The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  On the sixth night, Kemble abandoned his Coriolanus-like hauteur, and agreed to a ceasefire. Catalani fled to Ireland, happy to be paid off, and the theatre’s accounts were turned over to a committee to assess whether the price rises had been justified. That night a coffin was carried through the pit, celebrating the demise of the new prices, ‘an ugly child, and base born, who died of the whooping-cough … aged six days’. But the funeral meats were scarcely reheated before the committee’s report came back in support of the proprietors. Theirs was not an isolated view, for a sizeable minority existed, including the editors of The Times and writers like William Cobbett, who upbraided the OP for obstructing free trade. To the protesters, however, the idea that theatre was commerce and they were its customers was straightforwardly repugnant, and they returned to the pit with their wrath redoubled. Kemble was furious and sought to fight fire with fire, hiring the pugilist Mendoza and a gang of prize-fighters to quell the tumult and intimidate the trouble-makers, though this merely led to an escalation of anger and an anti-Semitic backlash against the predominantly Jewish boxers.

  Things got further out of hand when James Brandon, Covent Garden’s doorkeeper and head bouncer for more than forty years, started wading into the audience, snatching banners and grabbing peaceable protesters to put them before the magistrates in the hope of harassing OP into non-existence. The strategy backfired after one sally collared a prominent ringleader, the respected barrister Henry Clifford. Not only were the charges against him swiftly dropped, but when he moved to counter-sue for wrongful arrest, the movement was suddenly re-energised around the sanctified values of liberty, free speech, and John Bull against John Kemble. Crowds began to follow Kemble to his house beside the British Museum, hollering until dawn and throwing stones at his windows, agitating his frayed nerves even further and terrifying Mrs Kemble so much that she slept next to a ladder in case she had to make her escape through the garden.

  The rejuvenated protesters, replenished each night by the fresh hordes that flooded the pit when they were let in at half price, finally induced Kemble to abandon spoken drama and just show pantomimes. Yet Hamlet or Harlequin, the audience was indifferent, ‘more than usually uproarious’ throughout Kemble’s chosen piece, Oscar and Malvina, one protester even managing to hit Jack Bologna with a tin horn. At least the noise gave Kemble a new appreciation for the pantomimist’s art – he is supposed to have said of Bologna, ‘If that man could speak as well as he acts pantomimes, I would never again appear on the stage.’

  Eighteen days later, Kemble threw Grimaldi into the maw, instructing him to play Scaramouch in Don Juan. It was his first night after a lengthy lay-off. Intermittently ill throughout the summer season, he had recovered only to injure his knee in the Sadler’s Wells pantomime, Castles in the Air, which kept him offstage for the whole of August. There had been a spot of domestic bother too. Joe was required to testify again in court, as his young Finchley servant, Richard Watts, was tried at the Old Bailey for rustling sheep and selling their skins. Miraculously, instead of playing to rows and rows of sullen backs, Joe was greeted by warm applause, the audience permitting him to perform the entire show without disturbance. This brought an even more than usually haggard Kemble scurrying up backstage. ‘Bravo, Joe!’ he said, enthusiastically shaking his hand. ‘We have got them now.’ But it was not to be. Don Juan played the following night, but the OP had had their holiday, and the pit was as turbulent as ever.

  The OP war lasted a total of sixty-seven nights, nearly four months of riot and misrule that ended only with the complete capitulation of John Philip Kemble. Meetings were organised between him and Clifford, and articles of peace drawn up demanding the restoration of old prices, the demolition of private boxes, the dismissal of James Brandon, and all outstanding prosecutions dropped. As the exhausted Kemble delivered the terms of the truce from the stage with his own forced apology, a large placard was raised from the pit that read, ‘We are satisfied.’

  There were a few spats still left in it, but hostilities were largely over, having taken an enormous toll on everyone involved, not least Kemble, who was more dependent on opium than ever. Thomas Dibdin also decided to leave. His wife was pregnant and, having already lost two daughters, he elected to enter semi-retirement in a cottage in Betchworth, Surrey, devoting his time to his pet project, the ‘Metrical History of England’. After thirty-five years in the choruses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Joe’s mother, Rebecca Brooker, finally hung up her pumps, looking forward to spending more time with her only grandchild.

