Unmasked

Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Andrew Lloyd Webber 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 Cover illustration © Bob King Creative Ltd.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Excerpts from ‘That’s My Story’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by EMI Music Publishing Mills Music Limited and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from ‘Come Back Richard Your Country Needs You’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by Novello and Company Ltd and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from Evita – Lyrics by Tim Rice © Evita Music Limited/Universal. Extracts taken from ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems and ‘The Naming of Cats’, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot © Set Copyrights Ltd and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber. Excerpts from Aspects of Love – Lyrics by Don Black & Charles Hart © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from The Phantom of the Opera – Lyrics by Charles Hart, Additional Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe © The Really Useful Group Limited.

Title page art courtesy of Bob King Creative Ltd.

While every effort has been made to obtain permission from the photographers and copyright holders of the pictures used in this book, the author and publishers apologise to anyone who has not been contacted in advance or credited.

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Source ISBN 9780008237592

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008237622

Version 2018-07-09

For my fabulously un-PC Auntie Vi, most of whose

sayings I could not possibly share in 2018.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Overture and Beginners

1. Perseus & Co.

2. Some Enchanted Ruin

3. Auntie Vi

4. A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn’t Taste Very Nice in the First Place

5. “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?”

6. Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice

7. Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas

8. Elvis with Mellotron and Tambourines

9. Any Dream Won’t Do

10. “Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?”

11. Love Changes Everything, But . . .

12. JCS Meets RSO

13. Jesus Goes to Broadway

14. A Bad Case of the Edward Woodwards

15. Suddenly There’s a Valet

16. Syd

17. Driverless Juggernauts Hurtling Down a Hill

18. Eva and Juan

19. The Long Hot Summer and the Sound of a Paraguayan Harp

20. The Song that Cleared the Dance Floors

21. Imogen and Niccolò

22. Variations

23. Really Useful

24. Tell Me on a Sunday

25. “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency”

26. Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face

27. Mr Mackintosh

28. “All the Characters Must Be Cats”

29. Growltiger’s Last Stand

30. Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers

31. Song and Dance, and Sleep

32. “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented”

33. Miss Sarah Brightman

34. “Brrrohahaha!!!”

35. Requiem

36. Epiphany

37. “Big Change from Book”

38. Year of the Phantom

39. In Another Part of the West End Forest . . .

40. Mr Crawford

41. “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!”

Playout Music

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

I have long resisted writing an autobiography. Autobiographies are by definition self-serving and mine is no exception. It is the result of my nearest and dearest, aided and abetted by the late great literary agent Ed Victor, moaning at me “to tell your story your way.” I meekly agreed, primarily to shut them up. Consequently this tome is not my fault.

I intended to write my memoirs in one volume and I have failed spectacularly. Even as things are you’ll find very little about my love of art which, along with architecture and musical theatre, is one of my great passions. I decided the saga of how I built my rather unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art collection belongs elsewhere. The dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully – at least for the moment.

This medium sized doorstop judders to a halt at the first night of The Phantom of the Opera. Quite how I have been able to be so verbose about the most boring person I have ever written about eludes me. At one point I had a stab at shoehorning my career highlights into a taut tight chapter, rather like Wagner brilliantly packs his top tunes into his operas’ overtures. This was a dismal failure. The only thing I have in common with Wagner is length.

So here is part one of my saga. If you are a glutton for this sort of thing, dive in, at least for a bit. If you aren’t, I leave you with this thought. You are lucky if you know what you want to do in life. You are incredibly lucky if you are able to have a career in it. You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

OVERTURE AND BEGINNERS

Before me there was Mimi.

Mimi was a monkey. She was given to my mother Jean by a Gibraltan tenor with a limp that Mum had taken a shine to in the summer of 1946. Mimi and Mother must have seemed a really odd couple as they meandered through the grey bomb damaged streets of ration-gripped London’s South Kensington. “South Ken” was where my Granny Molly rented a flat that Hitler’s Luftwaffe had somehow missed which she shared with Mimi, Mum and Dad.

My dear Granny Molly came from the Hemans family, one of whom, Felicia, wrote the poem “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” a dirge which every British schoolchild was force-fed a century ago. Granny was an interesting lady, not least for her strange political views. She was a founder member of the Christian Communist Party, a short lived organization that arguably was rather a contradiction in terms. She had a sister, Great-Aunt Ella, who married a minor Bloomsbury Set artist and ran, I kid you not, a transport cafe for truck drivers on the A4 outside Reading in which she kept hens.

