How a husband reacts to the news that his wife is pregnant depends, it seems to me, on their personal circumstances. When Eve told me she was expecting, I was not at all sure that I was ready for fatherhood. I had read the literary mandarin Cyril Connoly’s book Enemies of Promise in which he stated that one undoubted enemy of a writer was the pram in the hall. A baby, therefore, was more than likely to stop me taking the risk of going freelance as Eve would obviously have to stop modelling at some stage. So a career in advertising was again the probable solution. I leafed through relevant magazines, sent a CV and my book of cartoons to a number of agencies and, in time, was offered a job as a copywriter which I knew it would be foolish to refuse.
The big hurdle was telling Eddy of my intention. I chose a Saturday morning in Pangbourne when he was fishing at the bottom of the garden.
He did not react kindly.
Did I realize how hard it had been for him to train me for the position I now held ? How difficult it had been for him to convince the Board that I should be made a director? Had I no sense of loyalty? Of gratitude? I put an end to the flow.
'Eve is expecting a baby, she wiill have to stop working and I can earn a great deal more in advertising than the firm can afford.' I said.
He stopped reeling in the little silver spoon at the end of his line, I watched it sink in the shallow water.
'I suppose it will bear my name?' he said testily.
I had not thought about it before, but any child of mine would not be his grandchild. The man was obsessed. It was a bitter comment which gave me a reason to turn on my heels and walk away.
The atmosphere at lunch time proved so deadly that Eve and I went back to London that afternoon. My mother was again the one to take the brunt of the situation, but she had at last hardened her attitude to the whole sad business and managed to cope.
Eve was very slim, wasp waisted, not anorexic, but thin enough for the gynaecologist to warn her that because, in her case, the pregnancy might not become very evident, she should resist the temptation to go on modelling for too long.
She told Digby Morton she would have to leave, he had not quite finished designing a dress for Queen Soraya of Persia, creating and fitting it on Eve, so begged her to stay until after the royal presentation.
On the day of the show all went well. She walked up and down the rostrum as elegantly as ever, a surprise party to bid her goodbye was thrown by the other models afterwards. The champagne flowed, a good time was had by all, but that night Eve woke up in great pain. Something was going very wrong with the baby.
I called the doctor, she was rushed to hospital, nothing could be done and she miscarried.
I paced the floor of the clinical corridor outside an emergency room and, when she was wheeled out, pale and distraught, she could only repeat again and again through unbearable tears 'It was a little boy...it was a little boy.'
They sedated her. I was told to go home and, numbed, I walked the empty night streets of London realizing that I had not, over the past months, been too concerned about what she had been going through. Suddenly this expected child had been prematurely born and died, a tiny unfinished human being which I had felt kicking magically inside her and which I had never imagined could be lost.
Eve remained in hospital for the next few days which were spent by both of us being very British, with stiff upper lips, pretending that the tragedy was not a tragedy and that we would get over it without difficulty.
Major Bill, who avoided unpleasantness at all costs, did not visit her, but Doris hardly left her side. My mother came once but found it difficult to handle the situation as she sensed that Eve did not want any display of emotion and Eddy, unexpectedly, rang me, offering help, financial or otherwise if we needed it and apologised for the unfair remark he had made when fishing at the bottom of the garden. His genuine sympathy and effort to overcome his own feelings helped towards a reconciliation but did not deter me from giving in my notice to the Board a while later.
It was agreed that I would not leave the firm for three months and after, would remain as a director of the company and be available as a consultant should my help be needed in the future.
By the end of April (1959) Eve recovered completely and we went alone to Spain for a holiday before I launched myself in my new madcap career.
Eve modeling for queen Soraya of Persia 1958
The play is set in the ruins of a house that has been
burned to the ground. As the curtain rises three young
men are sifting through the smoking ashes.
In September 1958 Eve and I drove up to Edinburgh for the dress rehearsals of The Aimless.
