The Fun Factory (22 page)

It was the autumn of that year, 1909, a sunny afternoon, and a little group of us were standing out in front of the Bells’ house. Clara was there, and Edie, clutching her dolly, the ubiquitous Miss Churchhouse, as usual. Charley Bell crouched down, poking away at a flower bed with a trowel. Mrs Karno was ruffling the hair of her little lad Leslie, and quizzing me for gossip about the Guv’nor and his empire. Suddenly I realised that Clara and Edith Karno were no longer listening to me, but were looking at something behind me, in the street. Their faces had hardened, and Charley Bell was slowly rising to his feet.

I turned and there was a brougham gliding slowly past, the driver holding the grey horse at a gentle trotting pace. If I hadn’t been able to see the passengers I would have recognised it easily enough, as it was the Guv’nor’s pride and joy, painted maroon, with gleaming brass fittings, with “Fred Karno’s Comics” painted boldly on the door. Inside I could see Karno and Maria, the woman he’d introduced to me as his wife, chatting away, laughing, affecting not to notice whose houses they were passing.

“Oh, my dear,” Clara sighed. There was a resignation in her voice that told me this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened.

“It’s quite all right,” the real Mrs Karno replied stoically.

“Coming back,” Charley Bell muttered, and sure enough, the maroon brougham had executed a languid turn at the far end of the road and was about to trot past again.

“Well, then,” Edith said. “Let’s give them something to laugh at, shall we?”

She reached over and grasped Edie’s dolly, cradled it in her arms and began to coo over it as though it were a real baby. Charley and Clara joined in, and Edie and Leslie too, thinking this was a fine game.

I watched as Karno’s brougham glided past again, with the Guv’nor and his mistress themselves playing at happy families, and saw the moment Karno spotted that his wife was nursing a baby. His jaw dropped, and, as the carriage pulled away, I could see him leaning out to get a better view, almost braining himself on a lamp post as he disappeared around the corner.

The next time I saw Karno was at the Fun Factory. He called me into his office, and I sat across the desk from him as he tapped a pencil on his fingers. A little cough, and then he smiled, as if not quite knowing how to begin. My first thought was that Syd had finally told him about the moral turpitude thing and I was going to be sacked.

“So,” he said eventually. “How did you and young Chaplin take to Mister Harry Weldon?”

“Charlie said he thought it was a punishment,” I said.

Karno laughed. “So it was, so it was,” he chuckled. “But not for you, for Harry Weldon. He was throwing his weight around, so I thought I’d send him a couple of arrogant young upstarts to shake him up a bit. And you certainly did that, by all accounts.”

He smiled, looked down at his hands.

“You’re living with the Bells, then?”

“When I’m in town.”

“So you’ll have realised that … ahem … that your next-door neighbour is, or
was
rather, my wife?”

I was on my guard, now. “Yes,” I said.

“Does she…? Erm, that is to say, have you had the chance to speak with her?”

“I have,” I said. “She often asks about the various goings-on.”

Karno’s eyes narrowed.

“The shows, I mean, she’s always very interested in what shows I have done, and all your many successes.”

“Quite so.” Karno tapped a pencil against his teeth.

“And you know that t’ child who lives there with her is my son?”

“Leslie? Yes, he’s a grand little chap.”

“You don’t think him too skinny?”

“No, not at all.”

“I am concerned that she doesn’t feed him well.”

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t worry about that, he eats like a horse, he just runs it off, you know.”

“You would tell me if you thought he was badly treated?”

“He is not, I assure you, Guv’nor.”

“Right.” Karno coughed again, and leaned forward onto the desk. “Now listen to me. What I have to ask you about is rather a delicate matter, and you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of it all, but I happened to see, as I was passing t’other day, just in the area, you understand, I happened to see … a certain … babe-in-arms.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t give me that,” he snapped. “I need to know who is t’ father of that infant and I need to know it this minute.”

“The father?” I said, quite taken aback.

“Is it Bell? Is it?”

