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Title: A Star Danced (1945) Author: Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952) * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0700891h.html Language: English Date first posted: July 2007 Date most recently updated: July 2007 This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg canadianebooks@gmail.com Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
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Contents
"Lunch in London, the day after tomorrow...'
The skipper dropped the words out of one corner of his mouth without disturbing the cigarette in the other corner. He disposed of some three thousand miles of atmosphere as nonchalantly as you would toss a peanut shell over your shoulder.
I blinked. But only once. After all, the past two days had been so fantastic that this ultimate scene and conversation on the brilliantly lighted airfield outside a city in one of the Southern states, beside the big airliner which was to take me to England in a scheduled thirty-six hours, seemed part and parcel of the events that had been happening thick and fast ever since the telephone woke me at seven o'clock one morning.
The telephone had summoned me from a dream in which Richard and I were running, hand in hand, down our own narrow strip of Cape Cod beach into the ocean. Sleepily, unwilling to let go of that dream, I reached for the receiver and held it to my ear. New York calling. At Dennis, Cape Cod, at seven o'clock of a May morning, New York seems as far away as London or Timbuktu.
"Are you up?" the voice of my lawyer demanded crisply.
Knowing me as she does, this was purely a rhetorical question which, I felt, did not rate an answer. She went on: "Get up! Right away! Get yourself onto the first plane, or the first train, into New York. I've just had word from the Air Ministry in Washington that there is space for you on the British Airways plane leaving at midnight tomorrow. You're on your way."
After weeks of more or less patient waiting, repeated timid, pleading, urgent, and finally importunate requests to the authorities who rule such matters in Washington and London, and a rapid-fire barrage of telegrams, cables, and telephone calls, it had happened. At last I had permission to do what I had been wanting desperately to do for four years—go to England and do my bit on a tour for E.N.S.A. Though no one knew just when, everyone was aware that the invasion of Europe was imminent. More than anything in the world I wanted the opportunity to entertain the British and American troops who would soon be fighting in France.
Basil Dean, founder and director of E.N.S.A.—the British equivalent of the U.S.O.—had cabled, asking me to come; but getting a priority to make the crossing and getting a place aboard a plane had taken a lot of wire-pulling at the American end. Now, I was really on my way home to London which I had not seen in six years. I would see my old friends, or at least those who remained of that gay company after the Battle of Britain—those who weren't fighting in Italy or the Near and Far East, or on any one of the seven seas.
And I might see Richard.
That thought brought me out of bed and under the shower in one swift leap. From then on the next two days were one mad rush, winding up with the final leap to the airport.
And now here I was, ready to board the big airliner for the hop to Newfoundland. I caught my breath, and did my best to imitate the casual-almost-to-the-point-of-boredom air shown by all members of all the air forces I have ever met when they are about to take off.
I was assured of passage to Newfoundland, where we were due to land at 9:00 A.M. the next day. Whether there would be a place for me in the plane going on from there to Ireland remained disturbingly uncertain. We all joked about it, standing there beside the plane. The others were sure of their passage all the way to England. They were officials or had diplomatic passports and were bursting with priorities. But I had only a number-three priority, which guaranteed me nothing much more than leave to hitch-hike.
Ernest Hemingway was among the favored ones. I met him then for the first time. There is something about Mr. Hemingway that makes one think of a small boy—a rather mischievous small boy whose pockets are full of bits of string, old rusty nails, chewing gum, and maybe a pet toad or two. A small boy hiding behind a big, bushy beard. He asked me, grinning:
"Suppose there is no place for you on the plane? What will you do?"
"Stow away," I retorted, "in your beard!"
This, I found, was Hemingway's first visit to England. How strange and sad, too, to have one's first glimpse of London in her grim battle dress.
My first view of Newfoundland, from about five thousand feet, was of an enormous black-and-brown land splashed with snow, like a huge chocolate cake with white icing. All around was a calm, oily, gray sea and, overhead, a beautiful clear, cloudless sky. We had breakfast in the cabin of the plane before we docked. Then we went out to breathe the fresh, salty, fishy-smelling air, stretch our legs, and see the sights. The airport was full of Canadian, British, and American airmen from the planes which ferry steadily back and forth across the North Atlantic. You felt you were getting close to the fighting front, even though several thousand miles of ocean still stretched between Newfoundland and Europe. Here, everyone was engaged, in one way or another, in getting on with the war. The little town was crowded. People spoke matter-of-factly about hopping from continent to continent.
Recalling letters from England and tales of food shortages over there, I did some prudent shopping and emerged triumphantly with a watch, which I had forgotten to get in New York, two pounds of butter, and a dozen eggs. I tried to buy some lemons, which I knew were regarded in England as extinct, but they were extinct that day in Newfoundland also.
The local paper announced that the Germans were retreating in Italy. Good! The invasion of Europe was believed to be very near now. And it was reported that Roosevelt would run again. I wished my chances of holding my seat (in the plane) were as good as his.
After lunch and the arrival of the Pan-American Clipper, bringing more passengers bound for England, I was assured there was a place for me on the plane leaving at one-fifteen. I told Ernest Hemingway:
"Your beard is now safe from British invasion."
For the next eighteen hours, during eight of which I slept soundly, we flew so high, sometimes at an altitude of eight thousand feet, that there was nothing to see but clouds. How strange was the knowledge that far below was the stretch of tossing gray ocean I had crossed so many times since my first trip to America in 1924, when I came over with the cast of Charlot's Revue. Strange to think that, far below us, the American and British navies were patrolling those same waters to protect the convoys of transports and freighters which were plying back and forth with men and war matériel.
Just after daylight we had our first glimpse of Ireland—lush green fields and the heather-colored mountains of Connemara with the morning mists curling from their crests like ostrich feathers. Disturbingly peaceful it seemed after the warlike atmosphere one felt in Newfoundland. Fat white sheep grazed placidly in the fields that bordered the road by which we motored from Limerick. Several times our car slowed down to clear the road for the herds of young beef cattle, bound (as I hoped) eventually for England. Every letter I had had from friends at home had spoken wistfully of the past days of plenty. Though none of the writers complained, you read between the lines the same longing you see in children's faces pressed against a sweetshop window.
We took off again late that afternoon and put down at Croydon about seven o'clock. The skipper, who had promised me lunch in London that day, was only five hours out on his calculation.
Flying across southern England, I wondered where Richard was and how soon I might see him. After all, I couldn't expect the American Navy to adjust its plans to allow one of its lieutenant commanders to be at Croydon to meet his wife. But, being a woman, I couldn't help wishing.
In the excitement of actually recognizing the big, familiar field just below us, I bounced in my seat—and promptly broke two of the precious eggs in my lap.
"My God, woman," said Hemingway, helping me clean up the mess, "what are you going to do now?"
"Fortunately, I'm the same shape front and back," I told him. I jerked my tweed skirt around so that the egg stain was behind me, buttoned my fur coat, and assured myself, as I tripped down the gangplank, that I was making as neat an entrance as any in my career.
It was eight o'clock, the dinner hour, when I drove up to the dear familiar Savoy. It was not yet dark, just the beloved twilight, yet London's streets were strangely quiet and free of traffic. There were great gaps in the familiar skyline and piles of rubble along the streets we drove through. All the way over I had been steeling myself for this, my first view of bombed London. I knew it was going to be hard to take. There was bound to be that wrenching struggle between the impulse to cry out and the feeling that one simply dared not give way to one's feelings. London is my home town. I was born there in Kennington Oval. I grew up within the sound of Bow Bells. I spoke with a cockney accent until I was eleven or thereabouts, when Miss Italia Conti scolded and drilled me out of it. In London I have been by turns poor and rich, hopeful and despondent, successful and down and out, utterly miserable and ecstatically, dizzily happy. I belong to London as each of us can belong to only one place on this earth. And, in the same way, London belongs to me.
The windows of my room at the Savoy looked out over the Thames Embankment. After a solitary dinner, as I stood there looking down, I had my first sharp realization of what war had done to my town. An impenetrable black curtain seemed to have fallen between me and the city. The enveloping blackness in which the stars seemed unreally bright and near and the unusual, wary, listening stillness were more impressive at that moment than the destruction wrought by the bombs. They filled me with a swift, blinding fury against the enemy who could muffle the voice and force of the greatest and most tolerant city in the world. Suddenly the silence overhead was cut by the whir of flying planes. They were our bombers starting out for targets across the Channel. The sound carried me back to World War I, when we used to be glad of nights such as this, when there was no moon to guide the Zeppelins up the winding Thames to drop their death freight on us.
On such a night...
Suddenly, as against a black-velvet backdrop, the past came back to me, and I saw myself as a little girl, dancing on a sidewalk in Clapham....
Clapham is not the least desirable of London's many widely sprawled districts. Clapham is "genteel." Dwellers in other suburban districts of London speak enviously of their better-off cousins and in-laws who are privileged to live in Clapham, London S.W. For them—and they include thousands of tried-and-true Londoners—Clapham is something to aspire to.
Residents of Clapham speak of these less-favored boroughs with no more than the faintest tinge of superiority. For if there is one thing which every true Claphamite knows and will swear to, it is that employment is full of uncertainties and life is a matter of ups and downs. His attitude toward the dwellers in the East End is that of the humble apostle; but for the grace of God, there go I.
Clapham has its own code, its own proper pride, and its own firmly rooted conventions. For one thing, it is very bad form, indeed, to ask questions. Of course you can't help being aware of certain facts about your neighbors: the hours they keep, who is in or out of work, whose husband spends more of his free time at the corner pub than he spends with his family, and what they buy at the butcher's and greengrocer's. Good form, however, demands a pretense that you know none of these things. If one of your neighbors suddenly disappears overnight, bag and baggage, you are properly surprised about it the next morning, even though you did hear the bailiff's voice in the hall and the stamping made by the men from the hire-purchase company as they carried out the furniture.
If you were brought up in Clapham, as I was, you don't have to be informed of these nice points of etiquette. You grow up knowing them. "Don't be nosy," Mother would say. And Dad would add: "It doesn't pay to see everything, my girl."
Mother hadn't always lived in Clapham, and Kennington Oval was a step down for her. Her father had been a master builder—a man of substance in his own line, whose fortune, however, had been lost in "gilt-edged" securities. Granny still lived in the same house to which she had moved as a young bride, where her children were born, and where, she stoutly affirmed, she intended, "God willing, my dear," to die. Mother had taken the step down when she allowed the unexplained romantic streak in her nature to make her deaf to the dictates of her class. Following that will-o'-the-wisp, she married for love with a blind disregard for economic security—married, of all things, a theatrical! And a foreigner at that. Even though he had come to England at the age of two, he was a Dane whose professional name was Arthur Lawrence. He sang in a deep, rich basso profundo, and with a dramatic fervor that went down very well with audiences at smoking concerts and in the smaller music halls. He rendered such favorites as "Old Black Joe" and "Asleep in the Deep." His "Drinking Song" was famous throughout Brixton and Shepherd's Bush. Alas!
Mother had been very carefully brought up. "All the time your father courted me we never once were out together after ten o'clock. I'm sure I don't know what your grandfather would have said if I had not been home and on my way to bed when the clock struck that hour."
So much decorum must have been a great strain on my father, accustomed as he was to the hours kept by the profession. Perhaps something in his Danish nature responded to this strict middle-class propriety. His family, the Klasens, were a solid, respectable lot—and he was the only one of them with a taste for anything so Bohemian as the stage.
Mother's family shook their heads over the future of such a marriage, and they were quite right about it. My father liked his glass, and an evening dedicated to bass solos gives a man a thirst. He was—as I was to learn—one of those whose personality was completely altered by alcohol. His gaiety, his charm, his blond good looks disappeared. He became ugly in disposition and demeanor. Mother left him soon after I was born. I grew up with no memories and no knowledge of him. But I adored Dad, my stepfather.
