Frank Norman
Jeffrey Bernard
I'd like to make a particularly personal tribute to Frank Norman who died on 23 December bringing 1980 to such a very sad end for so many of us. I don't want to harp on about the history of his career — that's been done — and we know he wrote 16 books that included Bang to Rights and Banana Boy plus four plays including Fings Ain't What They Used to Be. 1 just want to recollect and savour some of the happenings that involved us both during the 30 years I knew him and which spanned the hooligan days of the early Fifties through to the wild and successful days of the Sixties and then to the recent tongue-in-cheek mellowness which spread benignly during the Seventies. I say 'mellow' although I know you can stir up an old wasp's nest, but Frank, until very recently, looked to be cruising through middle age, happy with his wife Geraldine, one novel a year and a Friday-only visit to Soho to give a master class. That Soho is dying we know, but that one of its more distinguished features should be so suddenly and cruelly demolished makes me wonder what on earth is God up to? I doubt that heaven knows.
Memories of Frank merge and blur. When I first met him in a cafe called the Alexandria in Rathbone Place — he was later to use it and the layabouts in it for his play A Kayf Up West — he caught my and everyone's attention with his aggression or at least his aggressive looks which were highlighted by a razor scar. He was pretty distant in those days, a little broody, and he • made an amazing attempt to settle down at one point when he got married and set up as a newsagent, of all things, in the village of Boxford in Suffolk. Can you imagine it? Of course, he got as bored as hell with it. He'd pop up to London in his car, get drunk in the Stork Club, drive back to Boxford at four in the morning and, of course, the papers would get delivered at lunchtime. Well, that didn't last long.
What else springs to mind? The Ad Lib Club. That was in the days when it had just become fashionable to import piranha fish and keep them as pets. The tank in the Ad Lib represented a challenge to Frank, so he took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeve and plunged his arm into the tank. They didn't even give him a nibble, which disappointed him deeply, but he then mounted the stage and sang 'Falling in Love with Love is Falling for Make Believe'.
There was the epic fight in Gerrard Street. He somewhat foolishly wrote a piece in the Evening Standard which said that the man he'd shared a cell with when he was in the nick was a grass. Eventually the grass was sprung and came looking for Frank. My brother and I were unfortunate enough to be with Frank when the grass and 14 of his companions caught up with him. Frank ended up in hospital, but he showed tremendous guts in a fight reminiscent of Brando's effort in On the Waterfront.
Our efforts to collaborate on the book we did together, Soho Night and Day (he wrote it and I took the pictures), were something of a farce. We'd wander around Soho all day and night having hospitality heaped on us by publicans and restaurateurs who wanted to appear in the book and I suppose we were drunk for a year. When we weren't given hospitality, Frank paid for everything.
That generosity sums him up for me. We had some fearful rows but his sort of generosity would end them. He had tremendous loyalty towards his friends and was so much a warmer person than the 'scar-faced ex-jailbird' he called himself, The Times cut a sentence I wrote about him — not the sort of thing, The Times would like. I said that he negated that ghastly cliche You only get out of life what you put into it'. Frank put an awful lot into it, and I wish he'd got a little more out of it than he did, We all knew him far too briefly.
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