Chapter 2
The London to Sydney Car Race
Around this time, while my brother and I were away with mum, Charlotte and my father travelled to the East to pick up a damaged London to Sydney Mercedes works rally car and drive it back to Europe along the hippy trail. Of course my father filled the car with hash and even though they had papers from Mercedes they made it through the border crossings and past highly suspicious customs officers by the skin of their teeth.
The journey was epic and started out in November of 1968 with us on a motorway outside London seeing off Mike Taylor – an old racing friend of dad’s – in the red works Mercedes 280 SE at the start of the London to Sydney Ralley. He was racing with an accomplished driver, Ireland Innis, and they got as far as Australia, but most of the Mercedes team was forced to retire due to mechanical problems or accidents. The red Mercedes was ditched in Kabul.
For motor racing fans, the details of who started and finished the race and where, are below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_London%E2%80%93Sydney_Marathon
Mike Taylor asked Tommy if he’d be interested in driving the famous red beast back to Europe. Our father, seeing an interesting opportunity to use the Mercedes and its label for smuggling, jumped at the chance and dad and Charlotte flew out to retrieve the car from Kabul. Tommy’s connections in Afghanistan were quite developed by then, although I sense many of them came through his partner in crime, Taffy, who ran a darker kind of operation involving female couriers who slept with guards. Tommy’s style was a bit different and seemed to bring the two into conflict, which at some point culminated in Taffy pulling a gun on dad and dad laughing at him and calling his bluff.
Tommy’s Afghan contacts supposedly were tribal chieftains and members of the royal family. He took payment for the goods out there in trade, a lounge of suitcases full of rolling papers and exchanged them for as much hash as he could pack into the works Mercedes rally car. His logic was that no customs officer would question, much less strip down, a works rally car made by the most important auto manufacturer of all time.
Initially the theory seemed to work, especially at the borders in the east, but as they got further west the customs officials became more and more suspicious. Until, after several 24 hour nail biting and excruciatingly close customs inspections, although nothing was found, Tommy decided to take the majestic red Mercedes out to the woods and with a gargantuan effort managed to burn out the engine so that it would have to be shipped the rest of the way back to the UK, with all the contents still inside. Tommy and Charlotte must have been exhausted by the time they got back to Hugh street. I think by that time Mum, Jake and I were on the road back from India, via Greece, Patmos and the Princess Islands near Istanbul.
Hugh Street Studio and Charlotte Rampling
A genuinely talented actress and sort of our stepmother for a while, we lived together in a bustling little commercial studio in Pimlico at the end of the sixties, after mum and dad had separated. Apparently one day mum returned from Glastonbury where she had been tripping on acid, convinced that she should try and repair her relationship with Tommy, only to find him in bed with an American girl in the master bedroom of the house in Pimlico.
The memories of Hugh Street and Charlotte are mostly all positive. On the 20th of June, 1969, the night of the moon landings, I stayed up late and watched the coverage on TV, occasionally peeking up at the moon through the large studio bay window and on the same evening watched Charlotte being interviewed by a late night talk show host. It was a changing world.
We travelled together with Charlotte to Italy and while she shot a film we hung around the set, which I loved. The director of the film put me on his knees and played hand games like: here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.
The Italian landscape whistling by while we were in the backseat, the film director with me on his knee and the taste of cantaloupes, for some reason I remember well. Looking at Charlotte’s filmography I would guess the film to have been ‘The Damned’ and the director to have been Visconti.
According to Charlotte’s film agent at the time, Maggie Abbott – a sort of super agent with ICM and someone I met in the mid-noughties in L.A. – the real reason for her increasing number of bookings on French and Italian films was the result of a specific attempt by Maggie to steer her away from her involvement with Tommy and his smuggling, which her agent saw as a potential threat to Charlotte’s burgeoning film career.
One final memory of Hugh Street is of my brother and me playing upstairs together on the mezzanine. Dad and Charlotte were out somewhere, but there was a knock at the door and mum peaked her head around it and said hello. We lit up to see her, but in retrospect it was strange that she didn’t ask us to come down or hug us, as she must have missed us. ‘I don’t want to disturb you, I just wanted to leave this for your father’, she said and left the red Gibson ES. She presumably must have wanted to see us all together. It was more than a little strange.
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After Tommy’s funeral in 2006
My brother flew back to the States for work commitments and we agreed that, for the purpose of gathering material for what we then thought would become a documentary about mum or dad or both, I’d stay in Europe a few weeks longer and snoop around old childhood haunts in London, like the former site of The Flying Dragon. I’d then fly to Spain to interview a few people who were relatives or friends of the family, particularly Susie Fenton.
Back in England – Gathering Research Material
When mum and dad divorced in 1969 the house on Cambridge Street had been sold and dad and Charlotte moved into the studio on Hugh Street, around the corner. After dad’s passing I swung by Hugh Street and rang the doorbell. To my surprise the door opened and there emerged the familiar face of a well known British stage and screen actor. A little taken aback by how surreal it felt, I said: ‘Hi, you don’t know me but my name is Charley Weber, I used to live in this place when I was a boy’.
‘Oh you must be Tommy Weber’s son. I met him a couple of years ago. I’ve heard a bit about you and your family’. I explained I was researching a documentary and that dad had just passed. He kindly asked me in and let me view the upstairs studio where we used to live. The place was a lot smaller than I remembered. I told him about a birthday party dad and Charlotte had thrown for me there. They’d obviously put a lot of thought into it – at the age of four I had been given a drum kit, of all things. Not any old drum kit, but one of Ringo Starr’s, which dad had been offered as payment in kind for a drug debt. At the party there had been Laurel and Hardy films in the spot where we now sat down and chatted.
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Charley Weber Portfolio 