John Duncan and his troupe had taken over the Royal Arch Hall in Queen Street three days before and the set was already up. It was basic, the remains of a charred wall and a broken window against a blue sky, branches of a tree, rubble centre stage which would give off smoke if the fire officer gave his permission, a marble statue of Adonis stage left.
I watched a run through and wasn’t too impressed by the acting. But everyone knew their lines.
The dress rehearsal was the usual chaos. The lights didn’t work, the sound effects were not on cue, the branches of the tree got in the way of someone’s entrance, but the advance bookings were good.
Nerves, butterflies, stage fright, sickness, everyone concerned suffered them on the night. The curtain went up. They got through it. Genuine applause. Three curtain calls. I had no idea what to think.
I sat with Eve in the auditorium numbed. The shock entrance of the father, believed dead at the end of the first act, had worked well, the gay boy got a few laughs when they were not intended but coped, and tension had risen uncomfortably when he kissed the statue a little too sensually - a change from the original script to satisfy the censor. But no one had booed nor thrown rotten eggs and the audience had left in silent thought and whispered discussion.
We went back stage to congratulate the company in the crowded dressing room. Doubt as to their own success occupied each actor as they wiped off the greasepaint, then there was sudden silence.
I turned. In the doorway stood an effete, immaculately dressed man holding a cigarette between third and fourth finger of his right hand.
'I think you all d-did sp-splendidly,' he stuttered, for he suffered from this setback.
It was Kenneth Tynan.
'And you must be the writer,' he said to me. 'Having the boy kiss a statue was a b-brilliant way of expressing his homosexuality without pointing out that such a thing exists. I was curious to see how you’d get round the problem. Well done. And he was gone.
The first review by A.V.Coton, drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, came out mid week.
THE WIDOWER AND HIS SONS
Family analysis in fascinating plot.
Combing through the tangles of the Edinburgh ‘fringe’ one can find worthy plays dully
acted and also dull plays excitingly presented. The Aimless by André Launay is presented
for only a few performances by a mixed group of talents at the Royal Arch Hall. It is a
competent well designed play on a permanently interesting theme - the responsibility of fathers
towards their children and of children for their father’s actions. Its involved but plausible plot
concerns the stresses between a widower and his three sons whose lives reach a particular climax
when their hom is burned down and the three sons have to decide what their lives are about and
how much they owe to their father This is an irritating but nevertheless fascinating play whose
strong skeleton carries little attractive flesh. Its atmosphere Chekhovian, its language and situations
entirely of the 1950s.
This was followed by a mixture of good and bad notices with some unexpected and some obvious headlines:
NEW PLAY IN THE NIHILIST TRADITION. ( Glasgow Herald )
SPARKLES AND SHOCKS IN NEW PLAY. ( Daily express )
IT'S MERELY AIMLESS. (Daily Mail )
THIS PLAY IS TOO OBSCURE. (Edinburgh Evening News )
ANGRY YOUNG MEN BLAME FATHER (The Scotsman )
NEW ANGRY YOUNG MAN SPOUTS VENOM ( News Chronicle )
On Sunday, the last day, Kenneth Tynan’s anxiously awaited critique in the Observer had to be searched for in his long three column piece on the Edinburgh Festival.
André Launay’s THE AIMLESS, though feverishly ill acted, has a beguiling theme : the rational hatred
of three sons for their hypocritical father. Each of them, through being truthful, learns that truth destroys:
We all inhabit prisons from which we cannot escape without injuring somebody else. A defensible idea,
but one that needs subtler writing to defend it.
My first thoughts were whether these notices would be good enough to lead to a more professional production, my second thoughts were of how Eddy would react to the Telegraph review. It was the paper he read regularly on the train every morning.
John Duncan and his cast returned to Newcastle with mixed feelings about what had been achieved, Eve and I returned to London where I received congratulations on the phone from my mother and Pierre, complete indifference from Bill and Doris, and a wall of silence from Eddy who never once mentioned the play let alone asked to read it.
Over the following months I sent The Aimless to a number of producers all of whom rejected it, some kindly, asking to see anything else I might write in the future, but I quickly realized that I was out of step with the plays that were filling the theatres.