No wonder Granny shook her head over Mother, who just couldn't seem to learn about men. Mother chose her two husbands for their charm, not for their ability to provide. Father had always been able to sing for our supper, but Dad was always promising to provide handsomely. "Wait," he would say to us. "Just let me back a winner...." When he did, we would celebrate with a slap-up feast—boiled salmon, or a bird, toasted cheese, and a side dish of prawns. And, occasionally, asparagus. The first time we had this delicacy, I remember, Mother cut off all the green tips and boiled the white stalks.
Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen—little Gertie Lawrence to you—was quite satisfied with Kennington Oval. For one thing, the organ-grinder came there frequently and would pause and grind out a tune on each side of the Oval, which gave the residents a fair-sized concert. I never could resist him, nor could I learn to be a proper child and satisfy myself with opening the window a crack to let the music come into the room.
"Where is that child?" Mother would ask. One look from the window was enough. There I was, following the music, holding out my brief skirts and dancing to what I hoped was the admiration of the neighbors.
Nobody that I know of had taught me to dance. The steps just seemed to come to me the minute my ears caught the music. But Mother loved "musical evenings," and my first song, learned from a sheet of free music cut from a newspaper, went like this:
Oh, it ain't all honey, and it ain't all jam,
Walking round the 'ouses with a three-wheel pram,
All on me lonesome, not a bit to eat,
Walking about on me poor old feet.
My old man, if I could find 'im,
A lesson I would give.
Poor old me, I 'aven't got a key,
And I don't know where I live.
Boom! Boom!
Whenever we had company, on a Sunday night, I would be made to oblige with a song. "Gertie's such a funny one!" Dad would puff out his chest, proud of my accomplishment.
"Fancy! A child her age singing songs like that!"
"Whatever will she do next? She ought to go on the stage. She's got it in her."
That song brought me the first money I ever earned. The summer I was six Dad must have had a streak of unusual good luck with the horses because he took Mother and me to Bognor Regis for the bank holiday. It was boiling hot, I remember, and the sands were crowded. I had never been to the sea before; the bathers, the picnic parties on the sand, the strollers along the Front fascinated me. A concert party was entertaining, and Dad paid for us to go in. At the close of the regular bill the "funny man" came forward and invited anyone in the audience who cared to, to come up on the stage and entertain the crowd. A push from Mother and the command: "Go on now, Gertie, and sing your song," was all the urging I needed. "It ain't all honey, and it ain't all jam," I caroled lightly, twirling on my toes with my skimpy pink frock held out as far as it would stretch. The applause and the cheers were gratifying, even without the large golden sovereign which the manager presented to me after a little speech.
I know I must have told this story to Noel Coward. No doubt I boasted of it when we were both pupils at Miss Conti's dancing school. The incident may have given him the idea for one of the scenes in Cavalcade. In fact, when I saw the play, there was something so familiar about that little girl doing her song and dance on the Brighton sands, the little girl who grew up to be an actress, that I felt a rush of tears and a choke in my throat. She made me remember, suddenly, so many things I thought I had forgotten.
One other thing makes that holiday at Bognor Regis stand out in my mind. We were living in lodgings, of course. Late one Sunday afternoon Mother told Dad to take me for a walk along the Front while she got our supper ready. Dad and I walked about for a bit, enjoying the crowds; then I noticed that his steps began to drag and he began to cast longing eyes at the saloon doors from which, now that they were open again, came the cool, sour smell of beer. Finally, he could stand it no longer.
"Sit down on that bench, Gertie," he said. "You can have a nice look at the sea and the people going by. Be a good girl, now, and don't move until I come back for you."
I watched him disappear in the direction of the nearest bar. I was not disconcerted. Obediently I sat on the bench, swinging my legs and enjoying my freedom. Even more than the sea and the crowd, I was interested in a stand where a sign announced bicycles for hire. That drew me as inevitably as the saloon had drawn Dad.
"How much does it cost to hire a bike?" I asked the attendant
"Sixpence an hour, my dear."
I felt around in my coat pocket and produced the coin. The attendant looked at me a bit doubtfully, but the sixpence was real enough and there in the rack was a bike just my size. He took it out and lifted me up on the saddle.
"That will do you a fair treat," he said. "Now be sure you bring it back in an hour." He turned away to wait on another customer.
I wheeled the machine proudly across the Front and down a street into a crescent where the railings in front of the houses gave me something to hold onto. I had never been on a cycle before, but I had no doubt of my ability to ride one. I leaned it against the railing, paying no attention to the sign which read, "Fresh Paint," mounted it, and, holding onto the railing with one hand, managed to pedal around the crescent. It was thrilling, like riding a circus horse around the ring, and there was always the possibility that the people were watching me from the windows of the houses. I fell off several times, skinned my knee, and got the front of my frock grubby while the side toward the railings became ornamented with stripes of green paint, but I kept at it, getting better with each lap. I had forgotten Dad and Mother, even the admonition of the attendant at the bicycle stand to be back within an hour.
It was getting dusk before Dad found me, a frantic, red-faced, frightened Dad, who had already spent some time running up and down the Front calling, "Gertie! Gertie!" and demanding of everyone, "Have you seen my little girl anywhere about?"
His relief at sight of me was immediately transformed into anger for the fright I had caused him. "Now, then, whatever have you been up to? You'd ought to be ashamed of yourself running off like that! Such a fright you've given me! Whatever would I have said to your mother? She won't half give you a piece of her mind when she sees what you've done to your frock! And it's your poor dad will get the worst of it."
He went on, muttering and scolding, all the way back to the bicycle stand where he paid the attendant for the over-time. And still clutching me by the hand, as though afraid I would vanish again, he hurried me back to our lodgings. We were nearly there when he stopped, removed his hat, and wiped his brow. Giving me a long look that immediately established a confidence between us, he remarked tentatively, "I don't know. How would it be if we were to take your mother a little gin and bitters to have with her supper?"
I nodded approval.
"Wait here, then. And none of your vanishing acts, my girl!"
He stepped jauntily into the convenient door of a refreshment bar. After a few minutes he emerged, wiping his mustache and looking very much more like himself. He patted one bulging pocket: "Your mother always did fancy a gin and bitters. Your mother's a wonderful woman, Gertie. Don't you ever forget it!"
No, I promised myself. Somehow or other I felt that I now had two allies against Mother's anger when she discovered the state of my dress. Dad, I felt, would be on my side and could be counted on to bring up the reinforcements—namely the gin and bitters—at the psychological moment.
Dad's admiration for Mother was unbounded, and his devotion was as great as his admiration. Whenever they had a tiff, he would feel moved to tell me solemnly that it was all his fault. He appreciated Mother's fine qualities, and he would lecture me on the subject of showing the same appreciation.
"Mind you always do as your mother tells you to, my girl. Your mother's a wonderful woman. Just you try to be like her, and you won't go far wrong."
There was nothing sentimental about Mother, nor about her determination to bring me up according to her standards. She saw to it that I came straight home from school each day and that I did the household tasks that were assigned to me. One of these was blacking the fire grates. As Mother said, there was something about a well-blacked grate that gave a room an air. It may be that this helped her morale and compensated for some of the instability of her life with Dad. Each of us has some sort of pet fetish, something we cling to which gives us self-confidence and power to go on. A neat, well-blacked fireplace was Mother's. If she had blacked the grates herself, she would have missed the satisfaction of feeling that she was bringing up her daughter in the proper tradition. So I blacked the grates each day. And on Saturdays I did the brass and helped in general.
It was not sentimentality but a fierce pride for herself and for Dad that made Mother put me into ruffled frocks which were a bother to make and to wash and iron. And what a nuisance they were for me to keep clean! It seemed as though some mischievous fate led me into trouble as soon as I was sent out, freshly bathed and dressed, with strict orders to "walk around the pond and try to act like a lady." It wasn't that I deliberately tried to misbehave, but that life would not let me follow Mother's command. It would hold out some other inducement to me, something I could not refuse. Before I knew it I would be engaged in sailing boats on the pond, getting wetter and muddier every minute, or making friends with some stray mongrel puppy whose playful paws had no regard for my starched ruffles.
"Why can't you be like your cousin Ruby!" Mother would scold.
My cousin was all that I was not—she was a plump, pretty, neat child with curls hanging to her waist; my hair was lank and as straight as a die. My cousin Ruby was always spotless and without a wrinkle. Her nails were clean. She was the pride of the family, and she knew it. Her father, my mother's brother, was in charge of the Royal Stables at Buckingham Palace, which gave Ruby a prestige. "Just look at your cousin," Mother would say. "She is such a credit to her parents, it's a pleasure to watch her come into a room. Here I spend hours on making you look nice and it lasts until you're out of sight. I declare, Gertie, you've got the very devil in you."
I think Mother always regretted losing the world in which she had lived briefly with my father—the world of the theater. In a slightly discolored mother-of-pearl card case she treasured a number of visiting cards of actresses she had known in those days. Sometimes, as a treat, she would let me play with them. I would pull a card out of the case, read the name aloud, and she would immediately launch into the story of how she and the owner of the card met and where, what her specialty was, and Mother's own opinion of how good she was at it. This parlor game gave me my first inside information on the theatrical profession. One of the things I learned was that Friday was "professional night" at most of the theaters. On Friday night it was usual to admit members of the profession free. By the time I was eight or nine, I had learned the trick of writing neatly across the face of any one of the cards, "Please give my little girl two seats." If Mother was out that evening, I would take the card, call for one of my little girl friends, and together we would take the tram to Brixton or any near-by district where there was a theater. I would present myself and my card at the box office. The man would look through the wicket at me a little doubtfully, whereupon I would put on my most innocent and pleading look. Usually someone hanging about would say: "Oh, give the kids a couple of seats." We would skip in and find places in the gallery.
After the show we would take the tram home, hoping desperately to get there before our mothers found us out. Once, I remember, either the tram was delayed or Mother came home from Granny's earlier than usual. She found the other little girl's mother hammering at our door.
"Your Gertie came and took my Mabel!" she cried.
"They're not back yet."
Mother did not put off whipping me to ask too many questions. After the punishment, she began to inquire into our evening. What shocked her most of all was our riding to and from Brixton on the tram.
"Did you speak to anyone?" she demanded.
"A gentleman spoke to me."
"How do you know he was a gentleman?" Mother asked suspiciously.
"Because he was wearing a gold watch and chain!"
Strangely, this seemed to satisfy her as completely as it had satisfied me.
The rooms on Kennington Oval marked the high tide of our finances. We lived there only as long as luck was with Dad. Then we moved, as we frequently did. There was a regular ritual connected with these movings which varied only as we moved up or down in the economic scale. If the move was occasioned by good fortune, Mother added a piano to the furniture she ordered sent around to the new address. There was something undeniably genteel about a piano in the house, even if no one could play it.
If the move was in the other direction, a van drove up and men smelling of sawdust and beer carried away the piano and the rest of the furniture which we had on the hire-purchase plan. They were quite impersonal about it; they gave you to understand that their orders to take away the tables and chairs and the sideboard with the mirror at the back came from the company. Mother was always on her dignity with them. She refused to be commiserated with. In her own way she contrived to imply a disdain for the household chattels over which there was such an unaccountable to-do. The impersonal air with which she watched the men from the Hire Furniture Company stagger down the front steps under the pseudo-Jacobean fumed-oak dresser was a triumph of dramatic genius. As the rooms became emptier, you felt that Mother was merely clearing her decks for bolder action, and that when we had furniture again, it would be on a nobler, more elegant scale.
Meanwhile Dad would have slipped 'round the corner and entered into negotiations with the neighborhood greengrocer whose account had been paid up and whose friendship could therefore be relied upon. Not until after dark, when there would be no prying eyes, would Mother take down the window curtains and pack the few possessions rightfully our own and which remained constant through all the changes for better or for worse—the bedding, though not the beds, the kitchen pots and pans, the square black marble-and-gilt clock with the figure of Britannia resting on her shield staring pensively at a beast which resembled a poodle more than a lion, the pair of gaily-flowered Royal Worcester vases which always flanked the clock above every hearth we gathered round, and a red glass mug engraved with the date of Queen Victoria's Jubilee.
