Mr Lennard, as it happened, turned out not to have the sharpest eye in the business. I wasn’t the only actor finding it tough; the others who used to hang out with me waiting for work around this time included Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. And all this while Mr Lennard had dozens of people under contract whose names are entirely absent from the annals of movie history. Despite his advice, I picked myself up, yet again, and kept on going, surviving on the odd small part. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that some of my friends were beginning to get the odd big part. Sean Connery, for instance, who had originally been discovered in a gym by a casting director looking for some slightly more convincing American sailors than the usual British chorus line for South Pacific, had got the lead role in the TV play Requiem for a Heavyweight. I came on in the last scene. Then my friend Eddie Judd got the starring role in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire; I played the policeman – and I didn’t even manage that very well. And Albert Finney, playing opposite the legendary Charles Laughton in The Party, was receiving rave notices for his performance – and rightly so. Meanwhile, I’d hit a new low. I turned up at one film audition, was called in, opened the door and the casting director shouted, ‘Next!’ before I’d even opened my mouth to say hello. I really couldn’t see what I’d done wrong – and it turned out I hadn’t done anything wrong, except grow too tall. The star of the film was the famously short Alan Ladd and if you were above the height mark they had chalked on the door as you went into the room, you were automatically disqualified.
But slowly – certainly more slowly than some of my friends – bigger parts began to come my way, and more often. I did another Dixon of Dock Green and then I was offered the job of understudy to Peter O’Toole in The Long and the Short and the Tall, by Willis Hall, a play about a British unit fighting the Japanese in the Malayan jungle in 1942, one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers. This was regular money and a chance to work with friends – Robert Shaw and Eddie Judd were also in the all-male cast – but it was a heart-stopping experience. The play was a huge success, because Peter O’Toole was brilliant, but he – as we all did – liked a drink and he sometimes cut things pretty fine. Once he came hurtling through the stage door just as the curtain was about to go up, casting his clothes off and shouting to me, ‘I’m here! I’m here! No need to go on!’ as he ran.
When Peter went off to make Lawrence of Arabia – the film that would rocket him to stardom – I took over his part in The Long and the Short and the Tall on tour. Playing one of the leads in a really good play with a talented cast (the other was the exceptional Frank Finlay) was just what I needed to give me my confidence back and I returned to London after four months travelling the country certain, once again, that I was on the right path. When I got back I moved in to a shared house in Harley Street with ten other guys, including a young actor called Terence Stamp – a fellow Cockney, like me – whom I had met on tour. I’d taken Terry under my wing and initiated him into some of the secrets of a happy touring life, including how to grab the best room in the boarding house and the rather more specialised significance of the Ivor Novello show The Dancing Years. This show was almost always on tour somewhere in the country and if you coincided with it, your luck was in. Set in Ruritania, it featured a large cast of village maidens and village lads and was known in the trade as The Dancing Queers as the village lads always seemed to be gay. This left a crowd of village maidens at something of a loss – although not for long if Terry and I were in town.
Unfortunately there was one lesson I didn’t teach Terry, which is never to reveal a friend’s whereabouts. I was in bed one morning in Harley Street sleeping off a hangover when I was roughly shaken awake. Two big men in ill-fitting suits loomed over me. ‘Maurice Joseph Micklewhite?’ It had been a long time since anyone had called me that; it must be serious. ‘You are under arrest for the non-payment of maintenance to Patricia and Dominique Micklewhite.’ ‘How did you know where I was?’ I asked as they escorted me to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court. ‘A Mr Stamp was very helpful,’ one of them replied enigmatically. If I got out of this mess, I vowed, Terry would be sorted out.
In fact, the policemen were surprisingly sympathetic. They could see I had no money, and they could see I was hungry and they treated me to a real English breakfast on the way. It was the best meal I’d had for months. When I got to the cells, however, reality struck. I was put in with a man who, I assumed, was a psychopath because he just sat staring at me intently until he was taken up to the court. All around me was the sound of nutters and drunks yelling and swearing and sobbing and occasionally letting rip with monumental farts. This was it, I said to myself. I am never, ever going to get myself in a situation like this again.
As I sat there, feeling sorry for myself, a warder shouted: ‘Who wants the last bit of cake?’ He was drowned out by the nutters and drunks all clamouring. I wasn’t going to demean myself further, so I just sat quietly and then I heard the warder outside my cell. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I see you in Dixon of Dock Green the other night?’ ‘Yes,’ I said and waited for him to take the piss out of me for it. Instead he opened the little window and pushed a plate with the last slice of cake through it and went off without another word.
When I finally got to the courtroom, Pat and her lawyer were there. We had been divorced for some time by now and I hadn’t seen her for several years. She looked good – expensively dressed in a fur coat and impeccably made-up. I, on the other hand, looked terrible. It wasn’t just the hangover – my clothes were shabby and crumpled where I’d slept in them. But I had nothing to lose and as I looked round the court I realised that this was just another audience. Dixon of Dock Green had gone down well with the warders downstairs, so I launched into an impassioned plea to be allowed to go free so I could take up my (non-existent) part in the next episode. Most of those present were fans of the programme because I sensed a slight defrosting of the atmosphere and I warmed to my theme. I had only got through about half of my speech when I realised that the magistrate was shouting, ‘Shut up!’ It was the third time he’d tried to stop me. I paused for breath and he leapt in. ‘How much do you have in your pockets, young man?’ I turned them out: three pounds ten shillings. ‘Then that is what you shall pay each week in maintenance,’ he said. ‘And if I see you back here again for this offence, I will send you to prison.’ No chance, I thought. As I left the court I risked a smile at Pat. To my surprise, she smiled back. I only saw her a few times after that, with our daughter Dominique. We remained on friendly terms but eventually she disappeared from my life altogether and she died of cancer in 1977.