Alma Cogan (4 page)

I could say ‘yes’ to a bit of that. I could say ‘yes’ to quite a lot of it, if I’m honest. But I have to bear in mind the almost inevitable consequences and something I recently wrote into my book.

‘A normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspires to – the aim must be to operate on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of people – like every natural process, human life gravitates toward moderation.’ Gone over in acid-yellow over-marker, meaning ‘v. imp.’

In other words, it wouldn’t be hard to get talked back into rejoining the conga-line of the professional attention-grabbers and pathologically unignored. Devora says she’s convinced she could get a book ‘into the sellers’; Brick writes that he’s already got the main promotional chat shows ‘locked up’.

All things considered, and everything being equal, though – ‘Per ardua ad astrakhan’ is a phrase which suddenly presents itself here – I think I’ll stick.

There’s some potatoes that need pulling; there’s a dog in the kitchen whining for his feed. So here I go. I’m walking away from this broop-broop. Watch me now.

‘Beginnings.’ ‘Solace.’

If you could wish to have two words spring out of the dark at you, you couldn’t wish better than these. If it happened to be the darkness enfolding the countryside where you were about to begin a new life – so much the better.

‘Beginnings’ – pokerwork lettering on a piece of varnished blond timber – was illuminated in the headlamps of the taxi when we pulled over to let a car squeeze past us at the top of the narrow lane. The car was travelling uphill, away from the village of Cleve, which was our destination, and it slid like a bolt along the high hedges whose sides were grooved smooth from a thousand tight negotiations like this.

We had one more pull-over to make in the dark on the steep gradient. Then ‘Solace’, the name of an old tub, was suspended in the lights as we carefully negotiated the last corner at the bottom of the hill: the letters were sharp-edged and oddly permanent-looking against the boat’s flaking boards, which were mainly that mysterious secondary colour, apart from their paint, which very old boats have.

I had another look at the piece of paper containing the directions which I had been reading aloud to the driver, and realised then that the lighted windows that we’d seen before bearing left round the end of the estuary were the windows of the cottage to which we had been blindly descending.

The driver seemed to realise this without me having to tell him. ‘Nearly got you home, young lady,’ he said (a sure sign that the years were starting to take their toll – the years
and
the efforts of my liver to process the brave intake of the night before: the truth was I was still quarter-cut). And then, ‘And you, mister’ to the dog, who was spiralling up in excitement at
the back of the man’s head, in between scuttling from door to door.

I had been pathetically reassured to see a rank of what I regarded as ‘London’ taxis waiting with their engines turning over at the station. Then I had been just as pathetically disconcerted to find myself cheated of the familiar, unreproducible, to me dependably balm-like and curative sounds and smells of the classic black FX4, ‘the special FX’.

The back of the cab, I soon saw, had been turned into a replica of the shoebox rooms in the sodium-coloured towers and terraces which made a corridor out of the city for the first three or four miles.

There was what had once been a brightly coloured, now uniformly greasy piece of carpet remnant covering the floor; a stretch-cover so pocked with cigarette burns it resembled nylon netting lay over the passenger seat. Two dish-type lavatory deodorisers were stuck to the back window and a black metal grille had replaced the sliding glass confessional of the London cabs.

The grille was necessary, the driver told me, on account of the number of Navy fares he picked up after they had been lagering hard on The Steyne (rhymes with stain). ‘Usually it’s just verbal they give you, but sometimes it gets more heavy. You get stacked by women even – smashing you over the head with bags full of deodorant.

‘I had one of them do a nasty on me in the back there last night. I only smelled it when I pulled over for a smoke. Sitting at the edge of a wood down by Wollaton here, breathing in the clean air, listening to the owls – “the loud-hooting owl/That loves the turbulent and frosty night/And hallooes to the moon”. (
Was
this
supposed
to
ring
bells?
)
Then I suddenly get hit with a whiff of that. I tell you. Nice people.’

The shift from city-and-suburban to country-creepy (hedgerows high as houses shoring up a vast unvariegated blackness; skidding and skeetering movements picked up in the sweep of the car lights) happened abruptly. So abruptly that
electric advertising signs from the main road were momentarily imprinted as after-images on the pitch dark, and the sense of strangeness and panic nearly overwhelmed me.

My banishment happened (can this really be right?) six, seven years ago, in the late seventies/early eighties. I spent most of the seventies living on or just above the cake line (a crack borrowed from the original cast album of
Pal
Joey
which has proved endlessly useful for deflecting cat-house queries about my circumstances).