Close on to midnight the grocer's boy would arrive with his cart. Dad would tiptoe down the stairs with the parcels and baskets and pile them on the cart while the boy leaned against the railing and kept a lookout for "Nosy Parkers." In all this there was nothing original; we were merely following a tradition long recognized in Clapham and in other less-favored districts. This maneuver was known in the vernacular as a "moonlight flit." Obviously, it was a move to cheaper lodgings in another district where we and our straitened circumstances were as yet unknown. Also, obviously, it was without the landlord's knowledge.
There must have been families whose moonlight flits were sad and shamefaced. Not ours. There was something daring and whimsical about this sort of move which challenged all that was adventurous in our three natures. Each of us responded to the challenge differently; each in his own way.
Mother always dressed up to the nines for the occasion. She would skewer her largest birded hat atop her puffs, twine a marabou boa elegantly about her neck, and draw on a pair of long, worn, but carefully mended gray gloves. Catching up her skirt with one hand and carrying the tea-kettle in the other, she would sweep down the stairs with a dignity calculated to overpower any lurking landlord.
In Dad, jauntiness rose over dignity. He would cock his bowler at an angle, and thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, he would chaff the grocer's boy, making him a partner in the adventure.
At a signal from Dad the boy would push off with his cart, Dad would gallantly offer Mother his arm, and they would follow. I would bring up the rear of the little procession. So we moved through Clapham's silent streets, pioneers setting forth into the unknown to start a new home in a new and untried land. The adventure tingled in my toes. Where the moon or a street lamp splashed the pavement with light, my feet would begin to dance....
The sun was shining when I opened my eyes on my first morning glimpse of London. Immediately things began to happen. Phones rang, flowers arrived, photographers snapped cameras at me, and the press began asking how it felt to be home again after six years "in the States."
I could tell them in one word: wonderful.
All that day and through the week that followed, lunching, teaing, and dining with old friends, applying to the proper bureaus for ration cards, gas mask, tin hat (quite fetching when worn at just the right tilt), and a National Service Permit to enter restricted areas, I was discovering and making acquaintance with a London that was strange to me.
I thought I knew London in every possible mood—gay and handsome and smart and ceremonious as she was during the coronation summer of 1937—I was there for that brilliant high tide of midsummer pomp. Officially I was "resting" while Rachel Crothers rewrote and polished Susan and God. Actually, I was entertaining myself and being entertained by the gayest season London had had in many years and the last she was to see for a long time to come. During those weeks, when the old city was washed and brushed and bedecked, like a doting grandmother for the marriage of a favorite grandson, all of us drank deep of our pleasure. Perhaps we had a premonition of what lay just ahead. Anyway, that London of 1937 came the closest to Edwardian London of any other season since World War I.
Sometime before I was there playing in Tonight at 8:30. All that season there was a hush over England; people spoke softly, nobody made plans. Everyone waited for the bulletins which gave us news of the King's condition. You felt the imminent passing of an era. I had a small radio in my dressing room at the theater and would turn it on between acts to pick up the news from the B.B.C. The news, to everyone in England that year, meant one thing—news of the King.
One night when we knew the King was very low, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was in my dressing room waiting for the final curtain. When I came off the stage and into the dressing room, the radio was tuned in and I didn't need to ask questions. Douglas' face told me that the last bulletin had not held out much hope. Very quickly I changed, and Douglas and I took a taxi to Buckingham Palace. It was impossible to get close, because the Mall and all the wide space in front of the gates were crowded. Thousands of Londoners and people up from the country were packed shoulder to shoulder in a silent, motionless mass. We joined the others and waited.
I remember seeing Claire Luce, in a bright scarlet coat, wedged into the crowd. She was then playing in Gay Deceivers, and she had come just as she stepped off the stage, even with her make-up on.
There was nothing one could do, but somehow there was no other place one wanted to be at that moment. Every quarter of an hour or so someone came out of the palace and posted a new bulletin on the board fastened to the gates. Then the whole crowd moved forward as one man. The two or three in a position to read the typewritten notice passed the word back. The message rippled through the crowd: "The King is sinking." I held on very tight to Douglas' arm and he to mine. We were rumored as being engaged, but just then and there personal relationships did not count for much.
Presently a new notice was put on the board. Again that urgent sweep forward of the crowd, like the tide pushing its way into a cove. But this time there was no ripple or whisper. Silently those in the front rank stepped back and removed their hats; then from the crowd as from one man there rose a single sigh.
We were wedged too close to turn. I was squeezed between Douglas and another very tall young man. I saw him sweep off his hat. There were tears running down his cheeks.
"Well, I guess that's that," he said. His voice told me he was an American.
The words wrote an end to a chapter.
The big event of my first day was getting in touch with Richard. He phoned he could get leave and asked me to come down and meet him at his base the next day, which was Saturday. We arranged that I would take the nine-thirty train from Waterloo. I arrived at the station a good half-hour beforehand only to be told the train had been canceled in the night. As no one seemed to think this was unusual, I got the impression that train schedules were pretty uncertain things even though the traffic was described as normal. I went back to the hotel and filled in time until I should start for the next train, which was scheduled to leave at eleven-thirty. However, I allowed myself plenty of time and took up my stand at gate No. 10 as the station guard had instructed me to do. There were so few people standing there I thought I was in luck, but this optimism was immediately shattered by a voice from the loudspeaker which announced: "Passengers waiting for the eleven-thirty to Portsmouth will please join the queues by the boards marked '5' and '6.'" Before these gates stretched two apparently endless queues, one made up of servicemen—British, American, Canadian; the other, of civilians. I added myself to the tail of the latter queue and waited with what patience I could muster. Slowly the procession shuffled a few steps nearer the still-distant gate. I kept my eye on my Newfoundland watch while my hopes of joining Richard that day evaporated. At eleven-thirty the voice spoke again: "The eleven-thirty is now full. The twelve forty-five has been canceled. The next train leaves at one-thirty."
I dropped out of line and set about planning a campaign. I dashed back to the near-by Savoy, where I changed into my American Red Cross uniform; then I returned to Waterloo Station and elbowed my way into the queue with the armed forces. After standing in line an hour and a half, I found a place on the one-thirty train.
It was quite an experience, but worth it. Richard met me. After many months of service overseas, he, apparently, was quite philosophic about trains which do not run and, when they do, cannot accommodate all of the passengers. We had a lovely day together and I returned to London the next morning. I was still wearing my Red Cross uniform and having lunch in the Savoy Grill when who should come along but Basil Dean. He stared at me.
"What are you doing in that uniform, Gertie?"
I explained. Whereupon he commanded me to go at once and be fitted for an E.N.S.A. uniform. Having known Basil since I was a child when he "managed" me, I meekly obeyed.
At first there seemed to be a great deal of hush-hush about the unit to which I was to be assigned, where we were to go, and—most important of all—when we were to start. All I could find out was that we were headed for an eight-weeks tour of Great Britain, during which we would be called on to give three shows a day, with a lot of motoring between shows.
Rehearsals were called in one of the underground cellars of Drury Lane Theatre, which had been bombed during the blitz, but which was still the E.N.S.A. headquarters.
At the first rehearsal I learned that ours was to be known as The Gertrude Lawrence Unit, a tremendous honor and one which made me feel a bit shy and self-conscious, especially as the others in the unit had all been together since the opening of E.N.S.A. But the ice was quickly broken over a couple of beers, and soon everyone was talking shop as pros do when and wherever they get together.
The only non-professional among us was Mary Barrett, whose position in the unit was that of shepherd, manager, confidential adviser, trouble-shooter, and bodyguard. Surely, that should give her professional rating. Mary had been Gracie Fields' secretary-companion when Gracie was in England, and consequently knew the ropes. She could improvise a costume at the last minute if the wardrobe trunks failed to turn up. With equal skill and speed, she could contrive to cook a supper over a gas ring out of whatever the shops or the rations offered. She had the soothing tact of a career diplomat and the adroitness of a ward politician. No one ever heard her grouse or complain of weariness, lack of sleep, or even the temperament of our performers.
We put on our first show and a big B.B.C. broadcast at a factory in Ilford on the outskirts of London for twenty-five hundred workers. The plant turned out radio parts for planes and was working at full production speed. The show gave me a chance to try out some of the songs I had brought over from America, but while I realized that these factory workers were doing a tremendously important job, nevertheless it was the troops I had come over to sing to. I was impatient to start our tour of the camps.
Meanwhile, during the week of waiting, I was discovering more things about the British people than I had ever thought about before.
I heard very little talk about the war. In fact, I rather got the idea no one was expected to talk about it. Perhaps this was because everyone—men and women—was doing some sort of war service. Everybody had to do fire watching on the roofs. Nobody whined about the servant problem, because there weren't any servants to whine about. A maid might be allowed to a household in which a certain number of persons were billeted. Otherwise people were cooking their own meals and making a practice of eating out whenever possible. Shopping took endless time. I saw Londoners of every social class queuing up for hours in front of the fish shops. The streets were full of bicycles. Everyone cycled to and from his job. The boots that pressed the pedals were patched on the soles, but they were well polished. This meant that the wearer had done the polishing himself. That below-stairs character so dear to Dickens and to the writers and illustrators of Punch—I mean the British "boots"—had joined up, or was making munitions.
People looked very fit, especially the women, most of whom were in some sort of uniform—the WRENS, ATS, Red Cross, et cetera. Everyone was busy all the time, but there was no rush or excitement. No one was breathless. You felt that without deliberate effort or any bravado everyone was carrying on the accustomed pattern of life as consistently as possible.
London was full of American correspondents. They kept popping up wherever you went. Allan Michie, who was commissioned to cover the invasion for the Reader's Digest, Liebling of the New Yorker, Hemingway on an assignment for Collier's, and several others I ran into, were fuming because word had gone around that they would not be allowed to go across with the British forces. General Eisenhower had apparently given permission, but some liaison officer on the staff said there was no room for them, so they were muttering and cursing. I was a sympathetic listener. I heard many accounts of the early days of the Battle of Britain. For instance, there was the story that during the early days of home-guard training the men were given beer bottles—three apiece—filled with some kind of mild explosive. With these homemade grenades they were expected to knock out the German tanks as they advanced up the beaches. These were like the famous "Molotov Cocktails."
Things were different now. Munitions in more formidable quantities were being turned out by the war plants for the invasion of Europe. Ernest Byfield, acting as war correspondent for the Hearst press, told me it took ten thousand pairs of nylon stockings to make one towrope for a glider plane, and at least a thousand gliders are needed for an air-borne invasion. "That should be broadcast to the black-market shoppers in America and elsewhere."
I agreed.
"When peace comes, instead of beating swords into plowshares, I suppose we will convert our towropes into stockings."
"And our tin hats into ash trays," I added.
We laughed about it, but, actually, we had learned the British way of thinking, which is that, no matter how the war is going, and in spite of the changes it imposes on everybody, the day will inevitably come when the established, comfortable, peaceful life, which every British person considers no more than his due, will return.
I was made aware of this national psychology the evening I went to dine with Daisy Neame in Eaton Square. On my way there I passed a sign which read: "Horse Shelter." That is something I am sure could exist only in Great Britain. I spoke of it at dinner and was told that the regulations regarding the treatment of animals during air raids were very strict. When the alert sounds, horses must be unharnessed immediately from carts and led to designated places of shelter before the driver takes cover.
Of course horses are valuable, especially during the shortage of petrol. Somehow one also feels behind those horse shelters the sporting instincts of the British, as well as the indomitable humanitarianism of all those tender-hearted ladies who used to write letters to the Times regarding the treatment of animals. It would take a lot more than the German blitz to lessen the British sense of responsibility toward horses, dogs, cats, birds, and even donkeys.
