By Ray Bennett
It’s been a long time coming but now I can announce that my autobiography is available worldwide on Amazon. Here’s the description:
In the golden days of Hollywood, M-G-M studios boasted that it had ‘more stars than there are in heaven’. The same could be said of ‘Mystery Train to Hollywood’ the memoir of Ray Bennett who spent decades as a writer, editor and critic on major newspapers and magazines in Canada and the United States including 20 years with leading trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.
Son of a railwayman, Ray Bennett grew up in rural England in the bleak years following the Second World War captivated by motion pictures and dreaming of being a journalist. When his parents first asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he said he would be a reporter and go to Hollywood to meet his hero, Roy Rogers.
He tells of being taken at a young age by his father into a railway signal box where a signalman moved a range of levers to change where a train was going. You might board a train headed to London and find yourself traveling to Paris. He decided that life was like that. You could pull the levers yourself or someone might pull them for you unexpectedly. Life was a ride on a mystery train and he soon learned, sometimes painfully, that you could never tell what would happen next.
It was a ride worthy of the movies he grew up loving, the first act unfolding as a young reporter in England and Canada, covering everything from accidents and murders, to criminal trials, the environment and Vietnam War protests.
His personal life was a mix of bliss and heartbreak with three marriages that ended in divorce, his third wife the troubled eldest child of world-famous country music entertainer Charlie Rich. Ray writes of those times as he criss-crossed the States interviewing the biggest names in film, television, music, media and the stage.
Famous names fill the pages of his memoir: screen legends such as Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, Bette Davis, David Niven, Jeanne Moreau, Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Trevor Howard and Paul Newman plus many other top movie stars including James Garner, Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, George Clooney and Patrick Swayze; TV icons including Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Andy Griffith, Barbara Eden and Raymond Burr; top film directors such as Robert Altman, music legends including Johnny Cash and many Oscar-winning film composers.
Ray tells of sipping Scotch whisky with Sean Connery on the terrace of Elton John’s house in the south of France, talking with Pierce Brosnan long before he became James Bond and spending a day on the set of ‘A View to a Kill’’ resulting in a candid interview with Roger Moore. There are tales from the sets of hit TV shows such as ‘Dallas’, ‘Knots Landing’, ‘Hill Street Blues’, ‘Cagney & Lacey’ and reports from international film festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Edinburgh and Rio de Janeiro.
From concerts by Elvis Presley, Elton John, David Bowie, the Stones, the Kinks, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Cream and many more to reviewing 300 London stage productions and covering the Oscars, the MTV Awards, the BAFTAS, the Olivier Awards and the Brits, Ray has been there.
He writes that he has lived his life on two planes. One filled with glamour, brilliant talent, fancy hotels and restaurants, exotic locations, premieres and launches of high-end entertainment. The other dealing with real life, the joys and pains of love affairs, marriages and divorces; living in dozens of places, changing jobs many times, being fired and living broke … always the railwayman’s son, always dreaming…
For Ray, it has been an extraordinary ride on an adventure-filled mystery train that makes for a unique memoir.
Screenshot
How quiet scenes help make ‘The Great Escape’ so thrilling
By Ray Bennett
John Sturges’s terrific prisoner-of-war adventure ‘The Great Escape’ is an annual treat around this time of year and remained great entertainment when I watched it on BBC-TV for the enth time. Elmer Bernstein’s splendid score was the first film soundtrack recording I ever bought and it is still thrilling. For me, too, some of the best scenes, which actually enhance the drama and chase sequences, are quiet ones between James Garner, as Hendley, the scrounger, and British actor Donald Pleasance playing forger Blythe, who loses his sight.
There appears to be genuine chemistry between the two actors and when I interviewed Garner in the Seventies, he agreed. ‘I felt so,’ he said. ‘I loved it! I just think Donald is so marvellous and it was a good relationship. We got to do some things on our own in there.’
Garner lauded director Sturges for being very accommodating. ‘He was very good about that,’ he said. ‘As long as we stuck to the point of it, we could change a little dialogue. I wrote about three scenes in the picture. They were small character things, you know, like the stealing of the equipment they needed for the forgeries.’
A poignant sequence in the film is when Hendley suspects and then sees that Blythe is going blind. ‘I really loved working with Donald,’ Garner told me. ‘As a matter of fact, John apologised profusely to me because there were two scenes that you never saw that were really absolutely wonderful. Donald was fantastic and they were beautifully shot and everything but they were left on the cutting-room floor so we could get Steve McQueen on his motorcycle.’
Garner was pragmatic about what made the film so exciting. ‘That turned out to be, I guess, the right thing to do,’ he said, ‘but it would have been better for Donald and me to keep those scenes. You have to look at the picture as a whole and it was the right thing to do: get McQueen on that bike.’
Screenshot