Fame and Fortune | A new book brings to life the celebrities interviewed by
a South African-born British show-business journalist and lyricist who says
they don't make them like they used to. Elizabeth Grice spoke to him.
I am not a religious man, but I do feel I am in some way born under a
rhyming planet Walt Disney, creator of the most famous rodent in the world,
confided to him: 'Mice frighten me . . .' I always resolutely refused to
have anybody else in the room. I doubt whether you'd get away with that now
GREY muzzle, low growl, noble profile. Herbert Kretzmer looks and sounds
like an old lion these days. Not any old lion, mind you. He is probably the
biggest of the big beasts that roamed Fleet Street in the '60s and '70s
seeking to capture celebrities of the day in deceptively silky paws and
offer them up to a glamour-hungry readership.
Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote, Peter Sellers, Groucho Marx, Irving Berlin
. . . Kretzmer's kind of quarry makes "celebrity" too puny a word.
Although he was ruthless in pursuit of the legends of stage and screen, he
was far too well mannered to be an outright predator. Some of them became
his friends.
"Why don't you come out and see me more often?" demanded Sellers from a
poolside in Los Angeles. The comedian's selfabsorption was, by this time,
trying the patience of his friends.
"Because I don't want to be a member of your entourage," replied Kretzmer,
one of the few people who had known him before he was famous. Sellers
clenched his fist and hit the wall in a fit of blind violence.
"We got over it," said Kretzmer. "There was finally something adorable about
the boy. He would have you absolutely helpless, bent over with laughter. You
can forgive people everything, everything, if they are able to do that. Fame
overwhelmed him like a tidal wave and he drowned . . . he drowned, poor
man."
Kretzmer had luck, charm and nerve. Hanging about with Dietrich's devotees
after a performance in the British city of Birmingham ("more a congregation
than a crowd"), he somehow managed to insinuate himself beside the enigmatic
actress in the back seat of her limousine.
He escorted her to her hotel room, extracting the promise of an interview
the following morning. A condition was that she should be able to "peruse"
his copy before publication. She deleted one adjective - "freckled", as a
description of her ageing finger - and thanked him in a sprawling
handwritten note, which he has kept.
I wonder how many of his famous interviewees - captured in his new book,
Snapshots - knew that the courteous, well-dressed man from the Daily Express
was already a successful lyricist who had written chart-toppers for the
French singer Charles Aznavour and the hit single Goodness Gracious Me for
Sellers and Sophia Loren.
They certainly could not have guessed that he would become as celebrated as
any of them - by writing the English lyrics for the unstoppable stage
behemoth Les Misérables . "I am not a religious man," Kretzmer said, "but I
do feel I am in some way born under a rhyming planet."
The collection of Kretzmer's encounters with 20th-century legends shows what
a proud and revelatory craft show business journalism once was. He operated
in the days when a writer could pick up a phone and get through to a
millionaire or a film star without layers of publicists and intermediaries.
The famous seemed trusting and recklessly available to him with their
insecurities and their confidences.
Over breakfast with Yul Brynner ("owner of the most celebrated skull in the
world") in his London hotel suite, Kretzmer discovered a shy philosopher.
When he interviewed a homesick Petula Clark in her Paris home at midnight,
she took him into the darkened nursery to stand at the cot of her sleeping
child. Walt Disney, creator of the most famous rodent in the world,
confided: "Mice frighten me . . . you never know where they are going."
A forty-ish Shirley MacLaine, in a mud-brown sweater, everyday slacks and no
makeup, was scathing about airheads. "You can't be a good professional and
just be a sort of show business turnip . . . I don't think there's such a
thing as a great performer who has nothing to say."
The singer Anthony Newley, who was married to Joan Collins, said of his
glamorous wife: "Joanie regards life as a kind of Mardi Gras to which she
has been invited and from which she intends to be the last to go home."
The most impressive person he met, he said, was the publicity-shy author
John Steinbeck, who told him after winning the Nobel prize: "I have lived
too long. Preferably a writer should die at about 28."
Has he ever been wrong about people? "Not wrong," he replied gnomically.
"Mistaken."
Kretzmer, 89 next month, was always "Herbie" in his journalistic days. Now
it seems a trifle disrespectful. He is reclining in a zebra-patterned chair
in a South Kensington, London residence at least as grand and gracious as
those of the stars he visited. Throughout the house, in posters and on
director's chairs, is evidence of his own celebrity, of what happened when
he gave up his day job - by then, television critic of the Daily Mail - shut
himself away for five months and emerged with the English libretto for the
French musical Les Misérables.
