Tony Booth
Sometimes we forget how much we owe to actors for keeping us entertained, with their incredible mimicry, ability to memorize their lines, imitate a variety of characters and often making an impression on an audience that can last for years. Elsewhere in this list of memorable characters, I quote Francis Bacon saying to me: "Ninety eight percent of people in this world stand around waiting for the other two percent to entertain them." Well, Tony Booth was one of the two percent. Who can forget him as "The Scouse Git" doing verbal battle with Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, keeping the British nation laughing until their ribs ached? He was instantly recognisable by his shock of blonde hair, and his cheeky Liverpudlian manner and devil-may-care attitude to life, and Tony was no respecter of persons, high, low or in between. And the highest to the lowest were admirers of the weekly show, including the Royal Family.
Quote, from Volume III of my memoirs Bogged Down in County Lyric (Chapter 9 - London): It was so popular with the Royal Family that the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret asked to meet the cast. In the line-up, the Queen Mother stood in front of Tony and said:
"You look very happy today, Mr. Booth."
"Yes, Ma'am, I backed your horse.."
The Queen Mother laughed, always happy, like the Queen, to talk horses.
"And what odds did you get?"
When Booth told her she was surprised and said she had got less odds than he had, to which he replied: "Ah, but I backed it ante-post."
"How very clever of you Mr. Booth," she laughed, and moved up the line.
"What were you saying to the Queen Mother to make her laugh so much?" Princess Margaret asked him as she shook his hand.
"I was telling her about the big picture I have of you on my wall at home, the one of you in Girl Guide's uniform, showing your navy blue knickers -- the sexy one."
"Oh, you didn't. You mustn't You must never talk about sex with the Queen Mother. She hates that sort of thing..."
"I'm just kidding you. We were talking about her horse," said the incorrigible Tony, laughing as she moved up the line.
From time to time we drank pints of light and bitter together in The Flask, a small but perfectly preserved public house in Flask Walk in Hampstead (so named because of the Spring water emanating from its source near the Heath where Londoners, in ancient times, filled their bottles and flasks and jugs) One day I joined him at the bar and he insisted on buying all the drinks. "No, it's my round" I said to him. "I'm buying today," said Tony who was often in an impecunious state while "resting", "because of that joke you told me about the island of Jersey being four thousand alcoholics clinging to a storm-bound rock." "That was no joke," I said, "that's what Tristan Jones called it when he was smuggling whisky from there to Paris in his yacht." "Well, I sold it to Les Dawson for fifteen quid and that's what we're drinking now..."
We had been stationed at the same posting in the Army, doing what they called National Service or what we called conscription, when the Forces took young men and used their talents for payment of one or two pounds a week, for two long years. We had been stationed in Fontainebleau, 60 km south of Paris, Tony in Signals Intelligence and I edited an army newspaper and reported the big NATO conferences in Bad Neunar, Germany, and the Cour Henri IV in Napoleon's palace in Fontainebleau, our HQ, chaired by the last Marechal in the French army: Marechal Alfonse Juin. But there was about a three year gap between his leaving and my arrival, back in the 1950s. We had both played football against the French army, and in my case we lost disastrously because they got us drunk in the champagne cellars of Moet & Chandon, at Epernay, before the match, and in Tony's case the French team told him: "You were promised a leave pass if you won, but we were told by the officers that if we lost we would be posted to Indo China to fight the Viet Minh." This was not long before the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Tony was always generous with tickets for the show when he was appearing in Oh Calcutta, so when Carl Sullivan suggested I accompany him in a taxi to the theatre to meet Tony to get a pair of tickets, I joined him. The tickets were for Carl's sister, Loretta, who was married to that great comedian Marty Feldman, and the show usually played to a full house except for those serious Indians who had taken their wives and children to see what they thought was a play about their home town, and had to hurry out with the kids when they realised what it really was, and the full cast, stark naked, danced on stage with Tony Booth bringing admiring glances from the ladies in the stalls. Oh Calcutta was Kenneth Tynan's play on words. The French "O, quelle cul tu as!" meaning, "Oh what an arse you have!".