The label ‘Angry Young Man’ had been applied in the early 50s by the media to describe working class playwrights who were disillusioned by traditional English society. Though I had been similarly tagged, I was not a working class young man angry with middle class society. I was a middle class young man angry with my middle class surrogate father and with my interfering upper middle class in-laws. I had also weaned myself on Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan, Jean Anouilh with a bit of Tennessee Williams thrown in, not John Osborne, Arnold Wesker or Harold Pinter.
I did not exactly give up, but I decided to put writing for the theatre on the back burner for a while.
Then Eve informed me that she was pregnant.
John Duncan was eventually to become head of light entertainment at Yorkshire Television and Nicholas Ferguson, who played the young boy, became a successful television director on Coronation Street, East Enders and many other productions.
If life at times is magnificent or disastrous I do not believe that it is due to good or bad luck but rather the management or mismanagement of opportunities. However, shortly after my new friend and mentor, Jimmy Eilbeck advised me to go into advertising and I was puzzling over how I could extricate myself from the family firm without causing a cataclysmic upheaval, I received what can only be called a "lucky" phone call. It was from a senior manager at Waitrose, the supermarket people, who was head hunting capable young men with knowledge of the luxury food trade. I went secretly for an interview, was offered a trial period of employment in their buying department for three times more than I was earning, and gleefully informed Eddy who, though incensed, realized that I might be seriously tempted to take up the proposal.
A conference of V.Benoist.Ltd shareholders was convened. My worth to the company discussed. I was bi-lingual, knew my foodstuffs, knew the trade, was popular with customers, so was offered an adequate increase in salary and a directorship with a few shares thrown in.
If I had been at all entrepreneurial I would have been over the moon about the appointment, but the fact that I was now a company director meant remarkably little to me except that I now had to attend board meetings which I found extremely tedious. Eddy sat at the head of the table as Chairman and Managing Director, while other directors did their best to look interested in what the accountant had to say about profits and losses though probably day dreaming about their forthcoming week-end golf.
I then made an astonishing discovery.
Eddy was not the major shareholder he had led me to believe. If, for instance, a take over was approved by others, we Launays could be booted out at the drop of a bowler hat. All he had put me through to keep the business in the family was based on a fantasy of his wishful thinking. The firm had never been a family concern.
It was my turn to be incensed.
I had mismanaged an opportunity and could not reasonably leave for at least a year, but I now had an office of my own, and a typewriter, so I vented my discontent by writing a very angry play - The Aimless - about a widowed father and his three sons who live in a state of deadlock in an old country house till one of them burns the place down.
At the time, Kenneth Tynan of the Observer, considered by the majority of people in the theatre business to be one of the fiercest dramatic critics of the twentieth century, organized a play competition to encourage new work, so I sent in my opus not at all confident that it would even be read.
A month or so later I received a letter from Mr Tynan himself congratulating me on being one of the finalists in the competition out of two thousand entries. My play had come third, a cheque was enclosed, he was sure I would have no problems getting a production. I was stupefied.
Within a week I received another letter, this time from a Mr John Duncan of Newcastle who had read of the award and got my address from the Observer. He was taking a company of semi professional actors to the 1958 Edinburgh Festival to perform a play on the Fringe and was looking for something new. Could I send him a copy of The Aimless ?
I did this immediately and got a long answer by return which astounded me.
Mr Duncan wanted to produce the play, would not be able to offer me much more than a chance to see it in performance and went on to analyse it with stimulating perception. He had detected some of the more abstract ideas I had had trouble insinuating in the dialogue and his suggestions on how certain scenes could be staged, the way the actors should express the lines, were impressive. He was clearly an astute theatrical director.
He wanted to meet me before the next `term’ began, which suggested he was a professor at a drama school. I imagined him to be an elderly academic gentleman from whom I would learn a great deal and wrote back that I was available at any time he chose.
In his next letter, with more incisive analysis of the play, he named a date. Would it be convenient to meet outside the Collegiate Theatre in Bloomsbury ? The venue fitted my idea of the type of character he would turn out to be.
