So why IS Joan Collins’ son calling his father a paedophile?
MICHAEL THORNTON recalls Anthony Newley, one of the most complex men in showbusiness — and the day he caught the star alone with two teenage girls
The redoubtable Dame Joan Collins has never been one to mince her words or to ration her comments.
So it seemed strangely out of character, to say the least, when she issued the briefest of denials to shocking claims made by her son, Alexander (‘Sacha’) that his late father — and her husband of seven years — Anthony Newley ‘was a paedophile . . . drawn to youthfulness’.
In an interview with a Sunday newspaper to promote his own memoir, Sacha, 52, went further: his father ‘thought innocence was an aphrodisiac. That was his sexual proclivity and it’s a very dangerous and destructive thing’.
his father ‘had been honest with my mother about his appetite for young girls, and said he would change, but she married him anyway’.
Dame Joan’s response on Sunday ran to just 15 words: ‘As far as I’m concerned this is absolutely untrue. I have nothing further to add.’
As it turned out, Our Joanie had plenty more to add.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain yesterday, she said: ‘I think Sacha’s being extremely naïve and not really knowing the meaning of that word [paedophile], because what Tony admittedly was, is he loved young women, and young women of 17, 18 and 19 years old.
‘Not children by any means. Never in a million years would I have been married to somebody like that. Categorically, I can say that it is not true, that I never saw any of that kind of behaviour from Anthony . . .’
Visibly upset, she said that this has been a ‘very’ stressful time for her. Sacha’s elder sister, Tara, has also said that she is shocked and ‘deeply upset by these false allegations’.
Sacha, a renowned portraitist, is adamant that he discussed his book, Unaccompanied Minor, with his mother prior to publication. ‘She has read it and likes it very much,’ he said.
If indeed that is true, her son’s detailed account of his father’s addiction to sex with young girls cannot entirely have escaped her attention.
And one would have expected Dame Joan, 84, to have had some inkling of Sacha’s suspicions about his father’s darker desires.
Whatever the truth, the resulting media frenzy has generated a huge amount of interest in a book that might otherwise have had limited appeal.
CERTAINLY, the whole business is perplexing, not least because Anthony Newley’s own biographer, Garth Bardsley, said that the multi-talented Newley — an actor, writer, singer, composer and director — made no secret of his sexual interest in young girls (or ‘lolita nymphets’, as he says Collins would later describe them).
‘A compulsive womaniser, with a fatal fascination for young girls, he tossed aside his conquests with shocking ruthlessness,’ Bardsley wrote in the 2003 biography, Stop The World.
Newley, like Charlie Chaplin before him, was obsessed by the hunt for what he called ‘ the perfect child-lover’, according to Bardsley.
‘he was fascinated by the idea of bringing teenage girls alive sexually and sensually; the image of himself as teacher and guide was an integral part of his fantasies.’
Others noted and found his proclivities disturbing. When he was still in his early 20s, the father of one young girl felt obliged to warn Newley off with threats of legal action and physical violence.
As a former film and theatre critic, I encountered ‘ Tony’ Newley on many occasions in london and New york.
he was an extremely complex and unpredictable character, a man never entirely comfortable with himself or his origins.
One of my more memorable encounters with him took place backstage at a Broadway theatre in 1965 where, then in his 30s, he was starring in his own musical, The roar Of The Greasepaint — The Smell Of The Crowd.
The show had opened to disastrous notices.
Normally Tony called me ‘mate’ and would envelope me in a bearlike hug every time we met. Not on this occasion.
‘So what have you come for then?’ he demanded.
‘To stick another knife in like the rest of those bastards? Anyway, we’ve got an advance of 700,000 f *** ing dollars. So they can screw themselves.’
I recall that there were two young girls, aged, I guessed, about 15, sitting in his dressing-room, gazing at him adoringly and watching his every move.
And as I left I spotted two more waiting in the corridor outside. I thought nothing of it at the time beyond the fact that they were groupies of the sort many stars attract. I shall never know the truth of that now, but it has left me wondering . . .
Bardsley tells of how Newley targeted two 16-year-olds in the cast and how the rest of the cast and crew would joke about him ‘leaving a trail of lollipops along the corridor to his room’.
I know that Newley was a man profoundly affected by his illegitimate birth in hackney, east london, in 1931. he was one of five children whose parents never married and who separated during his early childhood, leaving him to be brought up by an aunt and uncle.
Obsessed with the stage from an early age, at 14 he auditioned to join the prestigious Italia Conti acting school but his family could not afford the fees.
his talent, however, got him a job there as an office boy, with tuition thrown in.
he broke into films at 16, making his greatest impression as the Artful Dodger in David lean’s classic 1948 screen version of Oliver Twist. (During filming, he lost his virginity to another junior member of the cast, the 17-yearold Diana Dors).
