I didn’t know what to ask next. It may sound odd, but it was almost as if I had asked one question and that was enough—I didn’t know where to go from there. I didn’t think to ask her, “Does Daddy know?”
Finally I said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Very sure.”
And we left it at that.
SOMEHOW, I WAS able to push it away to a dark corner of my mind. Since I didn’t know whether or not Dad knew, I assumed she must have slept with him afterward in order to say “I’m pregnant.” I went into denial. I told myself that my mother had been drunk when she chose to tell the story. Maybe it wasn’t even true.
Nearly forty years later, some time after my mother’s death in the 1980s when I was making the film Victor/Victoria, I was chatting with Aunt Joan about the past, and suddenly the opportunity to broach the subject presented itself.
I asked if she remembered the certain gentleman who had come to visit once or twice in my youth.
“Why do you ask?” my aunt said, very sharply.
“Well…because Mum hinted a couple of times that perhaps he was my father.”
There was a long silence. Aunt seemed to be weighing something in her mind. Then she murmured, “Yes. He was.”
“But Auntie, how do you know?” I asked.
“Because I was around at the time,” she replied, “and Mum spoke to me about it.”
“What about Daddy?” I asked. “Did he know?”
“Yes. He did,” she said.
And that simply knocked me sideways.
ACCORDING TO AUNTIE, my father was so in love with my mother, he decided it shouldn’t make any difference. Two years later, Johnny was born—his legitimate son. Several years after that, my mother had the affair with Pop and became pregnant with Donald. The fact that Dad had offered to take me, and later Donald, under his wing to keep the marriage intact is extraordinary. If he knew about my heritage, he certainly never treated me any differently. I believe he loved me dearly. And because I did not know then that he knew, I didn’t have the heart to ask him about it before he died. I thought I was protecting him from some deep hurt.
I also never asked Win, my stepmother. And I never mentioned it to any of my siblings. Until the day I spoke with Auntie, I just wasn’t sure of my facts, so I thought I shouldn’t rock the boat. When I began to write this book, I felt they should hear the truth from me before my story was published. I was not happy being the bearer of such news, but it seemed right to set the record straight. It was a painful time for us all.
The important thing is that my love for the man I thought of as my father—Ted Wells—did not change in any way. I was fierce about it, and after that I wanted nothing to do with the other man. I wasn’t curious; I had no desire to start a relationship. I disliked the specter that he was. I didn’t see him again until some nine years later.
THINGS BETWEEN MUM and Pop further deteriorated. My mother seemed to fall deeper into depression, finances were growing increasingly difficult, and we were having trouble with house payments. The Meuse itself was becoming unkempt. There was a mouse in my bedroom, and at one point it ran over my hair, which scared the hell out of me. I began to hear voices in my head at night, a crazy chatter, and I worried that I might go mad, like Betty, my father’s sister.
A source of comfort for me was the late-night train that rattled through the nearby railway station. As it approached, coming up from the coast to London, I’d hear the wheels of the steam engine clattering over the railroad ties, the puffs of the chimney and shrieks of the whistle. Lying in the dark, the sounds were always reassuring. They implied that there was life out there…the world was going about its business, and that made me feel more sane.
Not long after the revelation from my mother, I was gazing out of my bedroom window one day, feeling a little sorry for myself. I stared at the garden, watching the birds swoop down and around the rosebushes.
Uncle Hadge had long since moved up to London with Auntie Kit, and the bitter truth was that all the magic he had made in that garden had fallen apart. It mattered deeply to me that it not sink back into disarray, but it had. The tennis court was overgrown, the roses had become wild, the gladioli were spindly, and everything was generally a mess. It seemed symbolic of the condition of our family.
It was a hot summer afternoon, still and perfect. It began to rain, lightly at first, but quickly becoming fat, heavy drops. I thought, “Someone send me a sign that there is something better in the world, something beautiful and worthwhile, something more to life than this.”
I was gazing at a particularly large, full-blown rose, when all of a sudden one extra raindrop was just too much for it. All its petals cascaded to the ground at once. It was startling, and oddly comforting.
A rose lay open in full bloom
and, looking from my garden room,
I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.
It seemed so fragile, resting there,
and such a silence filled the air,
the beauty of the moment caused me pain.
“What more?” I thought. “There must be more.”
As if in answer then, I saw
one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.
It trembled, then cascaded down
to earth just staining gentle brown
and, since then, I’ve felt different.
That’s all.
NINETEEN
IN JUNE OF 1950, I began work as a resident singer on a weekly BBC radio show called Educating Archie. Created as an unlikely showcase for the popular ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy, “Archie Andrews,” the show was originally slated for a six-week run as filler, but ended up running for thirty consecutive weeks without a break and playing to a regular audience of about twelve million listeners.
Although Peter Brough was not especially impressive at throwing his voice (one could always see his lips moving), he was charming, sartorially elegant, and came from a family of ventriloquists. Archie, the manic-eyed dummy dressed in a broad striped blazer, played the character of a bratty kid. Peter was his tolerant father who either argued with or placated him. The other cast members included Robert Moreton as Archie’s tutor, Max Bygraves (a budding comedian at the time) as an odd-jobsman, and as the neighbor Agatha Dinglebody, the comedienne Hattie Jacques, who, a few years later, would show me a kindness that changed the course of my life.
