A Comedian Dies (6 page)

Lennie Barber paused and poked rather suspiciously at his Martin Chuzzlewit, which had just arrived. Walter Proud took the opportunity to assert his entrepreneurial position.

‘Actually, I wanted to talk about the Barbershop Sketch. I think that's the one we should do for
The Alexander Harvey Show.
'

‘I knew it bloody would be.' Morosely Lennie Barber speared one of the sausages in his Martin Chuzzlewit. ‘I done more routines than most people have had hot shits and all they ever bloody want is the Barbershop Sketch.'

‘Well, it is a classic.'

‘Oh yeah.' He sounded resigned. ‘I feel like bloody Elgar must've felt – wrote all this acres and acres of music and all anyone remembers is Land of Hope and bleedin' Glory. Whoever he met, I bet they all said, “Show us your
Land of Hope and Glory.
Go on.” He must've got bloomin' cheesed off with it.'

It was an unexpected parallel for the comedian to draw. Lennie Barber was more cultured than he might appear. For Charles it offered a new insight to the man's character, which was beginning to exercise a strong fascination.

However, what Barber said did raise immediate worries for him as a performer. ‘Lennie, if it took you all those years of doing the sketch, presumably twice nightly, to get it right, how on earth do you reckon I'm going to be able to learn it up in one day of rehearsal?'

‘No problem. It's because we done all that work that it'll be easy. I know exactly how that sketch works. Wilkie was only the feed anyway; I had all the lines. No, so long as you can get the voice right – and I presume you can, otherwise Walter wouldn't have booked you – it'll be all right. I'll give you the timing. You just do exactly as I say and it'll work.'

‘I don't look a lot like Wilkie Pole.'

‘You will in the costume, don't worry. He had the special wig, so's I could cut the hair, then that big moustache and the pasty face. Under that lot anyone who'd got two eyes, a nose and a mouth would look like Wilkie Pole.'

While not wholly flattering to his self-esteem as an actor, this was at least a comfort for the job in question.

‘But, Lennie, if it was so easy to get someone to look like Pole, why didn't you take on a new feed after he died? Any number of comics have done that. Jimmy James kept on changing his stooges, why couldn't you do that?'

‘Bloody hell, Charles, haven't I told you?' Lennie Barber now sounded quite annoyed. Other people munching through the Complete Works of Dickens looked over to their table. ‘I wanted to do something else. I had been trying to get out of the Barber and Pole thing for years.'

‘Look, I'm a comedian, that's my profession, and like anyone in any other profession, I want to get better at it. I've been on the boards for fifty-six years and I'm still improving my act. I started in 1921, six years old I was, did a comic song and a dance.
Harry, What Are You Doing With That Hammer?
– that was the number. On the same bill as my Dad.' His tone softened with pride. ‘Did you ever see my Dad? Freddie Darvill he was called – Darvill's my real name. He was on the halls all his life. Billed as The Simple Pieman – did an act with a barrow of hot pies. Sang, danced – did a lovely clog dance – not that he come from the North, Londoner born and bred, like me. He could do it all, my Dad. Taught me the lot.'

‘I'm afraid I don't think I ever saw him.'

‘No, I suppose you wouldn't have done. Too young. He died 1936, backstage at the Derby Hippodrome. Perforated ulcer.' The memory abstracted him for a moment and the watery eyes fixed in space. Then he turned to Charles with a gleam of malice. ‘Still, I'm sure you weren't traipsing round the halls at that age. Getting your dose of culture down the bleedin' Old Vic, I dare say.'

Charles smiled indulgently, hoping to disguise the fact that Lennie Barber was absolutely tight.

‘I still got all my Dad's old gear. All his props and that. Look after them very carefully. In fact, I used his old pie-cart in a summer season I just finished.'

‘Hunstanton.'

‘Right.'

‘I saw it.'

‘Oh, did you?' For the first time in the conversation the comedian looked embarrassed. ‘Well, I can only apologize. Not my greatest performance. No, I wanted to work up a new act there, you know, using some of my Dad's routines with the pies, but the audiences up there . . . Jesus. Like I said, you got to give the audience what they want and that lot of old biddies just wanted jokes they knew so well they could join in the punch-lines. I'm afraid I give up on that lot.'

