Next, the audience were treated to a pantomime retrospective, an olio of favourite scenes for ‘which the entire pantomimic strength of the metropolis assisted’, including JS playing the Watchman scene from Harlequin in His Element, and Wieland and Chikini, two young Clowns from Drury Lane, dancing a comic pas de deux. As the last notes of music drained away, and the last performers ran offstage, Joe returned, divested of his motley, one hand hanging on to Harley, the other clutching Hood’s speech. When the noise had finally died down, he said,
Ladies and gentlemen, I appear before you for the last time. I need not assure you of the sad regret with which I say it; but sickness and infirmity have come upon me, and I can no longer wear the motley! Four years ago I jumped my last jump, filched my last custard, and ate my last sausage. I cannot describe the pleasure I felt on once more assuming my cap and bells tonight – that dress in which I have so often been made happy in your applause; and as I stripped them off, I fancied that they seemed to cleave to me. I am not so rich a man as I was when I was basking in your favour formerly, for then I had always a fowl in one pocket and sauce for it in the other [laughter, cheers, and applause]. I thank you for the benevolence which has brought you here to assist your old and faithful servant in his premature decline. Eight-and-forty years have not yet passed over my head, and I am sinking fast. I now stand worse on my legs than I used to on my head. But I suppose I am paying the penalty of the cause I pursued all my life; my desire and anxiety to merit your favour has excited me to more exertion than my constitution would bear, and, like vaulting ambition, I have overleaped myself. Ladies and gentlemen, I must hasten to bid you farewell; but the pain I feel in doing so is assuaged by seeing before me a disproof of the old adage, that favourites have no friends. Ladies and gentlemen, may you and yours ever enjoy the blessing of health is the fervent prayer of Joseph Grimaldi – Farewell! Farewell!
The old friends rose to stamp and cheer and wave their hats, but the thunderous noise could not shake Joe from the trance into which he had fallen. His feet refused to move, and he stood at the lamps ‘swaying to and fro as if fascinated, rooted to the spot’, until JS forced his way on and ‘taking the veteran by the hand, half led, half-carried him from the stage’. Backstage, Joe was taken into a private room where he was helped into a chair and fortified with a couple of glasses of Madeira. As a token of gratitude, he handed Mr Harley the new wig he had worn for the performance and the original copy of Hood’s address, before a delegation of performers formed a line in the room to give him their farewells and good wishes.
At the stage door, the street was thronged with people waiting for him to emerge. They gave him three cheers and followed his coach all the way home, where they cheered him again as he went in, and refused to disperse until he had come out again and made a bow from the top of his steps.
* Newspaper reports reveal that clowns and constables were evenly matched. In 1831, Henderson, a clown at Astley’s, single-handedly beat up two police officers on account of ‘being uncommonly active on his pins’. The clown of Saunders’ Equestrian Troupe was not so lucky, killed by a cutlass-wielding Watchman in the early hours while walking home drunk.
12
THE LIBERTINE DESTROYED
Don Juan, with frantick obduracy, seizes the mouldering bones of the murdered father; fractures them, and casts them at the feet of the Phantom, and in a paroxysm of wickedness, tramples on his skull! Horrid thunders roll! The vision vanishes! The earth yawns! The ministers of vengeance arrayed in flaming sulphur ascend from the chasm! – The Libertine, in all the agony of guilt, casts himself upon the ground to avoid the terrors which encompass him, but in vain! His momentary slumber is awakened by the demons which surround him; and, HELL, with all its HORRORS, bursts open to receive him!!!