Stardom came in 1959 in the film, Idle On Parade, loosely based on the life of elvis Presley, following which he unexpectedly found himself in the pop charts.
But even after Newley had conquered the West end in Stop The World — I Want To Get Off, in 1961, which he directed and starred in, he was still a lost soul who seemed to be searching for an identity.
NOTHING conveyed this so vividly as the show’s hit song, What Kind Of Fool Am I? he seemed to be singing about the pain and hollowness he felt. ‘What kind of man is this?/ An empty shell/ A lonely cell in which/ An empty heart must dwell’.
In the audience one night, squired by the hollywood actor robert Wagner, was Joan Collins, who went backstage to be introduced to Newley. She had been told by a close friend that Tony, the toast of the West end, had never been in love.
‘Never?’ she said. ‘What is he — some sort of faggot?’
‘No, no,’ her friend assured her. ‘Come off it darling. he loves the ladies. No, he’s just never been able to fall in love with anyone. Can you imagine, darling, 29, and never been in love. Awful isn’t it?’
To Collins, who had already claimed legendary lover Warren Beatty as a notch on her bedpost during her time in hollywood, it was a challenge.
She and Newley embarked on a torrid relationship, although at the time he had a live-in lover, an 18-year-old starlet, Anneke Willis, who became pregnant by him.
he forced her to have an abortion just before he married Collins in 1963. Newley had been married
twice before and Collins, once, to the actor Maxwell Reed, whom she later claimed wore more mascara than she did and had raped her.
Her daughter by Newley, Tara, was born seven months after their wedding, and their son, Sacha in 1965. Sacha told the Sunday Times that his father was, ‘ withdrawn. He was prickly. He was a hypochondriac. But worst of all, he was flagrantly unfaithful.
‘Nowadays, he’d be labelled a sex addict. He depended on the promise of an after- show tryst with a starlet or groupie to get him through the grind of a performance. He lived to screw.’
Sacha believes that he was a victim of his parents’ careers and suffered accordingly.
‘The chief culprit was an ogre called Show Business,’ he says. ‘It yanked my helpless father and mother back and forth between England and America: Broadway, Hollywood and the West End.
‘My parents were both enslaved by the monster’s demands. It gave them no security, but kept them in the precarious state of wanting and needing the phone call from the agent with the next big gig — the only thing between them and oblivion.
‘As a child, I could feel their insecurity, and knew their focus was elsewhere, not on me.’
The Newley- Collins marriage came to its terminal crisis in 1969, with the production of Newley’s X- rated autobiographical film with its famously unwieldy title: Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness?
Or, as Sacha has now retitled it, ‘How am I ever going to stop lusting after underage girls and become a proper family man?’
In it, Collins played the female lead opposite Newley, and Tara and Sacha played the couple’s children.
‘ That film is a confession of paedophilia,’ Sacha says. ‘ Mercy Humppe is the “perfect child lover” — an underage girl.
‘My father didn’t peg her age exactly, but it falls within the Polanski thing.’ (He was referring to the Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski who remains wanted in America to face allegations that he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977.)
Sacha adds that the film ‘was a testament to the unbridled sinfulness of [Tony’s] sex life. And it was a holy mess’.
He claims that his mother was ‘disgusted’ by the script and ‘destroyed’ by that film.
‘It was the end of their marriage,’ he added.
In her own autobiography, Collins admitted as much, writing: ‘I realised that, much as I adored my children, cared about Tony and wanted our marriage to work, there was no way I could spend the rest of my life with him.’ The film was a critical fiasco. The New York critic Rex Reed wrote: ‘If I’d been Anthony Newley I would have opened it in Siberia during Christmas week and called it a day.’
AND the British critic Michael Billington added: ‘ The kindest thing for all concerned would be that every available copy should be quietly and decently buried.’
Newley never entirely recovered from the final devastating rejection of what he considered to be his masterpiece.
He and Collins divorced in 1970, and in the intervening years Sacha says he struggled to maintain a relationship with, and affection for, his father.
In his later and more straitened years, Newley returned to Britain to live with his 90-year-old mother and even took a minor supporting role in EastEnders in 1998, a far cry from the days of his glory.
When Newley was dying in Florida in 1999 from kidney cancer, Sacha went to say goodbye.
‘I hugged him, and his whole body was distended with the cancer, which had overtaken his liver,’ he says.
‘I remember the warm sensation of that tumour against my body and how, for a moment, it was overwhelmed with a wave of love coming out of the core of him. I’ll never forget it.’
A poignant account, indeed, but it was clearly a father-son relationship that had been horribly tainted by Sasha’s well-founded belief that his father was always battling his own dark demons.