Kitabı oku: «Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic», sayfa 3
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: âNow you, Betty, will go on the stage and say something. Anything. Then Iâll say something. Then Charlie here will say something. Weâll make it up as we go along â always remembering that weâre aiming for the tag-line ⦠Which I will deliver!â30
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 âTalent Nightâ 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 â a bad act, or a good act that just happened to be having a bad day, would soon be loudly booed and crudely abused â 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 âRonnie Ordexâ, 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. âI kept trying,â he later explained, âbecause 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.â31
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 â 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 â that Frank Howard discovered just what it really meant, in the cutthroat world of show business, to âdie a deathâ 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 â and the comedian who closed the first half was Jimmy James. Soon to be dubbed âthe comediansâ comedianâ,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: âThe audience began to laugh, but it was the most dreaded of all laughter for a performer â derision. And the more they fell about, the worse I became. The orchestra leader hissed from the pit: âDo something, or get off!â I stumbled off â in tears.â33
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 âNo,â however, Frank Howard never stopped believing that, one day, someone would say âYesâ: âI was the most undiscovered discovery of my day!â34
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.
CHAPTER 3
Army Camp
So, anyway, he said, âI was wondering if you could go to the lads,â he said, âand give them a turn. â Yes! Thatâs what I thought â cheeky devil!
This time, he did not even need to audition: the British Army showed no hesitation in signing him up for the duration. It had taken the outbreak of a war, but, at last, Frank Howard was able to feel that he was wanted.
The precise date of his admission is a matter of some dispute. Howerd â that notorious biographical dissembler â would claim that it had arrived one day in February 19401 â more or less a month short of his twenty-third birthday, and a decidedly dilatory-sounding four months after his name was first registered for conscription.2 On this particular occasion, however, he was probably telling the truth: his call-up papers remain unavailable for public scrutiny, but, given the bureaucratic inefficiency that is known to have dogged the entire process of mobilisation, the date is not quite as implausible as, at first glance, it might seem.3
His initial hope, once war was declared, had been to join ENSA (an acronym that stood formally for âEntertainments National Service Associationâ, and informally for âEvery Night Something Awfulâ).4 The motivation, he later took pains to explain, had not been âto dodge the columnâ, but rather âto try to be of service at something I thought I was good at: entertainingâ.5 Even at that early stage, however, the ENSA organisers were already managing to attract a sufficient number of suitably-qualified applicants (ranging from ageing music-hall performers to a younger breed of actors, comedians and musicians) to make them feel able to pass on such a raw and unconventional talent, and so Howard was forced to try his luck elsewhere.
He ended up as just another regular soldier in the Royal Artillery â his fatherâs old regiment â and was posted to Shoeburyness Barracks, near Southend-on-Sea, in Essex. It was there that, within a matter of days, âThe Actorâ acquired a new nickname: âThe Unknown Quantityâ.6
The name was first spluttered in exasperation by the latest authority figure to loom large in Frank Howardâs life: a loud and irascible little man called Sergeant-Major Alfred Tonks. Howard â a gangling, slouching, stammering and startlingly uncoordinated creature in crumpled khaki â managed to make his Sergeant-Major angry, distressed, amused and confused in broadly equal measure.
He always struggled to look half-smart, made a shocking mess of stripping down his rifle, never seemed to know when he was supposed to march quick or slow, mixed up âstanding at easeâ with âstanding easyâ, and was often a positive menace on the parade ground. âFrank just couldnât get it together,â one of his former comrades recalled. âWhen the sarge shouted âRight wheel!â once, Frank actually headed off to the left. And when the order came to âMark time!â â guess who bumped into my back and sent me sprawling into the bloke in front? Right first time.â7
As if intent upon making matters even worse, Howard sometimes also failed to fight the urge to answer back. On one particular occasion, straight after Sergeant-Major Tonks had shrieked out his standard sequence of critical clichés â âYou âorrible shower!â â young Private Howard actually had the temerity to mutter in response: âSpeak up!â It was âmerely a nervous reflexâ, he later explained, but it was more than enough to spark another noisy rant from his ruddy-cheeked tormentor.8
The only thing that saved him from spending one long spell after another stuck in the glasshouse was the fact that Tonks, though clearly impatient to hammer this risibly unconventional soldier into some kind of vaguely acceptable shape, could never quite decide whether he was dealing with a âtruculent rebelâ or merely a useless idiot.9 He settled for thinking of Howard as his âUnknown Quantityâ â partly because the act of classifying the unclassifiable made him feel as if he was restoring at least the semblance of order to his environment, and partly because he was probably quite relieved to leave the true nature and extent of that âquantityâ undiscovered.
