Anyway, so we came back to England and I... directed the play of Lady at the Wheel at the Arts Theatre and Leslie directed the songs. And he collected lots of very good-looking girls; he was very good at collecting girls. He did the collecting. And with good voices, and all had 16-inch waists and 36-inch busts and 34-inch hips, and all the rest of it. And he was very keen on statistics.
And we did it, and Leslie wanted the president of the ADC, who was an American called Gordon Gould to be in the musical, and would I talk to him? I'm sure Gordon Gould was a Jew, he was also born in Chicago, probably about a month or two, a year or two before me, but he was very solemn and serious, and since he was by this time president of the ADC, he was not disposed to be brought to play low comedy. But for some reason or other I did persuade him and he came along. Pretty damn condescending he was, but I gave him a terrific scene at the beginning of the second act and when the play opened he was immediately, as people can always tell, immediately... an incredible, vulgar success.
The laughs came quickly, the applause was terrific, the second act began with Gordon Gould doing a number being a hungover potentate at a very long breakfast table. And it was all, went like cream and the houses were packed right through, and Leslie said that people wanted to transfer it to London. And the smart people in Cambridge, Karl Miller who was the editor of Granta and Mark Boxer who was the arbiter of elegance and various other people of course were horrified by the utter vulgarity of this musical comedy, which in all truth was a perfectly harmless piece of nonsense. Somewhat like Salad Days had been or was the play which Sandy Wilson had done, a mock-up of the twenties which was a great success in London.
Anyway, we had a huge hit and no-one could deny it. Varsity offered me a column to write every week, which I was perfectly happy to do. A man called Michael Winner was the editor. Michael was... Michael was a completely kind of Jewy Jew and he didn't give a damn and he actually could have spoken perfectly proper, but he didn't. And he was a smart man who'd had a column in a South London paper before he went up to Cambridge and he was... Michael Winner and his father was also an extremely rich man which never hurt anybody's confidence or not always.
