Alma Cogan (5 page)

Monday nights and Thursday nights – the night programmes changed at the Troxy – were when we went to the cinema together as a family. We usually made up the head of the queue at what my father still quaintly called the Electric Palace (it was only years later, many years after his death, that I noticed these words done in plaster, amid baroque twirls, high above the contemporary façade).

The balcony at the Troxy was thrillingly raked and cantilevered and we would dash to claim seats in one of the two curved corner sections which swung out over the stalls like Waltzer cars.

This was part of what, in the late thirties, was the owners’ much-vaunted Odeon-modern look. My mother was super-taken with a colour scheme she insisted was ‘carnation and mango’, and with the way the gilded sconces and scrolls that went with a past that pre-dated even their past had been blocked and negated and streamlined out.

A game I liked to play – only with myself, who of course was too young to know the Troxy as Mark and Fay had known it – was to seek out evidence of what the Troxy had been like in the days of the silents, when the decorative theme was apparently south-coast Samarkand; in the days, that is to say, immediately before my arrival on the scene.

I would gaze about me and quietly note a palm cornice here, the tip of a barley-sugar column there, a swan-neck gas bracket concealed behind a sweeping parabolic plaster screen. Stupid, I know, but it was almost as though Mark and Fay – Poppa and Momma, Tateh and Mameh – had been trying to keep something from me and I’d found them out.

I was a strange little girl. But not as strange as the little girl who, singing, dancing, acting and dimpling, would tower over us, spit curls bouncing, hammy knees hamming, toxic in her winsomeness.

Baby
Take
a
Bow,
Our
Little
Girl,
Bright
Eyes,
Little
Miss
Broad
way,
Curly
Top
… There was no end to them. Shirley Temple films came thick and fast. And we sat through everything One-Take-Temple, America’s Sweetheart, ever made.

There was always a special tension between the three of us when we went to see a Shirley Temple picture. I could sense meaningful glances being exchanged over my head each time the precocious one launched into another number. Many encouraging smiles were flashed at me in the flickering half-light and there was a marked amount of cosying down in seats and metaphorical clucking.

I felt them willing me to like her and want to follow her down the thorny path she had beaten. I was given a Shirley doll for my third or fourth Christmas with moving and sleeping eyes and jointed arms and legs and her name branded into her head under the human hair wig.

But I pointedly ignored what I have no doubt is now a much-coveted collectible, and instead lavished all my affection on the plastic likeness of the ice-skater-turned-movie-queen, Sonja Henie.

Too late in my own career – the Teds were on the rampage; Elvis was being denounced as morally insane – somebody put an Alma doll on the market. The manufacturer took the bath on it that I predicted. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you can still sometimes spot me sitting on the top of a TV set in place of the lava-lamp or the Spanish lady that film-makers invariably dig out when they want a shorthand way of establishing a certain kind of birdbrained, latently violent, Darren-and-Sharon fish-finger ambiance.

In the event, it was the other regular weekly fixture in our life as a family which was to prove most effective in realising Mark and Fay’s ambitions. On Wednesdays, halfday closing in town, we would join many of our neighbours and friends from the business community at the tea dances which were held in the Famous Name Danse Salon on the front.

I don’t think I need to go into a great deal of detail about this.
The Famous Name is the kind of place that is familiar from a thousand period reconstructions. Suffice it to say that it was peach-mirrored and below pavement level and suffused with the smell of naphthalene fur protection from the ladies’ Persian-and beaver-lamb coats and chinchillette hug-me-tights. They carried their own and their husbands’ shoes for dancing in homemade bags with draw-string tops.

In the films, there was never any suggestion that fur, which was constantly being tossed and draped and trailed across nightclub floors, could ever be in any danger of infestation or rotting. Or that the stars were ever anything less than the flawless beings they appeared. I was too young then to appreciate the important part played by lighting, camera angles, and the scalpel.

I just knew that the scrutiny demanded by the movies terrified me. I was a little Jewish girl: dark-skinned, lank-haired, shortsighted, horribly fat; no amount of reassurance that my big nose would ‘photograph cute’ was enough to convince me. The cinema demanded perfection, and I didn’t have it.

