Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  Jo emailed me back the next day telling me that she thought I was over-reacting: they just wanted to check that there wasn’t anyone else giving Dora contrary advice, no criticism was intended, and Frank would sort it out and everything would be fine. I replied ascribing my hysteria to PMT – which was, mostly, a lie; I suspect I would have (over-)reacted in exactly the same way at any other time of the month – and then called her for more reassurance. She gave me some, reminding me that Dora was six years old and that in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour professional show, it’s not actually surprising if a six-year-old makes mistakes and that it can actually increase the ‘aah factor’. I didn’t tell Dora that bit. I didn’t want to give her any ideas.

  As the show, the kids and their parents bedded in, everything started to settle down into a regular rhythm. Within a few weeks, we mostly knew what would be happening when, which made having a life marginally more possible: although, as The Sound of Music was such fun, I didn’t necessarily want one. I found myself watching the show about once every two weeks. Around the middle of November, I’d discovered www.theatremonkey.com, which not only provides reviews of West End shows, but also features some very useful information about which seats in each theatre are the best value for money, which offer sufficient legroom for people who need it more than I do, and which are restricted view. Here I found out that there are, at the Palladium, standing tickets. Unable to afford the top-price tickets that Jo had organised for us, I took to buying one of those for £20 each time I wanted to watch the show. You stand at the back of the stalls, where you can lean on a brass rail. The view isn’t bad at all – because you’re underneath the royal circle, you miss out on the enormous red banner with the German Imperial Eagle on it, but other than that, you can see just about everything. There’s also seat XX1 that, for health and safety reasons, is never sold. If you get in quickly, you can sit in it once the show starts. But I found myself often choosing to stand, even when no one else had taken the seat. There were often one or two other parents or strangers there to chat with (the most exciting of whom was Sister Mary, the Real Life Nun from the US) and, as quite a fidgety person, I enjoyed the freedom of movement. Also – a bonus – if I needed the loo in the interval, I could beat the queue, even if I waited until the last glorious note of Lesley Garrett’s ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’.

  While I was loving being in the audience, Dora was loving her time on stage and beginning – uh-oh – to enjoy signing autographs at the stage door afterwards. Even though I hadn’t wanted her to get any ideas, over the next few weeks she started to get some anyway.

  In Noel Streatfeild’s classic Ballet Shoes, when Pauline Fossil, the actress of the family, lands her first job (she’s twelve) in the theatre as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, she becomes ‘very conceited’. The combination of the applause, the reviews and the fan letters, and the fact that the adult cast members are kind to her and obviously think she is good at her job, all go to her head. She starts expecting her adoptive sisters Petrova (the aspiring mechanic) and Posy (the dancer) to fetch and carry for her at home, and Winifred, her talented but plain understudy, to do the same for her in the dressing room. Eventually Pauline’s behaviour spills over into the rest of the theatre, and the boss of the company makes her the understudy and Winifred Alice for one performance. This upsets her enough that a good cry (privately, in the bathroom at home, naturally), initially about how unfair the whole business is, segues, as she calms down, into a consideration of her own behaviour, which then mends itself. Shirley Temple Black wrote in her autobiography Child Star about her own ‘sense of self-importance’ as a child – which affected her behaviour towards others in a way she regrets (and she seems to be a woman with very few regrets): ‘Only an idiot could have lived in the glare of such a central spotlight and been unaware of her prominence.’2 It is nigh-on impossible for anyone to remain completely unaffected by public adulation, let alone a child.

  When Dora was on stage, every time she opened her mouth, a large chunk of the 2,300-strong audience went ‘aaah’. After the show, there would usually be a crowd of people hanging round the stage door. A few would ask the children for their autographs, but most would clap and cheer when they came out and tell them how brilliant they were – and in the case of the little ones, how cute. Dora didn’t remain unaffected by public adulation.

  It started with her coming home from school and announcing, ‘You can call me Gretl.’

