The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  Joe’s first performance at the Coburg was an olio called Salmagundi; or, the Clown’s Dish of All Sorts, puffed in the bills as ‘a splendid comic pantomime with entirely new scenery, machinery, tricks, dresses and decorations in which Mr Grimaldi will sustain the character of Clown, and Mr Barnes that of Pantaloon’. It played for only a week before being replaced by Disputes in China; or, Harlequin and the Hong Merchants. Six days later Joe fell ill, and the bills proclaimed that ‘The public is respectfully informed that in consequence of the continued and dangerous Indisposition of Mr Grimaldi, the Pantomime is unavoidably postponed. Due notice will be given of its next representation.’ Due notice never came, as Joe found himself too ill to carry on.

  Two weeks was all it took for JS to be fully inducted into the riotous world of Henry Kemble. He had idolised the rascally white-maned tumultuary, thirteen years his senior, from the moment they met. Incapable of discretion, and filled with mocking scorn for the feats of his famous family, he was someone with whom JS could share the alienation of being eclipsed by one’s own name, concealing their insecurities behind huge amounts of drinking. ‘The irregularities and drunkenness of this man were unpardonable,’ wrote Charles Whitehead, the original editor of the Memoirs, of Henry Kemble, going on to accuse him of being ‘the instigator of young Joe’s follies and misconduct’. JS did not remain an apprentice for long for, as Whitehead soon conceded, ‘which was the worst of the two was hard to be decided’.

  With his father laid up, JS and his new confederate went on the rampage, drinking, gambling and baiting the Watch, the generally ineffective ‘Charleys’ who had become a popular target for drunken assaults ever since ‘larking’ had been made popular through the ribald adventures of Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom in Pierce Egan’s comic novel Real Life in London. But for all that JS and Kemble used their cynicism and extravagance to ease the burden of pedigree, they, too, were paying homage to the most talented, maddening and ill-behaved incendiarist in contemporary theatre, the originator of ‘the Bedlamite system of acting’, and every young actor’s idol, Edmund Kean. Ironically, Kean was a great admirer of Joe Grimaldi, and claimed to have based his famous death scene in Richard III on Joe’s own desperate retreat from the oncoming Tartars in Drury Lane’s Lodoiska almost a quarter of a century before. Kean had also played Harlequin, and was so fond of pantomime that his father had dismissively claimed ‘he would be a second Grimaldi – if anything’.

  All this was forgotten once Kean had made his début as a leading tragedian, arriving with the impact of a falling meteor that made John Philip Kemble’s ‘majestic dryness and deliberate nothings’ seem stiff and histrionic, and eventually led the old Roman, retiring to Lausanne, to live an ascetic life where, it was rumoured, he was jealous of the attention paid to Mont Blanc. Off stage, Kean lived as intensely as he acted on it. Stories circulated of an insatiable sexual appetite and taste for self-destruction, of whores lining up to service him between acts, and backstage rivers of booze. Seething with rage at his childhood abandonment, he was sullen and rude, especially to members of polite society, whom he accused of being fakers and hypocrites. He had tantrums and made threats, complained of being treated like a carthorse when he worked more than four nights a week, and once excused his late arrival on stage by explaining, ‘I always take a shag before the play begins.’

  Kean’s example was literally intoxicating. He made it fashionable to be bad, and many sought to emulate his lifestyle in the hopes of tapping his talent. Though heavy drinking was a theatrical constant, Kean lent it a new Byronic glamour, raising it to the status of demonic compulsion as if it were the only sanctuary from a gift that might otherwise flay him alive. By establishing the Wolf Club at the Coal Hole Tavern in the Strand, he not only founded a brotherhood of actors similarly devoted to alcohol, but he cemented his own mythology by instituting the bond between genius and excess that would be taken up by an entire generation. Aspiring Wolf Clubs sprang up close to every theatre in every town, and in South London the Lambeth triangle that was home to the Coburg, Astley’s and the Surrey theatre boasted more than any other place on earth. Lambeth had been a thespian ghetto even in the Signor’s day, but now, with three large theatres and a growing transpontine population, it was known as the ‘theatrical barracks’. Mount’s Place, the home of Thomas Ellar, was an outpost of equestrians and pantomimists, while St George’s Circus at the end of Blackfriars Road gave shelter to a colony of melodramatists, and Philip Astley’s Hercules Hall on Westminster Bridge Road was said to house a theatrical family in every apartment, including that of the clown Dicky Usher.

