Alma Cogan (2 page)

There was nothing this noteworthy on the night in question:
just a ripe ponging crush of hot-eared young men who looked like their fathers and full-blown, over-talced young women who looked like their mothers, and their earnest, fumbling attempts at familiarity. There was a chorus of shouted goodnights as Stan finally edged me clear and we started walking in the direction of the front, where we could still see the late trains gliding past, lit up like galleons.

A car usually dropped me at the theatre and came back to collect me later. I can’t remember if that was the first time I’d travelled the length of the pier under my own steam. What I do remember is the state of disrepair of the footway; the treacherous gaps between some of the boards – easily big enough to break a leg in; the sea churning like cocoa thirty feet below and the incongruous, glinting texture of my shoes in the near-dark.

I also remember the billboarded pictures of myself that I tottered past, clinging to Stan’s arm, and my name spelled out in block-letters that had the same drunken haphazardness as the letters that run through seaside rock. Posters were still the products of primitive tech in those days, with red and blue inks that seemed to stand off the paper and create a nimbus effect where the printing misregistered. As a result, the face that stared back at me as I negotiated the North Pier that night is the face I still see when I think back to those times: bright, confused, innocent, blurred, with a dated, hopeful glow around the edges.

The party conference season started when we finished, and a picture of Mr Attlee – an old man in a homburg hat with fatigue and defeat written all over him – had gone up outside the Winter Gardens. We turned right into the narrow streets of the old town where the traditional seaside smells – shellfish, rancid fat, sugared rock – seemed baked into the fabric of the buildings.

We were looking for somewhere called the Helmet – I wasn’t aware of the sexual connotation at the time – and found it after several wrong turnings which involved stepping over cooling streams of urine and disturbing courting couples in the recessed doorways of shops that seemed to sell nothing but rusted baked-bean tins and pre-war hats.

‘Are you members, darlings?’

It was the second-spot comic, got up like something – something female, that is – from the naughty nineties or the roaring twenties, it was difficult to tell.

‘She’s not a pretty little lady, is she?’ This to me about Stan, who was six-foot-one and still V-shaped from his time in the navy. ‘Oh better come in then, cunty.’

The Helmet was what my mother would have called a dive and my mother would have been right. It was at the bottom of two flights of funnel-like, slack-carpeted stairs and consisted of a single room with a small serving bar in one corner and a small raised stage in another, diagonally opposite.

In the minimal lighting, it was possible to see that somebody, almost certainly a previous owner, had carried out murals on a maritime theme. Crabs, starfish, octopuses and other – to me – unidentifiable crustaceans and creepy-crawlies battled for space in patinaed, gilt-framed panels. Flocked wallpaper in two shades of green completed the decorations: with light filtering dimly on to it, it looked appropriately like river-moss.

Stan went to the bar and I parked myself at a table full of faces that I hardly recognised without their tall head plumes and feather-cut wigs and the cheap, raw-edged gorgeousness of theatrical slap. Most of the gorgeousness that night seemed to have been hijacked by a few of the boys from the chorus (and a couple from front-of-house) who had come dragged up in borrowed diamanté sheaths and ‘hostess gowns’ of ruffled chiffon.

The female members of the chorus, present as themselves, looked like husks. They looked slighter; softer. The softness was emphasised by the cigarettes and brittle painted nails they waved in front of their faces all the time like shields.

Show girls in those days weren’t necessarily brassy: it wasn’t a condition of the job; and the word itself had yet to become a euphemism for ‘tart’. Most of the ones I knew who didn’t marry comics married accountants, doctors, commercial travellers and ambitious local government yes-men. They were content to keep house and take their place on the church flower-roster until the
children grew up, when they would become, as many of them now are, marriage guidance counsellors, animal welfarists, Earth Firsters, prison visitors and JPs.

