My Autobiography (19 page)

Living was cheap. At a small hotel one could get a room and board for seven dollars a week, with three meals a day. Food was remarkably cheap. The saloon free-lunch counter was the mainstay of our troupe. For a nickel one could get a glass of beer and the pick of a whole delicatessen counter. There were pigs’ knuckles, sliced ham, potato salad, sardines, macaroni cheese, a variety of sliced sausages, liverwurst, salami and hot dogs. Some of our members took advantage of this and piled up their plates until the barman would intervene: ‘Hey! Where the hell are you tracking with that load – to the Klondike?’

There were fifteen or more in our troupe and yet every member saved at least half of his wages, even after paying his own sleeping berth on the train. My salary was seventy-five dollars a week and fifty of it went regularly and resolutely into the Bank of Manhattan.

The tour took us to the Coast. Travelling with us out West on the same vaudeville bill was a handsome young Texan, a trapeze performer who could not make up his mind whether to continue
with his partner on the trapeze or become a prize-fighter. Every morning I would put on the gloves with him, and, although he was taller and heavier than I was, I could hit him at will. We became very good friends, and after a boxing bout we would lunch together. His folks, he told me, were simple Texan farmers, and he would talk about life on the farm. Very soon we were talking ourselves into leaving show business and going into partnership, raising hogs.

Between us we had two thousand dollars and a dream of making a fortune; we planned to buy land for fifty cents an acre in Arkansas, two thousand acres to start with, and spend the rest buying hogs and improving the land. If all went well, we had it figured out that with the compound birth of hogs, averaging a litter of five a year, we could in five years make a hundred thousand dollars apiece.

Travelling on the train, we would look out of the window and see hog farms and go into paroxysms of excitement. We ate, slept and dreamed hogs. But for buying a book on scientific hog-raising I might have given up show business and become a hog-farmer, but that book, which graphically described the technique of castrating hogs, cooled my ardour and I soon forgot the enterprise.

On this tour I carried my violin and ’cello. Since the age of sixteen I had practised from four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left-handed with the bass bar and sounding post reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on I realized that I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.

In 1910 Chicago was attractive in its ugliness, grim and begrimed, a city that still had the spirit of frontier days, a thriving, heroic metropolis of ‘smoke and steel’, as Carl Sandburg says. The vast flat plains approaching it are, I imagine, similar to the Russian steppes. It had a fierce pioneer gaiety that enlivened the senses, yet underlying it throbbed masculine loneliness. Counteracting this somatic ailment was a national distraction known as the burlesque show, consisting of a coterie of rough-and-tumble comedians supported by twenty or more chorus girls. Some were pretty, others shopworn. Some of the comedians were funny, most
of the shows were smutty harem comedies – coarse and cynical affairs. The atmosphere was ‘he-man’, charged with profane sex antagonism which, paradoxically, insulated the audience from any normal sex desire – their reaction was to snivel at it. Chicago was full of these shows; one called
Watson’s Beef Trust
had twenty enormously fat, middle-aged women displaying themselves in tights. Their combined weight went into tons, so it was advertised. Their photographs outside the theatre, showing them posing coyly, were sad and depressing.

In Chicago we lived up-town on Wabash Avenue in a small hotel; although grim and seedy, it had a romantic appeal, for most of the burlesque girls lived there. In each town we always made a bee-line for the hotel where the show girls stayed, with a libidinous hope that never materialized. The elevated trains swept by at night and flickered on my bedroom wall like an old-fashioned bioscope. Yet I loved that hotel, though nothing adventurous ever happened there.

One young girl, quiet and pretty, was for some reason always alone and walked with a self-conscious air. Occasionally I would pass her going in and out of the hotel lobby, but I never had the temerity to get acquainted, and I must say she gave me little encouragement.