  With such a demographic, the taverns spilled over with performers in the clutch of intemperance, and when Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography took its readers on a tour of them, it found ‘an excellent actor, who, from a love of intoxication, has reduced himself (although a young man) to a state of pauperism’, along with many others ‘striving, with all their might, to destroy themselves the same way’. None could survey their ‘emaciated countenances,’ it concluded, ‘with all its alloy of dissipation and vulgarity, without feeling a sincere regret’.* The managers were no better. Robert Elliston, the man who employed Kean and nursed his ego, drank copiously, pursued actresses and rarely went to bed until nine in the morning. His partner, James Winston, once claimed he’d been drunk for ten consecutive days. The only place where this was forbidden was Astley’s Amphitheatre, where Philip Astley detested drunks and withheld the pay of any performer who, in his opinion, imbibed too much. Astley, though, had died in 1814 of stomach gout in Paris, and was succeeded in the family business by his son John, an angry alcoholic who ran up copious debts before following his father into a Parisian grave.

  Drinking was not the only aspect of a profession that had fundamentally changed with the arrival of Kean. Angry posturing and complaints of overwork were endemic among young actors, while the irresistible force of celebrity had continued to erode the idea of actors as public servants, replacing it with a sense of them as a special breed, a delusion greatly encouraged by innovations in lighting, such as the introduction in 1817 of gas lamps that could be lowered to darken the auditorium, and the invention of ‘limelight’, a cone of incandescent lime that could be used as a directional spotlight on the performer. Drawn by the promise of being bathed in bumptious glory, celebrity became its own motivation and the stage an avenue to acclaim, transforming, in the opinion of Alfred Bunn, Macready’s successor at the Birmingham theatre, the once-noble institution of Garrick into a refuge for the feckless and attention-seeking. ‘An actor’s position is very seldom obtained by education, by study, and preparation,’ wrote Bunn despairingly. ‘In nine cases out of ten he has tried his hand at some honest trade, and having failed or being disgusted, as a dernier ressort he flies to the stage, without possessing any of the qualifications considered essential.’ Nowhere was this ‘heartless indifference and contempt’ for the craft more apparent than at the Coburg, where Hazlitt was disgusted to observe how the actors slurred their parts and behaved ‘as if ashamed to be thought to take any interest in them, laughed in one another’s faces, and in that of their friends in the pit, and most effectually marred the process of theatrical illusion, by turning the whole into a most unprincipled burlesque’.

  Following his relapse, Joe spent August taking the Cheltenham waters, feeling well enough to accept two weeks in the local theatre, which had been leased by Farley. Yet his health was far from restored, and the visit took its place in the long-running cycle of breakdown and recuperation that had dogged him for years. As he neared his forty-fourth birthday, he had already subjected his body to almost two hundred thousand performances, yet he still remained unwilling to acknowledge his limitations or the extent of his chronic injuries, seeing every small improvement as a ‘token of a real and permanent change for the better’. The situation persisted for almost a year, until things finally came to a head in the pantomime Harlequin and the Ogress; or, the Sleeping Beauty of the Wood. Rehearsals h
ad been cut short to accommodate his diminishing strength, but ever the master of concealing pain from public view, Joey appeared before the holiday crowd ‘all grin and good humour’, and ‘full of humorous whim’, a deception so convincing that one reviewer even praised his ‘singular faculty of appearing younger every year’: ‘Time seems to pass harmlessly by him,’ he said, ‘except to increase the rich lubricity of his face.’ The journalist Theodore Hook was likewise deceived. ‘The strength of Grimaldi, the Garrick of Clowns,’ he wrote, ‘seems like that of wine to increase with age.’

