directors there. Early on in my first year, however, I got a bit cocky and began to stretch the rules. I was treating it like high school, taking everything for granted, often going into classes late and sometimes skipping them altogether. I wasn’t aware of how lucky I was to be there or how many hundreds of drama students would have loved to swap places with me … at least not until the day when I walked in very late and was told to go and sit outside the Principal’s office.

      After leaving me to sweat for an hour and a quarter, Hugh Cruttwell called me in. By that stage I was in an abject state of terror, convinced I was about to be thrown out. With his dry wit, passion for the theatre and an eye for spotting potential, the legendary Principal was held in complete awe by us students, and as I stood in front of his desk he read me the riot act: ‘How dare you come in late! Don’t you know it’s an honour to be here? I believed in you, but you’ve let me down …’ and so on. By the end of his speech I was left in no doubt just how much trouble I was in. He finished up by saying, ‘… and if you get yourself together and work hard, I will consider keeping you next term.’

      That was the kick up the bum I needed. Believing I was about to end my short time there and determined to show him how wrong he had been, I worked incredibly hard after that. I was never late, attended all my classes, took my acting very seriously and did so well that by the time I left RADA in the summer of 1971 I had won six awards, including the Ronson Award for Best Actress with a prize of 100 guineas. Of course this was exactly the response that Hugh Cruttwell was counting on. Years later he told me, ‘I would never have thrown you out – I could see how much talent you had, I just thought I’d give you a fright.’ And it worked.

      One of the wonderful perks at RADA was that superstars would arrive as visiting lecturers. We met some incredibly famous people, but none more famous – or gorgeous – than heart-throb Steve McQueen, who turned up one day to talk to us about the art of acting. I can see him now. He was standing in front of the desk, and I was at the back. He had a very soft, mumbling American accent and we couldn’t understand a word he said. But no one cared, he was delicious. At that time he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. A former reform-school kid, known as the ‘King of Cool’, he had starred in some hugely successful films including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and Bullitt. He was also a dirt-bike rider and racing car driver who did his own stunts. You can’t get much cooler than that. So, imagine how overwhelmed I felt after being chosen to show him around London. Of course I was in complete awe of him and fell totally in love: he was just so beautiful and I was dumbstruck.

      Steve wanted to go on a London bus and so that’s exactly what we did. People must have been gob-smacked to see Steve McQueen on a bus, but I never noticed because I was far too busy staring at him and thinking, I’m sitting with Steve McQueen, little me from Nottingham in my flowery dress and homemade love beads.

      That evening Steve decided to take me to the Poissonnerie, a restaurant in Chelsea. Despite my French nursery education I didn’t remember that ‘poisson’ meant fish. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this until it was too late as I’m violently allergic to seafood.

      The place was exclusive and classy, all heads turned as Steve walked in and I was so proud to be his dinner companion. Sadly, the evening became memorable for all the wrong reasons. We sat at the bar on high stools, looking at the menus, and, being a gentleman, Steve offered to order for me. I was relieved as the menu was in French and I didn’t know what most of the dishes were.

      He ordered a stew and it arrived with all sorts of strange-looking things floating in it. As I stared into my bowl Steve handed me a large wooden instrument shaped like a truncheon. I sat there, holding it, but after a minute Steve (realising I didn’t know what to do) gently relieved me of it with one of those wonderful Steve McQueen smiles. It turned out to be a pepper mill but I’d never seen one before and I was truly mortified when I realised my mistake.

      I dutifully tried the stew and after a very short time, having eaten a rather strange rubbery ring, my stomach started to rumble like a boiler and my face began to swell and burn. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t, and as Steve turned to me, realising something was wrong, the trajectory of vomit hit him square on the chest. I stared at him in horror; knowing I was having an allergic reaction and that there was more to come, all I could do was make a run for the street to throw up in the gutter.

      Next thing I knew, I was being bundled into a taxi by the restaurant manager, who gave the driver some money and told him, ‘Take her home.’ As we took off, my final image of Steve McQueen was of several staff fussing over him and wiping his shirt. Alas, I had almost certainly blown my chances of marrying this particular Hollywood superstar, I realised as I flopped in the back of the taxi.

      Chapter Five

      After that encounter with Steve McQueen, I felt mortified. I was still smarting when I received some upsetting news from home: my parents were to separate. This was something that would never have occured to me. There had probably been clues leading up to it, but if so I hadn’t cottoned on. I always believed they were happily married and the occasional rows they’d had in front of me during my childhood hadn’t seemed at all important. I guess I might be forgiven for not noticing that a problem had been brewing. In our house, my father had his bedroom and my mother had hers: having grown up with this, I thought it was the norm.

      My mother had the most beautiful bedroom: a proper boudoir, it was full of plumped-up satin pillows, silk cushions and Venetian-style mirrors. There was also a reproduction Louis-Quinze bed and dressing table. Huge walk-in wardrobes had doors decorated with hand-painted French pastoral scenes. Father’s bedroom, on the other hand, was a proper man’s room with a plain wooden bed СКАЧАТЬ