England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (8 page)

Nearly a quarter of servants in Emma's time left their position within a week to three months. Servants could be sacked for the slightest mistake or sign of illness, or simply because the family needed to save money or was leaving town. One magistrate estimated that around the time of Emma's arrival in the capital, there were more than ten thousand domestic servants without a position. There was no unemployment insurance, and even if she had been a good worker, there was no guarantee of a reference. Without a recommendation or the money to return home, the single female servant had no choice but to head for the areas where the poor lived and try to avoid falling into prostitution or crime.

Thirteen-year-old Emma already had the energy, beauty, and self-confidence that would carry her far, but such qualities had a darker underside—an addiction to glamour, a hot temper, and a desire to please by winning attention. There was no way that her life of drudgery could continue: she was too pretty and ambitious. On leaving the Budds, equipped only with a few dresses and one or two trinkets from admirers, Emma headed straight for the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden, the most sensational spectacle in London.

CHAPTER 8
Powder and Paint

E
mma, as a squire later described her, was “designed by Dame Nature for the Stage.”
¹
First, however, she had to find somewhere to live. She fled to her mother, who lived in the St. Giles area, near modern-day Oxford Street, right in the middle of the city
²
Paying up to threepence a night, London's new workers slept sometimes twenty to a room and between three to eight to a bed in windowless, rat-infested cellars and garrets. Every drafty crevice was stuffed with paper or rags, and the rooms were pitch dark, even at midday. Going out was as risky as staying in, since ragged, cunning humans awaited in every corner, looking for something to steal, and even a clean dress on a woman would do. Dozens died every week, too poor to do anything more than buy a few drops of gin and sprinkle them on a rag to suck, while stray dogs and rats picked at the sewage around them. Emma was living in squalor, gathering flea bites on her shins, and she had no plans to hang around. She was soon trying for a job at the oldest and most prestigious theater in London.

Her chances of becoming an actress were slim. Hundreds of girls queued at the stage door every month, but few were allowed to audition. Many actresses came from theatrical families, and most began on the provincial stage or as dancers. Quick, clear, and sweet speech was more important than beauty, and Emma's voice was raw and untrained. She had no patron to smooth the way by bribing theater owners or supplying her with contacts and clothes. Most aspiring actresses ended up working as waitresses, barmaids, or prostitutes. Emma did have one advantage over the others: she could read. She also had spirit, vital in the rough and competitive world of the theater, as well as sturdy health, experience in service,
freedom from parental control (no concerned mother would allow a thirteen-year-old to serve as an actress's assistant), and youth (her salary would be very low). Emma was probably removed from the audition line and put to work as maid to Mrs. Linley, the wardrobe mistress.

Drury Lane, on the site of the modern-day theater, was big business. Only one other theater—Covent Garden—could stage full plays, and since London had only one opera house and no other regular theater for ballet, comedy, musicals, or indeed any type of entertainment, over two thousand eager patrons crammed into Drury Lane every night. In the season of 1778-79, when Emma arrived, her new home employed 46 actors, 32 actresses, 13 dancers, and 6 singers, as well as a full orchestra and about 150 support staff: seamstresses, hairdressers, carpenters, painters, animal handlers, chorus masters, and choreographers, along with temporary painters and workmen when needed. The yearly profits often hit over £6,000, once the costs of around £40,000 had been paid. The architect Robert Adam had renovated the building in the 1770s by adding a graceful classical façade and decorating the walls in sumptuous gold leaf, while improving the stage lighting. Beneath the graceful, gilded ceilings were terrible rivalries and factions. Emma had arrived at a theater in crisis.

