Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  Next, we drove past Nonnberg Abbey – the oldest female convent in German-speaking Europe, dating back to 714 – where the real Maria was a candidate for the novitiate and the Julie Andrews version was a novice. Had Maria really run there from the Untersberg, as Julie Andrews appears to do at the beginning of the movie (having been repeatedly knocked over by the downdraught from the helicopter filming the opening shot), it would have taken her much longer than the minute or so the film allows, as she would have sprinted approximately fifteen kilometres. Still, I suppose it was Julie Andrews doing it, so anything’s possible … Next, a mountain drive up to St Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang for the chance to use a pay toilet and buy a yodelling, lederhosen-clad rag doll (we demurred), whilst looking at some pretty yachts, and then on to Mondsee cathedral, where the wedding scene was filmed.

  It was all good, healthy fun: I didn’t feel too sick and Dora didn’t get too bored. Our tour guide, Peter, joked his way round the sights in a way a few American purists have allegedly, on previous tours, found slightly offensive. In between his jokes – Dora still enjoys mistelling one, which features a family of tourists running out of petrol, an old castle, Dracula and the punchline ‘the Hills are alive with the sound of music’ – we were all encouraged to sing along to the movie soundtrack. There were lots of British people on board that day, so the singing was muted. We were also introduced to the fizzy delights of the Austrian national soft drink – Almdudler, a kind of not-quite-ginger-beer, the first few glugs of which are fruit-and-herbily thirst-quenching. Overdo it, though, and it feels like the inside of your mouth has been shrink-wrapped.

  We finished up back in Salzburg, where the tour guide presented each of us with a tiny and tasteful edelweiss lapel pin. Back to the hotel to change, then into Salzburg again for our evening treat – The Sound of Salzburg. Bound to be toe-curlingly tacky, I thought as I rushed us into town on a bus. After all, the tour had been fun and superbly lowest-common-denominator, so I anticipated more of the same. We got off too soon and spent a hurried half an hour asking the way and dashing off in the wrong direction. Eventually, I found someone who both understood English – my German being restricted to bitte schön, danke schön, grüss Gott, several schokolade-related items and now Almdudler – and knew where the Sternbräu Dinner Theatre was. I dragged a dressed-up and grumbling Dora through the Mirabell Gardens, promising her that we’d return the next day to see the dwarf statues that Peter the tour guide had told us about, across the bridge over the river and into the old town.

  We found the venue and entered. It was an old-fashioned oak-panelled space. A man behind a high reception desk took our money and told us we were too late to book a dinner. This was something of a relief, as I was still feeling slightly fragile, and the prospect of schnitzel (well, chicken escalope, actually) with noodles (even though no self-respecting Austrian would eat it, it’s served up for tourists by popular demand) followed by crisp apple strudel with whipped cream was more than I could stomach. A big bowl of chips or two, though, was another matter. ‘Back to healthy food as soon as we get home,’ I told Dora, trying not to feel guilty about all the junk I’d been feeding her while we were in Salzburg.

  Despite my expectations to the contrary, the show was terrific – even better than the chips. The evening started with the showing of a film interview, in English, with the real Maria von Trapp. Then a troupe of performers who could really sing performed a selection of songs from The Sound of Music and a few of the folk numbers that the original Trapp Family Singers sang in the concerts they gave, then treated us to a variety of light opera extracts. There was audience participation in which Dora refused to participate, although I allowed myself to be coaxed up on to the stage along with several others, to join the cast in a simple folk dance, which I persisted in getting wrong.

  The following morning we ate as much as we could for breakfast, checked out of our room, dragged the suitcase to the hotel office for safe-keeping, donned our backpacks and set off to catch the bus into town. It was a gloriously sunny day, perfect for exploring. We bounced round the Mirabell Gardens, hunting for the dwarf statues and then taking photos of each other with them. We crossed the bridge over the river into the old city. Dora wasn’t interested in visiting Mozart’s house, so I bought her a present – a very pretty and very cheap china doll dressed in a green checked dirndl, who was loved intensely for the next few days and then tidied into a box, where she’s languished ever since, her broken right leg in severe need of glue – and we wandered for a while, in the general direction of the fortress that has loomed over the city for the best part of the past thousand years. En route we listened to a girl playing the harp, laughed at a man dressed as a skeleton with a giant skull, hands and feet, and watched a whole troupe of Chinese dancers rehearsing for a show.

