Remembering Michael Winner

I had no idea that the whole thing was being filmed. This photograph, from forty years ago, February 1985, captures the moment when I decided that the time had come to give up my first job in the film industry. Five minutes later, I was gone.

Working for Michael Winner. It was a foot in the door that was obviously going to get crushed. He was just about to begin pre-production on Death Wish III. I was given a desk in a small office that I shared with his executive assistant John Fraser.

My diary entry for the  first day, Monday 18 November 1984, reveals the total absence of any honeymoon moment: “Winner and Fraser, BA, M. Phil! Why does he put up with the sod?” We worked in the basement of a huge house next to Holland Park, 31 Melbury Road, where Winner had grown up (if someone so perpetually juvenile could ever be said to have grown up). He had an office in Piccadilly, but he liked to work from home. His neighbour, Jimmy Page, wrote the music for Death Wish 2 and would do again for Death Wish 3.

The spoilt only child of extremely wealthy parents, Winner had had the good fortune – or misfortune? – of not ever having to worry about how he was going to earn a living. He behaved badly because he didn’t have to worry about the consequences. He could watch his money accumulate in the City Prices edition of the Evening Standard, which he read over the fillet steak that his housekeeper, Mrs Hickey, prepared for him every lunchtime. By the 1980s, directing movies had become for him much more a hobby than a livelihood. His real job now was “being Michael Winner”. 

Poor John Fraser, on the other hand, crippled by childhood polio, couldn’t afford to put a toe out of line. Whenever Winner rang down from his study upstairs, John’s hand would tremble as he picked up the receiver. His daily routine was to be the butt of Winner’s constantly cutting remarks and often outright abuse. On that first day the City Prices edition can’t have even arrived before I witnessed John receive his first summons. “Come up!” Winner snapped on the intercom. John, visibly shaking, hobbled up to Winner’s study on the first floor, from where Winner’s shouting could be heard down in the basement. 

Winner had known John since they had both been at boarding school together. In his memoirs  Winner described the essential nature of a relationship that would remain unchanged over more than sixty years: “At school I paid a boy from the class above to do my washing-up and clean my room. When they called ‘P to Z’ to stand at the cold, exterior, wooden basins and wash the plates, studious John Fraser would be my stand-in for sixpence. He got two shillings a week to clean my room and make my bed. ‘It’s wrong,’ the Headmaster said, facing Fraser, ‘it’s the power of the purse.’ ‘What do you want to do, John?’ I asked. ‘I’d like the money,’ he said. He’s worked for me ever since.”

John walked to work with the aid of a stick from his flat in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington, arriving every morning in Melbury Road on the dot of 9.30. Winner’s money enabled him to pursue a passion for history, which provided some compensation for the routine humiliation of office hours. John described his occupation as “executive assistant/author”.  The first bit of this job description ran in the family – his grandfather, I remember him telling me, had been a butler to the retail magnate Gordon Selfridge – but it was the “author” bit that kept him sane. He reminded me of one of those civil servant characters that used to be played by Richard Wattis in old British comedies: put-upon but essentially decent.

A sign that I had broken the ice with him was when one day he lent me a book on the French Revolution and, soon afterwards, an article that he had written on the Indian mutiny. He had a good ironic sense of humour, although he didn’t find it funny when I asked him if he had ever thought of mutiny.

As we were all under the thumb of a boss who could on the slightest pretext explode into coruscating anger, the atmosphere was tense, but it was striking how if Winner was speaking to, say, a girlfriend or a famous actor, he would quickly switch into a tone of the most unctuous flattery. “Mmm, he can, can’t he?” agreed John when I pointed it out to him. “He puts it on, like everything else. It’s the same when he gets cross. He puts it on mostly.”

My main activity while we were waiting for Death Wish III to begin was to research potential corporate donors for the charity Winner had founded, the Police Memorial Trust. Its purpose was to erect monuments to policemen and women who had been killed in the line of duty. My instructions were to go through a company directory and compile a list of public companies with a turnover of at least £125 million.

It was a relief from the oppressive mood of the office every now and then to be sent off on small errands: one day it was to return some towelling robes to Harrods. On another, I had to get some resident parking permits. The fact that John had been put down as the named driver of Winner’s Ferrari even though he was too disabled to drive it was fairly typical of the way that in any situation Winner would push for maximum advantage.

That Christmas I was the only member of staff in the household not to receive a Christmas card.  It didn’t bother me, because I knew it wasn’t personal – it was Winner’s practice to treat his most junior employee as badly as possible.  The routine form of address for me was “the idiot”. If he had an errand for me, he would ring down to John, “Send the idiot up.”  Of course I wasn’t any more of an idiot than any of the other runners who had worked for him over the years: just representative of something he was particularly keen to rail against – the fact that I was young, I suppose; that I had my life, hopes and dreams ahead of me. Well, he doesn’t need to be jealous now!

One day he asked me to photocopy the script of Death Wish III. A week later, I was summoned up to his study. “Fucking moron!” he shouted. Two hundred copies had been sent to America without page 50A. “I give you a chance that thousands are looking for and you fuck it up! Is there any reason why I shouldn’t fire you now?”  “I’m sorry, Mr Winner,”  I answered, thinking to myself – what I knew he knew I was thinking – that the script could only have been an improvement for one page less.  “You think you’re so clever with your Oxford degree. Well, let me tell you, Oxford is garbage!”

