The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  Then there was the face. Where Dubois had merely rouged circles on his cheeks ‘in imitation of florid nature’, Joe wanted to make a canvas of his entire visage, painting a picture that was sufficiently bold to be seen at the back of a barn like Drury Lane, yet expressive enough to convey the subtleties of character in the intimacy of the Wells. Day after day he sat before the mirror, brush in hand, marking his features, wiping them clean, and starting again, until finally a face emerged from the candlelight that bore a grin so incendiary it refused to be erased. It began with a thick foundation of greasepaint, applied to every exposed inch of face, neck and chest and invading even the nostrils, the ears and inside the lips. He fixed it with a cloud of powder, then painted a blood-red wound, a mile-wide smear of jam, to form the gaping, gluttonous cavern of a mouth. The eyes, wide and rolling, were arched by thick brows whose incredulous curve belied their owner’s mendacity, while each cheek received a red chevron that conveyed insolently rude health while being simultaneously suggestive of some exotic beast of Hindu demonology. The whole was topped with a wig, or rather a series of wigs, beneath which he hid his own thick brown curls: red Mohicans, blue three-tufted plumes, an orange and green thistle that was half plumber’s plunger, half fox’s brush.

  With his hands in gloves and his feet in slippers, no part of Joe Grimaldi was left uncovered by this supreme comic being, part-child, part-nightmare. It was one of the most significant theatrical developments of the nineteenth century, and he dubbed it simply ‘Joey’.

  When the season opened and he went to work, the newness of his Clown was immediately evident. As Dibdin had noted during the run of Peter Wilkins, what came through clearest was the degree of mind he brought to clowning. Though still a gifted physical performer, Joe had never performed in a circus, on horseback or played clown-to-therope, and as such, he gave acrobatics far less emphasis than past performers had. Shifting the attention from tumbling to a fuller sense of character, his Clown had a keener intelligence and a broader palette of emotions than that of Dubois, who had been content to play the halfwit. It was a range he achieved with his incredible face, the single most remarkable face in the history of British comedy, a ‘countenance’, wrote the London Magazine, that ‘is a whole pantomime in itself’. Those who saw it uniformly declared it ‘indescribable’, but when they could be persuaded to hazard a description called it an ‘encyclopaedia of wit’ perpetually animated with ‘a thousand odd twitches and unaccountable absurdities oozing out at every pore’, so flexible that each feature seemed infinitely elastic and could be independently controlled. His eyes, ‘large, globular, and sparkling’, carried on ‘without the aid of each other; one eye was quietly silent and serious, whilst the other would be engaged in the most elaborate and mischievous wink’. With one look, he could accomplish ‘more … than his rivals could effect by the most injurious and elaborate transformations’. His ‘oven-mouth’ had a ‘never-ending power of extension’, his chin touching the buttons of his waistcoat. Even his nose could assume character. It was, in the words of one witness, ‘a vivacious excrescence capable of exhibiting disdain, fear, anger, and even joy’.

  Joey made an instant impression. The audience loved his explosive insanity and dedication to the pursuit of what Henry Downes Miles called ‘clown atrocity’, moving Dibdin to declare that nothing short of a ‘New School for Clowns’ had been founded at Sadler’s Wells. It was an inspired comic creation, the definitive articulation of Joe’s unrivalled gifts, his professional commitment and long-standing ambitions. There were influences, of course: Delpini’s recklessness, Dubois’s malice (recast as a playful fondness for torture), and the Signor’s irresistible tendency to meddle and remake, along with a liberal dash of all the gypsies, bandits, hermits and revolutionaries he had ever played in the course of his long apprenticeship.

  Joey was also an emotional homunculus, a patchwork fabricated from the emotional tatters and psychological compartmentalisation that had reshaped him since Maria’s death, that provided access to a universe uncontaminated by adult disappointments and the consequences of mortality. Key to this was the retreat into childhood, as every aspect of his Clown, from his manic energy and schoolboy clothes, to his insatiable appetite for sausages and larcenous will, was suggestive of pre-adolescent desire: ‘He always appeared to us to represent a grown child,’ wrote the periodical Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography, ‘waking to perception, but wondering at every object he beholds.’

