Encounters with Royal princes and a comic’s rough night Up North after a gig

Mark Kelly: not always warm in the West End

Many years ago, I used to write film reviews. The previews to which critics were invited by film distributors started in the morning and ran until about teatime. You saw perhaps three films per day.

One day I was invited to review the soft core ‘erotic’ movie Emily, starring unknown Koo Stark. At the time, she was an aspiring actress. I did not go because I had had a run of soft core films to sit through and the thought of what I presumed would be yet another averagely-directed parade of pointless breasts at 10.00am in the morning was too much for me to face.

A few years later, I was walking past the front of the Prince Edward Theatre in Old Compton Street, Soho, when I saw three people kneeling around a body lying face-down in the gutter. It was a girl in what looked like a very expensive coat. They seemed to be attending to her, so I walked past.

In the next day’s newspapers, I read it had been Koo Stark, by then the former girlfriend of Prince Andrew. She had been taking photos of someone outside the Prince Edward Theatre (she was a professional photographer at the time), stepped backwards off the kerb to get a better angle and was hit by a taxi. She recovered.

Last night, I was standing outside the Prince Edward Theatre in Soho with comedy writer Mark Kelly. Koo Stark was not there. The theatre is currently running the musical Jersey Boys.

Yes, that’s irrelevant. All of it.

“Is he still alive?” I asked Mark.

“Yes,” Mark replied.

“Well, I had better change his name in my blog,” I told Mark. “And I will just say it is a city in northern England.”

“OK,” said Mark.

So this is not exactly what Mark told me…

_______________

So it’s the early 1990s and I am performing as a comedian by the name of Mr Nasty and I get a phone call from this guy called Dave who puts on comedy shows in a northern city.

It’s a Saturday night gig I have vaguely heard about. It pays well into three figures – a reasonable amount at the time – plus hotel accommodation.

I get a train up to this northern city and the gig’s fine: local acts with me headlining at the end. There are well over 100 people there. I have been told that Dave has taken quite a lot of acid in his life, but he seems nice – a little scatty, but OK.

At the end of the gig, Dave gives me the money which is what we agreed and says, “I’ll take you round to where you’re staying,” which is where the nightmare begins.

Dave is not totally out of it, but is a bit stoned. It’s about one o’clock on what is now a Sunday morning. It’s the dead of winter. It’s snowing.

We are in the back of a cab and we drive across this northern city which I do not know. We pull up outside a very large, grim-looking building which has no lights on. I have a guitar case and  bag. He takes out two keys and says: “This one’s for the front door; this one’s for your room.”

“It’s this building?” I ask. “You are sure?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Just go in there. This is where you’re staying.”

I think it’s a bit odd, but I get out of the taxi. I have the keys. I have all my stuff. The taxi drives off and  I’m left standing in front of this very strange, grim-looking building with no lights.

I open the front door with the first key. It’s completely dark inside. I step into what looks like a dark, large space. There’s no sound. There’s no-one around – certainly nothing like a hotel porter. It’s absolutely freezing cold; it’s snowing heavily outside, so just being indoors at this stage seems like a bonus.

I know which room I’m supposed to be in because it’s on the second key, but I have no idea which floor it’s on and, in the distance, I can hear kind of groaning sounds. It’s beginning to feel like an Abbott & Costello in The Haunted House type scenario.

These groaning noises don’t seem as muffled as you’d expect in a hotel nor the sort of noises your average hotel guest would make.

By now my eyes are getting accustomed to the darkness.

I dimly see this number on what appears to be a door and it’s not that far off my number. So I inch down the corridor and find a very flimsy door with my number on it. I open the door, go in and then realise I am in a dosshouse and this is a key to one of the cubicles.

The building is full of alcoholics, mad people, the desperate homeless.

It’s obviously massively illegal because there’s no internal lighting. There’s no Health & Safety.

So I think, “Okaay…. I’m inside, it’s snowing outside and I can lock the door and there is a light switch in the room.”

I turn the light on. There’s a heater on the wall, which doesn’t work. The water in the sink doesn’t work. The place is filthy. There’s a hole in the windowpane and snow has come through and is piling up on the bed.

This is in the days well before mobile phones.

