Get ready teddy go, go, go...

by Pete Clark The Evening Standard, London 9th February
More is the pity, but they do not make them like Mim Scala any more.

He was a true creature of the Sixties, hugely skilled in the arts of creative ducking and diving, making things happen for others and having the time of his life in the process. Mim knew everyone in that immensely volatile world, and they all knew him.
He brokered deals in music, film and theatre, having honed his skills as organiser of illegal gambling sessions. Raised amid the costermongers of the North End Road market, he brought something of that rough-and-ready charm to his dealings with a wider world.
Mim has now committed his colourful memories to print in the pages of Diary of a Teddy Boy. Charmingly, the book first took shape as a diary for his 10-year-old son. At the age of 60, Mim felt the boy should know what his dad had done as a youngster. Appropriately, Diary of a Teddy Boy is utterly life-affirming and free of the bitterness and spite that so often informs such accounts.
Mim was ready for the Sixties from an early age. Leaning with practised ease against the bar of a restaurant, sipping occasionally at a vodka and tonic, he recalls his early struggles to achieve the sense of style that he instinctively knew would be of the greatest importance for his future. "I remember living in the North End Road, and suddenly the peacocks started to arrive in the shape of the teddy boys. They looked different and they looked beautiful. But they did hang out in some corny places, like the record department of British Home Stores. You went into BHS, the counters full of all this dreary stuff, and there in the middle would be this bunch of teds rocking away to Fats Domino. As a kid on the outside of that, it looked like a fairy tale."
The problem for Mim was that he was working in the family ice-cream shop: the hours were long and the discipline postwar strict. "Of course, I had to join this gang and, of course, I had to keep it a secret from my parents. I ordered my suit from the tailor Mr Tobias, and I bought the shoes, which I hid under the bed. The problem was that I couldn't put the whole outfit together until my hair was long enough. So I was letting my hair grow, being constantly told to get it cut, and pretending all the while it was not growing by smearing it down with Brylcreem. Then the day came when I finally achieved the DA, got a bit of a flick going on up top. It all came together and I looked in the mirror and I was the business."
Mim did not last long as a teddy boy, disliking the violent aspects of the culture. He was also aware that the teddy-boy lifestyle was not the only option for a kid with the urge to be different. In the bits of London that mattered, principally Chelsea and Soho, the conventions of a grimly polite society were undergoing a tectonic shift. "Suddenly, in the late Fifties, the clear-cut social structure began to break down. Aristocrats started to develop strange cock-ney accents, while cockneys were trying out a bit of elocution. Suddenly, it was OK for a debutante to have a cock-ney boyfriend, or for a toff to be a bit wayward and have a bird from Fulham. Just in time for the Sixties, the barriers had fallen away. In the Sixties, you were finally allowed to fly."
Mim flapped his wings to great effect. He worked as a theatrical agent, but his real love was the business of constant socialising. The worlds of music and film collided in a detonation of maximum mayhem. Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and Richard Harris crossed party swords with Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones. Purple hearts and black bombers fuelled the frenzy. The settings were provided by Tramp, the Establishment, Mr Chow, the Playboy Club and any number of fine country estates. "The Chelsea of the Sixties was a very small world and everybody seemed to be successful," recalls Mim. "It was a vortex of very creative people drawn from all over the country, then all over the world, all of whom had a strong desire to make it. The whole scene was fuelled by the music, and wherever the music was played, everybody went, so we were all family."
As we all know now, the beautiful creature that was the Sixties had a dark underbelly. "Of course there was a downside," says Mim. "There were a lot of people who tried to enter this world and got rejected for one reason or another. You were at the mercy of this world, because the people coming in had no money and no job, almost by definition, and therefore had to prove themselves through strength of personality and imagination. Some people tried so hard that they burned out - there were awful casualties in the chase for that dragon. There were shock waves in paradise."
By his own admission, Mim indulged himself as thoroughly as anyone in the rush towards 24-hour hedonism. "I was lucky to survive that period," he confesses, "but the bottom line for me was that I was never looking for oblivion, I had no interest in that whatsoever. I just wanted to be amazed. What was important to me was spotting talented kids, making a phone call that mattered, getting the hustle going. I would ring somebody and say, 'I've this young guy called Cat Stevens in my office and the songs are just pouring out of him, he's magic!' I like to think I made a few phone calls that caused things to happen."
As a parting shot, I ask Mim about that cliché about the Sixties - if you remembered it, you couldn't possibly have been there. Mim snorts in derision. "That's an absolute load of bollocks! That cliché really gets up my nose. The fact is that if you were there, you remember every f***ing detail."