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THE START OF THE SIXTIES

Beyond the Fringe; The Establishment; the Royal Court Theatre

WHAT MILLER HAD NOT FORESEEN was a different kind of hidden enemy, about to blow his plans sky high. He has never been able to resist an invitation to ‘come out and play’, as he puts it. That being the case, he succumbed to the beckoning finger of comedy when it materialized in the casualty department at University College Hospital, shortly before he transferred to the Central Middlesex. In an off-duty moment, the young doctor agreed to see a man called John Bassett who was assistant to Robert Ponsonby, the artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival.1 Ponsonby’s lofty programming of classical music and drama was being rivalled by the unofficial and more fun Edinburgh Festival Fringe, so he had decided to beat his competitors at their own game by commissioning a late-night Oxbridge revue. This show was to be called Beyond the Fringe.

Having studied at Oxford, Bassett already knew Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore from there. Bennett was a witty postgraduate historian who had been in an Edinburgh Fringe revue the previous summer.² A former organ scholar, Moore was a fast-rising jazz pianist, a theatre composer and natural comic actor.³ When invited to be the third man, Miller recommended Footlights’ new prodigy, Peter Cook, as the fourth. Though still an undergraduate, Cook was already a professional, penning sketches for the West End revue Pieces of Eight (co-written by the young Harold Pinter and starring Kenneth Williams).⁴

On a return visit to Cambridge, Miller had seen Cook performing (trying out the cranky persona E. L. Wisty) and he had been electrified by this weird, glazed, handsome figure producing comedy ‘at right angles’ to everything that had gone before.⁵ At a party afterwards, Miller had eagerly informed the younger man that his routine perfectly reproduced the speech patterns of schizophrenics.

Cook had not welcomed that comparison, apparently forgetting that Wisty was based on a mentally wayward butler at his public school, Radley.⁶ Nonetheless, he had the sense to realize that Beyond the Fringe could be a winner. He duly ignored his London agent, Donald Langdon, who assumed that appearing with three amateurs in Scotland would be a thorough waste of time. Langdon’s misjudgement, akin to Decca’s Dick Rowe rejecting the Beatles, was to make him a laughing stock for years. That said, the joke was briefly on Cook when Langdon negotiated his client’s Edinburgh wage up from £100 to £110, then pocketed an £11 commission fee.

Langdon was not the sole sceptic either. When the foursome first met up in January 1960 for a lunch with Bassett, everyone was in two minds, except Cook. They gathered at an Italian restaurant near UCH so that Miller, the medic with comedic leanings, could hasten back to his ward rounds.7 Bennett, the academic/comic, was suffering guilty pangs about sidelining his thesis on Richard II’s retinue, and he felt he was there ‘under false pretences’ – a feeling which, he says, never really left him.

At the outset, the conversation was tentative and latently competitive. Miller was wary of cracking a joke in case it did not raise a laugh, and various social gulfs lay under the surface. Bennett and Moore came from working-class families while Miller and Cook (an urbane diplomat’s son, expected to follow in his father’s footsteps) were patently upper-middle class. The Yorkshire-born Bennett remained almost mute – only venting a few nervous cries of ‘Oh dear me!’ – and Moore, at only 5'2", felt small, figuratively and literally.⁸ The others were all a foot or more taller than he was.⁹

Competitiveness was to remain corrosively in the mix. Miller has even suggested that they ‘instantly disliked each other’ but all ‘decided that it might be a profitable enterprise’, like a cynically manufactured boy band.¹⁰ He discussed the project in markedly pragmatic terms that day. Was his motivation really as Wilcoxian as he makes out, though? He affectionately remembers how Moore broke the ice, doing a Groucho Marx scuttle in and out of the kitchen’s swing doors, chasing after attractive waitresses. For all the personal tensions, the four of them were, at points, if not often, going to enjoy themselves in one another’s company.

By the time coffee was served, they had agreed to do the show, and Ponsonby saw that they were sparking off one another brilliantly when they met him a few days later.¹¹ He gave them carte blanche to send up anything they liked. As he later affirmed: ‘I always had a naughty corner in my mind.’ Thereafter, whenever Miller was on call at the Central Middlesex and thus half-free, the other three would go to meet him there. Sitting in the young doctor’s tiny staff bedroom, they began bouncing ideas around and improvising Beyond the Fringe into existence: a quirky kind of hospital birth.

Miller was writing two scripts at this time in quite different modes, like Dr Jekyll with a dangerously funny doppelgänger. On the one hand, with Cook and co., he was drafting sketches destined to become applauded classics, not least the mock-heroic World War 2 spoof ‘Aftermyth of War’.

PETER : Perkins! Sorry to drag you away from the fun, old boy. War’s not going very well, you know.

JON : Oh my God!

PETER : We are two down, and the ball’s in the enemy court. War is a psychological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven – ?

JON : Yes, sir.

PETER : Perkins, we are asking you to be that man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

JON : Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?

PETER : No, Perkins.12

On the other hand, Miller had teamed up with his registrar, A. D. M. Smith, to co-author his first paper for the Lancet, appealing to a decidedly specialist audience with the title ‘Treatment of Inorganic Mercury Poisoning with N-Acetyl-D L-Penicillamine’.¹³ Although this was not a bundle of laughs, a distinct trace of Milleresque humour can be detected in the description of how their patient – a case of Hatter’s Shakes – had uncontrollably broken his wife’s best china.¹⁴ One Central Middlesex colleague further recalls how Miller enhanced his hospital presentation with unconventional artistry. He made a film of the man with the shakes standing in the dark, holding a lit taper.¹⁵

Partly because of his busy schedule (not to mention Cook being commissioned to script another Kenneth Williams revue), Beyond the Fringe was not shipshape when the quartet set off for Edinburgh in mid-August 1960. Individually, they had monologues and choice bits of old material, but their collective skits were sketchy to say the least. Bennett had felt incompetent when it came to improvising en masse. The future playwright preferred to craft his words scrupulously. Cook was much more productive but had initially balked at Miller and Bennett’s satirical audaciousness, wanting to create an unproblematic commercial hit. Moore had protested even more, anxiously imagining they would all be arrested. His timidity and his suggestions were, he stated later, treated with thinly disguised scorn by the others. He felt crushed and intimidated by the verbal pyrotechnics of the two Cambridge boys.¹⁶ Even Miller admits that he was ‘enormously impressed and frightened’ by Cook’s extraordinary fluency and gift for doing routines non-stop.

When it came to the crunch at the International Festival, the foursome had just seven days in which to whip the show into shape after arriving in the Scottish capital. As Bassett recollects:

They all got there on the Monday and hadn’t a clue as to what they were going to do. There was no shape, no running order, nothing. The critic Alan Brien, who was writing a piece about the show, came in on the Thursday and was astounded and appalled that they were going to open the following Monday and were still fooling around and saying, ‘It’ll be all right on the night.’ But there is no doubt that Jonathan brought order out of the chaos and if he hadn’t, I dare say, it wouldn’t have been the success it was. I think they all agree that Peter wrote the most material or came up with the most ideas for sketches, but it was very marked that Jonathan automatically became and was accepted as the director.

The run-through that Ponsonby saw, just before the show opened at the Lyceum, was a shambles. As he watched the foursome fluffing their lines and collapsing in hysterics, he pictured the Festival’s formidable board members tearing him to shreds. Yet miraculously, on the night, Beyond the Fringe was more than all right. The Daily Mail’s young reporter Peter Lewis started the stampede for tickets with his review:

Behind this unpromising title lies what I believe can be described as the funniest, most intelligent, and most original revue to be staged in Britain in a very long time.

It is the creation of four, mobile, deadpan young men . . . [who] take the stage for 90 minutes with grey sweaters, four chairs, and a piano, and proceed to demolish all that is sacred in the British way of life with glorious and expert precision.

Disregarding all the jaded trimmings of conventional sketches, production numbers, dancing, and girls, they get down to the real business of intimate revue, which is satire and parody . . .

If the show comes to London I doubt if revue will ever be the same again.17

The show’s almost bare, low-budget set functioned as a great foil, as well as making this revue look trendily minimalist (in line with the spartan aesthetics of Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Brutalist architecture).¹⁸ By offering no distractions, it concentrated all the attention on the cast’s physical comedy and linguistic flair.

Their satiric portraits formed a national gallery of fools and bigots, exposed different cross-sections of British society, and cleverly magnified each type’s flaws in a way that seemed at once accurate and grotesque. They boldly caricatured floundering ministers of Church and State, reactionaries and racists, dodgy top-level scientists, crass film producers, pedantic philosophers and mindless royalists.¹⁹ Especially startling was the show’s direct parodying of Harold Macmillan, by Cook.20 Naming and aping the complacent, old Conservative prime minister took Beyond the Fringe beyond the existing bounds of British comedy.

