The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  * Chunee the elephant was killed in a hail of gunfire in March 1826, after the frenzy of his annual musth, exacerbated by the pain of a rotting tusk, had driven him into such a violent rage that he threatened to break out of his cage and kill his keepers. A decision was taken to destroy him, and Joe’s friend Edward Cross, who had owned Chunee since 1812, as an attraction at the Exeter Change Menagerie, called in surgeons to administer poison. This had no effect. Next, a pair of marksmen were called to shoot him while his keepers held him back with ten-foot spears topped with double-edged blades, but their bullets merely made a hissing sound as they pierced his skin, which only served to enrage him further; he threw his entire weight against the bars of his cage, buckling the ironwork and threatening to open the cages of the lions and tigers next door. The report of musketry, combined with the elephant’s furious trumpeting, set the other beasts into a cacophony of animal terror, their squawks and roars causing shoppers in the Strand to stop in their tracks and run towards the noise. A detachment of soldiers was called from Somerset House to execute him by firing squad, but the ill-trained men seemed incapable of correctly loading their rifles and their inept fusillades emptied over a hundred bullets into the elephant at close range before he began to show even the first signs of pain. All of a sudden, reported the Mirror of Literature, ‘his eyes instantly appeared like balls of fire; he shook his head with dreadful fury, and rushed against the front of his den, and broke part of it, and it was expected every moment that the massy pillars, strengthened with plates of iron, would have given way’. They called for a cannon as the failed carnage got further out of hand, though in the end, there was no need: one of Chunee’s keepers completed the destruction by piercing his stomach with a harpoon. As Cross wept inconsolably, Chunee fell to his knees in disbelief, like Caesar before the Forum, and, with a last, loamy exhalation, collapsed into a lake of blood. A hundred and fifty-two bullets were pulled from his corpse.

  * Hughes’s funeral was on Boxing Day, thus presenting Grimaldi with another gruesome juxtaposition as he ran from dress rehearsal to graveside and back again to prepare for that evening’s début of Harlequin Whittington. This time, though, the backstage tears would not pave the way for rapturous applause, as he sang flat and out of key, and ‘with all his nearly irresistible power of producing laughter, it was almost half an hour before he could, by his ludicrous exertions, do away with the stupefying effect of his ballad’.

  10

  THE ORPHAN OF PERU

  Grimaldi, he’s getting old; what would you? One can’t do anything else – neither pills nor rhubarb taken at the astrologic, star-predicted, Hicksian hour can impede the fatal progress of the years.

  Letter of William Beckford (14 January 1819)

  ON 2 DECEMBER 1816, a crowd of almost twenty thousand assembled outside the Merlin’s Cave, a pub on Rosoman Street, Islington, just around the corner from Joe’s house at Baynes Row. Composed of distressed manufacturers, sailors and artisans, working men impoverished by the economic crisis that had followed the victory against France, they had come to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt call for universal male suffrage and a range of tax, land and parliamentary reforms. Having addressed the crowd from a first-floor window, Hunt ceded the platform to a failed apothecary and agitator called James Watson, who for many years had been advocating violent insurrection as the means to secure change. Watson’s speech was short but effective. Using martial rhetoric, he persuaded about three hundred men to march on the City, with his mentally unstable son at their head. The mob signalled its intent by looting a gun shop in Clerkenwell and shooting one of its customers in the groin, and by the time it reached Cheapside, swelled by more armed men, it mounted an assault on the Tower of London. A skirmish ensued with the regiment in residence, and the mob was quickly repulsed, dispersing into smaller, even more destructive groups, who rampaged through the streets.

  The Spa Fields riots, as they came to be known, marked the beginning of what would prove a protracted period of unrest in Britain as increasingly vocal reform movements were met by equally intransigent authorities happy to respond with force. The government, convinced of rampant sedition among the working classes, set about suspending rights and redrafting laws, billeting troops in ‘disturbed districts’ and loosing agents provocateurs on every pub and debating society. As the head of state, and its most corpulent symbol of social inequality, the Prince Regent was the focus of discontent. Already unpopular due to the cruel mistreatment of his wife, Princess Caroline, whom he had hypocritically put on trial for adultery and forced out of the country in 1814, he had become widely despised. People lined the streets to boo him as he made his way to open Parliament in January 1817, and attacked his coach in the Mall. The result was only a broken window, although it was never fully ascertained whether it had been shattered by a bullet or a stone.