“No…”

“Is it you, you randy little sod? Because if it is…”

“No, no!” I cried out, alarmed at the turn things were taking. “It was just a doll, that’s all!”

“A doll?”

“A child’s toy. Your wife bought it for Edie, the Bells’ daughter. It’s very lifelike. It’s a toy!” There was an awkward pause, and then he smiled again. It seemed to cost him a little effort, but he was trying to signal a return to the jollier mood of a few moments earlier.

“Well!” he said. “Ha ha! Enough of all that. I have some news for you. I need to send a
Mumming Birds
company to Paris for a month. You can go and give that very
very
fine Magician I witnessed in Warrington, and you can take young Chaplin along, as he is so desperately keen to play the drunk. Paris, eh? The Folies Bergère! How about that!”

“Thank you very much, Guv’nor,” I said, relieved.

“Now then. Is there anything else I can do for you, young Dandoe?”

“Anything you can do for me?”

“Yes. Is there anything else that I…” – he patted himself on the waistcoat – “can do for you?” – and offered both hands across the desk to me, palms up. Ordinarily I would just have been pleased to be on my way, but he seemed keen to make amends for his earlier sharpness, so I felt momentarily emboldened.

“Well,” I said. “I saw someone who would be a fine addition to the company. He was working as a solo, but I’ve seen him in a skit as well. His name is Stan Jefferson.”

Karno looked curious, alert. “Jefferson? Any relation to ‘A.J.’ Jefferson? Calls himself the ‘Karno of the North’?”

“His son,” I admitted. “You remember when we first met in Cambridge, and you said I had ‘it’?” Karno nodded. “Well, I’m pretty sure Stan has ‘it’ too.”

“I see…” the Guv’nor mused, more to himself than to me. “That’d be one in the eye for old A.J., and no mistake… Ha! His own son…!”

I edged towards the door.

“I’m obliged to you.” Karno sprang to his feet to usher me out. “See, this is good, isn’t it, Arthur? I help you, you help me. That is how things ought to be, don’t you agree?” He caught himself there, speaking in rhyme, and smiled broadly. “There’s an idea for a song, half written already, ha ha! Enjoy yourself in gay Paree, lad, an’ I’ll see you in a month!”

22

OUI! TRAY BONG!

WE
left for Paris on a Sunday morning. Charlie did his usual trick of almost missing the boat train, and it was only when we got to Dover that we realised he had travelled down in the guard’s van as per usual.

Charlie had been to call on Hetty Kelly to tell her that he was going to Paris, only to be told by her sister that Hetty herself was there already with the Bert Coutts Yankee Doodle Dancers, so he was aflame with romantic imaginings. He didn’t keep them to himself, either, while the rest of us tried to while away the crossing playing cards.

“The most romantic city in the world!” he kept sighing. “It can hardly fail.”

The late autumn weather was filthy, with heavy rain keeping everyone below decks, and our first view of the continent was through a foggy curtain of water. The outlook was hardly more thrilling on the train journey from Calais, as the countryside was flat and uninteresting, and the rain grimly persistent. Charlie’s excited chatter continued unaffected, however, and to tell the
truth as we approached Paris I began to feel a little thrill myself. We saw a golden luminescence lighting the underside of the rain clouds in the distance, and Charlie pressed his nose against the window.

“Is that it, do you think?” he asked. “There! There! Is it?”

“Oui, oui, c’est Paris,” said a French gentleman sitting nearby without looking up from his newspaper, using the tone of voice a parent might use to a child he has already told several times to sit still and be quiet.

“Oui! Tray bong!” Charlie exclaimed. When Ernie and I wrinkled our noses in puzzlement, he launched into a song, inviting us to join in as if we must know it:

Hip, hooray! Let’s be gay!

Boom diddy ay! Ta-ra-ra!

To each little Frenchy dove,

Standing drinks and making love,

We fairly mashed the ladies with our Oui! Tray bong!

“Sit down, you idiot,” I said. “Before you destroy the
entente cordiale
completely.”