It had, ironically, been Macmillan who coined the phrase ‘the wind of change’ as 1960 dawned, trying to sound as if he were moving with the times. English society, under his government, was still far from liberated. Beckett’s play Endgame, for instance, was refused a licence in 1958, being deemed blasphemous, and a British Medical Association booklet on marriage was prudishly withdrawn in 1959 as well, merely for discussing whether chastity was outmoded. The rules were, nonetheless, mutating under pressure. The state ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was being fiercely contested in the courts and, just a few months after Beyond the Fringe opened, that restraint would finally be lifted.²¹

The Lord Chamberlain, who vetted all scripts, quite possibly decided to be more flexible than of yore, sensing that the said wind of change might soon blow his house down. He cast aside his notorious blue pencil almost entirely when vetting Beyond the Fringe. It may have helped that his Lordship was tickled by Miller, who visited him personally. Ultimately, he censored only one sketch, called ‘Bollard’, in which Cook, Miller and Moore played camp luvvies attempting to act macho during the filming of a cigarette advert. Even there he merely objected to the terms of endearment ‘love’ and ‘darlings’ in the dialogue, presumably deeming this flagrantly homosexual.²² In spite of the Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommending decriminalization, homosexual acts remained illegal until 1967. To get round the censor in ‘Bollard’, Moore pertly cried ‘Hello, men!’ instead, and in another vignette, entitled ‘Frank Speaking’, he actually portrayed a preposterous Lord Chamberlain, exclaiming: ‘I don’t want to see lust and rape, incest and sodomy [on the stage] – I can get all that at home.’²³

In Edinburgh, word spread like wildfire about this new revue subverting sacred cows, blitzing the status quo. The city’s Evening News proclaimed it to be the Festival’s hottest show and started printing highlights from the script.²⁴ After a thinly attended first night, queues formed round the block and each performance was crammed to 140 per cent capacity with feverishly applauding spectators, some jumping on their seats and hurling their coats in the air.²⁵

Miller and Cook continued to improvise and make each other corpse with laughter, yet they won all the more fans with their informality. Bennett believes Beyond the Fringe was daring and intimate in a new way because, as he says, ‘We dealt with things that young people made jokes about in private but never publicly.’²⁶ It was as if the Fringers – as they came to be known – were almost literally at home onstage, or the theatre was some Oxbridge Junior Common Room suddenly open to all. This made the audience feel simultaneously at ease, privileged and mentally stimulated. The lack of professionalism generated moments of utterly unplanned hilarity as well, not least when Moore was meant to be playing the National Anthem in the opening sketch and didn’t realize that the others had got started. He was duly heard, by a hushed full-house, as he wandered around offstage, whistling and flushing the loo.

A letter that Miller wrote in September and posted off to Oliver Sacks (by then in America) conveys what a roller-coaster those festival weeks were, propelling him from nervous pessimism to elated crowing. Apologizing for the delayed correspondence, he explained:

I have been too jumpy to compose myself enough to write to you . . . It is now a month since I went up to Edinburgh and a lot has happened as a result of that excursion . . . [I] motored up to Scotland with Peter Cook and his funny little mistress [Wendy Snowden, later Mrs Cook] . . . We settled down to a strange week of rehearsal, rewriting and hangdog prognoses of our forthcoming failure. After a few days the atmosphere became entirely ‘huis clos’ giving the impression that we were the only things that existed: us, that is, and the handful of horrible jokes that were shortly to bring dramatic disaster. We rehearsed in the flat [communally shared and near the Lyceum] since the Old Vic [Company] had monopolised the theatre for their own production and since we were only doing a late night show our needs were cavalierly disregarded in the face of their impending Seagull. This set up of priorities and privileges was soon to be reversed however by the astounding success of our show.

After the first night the critics gave us fantastic notices and shortly the cast of the O.V. were standing at the back of the auditorium to see us. Within a week half a dozen West End managements were after us . . . The fees which we are to be paid [for the London run] are astronomical . . . If the show is successful we shall almost surely come to Broadway some time at the beginning of 1962.27

He retrospectively calls the Lyceum run ‘a cocaine-like snort of celebrity and approval’, and his letter reveals that the whole transfer package, including New York, was being planned much sooner than some accounts of Beyond the Fringe suggest. Nevertheless, in the immediate whirl of Edinburgh, the spiralling excitement spelled disaster for his progress as a doctor. Cook and Moore were keen to transfer to London as soon as possible. They regarded any shilly-shallying from their co-stars as ridiculous. Miller, though, was on the horns of a major dilemma.

He had managed to take a fortnight’s leave to coincide with the Festival, but no hospital was going to employ a house officer who transformed into a revue artist every night. Such an open relationship was unacceptable. He could not both walk the wards and tread the boards. When Rachel came up to Scotland, the two of them ended up pacing round and round Castle Rock until dawn, with Miller in crisis, unable to make up his mind. He calls it ‘that fatal night’, noting that Rachel rightly foresaw how there would be no return from this runaway hit if he signed up for the West End. ‘But’, he adds, ‘she knew that I wanted, in some ways, to go on with Beyond the Fringe.’ Perhaps whichever choice he made, he would never forgive himself.

In his September missive to Sacks, he was still clinging to the idea of attaining medical goals, though wishful thinking had begun to creep in as he wrote:

I was involved in the old dichotomy [as regards the West End deal]. This time however I have decided differently. I have decided to abbreviate my stay in Cambridge [holding down a new post at Addenbrooke’s Hospital] to six months. I shall then give up Medicine for a year whilst the show plays in London . . . I shall, in all probability, try and study seriously for the M.R.C.P. during the day . . . [and on Broadway] I shall stay with it for six months and then hop off and resume Pathology in the U.S.A., being by that time extremely affluent and financially well able to stand the privations of a badly paid job in a good centre. At last I am beginning to see the possibilities of what I have always regarded as an ideal situation viz. Medicine as a delightful hobby, as opposed to an irksome breadwinning slavery.

In practice (or rather, out of it), he would never write a second paper for the Lancet, let alone win a Nobel Prize for neurology as his university friends had envisaged. At some point, he must have recalled Danny Kaye’s galling personal prediction, ‘You’ll never do it’, or indeed Kaye’s screen character, Walter Mitty, who merely daydreamed of being a top surgeon. How ironic too that, after converting Rachel, the child ballerina, to medicine, he himself should caper off into what he calls ‘this footling flibbertigibbet world of theatre’ while she became a long-standing GP.

Far from disgraced, he is part of a historic line of trainee and qualified doctors who have migrated into comedy and drama: Oliver Goldsmith, Schiller, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, William Carlos Williams (who wrote some plays as well as poetry), Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood, Mikhail Bulgakov, and more recently Michael Crichton (of ER). Other physicians-turned-humorists have included Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (who went to Cambridge to read medicine because he saw Miller in Footlights), Graeme Garden of the Goodies and Harry Hill.

Regardless of that, Miller views medicine as his lost ideal and sees comedy as his tragic fall, a woeful degeneration, certainly not progressive evolution. Often he talks of his lapsed state as if it resulted from an accident, a stroke of ill fortune. He compares his career change to being ‘tripped up’ by showbusiness, to suddenly ‘falling out of an aeroplane’, to ‘stepping off the edge of a diving board into this murky swimming pool where my moral fibre rotted irreversibly’. He makes this sound like a Wittgensteinian case of ‘My foot went out’ as distinct from ‘I moved my foot’, and his CV looks like a case of Chinese whispers, of unintentional typos or slips of the tongue, recategorizing the medic as comic, the doctor as director, and sliding from the operating theatre to opera and theatre.

He will admit to a degree of self-determination, observing: ‘You make a small choice and find it’s committed you to a large change of life.’28 In an upbeat mood, he will confess that he had great fun and remains proud of Beyond the Fringe. Even so, that never cancels out the remorse. ‘I still’, he concludes, ‘fiercely regret the distraction. I think that was a bad thing I did.’²⁹ In spite of his theory of comedy – that laughter is generated by sudden wrong categorizations – his own reclassification, swapping professions, has left him down in the mouth.

The ‘irksome breadwinning slavery’, alluded to in his letter to Sacks, had also played a part. He was no longer enamoured with the medical profession because he felt it did not embrace its youngsters with any warmth. John Bassett had caught him at a low point, just as he was facing hard graft as a junior doctor: extended periods of separation from Rachel, exhausting working hours, and what he considered an obstructive geriarchy. It was not institutional anti-Semitism, as in his father’s era, but it was ageism of the old-school variety, whippersnappers being put through the mill by their elders.³⁰

Emanuel’s eminence may have exacerbated worries in Miller about falling short, but it did look like a survival-of-the-fittest scenario. He saw a bottleneck of clever registrars who could not all make it to the top due to insufficient consultancy posts. Many trainees felt it necessary to do a stint in the USA, to bolster their CVs with Stateside internships (nicknamed BTA degrees, as in Been To America).