The war has altered some aspects of British life unbelievably. Daisy's door was opened by her husband Lionel. Butlers have become extinct, even in Eaton Square. Everything was as I remembered it except for three unusual vehicles standing in the hall. These were the two bicycles on which Lionel and Daisy pedal to their respective war jobs. The third was the baby's pram which Daisy told me she wheeled herself, to give the infant an airing, when she went out to do the marketing. Another innovation in Mayfair. The British "nannies" in their correct gray uniforms and caps with flaring streamers have been blitzed out of London's life.
When we went in to dinner the table looked just as lovely as usual. The silver had the wonderful blue sheen that comes only from frequent vigorous polishings. The damask was lustrous, and the centerpiece of heavy-headed tulips was like a cluster of glowing jewels. The men, of course, were in uniform. Daisy and I wore short black dresses. Yes, it was all almost prewar. But one thing was missing—there were no servants to wait on us.
When we had finished the first course, "Here we go," said Daisy, rising and leading the way to the sideboard. She slid back the shutter of a little window she had had cut in the wall between the dining room and the service pantry. Daisy went around into the pantry and received the plates each of us passed to her through the window; then she handed us plates with the next course, which we carried back to the table and proceeded to eat with enjoyment. Daisy had cooked the food herself, and I must say she had done a very good job.
I found a tremendous interest in America—a genuine curiosity about what Americans thought, what they were doing, and how they felt about the British. Everything sent from the U.S.A. had become extraordinarily valuable and desirable. I don't suppose that at any time since the reign of James I, when the first British colonies were established in America, has the world beyond the Atlantic held out such riches as it does today.
The British are rediscovering America.
Later, thinking over the things I had seen going about London, I began to ask myself why I took this imperturbability without surprise. Because I wasn't surprised by it at all. Somehow or other, deep down in me, was the knowledge that of course these people would act in exactly this way. What would have surprised me would have been to find them changing their manner of living, forsaking their ideals of behavior and their standards of what is pleasant, enjoyable, and worth while; and doing this at the crack of Herr Hitler's whip.
Inherently and instinctively I knew these things about the British people because I had known and loved Granny. Though her life was lived a very long stone's throw from Mayfair, Granny, nevertheless, was a perfect personification of the British character. She represented the backbone of the nation.
"Mark my words, Alice, the child has talent."
Whenever Granny said "mark my words," she became the family oracle, to be heard and heeded with respect.
She spoke composedly, continuing to rock in her wheel-back armchair with her feet resting on the brass fender rail, while her knitting needles clicked without ceasing.
I have no way of knowing just when Granny decided that I was destined for the theater. She and Grandfather, whom I chiefly remember because he suffered from a disease called chalky gout, had strongly disapproved of their daughter Alice's alliance with the profession. Perhaps they accepted the fact that the offspring of that unfortunate union was doomed from the moment of conception, and could not, therefore, be held back from her dark destiny. At any rate, I never remember Granny putting up any objections to my frankly expressed ambition to go on the stage.
To tell the truth, she encouraged me. Whenever I stayed with her we would play theater. The program started with me coming through the sitting-room door to bow to her as the audience and make my opening speech which began: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to appear." I would then disappear and get dressed up for the performance.
During those early years, when our family finances went up and down with the nervousness of a barometer during a September equinox, Granny represented security, stability, and assurance,
The stability was to be found in her cozy little sitting room in Sandmere Road with its crocheted antimacassars on the chairs and the embroidered lambrequin draped along the mantelshelf. A pair of china Staffordshire dogs—white with red splotches—stood guard on either side of the over-mantel mirror.
The large gilt-framed engraving hanging above the horsehair sofa, showing Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort surrounded by their progeny, was flanked by a similarly framed engraving of King Edward and Queen Alexandra. All my life, since those early days in Granny's sitting room, I have looked upon Queen Victoria as a most extraordinary woman; one who apparently, without the aid of hatpins or elastic, could balance a small, teetery crown on top of her smoothly brushed head at the same time as she dandled an obese infant on her satin-draped knee.
Granny was a mine of information concerning the Royal Family. Their births, marriages, coronations, widowings, and deaths provided her with constant and unlimited romance and drama. The British Royal Family belonged to her, as if they were a very superior family of paper dolls. Whenever I went to see Granny, I would ask her about the different members of the Royal Family, and she would tell me, confidentially, all the latest goings-on. I was under the impression that Granny was very much in the know about whatever happened at Buckingham Palace, Windsor, or Sandringham which was summed up in the impressive words "at Court."
A Bible and a worn black leather Book of Common Prayer were always on the little table beside Granny's bed in her bedroom, where everything smelled of Pears' Soap and lavender water. These represented the second article of Granny's faith; for if article one of her simple creed was her trust in the Crown, article two was her unquestioned faith in the Church of England.
Granny's respect for these two institutions was founded upon her equally categorical respect for herself and her class. So long as she did her duty toward her King on high and toward her King here below, she had every right to expect State and Church to do their duty toward her. There was no subservience in Granny's attitude toward king or bishop. She simply paid them the respect due the dignity of their positions, and in return she expected the State to give her security in this life, and the Church to usher her into a seat on the right hand of the Lord in the next.
Frequently on Sunday evenings I would go to church with her, carrying her prayerbook and finding the hymns from the numerals put up on the hymn boards beside the chancel. Granny and I shared the hymnbook, and our voices—hers still sweet, but a little husky and sometimes off key, mine higher, steadier, and a complete imitation of the boys' in the choir—would unite in the hymns and psalms which we both enjoyed immensely.
Many of the hymns were puzzling to me, and not a few of them seemed rather nasty with their references to sweat, wounds, and blood. How amazing that Granny, who had very strict ideas about what was and what was not nice, could still warble piously:
"There is a place where Jesus shedsReligion, I thought, was certainly a very rum business. Take the word "bloody," for instance. What made this word quite proper in church and unforgivable in ordinary conversation?
The oil of gladness on our heads;
A place than all besides more sweet:
It is the blood-bought mercy seat."
Sometimes when Granny's rheumatism got the better of her piety, she would send me to church as her representative. Then I would be entrusted with the prayerbook and a sixpence for the offertory, tucked into the palm of my white cotton glove.
When I returned, Granny would ask expectantly: "Well, my dear, what was the sermon like? And what was the text?"
Following this lead, I would turn a chair around to form a pulpit and proceed to deliver a digest of the vicar's remarks for her appreciation. Of course it was necessary to dress up for this in Grandfather's coat and one of his collars, both worn back to front to give me a clerical look. I must say I think I did the part of the reverend gentleman rather well, though I improved on his gestures and dramatized his style of delivery. Keeping in character, I would sing the hymns for Granny—not always those which we had sung at the service, but others which were my favorites.
After service Granny and I would have a cup of tea, and then, feeling relaxed and ready for a bit of amusement after all this edification, she would encourage me to sing for her songs she had taught me: "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," "She's Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage," and "Champagne Charlie Is Me Name." For this act Grandfather's coat and collar were readjusted, his bowler hat and walking stick were produced, and the show was on.
Granny's frankly expressed preference was for little girls who were plump and rosy-checked. Tall, thin, sallow children looked half starved to her, and, therefore, she worried over my natural gawkiness.
"The child needs fattening up, Alice. Look at her. She's all legs."
"She's growing fast, Mother. I have to keep letting down the hems of her dresses until there is no more stuff to let out."
Granny sniffed. "It's the Danish blood, I expect. The Danish princes are all over six feet. And Her Majesty is extremely tall; though a fine figure of a woman, of course."
I preened to this. "Her Majesty" meant Queen Alexandra. I felt I had a special share in Her Majesty, who had come from Denmark, my father's country, and after whom I had been named.
Granny's next remark, however, dashed my self-esteem. "She's sallow too. I never did like a puny child. Some Scott's Emulsion would do her good. Mark my words, Alice, you'd do well to get a bottle and give her a spoonful night and morning."
"Very well, Mother. If you think so."
I loathed Scott's Emulsion, I gagged over each spoonful of the beastly stuff; but I knew better than to rebel. I had heard Granny's orders. So I was brought up on Scott's Emulsion to fatten me up, camphorated oil for my constant chest colds, and Parrish's Chemical Food, which was supposed to be a tonic. But I was no advertisement for all or any of these remedies, and Granny would sigh:
"Well, Gertie, I suppose you are just one of Pharaoh's lean kine."
Out of love, she made it sound like a compliment. Not to worry her, I submitted to Mother's habit of pinching my cheeks to make them look rosy whenever we approached Granny's doorstep. I even resorted to the trick of pinching my own cheeks when alone on her doorstep, waiting for her to let me in.
The popular taste was still for buxom beauties. His Majesty King Edward could 'ave 'is Jersey Lily; the British workingman preferred a nice generous armful.
The winter I was ten, and at a time when our finances hit rock bottom, Mother got herself a job in the chorus in a Christmas production of Babes in the Wood at the Brixton Theatre. The casting director studied her pleasing curves, listened to her voice, which was a very good soprano, and for once did not ask her to lift her long skirts to show her legs. This was fortunate, for though Mother had pretty ankles, the rest of her below the waist seemed to have no relation to the part of her above the waist. However, she had no false notions about her shape, and she had a very practical mind.
Having signed the contract, she came home with the flesh-colored tights supplied by the wardrobe mistress. Putting them on, she instructed me how to pad the legs of this garment with cotton wool to give her the much-desired and seductively rounded thighs which she unfortunately lacked. Of course it was possible to buy tights thus treated. These were called symmetricals. But they were very expensive, consequently necessity drove us to make ours at home.
Mother would stand on a chair in front of a mirror and direct me as I poked the wads of cotton down inside the silk tights. It was a long and tedious job, because the padding had to be sewn in smoothly so that it would not be detected.
Though I was only ten, I understood very clearly that her job in the chorus and the thirty shillings she was to get each week meant bread and groceries and coal and gaslight for us at home. I was well aware that it was up to me to make those legs satisfy the theater patrons and the eagle eye of the manager.
That is how I learned at a still tender age that frequently a woman's legs (and not her face) are her fortune.
Finally, after a week of waiting and rehearsals, our unit got its orders to leave for Southampton.
There were eighteen of us, and we traveled in three cars—one large bus, one van for equipment, and a car for Mary, Stanley Kilbourn, my pianist, and me, with our driver.
Our first concert was aboard H.M.S. Collingwood. We had a great crowd—about thirty-five hundred enlisted personnel, WRENS, officers, the commodore, and his wife.
During my week of waiting in London I had been required to submit to the official censor the songs I had brought over from America to sing to the boys. Two of the songs were rated "not quite suitable for the B.B.C.," but they were finally passed as O.K. for the servicemen.
The songs I worked over and which I sang at that first concert were "A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening," which was one of Frank Sinatra's successes; Gertrude Niesen's song "I Wanna Get Married" from Follow the Girls, and "A Guy Named Joe." I also had the saga of an air-raid-shelter romance, entitled "'E Vanished When the All-Clear Came." The last two numbers were written especially for me by two American boys, Bus Davis and Jim Carhart.
The most delightful surprise of the concert aboard H.M.S. Collingwood was finding Richard seated in the front row. He had got leave for a couple of hours. There wasn't even time enough for him to take me back to the hotel in Portsmouth where Mary Barrett and I had been billeted; he had to return to his base. But even that glimpse of him was wonderful. It set me up no end.
I had just got into bed and was feeling terribly grateful for it after a long, hot, tiring, but exciting day.
"Good night, Mary. Have a nice, long, restful night."
"Good night," came Mary's voice from the other room, and, almost like a punctuation to that response, the sudden shriek of the sirens.
They were coming.