On the short drive from the Gare du Nord to the small hotel where we were to stay, on the Rue Geoffroy-Marie, Charlie was once again a bundle of energy.

“Look!” he cried, pointing at some café or building. “Just like a Pissarro. I’m getting out and walking…”

“Just wait, can’t you?” I said. “If you start walking you won’t know where the place is.”

The place, when we got to it, was enough to dampen even
Charlie’s enthusiasm; small rooms, with freezing-cold stone floors, like cells in a monastery. The Bastille, Charlie called it, and it was a great incentive to get out and about.

Charlie was quickly dressed up to the nines and knocking impatiently on my door. I myself only ever had the capacity to dress up to the sevens, maybe seven and a halfs at the outside, but enough to pass muster. The two of us stepped out and strolled over to the Folies Bergère, where we were to catch the Sunday night performance before starting in ourselves on the Monday.

And it was quite an eye-opener, I can tell you, after the months of traipsing around the ale-drenched halls of Northern England, to set foot in the thick-carpeted foyer of the Folies Bergère. You never saw such a glamorous place in all your life. An orchestra played as gorgeous ladies checked their wraps and fur coats, baring their creamy white shoulders. Huge mirrors and vast chandeliers made the room twinkle, and it seemed somehow that we had arrived at the very centre of the whole world. We climbed a plush staircase to the promenade of the dress circle, where
bejewelled
Indian princes in their pink and blue turbans, and military officers of all nationalities, it seemed, French, Turkish, British, in their peacock uniforms and plumed helmets, had congregated to watch the world go by. And you could get good old British Bass Ale there too. It was like a vision of Heaven.

We ventured into the theatre to get a flavour of the entertainment, which was as different from a night at an English music hall as champagne is to ale (although, as I say, you could get ale). Women, women, dancing girls, flesh, quivering, wobbling, girls, moving or in teasing tableaux as far as the eye could see.

In one number the dancing girls were wearing flesh-coloured body stockings which left nothing to the imagination, except,
obviously, what they looked like without the flesh-coloured body stockings on. In another an alluring array of female pulchritude twinkled and glittered behind giant feather fans on a huge glass and gilt staircase.

In between these fleshy parades there were turns, musical and comical. I felt a little sorry for one act in particular, a tall,
loose-limbed
youth of about my age, who came on to do a few wistful and melodic numbers by himself. A solo male singer stood very little chance of holding the crowd’s attention after dozens of scantily clad girls had just departed the scene, and although he actually had a thoroughly tuneful and agreeable singing voice, the place simply emptied in front of his eyes as he warbled away about this and that, and occasionally the other.

More successful at holding the audience in their seats was a sketch by the celebrated local comedian Max Linder. He cut a dapper figure in his forlorn pursuit of a lady, with his louche moustache and his sleepy eyes, and although I could not follow the dialogue I picked up enough to be impressed.

The headline act was a familiar figure, none other than Little Tich himself. Tich was a huge star in our home country, of course – Marie Lloyd used to say that the only people she would ever share top billing with were George Robey and Little Tich – but in Paris, well, he was a god.

For this engagement at the Folies Bergère he had chosen not to employ his usual bag of tricks, not even the trademark Big Boots. Instead, he hurled himself onto the stage dressed as a grand lady in a glamorous court dress with a long train.

“Je m’appelle Clarice!” he cried, and proceeded to chatter away in a mixture of French and English, both with his strangely deep-voiced Kentish accent, while waving a large feathery fan
and becoming inextricably tangled up in his costume. His act was, as always, grotesque, yet perfect, filled with little touches and movements that kept the place in gales of laughter, as the miniature lady tried to hang onto her dignity. The little genius climaxed his spot with a wicked gnome parody of a dancer called La Loïe Fuller, who had earlier that evening cavorted around the place in a sheet with tremendous po-faced seriousness, and whom we later became accustomed to seeing in the wings, seething.