Reforms were coming. The Conservatives had pledged twenty million pounds for new hospitals in 1959. The future Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was simultaneously developing his progressive ‘white heat’ campaign, to champion science and technology more proactively, including medical research. Some in that line, however, were unconvinced by Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ assurances, still considered themselves undervalued, and wanted a speedier boost.³¹ During his UCH period, Miller had also talked of the proliferation of medical journals making it ever harder to keep abreast, a neurosis-inducing task, like his childhood nightmare of struggling to eat the sun.³²

He was enticed by the comparative ease, glamour and adoring applause of a life in the theatre. Sociologists were, moreover, predicting that the future lay in the cultivation of leisure. With more spending power and mod cons in the pipeline, Britain was going to become a Utopia of free time and frivolities, with the arts and entertainment in the ascendant.³³

After the heady success of Edinburgh, Miller told Sacks: ‘I now for the first time in my life actually don’t give a fuck for what anyone in the [medical] profession thinks.’ Likewise, writing in the press in October 1960, he called its senior figures pompous and philistine, and associated a doctor’s career path, rather than showbiz, with a woeful fall. He claimed:

I cannot remember ever having decided to become a doctor. The process by which I finally did become one was much like the migration of the lemmings: a blind scramble for the sea . . . a falling-off from this original sombre ideal [of becoming a Victorian-style scientific savant] . . . I was [rapidly] on the look-out for a job which offered status and security . . . I am now somewhat shamed by this graceless combination of pride and caution.34

Being turned down for a registrar’s post in neuropathology at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, in London’s Queen’s Square, had riled him, no doubt. One of his University College friends was working there and asked the senior neuropathologist why such a superlative graduate had not been appointed. ‘No, no, totally out of the question’, came the reactionary reply. ‘He turned up wearing a sports jacket.’³⁵

Miller did go to Addenbrooke’s, and he worked at both the London Hospital and the Royal Marsden during the West End run of Beyond the Fringe.³⁶ However, this only intensified his misery because, on bad advice, he chose to study general pathology and neuropathology, before getting down to neurology itself.³⁷ As a resident assistant pathologist at Addenbrooke’s, his dull task was to cross-match blood for transfusions. At the London he did autopsies, and at the Marsden he took a mind-numbing job, freezing cancer cells, unpaid. He was faced with a prospect of exasperating years before he could really investigate how the brain affects behaviour, and he lacked the patience for that. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘a complete cock-up, absolute folly, and I knew I was up a gum tree.’

The only perk regarding Cambridge was that some old associates were still in town and Rachel briefly came to Addenbrooke’s to train in obstetrics. In a winter letter to Sacks, he described her as wonderfully replete with domestic comforts – rugs, warm towels, hot baths, smiles and chocolate. That aside, he went on:

I have now been working for six weeks and am still very uncertain if this is really what I want to do . . . In the evenings I am on call for all emergency work and sit alone in the empty laboratory waiting for haemorrhages. I actually like the isolation of night work in a lab since I have no concessions to make to convention. I can sing and mutter, wear T-shirts and mocassins [sic] and sink deeper each night into an autistic state. I meander around the upper rooms, appearing at the windows like a mad, male Lady of Shallott [sic] . . . I am very relieved that I have the escape clause of the revue in April.³⁸

Some weeks later, he added that he had reached the end of his tether regarding all resident work and he now resented the boredom with a keen fury, yearning for the ‘daguerreotypic decor’ of old-fashioned science.³⁹ The strip-lit world of modern medicine was not for him, and the shift to the hi-tech was clearly to become more stark, with Addenbrooke’s preparing to move from its neo-Gothic building to a brand-new site on the city outskirts.

A follow-up letter, veering between self-rebuke and self-regard, went further:

Alas, I think it is all a literary illusion . . . The dancing mote under the micrscope [sic] is all very well until you have to sit over it hour after hour . . . Fickle lad. The baleful shade of Sid [Pask] gobbles and stutters his rebukes at another failed pupil of astronomical promise. It has happened to all of us [the gang from St Paul’s] . . . lured into biology by the [Edmund] Gossian flavours of the subject40 . . . You . . . Eric [Korn] . . . Our love of science is utterly literary . . . I do not think that I will ever do experimental work of any value, if indeed any at all. Instead, I now feel that I am ready, equipped with an extraordinary biological education, to turn a powerful instrument into a region which I have never dared to imagine myself at home. I imagine that when this theatrical business has burned itself out i.e. in about two years I shall . . . get myself attached to a unit where sociology, psychology and neurology meet. A place which will heat me up to some sort of creative activity: wrting [sic], teaching or even perhaps just talking. The ideas are vague at the moment but the sudden affluence has torn a small rent in the clouds and given me a breathtaking view of some distant intellectual Canaan . . . this is all rather inflated and confused. In a letter to follow . . . I shall try to sketch in a sober factual background to this sententious turmoil.⁴¹

Incidentally, Sacks’ prospects were less rosy than Miller’s at this point. He had, as yet, won no public recognition and was living dangerously in a leather-clad biker phase in California, donning a white coat by day but going wild at night, taking what he himself describes as ‘a fair sampling’ of LSD.⁴² Convinced that he would die young, he posted off to Miller, in 1960, a sealed package inside which lay a kind of will and testament in waiting:

Dear Jonathan,

I hope you will never read this note, but if you do you can do me a last favour.

This box contains a selection of what I have written over the years, and if I have ever written anything of worth it is likely to be here. I leave it to your good sense and discretion to retrieve anything you think fit, destroy, or keep as a memento.

Love, OLIVER⁴³

Among the selected scripts was – crucially, as it turned out – a draft of Awakenings. This record of Sacks’ extraordinary work with L-DOPA and with patients suffering from post-encephalitic Parkinsonism was, eventually, going to make him world famous.⁴⁴

In the meantime it was Miller who was the obvious success story. At least one publishing house was asking him to write any book he liked and, in early 1961, he became the Spectator’s medical correspondent. His column appeared under the pseudonym John Lydgate, although Miller’s distinctive seriocomic voice came through, his articles being characteristically strewn with literary, anthropological and philosophical allusions.⁴⁵ He ruminated on psychiatry, on rising NHS costs and on cerebral senescence. His piece on the Alice-in-Wonderlandish symptoms of epilepsy, where the patient sees their hand as suddenly huge or the room shrunk to a brilliant miniature, was riveting.46 John Lydgate was, however, short-lived, peforming a vanishing act in May 1961, when Beyond the Fringe opened at the Fortune Theatre.

The show had been reworked after Edinburgh with director Eleanor Fazan.⁴⁷ As she recalls, the Fringers wanted to appear unprofessional yet worked hard, incorporating new material. They fought competitively for solo spots but Miller, she reveals, was the most humane, helping Dudley with his routines. The rewrite included, notably, the nuclear WMD skit Civil War with its gallows humour:

ALAN : Her Britannic Majesty’s Government is very anxious to popularize the notion of Civil Defence . . .

JON : [But] if we are lucky enough in any future conflict to be the aggressor, we are in a position to inflict a blow of twenty, thirty, or even forty mega-deaths – or to put that in more human terms, forty million dead bodies strewn all about the place here and there. Jolly good . . . our Sea-Slugs will then come into their own in a second wave and bring our score up into the seventy or even eighty mega-death bracket, which is practically the maximum score permitted by the Geneva Convention . . . Following Armageddon, we do hope to have normal public services working fairly smoothly . . . something in the nature of a skeleton service.⁴⁸

This was considerably sharper than ‘Whose Finger on What Button?’, the Fringers’ earlier routine on the same subject. ‘Civil War’ was partly fuelled by actual civil defence manuals, such as the one from 1957 (the year of the serious leak at Windscale) which had risibly recommended wearing a hat in the event of radioactive fallout. On top of that, Britain had been testing H-bombs and declared itself a thermonuclear power, such that the new protest group CND drew a record-breaking, 100,000-strong crowd at its 1960 demo against nuclear weapons in Trafalgar Square.

The show’s rewrite did not save its pre-West End tour from dramatic ups and downs. The performances in Cambridge were triumphant epics, running on into the small hours as the Fringers tried out virtually all their material on an audience who welcomed them like returning heroes. In Brighton, by contrast, it bombed. The seaside town’s war veterans were enraged by the ‘Aftermyth of War’ vignettes which made fun of the Valiant Few:

DUDLEY : Please, sir, I want to join the Few.

JON : I’m sorry, there are far too many.⁴⁹

Bennett and Miller still remember the sound of the theatre’s flip-seats, angrily vacated, ricocheting like pistol shots. Donald Albery, the major producer who was bringing them into the West End, got cold feet and took against Bennett, decreeing that the blond one must go. Having lost that battle, he refused to transfer the show to Wyndham’s, the large Charing Cross Road playhouse which he had previously offered. So, he brought it by default into the Fortune, which is off Drury Lane.

The financial deal was not nearly as generous as Miller had naively supposed either. Albery’s young co-producer, William Donaldson (subsequently better known by his nom de plume Henry Root), was outrageously roguish.50 In his own words:

My participation was absolutely shameful! I was about the only London manager who didn’t even see the show [in Edinburgh] and I knew nothing about anything. All I had ever done was completely screw up a revue by a friend of theirs, John Bird [whose Footlights’ 1959 show, The Last Laugh, had featured Cook]. And within twenty-four hours Don Langdon [still Cook’s agent] had persuaded them this idiot that was me – and that they all hated – was the only person in London qualified to put it on. And they agreed. To this day I don’t know what on earth they could have been thinking of. And then we robbed them blind!⁵¹

Langdon’s argument had been that Donaldson would be pleasantly hands-off and, for sure, the promised weekly pay of around £75 was huge compared to Miller’s earnings as a junior doctor.⁵² Nevertheless, the two producers were soon pocketing £2,000 per week, and when the foursome demanded a meeting, having done the maths, they were told that a successful production must, naturally, pay for the investors’ flops.⁵³ According to Donaldson: ‘They must have had a combined IQ of about 1,040, with me and Albery in the lower sixties, but we outmanoeuvred them easily. They were dumbstruck and they apologized for wasting our time!’⁵⁴ Miller remains, to this day, outraged by the sharp practice, commenting that he and his fellow performers were young innocents and traitorously exploited.