In 1776, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at the age of twenty-five, bought a half share in the theater from its actor-manager, David Garrick. A brilliant playwright, Sheridan was an incompetent manager. Playwrights claimed he never answered their letters, and he forgot to pay his employees. Most of the time, as the actress Kitty Clive wrote, “everyone is raving against Mr. Sheridan.” He appointed his family to the plum positions. His pompous father became artistic director, and he made his father-in-law, Thomas Linley, musical director, putting his mother-in-law, Mary Linley, in charge of costumes and props. Infuriated by their autocratic and inexperienced new managers, performers defected to Covent Garden and provincial theaters. The servants also left, and so, as Emma found, there were new jobs on offer.

Mary Linley was forty-three. Four of her twelve children had died in infancy, and her husband, Thomas, set the remaining eight to work singing at public recitals. Crowds admired their eldest daughter, beautiful, talented Eliza, while they mocked her greedy parents. In his hit play of 1771,
The Maid of Bath,
Samuel Foote poked fun at how Mary had tried to force seventeen-year-old Eliza to marry a widower of sixty, a disaster averted only when Sheridan whisked the teenager to France and later married her. Initially, Mary flourished as her son-in-law's wardrobe mistress.
By the time Emma arrived, she was wilting, mourning Thomas, her eldest son and favorite musician, who had drowned in a boating accident in August. She was also concerned over her daughter. Now retired from singing, Eliza was only twenty-one but weak from bouts of tuberculosis and a series of miscarriages. Her father told her husband that if he touched her, it was a "nail in her coffin," and Sheridan left her to pine in their house in Great Queen Street. By the time Emma arrived, he was besotted with the beautiful actress Mary Robinson, known as Perdita. Grieving for Thomas and angry to see her daughter humiliated by her husband's infidelities, Mrs. Linley was embittered and almost impossible to please.

No needlewoman, Emma was Mary's errand girl. Since the stock dresses were shabby, there was vicious competition for the good costumes. Even the most talented actress struggled onstage without a gorgeous dress in velvet or silk and jewels for attracting light to the face. As one actress complained, a performer "may as well be dead as not in the fashion."
³
Mary had the difficult job of implementing Sheridan's wardrobe cutbacks. He wrote in his notebook, "New Performers and old ones on new salaries to provide their own white silk stockings." Players often tore their stockings on the splintered scenery and had to replace them at the cost of a shilling per pair, as well as buying their own gloves, all out of a salary that could be as low as £1 a week. The performers were livid about Sheridan's cutbacks and blamed Mary, declaring her so mean that she would cut off the "flowing robe of a tragic performer to gain for herself the covering of a footstool, or the materials for a velvet pincushion."
⁴
As Mary's messenger, Emma would have taken the heat of their anger.

Emma's contact with the actresses was an education. As one theater biographer gossiped, the stage employed "many Ladies and Gentlemen respectable now, whose previous situations in life would have precluded them the possibility of mixing in virtuous society."
⁵
Few actresses led perfectly virtuous lives. Many became the mistresses of wealthy men in return for money, clothes, and patronage; the rest tended to have affairs with other actors. Although Mrs. Frances Abington had been a courtesan for the celebrated madam Charlotte Hayes, she was "more indebted to her vivacity than to her beauty," and so by 1778 she had become the theater's lead comedienne.
⁶
Thanks to her famed sense of style on and off the stage, she was also employed as a fashion consultant, called in by the social elite for emergency fashion disasters and panics before balls and weddings. Margaret Cuyler, another comedienne, was dubbed one of the "Most Fashionable Votaries of Venus" (i.e., a courtesan) by the
Rambler's Magazine
of 1783 but maintained a successful career. The third leading actress, Elizabeth Farren, only three years older than Emma, was acting on provincial stages before the age of ten (she was so poor that the other actresses lent her clothes to wear onstage), and she made her debut at Drury Lane at about the same time as Emma arrived. After a glittering career, she married the Earl of Derby and was even selected to walk in the procession of the Princess Royal at her wedding. Mary Robinson capitalized on her connection to the aristocracy in a different way: she began an affair with the Prince of Wales when he saw her play Perdita in
The Winter's Tale,
and then extracted a substantial pension from him. Emma learned an important lesson from her new mistresses: a dubious background did not prevent a woman from entering the most eminent society.