  OP claimed another victim in the family as well: Joe’s sister-in-law Louisa Bristow, for whom the season had brought an intense but fleeting fame. None of the Bristows had come to much in the profession, although Louisa had an uncommon beauty that had already been noted in the press, which is possibly why Kemble had decided to promote her from supernumerary to leading lady just as the riots began. It was the harshest introduction imaginable for such a young and untested actress, and the constant commotion, with the burden of learning more than twenty major roles, left her looking nervous and unprepared. Perhaps he had banked on any inadequacies being masked by the tumult, although the Monthly Mirror managed to catch enough of ‘Mr Kemble’s favourite’ to conclude that ‘a prettier Cordelia was never seen, but to do her justice, a worse was never heard’. Even in this oddest of seasons, Louisa’s promotion had caused a stir in the company, with rumours suggesting that she owed her sudden elevation to the backstage favours she bestowed on her patron, suspicions that seemed to carry even more weight following her abrupt expulsion before the season closed.

  Following her dismissal, Louisa was unable to get another job in London, but when she eventually found work at the Birmingham theatre the following year, she continued to cause rancour in the ranks of Covent Garden, albeit from a distance. Taking a benefit at the end of November 1810, she had begged her famous brother-in-law to swell the treasury with a performance. Grimaldi agreed and, once there, was invited by the manager, Mr Macready (father of the famous tragedian), to stay and perform for an additional three nights. But by entering into this arrangement, Joe unwittingly offended one of the most important actors in the company, John Fawcett, a comedian and significant star in his own right, who had only recently asked Grimaldi to perform at his own benefit but had been rebuffed on the grounds that he had asked him to play a character in a farce. Why Grimaldi should turn down this senior performer is a mystery, but he justified it as an unwillingness to intrude on ‘legitimate’ drama and thereby endanger his standing in his own ‘branch of the profession’.

  Whatever the reason, Fawcett took the refusal and Joe’s subsequent trip to Birmingham as a gross insult, and determined to take his revenge by having Mother Goose announced in his absence to make him lose face with the public and risk censure by the management. A friend’s note alerted Joe to the plot in the nick of time, telling him that his name had been published in the bills for the following night, ‘and as they know you have not returned from Birmingham, I fear it is done to injure you’. Joe pleaded with Macready to let him go, but as the performance had sold out and the audience were expecting him, he was made to stay lest the house be torn apart.

  It was past midnight by the time he finally took his seat in the coach for another bitterly cold and uncomfortable journey, made even more excruciating by the drunkenness of the coachman who kept getting lost. Nineteen miserable, sleepless hours put him beyond the point of exhaustion, but as the coach pulled into Salt Hill, a mile outside Slough and the last major staging post before London, he had no choice but to jump directly from the first coach into another that took him straight to the stage door. Rushing to his dressing room as the first bars of the overture were playing, he frantically dressed and pushed past an astonished Farley, who was waiting in the wings, preparing to take his place. Sitting in his box, Fawcett visibly soured as Joe arrived to take his cue, and for the next three years, he would neither speak to him nor look him directly in the eye. For J
oe, however, it was another battering he could ill afford.

  * This rare act of Grimaldian violence is one of only two recorded in the Memoirs – the other is the only instance of co-operation between him and Dubois. It happened after Joe had been falsely accused of driving an ox across Spa Fields by a corrupt parish constable named Lucas. When Lucas came to the theatre to arrest Grimaldi, Dubois threatened to throw him into the New River. When he tried a second time, Joe knocked him to the floor. When the incident came before the magistrate, Lucas was fined for false testimony.

