Wednesday 24 April 2019
It all started when I was a teenager. I discovered that if you just assumed you could connect with someone ‘famous,’ you usually could. Of course, those were different days. And somehow I was born not being too awestruck by authority or whatever. I treat everyone more or less the same. Now, people in authority sometimes get bent out of shape when I call them Jenny instead of Dr Smith, or suggest I’m a peer of any description. But at least in those young days almost every ‘famous’ person I met was happy to be treated ‘normally.’
My first famous person is probably Roger Moore. He was a guest at a Unilever Christmas party for employees’ children – and I was one. He wasn’t yet a big star but he had some national following from ‘Ivanhoe,’
Yes, this dates me! While all the other children flocked around to get an autograph, I chose, as Roger bent down to connect with our smallness, to ask him, ‘Is it your real hair?’ (For those days of short back and sides, his was rather long as Ivanhoe. He laughed and said ‘Touch it and see,’ so I gave it a tug. This probably cemented my future as a pretend groupie.
Skip forward some years.. I’d go to the BBC shows at the Playhouse Theatre in London and let it be known I’d like to go backstage. No question was ever asked. I’ve forgotten some of these adventures but I do remember meeting Tommy Roe, who seemed remarkably tall, and my girl crush, Connie Francis
who sat looking perfect and beautiful on a make-up chair. I must have spoken to her but I don’t remember a word.
My first real experience of being so close to anyone was courtesy of three Greek sisters that I met who knows where but it must have been at another concert/BBC performance with Bobby Vee who i absolutely adored.
The sisters were dark and mysterious to me. They had black glossy high beehives, wore make up and trendy for the times clothing. They lived in also-mysterious Chalk Farm in a house with high ceilings and many rooms. One of them was their bedroom with its old fashioned dressing table full of toiletries and makeup. I wanted to be them. Instead I was a rather shy looking middle class Jewish girl, not yet brave enough to flaunt a thing. I ate at their house, food I’d never had with some biscuits that had no flavour but they gobbled up.
Continue reading “I’m only a pretend groupie”