Low life
Behind the scenes
Jeffrey Bernard
Itook my daughter's mother down to the theatre one evening last week, and what an odd lot there were sitting in the stalls. I didn't go into the auditorium but the theatre manager told me that we were being graced by the presence of Elton John, Sean Connery, Norman St John Stevas and the King of Norway with two of his minders. I wonder why the King of Norway should need bodyguards. Who on earth could possibly want to shoot him? He should have lent them to Mr John for the evening.
So my ex-wife Jill went to see the play and I lingered for a while in the stalls bar chatting with the theatre manager, the company manager and the barmaid. Lon- don pubs are now unbearable in the evenings and the quiet and comfort of a theatre bar is comparative bliss. The Royal Opera House must have one of the best bars in London. I was still sitting there when the curtain came down for the interval to buy Jill a drink. A few people said nice things to me about the play and that caused her to have a giggling fit. 'Why couldn't this have happened in 1966?' she asked me.
Norman St John Stevas came to sit at the next table to ours and I must say that he was not looking best pleased with life. Anyway, they all trooped back for the second half leaving one extraordinary old woman behind. She was the typical Amer- ican tourist: blue-rinsed hair and effusive. She was on crème de menthe and I soon saw that she was legless. She couldn't get out of her chair to see the second half. We got talking and she revealed that she had been on creme de menthe all day. The lady was a lush and she was making no secret of the fact. Very unusual in an American, that. But what dreadful stuff to drink all day. It is as sickening as the thought of somebody sitting in bed all day eating chocolates.
After a while she asked me if I was Peter O'Toole. I said that I hoped I wasn't because he was supposed to be on stage at that moment. There was another strange case of mistaken identity last week. I was sitting in a taxi when the driver suddenly turned round and said, 'I know who you are. You're Laurie Lee, aren't you?' Poor Laurie will not be best pleased that a cab driver should think him as ugly as me and I don't much like the fact that the man could have thought that I was born in 1914.
Anyway, the American trout kept knocking back her peppermint nightmare so I tarried to take Jill to the Groucho Club for a goodnight and farewell drink. Now that she lives in Spain I hardly ever see her. I like to see ex-Mrs Bernards but it always fills me with feelings of regret and remorse and that can make for a sad and sleepless night. I wish the police would block off memory lane.
She is running a bar cum restaurant out there and our daughter Isabel is helping. When she comes back to England at Christmas God only knows what I can do for her. I might be able to get her a job at the Groucho but beyond that I haven't a clue as how to be of any help. I don't really know what 19-year-old girls want. I knew what I wanted when I was 19 and unfortu- nately I got it with a vengeance. If she wants to go back to Australia I will stake her to a one-way ticket but not a return. She can eat seafood at Doyle's on the Sydney waterfront and I can go quietly mad drinking exotic drinks with crazy ladies from America in a variety of theatre bars. What a prospect.
And now I have to go and be inter- viewed by a woman magazine writer. She wants to follow me around today to see what I do. Poor thing. She will see very little and I suppose we will end up in the stalls bar drinking something awful like Drambuie or Cointreau. I just hope this play runs and runs.
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