As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
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this was where his heart was.
He was medium in build – a bit like me – and was shy, rather sharp-featured, not aggressive in any way, quite good-looking and with the sandy hair I had when I was a child – although mine was more ginger. His eyes were strong, with an element of fear or uncertainty in them. He kept his good looks all through life. He was very backward in coming forward, so to speak. Like me, he’d never argue, and as a reticent sort of man he never took offence. We got on fantastically well, and I did rely on him. If I’m honest I’d say I used him, for if anything went wrong I would immediately call him. The habit was there even as a small child.
The garden was not very big, and much later as a teenager I used to play tennis in it with my friends. We would knock over the flowers, but even with his precious tulips flattened, ruined by the tennis balls, Dad never lost his temper: the most he would ever say was, ‘Don’t do that, son.’ In his later years he would come out to France where I had bought a country house near Toulouse. He was very proud of France. He would call it ‘Derek’s villa in the South of France’, and he’d just sit there in the garden, staring for hours and hours. One thing is for sure: he was composed in his own head.
But one night when I was very young there was an incident with Dad, which made me feel very ashamed.
I was going through a stage of waking in the middle of the night and coming downstairs – to Mum and Dad’s great annoyance. There was no apparent reason, but it had been going on for some time.
On this particular night I woke up all of a sudden, left my bed, and then descended the stairs. When I arrived at the bottom my father was standing there with a ruler in his hand; he had never hit me before – ever. But now he brandished it, threatening me with this ruler.
‘Do that again, son, and I’ll have to use this on you!’
I fled upstairs immediately. I couldn’t believe it – nothing like this with Dad had ever happened before. I was so shocked with this threat of Dad hitting me with the ruler that I went upstairs and, to my everlasting shame, shat on the floor of my bedroom. I kept this all to myself, cleaned it up as best I could. They would never know it happened – and I never went downstairs in the middle of the night again!
They did find out next morning, inevitably, and again nothing happened. I think Mum told me off in the gentlest way. This was such an isolated episode of Dad becoming strict, and he never mentioned it again.
‘WITH ONE LITTLE TOUCH OF HER HAND’
At the age of seven – as a schoolboy with my satchel and shining morning face – I discovered acting in front of others; or it discovered me. Here, I knew, at once instinctively, was the reality of playing a part that brought me alive.
I had the lead in The Prince and the Swineherd, a pantomime staged at our local library. I played both roles, something I loved doing later on when I could bring out the differences between two characters, or both sides of a dual personality. My favourites among these were in the film of The Fool, when I played a nineteenth-century poverty-stricken clerk, ‘the fool’ who sells tickets for the vaudeville, and Frederick, a City of London speculator, whose fortunes tumble when a great financial bubble bursts.
I was bullied at this time by a boy at Capworth School, because I wasn’t aggressive, nor was I a toughie. He knew I would not retaliate. I asked Mum and Dad to save me, so after school they’d come to pick me up. I was probably seen as soft, girlish and a bit fey, and I much preferred the company of girls, and they mine, again because there was nothing confrontational about being with them.
Karen, a teacher at Capworth School, who was young and unmarried, took me out to the West End to see my first professional show. It was her personal choice to ask me, so I have no idea how it came about, except that she must have asked Mum. The show was the musical Oh Marguerita, which had the famous song ‘Bella Marguerita’:
Her lips have made me her prisoner
A slave to every command
She captivates and intoxicates me
With one little touch of her hand.
It stimulated the romantic lover – the dreamer inside me – but also a nagging awareness of how I appeared to others. I’m not sure which came first, but the other side of show business, the glitz, exerted its pull on me when Mum and Dad bought tickets for the London Palladium Christmas panto, which was Cinderella.
‘I’m coming down there to pick one or two of you to come on the stage,’ Evelyn Laye royally announced to the audience. She was Prince Charming, with Noëlle Gordon as Dandini, the other Principal Boy. Miss Laye tripped down the stairs into the stalls and selected me, so here I was up on stage with the world-famous music hall star: my first professional appearance clocked up at the Palladium! Thrilled to bits, I was given sweets and a balloon.
Fast forward to Westminster Abbey in the 1990s. A plaque is being laid to Noël Coward and at the ceremony I read out an extract from his War Diaries. There in the front row I spot Evelyn Laye, a great friend of Coward’s, now eighty-six. I go over to her.
‘You won’t remember, but we have worked together before – at the London Palladium.’ Naturally she didn’t remember me at all, only the panto!
After this I felt proprietorial about the Palladium, so sometimes for visits to the West End I’d save up pocket money, take the Tube west to Argyle Street, summon the maître d’ outside to hail me a taxi to drive me to a theatre nearby: just for the sheer joy of the taxi-ride.
At the age of nine I wrote to Sir Michael Balcon, the Ealing Films boss, asking him outright if I could be in a film of his, and received back a very sweet letter.
If you are that keen, you should pursue your dream and get in touch with us again in a few years’ time.
One of the basic things I knew at a tender age was that I was attracted to other boys, in particular to a boy in kindergarten whose name was Julian. I would also try to be near him, to join his team, or play with him in the playground or be his partner. I was physically drawn to him – I wanted to touch him, but I never did.
But actually, towards none of the boy friends that I was close to later at school did I feel any kind of physical attraction; neither to Mark Allen, nor Graham Smith, two friends I went around with. I was much closer to girls.
Of all the girls Ivy Mills was the one I became closest to. I remember Ivy and I were at home once while Mum and Dad had gone out for the evening. We deliberately sat side-by-side on the sofa, staring ahead, barely daring to touch, but aware what this might lead to.
‘Let’s try it,’ said Ivy.
So we ‘did it’ – in those days this meant only kissing like grown-ups ‘properly’, not quite sure what we were doing.
My friendship with Ivy led to a turning point in my life, for I was invited to her ninth birthday party, where something unforeseen and quite disastrous happened.
Mum and