Hiring and firing
Roger Lewis
When they were making Cany On Don't Lose Your Head, the one about the French Revolution, the wonder is that the cast didn't grab their chance to shove Peter Rogers, their producer, under the guillo- tine. The gulf between how he and his wife Betty Box lived — Aston Martins, Rolls Royces CI had two at a time. A saloon and a convertible'), floor-length mink coats and chauffeur-driven trips to the Royal Ballet (`the barman became a personal friend and would always have champagne and a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches ready during the interval') — and how the actors lived (Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, for example, eating out of tins in shabby bedsits) — is as laughably wide as that which divided the court of Louis XVI from the horny-handed peasantry. Or another example would be the difference between the Ceausescus and the rest of Romania.
Peter Rogers himself would be amused at the comparisons and has anyway heard it all before. Hawtrey, for instance, accused him of being drunk with power — to which Rogers retorted that he wasn't the one who was drunk, which is chillingly true. Rogers comes across in this absorbing book, by the indisputable Carry On experts Morris Bright and Robert Ross, as sober-sided to a fault; niggardly, in fact. Ice-cold. If he's tyrannical, then that is what a successful tycoon has to be. 'I do my best to make a film on time and under budget, that's all,' he says flatly. If he treated his subordinates (or assets) abruptly or less than compas- sionately, well, you can't expect a generalis- simo's authority to be questioned. The Carry Ons, 30 of them over 20 years, had to be completed with severe military preci- sion. 'I make a film in five working weeks and it makes a fortune,' he explained.
The trouble is, he didn't want to dish the gravy around and the actors had a horrible time, standing about in the rain, being ticked off if they needed a second take, having to make their way to the studios by public transport, being cut down to size generally. Rogers refused Hawtrey the small status symbol of a little cardboard star for his dressing-room door and for some reason Joan Sims's going out with a studio carpenter was taboo — 'he did not approve of one of his artistes going out with one of the crew'. When Jim Dale protested half jokingly about a night shoot — 'We ought to go on strike!' — Rogers was instantly heavy-handed. 'I couldn't have that sort of behaviour, so, yes, I did contact his agent' — in the expectation of a fulsome, crawling apology.
Normally, actors weren't given the chance to apologise. Bernard Bresslaw was lucky to escape execution when he con- fessed he couldn't ride a motorbike for a sequence in Carry On at Your Convenience CI was outraged, to be honest,' says Rogers); the normal fate for a miscreant or complainant was never to be seen again. When Liz Fraser suggested that the films could be better marketed, Rogers didn't expect 'an actress to be so opinionated about distribution and presentation', and so 'it was time to find a new leading lady'. When Bernard Cribbin, hit by a stray plas- tic bullet during Carry On Spying, not unnaturally screamed, 'neither Gerald [Thomas — the director] nor myself could tolerate that sort of bad behaviour on set. It shows a lack of control.' Hence 'we both felt that our films could do without Bernard Cribbins in future'.
Hawtrey was sacked because he felt his long loyal service ought to be reflected in the billing (he was stuck in third or fourth position). 'There was no question that Charles Hawtrey was going to hold me to ransom,' says Rogers, who felt he was the one being let down. Bruce Montgomery, the music director (and Larkin's and Sir Kingsley's chum), got in the grip of the grog and thus 'Rogers severed his link with his lyricist and composer and took on Eric Rogers', who himself left eventually after his orchestra of 40 dwindled to a band of 20. Even Talbot Rothwell, the innuendo- prone writer whose script for Cany On Henry assured us that Bluff King Hal was 'a great guy with his chopper', was let go. He had a breakdown and 'Sadly, we couldn't use Talbot again.'
A ruthless bastard or a shrewd impre- sario without whom we wouldn't have a much-loved film series, England's own La Comedie Humaine? Mr Carry On suggests you can't have one without the other; this is how moguls are made. But it is a fine line that is drawn and the authors note that Rogers is always very kind to animals, as if in mitigation. Here's a fellow, though, who was so worried by too much jollity in the studio, when guffaws erupted between Frankie Howerd and Joan Sims, I walked on to the set, tapped my watch and rather confidently said, 'We have got to be finished by 5.30.' The laughter stopped immediately.
