Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер

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СКАЧАТЬ she had just seen. “A nauseating show with a fifty-five-year-old woman pretending to be an eighteen-year-old nun, plus a load of saccharin cute children.” She was referring, of course, to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music.

      It’s hard today to understand just how low the reputation of Rodgers and Hammerstein had sunk in the eyes of the British intelligentsia. I still remember the father of a school friend thinking I was a congenital idiot for loving the “sentimental twaddle” called Carousel. He collected cuttings of ghastly reviews and with great pleasure showed me one by John Barber describing the show as “treacle.” Of course I was taken to The Boy Friend and frankly I’m still agnostic about it. It was yet another nostalgic British musical burying itself in the sand against the tide of rock’n’roll. However it was a lot better than Salad Days. I was dragged to this concoction by my godmother Mabel, who disowned me after Perseus the cat destroyed a fox fur stole she left in my care when she was dining with Granny. I remember thinking that if ever I worked in the theatre Salad Days was the sort of show I had to eliminate.

      THE ATMOSPHERE AT 28 Weymouth Street was everything home wasn’t. Aunt Vi had a real eye for interior design, two words my parents hadn’t heard of. And it was Vi who taught me to cook. In the process I learned a few choice bon mots that hardly any boys of my age knew, let alone understood. However what really forced me into Auntie Vi’s not inconsiderable bosom was Mum’s latest obsession which affected the family deeply. Certainly the family was never the same again. Its name was John Lill.

      John Lill was sixteen years old and Julian only nine when they met at the Saturday junior school of the Royal College of Music. John Lill was the school’s star concert pianist and destined to be the second Brit to win the Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow. Although Julian was seven years John’s junior, somehow they had become friendly enough for Julian to ask him back to Harrington Court where John met Mum. It was a meeting that was to change all our lives. It’s easy to understand why John, plus his back story, so grabbed Mum. John Lill was born into a working-class family who lived in the then run-down deprived northeast London suburb of Leyton in one of those slum houses that today sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, such is London’s housing crisis. John was selected for the local grammar school but it was at the piano that he excelled. He won a scholarship to the junior Royal College and scraped together his train fares there by playing pub piano in one of the East End’s tougher bars. The owner would introduce John with gems like:

      “Do you know your balls are hanging out?”

      To which John would reply, “No, but sing the tune and I’ll vamp.”

      At last here was the young musical genius Mum had been looking for. Better still, from a background that salved Mum’s conscience big time about hours spent teaching privileged brats at the Wetherby School. Soon Mum was driving John back to Leyton from college and had befriended his parents. Before long Julian and I found ourselves in Leyton to see for ourselves John’s family terraced house “in the slums” as Mum unmincingly chose her words.

      There was another life-changing consequence to all this. Whilst Mum was up to good deeds, Julian and I were let loose on the streets of Leyton and we soon discovered the local football team, London’s “Cinderella” soccer club Leyton Orient. Although for one brief season the O’s did reach English soccer’s top flight, we Orient supporters are a small bunch unsullied by success, principally because there’s never been any. However once you have pledged allegiance to a soccer club, that’s that. Julian and I support the O’s to this day, although tragically as I write this, the club has gone out of the Football League.

      Years later, it was at the O’s that I was given some truly sage advice. Around the time the “Jesus Christ Superstar” single came out in Britain, I was invited to lunch in the O’s boardroom by the club’s then chairman Bernard Delfont. Bernie, later Lord, Delfont was half-brother to Lew and Leslie Grade. Between the three of them they controlled British show business. Bernie owned the theatres, Lew owned the top film and TV outlets and Leslie was agent to the stars. It was what is today called a 360 degree arrangement. So I was pretty overawed to be asked to watch a home game by the most powerful man in British theatre. Leyton Orient lost of course. But it’s the conversation after the debacle that I recall most.

      “My boy, can I give you some advice?” said Bernie, drawing me to one side.

      “Of course, Mr Delfont.”

      “Just call me Bernie.”

      “Yes, Bernie.”

      “I’ve heard that song of yours, I’ve got this feeling you could go far. I’ve got some advice for you, my boy. You’re not Jewish are you?”

      “No I’m afraid not, I’m …”

      “You’re not one of the tribe?”

      “No, I er …”

      “Never mind, I’ll give it to you anyway.” He paused. “Never, my boy, never buy a football club.”

      From that day onwards Bernie became a friend I could always count on. It was Bernie who years later came to the rescue of Cameron Mackintosh and me when we couldn’t get the theatre we needed for Cats.

      NOT VERY GRADUALLY MUM imported John into the family. There were plusses here too. As John increasingly practised chez Harrington Court, I sometimes turned the pages of his piano scores and discovered a huge amount of music I would never have known otherwise and John’s technical ability was inspiring to witness. But there were three boys going on the summer family holiday now. I am sure it must have been very awkward for John too but he seemed to accept everything Mum threw at him. Whatever Julian and I felt, we had acquired an elder brother. We had no choice in the matter. Nor did Dad. He admired John and recognized his exceptional gifts, particularly as an interpreter of Beethoven. But it must have been hard for this quiet, reserved man to stomach that his wife’s attentions and ambitions were focused on someone else.

      THE JOHN LILL SAGA was still in its embryo when, in the autumn of 1960, aged twelve and a half – a year younger than my contemporaries and frightened out of my skull – I started my first term at Westminster School. The school, circa 1960–65, was a bit like me, a curious mixture of rebellion, tradition, bloody-mindedness and neurosis, glued together by academic excellence, although the latter was arguably not strictly applicable in my case. It is supposed to have been founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560. In fact the school long predated the throne’s most famous redhead. It was Henry VIII who did one of his rare decent deeds, apart from allegedly writing Greensleeves, by sorting out a chaotic Abbey school. After he annexed and plundered the monasteries in 1536 he found himself in a quandary about Westminster Abbey because this was where the monarch was crowned. Its destruction would have made the operation awkward. So the school became part of his Westminster scheme of things.

      The school’s location greatly defines its character. Westminster is at the epicentre of British tradition. It’s where the monarch is crowned. The Queen’s Scholars are by statute the first voices to shout “God Save Whoever” the moment after he or she is crowned. Westminster scholars are to this day allowed to attend debates in the mother of Parliaments. If you were a Scholar in my time you could have skipped the queues at Winston Churchill’s lying in state, witnessed the vote that legalized gay sex and watched the Profumo Affair bring down the Macmillan government.

      On arrival, new boys had to choose two special subjects to top up the usual diet of Maths, French etc. Annoyingly history was not an option. Westminster kids did not take the lower history grades as the senior history master rightly considered them useless. So I wound up doing Ancient Greek which I hated and biology (you had to choose a science-based subject) which was Greek to me.

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