By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Fans of “The Voice” might not suspect that the venerable Sir Tom Jones, who turns 85 today, was censored on American television when he was younger.
His show “This is Tom Jones” aired on the ABC network for three seasons until 1971 and his electrifying performances made him a huge sex symbol that terrified his network TV bosses.
When Jones first appeared on U.S. television – in 1965 on “The Ed Sullivan Show” – the cameras moved to facial closeups when his pelvic thrusts began as they had when Elvis Presley appeared on the show.
Later, on “This is Tom Jones”, ABC sent a female censor to monitor his performances. He told me, “She used to sit there and watch me. I remember once singing ‘Satisfaction’ and she said, ‘You can’t move like that and sing that song, it’s too suggestive.’ I said OK, but I did sing it and I did move like that, and we got away with it it.”
Jones was always a genial interview. I was a fan from the days he used to jam on British TV shows with Little Richard, John Lennon and Jerry Lee Lewis and others, and demonstrated that he had the chops to stay with the best of them.
He used to play at the Elmwood Casino, the nightclub in Windsor, Ontario, that was the biggest such venue in the Detroit area in the seventies. He had emerged in the sixties on the strength of the hit song “It’s Not Unusual” from the obscurity of Britain’s workingmen’s clubs. He told me, “That’s where entertainers start there. It’s a great training ground in front of a tough audience. If you can make fellas that are drinking beer listen to you then you’re getting across.”
Jones had developed his from-the-hip singing style even then and there would be the occasional over-excited woman in the audience with an annoyed husband. An occasional bottle would be thrown: “I never got hit, though. If it got ugly, we’d close the curtains and get the hell out.”
Later in his career, he would be bombarded by hotel-room keys and knickers thrown on stage by adoring female fans. When I interviewed him in 1981, he told me his style wasn’t really something he had much control over – “I can’t lay back on a song” – and he viewed his macho strutting with humour: “You can’t take it seriously. I laugh at myself a bit. If it’s an up-tempo number, a sexy number, then you do it. People want to enjoy themselves but they don’t want something thrust at them.”
At that time, Jones was making a TV comeback after 16 years in a show taped in British Columbia. The TV series, “Tom Jones”, was made in Canada for one simple reason, he said, “We wanted to do a series for syndication but it’s difficult to get people to invest in this kind of show in Los Angeles because it’s very expensive there.”
Canada, however, offered tax-shelter investments and a favourable exchange rate on the U.S. dollar: “Our producer, Clancy Grass, is a Canadian and he came up with the idea of doing it here. Canadians want people to come here and do shows, films or TV or whatever, so it’s good for Canada and it’s good for the entertainer.”
The show sold steadily to nations in South America, the Phillipines and China, and was seen across the U.S. in 1982. He had remained popular in concert, playing at Caesars Palace two months a year in two-week stints, and he spent seven months on the road. He also continued to have hit records with releases such as “Darlin’” and “What in the World’s Come Over You?”
Speaking in 1981 when he was 40, Jones had been away from Britain for seven years and he hadn’t been back. He made no bones about why he lived in the United States: Promoters in Las Vegas and elsewhere in North America were eager to pay substantial sums to a man whose vigorous singing put new life into dwindling nightclub audiences – and the U.S. taxman let him keep more of it.
He said, “I daren’t go home for a visit. I like living in Britain and if I go back for a short visit it would just be teasing me, so I’d rather not. I’d get homesick and would want to stay, it would tempt me so much.”
He used to carry a little bit of Wales around with him wherever he went in the form of a bristle dartboard from Caerphilly, just down the road from Pontypridd, South Wales, where he was born Thomas Jones Woodward. There was a larger piece beside the pool at his home in Bel Air but it didn’t travel well. It was the old red telephone box from his end of the street in Pontypridd.
Jones said, “I heard that they were putting in new phone boxes and I thought, my God, I’d love to have the one from the end of our street. That was our phone when I was a kid. It was the only one we had.”
