Alma Cogan had a hit record in 1956 with the verse ‘The railroad runs through the middle of the house’, which from where I was sitting seemed entirely possible.
The crossroads outside our building was a really happening place. Garment factories; various one-man entrepreneurial dealerships; three barber’s shops; Millicent’s the ladies’ hairdressers; snooker halls; two cabaret joints; two dispensing pharmacies; three medical practices; several movie theatres; various car showrooms; two gentlemen’s outfitters; several patisseries; Freda Sieff’s bagel joint; Barclays Bank; a launderette; three pubs; three coffee bars; countless confectioners/tobacconists/newsagents; a wine shop; a valet service – that is, a guy, usually a qualified tailor, who carried out invisible mending, steam pressing, miscellaneous alterations, and, where necessary, button replacement; plus the UCP, United Cow Products, which although specialising in many of the less popular ruminant organs was known throughout the industrial North-West as the Tripe Shop . . . All these attractions, just beyond the communal front door.
Next door but one was Harry Davis’s Hotel Amanda, the hang-out of Manchester’s drag mafia, including club owners such as Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lammar, Bunny Lewis, and Jackie Carlton, and from Blackpool, Diamond Lil (baptismal name unknown). After I started school, my mum got a cleaning job there that came with a warning from Harry that she’d have to be ‘broad-minded’. ‘More like women than women,’ was my mum’s verdict. I was sceptical about this.
Every weekend there would be a party at the Hotel Amanda, which would always degenerate into a punch-up in its backyard. Up on the fire escape I had a ringside seat, and, take it from an eyewitness, these guys were no ladies. Some of them were rock hard and bad-tempered with it.
The opposite block, dominated by the faience-tiled facade of the majestic Rialto Super Cinema built in the 1920s, housed a parade of shops in the same ornate style: Sid and Aubrey’s barber shop, for example, and the Higher Broughton Assembly Rooms.
The Assembly Rooms was a high-end functions venue, available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, twenty-first-birthday celebrations, etc. It boasted a Louis XIV interior featuring indoor fountains picked out by magenta spotlights, and a sprung dance floor in the ballroom. At some point the Assembly Rooms, under new management, was renamed The Whisky-a-Go-Go.
On a Friday night it became The Disc-a-Go-Go, a pre-Beatles teenage nightspot, sometimes involving a local group in the manner of Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but more often it was the first example of something I’d never heard of: a discotheque. The resident DJ was the monstrous Jimmy Savile, who lived nearby.
There were quite a few fires there (possibly insurance related; we will never know), which I observed from our front windows (we made our own entertainment in those days), but the place always rose from the ashes, even exceeding its former splendour.
Occupying the upper floors of this busy commercial parade was Potter’s Snooker Club, where all the world-class players from the Barry Hearn stable of the 1980s practised their games. The possession of a Yale key in lieu of a membership card meant that, for them, the club never closed. Since it was on Great Cheetham Street, otherwise known as the A57, it was a straight road to Sheffield and the Crucible Theatre, then as now the national arena of snooker excellence; Potter’s, therefore, became a second home to the likes of John Virgo, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, John Spencer, Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, Dennis Taylor, Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White, and the Canuck contingent featuring the devilishly handsome Cliff Thorburn, Kirk Stevens, and of course Bill Werbeniuk, a man of aboriginal Canadian descent who had somehow finagled an NHS prescription for eight pints of lager, to be taken daily in order to combat the career-threatening effects of the betablockers he took for his high blood pressure.* He was a lager-than-lime character. It was a shame he didn’t live long enough to be older Budweiser (geddit?).
The block was dominated, as I said, by the Rialto picture house. When my mum went shopping, she’d stick me in the Rialto and pick me up on the way back. That was my babysitter: the movies.
There were at least half a dozen movie theatres within walking distance. Movies were my life. This enthusiasm was mainly due to my mum. My dad’s interest in motion pictures began and ended with Jimmy Cagney, and he was in good company: when Orson Welles was asked to name his three favourite screen actors, he replied, ‘That’s easy. James Cagney, James Cagney, and James Cagney.’ When the emblematic lion came up at the beginning of an MGM feature, it was my dad’s cue to stand up and say, ‘Seen it . . .’ That was his get-out clause.
In fact, my dad only ever took me to see two movies, both in 1956. The first was The Searchers, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and Natalie Wood. The second was Moby Dick, directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and Richard Basehart as Ishmael.
