The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Read online

  At the height of the Regency, more than twenty thousand Londoners attended the theatre every night, a figure that climbed considerably once the numbers visiting the capital’s various concert halls, pleasure gardens and exhibition rooms were taken into account. Theatre was a shared experience, a place of national communion that addressed a surprisingly democratic cross-section of society, which, in its eating, drinking, smoking, fighting and heckling through long nights of drama, was as diverse and lively as any public square or marketplace.

  Drama itself was in the midst of a revolution. Following the death of Britain’s premier actor-manager, David Garrick, in 1779, the theatrical world engaged in rapid change, dismantling the strictly policed divisions between comedy and tragedy that had governed drama for almost a century and experimenting with new forms, new attractions and new types of shows. Plays increasingly made way for show-stopping spectacles enabled by technological advances that allowed battles to be enacted, sieges to be staged and palaces set on fire. They were experiments encouraged by indulgent audiences incredibly open to novelty, at least until they felt some invisible line had been crossed, at which point they were liable to riot. Until that point was reached, however, they sat happily through plays starring dogs, elephants, prepubescent children and lifelike men-o’-war floating on tanks of real water. The proscenium was a window through which Londoners enjoyed the pleasures of dominion, a world perceived through imperial eyes – abundant, exotic, various and yielding.

  London was central to both Grimaldi’s personal and professional identity, for despite his Italian heritage, he had been born and bred in the city, a one-time resident of the slums that multiplied in the shadow of Drury Lane, and the airy suburbs of Islington and Pentonville, semi-rural hamlets set apart from the smog by the green acreage of Spa Fields. Grimaldi’s clown was a Londoner in hyperbole: channelling its voracious consumerism and infusing his clowning with its manic energy, flamboyant theatricality and love of show. Described by one pantomime arranger as a ‘half-idiotic, crafty, shameless, incorrigible, emblem of gross sensuality’, Grimaldi’s clown was cunning, covetous and childlike in his wants, an uncensored mass of appetites and an embodied accumulation of unconscious desires. Everything tempted him, calling him forward and enticing him to touch, tinker and meddle, with an impetus that overrode all considerations, especially the law.

  Pressed against each other in the bulging metropolis and closely monitored by their political masters, who feared the growing rise of Radicalism and dissent, Londoners revelled in Grimaldi’s lawlessness, watching him commit a litany of crimes that outside the theatre would have been rewarded with transportation or death. ‘Robbery became a science in his hands,’ wrote one commentator, recalling with relish the way he would pilfer a leg of mutton and, with ‘bewitching eagerness’, extract handkerchiefs and pocket watches with ‘such a devotion to the task’ that he ‘seemed imbued with the spirit of peculation’.

  Though abundantly gifted and publicly adored, Grimaldi’s private life was marked by tragedy and depression. A profound melancholic who suffered from hereditary madness, he had survived a traumatic childhood at the hands of a deranged father, only to see his successes marred by incapacitating bouts of paranoia and insecurity. A naturally self-deprecating man, he was naïve in business and careless with money, and when an economic downturn left him struggling, he found himself incapable of earning a living, having been crippled by the leaps and falls that had so delighted his audience. Being forced to retire in the prime of life was doubly cruel, as the stage was the only place in which he was spared his anxieties. He was ‘petulant, and suffered under nervous irritation and morbid sensibility’, wrote Henry Downes Miles, a sportswriter who followed the clown’s performances religiously. ‘We never met with a performer so nervous: he had no self-reliance until he was in the heart of his mystery, and then he had no fear.’

  Grimaldi’s hopes devolved to his only child, a boy also called Joseph, whom he personally tutored in the art of clowning. But the second Joseph Grimaldi rejected both his parents and his calling, and as his own signs of psychological instability began to develop, he ran wild, heaping shame upon his family and linking his famous name to insanity and dissipation. A mythology quickly attached itself to these unhappy circumstances, an effect of the new celebrity culture and the brooding fancies of Romanticism that constantly speculated on the source of their subjects’ talents. Grimaldi’s comic brilliance became indivisible from his troubles, a necessary burden that lent his clowning substance and credence to the idea that comedy was somehow the by-product of misery, and that clowning somehow concealed an ineffable sadness. It has been an abiding myth. Comedy demands sacrifice, and Joseph Grimaldi was about to become its first martyr.

