Alma Cogan Read Online Free

at the Savoy. With its kind, modulated lighting, circulating flunkies and stiff linen napiery it was a world away from the sleaze of the Helmet. Inevitably, though, when we were introduced I found myself scrutinising the star guest’s ivory porcelain mask for signs of mutilation and invisible mending. (The boy Gerard survived, hideously disfigured.)
    The main focus of interest, for obvious reasons, was her mouth. ‘No successful singer has an ugly mouth’ was something that had been drummed into me by a woman with a perpetually glistening crimson gash who I had gone to for voice lessons when I was younger. And I found myself following the ellipses and painted puckerings of Doris Day’s (surprisingly full) lips with such concentration that afterwards I would be able to recall barely a word of our bright, brief cocktail conversation.
    It seemed inconceivable then and for many years afterwards that anything could eclipse that as my most vivid memory of the occasion. Events conspired, however, to place even the Gerard episode in a perspective that suggested how far the world had rolled in a direction that no one at the time could have predicted.
    My escort at the Savoy that day was a friend called Sammy who had started out in the Delfont office and was now working as a song plugger in Denmark Street. It was a job he did well; Sammy was what he described as a ‘people person’. He hadextra-finely-tuned antennae. He had a nose for an opportunity; an unerring instinct for the profit-pulse. And at the Day reception he quickly ingratiated himself with a small boy who was sitting alone and bored at the edge of the action.
    It didn’t take a genius to see that the boy was American – his skin was honeyed, compared to the dishwater grey of English children; and he was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt and saddle-oxfords. Sammy still maintains he didn’t work out until afterwards that his new chum Terry had to be the son of Doris Day and her first husband, the trombonist Al Jorden, who committed suicide.
    But he was, and for the rest of their stay Sammy did ‘Deedee’, as she almost instantly became, and her husband, Marty Melcher, the favour of keeping Terry occupied. Unlike his mother’s husband, Terry Melcher wasn’t a shlump; he was a nice boy who was remarkably well adjusted for somebody who had grown up on the Hollywood celebrity circuit.
    I went with him and Sammy to watch a baseball game at a U.S. army base in Oxfordshire and a couple of nights later to see the speedway at the White City. Both times, Terry fell asleep in the car afterwards, and slept with his head in my lap – I can feel his hair now, smell the soapy, boyish smell – all the way back to the hotel. My instinct all the time was to comfort him for the terrible thing I thought I had seen happen to his mother.
    Unlike Sammy, who wasted little time in acting on Marty Melcher’s invitation to give him a call if he was ever on their side of the Big Ditch, I made no attempt to follow through or build on the DD connection.
    I followed Terry Melcher’s career at a distance – the records he made in the early sixties as ‘Bruce and Terry’, with Bruce Johnson of the Beach Boys (I was pleased – if mistaken – to be able to vote one of them a hit during a stint on Juke Box Jury ); his successful production work for the Byrds and others who had helped turn his mother and myself into show-business dinosaurs.
    It was odd, then, that I should react to news of his narrowescape from involvement in the Manson murders with such a sense of alarm and personal foreboding.
    It emerged that Terry Melcher had been the previous occupant of the house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where Sharon Tate and a number of others were ritually butchered by the Manson ‘Family’ in August 1969. Terry had apparently auditioned Manson for a recording contract and turned him down; it was Terry who the ‘Family’ intended to slaughter that night, rather than Sharon Tate, Jay