  ‘Er, no. We will call you Dora because that is your name.’

  ‘But I want you to call me Gretl.’

  ‘Well we’re not going to.’

  And ‘It doesn’t matter if I get things wrong, because I’m the youngest’. Yes, well, but that’s not quite the attitude …

  Her tantrums increased in both frequency and, although I hadn’t thought it physically possible, volume. She was, evidently, receiving some excellent vocal training.

  ‘I am cute,’ she insisted on one occasion when she had been anything but. I explained that in my eyes, cute is as cute does.

  ‘But I am cute. Everyone says so.’

  She started expecting more things to be done for her: ‘I have a dresser at the theatre. Why can’t you help me put my school uniform on at home?’

  At the theatre, Russ, the chaperone, did his bit to help the kids keep their feet firmly on the ground. ‘I joke with the children. “Come on now, let’s practise for your next job. Kentucky Fried Chicken.” And the kids are laughing their heads off. They sit down: “Would you like a Kentucky, sir?” Just to keep them in reality.’

  Back home, I tried to do mine.

  ‘Yes, sometimes you are cute. At other times, when you’re naughty, you’re not. And part of the reason people say you’re cute is that you’re playing a cute part. It’s your job.’ In a quiet moment we discussed the difference between being cute and playing a cute part. The process was helped by the fact that Dora had already announced that she wanted to play a baddie so that she could wear a wig. I didn’t quite understand the connection, but hey, whatever bit her biscuit …

  ‘If you were playing the part of somebody nasty,’ I pointed out, ‘you wouldn’t want the audience to think you were really a nasty person, would you?’

  That made a small inroad. She shook her head. I could tell she was thinking about it. But what made all the difference was Julie Andrews Edwards’s book. We were reading The Great American Mousical whilst waiting for the next batch of Harry Potters to arrive from Amazon. Set amongst a troupe of theatrical mice on a Broadway substage, the book features a big-headed prima donna mouse called Adelaide, who throws regular tantrums. She is also unkind to the pretty ingénue mouse, Wendy, with whom Dora identified. One night while I was reading her an episode in which the leading lady is particularly nasty, Dora turned to me, her eyes open wide in a state of shock and declared ‘I don’t want to end up like Adelaide,’ and instantly mended her ways.

  There’s not much you can rely on in life. But you can usually count on Julie Andrews. And I was very proud of Dora for having worked it all out for herself, and – once she’d figured out right from wrong – for sorting out her own behaviour.

  Although Dora has a half-sister on her father’s side, she doesn’t live with us, so Dora is, effectively, an only child. This meant that we didn’t have to cope with the effects of her being in the show on any siblings. It can be hard to be the brother or sister of a child who’s doing something high profile. To start with, an awful lot of time and energy goes into organising the performer’s schedule – and that’s a lot of time and energy that isn’t available to you. Then there’s the kudos they’re getting, the excitement generated by what they’re doing, and the level at which they’re doing it, which can make your everyday achievements at school and any extracurricular activities pale into insignificance. And that’s before you even consider the money, which, as we’re talking theatre, while it may not be much in real terms, is likely to be a lot more than any pocket money your parents are giving
you. ‘It’s not fair,’ complained the younger brother of one of the Sound of Music kids about his sister. ‘She gets all the fame AND all the money.’ ‘I suppose,’ sighed the older sister of another, a boy who has spent several years in the business, ‘that there’s absolutely no point asking if we’re going on holiday this year. We won’t be, because he’ll be working.’ Low-level grumbling, and the sense of injustice that your needs are treated as less important than your sibling’s, can, sometimes, escalate. ‘I could,’ Paul Petersen told me, ‘recite more than a score of suicides from the less famous siblings of prominent child stars.’