At least they had the satisfaction of seeing Albery look foolish for relegating the show to a small theatre. It rapidly became a West End sensation. Among a chorus of jubilant notices, Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard hailed it as uncompromisingly provocative and uproarious. Bernard Levin stumbled away in ecstasies, giving thanks in the Daily Express that there should be such men living ‘who could come together to provide, for as long as memory holds, an eighth colour to the rainbow’. He moved on to call them ‘four immortals’ because their wit was so sharp, ‘deeply planted and aimed at things and people that need it’. Setting aside a few cavils, Ken Tynan pronounced, in the Observer, that English comedy had taken ‘its first decisive step into the second half of the twentieth century’.⁵⁵ Before long the papers were reporting that tickets were like gold dust, with the demand far outstripping the Fortune’s capacities. Even the Queen (allegedly encouraged by the Lord Chamberlain himself) and Macmillan came to see this show. Her Majesty was royally amused by Cook’s impersonation of the PM.56

The foursome had a phenomenal long-term impact. They sparked off a revolution equivalent to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the 1956 stage play that shook up British drama. They killed off old-style revue and they kick-started the British Satire Boom which, of course, went on to incorporate Cook’s sardonically named Soho comedy club The Establishment, Private Eye magazine (of which Cook was to be joint owner), and the hit TV series That Was The Week That Was, aka TW3. As Michael Frayn puts it, in his introduction to the published text of their sketches: ‘Beyond the Fringe first fell upon London like a sweet, refreshing rain . . . it rained satire thereafter, day and night . . . The demand must have existed, ravenous but unrecognised.’⁵⁷

The show’s skits were preserved on vinyl by Parlophone at Abbey Road, the LP being produced by no less than George Martin.⁵⁸ He subsequently slipped the recorded buzz of the audience at the Fortune on to the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Comparisons were, indeed, soon being drawn between the Fringers and Liverpool’s emergent Fab Four, and their comedy was marketed as a kind of alternative rock ’n’ roll. In the black-and-white image used on the Beyond the Fringe LP cover – taken by the celebrity photographer Lewis Morley – they are coolly leaning against striped street hoardings, with Miller in a hooded coat, looking more like a juvenile Mod loitering with intent than a married doctor.⁵⁹

The theatre critic Michael Billington was starting out as a student reviewer in 1960. ‘My first encounter with Jonathan [chatting after a press conference] was life-enhancing and my generation grew up worshipping him,’ he recalls, adding that the record developed a youthful fan club nationwide, who could reprise the sketches with the accuracy of trainspotters. It was their unofficial set text, making Beyond the Fringe a real turning point in British culture and a force for social change.⁶⁰

The LP and the live show (on tour and in London) inspired several of the Monty Python crew, beyond the aforementioned Graham Chapman. Eric Idle recollects with delight:

I went with a friend and we could only get standing tickets, but it was just as well because I would never have stayed in a seat. I was rolling around the walls, then I immediately bought the album and learned every single word. It changed my life absolutely and utterly. I never knew you could be funny about those sorts of things before. It was like a liberation, going from a grim boarding school to that world where you could laugh at all the things that were repressing you. I just wanted to make people laugh from then on, and I think, though we tended to be sillier and not quite so smart, it was a direct influence on Monty Python.

John Cleese still remembers being reduced to chewing his college scarf in fits of laughter. He observes that Cook’s idiosyncratic style influenced up-and-coming Cambridge comics most persistently. ‘But I thought then, and I still think that it’s the most wonderful show that I ever saw because all four of them were geniuses’, he says. ‘With A Fish Called Wanda, really I was working on exactly the same idea: four characters who are funny in different ways being combined in various permutations.’61

Not many stage shows can claim to be genuinely life-changing but Tony Hendra, the humorous writer and star of This is Spinal Tap, was going into Benedictine orders until he was converted by Beyond the Fringe. The leading TV producer Roger Graef, who became a neighbour and long-term friend of Miller’s, also decided to make England his permanent home because, as he says: ‘I got off the boat [from America] and, second night I’m here, I see Beyond the Fringe and the picture [it paints] of Britain is so wonderfully silly that I think, “I’ll stay in this country”. I was completely enchanted.’

Paradoxically, therefore, Miller and co. became icons of the iconoclastic Sixties, alternative comedians working like moles from within Oxbridge’s old boy network. This was the grown-up version of Jonathan, the small boy who dangled on Lord Lucan’s fire-escape rope, well connected yet rule-breaking.

What is hard to determine, categorically, is whether or not Miller and his fellow Fringers consciously set out to create something revolutionary. Bernard Levin retrospectively rued how the group ‘suffered the inevitable fate reserved in England . . . for rebels, namely affectionate absorption into the bosom of the Establishment that they are supposed to be out to destroy’.⁶² Miller ripostes that none of them ever viewed the world with real spleen because they were all quite comfortably off in the first place, and that having the banner of satire shoved into their hands by Tynan was ‘rather like Charlie Chaplin [in Modern Times] finding himself at the head of a communist parade’.⁶³

He stated, at the time, that the Fringers had adopted no strategic agenda because, whenever they tried that, their scriptwriting ground to a standstill.⁶⁴ All the same, Bennett remembers that the fundamental concept was sending up everything they loathed. Moreover, writing in the press about The Establishment’s imminent opening in the autumn of 1961, Miller sounded militantly keen on ‘the satirical blade’.⁶⁵ With the club being technically outside the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction, he hoped that the blade could be sharpened to be a match for continental Europe’s barbed cabarets and America’s new ‘buzzing hornets’. By the latter he meant Mort Sahl (whose hard-hitting political comedy he loved), Lenny Bruce, and the Second City group set up by Mike Nichols and Elaine May.⁶⁶ In conclusion, he proclaimed:

The Establishment represents a research station in which we might see developed the weapons necessary for the final overthrow of the Neo-Gothic stronghold of Victorian good taste . . . The ranks are drawn up and the air resounds with the armourer’s hammer. When battle is joined one can only hope that blood will be drawn.

This was, surely, the closest Jonathan Miller ever came to being England’s answer to Che Guevara, the Latin American physician-turned-freedom fighter. Cook did not thank him for the advance publicity, observing afterwards that the only blood drawn resulted from someone whacking him over the head with a handbag.67

Miller’s level of political engagement offstage was limited. During his third year at Cambridge, and again while at Addenbrooke’s, he had lodged out in Newnham village with Rachel’s cousin, Nina, and her husband, Bill Wedderburn – today a member of the House of Lords, back then a law don with strong Labour Party connections. Wedderburn fraternized with the future cabinet ministers Denis Healey and Peter Shore, with the lawyer Lee Kuan Yew (soon to be Singapore’s prime minister), and with the barrister-going-on-Tanzanian attorney general Mark Bomani (later chief aide to Nelson Mandela on Burundi peace negotiations). Yet the consequent discussions at the house left Miller only mildly politicized.⁶⁸

Along with masses of others, he participated in one or two of CND’s Aldermaston marches, a commitment reflected in Beyond the Fringe’s anti-nuclear gags. He has also signed a range of high-profile petitions over the years. In the 1960s, among other issues, his name appeared on the British Artists’ Protest against the continuing Vietnam War.⁶⁹ In the 1970s, he would become a pundit in the heated debate about state censorship. He signed another British Artists’ Protest against Kenya’s repressive regime, joined George Melly and others calling for the legalization of cannabis, and contributed to an Amnesty International conference on torture.⁷⁰ His excoriating quips regarding Margaret Thatcher were warmly appreciated by many in the 1980s. In 1991, when the USSR was disintegrating, he co-signed a letter to the Soviet Embassy – together with Harold Pinter, Michael Frayn, Claire Tomalin and others – protesting at the coup in Moscow and supporting the right to free speech. And so on into the twenty-first century when he joined London’s huge protest marches against the Iraq War in 2003, and signed a letter of protest at the Pope’s state visit to Britain in 2010.⁷¹

He was and remains, he says, merely a reflex Old Labour type, not an active socialist or party member. Often tagged as a trendy lefty, in fact he is a more complicated political animal than that suggests. Today, in unguarded conversation, he can tilt breathtakingly to the right on occasion. He alludes to one fellow director as a ‘little guttersnipe’ and another as a ‘slag of a dyke’, throwing political correctness to the wind.

Even his 1961 Lydgate articles for the Spectator reveal subtle oscillations. In one piece he describes ‘the organic charter’, metaphorically comparing the inner workings of the body to an orderly republic. That makes nature sound pleasantly democratic. Almost in the same breath, though, he unsettlingly alludes to the body’s spontaneous ‘xenophobic’ reaction to skin grafts. In another piece, he likens low-skilled workers’ health complaints, ones which vanish after legal compensation, to ‘an insidious form of wildcat strike’. He is hardly taking their side with ‘insidious’, though his argument then switches, saying those complaints express the patients’ sense of exploitation.72 That shifting perspective – in two minds, half left-wing, half right-wing – owed something to the pre-PC era in which Miller was writing, as well as his own socially complex roots. Beyond the Fringe’s satirical gun certainly swivelled in many directions, taking pops at anyone foolish, smug or dishonest, whether they were a Tory leader, a union chief, a racist British landlady (of the ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ ilk) or a black African leader.

