Every so often, like today, I'll be looking through my phone for a contact number and I'll stumble across the contact details of someone I once knew or worked with who has sadly passed on.
Jeremy Hardy ... Sean Lock ... Terry Jones ... plus various artists, musicians, friends and family.
Weirdly, even though I am not superstitious, I haven't got around to deleting them. It just feels too ... final. It's like I'm erasing them in some way.
Today I happened upon the contact card for Ray Harryhausen.
A few years ago, I got the opportunity to meet the great man. A journalist friend of mine had interviewed Ray at his home and I’ll admit that I was envious. There are very few people whom I regard as 'heroes' but Ray is definitely one of them. You may not know the name but you'll know his work. He's the pioneering stop-motion animator who gave us those great adventure movies of the mid-late 20th century like Earth Vs the Flying Saucers, One million Years BC, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clsh of the Titans and It Came from Beneath the Sea. It was thanks to Ray that we got to enjoy Jason and his Argonauts fencing with an army of skeletons, Sinbad battling the multi-armed iron statue of Kali and Raquel Welch in a pair of fur knickers (Incidentally, it's also Ray we have to thank for Tom Baker getting the lead role in Doctor Who. The BBC chose him after seeing his performance as the bad guy in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad).
Ray's films are a fondly-remembered part of my childhood. And I said as much to my journalist chum who was quite happy to pass on Ray’s contact details. But I needed a good reason to meet him. I couldn’t just turn up and say I was there because Ms Welch’s hirsute undercrackers had filled me with adolescent joy, or because he’d been the first person to show me what a living dinosaur could have looked like (I was dinosaur mad as a kid – I still am). But then, a few weeks later, I found that excuse. I won't bore you with the details but it was a charity project I'd got involved with that had a monster theme. I reckoned it was a good enough reason and, I'm pleased to say, the great man was more than willing to accommodate me. We set a date for me to visit him at his London home.
Originally from California, Ray lived in the UK for nearly three decades and loved us Brits. Maybe that’s because he married one. Diana was certainly very welcoming as she opened the front door. I’d heard that’s she’s quite fiercely protective of Ray so I made an extra-special effort to be on my best behaviour.
Ray was a delight. He had a permanent twinkle of excitement in his eyes and he was twinkling fit to explode as he showed me around his house like I was the first person he’d ever had visit. In some ways his house was more like a museum to his career. It fairly bulged with references to his films. To begin with, there were bronzes, all sculpted by Harryhausen himself, displayed on every available flat surface. He explained, as we climbed the two flights of stairs up to his study, that many of the original models from his films had deteriorated.
'I wanted to create a permanent record of them', he said, 'So I resculpted some of the figures and had them cast in bronze. They’ll be around long after I’m gone.'
As he said this, we passed a superbly detailed bronze of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms attacking a lighthouse.
'I cast the lighthouse from the actual prop we used in the movie', he explained. 'I kept them all you see.'
Ray is a rarity in the film industry in that he’d hung onto most of the models and props used in his movies. The shelves and glass cabinets in his study were groaning under the weight of them: Medusa (Clash of the Titans) enjoyed sharing a case with a rather moth-eaten and threadbare Pegasus. Across the room, a group of Selenites (First Men in the Moon) shared their home with a couple of skeletons (Jason and the Argonauts) and a dinosaur from Valley of Gwangi. There were octopus tentacles and Cyclopes, Big Bad Wolves and Dragons. A saucer from Earth versus the Flying Saucers sat incongruously atop a pile of rubber legs. The models looked old and worn and I could see what Ray meant about their deterioration. Many of them offered a glimpse of their metal skeletons; the wires poking through the rotten rubber flesh like steel bones. But they were in good enough nick to still show off the man’s sculpting ability. Oh, and there was a signed photo of Raquel Welch in her hirsute shreddies from One Million Years BC. That's a fond teenage memory.
He told me that Peter Jackson flew him out to New Zealand during the filming of King Kong because he's a huge fan of Ray's work. While there, Jackson told him that he'd like to establish a Museum of Film Animation. If he did get it off the ground, Ray reckoned he might donate his priceless collection.
As it happens, a Foundation was set up after his death and many of the models were sympathetically restored. Some went on display in 2020 in Edinburgh to accompany a book on his life being written by daughter, Vanessa (see here).
We headed back downstairs and the walls of the staircase were covered in his drawings. Ray was an exceptional draughtsman too and his original sketches, drawing and paintings were everywhere, framed and hanging on every spare inch of wall. I’ve been deliberately coy about where Ray lived as a burglar could net himself millions in swag from just one good rummage.
The day ended with tea and a chat in one of the several downstairs reception rooms. I was distracted momentarily by the sight of a maid wandering around with some kind of parrot on her shoulder. But then I saw the plaque commemorating Ray’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And the golden knight standing on the sideboard. There, in front of me, was a real Academy Award - the Gordon E Sawyer Award for outstanding scientific and technical contribution to film - presented to Ray in 1991. A photograph next to it showed Ray accepting the award from (his words) that ‘nice guy Tom Hanks’.
'That’s an Oscar', I said. 'A real Oscar.'
'Yes', said Ray. 'Please be careful. It’s heavy.'
He was right. It weighed a ton (well, eight and half pounds anyway). Dark visions of clubbing him over the head and running off with it flitted through my starstruck brain. But I could never do that. Not to such a genuinely nice man. And anyway, Diana was watching me like a hawk. I placed it back on the sideboard and finished my tea.
He signed my copy of his biography and we posed for a photograph together with a Gwangi. It was the only photo I took that day as Ray was very strict about such things. He'd had a bad experience with a reporter a few years previously who'd taken lots of pics and then sold them indiscriminately (most of the images in this blogpost are from his magazine articles).
So ... I’d met a childhood hero; a genuine Hollywood star and movie genius. And I’d been allowed to hold an Oscar.
Not a bad day out, eh?
I was to visit Ray a couple of more times before his death in 2013. We got on splendidly. And we chatted on the phone a few times too. All of which is why it would feel weird to delete his number.
Call me irrational and sentimental, but it's a nice memento of precious time spent with one of the greats.
Meanwhile, copies of the fantastic bronze figures I saw can now be bought, courtesy of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation (see here) ... but you'll need deep pockets!
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