On the appointed day at the appointed hour I drove round Bloomsbury Square in my open car, parked outside the Collegiate Theatre and waited. The only person in sight was a long haired youth in an old threadbare overcoat, nervously pacing up and down the pavement massaging his neck as though he had mumps.
This uncouth youth, eighteen years old if a day, suddenly stopped to stare at the car, looked at me quizzically and in a Geordie accent that would have made Eve’s father suffer an apoplexy, addressed me.
'Are you Aundrey Loonay?'
Professor Duncan, I decided, had obviously been delayed inside the Collegiate Theatre and had sent one of his students to tell me.
'Yes, I am,' I replied.
'I’m John Dooncan,' he said and stretched a long arm across the passenger seat to shake my hand.
I was so taken aback that it obviously showed..
'Were you expecting someone older?' he asked, grinning 'Most people do. But then you don’t look mooch like what you write, I thought you’d be a bit more untidy, like me.'
We went to a pub and sat down in a corner.
'We’ve got a problem,' he started straight away.' I don’t think the Lord Chamberlain will allow the queer lad to kiss the farmer’s boy.'
We were in 1957. The Sexual Offence Act decriminalising homosexual acts was not to be passed for ten years, and the Theatre Act, abolishing censorship on stage was not to come into effect till a year after that.
'I’ve got just the right actor for the little poofter,' he went on, 'and I’ll play the older brother myself so we only need to find the Dad and the middle son.'
He would rehearse in Newcastle. He had an architect student friend who would design and build the set, a printer friend would take care of the programmes. He had already booked the venue in Edinburgh, all he wanted from me was an alternative to the homosexual content without losing the quirky element of the plot.
My mind drifted. I wasn’t sure that putting the play in his hands for a whole year was a good idea. I could wait for a more professional offer, but then none might be made. Apart from his letters, which suggested he knew what he was doing, I didn’t know anything about him.’
'What do you do in Newcastle?' I asked.
'Teach geography and history to eleven year olds, and drama. I’ve produced lots of plays before with amateurs and semi pros, if that’s what you’re worrying about. And I’m twenty six. And I rang Kenneth Tynan who said a Fringe production of the play would be ideal to gauge an audience’s reaction.'
On the strength of that, I committed myself there and then and worried for a year whether I had managed this opportunity correctly.
Kenneth Tynan, dramatic critic
'If you are going to stab your mother-in-law during a deadly quarrel, consider stabbing her with Sheffield stainless steel...'
That was, more or less, the theme of my third propaganda radio play for the BBC Arabic Features Unit, promoting the benefits of British industrial products, the first two having urged listeners in the Middle East to beware of Syphilis and Gonorrhea..
I did not think I would be contracted for more but, during 1956-57 I wrote forty of these offerings which proved sufficiently lucrative for me to hire-purchase my first car ( a beautiful sky blue Sunbeam Talbot coupé ) and throw a lavish party to celebrate.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I personally did not throw the lavish party, I was only a part host.
One day, in a pub round the corner from Bush House after the recording of a broadcast, I met a most extrovert character by the name of Jimmy Eilbeck.
Jimmy was a tall, 30 year old lanky energetic man, a head of curly ginger hair, an unruly ginger moustache, spectacles with thick lenses and a strong Liverpool accent. He was a senior editor on the Dailly Mirror, had devised a new publication – The Woman’s Sunday Mirror - which he intended to launch with an exceptionally original party on an island somewhere in the middle of the Thames.
'I’ve got an island in the middle of the Thames,' I said lightly.
And the following Sunday he turned up at Pangbourne and decided that our island would be the ideal location for the star studded night of Fleet Street mayhem he had in mind. The world and his wife would be invited. Money was no object.
The weekend of his preference coincided with the fortnight when Eddy went down to Pau to visit his mother for the first time since his accident. As my mother badly needed a release from the cheerless life she was leading, she happily agreed to be Jimmy Eilbeck’s joint hostess along with Eve and myself and invitations were sent out to a list of impressive names for: A Barbecue on Satan’s Isle. Dress Primitive. No Swimming - the river is 18ft deep, the current deadly, two experienced swimmers have drowned here.