When we left Chicago for the coast she was on the same train; burlesque companies going west usually toured the same route we were travelling and played in the same towns. Passing through the train, I saw her talking to a member of our company. Later he came and took his seat beside me. ‘What sort of a girl is she?’ I asked.

‘Very sweet. Poor kid, I’m sorry for her.’

‘Why?’

He leaned closer. ‘Remember the rumour going around that one of the girls in the show had syphilis? Well, that’s the one.’

In Seattle she was obliged to leave the company and enter a hospital. We made a collection for her, all the travelling companies contributing. Poor girl, everyone knew what was the matter with her. Nevertheless, she was thankful and later rejoined her company, cured by injections of Salvarsan, a new drug at that time.

In those days the red-light districts were rampant throughout America. Chicago was especially noted for the House of All Nations, run by the Everly sisters, two middle-aged spinsters; it
was notorious for having women of every nationality. Rooms were furnished in every style and décor: Turkish, Japanese, Louis XVI, even an Arab tent. It was the most elaborate establishment in the world, and the most expensive. Millionaires, industrial tycoons, cabinet ministers, senators and judges alike were its customers. Members of a convention usually terminated their concord by taking over the whole establishment for the evening. One wealthy sybarite was known to take up his abode there for three weeks without seeing daylight.

The further west we went the better I liked it. Looking out of the train at the vast stretches of wild land, though it was drear and sombre, filled me with promise. Space is good for the soul. It is broadening. My outlook was larger. Such cities as Cleveland, St Louis, Minneapolis, St Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, throbbed with the dynamism of the future, and I was imbued with it.

We made many friends with the members of other vaudeville companies. In each town we would get together in the red-light district, six or more of us. Sometimes we won the affection of the madam of a bordel and she would close up the ‘joint’ for the night and we would take over. Occasionally some of the girls fell for the actors and would follow them to the next town.

The red-light district of Butte, Montana, consisted of a long street and several by-streets containing a hundred cribs in which young girls were installed ranging in age from sixteen up for one dollar. Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the Middle West, and it was true. If one saw a pretty girl smartly dressed, one could rest assured she was from the red-light quarter doing her shopping. Off duty they looked neither right nor left and were most respectable. Years later I argued with Somerset Maugham about his Sadie Thompson character in the play
Rain
. Jeanne Eagels dressed her rather grotesquely, as I remember, with spring-side boots. I told him that no harlot in Butte, Montana, could make money if she dressed like that.

In 1910 Butte, Montana, was still a ‘Nick Carter’ town, with miners wearing top-boots and two-gallon hats and red neckerchiefs. I actually saw gun-play in the street, a fat old sheriff shooting at the heels of an escaped prisoner, who was eventually cornered in a blind alley without harm, fortunately.

My heart grew lighter as we travelled west: cities looked cleaner. Our route was Winnipeg, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland. In Winnipeg and Vancouver, audiences were essentially English and in spite of my pro-American leanings it was pleasant to play before them.

At last California! – a paradise of sunshine, orange groves, vineyards and palm-trees stretching along the Pacific coast for a thousand miles. San Francisco, the gateway to the Orient, was a city of good food and cheap prices; the first to introduce me to frogs legs
à la provençale
, strawberry shortcake and avocado pears. We arrived in 1910, after the city had risen from the earthquake of 1906, or the fire, as they prefer to call it. There were still one or two cracks in the hilly streets, but little remnant of damage was left. Everything was new and bright, including my small hotel.

We played at the Empress, owned by Sid Grauman and his father, friendly, gregarious people. It was the first time I was featured alone on a poster with no mention of Karno. And the audience, what a delight! In spite of
The Wow-wows
being a dull show, there were packed houses every performance and screams of laughter. Grauman said enthusiastically: ‘Any time you’re through with the Karno outfit, come back here and we’ll put on shows together.’ This enthusiasm was new to me. In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard.