One night, in The Flask, Carl said: "Look -- there's fifty thousand pounds worth of teeth at the bar."
Sitting in a row were Marie-Lise Goetz, former Vogue model, with her partner John Hurt, Patrick Wymark and Loretta and Marty Feldman. "They've all had their teeth done, by Frank Sinatra's dentist who comes over once a year, and charges £10,000."
We joined them, and Carl admired his new smile. Marty told me: "You know everybody thinks my parents objected to my marrying Loretta because she's a Catholic and I'm a Jew. That's not the real reason. The real reason is that my parents, like me, are strict vegetarians, and her father is an Irish pork butcher!"
Next day Carl told me of an unfortunate incident. Loretta had taken Marty to Keats restaurant, where he had inadvertently bitten into a French bread roll on the side plate, only to discovered that it was rock hard, and was only on display. His ten thousand pounds' worth of new teeth had clattered onto the plate.
Quote, from What's Left, part II of Tony Booth's autobiography: "I was greatly saddened by Patrick Wymark's death in 1970 and I attended his funeral service with three of his drinking companions. Afterwards the four of us piled into my car to follow the cortege. I was forced to stop at traffic lights, but as we watched the funeral procession move up Haverstock Hill towards Hampstead we were sure we would soon catch up. Despite the traffic I was able to keep an eye on the cortege as it made its way in the direction of Golders Green crematorium. Bringing up the rear, we followed sedately. As we entered the chapel a man handed us black paper skull caps to wear. Somewhat puzzled, we did as requested. Turning to one of my companions, Peter Kinsley, I whispered: "A Catholic service and a Jewish burial?" Peter muttered something about Patrick covering his options. It was only when the rabbi began the service we realized we were at the wrong funeral..."
Tony was at the entrance to the Fontainebleau HQ once when he saw an enormous black limousine draw up, chauffeur driven, with two tourists in the back. "Out stepped Lauren Bacall" Tony told me: "And then out stepped a dwarf, with a big noddy head and tiny legs, and I suddenly realised it was Humphrey Bogart!" Which leads me to the mysery that Tony left behind him when he was demobilized and left France for Liverpool.
Quote, from Vol. V of my memoirs, Gunner Strikes Back: "One Signalman, who had become an actor in England, had left a love child behind in Fontainebleau, not even bothering to find out later if he had a French son or a French daughter."
Tony had been having his ups and downs as an actor in his later years. Once, when he was signing on for Income Support, the clerk asked him if he would join him for drinks (on him) when he finished work. "I thought he was trying to pick me up, you know, but when he bought two large scotches he said: 'I'm retiring today, Mr. Booth. May I call you Tony? We've become like friends, really, haven't we? Thirty years in the job. My wife and I love your show on the telly, and I just wanted to be able to tell her tonight had I had a farewell drink with the famous Tony Booth on my retirement night!"
However fame does not pay electricity and gas bills, or put food on the table. He was in difficulties after his terrible accident when he was almost burnt to death, recounted in Vol. I of his autobiography. One day I suggested to Tony that we return to Fontainebleau and trace his offspring. We were having lunch in a restaurant next door to the Victoria Palace theatre, planning to write a script together for television, and he quite liked the idea of going back to France, and when I said to him: "I bet you can't even remember the woman's name." He said: "Yes I can: it's ------" But two minutes after he said it, I had forgotten it. I suggested that The Observer could do a story about it, and wrote to the Deputy Editor, who said the paper would treat it "with taste and discretion", but the next time we met he told me he had gone off the idea of going back to France. It appeared that someone had talked him out of it.
Tony had been having a torrid love affair with a lady doctor in Fontainebleau and Paris during his time as a soldier, and wrote about it in What's Left, calling her "a stunningly attractive woman in her late thirties." The beginning of Chapter Two, called Daydream Believer, quotes Jean Anouilh in Ardele (1949).
