by: DEKKER Diana
Michael Crawford is a funny mixture of Frank Spencer, the Phantom, Phineas Barnum and many more. He talks to Diana Dekker before speaking at a packed luncheon to promote his new autobiography.
They're all rolled into one sandy-headed barrel-chested man. Michael Crawford is Frank Spencer with the little twitch of the right leg, the pause and the asinine smile, or the Phantom Of The Opera - seriously passionate - and then the smooth singer-cum-entertain er perched on a stool charming an audience.
For public consumption at least, Crawford has adopted the mannerisms of the characters that made him famous. Sometimes they overlap. You have Frank Spencer idiocy in almost the same breath as the Phantom jerks a tear from rapt observers at a fancy Parkroyal lunch by demonstrating how he yearned after Christine in the smash stage production. In the rehearsals for Phantom, Christine accidentally dropped her shawl and Crawford hugged it to his cosmetically deformed face as he sang after her. He hugged it the way he hugged his nan's bedjacket after she died. Andrew Lloyd-Webber let him keep this personal touch in. This is Michael Crawford, lovable and loving family man, meets Michael Crawford, performer. His nan and his mum are the stars of his life and autobiography, Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied With String.
"A lot of us are not always outgoing about what our mothers and grandmothers meant to us and how much they meant to us," he says, connecting with every honourable person in his audience. The air is thick with adulation.
It's no surprise to learn at the end of the lunch that though Gene Kelly is one person he really admires - "He taught me about professionalism" - the other, who he hasn't met, is Mother Theresa. "She epitomises compassion."
YOU absolutely have to like him. His face, at 57, is as open and almost as young as the boy next door. He's so tousled, so wholesome. If he doesn't have freckles he should have.
He tells the same anecdotes on stage and in an interview, just delivered slightly more sotto-voce with only a journalist and photographer in the room. The anecdotes are repeated almost word for word in the biography he is travelling the world promoting. It's impossible to be so famous and so incessantly interviewed without going over things again and again and again.
But everything he says and the way he says it is so good.
Even his beginnings had dramatic cache. He never knew his real father, doesn't have a great deal to say about his stepfather but idolised the idea of the man his mother was briefly and blissfully married to before his birth. "Smudge" was a heroic pilot shot down in the Second World War.
Crawford, christened Michael Patrick Dumbell-Smith, a name to conjure with almost in the league of Frank Spencer, was born from a brief affair. His mother did attempt to tell his father she was pregnant but saw him in the lobby of a hotel on the arm of another woman and left without saying word.
When Crawford was born, the news was relayed by a telegram saying "parcel arrived safely tied with string", so as to confuse the gossipy postmistress. Had he been a girl, it would have read "parcel arrived safely".
Crawford has never tried to find his biological father and assumes his father has never sought him out.
"I didn't want to hear from him. If you've been given up for adoption it's more of a thing to get back and see where you came from. I've never had any desire to do that."
A less inspired actor than Crawford might have become typecast as the accident-prone Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, which really shot him to fame in the 70s. Presented with a script containing funny but sporadic dialogue, he added his own zany stunts and leg-crossing gawkiness.
Frank Spencer wasn't just a trial to screen wife Betty (Michele Dotrice) and a figment of Crawford's imagination. Art alarmingly imitates life in Crawford's description of the real-life rush to get now ex-wife Gabrielle to hospital for the birth of their first daughter.
"By dint of calm persuasion Gabrielle was able to get me dressed and into the car and we started the mad drive to the nursing home. I couldn't understand it; in just a few short hours I had completely forgotten the way. We drove in some raging fashion, going the wrong way down one-way streets and finding every cul-de-sac in Clapham. Finally we found Central London. Greatly relieved I pulled up at the entrance of Westminster Hospital, totally the wrong place."
He attended the birth of his second daughter. "By the time the birth process was reaching its climax I was on top of the bed trying to see exactly what was going on down the busy end. When the baby finally appeared, I was shouting at the top of my voice: 'It's a boy, it's a boy'." He had been fooled by the umbilical cord.
There were 18 episodes of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and 26 million people watched. A different generation saw Crawford in the dramatic role of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's The Phantom, a role he acquired partly by chance. Crawford and Lloyd-Webber's wife of the time, Sarah Brightman, shared the same singing teacher. Brightman was singing downstairs, Crawford up.
"Andrew heard me through the floorboards, asked who was singing and said, 'I think we've found our Phantom'."
Fate, says Crawford.
"You have to believe in fate. I'm sure I've missed out on a few parts, but maybe I was meant to miss them. I wouldn't change the parts I've taken. And I've learned more from my mistakes - as we ought - than from my successes. I enjoy the successes but you can't know the joys without experiencing failure and the pain of failure. You've got to drink bad wine before you appreciate good wine and bad beer before good beer," he adds. "And it's fun learning."
He likes New Zealand, has spent a month travelling round on what he says was the best holiday of his life and even contemplates living here.
He embraces rugby like a Kiwi bloke. In his lunch speech he spits explosively on the floor when he mentions France. He knew "we" had lost to France when he woke up in his hotel room and there was quiet.
"There were no hooters. It was like a country in mourning. They take it very seriously. I'm an English cricket fan and I'm used to losing. I laugh about it. You're not used to it. You have a great team and they have to come unstuck sometime.
"It was a great game for the uneducated observer, so frustrating. You were there willing them to concentrate. The big guy carried five across for that try. That was his most satisfying moment. Next time they said 'aprez vous' and waved him by."
Crawford's book is full of references to workmates in the league of Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Gene Kelly. He began his professional career as a soprano in Benjamin Britten's Let's Make An Opera. He and Gabrielle lived, at one stage, with Cynthia and John Lennon and Ringo Starr and his wife. Crawford starred in How I Won The War with Lennon.
"John Lennon never said anything that wasn't deeply serious. Even his jokes were philosophically meaningful. When he spoke to you in that deep, nasal whine, it was always as if he were speaking from somewhere far off in his head - except the time I doctored one of his gigantic hand-rolled cigarettes . . . with a mini-explosive . . . He lit it and phhhfffft! John just stared at me impassively. It was as if I'd just confirmed all his existential anxieties about the futility of existence. 'Piss off!' he grunted.
"I can honestly say I hardly got to know him. It might have been because he was in the midst of world fame on a scale beyond our ken; or that he'd reached a point where he had nothing to give any more, outside the songs he continued to write and the friendships he shared with the tiny circle of people he knew well and trusted."
Crawford's biography began with a diary and, even without reference to the last decade of his life - "material for another book - grew bigger than the publishers needed. I over-wrote about certain things - the behaviour of trolley buses and the time I spent on them. He (the editor) said it interfered with the drama. He was good."
Crawford has spent the past two years touring the United States, Australia and New Zealand as a solo artist.
On Christmas Eve he'll be singing in Bethlehem "in front of Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister. Singing Oh Holy Night in a flak jacket".