As Emma watched from the wings, she realized that acting was more difficult than she had thought. Players had to work hard, accept low pay, and battle against other actors trying to undermine them or seize their position. Only the stars were paid if absent because of illness or if the theater closed (after the death of a royal, they were shut for two weeks). New plays were rehearsed in only a fortnight, and casts had to rehearse several plays at the same time. One actress might have up to forty different parts in a season of 150 nights, and many also worked as singers and dancers. They needed excellent memories, for it was difficult to hear the prompter. Forgetting a line was not only ridiculed by the crowd but heavily fined by the management. The competitive environment bred venomous jealousy, and some even attacked or, like Peg Woffington, stabbed their rivals onstage. They all wanted to outdo each other with fine clothes—and they besieged maids such as Emma with demands and threats.

In the morning, the theater's maids were kept busy running errands or helping the other servants with cleaning or watering the trees in front of the stage. Rehearsals of up to four pieces began on the main stage at ten, while the musicians and dancers also practiced. Wearing coats and boots because the theater was unheated, the actors read their lines by the dim light from the upper windows. At two, stagehands began preparing the stage for the performance. The actors devoted the afternoon to fitting costumes, learning lines, drinking, gossiping, and complaining about their wages before dining at four. Throughout it all, Emma and the other maids sorted costumes and parried the actors' teasing and the actresses' commands to fetch, carry, or help with an alteration.

The backstage area that maids had to negotiate was much larger than the area devoted to the front of the house. Behind the maze of ladders,
stairs, dingy corridors, and ramps used by animals and carriages, there were offices, areas for sewing and painting scenery, and, because playbills always advertised new scenes and dresses, two dozen or so storage rooms overflowing with backdrops and props. The hundreds of wax candles for the chandeliers were stuffed into the cellar. There were twenty dressing rooms, and those who could afford it had their own personal dresser and maid. The rest used and bullied girls such as Emma.

The actresses' dressing rooms were chaotic. Chalk lines divided the women from each other, and each woman had a candle and a small mirror. In air thick with carmine, powder, stain removers, gin, and perfume, women undressed while others rehearsed their lines. Aristocrats came backstage to meet the stars, and actors wandered in to practice. Linley and his minions arrived to explain last-minute changes to the set or casting. Some women petted lapdogs or nursed their babies, and the newest actors were sick from nerves. Amid all the confusion, maids repaired torn bodices or unraveled hems and shooed away unwanted admirers or playwrights.

No fine lady could dress herself, and much of Emma's job was to assist the dresser by pulling corset laces tight and buttoning hooks. Actresses piled their tresses high to be in the fashion and to be better seen by the crowd. Their foot-high confections of powdered and decorated hair required daily maintenance, and Emma would have tied up stray strands, re-powdered sections, refreshed flowers, and picked out the dirt. Her own hair was unpowdered, luxuriant chestnut but unfashionably naked. After a frantic round of dressing in the airless heat, the actresses sauntered to the green room. The maids remained, trying to tidy the tangle of dresses before they returned.

A different play was acted every night of the week except Sundays, when the theaters were closed. There was dancing and singing in between acts, and the evening would usually finish with a vaudeville performance or a knockabout farce. When Emma arrived, the theater had been open since September 17, and a big hit was the bubbly musical
The Camp,
about a young woman who disguised herself in male dress to follow her soldier lover to war. Since the most sexually enticing part of a woman's body was considered to be her lower leg, dramas in which an actress wore male breeches and stockings were inordinately popular, and the crowd-pleasing
The Camp
treated the audience to the vision of Robinson, Farren, and Cuyler onstage together in breeches. Emma would have seen or at least heard Sheridan's hit,
The School for Scandal,
as well as William Congreve's
The Way of the World,
in which Abington took the role of the sparkling heroine, Millamant;
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,
and
The Tempest;
and
The Beggar's Opera and Jane Shore.