I sat up in bed in the dark and waited for the sound of the guns which would tell us the Germans were overhead. I shivered—not, I hoped, from fear, but from the suspense of waiting. I was under no misapprehension as to the amount of damage the raiders had done and could do to a town like Portsmouth. I had seen it with my own eyes.
Presently the guns started. It was strange to sit there in bed in the midst of my first real war experience. Between the enemy bombs and our own guns Portsmouth was actually the front. Yet in the street below people were calmly walking to air-raid shelters. One man went by whistling: "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair."
The "all clear" came after about an hour, and I dropped off to sleep. The next thing I knew Mary Barrett was shaking me awake. The guns were going like mad again. We sat and waited. Nothing happened; so Mary curled up on the foot of my bed and we dozed off until all at once the rocket gun on the sea front went off. We both shot up and out of the bed, grabbed our papers, and prepared to dash out of the hotel if the hotel people notified us to do so. We had been told the rocket guns were not fired unless the enemy was overhead and flying low. They are precision guns and fire directly on the target; but, although they are very powerful, they apparently haven't a very long range. The noise they made was incredible; as if Jerry were dropping blockbusters. I really thought we had been hit, and my reaction—born of nerves—was to get the giggles!
Mary had been through it all many times over, on all the war fronts. She said the thing to do was to stay there in the room unless someone came and yanked us out. The only one who did turn up was Stanley, who came running down the corridor to see if we were all right. Stanley had been bombed out of four different homes during the blitz, and, as he put it, he was "fed oop with it all."
They chased Jerry out to sea about 2:30 A.M., then the "all clear" sounded, and we went back to bed and to sleep.
Next day Richard rang up to find out how I felt about it all. Now I could speak as a war veteran and I told him rather loftily that it felt better than being three thousand miles away, getting the news over the radio, and wondering where and how he was.
I saw some of the night's damage that day and the next, during which our unit covered the entire Southampton area. There was a new and very nasty hole in the side of the building next to our hotel.
Every noon we put on the show at a plane factory or a shipyard or in a hangar for the workers, and at night we gave concerts at the camps. At the Civic Theatre in Southampton we played to some eight thousand men and women, representing all the Allied nations and all branches of the service, and from there we went on to give a show under canvas—and in a pouring rain—at camp C. 22 for two thousand American and British Rangers.
The whole area was feeling the suspense of approaching D-Day. No one, of course, would, or could, say when that would be, but the bases and the men were being "sealed." Driving home from a secret concert at Broderick for Americans and British about to leave, we passed thousands of "ducks" all lined up along the road to Southampton, ready to pull out at dawn for somewhere.
At the end of the show at C. 22, our manager, Norman Adams, called me aside and told me orders had just come through that our unit was to return to London immediately. In fact, he said, our show that night, which had gone particularly well, had almost been canceled in the middle of the bill. It seems that word had come through that the entire post was to be "sealed" and all E.N.S.A. units would have to evacuate or be sealed in until after D-Day for security reasons.
After swearing me to secrecy, Adams collected the whole unit and led us all to the officers' mess for refreshments. The mess was just a tent with a trestle table, but they put on quite a good meal for us, and the refreshment was good old bathtub gin with the kick of a bronco. As we laughed and joked, I wondered whether the fellows knew that I knew this was to be their last party for a long, long time. No mention was made of their departure, but as they crowded around our cars and shouted and waved to us as we drove away into the darkness back to London, I had the horrid feeling we were deserting them.
On arriving in London we were immediately re-routed to another coastal area. It turned out to be Brighton.
My orders came through to be ready to start on the morning of June 5. After leaving the Savoy, we drove through the districts of London that were home to me as a child—past Kennington Oval, past the "Horns Hotel" where my father had sung at smoking concerts for a guinea a night, past the Brixton Theatre where I made my stage debut at the age of ten for the magnificent sum of six shillings per week in that same Christmas play in which Mother had worn her homemade symmetricals.
The manager wanted a child who could sing and dance with nine others in a troupe, and one who could be trusted to be on time for the show and not get into mischief. Mother promised she would take care of all that, and I was taken on.
We children were little robin redbreasts in the forest ballet when the "Babes" got lost in the wood. Dressed in brown tights, very wrinkled at the knees, our skinny bodies clad in musty feathers and with hats which had beaks in front, we covered the two unfortunate children with artificial leaves to keep them from the cold until they were rescued by Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Mother was one of the Merry Men! I can remember to this day the song which Robin Hood sang in this scene. The chorus went like this:
There's a little green patch at the top of the hill,This was sung with great gusto, accompanied by the marching up and down and suitable gestures and hearty thigh slappings of Mother and the seven other Merry Men.
Climb, boys, climb.
And it's there we can rest at our pleasure and will
Climb, boys, climb.
Though the way be dreary and your heart be weary,
It will all come right in time.
There's a little green patch at the top of the hill,
So climb, boys, climb.
At this time Mother had a friend, who was a friend of the mother of Ivy Shilling who played Alice when Lewis Carroll's immortal story was dramatized for a Christmas production. I was taken to see the play. We sat in a box, which was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed such prominence. I watched every move, every gesture of Alice's, and my envy of Ivy Shilling gave me no rest until I nagged Mother into taking me to Miss Conti's dancing school, at which she was a pupil.
Miss Italia Conti held a unique place in the world of the British theater. She had a basement studio just off Great Portland Street where the boys and girls she accepted as pupils practiced dance steps, did acrobatic exercises on the horizontal bar, and were taught elocution and the rudiments of the drama. The studio was a big room lined with mirrors in which you could see yourself from every angle, and at one end was a small stage with a piano.
Mother had no money to pay for dancing and singing lessons for me. Dad had suffered a run of bad luck for months, and we had moved to cheaper and still cheaper lodgings. My education did not benefit by these flittings about Clapham and Brixton; whenever we moved into a new district it usually meant my entering a new school. It also meant finding myself one of a new group of children, who stood off and eyed me suspiciously.
The boys and girls at Miss Conti's eyed me too. But their glances were different. They looked at me appraisingly—not for my clothes or where I lived, but for what I was able to do. Many of them had been born into theatrical families. All of them aspired to stardom.
I sang and danced for Miss Conti, and she thought me sufficiently talented to offer to give me free lessons. On these terms I was enrolled one afternoon a week for a six weeks' trial period. If I showed promise, I had the opportunity of staying on as a pupil-teacher, thereby repaying my tuition.
I am a little hazy about those weeks at Miss Conti's. It was an entirely new world to me. I am under the impression that Noel Coward was already a pupil there when I started. If he was not, he came very soon after, because Noel figures largely in all my memories of Miss Conti. Anton Dolin joined the school later to study Shakespeare.
Noel was a thin, unusually shy boy with a slight lisp. He was studying elocution, acting, and dancing (or should I say deportment?) and was one of Miss Conti's star pupils. Noel's people were in a position to give him educational advantages. They were "comfortably situated."
Noel wasn't snobbish about this; in fact, he and I, who were about the same age, entered at once into an alliance.
This doesn't mean that Noel wasn't occasionally condescending to me, but this condescension sprang from a quite natural masculine impulse to put in her place an irrepressible and very plain-looking small girl who had the annoying faculty of getting herself noticed. I could put up with the condescension. What I could not have endured was to have Noel ignore me.
However, even at the age of eleven I suffered no illusions as to what constituted the charm I had for Noel Coward. I was the proud possessor of a bicycle, bought for me from the boy next door by a friend of Dad's. The bicycle originally had a bar across the middle, but Mother, ever practical, paid a man to saw this off so a girl could ride it. However, even she could not alter the drooping handlebars which showed it was a boy's model. Noel pointed this out immediately:
"It's quite unsuitable for a girl."
He could not conceal from me the fact that he wanted a bicycle, which was something his family would not permit him to have.
But Noel had a possession which I secretly coveted—a phonograph with a large spreading horn. He also owned a stack of records. So we made a deal. He could ride my bicycle in return for lending me his phonograph for the same length of time. I imagine that sort of lend-lease is as good a basis for a lifelong friendship as any other.
Noel's records greatly increased my acquaintance with the popular music of the day. They also brought me the beauty of "The Blue Danube," the sweet rhythm of "Valse Triste," and the sticky romance of the "Indian Love Lyrics."
So once a week I packed my small attaché case containing my toe-dancing slippers, my practice clothes, soap and a towel, and took the bus to Great Portland Street, always in the hope that Noel would be there.
Miss Conti had undertaken to teach me to dance and to sing, at least to the extent of fitting me to appear in one of the Christmas plays. These are a part of the holiday season in England, and the theater managers always went to Miss Conti for child actors to play in them. Miss Conti found no fault either with my leg work or my vocal efforts. But my accent, which was pure cockney, caused her to wince. One day she led me to the piano and, after laying a sheet of paper under the strings, she struck a chord.
"That, my dear Gertrude," she said, "is what your voice sounds like to me."
My quick ear recognized the similarity between the tinny vibrations and my own accent. That was my introduction to phonetics.
I was not good enough to appear in one of the Christmas plays. However, I was approved for a part in a fairy play called Fifinella, which was put on at the Repertory Theatre in Liverpool. We were rehearsed in London, under Miss Conti's careful eye, and then sent up in the care of a matron and her husband. Estelle Winwood played the beautiful Fairy Queen, but she made little impression on me because I had eyes only for the Prince in his scarlet tights and doublet. This fascinating hero was played by Eric Blore. I thought him wonderful. And obviously no one had found it necessary to pad his tights with cotton wool.
The first time Noel and I appeared together was in a German morality play, Hannela, put on at Manchester, under the direction of Mr. Basil Dean. Noel and I played angels in white robes, gilded wings, and sanctimonious smiles. Neither of us, as I remember, cared for the play or for our parts in it. However, we touched the heart of Noel's kindly uncle, for he asked permission to take us for an afternoon's outing.
It was Christmas week, and the shops were full of entrancing things to buy. By various ruses Noel and I enticed him to one shopwindow after the other, artfully pointing out what each of us would like to receive for a Christmas present. But our benefactor was not in a generous mood that day. Not till the afternoon was nearly over did he weaken and buy us a large box of peppermint creams, which he made us promise to divide with the other children in the cast.
Noel and I managed to forget this admonition and to eat most of the sweets ourselves in the taxi on the way home. Soon I began to feel very queer. When we went on in the heaven scene, the other celestial beings seemed to float and bob dizzily around me. I stole a glance at Noel. He was positively green. Presently the audience was permitted an unexpected vision of heaven in which two small angels were being violently sick.
I couldn't have been a total failure as an angel, because soon after Hannela I was given a job in The Miracle then being put on by Reinhardt at the Olympia. The play called for one hundred children—fifty boys and fifty girls. As we did two shows a day, and the children came from homes all over London, the London County Council established a special school for us at Olympia. We had classes in the mornings, then dinner, after which it was time to dress and be made up for the daily matinee. Olympia is out beyond Shepherd's Bush, a wearying, long tram ride home after the evening performance.
It must have been that summer that Dad took Mother and me on a Sunday excursion to Brighton. The resort was crowded with trippers like ourselves; the bands kept up a ceaseless accompaniment of music, and the Pierrot troupes on the sands played to enormous business. I watched their performance with a critical eye; after all, I was now in the profession.
On the pier, among other penny-in-the-slot machines was one showing a gaudily painted picture of a gypsy. The machine promised to tell your fortune for a penny. I dropped my copper piece into the slot and waited anxiously while the machine ground out a few bars of a popular tune; it then proceeded to stick a tongue of pink cardboard at me. There were words printed on it. I tore off the slip and read my penny destiny:
A star danced,
And you were born.
I accepted my fate without hesitation. The gypsy meant to tell me that I would be a dancer and someday I would be a star.
A few days later I stopped in at the printers in Clapham High Street and ordered some cards made. I had written out what I wished the printer to put on these bits of pasteboard:
I had used the name Lawrence, because that was the stage name Mother used. I was especially proud of the word "danseuse," which, according to the old gentleman on High Street who printed the cards, meant "dancer" in French. Already I could see my name in electric lights on Shaftesbury Avenue. I had never been to that thoroughfare except on a bus, but I had heard about it and dreamed of it as children today talk and dream about Hollywood.