‘But you're still going to work up the new act, are you?' Walter Proud asked with professional interest.

‘Oh sure, I will do it.'

‘Because I'm still convinced that with the right sort of act, the right breaks, a timely telly show, you could make a very big come-back. Nostalgia's very big in the entertainment business.'

‘Thank you very much.' The words were loaded with irony. ‘If I make a come-back, it won't just be because nostalgia's very big, whatever that means. It'll be because I'm a bloody good comic. I'm going to go on being a comic and if it turns out that I'm what the audience wants suddenly, then I'm sure I'll be a rich and popular comic again. If that doesn't happen, it won't stop me working.'

‘But don't you get depressed when it's going badly?' asked Charles, prepared to identify with the reply.

‘Of course you do, but it doesn't stop you doing it. It's my profession. Look, an estate agent doesn't stop estate agenting when a house sale falls through and I don't stop being a comic when I get the bird. I get depressed, sure, but it just makes me determined to do it better. I'm not like that poor boy who used to do
I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside,
what was his name? Mark Sheridan, that's right. He shot himself in Glasgow when the audience hadn't liked his act. Well, that's not my style. I just keep doing it.'

‘But surely you want to get back to the success you had in the forties and fifties?'

‘Oh sure I'd like to get back. I'm human. That was good, that was a peak. The money, for a start, being recognized in the street, flash restaurants, showbiz golf, Royal Variety Show, all the ballyhoo. But if it doesn't happen, I'll still be a comic, that's all I'm saying.'

‘I think it could happen again,' said Walter Proud wisely, as if he was withholding some information on the subject. Charles knew from his experience of Walter's character that he wasn't.

‘I don't think about it no more.' Barber took a swig from his whisky glass. ‘I've heard too many agents and producers saying this is going to be the big one, this time it'll really take off. I tell you, I been discovered so often that I'm only glad all the discoverers didn't plant flags on me. OK, a comic has peaks and troughs. I've had my peaks, I'm lucky – a lot of comics never even have that. My Dad never made it big. Always a great comic, but nobody remembers the name. And what's more, it didn't stop him working.'

The long exposition of his life seemed to have relaxed him. He joked over the choice of sweets before plumping for a Little Nell. ‘I shouldn't really, but the old guts don't seem to have taken the first course too badly.'

Charles thought it might be a good time to find out a little background to the death of Bill Peaky. ‘Interesting, the Hunstanton show,' he began.

Lennie Barber quickly showed up the fatuity of that as an opening gambit. ‘Interesting? I would have thought it was anything but bloody interesting. Now if you'd said boring or dull or terrible, I'd be right with you. But interesting – no. Summer season's always hell – even pantomime's better – but Hunstanton was the bottom. Nothing happened there.'

‘Except the death of a comedian,' Charles offered gently.

‘Like I said, comedians have died in every –'

‘I didn't mean that. Bill Peaky.'

‘Oh, him.' From his intonation, it sounded as if he had genuinely forgotten the incident. ‘Was he a comedian?'

Walter Proud couldn't forget that he had actually been trying to set up a programme with the dead man. ‘Oh yes, I think he was enormously talented. Would have developed into something really big.'

‘Jesus, Walter, ever since I've known you, you've always wanted everything to be
big.
Back in Ally Pally days, when you were just a technical boffin with all the sound recording stuff, you were always talking about things being big. I don't know whether Bill Peaky was going to be big or not. Personally I couldn't see anything in his act. He had no technique, no experience. But I'm prepared to believe from the money they were paying him that somebody thought he had a future. But a short one, surely. The public will be fooled by novelty for a bit, but they soon get tired of it.'

‘They didn't get much of a chance to get tired of Bill Peaky,' observed Charles.

‘No. Mind you, the rest of the company did. A little of him went a very long way.'

‘Not popular, you mean?' Charles overlaid his interest with casualness.