He had it shipped out complete with its lists of British exchanges and it sat in the shade of the Georgian-style home that he bought from Dean Martin. It was similar to the home he had for many years in England in the Surrey town of Weybridge, he said: “I wanted a house that was nearly the same and this is – the red brick and everything. I had all my furniture brought over and all the fittings. I seldom go out when I’m there so really it’s like being in Britain … except that when I’m out by the pool, the weather’s different.”
‘That’s how I like to think of myself,’ Margolin told me in 1982 for a cover story in Canadian TVGuide. ‘Some guys can take a sidekick, others can’t. Jim didn’t have a sidekick for many years and he doesn’t need one but somehow this has evolved snd I think we work well together.’
Taking voice lessons to lose his Texas accent, Margolin gradually won small stage roles leading to the road company that took him to Los Angeles in 1960. There, he dound steady work on TV series such as ‘My World and Welcome to It’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ and acting in movies including ‘Death Wish’ and ‘Kelly’s Heroes’.
Margolin’s sidekick eccentricity found its purest expression in Garner’s reprise of his western show, ‘Breat Maverick’. He played Philo Sandeen, a Yugoslavian who came to the New World, decided that he preferred to live the way the Indians lived and preferred to go by the name Great Scout Standing Bear. Philo Sandeen was much more capable than Angel and more dangerous. Margolin said, ‘After a while, as Angel, it became incumbent to get a laugh on everything I did and I didn’t want to fall into that.’
20 David Niven movies you should see
By Ray Bennett
David Niven, who was born 115 years ago today and died aged 73 in 1983, gave Ron Base and me the best quote of all time.
The Oscar-winning British actor was on a book tour to promote his first memoir, the brilliant “The Moon’s a Balloon”, in 1972. Ron and I, who worked at The Windsor Star across the river, went to a Detroit hotel ballroom for a lunch – a hospital fundraiser – at which Niven was to speak. We were told we could interview him afterwards.
Lunch was great because we sat at a table with actress Constance Towers so we encouraged her to share yarns of her films with John Ford. Niven was a masterful raconteur and he spun hilarious tales from his book.
Always one of my favourite screen actors, Niven was the definition of suave and debonair from his start in comedies such as “Thank You, Jeeves” (1936), in which he naturally played Bertie Wooster (pictured above with Virginia Field and Arthur Treacher as Jeeves), and war pictures such as “Dawn Patrol” (1938).
He might be best known for his role as Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in Eighty Days”, which won five Academy Awards in 1957 including Best Picture. He is perfect and Shirley MacLaine and Robert Newton (pictured below) have their moments although the film is a bloated travelogue stuffed with odd star cameos.
Here are 20 other David Niven movies worth watching:
“The Sea Wolves” (1980) Great fun based on a true story as Gregory Peck, Niven and Roger Moore play former soldiers who are sent on a secret mission in World War II to destroy a Nazi ship based in neutral Goa. Andrew V. McLaglen directs Reginald Rose’s entertaining script with a cast that includes Trevor Howard and Patrick Macnee.
“Murder by Death” (1976) Neil Simon’s Agatha Christie spoof has some wonderful moments from a cast in which Niven is joined by Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Maggie Smith.
“The Extraordinary Seaman” (1969) Bizarre comedy that I’ve always been fond of with Niven as the ghost of a drowned World War I sea captain who fetches up with his boat in World War II, helps some American sailors survive and falls for an American woman in the Phillipines. John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate”) directs Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda, Mickey Rooney and Jack Carter.
“Lady L” (1965) Ambitious if flawed comedy directed by Peter Ustinov, who adapated a novel by Romain Gary about an ageing woman played by Sophia Loren who recalls the loves of her life. Niven, Paul Newman, Cecil Parker and Philippe Noiret are among them.
“The Bedtime Story” (1964) Comedy Marlon Brando and Niven as conmen who challenge each other to seduce women on the Côte d’Azur such as an heiress played by Shirley Jones. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times said the two actors hit “a comedy peak” and “it is a very funny picture. It was remade in 1988 as “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” with Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenne Headley, and later became a successful stage play.