I remember the day I decided I could make a singer, though.

I was wearing a touch of something from my mother which smelled strongly of cantaloupes and oranges (‘You want a man to like it, go after the food groups’ was her position on perfume, which she still calls scent) and gliding around the floor in the arms of my father at the Famous.

I danced with Mark and Fay by turn, and had tea and cakes with semi-transparent icing while they took their turns with each other. I came up to chest-height on my mother, whom I seem to recall having heavy, pendulous breasts even as a young woman. The part of her where my hand rested had a stiff, packaged feel and was gently corrugated from her boned girdle.

I came to just above waist-height on my father who, as usual, was wearing a suit of a heavy winter fabric which lightly inflamed my cheek. The band had only one shantooz or canary, a lilting lovely and curvaceous cutie whose general standards of presentation and personal grooming were as formidable as anything I encountered at the Troxy.

In her dress of rhinestone lights, standing in a pool of light, never making eye-contact, singing always above the heads of the dancers to the middle-distance, she was a mirage – bleached, evanescent, shimmering. It was as though she was both standing in the light and at the same time helping to create it.

It was an effect she was able to sustain (and I was able to learn from) by never appearing in the public parts of the hall. She seemed to dematerialise when she was out of the spotlight. I had never seen her arrive or leave, and had never spotted her anywhere in town while shopping with my mother.

June Satin (not her real name – that has gone, unfortunately) was as other-worldly, as
unearthly
as anything coming out of the Hollywood dream factories. Her farts even probably smelled of violets, to revive a saying I was rather fond of (but never allowed to utter) in those days.

On the day the scales fell from my eyes, she was wearing a dress of yellow (blue?) tussore with blue (yellow?) ornaments and bright lemon-coloured gloves extending to the creamy upper part of her arm.

The bandstand wasn’t very far from the ground and I had skirted it several times in the stiff embrace of both my father and my mother before I noticed something that seemed impossible in my eyes: June Satin had a mend in her stocking!

Her immaculate toes were as usual framed in the brilliant straps of her slippers. But there, in addition to the dark hint of nail polish that was always visible, on the cusp of her big toe, at the summit of the pretty stairway of her perfect foot squatted what looked like a medulla, a
tarantula
of last-minute mending. Hallelujah! Succour for the week! Hope for the suffering! Was blind but now I see!

June Satin’s toe-hole was a chink through which the light suddenly seemed to come flooding; it exploded off the mirrored ball turning slowly under the ceiling (people were walking above us), lighting up a world of the possible. Suddenly now the shoes of the band personnel, for instance, weren’t uniformly glassy, but horizontally striped with the dust in the creases. There was a button
hanging by a thread from the sleeve of the double-bassist’s jacket. The band desks, monogrammed and slickly finished from a distance, proved to be scuffed and jerry-built on closer inspection. (And offered a microcosm of the show-business life, as I was to learn with experience. You should have seen some of the things those boys kept back there – pictures of their wives and kids, pornographic pictures, chewing-gum, packets of biscuits, rags to hawk and spit in.)

So hats off to Junie. Hers was an invaluable lesson in the crucial part attention to detail plays in sustaining an illusion. I became a fanatic about footwear as a result of that small moment of awakening, and a perfectionist with a prickly and enduringly ‘difficult’ reputation.

The strongest memory I have of my mother is of her in turban and apron in a steam-filled kitchen, boiling dyes in order that a pair of shoes might exactly match the colour of my latest over-the-top stage creation.

This was our regular drama: her sweating and stirring, mixing and matching; me shaking my head dismissively and sending her back to come up with something better. A heartless image, I agree, loaded with pathos.

So let me quickly set beside it another – of me, the biggest-drawing entertainer in the country and a mature woman, through television and radio a virtually inescapable presence, living in trepidation (I was a baroque, moygashel-and shantung-hung definition of the word) in case anything should happen to prevent me putting in my nightly call to the widow Cogan.

Wherever I happened to be, whatever I happened to be doing, a call, preferably on the stroke of eleven, is what she expected. Failure to deliver resulted in extraordinary scenes and recriminations.

