Alma Cogan (20 page)

A red circle hovers around the head of one of a party of tadpole figures slithering across the lunar landscape of snow. It encloses a black hood worn over a black balaclava which, when they blow it up, pushing as far as it will go, hovers on the edge of disclosing who or what is in there, but in the end dissolves into dots of primary colours.

That she has an existence independent of the image that has represented her for twenty-one years – the trowel nose, the defiant eyes, the peroxide hair – is a mystery that seems hard to get to grips with. Hindley was twenty-three when she was arrested. Now she’s forty-four. It is as if by changing her appearance, and keeping her current identity secret, she has effected some form of escape.

‘The senior detective leading the investigation said that Hindley’s recollection of bleak moorland she has not visited for over twenty years was surprisingly vivid. It had led police to a new search area where she believes more young bodies may be buried, and where digging may begin tomorrow.’

The wind-burned face of one of the searchers (filmed from above, probably from a ladder, over the heads of the other camera crews and reporters) now fills the screen. ‘We will be using the new digging techniques we have been taught by experts in buried body detection, removing the topsoil and then using a trowel and a hoe to identify the different layers of soil and looking for signs that the natural layering has been disturbed,’ he says.

Extract from
Tate Gallery Archive Tape TAV
499A
, recorded 3.10.74

COMPILER
: I sense a certain sexual ambivalence in the figure of Alma Cogan as you have portrayed her in the painting. The hands, for instance, are very big. This could be a woman imitating a man imitating a woman.

PETER BLAKE
: That was intentional. On the occasion when we met to discuss the painting, I remember her saying something along the lines of her learning all her make-up tricks from drag queens – what kind of mascara lasts longest, how to apply eyeshadow, ‘all the important decisions’.

Later, some years after the portrait was finished, in the mid-sixties, I believe there was a drag act who billed himself as’... in the gowns of Alma Cogan’, which is very strange.

A thing I realised many years ago is that nobody believes what they read in the papers more than the people who write for them.

Similarly, the biggest suckers for the old ‘roar of the greasepaint/no people like show people’ routine are performers themselves. The bigger they get, the more they buy it. Sammy Davis has always been particularly susceptible. ‘Sammy, dear boy,
don’t be so blasted gauche,’ Larry Harvey was always telling him. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

But Sammy has gone on building up his collection anyway. John Wayne’s stetson from
Stagecoach
, James Dean’s jacket from
Rebel
Without
a
Cause
, the bullfighter Dominguin’s suit of lights, a ‘Grecian-style’ lamé dress belonging to Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland’s dancing shoes … They’ve all been given places of honour in the house in Beverly Hills.

The market in showbiz tat and memorabilia has boomed in the last few years. It used to be that they were content with an autograph and a snap. Now they’re prepared to bid for your family albums, contracts, letters, old clothes and bed-linen. Once or twice a year I get a letter asking me to authenticate the latest piece of my past that has found its way into the saleroom.

‘Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it’: Indian proverb. I’ve tried to make that my philosophy in the past decade: I had been there, but now it looked as though I had never been. I had made a deeper and apparently more permanent mark than most, but all the signs had been obliterated, swept away. ‘As soon as you leave the room you are forgotten’: something we used to tell each other in our cups.

But it seems now that this is not the case. What’s happening is like a real-life enactment of those television title sequences where an atomised image shinily reassembles itself, like an explosion in reverse.

I’m finding out that a lot of what I thought had been bonfired, Oxfam-ed, used for land-fill, has in fact been tidied away in sound archives, stills libraries, image banks, memorabilia mausoleums, tat troves, mug morgues.

It’s an odd experience to find yourself catalogued, card-indexed, museumised, a speck of data for the information professionals to bounce around.

It seems that as long as you’re in print or on film or a name on a buff envelope in an archive somewhere, you’re never truly dead now. You can be electronically colourised, emulsified, embellished, enhanced, coaxed towards some state of virtual reality.

You can be reactivated or reëmbodied; simulated and hologrammed. In just the last two years my voice has been artificially reprocessed for stereo effect and reincarnated in half-speed remasterings and on digital compact disc.

The spare-parts that make this possible are housed in a proliferating number of noninvasive environments in London, where they may be viewed (fingered, sniffed, listened to) by appointment.

The basement door at the rear of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden clicks open without me having to lift a finger. There’s a TV monitor in the security man’s cubicle and he has seen me coming. I sign the visitors’ book. He slaps an identity sticker on my jacket. Security Heightened Awareness it says on a sign next to his electric kettle.

‘Please ensure that your hands are clean. Washbasins are situated on the back staircase’, a sign says at the door to the Research Room. ‘No fountain, ball-point, felt tip or any other sort of pen. Pencils only.’

