Summer books 3: Ray Connolly

It would surely surprise anyone familiar with London’s Evening Standard only in its shrivelled, almost content-free current version to learn that it was once a substantial newspaper, a proper reflection of the city’s vitality. In the days when it was edited by Charles Wintour, its pages thrummed with big names as well with as the classified ads for flats and cars that paid their salaries: the likes of Alexander Walker, the film critic, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor, and Sam White, the Paris correspondent, who filed his column from the bar of the Hôtel de Crillon. And, of course, Ray Connolly, who succeeded Maureen Cleave as the byline attached to interviews with the pop stars and other showbiz celebrities of the time. On billboards outside newsagents, “BEATLE TO RETURN MBE” would inevitably refer to one of Connolly’s stories. It was an enviable gig, and he made the most of it.

Although he never gave up journalism, he moved beyond it in the early 1970s when he wrote the screenplays for two films, That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, which examined the years of his own youth with a fondly nostalgic eye and made a star out of David Essex. He went on to write TV and radio plays, novels, and books about John Lennon and Elvis Presley (his radio plays included a smart counterfactual called Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition, which imagined a future for the four Beatles had their stars not aligned with success).

Three years ago he caught Covid-19 in a very serious way, spending six months in hospital, most of that time in intensive care. When he emerged alive, somewhat to his own surprise, he needed to relearn some of the things he had previously taken for granted, such as how to walk. He also set to work on a memoir, just published under the title Born at the Right Time.

The story of his journey from a post-war Lancashire childhood (he was born in 1940) to Fleet Street is interesting for the sharp contrasts it draws with today’s world, in which such priority is given to ambition and career planning. But the real value of the book comes when he raids his own cuttings file for excerpts from his interviews with the celebrities of his era. Ray was an exceptionally good interviewer at a time when there were no filters between journalist and subject. A PR person would set the time and place of the appointment, and then retire gracefully. Ray’s gentle but persistent stammer was, he believes, a help in enlisting the sympathy of those answering his questions.

He was the person to whom Ringo Starr described the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh as being “just like Butlin’s”, and to whom Cynthia Lennon confessed that she “didn’t know the tricks” of how to stimulate John. When Ray asked Bob Dylan in 1969 why he always looked so moody, he got this reply: “When I ask photographers how to look, they always say, ‘Don’t smile.’ So I don’t.” Interestingly, when Dusty Springfield spoke to him for the first time about being attracted to girls (and afterwards he drove her back to the house where she was living with Norma Tanega), he and his editor decided not to highlight her responses in a piece that appeared under the headline “Dusty at 30”.

Don and Phil Everly — among his great heroes — talk to him about the origins of their hits. Don on writing “Till I Kissed You” on a place returning from Australia: “I’d fallen in love with a French girl called Liliane and I was afraid I’d never see her again. In those days Australia seemed like the end of the world.” Phil on performing “The Price of Love” in concert: “While Donald plays to the band, I like to look around the audience and maybe pick up a pretty face, a girl I’ll never see again. ‘You talk too much, you laugh too loud. You see her face in every crowd.'”

Away from music, Peter Fonda and Edward Fox behave as if still in character for Easy Rider and Edward and Mrs Simpson. Michael Caine talks while returning to London from Shepperton Studios in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce about his command of French and German and of the craft of acting: “Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view, I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.” Well, maybe just a bit when Terence Stamp and Anthony Newley turned down the lead role in Alfie.

Sharp assessments are made without leaving the subjects lying in a pool of blood, as would later become the Fleet Street fashion. Marc Bolan, the teenybop hero of 1972, sits in his flat in Maida Vale and claims that he can fly and make himself invisible. “Bolan was one of those stars who bubbled up in the vacuum left after the Beatles’ dissolution,” Connolly remarks.

There are stories about failures as well as successes in the movie business, the best of them being the protracted and painful saga of trying to get Bianca Jagger to star in the film version of Trick or Treat?, Ray’s 1975 novel, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Michael Apted. “A sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences”, it turned into a disaster both predictable and expensive.

Ray’s father was lost at sea during the 1944 landings in France. Unsurprisingly he developed an interest in talking to famous people about their war experiences, from Harry Secombe and Paul Raymond to Tony Benn, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who won the VC for bravery after flying 200 bombing missions to Germany and tells Connolly about being sent by Churchill to observe the nuclear explosion that destroyed Nagasaki: “One part of me was thinking in relief, ‘That’s it. The killing of six years is finished. And another part was thinking about the people who had just died.” Cheshire devoted the rest of his life to charitable work.

In part, this is the sort of memoir you might write because you want your children and grandchildren to know who you really were, trying answer the questions they might never get around to asking. At 80-odd, too, your recall is unlikely to be flawless, and it’s not worth quibbling here about the year Dylan performed in the UK with the Hawks or whether it was Stormy Tempest and the Hurricanes that Ringo played with before the Beatles. The value of the book is elsewhere: in the reminder of how a fine journalist got people to talk, and what happened when he spread his wings.

* Ray Connolly’s Born at the Right Time is published by Malignon.