I am somewhere in this northern city which I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue which part. It’s now about two on Sunday morning. It’s snowing outside and inside. I am absolutely freezing. I have a guitar case and a bag. And I have no home phone number for Dave anyway.

So I walk up and down the corridor all night with my coat on trying to keep warm and, when daylight comes, I take the milk train out of the city.

Now…

You might reasonably expect that would be the end of the story… You might expect that Dave and I would require no further contact.

But, about eighteen months later, my phone rings…

(…TO BE CONTINUED…)

Revealed – gay sex scandals of the rich and famous – and the Royal Family?

Someone invited me to have tea with him the other week because he wanted to ask my advice. Yes, I am anybody’s for a cup of tea and some beans on toast.

What he wanted to ask me was: “How do I start a rumour?”

My answer was, “Obviously via the internet, but it is more difficult than it sounds because the internet is full of rumours so it is difficult to be noticed in the tsunami of twittering. Wikipedia probably says that Guy Fawkes was an actor in the Star Wars trilogy, but no-one will necessarily believe that.”

On the other hand, large numbers of people can apparently be convinced by the conspiracy theory that the Americans never landed on the Moon…. Despite the fact that, if so, the Soviets would have immediately revealed the flight and the landing as fake.

Many people believe that, despite the fact al-Queda did admittedly have people flying planes into the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center was actually also rigged with unimaginably large numbers of explosives to blow up when the planes full of fuel flew into them so the US government could blame the Islamic terrorists who were already doing what they were going to be blamed for doing.

Which brings me to sex and Hollywood stars.

A new book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars is about to be published in which 88-year-old former US Marine and former gas station attendant Scotty Bowers claims that Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn were both gay and their famed ‘secret’ romance was just smoke and mirrors to hide their gayness.

According to Bowers, Hepburn first approached him at a Hollywood party and said:

“I know your reputation, Scotty. When you get a chance, do you think you can find a nice, young dark-haired girl for me? Someone that’s not too heavily made-up.”

Over the next 50 years, he claims he fixed her up with more than 150 women.

One day he got a phone call:

“This is Errol Flynn. That gas station of yours has gained quite a reputation.”

Flynn wanted to be fixed up with women “who both behaved and looked as if they were underage”, but Bowers claims that Flynn would get so drunk that, after saying, “I’m going to make love to you like nothing you’ve ever experienced,” he would pass out and Bowers would have to “oblige the lady myself”.

Why Bowers would have been present at the time is not clear.

I can believe he “arranged voyeurism sessions for Somerset Maugham, found a string of young men for Noel Coward and had sex with Tennessee Williams”.

But I find it very difficult to believe that both the would-be Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson were actually gay and “the whole myth of the great royal romance was a fabrication, a giant cover-up”.

If they were both gay, why would Edward have abdicated over a perceived heterosexual love? He could have publicly dumped her, stayed platonic friends and retained the throne. The reason for pretending to be in love with her might have been to hide gayness… but not at the cost of losing the throne.

Spencer Tracey as bi-sexual and Katharine Hepburn gay, yes, that I can believe.

And Cary Grant, of whom it has often been said.

According to Hollywood Babylon, Cary Grant shacked-up with Randolph Scott for a time. I found that duo a bit difficult to believe but the Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger knew where the scandals were – and he was able to believably explain what the name “Rosebud” means in Citizen Kane – it was allegedly William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for his mistress Marion Davies’ clitoris, so the fact Kane dies with it on his lips has some meaning and would explain why Hearst tried to destroy director Orson Welles’ career.

But I find it difficult to believe the former Marine and gas station attendant turned sex fixer for Hollywood’s story about Edward and Mrs Simpson.

Gore Vidal says: “Scotty doesn’t lie – the stars sometimes do – and he knows everybody.”

But do I rate Gore Vidal’s opinion?

I have never really believed the story which suddenly appeared after J.Edgar Hoover’s death that he dressed up as a woman and attended gay parties. “J.Edgar Hoover in drag” sounded too much like something people who hated him thought-up to destroy his image.

It is a bit like spreading a rumour that Cilla Black is a man.

That was not just a nose job she had early in her career.

Very entertaining, but not necessarily true.

They’ll be saying Tom Cruise, George Clooney and SpongeBob SquarePants are gay next.

Unbelievable.