By the autumn of 1800, the public’s appetite for Gothic spectacle had finally reached a peak, and John Philip Kemble took the decision to reintroduce pantomime to Drury Lane after a gap of three years. Searching for someone to take charge of pantomimical affairs, he hit upon James Byrne, a walnut-faced forty-five-year-old, who had served his apprenticeship at Drury Lane when the Signor was still maître de ballet. Byrne was an unusual choice. Jaded and weary, and not at all certain he wanted to be in the theatre, he had recently returned from three years in America with his wife and son, where he had performed lengthy stints in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. He had found the experience so disagreeable that he had decided to leave show business altogether and make a go of it working on a plantation in Jamaica.
Having reached the Caribbean, however, tales of hardship and fatal diseases sent the family packing before they had had time to settle in. Ungratifying work at the Royal Circus followed, and a chance to join the company at Covent Garden was squandered when the audience booed him for his ‘silly’ dance.
Kemble’s offer of employment was odd, given Byrne’s recent form, but then pantomime was low priority and he had a familiar face. Byrne, too, had his misgivings. Like everyone else, he found the new theatre unwieldy, too big for the intimate visual jokes of pantomime, and making transformations so laboured that one critic compared them to ‘the putting about of a large vessel heavily laden’. His cast were similarly uninspiring, makeshift and inexperienced compared with the formidable troupe being assembled at Covent Garden, where Thomas Dibdin, still not being taken seriously enough for his liking, had formed a fertile partnership with an actor and arranger called Charles Farley. Together they had mounted some of the most original pantomimes ever seen, supported by Jack and Pietro Bologna, recently hired as Harlequin and Clown, and the old but still brilliant Carlo Delpini as Pantaloon.
With little to lose, Byrne set about making changes and, in the process, became Joe’s unlikely saviour. His success in Peter Wilkins duly noted, Byrne promoted Joe to Clown over Dubois, who was dropped completely. Next, he declared that if the pantomime was going to catch the public’s attention, it was necessary to innovate. A dancer by both training and inclination, Byrne disliked the stiff athleticism that had characterised the role of Harlequin since the days of John Rich. Rich’s Harlequin had been first and foremost a thief and an acrobat, who, when not leaping, would stand in one of five conventional postures, or ‘attitudes’, representing Admiration, Defiance, Determination, Flirtation or Thought, which, over the years, had become rigidly formalised and inelegant. Byrne favoured a freer and more balletic approach that would retain Harlequin’s trademark gymnastics but incorporate them within a liquid and unbroken sequence of movements.
To achieve the full effect, it was necessary also to change his costume, and in a move that mirrored Dibdin’s innovations in Peter Wilkins, he replaced the full-faced vizard with a small Venetian eye mask, and swapped the loose shirt and trousers for skin-tight fleshings that he decorated with more than fifty thousand spangles. The new Harlequin cut an ethereal figure, a sleek and shimmering silhouette, whose phallic bat and power to transform the world presented an idealised and erotic vision of the trim and dandified masculinity currently being celebrated in men’s fashions. The changes would prove as important for Joe as they did for Byrne: during rehearsals, the players noticed that Harlequin’s new form incontrovertibly altered the comic balance of power. With Harlequin romantic and mercurial, instead of mischievous and beggarly, the undisputed agent of misrule was indubitably Clown.
Byrne unveiled his changes on 22 December 1800, in a Welsh-themed pantomime called Harlequin Amulet; or, the Magic of Mona, and won enough praise to see the show run well into the following April. Joe appeared in almost every scene, first as a ‘big head’ Punch, concealed beneath a heavy wooden disguise, and then as Clown. The part required immense physical exertion, but when the ludic mist descended Joe did not shirk, and the oblivion it provided was exactly what he sought. The momentum was successfully maintained over at Sadler’s Wells, where the 1801 season provided him with further opportunities to assert his ascendancy over Dubois. Dibdin had again decided to double the clowns for his opening pantomime, Harlequin Alchemist, although this time he aimed to exploit their rivalry rather than maintain the peace, providing them with a bit of business that asked the audience to decide who should stay and who should go. The setting was a mock duel – a perfect piece of symbolism – and, with challenges issued and seconds appointed, the clowns of Sadler’s Wells took to the field to prepare their chosen weapons, the victor being hailed as he who could pull the most hideous face. After rounds and rounds of epic gurning, the audience’s cheers delivered Joe as their champion, and consistently returned the same result for the following eight weeks.
