“Once you’ve realised you’ve got the kind of face people laugh at, rather than swoon over, you concentrate on making people laugh.”
The year 1969 crystallised what the entire decade had stood for. Flower Power had wilted, the mini – both skirt and car – ruled and the cool people didn’t have to act cool anymore. They just were. It was the year of Abbey Road and The Italian Job.1 Cool Britannia didn’t need a snappy brand name. England and, more to the point, London, and even more to the point, Carnaby Street, was the centre of the known world. If it had a comedy king then that man was Marty Feldman.
As befitting a man at the top of his profession, Marty embraced the fame, fortune and familiarity that came as the trappings of stardom. In the whistle-stop, rollercoaster eighteen months that had seen him emerge blinking and feeling his way into the television limelight, he had become an icon. A personality on the cutting edge of swinging sixties London with his trendy Egyptian symbol of life dangling around his neck.
As the London Evening Standard opined: “On a bad day he can look like the very Devil himself. But a very contemporary one. The dress is strictly hippie. A simple tie-dyed shirt, fading denims, bare feet, a bag hangs from his belt, the biggest I’ve ever seen. Into which he reaches for his cigarette pack...”2
As a writer Marty kept his bare feet reassuringly on the ground. Suitably one foot was planted firmly in the established past, the other knowingly in the future. If comedy had a pulse, Marty’s finger was pressed to it. The dim, fading pulse of variety and sauce was embodied in the figure of Kenneth Horne. Horne A’ Plenty had been his successful attempt at television, with the second series coming to a close on Thames Television on New Year’s Day 1969. Barry Took had script-edited the programme and, for the second series, even taken over as producer. Marty contributed written material to one show. It was to be his last tangible link with Kenneth Horne, who died on Valentine’s Day 1969.3
Although the days of these variety shows for other people were numbered, certainly as far as Marty was concerned, he and Barry Took were still furiously protective of their financial and creative hold on programmes they considered their property. One such case was the eventual resurrection of the Scott On... series in the autumn of 1968. Having written the first three instalments of the show, both writers felt aggrieved that the programme was back without their approval. “The result of my investigations with Bill Cotton and others is that in this case, although Barry Took and Marty Feldman provided scripts for the programmes which they wrote, they did not provide what we call a format or layout which would entitle them to control the series with regard to those scripts which they did not themselves write or which would justify a credit.” Both wanted “some form of interest in the programme Scott on Marriage” but this was not to be and the series, with a myriad of different writers, ran with great success until 1974.4
The pulse of comedy was racing in other areas, however, with the BBC continuing to invest in the “unique” comedy of the surreal that Marty Feldman himself had come to personify. Marty’s chief cohort, Tim Brooke-Taylor, had been given the opportunity to develop his own sketch series with Broaden Your Mind in which he and Graeme Garden presented “An Encyclopaedia of the Air”: a convenient hook on which to hang a quick session of sketches based around a given theme. Marty was commissioned to write a thirty second quickie, with Barry Took, and that seems to be the extent of his contribution. Still, here was the guru of the movement being almost omnipresent.5
With Marty’s fame as a performer at its zenith and with so much money having been invested in Marty the programme, it was little surprise when the BBC chose it as their entry for the 1969 Montreux Festival. As befitting the rules of the competition, a skilfully assembled compilation of Marty was broadcast on British television on 17th March 1969. Dennis Main Wilson and Marty himself were very hands-on in choosing the content and a specially filmed opening, in Montreux, was shot in the February of 1969. It was noted that: “Our expedition was most successful as regards the interior shots, but we shall have to go next week again to Montreux, to shoot the exteriors. It is quite impossible to make Montreux look as though it were in the month of May, when there is heavy snow on the ground!”6
Marty’s new opening interlude was a clever introduction to the collection of popular sketches from Marty. It consisted of around ninety seconds of Marty arriving at the Festival, switching on the bank of television sets in the Jury Room and watching the jury enter to settle down to watch Marty.