I was supposedly the little girl next door. If I was lucky, I got a few lines with the dummy; if not, I just sang. Working closely with Mum and Madame, I learned many new songs and arias, like “The Shadow Song” from Dinorah; “The Wren”; the waltz songs from Romeo and Juliet and Tom Jones; “Invitation to the Dance”; “The Blue Danube”; “Caro Nome” from Rigoletto; and “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark.”
Pop, in one of his sober periods, used the opportunity to make some money by doing my orchestrations. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to sing with a big orchestra on a regular basis.
Though not broadcast live, the program was recorded in front of a live audience, and I was able to sit in on many of the read-throughs and the show itself. I would rehearse my one aria, then watch these brilliant comedians and actors perform for radio. Many wonderful artists appeared on the show, all of whom became big headliners, like Tony Hancock, Harry Secombe, and Alfred Marks. Eric Sykes wrote many of the scripts, but later also became a well-known comedian.
The first broadcast of Educating Archie aired on June 6, 1950. As we only recorded one day a week and I was not in every episode, I was able to continue touring with Mum from time to time.
An impresario, Harold Fielding, promoted a series of elegant concert evenings, usually in the summer, called Music for the Millions. His venues were the concert halls along the South Coast of England, towns such as Eastbourne, Margate, Bournemouth. The shows were purely musical presentations, and quite classy. I was invited to do several of these shows in the late summer.
Mr. Fielding was a diminutive, exquisitel
y neat gentleman, very kind and enthusiastic, and always in good humor. He seemed to have a soft spot for me, and I loved working for him. His concerts felt to me like a step up in the world, and I appeared on the bill with wonderful performers: The Western Brothers, who did satirical monologues to music; Elsie and Doris Waters, who chatted about inconsequential things; Rawicz and Landauer, a piano duo; Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy of the British stage; Larry Adler, harmonica player, and Joyce Grenfell, a gentle comedienne and singer who many years later played the role of my mother in the film The Americanization of Emily.
One particular Bank Holiday, Mum and I were contracted to appear in Eastbourne. I had said to my mother that I was old enough now to pack my theatrical gear myself, and I did just that. We drove to the south coast in a terrible downpour. It seemed like the wettest Bank Holiday on record.
We waded through the puddles to the stage door of the Winter Garden and shivered through a damp rehearsal. Setting out my clothes for the evening, I discovered to my horror that, though I had packed my frilly party dress, I had omitted my ballet shoes. I had traveled to Eastbourne in a pair of heavy brogues, which were totally unsuited to my outfit. Since it was a Bank Holiday, not a single shop was open, and there were no dancers on the program who could, perhaps, have lent me a pair of appropriate shoes.
My mother despaired. Rummaging through my theatrical kit, she found the white liquid paint that we used to freshen up my ballet slippers.
“There’s only one thing to be done,” said Mum. “I’ll paint a ballet shoe on your socks.”
Alas, my socks were not only mud-spattered, but also full of holes. My mother designed a white shoe on the grayish material and filled in the holes by daubing my bare skin beneath. My socks—and feet—didn’t dry in time for the show, and I made my entrance onto the stage leaving a trail of white footprints in my wake.
There were no footlights in the Winter Garden, and the audience couldn’t be sure that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. Heads craned and a buzz of whispered comments continued throughout my performance. I tried hiding one foot behind the other, then reversing them, all to no avail. Mum thumped away in a spirited fashion at the piano, I sang my songs faster than usual—and was never so happy to leave the stage. I was mortified; no extra bows for me that night.
On October 1, I turned fifteen and was officially freed from the London County Council’s child performer restrictions. My mother decided that Miss Knight, my tutor, was now no longer necessary—and thus ended my formal education.
“Aren’t I going to get any schooling at all?” I asked. I had the good sense to know I would be missing out on something important.
“You’ll get a greater education from life, Julie, than from going to school,” she replied. And because I was busy, and school was an extra burden, I didn’t argue.
To celebrate my “liberation,” Mum threw one of her great parties. There must have been about sixty people in the house. Everybody danced and jitterbugged and had a fine old time. Don and Chris, having been sent to bed, crept out to watch the party through the banister railings.
At some point, we took a break to have something to eat, and Pop made a very inappropriate remark about me and my friends, Susan Barker and Patricia Waters. I don’t recall what he said, but Gladdy Barker had been getting more and more irritated by his drunken behavior. There was a large dish of blancmange—a milky, jelly-like English pudding—sitting on the table nearby, and she suddenly picked it up and hurled it at him. Pop ducked in the nick of time and it hit the wall behind him. There was utter silence in the room as everyone watched the wobbly pink goop slide slowly down the wall and into the bookcase. Then everyone began talking at once. The goop was cleaned up, and the party continued on into the night.
TOWARD THE END of the year, I began to perform occasionally without my mother. She had the two boys and Pop to look after and simply couldn’t be with me all the time. I went on the road with a gentleman pianist who was good, but he didn’t know my idiosyncrasies or have the fine musical instincts my mother had.