  * That fame altered personal relationships had been shown by the reemergence of Mackoull, but even the Sir Hugh Myddleton was no longer the sanctuary it had been. Joe discovered this one night when he was held up at gunpoint on the Finchley Road. Frightened out of his wits, he blabbered that his tormentors wouldn’t dare mistreat him if they knew who he was, to which came the reply, ‘Oh, we know you well enough, Mr Grimaldi. We have been waiting for you these three nights.’ One of the robbers turned out to be a drinking friend, a jeweller named George Hamilton, who had set his criminal friends on Joe after his business had failed. His identity was established the moment Joe passed him his pocket watch – Hamilton only had two fingers on his left hand.

  * The cause of the fire was never resolved. It was initially thought to have started in the shilling gallery where, according to the papers, ‘there had been much riot and confusion the preceding night’, although it was later decreed to be the work of wadding fired from a gun. Neither theory was proven, and it was just as likely that the fire was the work of simple convection. A German stove had been left burning in the property room all night, and while it had no naked flame, the simple fact of it continuing to dry the air may have been sufficient to ignite a spark. Dry air was a constant hazard in the theatres, where lamps and candles removed the moisture from the atmosphere, causing particular problems in the fly-towers where, without constant vigilance, frayed ropes, exposed beams and the edges of scenery might easily start to glow with embers.

  PART THREE

  [1811–1837]

  9

  HARLEQUIN IN HIS ELEMENT

  What a strange court! What a queer privacy of morals and manners do we look into! Shall we regard it as preachers and moralists, and cry, Woe, against the open vice and selfishness and corruption; or look at it as we do at the king in the pantomime, with his pantomime wife, and pantomime courtiers, whose big heads he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pantomime sceptre, whom he orders to prison under the guard of his pantomime beefeaters, as he sits down to dine on his pantomime pudding.

  William Makepeace Thackeray, The Four Georges (1855)

  SIR HENRY HALFORD WAS the one to tell him, although at first the King seemed not to understand. He sat listening in his purple dressing-gown, his beard and hair grown long and white, like an Old Testament prophet’s, but it took a while for the severity of the news to cut through the thick briar that entangled his reason. When at last he became more lucid, he merely sighed and said, ‘Poor girl.’ The death of Princess Amelia, his youngest and dearest daughter, was the final burden the King’s fragile mind would have to bear. Withdrawing into solitary sadness, he dabbed at the keys of a harpsichord as his thoughts ran inconsequentially on and the world around him began to dim. The Queen discontinued her visits, leaving her husband to mutely wander the labyrinth of his memory, and the cares of state devolved entirely to his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, the fat pasha who had waited hungrily for this moment since it had first been denied him twenty-three years before.

  George III had spent much of his adult life battling with his sons, none of whom, with the exception of his seventh, Adolphus Frederick, had shown themselves to be anything but morally deficient. When not shacking up with actresses or consummating clandestine marriages, they were ruinously indebted or flogged the regiments under their command. None, though, outdid the villainous Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who, having already distressed his parents with rumours of an incestuous affair with his sister Sophia, was at the heart of a much greater scandal in the summer of 1810 when his Sardinian valet, Joseph Sellis, was found lying in his apartments with his throat cut. The Duke, who had a head wound, claimed that a deranged Sellis had attacked him before retreating to his bedroom to kill himself. Informed gossips declared that it was Sellis who had been attacked for daring to defend himself from the Duke’s sexual advances.

  Compared to his siblings, the riotous and hedonistic George Frederick, Prince of Wales, was not that bad. It was true that he had pointedly snubbed his dutiful upbringing by embracing all the people and vices his father abjured, yet even in his dissipation he remained a hugely impressive man: his charm, his looks, his girdled Falstaffian girth, the outrageous gilt frogging on his dress-coats, which was said to weigh two hundred pounds, and his passionate connoisseurship of and support for the arts, all bespoke an individual committed to life with wide-open senses. The Prince, said the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was an ‘overgrown bantling’, convivial, but tending to excess, brimming with fellowship, yet often inconstant, chivalrous, romantic and lascivious too. In person, said the Duke of Wellington, he was ‘very blackguard and very entertaining’, with a keen sense of humour forged in company both male and bibulous that delighted in the complex rituals of torture and humiliation that flourished in English public schools. A lover of puns, swearing, sarcasm and scatology, he liked to dress in extravagant costumes and pull elaborate pranks, such as painting his friend’s black mare white and presenting it to him as a gift. He was also an excellent mimic who did John Philip Kemble so well that the dandy Beau Brummell thought he should turn professional.*