  Then we hopped on the funicular railway and explored the fortress, taking in the spectacular views, the torture room and the marionette museum, until Dora got bored and needed lunch. So it was back down the funicular and into a little café, where we ate more chips and drank a final glass of Almdudler. A bit more wandering, and that was it. Time to go home. Laurie met us at Stansted and drove us home while Dora fell asleep.

  WHEN THE DOG BITES

  EARLY SEPTEMBER, AND school was about to start. I bought Dora some supermarket school uniform shirts and skirts to go with her new shoes. Routine set in. It was more than six weeks since we’d heard she’d been cast, and there was still almost a month to go before rehearsals were due to start. It was impossible to sustain our excitement. I’d read everything I could in books and on the internet about The Sound of Music and digested the financial implications of my daughter’s involvement. So it was time to start worrying about the other potential down sides of propelling a six-year-old on to a West End stage.

  Child performers are not famous for going on to live happy, fulfilled adult lives. Addiction, anorexia, misery, tragically early deaths and terrible plastic surgery are their lot. Was that what I was condemning my daughter to by allowing her to go on the stage so young?

  Because it hadn’t occurred to me when I took her to the first audition that she might actually end up getting a part, I’d only prepared her to handle the disappointment of not being cast, not how to cope if she was picked. In technicolour contrast to the stereotypical stage mother approach, I was geared up for, and anticipated, failure, not success. I’d considered the consequences of her being eliminated at each round, and decided that she was sufficiently robust and well-cushioned to handle the rejection. There were, I felt, no major risks: we could just say ‘oh well’ and get on with our lives the same as before. It would, I knew, be no big deal supporting her through that: a hug, a ‘you did very well, darling, to get this far on your first go’ and a quick diversion into some other fun activity, and that, I was confident, would be that.

  Because I was completely unprepared for it, I hadn’t thought about how to help her handle success. Or whether I’d been nuts to start the whole process in the first place. Would it be possible for her to do this and come out okay? Might Jo Hawes be wrong: could this be a happy one-off experience? Could it even be good for Dora? And if it wasn’t going to be a one-off experience, was showbiz something she could be involved in without it taking over her life and the lives of those of us she lived with? Why do some well-known child performers turn out all right, when others – the ones we hear most about – crash and burn? Why do we expect child performers to end up terribly scarred? Why do we expect their mothers to be horrid? Was I horrid? Was I being a terrible mother to let her get into this sordid, destructive, vicious business? And if Dora did go horribly wrong after spending six months pretending to be Austrian twice a week in front of 2,300 theatre-goers, would it all be my fault?

  Like many other ordinary mothers, I’ve sat aghast in front of television documentaries wondering why on earth any parent would tart up their four-or five-year-old daughter and train her up to pose and pout like an apprentice prostitute on the US pageant circui
t. Like many others I was shocked and distressed – though not overly surprised – when one of them, JonBenet Ramsey, was murdered, and her parents treated as prime suspects, while local cops missed signs of a break-in. It is fundamentally wrong to put little girls on display in such a sexually charged way. It’s one thing for them to clatter around the house in plastic dress-up high heels, smeared in cheap, lurid-coloured kiddie make-up, making believe that they’re grown-ups in the privacy of their or their friends’ own homes, quite another to do it on stage, in front of strangers, as part of a competition.

  I was also, more recently, discomforted at the sight of Connie Talbot, the six-year-old who made the finals of Britain’s Got Talent, singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and then ‘Ben’ – songs popularised by Judy Garland and Michael Jackson, neither of whom exactly managed to grow up into happy, well-grounded adults. And yet I’d popped my own six-year-old daughter into a big, professional stage production. What was so different about what Connie Talbot was doing? Where should I draw the line? Had I, in my naivety and over-excitement, already overstepped it?