  The puckish wantonness of his earlier years seemed to have abandoned the Prince, with the recent departure of two of his most totemic allies, Lord Byron and Beau Brummell, who had separately left England the year before, the first to outrun rumours of sodomy and incest, the second to escape his debts. Even the weather colluded in the national despondency, another cold winter making way for a dreary spring and a particularly gloomy summer. 1817 was not a good year.

  Though it was the first time in thirty-five years that Joe had not played a summer in Islington, he wasn’t unemployed for long. The first offer came from William Murray, the young manager of the Edinburgh and Glasgow theatres, who retained strong connections to Covent Garden through his sister Harriet, daughter-in-law to Mrs Siddons. He knew Joe well, having been both a pupil of Charles Farley and a villager in the original production of Mother Goose. Once Joe had agreed to terms in Scotland, another offer came from Knight, manager of the Manchester and Liverpool theatres. Having in a few days arranged enough work for a short tour of the north, Joe turned his back on Sadler’s Wells.

  The trip was lucrative but gruelling, his trials beginning on the outward journey with a night-time collision between two coaches that left both vehicles on their sides, one on top of the other. Competition between coaching companies and the Regency fashion for fast driving had made this kind of accident shamefully common. There were no serious injuries, though Joe found himself buried beneath five stout men at the far side of the bottom coach. It was the harbinger of further blows to come: while his Scottish shows passed off without incident, in Manchester he fell badly during a performance of Castles in the Air. He was required to emerge from the centre of an enormous bowl of gooseberry fool placed over a rising trap, but the ropes snapped as he made his ascent and sent him crashing into the cellar with nothing to break his fall. Bruised but with nothing broken, he managed to play on.

  The following day the company decamped to Liverpool, forming a caravan that drove the thirty miles to the new venue. Joe showed the scenemen his injuries and begged to be spared a second fall, but his entreaties came to nothing: the same accident happened again. This time, though, it was worse, for when the ropes gave way Joe tried to catch the edge, but slipped; the narrowness of the trap forced his arms above his head and almost pulled them from their sockets before he fell to the cellar floor. Somehow he managed to finish, but had to be carried to bed at the final curtain. The following morning, unable to stand, he was lifted into the coach for the long drive home.

  Had the carpenters deliberately tried to injure Joe? Falls were common, but consecutive accidents across two nights suggested malicious intent, and Joe had certainly had problems with them before. While he was working in Birmingham for Macready, his fastidiousness over the detail of specific props had been interpreted as starry petulance, and when it came time to go on stage, the scenemen replaced the real props with a live pig, a goose and two ducks and told him to get on with it. Scenemen and carpenters were a proud, tight-knit fraternity, a proto-unionised body who could halt a production if they felt aggrieved, extort money from any actor who relied on them for their effects, and exact revenge on
those who refused to pay. Sheridan’s friend Michael Kelly, the singer, owed one of his finest moments to a carpenter’s poor timing in Lodoiska, but when he feuded with stage-hands during the course of the melodramatic opera Blue-Beard, they ‘forgot’ to lift the skeletons that were meant to dissolve magically before him, leaving Kelly with no choice but to kick and punch the apparitions noisily to the floor.

  Frederick Reynolds similarly recalled how a particularly nervous actor playing the ghost in Henry VI bribed the carpenters nightly to raise him through the stage with ‘particular gentleness and caution’. The arrangement worked well until the carpenters decided to raise their taxes, and when the actor resisted they heaved him through the trap so quickly that the ethereal vision shot six feet into the air and landed on the stage with an ostentatiously loud bang that produced ‘an instantaneous burst of laughter from all parts of the house’.