  In youth, the Prince’s passion for the theatre had manifested itself as an erotic obsession with the actress ‘Perdita’ Robinson, but even in middle age, he was infused with the spirit of illusion to the degree that pageantry and opulence often seemed to constitute the limit of his statecraft. This, though, he understood exceptionally well. The party he threw at Carlton House to celebrate his accession as Regent, for example, an Asiatic fête festooned with lights and flowers, was, gushed the Irish poet Thomas Moore, an assemblage of ‘beauty, splendour and profound magnificence’: ‘Nothing was ever so magnificent,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘it was in reality all that they try to imitate in the gorgeous scenery of the theatre.’ Not everyone was so impressed. When George Tierney described the centrepiece of the two-hundred-foot-long dinner table, a stream made of silver that contained real fish sporting along ‘faintly waving, artificial banks … covered with green moss and aquatic flowers’, he also noted a theatrical likeness, dismissing it as ‘that Sadler’s Wells business’.

  The Prince and the pantomime were made for one another, and during the period from the declaration of the Regency in 1811 to his coronation as George IV nine years later, the form reached its zenith. At Covent Garden, Charles Farley presided over a golden age. The company was the strongest it had ever been, ‘a vast body of conjoined talent’, said Frederick Reynolds, outstripping even Garrick’s in the heyday of Drury Lane. For Robert Elliston (known as ‘the Great Lessee’ for the large amount of theatres he acquired and managed), it was simply ‘the best body of performers that had ever been got together, in the memory of the living’. Its pantomime troupe, known as the ‘pantomimic wonders’, had been joined by several new performers since 1811, and two in particular made enormous contributions.

  The first was James Barnes, a short Enfield cobbler whose otherwise bland face bore eyes as sharp as thorns, a Pantaloon with a ‘mode of playing that anomalous character’, wrote Charles Dibdin, who also hired him for Sadler’s Wells, ‘as completely original as Grimaldi’s Clown’. Together, Barnes and Grimaldi transformed any scene in which they appeared into the ‘acme of pantomimical drollery’. Barnes was followed by the Harlequin Thomas Ellar, who arrived at Covent Garden via Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre and a number of travelling circuses to work as Jack Bologna’s stunt double, performing all the jumps and tumbles in
Harlequin and the Swans (1813) after Jack had broken his collarbone. Ellar moved so lightly he appeared barely to touch the ground (‘His legs twinkle, rather than dance,’ wrote The Times, ‘he moves like a sprite’) and he would complete his transformation from lovelorn youth to Harlequin by spinning his entire body with remarkable velocity, ‘as if the masked face was only a whirling teetotum revolving on the centre of his frilled neck’. Like Joe and Jack, Barnes and Ellar became the best of friends, and remained so for the rest of their lives, travelling together, sharing the same room, and competing for the same women. As Harlequin, Ellar cut the finer figure, though this didn’t stop Barnes deploying his natural wiles to win an advantage: on a trip to Paris, he managed to thwart a romance between Ellar and their landlady by emptying a box of maggots into Ellar’s bed and carefully explaining to the repulsed lady in his pidgin French that the poor man couldn’t help it as ‘he was subject to them’ three or four times a year. Overseeing them all was Charles Farley, dubbed ‘the king of melo-dramas and high-priest of Christmas sports’, who managed his troupe with paternal pride, treating them to a dinner at the Piazza Coffee House every Boxing Day afternoon. There, he would gee them up like cup-finalists, focusing their minds on the job ahead and entreating them to ‘enjoy their evening as much as possible, but, at the same time, to remember “whom they have to cope withal” – viz. the good folks at Drury’.