Once the trauma of basic training was finally over, Howard was transferred away from Tonks â no doubt much to their mutual relief â and into B Battery in another section of the barracks. Accorded the rank of Gunner, Frank began busying himself with the business of providing a proper form of defence for an area of Essex surrounding Shoeburyness.
His thoughts, however, were seldom far removed from the much more pleasant world of show business. As soon as he started to settle, he found that all of the old âpassionâ and âfireâ that had recently been âdamped down by the practicalities of circumstanceâ now suddenly âburned hot againâ.10Hearing that some of his fellow garrison personnel were putting on a concert each Sunday night in the local YMCA, he eagerly sought out the Entertainments Officer and offered his services as a stand-up comic. The out-of-his-depth officer, who had been anxiously patrolling the corridors asking anyone and everyone he encountered if they might just possibly be able to âdo anythingâ, accepted the offer without hesitation. Frank Howard the performer was free to make his comeback.
When he stepped on to the stage the following Sunday, however, he was more than slightly surprised to hear himself introduced by the compère as âGunner Frankie Howard of B Battery.â He did a quick double-take: âFrankie Howard?â He had never allowed anyone to call him âFrankieâ before â âI didnât like Frankie a bit; it seemed positively babyishâ â but, once the show was over, he soon came to find that it had caught on, and, in time, he would reluctantly become resigned to the fact that the name was destined to stick (âA pity, reallyâ).11
The performance itself had gone down rather well. Most of his four-minute spot was filled with the kind of tried and tested material that had been blatantly âborrowedâ from professional comedians â most notably Max Miller â but he did manage to make at least one elderly gag sound vaguely original:
I was at a dance the other night in Southend. At the NAAFI. And this girl was there. Very nice, she was. Yes. So after the dance I said to her: âMay I see you home?â And she said: âOh, er, yes. Thank you very much!â So I said: âWhere do you live?â She said: âI live on a farm. Itâs not very far from here. Itâs about a half-an-hour walk.â So I said: âOh, right, thatâs fine.â Then she said: âThe only thing is, you see, Iâve got a couple of packages to pick up, from my uncle, to take back home to the farm. Would you mind?â So I said: âNo, no, weâll call in. What are they, by the way, these packages?â She said: âTwo ducks.â I said: âDucks?â She said: âOh, itâs all right. Theyâre not dead. Theyâre alive. But they wonât flap. Theyâre all sort of bound up a bit.â So we went down to this uncle, and he gave her these two ducks. So I â the perfect gentleman â said: âPlease, let me. Iâll carry them.â So I put one under each arm. And then off we traipsed, down this lane and across this field. Pitch dark it was. And all of a sudden this girl fell back against a hedge and went: âOoo-aaa-eee!â I said: âWhat the hellâs wrong with you?â She said: âIâm frightened!â I said: âWhat on earth are you frightened of ?â And she said: âIâm frightened of you!â I said: âFrightened of me?â She said: âYes. Iâm frightened that youâre going to try and make love to me!â I said: âHow the hell can I make love to you with a duck under each arm?â So she said: âWell, I could hold âem for you, couldnât I?â
He also sang the song, in his own inimitable style, for which he would later be infamous â âThree Little Fishesâ:
Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool
Lived three little fishes and their mommy fishy too. âSwim!â said the mommy fishy, âSwim if you can!â So they swam and they swam right over the dam.
Each subsequent verse was disrupted with comic interjections, and each chorus became an excuse for a quite extraordinary array of high-decibel shrieks and yelps:
There was Tom: âBoop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, choo!â
And there was Dick: âBoop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, chooo!â And there was Cecil: âBaa-oop-boop-dit-tem-dat-ten-wat-tem, choooo!â (Oh, he was a snob! He was dying to get into an aquarium!) And they swam and they swam right over the dam â¦12
Snobbish Cecil, needless to say, met with a particularly grisly end.