When the second pantomime of the Sadler’s Wells season débuted in June, Dubois had been relegated to Pero. As Clown, Joe gave no quarter, basking in his new-found favour and relishing every chance to upstage his old tormentor. Dubois retaliated with everything he had, but his tricks lacked the impact of former years, and sensing he was losing ground, he began to lose his temper. His humiliation was made all the more acute because his son and three of his apprentices were in the cast, nightly witnesses to his defeat at Joe’s hand. With ‘the latter intrenching so much on the popularity of the former’, as Dibdin recalled it, Dubois ‘grew discontented’, raving at the management and demanding top billing and an immediate increase in his salary, which Dibdin refused. Though he had forty years’ experience, and had transformed the art of clowning by harnessing the danger of the equestrian ring and bringing it into the intimate setting of the Wells, Dubois was yesterday’s man, and for once the cabal at the Sir Hugh Myddleton failed to rally round him. Dubois left the Wells under a cloud, and though he continued to perform right up until he died a pauper’s death in 1814, ‘he shone with diminished rays’.
Dibdin certainly had no time for regrets. Urbane and buffoonish though he frequently seemed, he was made of more calculating stuff, and no doubt pitted Dubois against Grimaldi as a means of cutting out dead wood and further pleasing his master, Hughes. Whatever machinations were at work, Joe had realised his life-long dream of being Clown at both Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane, a unique accomplishment he had marked by shooting himself in the foot.
Without clowning, Joe might never have made it through those difficult months but, laid up in Baynes Row away from the consolation of work, the consequences of taking refuge in a fictional identity began to catch up with him. Though his onstage persona insulated him from the pain of Maria’s death, it simultaneously walled him off from his private life, and now, in the long days of enforced rest, it was obvious that he was dwelling on shrunken ground. The clearest evidence lay right before him in the pretty girl who so assiduously observed her daily rituals, bathing his foot and tying his bandages with vocational patience. She had come to him every day for a month, and continued to come even after his foot had healed. Though Joe came to rely on her, and probably took advantage of her, she mostly left him perplexed.
As soon as he was sufficiently healed, he leapt at the opportunity to return to work. An invitation had arrived to perform for the benefit of a comic singer called Lund, a sometime member of the Sadler’s Wells company who spent his winters on the same Kent circuit Thomas Dibdin had worked on. Excursions into provincial theatre were essential for ambitious performers who wanted to push their names out into the country and open up the possibility of lucrative tours. Touring was often the only way for actors to make real money, and while they grumbled about prostituting themselves before Philistine provincial audiences, the ample rewards sent them out on the road year after year. Sarah Siddons did it to fund her profligate family and underwrite her husband’s theatrical speculations; Dora Jordan did it to pay her taxes and support the Duke of Clarence and his numerous children; John Philip Kemble, owed thirteen hundred pounds in back pay by Sheridan, simply needed to live.
&nbs
p; Given that he was only offered two nights in Rochester, Joe’s expectations were far humbler, but it was a positive step nonetheless. The theatre was one of several under the management of an indefatigable widow named Sarah Baker, the daughter of fairground performers who had worked at Sadler’s Wells in Rosoman’s day. Tough, profane and barely literate, hard work and ruthless economising had made her one of the most formidable figures on the theatrical scene. At sixty-five, she undertook almost every aspect of the business herself, hiring the performers, balancing the books, taking the money and drafting advertisements by cutting the words out of old bills and sewing the bits back together like a blackmail note. Her efficiency even stretched to building her six theatres to exactly the same specifications to enable props, scenery and company to move from one to another with the minimum of fuss. Even the sitting rooms at the back were the same, and without the hour’s ride between venues, it was impossible to tell them apart. With her staff, which consisted of her sister, who doubled as actress, dancer, wardrobe-keeper and cook, and a prompter and general factotum who went by the name of ‘Bonny Long’ on account of being extremely tall and inordinately fat, she amassed a fortune that she banked in six large punch bowls that sat on top of her various bureaux.
