Retiree to Lead Orchestra’s Debut

When you’ve conducted an orchestra in front of the Queen of England, when you’ve been poked in the eye by your own baton, when Jack Benny has smeared hair dye on your sofa . . . well, not much can unnerve you.

And Woolf Phillips, a native of London now living in Camarillo with his wife, Sylvia, is as collected as anyone in his position has a right to be.

The hectic days of conducting the London Palladium Orchestra and the Royal Army Band are over, but the 71-year-old Leisure Village resident is not living his life at a particularly leisurely pace. With slightly more than a month to go, he is consumed with putting the final touches on the debut of the Camarillo Symphony Orchestra, which he will conduct.

What kind of final touches? Oh, little things such as getting the piano to the theater in time for the performance, and finding the right podium to stand on.

“We need a podium with a metal back,” he said. “As a conductor, when you get excited you move backward and if you don’t have the right back on the podium you can disappear. Well someone spoke to someone else . . . and now somebody’s building the podium for us.”

And as for the piano, Baldwin piano company is lending it to the orchestra at no charge, but Phillips still needs to arrange to get it here from Los Angeles.

Fortunately for Phillips, the musicians have already been rounded up, at least for the first few performances. The Camarillo Symphony Orchestra will actually be the 50- to 60-member West Valley Symphony Orchestra, for which Phillips has been the guest conductor on several occasions.

If the Camarillo orchestra gets established and starts to make money, the plan is to audition local talent. Whether the orchestra can be a money-maker, though, is a big question.

“To break even would be quite something,” he says. “If we wanted to make a fortune we’d get the Grateful Dead or my nephew Simon who’s a drummer for The Who.”

Actually, all this business stuff is new to Phillips. When he conducts, he just walks in and conducts.

But because he’s been surrounded by music all his life, he will do what it takes to stay involved with it.

As a child, Phillips learned musical theory and harmony from his older brother Sid, a well-known arranger, composer and orchestra leader at the time. Phillips was soon writing, arranging and composing on his own while learning to play the trombone.

Later, as a bandleader, Phillips worked with some of the biggest names in the entertainment business--Judy Garland, Donald O’Connor, Sammy Davis Jr., Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny among them.

“Jack Benny was my favorite,” he says. “He was a marvelous man. I remember once in London he and his wife came over for dinner after a performance. He was sitting on a couch with lots of cushions telling how he had switched over from ABC to CBS. He had some blacking on his head to cover a bald spot. He leaned back and got some on the couch. His wife got upset but I said, ‘That’s all right. I’ll just tell everybody Jack Benny leaned here.’ ”

While conducting the London Palladium Orchestra, Phillips did six command performances for Queen Elizabeth II and Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh.

“Everybody looks at the queen. When she smiles, everybody smiles. When she applauds, everybody applauds,” he says. “One time I knew she was about to come out so I started the Orchestra playing the National Anthem. I was so nervous my baton was shaking.” Pointing to his wrist, he said, “When you shake here it really moves around out here,” motioning this time to the end of the baton.

Though Phillips has earned his fair share of recognition, he has had his embarrassing moments.

There was the time his baton flew out of his hand and landed in the audience. There was the time he was performing with the dance duo the Nicholas Brothers and Fayard Nicholas poked him in the eye with the baton. And there was the time he was standing atop a high rostrum conducting about 800 musicians, with the queen in the audience, when his tuxedo collar flew off.

But then Phillips never said conducting was easy.

“We stand up there for three hours. This job is worse than a policeman’s--I mean the old policemen who used to walk around. But you just don’t think about it.”

The orchestra’s first performance will be May 10 at the Bill Esty Theater, 3701 Las Posas Road at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10. Call 388-1376.