It was the same routine that he had performed so many times before, but, on this particular occasion, it really seemed to work. There were relatively few noticeable stammers or stumbles, and plenty of well-rehearsed cues for laughs; compared to most of the others taking part, Howard looked as if he knew what he was doing â even when he was pretending not to know what he was supposed to do. His audience, though captive, was genuinely appreciative. He left them calling for more.
More was just what they were going to get. Buoyed by this initial success (âfor me the smell of greasepaint had the same effect as a whiff of cocaine on a junkieâ13), Howard threw himself back into his old routine, and, within a matter of a few short weeks, he had practically taken over the running of these Sunday night productions. He pestered his ostensible superiors until they agreed to let him improve the quality of the programmes; demanded â and received â a bigger say in the title, running order, writing and staging of each production; and he not only bossed about all of the officer-performers during rehearsals but also â much to the amusement of his many new friends among the audience â reduced them to mere stooges during the concerts themselves (âI treated them as bad performers and not as men with pips on their shouldersâ14).
He also worked hard at improving his own act. Always a perceptive student of other performers, he was now able to stand back and think remarkably dispassionately about how best to shape and display his own peculiar talents. His stammer, for example â which had for so long been considered nothing other than a troublesome impediment â was now quite consciously transformed into a positive technique. Instead of struggling vainly against it, as he had done to such distressing effect in front of those grim-faced RADA examiners, he started using it, and sometimes even exaggerating it, along with all of the other obvious aspects of his general nervousness, to help accentuate his originality.
First, he thought of how much more distinctive and real and funny it would sound if, instead of just parroting the polished patter of a well-known professional, he actually appeared to relate the story to his audience as if it had really happened to him. Second, he realised how much easier it would be to fill up his allotted time on stage, and disguise the paucity of his original material, if he mastered the art of, as he put it, âspinning it outâ.15 Max Miller, for example, would deliver the following joke, word perfect, at his normal rat-a-tat-tat pace:
âEreâs a funny thing happened to me this afternoon. A girl said to me: âHello, Max!â I said: âI donât know you.â She said: âItâs my birthday. Iâm twenty-one today.â She said: âWill you come up to my fiat for coffee and games?â I said: âDonât bother with the coffee â but I will come up.â Well, it was raining outside, and there are only two things to do when itâs raining. And I donât play cards. âEre!16
Howard, however, would take this basic joke and, through hesitation, deviation and repetition, make it seem entirely his own:
Oh, no, donât, n-n-no, please, donât. No. liss-en! Um. Ah! Youâd have screamed! Oh, you would! Yes. I have to laugh meself when I think about it! Yes. I do. No, er, the thing was, th-th-there was this girl, you see. Yes. This girl. And, oh, she was pretty! What? Pretty? Oh! I should say so! Pret-tee! Yes. This girl. Oh! Ever so pretty. And, er â where was I?17
On and on he would go, moving forward, pulling back, stepping sideways, moving forward again, drawing his audience deeper and deeper into his distinctive comic world, until, when he sensed that they were ready, he finally hit them with the punchline.
He was no longer trying to hide his own inadequacies. He was no longer trying â and failing â to be like the other stand-up comics. He was now trying â and, increasingly, succeeding â to be more like himself. He started using everything â his arching eyebrows, his skewer-shaped mouth, his swooping vocal inflexions, his risible sartorial awkwardness, his occasional lapses of memory â to make a strength of his imperfection.
Most important of all, he began performing with, rather than to, his audience. They now became âa vital part of the actâ:
I told these stories of misadventure in the form of a cosy âjust between you and meâ gossip, as though leaning over an invisible garden fence or chatting to cronies in the local pub. And just as Mrs Jones can evoke laughter and sympathy by telling her neighbours about her troubles, so I found I could create laughter and sympathy by making the audience share the preposterousness of the improbable (but not impossible) situations in which I put myself as the innocent and misunderstood victim of Them (i.e. authority).18
It worked. It made âFrankie Howardâ work.
From now on, he would appear irrepressible. The Sunday concert parties grew to seem far more like âThe Frankie Howard Showâ than any orthodox form of ensemble entertainment event. He appeared four or five times during each evening before, inevitably, returning yet again as top of the bill. Not content with his multiple solo spots, he also persuaded his sister, Betty, to take the train from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness every Sunday morning in order to join him on stage in an all-singing, dancing, joking double-act (she âcould have been a proâ, he later reflected, âbut her energies were always to be channelled towards furthering my careerâ19). He was everywhere, he was always involved, and it was only a matter of time before he was completely, and officially, in charge.
