by: Vicky Allan
the Frank Spencer laugh, the wide eyes, the nasal voice, the accent: you can almost imagine that "Ooh, Betty." And there it is again, as he tells some joke about a picture in the paper and as he mimics his assistant's gawping smile. "Do dat again," he says pointing at her. And although I know I shouldn't, given that this is a 57-year-old performer who has done many a theatre show since that Seventies TV comedy, I can't help Spencer-spotting. Too many people have asked me if he's really like Frank and every small gesture makes me wonder if the interview will turn into an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. But here, now, there's one element absent -the threat of impending disaster, of a man at odds with his environment, a man who doesn't know the limits of his own body and brings chaos in his wake. No, here is a man in control. This is Michael Crawford. It's the legs I'm trying to work out. Solid and firmly planted, are these really the same legs that were a running gag in Crawford's early career? In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum they were considered so hilarious that their owner became known as "the fellow with the lovely legs." Now hidden in well-pressed grey woollen trousers, it's a little difficult to tell - but I know I don't feel like laughing. "They're not funny now," he says. "They used to be because I was so skinny. Look at any pictures of me as a kid and you'll see these tiny little sticks. But they're not now because they're very strong."
Crawford is not weedy any more, he hasn't been for a while. The days of the gangly disaster-prone nincompoop in the beret are long gone.
Phantom of the Opera has passed into history with the rest of the big Lloyd Webber musicals.
But Crawford remains. The great barrel chest he's built up through long hours practising singing gives him a deceptively puffed-up look. "But it's not fat, it's muscle," he says tapping his rib cage. The mismatched jumpers have gone and his white shirt and trousers are more conventional than a bank manager's.
Frank Spencer style, he drives a tiny Nissan car that's "about the length of the sofa".
"Never forget who you are," are the words of advice his mother gave him and he appears to have listened well. "I wondered if maybe she thought I had a bad memory," he deadpans. But Crawford has not forgotten who he is -Michael Dumbell-Smith (he stole Crawford from a passing biscuit van), a hyperactive Catholic choir boy from the Isle of Sheppey.
Looking at him now, it's difficult to imagine him being funny - though he probably doesn't mind, because Crawford is many other things as well as a funny man: a dancer, a singer, an acrobat and now a writer. So what if he can no longer play Spencer (to play an incompetent like that requires an extreme level of physical competence, the kind of competence that dwindles with age). He wouldn't want to. He's been trying to get rid of that ghost for years.
"Every actor dreams of creating a character as substantial and effective as Frank Spencer," he says, "but with that comes the nightmare of 'how do I get rid of him?'" Even now, those who don't recognise him, and they're remarkably few given that his last show in Las Vegas was a bigger draw than Frank Sinatra, assume he's going to trail that chaos.
"I couldn't even try to do the things Frank Spencer used to do these days - because of my hip," he explains. Just three years ago, he had an accident while starring in EFX, the GBP 26m Las Vegas show in which he played HG Wells, Barnum and Houdini, as well as performing a high wire walk and singing and dancing. "I've recovered from it now. At the time there were headlines saying, 'Will Michael ever walk again?' But that was just people hyping it up. It was very disturbing. I had to come to London that day and do a deal with one of the papers, to ask them to reverse a story and put pictures out saying that I'm actually fine. Because I would lose work. People would think I couldn't do anything. Friends were quoted as saying 'he may never work again' or was it 'never walk again'. This is so harmful. There are some things I shouldn't do any more.
I shouldn't run because it shortens the life of the hip. But I go on long walks and it doesn't impinge on me in any other way."
The physical side of Crawford's working life is fascinating. Firstly, there's the discipline. For the musical Billy, he learnt to dance, practising for hours in front of an open refrigerator (the bottles were the imaginary audience), to play Barnum he went to the Big Apple Circus School at the age of 39, training 11 hours a day to enable him to walk the high wire, fly the trapeze and do rope tricks. For the 1970 film The Games, he trained with Olympic athlete Gordon Pirie until he was able to run a mile in 4 minutes 20 seconds. "I'm a natural runner. To play a runner, you've got to understand runners, you've got to work with runners."