He was treated royally by the BBC for the Montreux excursion as Bob Gilbreath, Light Entertainer Organiser for television comedy, told Marty’s agent Kenneth Ewing in a letter dated 6th March 1969: “Before Marty Feldman flew to Montreux for the filming of the opening sequence of the Marty special we made provision for him to draw the amount of £45 in Swiss francs to cover his hotel expenses whilst in Montreux. I have since discovered that in fact Michael Mills paid all Mr Feldman’s expenses, and so it was found unnecessary for Mr Feldman to draw upon his special allowance.”
Still, it all seemed rather petty when concerning the star of the show. On 13th May, a further BBC memo from Michael Mills detailed that: “I should be glad if you would arrange to pay one tourist return fare London/Geneva, plus one £10-a-day allowance to Marty Feldman. This is in connection with his visit to Montreux. He himself tried to lumber us with his own fare, his wife’s fare, and a bill of £52 for a 24-hour stay at the Montreux Palace Hotel. Needless to say, we would not wear this, but... we could go as far as suggested... in order to keep Mr Feldman as sweet as possible.”
If the British audience was anything to go by, Marty had the Golden Rose of Montreux in the bag. The Audience Research Department report for the ‘Marty in Montreux’ compilation revealed that the programme was: “received with rare enthusiasm by reporting viewers, most of whom evidently regarded it as an ideal choice as the BBC’s entry...”
“Marty himself was a natural clown, it was said (‘something of a cross between Chaplin and Tati’). The items were well chosen and the show had pace and variety, viewers thought: this kind of humour, moreover – most of it visual – was truly international and, as such, must stand an excellent chance at Montreux ‘anything that beats this MUST be good’ declared one, typically.”7
That programme was Holiday in Switzerland, for Marty was awarded the Silver Rose of Montreux. Coming second in an international television competition as fiercely fought as Montreux was no mean feat though, and Marty was delighted. Although the show had lasted just two short bursts over nine months at the tail end of the 1960s, it was pure and untreated Marty. He would never have such control again, even when directing for the cinema. The BBC may have been his bosses but they trusted him. He may have been indulging in a little diva-like behaviour but the BBC didn’t really seem to mind. Besides, they wanted another series. Marty was being recognised. Marty Feldman himself was being recognised.
The show not only won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for the Best Light Entertainment Series and a BAFTA for Best Script, but Marty was voted the Variety Club’s TV Personality of the Year for 1969. As a writer and a performer he was at the top. But it was the work that mattered. Awards did little for him save give him even more clout in television production. “It’s nice to know you’re liked,” he said, “but you can live without awards. They’re only a matter of opinion, after all.”8
A popular by-product of Marty was the Decca album I Feel A Song Going Off which boasted old friend Denis King as Musical Director: “Music had been what linked Mart and I as friends,” he recalls. “Often we would journey down to Ronnie Scott’s after a boozy night in Gerry’s club on Shaftesbury Avenue and Mart would be there. He loved music. Both playing and listening. He would try and persuade us to play along. It was some of the happiest times. John Junkin and I had written some silly songs for Marty’s television series and he said he was a big fan of them and wanted to record them for Decca Records, which delighted me.9 It was like old music hall songs but with a slightly hip quality to them.” Indeed, there is an air of cockney knees up about ‘Ilford Town Hall’ performed with gusto while ‘The Great Bell’, probably the most melodic track on the album, wouldn’t have been out of place in the Rambling Syd Rumpo songbook. Marty’s little man persona is given his head on ‘Cautious Love Song’ and ‘You Without Me’, while many, like ‘The Elephant Song’ end on an abrupt drum sting. ‘Loo’ displays Marty’s love of cool jazz in a number that blends Mel Tormé with George Formby. “We dug out Marty’s favourites from the old ones and wrote some new ones,” explains King. “I half produced the album, worked on the arrangements in the studio, played and sang backing vocals. Junkin and I were in the studio all the time and it was great fun. Zany silly stuff. We weren’t expecting a great hit which was just as well because we didn’t get one. I never got any money out of it! But some of the tracks got a bit of air play.”