I'll bet it did. And as a chap who'd fly down to the Cote d'Azur with Betty Box whilst a driver went on ahead with one of the clas- sic motor cars, he must be one of the world's champion ironists to be proud of the fact that when Kenneth Williams asked for transportation between his flat and Pinewood, 'that's when I had to draw the line... If he wanted a car it would have to come out of his fee' — which was £5,000 per film in 1958 and still £5,000 per film two decades later. Rogers, meantime, trousered several times that, plus — cru- cially — a whopping percentage of the gross. Betty Box was cut in on some of the deals, too. Because she'd produced the Dirk Bogarde Doctor pictures, she was given a profit participation for use of the word in the titles Carry On Doctor and Carry On Again Doctor, which seems plain rapacious.
The actors didn't get near the real money and they all categorically denied that they were ever offered anything other than the basic flat rate. (The women, scandalously, were paid half of the blokes' standard remuneration.) Though there hasn't been a Carry On for years (they are perky period- pieces, 'a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland,' as Hazlitt said of Restoration Comedy), they are now bigger business than ever, with videos and DVD sales in every corner of the circular globe. The moral argument concerning Peter's use of film performances ... without either the permission of the actors involved or further payment for the privilege still rages to this day,' comment the authors drily.
As it should. Couldn't a good lawyer find a way into or around this by declaring the original contracts, which date back to the Fifties, intolerably onerous and untenable? Or what about the Protection of the Per- former Act, especially as amended by the Rickless vs United Artists case, where the Peter Sellers estate won a million pounds in compensation and damages for the use of out-take material and unauthorised clips? Or the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988), which gives performers a statutory civil right not to have recordings of their performances used without their consent?
Come on, Joan Sims and Barbara Wind- sor, the only regulars still in the land of the active living, hie to a shyster and swan about the Gritti in Givenchy frocks, as Betty Box did; and as the legislation is retrospective, the heirs of Sid, Charlie, Kenny, Bernie Bresslaw, Hattie and the rest would benefit, too. (But then good lawyers cost money, don't they?) Turning to Lifting the Lid, Betty Box's memoirs, after the biographia fiscalis that is Peter Rogers's life, is a bit like reading the Journals of Elena Ceausescu or Imelda Marcos. It's all exotic foreign travel, five- star hotels, shoes, dresses, galas; and in the back of our minds we know full well that the Carry On team never got further than Slough or Reading aboard the catering bus. Nevertheless, it is written with much colour and dash and pluck and old Betty, with her `Peacock eye — it darts quickly here and there and sees everything', whilst not being somebody you'd want to mess with, or meet particularly, did have an enviable time, gadding about scouting for locations in Paris, Rome, Florence, the Canadian Rockies, Vienna and Venice, where James Robertson Justice was mistaken for Hem- ingway in Harry's Bar. (I'd like to know more about James Robertson Justice: is there a book?) If the scrimping Rogers sel- dom took his cast and crew out of the Pinewood car park, Betty, by contrast, was up the BOAC steps wrapped in her furs (`Peter supplied the diamonds') faster than a rat up a rhododendron. One moment she's at Jaipur, gazing at the Maharajah's elephants which are freshly painted and decorated each day, the next she's drinking brandy in Hollywood with Katharine Hep- burn, whom she liked, and Bob Hope, whom she hated.
`The films I'd made had all been prof- itable. I'd made a lot of money for myself,' she states. The pity of it is that none of her pictures (all directed by Ralph Thomas, Gerald's brother) was much good. Doctor In the this-or-that; the Percy flicks about the ding-a-ling transplants; forgotten photoplays with John Gregson, Juliet Mills or Kenneth More. We never quite get the lid lifted on how she succeeded, what her knack was, or what precisely her skills entailed. Away from the travelogues and anecdotes, the book suggests an empty heart. She mentions her husband but sel- dom. Similarly, in Mr Carry On, it is Betty Who is absent from the story. As a married couple they seem to have ploughed separate furrows and were childless by Mutual consent, whatever that means. (Psychologists might like to reflect on the contrast between the producers' somewhat undemonstrative relationship' and the sex- ual erethism in every single one of their Rogers, Betty died last year of cancer. Kogers, nearing 90, still goes to his office each day at Pinewood, accompanied by his faithful Alsatian, Heidi.
Previous page
