The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  7

  MOTHER GOOSE

  Well, wonders, for certain, they never will stop,

  The stage is transform’d to a poulterer’s shop:

  These fashions of Lunnun seem queer to a clown;

  Once the town pluck’d the geese, now a goose plucks the town.

  ‘John Grouse and Mother Goose’, sung with unbounded applause by Mr Emery, of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (1807)

  IT TOOK SIX DAYS for the company to get back from Dublin. The crossing, never pleasant, was worsened by foul weather, though the discomforts of travel only really made themselves felt after they landed at Holyhead. The booking agent had forgotten to reserve Joe a seat on the coach, and as Mary took her place inside, he was forced to sit outside with the luggage. None of the passengers was exempt from being bumped and jolted along the abysmal roads, rutted, muddy and often impassable outside summer, but Joe had to endure the added privations of rain and cold that no combination of greatcoats and blankets could repel.

  At Red Landford, they encountered a frost so intense it rendered him insensible. Literally frozen to his seat, he was revived only hours later, after a couple of ostlers had hauled him into an inn, bathed his feet in a tub of brandy and rubbed his body with astringents to restore the circulation. Cold reanimated the aggregated pains and injuries that on good days he could ignore, parcelling his body into fillets of deep aches striated by sharp, cartilaginous twinges. Having borne the brunt of a quarter-century of high leaps and heavy landings, the pain was worst in his legs. On winter mornings, his hamstrings were so tight he found it difficult to walk. Bone spurs in his heels and ankles felt like hot screws in his feet, while inside his knees grew the first signs of arthritic calcification.

  The road never treated Joe well, but thankfully there was little travelling that spring, and by summer he was enjoying relative ease. Bettymania was finally over. His image tarnished, the gilt of adulation had peeled and blistered, helped on its way by John Philip Kemble who, sensing that the ‘influx of pygmies’ would surely induce an ‘epidemic nausea’, delivered a public emetic calculated to shame the people back to their senses. It had been administered in November, three weeks before the boy was due to return to Covent Garden, and came in the form of his very own infant phenomenon, an eight-year-old girl called Miss Mudie. Casting her as Peggy in The Country Girl (one of Dora Jordan’s most popular roles), he treated the audience to the sickly spectacle of a child courted by a series of adult lovers, all of whom had to kneel to embrace her. The bounds of propriety had been pushed too far, and the disgusted audience hissed the child from the stage, although, to her credit, she refused to leave until she’d first come to the footlights to deliver a haughty rebuke. It was nasty and embarrassing, but it worked. The spell had been broken, the audience had been chastised, and no longer was the public willing to accept children playing adults.

  Things were also running smoothly at the Wells, where the battle of Trafalgar was playing with the apotheosis of Nelson rising from the water and ascending into the clouds. Joe, meanwhile, had signed a new three-year contract worth twelve pounds a week and two clear benefits free from overheads, good for another two or three hundred pounds each. The water had pushed the pantomime to the front of the bill, which meant that, for the first time in his career, Joe’s work had finished at the theatre before it was even dark. Hardly knowing what to do with himself, he took to ambling around the streets, taking in the sights and marvelling at the occupations of ordinary people ‘in perfect astonishment at finding himself there’.

  That summer, the Grimaldis took a cottage eight miles out of the city at Fallow Corner in the grounds of what is now Finchley Memorial Hospital. This small, agrarian community seated on the common a few miles above Kentish Town gave little JS the chance to enjoy the clean air and space his poor health badly needed. More than that, it reassured Joe to have his son as far away from the theatrical stews as possible. He didn’t want his boy to go on the stage. He already had an apprentice in Mary’s little brother, George, whom he had just taken on at the Wells, and Bettymania had only confirmed any lingering doubts. Instead JS lived quietly in the cottage with his mother for the duration of the summer season while Joe commuted, travelling between Finchley and Islington four or five times a week, spending the occasional night in Baynes Row when business detained him.

