Michael White - The Last Impresario

The Last Impresario

Michael White

To Joshua, Liberty and Sasha

Contents

Image Gallery

Michael White, Lyndall and children in 1974

On the roof of Duke Street in 1968 (left to right): Michael White, Sarah White, Pauline Fordham, Gala Mitchell and David Hockney

With Frank during rehearsals for Any Wednesday at the Apollo Theatre in 1964

A restaurant in Rome in the late Sixties: Peter Daubeny (left), with whom Michael White spent five happy years of apprenticeship, and Federico Fellini

An invitation to Harold Wilson to attend a performance of Soldiers received a dusty answer

But the Daily Express had to apologise for misrepresenting another of Michael Whites shows

The Young Vic production of Cato Street with Vanessa Redgrave

Tony Richardson at the first night of The Threepenny Opera

Clive Goodwin, key Sixties literary agent

American glamour in Earls Court: Diana Vreeland and Jack Nicholson with Michael White at a Bob Dylan concert

Introduction

The word impresario, although impressive, doesnt accurately describe the extraordinary qualities that go to make up Michael White.

Originally, Michael gave the title Empty Seats to this book. This was a typically modest and self-deprecating way that Michael had to undersell his achievements. Not a quality shared by many other producers with half his talent or career.

Michael never wanted to conform, and his first production in the West EndThe Connectionlaid down clearly that here was a man unafraid of taking risks. The play had originally been produced by the Living Theatre in New York, and its title referred to the drug connection. It was performed by actors and jazz musicians (some of whom were actual using junkies), and depicted a side of New York life that came as a shock to staid West End audiences, who were used to a diet of Coward and Rattigan. The year of the London production was 1960, and it is no coincidence that Michael would play a key role in the cultural explosion of the famous decade that followedorganising happenings with Yoko Ono, and again taking on the outraged old guard, typified by Mary Whitehouse, with his production of Ken Tynans groundbreaking Oh! Calcutta! He was also not popular with the Lord Chamberlain, who until 1968 had to read and vet all plays for their language content.

Michael was, on the other hand, quite capable of presenting the exact oppositemainstream, popular musical theatrefor example, A Chorus Line, Annie, The Pirates of Penzance, and Crazy for You, to name but a few. But his greatest enjoyment came, I think, from encounters like the one when Richard OBrien played him a couple of songs from a musical idea he had called The Rocky Horror Show, which Michael immediately agreed to back, or the time when the Monty Python team needed a few hundred thousand pounds to make their first feature film and Michael wrote a personal cheque after Lord Delfont, the then king of London entertainment, and EMI, a major UK film company, pulled out at the last moment. The Comic Strip, featuring, amongst others, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, found Michael as its first champion.

He is as comfortable in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot as he is at the hottest nightclub in New York or L.A. His house was always filled with interesting people from all walks of life: poets, playwrights, painters, models, movie stars, musicians, and royalty. As important as his friends and family are to him, he has always travelled a fundamentally lone path with no particular plan, except to do the things he enjoyed, work with those he admired, and live the life that suited himbut there could be no more generous a friend and colleague, and he was magnificent in a crisis.

He never liked a quiet night in and he was never a slave to domesticity. His first-night parties were given with a fin de sicle extravagance and he was always one of the last to leave. To say that he enjoyed life would be to vastly understate his achievement. He led it to the full and even now, when the years have crept up, Michael is just as likely to be seen in the most exciting new nightspot in London as any twenty-year-old might be. He would, as usual, be surrounded by gorgeous girls, all of whom hang on his every word.

When I worked for him, if I ever cautioned him with Are you sure thats a good idea? hed invariably reply, Dont be such a nervous Nelly. Well, he followed his own advice and often stuck his neck out recklessly. Sometimes it cost him dearly and there were many empty seats. But there was triumph in equal measure, and, to paraphrase Kipling, he treated those two impostors (triumph and disaster) just the same.

Whenever I see him now, I am as excited as I was on the first day I went to his office when he offered me a job as a twenty-one-year-old rookie, running a new theatre he had just agreed to take over at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I had no experience or training to do it, but Michael had a hunch, and, as usual, he followed it. I am forever in his debt, be it with empty seats or full houses.