I did not show the pink slip of paper with my fortune to anyone; perhaps I was afraid it would not come true if I shared the secret. But my professional cards were different. I scattered them like confetti and with complete self-assurance.
The mother of "your cousin Ruby," who up to now had produced the most promising child in the family, said to Mother: "Do you want your child in that sort of life, Alice? I wouldn't. Not for my Ruby."
"Your Ruby hasn't the temperament," Mother countered. "You've got to have temperament for the stage."
"Temperament! Well, Alice, you can call it that if you like. Myself, I'd give a plainer name to it. And when it comes to temperament, anyone would think you'd had enough of that with Gertie's father. If she was my child and had his blood in her veins, I wouldn't let her near a theater. That I wouldn't."
Cousin Ruby's mother had maneuvered Mother into an impossible situation. She could not defend my father without appearing disloyal to Dad, or without drawing down on her the obvious retort: "Well, if he was as good as all that, why did you ever leave him?"
It may have been such conversations as these with my aunt which unlocked my Mother's reticence. Up until then she had never mentioned my father to me.
We were out shopping one day when suddenly she stopped to read a playbill stuck up on a wall. It advertised a minstrel show. Heading the cast as the star appeared the name: "Arthur Lawrence."
"That's your father, Gertie," said Mother, pointing.
I stared at the name, trying to accustom myself to the idea of a relationship between this man and me. No one had ever told me much about my father. I could not remember having seen him or heard of his taking the slightest interest in my existence. Dad was all the father I had known, or needed. This strange man on the playbill seemed suddenly to trespass on Dad's position. I slid a questioning glance at Mother. She was still staring at the poster. Her voice was suddenly wistful—and a little proud: "Well, now you know. He's a fine singer. You get your talent from him."
We went on, and no more was said about my father. I would have liked to have gone to the theater to see him and hear him sing, but Mother did not suggest it. I only had to look at her to realize that the subject was closed. But the sudden discovery that I had a father who was a success in the theater set me thinking.
I was now nearly thirteen. For several years I had been appearing in plays from time to time, earning a few shillings a week. The gypsy had given assurance that my fortune lay in the theater. As I compared Dad—dear, lovable, but unsuccessful—with my own father, whose name appeared in big letters on the playbill, a plan began to develop in my mind. I began to watch the bookings of the minstrel show starring Arthur Lawrence.
For all that I might not have done anything about it except for two things which happened simultaneously. We were undergoing one of our periodic lean periods. These seemed to occur more frequently and lasted longer as Dad's luck became more and more elusive. And Mother, irked perhaps by some remark of her sister-in-law on the proper bringing up of daughters, had become more strict with me.
One evening several months later, when Mother and Dad were out, I decided to carry out my plan, and I packed a few belongings in a small straw portmanteau. I then collected all the empty bottles and jars in the house, returned them to the grocer's, and got the money I needed for the journey. Wearing my best coat and a large mushroom-shaped hat, and carrying the portmanteau, I took the tram to the theater where I knew my father was appearing. A note left on the kitchen table for Mother and Dad told them of my decision to join my father, and that they were not to worry.
The stage doorman looked at me suspiciously. "Now then, what do you want, youngster?" he demanded.
"I've come to see Mr. Lawrence."
He frowned. "It's not at all likely Mr. Lawrence will see you. He's dressing now to go on."
"I'll wait," I said, and set down the portmanteau. "It's very important."
Perhaps something in my tone made the doorman realize that this was no ordinary occasion. He squinted at me sharply.
"What's your name? I'll tell Mr. Lawrence you're here."
I swallowed. "Just tell him it's Gertie."
The doorman went away, slamming the door to prevent my slipping in. For a moment I felt an impulse to turn and run. There was still time to return to Clapham—to seize and destroy the penciled note I had left letting Mother and Dad know my decision. But something—my own destiny perhaps—held me there on the bench inside the stage door. Presently I heard steps coming along the corridor and a mutter of voices. The door opened...
A man stood there—a very tall man who leaned forward to peer down at me in the dim, flickering light of the gas bracket in its wire cage. He was in his shirt sleeves and collarless. One half of his face was smeared with grease and burnt cork. Out of the black face a pair of very blue eyes stared at me in utter incredulity. He spoke in a deep, quiet voice:
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
I drew my card from my pocket and handed it to him. His eyes took in the printed words, then came back to me.
"I'm Gertie," I said. "And I've come to stay."
Driving down to Brighton on that June day, strangely it was the memories of the past which were more vivid and more alive in my mind than the scenes we drove through. That glimpse of Kennington Oval and Brixton brought back events and persons I had not thought of in years. For some reason or other, and I suppose only a psychologist could explain it, this visit home to a fighting England was like a visit to a psychoanalyst. In Lady in the Dark I had played the part of a successful businesswoman who had been psychoanalyzed. Her dreams were reproduced on the stage in fantastic scenes. In somewhat the same way, recollections of "Little Gertie Lawrence—child actress and danseuse," began to form scenes that were scarcely less fantastic than those imagined by Moss Hart for Lady in the Dark.
Suddenly I smelled again the cold, dusty, tremendously exciting smell of backstage in that Music Hall Theatre when Father, still holding my card in one hand, reached out the other and caught me by the wrist. He pulled me over the threshold, past the doorman, and let the stage door slam behind us.
"Come along to my dressing room. Curtain's going up in five minutes. I've got to finish dressing. You can wait there. I'll talk to you later on. Sit down. And for God's sake, don't cry."
I had begun to weep from relief, fear, and the physical reaction to the whole adventure.
In the dressing room stood a woman holding the coat Father was to put on. He paid no attention to her, but went on rapidly blacking the rest of his face before the mirror. After which he put on a curly black wig and stuck it down with spirit gum.
"She's Gertie," he said out of the grotesque red mouth he had quickly painted in the middle of the black face. "She's my kid, Rose."
Rose did not move. She looked at me not unkindly and I stared back at her. I was not prepared for Rose.
A callboy went along the corridor calling, "Mr. Lawrence, please!"
Father turned from the mirror, his make-up completed, and thrust his arms into the evening coat Rose silently held out for him. He jerked down his waistcoat, twitched his white tie a fraction of an inch, and was gone.
Only then Rose turned to me, standing there gripping my portmanteau and staring. "So you're Arthur's little girl," she said. "How old are you?"
"I'm thirteen," I said.
"You are! Well..." She looked me over appraisingly. "There's not much of you."
Rose herself was what Granny would have called a fine figure of a woman, which meant she had plenty of curves. She had also, I noticed, very pretty ankles. Show girl, I thought.
Rose told me I had better sit down because we would have a long wait. A minstrel show wasn't like a play in which the actors frequently left the stage for long periods. Once the curtain was up, my father would remain on stage until the end of the act.
During that wait Rose and I became acquainted. She had a kind heart and there was no guile in her. She loved my father and said so with a disarming frankness. She continued to tidy up the dressing room. "We've been together six years, Arthur and me. That's more than a lot of married couples can say. Oh, not but what we've had our quarrels. And who hasn't, I'd like to know."
I nodded. I found myself liking Rose, who admitted me so hospitably into the intimacy of her life. But it was clear that she did not intend to consider me one of the family.
"You can't stay with us," she went on. "You know that, I suppose?" (I didn't. How could I, when I had never known of the existence of Rose until that evening?)
Then she said: "Your mother will be here to fetch you back tonight or in the morning, and there'll be all hell to pay."
I told her I had left a note for Mother and that I couldn't go back. But immediately Rose dashed my plans by remarking: "Of course you can't stay on with Arthur and me. We can't travel you."
Strangely, that possibility had not occurred to me. I began to wish I had not left the note. Still, I thought, something might happen to prevent Mother coming. Meanwhile, I had to win Rose over to my side. I told her about my experience as an actress, emphasizing the fact that Miss Conti considered I had talent. I showed Rose my card.
She was obviously impressed.
"How nice! Danseuse looks elegant. Quite West End."
"I think so," I agreed complacently.
When Father came off stage, he found us chatting comfortably. Perhaps this lifted a worry from his mind.
"The kid's all right, Arthur," Rose said. "She's got a lot of you in her, I'd say." She repeated to him briefly what I had told her about my experience in the theater. "She must be good."
Was it Rose's acceptance of me which persuaded my father to keep me with him? I have sometimes thought so. That, and a curious pride in the child who had followed his profession, made my father suddenly laugh and say to me: "You can stay with us for tonight, anyway. We'll find a place for you somewhere in our digs. She can sleep on the sofa, can't she, Rose? We'll send a telegram to your mother this minute and tell her you're all right. Tomorrow we can talk things over."
Mother did not appear until the next morning. What passed between my parents I never knew, but an arrangement was made by which I was to remain with Father as long as I wished to do so and he would support me. I was to write to Mother once a week and keep her informed of my whereabouts. If anything went wrong, she was to be immediately advised of it and was to come and take me back to live with her.
That is how my life with Father and Rose began. I shared their lodgings and whatever they had. Whatever I earned, when I had a job, Father got, under our joint contract, since I was under age.
Although I missed Mother and Dad terribly, I missed Granny even more. I often thought of her and her tidy little house. I missed the news of the Royal Family. King Edward VII had died—his funeral was the first state pageant I had not read about in history books. Now all the talk was of the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary. To me, as to millions of children throughout the Empire, the leading personage at the forthcoming coronation was the youthful Prince of Wales. Perhaps our generation derived an immense amount of satisfaction from the fact that one of us was to occupy a prominent place at the Abbey ceremony. The newspapers and illustrated weeklies were full of photographs of H.R.H. Prince Edward and his sister and brothers. The princess interested me very little, but every photograph of Prince Edward I came across I cut out and pinned to the wall of my room. The increasing collection of photographs traveled with me.
And we were constantly on the move, touring the Midlands, swinging back to London to look for fresh engagements. When we were not working, I amused myself in any way that I could. I did the shopping for Rose and helped her keep our lodgings tidy. We made our own clothes, trimmed our own hats. I made myself a hobble skirt out of a remnant of tweed when I was fourteen. Rose appreciated these efforts of mine. She was not a housekeeper, but she was neat, and Father's untidiness was a constant annoyance to her.
Life wasn't all beer and skittles. Not by any means. Father still liked his glass, and though he would go several months without drinking, invariably there came a day when he would become short-tempered, restless, and start going out between the matinee and the night show. Finally he would crack up. Then he became ugly, cruel, and impossible to handle. Neither Rose nor I could do anything with him.
I began to watch for these drinking bouts and to dread them and the rows that went on at the theater with the manager and other members of the company and at home with Rose. In between spells Rose and I formed a conspiracy to keep Father in bounds. One or the other of us kept watch over him all the time. We would try to think up schemes for keeping him happy and entertained, but when our cleverness failed to win over Father's craving, Rose and I knew we were in for it. Father would go on drinking, growing more and more sullen, more and more difficult to handle, until the manager paid us off. Since Father and I were always on a joint contract, this meant I lost my job when he was fired. When that happened, he would drink himself into a state in which he was unable to go out at all. Poor Rose then put him to bed and nursed him until he sobered. Father would emerge from her hands chastened, and go out to hunt a new engagement for himself and for me. We had no agent. We could not afford an agent's commission. It was our habit to search the "Wanted" ads in the theatrical newspapers. Sometimes Father heard of something through hanging around the crowds by the London Hippodrome.
We had been out of work for several weeks and were more than usually hard up when Father landed a job to play in a touring revival of André Messager's The Little Michus, a comic operetta for which his voice was perfect. He came home to the dreary back room in Camberwell where he and I were then living to tell me the good news. Rose was away on tour with a concert party. That room which was divided into two private apartments by a curtain suspended from a sagging wire represented the ebb tide of our fortunes.