I’ve never been ashamed to admit when I’ve been broke. As my
bobbeh
and
zaideh
used to say, What’s to worry? You’ve heard of people so poor they thought knives and forks were jewellery? So poor they … Those old chestnuts. Well that was my parents’ parents. Both sets. But regardless of how broke I’ve been, I have rarely denied myself certain basic luxuries: good gargle, good music, fresh flowers, taxis.

Few evenings were ever able to live up to the taxi-ride through the London dusk which began them. The contrast between the blank, dim, gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity outside (plus of course the couple of stiffeners I’d tucked away before leaving home) never failed to produce that perfect balance between excitement and boredom, anticipation and relaxation that is the condition in which I’m sure most people would live all their lives, if they had the choice.

I always was a great go-outer. My appetite for the social whirl even surprised me sometimes. In the ten or so years before I decided to cut out and head for rural entombment, socialising – partying, lip-flapping, throwing it back – was all I seemed to do. If I wasn’t preparing for a drinks, a first-night, a private view, a record launch, a supper, I was picking myself up from the night before. (The formula: sleep, ice-cream, plenty thick brown tea.)

What can I tell you? I enjoyed it. Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of the shallowness, the fatuity, the whatever you want to call it, the truth was that I got a kick out of mingling with faces from the shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper.

I liked chewing the fat with the hacks and the stars of the day; adored getting slewed; lived for the moment when the weals and eructations on the hand of the wine waiter, the powder congealed in the crowsfeet and clogging the pores of the waitress offering stuffed dates, quails’ eggs, chicken satay, tempura caused feelings of almost overwhelming tenderness to well in me. (Always the signal then to slow up.)

Slipping into a room where the buzz was on and gorillas were mock-menacingly twirling worry-beads at the door (I knew most of them by name) to me was like being lifted out of a rough sea by helicopter. The noise, the smoke, the fracturedness, the social treachery and superficiality … all the things that so many people of my acquaintance would cross continents to avoid, were what drew me and started my juices flowing.

(The thing I would cross continents to avoid, even now, are the faces of those friends and contemporaries which I remember – it does seem only yesterday – as being emulsified, as being
rich
with optimism and confidence, and are now, to greater or lesser degrees, opaque with disappointment and the baggy accommodations we have all had to make with reality.

(I’m not talking here only about money: some of the richest are also the most disappointed. Or even about disappointed ambition. Probably the most chilling look is the look of ambition realised – the hollow haunted look of disgust with achievement. You know: Pa-dum-da-da-dum-dee-dum … Is that all there is to the circus? That one.)

Most afternoons now, in these weeks close to the end of the year, I come back from my walks with the smell of wood-smoke and garden bonfires rising off me in waves with the cold. This was the smell of my pillow on all those woozy mornings after the nights before. By washing my hair less often than it should be washed – not difficult, given the state of the plumbing (and the condition of my follicles) – it can be the smell of my pillow here in turniptown.

On my infrequent trips to London I can still pull on a coat or a jacket in the reasonable certainty of stabbing my finger on the
toothpicks and cocktail stirrers that have collected in the pockets.

My clothes and the bags I carried in those days are littered with match-books for enterprises that went under almost as soon as they were launched and invitations to bashes which nobody in their right mind could ever have hoped would pay their way. Also with cards giving the addresses in ‘toney’ raised copperplate of men whose names would add up to a bizarre network if anybody – the police, say, or a reporter or freelance snoop – ever went to the trouble of tracking them down.

(I have no idea why this thought should suddenly occur to me now; but the picture of my life which would emerge from such an exercise – sparked off by … what? my disappearance? my death? – would be so distorted and grotesque that I have made a mental note to have a major clear-out the next time I go back.)

My determination to be always next to the action was a standing joke among my friends, none of them exactly wallflowers themselves.

One example. One afternoon sometime in the fifties when I was up there, riding high, my agent asked me what I was doing for the weekend.

‘After Sammy’s finished his show on Saturday,’I said (Sammy Davis was in town filming with Peter Lawford and playing the Pigalle), ‘I’m flying to the Italian Riviera with him, Betty Bacall, Sarah Churchill and Cary Grant. We’re staying with the Rex Harrisons in wherever it is they live overlooking the sea.’