Then there's the risk-taking, the seeming masochism.
During his first film role in Soapbox Derby, in 1958, he had to have his stomach pumped after a sequence where he dived into the Thames. Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em had him within inches of death when a stunt went wrong as he dangled from a window cleaner's trolley 200 feet above the ground, he was also dragged along behind a car on his knees and had to roller-skate through moving traffic. "It's not as if I'm particularly drawn to big physical challenges," Crawford makes it sound everyday. "They were just part of the job. If I had to do stunts I would just talk the way through with stuntmen. And I was always fit, so I could fall off something and land on a mattress. I mean, anyone could do that if they knew how. It's not really difficult to fall on an air bed. You've just got to have the nerve and the skill to know how to tuck and when to fold."
Along with the physical ordeals, came the injuries and the illnesses. On the night of his opening preview for Phantom of the Opera, Crawford collapsed with exhaustion - he hadn't been eating and had been living on caffeine. After Billy, he had to have varicose veins stripped from his legs.
When he was training for The Games, his then wife, Gabrielle, ran over his foot. He has had lumps removed from his breast. He had a hiatus hernia while performing Phantom. One of his favourite stories is of one woman doctor who came to examine him backstage for swollen glands.
"I was stripped to my dance belt, wearing trainers and grotesque belt, and looking like a sumo wrestler with these legs poking out underneath."
Even now he seems paranoid about health. When I suggest that the photographer isn't feeling well, he gets into a flap.
A spiky-looking minder fusses.
The whole thing might be off.
Michael doesn't want to be near any suspected germs. I even feel as if I might be thrown out as a disease carrier. But we sit down again, breathe deeply and Crawford gets back on his emotional rollercoaster and tells me some stories about his childhood, about the times he's trusted people and about how you live and learn.
"Don't ever let people harm you," he warns me, as if from nowhere. It's difficult to tell whether Crawford sounds like a child or whether he sounds like he's talking to a child.
From his slow, measured, parental repetitions, I start to wonder if he thinks I'm stupid, but then conclude that no, he always talks like that. There's a naivety there that's very Frank-like and that it's tempting to believe it is very real when he tells me how when he was young he brought dresses for his mother and they were in appalling taste, but she always wore them, and says: "Aren't mothers lovely? Aren't they? They're superb. I love mothers."
Or when he starts preaching about how every person in the world is special, from the bus conductor he used to get up 20 minutes early to ride to work with, to the man standing in the shop doorway, "because we're all here to teach each other lessons, no one is unimportant." I want to believe all this Frank-ness is real.
How did a man like that survive in such a tough industry? Crawford has said of Raymond Allen, the writer who invented Frank Spencer: "For the life of me, I cannot imagine how he ever found his way into the fiercely competitive world of television where in order to survive you need ego, arrogance and an armoury of assorted defence mechanisms."
The same could be said of him.
Even now, Crawford could easily be a grown-up Frank, sounding as bumblingly star-struck as anyone would be, as he describes living with John Lennon ("Here I was sharing a house with the coolest person in the world, and I would bounce around with my heart on sleeve and unable to keep my mouth shut"), performing with Buster Keaton ("Wow!") and his first meeting with Gene Kelly. He stuttered while Gene Kelly told him, "What we're looking for here is someone to play Cornelius Hackl in Hello Dolly... He's an attractive idiot. Now, my wife... well, she thinks you're attractive. And I think you're an idiot. So, between us, I think you could be exactly right for this film."
Hollywood beckoned, and not surprisingly, it was during his time there, that he thinks he was most in danger of "forgetting who he was." He bought the Rolls-Royce, he partied with the stars. Those were heady days - before he came back to London, invested all his money with a dodgy financial advisor and found within a short time that it was gone.