But Father beamed over his good luck. He planked down a couple of half crowns from the advance he had persuaded the company manager to give him and said gaily:
"Let's have sausages for supper, Gertie. This calls for a celebration, my girl."
I pocketed the coins and made ready to go out and do the shopping. Meanwhile Father ran on about the company and the play. He was to play M. Michu, the proprietor of a patisserie and the perplexed parent of twin daughters, Marie Blanche and Blanche Marie—the "little Michus." Immediately I pricked up my ears.
"Who will play the girls?" I demanded.
"Not a chance of it," Father smiled at me ruefully. "I spoke to the manager about you. He was interested until he asked me your age, and I had to tell him fifteen. Then he wouldn't hear of it. He insists he must have someone older. It's too bad, because you could do it, I'm sure."
I thought hard. I went to the mirror and studied what I saw there. What could I do to myself to add three or four years to my age?
"Are you sure he hasn't filled both parts yet?"
Father said he was. "He has one girl. She's about your height. But she's nineteen or twenty, I'd say."
My hair was long and hung in curls to my waist. I brushed out the ringlets and for the first time put my hair up. I rummaged in the cupboard and brought out my one straw hat. I cut off the brim, pinned on a bunch of cherries, and contrived a toque which could be called anything but youthful. In my tweed hobble skirt I looked at least eighteen.
Thus arrayed, and with Father's encouragement, I presented myself at the manager's office and asked for the job. He tried my voice and engaged me on a joint contract with Father, as I was still under age, no matter how old I looked.
Father and I toured with The Little Michus for many weeks. When Rose's engagement ran out, she joined us. We were playing to good business and it looked as though the show would have a long run. Then Father succumbed to one of his drinking spells. Rose and I did our best to straighten him out and to cover him up. But as the drinking went on for days, the manager fired him.
This meant that I, too, was once more out of work.
"I'd like to keep you on, kid," the manager said regretfully. "You're good. But you're under age, and what can I do?"
Rose took Father in hand once more and I searched the columns of notices in The Stage for a new job. This time I intended to lie boldly about my age. Rose agreed with me it was the thing to do. "It's no life for you, being with Arthur," she said. "He's hopeless. I know that now. You must go on your own. You've got something, Gertie. I think you're going to get on. You're not pretty and you're too thin for everybody's taste, but you've got class. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if you were up in the West End one of these days."
"Oh, Rose. Do you really think so?"
Rose nodded solemnly. "Yes, I do. You've got something that goes down with a certain kind of audience. High-toned. It's just that you've got to be seen by the right people. And that takes some doing."
"I'll land something before long," I assured her.
What I landed was a job as chorus girl and understudy in a traveling revue—one of the first of its kind—entitled Miss Plaster of Paris. I had been forced to lie about my age, but we needed the money desperately. The man who ran the show and his wife played the leading parts. I worked in the chorus, played maids, and in one scene sat on a column. I was selected for this honor because mine was the smallest posterior in the company.
All week I looked forward to Saturday night when "the ghost walked" and we were paid. Pay night usually meant a good spree for the manager followed by a fight with his wife in the course of which he frequently gave her a black eye, thus paving the way to my appearance in the leading role the following Monday. For all this excitement and experience I received fifteen shillings a week.
I managed very well on this sum. Three or four of us lived together, sharing room rent and pooling our money for the catering purse. We took turns doing the marketing each day. It was a hard-and-fast rule that we count the potatoes before giving them to the landlady to cook for us. She was under orders to boil, not to mash them. This enabled us to be sure she had not helped herself to a couple of them. Sometimes one of us would forget to give the order, and when the vegetable dish cover was lifted, a groan would go up:
"Oh, blast! The old bitch has mashed 'em!"
The manager had an old white bull terrier which traveled with the show. The bulldog had appeared with his master when he played Bill Sykes. At rehearsal one day, when we were back in London preparing a second revue called Miss Lamb o f Canterbury, I was playing with the dog when he suddenly growled and sank his teeth into my right hand, refusing to let go.
I fainted. A doctor was sent for. I was cauterized, bandaged, and told to go home. I was living in lodgings with Father. Rose had finally left him, "and this time for good," she had asserted. "Enough is enough, but too much is a little bit too much, if you ask me. And that's what I've had with Arthur. Oh, I've walked out on him before to teach him a lesson. And every time he's come round within the fortnight and made all sorts of promises, and I've listened to him and gone back. I can't say I've ever taught him a thing except what a man like him knows already—that a woman like me can be an awful fool. This time, though, I don't care about teaching Arthur anything. It's myself I'm thinking about. And high time too. Myself and you, Gertie."
"Me?"
"Yes, you. Because, don't you see if I stay on with your father you probably will too. And what would happen then? I've been seeing it coming for the last year. You and I would be working and keeping him. The way it is, if Arthur wants to eat and drink, he's got to work. And that means he'll keep sober more or less. Without him, you've got no one but yourself to think about. This is your chance to get ahead."
There was something in what Rose said. I thought it over and decided I should stand on my own. Father had been out of work for some time, but that morning he had told me he had a chance to go to South Africa. This seemed too good to be true. On the way home a thought struck me: if he knows what has happened to my hand he may refuse to go so far away. "He must go. He must," I kept saying all the way home.
Father was there when I arrived. He was tremendously excited. He had only to sign his contract next day and he would leave in a week.
"You will be all right, won't you, Gertie?" he said eagerly. "You are getting on fine, and this will be a great chance for me to earn some decent money and see a bit of the world. South Africa is a great country. A man can start life over again out there."
I assured him I was at the top of my form, and kept my bandaged hand behind me, saying nothing of the intense pain. When he finally noticed the bandage I explained I had cut my hand on a broken glass at rehearsal. Father never knew the truth about my injury, which took a long time to heal and left a scar which is still visible. He went off to South Africa and I managed to keep working. He was gone about a year. He came home well and bronzed and self-assured. When I met him at the boat, he introduced me to an enormous, handsome man with whom he had made friends during his trip. This was Victor McLaglen.
Unfortunately South Africa had not made Father's fortune or changed his habits. But something had changed in me during the months he was away. I had learned to stand alone, and by managing to keep on tour I never lived with Father again. He retired to Brighton, did an occasional show or a concert, and later on I was able to help him until his death.
In between jobs I lived at the "Cats' Home" in London so that I could make the rounds of the theatrical managers' offices. This was a tall, gaunt house in Charlotte Street which called itself The Theatrical Girls' Boarding House. Here, for ten shillings a week, you could luxuriate in a cubicle by yourself. For five shillings you shared a room with another girl. For half a crown you could have a cot in a dormitory. I never reached the ten-shilling private-cubicle stage.
There was a great feeling of camaraderie at the Cats' Home. We girls loaned each other tram fares and clothes to look our best when seeking a job. There was a sewing room where we made our own clothes, and the stars of the London theaters used to send their discarded gowns to us to be raffled off at sixpence a ticket. I remember winning a pink net evening gown with a harem skirt and ornamented with beads. This I sent to Mother as a gift. She wrote saying it was beautiful and she was going to put it in a raffle! That pink net confection may still be going the rounds.
These and other memories filled the long, beautiful drive across Surrey and over the Sussex Downs, which I remembered so well from the days when I used to drive this way to Brighton to visit Pamela at her school, Roedean.
Odd to think of Pamela, my daughter, having any connection with the little girl who ran away to seek her fortune on the stage. The decade which separated that little girl from Pamela's mother was crowded with experiences. Four of those years were filled with World War I, toward the close of which Pamela was born. Long before I had the responsibility of a child I had entered upon another responsibility—one which had remained unfulfilled until I made this trip to England to entertain the Tommies and the G.I. Joes who were pledged to defend the way of life I want Pamela and all other children to have. I shall come to the story of that responsibility and how I entered upon it a little later.
All the gay Regency recklessness was gone from Brighton. Barbed wire prevented access to the sea front. The old, well-tanned houses, which always used to remind me of Indian colonels basking in the sun, with their backs to the protecting downs, showed plenty of battle scars. But there was still the old, steady, carrying-on spirit at the Old Ship Hotel where our unit was billeted. In the old days, when I came to Brighton, I had a suite at the Albion or the Metropole, but these places had been taken over by the services, and only the Old Ship remained for civilians. I was grateful for my billet there—a single bedroom without a bath.
It was June 5 when we arrived in Brighton, and we did a show that night at Tilgate Camp, outside Crawley, in a Nissen hut.
The air in the hut, which was packed with soldiers, wedged shoulder to shoulder, seemed to quiver with anticipation. It was bound to be very soon now, almost any hour, that the United Nations would launch their long-prepared-for blow at the continent. The quivering you felt was like that of a boxer who draws back a second before lashing out with both fists at his opponent.
"Oh, it's a lovely way to spend an evening," I sang to the rows upon rows of faces that, from the stage, looked like spume on a khaki-colored sea. Silly words, and ironic under the circumstances. These words were on my lips, but while I sang them my heart was speaking those marvelous lines from King Henry V:
Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fix'd sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other's watch:
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other's umber'd face;
Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night's dull ear; and from the tents
The armourers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation...
A country cock crowed, though it was not yet "the third hour of drowsy morning," when we tumbled out of the cars, before the door of the Old Ship, and stumbled up the stairs to bed.
How odd to begin a day so momentous as June 6, 1944, with tea and toast. A warm breeze which smelled like the wind which blows across the sand dunes at Dennis lifted my bedroom curtains and set me longing to go out for a bathe. Brighton was very quiet except for the recurrent waves of planes flying high overhead—that monotonous accompaniment to life in wartime England. The newspaper brought the news that Rome had been ours since the day before. All dwellers in the continental coast towns had been warned by the army commander in chief to evacuate their homes at once. A headline announced that His Majesty would speak on the air that night.
Were we on the eve of the invasion at last?
I went downstairs with my hands full of letters for the post. It was the old hall porter, in his green baize apron, who told me that D-Day was at last a reality. Our forces had set sail for the coast of Normandy at 5:00 A.M. That tremor I had felt the night before was not imagined. I had caught the "dreadful note of preparation."
Mary Barrett and I walked out into the sunshine and along the Front. The people we met were very quiet and looked a little grim, conscious of what must be taking place only forty-four miles across the Channel. Whenever a bevy of planes passed overhead, pointing toward France, all eyes were lifted to them and, I dare say, all hearts. I know mine was. I wanted desperately to speak to Richard, but I was told all civilian telephone calls were canceled. I knew he must be in the midst of the busiest day for the Navy.
On the evening of D-Day our unit was scheduled to do a show on the pier at Worthing. The spirits of the men in the audience ran high, and no wonder, with good news coming in that our invading army had made an advance of ten miles into France within a few hours of landing. Worthing is only a few miles east of Bognor, where I had my first glimpse of the sea and where I earned my first sovereign. The Victorian poets had a fancy for writing odes to places "revisited." This tour of the south coast was full of such places for me.
The next day, Wednesday, the War Department unsealed a camp for us, and we motored out toward Lewes to Camp Tanner. The men had rigged up an old barn to serve as a crude theater. When we arrived there, we found the troops in the process of moving out for France. Hundreds had already left. From what one could learn, the invasion was going so well—"going according to plan" as Churchill announced to the Empire—and the advance into France was so swift more men could be dispatched immediately.
The troops about to leave were already lined up when we arrived. They carried all their equipment and were wearing their Mae Wests. A groan went through the ranks because they thought they would miss our show.
So we unloaded fast, and the colonel (his name was Bury, and the outfit was called "Bury's Bashers") let them into the barn theater where we did our show for them. I sang my songs and then stood out in the farmyard waving to them as they drove out, headed for France.
It was all like part of a film. There I stood in the middle of that once-peaceful farmyard, in the brilliant sunshine, tears streaming down my face, waving good-by to those men—knowing I was the last woman to sing them a song for many a weary while.