  Having acquired a neat little gig and a wily old horse, ‘a very steady one’ who could find his own way home in the dark, Joe was at liberty to spend a few hours in the Sir Hugh Myddleton after every performance, and it became his custom to take a few glasses with his friends before falling asleep at the reins and waking up an hour later at his own gate where his fourteen-year-old servant, a boy named Richard Watts, would be waiting to help his master to bed. Sometimes Watts would also fall asleep, and there they would have stayed, dozing on either side of the fence, had not the horse woken them both with an irritated snort.

  Everything seemed to be going well: the work was rewarding, the weather was good, and having had the satisfaction of reading in the press that ‘Grimaldi’s clown may, with justice, be said to be the best on the English stage’, his status as a respectable citizen was confirmed when he was invited to sit on the jury of Highgate Manor Court.

  But the tranquillity of summer turned with the leaves, and with his first season at Covent Garden approaching, the anxiety of business resumed. Working at Thomas Harris’s theatre would be markedly different from life at Drury Lane. Covent Garden was the King’s preferred venue for a reason, as during the almost forty years in which Harris had been associated with the theatre, he had built a commonwealth of such stability and sound principles that any monarch would have been proud to rule over it. Harris’s reputation for fiscal probity, managerial efficiency and even-handedness was a far cry from the libertinism and perpetual chaos of Drury Lane, although it was the Lane that had always enjoyed a reputation as the more adventurous and engaging of the two. This is not to say that Harris was immune to either novelties or faddishness, as the William Betty débâcle had shown, but by luring John Philip Kemble to Covent Garden, he aimed to seize the artistic laurels from his rival.

  Free from the impecuniosity and financial brinkmanship that characterised life under Sheridan, Kemble set about assembling the biggest collection of talent Britain had ever seen, albeit one that strongly emphasised tragedy as opposed to Covent Garden’s traditional strengths in innocuous modern comedies. In hiring Kemble, Harris dealt his rival a death blow, as Sheridan had neither the finances nor the focus to compete, and though granted the occasional reprieve in the shape of successes like Carlo the Wonder Dog, his theatre entered an irreversible period of decline that his reputation for flash and brilliance could do little to reverse.

  There was no doubt about it: Joe was being inducted into the highest circle of British theatrical life, and he began to fret excessively about what role he should take for his impending début. This question brought him into contact with Covent Garden’s head of pantomime and melodrama for the first time, Thomas Dibdin’s colleague and collaborator Charles Farley. Joe was set on playing Scaramouch in Delpini’s Don Juan, a role he had successfully played at Drury Lane and which had the additional virtue of presenting him as a natural heir to one of the greatest pantomimists of them all. Farley, though, wasn’t convinced, and made a suggestion that stopped Joe in his tracks: why not play the Wild Man in Valentine and Orson, the role synonymous with the malignant Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Dubois? Joe recoiled at the thought. After everything he had done, to open himself up to renewed accusations that he was nothing but ‘a pupil and copyist of Dubois’? But Farley, who had played Valentine alongside Dubois many times, was convinced that Joe could do it better, arguing that the bigger, more extensive role was a vehicle far superior than the servile mugging of Scaramouch. Reluctantly, Joe allowed himself to be persuaded, but only on condition that Farley help him to reinvent the piece. Donning the lucky red cap he always wore to rehearsals, Farley coached him intensi
vely long before the show had even been cast.

  These sessions were a revelation. Joe was in awe of Farley’s theatrical intelligence and his skill as a mime, taking so much from his instruction that in later life he was happy to say that if he had had any master at all it was Farley. Though older than Grimaldi by seven years, the two had a great deal in common. Like Joe, Farley was a local boy who had floated free of the slums through the power of a vividly phantasmagorical imagination. A life-long bachelor with a reputation for being exceptionally devoted to his mother, he had entered the theatre in childhood, working in a variety of menial capacities as he waited for his opportunities on stage. His choice of roles was hampered by a squat figure, an enormous nose and a curious voice said to sound either ‘bubbling’, as though with effervescent saliva, or as if his mouth contained a currant bun. (‘His voice is against him,’ claimed one review, ‘and is not mended by over-exertion, which he seems to think it is.’)

