Some Sort of a Life

Miriam Karlin

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783194605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"I have never, ever wanted to write an autobiography. The number of times I have been approached and every time I said no, no, it's a wank" Miriam Karlin is that rare creature: a pillar of the British acting establishment who is at the same time a thoroughgoing maverick. During sixty distinguished, workaholic years of acting, she has been a West End regular and RSC company actor, a pioneering performer on live television, half of a radio double-act with Peter Sellers, a stand-up comic, a scene-stealing character actor in such films as The Entertainer and A Clockwork Orange, and, of course, the truculent, whistle-blowing shop steward Paddy in the long-running TV sitcom The Rag Trade, with her catchphrase "Everybody Out!" Parallel to her career as an actor are her lifelong socialist beliefs, her unerring sense of justice and her political activism.
Miriam's life also has been a long battle against addiction; to alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, cigarettes, and dieting (she recently revealed herself in the Observer as "the world's oldest bulimic") challenges she describes in Some Sort of a Life with great humour and irreverence. Dictated to Jan Sargent as Miriam was recovering from mouth cancer (an experience she describes in a chapter typically entitled 'Sans teeth, sans f ckin' everything') she is compellingly candid about the people in her life: her family (part of which perished in the holocaust), her friends and the eminent figures she has worked with, such as Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellars, Stanley Kubrick, Tony Hancock and Barry Humphries. Above all though, she is utterly honest about herself: her love affairs and abortions, her battles with eating disorders and illness, her gradual disillusionment with the Labour Party and the state of Israel, and her own compulsive nature, which accounts for many of the highs and lows of her fascinating life. Some Sort of a Life is an autobiography refreshingly free of self-justification and recrimination, and full of the passion and earthy humour of one of our finest character actors.

1

LATE TALKER

In which I turned blue and nearly died, developed a sense of humour, became aware of the family I was growing up in, enjoyed being Jewish, and learned to impersonate Hitler and Jesus.

I DIDN’T TALK UNTIL I was quite old in the normal scheme of things. I wonder if I was listening intently, waiting until I could form fluent and coherent sentences in order to stun my public.

Apparently I said nothing until I was about two and a half, by which time my parents were very worried. Then one day, when I was sitting on my father’s knee, I pointed to a button on his waistcoat and said, ‘Dis is a buckon?’ My brother Michael, who is five years older than me, started running round and round saying, ‘She’s spoken, she’s spoken!’ After that, I became unstoppable and conversation became the most important thing in my life: even now, the sound of the human voice is so reassuring I sleep at night with Radio Five Live chatting away in my ear.

When I was a tiny baby, only about a couple of weeks old, I turned blue. As a little girl I was very proud of this fact, and would go around telling everyone, ‘I went blue.’ While it was happening, of course, my mother was in a blind panic, because she didn’t know what to do; this time, my brother was running up and down the corridor shrieking that his little sister was dying. We lived in a flat then, and the neighbour who lived above us, who had been a nurse, told Ma to shake me upside down quite vigorously, whereupon my complexion came back to normal.

I didn’t grow up with the notion that I had nearly died – well, maybe subconsciously, who knows what goes on in a baby’s head? – but this early brush with death always makes me think about my mother marrying in this country and not in Holland or Belgium, because I know that if she had stayed there, I may not have survived at all.

My very earliest memory is peeing on the sands. I don’t even remember which beach: it might have been Broadstairs, or a beach in Belgium where we went regularly for summer holidays. We had a hut, and I remember crawling behind it, and peeing, and I can still remember the warm feel of it in the sand. I covered it up rather as a cat does when it goes in the garden.

Everything that happens when you’re a child, you retain with such clarity. My mother took me to Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was five, and I remember that experience better than I do some plays that I saw three or four months ago. It was an amazing June. The sun was shining and the park was looking glorious. I remember saying, ‘Oh mummy, I am so happy.’ It is extraordinary to be aware of being happy at a particular time, when one is normally only aware of happiness in retrospect. I was so conscious of it, and I knew then that theatre was what I wanted to do.

Later, I remember seeing Michael at school in another production of the Dream, playing a fairy or Titania (I’m not sure which), and I became used to the idea that performing was something one could do. I had already been to pantomimes, and when they asked children to sing, first the boys and then the girls, I would sing louder than anybody else.