When the trucks had pulled out, we returned to the barn and did our show again for the men who were still waiting for orders. Halfway through the bill we had to stop while the troops were summoned to muster outside. Again I went out, and kissed them and waved good-by. Again we struck up "Auld Lang Syne." Above the rumbling of the lorries rose the sound of men's voices singing the song which I had just taught them.
By this time Mary Barrett and I were both reduced to pulp. But the show had to go on; so, with a lumpy throat and an ache in my heart, I went back to the barn and we did a third show.
There was no one to know that what I was doing there that afternoon—and what I was to do for many days at many other camps throughout England—was the long-overdue payment of a debt. Bury's Bashers and the other boys I sang to could not know what I owed to half a dozen British Tommies of World War I who, before they went out to fight in Flanders, gave Gertrude Lawrence her chance to become a star.
Though I was now entirely on my own, without obligation to Father, I did not go back to Clapham. What held me back from doing this was bravado. I had left them and Granny to further my career as an actress. I was still a long way from achieving that goal and, therefore, I felt hesitant about going back to the family. Above all, I had no desire to have the virtues of Cousin Ruby dinned into my ears. Someday, I promised myself, I'll be doing so well I can afford to go back.
I was determined to make good, and deep inside myself was the unshaken conviction that I would be a success someday. I was quite willing to work for that success and to make sacrifices to attain it. I did work, not forgetting Miss Conti's teaching, and striving all the time to do better. Many of the girls I met in the companies in which I played, or at the Cats' Home, admitted, frankly, that they were content just to be good enough to get by. They, apparently, did not have that insistent, not-to-be-ignored inner drive which forced me to practice constantly and to learn more and always more about the theater.
I cannot take any credit to myself for this determination to succeed, for it was inherent in my nature. I did have to battle through periods of despair and frustration. But I am by nature hopeful. I do not understand defeat. My own psychology in those years before I was seventeen was quite simple: I believed, unquestionably, that I was destined to be an actress. The fortune which the penny-in-the-slot machine on the pier at Brighton had given me seemed to me to state this quite unequivocally. I saw no reason to doubt the gypsy's prophecy. It might be. this season—or the next—that I would emerge from the obscurity of the chorus of a musical which played the provinces and the cheaper suburbs of London. But emerge I would. Meanwhile it was up to me to make myself as good as I could be. Each performance was a fresh challenge.
One night after the show in Swindon there was a knock on the chorus's dressing-room door. The callboy handed me a card which read LEE WHITE AND CLAY SMITH, LONDON AND NEW YORK. I went out and found an American couple on vacation from their London season. They were visiting Swindon to see the cathedral and had dropped in at our show.
They took me out to supper at their hotel and we talked.
"You're good," Lee said to me seriously. "You don't belong in a show like this. You've got something. Clay and I are going to keep our eyes on you." She made me promise to keep them informed of what towns we played, and let them know whenever I changed shows. "You never can tell," she finished; "we may learn of something. And, when we do, you'll hear from us."
I rather doubted the validity of this promise, but from time to time I would send them a picture post card to the address Lee gave me.
Nearly a year later, while I was playing in Yarmouth, I received a telegram. It was signed Lee White and Clay Smith, and it said tersely that they had recommended me for a job in a revue which André Charlot was staging in London. Can you come at once? the wire ended.
I was all for dashing to the station and leaping aboard the first London Express, but the other girls, to whom I had shown the wire, held me back.
"How do you know this is a genuine offer?" they demanded. "Suppose you leave the show here and go flying up to London only to find the manager has signed someone else? There you'll be—out of a job and without a bean."
These suggestions sobered me. "What'll I do? I can't afford to throw over a chance like this, can I? It's for London!"
The girls agreed wholeheartedly that this was not to be thought of. We put our heads together and concocted a return message: Does your wire constitute a contract? I ran down to the station and sent it off; then I went back to the theater to dress for that night's show, trying desperately to keep my mind on my cues and not on the extravagant fancies that kept popping up when I thought of London.
When I came off stage after the final curtain, the stage doorman handed me a telegram. I ripped it open. With the other girls crowding around, peering over my shoulder, I read:
YES, IF YOU CAN COME AT ONCE, THIS TELEGRAM CONSTITUTES A CONTRACT. CLAY SMITH.Luckily, I had no contract, but if I was to leave I had to do so without the management getting wind of it. Back in our lodgings, my roommate, Madge, and I took stock of our resources. It was a Tuesday night—four days to payday. What money I had plus all that she could afford to lend me wouldn't pay for a third-class ticket to London. Neither of us owned anything of value that we could pawn. We looked at each other, and for the first time in my life I felt desperate. Here was my chance—a chance for a contract at a London theater, and for the lack of a few shillings I couldn't seize it. Madge said slowly:
"I've got a friend in camp here. I'll get word to him. If he has any money, he'll help us. And, if he hasn't, he'll know how to raise it."
We didn't sleep much that night. I lay tense, staring into the dark. Somehow, by some means or other, I must get the money for that ticket to London. Next morning I was packed and ready to take off when Madge went out to meet her boy friend. She came back in a short time, bringing him with her. He was a little, bright-faced lad from Bristol. Before he enlisted, he'd been a joiner's apprentice. Now he was drilling with a regiment of gunners, getting ready to go over to Flanders. Madge showed him the wire and drew a vivid picture of the importance of this chance which had come my way. Bristol looked me over with a speculative eye, as if I were a horse on which someone was advising him to place his money. I tried to look as promising as possible. If only he would think me worth betting on. Presently he nodded. He had, he informed us, eight shillings, which he was prepared to risk on me. My face fell. Even with his eight shillings added to our resources, the ticket to London was a long way off. Madge explained this to him.
"That's all right," said Bristol complacently. "I've a couple of mates who might be willing to take a flier."
We arranged to meet him and his friends at the railway station within an hour. Madge and I were standing by the ticket office when five British Tommies, with Bristol in the lead, bore down on us.
"There she is," said he, pointing at me. The other five looked me over. Five heads nodded approbation.
Out of the uniform pockets came half crowns and shillings which the Tommies handed over to Madge, my self-constituted financial manager. She counted the money. "Hurray! Enough for a ticket, and fifteen shillings over to see you through your first week in London," she said triumphantly.
While she bought my ticket, I turned to Bristol and his five mates. "Thank you, boys. You'll get your money back. And you won't be sorry you've done this for me. I promise."
"Oh, that's all right," one of the Tommies replied gallantly. "It's always a pleasure to help a lady."
"I mean it," I said earnestly. "I won't forget what you've done for me today. Not ever! And when I'm playing at His Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket, it'll be because you boys helped me get there."
The six Tommies saw me off on the London Express. I hung out of the window and waved to them, and they all waved back to me.
"Best of luck, Gertie! Mind now, don't let us down."
The little revue in which Lee White and Clay Smith found a place for me was one of the first of a long run of such shows staged by André Charlot. The revue in which I made my first appearance bore the innocuous title, Some. This was followed in turn by Cheep, Tabs, and Buzz-Buzz. I did a toe dance and a duet with Clay Smith, and was also in the chorus. Charlot gave me a three-year contract at three pounds ten shillings a week the first year, four pounds ten shillings the second, and six pounds ten shillings the third. I was made.
The pattern of all these wartime revues was simplicity itself. They were staged with a minimum of scenery and a maximum of taste, and they were cast with star names. Charlot's revues caught on immediately with the British public. Each of them had a long run, and when it closed, it was almost immediately succeeded by another, cut to the same successful pattern.
The masculine part of those revue audiences was almost entirely in khaki. The girls with the young lieutenants in the Gunners and Sappers wore gay evening frocks. The men themselves were home on leave from the Western Front, and were desperately in need of getting the sights and sounds of the battle fronts along the Somme out of their systems. They wanted terribly to forget. They dined and danced and went on to the play and then on to supper clubs, where they danced again and drank, cramming their hours of leave with all the gaiety they could seize. It was up to us in Charlot's Revue to offer these men gaiety. It was up to us to bring laughs to boys whose youthful faces were set in grim lines and whose eyes never quite lost the wounded look even when their lips smiled. It was up to us to delude them into believing—if only for one split second—that death and destruction and terror and dirt and pain were unreal.
The boys adored Charlot's revues. You would look out into the house and see a boy sitting in the same seat night after night. You would smile at him across the footlights, establishing a comradeship. Then one night, when you looked, there would be another boy in khaki or navy blue sitting in that seat. The other had gone back, where and to what you didn't know and didn't want to guess. Sometimes, after months, suddenly there he would be again, waiting for you to make him laugh. When he turned up like that, you felt better yourself and you'd think: "He's all right. He's come through this time." It never occurred to you, nor did it matter at all, that you didn't even know his name.
The London of June 1944 in which I had found myself on arriving from America bore not the slightest resemblance to the London I remembered during the years 1915 to 1918. The audiences one saw at the West End theaters in the summer of 1944 were predominantly in uniform, but there was a noticeable lack of girls in evening dress, and there was a striking absence of the hectic let-us-dance-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die gaiety, which was the undercurrent of the life I remembered during World War I. The Londoners of 1944 were quieter and more matter of fact, even about their pleasures. They laughed at the jokes and the songs and the comedy skits in the shows, but you felt no desperation in their amusement. You felt that, not for one minute, though they laughed, did they forget the immediacy of war and the menace to all that the British people hold dear. One felt—at least I did—that between 1917 and 1944 the British people had lost their youth and regained their wisdom.
Bea Lillie was one of the stars of Some, and I was required to understudy her as well as appear in the chorus. Bea and I quickly became friends and partners in practical jokes which both of us adored to play on others in the cast.
I remember the night in 1917 when America entered the war. Lee and Clay had sat up all the night before writing a song especially for the occasion, and had rehearsed it all day. The time came for Clay to step out onto the stage and announce the new song. This done, the front tabs were drawn, leaving room downstage for Lee to sing in a spotlight. Bea and I and the rest of the company were standing back of the drop curtains to hear the new song. It was a march entitled "America Answers the Call."
As Lee sang, suddenly Bea started to march madly back and forth back of the curtain just behind Lee. I joined her. The cast began to laugh, and the more they laughed the more exaggerated our marching became. Our arms waved until they moved the curtains. Finally Clay came down upon us.
"My God," he whispered fiercely at Bea, "where do you think you are?"
"The Ritz," she replied with her own inimitable gesture of the right hand, and with that distinctive lift of the voice at the end of the line.
There was a rehearsal call the next day. Although Bea and I lived at opposite ends of London, by sheer coincidence we both arrived late. We were both fired.
The star and her understudy went out to lunch together. I knew Charlot would want to take Bea back, but I was worried about myself. I had gone too far, and I had seriously offended Lee and Clay, who had done so much for me.
Bea and I returned humbly to the theater and I sat in the wardrobe mistress's room waiting to be sent for. Bea was forgiven, and I was lectured severely and then—at Lee White's urgent request—given another trial.
Anyone would think I would have learned something by this experience, but apparently I did not. I was soon up to mischief again.
In one of the revues Lee sang a song, "Have You Seen the Ducks Go By?" At the end of the verse a row of obviously artificial ducks appeared on a wall at the back of the stage and moved across it in time to the music. The effect was made by us girls walking behind the wall, with only our duck-like hats showing. That number was a hopeless temptation to me. I couldn't help making my duck frisk about and behave as no properly drilled duck would ever do. Nor could I resist popping my head up over the wall in the wrong place, winking at the audience, and laughing when they laughed at me. Naturally Lee did not like this in the least. But Bea Lillie adored it and would join in with the chorus and pop her head up—minus the duck headdress. Sometimes she wore a man's straw hat and a false mustache. The audience would howl with laughter, but it upset Lee. Finally Clay stopped speaking to me.
I suppose a psychologist could find a reason for the irrepressible impulse to play pranks which ob