  To be honest, I didn’t know. I worried. There’s a long list of child performers who’ve gone on to lead short and troubled adult lives. Visit US journalist Joal Ryan’s blog Former Child Star Central (www.fcscentral.com) for a less-than-comforting picture of the grown-up experiences of showbiz kids. There’s a lot of rehab, attention-seeking kinds of crime, car crashes (generally under the influence), broken relationships and fighting. Judy Garland on slimming pills at twelve. Lena Zavaroni, anorexic from her mid-teens, penniless and dead from the illness before she hit forty. Michael Jackson, troubled in so many ways. Jack Wilde – the Artful Dodger in Oliver! – dead of alcohol-related liver disease at fifty. Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears in and out of rehab. And yet despite all these very public, horribly sad stories, so many of us parents encourage, support or simply allow our children to go out to work in the entertainment business. One glimpse of a spotlight and we make like moths.

  In the US in particular, there are books, websites and courses dedicated to informing and assisting parents who wish to turn their little darlings into stars of stage and screen. You must, these exhort, ensure that your offspring become ‘triple threats’. That is, they must be able to sing, dance and act, and even when they tick all those boxes, on top of that, they must look cute. Pure natural talent isn’t enough. You must pay for them to go to the best singing, dancing and acting teachers. You must pay for portfolios of professional photographs. You must get them the best agent. You must take them to audition after audition after audition. Success comes at a heavy price in terms of investment of money, time, hope and energy. Failure costs just as much – although maybe not in the long term, if the child’s wellbeing is considered. Oh – and if your child isn’t naturally cute/classically good-looking, you need to get them to cultivate a niche persona. Geek, for example. Or fat kid.

  American child TV star Paul Petersen started off as a Mouseketeer, made Houseboat with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren and spent his teenage years on The Donna Reed Show. He recovered from his alcoholic, drug-addled and generally dangerous-living twenties to write a string of adventure books and found A Minor Consideration, the US organisation dedicated to protecting performing children from the exploitation common in the industry: exploitation in which the children’s parents are so often enthusiastically complicit. It was his own experiences in the business – and his recognition that so many other child actors had to cope with the same difficult issues – that led him to set up the organisation in 1990. Since then he has worked with the entertainment unions, the US government and even the United Nations to improve the lot of working children. The issue that starts most of the problems in the US, he told me, is a legal and financial one. ‘The law requires that an adult person attend the child’s workplace to be within sight and sound of their child at all times. They receive no compensation.’

  This adult is usually mum or dad – who else would do it for nothing? They have to be there, looking after their working child, and so can’t be somewhere else, earning a living or caring for any other children. They become financially dependent on the working child and ‘it’s an all-too-familiar story, that these young people come to their eighteenth birthday and discover, to their horror, that they’re the only one in the family that’s working’.

  And then, suddenly, they’re not. After The Donna Reed Show ended, Paul Petersen’s career – like that of many juvenile actors when they reach adulthood, especially if they are identified with one particular role, like Petersen was – stalled. He went off the rails.

  Whether the ratio of child performers who grow up wild – or, at a minimum, live out dangerously feral late teens and early twenties – is higher than it is for the general population, I don’t know. And I don’t think anyone does. Certainly, at eighteen or twenty, having worked in film or TV, they most likely have access to more money to buy more alcohol and narcotics and faster cars than most other kids – excepting, of course, those with very rich parents, who may get into similar trouble when they come into their trust funds. Being that age, having lots of money and no gainful employment is dangerous.

  Petersen reckons that ‘about half’ of his troubles would have happened if he’d never set foot in a TV studio. He’d been a rambunctious child, sacked from his first job as a Mouseketeer for ‘behaviour unbecoming’, regarded by his teachers as one of the brightest boys in the class, but also amongst the most disruptive. He says he’s ‘genetically predisposed to being an alcoholic’, and ‘didn’t learn how to say no’ until he was well into his forties. ‘That’s on my back, I get that and I’m responsible.’ But ‘a significant chunk of the rest, I was either driven to, or encouraged to do by people who were not supportive of my efforts, but were envious and jealous and couldn’t wait for me to fail’.