Racism had, of course, become a highly charged issue since the mid-1950s with the African-American civil rights movement, headed by Martin Luther King, and with London’s 1958 Notting Hill riots. Prejudiced white Brits were repeatedly satirized in Beyond the Fringe, but Miller also played Mr Akiboto Nobitsu in the slippery, target-shifting sketch ‘Black Equals White’. This dodgy post-colonial leader – head of the fictional Pan-African Federal Party, being interviewed in London – declared that ‘one man, one vote’ was God’s law and that it applied to everyone, ‘especially the nine million black idiots who vote for me’. Miller’s Nobitsu admitted he appeared to be white but he had, he explained, recently undergone an op to remove his skin pigment in the interests of his people, the better to speak to the white man on his own ground. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it is the only way I can get lodgings.’

In any overarching analysis of Miller’s brand of comedy, Beyond the Fringe was his most obviously political, besides being his last major turn. Yet the personal was never far away. As the show continued its run, he slipped in more monologues of the semi-autobiographical variety, teasingly hovering between a cranky comic persona and himself.⁷³ ‘Porn Shop’, for instance, described a medical student’s research into seedy Soho outlets and their sales of unusual books, trusses and similar ‘surgical apparatus’. Even if he was less inspired than Cook and sometimes prolix, such digressive chats made Miller the forefather of today’s intimate, observational stand-ups.⁷⁴ Consider ‘The Heat-Death of the Universe’, which Michael Frayn cites as evidence that Miller was not so much a satirist as a humorist of the whimsical-fantastical school:⁷⁵

Some years ago, when I was rather hard up, I wanted to buy myself a new pair of trousers – but, being rather hard up, I was quite unable to buy myself a new pair. Until some very kind friend whispered into my earhole that if I looked sharp about it I could get myself quite a nice secondhand pair from the sales department of the London Passenger Transport Board Lost Property . . .

[So,] after a great deal of moral contortion, I steeled myself to the alien crutch, and made my way towards the London Passenger Transport Board Lost Property Sales Department in Portman Square, praying as I did so, ‘Oh God, let them be dry-cleaned when I get there.’ And when I arrived there, you can imagine my pleasure and surprise when I found, instead of a tumbled heap of lunatics’ trousers, a very neat heap of brand new, bright blue corduroy trousers. There were 400 of them! How can anyone lose four hundred pairs of trousers on a train? I mean, it’s hard enough to lose a brown paper bag full of old orange peel when you really want to . . . No, it’s clearly part of a complex economic scheme . . . along Galbraithian or Keynesian lines, presumably. So over now to the Economics Planning Division of the London Passenger Transport Board Ops room:

‘All right, men. Operation Cerulean Trouser . . .’

And they disperse to places far out on the reaches of the Central Line – places with unlikely names like Chipping Ongar – places presumably out in the Essex marshes, totally uninhabited except for a few rather rangy marsh birds mournfully pacing the primeval slime.

And there in the empty railway carriages . . . before they commit the final existential act of detrouserment, they do those little personal things which people sometimes do when they think they’re alone in railway carriages. Things like . . . things like smelling their own armpits.

It’s all part of the human condition, I suppose. Anyway, it’s quite possible they didn’t even take their trousers off in the compartments but made their way along the narrow corridor towards the lavatory at the end – that wonderful little room, where there’s that marvellous unpunctuated motto over the lavatory saying, ‘Gentlemen lift the seat’. What exactly does this mean? Is is a sociological description – a definition of a gentleman which I can either take or leave? Or perhaps it’s a Loyal Toast? It could be a blunt military order . . . or an invitation to upper-class larceny . . . but anyway, willy-nilly, they strip stark naked; and then, nude – entirely nude – nude that is except for cellular underwear (for man is born free but everywhere is in cellular underwear) they make their way back to Headquarters through the chilly nocturnal streets of sleeping Whitechapel – 400 fleet white figures in the night – their 800 horny feet pattering on the pavements and arousing small children from their slumbers in upstairs bedrooms. Children who are soothed back into their sleep by their parents with the ancient words: ‘Turn your face to the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen trot by.’76

Fantastical worlds are not, of course, simply apolitical and almost all Miller’s humour is laced with allusions to authorities or institutions. Indeed, the imaginative/realistic mix is a continuity in his comedy. In its merging of fact and fancy, of dull-sounding English outposts and near-magical or fairytale strangeness, ‘The Heat-Death of the Universe’ is akin to the mock conspiracy theory that he cooked up back at school – the one about the meteorologically weird mystery towns of Tooting and Brighton. It also constitutes a prime example of him weaving small private memories into public entertainment. On receiving no trouser-buying money from Emanuel, he had actually resorted to the LTB’s cast-offs. Meanwhile, those marsh birds materialize as in a dream of his past Field Club expeditions, and the trotting gentlemen subliminally echo the troop of uncaparisoned horses that used to wake him at dawn as a boy – all superimposed on his father’s old haunt of Whitechapel.

He himself linked dreaming and laughing when he wrote in the Twentieth Century magazine in 1961:

Some years ago I woke in the middle of the night and found to my astonishment that I was shaking with laughter . . . as I lay there in the darkness giggling foolishly I experienced a curious sense of guilt. For in broad daylight, in the usual run of things, laughter comes attached to circumstances . . . issued by quota to sweeten the rigours of reality . . .

Humour, even when legitimate, fastened to a joke, has something of the naughty about it . . . [it] must have been stolen, like fire, by Prometheus from the gods.77

Did the link he sensed between reprehensibility and laughter relate to Emanuel’s disapproving view of his comic antics? The son may have projected his own guilty feelings on to his father, or vice versa, suggests Oliver Sacks:

I think Jonathan’s father had a feeling that he [himself] had been undervalued and had not achieved all the professional status he perhaps wanted. There was a real conflict in him between a warm, funny, rather brilliant and artistically talented, Jonathan-like man and this inhibiting and censorious quality. He would intimate to Jonathan that theatre and other things were levity, and that intellectual virtue lay in concentrating and producing a shelf of heavy, learned books. I think the accusing and censorious aspect of the father has been interjected by Jonathan and has haunted him for much of his life, introducing a note of guilt or ambivalence so that his own brilliant and various achievements are, maybe, undervalued by him because of this paternal admonition.

Emanuel obviously did not turn up at the Fortune Theatre like Mozart’s Commendatore in Don Giovanni, damning Miller’s larks in baleful, melodramatic tones. He may, after all, have recognized an integrated outsider’s perspective in his son’s satirical viewpoint, or been amused by the caricature of a hip vicar preaching about juvenile delinquents. (‘It is my aim to get the violence off the streets and into the churches where it belongs.’)⁷⁸ Nevertheless, he does seem to have cast a long, sombre shadow. Emanuel regarded any sidelining of medicine as an act of treachery, according to Miller. Nor did he laugh heartily at his offspring’s gag, ‘I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish.’ Although he never spoke of it to his son, he discussed that joke with the rabbi Hugo Gryn, fearing it was anti-Semitic.

On Jews and comedy more generally, Miller has remarked that the Judaic religious practices of exegesis, argument and debate naturally led to comedy being embraced, the disputant’s protest being tactically articulated with a smile. Comedians with Jewish roots have included his hero Danny Kaye and the Marx Brothers, as well as Mort Sahl. Jews make their greatest contribution to contemporary culture, Miller argues, when their intellectual energy, long compressed by the practice of exegesis, is suddenly released like an aerosol spray into ‘this huge world of liberty’.

In the process they are assimilated, and that is, he believes, for the best. If orthodox practices are maintained, he says, ‘for the sole purpose of making sure that in the future you’ll be able to say the prayers for the dead when the Holocaust is finally inflicted again, then I think it’s a damnable device’. He has been charmed by ethnic customs – beyond just Jewish ones – when encountering indigenous peoples in, for example, the Atlas Mountains. However, he finds such practices somewhat disturbing when he sees them ‘maintained defensively’ in modern American or European cities. ‘I feel’, he says, ‘that the Jew must constantly readventure and reventure [sic] himself into assimilation. He owes it to himself and to humanity.’79

Whilst shrugging off Judaism, Miller has felt pangs of self-reproach about his decision to abandon medicine, most strongly when discussing cases with his wife, reading professional journals or simply passing hospitals. He strikingly compares the guilt to that of a lapsed Catholic. It is as if he regarded himself as an infidel in the sense of being unfaithful to his father’s profession.⁸⁰

Betty surely sympathized with her son’s ‘Jew-ish’ pun, and given that she harboured play-writing ambitions, she doubtless enjoyed seeing him on the stage, but he believes she regarded the comedian’s art as second-rate compared to writing novels.⁸¹ Furthermore, she must have flinched at ‘Aftermyth of War’. Miller’s dialogue with Cook remains droll, yet also terribly painful if one remembers the death of Betty’s beloved brother, Henry, in military service.