The album jam-packed twenty-four songs into its short running time with some of them, like ‘Kensington High Street’, lasting no more than a few seconds: “It was the law of averages,” says Denis King. “If you didn’t laugh at one, you would only have a short time to not laugh at another one!” In fact, I Feel A Song Going Off is the perfect record of that late sixties period when Marty was at his peak in Britain. “He had a great comedy brain,” says Denis King. “We had a lot of fun in the studio but Mart took it seriously. We added some ad-libs and I remember Junkin and I being very proud that he was doing it.”10
Interestingly, as Marty chose to immortalise some of the songs from Marty he was in no hurry to secure an even more lucrative deal for more Marty episodes on television. Instead, he turned back to a treasured writing project, Comedy Playhouse. Two of the scripts he had been commissioned to write in 1964 were pulled out of the BBC archives and dusted off for production in the eighth series.
‘The Making of Peregrine’ was heralded by the BBC publicity department as a “must for fans of the ‘domestic interior’ school of comedy” although the actual premise of the situation was rather more shady and down-toearth than that. Andrew Ray played the Peregrine of the title. His father, Stanley, played by Dick Emery, attempts to make a man of him. Taking him away from his mother’s apron strings and that “domestic interior” that the BBC fanfared, the young man is shown the seedier side of life; namely the wine, women and song of a public house bar.
The other Comedy Playhouse for this April/May 1969 series was of even more interest. ‘Tooth and Claw’, like the rather ill-fated ‘Nicked at the Bottle’ before it, was steeped in Jewish humour and East End understanding. If it had been picked up for production in 1965 it would no doubt have starred Alfred Marks and Sydney Tafler. Now, in 1969, Marty’s fame was such that his name attached to one of the roles was considered not only a good omen but also somewhat bankable. So it was that Marty himself joined Warren Mitchell as the embittered, feuding, Jewish millionaires.
Bill Harman was the assistant floor manager on the programme and remembers: “Marty and Warren corpsing throughout the recording. The script was outrageous and you could see Marty was enjoying playing the role. I must imagine it was something of a thrill to find himself mugging it up in something he had written before he himself had become a performer of note. Anyway, one scene had the two rivals both sporting a bandaged nose. The entire story was simply one of one-upmanship. Each time Marty said a line Warren would collapse into laughter and every time Warren started to laugh Marty would join him. This scene took what seemed like hours to record. Finally, after take six or seven, [director] Roger Race stormed down from the control room shaking his fist in fury and bellowing: ‘If you two bastards don’t behave, I’ll make sure you are wearing real bandages in a minute!’ Marty and Warren behaved after that!”
Indeed, a note from Roger Race to Marty clearly hinted at the exasperation of the director: “Just a brief note of my thanks to you for taking part and greatly contributing to the success of the Comedy Playhouse Tooth and Claw production. I felt it went very well indeed and after all the editing that we have obviously had to do on it, I think we have a very fine programme.”11
Bill Harman recalls that Marty was a relaxed and informed conversationalist but relished the opportunity to shock: “It’s the only other thing I can remember about Marty (apart from that face which, once seen, could never be forgotten). There was a conversation we had with Warren Mitchell about Jewish idiosyncrasies. Marty claimed that no matter how much you might hate and despise someone, once they die, as a Jew, you would never say a bad word about that person. As an example he said, ‘If someone told a Jew that Adolf Hitler had died, they would say, ‘Oh no, and such a young man.’ Warren Mitchell couldn’t believe he was hearing this from Marty.”12
While the cross-section of the viewing public had been so confident in Marty’s Montreux effort, they were less impressed with ‘Tooth and Claw’. As the Audience Research Report read: “Perhaps viewers had expected too much from this story of two Jewish millionaires (played by Warren Mitchell and Marty Feldman) whose only zest left in life was to outdo each other: at all events, the programme evidently came as a sad disappointment to the sample at large, who found it, at best, only mildly amusing and, in a number of cases, slow, tedious and repetitive. In fact, only just over a quarter of the sample can be said really to have enjoyed this edition of Comedy Playhouse. For them, it was all great fun – not ‘belly laugh’ material perhaps, but amusing in a gentle, more subtle way: these were two excellent characters, just as determined to get the better of each other now as in their poverty-stricken youth, and their rivalry, their attempts at one-upmanship and their ‘love-hate’ relationship provided an original basis for comedy. ‘Entertaining and full of home truths. However much you have, you must still achieve and win over someone’; ‘Let’s have a series. The scriptwriters are clearly masters of their art.’”