I was also brought up with the idea that ‘famous’ and ‘powerful’ people were not out of reach. For example, my parents were invited to 10 Downing Street when Stanley Baldwin was the Conservative Prime Minister. (I found out many decades later that some members of the opposition were always invited on these occasions.) In those days you really got dressed up for something like that – men would almost always wear tails. Apparently, whenever they were going out to some ‘do’, Dad would take his evening clothes to his chambers to change there, and he and my mother would meet nearby. So off they went to Number 10, and it was only when they were home and getting undressed that my father, who used to take his trousers off and leave them on the floor for my mother to pick up, left the navy blue turn-up trousers from his daytime suit that he had worn with a stiff white wing-collar shirt and tails. When my mother picked them up, she was furious and said, ‘Thank God I didn’t see them when you were there, otherwise we would have gone straight home!’

My father had stood as a Labour candidate. The issues he campaigned on were health, education and housing – and what has changed? He was passionate about education because he came from a large family who were not very well off and, though he had an outstanding intellect, he had to fight to have a real education. He had been born and raised in Liverpool, which was full of slums, and because of this he cared hugely about housing.

Dad had had a difficult time being Jewish when he was young and one day, when he and Emanuel Snowman were walking out of the synagogue, they discussed where to send their five-year-old sons to school, because they wanted them to have a basic education in Judaism. Emanuel Snowman was a well-respected man in the community who afterwards became Mayor of Hampstead. They founded this school, the West Hampstead Day School for Jewish Children, which at the beginning consisted of just two pupils: Michael Samuels (that’s my brother – Samuels is my family name) and Kenneth Snowman. Interestingly, they would both go on to become world authorities in their respective careers: Kenneth on Fabergé, and Michael on linguistics. I went to the school too when I was five. My mother was the school’s Honorary Secretary, and because of this I behaved appallingly and used to say to the other pupils, ‘I’ll tell my mother, I’ll tell Mummy about you.’ I can’t remember if she ever took any notice.

I was really taken with religion then, learning to read Hebrew and becoming obsessive about my Jewishness. I have always gone over the top, right from being very small: my father recognised it in me early on because I remember him saying ‘Oh Min’ – his name for me, from the way I used to say my name when I was tiny (‘Minnum’) – ‘you are so compulsive’, and that is what I have been all my life, compulsive and extreme.

The school was moved to Willesden Lane – my mother found the building for it – and it is still there. It’s now called the North West London Jewish Day School and has become the best-known primary day school for Jewish kids in north-west London. What is so ludicrous is that I only have to hear politicians talk about faith schools and I start shaking with rage because I think that, living as we are today, we are creating ghettoes. Then another part of me questions this assumption and thinks that as long as separate schools are only for the very young to understand their roots it’s fine. But it is a dilemma.

A couple of times we went on holiday to Westgate. My father once took me to see Will Hay at the Pavilion in Margate. He was playing a comic schoolmaster and I laughed so much I banged my nose on the seat in front of me. It started bleeding profusely, but Dad simply dabbed it and put a plaster on it. He should really have taken me to a doctor to have stitches put in because I have grown up with a bump in my nose which had been perfectly straight. But God, Will Hay was funny and we didn’t want to miss a minute. This was my earliest experience of a real live comic on stage.

Within my family I developed a scatological sense of humour: everything to do with farting, shitting, peeing, still makes me laugh, and this was one of our shared sources of humour. My brother used to run out politely into the garden to fart, and we all found that funny, even though others thought it rude.

My father was a wit, with an ironic and self-deprecating turn of phrase, who had a capacity for being able to come up with extraordinarily clever remarks. I discovered that he kept a joke book in which he had written down funny stories under headings. I once caught him having a look under the table just before he came out with something that was hugely apposite to what was being said at the time. Of course he was knowledgeable and a brilliant public speaker, so it wasn’t exactly cheating.

I learned very early that impersonation would make my parents laugh. I began doing them from the moment that I could talk. I suppose I had been watching and listening all that time and would imitate everyone who came to our house. There were some incredibly ‘Jewish’ characters, archetypal Jewish women, amongst our visitors and relations. My parents would even get me to mimic people who were sitting in front of us. I impersonated my Auntie Nora to her face, but she took it well because she had a good sense of humour and managed to see herself in my rather pathetic attempts. My mother would bribe me with a chocolate to do an impression, so I suppose I was trained from an early age to get up and do my tricks, like a performing dog. A few years ago, when I got cancer and started having bits of my tongue cut out, part of me thought I must have brought this on myself because I used to make fun of people with impaired speech: there was the deaf dressmaker who had something wrong with her tongue, and an old cleaning lady with a cleft palate when we were in Westgate on holiday one year.