Charlie and I hurried around backstage at the end of the show, he ostensibly to seek news of Hetty, and I because, well, backstage seemed like it might be a pleasant place to pass the time. The magic word “Karno” gained us access, and Charlie scurried off to quiz some of the regulars while I loafed against a wall in a corridor, smoking and watching the comings and goings. Dancing girls thronged, completely uninhibited by my presence. Indeed, I picked up a number of appraising glances, and seemed to be the object of some finger waving from one group in particular, who were offering, through the international language of mime, to treat me to a drink and more besides.

I straightened myself up and headed in their direction. Just then, however, there was a tremendous screeching from one of the other dressing rooms, and the gangly singer I had felt sorry for earlier suddenly bolted from a doorway ahead of me, followed by a bottle of champagne, hurled with great force by someone inside. It hit the corridor wall right by my head and smashed, drenching me from head to foot.

Out of the room then shot a little whirlwind of a red-faced French woman, who continued a screamed tirade at the young singer, while he cowered on the floor with his knees up to his
chin waiting for the storm to pass. The woman punctuated her shrieks with angry kicks and slaps, and finally blew herself furiously up the stairs and out into the street. Faces (and more besides) disappeared back into dressing rooms, and the young singer picked himself up and dusted himself down.

“Ah, mon ami, je suis désolé, désolé!” he cried, when he saw that I was (a) soaked in fizzy stuff, and (b) covered in broken glass.

“All right, it’s all right,” I said, trying gingerly to brush the debris off.

“Oh, you are English?” the singer said. “I apologise a thousand times, sir. Marguerite, she is…” His English let him down and he gave a miserably eloquent shrug. “Come, come…”

He showed me into his dressing room and positively insisted that I borrow one of his jackets, which fitted me well enough (and was something of a step up on the one I had been wearing, truth to tell), and then he led me out to the dress circle bar, where he furnished us both with a drink.

“I am Maurice,” he introduced himself. “Maurice Chevalier.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I’m Arthur Dandoe, with the Fred Karno company.”

“Ah!” Chevalier cried. “But you will do very well here, I think. Above all the audience loves
spectacle. Danses et sports
– sketches, I mean, anything where there is lots and lots to look at.” Here he made a little firework display with his fingers. “For me it is different,” he went on. “I am just one man. The manager, Monsieur Banel, he likes me, but the critics not so much, and the crowd, well, who wants to hear a sad song when there are so many pretty girls to look at?”

“Thank Heavens for them,” I said.

“Indeed, my friend,” Maurice said, raising a glass to that sentiment.

“Perhaps you should find yourself a sketch,” I suggested. “Like Max Linder.”

Just then Charlie came into the bar, looking dejected, which is to say, he looked like someone doing a pantomime of the word ‘dejected’, scuffing his feet on the carpet. I beckoned him over and introduced him to Maurice, but Charlie was barely able to force a smile.

“Whatever’s wrong?” I asked.

“Hetty’s troupe, the Bert Coutts Dancers. They were here last week…”

“I remember them,” Maurice nodded. “The Yankee Doodle-doodle girls, no?”

“That’s right,” Charlie agreed mournfully. “They left
yesterday
.”

“Perhaps they haven’t gone too far,” I said, thinking they might still be playing somewhere in Paris.

“Huh,” Charlie grunted. “They’ve gone to Moscow.”

“Oh! And you like one of these little girls?” Maurice sighed. Charlie nodded glumly. “Ah, what are we poor fellows to do? Your girl is in Moscow, and mine throws a bottle at my head if I even look at one of the dancers. What am I supposed to do? Wear a blindfold backstage? The naked ladies are everywhere!”

Charlie and I smirked at this like schoolboys.

“And what about you, mon ami?” Maurice said, patting me on the shoulder. “Is a woman making of your life a misery also?”

Before I could reply, Charlie butted in, flapping a hand dismissively. “He had a girl, but he’s lost her.”

Maurice looked stricken. His hand flew to his mouth. He assumed the tone you assume when questioning the recently bereaved.

“I am so very sorry. How did this happen?”

“No, no, no, she’s not dead, he’s lost her. He doesn’t know where she is.”