Barry Cryer was blown away by Marilyn Monroe - and heckled by John Lennon
Barry Cryer was a fixture on panel shows Just A Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and wrote for giants including The Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise.
Now his son Bob Cryer, an actor and writer, has revealed more about his father’s seven decades in the business. Born in Leeds, Barry was married to Terry for nearly 60 years, with four sons, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild when he died last January aged 86. Here, in exclusive extracts from his book, Bob tells some of his dad’s celebrity anecdotes...
A call with Marilyn Monroe
English singer and actor Frankie Vaughan was a mentor of the comedy great’s, and went on to star with Marilyn in Let’s Make Love. One day, Barry enjoyed a conversation with the Hollywood icon in an agent’s office. At the time of Let’s Make Love, Dad was in Paul Cave’s office one day answering his mail when the phone rang and as there was no-one around to answer, Dad picked up. A voice said: “It’s Miss Monroe for you.” Marilyn then came on and said: “Hello, who are you?”
Marilyn Monroe in 1956 (Hulton Archive)
Barry with his son Bob (Geoffrey Swaine/REX/Shutterstock)Now, at this point, the young Barry Cryer must have had a thousand different answers scrolling through his head. From “Frankie speaking” to “Never mind that, who are you?” However, this was 1960 and a 24-year-old Dad instead chose the following, devastating response: “Hello, I’m Barry Cryer.”
He expected to be hurried off the call, but she continued: “What do you do, Barry?” “I’m an out-of-work comic,” he parried. He told me that they then talked for a further three minutes. I asked him what they talked about and all he could say was that although he couldn’t remember, it was wonderful.
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Heckled by John Lennon
The Beatles star made his feelings known when he saw Barry performing alongside female impersonator Danny La Rue at This Is Your Night Life at Winston’s nightclub in London’s West End. It is easy to dismiss Danny La Rue as an eccentric curiosity in the history of the West End.
However, when my parents first worked with him, he was about to become Britain’s highest-paid entertainer. Princess Margaret, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Grace Kelly would all go to his club to pay homage and also see themselves parodied or sent up.
Dad remembers Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev snorting with laughter at a private viewing of a show featuring Danny as Fonteyn and Ronnie Corbett as Nureyev. Nureyev had an interpreter and Dad said it was the only time he got three laughs per joke. Composers and songwriters also came in for parody – Bill Solly would rearrange the music and Dad would alter their lyrics.
They once took aim at Noël Coward’s musical Ace of Clubs. The song Two Juvenile Delinquents was ripped off as Two Most Successful Call-Girls, with Danny and Toni Palmer. When Coward came backstage to congratulate the company, he patted Dad on the head, saying: “Nearly as good as mine.”
John Lennon in 1966 (Getty Images)Dad introduced him to Mum, who was pregnant with my brother Tony. Coward patted her on the stomach and said: “Here’s to a wonderful opening.” Lionel Bart was also a regular visitor to Winston’s when Oliver! and Blitz! were running in the West End. Who’s This Geezer Hitler? was one of the catchier tunes from Blitz! And, with the great Elizabeth Taylor epic Cleopatra still playing in cinemas, Dad thought Danny could play the Egyptian queen with Ronnie as her Julius Caesar.
The song they sang was Who’s This Geezer Caesar? Bart came backstage and was delighted. “That’s better than mine,” he said. “It rhymes for a start.” Dad’s parodies even had the power to see the future. He and Danny developed a character called Lady Cynthia Grope, who was a Conservative campaigner with big bouffant blonde hair, twinset and pearls.
Her hectoring of liberal values would shortly be made real in the form of women like Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse. The eventual progression to Cupid Stunt in the Kenny Everett Show can also be seen in the way Lady Cynthia would protest innocence, but then unleash a torrent of double entendres.
Not everyone approved, however. Dad was once halfway through his opening monologue when he was heckled: “This is satire, I suppose?” Dad looked over at a table containing Peter Sellers and Lionel Bart but saw only smiles. He fired back into the darkness: “It’s nightclub filth. You need to get out more.” Turned out it was John Lennon.