  For Grimaldi, though, the return to childhood was categorically not a return to innocence – there was little comfort to be had in revisiting a period of his life that had been unrelentingly complex and traumatic. Rather, being an overgrown child confirmed him as an outsider, incapable of conforming to adult laws, and perpetually excluded from Harlequin and Columbine’s marital embrace. This feeling of alienation reflected a puerile, under-developed sexuality, for even though Joey was a form of drag, an experiment in costume and cosmetics that allowed him to explore the boundaries of his identity, it was a transvestism of arrested, rather than embellished, sexuality. Disrupting Harlequin’s hymnal dance was the sole reason for his existence, although his motivation was not jealousy or a desire to possess Columbine, but rather the opportunity to mock infatuation through ‘mincing affectation’, grotesque leers and parodies of ardent love. It was adult desire mimicked by a ten-year-old boy, or the queasy prurience of one who uses obscenity to mask a deeper aversion to intimacy. Abandoned, isolated and incapable of passion, Joey was not an escape from the self, he was a confrontation with it.

  For all Grimaldi’s advances in clowning and his audiences’ ecstatic responses, as the season drew to a close it looked increasingly as if the Wells would record another loss. In a last-ditch attempt to claw back some profit, Dibdin arranged a boxing match between the champion of England, Jem Belcher, and the ‘Father of the Art’, Daniel Mendoza. It was not entirely untried – Covent Garden had tacked a match between Mendoza and his rival Richard Humphries to the end of Aladdin some years before – and the crowds returned in riotous full voice. Encouraged, Dibdin engaged a stable of boxers to fight nightly bouts, but again the magistrates closed him down. It was a dismal end to the season and rumours began to circulate that the proprietors were going to sell. It was the last thing Joe wanted to hear as he and the heavily pregnant Mary prepared to move to Exeter. Convinced that his sole chance at being a patent Clown had passed, he was in a bleak mood.

  Fortunately, a reconciliation with Drury Lane came about, although how is not entirely clear. The Memoirs tell the story of a dramatic awakening at midnight by a porter carrying a message from Sheridan: Grimaldi was to report at rehearsals the following day. There had been a commotion during Blue-Beard, a piece in which Joe used to fight a combat before the final scene, thus giving the carpenters time to prepare the complicated scenery. (Scene changes in afterpieces could be painfully slow. The King, having once commanded a performance of The Castle Spectre and Blue-Beard together, was politely told that if it was to end by midnight, it would be necessary to commence the show straight after lunch.) Having failed to arrange a replacement, Kemble left the bored audience with nothing to look at but the curtain, and they began to shout and boo, threatening to make Kemble fight the combat himself. Things rapidly deteriorated and the entire play had to be abandoned. Sheridan was supposedly furious, appearing backstage and demanding an explanation, with the result that Kemble was dressed down and Grimaldi reinstated with an additional pound a week. Satisfying though this would have undoubtedly been, it was impossible, as Kemble was travelling and Blue-Beard had not been in the repertoire for at least ten months. Was it an honest mistake, or a fantasy of triumph intended to confirm the reality of his persecution by serving justice on the man who had done him wrong?

  However it happened, by the autumn of 1802, Joe was back at Drury Lane and Mary was spared the long and potentially hazardous journey to Exeter. Two months later, on 21 November, she was safely delivered of a son, Joseph Samuel William Grimaldi.
Joe was overjoyed, and made earnest, if not difficult, promises to be a better father than the Signor had been. Ostensibly, at least, Joseph Samuel was born into a much more settled environment than his father, with the love and attention of two doting parents. In spite of the recent uncertainty, the family was also enjoying a period of relative prosperity.

