David Hepworth - The Secret History of Entertainment

KENNETH WILLIAMS’S LAVATORY KENNETH WILLIAMS’S LAVATORY A walking parody of fastidiousness, the late Carry On actor and radio performer was neurotically suspicious of human society and utterly obsessed with hygiene. He lived alone in a flat in the West End of London where he kept clingfilm over his cooker to ward off germs. He never invited his friends round for dinner because, he said, ‘I can’t stand the idea of another bottom on my loo.’ On the rare occasions that people did drop in on him unexpectedly they were asked to use the facilities at the hotel across the road from his flat.

DAVID BOWIE’S EYES ARE DIFFERENT COLOURS DAVID BOWIE’S EYES ARE DIFFERENT COLOURS When the young David Jones of Bromley was thirteen he was involved in a fight over a girl with a school friend called George Underwood. This resulted in his taking a blow to his left eye from a fist (and not a pair of compasses or a toy airplane propellor as some more lurid accounts have it), which caused him to be hospitalised for over four months. At first he was in danger of losing his sight altogether, but ultimately he was left with a permanently enlarged pupil in his left eye. This still shows predominantly hazel, in contrast with the natural blue of his right eye. (The rim around the iris is still blue in certain photographs, although the issue may be clouded by Bowie’s occasional use of contact lenses.) Bowie and Underwood, who subsequently played in bands together, have remained close friends since the incident.

THE VOICE OF GOD THE VOICE OF GOD If you’ve ever sat in a cinema and felt the speakers shaken by a voice like a gravel and honey cocktail intoning a script which generally begins with the words ‘In a world…’, then you have probably heard the work of Don LaFontaine, Hollywood’s foremost voiceover artist for the last forty years. Starting as a sound editor, LaFontaine lucked into his multimillion dollar profession one day back in the 1960s, when the actor supposed to voice Gunfighters of Casa Grande didn’t show up for the date and Don was called upon to speak the line ‘In a blur of speed their hands flashed down to their holsters and came up spitting fire’. Since then LaFontaine has done more than 4,000 trailers and is known as the ‘Voice of God’, a role he has actually performed live from behind a curtain at his local church. LaFontaine still works as often as he feels like today, ferried from date to date in a white stretch limousine. A decent job will make him $2,000 and may take as long as half an hour. However, like most voiceover artists, he has the latest state-of-the-art ISDN technology installed in his home and can work without leaving the house.

THE POCKET SUPERSTAR THE POCKET SUPERSTAR Alan Ladd, Hollywood superstar of the cowboy era of the 1950s, was remarkably small for an action hero. He had been malnourished as a child and once burned down the family apartment playing with matches. His mother called him ‘Tiny’, and when an interviewer once asked what he would change about himself he replied, ‘Everything’. Estimates of Ladd’s precise stature begin at five foot four, but even the most generous go no higher than five foot six. Love scenes were always a problem. When he appeared with Sophia Loren in the 1957 movie Boy on a Dolphin he had to stand on a fruit box for the love scenes. James Mason made it clear that if he was to co-star with Ladd in the film Botany Bay he was not going to do what many of Ladd’s male costars had done, which was to stand in a trench to save the lead’s dignity. Ladd died in 1964, apparently after an accidental overdose of pills and alcohol. Even at five foot six he was still an inch taller than Dustin Hoffman and the same height as Al Pacino, and would have fitted in with many of the biggest names in Hollywood today. Tom Cruise’s official height is five foot seven, while even Tobey Maguire and Joaquin Phoenix claim no more than five foot eight. Michael Caine, who’s six foot two, has been around long enough to note the change with what he calls ‘the emergence’ of ‘a generation of very talented small people. Maybe they are more ambitious because they are more angry because they are short.’

THE BABYSITTER WHO INVENTED COUNTRY ROCK THE BABYSITTER WHO INVENTED COUNTRY ROCK In 1972 Emmylou Harris was a twenty-four-year-old single mother singing folk songs by night in a Washington club called Clyde’s. One night Rick Roberts of The Flying Burrito Brothers happened to hear her perform ‘It Wasn’t God That Made Honky Tonk Angels’. He was so impressed that he returned the following evening with fellow Burrito Chris Hillman. Two nights later, The Burritos were preparing to play a show fifty miles away when they were joined backstage by former member Gram Parsons. He told Hillman he was planning a new record for which he needed a featured girl singer. Hillman said he had heard a fine singer a couple of nights earlier but couldn’t remember her name and didn’t have her number. At that very moment a girl fan who happened to be backstage with the band announced that she was Harris’s babysitter and obviously had her number. Introductions were made. Parsons and Harris met and sang together. Harris recorded Parsons’s first solo album G.P. with him and country rock was born. ‘I lucked into this whole thing,’ said Harris years later. ‘One little millimeter would have made the difference. If my babysitter hadn’t been at that Flying Burrito Brothers concert and given Gram my phone number, if Gram hadn’t come into my life, who knows what would have become of me?’

MONKEE MOMMA MAKES MILLIONS MONKEE MOMMA MAKES MILLIONS Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as a typist in Dallas in the early 1950s when she came up with the idea of a white correction fluid that she initially called Mistake Out. She began manufacturing it herself, at first in her kitchen, using her son Michael and his friends to bottle and sell the product to office supply dealers. She changed the name of the product to Liquid Paper and moved into larger premises in 1968, by which time Michael had become a member of the chart-topping Monkees and made more money in a year than her business had done in the previous ten. She eventually sold her share of the business to Gillette in 1979 for $49 million plus a royalty on every bottle for the rest of the century. Sadly she died the following year at the age of fifty-six, leaving her son with a significant amount of money, an important collection of the work of women artists and a charitable organisation called The Gihon Foundation.