Mrs Baker did not fail Joe, who made £160 for one night in an olio, and another as Scaramouch in Delpini’s Don Juan. Bonny Long paid him entirely in three-shilling pieces, a transaction made all the more bizarre by the prompter’s deformity: according to Thomas Dibdin, he had ‘ten fingers and no thumbs’. Joe brought the cash back to London, where Mary Bristow was waiting for him. At more than forty times his weekly salary, it was the most he had ever earned in his life, and the accompanying notion that he was suddenly a man of substance undoubtedly influenced his decision to propose to her.
They were married the following month, a fact recorded in the Memoirs in astonishingly neutral terms. ‘In gratitude for her kindness,’ they report, ‘Grimaldi married her on the following Christmas Eve, and it may be as well to state in this place that with her he lived for more than thirty years.’ That sentence constitutes the most substantial comment on the second Mrs Grimaldi until her death was recorded in 1834. The contrast with the fastidiously detailed recollections of anticipation and obstruction that marked his courtship of Maria Hughes could not be more striking, and its blank utility, along with its implication that marriage was Joe’s way of rewarding her for her loyalty, is a telling sign of his diminished emotional capacity. Yet, arguably, Mary’s elected role as nurse and self-effacing protectress of the wounded clown suggests that she shared his view of a relationship built on mutual charity or even communal pity, although ultimately there is no telling. For the rest of their lives, Mary Bristow remained an oblique and only partially rendered figure beside her husband, a shadow in the chorus, companion to a cumulatively sad love.
There was nothing like a honeymoon. Three days after the wedding, on 27 December 1801, Grimaldi was back at Drury Lane where, instead of commissioning a new pantomime, Kemble was happy for Harlequin Amulet to be revived with its existing cast. The show was graced with a visit from George III, resplendent in his general’s uniform and accompanied by four of his daughters. This was a special honour. The King did not visit Drury Lane often due to its strong affiliation with his obdurate eldest son, and he had been even less inclined since his last visit nineteen months ago when a suicidal madman had risen from the pit and fired a gun at him. The shot missed, and as members of the audience and orchestra had launched themselves at the would-be assassin, the King came to the front of his box to show his subjects he was unharmed. It was the second bullet to have missed him that day. The first had whizzed past him just after breakfast as he reviewed the 1st Foot Guards in Hyde Park, passing straight through the thigh of a clerk of the Allotment Department of the Royal Navy Office, who screamed and bled profusely, even after Lord Cathcart had valiantly asked him if he’d like to borrow his handkerchief to bind up the wound.
The second run of Harlequin Amulet closed in March 1802, when the prospect of making more money sent Joe back to Kent, playing two nights at Mrs Baker’s theatre in Maidstone and two in Canterbury. His professional successes were accumulating, though in the eyes of John Philip Kemble he was still very much a servant. During his stint with Mrs Baker, Kemble had announced Joe to appear early on the Easter Monday bill in clear contravention of his articles, which stipulated that he only performed in Drury Lane’s afterpieces once the season had begun at Sadler’s Wells.
On his return to London, Joe waited for the manager to explain the problem, but the lofty tragedian refused to entertain him, only asserting that he ‘must’ come. It was typical of the froideur Kemble mistook for dignity, a fatal flaw that in time would make him the greatest enemy of the British theatre-going public. But Kemble was beyond caring: the thankless round of daily aggravations that passed for management had left him a miserable, gouty, drug-abusing wreck. Not another word was said until 26 June, when Joe received an icy little note informing him that his contract had been terminated for the followi/ng season. Kemble underlined his distaste for the quarrel by having it signed by the prompter, William Powell, a petty snub deliberately belittling Joe’s two decades of service.
This was by no means the last time that Joe would be slighted by a Kemble, but for now it was one of the tragedian’s final acts as the manager of Drury Lane. In July he resigned, travelling to the Continent with his friend Robert Heathcoate for a nine-month tour, before returning to take up the management of Covent Garden.
