Low life
Curse of the sausage roll
Jeffrey Bernard
Ibought a woman a drink yesterday. Ten minutes later I bought her another one. A further ten minutes after that she bought herself one. Just herself. Equality? I make that little session a 3-0 win. Feminists never realise just how much the majority of women welcome, like and need male chauvinist pigs. She has a job too and doesn't have to walk the tightrope that is the freelancer's conductor and earth. You could buy drinks all day for people who are flat broke but to hell with people like that. It was like finding that the milk has turned sour. A trivial incident? No, not at all. When I was a barman for a while 25 years ago it always fascinated me to watch a man who could- outfumble his friends for an entire session. An Ascot Gold Cup winner. A real stayer. A man, as the cockneys say, who could peel an orange in his pocket. Oh well, it takes all sorts and what a bloody shame that is. I knew a man once who damn nigh destroyed himself through a petty act of meanness. He pinched a sausage roll from the buffet on Paddington Station, got nicked and was thenceforth known to everyone as 'the sausage bandit'. After a while people couldn't remember his proper name. He was a film extra when I was a clapper boy on one of the greatest films of all time called Zarak Khan, which starred Victor Mature, Anita Ekberg and Michael Wilding. Nic Roeg was the camera operator. When they wanted the said extra in shot the assistant director would shout, `Bring on the sausage bandit.'
What strange days they were. There was another awful film on which Martita Hunt asked me to sit on her lap between takes. It was probably that that made me flee to the cutting rooms and become an assistant editor. She used to stroke me and say, 'I want to buy you lots of pretty jerseys.' She never did. But Anita Ekberg was some- thing else, as they say. I have never been obsessed like most men about women's breasts but hers were quite extraordinary and had electricians almost falling off the gantry to get a closer look. She didn't need a bra, she needed scaffolding. Actually she didn't. Her breasts were quite capable of making their own arrangements. I find it quite amazing today to think that there was a time when the sight of a woman as stunning as Ekberg could make me itch.
Ingrid Bergman was a lovely person. I worked on Anastasia and apart from the ubiquitous sausage bandit there was the dreaded Yul Brynner. Not nice. The best bunch of people were on The Guns of Navarone. It wasn't a had job either what with alternating lunch breaks between the studio bar and The Ship in Shepperton. On a good week and with a bit of overtime I earned £35. Math pas de sausage bandit. The last time I saw him was on a dreadful pilot for a television series which never got made but which starred Donald Wolfit. (By this time Nic Roeg was lighting cam- eraman.) That was at Nettlefold Studios at Walton-on-Thames. Wolfit struck me as being one of the greatest hams of all time, on a par with Anthony Quinn.
Of course, what annoyed me about those days, frustrated me anyway, was the fact that being an assistant editor made it very improbable that I could get a budding starlet to bed. Others had their evil way but I sulked in the pub. Then in 1962 I got a job in the cutting rooms at Ealing Studios working for the BBC. I wouldn't want to work for that organisation again. Actually, to call it an organisation is to flatter it. Never have I come into contact with so
many madmen and women. We made a documentary called The Death Penalty and had Albert Pierrepoint in the studio for three days. A rum cove. He really had enjoyed being the public hangman. (Could you be a private hangman?) It gave me the creeps sometimes to listen to him talking as we sat in the canteen. With him about wild horses couldn't have dragged me to the pub. I asked him once was it true that the prisoner always ate a hearty breakfast? He said, 'I'm not sure but I always did.' Ho, ho. I suppose he would have hanged the sausage bandit had he been on that film. Such a mild little chap was Albert. I'm told Himmler was too. Well, if they bring it back it's a job that Norman could do.
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