‘You could say that. About as popular as a mosquito in a sleeping bag. Always going on about how great he was, how much money he was making, what a big star he was going to be. Fair got up everyone's hooter. No, he was riding for a fall. Just as well he snuffed it before someone helped him on the way.'

It shouldn't have been, but it was a shock to Charles to realize that most people still thought of the death as an accident. The presumption of murder had become so much a part of his thinking. ‘Anyone in particular out to get him?' he asked with the same casualness.

‘Like I say, no one liked him. Big-headed little runt. He was so rude to everyone. My God, the things he said to that poor little pianist, Norman del Rosa. But not just him. Everyone. We were all crap and he was God's gift to the entertainment business.'

‘What about the girls? Did they like him?'

‘If you mean was he shafting any of them, the answer was yes. I think he was trying to work his way through all the dancers.'

‘These Foolish Things?'

‘Yes. Maybe he thought when he'd had all of them, he could send off for a free badge or something.'

‘How far had he got when he died?'

‘He'd made it with a couple of them, I know. But I think he may have come unstuck with one called Janine.'

‘What, she wasn't having any?'

‘Oh no, not that. But she got a bit serious about him. He'd seen it as wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, but I think she had something more permanent in mind. They had a fairly major bust-up about it. Lots of shouting in the dressing rooms and slamming doors.'

That confirmed what Vita Maureen had hinted at so decorously.

And suddenly something else slotted into place. Charles thought back to the show in the Winter Gardens, Hunstanton. To the end of the first half. When These Foolish Things had mimed and danced to
When You Need Me
. When, contrary to all the teaching of Chuck Sheba the great choreographer, there had been four boys and only three girls. Charles reckoned he could put money on the name of the missing girl.

In fact, to find the murderer of Bill Peaky, the first essential was to trace a Foolish Thing called Janine.

COMIC: An out-of-work actor came home one day and found his wife in a hysterical state, her clothes torn, her face and arms scratched to pieces.

‘My God,' he cried. ‘What happened?'

‘It was terrible,' his wife replied. ‘This man came round and raped me.'

‘Who was it?' shouted the actor in fury. ‘Who was it?'

‘Your agent.'

‘My agent? Did he leave a message?'

There was only one member of the
Sun 'n' Funtime
company over whom Charles had any hold. And fortunately Vita Maureen, anticipating a reciprocal genteel tea party, had given him their phone number in Dollis Hill.

Norman sounded guilty when he answered the phone, as if he had been caught in the lavatory with a dirty book. From what Charles knew of the pianist's character, it was quite possible that he
had
been caught in the lavatory with a dirty book.

‘I'm sorry, Vita's out.' He didn't entertain the possibility of anyone wanting to speak to him rather than to his lovely wife. ‘She's doing an audition for a new rock musical about the Boston Strangler.'

While Charles' mind stove to digest this incongruity, his voice said he didn't want to speak to Vita anyway.

‘Oh.' Norman sounded desperately unhappy.

‘It's about the dancers in the Hunstanton show.'

Of course Norman took it wrong. ‘Look, you said you'd never mention that. Are you trying to blackmail me, because I daren't let Vita find out about –'

‘No, no,' Charles soothed. ‘I wouldn't dream of breaking your confidence.'

‘Oh.' Norman sounded appeased but still suspicious. ‘Then what do you want?'

‘I'm trying to trace one of the dancers. Janine. She was the one who was having an affair with Peaky, wasn't she?'

‘Everyone reckoned so. Mind you, I don't think she was the first in the company.' This was said with a kind of wistful relish. Maybe Norman del Rosa didn't confine his voyeurism to peeking at girls changing.

‘And she had a row with Peaky on the day he died?'

‘Yes.'

‘When he broke off the affair.'

‘That's what everyone reckoned.' Norman del Rosa was unwilling to answer anything off his own bat; he needed the support of majority opinion.

‘And then she went off in the middle of the show?'

‘Yes, she wasn't well. Gastric trouble.'

Fairly easy to fake. Lots of visits to the lavatory and nobody would question their authenticity. ‘So, what . . . she went home?'