PETER : I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war . . .

JON : Goodbye, sir – or is it – au revoir?

PETER : No, Perkins.⁸²

Retrospectively, Miller himself is appalled by ‘Aftermyth’, stressing that he now feels ashamed of having made an insouciant joke of those men who risked death to save him and others. He recently spent a day watching In Which We Serve and other vintage war movies which moved him to tears. At the time, the Fringers insisted they were not directly mocking World War 2 servicemen, but rather propagandistic or sentimental films such as The Dambusters and A Diary for Timothy. If that was the case, Miller still risked causing offence because A Diary for Timothy was made by the Crown Film Unit where Betty’s other brother, Julian, worked.⁸³ Julian did not object because he remembered his nephew hero-worshipping his D-Day bravery and also David Niven on-screen in RAF mode.

In fact, a close look at ‘Aftermyth’, on the BBC TV recording of Beyond the Fringe, reveals four young men (none of whom did front-line service) playing at soldiers, smirking but also looking as if they were acting out a fantasy or a fear that they have not completely outgrown. That chimes with Miller’s statement that he had, as a boy, been ‘absolutely fascinated by the mystery, excitement and dread of being aircrew’, and with his confession that, at university, he felt slightly envious of those in his generation who had done National Service and seen some ‘maturing and possibly rather exciting’ action in Malaya or Korea.84 Alan Bennett did National Service on the language-learning Joint Services Russian course, thus being spared military manoeuvres. Cook had declared himself unfit for enrolment because of an allergy to feathers, and Moore had been exempt because of his club foot.

Beyond the Fringe made the group into major celebrities, if not national heroes, as 1960s London began to get swinging. Besides being screened on TV, the show won an Evening Standard Award, and Miller was nominated for the title of ‘Man of the Year’ in 1961.⁸⁵ Soon the Goons invited him and Cook to join them on the LP recording of Spike Milligan’s lampoon Bridge on the River Wye.⁸⁶ While Peter Sellers parodied Alec Guinness’ Colonel Nicholson, Miller exuberantly spoofed Commander Shears. He was asked to play Fagin – a role he turned down – in Lionel Bart’s Dickensian musical Oliver!⁸⁷ There was also talk of him starring as the oldster-mocking hero, a subversive young lecturer, in a movie version of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. In the end, that came to nothing.

He took on one big-screen role, cast as Kirby Groomkirby, the mad genius who teaches weighing machines to sing, in the film version of N. F. Simpson’s absurdist comedy One Way Pendulum.⁸⁸ His performance wasn’t dazzling, so a Danny Kaye-style career as a movie star remained a pipe dream.

He was often out on the town, part of the increasingly trendy scene in Soho. As Rachel was busy doing her medical house jobs, he dined with Cook, Moore or Bennett after their evening performances at the Fortune, and he hung around at The Establishment which was buzzing. On its opening night, the club’s new members turned up in their thousands. Five hundred packed into a space made for 90, and one critic, who needed to leave early, was entertainingly passed over the heads of the crowd. Miller was part of the first-night bill and he made occasional appearances thereafter. Most memorable was the spoof tobacco commercial, shot on film and shown between live sketches, where he played a surgeon operating on a patient with lung cancer while chain-smoking through his mask. Mainly, though, he was watching the acts and rubbing shoulders at the bar with cabinet ministers, fashion models and the likes of Michael Caine and Terence Stamp.

He became good friends with the regular performers John Bird and John Fortune, Jeremy Geidt and Eleanor Bron.⁸⁹ His childhood friend Nicholas Garland turned up again as the venue’s theatrical director, while the burly cartoonist Roger Law (now celebrated for Spitting Image) contributed comic material and beat up Soho gangsters who demanded protection money.90

What of the burgeoning culture of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll? How did Miller fit into that? ‘Well, not at all,’ he says. He was certainly not averse to laddish banter. He once declared his vice was lust, and he remarked on Moore’s leggy lady-friends: ‘I think he found them very fuckable. He liked that size girl. A lot of us do’.⁹¹ One actor-friend similarly remembers Miller’s conversational ice-breaker: ‘Seen any good plays lately? . . . Oh, yes, I’d like to fuck Judi Dench.’ This was, surely, far from high-minded. In the Sixties, though, the term ‘fuck’ was seen as expressing a positive, liberated spirit of sexual revolution.⁹² Or Miller may simply have been all talk, words not necessarily tallying with actions.

It is a truism, universally acknowledged, that a life in the theatre offers ample temptations, and fame bestows extra pulling power. However, he has fended off nosey queries, riposting that stage work probably entails no more sexual temptations than, say, a job in the Stock Exchange where one might, equally, be surrounded by people with whom one might want to experiment. One persistent journalist was told: ‘I’m not going to talk about that [question of unfaithfulness] . . . not because I am embarrassed about what I have or have not done but I owe it to my family. I hate it when people boast about their families or their intimacies or whatever’.⁹³ The man will talk about almost anything, except marital unfaithfulness.

According to one associate’s claim, he was once tempted by the possibility of a fling as British society became increasingly permissive, but he backed away, conscience-stricken. In that case, he didn’t literally acquire a mistress but just, as aforementioned, regularly compared his two occupations, medicine and the theatre, to a wife and a seductress (an analogy he may have picked up from Chekhov, incidentally).

Even if he did have an eye for a nice pair of femurs and knew – in a purely clinical capacity – how to test a knee, he underlines that he was married. The Sixties were good fun, he says, but he was never into rock ’n’ roll; what ‘swinging’ he had done had been in jazz clubs at sixteen; and it was Moore who was the man of the moment, surrounded by Courrèges-booted dolly birds. Cuddly Dudley himself recalled: ‘Jonathan was married, as I think Peter was. Alan didn’t seem that interested in girls at that time, so that left only me. I had a marvellous time.’⁹⁴ On one occasion at the Fortune, Moore was having such lusty fun in his dressing-room that he again missed his cue, finally dashing on to the stage drenched in sweat. Knowing fine well what he had been up to, the others responded in unison to his ‘Oh, hi!’ with a pointedly suggestive ‘Hello!’

Among Miller’s stash of personal notebooks, which he has kept since 1961, one entry ruminates on Moore, sounding admiring though not really envious:

There is a persistence of myth in modern life . . . there are [certain] people who are inheritors of mythical roles . . . They seem almost oversimplified . . . strange immortal, separate and almost vulnerable in their immortality. Like the Gods in disguise. D.M. is one of these. Libidinous and musical, an Orphic cupid. His club foot in someone ordinary would just be a fault. In him it is an insignia of this hidden divinity . . . The Gods are human species written in an upper case while the rest of us are in lower case.95

Moore was not quite superhuman and he eventually keeled over from exhaustion. Consulted as the doctor in the house, Miller told him he was suffering from a liver complaint and had to take several weeks respite.

No screaming groupies ever pursued the Fringers en masse. The only stage-door devotees they attracted were, apparently, two forlorn schoolgirls and their little brother. The small boy expressed his admiration by evacuating his bowels. Miller was sent billets-doux on scented notepaper by one other woeful admirer who used to sit under his nose in the stalls, staring up like a puffer fish in shallow water.⁹⁶ The nearest he came to going boho in Soho was, he says, taking to the floor at The Establishment on New Year’s Eve, merrily dancing with the colourful antiques dealer and transvestite Geoffrey Bennison in his Big Carol outfit.⁹⁷

Another walk on the wild side had rapidly degenerated into a bedroom farce: this was the private cast party organized to celebrate Beyond the Fringe’s London run. Using his seedy underworld connections, William Donaldson arranged for the Fringers to see some blue movies, an activity which, being thoroughly illegal, was regarded as more hip and risqué then than it would be today.⁹⁸ They all met, along with Rachel and John Bassett, in a pub off Berkeley Square before tipsily following Donaldson to an address in Bond Street (now the Burberry store). ‘There,’ as John Bassett humorously relates, ‘after much ringing on the bell, an old fat French slattern came down . . . and everyone had to watch [the porn] reclining on a double bed in the hostess’ boudoir, surrounded by framed photos of her poodles. Oh, it was terrible!’

Miller was apparently the first to start howling with mirth as the movie proved to be some stuttering 1930s film, shot in Havana, featuring sexual congress in socks and dark glasses. He and Rachel then supplied a medical commentary while the shy and somewhat prim Bennett was, according to Bassett, hiding under the bed, groaning in horror. Bennett himself wryly remembers that the films still managed, somehow, to be exciting and that he wandered away at the end, ‘wondering if this at last was “living”’.⁹⁹ Cook regularly amused himself thereafter by scandalizing Bennett who, when nervous, had a rewarding habit of stuffing his hanky in his mouth or, better still, chomping on his tie.

As for drugs, it seems they were all innocent on that score in the early 1960s. When the heroin-addicted comedian Lenny Bruce flew in from the States to perform at The Establishment, he sent Cook off into the night armed with some ridiculous phoney prescription signed ‘Dr Ziglovitz’. Turned away by every pharmacist, Cook surmised that Moore, the jazzman, must be the right contact for narcotics, only to be offered half a junior aspirin.¹⁰⁰ Miller became pals with Bruce as well, before the controversially foul-mouthed American was deported amidst a public furore. ‘[Lenny] was actually’, he reminisces, ‘rather enchantingly nice and easy-going, though there was this row concerning his hotel in Piccadilly where he’d got caught with syringes or something.101 I can remember winding a sock round his arm once [for an injection]. He said it was because he was diabetic.’