Carlo Delpini, Don Juan; or, the Libertine Destroyed (1790)
THOUGH JOE HAD BID the stage farewell, the Grimaldi name remained on the bills through the efforts of JS. Joe’s support for his estranged son did not falter, his attention to the boy’s career fuelled by a desire to see his own work live on. Passing the baton from father to son was as important to him as it had been to the Signor, and the succession seemed secure when JS appeared as Clown in Harlequin and Little Red Riding Hood at Covent Garden on Boxing Day 1828. His performance was roundly praised, even if it failed to dislodge comparisons with the old man himself. ‘Young Grimaldi – now, alas! our only Grimaldi,’ wrote The Times, ‘is evidently improving. The rawness of his boyhood is going off; he grows more like his father in manner … and therefore grows better. His activity is equal to anybody’s, his grimace is very masterly … and his humour is getting generally rounder and more solid.’ With both critics and audiences happy to give him time, JS had every right to feel secure in his position, yet still the weight of expectation proved unbearable. Trapped in a role he had not chosen, he quickly reverted to his old ways, finding a solution to his problems in a self-sabotaging cocktail of drink and anti-social behaviour. After only three days, Charles Kemble sacked him from the pantomime and replaced him with the ever-dependable Signor Paulo.*
Ejection from Covent Garden was the cue for the acceleration of JS’s decline. Tortured and alcoholic, he fell into a pattern of behaviour that saw him moving quickly from theatre to theatre, never staying longer than a couple of months before another relapse would compound the misery of his self-destructive ways. In the summer of 1829, he was taken back by the Wells to perform in a pantomime his father had produced called Three Wishes, comprised of twelve of the most popular scenes from his repertoire. Yet even the great love the Wells felt for Joe could not induce its management to tolerate his son’s appalling behaviour, and JS was sacked after only a few weeks, replaced by the one whose dearest wish would have been to call Joe father, Tom Matthews.
Joe and Mary moved to a smaller house at 23 Garnault Place, just around the corner from their old one at Exmouth Street, where they intended to live a quiet retirement with the proceeds from his benefits and an annual pension of a hundred pounds granted by the Committee of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund. Even now Joe’s name retained the power to attract a crowd, as evinced by a practical joke that advertised an attempt by ‘Grimaldi’ to repeat Usher’s trick of riding a wash-tub pulled by four geese down the Thames from Westminster to Vauxhall Bridge. The bill, announcing ‘a Grand Naval Aquatic Exhibition’ in the best style of Charles Dibdin, claimed that Joe would win a hundred sovereigns if he could do it in less than forty minutes. Anyone who knew him was aware that it would take Joe that long to climb the stairs, but nevertheless an enormous crowd gathered to find tub and geese waiting, but no Grimaldi. The hoaxers had bet each other how many people would turn out.
Drury Lane’s charity extended as far as providing JS with one last chance. In October 1829 he was cast in a melodrama called The Greek Family, and at Christmas he played Clown in the pantomime Jack in the Box; or, Harlequin and the Princess of the Hidden Island. ‘Of Mr. J. Grimaldi,’ wrote The Times, unrelenting in its familial theme, ‘it is sufficient praise to say, that he very often reminded us of his never-to-be-forgotten father.’ JS completed the season, but after that he disappeared from London, apparently on tour. He certainly visited Manchester and Edinburgh, where he was plagued by fits and insanity and ‘not infrequently arrested’. ‘Young Grimaldi arrived a few days since,’ reported a Scottish newspaper in 1830, ‘had scarcely landed when he was seized with feverish symptoms, and is at present in a most precarious state, and quite delirious.’
His itinerary was curtailed before the close of the year, when he voluntarily entered prison in London by invoking the Insolvent Debtors Act to rid himself of his many creditors. In court, he answered questions in ‘a very candid manner’, and listened to a citation that shed some light on his recent movements and turbulent lifestyle, listing addresses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ayr, Greenock, Stourbridge, Worcester and Cheltenham, and a long roll of lodgings in London that included four different addresses in Islington, three off Theobald
’s Road, one in Martlett Court, Drury Lane (where his great-grandfather had once pulled teeth), and one each in Mile End Road, Borough High Street, and the New Cut, Lambeth, next to the Coburg. It is unknown which of these addresses he returned to following his release from prison on 3 March 1831, aided by his father’s expenditure of forty pounds on court costs and the expenses he incurred during incarceration, but by May he was employed at the Pavilion, an even more tawdry version of the Coburg, situated in an old clothes factory in Baker’s Row, Whitechapel. Prison had obviously done nothing to reform JS, as he lasted less than three weeks in his new job before being sacked and presenting himself at his parents’ door in ‘the lowest form of wretchedness and poverty’. ‘His dress had fallen to rags,’ say the Memoirs, ‘his feet were thrust into two worn-out slippers, his face was pale with disease and squalid with dirt and want, and he was steeped in degradation.’
