Alma Cogan (15 page)

I also hadn’t forgotten a review I had read of the latest career re-launch of a near-contemporary (she’s slightly younger, but not much) where she was described as looking like ‘a minicab driver in Bacofoil’.

I took the business card to which he had added his direct number and the number of his car-phone and promised Jase to think about his offer and let him know.

I went on somewhere else with Ronnie and Tonya after leaving Seigi’s, then somewhere else and (probably) somewhere else again. I woke up this morning with the usual misheard and stray snatches of conversation swooshing around my system with the after-effects of the alcohol.

I was sure I could remember, for instance, somebody (could it have been Tonya?) talking about going to an erotic sculptor to have her ‘pussy’ sculpted: ‘I had it done in dental clay and painted blue and silver and now it’s sitting on my mantelpiece at home. I think all men should have them in their offices instead of the usual dreary picture of the little woman.’

The general atmosphere is vivid (there were peppermint-coloured nuclides of neon playing on the surface of my drink; ‘Lady in Red’ was the record playing at the time); but key details, such as the identity of the speaker, couldn’t be sworn to.

I have a hazy recollection of Ronnie putting me in a cab and scrunching a large note into a ball as he passed it through the window to the driver.

It was only a couple of hours ago, when I was getting myself organised for the schlep across London to visit my mother, that I
found the samples of ‘Woman’ stinking up my bag. They were probably put there by Ronnie, thinking he was doing me a favour. I decided to leave them and take them to Fay and the other old girls who spend most of their time experimenting with hair and make-up and dressing up like weenyboppers.

The first sign of my mother disappearing off the radar was when she started swanning around in the guise of Alma Taylor, the silent movie star who she named me after. I would come home to find her with her face whited-up, sitting in front of the mirror with candles lit, pulling faces and striking poses she remembered from fifty years ago.

The next step was thinking that people on television could see into the room. ‘Pull your skirt down. He’s looking at you,’ she’d whisper during the news. Or ‘Close that drawer. He can see right in there. It hasn’t been tidied for months.’ She wasn’t even an old woman – not
old
old. She was sixty-eight when all this started to happen.

I got her into Dorothy Ward House by calling in a few favours. Strictly speaking, it’s a retirement home for variety performers exclusively. But by the late seventies, it was a purely academic distinction in my mother’s case. By that time she was convinced it was herself, rather than me, who had had the career.

‘The Old Pro’s Paradise’, as it used to be referred to (unironically) in the profession, is a bizarre and unnerving place to visit. Very few of its three dozen inhabitants believe they were anything less than the toast of the town in their day. The difficulty lies in deciding which Hollywood lovely or Broadway legend, which king of comedy or matinee idol they see themselves being this week.

You’ve heard the old joke: Open the fridge and she’ll do twenty minutes when the light goes on? Welcome to Dorothy Ward House.

The escalator at this end was roofed in with corrugated iron and chicken-wire. Sprawled on the steps outside the station were a
gang of Stone Age derelicts with violent contusions and scabs on their faces as exotic as Ubangi tribesmen.

The sweet rotted smell of cider lufted from the gardens at the bottom of the hill where they go to relieve themselves. It’s still thick in my throat now that I’ve climbed as far as the Victorian villas with pink and apple-green garden paving and bottle-holders with little clock-faces on them to tell the milkman how many pints to leave and caravans and motor homes standing waxed and raised on bricks in the gravel drives.

How well I feel I know this street (and how much I loathe it). The question that nags at me every time I find myself panting up it is: what are the chances of me coming to know it even better? How strong is the possibility that I may one day have to end up seeking refuge here myself?

It’s inevitable that I’m going to sound as though I’m weeping in my beer when I say this, but I own virtually nothing. The flat in London is in my mother’s name. In the event of her death – not very far away now – the tenancy is not transferable.

Yet every time I step into Dorothy Ward House (past the mezuzah on the door-frame, under the arch ‘Stage Door’ sign in the porch) and see the cracked and faded trade ten-by-eights, the old show-bills in their frames, the collections of china dogs and toy ballerinas set out on the tops of walnut chests in rooms labelled Hippodrome, Empire, Tivoli, Coliseum, Palladium, and so on, I am reminded why I have been happy to see my own souvenirs and career cast-offs dispersed like a wig in the wind.

