Annie was surprisingly nervous about acting and had a respect for Vanessa and her classical theatre work. She never hid her vulnerability and perhaps never realised how magnetic she was as Jenny Diver. Hearing her sing was one of the joys of that production. We remained friends until she died in New York aged eighty-nine.
As Jenny Diver, Annie was the star tart and Diana, Pat, Stella and I were her supporting blousy girls. Eleanor Fazan was the choreographer. She was patience itself, as well as creating some unusual dance numbers. I’m a terrible dancer, but Diana and Pat were irritatingly brilliant. Stella died in 1985 but Pat and Diana are still in my life. Pat later became famous as Magenta in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show; and the marvellous Diana Quick was superb in Brideshead Revisited and wrote a brilliant book, A Tug on the Thread, about her discovery of family connections to the British Raj. To my eyes, they were both frighteningly sophisticated; they smoked pot and went to clubs and knew about jazz and fashion. I had never even seen marijuana before and I was deeply impressed and rather shocked; it was just something I’d never done. I was quite po-faced with them about it, until they made it quite clear that I was a pathetic idiot and I didn’t have to smoke if I didn’t want to, but they were going to. I don’t think it made the slightest difference to their work. Stella, who was sixty to our twenty-somethings, was rather appalled too but she smoked like a chimney and didn’t complain. For the record, I still know nothing about marijuana or any drug, and don’t want to. My drugs are chopped liver and cheesecake — probably equally damaging, but they taste better.
Vanessa Redgrave and Ba got on like a house on fire. That surprised me because they came from very different backgrounds. They were also miles apart politically. Nobody else in The Threepenny Opera company was the slightest bit interested in Vanessa’s politics, nor the ideals of the Workers Revolutionary Party — most certainly not Ba, who was an ardent Edward Heath fan. By then, I was a convinced socialist; it was around this time that I joined the WRP and leafleted people and signed petitions and actually went to the Blackwater Estuary summer camp (but that’s a story for another chapter). In fact, the whole cast was England in microcosm: Joe Melia, whom I deeply disliked but at the same time admired for his acting, was the son of Italian immigrants. He went to Downing College, Cambridge, but never spoke about that to me. All he wanted to talk about was football. At that time, and foolishly, I scorned football (now I am a strong Arsenal supporter). One night we were all on stage, waiting to begin the show in our places behind the ‘Iron’ (the front stage curtain). Joe was bemoaning an Arsenal defeat the previous night. I laughed scornfully; Joe snarled at me, ‘You silly cunt!’ and I slapped his face. Curtain up! I cannot substantiate the widely held belief among the cast that he slept with both Vanessa and Annie (I never dared ask either of them), but Ba definitely wasn’t an admirer.
Victor Maddern was another cheeky chappie; a terrific character actor in British films and a sweet guy. He had a mushroom farm and every week brought punnets of mushrooms for the cast and left them at the stage door for us to take home. Arthur Mullard, another definitely working-class actor, I got to know better later, when we did voice-overs. Every night after the show he went back to his council flat in Islington, although he died a millionaire. Famously cockney, he was once asked by a commercials director if he could change his accent to be more upper-class. Silly request. He was always begging me to suck him off. The excuse I gave was because he had never changed his jumper, not once in the entire run and I just didn’t fancy being that close to old wool. I read later that he’d abused his daughter and his wife had committed suicide. We knew nothing of that then but the news made me shiver.
Henry Woolf was the other Jew in the cast. Short like me, and massively intelligent, it turned out he was Harold Pinter’s best friend.One day he said, ‘You would do anything to live life on your own terms’. I was shocked by his perspicacity. He was a good actor, a brilliant critic, but left the business and became an academic in Saskatchewan.
I became particularly fond of Hermione Baddeley; she would hold court in her dressing room, before and after the show, sharing memories of her life in theatre, always pouring out gin for me, wine for the others. Hermione had been nominated for an Oscar for Room at the Top; her older sister, Angela, played Mrs Bridges in Upstairs, Downstairs. I liked her; perhaps because she was a (closet) lesbian; her girlfriend Lady Joan Ashton-Smith hosted our first night party, in her stylish all-white flat, designed by Sibyl Colefax. At that party I met David Bailey, the photographer. He was short, cockney, with a sharp grin and the air of someone who deliberately refused to show respect for anyone. He said to me, ‘You’re an interesting bird. Come to my studio, I’ll photograph you.’
I wish I had.
I used to walk home after the show, past all the prostitutes who gathered outside the stage door in Denman Street. I became friendly with one of them, a pretty Irishwoman, and used to talk to her every night. I asked her, ‘Why are you doing this work?’ She explained, ‘Ah, well, I’ve got a little boy and I want to look after him. This way, I can send him to a good school and he’ll have a proper upbringing and a good education. I do it for him. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.’ I said, ‘Do you do whatever they ask?’ She said, ‘Well, I just don’t like them kissing me. I won’t let them kiss me. That’s one thing I don’t allow. But they can do whatever else they like.’ I enjoyed talking to this lady, hearing news about her son — but I never connected my encounters with this real-life prostitute with my role in the show. She was light years away from my Nelly!
Barbara Windsor was fabulous. Of course, she’s famous for her Carry On films, but before that she had been part of Joan Littlewood’s company at Stratford East and loved theatre. She announced at our first conversation: ‘Miriam, I’m a star.’ And pointed to the gold star affixed to her dressing-room door. I asked her about the Krays, whom she had known when they ran London crime. ‘They were gentlemen,’ she said. ‘When I came into the room, they stood up.’ She knew she was special but she worked hard and took her work seriously. She gave an interview to the Observer during our rehearsals. I love this extract: ‘ «Well, dear,» said Miss Windsor, «I’ve always voted Conservative, if that’s what you mean. Most actors do.» She said that apart from Jennie Lee, Labour governments were bad for the profession: they stuck the prices up. «Of course, we all know Vanessa’s a raving socialist, but she’s a lovely girl, so you just don’t mention E. Heath in her company.» «Brecht?» «No, dear, I don’t know him. We used to call Joan Littlewood „Mother Courage“. „Barb,“ she’d say, „you must do me a bit of Brecht one day. It would be nice for you.“»’
I’d never been an understudy before, but I learnt my lines dutifully and they made a costume for me, as I was much fatter than Ba. Our understudy rehearsals were run by Keith Hack, whom I’d known at Cambridge. He used to rehearse us in the Stalls Bar at the back of the auditorium.
One day, as I turned up at the stage door on the Saturday before the matinee, relaxed and happy, the stage manager grabbed me and said, ‘Miriam, you’re on.’ I thought he was joking. I said, ‘Stop it. Don’t do that to me.’ He said, ‘No, really, Miriam, you are. You have to go now and get your costume sorted. Barbara has a sore throat. She’s off till Monday, so you’ll have two shows to do.’