I ask him if he thinks he's a very trusting person. "I was until I met the money man.
But in a way I think maybe I wasn't meant to have it. I wasn't meant to have the Rolls-Royce. It really wasn't me." Many things in Crawford's life were 'meant to be': from the miracle of a script for Some Mothers arriving on his doorstep just after he had split up from his wife, Gabrielle, to Andrew Lloyd Webber overhearing one of his singing lessons with the teacher he shared with Sarah Brightman.
("I think I've found my Phantom," Lloyd Webber is reputed to have said). "I've got a superstitious streak. I think someone is watching over me and I do think that things are meant to happen," he explains. "I can't sit here and say, I think I'll just sit here on my backside and let things happen, but I do think things are sent to test us. And when a show fails it fails for a reason."
Crawford is reflective - the result of writing his autobiography. "Ten years ago, I wasn't this man. I don't know exactly what it is that has changed in me. But I think those of a more mature age will understand. There's a line in a song that I sing in my concert, 'The more you live, the more you learn, the more you learn, the more you realise the less you know'." The book stops at that significant date, 10 years ago, after Phantom, leaving you wondering about the secrets that lie in the last 10 years. When asked why he ended the story there, he says "when my editor had already taken out 164 pages, I thought why waste my time writing another 200 on what's happened in between"
It's a book which he says is dedicated to the women in his life. It is about mothers, Some Mothers you might say: his mother, her mother and the mother of his two children.
More than just a theatrical story, "it's a love story really, about how I came about and where I was and my mother and all the courage and love that she gave me with my aunts and my nan. So they're the stars of the book really, they are and then my children and my wife that was."
Crawford willingly describes himself as 'heavily mothered'.
His own mother died when he was 21 and the section describing her death from a pancreatitis that had been misdiagnosed as a gall bladder problem, is harrowing. "I can't read that now," he says. "I just can't read it." And he goes on to tell a story of how just after her death he was sitting in a car, while his father went to register his mother's death. "I remember a policeman looking down into the car and I never looked at him. I just looked out of the front of the car. I knew we were parked in the wrong place, but I didn't care about anything, and I just said, 'Piss off'. And he said, 'What did you say?' And I repeated it, and then I explained that my mother had just died and my father was in there, and that man just put his hand on my arm. He squeezed it gently and walked away. I wonder if he remembers. You never know, he might, and he might read the book and realise how much that meant to me."
Though Crawford has had many relationships with women since, none has been more important than that with Gabrielle, his ex-wife, the DJ he met playing The Pickwick club "sitting in what looked like a converted confessional with the main grille taken out." It was Harry Corbett who got them together, when after weeks of Crawford trying to summon up courage to speak to her, he went up and said, "There's a geezer over there with his head under the table who's driving me sodding mad about taking you out - and he hasn't got the bottle to come and ask you himself, so I've been sent over. For Christ sake go out with him before he drives me round the bend."
They were soon married and had two daughters. Crawford admits that one of the biggest mistakes was letting his ego get carried away and having a short affair. Worse still, he says, like the good Catholic, he confessed. They divorced and she went on to marry a football player. "We healed though, and we're now very close. And that's very important for the children. Because then the family feels that they're still a family and they understand that Mummy and Daddy can't be together, but they still like each other, and we love you, and that's the main thing." He talks as if his two daughters really are still children, though they're now grown up, working in television, and Crawford is a grandfather.
Women have always been a problem for him. "God knows I was never a Romeo," says Crawford, who lost his virginity at the age of 21. As a teenager he remembers performing in Benjamin Britten operas with the young David Hemmings. Hemmings was cool, the girls fell over themselves to be with him. He had the knack. Crawford didn't. Or did he? Perversely, through so clearly not having the knack, he got it. In the all-too-cool Sixties, he punctured through all those pretentious ideas of sexiness and seriousness. Ask any of the women who are queueing to have his book signed. No wonder his book is dedicated to women. Wasn't Frank Spencer the one British comedy character all women loved?