There are no pictures of me around my mother’s flat (and none in Kiln Cottage). There are only pictures of my mother here in my mother’s room: Fay being introduced to the Duchess of Kent; Fay making up a card school with Roger Moore, Michael Caine and Stanley Baker; Fay refreshing her lipstick at a bottle-crowded table at the Talk of the Town (Tony Dalligan is just visible in the bottom right-hand corner).

She accepts a kiss on her downy, doughy cheek but obviously has only the haziest notion of who I am or what I might be doing there.

She is wearing black lace gloves with cut-off fingers, white PVC knee-length boots and a purple dress I haven’t seen before. Ash dribbles down her front. By her elbow on the bedside table is a schooner of the Tia Maria that she keeps in the wardrobe (I have another bottle in my bag).

‘See that Rolls out there?’ she says abruptly and with such conviction I half-turn to look at the window. ‘It doesn’t mean a light. Truthfully. I thought it was all going to be different when I was a star. Not a bit of it. Don’t you think I’d like to go into town to the shops, have a rummage round? But it’s impossible, you see. The commotion. I’m a prisoner.’

Her room is at the back of the house, with a view of the garden. All that’s out there is a wooden bench and a blackened bush in a circular bed on the lawn. Everything else has been brought inside for the winter.

It is early evening. The low murmur of the TV news comes from other rooms on the corridor. There is a chrome bar along the wall just inside the door and support-handles by the washbasin and the armchair. There’s an emergency buzzer by the bed.

‘I’ve been on bills with stars recently,’ my mother continues, ‘and I’ve been in the number-one dressing-room where they used to be and they’re down the corridor now. Which embarrasses me terribly. I couldn’t see my name down there on the bill when I was up there once.’

Silence. I shake out the few items of clothing that are lying around and fold them neatly in a pile. I open the door of the medicine cabinet and quickly shut it again. I prise some white hairs from a brush using the handle of a metal comb and, reluctant for some reason to throw them into the empty, paper-lined bin provided, flush them down the sink.

They wrap themselves around the spokes of the plughole. I poke at them with the comb as if they were something unpleasant I’d just discovered and let the tap go on running long after they’ve disappeared.

The sound of water is immediately followed by the sound of a voice coming in our direction and announcing, ‘This is your
five-minute call, ladies and gentlemen … Five minutes.’

If you didn’t know the sound had a human source, however, you wouldn’t identify the cheese-grater purgatorial mechanical croak as a voice at all. Connee Emerald played saxophone and sang in an act called the Emerald Sisters and Michael. She was a celebrated West End ‘Peter Pan’ in the years before the war. Now cancer has eaten her face away and she has a throat box.

Without saying anything, my mother drains the last of her drink, makes some tiny adjustments to her appearance and begins to make her way along with the others to the lounge (the ‘Larry Parnes Lounge’ – it says this on a chafed brass plate by the door) where the evening’s programme of entertainment is about to begin.

A regular part of life at the home are the ‘chat shows’ in which the residents take part. It is all done along professional lines, with television make-up and a spotlight beamed from the ceiling and a ‘conversation area’ of three armchairs set in a two-on-one formation directly below the alcove containing the remains of Prince and Duke.

The ‘host’ is the resident manager of the home, or ‘Super’, as he prefers, a blot-shaped man with glazed candle jowls and perfect cuticles who talks in the ingratiating, stupefyingly ebullient style that he has perfected from the box.

The unfortunate thing is that the old stagers, who nearly all have a tale to tell, have been pressed into following his example. Which means that originality – of point of view, of experience, of expression – is not only not expected, but not encouraged.

The bland generality, the formulaic utterance, the quip that has been round the block a few times – they are all preferred to the texture of lived experience. The audience has also internalised the rules of the game: they come in with a laugh-track whenever the Super’s bared teeth and lifted shoulders suggest that it’s appropriate, exactly on-cue.

‘It’s been some fun days, I tell you,’ Bubbly Rogers is saying and winning loud murmurs of approval from the hair-dos in the gloaming. (A hairdresser has been in in the afternoon and many
faces, including Bubbly’s, are still heat-blotched and par-boiled.)

