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Keith Waterhouse: That b

liar was the making of me!
By KEITH WATERHOUSE
Created 7:24 PM on 07th August 2009

Keith Waterhouse is one of

Britain's greatest novelists
and playwrights, and until his
retirement earlier this year
was Fleet Street's finest
columnist, writing twice-
weekly in the Daily Mail-
B u t before his second novel
Billy Liar was published 50
years ago next month,
Waterhouse considered
himself something of a
failure-
Centred on the life of a y o u n g
undertaker's clerk who
fantasises about escaping
his humdrum life, the book
was quickly acclaimed as a
classic and was f o l l o w e d by
a hit West E n d play starring
Albert Finney, and a T o m
Classic: Keith Water house
Courtenay film-
Here, to celebrate the anniversary of its publication, the
brilliant Waterhouse recalls in typically rumbustious fashion
h o w he hit t h e b i g t i m e -
writing a second novel when the first has been a success can be a daunting exercise.

A first novel is an indulgence, and it is indulged; a second tells the world that you are
re-entering the ring as a serious contender and that you are prepared, if it comes to it,
to take a hammering.

Mote recent...
• Wiiter Keith Waterhouse dies, ayeil 80

A strong case for dithering, then. But I got down to it at last and wrote down the title I
had thought of-The Young Man's Magnificat- on the first page of the shiny little
memorandum book I had bought forthe purpose of making notes.
After the usual procrastination I finally rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and
got cracking.
Pretty soon I had 10,000 words. They were as pretentious as the title itself-the
supposed freewheeling innerthoughts of a North Country adolescent, they came over
simply as mawkish ramblings in a narrative that had neitherform nor shape.
Mercifully, having got into the habit of carrying the manuscript about with me in a
manila folder so that I could work on it at odd moments, I left it in a taxi taking me from
Fleet Street to Liverpool Street station after a long day among 'contacts' and never saw
it again.
I went back to square one, this time slashing away at my hero's affectations as one
hacks lichen off a tree. I found that the old indolence had melted away entirely. I
discovered, and heaven knows where it came from, a new and mounting excitement.
I packed my wife and children off on holiday, locked the doors and jumped in at the
deep end. For three weeks, I did not answer the telephone orthe doorbell, shave,
wash very much, or eat more than sandwiches.
By this time, the novel was called Saturday Night At The Roxyand it concerned an
estate agent's clerk called Norman Fisher who has vague ambitions of becoming a
writer.
By the time I typed the last line it had
transformed itself into a novel called Billy
Liar about an undertaker's clerk named
Billy Fisher who is a compulsive liar and
daydreamer. I finished at 4am on a
Sunday. I woke up at seven the following
evening and by half past seven I was
extremely drunk.
Around this time I had become a
semi-habitue of a pub in St Martin's Lane
called the Salisbury Tavern, which was
dominated by a noisy group of provincial
actors appearing at the New Theatre
across the alley, in a play about a squad
of British soldiers nervously patrolling the
Malayan jungle while the Japs advanced
upon Singapore.
Their number included Peter OToole,
Robert Shaw and Ronald Fraser, all with
growing reputations in the theatre but
with their reputations at the bar of the
Salisbury already well established. I dont
think the term 'hellraisers' had yet been
coined but it would soon need to be,
when it would be applied in particular to
the young Peter OToole.
Not even the hard-drinking Robert Shaw, © Reuters
not even Ronald Fraser with his cry of "Hellraiser': Peter O'Toole
'More Fraserwaters!'- quadruple vodkas-
could match the OToole appetite for
alcohol.
One evening, after a leisurely survey of the afternoon drinking clubs and a few last
quick ones at the Salisbury, he had lurched across to the New Theatre a minute
before curtain-up to find his understudy, Michael Caine, dressed and waiting to go on.
'No you dont, Michael,' roared OToole.
He was changed within seconds and, pausing only to throw up violently out of the
upstage window of the set-which the audience thought was part of the action- gave a
flawless performance.
The play was The Long And The Short And The Tall by Willis Hall, an old youth club
friend from Leeds whom I hadnt seen for 12 years. It was being directed by Lindsay
Anderson.
Albert Finney was cast in the leading partofBamforth, a bolshie Cockney, but just
before rehearsals were about to begin Finney fell ill with peritonitis. So the part went to
Peter OToole.
It was odd that after losing touch for 12 years, Willis and I should emerge blinking into