  But the greatest act of denial was reserved for himself when, in January, Charles Kemble replaced Henry Harris as manager of Covent Garden and Joe signed a contract for three more years. He would only work for a fraction of that time as by Easter 1823, when Harlequin and the Ogress was replaced by a Farley melodrama called The Orphan of Peru, he was fast approaching the end. For twenty-four nights, Joe struggled painfully through his part, collapsing between scenes into the arms of men positioned in the wings where they laid him on a table and vigorously rubbed the muscles that had ‘gathered up into huge knots’. On 3 May, Harlequin and the Ogress was announced again, but though he reported for duty, Joe’s body would not comply. Seized with agony, he collapsed backstage, only to recover his senses with the heavy realisation that it was impossible to continue. Pain gave way to a wave of anguish ‘to which all his bodily sufferings were as nothing’, and alone in his dressing room, Joey the Clown buried his face in his hands ‘and wept like a child’.

  * Coincidentally, Harlequin and Fortunio was the first pantomime to feature a Principal Boy – then still known as a ‘breeches’ role – played by Maria de Camp. The Principal Boy would not become standard in pantomime for another forty to fifty years.

  * Years later, Philippe Laurent became an eminent Harlequin in the Parisian Théâtre des Funambules, and right-hand man to Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who popularised the tearful, iconic, white-faced Pierrot.

  * Joe did not see Bradbury for several years following his brief engagement at the Wells, until one day he received an unexpected note from a private madhouse in Hoxton. He took Richard Lawrence along for support, and the two men were led deep inside the asylum where they found him bound in a strait-jacket with his head completely shorn. Uncertain how to behave, Joe spoke slowly and carefully, which made Bradbury roar with laughter. He was only feigning madness, he claimed, having caught a young man trying to steal his gold pocket watch. The man turned out to be a member of a rich and powerful family who, to avoid a blot on their honour, had paid him handsomely to withdraw his prosecution. His ‘lunacy’ was only temporary, a means to defray any suspicion that the course of justice had been perverted. He had asked Joe to come in order to ask him a favour – the next day, he was due to be released, and wanted to know if Joe would play for his benefit at the Surrey. Happy to believe everything he’d heard, Joe agreed, and the next evening, things proceeded normally until it was Bradbury’s turn to take the stage. ‘Impelled by some strange and sudden whim’, he suddenly turned nasty, performing ‘a disgusting piece of irreverence and impertinence’, too shocking to be named, that left the entire audience stunned.

  * Interestingly, Oxberry’s also claims that ‘If any persons have an excuse for indulging at the shrine of Bacchus, it is those who are engaged in pantomime: the exertions they are compelled to make, require that they should resort to the use of stimulants.’

  11

  POOR ROBIN

  Lastly, be jolly, be alive, be light,

  Twitch, flirt and caper, tumble, fall and throw;

  Grow up right ugly in thy father’s sight,

  And be an ‘absolute Joseph’ like old Joe.

  Joseph Grimaldi, ‘Adieu to the Stage, and Advice to His Son’ (1823)

  IT ALL BEGAN WITH a blow to the head that would open the vents of hell.

  JS had taken over his father’s role in The Orphan of Peru, learning the part in a day and performing it superbly for the remainder of the run. He then joined the old man in Cheltenham, and while Joe sipped the restorative waters, JS indulged in something more sulphurous. Having just been offered the role of Drury Lane’s principal clown at a salary of eight pounds a week, he had cause for celebration. At Cheltenham they met Alfred Bunn, frequently in town as a guest of Colonel Berkeley, the hardened roué who was conducting an affair with Bunn’s wife. Bunn, likened to a cat thrown from an attic window for his propensity to land always on his feet, encouraged the affair, even installing his wife at Berkeley Castle the moment Berkeley had ditched his previous mistress, the beautiful actress Maria Foote, ‘a divinity just lighted on the earth’, whom he had seduced at seventeen and given two children.

