In the Wide, Wide World
How the Other Half Was Lived
In last issue's "Wide World," we left our protagonist, whom I unblushingly called Dartmouth's "most famous living graduate," nearing the third furlong of a typical day in London. Here is how the rest of the race was run.
The lobby of Broadcasting House, "this temple of the arts and muses" as the inscription there calls it, is where my share of Paul Gambaccini's day begins, but we are through it in a flash and headed for one of the studios from which the BBC's incredible output of radio plays is transmitted. We are calling in to give moral support to a friend whose first play is in rehearsal, and it's clear that the gregariousness and curiosity about all the arts which I remember from Paul's Dartmouth days are still present in full force: He knows enough about this radio drama studio, with its impressive apparatus of various doors and stairs and other sound-ef-fects-producers, to speak of it as a favorite place in this multi-story labyrinth. It's not a long visit; the playwright may be made happy by the presence of a friend and the friend's friend, but the director and studio manager are decidedly not. But it's just as well since there are a couple of other calls to fit in before lunch.
The Performing Rights Society headquarters has the kind of detailed records that the encyclopedist in Gambaccini needs, arid he drops off there a list of the last 18 (out of 500) songs about which he needs to know some fact or other for the latest in the Guinness books that he is editing with three others (one of them the man who wrote Jesus Christ, Superstar, and Evita). "The books are what you might call fact-intensive, and we all keep chipping away at bringing all the facts together." And how well they sell!
From P.R.S. to the area in Soho where the British equivalents of Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood and Vine, and Broadway all meet, amidst a plethora of sex shops, strip joints, and doorways with little notes at tached telling you about the delights to be found "one flight up." There we find a couple of garret offices in a Dickensian building where international video deals are being cooked up and where a couple of progress reports are given and received.
The office of "GRRR Books" (sounds like a law firm: Gambaccini, Read, Rice and Rice) shares a building with the Dagenham Girl Pipers and other staples of the British entertainment industry, and for the moment it is occupied by a young research assistant and an amazing array of charts and back issues of music magazines. More of the truth about what the British public went for in a big way is being tracked down. As we climb yet another flight of steep stairs we talk about the need to keep fit and then about the very recently departed John Belushi and the toll that stardom continues to take on the youngsters who make it.
The restaurant we're heading for is in the even sleazier district formed by the triangle-sides of Leicester Square, Shaftsbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, but it turns out to be a gourmet's delight, and over a lunch that suggests the Chinese know more than the rest of us about keeping prices manageable while delivering the best, we talk about Gambaccini the gourmet and his role as a correspondent for the Good Food Guide (a well-loved British annual), though not about its effect on his waistline. And we touch on such things as his having been guest-of-honor at the previous evening's Oxford versus Cambridge ice hockey match (which Oxford, appropriately, won) and the chances for success for the National Theatre's forthcoming production of Guys and Dolls (no odder a phenomenon, after all, than, say, the Connecticut Stratford).
Another walk through Gambaccini's London (there the offices where RollingStone got him started; here-the Middlesex Hospital from whose balcony he opened the University of London's Rag Week not long ago) and we find ourselves in one of Britain's national treasure-houses the BBC record library. From the huge catalogue to the rooms where well over a million discs are housed, we find our way to verify this name or that title, and while Paul is stalking a datum I decide that the best way to share with my readers the scope of the place is to set down the randomly chosen fact that in the second half of the SAA to SAZ sequence the library contains records on the following labels: Samantha, Samaroo Sounds, Santa Ponsa, Saphir, Sappho, Sar, Satril, Saydisc, Save the Children Fund, and Savoy. Hands up the alumnus who has any one of them!
The rush continues. A call on the boss (the chief assistant director of Radio 1) and a look at the color photograph that will grace the cover of the Radio Times (weekly sales of seven million) sometime in early May: three men in a boat, one of them Our Man in London, all of them in their striped caps and blazers. Then there's talk about the rebroadcasting of the Masters of Rock series, and about "Elton's team" (it's said so matter-of-factly) in the five-a-side charity football (i.e., soccer) series. On to pick up the newly-arrived-in-Carnaby-Street Billboard, and the long walk begins (Paul with his head in the magazine, deciding what next Saturday's program will consist of) back to his flat.
We go through Grosvenor Square — the London residence of the Earl of Dartmouth is somewhere on our right — and we direct a stranded Cornell student to the American Embassy. We go along the edge of Hyde Park (only five people in sight, tranquil, quite different from Central Park) where a thousand crocus bulbs seem to be forcing the early March weather to change its priorities (Paul says, "It is good for the soul, even if it's only for ten minutes a day"). And then we go through several of the quiet and elegant streets and squares that make London so much more interesting a city, architecturally, than most others - at least in terms of where people live. And we reach a fourth-floor flat in a vast house which, almost unbelievably, was a one-person residence until a few years ago. I admire the view, look at the decorations (Marcus Heiman Award and Newsweek covers of the McGovernNixon contest, among others), read about his latest nomination for a show-business prize, and listen to the Beatles gently, while he continues a Dartmouth practice of taking a nap on a day when the pace is rough.
The main event of the day is still to come. We drive to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, where Paul is to be a guest reviewer on one of the most popular of the pop music programs on BBC-TV. It's a regular assignment whenever a film is about to be released that has some bearing on the pop music business; and Paul is always in an appropriate costume. Tonight he has to talk for a couple of minutes about a film called (don't ask me why) The SecretPoliceman's Other Ball and is to go on as a London bobby. It's the same as it always is with filming: the main occupation is waiting — lots of waiting between a preliminary run-through and a serious runthrough and then even more between that and the actual taping. And everything is complicated a bit this time by the fact that an employee of the costume-rental people has to keep an eye on Paul because there's a law that no actor wearing an authentic police uniform can leave a building he's performing in so long as he's wearing it. The things one learns!
The show itself is noisy, the young audience enthusiastic, and the canteen is the center of activity during the waiting. P. C. Gambaccini (who obviously knows everybody, and, just as obviously, is liked by everybody) moves from table to table, doing an endearingly passable version of Henry the Fifth's visiting the troops on the night before Harfleur. It's a memory that sticks as, late in the evening, we head back for the West End at the end of a day in which, directly or indirectly, a very large number of people have had a little touch of a talented man who a dozen or so years ago learned his trade on the third floor of Robinson Hall, and has never forgotten the magic he found there.