It was the padre who did it. Howard was still a sincerely religious, churchgoing individual, and, from the moment he arrived at Shoeburyness, he had instinctively gravitated towards, and confided in, the garrisonâs resident chaplain, the Reverend Mackenzie. Mackenzie, in turn, followed Howardâs progress with interest, and, after watching him blossom as an entertainer, helped facilitate a transfer to the Quartermasterâs Office â a move that promised not only a promotion to the rank of Bombardier, but also, more importantly, the prospect of slightly more time for planning performances.
That was by no means the end, however, of the padreâs well-meaning interventions. Keen (for the sake of camp morale in general as well as that of his protégé in particular) to encourage Howardâs countless passionate plans to improve the standard of the garrisonâs in-house entertainment, Mackenzie arranged for him to write a letter to the Commander-in-Chief at Shoeburyness, setting out precisely what was wrong, what needed to be changed, and who should be charged with the power and responsibility to change it. It proved, recalled Howerd, to be âan absolute stinker of a letterâ:20
In no uncertain terms I said that it was outrageous that officers should dictate to the men the way they should entertain and be entertained ⦠That there was too much censorship ⦠Too much patronising paternalism by the Entertainments Officer ⦠That an entertainments committee should be set up on which the men should be represented â instead of this vital matter being left in the hands of an Entertainments Officer completely lacking in any semblance of qualifications for the job.21
The note went on, he would recall, âflorid with such adjectives as disgraceful, stupid, appalling [and] ridiculousâ.22 Naivety, rather than any conscious desire to cause offence, had prompted such a diatribe: âHad I been more discreet in my wording, and wrapped the modified result in such phrases as âIt seems to me, sirâ and âMay I respectfully suggest, sirâ it might have been all right â but I was far too ignorant for such circumspect subtleties.â23
The result, unsurprisingly, was that Bombardier Howard was dispatched to the guardhouse and charged with gross insubordination. Luckily for him, the Reverend Mackenzie stepped in and saved the day: he sought out the furious Commander-in-Chief and sowed a few seeds of dubiety into his fevered mind, assuring him that the offending letter had, after all, been solicited by his good self, and, though its style and tone had obviously fallen far short of Sandhurst standards, its author had clearly only been trying to be honest. The General relented, and Howard was reprieved.
In fact, he was more than merely reprieved. He was actually given his head. As his letter had suggested, an entertainments committee was established, censorship was relaxed and a higher level of commitment was demanded. Bombardier Howard became the de facto controller of the Shoeburyness concert parties. His superior officers, having reasoned that it was better to have a character such as him operating on the inside instead of on the outside, then sat back and waited to see if he would sink or he would swim.
He swam. He swam length after length. He was practically amphibian. Glorying in the greater stature, power and security that came (at least in his eyes) with his crowning as the unopposed âMr Sunday Nightâ of Shoeburyness, Frankie Howard pushed on with all of his brightly ambitious plans. The concerts grew bigger and bolder. The material became considerably more irreverent (a deliberate change of policy by such a playful anti-authoritarian) as well as a little âbluerâ (a trend whose start had far more to do with naivety than any conscious desire for greater vulgarity: âNobody realised that I was genuinely innocent,â he protested. âSuch is the way reputations are made!â24). There was also a change in sensibility: it gradually became more âcampâ.
âCampâ is one of those terms that has since been stretched to encompass everything from a marked preference for matching genitalia to a chronic weakness for placing words within quotation marks,25 but, in the early 1940s, it meant little more than men mocking the supposed rigidity of their own masculinity â sometimes, but by no means always, in drag. It was a safe and playful form of release: a chance for homosexual men to behave less like heterosexual men, as well as a chance for heterosexual men, tired of going through the motions of military machismo, to behave less like heterosexual men.