“The Pink Panther” (1963) Niven and Robert Wagner are the jewel thieves in pursuit of the fabulous gem worn by Claudia Cardinale (pictured above) although Peter Sellers steals every scene as Inspector Clouseau. Blake Edwards directs the first of the “Pink Panther” series, which he co-wrote with Maurice Richlin (“Operation Petticoat”, “Pillow Talk”). Henry Mancini, of course, wrote the infectious score.
“55 Days at Peking” (1963) Nicholas Ray epic about American soldiers and British diplomats in the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Niven stars with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and a very large cast with cinematography by the great Jack Hildyard (Oscar-winner for “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) and music by Dimitri Tiomkin (Oscar-winner for “High Noon”, “The High and the Mighty” and “The Old Man and the Sea”).
“The Best of Enemies” (1961) Smart and cynical comedy about a square-off in the Abyssinian desert in World War II between an Italian captain (Alberto Sordi) and a British major (Niven). Directed by Guy Hamilton (“Goldfinger”, “Funeral in Berlin”), it co-stars Michael Wilding and Harry Andrews atop a raft of British and Italian character actors.
“The Guns of Navarone” (pictured above, 1961) Grand wartime adventure directed by J. Lee Thompson and based on a novel by Alistair MacLean about a group of Allied soldiers who must destroy a giant Nazi cannon so that convoys at sea might remain safe. Niven stars with Gregory Peck, Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle, James Darren, Irene Papas, Gia Scala, Richard Harris and Anthony Quinn, whom Peck told me was the greatest scene-stealer in the movies.
“Ask Any Girl” (1959) Frothy comedy about brothers who fall for the same woman although one doesn’t realise it. Shirley MacLaine stars with Niven and Gig Young (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They”) with the late Rod Taylor also in the cast.
“Separate Tables” (1958) Niven was named best actor at the Academy Awards for his performance as a stiff British Army officer with a secret in Delbert Mann’s version of the Terence Rattigan play about a group of off-season residents of a middle-class hotel at the English seaside town of Bournemouth. Deborah Kerr (pictured above), Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster and Gladys Cooper co-star with Wendy Hiller, who won the Oscar for best supporting actress.
“Bonjour Tristesse” (1958) Saucy Otto Preminger story of an unconventional playboy (Niven) and his fetching daughter, played by Jean Seberg (pictured above). Deborah Kerr and Mylène Demongeot co-star in a film whose reputation has grown over the years.
“My Man Godfrey” (1957) Niven is a butler with a dubious past to an American family dominated by women played by such as June Allyson, Jessie Royce Landis, Eva Gabor and Martha Hyer. Henry Foster (“Harvey”) directs.
“The Way Ahead” (1944) Carol Reed (“The Third Man”) directs a morale-building drama written by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov about conscripts who learn about battle in North Africa. Niven stars with a raft of British character actors including Stanley Holloway (“My Fair Lady”), James Donald (“The Great Escape” and William Hartnell (the first Doctor Who).
“Spitfire” (1942) British actor Leslie Howard (“The Painted Desert”, “Gone With the Wind”) directs and stars as the airplane designer who created the famous machine flown by “the few” in the Battle of Britain in World War II. Niven, who left Hollywood to return to England for the war, co-stars with Rosamund John.
“Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” (1938) Directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder adapted from a play by Alfred Savoir. Screwball comedy on the French Riviera with Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper. Niven co-stars along with the incomparable Edward Everett Horton.
“Dodsworth” (1936) William Wyler’s screen version of the Sinclair Lewis novel about a US industrialist (Walter Huston) and his wife (Ruth Chatterton) who drift apart on a European holiday picked up six Oscar nominations. Niven co-stars along with Paul Lukas, Mary Astor and Maria Ouspenskaya.
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” (below, 1936) The famous tale directed by Michael Curtiz, who gave Niven the title of his second memoir along with other very funny English-language clangers, my favourite of which is when the exasperated director told Errol Flynn (who starred opposite Olivia de Havilland) and Niven: “You think I know fuck nothing, but I know fuck all!”