Warren Mitchell agrees that: “It had the potential to become a series but Marty was busy and I was busy. The script was perfect. Marty very rarely lost it [corpsed]. If he did it was for a real purpose and he got what he wanted in the end. He liked to get it right and he would fight for his corner.”
The Audience Research Report continued, “An equal number, however, reacted in a distinctly unfavourable manner and the rest evidently considered it no more than a very ‘average’ show – not poor, exactly, but certainly hardly up to the standard they had come to expect from these two artistes. The basic idea had promise, and there were the odd flashes of humour, it was said, but there was too much talk and too little action (the scene in the restaurant, for instance, seeming endless) and the show was repetitive and predictable.”
For Warren Mitchell, that scene was at the heart of the show: “We played them as about sixty years old and they met every week and they would argue over the menu in this posh Park Lane Hotel restaurant. I’d say, ‘I’ll have six oysters’. ‘I’ll have seven,’ said Marty. ‘What sort of a number is seven? I’ll have eight!’ It was so childish and very funny as a result. Of course oysters are a forbidden food for Jews. That was a joke not many picked up on. In the end we had pease pudding and faggots like we always did!”
But some viewers simply found: “little amusement to be had from watching grown men behaving like children, and their bickering and squabbling grew decidedly wearisome. Indeed, had it not been for the fact that these were two artistes who ‘couldn’t give a bad performance if they tried’, viewers said, this would have been really dire (some, in fact, having no hesitation in describing it as ‘absolutely rubbish’)”13
The Daily Express reviewer opined that: “Two of TV’s most successful funny men, Marty Feldman and Warren Mitchell teamed up last night on BBC1’s Comedy Playhouse. Potentially they should have forged one of the strongest links of talent since Steptoe and Son. But somehow it did not quite come off. Feldman... is essentially a better clown than an actor. Comedy Playhouse has sparked off many a good series. I doubt if this oneshot play will turn into another – it would be too hard to sustain such a series of repetitive ideas even with such stars in hand.”14
“In a few opinions however brilliant they were individually, Warren Mitchell and Marty Feldman did not make a good comedy team, at least on this showing,” continued the Audience Research Report. “Their respective styles were cramped and neither appeared at his best – ‘possibly’ as one suggested ‘because thirty minutes was not long enough for them both to do full justice to their great talents.’ It is clear, however, that the programme’s lack of success was due to the script rather than the performance and, as has been said, in lesser hands, the show might have been even more of a ‘flop’. Those who enjoyed ‘Tooth and Claw’ attributed much of their pleasure to the performance of these two very accomplished artists (‘well, what can one say about Marty and Alf. They were both splendid’).” It is interesting to see that even at this early stage with three series of Till Death Us Do Part under his belt, Warren Mitchell was already completely cemented in the public eye as the ranting Tory bigot Alf Garnett.15
Johnny Speight, the creator of Till Death Us Do Part and a regular companion of Marty’s, was instrumental in a more serious venture into acting, however. Both Speight and Marty, it was remarked, were: “from working-class backgrounds, were professional jazz musicians, are mad about football, and became top comedy script writers functioning at their best in the unlikely setting of the BBC.”16 Shortly after the recording of ‘Tooth and Claw’, Johnny Speight and the BBC had approached Marty about revisiting two television plays that had previously starred an on-the-cusp of stardom Michael Caine. ‘The Compartment’ and ‘Playmates’ cast Marty as Bill, a downtrodden, rather irritating man seemingly with a grudge against the rest of humanity. The double header, cleverly presented as ‘Double Bill’ under The Wednesday Play umbrella in the November of 1969 saw Marty playing it straight for the first time. (Alas, it is now missing from the archives.)