We finished our first tour in Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormons, which made me think of Moses leading the children of Israel. It is a gaping wide city, that seems to waver in the heat of the sun like a mirage, with wide streets that only a people who had traversed vast plains would conceive. Like the Mormons, the city is aloof austere – and so was the audience.

After playing
The Wow-wows
on the Sullivan and Considine circuit, we came back to New York with the intention of returning directly to England, but Mr William Morris, who was fighting the other vaudeville trusts, gave us six weeks to play our whole
repertoire at his theatre on Forty-second Street, New York City. We opened with
A Night in an English Music Hall
, which was a tremendous success.

During the week a young man and his friend had a late date with a couple of girls, so to kill time they wandered into William Morris’s American Music Hall, where they happened to see our show. One remarked: ‘If ever I become a big shot, there’s a guy I’ll sign up.’ He was referring to my performance as the drunk in
A Night in an English Music Hall
. At the time he was working for D. W. Griffith as a movie extra in the Biograph Company, getting five dollars a day. He was Mack Sennett, who later formed the Keystone Film Company.

Having played a very successful six weeks’ engagement for William Morris in New York, we were again booked for another twenty weeks’ tour on the Sullivan and Considine circuit.

I felt sad as we drew near to the end of our second tour. There were three weeks more, San Francisco, San Diego, then Salt Lake City and back to England.

The day before leaving San Francisco, I took a stroll down Market Street and came upon a small shop with a curtained window and a sign reading: ‘Your fortune told by hands and cards – one dollar.’ I went in, slightly embarrassed, and was confronted by a plump woman of about forty who came from an inner room still chewing an interrupted meal. Perfunctorily she pointed to a small table against the wall facing the door, and without looking at me said: ‘Sit down, please,’ then she sat opposite. Her manner was abrupt. ‘Shuffle these cards and cut them three times towards me, then lay the palms of your hands upwards on the table, please.’ She turned the cards over and spread them, studied them, then looked at my hands. ‘You’re thinking about a long journey, which means you’ll be leaving the States. But you return again shortly, and will enter a new business – something different from what you’re doing at present.’ Here she hesitated and became confused. ‘Well, it’s almost the same but it’s different. I see tremendous success in this new venture; there’s an extraordinary career ahead of you, but I don’t know what it is.’ For the first time she looked up at me, then took my hand. ‘Oh yes, there’s three marriages: the first two are not successful, but you end your life happily married with three children.’ (She was wrong there!) Then
she studied my hand again. ‘Yes, you will make a tremendous fortune, it’s a money-making hand.’ Then she studied my face. ‘You will die of bronchial pneumonia, at the age of eighty-two. A dollar, please. Is there any question you’d like to ask?’

‘No,’ I laughed, ‘I think I’ll leave well enough alone.’

In Salt Lake City, the newspapers were full of hold-ups and bank robberies. Customers in night-clubs and cafés were being lined up against the wall and robbed by masked bandits with stockings over their faces. There were three robberies in one night and they were terrorizing the whole city.

After the show we usually went to a nearby saloon for a drink, occasionally getting acquainted with the customers. One evening a fat, jovial round-faced man came in with two other men. The fat one, the oldest of the three, came over. ‘Aren’t you fellows playing the Empress in that English act?’

We nodded smilingly.

‘I thought I recognized you! Hey, fellows! Come on over.’ He hailed his two companions and after introducing them asked us to have a drink.

The fat one was an Englishman, although little trace of the accent was left; a man about fifty, good-natured, with small twinkling eyes and a florid face.

As the night wore on his two friends and members of our company drifted away from us towards the bar, and I found myself alone with ‘Fat’, as his young friends called him.

He became confidential. ‘I was back in the old country three years ago,’ he said, ‘but it ain’t the same – this here’s the place. Came here thirty years ago, a sucker, working my arse off in them Montana copperfields – then I got wise to myself. “That’s a mug’s game,” I says. Now I’ve got chumps working for me.’ He pulled out an enormous wad of bills. ‘Let’s have another drink.’