She was a vocalist with Vic Oliver’s orchestra in the thirties. The bow of her lips is exaggerated and pearly pink, and so is her wispy nest of hair. ‘I think you can control your destiny,’ she says, leaning forward in a confiding manner. ‘You and God.’ (Applause.) ‘No, God and you. Watch out for the billing!’ (Laughter.)

‘I never go to the cinema anymore. You get through the door, and five minutes and they’re in bed. I’m not a prude, I just don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like bad language in films.’ (Loud applause.) ‘I don’t like it on television, it frightens my dog.’ (Loud laughter.)

Norman Long (‘A Song, a Smile, a Piano’) has slipped into the place next to me on the sofa, making me the filling in a sandwich consisting of himself and my mother. He has done it in the casual-conspicuous way that reminds me why I was never able to deaden the tedium of long afternoons in strange towns by going to the cinema on my own.

I half-expect his sclerotic old hand to come sliding over and start working its way up my skirt. Instead he starts plucking at my sleeve and jerking his head in a way that says he wants me to follow him out of the room. I look at my mother; she is moving her lips, silently mimicking Bubbly Rogers’ answers with her, so I do.

The wall-lamps in the corridors are the kind that drip plastic candle grease: many of the shades have toppled sideways and become scorched from the heat.

We pass the doors of the Prince Littler undenominational chapel (there is an artificial Christmas tree on a table, waiting to be dressed) and then bear left in the direction of Norman’s room.

After his solo career was over he’d been props-marr for Tommy Cooper for many years – the person in charge of the doomed tricks and other famous bits of comic business that made Tommy the institution he was.

He’d been let go for some considerable time when Tommy Cooper collapsed and died on-stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre during a live television broadcast in 1984.

The curtains are drawn in Norman’s room. The only light
comes from a lamp on the bedside table which has a chiffon scarf thrown over the shade. Illuminated in the light above it – he has insisted I take the only chair, while he himself perches on the edge of the bed – are a number of personal mottos, hand-inscribed and framed in cellophane and black tape: ‘You’ve either got it or you’ve had it’ is one; ‘Teach a kid to blow a horn, and he’ll never blow a safe’ is the only other one I can read.

He offers me a whisky; then an apple or a boxed date. He pours a small drink for himself then bends forward from where he’s sitting and loads a tape into the video machine.

There are a few frames of a man and woman at a kitchen table but these soon stutter into the opening credit sequence for
Live
from
Her
Majesty’s
. The curtains open on a high-kicking chorus, who are followed by the compère, who tells a few jokes before introducing a girl singer who lip-synchs.

Norman fast-forwards all this. Only when Tommy Cooper comes on to take his first spot does he allow the tape to play at normal speed. Cooper comes in on the revolve with his familiar fez on his head and a purple velvet-covered pedestal of tricks in front of him. But when he opens his mouth to speak, Norman hurries the tape on again.

‘… like a log. Woke up in the fireplace,’ Tommy is saying when Norman takes his finger off the button. During the laugh an assistant comes out of the wings and wraps him in a shiny kimono which causes some camera flare. As she exits, Norman freezes the frame.

‘Now!’ he says, moving the tape on inch-by-inch. ‘Don’t blink. Here it comes!’ On the screen Tommy has begun his backwards fall into the curtain. The next frame shows him with his mouth open gasping for air. By the next – ‘There he goes – he’s going over!’ Norman almost shouts – he is on the ground.

He fast-forwards through the commercial break – the super-laminate images, the galloping colours, the sweat beading on Norman’s head – into part two of the show in which a young comedian has been brought on to cover for the confusion backstage.

‘But he’s still there!’ Norman says, moving back a few frames. He leaps from the bed and stabs with his finger at what he says are a pair of feet pointing skywards amid the static and muck of distortion at the bottom of the screen. ‘He’s still there. They’re breathing in his mouth! They’re jumping on his chest! He’s too heavy to move!’

The deteriorated quality of the tape in this section – it has the milky opaque look of sugar that has been spun and stretched – shows how it has been run and re-run over the heads, freeze-framed and examined pixel-by-pixel, played and re-played in the hope (I assume) of isolating the moment of death.