  Humiliation was one thing, but for pantomimists, the stakes were considerably higher. Though the theatre’s strict hierarchy forbade carpenters to fraternise with performers, in the lowly pantomime department questions of status were fraught and contentious. Pantomimists relied on the goodwill of the carpenters far more than anyone else, but they were simultaneously bound to keep their distance by the rules of the house, thus presenting them with a number of unique problems of etiquette. Once, while working in Paris, for example, James Barnes had to ask the carpenters not to sit so close to him during lunch. It was a particularly delicate mission that had to be seen as his sole initiative, for if Clown and Harlequin were implicated, both of whom needed the carpenters on their side to perform their jumps and tricks safely, there would almost certainly be consequences. As Pantaloon, Barnes was relatively safe.

  When the relationship did break down, the repercussions could be terrible – Harlequin might dive at a trick flap that had not been unfastened, or, having made it through, discover that the men holding the carpet to catch him had chosen that moment to take a break. This was exactly what happened to Thomas Ellar in Harlequin Munchausen (1818). Ellar, who had already paid his catch money, snapped at the men when they came to him to complain that their carpet was still very ‘dry’, and when the time came for him to leap through the face of the moon, the men were there, but so far out of position that he landed short and broke his hand. A younger performer called Tom Ridgeway, subjected to the same treatment, grabbed a handful of hair as he sailed past one of the carpenters, making sure not to let go until he’d torn it from the man’s scalp. He had a right to be angry – no one in the profession could forget the fate of Signor Paulo’s father, Paulo Redigé, who had died when the top of his skull collided with the head of a protruding screw after the carpenters had failed to catch him.

  Joe limped into London to be greeted by a further barrage of requests from provincial theatres keen to secure his services. A long, circular itinerary was compiled, over which he consulted at length with Mary. It was agreed that he should take JS along for company. At fifteen, the boy had already outgrown his father by a couple of inches, was lean and supple with black hair and striking features that revealed his Italian genes and full lips and drowsy eyes gave him the look of a young voluptuary. Having been sickly throughout childhood, whether from a fundamentally infirm disposition or his parents’ projected hypochondria, he was used to being left behind, and it was uncertain whether he’d have the stamina to endure such a long trip. But JS was tired of his cosseted existence, watching his cousin George practise handstands and somersaults and play with swords at Sadler’s Wells while he went muffled even in fair weather and was confined to bed at the first sign of a sniffle. For years, he had been trying to demonstrate his suitability for the stage, especially through music, for which he showed early promise.

  Still Joe persistently refused to let him enter the theatre, sending him instead as a day-boy to his old school in Putney, and then to one in Pentonville, where he shared his enthusiasm for the theatre with his classmates Robert Honner and Thomas Hamblin, both of whom went on to become actors. JS excelled in his lessons, and by twelve was fluent in French and well read in French literature, yet no amount of formal learning could dislodge the combined forces of nature and nurture that had impressed themselves upon him, and at length Joe was forced to concede.

  JS’s début came at Sadler’s Wells on 10 October 1814 when, aged twelve, he played Friday in Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe for Joe’s last benefit of the season. His appearance had been kept secret until just a few days before the show, although a hint lay in the image printed on the ticket – a paternal Crusoe patting the head of a youthful Friday. The performance was prefaced by weeks of intense rehearsal that introduced him to a side of his father quite separate from the amiable man who slept late and sang ‘tol de rol’ while shaving. At the theatre, Joe was a perfectionist, proceeding slowly through the minutiae of each trick, finding countless reasons to perfect footwork, props and scenery, and always busy, as if he anticipated being accused of working insufficiently hard. These were the habits he had learnt from his father, and while Joe was conscious not to visit the same kind of tyranny on his own son, he still found himself drilling him harder than the others, both to spare him from accusations of favouritism and out of nervousness lest the public think worse of him for the boy’s shortcomings. JS, though, was perfect on the night, receiving compliments from every quarter, greatly comforting Joe, who fondly imagined that ‘when his own heyday of fame and profit was over, he should gather new life from the boy’s success’.