The lawns of Weir Pool by which Satan’s Isle is approached are private property. Any indiscretion should only becommitted in the long grass of the island.
The day of the launch in June fortunately turned out to be one of the driest and warmest of the year. More than three hundred guests arrived causing a fair amount of disruption in the village.
While the invited guests gathered on the island to drink champagne and munch away at a roasted pig or two, local residents took to dinghies and punts to row around and stare at the unexpected celebrities of the time. Censorious news editors and journalists formed the nucleus of the event, fashion models abounded, several stars from stage and screen, Frankie Vaughan a then No 1 pop idol struggled with a 3-piece band to be heard above the water cascading down from the weir.
At the height of the party I noticed that Jimmy Eilbeck himself was not around. I eventually found him in the dining room of the house feverishly typing out an imagined account of the evening for the morning press and phoning in the reports to rival newspapers.
'It would be great if Diana Dors fell into the water right now, could you give her a shove?' he said to me between calls.
I read some of his copy, invented snippets of what he would have really wished: A baroness arriving in a minimal costume of sequined fig leaves, a Hollywood actor in white tuxedo getting stuck up a willow tree while imitating Tarzan. A member of parliament spotted in the bushes with a starlet....
'The majority of people lead terribly dull lives and are crying out for excitement,' he said.. 'The successful press supplies this. Whether things are true or not is of no importance whatsoever.' This ten years before Rupert Murdoch acquired The News of the World.
As dawn broke everyone drifted off home, I went to bed and, later that morning, I found Jimmy on the island sitting at a table working away on the next edition of his new paper.
'Any chance of me writing articles for you?' I asked. I’d shown him my cartoon book and he’d read a couple of my radio scripts
'You’re good at dialogue,' he said, not looking up, 'but that’s not the same as journalism. Stick to plays, get away from Daddy, and if you can’t risk life without a regular income try advertising, they’ll love the way your imagination runs riot with inessentials.'
I seldom saw him after the party, but eventually took his advice.
The success of The Woman’s Sunday Mirror went to Jimmy’s head and, two years later , after getting into uncontrollable debt trying to launch another newspaper, he threw himself in front of an underground train at Stratford East station.
With Diana Dors
Jimmy Eilbeck working at the bottom of the garden
Jimmy Eilbeck
There is nothing like a tiny bit of success to boost one’s confidence.
The tiny bit of success I experienced was the publication of my book of cartoons coupled with my disengagement from Eddy which freed me from the restrictions in my head that held me back from attempting to write more professionally.
One evening when glancing through the pages of the TV Mirror, a rival magazine to the Radio Times that listed independent programmes, I read of a competition for a 30-minute television play they were organizing in conjunction with the Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary Literature.
I unearthed my rejected plays and stories and found an idea that might work as a half hour comedy. Entitled The Man on a Balcony it concerned two unsuccessful actors staying in a hotel at the Cannes Film Festival who go to the ends of the earth to get noticed by the media. It was quite well plotted, I re-worked the dialogue, found a more exciting surprise ending, sent it off to the competition and thought no more about it.
A few weeks later I received a telegram from the TV Mirror informing me that I had won a prize for my entry and, the next day, a letter from the Cheltenham Festival organizers inviting me to the prize giving ceremony the following month. I was amazed.
Eve and I went to Cheltenham for the prize giving and were received at the Town Hall by a Festival hostess who showed us to front row seats in an auditorium packed with serious looking academics.
Six judges walked on to the stage and took their seats at a long table. Three were best selling authors at the time - Robert Henriquez, Eric Linklater, and John Moore, there was also Gilbert Harding, a notable TV personality of the time, and John Fernald the head of RADA ( The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art ).
Prizes were awarded for high literary merit to writers who had entered competitions for works of non-fiction, biographies and novels. This took a good hour with the introduction of each winner followed by their thank you speeches, then I heard my name called out by John Fernald.
