The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  And show folks something new.

  But is it true, my Fawcett, say

  Has Fate thus spoke her will –

  Is all we’ve done, for many a day,

  Cut up – our hopes all cast away –

  Is Joe Grimaldi ill?’

  ‘He is, he is – that woeful brow

  Declares my piteous lot;

  But come, cheer up, and tell me how

  To act in this dire moment now,

  For someone must be got.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ said Fawcett – as he spoke,

  Great Kemble felt less pain

  ‘He hath a son, all full of joke;

  Could he be got,’ twould take the spoke

  Out of our wheel again.’

  Cried Kemble, ‘Bring him hither straight,

  Then puff him in the bill;

  The son will share the father’s fate –

  Be grinned at; I’m with joy elate,

  Though Joe Grimaldi’s ill.’

  While this poet took obvious comfort in the transmission of the role from father to son, others feared for the future of the form. ‘His name is not in the bills,’ wrote one. ‘ ‘‘Clown, Mr. J.S. Grimaldi.” Oh, villainous, J.S.! It should be “Clown, Mr. Grimaldi” – or Pantomime should betake itself to its weeds – and pine in perfect widowhood. We will say, without fear of contradiction, that there not only never was such a clown, but that there never will be such another.’ The author went on to imagine Joe sitting by the fire with a glass of Madeira ‘and J. S. (good in his way, but no Joe) listening to the clownish reminiscences of his inestimable Papa’.

  Yet as JS prepared to assume tenancy of the horizonless tract of Joey’s pockets, relations between the two men were far from cosy. Following the fight in Cheltenham, JS had begun to suffer epileptic seizures, episodes exacerbated by the constant cycle of heavy drinking and withdrawal he subjected himself to with the aid of an increasingly debauched circle that now included the great Edmund Kean. Three days before JS made his clowning début, the two men could be found drunk together in JS’s Covent Garden dressing room, Kean in particularly petulant mood, throwing his weight about and shouting that if Elliston did not come to him immediately, he would leave for America the following day. Joe, meanwhile, fretted over the succession and bombarded his son with advice. When JS stopped listening, he published it in the form of doggerel verse:

  Hand Columbine about with nimble hand,

  Covet thy neighbour’s riches as thy own,

  Dance on the water, swim upon the land,

  Let thy legs prove themselves bone of my bone.

  Cuff Pantaloon, be sure – forget not this;

  As thou beat’st him, thou’rt poor, J.G. or funny!

  And wear a deal of paint upon thy phiz,

  It doth boys good and draws in gallery money.

  By the time of his début, JS had managed to shelve his problems, even showing some of the exceptional promise of which he was capable. ‘His voice is thickening into that ancestral and sonorous tone,’ wrote one reviewer of his Clown in Farley’s Harlequin and Poor Robin; or, the House that Jack Built, ‘his eye lacks none of its parental luster and wickednesses and his indescribable turn for mischief and humour is genuine Grimaldi-ism.’ The Times wrote,

  Without being equal to his father just yet, Mr Grimaldi, jun. shows a great deal of cleverness; and his attempt may be considered as decidedly a successful one. He had great activity, and some humour. Tolerably light of finger, and uncommonly light of foot. He avoids, and with very good judgment, any servile imitations, and gets on rather by a juvenile vivacity, than by that sleepy style of humour which Mr Grimaldi, sen., latterly relied upon. Upon the whole, he is, at least, as good a clown as any now upon the stage; and if he takes pains, and avoids breaking his neck, we see no reason why he should not be as great a man as his progenitor.

  Charles Kemble continued to pay Joe a half-salary until the end of the 1823–4 season, after which he found himself without an income and still unable to perform. ‘In my present state of health,’ he wrote to Richard Hughes junior, ‘I fear I shall not be able to accept any engagement anywhere,’ and pinned his hopes on selling his shares on the expiration of Egerton’s lease. Disappointed to find their market value was still far below what he’d paid for them, he carelessly let them go in dribs and drabs, ‘consequently rising every morning a poorer man’.