  Ill-favoured by nature, Farley made the most of what he had, compensating for his physical shortcomings with a fund of talent and an ability to work without fatigue. He was ‘remarkable’, said Leigh Hunt, who served with him in the St James’s volunteer corps at the height of the invasion threat, ‘for combining a short, sturdy person with energetic activity’. His nose was later reduced by a primitive cosmetic surgery, and even the voice ended up working for him, particularly suited as it was to frothing madmen and giggling bons vivants. Farley’s greatest gift, however, was for arranging pantomimes and melodramas, summoning scenes with the clarity of vision with which a child perceives the figures of its mind’s eye. Though without formal education, Farley had an extraordinarily rich visual vocabulary and an eye for detail that he sharpened by spending hours browsing the artefacts of the British Museum or the prints in Signor Colnagi’s Cockspur Street print shop, where he could often be found cramming information on flora, fauna, costume and geography.

  Under Farley’s instruction, Joe worked harder than he had for any other role. The play, which opened on 9 October, was performed in a mélange of dialogue, song and long sequences of action, and though Joe had no lines, as the Wild Man, he expressed his savagery through explosive movements and beast-like physicality. The piece opens with the return of the King of France from war, especially grateful for the heroism of Valentine, a foundling youth whose courage has assured their victory. Soon, a group of peasants arrives at court to petition for the King’s protection from a wild man who is terrorising their woods, and Valentine is volunteered for the task of hunting him by envious courtiers who wish him out of the way. Accepting the challenge, Valentine enters the woods undaunted, encountering the Wild Man Orson just as he is out hunting for meat to feed the ‘old weather-beaten she-bear’ that suckled him. Valentine attacks him, but he proves a tenacious opponent, demonstrating the agility of an animal by leaping from bough to stage and back again, hurling rocks, ripping up saplings and wielding his club with monstrous rage. During the fight, the she-bear dies after drinking some wine left behind by Valentine’s fleeing page, and weakened by grief, Orson submits himself to the warrior, who binds his hands and leads him back to court where, after various comic encounters with polite society, he is discovered to be the lost brother of his captor, and both of them the abandoned sons of the Queen of France.*

  It was a watershed role for Grimaldi, the hardest part he had ever played, making physical demands that far outstripped anything he had tried before, while also fundamentally reshaping his sense of his career. The plaudits were many – as a representation of bestial man, William Hazlitt always preferred Grimaldi’s Orson to any Caliban he had ever seen – but after only a few nights, his exertions caused significant pain, forcing him to ‘stagger off the stage into a small room behind the prompter’s box, and there sinking into an arm-chair … sob and cry aloud, and suffer so much from violent and agonising spasms, that those about him, accustomed as they at length became to the distressing scene, were very often in doubt, up to the very moment of his being “called”’. Grimaldi invariably conquered his pain in time to reappear, but in the contrast between the expansive candlelight of the Covent Garden stage and the ‘small room behind the prompter’s box’, he uncovered the tension between public performance and inward despair that would become the defining principle of his career.

  The idea went back to some of his earliest memories of childhood, such as a time in the green room at Drury Lane, where the Signor, having found him straying from his corner, took him on stage to beat him in front of the audience. As the Memoirs have it, the scene was taken ‘as a most capital joke; shouts of laughter and peals of applause shook the house; and the newspapers next morning declared that it was perfectly wonderful to see a mere child perform so naturally, and highly creditable to his father’s talents as a teacher’. While a search of the newspapers yields no such report, the intent of the anecdote was to lend weight to the idea that Joe was never more brilliant than when suffering. Such was the cornerstone of a personal mythology that became woven into the structure of the Memoirs themselves, ordering events within a carefully calibrated economy of punishment and reward where pleasures of any kind, professional or romantic, find an immediate counterweight in misery or pain.