The work surfaces are dark and polished, the lighting indirect, the walls lined in green baize.

‘C’ is for ‘Cogan’. I pull open one of the catalogue drawers and run a finger over the coloured cards indicating the main categories.

A reading of the ‘How to use this resource’ notice tells me I’m fishing in the wrong pond. Personal Files is where I should be looking.

Chastened, my heart hammering behind my ribs by now, I approach the Personal Effects Index anti-alphabetically.

I dawdle back towards my own entry, which I have caught a glimpse of in passing, via David Bowie, Elkie Brooks, Bucks Fizz, Kate Bush and The Carpenters. There are two cards.

Our cleaning woman for many years was a man – Ricci Howe, a veteran of the all-male ‘Soldiers In Skirts’-type touring revues that were popular with provincial theatre audiences immediately after the war. It wasn’t unusual to see him wearing something from my wardrobe, a pair of shoes belonging to my mother and a fluffy platinum wig while he pushed a Hoover around.

‘Her face is the sort of face that looks as if the rest of the body is making love,’ he’d croon while he worked, quoting imaginary reviews. ‘She just laps you up with her eyes and lips and tongue.’

‘She has the equipment of a bitch in the long shot. And yet when you look in her eyes in close-up‚’ he’d tell the mirror, ‘she’s like a baby. You can’t tell if she’s an angel or a bitch.’

In the mid-sixties, when I was often out of the country for long periods and had anyway abandoned my old style, he took an act on the road in which he billed himself as ‘Mr Ricci Howe, appearing in the gowns of Miss Alma Cogan’.

I only went to see him once, at a large pub called the Four Chimneys close to the power station and the dogs’ home in Battersea. I understood, as he had told me, that it was meant to be an affectionate take-off, ‘a way of keeping the legend alive’. But I probably don’t have to explain the confusion I felt seeing a man on a stage in my clothes, moving his lips to the sound of my voice.

I felt disembodied. I felt as if some strange voodoo was going on.

He did well for a time. He was making a better living out of
being me than I was. Then eventually the audience for even the camp version melted away and he went back to working for the cleaning agency. I have assumed that the relics that have been coming on to the market in the last few years are from his collection (nobody else had any), earning him a modest pension.

Now, courtesy of their current owner, ‘F.McL.’, a couple of characteristic examples have been made available for serious students of showbiz in the Crypt, the name given by the people who work here to the below-ground storage area at the Theatre Museum.

We’re not far from the river, and the barrel-ceilinged tunnels where the reserve stock is stored give the sense of interconnected culverts or drains. It is cobbled underfoot with here and there heavy cast-iron grates through which it seems it is possible to hear the sound of distant running water.

When the uniformed minder who has accompanied me asks for the code written on the inevitable form, his voice echoes and a trace of his breath lingers on the air.

The smaller parts of the collection are stored in brown box files, rubber-stamped ‘Supplied for the public service’ and stacked on crude industrial shelves. The clothes are hung on hangers on long metal racks which, in some instances, sag under the weight.

They are protected by bin-liners, which emphasises the no-man’s-land they occupy, somewhere between treasures and refuse, or (and this is the case with my old threads) zippered plastic bags.

Half the trick of getting a dress to live on stage lay in the lights and the lighting-plots – getting the beads and heaped-on glitter to catch the light streaming from the gantry in a way that broke it up and sent it flying around like tracer fire.

Off-stage, out of the lights, the dresses always had something forlorn about them. They were so solidly constructed they stood up unaided when you took them off. Tony Hancock once poked his head into an empty room and saw one standing on its own and said he found it as disturbing as the occasion he glimpsed
Peter Brough’s dummy, ‘Archie Andrews’, hanging on a hook behind a door. Both experiences gave him occasional nightmares for months afterwards.

I was expecting the tinsel to have tarnished, the sequins to have sloughed off like cells, the fabric to be distressed to some degree. What I wasn’t prepared for was the total deadness; the lack of human imprint. What I am holding in my hands don’t feel like clothes emptied of their owner, at least not if I think of the owner being me.

Ricci Howe had a slight build and the slender hips of a dancer, and both dresses have been cut down to fit this shape. The discrepancy – the grotesque shrinkage – is obvious when I measure them against my body, in a gesture that for a second revives memories of Wednesday afternoons and taking turns dancing with my father and my mother in a pre-war dancehall near the sea.

I leave by way of the museum proper, with its doomy showcases of dummies in famous dead people’s clothes. The only visitors are a party of schoolchildren who are rough-housing it, acting out how they got the fake black-eyes and cuts and fat-lips that are the obvious highlight of a dreary outing.