A few years later, Dad was working on a David Frost TV show, when he bumped into Lennon in the green room (it was that kind of show). “Where do I know you from?” “Danny La Rue’s nightclub probably.” “Was I a pig that night?” Lennon said. “I was out of it in those days, I don’t remember much about them.”
Trying to outsmart Ronnie Barker
Barry’s friendship with Ronnie Barker saw him try to outsmart the actor and comedian – and fail miserably. Dad and Ronnie stayed in regular touch over the years, most notably, of course, when Dad was writing for The Two Ronnies. He was present at a dinner for writers of the show when mysterious sketch contributor Gerald Wiley was unveiled by Ronnie Barker as… Ronnie Barker. Dad is reputed to have exclaimed: “No-one likes a smart-arse.”
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The Two Ronnies (Reg Wilson/REX/Shutterstock)It turned out to be an act of hubris on Dad’s part as karma struck when he tried to trick Ronnie at a book signing. Dad thought it would be funny to go in disguise as a fan. Pulling up the collar of Mum’s biggest coat, he donned dark glasses, a hat and put on his best American accent.
Dad asked Ronnie to sign a book to ‘John Smith’. He smugly trooped off home to brag to Mum. She laughed at the tale, opened the book and read the inscription: “P*ss off, Cryer. Can’t you see I’m busy?” It’s only a shame he didn’t write: “No-one likes a smart-arse.”
Chemistry with Kenny Everett
Barry collaborated on two of creative genius Kenny’s most successful series, The Kenny Everett Video Show and The Kenny Everett Television Show. There was a chemistry between Dad and Kenny, and it would prove to be one of the great relationships of Dad’s life. It was the same connection he had found with Danny La Rue and Graham Chapman.
The common denominator was that all three were gay men. Growing up alone with a single mother and an imaginative flair for flamboyant performance was a situation Dad felt he shared with many of his gay friends. David Sherlock, Graham Chapman’s partner, even described Dad to me once as a ‘man magnet’.
There were stories of him going on nights out to gay bars with Graham and Kenny and returning home with phone numbers on scraps of paper in his pockets. My mother found it all highly amusing. Kenny once said: “Ooh Bar, married for 25 years and four children. What a smokescreen!”
Bob Cryer with Kenny Everett and crew on the set of The Kenny Everett Show (FremantleMedia Ltd/REX)The early recordings of The Kenny Everett Video Show were anarchic. Dad said it was the only show he ever worked on where the camera script (the ‘finalised’ document for shooting) was sometimes full of blank pages. As it was originally only set up to be a clip programme (made up of links between music videos), there was to be no audience. Kenny used to make stuff up and if the crew laughed, it was in.
In a regular comedy show, having the crew laugh would usually put the performers off, but seeing that the only performer was Kenny (who loved it), it soon became a feature of the show. Crews would fight to get on the show. They all enjoyed working with Kenny, and it was the only show Dad ever worked on where nobody said: “Quiet!” before a take.
There was no countdown, no schedule as such, they just started the cameras and waited to see what happened. It’s hard to imagine any of Dad’s peers being quite so affable in the face of such anarchy, but Dad was in his element. Utter chaos. Just as he loved the cushion falling out of his shirt when he was playing Falstaff, or when the set was falling down in Expresso Bongo, or when the Hello Cheeky costumes got mixed up, or when I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue was falling apart, Dad was once again practising the art of professional amateurism.
The charm of that performance mode is that you are sharing your workings out with the audience. When you eventually get it right, the audience feels part of the journey. It’s easier to laugh if you trust that the process is being honest with you. Once, when Everett was playing the leather-clad rocker Sid Snot, he grabbed some cigarettes from a cameraman just before filming and started throwing them in the air to catch them in his mouth. When he finally caught one, he beamed, and the crew started laughing. Just pure joy. And nothing to do with what was written in the script. Dad said those were some of the happiest days he ever spent in a TV studio.
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