  Another lessee appeared in Llewellyn Watkin Williams, son of the proprietor of the Old Bailey Boiled Beef House. Williams proposed to hold the leases to both the Wells and the Surrey simultaneously, but proved no more capable of steering the theatre to profitability than any of his predecessors, despite a plan to divide his costs by splitting his company, having one half open at the Wells and closed at the Surrey, and the other doing the same in reverse. A special carriage was equipped to shuttle the cast between venues, but the experiment still failed and, predictably enough, Williams took his place in the King’s Bench prison.

  Forced to bear another loss on the Wells, Joe had no choice but to look about for work, and with little prospect of making money beyond performing, he put his health aside and offered himself out as a cameo performer in various pantomimes. One taker was Richard Brinsley Peake, son of the Drury Lane treasurer – his name betraying his father’s devotion to the Sheridean cult of personality – who was dramaturge at the English Opera House. Peake proposed to place him in a piece called Monkey Island, describing his plan in a letter in which he sketched out a gallery of clowns that included portraits of Dubois, Paulo, Follet, Bradbury, Bologna and Laurent. The largest was covered with a curtain that read ‘Grimaldi’. ‘Grimaldi junior as Clown, and the other characters come on with catalogue to view the pictures,’ Peake explained. ‘Grimaldi junior draws the curtain of the centre picture and discovers his father – the “ne plus ultra” of pantomime – Harlequin touches the picture and Grimaldi descends – is received warmly by the audience and his friends – sings a song – and goes through the two last scenes of the pantomime.’ In the event, Joe was too unwell even for this commitment, and the scene was excluded, leaving JS to take the engagement alone. ‘Young Grimaldi is the best Clown,’ read the review with demoralising predictability, ‘excepting his father.’

  Instead of liberating him, Joe’s retirement from the stage only served to make JS’s behaviour worse. At home, he was glowering, moody and withdrawn, and when out, kept the company of prostitutes, abandoning himself ‘to every species of wild debauchery and riot’. To his epilepsy and seizures were added episodes of foaming mania in which he became ‘a wild and furious savage’, a seeming reincarnation of the Signor that so intimidated Joe he was unable to speak to his son for fear of provoking a violent confrontation. Joe and Mary watched helplessly as his drinking became increasingly reckless and compulsive, heedless of neither health nor consequences. Indeed, drink may have been responsible for the injury to E. J. Parsloe during the run of Harlequin and Poor Robin, when Parsloe, standing in for Barnes as Pantaloon, was stabbed in the face during a scene with JS, resulting in a lost eye and a dangerously high fever. JS’s alienation continued to grow, until at last he turned his back on his family entirely, leaving home and refusing to speak to his parents, even to the extent of crossing the street if he saw them coming. For the next four years, say the Memoirs, Joe and Mary only saw their son on stage.

  What had bred such animosity in the young man? Was the fight in Cheltenham entirely to blame, as Joe and Mary believed, or was it a legacy come to pass, the latest mutation of an atavistic madness that had coursed through the family’s veins for generations? The reality was probably much more mundane: JS was simply smothered by his father’s success and, with a resentment fed on narcotic fumes, his efforts to break free manifested themselves as a spiteful and misshapen rejection. With his good looks, swagger and swordsmanship, so skilful that it set the visiting King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands on the edge of their seats, JS was perfectly cut out for a life in straight acting an
d melodrama, a fact his father overlooked in his desire to see him inherit Joey. But while Joe had been able to impart techniques, he could do little to induce in his son a genuine love for the role, or convey a means to channel the inspiration that he himself could explain only through some mystical transaction with pain. Lacking that feeling of authenticity no doubt left JS feeling like a fraud, deserving of the comparisons that would superficially flatter before inevitably concluding with some assessment of the gulf between his abilities and those of Joe. One reviewer summed it up when he said that, ‘Time and experience may do much [though] we will not at the expense of sincerity put this young gentleman in competition with the transcendent talent of his father.’

