Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  Meanwhile June’s older sister Louise was emerging a beauty. During June’s starring years, Louise – blessed, allegedly, with none of her sister’s talent – was forced by their mother to wear boys’ clothes. She was kept firmly in her younger sibling’s shadow to ensure that all attention focused on June. When June married and left the act, Louise stepped into the spotlight and within a few years had achieved a much higher level of fame than her child star sister. She became the world’s best-known burlesque artiste, Gypsy Rose Lee, feted for the sassy humour of her striptease act, and able to get away with revealing comparatively little flesh.

  In her memoirs, Gypsy described their archetypal stage mother as ‘charming, courageous, resourceful and ambitious. She was also, in a feminine way, ruthless.’ Once Gypsy hit the big time, Mrs Hovick didn’t bother with June, who by the early 1930s was separated from Bobby and struggling to scrape a living doing the rounds of the gruelling dance marathons. The first volume of June’s extraordinary memoirs is very matter-of-fact about her mother’s coldness. I wondered how she felt about it, imagining a combination of sadness, disorientation, a sense of abandonment, but also relief and freedom after all the years of intense attention and pushing. Now in her mid-nineties – and just over a decade into her retirement – Miss Havoc explained, via her assistant Tana:

  ‘Yes, of course that’s how I felt, but I also experienced bewilderment at the sense of relief and freedom. I did love my mother but found those feelings a little uneasy to have. And by the time that happened, I was more cognisant of my mother’s ways than I had been as a child; and while things were hard, I held on to my dream. That occupied me emotionally – that and taking care of my infant daughter.’

  Miss Havoc also told me how, despite the kind of upbringing that would drive most people to drink and drugs – or at least extended bouts of unproductive self-pity – she got up, dusted herself down and worked incredibly hard to forge herself a successful adult career

  ‘I gained the uproarious, unconditional acclaim of the audiences I played to – waves and waves of love coming over the footlights. This, along with the approval and guidance of many of the vaudevillians with whom I worked, gave me a strong foundation of self-respect, and knowledge of talent and achievement.’

  She went on to explain how most vaudevillians prided themselves on their family values. ‘I learned right from wrong by being among them backstage. I hate to see the young actors of today being exploited when so many of them have had little opportunity to plumb the depths of their talent and instead are being turned into “icons”, whatever that means.’

  There is, in other words, a big difference between being a working child actor and a child star. June Havoc was both, but she was both at a time before the press and public felt entitled to invade a star’s personal space, and in a place – vaudeville – where the focus was on teamwork, on the responsibility performers had to each other and to their audience, to keep going even when they felt rotten, to hone their skills and to work hard. As Tana told me, if you were working in vaudeville, you ‘went on stage no matter what. I suppose the odd missing limb might excuse you, or a coma, but other than that, you went out there because the rest of the people in the act – perhaps all the acts on the bill – depended on you.’

  And then came film, and then television, video, DVD. With the evolution in media came a change in how we, the audience, respond and relate to the performers. With traditional theatre, the differences between us and them and – crucially – between performance and real life are clear. As filming techniques and technology increased in sophistication, as television arrived in our living rooms and started taking over our lives, the relationships between audience and performer changed. The more our lives are ruled by TV, the more proprietorial we feel towards the people on it and the less we are able to distinguish between real life and drama.

  In her book Former Child Stars: the story of America’s least wanted, journalist Joal Ryan posits the theory that ‘a TV kid makes a more personal impression than a movie kid’. Her idea is that kids on TV shows are watched over years by children, grow up with us and are seen as peers and attainable, whereas children on films are movie stars and different. I think it’s more that anyone who appears on a regular basis in our living rooms along with our families feels familiar. Because we’re used to them being in our homes, we feel – on some primordial level – as if they are kin.

  Weirdly, it works the other way round, too. A few years ago, a family friend, an actor, was in a TV series called A Thing Called Love. I watched avidly. During one episode, his character was rounded on by several of his friends who all shouted at him a lot. I can’t remember why. What I can remember are the emotions this scene evoked in me. I got very cross and upset with the people who were being horrid to my friend, and felt very protective towards him – which is embarrassing and, given the fact that he’s six foot tall and works out (I’m four foot eleven and don’t) and perfectly capable of looking after himself, hilarious. I am – like most people – intellectually sophisticated enough to distinguish between real life and TV drama. On a deeper, emotional level I can’t tell the difference.

  Some months after Dora finished in The Sound of Music, she went to audition for a prestigious TV police drama. We knew only that her role involved cavorting round London Zoo, posthumously, as a figment of her grieving father’s distressed imagination. That, I thought, would be enormous fun for her, and given that was all it involved, I reckoned I could cope with the fact that her character was dead. After the casting she told me that she’d had to lie still without breathing for thirty seconds. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ she replied happily, having thoroughly enjoyed herself. I had a fairly good idea, but consoled myself with the conviction that she wouldn’t get the part anyway.