Kathie Moody, a former Breams Breezy Babe and seaside hoofer, had graduated in style a few years earlier by marrying Law Grade. Audrey Smith, a Tiller Girl and can-can dancer, had married Leslie Grade. Then there was old Nora Docker, as if we could forget, who had worked her way up from high-kicking and hostessing at Murray’s Club in Soho, to Sir Bernard and the gold-plated Daimler.

Even Rita, the Grades’ sister, who would soon be constantly on the phone trying to recruit me for her charitable functions and good works, started off on the boards. (‘We’re all going to feel a little bit taller at the end of the day, would I lie to you, Alma?’ Rita would launch into her familiar schmooze, well aware that any refusal to put in an appearance amounted to professional suicide. ‘It’s for a good cause. That road home is going to seem a little bit shorter.’)

In the meantime, it was a life of cheap chat-ups and dried-out boarding-house suppers for those who were less well-connected. That night at the Helmet most of the chorus didn’t know where they were going to be the same time the following week. This accounted for the cigarette-ends piling up in the saucers and the wreaths of pale smoke that clung to their hair and played around their lively, laughing faces.

‘… so he said, “I’ve slept with more people than are in here tonight – and that was on my honeymoon,”’ I heard a brunette on my left say. She was shouting to make herself heard above the noise which had already reached a level where talking made you worry about preserving your voice for the next night’s performance. Somebody was banging away at a piano; somebody else was murdering a banjo.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way. But are you ever worried‚’ the brunette, whose name was Glennis, was addressing me now, ‘about being, you know, a five minute’s magic?’ But before I could answer I was being tapped on the shoulder by Trevor,
known throughout the business as Big Rita. (Later in life, when the drink and ‘trolling’ had begun to take their toll, it would become ‘Rita Hayworth’s mother’.)

He was gesturing at the table with thick fingers covered in glass rings the colour of table jellies. I thought it was my drink he was after, which was just lemonade mixed with vermouth. But he wanted my cigarette packet: I passed it to him and he slid the silver foil out gently, removed the membrane of tissue paper from the back of it and elaborately blotted his lips. He let the lipstick-stained tissue drift down onto the table and made his way towards the stage.

Trevor started to sing.

A part of the evening’s entertainment, being quietly relished by those of us not directly involved, came from the cross-currents caused by the appearance on the scene of some of the band wives, breaking up various cosy liaisons that had lasted through the summer. A number of the girls who had been displaced were drinking more heavily than usual and hostilely eyeing up the opposition. Margaret, a full-figured but otherwise rather plain girl from Coventry, was one of them.

‘I was expecting to be able to come here tonight and let me back hair down,’ she complained loudly. ‘Then
she
has to put in an appearance. She hasn’t got the, excuse me, guts to look me in the eye, if you’ve noticed. She looks like one of them that’ll go fat when she gets older.’

There was a lot more in this vein. Fortunately most of it was swallowed up in the general hubbub which, every so often, gave way to the loud singing of sentimental songs. Then, just as suddenly as the singing had started, it would stop, and everybody would go back to bawling at each other over their glasses.

‘Scientists are busy proving the big part personality and looks play in your life. It’s all written, you know.’ Margaret again. ‘They’re going to prove that your life is mapped out for you. So why regret what was inevitable? I’m a total fatalist.’

But I had started to experience, and covertly enjoy, the gently rolling sensation you sometimes get when you have spent time surrounded by water; the floor and the table both seemed to be moving. That, combined, I suppose, with the fact that I was now a little lit myself and the noise in the Helmet which had reached the sort of pitch where it was as unobtrusive as silence, dredged to the surface something somebody – an eminent artist, as it happens, his face as red as the wine he was anxiously looking around for more of to put in his glass – had said to me not long before at a London party.

‘There are only two things I know that I can look at forever: waves breaking in a long slow rolling turn along a sandy beach with the spray being blown off the top. And – oh yes’ – a waiter had finally arrived with a refill; he relieved him of the bottle – ‘the movement of a tall poplar’s topmost branches and leaves. The poplars I can watch endlessly with the lovely movement they have all the time.’