It was a release for Frankie Howard, primarily, because it suited his overall comic style and sensibility. He had not been drawn to, and influenced by, other comedians because of their actual or supposed sexuality; he had been drawn to them because of their allegiances â always us against them, workers against bosses, women against bullying men, men against bullying women, the powerless against the powerful â and their devious methods of attack â such as George Robeyâs tactic of provoking anarchy by demanding order (âDesist!â), or Robb Wiltonâs use of characterisation as a means of critique (âThe wife said, âYouâll have to go back to work.â Oooh, sheâs got a cruel tongue, that woman!â), or Jimmy Jamesâ subversive air of disingenuousness (STOOGE: âAre you puttinâ it around that Iâm barmy?â JAMES: âWhy, are you tryinâ to keep it a secret?â).26
Howard was especially inspired, at this stage in his career, by the drag act of Norman Evans. As âFanny Fairbottomâ â a mob-capped, bulbous-bosomed, voraciously nosey Lancastrian harridan â Evans would lean over a back-street wall and exchange gossip with an unseen neighbour:
What did you say? Who âas? Her? That woman at number seven? âAs she? Is she? Oooooh, gerraway! Oh, no, I wonât say a word, no, I never talk. But, well: fancy! Mind you, Iâm not surprised. Not really. I told her. She would go to those illuminations! It was the same with her next door to her. Oh yes, and that wasnât the first time. I knew what she was as soon as I saw âer! Oh yes. That coalman was never away, you know! I mean, donât tell me it takes thirty-five minutes to deliver two bags of nuts! Heâs a bad lot! Oh yes. I knew what was goinâ on when I saw him shout âWhoa!â to his horse from her bedroom window â¦27
Off-stage, there was nothing remotely effeminate about Evans â and no one was in any doubt that he was a happily-married heterosexual28 â but, on stage, he relished the role of this gossipy old woman. Howard was impressed by his acting skills: âEven though [he] was talking to an imaginary person you could always hear the replies he was getting from his phrasing. He produced a personality on the other side of that garden wall without you ever seeing that person.â29 Howard was also fascinated by the fact that Evans, when dressed as â and behaving like â a woman, could get away with the kind of material that, if it had been delivered by (or, in his case, as) a man, would have sounded far too âblueâ.
It was this sense of serving up an audience sauce through indirection, of sending out an encrypted signal of naughtiness, that drove Howard himself deeper and deeper into the camp sensibility, and often into drag. He wrote a new musical comedy routine, entitled âMiss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twitâ, and, alongside two of his male colleagues, performed it dressed up as ATS girls. The trio (with Howard centre-stage as Miss Twit) began the act as follows:
Here we come, here we come,
The girls of the ATS â
Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit.
(Repeat)
The huge amount of work we do,
You know, youâll never guess.
But in Army life we fit â¦
To bend we never ought,
Because our skirts are short.
But they really do reveal
That weâve got sex appeal.
And if you want a date,
Enquire at the gate
For Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit â¦30
It went down well inside the boisterous barracks, and it also proved popular on those occasions when they were given permission to perform outside as part of a touring concert party called the Co-Odments.31 It ran into trouble, however, when, right in the middle of one lunchtime performance in the Mess, the air-raid siren started up. As the audience stampeded for the exit, Howard had just enough time to remove his wig, the two balloons that passed for breasts and the painfully tight womanâs shoes, and wriggle out of the borrowed ATS outfit and slip back into his own uniform â but, in the rush, the thick layer of make-up and the strip of ruby-red lipstick were forgotten. Out on parade, he stood stock still with his rifle, pack and painted face, looked straight ahead, and hoped for the best.
A young subaltern arrived to inspect the ranks. He approached Howard, gave him a cursory glance, moved on, stopped, shook his head, and then turned back for another, closer look. For a moment, neither man spoke: Howard stared blankly into the distance, trying his hardest not to twitch or tremble, and the officer, head cocked slightly to one side like a quizzical cocker spaniel, stared fixedly at his face. Finally, the officer managed a cough, which Howard took as the cue for him to offer some kind of explanation. âC-concert party,â he stammered, the panic strangling his voice into a squeaky falsetto. âThe alert went,â he struggled on, âin the m-middle of the c-concert party.â The officer seemed dazed: âConcert party ⦠Er, yes ⦠Mmmm ⦠Concert party ⦠Jolly good.â He moved on along the line, stopping every now and again for a nervous glance back and a quick shake of the head, before departing hurriedly off into the distance. It had been a narrow escape, but it would not be the last time an officer would stare at Howard, in or out of drag, and shake his head and think: âEr, yes ⦠Mmmm â¦â32
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