Kitabı oku: «Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic»

CHAPTER 2
A Stuttering Start

Well. No. Yes. Ah.

They coined a new nickname for Frank Howard at Shooters Hill school: ‘The Actor’.¹ He loved it.

He loved the idea that an actor was what he was set to become. It might only have been 1932, three long and arduous maths-and Latin-filled years before he was due to leave school, but already, as far as he was concerned, acting was the only thing that really mattered.

Having acquired his initial theatrical experience under the auspices of his church, Frank now proceeded to advance his acting ambitions inside his school, joining its own informal dramatic society and establishing himself very quickly as one of its most lively and distinctive figures. Gone, in this particular context at least, was the insecure loner of old, and in his place was to be found a far more sociable, self-assured and increasingly popular young man: his whole manner and personality appeared to come alive, growing so much bigger and bolder and brighter, whenever the action switched from the classroom to the stage. Here, at least, he knew what he was doing, and he knew that what he was doing was good.

Right from the start, he made it abundantly clear that he was eager to try everything: acting, writing, direction, production, promotion – whatever it was, he was willing to do it, work at it and, given time, perhaps even master it. Everywhere that one looked – backstage, in the wings, centre stage, even at the table with the tickets right at the back of the school hall – Frank Howard seemed to be there, still slightly stooped, still slightly stammering, but now entirely immersed in the experience.

As a performer, he progressed at quite a rapid rate. Although he was hardly the type, even then, to lose himself in a role – his playful disposition, in addition to his distinctive voice and looks, conspired against the pursuit of such a style – his obvious enthusiasm, allied to his lively wit, ensured that each one of his stage contributions stood out and stayed in the mind. At his most inspired, such as the occasion when he played the spoiled and rascally Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s satire She Stoops to Conquer, he showed real comic promise, relishing the chance to release all of the dim-witted verve that he had found lurking in the original text.²

As a fledgling playwright, on the other hand, the great amount of faith he invested in his own ability struck most of those whose opinions mattered as gravely misplaced. An audacious attempt to squeeze a rambling one-hour play, entitled Lord Halliday’s Birthday Party, into a tight ten-minute slot in a forthcoming concert was thwarted by the school’s headmaster, the rather dour Rupert Affleck, who deemed the script (which featured a messy divorce, a brutal murder and several other striking themes lifted straight from some of the movies Frank had recently seen) ‘far too outrageous and bold to be performed by young boys’, adding (according to Howerd’s own rueful recollection) that he was ‘appalled that a fifteen-year-old could be so depraved as to write such filth’.³

Embarrassed but undeterred, Frank proceeded to write several more scripts that Mr Affleck, had he seen them, would no doubt have considered to have been of far too sensational a nature. When, however, a play that he did manage to get performed – his blatantly derivative murder-mystery, Sweet Fanny Adams – elicited nothing more audible (let alone encouraging) from the auditorium than the lonely sound of tumbleweed being blown through the desert, he resolved in future to keep the rest of his ‘masterpieces’ to himself.⁴ Always a populist, Frank reasoned that if the current market demand was restricted to his acting, then his acting, for the time being, would have to be the sole commodity that he would seek to deliver.

In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he began attending an evening class in acting offered by what in those days was called the London County Council (or LCC). It was there that he first encountered his next great mentor: Mary Hope.

Hope – an experienced stage actor herself – became one of Howard’s tutors, and, just like Winifred Young before her, she soon found herself intrigued by the young performer’s quirky appeal. First, she encouraged him to join the LCC Dramatic Society – a vastly more serious and rigorous kind of company than either of Howard’s previous two theatrical troupes – and then, after seeing how richly original was his potential (and also how open he was to instruction), she advised him to aim his sights on securing a scholarship at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). If he was interested, she added, she would be willing to work alongside him as his coach.

Howard, his eyebrows hovering high and his bottom lip hanging low, was, as he would later put it, ‘a-mazed’. Listening back to the phrase as it echoed around inside his head – ‘Was I interested?’ – the only word that sounded out of place was the ‘was’. He was almost too thrilled to speak: ‘Choked with emotion, I managed to stammer that it was the most exciting prospect imaginable.’⁵

Before he could commit himself with a clear conscience, however, he knew that he would have to find a way to win his mother’s blessing. This did not seem likely to be easy. Edith, after all, had set her heart on seeing her son acquire a good education and then pursue a suitably upright and worthy religious career; now he was set to dash both of these treasured hopes at a stroke. Frank’s great sense of guilt grew even worse when he reflected upon the many sacrifices that had been (and still were being) made, not just by his mother but also by everyone else in his family, so that he could see through his education at Shooters Hill.