  Mary returned to the Drury Lane chorus two weeks after giving birth, and though she only earned a pound a week, when it was counted alongside Joe’s fees from both theatres they could reckon on a household income of around £180 a year. On top of this came the trips to Mrs Baker’s: those four nights in March had been worth £311 alone, making their total income for 1802 equivalent to that of an affluent tradesman. In addition, Mary had persuaded Joe to apply for membership of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, an actor’s charity that provided a small pension in return for weekly contributions. Though pantomimists were generally ineligible for the Fund as they weren’t actors, over the years Joe had accumulated enough small speaking parts to qualify. It was an excellent move. Young and coming from perpetually impoverished theatrical families, Joe and Mary were unused to money and spent freely.

  Such profligacy did not go unnoticed and, coupled with Joe’s rising visibility, attracted some unwanted attention, most notably from a City gentleman named Charles Newland, who approached the Grimaldis a few weeks after their first lavish Christmas with the baby. His connection to the family is uncertain, though the Memoirs suggest that he was known to Joe as a wealthy and respectable businessman, possibly one of the many new acquaintances he had made after the success of Love and Magic, the 1802 pantomime that had seen injurious crushes at the Drury Lane box office and casual labourers booking expensive boxes just to guarantee a seat. Newland asked to borrow some money for a business venture, claiming that his own capital was all profitably tied up. He must have been particularly persuasive, for Joe gave him £599, a sum that the Memoirs implausibly claim he’d found on the street outside the Tower of London some three years before.

  Whatever the actual provenance of this golden egg, Joe happily handed it over, and in a virtual repeat of the fraud perpetrated on his father’s estate by Joseph Hopwood, it immediately became clear he’d been cheated. Word came that Newland’s businesses had failed, followed rapidly by the news that he’d died trying to flee his creditors by crossing to America. It was a hard blow to endure, especially as the totemic Tower Hill treasure had been found on the same day he’d asked for Maria’s hand in marriage. A fool and his money are easily parted, and it would set the pattern for the rest of his life.

  Joe’s personal financial problems mirrored those of the Wells, where the rumours proved to be true. The disappointment of the previous season, following hard on the heels of an expensive refurbishment, had persuaded the proprietors to rid themselves of their unprofitable theatre, and shares were being offered at a quarter of their original price. The plummeting values were the result of troubling news from abroad – the Peace of Amiens had come undone and it was universally believed that Napoleon’s next move would be the conquest of Britain.

  William Siddons was particularly affected by the threat. Constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and locked in a perpetual struggle for authority with his wife, he was convinced that the days of theatricals were numbered and was trying to persuade his partners to get out before they were all overrun. One day, while he was casually stealing a look at the contents of Siddons’s desk, Charles Dibdin uncovered a plan to sell the Wells to the dramatist Frederick Reynolds and the actor John Fawcett. Alarmed at the prospect of losing his job, he confronted Siddons with his discovery, refusing to leave his office until he had extracted a promise that he would have first refusal if the theatre was put up for sale. The only problem was money. Dibdin had none, but he busily set about building a syndicate with sufficient capital to meet Siddons’s asking price that consisted of himself, Richard Hughes, who retained his share, the scene painter Robert Andrews, the composer William Reeve, and two businessmen, Thomas Barfoot, a bankrupt grocer with a roving eye who had had the good fortune to marry the daughter of Penton, the rich north London builder, and his friend William Yarnold. The final share went to Dibdin’s brother, Thomas, happy to resume his acquaintance with the Wells as a sleeping partner.

  Having successfully purchased William Siddons’s share of the theatre, the owners decreed that they would begin their first season by doing ‘everything upon a liberal and magnificent scale; and to give such Salaries as would tempt performers of Merit to engage with us’. The resolution was celebrated with a sumptuous dinner at the Hugheses’ house in the Wells’s yard, at which Charles Dibdin got incredibly drunk.