In November of that year, I landed the title role in Red Riding Hood, the Christmas pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham, a historic town in the British Midlands, famous for its lace, Sherwood Forest, and Robin Hood lore.
Mum and Auntie came up to help me settle in. We took our trailer and parked it next to the wall of a big cinema, and lived there during rehearsals. After they returned home, I moved into a hotel.
Since I was only fifteen, I still needed a chaperone, and I believe that the leading lady, Cherry Lind, who played Prince Valiant, was asked to keep an eye on me. Happily, she was also in the same hotel.
I was a gauche Red Riding Hood. Tony Heaton was Mother Hubbard (my mother); Tony Hancock, the comedian, was Jolly Jenkins, a bumbling, well-meaning Baron’s page; and the variety artist brothers Albert and Les Ward were the Baron’s Henchmen. They played guitars, bicycle pumps, washboards, and practically anything that would provide accompaniment to their country-and-western-style songs. Kirby’s Flying Ballet were the fairies and woodland creatures. In true panto tradition, the comedians brought their own shtick to the show—and, as always, the songs had nothing to do with the story. I contributed a highly technical coloratura aria called “The Gypsy and the Bird,” which I sang in the forest on the way to Grandma’s house. (So I, too, brought my own shtick, so to speak.)
One matinee, I was performing this aria and I became aware of giggles coming from the audience. I thought, “Oh Lord! My petticoat’s probably falling!” What I didn’t know until I finished the song was that one of the Flying Ballet wires had broken loose from its moorings. The wires were weighted with sandbags and tied off at the side of the stage, and one large sandbag had broken free and was swinging on its wire the entire width of the proscenium, missing me by inches while I was trilling away. I was told later that had I stepped back a mere inch or two, I would have been clobbered.
Being a teenager and much on my own, I became rather unprofessional and would arrive at the theater as late as I possibly could. Sometimes, I washed my hair before the performance, and it would still be dripping wet when I went onstage. Nobody ever said anything; nobody cared.
Mum didn’t visit much, and I was horribly homesick. When she and Auntie came up for a weekend, they found me in tears and quite depressed. They hadn’t the heart to return home right away, so they stayed a few more days and gave me some much-needed cheer.
Fortunately, I was an avid reader, so that took up some of my time. I had a fairly big break between scenes, and I would often read in my dressing room. One day I was so engrossed in my book that I missed my cue. I heard thunderous footsteps as the assistant stage manager came running down the corridor to pound my dressing room door, and the loudspeaker clicked on backstage.
“Julie? Get down here! You’re on!”
I flew down the stairs, and by the time I made my entrance, the audience was chatting loudly, wondering what was supposed to happen next.
The inmates of the local asylum came to a matinee, and following their visit, I received an explicit letter from a patient suggesting that if I cut an orange in half and rubbed it on certain private parts of my anatomy, I would be “purified.” My mother was appalled.
“All the more reason to never open your own mail!” she admonished.
An audience member gushed to me once, “It must be so exciting performing in the theater! Tell me, do you all meet onstage between shows and have picnics together?”
To the contrary, the hotel dining room was always closed by the time we returned after the evening’s performance. The kitchen would leave out a salad and some cold chicken, and Cherry Lind and her mother and I, and sometimes Cherry’s boyfriend, would sit and eat in the empty dining room, which was eerily quiet with only a few lights left glowing in the darkened hotel. I remember Cherry showing me how to make a vinaigrette salad dressing, a recipe I have used ever since. Sometimes I sim
ply ate alone.
Occasionally the cast would get together after the show. Tony Hancock and his wife often entertained at their digs. Since he had performed in Educating Archie, I knew him a little and liked him, although we hadn’t had much connection on the radio show. He was heavyset, with a woebegone clown’s face and large, sad eyes. In his hilarious sketches, life was always tough, and he would stand, gazing out at the audience with thick-fingered, “wet fish” hands at his side, trying to understand the trials and tribulations that befell him. In real life, he was a depressed man, an alcoholic who eventually committed suicide. But he became quite famous long before that sad moment.
Red Riding Hood ended in March of 1951, and I was extremely relieved to go home.
TWENTY
AFTER RED RIDING HOOD closed, I went out on the road again. Mum and I made a memorable trip to the Isle of Wight off the South Coast of England for a Sunday evening appearance at the Shanklin Theatre.
Royal Navy ships were moored in the harbor, and the theatrical performers received an invitation to go aboard their frigate after the show. We trooped down to the pier and climbed into one of the tenders. Mum was wearing high heels, which kept slipping through the holes in the wrought iron steps of the jetty. We were ferried over to the main ship and shown into the officers’ mess, where everyone was plied with drinks.
Mum was very much the life and soul of the party that night, and she got completely “plotzed” from the size of the Navy rations and the fact that there was no curfew on board. It must have been one o’clock in the morning before we left the ship. We settled Mum into the tender, but getting her out of the little boat, which was rocking in the swell, was not easy, and I had to push her up the same iron steps.
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