Mary didn’t want to let him in. She had suffered too long at the hands of his ‘gross and violent abuse’, but Joe was lonely and unable to turn him away. Only infrequently at the Wells, he had been spending long hours at home, arranging his folders of cuttings, manuscript plays and ideas for pantomime tricks, while Mary toiled in the Covent Garden chorus from ten in the morning until midnight. Unable to pursue any of his former hobbies, his greatest pleasure lay in theatrical politics and gossip, and he took an especially keen interest in the growing struggle between the patents and the minor theatres, who were making increasingly bold incursions into the province of legitimate drama.
As a proprietor, Joe was firmly on the side of the minors, a partisanship that was buttressed by the great delight he took in watching minor managers and impresarios inflict heaps of aggravation on his foe Charles Kemble. In concert with the managers of Drury Lane, Kemble had bankrolled a network of spies to inform him when any of the minor theatres were presenting pieces that might flout the law. In 1830, this had led to a prosecution against Chapman, the manager of the Tottenham Street theatre, a case that Joe attended with many other notable men of the profession, whose enthusiastic support for the Tottenham reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the anachronistic and oppressive terms of the Licensing Act. Public opinion was almost entirely on the side of the minors, and when the Tottenham escaped prosecution, despite being unequivocally guilty of all charges, the court was overjoyed, especially as Kemble was universally vilified as both a monopolist and a sneak.
Taking JS back provided Joe with a new focus: he concentrated on his son’s rehabilitation and keeping temptation at bay while looking to repair their bond by arranging outings. ‘I know it is a great favour to ask,’ he wrote to a friend, probably the manager of the Exeter Change Menagerie, Edward Cross, looking for free tickets to see a show and visit the lions, ‘but as I cannot now put my hand in my pocket, have taken this liberty, which if complied will add an additional obligation.’ JS seems to have made progress: the autumn and winter of 1831 proceeded quietly and with no major ructions. He even found time for a little correspondence, although a letter written in reply to a request from the theatrical autograph hunter Charles Brantiffe Smith reveals either his affected nonchalance or genuinely patchy memory: ‘My Dear Sir,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot remember in what year, or in what Pantomime I first appeared at Covent Garden Theatre, all I can inform you of is that when First I play’d the Principal Clown, the name of the Piece was Harlequin and Poor Robin; or, the House that Jack Built, with regard to dates, Mr Farley is I think the only person who can give you the information you are in Search of.’
In the spring of 1832, the Wells was leased to the female jockey, Mrs Fitzwilliam, who, having no room for Joe, let him go soon after. Now that he had lost his small weekly stipend, and with no further reason to live close to the Wells, the Grimaldis decided to leave the Islington conurbation and enjoy the clean air and space of a riverside cottage in Woolwich, close to the Royal Naval Dockyard. JS came with them – an encouraging sign – and, buoyed by his general improvement, Joe helped his son look for work. Easter 1832 saw him rewarded with a contract at the Coburg where, by accident or design, he was fitted to roles that perfectly reflected his notoriety: ‘Gallows Charley, an ungovernable Kid’ in Paul Clifford or the Highwayman of 1770; ‘Desperetto’ in The Maid of Genoa; and a ‘Celebrated Drunken Combat’ in The Bandit of the Blind Mine. But Joe’s hopes for his son’s recovery proved premature, as JS was off the bills in less than a week.
On 8 May, he appeared at a benefit for the orphans of his sometime Harlequin, the one-eyed E. J. Parsloe at the Surrey. Parsloe had died while playing Clown in the first ever production of Mother Goose to be performed in America. A company had travelled to play at the Bowery Theatre, New York, but Parsloe had fallen and injured his spine during the voyage, and after two nights of performing painfully before a bemused American audience, who had no idea what to make of this unusual form, he suffered a mental breakdown and had to be led from the stage. He was found dead the following morning.* Superstitious pantomimical circles noted that Mother Goose had never been successful without Joe Grimaldi. To try it was to court disaster.