  It was a familiar story in the theatrical world, where dwelling in the shadow of a famous parent had cursed both Fanny Bland, Dora Jordan’s eldest daughter, who had tried and failed to establish herself as an actress and taken solace in doomed affairs and drugs, and her half-brother George Fitzclarence, who shot himself for want of recognition. And if the child is the parent to the man, then for Master William Betty the burden was even more acute, given that the legend he had to contend with was his own. Though able to live quite comfortably on the money he had earned as a boy, he found it impossible to quiet the demons that stemmed from those early years, and in 1821, a has-been for decades, he cut his own throat. He survived the attempt, and the following year invited all his old theatrical colleagues to a gala dinner for which he hired a large auction room. Only eleven people came. The year after that, he attempted suicide again by throwing himself through a closed window, but though he managed to break the glass, his bloated body was caught in the frame, and had to be pulled out by some Bow Street officers who noticed him dangling from the street. ‘Most men’, wrote Leigh Hunt, ‘begin life with struggles, and have their vanity sufficiently knocked about the head and shoulders to make their kinder fortunes the more welcome. Mr Betty had his sugar first, and his physic afterward … I wish with all my heart we had let him alone.’

  Worry over JS was compounded by worry about the fate of Sadler’s Wells. Its lessees had universally failed, and with its dwindling audience and worthless shares, its business was on the brink. With no one willing to take it on, the proprietors were forced to look for a manager and, inevitably, they turned to a Dibdin.

  Retirement had been unreasonably hard on Thomas Dibdin. The offer of fifteen pounds a week to work at the Surrey had tempted him from sequestration and reignited his taste for the theatre, which in turn led to him filling the position of prompter at Drury Lane before going back to the Surrey as manager and lessee. Denounced before the Police Committee as ‘one of the greatest nuisances in the metropolis, being resorted to solely by thieves and prostitutes’, the Surrey was a cash-consuming bunghole, which, when levelled with the mangy state of theatre in general, resulted in years of trouble, prolonged by the occasional glimmer of false hope proffered by an infrequent hit. In 1822, his association with the place ended in bankruptcy and a debt of more than eighteen thousand pounds, and what was supposed to have been an Elysian retirement became an Acherontic hell: Thomas was forced to take two jobs to pay off his debt, working at both the Haymarket and Drury Lane, where he clashed repeatedly with both managements. At fifty-two, he cut a bitter and careworn figure, mocked by the younger generation of performers, who considered him a relic, haunting the Drury Lane green room wreathed in pompous self-pity and telling anyone who would listen that ‘twenty years ago [he] was a great man at Covent Garden’.

  Airs and graces only served to make a bad situation worse, and when his play The Chinese Sorcerer did not get any laughs, he placed a note in the green room forbidding the actors to ad-lib lines. They responded with a note of their own, insisting that they were forced to ad-lib as theirs were the only decent jokes in the whole piece. When his pantomime Gog and Magog was hissed and he looked to blame the carpenters, he lost the confidence of the management and the respect of the entire company, who ganged together to try to force him out. Dibdin clung doggedly on, resorting to a court order to enforce his contract. At the Haymarket, meanwhile, he was directed to write a play for a herd of reindeer, but by the time he had finished a piece he called The Laplanders, the reindeer had all died, and the management withheld his salary. Dibdin ended up back in court and having to borrow money from criminal extortionists to put food on his table.

  It was, then, a ragged and miserable Thomas Dibdin who returned to Islington, a spot he found transformed as thoroughly as if it had been a pantomime trick. The once-bucolic Wells now stood in the ‘centre of a large town’, consumed by the metropolitan sprawl encouraged by a Tory government that had been spooked by the 1816 Spa Fields riots. Eager to brick over any space of dissident congregation, the expansive fields and pastures that had once surrounded Rosoman’s wine-room were now reduced to fugitive rectangles, or overlaid with paving stones on which were planted rows of houses, squares and streets.

  Though the world outside stood as proof that the epoch of Dibdin and Grimaldi had irrevocably passed, the new manager thought only of restoring the Wells to its former glory. Joe was appointed his assistant, for which he drew a salary of four pounds a week, and together they cut the prices and reinstated the wine, converting the Hugheses’ old residence into a saloon and, for the first time in Sadler’s Wells’s history, offering half-price admittance after half past eight. Next Dibdin set to plundering his vast catalogue of melodramas, burlettas and pantomimes to shore up the repertoire, though the season succeeded only in sounding a stale note of nostalgia: the performances lacked spark. ‘Mr T. Dibdin’s talent has oozed away with a vengeance,’ wrote one visitor, having endured a night of dreary pieces that failed to contain ‘even any of the happy absurdities of his former productions’. As the season faltered, the bills began to promise that ‘Mr Grimaldi will occasionally appear,’ although the principal appeal of this promise was not the songs he sang or the patter he delivered, but simply ‘once more witnessing the famed Joey’ before it was too late. It was bad sport, wrote one observer, watching ‘poor old Joey Grimaldi dragged from a sick bed, with a view to prop up the falling fortunes of this former scene of his early fame’, and many might have boycotted his appearances entirely, had they been aware of their true cost.