He took me to see The Searchers as a treat for my seventh birthday. It was showing at the Odeon, the hyper-luxurious picture house in Manchester city centre, Odeon being an acronym of Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation – Oscar Deutsch was the entrepreneur responsible for this ubiquitous cinema chain. (Not many people know that, as Sir Michael Caine apparently never said.)
The Odeon was the venue for the Big Night Out – bigger screen, softer seats, stereophonic sound, and a much greater variety of snacks available in the foyer. Rather than the standard popcorn, Paynes Poppets, and peanuts, at the Odeon you could get things like hot dogs, ice-cream floats, various partially gelatinated non-dairy gum-based snack beverages (milkshakes to you), and a profusion of refrigerated fizzy drinks, my choice, as ever, a glass of Pemberton’s* – Coca-Cola, that is. Wow! What a flavour – the lightning pick-me-up of the jet age, refreshment guaranteed. Delicious with or without Bacardi, and did you know you can cook with it?
At the smaller local cinemas like the Rialto you could still only get room-temperature, flat fruit squash – give it a name, Kia-Ora! Even so, the Rialto was no slouch: it was a luxury cinema in every other way. The staff were smartly uniformed: the chaps were in fitted burgundy dress jackets with gold-braided Sgt. Pepper epaulettes, bareheaded apart from one fella whose job description was ‘Fireman’ – he wore a peaked military-style cap. For the ladies, i.e. the box-office operative, the usherettes, and the ice-cream girl (the Rialto was an equal-opportunity employer), the livery was a rather attractive, though even then slightly anachronistic, 1940s boogie-woogie-style blouse in cream parachute silk with ballooning diaphanous sleeves that gathered at the wrist – a style popularised by Stewart Granger in the movie Scaramouche. This was worn with a neat pencil skirt in the same burgundy cloth as the gentlemen’s uniforms, and a little burgundy felt pillbox hat perched on the side of the head. It was all very old school at the Rialto: the women looked like the Andrews Sisters and the men dressed like some sort of military personnel.
When my dad was working away, I was required to accompany my mother on her thrice-weekly visits to the flicks. Two of them would be her choice, and the third, usually a Western, would be mine. More often than not, in spite of myself, I found something to enjoy in her ‘women’s pictures’: the killer dialogue, the cars, and the gents’ tailoring provided adequate distraction, not to mention the amplified attractiveness of the leading ladies in such films as The Best of Everything, Peyton Place, The Opposite Sex, and anything involving Doris Day.
Doris Day was a great favourite of ours. A dream girl in every sense, she existed in her own golden microclimate of glamour. Her singing voice alone justified every ounce of her stardom. She was without doubt the most beautiful woman I had ever seen at that point, and as a screen actress, utterly convincing. I can’t be the only guy for whom Doris Day was the first ideal woman. ‘The Black Hills of Dakota’ is a constant on my daily-revised Desert Island playlist.
With a couple of exceptions, I consider the hours spent watching these ‘women’s pictures’ to be golden, the first exception being Gone with the Wind, which I saw under sufferance. The only light relief from Vivien Leigh’s capricious toings and froings between Leslie Howard and Clark Gable was the Civil War massacre scene. ‘This is more like it,’ I thought. It started to look like a cowboy film for a bit, with all the dead bodies. But no, it was over in ten minutes! The Civil War was a mere backdrop to this fickle woman’s ups and downs. There was no lifestyle advice whatsoever to be gleaned from this depiction of the secessionist Southern states. The message I took from that three hours and thirty-one minutes was this: ‘Ah, perfidy. Thy name is Woman’, a sentiment reinforced by every Popeye cartoon.
What is it with Vivien Leigh? She also starred in The Deep Blue Sea, the second exception, and the film I blame for my ongoing nervous disposition. Its opening shot of Vivien’s head in a gas oven introduced me to the idea of suicide.
‘She’s trying to kill herself? What the . . .? Huh? What’s the matter with this woman? She’s got it all. A pretty face, fine gowns, and a nice apartment in London.’
It seemed to me the dumbest thing anybody could possibly do.
‘What? Is she insane?’
My mum tried to close down this line of enquiry by telling me that Vivien’s character had had a nervous breakdown.
‘What’s one of them?’ I asked. ‘Is she retarded or something, or is she a nutter?’
‘No, no, it’s her nerves. She had a nervous breakdown. She’s not a nutter: a nervous breakdown can happen to anyone.’
That was the worst thing she could have said. (NB: Be careful what you say to your kids, even if you’re a nice person, it could be the wrong thing.)
‘What, anyone? Just suddenly, like? So everything is normal, and it can just happen to anyone? What are the symptoms?’