Still Joe struggled on behalf of his son, writing to Alfred Bunn, as Christmas approached, in his new position as lessee of Drury Lane. Bunn was unable to help: ‘Being as lost to the stage as he was to his family,’ he wrote of JS, ‘a compliance with his wish was utterly impracticable.’ He did, though, enquire whether the services of the father were available as arranger of that year’s pantomime. Seeing a negotiating opportunity, Joe refused to concede, offering some of his tricks, scripts and designs in return for a place for JS. He wrote back to Drury Lane:
I sincerely regret that nothing can be done for my son as I am confident that you would find him a valuable acquisition in every department. Salary, as I previously stated, would be a secondary consideration, as a permanent situation is all that is required. An article perhaps for three or five years might still (by your kind interference) not be objected to, commencing at 3l. per week. Should an opportunity present itself, I hope and trust you will interest yourself in his behalf for the sake of Old Joe and Auld Lang Syne. With regard to myself, I cannot express myself in terms sufficiently to return you my sincere thanks for the good opinion you still have of me, and of my poor humble abilities. It is certainly a great consolation to know in my solace that I am as much respected and esteemed in my retirement as when in my public character. Your kind offer to me to superintend the forthcoming pantomime (however gratifying to my feelings) I shall never forget but must decline. I could no more sit in an arm-chair to instruct a pantomime than I am capable of jumping out of a garret window without injury to myself – for this reason, should anything go contrary to my wishes all ailments would for a moment vanish, for I must exert myself, which in all probability might end in a bed of sickness, and might terminate my existence. All that I can offer is this – I have as many models and tricks as would furnish six or seven pantomimes, of which you may select what is necessary for your Christmas Novelty. Independent of which I have a good opening which you may inspect, and also can, upon a pick, assist you with a comic scene or two of business, if required. Thus I can promise without fee or reward, provided an arrangement can be made for my son.
However much he wanted to oblige old Joe, Bunn could not afford the liability, and JS did not appear on stage again until November, when he was called to appear at another benefit. The long hiatus and Woolwich air seem to have done him some good as his performance was faultless, and when he returned to his parents the following day, he brought with him the news that he had been re-engaged at the Coburg for the Christmas season.
The next day he celebrated his thirtieth birthday in modest style, and in the afternoon received a note inviting him to play at the Tottenham Street theatre in Don Juan, and a melodrama called The Slave’s Revolt, based on Oroonoko, Aphra Behn’s novel of a noble African taken into slavery. After borrowing some money, JS left to take the engagement on Sunday, 24 November, and on Wednesday Joe went up to town and found h
is son in high spirits. They dined, and JS left for the theatre. The following Sunday, however, he did not appear for dinner with his parents as he’d said he would. A few days later, the news arrived in Woolwich that their son was ill, prompting Joe to write to a friend to enquire whether it was necessary to send for a doctor. For two days he heard nothing, although, given JS’s binges, this was far from unusual.
In the meantime, Mary fell dangerously ill and was confined to bed. ‘She has had a Paraletic attack,’ wrote Joe to Richard Norman, ‘which has deprived her of the use of Limbs and Speech and is confined to her bed, and is assisted out of Bed and in Bed by 3 persons – her Speech has partially recovered but the Limbs I fear never will…’ On 11 December, Joe was upstairs tending her when he heard a knock at the door. He went downstairs to open it and was greeted by a sombre-faced friend who informed him, ‘with great care and delicacy’, that JS was dead. The press notice read:
On Tuesday morning died after a sudden illness at his lodgings, 24 Pitt Street, Tottenham Court Road, Mr J.S. Grimaldi, the successful successor, as it was once thought, of his talented father. The deceased performed last week at Tottenham Street Theatre, the parts of Scaramouch in Don Juan, and Black Caesar in The Slave’s Revolt, and then appeared in his usual health. On Monday, however, he became delirious, but dressed himself and assumed one of his principal characters, he was then mildly restrained and medical aid called in, but all proved ineffectual, and at nine o’clock yesterday morning he breathed his last. The deceased was unmarried and in his 30th year.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 30