  Obviously, if you work hard as a parent to even things up, and have a value system in which the performing child is viewed as ‘just a little girl who’s having a very nice time’ – which is how one of the mums described her daughter to a radio producer who rang up to ask if she could interview her about what it was like being the mother of a star (she declined the invitation) – there’s a better chance of dealing with sibling jealousy. But it’s not a given. The fact is, if your brother or sister is doing something very exciting and getting paid for doing it, whilst simultaneously taking up more parental time and energy than usual because they have to be taken to and collected from somewhere inconvenient at difficult times of the day, it’s tough. Who wouldn’t feel just a little hard-done-by? Paul Petersen told me about his family’s experiences.

  ‘I got a wonderful job in a big movie called Houseboat, with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. It meant moving to Washington DC and living in a hotel. What an upset for my family! My mother left behind my older sister Pam and her infant daughter Patty and her job at Lockheed and came with me for five months. There were ramifications to that choice.’

  Three weeks before Paul spoke to me – ‘and, mind you, this is forty-five years after the main fame part of my life – Pam met a gentleman at a party. She had already been warned that this fellow knew she was my sister – imagine living with that for your whole life. For the first time in my fifty years of celebrity … when she met this man, in his mid-sixties, he said to her, “Pam, how did Paul’s fame make you feel?” It was the first time someone asked her about the impact on her life.’

  I asked Mark Lester how his sister coped with his success. ‘I don’t know. Maybe she had issues with it. She always used to trail along in my wake and was in a couple of films I did, in the background as an extra. But she was a chubby little girl and really not very photogenic.’

  ‘Er … are you good friends now?’ I asked. ‘How would she feel about being described like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s true, she was quite chubby as a child.’

  Back in London, Laurie suddenly needed some of my attention. One late November morning he woke up in agony, his left knee so swollen it looked like one of his buttocks had slipped down his leg and settled there. Several trips to our local Accident and Emergency unit proved fruitless. A couple of doctors extracted fluid from the joint – a procedure that simply added extra pain to the whole situation as his knee just swelled up again. In desperation, he found a private specialist and forked out for an emergency operation. This was followed by a month on crutches and him not being able to work during December, usually his busiest month of the year (juggling on crutches is harder than juggling on stilts, something he often did in his twenties). Worse than that, we also couldn’t go away anywhere because Dora was working and her contract didn’t permit it. And worst of all, his wife was completely obsessed with The Sound of Music and the whole phenomenon of child performers and didn’t seem able to sustain a conversation about anything else. So although I was there for him physically and made sure that almost everything that needed to be done got done (bar the housework, obviously), I wasn’t there for him emotionally in the way that you would expect a just-married wife to be there for her new husband – especially a husband who was in excruciating pain.

  It wasn’t long before I bored him to Bournemouth, where he went to spend a few days recuperating in Lilli’s flat, where he was properly looked after, didn’t have to listen to a one-track monologue about The Sound of Music, and also didn’t have to deal with stairs.

  1 Shirley Temple Black, Child Star, pp. 13–14.

  2 Shirley Temple Black, Child Star, p. 152.

  A CRAZY PLANET FULL OF CRAZY PEOPLE

  I DID WONDER, when Dora first started rehearsing for The Sound of Music, what impression she would get of Nazism. Would she pick up on any of the brutality that’s hinted at in the show’s story? Or would she just sail through, having fun like most other six-year-olds would, and not notice the political stuff? Would she end up thinking that a Nazi was a nice person who put on a costume and pretended to be nasty on stage?

  Naturally, it’s a particularly sensitive topic when you’re Jewish. I – and many of my generation, born in the sixties, whose parents were born in the thirties – imbibed the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust from our families along with, and as part of, our earliest religious education. It wasn’t history for our parents and grandparents: even for those of us whose families weren’t murdered.