"I don't translate, I recreate," he said. "You cannot translate a song.
Simply to translate the words into their dictionary meaning isn't going to
work. It doesn't interest me." A third of the show, he pointed out, had no
previous existence in any other language.
Although stooped and slow on his feet, Kretzmer is still a monumental
presence. The weighty slowness of his speech and its beautiful formality
make him sound mournful.
"When my life changed, it was obviously a great pleasure not to have to set
out every morning smartly dressed, sober, but I don't feel I'm on cloud
nine. I don't feel that euphoria that comes of success. I'm grateful for
everything, but I'm not in a state of delirious joy."
While still a newspaperman, he did a brief course in Buddhism ("I felt I
needed guidance and a steady hand") and he practises meditation every day as
a way of achieving harmony in his life. "The journey never ends . . . though
I prefer not to use the overworked word 'journey'."
Kretzmer caught the fame bug early and irrevocably. As a boy growing up in
the one-horse town of Kroonstad in the Free State, he was exposed to the
glamour of Hollywood through strictly rationed Saturday afternoon visits to
the local cinema. Star-struck, impatient, he wanted to know more about his
screen heroes. What were they really like?
"I never wanted to be famous myself. I never saw myself as a star or a hero,
but I wanted to be near the golden people - to become a part of their
world." Aged 12, he had a vision of his future. "I saw myself on a hilltop
with a microphone in my hand and the wind blowing in my hair. I was
reporting on something I could see but could not clearly identify, and I
felt a sudden rush of excitement. I knew that somehow, somewhere, I would be
a communicator. Not the centrepiece of the tableau, but an observer."
He seldom refers to being Jewish. "The word 'Jew' carries too much weight
and is not strictly relevant to what I do." However, his parents were
immigrants from Eastern Europe coping with a new land and a new language.
From his earliest career in Johannesburg and then London, there were always
two strings to his bow - newspaperman and lyricist. He sees the professions
as compatible. "In rhyming and journalism, you work under constant
stricture. You are held loosely behind bars. There is something about being
constrained that appeals to me: the freedom inside the cage."
Young Kretzmer spent a bohemian year in Paris writing a novel in a garret on
the Left Bank, doing odd bits of journalism and keeping body and soul
together by playing the piano in a St Germaindes-Prés bistro in return for a
hot meal. The mise en scène was perfect, he said drily, but the novel was
lousy. And he could not stand the solitude.
He joined the Daily Express in 1960 when it was selling four million copies
a day. It was quite normal for him to do an interview in the morning, write
it in the afternoon and then attend and review a play at night - everything
appearing in print the following morning. His prose is crisp. He is not a
word waster. Some pieces are the result of very brief encounters. "Short is
good," he growled. "I like short."
If he were still in the game, he doubts whether there are many celebrities
he would like to interview. "I always resolutely refused to have anybody
else in the room," he said. "I doubt whether you'd get away with that now."
The beginning of the end of his career in newspapers happened in 1984 when
Kretzmer tried to persuade British theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh to
back a sharper, angrier version of a 1964 musical he had written, Our Man
Crichton. Mackintosh declined.
But as Kretzmer was crossing the great expanse of carpet to leave, he
inquired: "Why didn't you go on writing lyrics?" Kretzmer listed his songs,
including She and Yesterday When I was Young for Aznavour. They were among
Mackintosh's favourites.
"Six months later, when he was stuck for a lyricist for Les Misérables ,
Mackintosh remembered that snatch of conversation between the sofa to the
door. In those 15 yards, my life totally changed."
Kretzmer was 61 when Les Mis became a word-of-mouth hit. His marriage was
coming to an end. At a New York party to celebrate the success of the show,
he met his American wife, Sybil. "I call it my late-life stroke of luck."
He continued with his newspaper job for a year, not daring to believe the
evidence of his bank account. "All I knew was that I had one show in one
town in one theatre. I had no idea that a miracle had befallen me."
Les Misérables has made him an immensely wealthy man, but not a satisfied
one. "I am waiting for the great comfort that wise men say comes with age,"
he said. "It is taking a long time getting here. My anxieties remain in
place."
What can he possibly be anxious about? "Perceptions."
But surely his reputation is secure? "No, no. Never enough."
Interview by: Elizabeth Grice.
Source: The Sunday Times.