Granny had got married to some army tosser and divorced him asap, which was not what a girl did every day in the 1920s. She told me that she threw her wedding ring down the lavatory on her honeymoon night. But the military deserter must have lurked around enough to sire Molly’s three kids Alastair, Viola and finally my mother Jean. Eventually he remarried some émigré Russian wannabe Princess Anastasia and that’s all I know about him.

Unquestionably Granny had a raw deal. Her only son Alastair drowned in a boating accident near Swanage in Dorset after he had just left school at eighteen. I have a photo of the man who would have been my uncle on my desk as I write. It affected Granny hugely but it particularly traumatized my mother. Mum had a complete fixation on Alastair and was forever proclaiming psychic contact with him. Curiously I think she did have contact with him, although her promise to “get hold of me when she discovered how” made in a letter just before she died has so far failed to deliver.

In 1938 Granny found herself bereft of her beloved son and a single mum supporting two daughters. The army tosser had never properly supported her so she was forced to sell a big house on Harrow Hill and move to the South Kensington rented flat on Harrington Road, SW7. When Mum met a plumber’s son named William Lloyd Webber, a young scholarship boy white hope of the pre-war Royal College of Music, love blossomed. Soon, despite the Second World War, nuptials could not be put on hold. Dad had close to zero income. That’s why he, Mum, Granny and Mimi shacked up under one roof.

A mere two years after VE Day, this postwar ménage à quatre came to an abrupt end. Mum got pregnant. Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mother’s stomach with bloodcurdling cries. In short, Mimi was the first person to take a dislike to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

A decision was taken that Mimi had to ankle out of the South Kensington ménage on the urgent side of asap. On March 22, 1948, I brought the number of residents up to four again.

CUT FORWARD TO THE 1960s and 10 Harrington Court, Harrington Road redefined the “B” in bohemian. At its 1967 occupational peak it housed Granny Molly, Mum, Dad, plus his huge electronic church organ, Tchaikovsky Prize–winning pianist John Lill, Tim Rice, my cellist brother Julian and me. No. 10 was on the top floor of one of those Victorian mansion blocks where the lift occasionally worked but most of the time you used the stairs. The traffic noise was deafening but I doubt if the neighbours heard it, such were the sounds of music emanating from our household.

One afternoon, Tim Rice and I were descending the stairs out of the menagerie. Julian was practising the cello. A bloke from the flat below leapt out and accosted us.

“I don’t mind about the pianist,” he rankled. “It’s that oboe player I can’t stand.”

However, as bizarrely bohemian as 10 Harrington Court may have been, I couldn’t wait to get out of it, particularly as Mum from time to time threatened my brother and me with jumping out of the fourth-floor window. This got boring after a bit, so enter into this narrative my aunt – my impossibly, adorably, unrepeatably politically incorrect Auntie Vi, Granny’s eldest daughter. She was married to a slightly pompous doctor called George Crosby for whom Granny had worked as a secretary when she was really down on her uppers. Vi had a brief career as an actress. She was hilariously funny and a great cook with several serious recipe books to her name. She knew a few glamorous names in theatre. She was everything my family wasn’t and I adored her. She was my escape valve. Fifty years later I still daren’t print her sayings. In the 1960s she was the author of the first gay cookbook. A chapter monikered “Coq & Game Meat” is headlined:

Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath.

FRANKLY I WAS FALSELY CITED as the cause of Mimi the monkey’s behavioural setbacks. Surely 10 Harrington Court was no place for a simian bent on swinging around the community? However, my mother stood by her initial stance. Ten years later she took brother Julian and me to Chessington Zoo. On entering the monkey house she let out a great cry of “Mimi!” more than worthy of her limping tenor. The simian turned its head, puzzled.

“Look, she recognizes me. It’s Mimi,” said Mum triumphantly as the monkey leapt across its cage and climbed the wire in aggressive fashion uttering the most fearsome sounds.

“I told you it was Mimi.” Mum looked at me pointedly. “She always hated the thought of you, now she’s seeing you for real.” The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.