The only problem Miller has ever had with drink and drugs is that he doesn’t care for either. He generally prefers Coca-Cola to wine. Some have misconstrued his support for legalizing cannabis. Drug-taking was, he states, out of the question when he was a medical student, and he only tried pot twice after that. It sent him reeling to the toilet with nausea. He has referred to himself as a sleep-and a clothes-junkie, but he is scared of illegal substances which could unhinge his mental faculties. This is not a man who needed his mind to be expanded.

At the height of the Sixties, he wrote a specifically anti-psychedelic article in Vogue, entitled ‘I Won’t Pay for the Trip’, which dismissed artificially produced, gaudy visions. What he advocated was acquiring just a sharper sense of how odd it is to be here, and he went on:

One method which I find works like a charm is to take a trip to a foreign city . . . The dizzying, ecstatic mystery of the experience comes from simply dislocating one’s self from the familiar . . . the sense of civic otherness . . . All this scores over drugs in achieving its effect by the unaided activity of the mind alone . . . [and] the dosage works in reverse. Simply with practice, you can get the same effects with smaller and smaller bits of travel . . . a sense of jamais vu.¹⁰²

His personal notebooks suggest he was never hugely interested in glitz or celebrity gossip either, for they offer no anecdotes in that line. They are more like so-called commonplace books, collecting thoughts and ideas. Beside the aperçu about Moore, Miller’s other entries from 1961–2 typically record quotations from the literary, philosophical and scientific works which he was reading, along with short descriptive passages of his own, inspired by quietly wandering around London. These jottings almost have the feel of a reflective intellectual retreat, escaping the hustle and bustle of fame.

Nov 10 [1961]

This morning woke to the sound of gulls outside. Seagulls squealing with cold in the blenched November sky.

Dickens on childhood vision – from David Copperfield

‘. . . Indeed I think most grown men who are remarkable in this respect may be said . . . to retain a certain freshness and gentleness and capacity of being pleased, which are an inheritance they have preserved from childhood . . .’

Dec 7th. Montaigne, ‘Of Inconstancy’

‘We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture that every piece plays every moment its own game and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.’

Montaigne. ‘Of Solitude’

‘Wives, children and goods, must be had, and especially health, by him that can get it. But we . . . must reserve a back-shop, wholly our own, and entirely free wherein to settle our true liberty, our principle solitude, our retreat[’] . . .

[Feb 1962]

A small moment. Blousy port drinker in a Mayfair bar. While talking, eyes wandering coldly to the legs of a young girl on the bar stool . . . A gap in the conversation – her eyes glance down to her own knees; this sets her hand brushing and fluttering at her dress, flicking and whisking with the little finger edge of her hand. This tiny tornado subsides with a puff or two at some ash on her shoulder. Calm returns . . .

Mar 10

Visited Apsley house [sic] in the afternoon, playing truant in the muggy spring sunshine. The stone pillars of the portico were warm as cider in the sunlight. Then wandering through the deserted galleries. The dull grandeur of a military residence. Windows and mirrors side by side, sliced and pleated time with the mirrors[’] sallow reflections of the past hinged beside the windows which transmitted the buses and the sunlight. A puzzling diptych with panels of different period hinged together.

In July 1962, when Beyond the Fringe had a summer break, he made another notebook entry, marking his debut as a professional director of stage plays. London’s Royal Court Theatre had been famously cutting-edge since premiering Look Back in Anger, and now its head, George Devine, invited Miller to mount Under Plain Cover, also by John Osborne. In fact, this was to be half of an Osborne double bill entitled Plays for England. Bennett was portraying an archbishop in the second piece, The Blood of the Bambergs, which was a royal wedding satire alluding to Princess Margaret’s marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon.

Under Plain Cover was a pointedly non-judgemental drama about a devoted suburban couple obsessed with sadomasochistic fetishes and knickers. The pair were portrayed swapping doctors’ and nurses’ outfits, in far from clinical circumstances, then being exposed and persecuted by the press. Miller says he has no idea why Devine asked him to direct this, but suggests it may have been on account of Osborne’s subversive tone or because no one else would touch the piece.103 Ken Tynan, a devotee of S&M spanking, was excited and declared this premiere – six years before the end of British stage censorship – to be ‘perhaps the most audacious statement ever made on the English stage’. He did not specifically praise the directing. Inversely, the Daily Mail said Osborne vainly tried to shock while Miller displayed diligence and invention.104

Even if he had seen Look Back in Anger and some other Court productions, Miller emphasizes that he knew little of the theatre scene and harboured no ambition to direct. He had always assumed that the job just involved sitting in the stalls, shouting out from time to time. Reportedly, he jumped at Devine’s offer, nevertheless. He was bored with repeating the same lines nightly in Beyond the Fringe, and had begun to scorn his own comic monologues, especially compared to Cook’s.¹⁰⁵ At the very acme of his success as a West End comic, he was becoming less and less assured about his onstage skills.

Self-doubt had, in fact, struck earlier. His Bertrand Russell skit had gone down like a lead balloon in his spot on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the very venue where he had watched Danny Kaye raise the roof.¹⁰⁶ The rot of insecurity then became pervasive at the Fortune where, paradoxically, the rave reviews made him wary. He now felt overloved, suspecting the adoration was excessive and only temporary. On The Establishment’s opening night, he realized he must stop playing the fool soon because he was, in his own eyes, so agonizingly unfunny. He did not perform there much after that.

He was not nervous about directing, except when his seasoned Royal Court colleague, John Dexter, announced that he had finished blocking The Blood of the Bambergs. Unaware that this was just the technical term for organizing the actors’ positions on the stage, the rookie had a moment of blind panic, envisaging his own production being mauled by the critics for dire blockinglessness. Having got over that blip, he confidently believed that he knew how conversations should sound and, he says, he simply had the actors moving around naturally. What he primarily enjoyed was the ‘nursery pleasure’ of a group being allowed to continue ‘pretending “I’m the king of the castle!”’ in grown-up life. The child psychiatrists of his infancy, by strongly encouraging imaginative free play, had indeed had an unexpected long-term effect.

He also became fascinated by ‘getting things right’, just as his mother had always advocated, shunning sentimental clichés in favour of accuracy, even if that entailed offending people. Directing is, in his view, ‘nothing more than reminding people of what they’ve known all along about being alive, but have forgotten, overlooked or repressed’, and ‘getting them to forget what they ought never to have “known” in the first place’ (i.e. the artificial mannerisms employed by hackneyed theatremakers).

Roger Graef, who was also a Court director, remembers Miller being shyly exhilarated about assembling this new kit of parts – actors, script, lighting and so on. ‘ Under Plain Cover had’, he says, ‘a fresh simplicity, if you like, compared to the more sophisticated conceits Jonathan would do later. Actually, it was closer to the way he now makes his art [his found-object sculptures].’¹⁰⁷ Devine helped Miller as well, solving problems that had developed with the set design, a house that was supposed to open like a clam shell.

When outraged audience members stomped out of the previews, Devine further reassured the company and rightly predicted that eager punters would flood in after press night. His protégé has nothing but praise for the legendary artistic director, describing him as an extremely supportive paternal figure, not an irritable man as some claimed.

The actors who played Osborne’s couple, Ann Beach and Anton Rodgers, were in turn impressed by Miller. ‘He understood the psychology underlying the piece,’ Beach says. ‘All his doctor’s tact, diplomacy, care and deep insights into the human mind work wonderfully for directing.’ Rodgers added:

He took to directing like a duck to water and what was so marvellous was – and this is an experience I never had before or since – I didn’t have to learn the lines at all, because he rehearsed it so well in terms of the reasons behind what we were saying. It was an extraordinary, terribly exciting show to be in because he had this ability to enthuse the cast. There was a tremendous enjoyment factor.

Rodgers further appreciated the Millers’ medical skills when he sliced through his thumb, to the bone, on his way to the show’s first night. He rang his director’s home number, got Rachel’s advice on staunching the blood, and was met at the stage door by her other half, who bandaged the wound with sticky tape until there was time for stitches.

Giving himself a pat on the back, Miller thought that Osborne was very approving during rehearsals, whispering with admiration about the production’s insights.108 He further reckoned he had avoided a conflict. When the writer spotted that he had surreptitiously pared some verbose speeches, he acted the innocent and exclaimed that everybody really must learn their lines. Little did he know what bile Osborne was pouring into his diary, namely:

I’m glad I’ve kept away from J. Miller . . . The striving fluency of the Hampstead nanny’s boy is deceptive and occasionally plausible. With its cultural allusions and cross-references to other disciplines, it is the gab-gift of someone to whom English is an adoptive tongue. Intellect does terrible things to the mind. As a director, he’s an Armenian carpet-seller.