“One usually dreads meeting English comedians,” wrote The Observer, “they’re always such miseries... [Marty] described himself as a manicdepressive. But the words seemed to roll too easily off his tongue, and we couldn’t resist saying that it’s a rather fashionable thing to be nowadays: ‘It may be fashionable but I was there first. Why didn’t you believe me? I was telling the truth. I was being honest.’ He’s a gentle man and, one suspects, an open book: ‘Why else be a comic? It’s a self-defence mechanism. Find me a perfectly-formed comic from a secure background.’”
With the BBC and Marty still talking about the possibility of more Marty, in some form or other, and his acting career pointing towards more substantial material it seemed the only natural move was into cinema.
It was John Antrobus, another of the writer fraternity long associated with Marty, that adapted the play The Bed Sitting Room for a feature film. Antrobus had written the play with Spike Milligan and its rather cheerful, satirical examination of a post-nuclear war Britain had struck a chord with late sixties audiences. United Artists, who had already capitalised on swinging Britain with the two Beatles films, invested in the project and with predictable haste signed up the Beatles’ director Richard Lester to make it. Lester had, more crucially, helmed the Goonish short subject, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film. The Bed Sitting Room celebrated the British eccentrics and their dogged attempts to carry on as normal: Spike Milligan wanders through the rubble as the last deliveryman. Harry Secombe babbles away as a very Welsh representative of regional government. Frank Thornton personifies the BBC, still delivering the news – in person and in a tattered dinner jacket – from within the shell of a television set. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are the demonic remnants of the police force. Jimmy Edwards is a piece of left luggage. Little wonder Variety praised: “A carefully-chosen roster of British character thesps who contribute stellar bits in almost impossibly difficult roles.”
The fact that Marty was included in the sparkling cast at all is testament to his respected standing within the with-it comedy scene. Moreover, making his feature film debut, he is given a special “introducing Marty Feldman” billing. His performance as the remnants of the National Health Service relies heavily on his little man persona; fussing and fawning in his nurse’s uniform. Richard Lester, seizing on that face, introduces him with a musical sting and a directionally opposing pair of binoculars before giving Marty his first big screen close-up. Subsequently, he shares a scene with the seasoned old pro, Sir Ralph Richardson. That’s what you call starting at the top. Marty later issues a death certificate for the still living Mona Washbourne and is in hot pursuit to collect. There is a streak of softly spoken violence throughout his performance. It was the perfect, surrealist introductory vehicle for Marty and although it proved a box office disappointment it remains a silly, affectionate, occasionally moving and always very British reaction to the nuclear winter as told by the great and good of comedy.
Although they had discussed it on several occasions, Marty had yet to actually write a feature film. With Barry Took, naturally, in tow and with Denis Norden in the writing mix as well, British Lion took on a satirical look at the advertising industry. Ned Sherrin was to be the producer and would find himself in that role for several big-screen comedies over the next few years.17
According to Marty, the film wasn’t originally intended as his starring vehicle: “It wasn’t my idea, honestly,” he said on the Shepperton set in November 1969. “When I started work on it with Barry and Denis I was just a scriptwriter, not an actor at all. But by the time we finished it I was, of some sort. And I suppose there wasn’t anybody else around nutty enough to do it.”18
The premise was indeed nutty: a comedy about a wacky advertising man whose challenge is to come up with a sexy campaign for frozen porridge. His marriage is rocky, his twelve-year-old son collects knickers in a stamp album and the man himself lives life through a fantasy of commercial breaks. If one word could sum up the experience of sitting through the film, that one word would be surreal. In a good way.
On set, visiting journalist William Hall reported that: “[Marty] had spent the morning sitting on a plastic dragon belching flames and smoke... all over Dinsdale Landen, playing the unfortunate vicar... Mr Feldman reached the end of the line before losing his balance, hanging like a huge spider from the invisible wire round his waist. ‘Not bad,’ said the producer... ‘I think it’ll work,’ said the cameraman, rather more cautiously. ‘The last frame might be a bit off.’