the limelight at almost exactly the same time, both of us with works drawing on our
own experience, he as a squaddie in Malaya, I as an undertaker's clerk in Leeds.
Like The Long And The Short, hailed as the best anti-war play since Journey's End',
Billy Liar was an instant success; in fact in the climate of the time it was among the
handful of books that attracted a buzz even before they were on the shelves.
Billy Liar had not been out a fortnight when I had a call out of the blue from Willis Hall,
who had somehow tracked me down.
Naturally I was delighted to hearfrom him and began burbling away as one does to an
old friend after a 12-year interregnum; but Willis typically had no time to waste on
preliminary chit-chat: 'Listen, this is business, luv. Billy Liar-fantastic. Have you sold
the film rights?'
Yes."Never mind, luv. I still think it would make a marvellous play. How do you feel
about collaborating on it?'
The last time I had collaborated with Willis was on some sketches for a youth club
concert when we were around 16. We had got on well then and I saw no reason why
we should not get on well now. I said: Yes, fine,'and we arranged to meet for lunch
the following day.
I dontthinkwe spent more than two or
three weeks on the script, and even that
not full time, for we both had other things
to do.
We worked mainly in Willis's ground-floor
flat in Ebury Street- rather enviable
'rooms', I thought, of the kind occupied by
amateur sleuths in detective stories,
complete with a Mrs Hudson in
attendance.
The working pattern we established was
as it was to remain over the years -we
would take it in turns to sit at the
typewriter while the other paced the
room, with every line of dialogue being
rehearsed aloud before it was committed
to paper.
If it achieved nothing else, the method
guaranteed that our speeches could be
spoken with ease - not always the case
with even the most seasoned of writers,
as any actor can testify.
Oscar Lewenstein had already
expressed keen interest in the play and
was prepared to raise the impressive
sum of £6,000 to put it on. Albert Finney,
having missed out on The Long And The
Star of the show: Albert Finney in 2000
Short, was the first and obvious choice
for Billy.
While he hummed and hawed-1 believe it was around the time he was being tested
by David Lean for Lawrence Of Arabia - there was some talk of Tommy Steele playing
the part. Perhaps fortunately for all concerned, Tommy elected to do his Tony Lumpkin
at the Old Vic, Albert turned down Lawrence, and we were in business.
Lindsay Anderson read the play and agreed to direct. Everything was going so much
like clockwork that it was really not the ideal production to cut my theatrical teeth on,
lulled as I was into believing that it would always be like this.
Billy Liar was to premiere at the Brighton Theatre Royal, play for a week and then
come into the West End.
I did not know that a week is a perilously short time in the theatre when it comes to
ironing out any kinks that might be revealed in a play once it is set before the public.
Therefore it was merrily enough that I drove Willis and Albert Finney down to Brighton
in the new little Austin A301 had bought on the strength of giving up my regular
employment with the Daily Mirror.
I had never been to Brighton before and we got lost- no easy task on that well-worn
road - with the result that we deposited Albert at the theatre fractionally late forthe
technical rehearsal. This did not endear us to Lindsay, who liked to run a
well-disciplined ship.
Things were not to get better when Willis and I returned forthe dress rehearsal after a
much-needed drink.
As Oscar Lewenstein OToole roared at Caine: 'No you
guardedly puts it in his
memoirs: There was an dont!'
unfortunate dress
rehearsal, in the middle
of which Willis and Keith, who had probably drunk too much, had a quarrel with
Lindsay (with whom they were not temperamentally in harmony in any case).'
Certainly Willis and I had been celebrating, and in retrospect we should have
addressed such remarks to Lindsay as we had to make down in the stalls, where he
was sitting, rather than from the dress circle, where we were standing. But our point
was valid.
We had brought to a head a difference of interpretation we'd had with Lindsay from the
start-that he was trying to tip Billy's immaturity into infantilism, a quality which did not
suit the character at all and which certainly would not have suited the personality of
Albert Finney had he chosen to go along with it.
But Lindsay, airily referring us back to what he called the underlying text'- by now he
seemed to have forgotten that I had written the original novel - would not listen. Watch
and learn!' he barked, and we retired to the Royal Albion Hotel.
The play, as Milton Shulman put it in the Evening Standard, had the outward veneer of
