DIARY
en years after his barnstorming success with the play, Peter O'Toole, with the origi- nal cast, is reviving my Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Old Vic. Early on in rehearsals Peter noted that the piece has acquired a darker edge than it had, tingeing the comedy with a touch of melancholy. The reason, of course, is that what was once a requiem for old Soho (I see that Jeff's favourite restaurant, Wheeler's in Old Compton Street, is now boarded up) has become a requiem for Jeffrey Bernard him- self. It is a shame he cannot be here to see this new production, but then he never saw very much of the old one, preferring to sit in the stalls bar receiving the adulation of his fans. Although the play is already up and running, press night is not until next Wednesday. It cannot attract more favourable reviews than the ecstatic one we got from the Sunday Mirror on the occasion of its 1991 revival when it broke all records at the Shaftesbury Theatre. This was written by none other than Jeff himself. The next day in the Groucho Club he asked me what I thought of his debut as a drama critic. 'A rave,' I said. 'The only problem I had with it is that we don't open until next week.' Jeff's jaw dropped. 'You don't mean to say I dreamt the opening night?' But he had.
Interviewers nterviewers have been asking if we have made any changes to the play, in view of Jeff's death two years ago. Not a syllable. There were a couple of anecdotes, gleaned since the first production, that I should have liked to incorporate in the show; but given that after the original try-out we had to shave half an hour out of it because of an excess of unseemly laughter, there was no room for them. The first concerns Jeff him- self. During the Gulf war he learned that four of his messmates at Pangbourne Naval College had risen to become rear admirals. Musing on this over a large one in the Grou- cho one afternoon, he ruminated: 'Just think, if I hadn't been asked to leave Pang- bourne I could even now be steering a nuclear submarine through the Arabian Gulf with a pink gin in my hand.' The mind judders. The other story touches on our mutual acquaintance with the late Dennis Shaw, a swarthy B-picture film actor notori- ous for his rudeness. One night Den-Den, as he was known in Soho, was dining off duck a l'orange at the old L'Epicure in Romilly Street. He beckoned over his waiter and asked what his side dish was supposed to be. The waiter told him it was petits pois. Den- Den snorted: 'These are not petits pois, you imbecile, these are the effing pellets you shot the effing duck with.' The waiter drew himself up to his full height. Neester Shaw, I 'ave been a waiter in zees restaurant for 25 Years, and nevair 'ave I been spoken to in
KEITH WATERHOUSE
zees way.' Another grunt from Den-Den. `You have worked in the same establishment for 25 years and never risen above the rank of waiter? Hardly surprising, when you serve used ammunition as a vegetable!'
Of the four stage Jeffrey Bernards in this country — Peter O'Toole, Tom Conti, James Bolan and Dennis Waterman O'Toole was by far Jeff's favourite, not least because he kept a bottle of Smirnoff in his dressing room for Jeff's personal use. His least favourite was Tom Conti, for stocking no alcohol of any description. It is not gen- erally known that, to paraphrase a line in the play about his four wives, there could have been a fifth Jeffrey Bernard had we played our cards wrong. He volunteered to play himself at a Sunday charity matinee. He was entirely serious in this ambition, responding indignantly to our hoots of derision that he already had West End stage experience as indeed he did, playing Bill the Burglar in Joan Littlewood's 1965 production of his friend Frank Norman's A Kayf Up West. To humour him I tried to teach him the cele- brated egg trick which opens Act Two. But he could never get the hang of it, and before giving up had done considerable damage to the decor of the Coach and Horses. People often assume that Jeffrey Bernard and I were great buddies. In fact we were cronies rather than close friends, although I did once briefly share a flat with him. This arrangement came to an abrupt end when, having forgotten my office keys, I returned home unexpectedly one morning to find a jazz musician fast asleep in my bed. Jeff, unknown to me, was running a Box and Cox racket of sub-letting my room to night owls in the daylight hours. On occasion, I was his reluctant host, when I would return home in trepidation late at night to find a trail of kitchen matches leading to wherev- er Jeff was slumped with a smouldering cigarette between his nerveless fingers. Knowing his record for setting beds on fire I preferred, when he had missed his last train home (this was when he had 'settled down' in the .country for a short spell), to get him into a hotel, if I could find one that would take him. One night I tried to book him into the Regent Palace. At that time I was writing a column for the Daily Mirror, which I knew had an arrangement with the hotel for putting up winners of its competi- tions who had been brought up to London to celebrate and, like Jeff, had overdone it and missed their trains. Propping Jeff against a pillar out of sight, I went up to the front desk and began negotiations. I had just persuaded them to accept our inoffen- sive lucky prizewinner from Macclesfield or wherever when Jeff lurched into view and snarled: 'Give me an effing room!' He didn't get it.
A, the public clocks in the booking hall of Bath Spa station — the gateway to a city that lives on tourism — have been out of action since well before Christmas. The main clock used to be plastered over with a scrap of paper reading 'Out of order'. Now it reads 'Out of use'. The handsome blue clock on the exterior of the building, which can be seen from half a mile away, works after a fashion, but it is always about 15 to 20 minutes slow — a serious flaw in a sta- tion clock, I would have thought. Jonathan Dimbleby wrote to our local paper ages ago to complain about this slovenly state of affairs, but got no response so far as I know. Then Miles Kington took up the issue in his Independent column, and nei- ther did he. The situation does not improve: neither of the booking hall's departures and arrivals screens has been working for three weeks now, and seven out of nine screens on the platforms are permanently blank too. Those of you who had nannies will know that Don't Care was made to care. Not if Don't Care is working as a stationmaster, as we used to call sta- tion managers when the clocks ran on time even if the trains did not.
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