by: ALDRIDGE Val
The singing, dancing, clowning, acting Michael Crawford talks to Val Aldridge about putting his life story--on stage and off--in a book
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In a poignant moment, Crawford tells the audience of a nine-year-old kid reaching out to touch the tombstone of the young Spitfire pilot he believed was his father, his hero, only to see a date that revealed he was born two years after the man had died
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He says goodbye at the hotel suite door, smiling broadly, all big white even teeth and twinkly blue eyes.
Superstar Michael Crawford, alias television's accident-prone Frank Spencer, alias The Phantom, in sharply ironed, white open-necked shirt, is conducting interview-surgery.
No singing this time, he's on a promotional tour for his autobiography, the somewhat obscurely titled Michael Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied With String (Random House, $ 49.95).
Brrrp, brrp, time's up. Journalists and photographers in and out. But he's never impatient, forever friendly. Not quite goodbye, I say. I'm going to the promotional luncheon, too. His hand flies to his mouth and eyes widen. For a brief second, there is Frank Spencer. It's 20 years since the the award-winning television series Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, for which Crawford was voted the Funniest Man On TV, but the gormless Frank seems to shadow him, popping up unbidden, or maybe intentionally.
It is hard to tell, the line between performance, interview and conversation is seamless. Each character he talks about is played, gesture and accent. The man--who, you've got to say, looks good for his 57 years--can work an audience of one as well as a filled concert hall.
He laughs: "I'll probably say all the things at lunch that I've just said to you." And he does. But a tweak here and there and the stories are like new and the guests at the $ 65-a-head lunch hang on his every word.
Crawford tells the story behind the book's cryptic title. How his mother's wartime marriage in 1940 to "Smudge", Arthur Dumbell-Smith, was cut short when the handsome Spitfire pilot was shot down and died. How the desperately unhappy Doris later became pregnant after a one-night stand with another pilot officer and left the family home on the tiny Isle of Sheppey, off the Kentish coast, to give birth in Salisbury, away from clacking tongues. A pre-arranged coded telegram was to announce the birth--"parcel arrived safely" for a girl and "parcel arrived safely: tied with string" for a boy. The boy was christened Michael Patrick Dumbell-Smith.
In a poignant moment, Crawford tells the audience of a nine-year-old kid reaching out to touch the tombstone of the young Spitfire pilot he believed was his father, his hero, only to see a date that revealed he was born two years after the man had died. He tells it with the tragedy of the clown.
Though Smudge was not his real father, in Crawford's heart he became so. He has Smudge's service record and wings and a few photos. And he flies, too. Nothing so bold as a Spitfire, but he's a happy hobby pilot in his own plane, a single-engined Cessna.
The man can make star turns out of "when I was an altar boy" and his earliest stage performances. The birth of his first child becomes sheer Frank Spencer and he shares the lucky moment that led to international stardom in The Phantom playing five-and-a-half years in London, New York and Los Angeles, earning him several theatre awards and an OBE.
He weaves the story of the Phantom's dramatic farewell to his thwarted love, Christine, with the aching loss he suffered when his mother died suddenly aged 44, and many years later the death of his life's anchor, his Irish grandmother. When rehearsing The Phantom finale, he caught Christine's falling scarf and impulsively smothered his face, smelling her scent, and was reminded of how when Nan died in her nineties, he'd buried his face in her pillow and bedjacket and could smell her still. And his Phantom had let out a strangled cry "Maaaama"--the deep, soulful cry from a child who'd lost a mother, "that first and steadfast love". The moment, he says, became part of the show.
Who among us, he asks the luncheon audience--riveted, some by now with eyes glistening--have not known this sort anguish in a loss?
Wellington bookseller John Ahradsen says Crawford has a magic, common touch that also comes through in the book which, he says, can hold its own with two other great celebrity autobiographies, Peter Ustinov's Dear Me and David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon.
Certainly, Crawford doesn't spare himself--from the facts of his birth to the infidelity that cost him his marriage.
What makes somebody who is essentially shy, and intensely private--so much so that last year he spent a month touring New Zealand with a woman companion (he won't say who) without drawing any public attention--bare all?
Simply, he says, to get in before somebody else did. He's already had an unauthorised biography done on him. His version began as a diary written while he was in The Phantom in New York, a bit lonely and homesick, but he put it away.
"I thought, I can't show this to anybody yet, about my father and my marriage break-up."
Approached by a publisher, he read it again and added more upfront material on his infidelity. It's a raw topic. He writes: How does a man's mind work so that he believes that an infidelity won't interfere with the love that stands at the centre of his life? Of all the mistakes a man can make, this one ranks right up there with the worst.
He says daughters Emma and Lucy and former wife Gabrielle approved the script.
Crawford writes that since his divorce, he's loved again, but never felt confident enough to remarry, though he's remained friends with many former girlfriends.
e tells me that now he's got the writing bug, he's trying to arrange the collection of eccentric characters he stores in his head into a short story maybe, or a novel, film script, stage or television play. But I am distracted trying to get a glimpse of his comedic legs.
A West End impresario auditioning the young Crawford (who took his name from a popular British biscuit brand) said "Comedically, they're bloody marvellous", but, sadly, the funny legs are mostly hidden under immaculate fawn sports trousers. In the book, Crawford describes them as stilt-like pipe stems.
A hyperactive, restless kid and good at sport, he became a restless adult, still good at sport and always prepared to have a go.
The comedic legs saw him through the often-dangerous stunts in each episode of Some Mothers, and the even more challenging leading role in the long-running stage circus musical Barnum.
Aged 39, he went to a circus school in New York to train for the part, contorting and testing his body and nerve till he had mastered the high wire and other stunts. An injury during a big stunt show, EFX, at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas in 1995, which he won't discuss because it's still the subject of litigation, led to a hip replacement three years ago.
Now he can't jump or do impact sports, so he swims and sails. He dreams one day, he says, of buying a boat and going ocean sailing.
So much of his career just happened, he says. He was lucky. Others would say multi-talented enough to grasp the tide when it was running.
A brief run through his CV turns up some unforgettable showbiz names--John Lennon, David Hemmings, Buster Keaton, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Noel Coward, Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, Glenn Close . . . but Crawford says that Gene Kelly had the biggest impact on his career.
Kelly selected Crawford for the juvenile lead in the motion picture Hello Dolly! and taught him professionalism and application, and became a lifelong friend.
There's a funny little tribute in the book to Kelly that somehow underscores the child-like enthusiasm Crawford admits he still has for everything. A little halo of printed stars surrounds Kelly's name in one of the book captions - as though a kid has gone stamp, stamp, stamp.
Looking ahead, Crawford says he can't see any big musicals on the horizon. They have become too expensive to produce, and though he's had offers of other musicals, the storyline or music haven't appealed. As for The Phantom on film, Warner Bros signed him up to do one but the film was postponed.
"I think it was because of some disagreement over the way they wanted to do it," he shrugs. "The artist is always the last to know."
Meanwhile, he loves travelling. He's just completed a tour of the United States and Britain, promoting his new Christmas album and the book. He will sing in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve and at the America's Cup Village in Auckland in January. There's an Australian concert in February, and one in Dublin in April.
After that?
Something will turn up. "I truly believe what will be will be."