  Perhaps to avoid such salacious gossip, the conversation soon fell to business and, sure enough, Joe found himself agreeing to appear in Birmingham for two nights. Two nights became three, at the end of which, said the Birmingham Reporter, ‘Mr. G. seems much the worse for wear.’ Also appearing in Birmingham was Charles Kemble, whom Joe approached with news of JS’s offer from Drury Lane, hoping to use it as leverage to persuade Kemble to keep him on. A negotiation began, at the end of which JS had been retained at Covent Garden at a weekly salary of six pounds.

  Those three nights in Birmingham had cost JS two pounds a week and an opportunity to embark on a career of his own, and Joe a month in bed, victim of a ‘severe and alarming illness’. Angry at his father’s interference, JS was left with nothing to do but loiter around Cheltenham, waiting for their next engagement. Loitering meant only one thing – immersing himself fully in the excesses of the town. Too sick to pay attention to a young man’s carousing, Joe only came to be aware of his son’s drinking when it was already too late. Having raised himself painfully from bed one morning, he was brought to the door by the knocking of the Watch and told that JS had been locked up ‘for some drunken freaks committed overnight’. Pulling on his coat, he accompanied the constable to the Watch-house, paid a fine and was taken to his son’s cell, where he found him draped lifelessly across the bench, his face covered with blood and his hair matting about a severe head wound. Like so many of his metropolitan larkings, the previous night’s revels had concluded with a fight with the local Charleys, although this time it was JS who had come off worst, felled by a Watchman’s quarterstaff that had crushed his hat and knocked him unconscious.* The wound would eventually heal, but it was only the beginning of JS’s troubles.

  With father and son both invalided, they prolonged their stay in Cheltenham for another two months in order to be well enough to appear in the Christmas pantomime. Returning to London in October, Joe began a long round of visits to leading doctors, many of whom had been recommended by the well-heeled patrons of Covent Garden. They included the plain-speaking John Abertheny, the physician who gave Joe a prescription to see himself perform; Sir Astley Cooper, Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, whose patients included the Duke of Wellington and the King (who had made him a baronet for removing a painful cyst from his scalp); and James Wilson, an expert on nerve and muscular diseases, whose father had performed the post-mortem on Samuel Johnson. Many others could be added to this list, but as Joe hobbled from one consulting room to another, the opinions they gave remained emphatically the same. He was suffering from a series of ailments – a respiratory complaint that left him breathless and gasping for air, recurrent digestive problems, and a number of chronic long-term injuries to his back and knees that had resulted in crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Full recovery was impossible, and though he had expected the news for years, he still took it very badly, refusing to make a final decision about whether or not he should appear in the upcoming pantomime until the last possible moment. At the beginning of December Joe finally faced the truth, and the next day a short, apologetic note appeared on the desk of Charles Kemble, explaining that he would not be able to fulfil the terms of his articles.

  JS was not the first choice to fill the vacant position. Kemble was reticent,
and may have instructed Farley to make enquiries about the availability of more experienced clowns, like Paulo and Laurent. But Joe pressed on behalf of his son’s claim, and after a number of discussions, it was eventually agreed that JS would make his début as Clown. The news was immediately taken up by the press, and some, like the anonymous author of ‘Grimaldi: a Jeu D’esprit’, chose to dramatise the passing of the pantomimic baton in verse:

  The Pantomime was all rehears’d,

  And puff’d off in the bill,

  When, full of grief, in Fawcett burst,

  To Kemble crying ‘Hear the worst,

  Great Joe Grimaldi’s ill.’

  ‘Grimaldi ill!’ the monarch cried,

  ‘Say, what then shall I do?

  Had I Macready at my side,

  Clown’s part with him I would divide,