Anguished calls to the police and the papers, for example, reporting my disappearance (they knew to humour her). Locks changed on the flat we lived in together after my father’s death in London (although she always saw it as
me
living with
her
). Records smashed (
my
records – records, that is, with my voice on
them – for preference). Clothes that turned out to be slyly mutilated the next time I went to wear them …

Oh she was something, my mother.

This peculiar ménage, of just myself and Fay and no sign of a male presence, was something which, understandably I suppose, people used to find intriguing, even in an era when nice girls didn’t.

The conversation would always proceed along predictable lines whenever the ‘human interest’ scribblers (gossip-mongers) came calling: uneasy opening pleasantries, then a trade-off of industry gossip, leading to the interview proper – biographical background (no matter how many times they’d read it); current hopes/ambitions/corny quips/crackerbarrel philosophising – ‘I have always prided myself that my fans are not the unruly type. I feel the attention of the fans is flattering to me as an artist.’ The usual bushwah, in other words.

It was only when notebooks were being pocketed and the smell of alcohol was finally starting to defeat the smell of the tobacco that had been used to disguise it (lavender-scented cachous, I seem to remember, were a favourite ploy of the ladies) that they would broach the subject with which of course they had always known they were going to be leading: discland’s most eligible bachelor girl and the man question.

‘Miss Cogan’ – a casual crossing of the legs; a rush of blood to the ears (those boiled lugs); perspiration flooding the pancake between nose and upper lip – ‘your love life seems to fascinate a lot of people. They find it strange that a good-looking girl’, etc.

‘Not so strange. I just haven’t met the right one. How can I think of marriage until …’ You can easily fill in the rest.

The unlikely truth is that, although I grew up surrounded by men who were far from shy about showing off their bodies – the boys in the chorus were tirelessly exhibitionistic, rarely bothering to close the doors of their dressing-rooms and padding around more or less a hundred-per-cent peeled – I was alarmingly vague about the male anatomy.

I had no idea what went on in the downstairs department. Really went on, I mean. I had a vague idea that something was put somewhere, but where and how was a giant mystery.

(‘Meat injection’, an expression I had overheard once or twice, was pretty graphic. But I remained ignorant as to the exact mechanics, not to mention the motivation. I didn’t even rind out what ‘B.U.R.M.A.’ or ‘E.G.Y.P.T.’ meant on envelopes until long after the war was over. When I was told they stood for ‘Be Upstairs Ready My Angel’ and ‘Eager to Grab Your Pretty Tits’ – and, worse, that ‘N.O.R.W.I.C.H.’ was code for ‘Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home’ – I blushed crimson.)

All this may seem strange – it may even seem barely credible – of somebody who by the mid-fifties would be able to count Diana Dors and an actress I later learned was known in Hollywood as the British Open, among her friends. But what you have to remember is that we’re still talking about the years of buttoned-upness and relative austerity before the lid blew off in the sixties.

I didn’t know I was living in ‘the vice capital of Europe’ in 1952, which is the year we moved to London in the interest of furthering my career (I was twenty). I hadn’t yet been introduced to the basement drinking clubs that had sprung up almost outside our front door in Kensington – Frisco’s, run by Frisco himself (‘Ah’s the biggest buck nigger in town’); the little House; Ruby Lloyd’s Maisonette. (I still didn’t drink.)

One club I had been introduced to – The Court Club in Mayfair – I visited several times without realising that the constant traffic through the curtained door at the side of the bar meant it was virtually a brothel.

I see now I was green as goose-shit. I knew Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton. I had been to his parties and he had occasionally been to mine. But I was as shocked as anybody by the revelations about his ‘fish book’ – his directory of available knock-offs – and the two-way mirror installed in the bedroom at ‘Bel-Air’, his big house in Maidenhead, and then at his London perch in Bryanston Mews. I suspected nothing.

I had known Paul Raymond since he was Paul Quinn, touring the number-threes (which were too good for him) with a mind-reading act he’d bought from a couple of palm-readers on Clacton Pier; I’d even known him before that, when he was Geoff Carlson, a part-time drummer and full-time hawker of nail varnish and hairnets at the funfairs.