1 Perseus & Co.

I was born on March 22, 1948 in Westminster Hospital with a huge birthmark on my forehead that Mum said was cured courtesy of a faith healer. Others said it faded of its own accord, but Mum’s graphic details had me convinced that it might recur at any time if I was a bad child. My first memory is of being in hospital aged three with acute appendicitis. This Mother told me was undiagnosed until it was just about to burst. My case was presided over by Uncle George, now Auntie Vi’s “partner” (they hadn’t married yet) who had undiagnosed the appendicitis in the first place. As my relationship with dearest Auntie Vi bloomed whilst I staggered into my teens, the saga of the undiagnosed appendicitis would be often recounted to me in increasingly distended detail. Mother also had a serious footnote about my being chucked out of hospital way too early due to my screaming which Uncle George found embarrassing to his standing in the medical profession. Mother was seriously pregnant with Julian at the time, so the saga must have been a pain to her to put it mildly.

Being told that I had a brother is memory number two. It was a bright spring day and I was playing in Thurloe Square gardens, to which my family had a key. I remember not quite understanding what having a brother meant, but here my memory goes blank. I can’t remember anything about Julian as a baby at all, perhaps because Julian’s popping onto the planet also saw the arrival of Perseus the cat. Perseus was a wonderful square faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy, not one of those angular faced jobs so beloved of today’s breeders. I fell in love with Perseus instantly. Dad was also completely devoted to him. But I realize now that the family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that cooped up in a flat. His incessant cries to get out still give me nightmares.

Such was Perseus’s deafening low Siamese miaowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square when I wasn’t at school. Both Mum and Granny said yes. How trusting parents were in those days. You wouldn’t let a kid loose with a cat on a lead around South Kensington today – unless you were after a million hits on YouTube. So I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog across the old zebra crossing that led to the train station and the only bit of greenery Julian and I knew, at least in school termtime. One day Perseus escaped. Five hours later he was found among the pedestrians on the zebra crossing returning from the only piece of greenery that he, too, knew. Percy’s kerb drill was impeccable.

Years later I had the job of looking after Percy when he was dying. The old cat raised himself tortuously from his basket and started miaowing in a manner all too reminiscent of his incarcerated cries. The poor old boy scrabbled at the front door as if there were a rabbit to catch outside. So I put his lead on. He didn’t want to walk so he sat on my shoulder, a mode of transport which he always liked.

A year or two earlier the traffic at South Kensington had been reorganized into a fearsome one-way system. At the time it was claimed to feature the most complicated set of traffic lights in Europe. Perseus never mastered the new system but it was clear that the old cat wanted to pad back to the gardens that he used to freely wander to before its advent.

We got to the site of the old zebra crossing. Percy tried to get off my shoulder and I put him down. He sat for a few seconds, looked out at the new traffic lights and hissed. Then on his own he turned, lead trailing behind him, back to our flat. Next day he died. I owe Cats not only to Mummy’s bedtime reading of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, but also to Perseus.

My third memory of 1951 is so shocking that it might also account for my not remembering anything of baby Julian. It concerns my appearance on the cover of a magazine called Nursery World. Mum hired a photographer, thrust a violin and a bow upon my person and thus created a nauseous picture on the front of the grisly publication that haunts me still. It speaks volumes about Mother. For Mum was so ambitious for her offspring that she would have given Gypsy Rose Lee’s famous showbiz mum a fair old run in the Great Child Prodigy Handicap Stakes. Sadly I was no such thing. Pushy mothers of the world beware. Offsprings rebel. Just as Gypsy Rose Lee took a career path her mother hadn’t intended for her, so did I. Not as a stripper, though, at least not in public.

Mum was an ace children’s piano teacher. Although she died in 1994 she is still a bit of legend among the great and the not so good who inhabit the leafier parts of southwest London. In 1950 Mother co-founded a pre-prep school called the Wetherby with a couple called Mr and Mrs Russell, the former being interested in bare bottom spanking. I was one of the first tots through the door. The place was a roaring success. Over the years luminaries from Princes William and Harry to Hugh Grant have joined the ranks of short-trousered ones who crossed Wetherby’s threshold.

