Patrick Newley was a colourful and remarkable theatrical polymath. A showbusiness columnist, affectionately regarded by the acting profession for his extensive knowledge and love of entertainment history, he was, by turn, an actor, director, biographer, a regular weekly columnist for The Stage, the editor of the British Music Hall Society quarterly magazine, a theatrical manager and agent, and the publicist or personal manager for some of the most extravagant personalities of modern times, including Quentin Crisp, Robin (Viscount) Maugham and the celebrated drag stars Rex Jameson and Douglas Byng.
He even had a brief working association with the former gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser, when the latter embarked on a public speaking career.
Newley possessed a prodigious fund of anecdotes about the rarer side of showbusiness, and was one of the world’s leading authorities on variety stars, pantomime dames, drag performers and pub entertainers, many of whom he knew. Recognisable from his lanky build, outsize spectacles and a theatrical drawl that hinted at his background as an entertainer, he prided himself on maintaining a successful newspaper career for decades as a freelance working from home, never having been employed on the staff of any national title.
Born Patrick Nicholas Galvin in 1955, he was the son of Diana (n?e Ferrier) and Patrick Galvin, the distinguished Irish poet and playwright whose Raggy Boy trilogy was the inspiration for an acclaimed film in 2003. After an early childhood spent in Dublin, the family moved to Brighton in the 1960s. Newley dropped out of school to work in the underground Unicorn bookshop. Through the owner, the American poet Bill Butler, he rubbed shoulders with a variety of counter-culture figures, including Allan Ginsberg, and became part of the town’s gay community.
Soon afterwards he moved to Better Books on Charing Cross Road, owned by John Calder, the British publisher of works by Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs. The latter was a frequent, if difficult, customer but a friendship developed with Newley, a long-time fan, that lasted until the American author’s death in 1997.
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Newley also found an unlikely mentor in Byng. The entertainer, for 30 years a headline attraction at the Caf? de Paris, was living in retirement in Brighton and in his seventies when the teenage Newley wrote to him and then turned up at his door. Byng introduced Newley to Maugham and also encouraged his stage ambitions.
In 1972 he was offered a place at the now defunct London School of Dramatic Art, based in Baker Street and run by Gertrude Pickersgill, “not on the strength of my brilliant acting”, Newley recalled, “but because I offered to pay my first term’s fee in cash”.
Aged 17 he adopted the stage name Newley in imitation of his hero Anthony Newley, the actor and singer. Finding little opportunity in theatre, he turned to light entertainment. A punishing season at Butlins in Barry Island, South Wales, followed, performing in six different plays over 22 weeks.
Pantomime was another source of employment. In his early twenties he was acknowledged by The Stage as “one of the country’s youngest pantomime dames”, with several productions to his credit, including stints in Barrow and for the producer Aubrey Phillips playing opposite the 1950s radio comic Ken Platt. He also worked as entertainments manager for the North Wales Holiday Camp in Rhyl.
Less successful was a first attempt to become a comic on the northern working men’s club circuit in Middlesbrough. After a strip act, he lasted ten minutes before being booed off. Peace was restored only by the offer of bingo. Ruck and Newley, his subsequent double act with his friend and fellow actor Richard Ruck, fared better.
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However, clubland was in the early days of its decline and Newley focused increasingly on journalism and public relations. In the late 1970s, Newley’s mother, Diana Galvin, became Warden of the Quaker meeting house in St Martin’s Lane, in the heart of the West End of London. Newley, who shared the property with her, was in his element, transforming his part of it into a theatrical agency and PR office. He worked as manager to Rex Jameson and press agent to Maugham. In his stage persona of Mrs Shufflewick, Jameson had been a major variety star but was by then an alcoholic, living in derelict digs and often performing for little more than a bottle of spirits. Newley persuaded “Shuff’s” old friend Dorothy Squires to take a risk and include him on her 1974 London Palladium show, attended by Barbara Cartland and the late Danny La Rue (obituary, June 2, 2009). Newley tipped off the press, Jameson won a standing ovation, and “within a month he was the highest-paid performer on the gay pub and club circuit”; he continued working until his early death in 1983.
Maugham, whose most famous work, including The Servant, was behind him, was by contrast living well beyond his means and keen to secure a new publishing contract. Newley lobbied William Kimber to agree a three-book deal on the strength of Maugham’s novel The Corridor, released in 1980, a year before his death.
Having written for a variety of publications including Gay Times, in 1982 Newley began work on Elkan Allan’s magazine Video Viewer. He found Allan a difficult boss, the office was in rural Suffolk and the venture short-lived, but the publication is credited with helping to end the BBC and ITV duopoly on television listings. It also provided Newley with a vital grounding for the nationals. With his wealth of showbusiness connections, he established his name as a freelance, writing mostly for The Times, The Sun, Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express.
He managed his old friend Byng during this period and served as press agent on Quentin Crisp’s one-man tour. Both proved a fertile source for stories, but his single attempt to introduce the pair ended in disaster. “Putting those two old queens together in one room — you must have been crackers,” concluded his friend, the journalist Peter Burton. Newley directed a documentary with Byng, got him booked on Michael Parkinson’s television show, and teamed him in a stage partnership with the octogenarian 1930s musical star Billy Milton. Byng’s swansong at the age of 93 was a one-night appearance at the National Theatre in 1986, negotiated by Newley.
The growing focus on pop culture, and later reality television, supplanted much of the interest in icons of an earlier showbusiness era. Yet Newley managed several tabloid coups. These included a pre-show splash romantically linking the American Judy Garland impersonator Jim Bailey with Angie Dickinson, the screen actress and former girlfriend of Frank Sinatra. Another concerned the appearance of “Mad” Frankie Fraser in Parliament with fellow members of the British Music Hall Society (BMHS).
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In later years, Newley concentrated on his work as an obituarist for The Times and for The Stage, for which he wrote a weekly column. He also contributed to The Oldie and to the BBC radio obituary programme Brief Lives, edited the BMHS house journal, The Call Boy, and was an active member of the Savage Club.
Newley wrote an autobiography, The Krays and Bette Davis, in 2006. This was followed in 2007 by a vivid mini-biography of his former client, The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick. Another biography, You Lucky People! The Tommy Trinder Story, appeared last year. His last book, on Douglas Byng, was published less than a week before his death.
He is survived by his partner John Walker.
Patrick Newley, journalist, showbusiness figure and author, was born on March 25, 1955. He died of cancer of the oesophagus on May 29, 2009, aged 54