Bill Dees

I think it's deeply personal stuff.

Back to Bill Dees.

I lost my train of thought there for a minute.

[laughs] I'm curious the impact that he had on you, and I'm always interested in early impact that people have on others.

The result was that if I'd wanted to go and work on The Times or the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, one of those papers, I would have to go and spend two or three years working on a small provincial newspaper, and I just didn't really want to do it.

I was impatient, I was ambitious, and all that sort of stuff.

And I met this fellow, Bill Dees, who was the editor of the Daily Telegraph and was a revered figure in British journalism and had actually, in an earlier life, been the figure on which Evelyn Waugh had modeled one of the characters in his famous satirical novel called Scoop.

Bill Dees very kindly responded to a letter that I'd written to him applying for a job at the Daily Telegraph.

I haven't got that information here.

Now, Bill Dees, D-E-E-S, was a songwriter and he collaborated with Roy on a song called It's Over, which was number one in the UK.

And the origin of Pretty Woman came about with this particular fellow because Claudette walked in on Roy and Dees' songwriting scenario.

She said she was heading for Nashville and Roy asked her if she needed any money, whereupon Dees said, well, Pretty Woman never needs any money.