I soon began to expand my repertoire. I had long, very dark hair which I wore in plaits in the week and curls at the weekend. I would pull my hair down against my face, trying to look like the Jesus that I had seen in pictures. I would lean against the wall with my feet crossed and Michael would come along shouting, ‘I’m a Roman soldier, I’m a Roman soldier’, miming the hammering of nails into my hands and feet. Then I would run into the kitchen shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Michael is crucifying me.’ The last time I was in Glasgow, about seven years ago for Michael’s eightieth birthday, we did it again and fell about laughing. It’s crazy really. (I suppose one could justify it as a historical reconstruction, as Michael knew about Roman soldiers.)

Hitler came much later. I heard him on the radio and had seen pictures of him so I knew about the moustache and I would stick some hair over my lip and stand there doing the Nazi salute. I used to say ‘Hitler ist ein fürchterlicher Schwein’ – in other words, ‘Hitler is a terrible pig’, which is the sort of thing he would say about the Jews. There was a little gallery looking down on the hall above a flight of stairs and when my parents invited people in they would say, ‘Do your Hitler.’ So this was my first ‘stage’…

By now we had moved into a larger house in Brondesbury with a garden, and we played games of all sorts (no television, you see). We used to play a really complicated game called ‘British Empire’. I remember I used to say to Michael, ‘Let’s play ’shempire.’ On this great board all of the places marked in red were British. When you think about it, we had the world; it was disgusting. I remember when Monopoly first came out we went Monopoly crazy too. I never wanted Mayfair – too bloody expensive. I liked Vine Street a lot. (Where is Vine Street?)

I was quite convinced that my mother preferred my brother, because he never made a fuss. He was very quiet, and I used to upset and annoy him when he was trying to do homework. I was so noisy after I learned to talk. We had a box room in our house and he turned it into a railway room. He used to go to the Caledonian Market and buy railway stock and stuff for his railway. He had a great friend and the two of them used to race their engines. I wanted to join them and play with trains but they wouldn’t have me in there. I was upset because I didn’t think of a railway as being a boy’s game.

I had dolls, of course. I had a beautiful doll’s house and used to go to a shop called ‘The Doll’s Hospital’ in West End Lane with a few pence to buy furniture, lovely little chairs and all sorts of things. I was quite practical in that I had things like a lavatory – a piss pot – and a little cooker and pots and pans in there. But I had no people in it at all.

I was quite good with my hands, and we had a big bag of different coloured beads. Once, when I was ill with chicken pox and possibly a little delirious, I found some bits of silk which I cut up into shapes. Although I can only have been about five, I managed to thread the needle and sewed some beads on to the silk. When my mother asked what I was making, I said, ‘I’m making boots for poor children.’ Perhaps I had been told, ‘Now you eat that up, or poor children would be glad to have it’, but I certainly had a latent social conscience.

I seemed to enjoy Jewish rituals and once asked my maternal grandfather why we had to do such and such a thing – why we had to have separate china for Passover, for instance. He said then that all of these customs and rituals have kept the Jews together as a people for two thousand years, otherwise they would have disappeared. ‘When we have a country of our own you will find that all of these trappings will go and we won’t need to stick to them.’ He said that to me 75 years ago, and the first thing many Israelis do when they come over to the UK now is to eat the ‘forbidden’ foods.

My grandfather was passionate about Zionism. He went to the very first conference in Vienna in the early 1900s where Theodore Herzl spoke. Herzl was the founding father of the concept of the state of Israel. Grandpa went back to Amsterdam, where his family were then living, completely imbued with the idea that the only answer to the ‘Jewish Question’ was to have our own country. He became the President of the Jewish National Fund in Holland and Belgium, and then in England when they came over in the First World War as refugees. We children had to buy trees in Palestine, and on my tenth birthday ten trees were planted in my name. We kept little blue boxes and any small change went into them. Every Jewish family who cared at all about the concept of the state would put in money. Grandpa spent his whole life thereafter preaching to people on Zionism, and he lived long enough to see the state created. He knew Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann very well, and they died within a few months of each other. Grandpa was a great, great man and I often wonder what he would be saying about Israel now.