  A few days later we heard that she had been cast. The job would start in two days, when she would have to wear a party dress and have her picture taken with penguins. That was very exciting. Then we heard that they needed to know how tall she was so they could buy a body double to use for when they showed her having her operation. And could I please bring in some family photos of her, but, naturally, none with her real family in. Then I discovered that her character was due to die as a result of a (routine) operation that, in real life, the sister of one of her best friends was waiting to have. And that viewers would see her character lying on a mortuary slab, as her grieving father – who spent more time than was strictly healthy visiting his dead daughter there – wouldn’t let her be buried.

  I pulled her. It was all too much. Although she would undoubtedly have had a fantastic time, and got to work with a highly respected director, top-notch cast and award-winning company, it felt wrong. It would have been a brilliant career opportunity, but might have caused her friend worry and upset, completely unnecessarily. And then there was my reaction to consider. Although I would know, indisputably, that Dora was alive and well, if I watched her performance and saw her lying on that mortuary slab, in the context of a realistic, contemporary drama, I would feel that something terrible had happened to her. Given how strong my emotional reaction was to my friend’s character being shouted at, I could imagine exactly how this would affect me. I’m still not sure whether my response was flaky or normal. I am sure, however, that she’ll have plenty of other brilliant career opportunities when she’s old enough to have a career.

  Dora, to her credit, took the disappointment very well. She had been very much looking forward to meeting the penguins, but was pleased that she wouldn’t miss seeing the results of the science experiment they’d been conducting at school (leaving an egg in a variety of different liquids – Coke, tea, milk and water – to see which stained the shell the most). ‘Oh well,’ she said, philosophically, ‘I didn’t really want to be dead anyway.’ She changed her tune a few months later, though, when she watched the brother of one of her Sound of Music colleagues playing a boy who died in the BBC drama Cranford. ‘It’s not fair,’ she complained. ‘Haydon was
allowed to be dead. Why wasn’t I?’ I opened my mouth to tell her and then closed it again. I didn’t think I could explain how a realistic drama has a different impact on the viewer than a period drama does. ‘You would be allowed to play a character who dies in period costume, but not in contemporary costume,’ simply wouldn’t compute in Dora’s brain.

  One of the things, I realised, about all the child star casualties was that they were child stars. And stars of films or TV shows. To keep things in proportion, Dora was not about to become a child star. She was going to be one of a team of children performing in a stage musical, a show that would be seen by thousands, but not by millions. And lots of them would be sitting a long way from the stage, and so, despite her highly visible face and those annoying red opera glasses that you have to pay fifty pee (FIFTY PEE!) to use and then have to give back at the end of the show and don’t really work, wouldn’t be able to see her that well anyway. Also, from what I’d read, most of the child performers who went on to have major problems were those who earned shedloads of money and were recognised whenever they walked down the street. I soothed myself with the thought that The Sound of Music would make Dora neither famous nor rich, nor lead to me becoming financially dependent on her. Appearing in it would probably make her no more likely to spend her late teens and early twenties going wild than she was anyway – than I had been. She had already, two years earlier, expressed a strong interest in motorbikes.

  We were sitting in my car, in a traffic jam. A man on a moped wobbled past us, L-plate slightly askew. ‘That man is riding his motorbike well,’ Dora informed me, impressed in a way that only someone with stabilisers on their pushbike could be. ‘When I grow up, I want one.’

  ‘Dora,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to imbue my voice with gravitas, so that she’d always remember the significant piece of guidance I was about to impart, ‘there are only two things that I really, really don’t want you to do when you grow up. One is smoke cigarettes. The other is ride motorbikes.’ I’ve seen too many casualties and consider both even more dangerous than going on the stage.

  ‘Mummy,’ replied Dora, who at four was already able to muster more gravitas, with less effort, than I ever could, ‘I will never smoke a cigarette. But I’ll get a motorbike when you’re died, because you won’t be able to know anything about it.’

  Oh well, I thought. She’s obviously grasped the concept of death.

  With Dora starting back at school, I had some more immediate worries to deal with. She’d been begging to be allowed to switch from packed lunches to school dinners, longing for those delicious meals of pasta, pizza, chips and bread followed by chocolate pudding with chocolate custard sprinkled with brightly E-number-coloured hundreds and thousands that you never find in a health-conscious, middle-class lunch bag, which is, instead, bursting with nectarines (in season), carrots, cherry tomatoes and some very tasty lettuce. As rehearsal and performance schedules were likely to mean that she’d be missing lots of hot meals at home over the winter months, I caved in, on the condition that if she had pudding at school, she could only have a healthy snack when she came home, but if she had fruit for afters, she’d be allowed a couple of biscuits.

  Meanwhile, another email had arrived from Jo Hawes.

  Hi guys,

  We would like to get all of you together on the morning of Monday 18 September in order to decide on teams and for Jeremy [Sams – director] and Arlene [Phillips – choreographer] to see you all together.