'André de Launay ...' he started ( I had used the de because I thought it would impress )....has written a short play with such excellent humour that I think it will be most effective for the teaching of comedy technique to my drama students and certainly deserves a television production.......'
There was a bit more about the apparent brilliance of the comedy followed by applause. I got up on stage, received a cheque, handshakes and pats on the back and returned to my seat, elated and numb.
Eve and I followed everyone to a buffet supper where we hob knobbed with more well known authors, publishers and television people. It was the first time we were mixing with high octane personalities and I expected to feel out of my depth, but some knew of my cartoon book and others had seen Eve in fashion magazines, so I grew a few inches taller and hoped an inner smirk of higher self esteem was not too visible.
In time The Man on a Balcony proved to be a little gem It was published by Samuel French and used as a curtain raiser by many amateur dramatic societies ( still is ), produced at RADA for a number of years to teach up and coming stars how to get laughs from an audience, was the first play to be televised as a colour experiment on a BBC closed circuit, and chosen as the centre piece of The World Our Stage, an entertainment to celebrate the 21st anniversary of BBC Television, starring Bob Monkhoue and Peggy Cummings.
Though I thought about leaving the food business and launching out as a free lance script writer, I sensibly decided to wait for a contact of some kind from a television company or agent before taking such a precarious step and, in time, an offer came from a quite unexpected quarter. I was rung by a radio producer from the BBC Arabic Features Unit who needed someone to turn out quick half hour propaganda plays.
I immediately went to Bush House and was interviewed by the Egyptian gentleman who had rung me. He suggested I submit a trial drama, twenty minutes of dialogue which translated would come out at thirty minutes in Arabic. He had a translator on his staff.
'Any particular subject ?' I asked.
'Oh yes,' he said, 'Venereal Disease.' We need to subtly warn the younger population of the Arab speaking world about the dangers of indulging in indiscriminate intercourse.
The actors on the set of the play "The Man on the balcony"
Bob Monkhoue and Peggy Cummings
The publication of my book of cartoons, innocent and lighthearted as it was, did not bring the abundance of joy I had anticipated to either Simone ( my mother ) nor Eddy. My mother, who was a competent artist when drawing Christmas and birthday cards for the family, appreciated what I had done but, again, had to put up with Eddy who saw the slim volume as another triviality which threatened any serious interest I might have in the merchandising of succulent sausages.
At the office he was unable to hide his irritation with me and, one day, having had enough of this unwarranted melodrama, I decided to take the bull by the horns, put an end to the deceptions that had clouded my life since I was fourteen, and bring the matter of our true relationship out into the open.
I rang my mother to warn her of my intention. She sighed very deeply, agreed that things could not get much worse, admitted that she too had had enough and wished me luck.
I invited Eddy for lunch and chose the Café Royal to add a little piquancy to the forthcoming debacle. We ordered the meal, discussed matters concerning the kitchen staff, the van drivers, the clients that did not pay their bills, then I changed the subject to my sister in France, always a favoured topic. This enabled me to mention that I had always been surprised how different she and I were. She was so much more serious and less fickle than me, I ventured, then added 'I’ve often wondered if she was actually my real sister...blood related...I mean.'
Taken aback, he looked straight at me, remained silent for what seemed an eternity, then grimly launched into an angry little speech which I suspected had been rehearsed and honed many times in his head ready for the day when he would use it.
'I am not your father', he said quite bluntly. 'This tragedy has caused your mother and I very many difficulties, not the least of which has been your attitude towards your responsibilities. You are very much like her and her mother, believing that your own amusement comes before anything else regardless of other people’s feelings. You are, of course, not to blame for your mother's flagrant disloyalty, but I hope that you will understand how hard it has been for me to accept the fact that you are not my son and appreciate all that I have done for you since you were born. I am an honourable man and will continue doing my duty as head of the family. I will not ignore your existence but hope that you will be grateful that I did not throw you out with your mother but took pity on both of you when I learned of her infidelity.'