I figured that any minute now I was either going to have a nervous breakdown myself, or a nuclear war would break out in the wider Cold War world. One way or another, these factors militated against any future contentment. Even when everything seemed to be going in my favour, my thoughts would inevitably turn to the possible foreshortening of that situation. I don’t think I’ve ever lost this fear. It turned me into a default existentialist by the time I was six: I quickly learned that the pursuit of happiness is largely pointless, happiness being the only target one merely has to aim at in order to miss. And you know what planted that seed? Not Jean-Paul Sartre, not Albert Camus, not Søren Kierkegaard, but the idea that I might lose control of my mental faculties, at any time, in any situation, any minute now.
Movies were the cause of, and the antidote to, most of my personal anxieties. What better distraction than the messed-up lives of others played out beneath the big skies of Montana? America featured big in my imagination, and I was a willing recipient of this cultural hegemony. Divorce, for example, was an American import that I discovered from the movies. It seemed to me that over there it was possible to get married in Las Vegas, get a quickie divorce in Tijuana on the same day, and wake up the next day like it never happened. Back then, divorce was something I only associated with Americans – over here, meanwhile, divorce was inevitably seen as a personal catastrophe, and marriage remained a life sentence. That situation persisted until the mid-Seventies with only rare exceptions.
Divorce aside, movie dialogue raised many other questions for me. What is ravioli? What is our ZIP code? What is a pizza? Is garbage the same as rubbish? Why don’t our policemen have guns? What is 7-Up? When will the electric chair replace the hempen noose for the dispatch of murderers? Then there was the matter of water management, and the American superiority in that field. They had showers; no sitting around in their own filth for them. And while we’re at it, where was our swimming pool?
Most Saturdays I went to the kids’ afternoon matinee at the County, a movie house less than two minutes from the fire escape. The County had a two-tier pricing policy: the best seats in the rear stalls cost ninepence, the front stalls just sixpence, owing to the stiff neck one would acquire and the perspectival distortion of the on-screen action. My friends’ and my MO was to purchase sixpenny tickets, wait for the lights to go out, and then, much to the annoyance of all the people settling down to watch the movie, crawl commando-style under the seats, all the way to the comparative luxury of the ninepennies: anything for a buck.
Whoever put those kids’ matinee programmes together really had their finger on the collective pulse: something for everyone. Before the main feature, usually a Western featuring the likes of Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, or Gene Autry – that or the Bowery Boys – you’d have half a dozen cartoons: the whole Looney Tunes crowd, Bugs Bunny, Tweety and Sylvester, Road Runner, and my favourite, I say my favourite, Foghorn Leghorn, along with Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Mr Magoo, and several two-reelers featuring the Three Stooges. The sound effects to the hilarious violence of the Stooges were right up our street.
The programme ended each week with a serial. Flash Gordon, Congo Bill (a pith-helmeted detective whose beat happened to be the perilous snake-ridden jungles of Central Africa), Hop Harrigan (a P.I. in possession of a biplane), and The Batman (directed by Lambert Hillyer in the 1940s, featuring Lewis Wilson as the caped crusader and J. Carrol Naish as his sinister arch-nemesis Dr Daka). Each episode concluded with a cliff-hanging situation, the resolution of which guaranteed further attendance next Saturday.
Then there were the afore-referenced Bowery Boys, who started out as the Dead End Kids in possibly the greatest motion picture of all time, Angels with Dirty Faces, the 1938 crime drama directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, with Jimmy Cagney taking star billing over Humphrey Bogart, along with the saintly Pat O’Brien as Father Jerry Connolly.
The Dead End Kids played a gang of street urchins who congregated around the New York waterfront, captivated when Cagney’s character, the notorious gangster William ‘Rocky’ Sullivan, alights from a Duesenberg, accompanied by a swell broad draped in silk, wrapped in mink, jacked up on high heels. He’s got it all, that Rocky. The swell broad. The big car. The pale suit. What impressionable punk wouldn’t want a piece of that? It had a very contemporary message. In some poor quarters, crime is still regarded as the fast track to the big life.
The Tatler News Theatre on Oxford Street was one of a chain of movie theatres called Jacey, which ran Movietone newsreels. The rest of the programme included the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Warner Brothers cartoons: Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Pie – a bumper programme on a loop. It was cheaper than most movie houses, so I went there a lot.
If you bought a ticket at 2pm you could sit there and watch the whole programme over and over until the theatre closed down at ten o’clock. People used to arrive in the middle of a movie, then leave when the programme reached the point where they came in.