  Please confirm that you will be able to attend – it does need everybody of course or we cannot achieve what we are setting out to do!!

  As Dora settled into the new term and the excitement of being-put-into-teams-day and the start of rehearsals – 25 September – drew nearer, I started thinking about the impact it would all have on her school life. Academically, I suspected she’d be fine. She’s not way out ahead of the other kids in her class, but is bright. Unlike me she enjoys, and has a natural flair for, maths. She reads well, writes carefully and neatly (also unlike me), and settles happily and conscientiously to do her homework. So I was fairly confident that she’d be able to make up for any schoolwork she missed while rehearsing or performing. She was, after all, only six, was contracted for only six months, and hence would have plenty of post-Sound of Music time to catch up before embarking on her PhD in rocket science.

  I was more concerned about her friendships. Her best pals don’t go to the same school as she does, and although, from what I could make out from her reports of school life, she nearly always had someone to play with at playtime, she wasn’t particularly close to any of her peers. This was partly because she tended to, er, ‘direct’ them. The previous term, for instance, she’d come home one afternoon and flopped on to the sofa. ‘Phew,’ she announced, as if she’d just returned from a hard day at the office. ‘I needed a lot of people today to play Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus.’

  ‘And did you get them?’ I asked, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, adding an ‘of course,’ to demonstrate her annoyance at my lack of faith in her persuasiveness and directorial talent.

  Given this history, I was worried that her frequent absences and the reason for them might further increase the distance between her and her classmates. At the auditions a couple of the other mums had told me how, once they’d started working on the stage, their daughters had been targeted by other girls at school and bullied. One mother – who works at her daughter’s school – told me how the ringleader had picked her daughter up and dangled her upside down. ‘The teacher said it was happening because she’d got this part, and what did I expect?’

  Perhaps it’s different for boys. Mark Lester remembers his childhood relationships being normal and uncomplicated. He attended a stage school for a while and then moved on to his local grammar school, where his friends were unfazed by his celebrity status. ‘They were okay. You have mates like anybody else. Kids are great levellers, they don’t really care if you’ve got one leg, or one eye. It’s only later in life that prejudices come in. Kids just get on, and get on together.’

  On 14 September, Dora’s licence arrived. She was now authorised ‘to take part in performances on the dates specified below … subject to the restrictions and conditions laid down in the Children (Performances) Regulations 1968 and to such other conditions as the local authority or the licensing authority may impose under the said Regulations’. Then there were the what, when and where details, followed by the names of the chaperones and then the regulations:

  On days where the child is required to take part in both afternoon and evening performances the child must not be present at place of performance no earlier [sic] than 1000 hrs and leave the place of performance no later than 2200 or 30 minutes after their required part is completed, [hooray, a comma!] whichever is the earliest; child must vacate location between performances for no less than one and a half hours for purposes of rests and meals; on single performance days child must leave the place of performance no later than 2200 hrs or 30 minutes after their required part is completed, whichever is the earliest. If the child has taken part in the performance on the previous day she may not be present at the location until 16 hours have elapsed; this does mean that she may return to a place where she would normally be the next morning.

  She was allowed to be absent from school on the days she was due to perform, but there was no mention of rehearsal dates – and it was during the rehearsals that she’d miss school most frequently. Had there, I wondered, been a mistake? Could this be a problem? Did it mean that Brent Council had authorised her to perform, but not to rehearse? Would it all go horribly, horribly wrong?

  I was thrilled to see the performance dates – but slightly confused by their presence. If the kids hadn’t yet been sorted into their final families, how could Jo – and Brent Council – possibly know the dates on which they would be performing? Could Jo, as well as being terrifyingly efficient and able to work round the clock on sub-That
cherite amounts of sleep, also see into the future? I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  The popularity of the How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? TV show meant that Sound of Music tickets were selling fast. The five pages of information about the show that Jo had sent included the bombshell that we had to book our seats through the box office like everyone else: i.e., no freebies or reductions for stage parents. On top of everything else, it seemed a little unfair. But by then I’d resigned myself to spending the money and was more concerned that, given the show’s popularity, tickets might have completely sold out by the time I knew the dates when Dora would actually be performing.

  So I emailed Jo Hawes hopefully, asking if there was any chance that the dates on Dora’s licence might be accurate and could I, therefore, book tickets? No chance. They would, she responded, almost certainly change. And some councils just didn’t include rehearsals in the licence. So that was all right then, Dora could attend the rehearsals. I didn’t book tickets, but continued to monitor availability on seetickets.com, the Really Useful Group’s ticket sales website. Most of the top-price tickets were already sold out for the first month or so, but at fifty-five quid apiece, I couldn’t see myself forking out for many of those anyway. There was plenty of availability in the upper circle, though, so I probably would be able to watch her long distance. Not to worry, I already knew what she looked like … I just wanted to make sure I could be there on her first night. Whenever that might be.