This reply – I honestly couldn’t see why at the time – broke him up. His face turned the unbecoming kippered maroon of the leather inlaid into the top of his desk, he laughed until tears streamed from his eyes. ‘I kvel when I think of you, Alma,’ he said. ‘Do you know what
kvel
is? It’s a yiddish word meaning I like flip. You really go with the big time, don’t you? You’d never go out with a couple of bums.’

‘Harry,’ I said solemnly, ‘I’m sorry, but I find going out with people who are rich, famous and successful simply divine.’

It all goes back to my mother (who else?). In essence, mine is the
classic pushy-mother story, so I won’t detain you too long with it here.

I have no wish to stick it to my mother (who is still implacably with us, by the way, minus some other marbles; the lights are on, as they say, but there’s nobody home). But it’s become pretty obvious since I got out from under her that she set out to use me absolutely cold-bloodedly to achieve all the things she was never in a position to achieve herself.

Family legend has it that she could have been another Callas if she had had the chance. The chance was denied her by her own mother whose violent reaction to the suggestion that Fay be sent to the Conservatoire – this was before the family were forced to flee with their handcarts from Romania – was to become the bane of my life. ‘I’d rather see her dead at my feet!’ my mother would declaim, imitating
her
mother speaking in another culture (another
language
), in an altogether other time. (Cue tragic pose by the chimney-breast; cue revivifying hit of apricot-brandy from the sideboard drawer.)

A striking facial resemblance between my mother and Fanny Brice as played by herself in
The
Great
Ziegfeld
– they shared the same ethnic features: proud forehead, bulbous nose, rolling Can-toresque eyes – encouraged her in her belief that the parade had passed her by.

She went to see that film (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, Prod. Hunt Stromberg, MGM, 1936; b&w) in the spirit that other people made pilgrimages to Lourdes: repeatedly, religiously, with a vacuum flask in her voluminous mock-croc handbag and me and my father in tow. There was never any doubt in her mind that it was the transformation of herself from rags to riches, from cheap burlesk to queen of the Great White Way, that she was witnessing on the screen. The comedown afterwards, as she rode our family bone-shaker the few hundred yards home, was pitiful to behold.

Inevitably, as it seems now, my mother met my father at a tea dance at the Café de Paris in Leicester Square. He was a familiar figure outside the stage-doors of the London music-halls and the
legitimate theatres of the West End and as incurably star-struck – he wore it in his eyes – as her.

The Kogins had disembarked in England from Russia, thinking it was America, and stayed. My father’s father, whom I never met, was a tailor. My father, whose name was Mitya, or Mityusha, or Mityenka, or Mityushenka – less euphoniously ‘Mark’ – sold women’s dresses from a shop in a genteel seaside resort on the south coast. In time he would build the one shop up into a small chain.

I must have seen the sea every day when I was a child but have retained no memory of it at all. My childhood was miraculously, certainly quite unnaturally, protected from the elements. I was, after all, conceived as an all-singing, all-dancing showtime spectacular and, like the exotic bloodstock that suggests, raised in what virtually amounted to laboratory conditions.

By the age of two I was being coached in voice and tap by Madame Rogers and her daughter, a stringy girl, splay-footed as well as tone-deaf, known to us as Mamzelle Leonora. There was something about the Studio – two rooms above a Burton’s the tailor, sharing a landing with a dangerously dingy billiard hall from which damp sawdust trailed, as out of a butcher’s or a burst teddy bear – that smacked of the gutter glamour to which I have always found myself ineluctably drawn. My parents, needless to say, saw it as merely glamorous.

Back home after every lesson I had to stand on one of the broad lino margins around the living-room and give a demonstration of what I’d learned, the metal taps cracking out into the room like gunfire.

‘Don’t stop ’til I tell you,’ my father would cry. ‘I want my shilling’s worth.’ My mother, meanwhile, perched on the edge of the sofa scrubbing on a ukelele, Formby-style. (She can still, at a pinch, and even out where she’s orbiting, play accordion, trumpet, clarinet, trombone and harmonium, God help us.)

By the time I was ten I could walk into a cinema and tell you which studio – Warners or Metro or Fox or Gaumont-British – had made what was showing just by looking at the print. MGM’s
lion; Paramount’s snow-topped mountain; RKO’s radio beacon, and Columbia’s diaphanous Miss Liberty were the dominant images in my childhood, the last two especially so because I wasn’t altogether sure what they were meant to represent.