  Thomas Dibdin’s first season ended with a deficit of fourteen hundred pounds, but still the proprietors persevered, slashing the budget to accommodate the loss, and reducing Joe’s already meagre salary to a paltry two pounds. This prompted Mary to return to the Covent Garden chorus, while Joe wrote to JS to beg for money. A reply was long in coming, and would never have appeared at all had it not been for the urging of many acquaintances. When it did arrive, it took the form of a solitary line that read, ‘At present I am in difficulties; but as long as I have a shilling, you shall have half.’ No charity ever came from that quarter, but things at the Wells eventually improved sufficiently to keep Joe and Mary from the workhouse. Persuaded that Islington’s enormous growth would provide them with an audience hungry for seasonal entertainments ‘without compelling the inhabitants to plod through sleet and rain to the patents’, the proprietors decided to take the unprecedented step of offering a winter season. No minor theatre had ever attempted such a move, but it went unchallenged despite an outstanding 1787 licence that restricted Sadler’s Wells’s operation to the months between Easter Monday and 19 September.

  The additional season gave Thomas Dibdin the chance to make a second major contribution to the history of pantomime when, following the practice of the royal theatres, he ceased to offer new pantomimes at Easter and Whitsun and saved them solely for Christmas. Pantomime has been a yuletide entertainment ever since.

  Fortunes were better served the following summer when a heat-wave convinced Dibdin to bring back the ponies, re-fence the coachyard and clear its outhouses to make way for ‘Newmarket in Miniature’, a racecourse that offered races by the light of a thousand lamps. It was quintessential Sadler’s Wells – races were interspersed
with exhibitions by ‘the female jockey’, Mrs Fitzwilliam, and sack races billed as if they were prize fights: ‘a pedestrian from Berkshire’ versus Wiltshire’s Paddington, ‘who has never been beaten’. Musical interludes were provided by military and Pandean bands, the evening concluding with a ‘fire balloon, thirty-six feet in circumference and a parachute attached to it with two pigeons’. Though the profits were not staggering, it at least put them in the black.

  When the receipts were good, Joe could at last enjoy some of the overdue fruits of retirement. These included making his annual pilgrimage to Bartholomew Fair, and taking a more prominent role in the activities of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, where in 1826 he had been elected one of its twelve directors, which also required him to act as a steward at its grand annual dinner. Less formally, he was installed as the president of the Crib Club, a friendly society that held its meetings in the Sir Hugh Myddleton, and whose membership included the illustrator George Cruikshank, and the pub’s landlord, the appropriately named Dickey Wells. Pantomime, though, was intractably in his blood, and as he wrote to a friend in the Christmas season of 1826, he was ‘quite ashamed of looking at himself in the Glass this season without his original painted Mug’.

  His son, meanwhile, maintained his voluntary estrangement. Even in the face of such unwarranted rejection, Joe continued to dote on the boy and did everything he could to indulge him, hiring him at the Wells at five pounds a week along with his reprobate crony Henry Kemble. In a generational echo of the way he had always tried to please the ferocious Signor, Joe’s acts of love served merely to make JS more contemptuous.

  Having lost his son, Joe began to work with Tom Matthews, a bow-legged young man with a mouth ‘like Piccadilly Circus’ who was almost the same age as JS and desired nothing more than to study the craft with the man he was happy to call master. Dedicated and irreproachable as Matthews was, Joe continued to yearn for his wastrel son, constantly searching for ways to repair their relationship, acting in his benefits, and asking Dibdin to write them a duet, in the hope that, if they could not be reconciled in life, they might at least be reconciled on stage.