  Nazism hadn’t loomed large in Dora’s early childhood in the way that it had in mine. In fact, The Sound of Music was her first encounter with it. Jeremy Sams’s direction and Robert Jones’s set design highlight the political aspects of the show. Captain von Trapp and Baroness Schraeder break off their relationship not (as in the film) because the captain is in love with Maria but because (as in the original stage version) they disagree on whether or not to resist the Nazis should they invade Austria. When the scene changes for the von Trapps’ tense performance at the Salzburg Festival concert, huge Nuremberg Rally-style red banners festooned with black swastikas drop down at the sides of the stage and an even bigger one with the Imperial German eagle stretches over the audience’s heads, completely dominating the theatre. The audience always gasps in shock.

  But all this terrifying imagery went completely over Dora’s head – both literally and figuratively. During the scariest scene – the one that follows directly on from the concert, when the family is hiding from the Nazis in the graveyard at the back of the abbey – the actors were crouched under the rotating oval, blowing raspberries at each other and trying not to laugh. According to Dora, this was all started by her stage dad, Alex Hanson, and continued enthusiastically by all the children as well as Sophie and Connie.

  Dora’s entirely understandable failure to grasp the evil nature of Nazism became clear one Saturday morning shortly after her cousins had been to watch the show. We were at my sister Nikki’s house. The grown-ups – me, Nikki and our dad – were relaxing on the sofas, gossiping, Dora, Millie and Freddie were snacking and chatting round the dining table. It wasn’t long before we heard some loud giggles and repeated cries of ‘Heil!’ We went to look. The children were Nazi-saluting each other and laughing manically. It was funny, but we stopped them and told them not to do it anywhere else. Heiling wouldn’t have gone down well in Millie and Freddie’s (Jewish) school playground.

  On the way home, I started trying to explain to Dora about Nazism, and why we’d stopped their game. I managed to avoid my usual tendency to pitch my explanations slightly above the appropriate level, feeling that a lecture on the origins of Fascism, the Weimar constitution and the history of anti-Semitism might go even further over Dora’s head than the banners. So I told her a bit about Laurie’s mother Lilli, who, at the age of ten, left home in what is now Wroclaw, then Breslau, and travelled to France with her father. She was eleven when he sent her off to England, alone, in 1938, on a kindertransport boat from Boulogne. ‘Can you imagine,’ I asked Dora, ‘what it must have felt like for her to leave her mummy and daddy and come to another country, not speaking the language and not knowing if she’d ever see them again?’ Dora could and did imagine. She cried a lot and needed a very big cuddle before she stopped and asked why the Nazis were so horrible.

  December. Dora bounced about on my lap chattering excitedly and clapping enthusias
tically while we watched Kettles and Alicia on TV singing ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Do-Re-Mi’ on the Royal Variety Performance. The girls had emailed ‘good luck’ to each other for their respective television debuts (I’d tried to monitor Dora’s spelling, but hadn’t always been quick enough) and loved watching each other perform.

  A couple of days later, I was surprised, after the recent concern that Dora was ‘deviating from the blocking’, when an email from Jo indicated that she was scheduled to do Blue Peter with Kettles. The next morning, Dora woke up and told me that she’d just dreamt that Adrianna was doing it instead of her. Later that day, Jo rang to tell me that Adrianna, not Dora, would be on Blue Peter. Dora was slightly upset that she wasn’t going to be on TV again, but her disappointment was tempered by excitement. ‘Mummy,’ she exclaimed, gripping both my arms and jumping up and down, ‘I saw into the future. I really did. Does that mean I might be magic? Like in Harry Potter?’ Her innate sense of justice kicked in too: she and Alicia had already been on TV, Lauren was due to perform with Mittens on New Year Live on New Year’s Eve. So it was only fair that Adrianna should get a go too. Shana, Adrianna’s mum, rang later to check that Dora wasn’t too upset, so I was able to reassure her that she wasn’t. In the event, as well as the in-the-studio live performance featuring Kettles and Adrianna, they showed film of Kettles rehearsing with Alicia as well as electronic press kit footage of Kettles with Dora.