  PART ONE

  [1778–1800]

  1

  THE WONDERS OF DERBYSHIRE

  Shou’d Harlequin be banish’d hence,

  Quit the place to wit and sense,

  What wou’d be the consequence?

  Empty houses, empty houses.

  David Garrick, The Theatrical Candidates (1775)

  WHEN THE ENGLISH NATURALIST Martin Lister visited the fashionable Paris fair of Saint-Germain, he was surprised to find ‘a very Pit or hole’ sunk eight feet into the middle of the street. Stepping down twelve perilous steps, he was sucked into a press of people, all trying to squeeze through the same narrow doorway and into the fairground while hoofs and cartwheels clattered dangerously close to their heads. Spat out the other side, he emerged into a cacophonous market, covered with a huge timber roof and criss-crossed by claustrophobic alleyways, so uneven that he was sure he would have fallen, were it not for the ‘vast croud of people which keep you up’.

  Travelling at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Lister had come to experience for himself an event that Parisians had been celebrating since the Middle Ages, a boisterous island of pleasure and intemperance that appeared in their city for six weeks every year between February and Palm Sunday. Stuffing themselves in by the thousands, ‘helter-skelter, masters with valets and lackeys, thieves with honest people. The most refined courtesans, the prettiest girls, the subtlest pickpockets’, fairgoers browsed through an infinite array of merchandise, stocked up on pills, spices and exotic preserves, shopped for wigs, and bought locks for their houses, barrels for their cellars, linens for the boudoir and mirrors for their toilette. Braced by Armenian coffee and curious philtres, they splashed out on luxury goods, jewellery and Moroccan leather, lace, perfume, porcelain, full-size sculptures and oil paintings, and gorged themselves on an assortment of sweetmeats and pastries. When not shopping or eating, they enjoyed an illegal flutter at dice, cards or skittles, or sojourned to one of the many ‘cabarets’ that sold wine at the front and girls at the back. Suitably refreshed, they perused the many curious diversions that filled one end of the yard like a clearing-house for entertainments. Bearded ladies battled for attention next to sword-swallowers and ingenious automata; gladiators fought combats alongside mountebanks and balladeers; and theatre troupes hoped to lure an audience into their ramshackle booths with a free farce before they could be distracted by a rhinoceros or a firework display.

  To the merchants who manned the stalls, the attraction of the fair was commercial, as within its walls they were able to offer their goods free from the monopolies and restrictions that ordinarily governed city trade. The same went for the many performers, known as forains, who came from all corners of the kingdom and beyond to take advantage of the lack of jurisdiction of ‘official’ theatre companies like the Comédie-Française, whose royal patents gave them the right to suppress unlicensed theatrics. Yet even when they could make themselves heard above the blare of music and drunken yells, ‘serious’ drama was rarely on the agenda. Forains specialised in novelty and spectacle, all that was brash and never-before-seen, performed by a versatile troupe of dancers, pantomimists, acrobats and funambulists – tightrope walkers who dealt in death-defying tricks, such as spinning in mid-air wh
ile hanging from one foot, or standing on one leg and playing the violin.

  The closest approximation to drama they offered were farces in the style of the Italian Commedia, a traditional form of improvised comedy where stock characters chased, cursed and cozened each other all the way to predictable ends. Dismissed by one Parisian critic as ‘little more than a type of deformed concert’, their plots were thin excuses for rude jokes and physical horseplay. An example was Gueulette’s Le Marchand de Merde, a play that tells the story of the oafish valet Gilles who each morning defecates on the doorstep of a young gentleman called Léandre. Dismayed by his ripe dawn deliveries, Léandre enlists the help of canny Arlequin, who, posing as a wealthy marchand de merde, convinces Gilles that he is literally sitting on a gold mine. Duped, Gilles sets himself up in business, enthusiastically filling a barrel with his merchandise, which he offers around town with the cry, ‘Buy my shit, it’s fresh,’ until an outraged apothecary attacks him with a stick.