The loss of the ailing Frank Snr’s Army salary, occurring as it did right at the time when the country was deep in the depths of the Great Depression, had forced Edith to find work as a cleaner in order to help pay the mounting pile of bills. A further, and far more painful, consequence of the family’s shrunken income was the fact that it had made it impractical for either Sidney or Betty to match the length (or the quality) of their elder brother’s education: both, it had become clear, would have to leave school as soon as they reached the then minimum age of fourteen (Sidney, as things turned out, for a career in the Post Office,⁶ and Betty for a job in an office⁷). Everyone, it seemed, had suffered for the benefit of young Frank, and now young Frank was ready to risk it all on RADA.

‘Children are inclined to take a tremendous amount for granted,’ the adult Frankie Howerd would come to reflect, ‘and for my part I never fully appreciated […] the degree of the hardship involved in keeping me at Shooters Hill.’⁸ The teenaged Frank Howard, however, in spite of his youthful self-absorption, knew enough to know how great a blow the news of his apparent recklessness would be, and how easily his sudden change of plan could be taken as a betrayal. He hated telling them, but he had to.

When he did, he could not have been more pleasantly surprised by his mother’s outwardly calm and remarkably compassionate reaction. Instead of initiating a bitter debate or administering a furious rebuke, she just sighed, smiled resignedly, and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea.’⁹ Frank’s relief and gratitude were immense: if his redoubtable mother was still on his side, then she would ensure that the entire family remained on his side. ‘I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t going to enter the Church, after all,’ he would recall, ‘but since her primary concern was for my happiness, she gave me all the support she could.’¹⁰

He returned, suitably emboldened, to his coach Mary Hope, and started working hard – ‘harder than I’d worked for anything in my life’¹¹ – in preparation for his forthcoming RADA exam. There were three set pieces to master: one a short speech from a contemporary play, and two soliloquies from Shakespeare. With the momentous event only a matter of months away, the schedule was unrelenting: day after day, week after week, the context of each discrete piece was studied, the character of each speaker explored and the rhythms of each line assessed. Hope also worked with Howard on keeping his nerve, controlling his stammer and coping in general with the unfamiliar experience of being up there on show all alone. Rehearsal followed rehearsal, critique followed critique, until both of them were happy that they had secured a strong start, a solid centre and a suitably big finish. When the time finally came, Frank Howard felt sure that he was ready.

The big day started cold and grey. Rising from his bed early, having barely slept throughout what had felt like an impossibly long night, Frank washed, fussed over his fine curly hair, and then put on his best, barely worn, brown suit – which hung limply off his tall, skinny frame like a large sack would have done from a stick. Studying the effect in the mirror, he thought that he looked rather good. There was just time to go downstairs for a quick cup of tea in the kitchen and some welcome words of encouragement from his mother, and then he was up, out and off to meet his fate.

Clutching the packet of cheese sandwiches that his mother had made for his lunch, he caught the train from Eltham to Holborn Viaduct, and then, with a growing sense of trepidation, walked slowly through Bloomsbury, with all of the lines from the three speeches rattling around inside his head, until he arrived outside the entrance to the grand-looking RADA building at 62 Gower Street. What happened next was an experience that Frank Howard would never, ever, forget.

Shuffling inside, he found himself at the back of a vast room that appeared to be almost full of his fellow-applicants. It only took one quick glance over at them – smart, smug, matinée idol types – and one furtive glance back at himself – suddenly revealed as a scruffy, shambling, ‘sweating oaf’¹² – for all of the old demons to come crashing back. The others looked as if they belonged; he felt that he did not. As he stood there, rooted helplessly to the spot, he held on tightly to his packet of sandwiches (‘I had to cling to something’), and felt sure that he could hear more than a few mocking laughs.¹³ He knew what he had to do, but at that singularly vital moment, in spite of all of those months of lessons and learning and desperately hard work, he knew that he had lost all faith in his ability to do it.

Called in for his audition, he walked over to his spot, still clutching his packet of cheese sandwiches absent-mindedly to his chest, and then, sensing that he was having some trouble in keeping still, looked down and noticed that his left leg had started to tremble. The more he tried to stop it, the worse the quivering became. When he looked up in embarrassment at the examiners (one of whom – the imperious actor Helen Haye – he recognised immediately as the haughty wife of the master villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s recent movie, The 39 Steps), he found that they were all staring back not at his face but straight down at his leg. Panicking, he took his right hand (which remained wrapped around his squashed packet of sandwiches) and slammed it down hard and fast against his left knee, praying that the violent gesture would at least bring the shaking to a stop.