My father was absent during the day because, being a barrister, he went to his chambers in the Temple. If he was going on a lecture tour – he used to give lectures on trade union law – he would be away, but only for a couple of nights, not for any length of time.

Our parents were always there for us, and the only time we were apart was when my father had a nervous breakdown. This was when I was about six. In those days people didn’t know how to deal with things like that, so my mother sent Michael and me off to Liverpool to stay with Dad’s father who was still alive, living with one of Dad’s sisters and her daughter.

They had a very different lifestyle. They used to kick us out of the house very early because they didn’t want us hanging about. Now I come to think about it, we were treated pretty casually, because Michael and I would be walking the streets by ourselves. They probably thought that it was good for us to go out and get some fresh air. Michael, being older, would tease me to make me scared. When we were walking on the Boulevard in Liverpool, he said: ‘There’s a policeman. I am going to send him after you’, and that made me terrified of policemen.

In Liverpool my Aunt Carrie thought it would be nice to take me to a grotto to see Father Christmas in one of those big stores. I was quite unimpressed by the man himself and concentrated completely on the present. I was going to be given something awful which I didn’t want and I cried that I wanted a particular box I could see. You could lift the lid and inside it was filled with different coloured pencils and crayons. I really wanted it badly, and found I could turn on the tears for others, because I got it.

We were away all during the Christmas holiday. I’ll never forget coming home and being so happy to see my mother as she came running along the platform wearing a pony-skin coat and a pretty hat.

As a boy, my father had won a scholarship to Liverpool College and then a scholarship in Classics to Wadham College, Oxford. I still have a copy of the play he wrote in Greek in 1914, when he was 21 – what an amazing thing to have done! He then took up law. His family regarded him with huge admiration, and always turned to him for advice on various matters.

Dad had taken Michael away from his school, Haberdashers’, because it wasn’t academic enough, and he put him in a cramming school called Warwick House. He won his scholarship to St Paul’s from there, so I was sent there too.

There were only two other girls there. However, both of them also had brothers who had been at the school, so it didn’t seem strange at the time. I enjoyed studying Ovid and Virgil, which were taught to us by Mr Dallas the headmaster, a brilliant classicist. Even though I was only ten, I realised he was also an alcoholic and slightly crazed. We were just getting American movies over here and Mr Dallas couldn’t bear to hear anybody speak in American slang. If anybody said ‘Okay’ or ‘Sez you’, they had to write out 100 lines – ‘I must not indulge in vulgar transatlanticisms’ – and if any of the boys were wearing Brylcreme on their hair he would pull it with great force, muttering ‘Filthy bugjuice.’

Dad would have loved me to go to a more academic school like Michael, but I just wasn’t that way inclined. I sat the exams for St Paul’s School but didn’t get in, so I was sent to South Hampstead High School for Girls. This happened to be a smashing school – very arts-orientated. Although I have regretted all my life that I didn’t get a degree and use my brain fully, it was a stroke of luck that I went to this school where my leanings towards the arts would be nourished.

It was a religiously mixed school, which was new for me: I had never been to an assembly first thing in the morning. Because there were a lot of Jewish girls there, once or twice a week there was Jewish assembly. There was an RE teacher called Miss Moose, who was a Liberal Jew. I used to argue with her like mad because I was so Orthodox. I discovered that I was pretty good at arguing: I’m not sure why, but I think it was a combination of feeling clever, having an audience and being able to show I was ‘right’ where she was ‘wrong’. Of course, it’s much harder to be Liberal and see ambivalence, but I didn’t know that then.

I remember Miss Moose had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface by Miriam Karlin
• Introduction by Jan Sargent
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Late Talker
• 2. Evacuation Dogged My Life
• 3. Diy Career
• 4. Doing It All
• 5. Body Swap
• 6. Piss Elegant
• 7. Good Stuff
• 8. Bad Stuff
• 9. Recovery
• 10. Sans Teeth, Sans Fuckin’ Everything
• Some Speeches and Letters
• Epilogue
• Colour Plate
• Index