  The following day he awoke with a sore head and a flash of inspiration. They would attract business by restoring the old custom of selling cheap wine with the price of admission. Accordingly, the advertisements for 1803 heralded ‘New Proprietors, New Management, New Performers, New Pieces, New Music, New Scenery, New Dresses, New Decorations, and Old Wine at 1s. 3d. per pint!!!’ It was populism on a grand scale but, as usual, Dibdin’s feel for the public’s fancy was spot on. Then came the expected news: on 18 May 1803, just one month into the new ownership, Britain declared war on France and suddenly a country that always thought of itself as an exporter of wars was under siege. Invasion was said to be imminent, sending the population into a frenzy of fearful speculation, stoked by rumours of tunnels dug under the Channel, fleets of giant balloons that could carry three hundred French marines each, and a slough of propaganda cataloguing the ‘cruelty of the Corsican usurper’ while simultaneously berating the effeminacy that had allowed Britain to become so weak. Chains of Martello towers appeared along the coasts of Suffolk, Essex, Sussex and Kent, from which soldiers scanned the horizon for signs of an advancing armada as the people readied themselves to repel the horde. ‘From being a nation of shopkeepers,’ wrote Henry Angelo, as citizen militias up and down the country organised for war, ‘we became a nation of arms.’

  By the autumn of 1803, more than 342,000 men across Britain had joined volunteer corps. One of the first was Jack Bologna, who enlisted with the regiment of John Barber Beaumont, an insurance magnate and Royal Academician whose troops spent their Sundays fencing and shooting at targets at the Montpelier Tea Gardens in Kennington, south of the Thames.

  Contrary to William Siddons’s expectations, however, instead of becoming marginalised as an unnecessary frivolity, theatre became more popular than ever. Sadler’s Wells had always incorporated warfare into its entertainment through its re-creations of battles, hospitality to sailors and long-standing tradition of announcing victories from the stage, but now, with the constant threat of the French inducing Londoners to eat, drink and be merry, its happy atmosphere of booze and pugnacity perfectly complemented the national mood.

  Dibdin couldn’t believe his luck. ‘As far as my experience goes,’ he wrote many years later, ‘theatres (in London at least) prosper most during War.’ Crisis brought a relevancy to the repertoire and an unexpected depth and piquancy to performances that both reflected and produced the fervent loyalty and turtle-fed John Bullism of its audience. Through their embodiment on stage, many popular images and stereotypes of the struggle against France were given a symbolic patina that they wouldn’t otherwise have possessed, galvanised into patriotic ideals by the proscenium frame. It was a spirit to which pantomime became indivisibly fused, using magic and ridicule to repel the enemy, such as when Bologna’s Harlequin destroyed French balloons at the Wells, thwarting an aerial invasion in Goody Two Shoes; or, Harlequin Alabaster.

  If Harlequin was a silent commando, Joey the Clown was an artillery barrage. Grimaldi’s innovations had already cut Clown’s ties to his Continental forebears, but it was during the isolation of the Napoleonic Wars that he emerged as a uniquely British figure who represented the epitome of national defiance. This was partly a product of Sadler’s Wells’s repertory system, and the permeability between an actor’s various roles. For example, Dibdin had cast
Joe as John Bull the previous year in a pantomime called The Wizard’s Wake, which required him to beat up a character called ‘Citoyen François’ (played by Frank Hartland) at the Gates of Calais; as the war came closer still, he had opened the season with a prelude in which the characters of Clown and John Bull were virtually fused in Joe:

  John Bull is my name,

  None my spirit can tame,

  I’m upright and downright with all.

  I laugh and grow fat,

  Crack my joke and all that,

  And live at old Liberty Hall.

  How ironic that this half-Italian actor, a child of the Babel-tongued theatrical slums, should become synonymous with national pride. But as Clown, displaying his battling obstinacy and contempt for authority, he absorbed and reflected all the stereotypes of Britishness that were championed in opposition to what was perceived as humourless French despotism.