  ‘I was very lucky,’ Mark Lester (most famous for playing the title role in the 1968 film version of Oliver!) told me, ‘to go from one film to the next up until the age of eighteen when the work just didn’t come in.’ At the same time as the work stopped, he gained access to his earnings and spent the next couple of years spending them on the traditional drink, drugs and fast cars. Then he went into rehab, came out, got into martial arts and then, having developed an interest in sports injuries, trained as an osteopath. He seems a very practical, down-to-earth person, not given to speculation. ‘I don’t know,’ he said when I asked if he thought he’d have gone off the rails whether or not he’d gone into the entertainment business. ‘But it’s probably in my genetic make-up. Maybe I was given more opportunity to do it, but I probably would have done anyway.’

  Danny Bonaduce – famous as Danny Partridge in The Partridge Family, and for his subsequent hellraising – is fond of pointing out that when he was in rehab, ‘he was the only former child star among forty-eight patients – nine of whom, he added, were dentists’.1 So, if you worry about your kids growing up to have drug problems, keep them out of the medical professions: it’s not only dentists that get hooked. Lots of doctors do, too. They have access to all sorts of substances that other people don’t and, because they are clever and know the telltale signs, tend to be highly skilled at concealing their own addictions. And a paramedic told me recently that loads of ambulance crews rely on diazepam to help them sleep. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t cope with the shift patterns.’

  Anxious to explore what I might be condemning my child to, I read some former child performers’ autobiographies. Shirley Temple had come through it all with flying colours, even though she ended up with very little of the money she earned through her movies. Her autobiography Child Star is dedicated ‘lovingly’ to her mother. Miraculously, despite the fact that her mum was the archetypal, ultra-pushy stage mother, Rose Hovick, June Havoc survived childhood stardom and struggled her way to adult acting and, much later on, writing and directing success. Her story, told in two volumes of memoirs, is an extraordinary one.

  At the height
of her career in the early 1920s, ‘Dainty Baby’ June’s act earned a staggering $1,500 a week as she headlined around the lucrative vaudeville circuit. But then puberty and moving pictures struck, work became harder to find, and wages dropped. Her mother grew increasingly hysterical. In 1929, June secretly married and tried to run away with Bobby Reed, a dancer in her act. She might have been thirteen – at least, that’s how old Rose told her she was on her birthday: ‘My baby is thirteen today. I just can’t believe it!’ June told Bobby she thought she was ‘at least sixteen’. But she couldn’t be sure. As she explained to him, she had an impressive collection of birth certificates that her mother had had forged so she could work illegally young. ‘Two of them make me twenty-one now. The others can’t be used. They make me over thirty.’2 Mrs Hovick discovered and attempted to foil the newly-weds’ escape plans. Following a scene in a police station during which she tried to shoot Bobby – but didn’t have a clue how to use her gun and left the safety catch on – the pair got away.

  Marriage was June’s only way out of the embarrassingly childish act that Mrs Hovick was still touting round the remains of the vaudeville circuit. June had wanted out for a while. A couple of years earlier, she’d realised: ‘I was much too big, not only for the act and the clothes, but for my billing: “Dainty Baby June”. I was gangly. Nothing about me pleased me. I was still doing the same wretched baby-talk kind of act … The same act that was remarkable for a little child … [was] completely uninteresting for a gangly teenager … Maybe I no longer looked like a ferret, but I hadn’t emerged a beauty … I knew I was no longer cute.’ June was offered the chance of training with Samuel L. ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, renowned for producing the best stage shows of the time at his New York theatre, the Roxy. ‘Give me this little girl for three years,’ Roxy said, offering to take care of them whilst June was training – provided they forgot about their act – ‘and I’ll give you a star.’ But Rose Hovick was having none of it. Despite her daughter’s desperate entreaties, she bawled Rothafel out: ‘Mother’s voice was shrill. “She is a star! She’s headlined in vaudeville since … You want to separate us! That’s what you’re trying to do – separate me from my baby. How cruel!”’.3