The headline on the Entertainment Page said: ‘YOUNG MAX STILL SINGING.’
‘At 72,’ it assured his fans, ‘Max Bygraves is still going strong.’ It left the unfortunate image of an elderly singer-comic tottering bravely on stage, voice trembling. A has-been entertaining oldies. ‘People with memories,’ was how the publicity hand-out put it.
Would it be worth $12? I wondered.
On the morning of the show, the lifts in the huge entertainment-and-poker machine palace had broken down and the retirees and pensioners who had been bussed in, climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, pausing gratefully for breath on the landings; welcoming the free cups of tea and coffee brought to them by girls bearing great pots. Walking frames and sticks left at the side of the auditorium, the capacity audience of gentlemen in slacks and sports shirts then settled down with their ladies, who appeared to have just left the hairdresser, even at that hour in the morning.
And at last he came on.
A bound rather than a totter. Tall, trim, hair shining gold in the spotlight, the face exactly the same as I’d seen it when I’d met him in London 30 years before. He had on a white double-breasted suit (courtesy Austin Reed, as he showed me in the dressing-room later), and a bright green tie. He could have passed for 50. And that might have been stretching it.
Roars of welcome; claps and shrill whistles.
‘Oh what a privilege and pleasure it is to be here!’ he says, smiling the wide, naughty-boy grin. ‘It’s a pleasure to be anywhere!’
They roar, doubled up with laughter.
‘I remember last year I was crossin’ Leicester Square,’ he begins. ‘And some fella called out: "Oi! Max! You let us down..." I didn’t know what the fella was talkin’ about. "What d’ya mean, I let you down?"
‘He said: "When Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd died we had you in a trifecta." He stands there, wicked look in the blue eyes. Waiting. And then goes on... ‘Did you know that Eric Jupp’ (the veteran accompanist across stage) and I were in the RAF together? I know what you’re thinkin’. You’re thinkin’: "What could two nine-year-old boys have been doin’ in the RAF?"
The five-piece band strikes up "Jealous", and as though they’ve been rehearsing it with him, several hundred voices join in as he moves into a quick-step, the long legs as supple as a teenager’s, the toes of his shoes tapping on note.
‘There was this fella,’ he tells them, ‘just about to close the Job Centre, you know, the CES, and he hears this voice: "You got a job for me?" And he looks around and all he can see is this duck. And it’s the duck asking for a job! So he phones the Palladium and they actually need a talking duck! The fella tells the duck he will be paid a thousand pounds a week for a 14-week season. But the duck doesn’t want it. "No good to me," he tells the fella. "I’m a bricklayer."
"Farrraway places, I’ve been dreaming about..."
‘There was this Australian,’ (and he over-does the accent) ‘waitin’ at London Airport and he sees this beautiful girl sittin’ there, and she’s got a case with NSW on it. So he goes over and asks her if she comes from Noo South Wales. No, she says. "The letters stand for Nymphomaniac Society of the World." She says she’s been doin’ this survey and she says the best lovers in the world are the North American Indians and just behind them, the Jewish race.
‘ "By the way," she says to the fella. "What’s your name?"
‘ "Hiawatha Goldberg."’
He sings again: "You need hands...Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer..."
Then he asks them: ‘You old d’you reckon I am?’ Shouts of 72 from those who’ve read it. ‘I am 84 years old.’ Roars of denial.
He’s been on stage now for one hour 45 minutes and appears reluctant to leave. In the foyer after it’s over, changed to open-neck blue shirt and slacks, he signs $10 cassettes of his singalong songs for a queue of some 300. Then on his way to the pokey back-stage dressing-room he is shielded from more followers by a minder. At last he settles in front of mirrors, the shiny hair quite obviously his own, face almost unlined.
I ask: ‘When were the best times for you?’
His blue eyes stare warily into the mirror at me as he thinks. ‘There’s a lot to be said for the years gone past. In the old days when we were in the theatres there were eight acts on the bill and there was always somebody that you knew. That you could play golf with; go off to a museum with. And the fun - there was always lots of fun.’
He said he had an 84-acre property at nearby Murwillumbah, New South Wales. He’d bought it from an English couple who had set it up as a resort, but it had gone into receivership. ‘I swim in the pool, I play golf. I’m there four or five months a year and then I go back to Bournemouth.’
What was the secret of his apparent agelessness?
He chuckles. ‘Bert,’ (his tall, balding minder), ‘and I were talkin’ about this yesterday. Sayin’ it’s alright to be doing this stuff and be under stress. But there has to be some time in your life when you need this tranquility. You’ve gotta have it sometimes. And I think I’ve had a lot of it over the years. I’ve managed to live in places where I’m not in a rush. I’ve got an apartment in London as well, and it becomes a treadmill there, I can tell you.
‘I write a lot of my own stuff. My friend, Eric Sykes, writes a lot. He’s got some lovely approaches. My script-writer, Spike Mullins, died last year.
‘You know,’ he smiles as he turns around. ‘There’s nothing more rewarding these days, than to draw up a little routine, and go on stage and find that it’s right. Though - to get the laughs - you’ve got to wait. Gotta sit on it. You don’t go out there and do 15 to 20 minutes and find it’s easy every time; there are the silences. And when you’re driving home afterwards, you think: "There was a moment there, and I missed it." That,’ he said, ‘is how you hone it. Try and get your act together.’