  It was an idea to which Joe would become superstitiously attached, in part because it was the only one that seemed to offer any explanation of his ability. Even at the height of his powers, Joe lacked a vocabulary to explain his performances accurately. Words eluded his critics, too. ‘We can in no way describe what he does,’ wrote one of the many delighted but baffled journalists who reviewed him, ‘nor give any idea of the inimitable style in which he keeps up the ball from beginning to the end.’ In the absence of any substantive grasp on what it was that made him so good, pain acted as talent’s guarantee, proof that he was performing at the very limit of his abilities. In tears and panting in a backstage nook, stupefied by the dilating fullness of his agonised body, Joe believed he had uncovered the mysterious logic that guided his life.

  Thomas Dibdin had never fully reconciled himself to his talent as a writer of pantomimes in spite of the quality of his collaboration with Farley and the cachet it brought him with Harris. To him it was the ‘drudgery’ that kept him from his true vocation as a legitimate writer, and an annual affront to his professional self-esteem. Kemble’s arrival only served to make matters worse, as now it was his turn to feel the Arctic chill that for years had frozen out the pantomimists at Drury Lane. The atmosphere deteriorated so badly that Dibdin decided that if he was ever to have a chance of making it as a serious writer, he had to distance himself from pantomime altogether. Seeking out Harris, he petitioned for another assignment, and was permitted to spend the summer of 1806 ‘free from the everlasting dream of traps, flaps, daggers of lath, and particoloured jackets’ to provide Covent Garden with a farce.

  Without Thomas Dibdin, pantomime was entirely ignored. Preparations for Christmas usually began as early as July, but by the end of October the carpenters hadn’t built a single trick, nor the seamstresses sewn a solitary spangle. Assuming that Harris had other plans, Dibdin’s Reminiscences recall how horrified he was when the manager came knocking on his door in mid-November and announced, ‘Well, my dear Dibdin! We cannot do without a pantomime from you after all.’ Appalled that his newest bid to be taken seriously was dissolving before his eyes, Dibdin protested in the strongest terms. There wasn’t nearly enough time, he said, but Harris would have none of it, telling him to dust off some old ideas and get going. The only script Dibdin had was a piece he’d been unsuccessfully pitching for the past five years.

  ‘What, that damned Mother Goose, whom you are so wedded to!’ Harris exclaimed. ‘Let’s look at her again: she has one recommendation; there’s no finery about her; and the scenery in general is too common-place to take up much time: so, e’en set everybody to work: I need not again see the manuscript. I will speak to Farley, and you must lose no time.’

  ‘But, sir,’ spluttered Dibdin, ‘our late
agreement, and the difficulties thrown in my way.’

  ‘You are too good a fellow to talk about agreements when I want you to do me a service,’ replied Harris, the pleasantry barely disguising the gravity of the command. Promising every resource within his power, he turned to go, saying, ‘I cannot expect you to effect much, especially with such a subject; but do the best you can.’

  Dibdin went to Farley, and the two set to work with lumpish hopes. The scenemen and carpenters shook their heads, tut-tutted, ran thick pencil marks through all the bits that would be impossible to make at such short notice and departed in a cloud of glue and turpentine. The big heads had to go and, given the paucity of time, the grand finale, the most anticipated scene in the whole theatrical calendar, must necessarily be austere. Next, they mustered the cast, who, looking at the outline of Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg!, found it, in Joe’s words, ‘as plain as possible’. With ‘neither splendid scenery, nor showy dresses … the apprehension of the performers’, he recalled, was ‘proportionately rueful’. With the script needing to be rewritten to accommodate production constraints, rehearsals began without it. (It didn’t actually reach the Examiner of Plays to be censored until 18 December, and then only as an eight-page précis that contained no business of any kind, just the words to the songs.) There was another bad omen when Farley arrived on the first day without his lucky red cap, and had to be sent out immediately to get a new one.