I might have been a child star, had it not been for Hayley Mills.
Back in 1959, when I was 11, I had hopes for a career in the movies. I had the looks (so my mother thought), I had the talent (so my mother believed) and I had a film agent – a man named Landor who had offices in Soho, off Wardour Street. Week after week (encouraged by my mother whose motto was ‘Persistence pays’), I turned up at Mr Landor’s door to remind him of my existence, to be told, ‘Nothing has come up yet – but it will.’
And one week it did. ‘An English picture,’ said Mr Landor, smiling. ‘Good director. He did Ice Cold in Alex with John Mills. This is another film with Mills, but set in South Wales. It’s about a young boy who witnesses a murder. Quite dark. Lovely script. You’ll be the boy. John Mills is the detective. They’ve seen your photograph, Gyles. They like the look of you.’
And when I went to meet the director, J Lee Thompson, he told me, ‘You’re what I’m looking for.’ I had the part in the bag. At least for a few days, I did. The fee was agreed, the time off school was sorted, there was some talk of whether or not to change my surname (Brandreth is a bit of a mouthful) and then came the call from my agent: ‘There’s been a change of plan.’
The part of the child who witnesses the murder in the film was now to be played by a girl rather than a boy – and the girl getting the role was to be John Mills’s younger daughter, Hayley.
I saw Hayley Mills in Tiger Bay in 1959. She was completely wonderful. I did
not feel even momentarily resentful. I simply fell in love with her there and then, and later, when I saw her in Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, Whistle Down the Wind and all her other films, I thought I had never seen any creature so lovely. Her eyes, her hair, her nose, her smile, her voice: I was mesmerised.
Of course, I wasn’t alone. For a few years, Hayley Mills was the most famous child star in the world. At 14, she was voted Britain’s most popular actress and won an Oscar. Anyone who is called Hayley today, whether they realise it or not, is named after her. Hayley was one of her mother’s family names: no girls were called Hayley until Hayley Mills came along – just as no one was called Wendy until the arrival of Peter Pan.
Sixty years on, I still love Hayley Mills and, happily for me, we are now near neighbours in south-west London and good friends. At our local book festival this month, I interviewed her about her childhood memoir, Forever Young (a New York Times bestseller and I reckon the best book about the reality of life as a child star you are ever likely to read), and she told me that she knew her break-out part had originally been written for a boy, but had no idea the boy might have been me. Very sweetly, she apologised for stealing my career.
I have no complaints to make about my life. I accept my lot. While there are hundreds of thousands of women in the world now called Hayley, as far as I know there is only one Gyles named after me.
This Gyles is the ten-year-old-son of one James Birdseye who emailed me recently to tell me that he and his boy ‘are both really enjoying listening to your autobiography on audio book’ and that ‘He loves that he is Gyles with a y as it makes him unique.’ Not wholly unique, of course, but special, certainly.
I like my first name, because it’s easy to remember. I like my surname less, because it isn’t. I would much rather have been called Birdseye. I could then have claimed possible kinship with one of my heroes, Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956), the American naturalist, inventor, and founder of the modern frozen-food industry. In my book, for comfort eating you can’t beat a fish-finger sandwich.
At a lunch party the other day, I was telling an American friend (a much- travelled retired academic) how I had once shaken the hand of a man who as a child had played ring a ring o’ roses with Joseph Stalin. He countered my boast with one of his own. He had once kissed a woman on the lips who had kissed
T S Eliot on the lips. ‘Who was she?’ I asked. ‘Valerie Eliot,’ he said. ‘T S Eliot’s
widow.’ ‘You kissed her on the mouth?’ I said. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘She was an old
lady. I always kiss old ladies on the lips. They like it. They expect it.’
Do they? I don’t think so. But my friend was insistent. Is this an American thing? If you are an old lady and have the answer, please let us know.
Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, is published by Michael Joseph