I was numbed by his rancour.. I had been prepared for a sensible, possibly emotional analysis of the situation both past and present, explanations of why there had been misunderstandings between him and my mother before I was born, whether love had ever played any part in our lives, but rationality was out of the question.
I looked down, speechless for a while, then asked him, with a certain amount of fear and trepidation, if he knew who my real father was.
'That is a subject which you had better discuss with your mother,' he answered, dryly adding, as he pushed his chair back, 'I will leave you to settle the bill since you invited me.'
He gripped his walking stick, displayed the difficulty he had in standing up to remind me, perhaps, that the car crash had added injury to insult, and made his way out of the restaurant.
I sat at the table for a while longer, feeling gutted yet incredibly relieved.
It was over There would be no more lies, no more duplicity. The situation was at last honest between us. Blood might be thicker than water, but water was crystal clear. I was now free of parental authority.
Wrong.
When I got home that evening, Eve was not in a good mood.
'I told Daddy that we were thinking of going to Spain in July for a holiday,' she said, 'and he’s decided that he and Mummy will come too. I don’t think I can put him off the idea.'
Major William Ekin, more fondly called ‘Bill’ by everyone, unexpectedly turned out to be a problem. Though he was a genial Pickwickean character and bon viveur whom one could not possibly dislike, he dominated his daughter.
Whereas I had found the strength to flap my wings, risk crashing to earth but had now flown off to a land of promising adventure, Eve allowed her father to clip her wings and so never quite managed to leave the nest.
Though Doris was only troublesome because she never contradicted her husband, both interfered with our lives on all levels throughout our twenty years of marriage and, sadly, proved to be partly responsible for our eventual divorce.
Eddy, Simone, Doris and Bill
Bill and Simone discussing the marriage of their offspring
Eve and I were married on 27th March 1954 at St James’s Church, Down Street in Mayfair, the reception held at the Naval and Military Club round the corner. It was a wedding with society pretences enjoyed by all and, for me, like jumping from a frying pan of simmering chipolata sausages into a gold plated salver of ornate elegance.
From the moment we returned from a brief honeymoon in Paris my life of live patés, venison pies and sturgeon eggs was eclipsed by the glamour of Eve’s new world which I embraced with fervour.
Up till then I had known little about fashion. I had heard of Balmain, Chanel, Dior and Givenchy, had glanced at their creations in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, but not with that much interest. Now I was thrown in at the deep end. The haute couture names of John Cavanagh, Digby Morton, Hardie Amies, Hartnell and Worth became part of my life, while crêpe de chine, grosgrain, organza, piqué, taffeta and other such words were added to my daily vocabulary.
I was proud to see Eve in the limelight, going to her fashion shows and accompanying her to all the social engagements connected with the new collections. What took place on the catwalk was glamorous, even theatrical, and I loved it all.
We moved into a very pleasant rented apartment off Holland Park Avenue and most evenings were more than content leading the happy domestic life.
Meanwhile, back at the factory I was appointed sales manager which impressed no one but enabled me to escape from the office to the peace and comfort of our clients’ cocktail lounges where I sat in great comfort with pen and notepad to write short stories or playlets but, in fact, mostly doodled while waiting for inspiration. I drew countless pictures of Eve modelling extravagant clothes and ludicrous hats, which amused her enough to suggest I should develop the sketches into cartoons and try to get them published.
I bought a block of cartridge paper, a special pen and Indian ink and started on the idea in earnest. The result was a series of 12 humorous drawings which I titled I Married a Model, depicting the ups and downs of our lives. I sent these to the editor of She Magazine whom I had sat next to at a fashion show, she published them all in one edition under ther fun name Droo, they impressed a director of Macdonalds the publishers who was himself married to a model, and he commissioned a book of 60 illustrations to be aimed at the Christmas present market.
The thin volume was launched in October1957 with a fair amount of razzle dazzle. Various newspapers and magazines featured photos of Eve and I posing as in the cartoons, and a film producer bought an option of the film rights.
At long last I perceived a light of creative success at the end of the grimy factory tunnel.
