I wanted to ring my friend Eleanor the other day after a show. Some reaction from the audience had surprised me, and she was always good at interpreting these things in a way that was useful for future shows.
It was then I remembered that there would be no Eleanor at the end of the line.
Eleanor Fazan – known to her friends as ‘Fiz’ (for some reason, I found the nickname over-familiar and was never able to use it) – was one of those friends whose influence on one’s life is larger than the part they played in it. Since her death in January at the age of 94, I have thought a lot about her, partly because I wrote an obituary for the Guardian and was interviewed about her on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Last Word but mainly because her life and personality were so unusual and interestingly out of step with the times though which we’re living.
As a dancer, choreographer and director, she lived a life of high achievement, working with talents as various as Alan Bennett, Lindsay Anderson, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, George Formby, John Osborne, Herbert von Karajan – the list could carry on down the page.
If she had been the slightest bit interested in fame or visibility, and probably if she had not been born a woman, she would have been a household name. As it was, she was consistently under-appreciated – and, as far as I could see, she never particularly minded about that.
In 1961, she had accomplished the considerable task of taking four talented amateurs – called Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore – from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End and Broadway, and turning a 55-minute student sketch show into a global theatrical hit. An essay she wrote about ‘the boys’, as she called them, which was later included in her brilliant, if over-modest, memoir Fiz and Some Theatrical Giants, made it clear what a tricky job that was. Yet, when I talked to Miller about her in 2005 while researching my biography of Willie Donaldson, he airily dismissed her as ‘an amiable go-between’.
Eleanor was the first woman to have three shows she directed running simultaneously in the West End – and did it twice. She choreographed for films like Oh! What a Lovely War and Heaven’s Gate, and for operas that were staged at La Scala, the Met and the Royal Opera House. Yet when she showed pages from an early draft of her memoir to her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, his reaction was, ‘No one’s going to be interested in you – it’s the people you’ve worked with who are interesting.’
It’s difficult to summarise a life so full of achievement and complexity in 1200 words, I discovered while struggling over the obituary. The stuff that gets lost is the personal, and that’s why I decided to write this blog.
I met Eleanor while I was writing my Willie Donaldson book in 2005. She had worked with Willie during the 1960s and was unusual – almost unique, in fact – in that she didn’t fall for the self-sabotaging myth he had built around his career in the theatre (and everything else in his life). She saw him for the strange, original talent he was, not the amoral, self-indulgent wastrel that he liked for complex reasons to present to the world.
Eleanor and I became friends, in spite of coming from different world and belonging to different generations. We found we were able to confide in one another from a distance, as it were.
When my career turned to performance, she took it all very seriously. Now and then, I would take my guitar and ukulele to her flat in Eccleston Square and, after I had gone through my show, she would give me notes. She came to my shows when I was performing in London and always had something helpful to say about them. I fear I was a disappointment to her – she wanted more showiness, and thought I kept myself hidden onstage (she was right) – but her analysis, however harsh, was somehow also encouraging.
Until the last two years of her life, she remained engaged in the world of theatre and dance. In spite of being virtually blind through macular degeneration, she would go West End plays and opera whenever she could find someone to take her. In 2021, we took her to a matinée performance of the Spielberg film of West Side Story. One of my last memories of her was of a small, trim figure sitting alone in the front row of a West End cinema, utterly absorbed as the Jets and Sharks leapt and pranced across the giant screen before her.
Eleanor was one of those people – and there are not many – whose quiet wisdom, revealed not only in what they said but in how they lived their lives, stays with you and comes to mind at the most unlikely moments. Here are five little beams of sanity and good sense that she has left with me:
1. Courage matters. The people Eleanor really admired were the brave and bloody-minded. ‘I suppose I have always been drawn towards those who needed to kick up; those who just couldn’t toe the party line,’ she wrote. Of the writers, directors and actors who were truly brave in their work – brave to the point of recklessness – she could forgive almost anything.
2. Put your weakest stuff at the start of second half of a show.’ If it’s in the first half, the audience will talk about it over interval drinks; if it’s early enough after they return, they will have forgotten about it by the end.
3. The value of invisibility. Only recently have I concluded that it was more than modesty that kept Eleanor out of the limelight. It was part of her plan – what she wanted. In an email to me, she once wrote, ‘I was always a hard worker because it mattered to me that those I worked with looked good. It wasn’t me that had to get up there to be made a fool of, it was them. If in the final week of rehearsal they, whoever, hadn’t started to take over from me, I knew I hadn’t done my job properly.’
4. The work is what matters. The reason why Eleanor was, at least when it came to her professional life, at ease with herself was that she knew she had done good work. The rest – reputation, fame, money – were of vanishingly small interest to her.
5. And then you walk away. ‘At the end of a day’s work,’ she wrote to me, ‘I would get off the bus or train and literally run the rest of the way home to be my own person again, to be US, to be home.’
