How Tommy Steele’s still rocking at 81
Two-mile runs every day, hours on the tennis court — and bouncing around in a West End show that keeps him up till 3am
SECONDS after skipping through the stage door of the London Coliseum, Tommy Steele is swinging around a lamp post with one arm, wrestling my heavy bag off my shoulder.
‘Let me take that, I insist!’ he says as he pulls me across the road to our coffee date.
He is surprisingly strong, has fantastically soft hands, never stops talking and trots though the crowds in his white trainers and elasticated cream slacks at an alarming lick.
Tommy is 81 years old. Not that you’d know it.
He looks a good 15 years younger, if not quite as young as one of his heroes, Glenn Miller, in his prime. (He is currently starring in The Glenn Miller Story at the Coliseum as the famous Big Band leader who went missing over the English Channel in 1944 when he was only 40.)
And Tommy’s bounce! I have never bmeectaausmeoorfe, tliwmobneer, w sp hriipnsg)y, ( bdeeasdpyi- te, or eyed octogenarian.
He chats on — and on — about his early days as Britain’ s first rock’n’roll star, the teenage fans who used to mob him (he once ended up unconscious in Dundee Royal Infirmary after hundreds of overzealous fans bent his arm back and pulled out clumps of his hair in a lusty frenzy); his passion for perfectly boiled eggs (‘Three minutes only or you’re eating a bullet!’); and his exercise regime — a daily two-mile run and a 90-minute tennis session, five days a week.
But most of all he talks s about his passion for r performing and that t golden moment when the e lights go down and the e curtain goes up.
‘It’s just like a microwave!’ !’ is how he puts it. ‘ It’s s reached that moment when n the food is hot and ready dy and, just as you step on n stage, it goes “Ping!”
‘So out you walk and the he audience says “Hello!”, the he microwave door opens, you ou take out what’s been cooking kou and you say, “Would you like some?” and YES, THEY EY WOULD!’
He glows as he talks. ‘I just ust love being on stage. I love it. I LOVE IT!’ he says, teeth flashing and astonishingly blue eyes adopting a beatific light.
But he’s been at it for more than 60 years now, so he knows what he’s talking about.
Because Tommy, of course, was the original pin- up song and dance man. He preceded The Beatles, his old friend Sir Cliff Richard (‘a very amiable young man’), and the age of groupies offering sex.
‘Sex? No, NO! No one offered me sex. They were too young. They just wanted to be part of the music, part of the tribe, respecting, understanding — they just loved me.’
So they sent him urgent, badly spelt notes scribbled in their bedrooms and innocent keepsakes and photos of themselves. But there were no knickers.
However, they did scream and turn up in their thousands to his concerts until, after the Dundee debacle and, aged just 20, he changed tack to play in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (at the Coliseum).
After that, he starred in a host of shows such as Half A Sixpence and Singing In The Rain, appeared on Broadway, danced with Gene Kelly (who taught him tap), acted with Petula Clark, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, made Hollywood movies with Fred Astaire, was friends with Noel Coward and had 20 hit singles.
What made his success so startling was how suddenly it all happened.
Just four months before his first hit record, Rock With The Caveman (which he co-wrote with Lionel Bart), Tommy Steele, born Thomas Hicks, was a merchant seaman, travelling the world and teaching himself how to play a £1.50 guitar he’d bought from a fellow sailor who showed him the three chords needed to play country music. His big break came in 1956 when, during a fortnight’s shore leave, he was spotted singing and playing Elvis’s brand new Blue Suede Shoes in a Soho coffee bar. He’d bought the sheet music weeks before when his ship docked in New York.
Days later, he was snapped up by record company Decca which rushed out Rock With The Caveman and, within weeks, he was on TV shows such as Six-Five Special which made him a national star.
He’d joined the Merchant Navy at 15 after a mixed childhood. His first few years growing up in Bermondsey, south-East London, were spent dodging German bombs. His sister, Betty, was killed by a hit- and- run driver during a blackout and his mother had at least three jobs to support the family.
Then, just as the war finished, he became ill. First with purpura (an enzyme deficiency affecting the nervous system that contributed to the madness of George III) that saw him endure daily enemas and a stay in a sanatorium.
‘That was nine months of my life!’ he says.