There is more than a whiff of anti-Semitism or sheer xenophobia there.¹⁰⁹ The dramatist seemed like a spirited dandy but was already turning into a grumpy old snob, observes Miller, who further underlines that ‘For someone who’d set so much store by a perfectly ordinary person ranting on the stage [Look Back in Anger’s working-class Jimmy Porter], he had very rapidly furnished himself with a Rolls Royce.’ Years later, the two men were to meet again for an interview marking Osborne’s sixtieth birthday. The playwright insisted this was done at the Garrick Club with champagne at his side. ‘He sat there in a cravat and elaborate five-piece suit,’ Miller remembers, ‘and I asked him about his drift to the right, at which point he said, “I thought this was going to be a celebration. Well, many fucking happy returns!”’ It all came to an ill-natured conclusion and was never broadcast.

Whatever Osborne thought, Miller was starting to enjoy directing in 1962, and his July notebook entry shows him grappling with the practicalities, philosophizing about this new craft, and connecting it up with his knowledge of science and Facetti-style collages:

Directing a play

As we go on the actors keep pleading for props . . . we begin to realise how much objects occupy the performer’s hands and direct his performance . . . one sees that we are nothing without objects. We are continually looting the tangible world for artificial limbs – anything will do – pencils, hankies, cups and matchboxes. We are like voracious amoebae, gliding about and engulfing things in our pseudopodia, holding them, warming them and rejecting them before we pass on and take up something else. It is as if our body image itself was vague and protean, pouring itself down our hands and into the objects . . .

The James-Lange theory holds to some extent in acting . . . performing unlocks the meaning . . . Direction consists here in persuading them, for a moment, to adopt the James-Lange approach and to discover grief through weeping. Performance is . . . the Prince Charming kiss with which the actor stirs the sleeping line . . .

Acting is, at least in rehearsal, collage. Fragments and replicas of the actor’s own life, taken from memory and pasted into a new pattern. Then we spin the wheel of the play and the patches and fragments fuse into a luminous blur, like Newton’s wheel.110

He came to apply J. L. Austin’s philosophical essay ‘Pretending’ humorously too, with the following example:

There are complicated philosophical questions about what it is to pretend to be angry onstage or in life. If you are playing a game, pretending to be a hyena, and you go down on all fours, make a few essays at hideous laughter, then bite a mouthful out of my calf, in what sense has your pretence failed? . . . If I am a burglar on a ladder pretending to polish the windows, and I am polishing them rather well, in what sense am I pretending? . . . If you ask someone to pretend to be Othello . . . It doesn’t make him a better Othello if he actually suffocates Desdemona.¹¹¹

As a sideline, Miller was commissioned by Schweppes, in 1962, to co-create posters for a major advertising campaign, a series of cod-Schweppeshire Foundation Reports. The rough drafts survive:

DRAMA AND THE PUBLIC SCENE

The Schweppeshire Foundation has an important part to play in the development of the new National Theatre project. The plan involves a complete revolution in theatrical design. ‘Drama,’ says Sir Hugo Prompt-Corner, co-ordinator of the scheme, ‘must break away from its conventional setting’ . . . plans include a daring production of The Cherry Orchard, to be staged on the Down Line of the middle span of the Forth Bridge. In this scheme, passengers on the 3.45 to Edinburgh will get a brief but invigorating dose of Chekhov as the train ploughs its way through the assembled actors . . .

THE CHANGING FACE OF BRITAIN

They [the Schweppeshire Foundation’s Social Psychology Team] have commissioned Raymond Bulge, Professor of Violence in the London School of Bodily Harm, to conduct a survey of Riots and the Performing Arts . . . a programme of Stravinsky was slipped into the Glyndebourne season, 400 dinner jacketed aristocrats went berserk, slashed seat covers and paraded around the ornamental gardens chanting, ‘We want Trad, Dad!’ The police of three counties and four fire hoses failed to quell the turbulent ‘toffs’ and order was only restored when the orchestra, who had fortunately kept their heads, struck up with the overture to Il Seraglio.112

It was probably for the best that these satirical skits did not make it to the billboards. They sent up top arts institutions which later would employ him as a director.

Miller’s income from Beyond the Fringe had enabled him and Rachel to leap up the property ladder. They left the rented basement flat in Regent’s Park Road and bought a tall, early-Victorian, terraced house in nearby Gloucester Crescent, where they still live. His rise in fortunes was dramatic yet also mirrored the upswing in the nation’s finances. The British economy was back on its feet, relatively firmly, for the Sixties. Wages rose and mortgage rates fell, with expansive affluence replacing the age of austerity.

The geometry was peculiarly neat, for Miller’s Camden Town property and his two childhood abodes form an almost perfect, right-angled, isosceles triangle on a map of London. Its three points all sit on the edge of the circle that is Regent’s Park, with Miller having settled directly north of Park Crescent and due east from Queen’s Grove.

Gloucester Crescent itself is a lovely secluded niche, which is simultaneously within earshot of the exotic bellows of London Zoo. It is just off Camden Market which, in the early Sixties, was full of fruit and veg, cheese, poultry and antiques stalls. The market would rapidly turn into a Mecca for hippy and grungy street gear. In the meantime, however, the Crescent was to become a celebrated nerve centre of liberal intellectuals, press and TV stars, so much so that the media was said to be run by an Oxbridge Mafia encamped in NW1 (the North West One postcode).

This area had a history of being inhabited by freethinkers, artists and academics because nearby are the British Museum, Bloomsbury and UCL. More notoriously, Dickens had stowed his wife at 70 Gloucester Crescent when he left her in the 1850s, after she had born him ten children. When the Millers arrived, the author Louis MacNeice was already living in their street. Essentially, though, they helped start an extraordinary trend. Alan Bennett became their lodger during the London run of Beyond the Fringe, residing in the basement flat (now the kitchen). This made home life highly entertaining, Rachel confirms, and Bennett shared intellectual interests with her husband, in history, art and literature.

Before many years had passed, other neighbours in the Crescent were to include Miller’s Cambridge friends Claire and Nick Tomalin (and later her second husband, Michael Frayn); George Melly and his writer-wife Diana; Max Stafford-Clark (of Joint Stock Theatre Company and then the Royal Court); Stevie Smith’s biographer Frances Spalding; the artist David Gentleman; Mary-Kay Wilmers (who took over the editorship of the London Review of Books from its founder, Karl Miller); Susannah Clapp (another LRB co-founder); Ursula Vaughan Williams (widow of Ralph); the Labour MP Giles Radice; the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis (real name Anna) and her husband Colin Haycraft (whose party-throwing publishing house, Duckworth, was based at No. 43, an old piano factory).

In nearby streets were Joan Bakewell; the philosopher A. J. (Freddie) Ayer and his journalist wife Dee Wells; the writers V. S. Pritchett, Angus Wilson and Julia O’Faolain; and Private Eye’s John Wells. That is not to mention Jill Tweedie, Kingsley Amis, Sylvia Plath, Roger Graef, Beryl Bainbridge or Jenni Murray of Woman’s Hour. The sculptor Anthony Caro has his studio round the corner, and Bennett himself bought a house virtually opposite his co-star’s in 1969.

When the Millers moved in the area was not gentrified. Their new home had previously been a cheap boarding house, and an entry in Miller’s notebook shows him appreciating the shabbier aspects of his environs. Riding on his Lambretta past the deep cutting at one end of the Crescent, he endowed it with a mythical, almost Orphean status, writing:

The railway exists at another level . . . a supernatural world hidden behind the houses . . . the shunt, grunt, rattle and shackle of goods yards behind the stucco terraces . . . an industrial spirit world, a plutonic [sic] reality under the surface of things. (There are occasional elegiac cries from the engines) . . . the strangeness of all this . . . that Hell, a supernatural place, should have an entrance geographically located in the ordinary physical world.113

Simply putting down permanent roots made Miller feel secure. He called his earnings ‘fuck-off money’ and, having inherited Emanuel’s dread of impoverished eviction, he bought the freehold.¹¹⁴ That way he could shake off the nightmare vision of being dragged down his front steps, as an old man, by some cruel landlord. He was certainly delighted to be a house-owner, albeit with some professional anxieties, as he typed the following and sent it off to Sacks in San Franciso:

Gloucester crescent, n.w.1 [sic]

My Dear Ol, another sluggishly belated letter. As you can see from the address I . . . am now comfortably set-up . . . My whole purpose, I think, in taking up this review [sic] has been to get enough money to buy a place like this . . . Having a place like this takes all the edge off one’s ambition . . . I am writing this from my study which is right at the top of the house looking down onto an enormous rock pool of tree filled gardens swimming with cats and children. Rachel is away doing her house jobs so that I am alone in the place luxuriating in the private emptiness; standing in the basement, shouting yoo-hoo and listening to the sound loose itself into the upstairs emptiness of my own property . . .

We [the Beyond the Fringe quartet] have been an astounding and resounding success and have become the theatrical gold standard by which practically everything else is calibrated. The curious and disturbing thing about all this is the fact that there is, implicit in it, a fair ration of resentment all ready to swing in the other direction whenever the climate changes. The whole system of critical praise and contempt seems capricious.115

Signing off, he added that he was now being asked to write a great deal for the papers, was still working for his MRCP (the postgraduate medical diploma), and would be coming to the States with Beyond the Fringe in September 1962.¹¹⁶ They were, he said, to play Washington before the big challenge, sinking or swimming on Broadway.