My mother had a big hand in the school’s birth pangs. In those days parents from most walks of life wanted their kids to learn the piano. My mother’s brilliance and patience in that department assured the Wetherby’s swift ascendancy. Anyone who has ever sat beside a child while it plonks away at ghastly ditties with titles like “El Wiggly” or “Honk That Horn” will bear out that to do so you either need to be a saint or tone deaf, or most probably both. Mum’s patience might well redefine canonization. I reckon she must have given at least 100,000 piano lessons to beginners in her lifetime. Further, she really cared about her charges. There was a time when this confirmed, yet confused, socialist claimed to have taught a fair wedge of the Tory party.

I confess that her piano lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. The trouble was that there were so many of them. And there was that wretched violin. Mum’s general idea was that I would emerge on the international concert stage as some Yehudi Menuhin-style violin toting child prodigy. Her hopes didn’t last long.

The next instrument out of the closet was the french horn. I was rather better at blowing than scratching. Indeed I rather enjoyed playing this overdeveloped hunting instrument until I was twelve. It was then that a crisis occurred. Mum’s quest to have me garner serious music grades brought me full frontal with Hindemith’s horn sonata. I have read somewhere that Hindemith developed a load of theories about the importance of amateurs to music. My theory is that some of his compositions were designed to make average instrumentalists like me abandon music for once and for all. He achieved a resounding success in my case. After attempting to play his epic I chucked my french horn in its case where it remains to this day.

Clearly Mum was transferring her ambitions from my father to me but to grasp why you have to know something about him. Billy Lloyd Webber was a mild man who feared authority in any form. He once hid in a cupboard because he had mistakenly called out the fire brigade. It transpired that Granny had left a chicken in the oven and smoked the flat out. He was convinced he was going to get a stretch in the slammer for abusing the emergency services.

Billy’s family was solid working class. His father was a plumber by trade but also a keen amateur musician. Like so many of my grandfather’s contemporaries, Billy’s father had sung in various church choirs. So Dad was steeped in the late High Church nineteenth-century choral tradition beloved by the Anglo-Catholic “smells and bells” establishments where Grandpa exercised the larynx. As a child Dad got music scholarships all over the shop. At an unprecedentedly youthful age he won a gong to the Royal College of Music. He also became the youngest person ever to become organist and choirmaster at St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate, a splendid “Arts and Crafts” church by Sir Ninian Comper. But for all his talent Dad wouldn’t say boo to a goose. All he wanted was a nice quiet routine.

By the time I was ten, Dad was increasingly content in his academic roles such as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1959 he became boss of the London College of Music which seemingly sealed the end of his composing aspirations. He felt his writing was out of step with its time and increasingly wrote “light music” under pen names or music for amateur church choirs. Mum found his lack of ambition infuriating. Still, she was very particular about taking me to listen to his cantatas and anthems, especially first performances. Even Julian, who was barely old enough, was dragged along to hear them but soon new compositions seemed to dry up – or so we all thought. After my father’s death, Julian discovered a cache of compositions that had never been performed. Some of them were as good as anything he ever wrote.

2 Some Enchanted Ruin

The three great passions that were to shape my life – art, musical theatre and architecture – surfaced early. My love of architecture kicked off with a weird romantic obsession with ruined castles and abbeys which began as early as I can remember. By my teens this led to a full-blown love of architecture of all sorts. Quite where this came from is a mystery; the visual arts don’t feature in the Lloyd Webber family DNA.

In the case of theatre and pop music, it is easy to explain why. My family had an annual Christmas outing to the London Palladium pantomime.1 Everything captivated me. In those days the Palladium was synonymous with popular variety theatre. All the big names played there. The pantomime was a combination of big names, big sets and contemporary pop songs that must have been a heady mix to this five-year- old. One such pantomime, Aladdin, contained a line that I still cherish:

Aladdin rubs lamp. Up pops genie.

“What is your wish, sir?”

“To hear Alma Cogan singing ‘Sugar in the Morning.’ ”

Curtain parts to reveal Alma Cogan singing “Sugar in the Morning.”

Very soon I had built my first toy theatre. This was first a well loved adapted version of a Pollock’s toy theatre but eventually became a vast construction made out of play bricks baptized the Harrington Pavilion. Over the years its technical ambitions grew to such an extent that its stage acquired a revolve made from an old gramophone turntable. That revolve was a direct result of my aping the famous closing scene of TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. All the stars used to line up on the legendary Palladium revolve waving good night to millions in Britain for whom that show was the television show of the late 1950s and early ’60s. To Britain it was as big as The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA. I pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.