It did not. The hand did not stop the knee; the knee started the hand. All that the attempt to end the action achieved was to provide the row of open-mouthed examiners with the even more peculiar spectacle of a crumpled young man and what was left of his crumpled sandwiches being shaken ever more wildly by a wildly shaking left leg. It looked a bit like a dance, and a bit like an exorcism, and a bit like a fit, but it was definitely a disaster. When, eventually, his leg, and the rest of him, finally came to a halt, his sandwiches had showered the examiners in a mixture of shredded cheese and breadcrumbs, and his suit was in almost as bad a shape as his frazzled nerves.

‘Begin,’ he was told, and so, red-faced and reluctantly, he did: ‘Yes … Well … Um … To-to-to … er be … or not-not-not to … um … Yes, well … To be … Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? …’ He was well aware that it was already over, right there and then, but, somehow, he struggled on to the bitter end: ‘I should have thrown up my hands and run for my life,’ he would recall, ‘but beneath the panic lay that hard subsoil of determination, and so I stumbled and stammered and squeaked and shook my way through all of the three set pieces.’¹⁴

They thanked him. He thanked them. He went out. The next candidate came in. The grey day turned black.

Howard spent the train journey home slumped deep inside ‘an anguish of desolation and shame’: ‘I’d let everyone down: my mother, my headmaster, my schoolmates, Mary Hope – and myself. I was a complete and utter failure.’¹⁵ When he arrived back in Eltham, he found that he simply could not bear to face anyone, not even his mother, and so he went instead to a field at the back of his house, where he sat down in the long grass and started to sob. ‘Never before or since,’ he would say, ‘have I wept as I did on that day.’¹⁶

He stayed there for two blank and miserable hours. Eventually, however, once the sobbing had stopped and the tears had started to dry, a bright thought burst through the gloom. Perhaps, he reflected, he had not reached the end at all, but had merely taken a wrong turn. Sitting bolt upright, he then said to himself:

You’re a fool. A fool … You must have courage. Courage. The way you’re behaving is absolutely gutless … Look, you believe in God, don’t you? And you know that God seems to have given you talent. You feel that to be true … Now God is logical. He must be, otherwise life is stupid. Pointless. Without meaning … OK, perhaps RADA and straight acting aren’t for you. What then is the alternative?¹⁷

It did not take long for this characteristically brusque internal inquisition to summon up an acceptable response: ‘Comedy? Is that the alternative? If you’re not meant to be a great Shakespearean, are you meant to be a comedian? Is that it? … Why not try and see?’¹⁸

There seemed only one answer to such a question, and that was: why not, indeed? ‘I didn’t have anything to lose,’ he concluded, ‘except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’¹⁹

He got up, dusted himself down and walked home, where his worried mother had been waiting most of the afternoon for her son to return. When he told her tearfully about his terrible day, she just held him for a while and gave him a consoling kiss on the cheek. When, a little later, he hinted at his belief that his ‘calling’ was now, yet again, about to change, and that this time it was set to be a career in comedy, she simply assured him that she still had ‘an unswerving faith’ in the inevitability of his eventual success.²⁰ Sensing how badly the fallen St Francis felt that he had already let her down, she did all that she could to discourage any further growth in guilt: ‘As long as you’re kind and decent,’ she stressed, ‘I don’t care what you do.’²¹

According to the neat dramatic myth engendered by the memoirs, what the 16-year-old Howard did next was to leave school (‘I’d betrayed the faith they’d had in me there: the Actor was now the Flop. No, I couldn’t go back’²²) and find a job while he waited impatiently for the arrival of some kind of bountiful show-business break. The unromantic truth, however, is that he returned to Shooters Hill, subdued and semi-detached, and, reluctantly but dutifully, saw out the last two years of his secondary education.²³ Although his academic studies never recovered (he would leave with only a solitary school certificate to count as a qualification), his actorly ebullience most certainly did: according to the fond recollections of one of his contemporaries,²⁴ Howard managed not only to strengthen his reputation as a much-talked-about ‘character’, but also somehow contrived to ‘bring the house down’ with his portrayal of The Wall in the school’s 1935 production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

When, at long last, the day approached when he really was able to leave – at the start of the summer of 1935 – he intended to start scouring the local area for the kind of relatively well-paid but undemanding short-term job that would complement a young man’s pursuit of a career in comedy. Before, however, he even had the chance to commence such a fanciful plan, his father died, on 12 May, and all of a sudden Frank Jnr, at the tender age of eighteen, found himself elevated to the position of the senior male in the Howard household.

