I was having lunch last month with Tim Rice (plunk, a name drops!) at the Ivy Club in London when we ran into a wizened old man in a ratty-looking sweater. He was sitting in the bar by himself sipping a Diet Coke.
“Michael White!” Rice exclaimed.
“Hello, Tim,” White replied in a faint voice.
Michael White is a name I’m sure you don’t know. But in his day — the ’60s and ’70s — he was London’s leading producer, the precursor to Cameron Mackintosh.
White is the subject of a poignant movie by Gracie Otto called “The Last Impresario.” I saw it last fall at the Hamptons Film Festival and was hoping it would make the list of Oscar-nominated documentaries announced Thursday. It didn’t, so I’m bringing it to your attention. (It’s available from Netflix and Amazon.)
White produced scores of shows, including “Loot,” “Sleuth,” “Oh! Calcutta!,” “The Rocky Horror Show,” the West End production of “A Chorus Line” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
He produced early Yoko Ono performance pieces and gave John Cleese his start by moving “Cambridge Circus,” a revue Cleese performed at school, to the West End.
And he introduced London to an obscure Australian housewife named Edna Everage, who’d go on to become Barry Humphries’ great Dame Edna.
White was at the center of London’s swinging ’60s, a fixture at the restaurants and bars along King’s Road in Chelsea. As the film has it, he rode around in a white Rolls-Royce, rented lavish villas in the South of France, drank cellars of Veuve Clicquot and did mountains of cocaine.
An avid photographer, he captured the whole ride in some 30,000 snaps, which pepper the documentary. There he is partying with Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, the Police, Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Anna Wintour and Naomi Watts.
He had a huge appetite for risk and fun but little interest in mundane things like, oh, contracts.
“He was hopeless at business,” one of his friends says.
White went out to Hollywood to make “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” hit the party circuit and wound up giving away his stake in the movie, which went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars.
He brought Dame Edna to New York in 1979, and lost a fortune. By the time Dame Edna came back in 2000 and triumphed, they’d severed ties.
White had a heart attack in 2005 that nearly killed him. A couple of strokes since have made it difficult for him to walk and speak. But he still has an eye for the pretty ladies, which is why he let Otto, a filmmaker and a model, follow him around for a year.
Today, as the movie implies, he lives off the generosity of his celebrity friends. I’d hoped to meet him in the Hamptons, but he was too ill to make the trip.
But I was glad to have the chance to shake his hand at the Ivy Club and tell him how much I enjoyed “The Last Impresario.”
“That’s very kind,” he whispered.
We left him alone, with his Diet Coke.