Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell

By Keith Waterhouse
(Playwright, England, Born 1929)

Keith Spencer Waterhouse was born and educated in Leeds. A journalist, novelist, and dramatist, he enjoyed considerable success with his second novel, ‘Billy Liar’, a regional comedy about a youth who attempts to escape his dull family life through fantasy. The story was adapted for the stage in collaboration with W Hall (1960). Other novels include ‘Billy Liar on the Moon’ (1976), ‘Office Life’ (1978), ‘Maggie Muggins’ (1981), and ‘Unsweet Charity’ (1992). Waterhouse and Hall collaborated on many stage, screen, and television plays, adaptations, and musicals, including the film ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ (1961). He also wrote the screenplay of Stan Barstow’s ‘A Kind of Loving’ (1960). ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’ (1989) was Waterhouse’s successful adaptation for the stage of Bernard’s Spectator columns. ‘City Lights’ (1994) is the first part of his autobiography. His long-running newspaper column, now appearing in the Daily Mail, has six times won major press awards.

A portrait of a man –
Warts, Vodka bottle and all

“I was sired by a scenic designer who was himself by a theatrical impresario out of an actress. My dam was a singer by an itinerant pork butcher out of a gypsy.” Thus Jeffrey Bernard’s form-book description of his parentage. In fact, by the time Jeffrey was born in 1932, the youngest of four children, his father had become a successful architect, responsible for the Art Deco interiors of the Lyons corner House restaurants. His mother was an opera singer before four children curtailed her career. In later life, Bernard said of his mother,” She looked like a cross between Maria Callas and Ava Gardner, and I fancied her so much it nearly drove me bonkers.” When Jeffrey was seven, his father died leaving his family penniless. His mother shamelessly cadged money to keep her three sons at private schools. Jeffrey left the naval college at Pangbourne at sixteen, just before he was expelled. His brother Bruce introduced him to an entirely different world, and one where he became increasingly at home the Soho of the late forties “like walking out of Belsen into Disneyland.”

He got by, scraping a living, by taking part-time jobs of any kind and scrounging off rich, old homosexuals. He had already started to become hooked on the adrenaline rush of gambling when he was conscripted into the army as a tank driver. On his first leave he went AWOL, staying on the run for four months before giving himself up to the military police. Not long after he faked a suicide attempt and was demobbed in 1951 for mental instability.

The following month he bumped into the girl he had lost his virginity to four years earlier, Anna Grice. They were married within two weeks and separated after four months. In the fifties Bernard spent most of his time in Soho, moving from one short lived job to another, begging stealing and borrowing, often from the many celebrities, poets, painters, philosophers, who frequented Soho at that period. Some of his friends even paid for him to go to film school in Paris, but he dropped out after two days.

After his first wife committed suicide, Bernard married Jacki, a promising young actress he met whilst working at the Old Vic as a stagehand, in 1959. Although at the start both funding and participating in her husband’s drunken sprees (which cost him his job at the Old Vic), by 1962 Jacki had had enough and she threw Bernard out. The divorce cited her infidelity, although both partners had been consistently unfaithful to each other. Also at this time Bernard made the first of his many suicide attempts, none of which came anywhere close to success.

Then followed a period of exploiting his friendships with the rich, famous and infamous until in 1964, a hard drinking friend, Elizabeth Smart, gave him a job doing the racing column for Queen. However, Bernard’s drinking and occasional gestures towards self-destruction tended to interfere with his writing. In 1965 came his first attack of acute pancreatitis; he ignored his doctor’s advice to give up drinking.

The following year he married for a third time. A 23 year old clothes designer, Jill Stanley. This marriage, although “open”, survived for seven years and produced Bernard’s only child, a daughter, Isabel. Possibly due to a more settled life in a Suffolk cottage (although interspersed with frequent trips to Soho), Bernard began to get more journalistic work and, in 1970, got the first full-time job of his life, writing a racing column for Sporting Life. The column was an overnight success, probably because he was the first person to write from a punter’s point of view. However, after a year he was sacked for repeated drunkenness, and especially for being sick in front of the Queen Mother and passing out when he was due to make a speech. Three months in an alcohol and drug addiction unit followed, but Bernard went straight back to his former habits.

Jill finally left him in 1973 and he reverted to drifting from woman to woman and from flat to flat. Illness became a recurrent theme in his life (he was now in his early forties), and he once spent the New Year at the Royal Free Hospital “where they told me I might have to be put down”. His ruined pancreas caused him to develop diabetes, but he hated being teetotal; “I’ve never met such boring people as my friends when I’m sober, never been so miserable or so lonely”. His sobriety lasted two and a half years, and it was then he began to frequent the Coach and Horses, a pub in Soho run by Norman Balon. Fortunately, writing work continued to come Bernard’s way, from the Express, Men Only (for whom he wrote a column entitled Bedtime with Bernard, then in 1978 Private Eye gave him a column on racing. In the same year he met and married Sue Ashley, a 29 year old producer of television commercials. Sacked by the Express for unreliability and a one-track mind, the Spectator gave him a column called “Low Life” which, with its alternative title of A suicide note in weekly instalments”, became a massive popular success probably because, said Bernard, “people like to read about someone who is deeper in the shit than they are”.

Bernard’s health continued to deteriorate, he was arrested for a dew minor ofences, invited to the CID Christmas Party and had his last real love affair, with Deidre Redgrave. Lawsuits of various kinds were weathered, both those against him and those instigated by him. Then in 1988, Keith Waterhouse suggested a play about Bernard’s life. John Hurt, an old friend of Bernard’s, turned down the part, but Peter O’Toole not only cancelled other engagements, but invested £20,000 in the project himself – Norman Balan invested £500. The success of the play made Bernard nationally famous; he was invited on Dessert Island Discs, where Sue Lawley shrewdly produced a bottle of vodka as he sat down, and Michael Corkrey painted his portrait, which hung for a while in the National Portrait Gallery. Financially, the taxman eventually took 80% of Bernard’s share of the play’s profits whilst, ironically, the Apollo Theatre, the West End venue for Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell took record profits at the bar.

Sickness brought on by his lifestyle and long-term devil-may-care attitude to its consequences began to loom ever larger in Bernard’s life. Although he had kept his good looks until about the age of fifty, he became physically somewhat grotesque towards the end – a columnist in the Evening Standard even ran two photos of him, taken 25 years apart, as evidence of the effects of excessive drinking. In 1994 he lost the bottom half of his right leg through diabetic gangrene and his death, in September 1997 at the age of 65, was a result of his refusal to undergo any further kidney dialysis treatments. Whatever posterity may make, or has made of Jeffrey Bernard – ‘the country’s most famous lounge lizard, an object lesson in dissolution, the subject of television programmes, and a block busting play, a shrewd and fearless observer of life, his own and others’ – maybe we should end with the picture conjured up by Peter O’Toole when he visited his friend Jeffrey Bernard in the Middlesex Hospital after his amputation.