“Enormous eyes like poached eggs floating sunny-side-up in a minestrone of facial expressions. Hair wandering off in all directions. A voice that makes itself heard in firecracker bursts: ‘Hey! Was that okay? Did you get it? Hey, someone! Hey! Absurd, isn’t it? Here am I, a grown man, sitting on a dragon while someone pushes lighted fireworks up its nostrils and 60 highly skilled men stand around watching us!’”19
Although a domestic comedy focused on Marty’s failing marriage, the “sex-sells” advertising fantasies throughout embrace vivid daydreams and a string of costume changes; Marty is indulged as everything from Count Dracula to the hero of a silent melodrama. Indeed with its hair-brained slapstick and quick-fire sense of the absurd, Every Home Should Have One – the title referred to au pair girls much more than it did to bathrooms – was for all intents and purposes the big screen spin-off for Marty the series. There’s even a tail-end cameo from Marty’s coarse archbishop. (In full regalia, complete with crozier, Marty encounters a television studio security guard: “’Ere, you a Bishop?” “Well, who do you think I am with this then, bloody Bo Peep? Course I’m a Bishop you twit!”)
Modestly Marty claimed that producer Ned Sherrin had gone through a lengthy list of other potential stars. He had peered round at Marty sat behind his trusty typewriter and sighed: “It looks as though you’ll have to do it.” Still, in the dying days of 1969, there was nobody else in the industry who could or should have done it. The darling of television comedy and an award-winning performer and writer, Marty was ideally situated to make his major break into feature films.
The Photoplay reporter visiting the set was: “convinced that Every Home Should Have One is going to be the funniest comedian’s film for many years. It’s also going to mark the arrival in the cinema of a zany genius who could grow to the stature of a Buster Keaton or a Jacques Tati. ‘I’m learning,’ said Marty, when we lunched together at Shepperton. He came late to the restaurant (he won’t miss the day’s ‘rushes’) and cheerfully attacked his vegetarian’s green salad.”20
Marty’s lunch during the shoot would always be a frugal one; typically one cheese sandwich and a glass of water. “I’m a vegetarian and I’m not hungry anyway,” he would explain. “Not, after [the dragon incident] I went through back there.” It was more than physical discomfort though. He was nervous. “I’ve put three inches on my waistline in the last ten weeks. People eat more when they’re insecure, did you know? Success goes to my stomach, I reckon.”21 But this was after seeing the rushes of the morning’s filming. If he wasn’t relaxed then, he was clearly worried about what he saw.
“I know a lot of actors are put off by seeing themselves in rushes,” he admitted, “but I go as much as a writer as an actor. They have taught me a lot about how much or how little you need to push a point home. If your face is twenty-feet-high, one word will do the trick. But if you think you’ve got an idea over from one half of the screen while some bird’s taking off her clothes on the other half, you’re wrong.”
Having left the safe confines of his own BBC show, Marty was certainly in no hurry to direct a film himself, although the possibility was already in his head at this stage.
“You pretty soon learn how small you are. In television, it’s easy to feel a big shot. It’s your programme, the camera’s on you and there probably aren’t many other people around. But a film belongs to the director. He controls those dozens of blokes all round you and you depend on every one of them. And when it comes to the finished film, it’s not what you do that makes it good, it’s the way they stick the bits together.”
The man that had landed the job of filming everything and sticking the bits together was, suitably, Jim Clark, an experienced editor on such controversial and cascading sixties classics as Charade, Darling and The Pumpkin Eaters. This was his first film as a director and Marty’s small screen acting technique learnt from both Marty and, perhaps, most importantly The Wednesday Play: ‘Double Bill’, paid off.