"There is love of course, and then there's life, its enemy."
In What's Left, the first part of Chapter Two deals with Tony's meeting with Nicole, a Communist and daughter of Communist parents from Lille. They go on a demo. in Paris to force the Government to bring in a minimum wage, and are attacked by police with batons. She introduces him to Edith Piaf and her lover Yves Montand, and to Charles Aznavour, in Piaf's dressing room, and to French culture and literature. Head over heels in love with this handsome young British soldier, she wanted him to stay on in France after his time in the army and study at the Sorbonne, but the army thought differently and all his pleas to his commanding officer brought the same reply: he had to return to the U.K. to be demobbed.
This is the only reference to a love affair in Fontainebleau in the book.
In the front of the book, Tony gives his family tree and lists seven wives, including the star of Coronation Street, Pat Phoenix, who married him on her deathbed, the ceremony filling all the newspapers with photographs at the time. He also lists eight daughters: Cherie, Lyndsey, Jenia, Bronwen, Lucy, Sarah, Emma and Joanna.
I was surprised when he said, during our lunch in Victoria: "I have another one -- in London."
"What if you have a son in France? It's surely worth finding out." I said. " There again, he could be a Gendarme!"
"Or a member of the National Front," he laughed.
I was curious when his book came out and I read his reasons for not returning to France after demobilisation: his father had had shabby treatment from his shipping company who paid only £500 compensation for an accident, a broken back, pelvis, legs, and a shattered left arm, leaving him unable to work again, and his mother trying to support the family by taking cleaning work, which meant to had to seek work quickly, any work, to earn money. He does not record the conversation when Nicole visited him and stayed in Liverpool, trying to persuade him to return to France, but says they parted sadly but as friends, and she told him that he would be welcome any time he wanted to return to Fontainebleau.
In his later years, when television parts became fewer, Tony worked hard at trying to secure better conditions for old age pensioners, still a staunch left wing fighter for the underdog. He often made speeches on behalf of pensioners' rights. Our script had run into the sand because of my heart condition, so I sent him a poem instead: it concerned the letters DNR on the records of patients over seventy, attached to the bottom of their beds in hospitals. The letters stood for Do Not Resucitate. It was, in effect, a death sentence for anyone old and alone who was taking up a hospital bed. The verses I sent to Tony described how these women had once worked as land girls and in factories making guns and tanks and munitions for their husbands and sons who were fighting in the war, and even though they had paid their National Health stamps during their working lives, they had now become useless in old age. At a crowded meeting in Manchester Tony read out the verses to the assembled pensioners. He had a standing ovation.
As Jean Anouilh wrote:
"There is love of course, and then there's life, its enemy."
The verses that Tony read out to the pensioners:
I haven’t seen the London Eye, nor have I seen The Dome
I’ve seen the world on my old TV, the one I had at home
For I was seventy five today, a very special date
At the foot of my bed they put a sign: “Do not resuscitate”
Once I was a land-girl, and then in a factory yard
The money there was better, but the hours were long and hard
We made the tanks and shells and planes, the ammo and the guns
We made the uniforms and boots for the husbands and the sons
We cheered the day of Victory and danced in all the streets
And praised the name Lord Beveridge, and paid our stamps each week
By then the war was over, so we just struggled on
With rationing and coupons, while the youngsters had their fun
The years slipped by so quickly, with memories galore
Of the good old days as a land-girl and on the factory floor
Now they call us “wrinklies” and don’t give up their seats
Or have any time to listen, to our old war-time feats
And in the ward beware this age: seventy to eighty-five
The doctors say: “They’ve had it. Why keep this lot
alive?
What war? What ache? What pain?
“They’re only bloody pensioners who do nothing but complain
I’ve swapped by little Nissan for a bigger German Merc.
So come on, nurse, let’s clear these beds, and get on with our work.”