  The broad comedy of Le Marchand de Merde pleased the raucous and easily distracted crowd, though a subtler vein of humour could also be detected running through its satire of unscrupulous Parisian commodity-culture and its desire to get rich quick. This was typical of a continual game of cat-and-mouse the forains played with the paranoid agents of the Bourbon police, exploiting the licence of the fairground to voice grievances that otherwise went unspoken in the repressive atmosphere of the ancien régime. Italian performers in particular had a reputation for sailing close to the wind, and the fairs were full of them as a consequence of their expulsion in 1697 from legitimate Parisian theatre business for scurrility.

  All of Europe agreed that Italy produced the most talented and sought-after comedians, a fact Lord Shaftesbury, writing in 1700, attributed to the ‘Spiritual Tyranny’ of that country, where the repressive activities of the state led its people to express themselves in comic fashion: ‘’Tis the only manner in which the poor cramped Wretches can discharge a free Thought,’ wrote Shaftesbury, as ‘the greater the Weight is, the bitterer will be the Satire. The higher the Slavery, the more exquisite the Buffoonery.’

  If it was exquisite buffoons you wanted, then Grimaldi’s family had them by the cartload. A group of travelling forains, they had connections to Malta and Genoa and even claimed distant kinship to the royal house of Monaco, although their true origins had long been lost in the trail of dust that followed them from town to town. Their patriarch was Joe’s great-grandfather, John Baptist Grimaldi, who was both dancer and dentist, pursuits that were far from incompatible in an age when renowned surgeons performed their operations in theatres to paying audiences.* His daughter, Anne, another dancer, travelled with him, as did his son, also called John Baptist, though better known by his Italianised name, Giovanni Battista. Completing the family were Giovanni’s partner, Catherine, and their son, Giuseppe, the boy who would one day father Britain’s legendary clown.†

  The Grimaldis were typical of their kind: eccentric, fearless, superstitious and crude, they took their chances where they found them, and professed a pragmatic morality of the road. In a trade that was characterised by crabbed and filthy playing spaces, official harassment and a peasant audience, they at least toiled at its upper end. Giovanni was even something of a star. A comedian, pantomimist and sauteur (a kind of gymnast specialising in incredibly high leaps that were achieved by bending one leg at an oblique angle and coiling it low to the ground before jumping explosively into the air), he eventually grew tired of the family business and sought to make it on his own. Naturally, this meant the Paris fairs.

  He and Catherine are recorded appearing in 1740 at Saint-Germain as members of the Grande Troupe Étrangère, performing in the pantomimes Dupres, or Nothing is Difficult in Love, and Harlequin and Columbine Captive. The visit was a success, for in 1742 he was back, having been invited to perform at the largest and most prestigious theatre at Saint-Germain, the semi-permanent and almost-respectable Opéra-Comique.

  It was here during a performance of Le Prix de Cythère that the Grimaldi family first leapt to national prominence. According to legend, the show was visited by the grand figure of Mehemet Effendi, ambassador of the Ottoman Sublime Porte. The ambassador, a vain and preening man, announced his presence by taking the box nearest the stage and, excited at the prospect of performing before such an eminence, Giovanni bet his colleagues that he could jump as high as the chandelier that flanked the box. He won his bet with his first leap but, in doing so, kicked the chandelier with enough force to smash it. One shard found its way down the throat of the laughing Mehemet, while a second hit him in the eye. Blind, choking and humiliated, he was quick to complain of the indignity he had suffered at the feet of a mere jester, and demanded that Grimaldi be punished before the full Court. A public act of contrition was accordingly arranged, only for Giovanni to seize it as a further opportunity for self-promotion by lacing his apology with such a dash of fairground double-talk that he reduced the courtiers to hysterics, heaping further dishonour upon the injured man. When news of the affair reached the people of Paris, they delighted in the audacity of this son of the marketplace who had ridiculed the loathed Turk, and adopted him as their new hero, conferring on him the heroic nickname ‘Jambe de Fer’, or ‘Iron Legs’, and singing his praises in a popular squib:

  Hail, Iron Legs! immortal pair,

  Agile, firm knit, and peerless,

  That skim the earth, or vault in air,

  Aspiring high and fearless.

