Kenneth Williams by Christopher Stevens

Author:Christopher Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Murray
Published: 2010-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

13

‘You can’t be childish at 42 and get away with it but nonetheless, I shall try’

August 1967 –August 1968

Two days after Orton’s death, Williams flew to Morocco. It was his third visit: he had spent two weeks over Easter in Tangier with John Hussey, staying once more at the Rembrandt Hotel and talking Polari with the crowd. That visit had been so boozy and relaxed that the Jule-and-Sand slang seeped into the diary, ‘filling Tangé with yr. actual silly queens and naf polones’. They spent several days with Lionel Bart, who had hired York Castle overlooking the city and was full of gossip about plans to film his musical, Oliver!

Bart, who met Williams on Pieces of Eight, shared his glee in tattle about friends: ‘Lionelli told me that after remonstration with Rachel Roberts apropos drinking during Maggie May, he had the phone call fr. Rex Harrison about “What have you been saying to my wife? Now look here, you little pouf!” – Lionelli [said] “Not so much of the little . . .!!” which was quite fun I thought.’

Williams invited Waine and Dennis to join him in Morocco and hoped to surprise them at the airport; instead, they were forced to put up for a night in a resort outside the city when their flight was diverted. At breakfast the next day a waiter called them to the telephone, and a nettled voice said, ‘Yeesss! Well, it’s all fallen rather flat, hasn’t it!’

Two cliques dominated the British expatriates in Tangier, clustered around a pair of minor aristocrats, Robert Eliot and David Herbert: the two ‘Honourables’ competed to throw the best parties. ‘There was a lot of rivalry,’ Waine said. ‘On Sunday mornings they used to congregate on opposite sides of the church to see who could raise more for the collection. But this holiday was fantastic, it was all parties and restaurants, gay bars all along the front, such as George Hardy’s Beach Bar.’

‘Ken loved Hardy’s,’ Dennis agreed. ‘He used to sit there, always in this blue jacket, with a white shirt and this little tie – no matter how hot, he seemed to wear it everywhere. He just wanted to be formal. He liked to be proper, although what was going on was improper in a way, but he wanted to have that façade of looking right.’

Williams needed a holiday after his most gruelling Carry On shoot, on Follow That Camel. This adventure-romance of Bedouin slavers and the French Foreign Legion was largely filmed on location, though on Peter Rogers’s budget that meant Sussex, not the Sahara. Phil Silvers, star of the fifties TV comedy Bilko, had been drafted in after Sid James suffered a heart attack, and he was billeted with Williams, Gerald Thomas and Jim Dale at a clinker-clad motel called Rumpels, outside Rye.

To keep location expenses to a minimum, Rogers announced on the first day that the cast would have no time off over weekends, and that filming would continue on Sundays. As if to thwart him, the next morning a bitter rain started to pour, turning to sleet and hail after lunch.

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