Out of desperation, he took a menial job as a filing clerk with a firm by the name of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at 37–45 Tooley Street in the East End borough of Southwark. The work was dull and the pay was poor (just £1 per week, which was meagre even for those days), and the only solace that Frank would find was within the walls of the nearby cathedral, where he spent most of his free time either sitting alone in prayer or sometimes listening to recitals.

He lived and longed for the evenings, when he could still feel, at least for an hour or two, that he was pushing on with his ‘proper’ ambitions: performing in local plays, pageants, concert parties, benefits, balls and revues – anything, in fact, that seemed to carry even the slightest scent of show business. He not only remained a keen contributor to the various productions put on by his colleagues at the local church, but he was also now an extremely active member of the Shooters Hill Old Boys’ Dramatic Society (where he was free to test his acting talents on slightly more challenging forms of fare).

Not even the playful evenings, however, could make up for the laboured days. As he sat there in Tooley Street, shuffling papers and watching clocks, Frank Jnr could feel himself turning slowly but surely into Frank Snr – another career clerk, another man without any discernible drive or dreams or pride, just going through the motions, just getting on with getting through life. It was demoralising – and it was made even worse by the man who was Frank’s boss.

As far as Frank Howard was concerned, the bluebird of happiness had never even come close to perching on one of Henry A. Lane’s sloping shoulders. With wounds from the Great War that had left him with a tin plate secreted in his head, a patch wrapped over an eye and a limp in one leg, he was no stranger, Howerd would say, to moods of ‘bitter malevolence’.²⁵ The one in-house factor guaranteed to trigger the eruption of such moods, it soon became clear, was the blatantly bored and permanently distracted Frank Howard: ‘If a cup of tea stood ready to be spilled in his lap then I, in my clumsiness, spilled it. If a bottle of ink waited to be knocked over, I knocked it. He truly despised me and terrorised me, and the more sadistic his behaviour, the more of a gibbering idiot I became.’²⁶

Lane was not the only one who found young Frank to be more than a fraction less than adequate. Most of his colleagues – noting his peculiar habit of suddenly making wild facial expressions in the direction of no one in particular, and his equally odd tendency to mutter, shriek and sometimes even squeak to himself behind the covers of a file – considered him slightly mad. The underlying reason for such eccentric behaviour was that Frank was actually spending the vast majority of each day’s office hours furtively studying his scripts (‘I simply had to,’ he later explained; ‘my nights and weekends were almost completely occupied with rehearsals and performances’²⁷).

After ten weeks of trying to combine the day job with his multiple play jobs, Howard was tired, run-down and covered in a rash of unsightly boils. Something had to give, and it was no surprise what did. Thanks to the chronically distracted Frank, a large consignment intended for the United States of America ended up in the Republic of China, and a folder dispatched to Leningrad was found to contain, among other things, a programme for Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. Henry Lane snapped, and Howard was sacked.

After he had endured the humiliation of a fortnight on the dole, his anxious mother intervened. Knowing that one of the wealthy people for whom she now cleaned was a part-owner of the United Friendly Insurance Company, she asked for – and duly received – a favour, and a suitable position as a clerk was found for her son at the firm’s head office in Southwark Bridge Road. Frank had landed on his feet: not only was the pay (thirty shillings per week) a little better, but the hours were better, too: ten to six from Monday to Friday, with half-day shifts on alternate Saturdays. He was also greatly relieved to find that his new boss – a single woman aged about forty – was as kind as his old boss had been cruel (‘I think she fancied me,’ he would later claim²⁸).

There was still not the slightest danger, however, of him ever wavering in his show-business ambitions and warming to his work as a clerk. He continued to pour all of his creative energies into his countless amateur performances, and even found the time, and the vanity, to form his very own tiny troupe – consisting of himself, his sister Betty, and one or two of their mutual friends – called Frank Howard’s Knockout Concert Party (‘the ego was in full flight again’²⁹). This troupe went on to stage innumerable 21-sketch-long revues – all of them strictly for charity (Edith was still watching) – based on whatever Howard had time to write in the office and whatever he and the others found the wit and the will to improvise in front of the audience. They toured all of the scout huts, church halls and retirement homes in the Eltham area, carrying their homemade scenery, costumes and props along with them on the tram, and did far more good than harm.