a riotous farce and the inner heart of a significant comedy'.
In the first half of this opening night, it seemed that half the audience went along with
the riotous farce reading while the other half either accepted the significant comedy
interpretation or did not know what to make of the piece at all. In other words the
reception was patchy.
The second half was even stickier. There were intermittent mutterings and
murmurings and as the curtain came down there was some booing from the gallery. It
was the first time I had ever heard the sound, and I wasntatall sure what to make of
it.
What had the gallery-ites taken exception to? The northern setting (remember we were
in Brighton), the way Billy treated his grandmother, the raw teenage dialogue-what?
The house manager put us right.
It was the epithet 'bloody', with which Billy's father punctuates practically every
sentence. The gallery- and for that matter the stalls and dress circle, but they did not
boo-took a strong line on swearwords.
That innocuous 'bloody'was to dog us. The reviews when we opened in the West End
were mixed. Then, six weeks after our opening, the film of Saturday Night And Sunday
Morning was released, with more massive 'star is born'publicity for Albert Finney- all
of it mentioning his West End hit', Billy Liar.
Finally we got our 45-minute slot on television. The BBC then regularlywentinfor
showing live excerpts, usually a whole act, from West End shows - it was relatively
cheap forthem and, so impresarios hoped, it brought business to the theatre.
Sometimes, in fact, it had the reverse effect and kept customers away- it depended on
the type of play. With a comedy crammed with surefire laughs, we felt on reasonably
safe ground.
The immediate result of the television extract was that, inevitably, the BBC
switchboard was jammed with calls', to quote the next day's papers - a repeat of the
Brighton gallery-ites' reaction. The fact that it takes fewer than a dozen calls to jam the
BBC switchboard did not diminish the scale of the hullabaloo.
A Sheffield councillor counted the bloodies - there were 15 - and condemned the play
as 'shocking'. Readers of countless local newspapers, including 'Disgusted
Sailorman' of Aberdeen, wrote to ask Why oh why'we had to have this bad language,
and what were the churches doing about it? Vicars responded by denouncing the play
from the pulpit. In headline terms, Billy Liar became That Blue Pencil Play'.
A further and more gratifying result was that not only the BBC switchboard but the
box-office telephones were jammed.
Advance bookings soared. Willis and I took to strolling over to the theatre in the
afternoons to see the ticket queues winding around the block. Forthe first time, we
could be sure of an extended run, and the House Full signs became a fixture in the
foyer.
Soon there was a regular procession of visiting celebrities through Albert Finney's
dressing room. Princess Margaret came. So did Noel Coward who, as he records in
his diaries, loathed the play and everything about it- exquisitely polite at the time, he
later penned a famously bad-tempered attack on the whole kitchen-sink theatre, as
the Press label had it.
One night, to the egalitarian Lindsay's delight and the management's horror, a bunch
of Teddy boys invaded the theatre. There was no need for alarm - they had come to
see the play.
Albert Finney played the part for nine months before Tom Courtenay took over. It was
fascinating to contrast their performances -Albert's extrovert 1 am a star'Billy, Tom's
introvert 1 wish I were a star' Billy.
Both interpretations were equally correct, for locked in Billy Fisher's tangled psyche are
both characters, star and nonentity, battling it out. The audiences kept flocking in. Billy
Liar was to run for 582 performances. After the 500th, the production's enterprising
Press officer worked out that Billy had told 40,500 lies so far during the run, and his
father had uttered the infamous B-word 100,000 times.
The advance on the dramatisation of Billy Liar having been £50 apiece, I had vaguely
supposed that if the play took off at all and royalty cheques began to come in, they
would be pretty much of the same order. In fact, Willis and I were pretty soon being
pigeon-holed in the gossip columns as wealthy writers.
For a while I dabbled at being seriously rich - hand-made boots from Lobb's, gold
Omega watch, Calibri lighter, expensive casuals, mink in the adjoining wardrobe, hire
cars everywhere, outrageously priced dinners at the White Elephant.
Except for a daily bottle of champagne, for which I have retained the taste, such
excesses soon palled, though not before I had acquired a three-storey family house in
Kensington, a designer-decorated flat overlooking the sea in Brighton, and a suite of
offices in New Bond Street.
Most of it came courtesy of Billy Liar.