“There are two things that have really surprised me,” Clark said. “I wasn’t sure that it would be possible to think of [Marty] as the husband in the straight scenes he plays with Judy [Cornwell] – Britain’s Shirley MacLaine. But he handles them beautifully. And having the scriptwriter as the star has brought no problems at all. He never objects if I cut a line, and it’s very handy to have him around to come up with a new idea when something doesn’t quite work.”22
Marty’s performance is something of a revelation. He had proved himself as a good sketch comedy performer week in and week out on television, but to sustain that energy and interest over a feature’s length took much more. Certainly it is a given that he excels in the Walter Mittylike vignettes but only because we, the audience, have warmed to the complex man behind the day-dreaming. Thus, we believe his marriage is threatened because of his apathy. The domestic scenes have an undercurrent of kitchen sink despair that Marty laudably refuses to send up for a quick laugh. We sympathise with him when his obsession with work makes him fail to pick up on the initial advances of another man towards his wife. We certainly believe his sexual attraction to Julie Ege. The Norwegian actress and model was, arguably, the most decorative of decoration utilised in British comedy and horror of the period. Producer Ned Sherrin used her several times, notably in the film version of Up Pompeii, and recalled Marty didn’t have to act very much while he was around her. During the shooting of the Ingmar Bergman-inspired fantasy of Swedish sex both Marty and Julie Ege were completely naked. Although the camera angles were skilfully designed to protect the audience from seeing Marty’s manhood, Marty himself had little control over it. Who would? As the two naked lovers ran through the fields Marty got erect. So excited was he at the sight of Julie Ege in the buff that the scene had to go for a second take. Marty’s penis had kept poking up into shot!23
Even at the end of 1969 there was talk of Hollywood stardom but Marty was happy to bide his time. He had plenty of clout on Every Home Should Have One but he was relaxed under the control of Jim Clark, who he dubbed as: “marvellous. I’m sure he’s going to be one of the greats.”24
The Monthly Film Bulletin reviewer was rather less impressed, writing that: “This feature debut by Jim Clark (formerly editor for [Jack] Clayton and [Stanley] Donen, and director of several TV documentaries and theatrical shorts) is a strictly hit-and-miss affair which reveals, once again, the dangers of trying to be fashionably contemporary and satirical at the same time. The targets are familiar enough (bizarre advertising campaigns, clean-up TV propagandists, au pair girls with funny accents and plunging necklines), and they are parodied in a manner somewhat akin to the Carry On tradition – except that the verbal jokes are even bluer and, occasionally, offensively dirty in their obsession with phallic symbols. In an attempt to keep the whole thing lively and effervescent (bright decors, heady colours, animated inserts, and so on), writers and director have gone for a spanking tempo in which one noisy gag is quickly superseded by another on the basis that if you don’t like one, you may love the next. Unfortunately this method is no guarantee of genuine wit, and it is surprising that such a film buff as Clark should make so little of his fantasy parodies of horror films, Swedish nude love scenes and silent melodramas. He fares much better with the decor and props, though, like the little van in the shape of a toothpaste tube which capers all over London.
“In some respects, of course, the whole thing is a gigantic in-joke: most of the creative talent involved know the television world from practical experience and proceed, gleefully, to blow it up – almost literally – at the end. The sight of the disintegrating studio prompts the TV producer calmly to remark, ‘This has the makings of real television material’; and the film’s better moments contain nice little throwaway lines like this. Most of the cast, however, are encouraged to punch away at everything in sight, which results in a good deal of unfunny mugging. Marty Feldman himself is probably an acquired taste; in close-up, his facial expressions and googly eyes make Jerry Lewis’ gyrations seem quite sober, and his film technique is as yet too limited to take the weight of a whole feature. If he could be calmed down a bit and encouraged to develop his sly, mean look, he might have the makings of a genuine grotesque, but the film’s particular brand of slapstick offers him little opportunity.”25
Marty himself was confident the film would be reasonably successful: “I have high hopes for it,” he said. “With any luck it’ll turn out better than good, even if it’s less than fantastic.” That modest, understated and certainly achievable level certainly was achieved. It is his only Britishbased starring vehicle and one that, on its very rare television screenings, reminds a jaded nation of just what Marty was doing during his super stardom of the late 1960s.