Even when he was part of a group, however, Howard always remained, in spirit, an incorrigible solo artiste. His instructions to his fellow-performers tended to take the following self-serving form: ‘Now you, Betty, will go on the stage and say something. Anything. Then I’ll say something. Then Charlie here will say something. We’ll make it up as we go along – always remembering that we’re aiming for the tag-line … Which I will deliver!’³⁰

Few talent contests in South London went ahead without the participation of Frank Howard. It was easy enough to execute: most of the old music-halls used to accommodate some sort of cheap and cheerful ‘Talent Night’ spot once a week on one of their bills, and all any amateur performer needed to do was to turn up, sign on and then try their luck. Such occasions were not for the faint-hearted – a bad act, or a good act that just happened to be having a bad day, would soon be loudly booed and crudely abused – but, for those with thicker skins or stronger dreams, these events were the places where hope would spring eternal, because, regardless of how awful it might have been on any one particular night, there would always be the promise of another week, another audience and another chance.

Howard, in spite of his notoriously pronounced susceptibility to stage fright, was one of those determined characters who kept going back for more. The first time, he walked on, delivered a comic monologue, and then walked back off again to the lonely sound of his own footsteps. The following week, he returned to try out a few impressions (the list included Noël Coward, Charles Laughton, Maurice Chevalier, James Cagney and Gary Cooper), but, once again, the act fell horribly flat. The week after that, he reappeared dressed like an overgrown schoolboy and proceeded to sing a novelty comedy song: that, too, sank like the proverbial stone.

One week, he even tried changing his name to ‘Ronnie Ordex’, but when that failed to change his fortunes, he promptly changed it back again, and then proceeded to try something else. He went on, and on, and on, into his early twenties, trying anything and everything that did not demand any great degree of physical dexterity. ‘I kept trying,’ he later explained, ‘because the utter conviction that I did have talent was stronger than the flaws of personality that crucified me when it came to an actual performance.’³¹

Not even an exceptionally humiliating on-stage experience at the Lewisham Hippodrome would shake this underlying faith in his own potential. It was during a talent night here – on a bill that boasted some of the biggest names (including the band leader Jack Payne and the crooner and stand-up comic Derek Roy) on the current Variety circuit – that Frank Howard discovered just what it really meant, in the cutthroat world of show business, to ‘die a death’ in front of a large live audience.

The root of the problem was the fact that, as the slot for new talent came straight after the interval, Howard was obliged to follow the comedian who closed the first half – and the comedian who closed the first half was Jimmy James. Soon to be dubbed ‘the comedians’ comedian’,³² Jimmy James was already widely admired as an inimitable performer, an inspired ad-libber and an exquisite timer of a line. With his woozily lugubrious looks (suggestive of a bulldog whose water has recently been laced with Scotch) and downbeat demeanour, he was a masterful droll, and Howard, who watched him fascinated from the wings, was left, quite understandably, feeling utterly awestruck.

Then, after the short interval, it was his turn. The curtain rose back up, he strode on to the stage, and was immediately blinded by the most powerful spotlight he had ever encountered. He winced, blinked, shifted from side to side in search of a shadow, winced and blinked again, and then gave up and began his act. It was no good: whatever he tried to remember, whatever he tried to say, he could not get that blinding light from out of his eyes or out of his mind. His mouth dried up, the beads of cold sweat crept down his brow, the eyes froze open and one of his knees, inevitably, began to tremble. The stage seemed to be getting bigger, and he was getting smaller. He squinted out at the audience, and the audience stared back at him. For one puzzled moment, there was just silence and rapt attention, but then, as the unmistakeable scent of sheer naked fear drifted its way slowly out over and beyond the stalls, there came a reaction: ‘The audience began to laugh, but it was the most dreaded of all laughter for a performer – derision. And the more they fell about, the worse I became. The orchestra leader hissed from the pit: “Do something, or get off!” I stumbled off – in tears.’³³

He realised, as he sobbed backstage, that he could not take any more of this, but he also recognised, as he dried his eyes, that he would be unable not to take any more of this. He was trapped, and he knew it, and so, yet again, he resolved to go on.

He tried more talent nights, but won none. He staged more plays, concerts and revues, but most of them faded from memory soon after they were done. He auditioned on no fewer than four separate occasions for Carroll Levis, the powerful talent scout, but the result of each one of them was the same: rejection. The recurring problem was not that people failed to glimpse any potential; it was just that, far too often, the nerves kept getting in the way. No matter how many times someone said ‘No,’ however, Frank Howard never stopped believing that, one day, someone would say ‘Yes’: ‘I was the most undiscovered discovery of my day!’³⁴

This, for the foreseeable future, was what he would remain. A war was about to break out. His own personal breakthrough would have to wait.