This Much Is True

It was hard work for us all: a show of the size and complexity of The Threepenny Opera would normally have two months of rehearsals, but we opened on 10 February 1972 after only a month. The show later transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre on 10 April.

Tony Richardson staged The Threepenny Opera as if in a fairground, with a real carousel, painted in dark and light silver, in the centre of the stage, designed by Patrick Robertson. The theatre had a revolving stage and Nelly was one of four prostitutes (I have played a lot of whores in my time) who sat on this merry-go-round which, as the reviewer for the Stage noted, was ‘at once gay and charming and strange and forbidding’.^[12] The three other whores were formidable personalities: Patricia Quinn, who is now Lady Stephens, widow of Sir Robert; Diana Quick; and Stella Courtney, an older actress who smoked continuously.

We four tarts shared a dressing room and had a wonderful time, gossiping and going off after the show to Gerry’s Club, run by Annie Ross’s husband, Sean Lynch. I never went in for all that partying and the Soho scene, but Annie knew all the late-night spots around Soho and the West End, and we all followed her. They drank for hours. I just ate. Annie was where the action was; she was part of that world, and I enjoyed tagging along. She took us to the Buckstone Club, an after-hours dining and drinking club in a basement behind the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre on Suffolk Street in St James’s, where Ronnie Barker met Ronnie Corbett. I had never been anywhere like that. Famous jazz musicians who’d probably been playing at Ronnie Scott’s and actors in all the West End shows came and caroused, and I mixed with the glamorous people; that was a taste of the highlife, but it’s not my natural habitat. Sometimes Annie would sing; I knew her records from the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross days; but when she did ‘scat’ singing… that was my favourite.

Annie was surprisingly nervous about acting and had a respect for Vanessa and her classical theatre work. She never hid her vulnerability and perhaps never realised how magnetic she was as Jenny Diver. Hearing her sing was one of the joys of that production. We remained friends until she died in New York aged eighty-nine.

As Jenny Diver, Annie was the star tart and Diana, Pat, Stella and I were her supporting blousy girls. Eleanor Fazan was the choreographer. She was patience itself, as well as creating some unusual dance numbers. I’m a terrible dancer, but Diana and Pat were irritatingly brilliant. Stella died in 1985 but Pat and Diana are still in my life. Pat later became famous as Magenta in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show; and the marvellous Diana Quick was superb in Brideshead Revisited and wrote a brilliant book, A Tug on the Thread, about her discovery of family connections to the British Raj. To my eyes, they were both frighteningly sophisticated; they smoked pot and went to clubs and knew about jazz and fashion. I had never even seen marijuana before and I was deeply impressed and rather shocked; it was just something I’d never done. I was quite po-faced with them about it, until they made it quite clear that I was a pathetic idiot and I didn’t have to smoke if I didn’t want to, but they were going to. I don’t think it made the slightest difference to their work. Stella, who was sixty to our twenty-somethings, was rather appalled too but she smoked like a chimney and didn’t complain. For the record, I still know nothing about marijuana or any drug, and don’t want to. My drugs are chopped liver and cheesecake — probably equally damaging, but they taste better.