Inside the mind of a star maker
by Andrew Lloyd Webber HarperCollins, £20
WHEN you are old, you fill blank days by doing pointless things such as writing biographies, writes Andrew Lloyd Webber early in his memoir. Since Unmasked is 500 pages long (and only goes up to 1986) either the world’s most successful musical composer has more blank days than you might expect or he is being disingenuous.
But Unmasked proves Lloyd Webber to be a surprisingly funny writer. He is a master of mock modesty and surreptitious showmanship. And while this is not the world’s most revealing autobiography it skips along with a colloquial wit and tongue-incheek naughtiness that keeps the pages turning at a rapid lick.
For anyone who has been living on Mars for the past few decades, Lloyd Webber is the musical powerhouse behind Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita and The Phantom Of The Opera, to name but a few. He writes the music while others write the lyrics. Of these, Sir Tim Rice looms large as they collaborated for 10 years from their early days (when they met Lloyd Webber was 17 and Rice 20) and this collusion resulted in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (conceived as a “Biblical cantata”). Lloyd Webber and Rice were Little and Large, chalk and cheese, oil and water in a relationship bonded by creativity but fraught with jealousy.
Rice was tall and blonde, “thin as a rake, a blond bombshell of an Adonis”. Lloyd Webber was none of these. And when Rice had an affair with the star of Cats, Elaine Paige, fur flew. Lloyd Webber found himself caught in the crossfire.
Born in 1948 and raised in an eccentric, slightly boho household in South Kensington, Lloyd Webber was encouraged to pursue music by his obsessive mother and his father, a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music and head of the London College of Music. He tells funny childhood stories about the family cat Perseus who he walked around the streets on a lead and undoubtedly inspired Cats. There was a cuckoo in the nest, John Lill, a gifted pianist who Lloyd Webber’s mother informally adopted and nurtured, investing him with all her hopes and ambitions at the expense of Lloyd Webber and his brother Julian. He reveals a youthful depression which culminated in a half-hearted suicide attempt.
And I’d love to have met the politically incorrect Auntie Vi to whom the book is dedicated.
As Lloyd Webber’s career takes off, personalities give way to musical constructions, backstage dealings and showbiz politics that are candid but not quite so interesting. Yet his tone is so amused and amusing that it hardly matters. He describes how Miloš Forman wanted him to play the young Mozart in his film of Amadeus but he wriggled out of it by demanding that the producers replace Mozart’s music with his own.
He is both discreet and cavalier about his three marriages: first to 18-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Hugill (“There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning”), second to Phantom Of The Opera star Sarah Brightman and third to Madeleine Gurdon with whom he remains successfully glued. The Brightman Years in particular resonate with an underlying regret that rarely surfaces in the rest of the book.
Even at the height of their relationship he observes “how hard it is to be married to someone whose day job is in the evenings”. Then in 1989 she lost her heart to a starship trooper or rather, had an affair with the keyboard player in Phantom. “Hugely fond of her as I still am, things weren’t the same for me after that.”
He spends many pages unpacking how his songs evolved: the heart-stopping power of Memory from Cats; the political mawkishness of Evita’s Don’t Cry For Me Argentina; the sinister fairytale-like The Music Of The Night from the world’s most successful theatre production Phantom, which in 2006 became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.
This lively anecdotal memoir offers a glimpse into the man and the music.