  Almost a year passed before JS was given a second opportunity, playing in the greatest tradition of clowning families a miniature Clown beside his father in Farley’s Harlequin and Fortunio; or, Shing-Moo and Thun-Ton.* Though not so miniature, this was the role he assumed as they passed through Glasgow, Edinburgh, Berwick, Liverpool, Preston, Hereford, Worcester and Birmingham, performing Don Juan, Harlequin Whittington and an olio compilation of greatest hits that included the Mother Goose pas de deux, the Vegetable Man from Harlequin Asmodeus, and both the Oyster crossed in love and dog-drawn curricle from Harlequin and the Swans. His reception was ‘highly flattering’ at every leg, and at the end of it, father and son headed off to Cheltenham for a few weeks’ relaxation. As JS looked about him, suddenly alert to the world’s size and full of the fervid longings of adolescence, Joe took long medicinal baths and passed some time with Jack Richer, the famous Sadler’s Wells rope-dancer, now enjoying a prosperous retirement with his wife, the wealthy widow of a clergyman.

  Joe returned to Baynes Row for long enough to deposit JS and be cheered by the news that Sadler’s Wells was having its worst season in living memory. Then he was called away again – first back to Birmingham, then Leicester and finally Chester, where he met up with Jack Bologna for a run of Mother Goose. Jack and Joe, closer than brothers for many years, were now officially family. Jack had married Mary’s beautiful sister, Louisa Bristow, in 1816, following the death of his first wife, Harriet. Like all brothers, the men squabbled, and never more so when forced to live at close quarters. Jack was careful with his money, and considered Joe extravagant, while Joe thought Jack cheap and skimping. Joe would leave a trail of money in the towns through which he passed, sparing no expense on room and board, touring the shops for new clothes and neckcloths for himself, ribbons and linens for Mary. Jack, by contrast, shrank at the thought of spending a farthing, took the outside seat on the coach, slept in the cheapest rooms available, ate only Welsh rarebit, and deliberately provoked coachmen and waiters to avoid having to give them a tip. His thrift annoyed Joe so much that he found it immensely enjoyable when, on the last night of their trip, his brother-in-law’s bill came to exactly the same as his own. In spite of his economising, Jack had failed to realise that the hotel’s tariff was all-in.

  Fifty-six summer shows brought in £1,743, a thousand pounds more than Joe would have made in Islington and for a third of the performances. Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, had lost more than £2,500 that season, its roof was in danger of falling in
and the landlord was threatening to raise the rent. Dibdin worked night and day to avoid disaster, but his wife had recently died, and with eight children to provide for, he found himself consistently defeated by the task before him. The proprietors added to the pressure by demanding an increased say in how the theatre was run, in total contradiction to Dibdin’s view that ‘as a Republic … the administration will get into confusion, and confusion is the forerunner of defeat’. His principal antagonist was the majority shareholder, Richard Hughes’s widow, Lucy.

  Having lost confidence in Dibdin, she came to see Joe in the spring of 1818 and implored him to return to the Wells. Joe found her impossible to refuse, but agreed to reinstatement only on condition that he, too, became a shareholder. The request was motivated by the events of last summer and his distaste at having to dance to Dibdin’s tune, but it was also an investment from which he hoped to draw an annual dividend of several hundred pounds to shore himself up against the vagaries of health and fame. An intimation that his star might be on the wane had come in March, when an Easter pantomime called The Marquis De Carabas; or, Puss in Boots closed after only a single night. Playing Grimalkin the cat, Joe had initially pleased the audience by mewing his lines and imitating a feline sneeze with great exactitude, but things turned nasty when Grimalkin persuaded the Ogre to change himself into a mouse, which he duly swallowed. This seemingly innocuous gag caused outrage among a faction of the audience, who thought it immoral, and for the first time in his long career, Grimaldi found himself being booed on stage at Covent Garden. The noise continued until the end, and for half an hour afterwards as patrons pulled up seats, broke the footlights and tore a hole in the curtain, until Fawcett appeared and promised never to show Puss in Boots again.