If it had been the Signor who’d been so ignominiously dismissed, Kemble would have been in the infirmary and Grimaldi up before the beak (the Signor had kicked a man in the face for ill-treating him thus). Joe, though, was naturally timid and, instead of lashing out, turned his anger inward, feeding the paranoia that had eaten at him since early adolescence. With his particular talent for torment, he read dark motives into Kemble’s actions that became increasingly elaborate each time he raked them over. When he weighed them against the whispering campaign he’d endured at the Wells, they amounted to compelling evidence of a sustained conspiracy against him. His first response was to sue Sheridan, who as proprietor was accountable for the terms of his contract, but was urged against taking such a suicidal course by Richard Hughes, who counselled him to burn the spiteful missive and spend the winter season with him at the Exeter playhouse. The thought of provincial exile made Joe feel even worse, but he had little choice other than to agree. At least Hughes would guarantee him four pounds a week and a full benefit. It was more than he was getting from Kemble.
Before the term of his banishment could begin, Joe had another season to get through at the Wells. The theatre had been losing money since 1796, and as revenues declined, repairs had been repeatedly put off until it had gained a reputation as ‘the dirtiest and most antique theatre in London’. Musty boxes, a leaky roof and the ‘penurious manner in which it was appointed’ were the most obvious signs of decay, though in actuality the entire building was troublingly unsafe. As a last-ditch effort to reverse the downward slide, Hughes and Siddons freed up funds through a renegotiation of the lease and hired the architect and machinist Rudolph Cabanel (the brother of the company’s principal dancer, Eliza) to remodel the auditorium. The cost of changing the floor plan from a square to a much more contemporary horseshoe, with an enlarged pit and gallery and private boxes based on those at Drury Lane, was seventeen hundred pounds, an enormous expense that put additional pressure on the company to produce a good season. Dibdin rose to the challenge, churning out a dozen new entertainments while simultaneously puffing the elegance of the new house and stressing its fitness to ‘accommodate Parties of the Nobility, Gentry, etc.’.
Through a coincidence of public taste, rather than an unconscious expression of their embattled status, combat was the prominent theme of the year. Dibdin had been fortunate to lure Jack Bologna back to the Wells from the Royal Circus. Jack played Harlequin to Joe’s Clown, a line of
work in which, said the Morning Chronicle, they already ‘stood unrivalled’. Jack’s first job, however, was not pantomime but war, fighting Joe with a battleaxe in St George, the Champion of England, and again in a six-handed ‘Indian combat’ along with Hartland, Banks, Wells and Miller, in Ko and Zoa; or, the Belle Savage, The Times reporting that the ‘dying scene’ between the two friends was ‘truly affecting’.
Alongside pantomimes and burlettas, there were also some untested novelties, including pony races, an idea Dibdin had come across during his time in Dublin. Hughes did a deal with a local stable-master to provide animals and riders, while the understrappers threw open the large doors at the back of the stage, normally used for installing oversized scenery, to create an unobstructed view that went from the back of the theatre across the stage, through the large doors and over the courtyard to a racecourse laid from the entrance gates on Islington Road to a start/finish line just above the orchestra pit. Three laps was one mile. At first, the races went well, drawing large crowds eager for a punt, but the accompanying rowdiness annoyed the neighbours, who were especially angry at having their fences broken by boys climbing up to peer over the screens Dibdin had erected to prevent people watching without tickets. A summons duly arrived from the magistrate, and the races were commanded to stop.
Still smarting from Kemble’s slight, Joe, too, was under pressure, which doubled when Mary announced she was pregnant. He received the news with a mixture of joy and trepidation, given the indelible fact of Maria’s death. At least he could control his work and, as undisputed Clown at the Wells, he moved quickly to erase all trace of Dubois and stamp his own identity on the role. The first thing he changed was his look. As Dubois’s reputation had rested on his enormous range, he’d cared little for his appearance, dressing himself, as Dibdin recalled, in the traditional character of ‘a rustic booby, with red hair’, a costume that was at least thirty years out of date. With the season fast approaching, Joe retreated beneath the stage to experiment with costume and makeup, commissioning Mrs Lewis to provide a series of prototype outfits. He canvassed Bologna, Hartland and Davis for their opinions, each waiting patiently behind a screen for him to emerge in yet another ensemble. Tatty country liveries were ousted in favour of bold patterns, vivid colours and a kaleidoscopic medley of circles, stripes and hoops, the dilapidated old servant’s clothes discarded in favour of the costume of a ‘great lubberly loutish boy’, a stylised version of the shirt, ruff and pantaloons Joe had worn at Mr Ford’s Academy.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 12