Everything that happened next seemed to happen at the same languorous tempo; waves breaking on a beach; a tall poplar brushing the sky.

I had been aware of a dancer called Gerard, who I knew was from a small town in the west of Ireland, sitting astride an upright chair on the stage miming to a tape of Doris Day’s ‘The Deadwood Stage’. He was batting black spiked lashes and had his own blond hair turned back in metallic brackets either side of his face to look like Doris Day’s; he was wearing a red-and-white bandanna and something that roughly resembled the buckskin jacket Doris Day wore in
Calamity
Jane
. Every time he got to ‘whipcrack away, whipcrack away, whipcrack away’ he waved around a piece of clothesline and everybody joined in.

Now, though, he was suddenly being jerked backwards off the chair by a man in a dark, American-cut sharkskin suit and what
we knew in those days as a Billy Eckstine shirt, who was accompanied by another man who was less flashily dressed. The second man caught Gerard as he fell, then flipped him upright in a single unbroken movement so that he was facing stage-front. This was done with such panache that for an instant you might have been fooled into thinking you were watching a top-line, if somewhat dated, adagio act. If you hadn’t been paying attention you might have thought that this was cod-violence; knockabout; pantomime aggro.

But already, of course, you know different. What we were about to witness was an act of violence of the sort that, up to that night, I’d believed no human capable. From that point on, though, it was the sort of vile craziness I would suspect everybody of having the potential for.

Very soon, I could tell – we could all tell; you could already smell it – there was going to be blood. And now – was that a drum-roll I heard? – here it came: a thick rope of blood which twisted lazily through the air, followed by a fine spray which settled on the shoulders of those nearest the stage like sparks from an anvil, like snow. There was a thick slick of it on the leading player’s sharkskin jacket that looked like blood on the flank of a tormented bull. Except that it was the bull in this case which was handing out the punishment.

Both men had inserted their fingers into the boy’s carefully painted mouth and had looked at first as if they were going to force open his teeth like a vice until he resembled the turkey-necked, screaming grotesques in my friend Francis Bacon’s painting,
Three
Studies
for
Figures
at
the
Base
of
a
Crucifixion
.

But these were learner performers. They needed cruder results than that. They weren’t prepared to trust the patience of their audience. The brass-ringed fingers hooked into his mouth and tore open the flesh of his cheeks like the wrapping round a promising-looking parcel; they ripped upwards towards his eyes and outwards towards his ears; they simply peeled his face like an orange.

Nobody was ever able to give an explanation for the attack,
but it seems reasonable to suppose that there could only be two motives: sexual or financial. If I opt for the former it is because of a comment made to me some years later by somebody who had also witnessed what happened at first-hand. ‘There is nothing more vicious than a villainous poof‚’ he said, and he spoke as one who was in a position to know.

The ‘American invasion’ of entertainers was at its height in 1954 – Lena Home, Johnny Ray, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Eddie Fisher and Guy Mitchell had all been over to play the Palladium. Nobody excited as much public interest, though, as Doris Day.

Four months after the events described here, I met her at a reception held in her honour in the River Room at the Savoy. With its kind, modulated lighting, circulating flunkies and stiff linen napiery it was a world away from the sleaze of the Helmet. Inevitably, though, when we were introduced I found myself scrutinising the star guest’s ivory porcelain mask for signs of mutilation and invisible mending. (The boy Gerard survived, hideously disfigured.)

The main focus of interest, for obvious reasons, was her mouth. ‘No successful singer has an ugly mouth’ was something that had been drummed into me by a woman with a perpetually glistening crimson gash who I had gone to for voice lessons when I was younger. And I found myself following the ellipses and painted puckerings of Doris Day’s (surprisingly full) lips with such concentration that afterwards I would be able to recall barely a word of our bright, brief cocktail conversation.

It seemed inconceivable then and for many years afterwards that anything could eclipse that as my most vivid memory of the occasion. Events conspired, however, to place even the Gerard episode in a perspective that suggested how far the world had rolled in a direction that no one at the time could have predicted.