It also consolidated his rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Marty still might have felt a little uneasy about being a cultural icon at the age of thirty-five but if he had to be one he was certainly going to enjoy it. Throughout Every Home Should Have One Marty donned flamboyant clothes designed by Mr. Fish of Piccadilly. The style perfectly suited Marty’s swinging sixties clout.26 “His first starring film role was very important in terms of this embracing of the sixties,” remembers Ian La Frenais. “Being a star on television was one thing, but being a star in your own film was something much more again. I remember seeing him entering a very trendy club with a very attractive woman on his arm – an attractive woman who wasn’t his wife. It was Julie Ege and she was in the film with him. I stopped him to say ‘hello’ and this woman on his arm was really stunning. We chatted about it a little later and he gave me that off -kilter smile and said: ‘Success has gone to my crotch!’ That was the first time I had ever heard that. That was a very Marty line.”
One can almost hear him thinking to himself as he chatted to William Hall over lunch in Shepperton that, no, it wasn’t his appetite for food that had increased because of his new fame but his appetite for sex. “But he really was a fifties man,” says La Frenais. “Very much of radio comedy, jazz cigarettes and that bohemian lifestyle. Suddenly he was a sixties man with floral jackets and revolutionary ideals. You see, he was older than all those other sixties people. Even though it was only by a few years, Marty was very conscious of it. Everyone famous was twenty-four at that time. Marty wasn’t.”
Dick Clement agrees that: “In a way, to use Marty’s own musical allegory, it was the difference between Elvis Presley and John Lennon. It may have only been a matter of five years but that was a huge chasm in the sixties. Marty probably felt like a fraud or a fool but he went along with it because it suited his career. He was a comic icon of the late sixties with the brain of a mid-1950s writer.”
Marty also quite clearly enjoyed it and one can scarcely blame him when his showbiz lifestyle culminated in hotel bedroom romps with Julie Ege. For Tim Brooke-Taylor, his unfaithfulness was an isolated incident: “There was a time when Marty suddenly flipped. He went off with a lady and did drugs and drank too much. He did everything wrong... for about a week, and then he went back to Lauretta. He got through it! I remember saying, ‘Well that was probably a good thing that you did that.’ He tried it all out, got it out of his system and went back to his wife.”
However Bill Oddie remembers several such instances. “Lauretta was long-suffering beyond belief. People would say: ‘She’s really putting up with that?’ Marty was back and forth from America. All these different girls would be around. I don’t even think it was the power of stardom. It was an era of Beauty and the Beast anyway, I promise you. It occasionally benefited me. There was a syndrome of glamorous models going out with wizened photographers. They all had these incredibly glamorous models as girlfriends. You felt like it was almost a fashion accessory for the girl.”
Warren Mitchell recalls that: “Marty’s close friends had a joke that his eyes went like that because he once found himself in bed with two lesbians! He was very attractive to women and he was happy to oblige.”
“Mart was such a lovely man that you could almost forgive him anything,” says Denis King. “I didn’t see that dark side of him but you would hear stories of his moods. We were very good friends. Marty, Lauretta, Anne and Ted Levy. In fact, Lauretta was a bridesmaid to my first wife. We would spend a lot of time together. Mart was taking a bit of dope. Well, a lot of dope really. He would go off on a bender; simply disappear and then reappear a few days later. No-one knew where he had gone.”
According to Marty, the rot had set in quite early. Back when he was just finding his feet on At Last the 1948 Show, the seven-year itch kicked in. “Suddenly I was going through my adolescence at thirty-two instead of fifteen,” he said. “Marriage isn’t easy. In fact it’s bloody difficult. All intense friendships are difficult.” He remembered that he and Lauretta separated for only a few months but that she was patient and forgiving. “She did the only thing a friend can do when there is trouble... be there,” he said. “She was. When I phoned her up and said, ‘Can I come home?’ She said, ‘Yes’. Otherwise I might not have survived or I’d have gone under through alcohol as so many of my friends did.”27
But Marty would return again and again to the heady cocktail of sex, drugs and booze, particularly at times of stress and depression. It would block out the pressure of work and dull the pain of critical failure. Lauretta would always stand by him. Whether the period of separation would be a week or a few months, she would always take him back and always nurse him through his insecurities. However, Marty’s other marriage couldn’t withstand the fame and frailties that plagued him. Barry Took filed for a “divorce”.