  Glory of Paris! outdoing compeers,

  Brave pair! may nothing hurt ye;

  Scatter at will our chandeliers,

  And tweak the nose of Turkey.

  And should a too presumptuous foe

  But dare these shores to land on,

  His well-kicked men shall quickly know

  We’ve Iron Legs to stand on.

  But Iron Legs’s new-found celebrity was short-lived. Over-confident in his popularity with Court and canaille, he misjudged their temper and performed something so scandalous at his next appearance that he was immediately arrested and thrown into the Bastille. What he did, exactly, is unrecorded but, given the infamous licence of the French aristocracy, it must have been particularly bad.

  It was a mercifully short stint in prison, and after his release, Iron Legs made himself scarce, leaving France and arriving in London in July 1742. London was a popular destination for Continental performers, whom it attracted with high fees and the promise of celebrity. But Iron Legs had a further incentive, as his father had settled there in the mid-1730s. Now semi-retired, John Baptist ran a successful business as ‘Surgeon Operator for the Teeth’ in Martlett Court, Covent Garden, while also making occasional appearances as Pantaloon to the Harlequin of the celebrated John Rich. Reunited with the old man, Iron Legs begged to be introduced to Rich, who in turn offered him work at Covent Garden theatre, first as Scaramouch in L’Antiquaire and later in a number of dances. Yet the comparatively staid air of an English royal theatre disagreed with him: only four months after his arrival, Iron Legs was already planning to leave, though not before first devising a scheme to fund his passage back to Europe. Henry Angelo, the proprietor of a famous London fencing school that doubled as a clearing-house for gossip, remembered being told the story of Iron Legs’s sudden departure:

  Rich, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, who was ever ready to catch at anything that was novel, or of pantomimic tendency, listened with rapture to Grimaldi, who proposed an extraordinary new dance: such a singular dance that would astonish and fill the house every night, but it could not be got up without some previous expense, as it was an invention entirely of his own contrivance. There must be no rehearsal, all must be secret before the grand display in, and the exhibition on, the first night. Rich directly advanced a sum to Grimaldi and waited the result with impatience. The maître de ballet took care to keep up his expectations, so far letting him into the secret that it was to be a dance on horse shoes, that it would surpass anything befor
e seen, and was much superior to all the dancing that was ever seen in pumps. The newspapers were all puffed for a wonderful performance that was to take place on a certain evening. The house was crowded, all noise and impatience – no Grimaldi – no excuse; at last an apology was made. The grand promoter of this wonderful, unprecedented dance had been absent over six hours, having danced away on four horse-shoes to Dover.

  Having successfully defrauded Rich, Iron Legs’s career entered a serious decline. Nothing was heard of him for several years, until he eventually turned up in Flanders in the company of a stage-struck bookseller he had duped into funding a troupe. Although he had added conjuring to his various skills, the venture met with constant ill fortune that culminated in an attack by bandits on the road to Brussels. Having been stripped and robbed, Iron Legs, the bookseller and Iron Legs’s mistress, ‘a Parisian lady of questionable character’, would have been murdered on the spot had not the lady thrown herself upon the brigands’ mercy and promised to become their collective wife in return for her lover’s salvation. They agreed, and departed with their prize, leaving the dejected comedian to tramp into Brussels alone, wearing the only thing he had left, a tattered Harlequin’s costume. By 1760 he was either dead or disowned: his father’s will, dated 11 March that year, neither mentions him by name, nor leaves anything to a son.