Pinned up on a wall in the basement were location photographs of the mean streets of Elephant & Castle, where Winner was planning to film Death Wish III, but monopolizing his attention was the approaching launch of the Police Memorial Trust. A ceremony was being planned for the unveiling of the first memorial in honour of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who a few months earlier had been shot dead during a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square.

With his extraordinary chutzpah – the one field in which he was truly a genius – Winner had persuaded the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to give a speech and unveil the memorial. It was only a few months before that the IRA had nearly blown her to bits at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Her press secretary, the very likeable and avuncular Harvey Thomas, who in the weeks leading up to the ceremony was a familiar visitor at Melbury Road, had been sleeping in the room directly above the bomb. Miraculously he survived with only minor injuries after he had been sent flying through the hotel roof and then crashed down several floors to be caught on a girder.

With hindsight, it seems to me, the Brighton bombing helps to account for why Thatcher agreed to attend the ceremony.  She and Winner shared a mindset that left no room for doubt. In the “Us and Them” lens through which she viewed the world, Winner was unquestionably in her camp. The Daily Mail piece he had written to propose a memorial for WPC Yvonne Fletcher was as notable for the party political demagoguery with which he defended police conduct during that year’s bitterly divisive miners’ strike.

“How sad that some should so often seek to separate the police from ourselves,” he wrote. “That they should perceive them, except in times when we particularly needed them, as ‘them’ while we are ‘us’ … How quick this vociferous minority are to demand investigation of the police, to accuse the police of being Fascist when they do anything they don’t like. How sad that the Labour Party and the trade unions should in a blanket fashion impugn the police…” 

Thatcher would have recognised Winner as “one of us”. She would have admired  the uncompromising style of someone who, like her, got things done. When it came to decisive action, Winner never flinched from taking it, as Tony the chauffeur found out when Winner discovered a speck of dirt on one of the cars he was meant to clean every weekend. Winner instructed his accountant Fred Ruff that henceforward Tony’s weekly pay was to be divided into two instalments, the first to be given on Friday, the second on Monday after Winner had checked that the cars had been properly cleaned.

Tony was furious. “I’m not having this! He can stuff his job up his arse!” He marched  up to Winner’s study. Returning to the basement afterwards, he triumphantly described to us the man-to-man talk they had had. Winner told him: “Tony, darling, my girlfriends like you, and I like you. You shouldn’t take my shouting to heart!” He persuaded Tony to stay, telling him that he would not have his pay held back after all. But at the end of the week of course Tony was fired.

Tony’s dismissal might have helped to explain why so few people stood up to Winner, but it didn’t make their refusal to do so seem any less appalling to me. My diary entries of the time were full of exasperation at the absurdity that often resulted from the general refusal to challenge him over even the smallest things: “John was too afraid to ask Michael Winner where the paper guillotine was. Now really!” This attitude meant my own days were numbered.

It certainly didn’t help that at about that time I was reading Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim during my journey on the number 28 bus to and from work. The novel concerned an episode on a steamer which a young seaman believes is about to sink. Rather than stay with the passengers, he jumps into a lifeboat with the captain. That jump, which  Conrad described as a jump into “an everlasting deep hole” of guilt, left a deep impression on me. In my youthful innocence I was still prone to seeing life in terms of black-and-white moral choices. I didn’t want to be like Jim.

The final showdown took place on the day of the ceremony, 1 February 1985. I was to be on hand with Winner’s walkie-talkie and to keep not more than one step behind him. Winner had naturally arranged the day in such a way that he would be the centre of attention. He would make the first speech, introduce the Prime Minister, invite her to unveil the memorial and then call for a minute’s silence.

He turned up early, as ever puffing his cigar, so that he could tell everybody what to do. It was as if he was directing one of his movies. And in the hands of another director, it might have been a very good movie. It’s only now that the thought occurs to me: with its potential for satire, it could have rivalled Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital.

As Winner turned this way and that, I was tripping over people trying to keep up with him. “I told you to keep one step behind me!” he snapped. “But you turned!” I protested. “People have been turning for thousands of years and doing very well at it.” “That’s as may be,” I answered. “But I no longer want to be part of your charade.” Suddenly I was Jim refusing to jump into the lifeboat with the captain. I handed him the bag he had told me to look after and his walkie-talkie, turned and walked away. I remember passing the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock, seconds later (who I can’t imagine felt any happier to be caught up in a Michael Winner charade than I did).

The video evidence shows that I left Winner’s employ at 10.08 a.m. on 1 February 1985. As I left the square, I noticed John, who was standing next to the accountant Fred Ruff. “John, you’re on your own now!” I called to him, but I kept on walking. He would have guessed what had happened – it had happened so many times before. “Not to worry. I’m used to that. Good luck!”

Recalling that strange day now, what strikes me most is how Trumpian the whole thing was: how easily the police and government fell in with a self-serving, narcissistic and dictatorial egomaniac. In some way, I suppose, Winner’s “Us and Them” attitude must have appealed occasionally to even the most responsible of police officers: amid endless bureaucracy, professional codes and rules for procedure, how appealing the fantasy that they could “bring justice to the streets” with a Magnum.

To his credit, Winner didn’t bear grudges. He knew he was impossible. Some years later, I got a very nice note from him after I had written a book about a favourite film of his, The Third Man. I was no longer the office junior.