Then he got pneumonia and spinal meningitis — ‘another four months’ — and after that he was in and out of hospital with problems such as cardiomyopathy (a disease of the heart muscle) and flat feet. ‘In all, I spent about four years in hospital and I’ve never been ill since,’ he says.
Cooped up, he read avidly — ‘first comics, then the Hornblower books, Dickens and all the classics’. He says his enforced confinement ‘gave me my life’.
Perhaps it also gave him his drive for success and formidable self-discipline. HE’S never been a drinker — not since having an enormous gin in a bar in Quebec aged 15 and passing out. No drugs or casual sex either.
‘I’ve never taken anything that could take away my reason or my self-control,’ he says. ‘But, anyway, this was the Fifties! It was a very naive and innocent time.’
Coffee was the new thing back then, not cocaine.
‘Everyone was drinking it!’ he says. ‘Wow! I couldn’t sleep afterwards! That was our excitement!’
He took up painting and sculpture — he has several sculptures on public display and has had art exhibited at the Royal Academy — composed music and wrote novels and children’s books.
For decades he has lived on just one meal a day — plus his 3pm perfectly boiled egg — and, until recently, always took his own microwave on tour so he could cook his own slimline dinner in his hotel room.
‘I did that until I burned a lamb chop one night in the microwave and was worried I’d burn the hotel down. I realised I’d been bloody silly!’ he says. So now, he pays for a chef to stay late at night to cook him a healthy meal. ‘ A bowl of soup is NOT going to do it.’
Until he was 70, he ran at least four miles a day and has never been fat.
‘How could I be?’ he says. ‘ I’m still running about on stage like a whirling dervish doing dance routines and singing songs.’
Such rigid self-discipline, I suspect, might be a bit annoying for Ann, his wife of 58 years and mother of his only child, Emma.
‘No! No! No! She loves it,’ he assures me. ‘ The whole family loves the business.’
During his six-week run at the Coliseum he’s up every night until at least 3am, sleeps until midday, dashes off for a run the minute he’s up, then back to the theatre for about 3pm.
‘You have to stick to a schedule! You are doing it for the love — of the theatre, the fans, the music, the show,’ he says.
This is a man who lives and breathes theatre. He limbers up for a show by listening through the theatre Tannoy system to the
sounds of the audience arriving. Which all sounds wonderful, but, I wonder, does it all perhaps makes him just a teeny bit selfish as a husband?
‘Yeah. I suppose so,’ he admits. ‘ But it’s in the contract. She knew!’
She certainly did. When they met in a Lyons Corner House in 1956, Ann Donoghue was a dancer (at one stage dancing in Expresso Bongo, the musical based on Tommy’s life).
‘We knew immediately. We knew all the same TV adverts and sang them together!’ he says. But they didn’t rush things and courted chastely for four years until, in 1960, they married in a big white wedding at St Patrick’s Catholic Church in London’s Soho Square surrounded by thousands of screaming fans (and their screaming mums) held back by a police cordon.
‘More than 30,000 people were at our wedding!’ he says, delightedly.
When the dust settled, Ann gave up dancing at his request. ‘A man needs a home and wife to come back to,’ he said.
Sadly, the longed-for six children didn’t materialise, though they have one muchloved daughter, a yoga instructor (‘She’ll never get married, she loves her three Chihuahuas too much!’)
Nearly 60 years on, he still seeks his wife’s opinion on every project and, although they watch TV separately (he likes documentaries, whereas she likes ‘girls films — love, kisses and cuddles’) insists he is never grumpy, never snaps and they never, ever argue.
They enjoy their homes in Spain, the Bahamas and London, where they live in the same luxury block as writer Jeffrey Archer and his academic wife Mary.
‘I love being asked — for jobs, for anything!’ Partly, he says, for his own enjoyment, but partly for his fans.
‘You feel you’re walking around with this army of fans — that you’re being cuddled all the time by them, and loved,’ he says.
‘And then, all of a sudden, you’re offered something that you know they’ll like and they’ll be so happy. And that’s what it’s all about!’
And with that (and after he’s gallantly insisted on paying the bill and leading me through the busy roads with one of his impossibly soft hands), we say farewell and he skips back to the theatre — a toothy, chirpy, perky cockney Peter Pan in very white trainers.