The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Read online

  With Iron Legs slipping into the Belgian sunset, his son Giuseppe had already emerged as a formidable talent. Giuseppe had been born on the road in either France or Genoa some time between 1710 and 1716, and entered a long theatrical apprenticeship almost as soon as he could walk. Iron Legs was a demanding master, expecting long hours and high standards of his son, and inflicting brutal punishments when he failed to meet them. Neither was the despotism of his methods offset by the comforts of warm maternal love, as what little glimpse we have of Giuseppe’s mother, Catherine Grimaldi, reveals a woman with a face like a millstone, a ‘squat, thick, strong figure … endowed with so much agility and strength, that she could break chandeliers’ as well as Iron Legs himself. This intimidating bruiser, who went everywhere with a brace of loaded pistols, was so similar in appearance to her husband that many believed her to be his mother, sister or daughter. ‘So equivocal was the lady’s character’, wrote Thomas Dibdin, the author of Mother Goose, ‘that no one has been able to ascertain the precise degree of relationship.’

  Parental incest would certainly explain Giuseppe’s many peculiarities. Like his parents, he was short, stocky and strong, described as having ‘more the agility of a roebuck than a man’, with a face built for gurning and licentiousness. His deep voice rolled with a thick accent, churning French, Italian and English into a curious pidgin that many listeners found hilarious. They also had cause to fear him: he had a fierce temper and was prone to dark moods and unpredictable bursts of violence.

  Like his father, Giuseppe served his time at the Paris fairs before making his way to England. The date of his arrival is not exactly clear. Joe’s Memoirs put it at 1760, when it is said he arrived as part of the retinue of George III’s bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in whose household he was employed, like his grandfather John Baptist, as a dentist. In later life Giuseppe would often refer to this period, announcing his exalted patronage in advertisements placed in provincial newspapers prior to his appearance on regional tours. In actuality, his royal service seems to have been short-lived and less than auspicious. A popular story (refuted by Joe) tells how he found the Queen’s constant toothaches annoying, until one day, having received yet another summons to St James’s Palace, he marched angrily into her bedroom, prised open the royal mouth and, ignoring her protests, pulled out the offending tooth with a single, unceremonious yank. He was lucky to be merely dismissed.

  Whatever the truth of his royal service, Giuseppe couldn’t have come to England in Charlotte’s bridal entourage, as by January 1758 he was already performing at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, accompanied by his formidable dancing mother, who had emigrated with him and remained a part of his household until her death in 1773. Giuseppe only danced at King’s twice before being wooed by David Garrick, the legendary actor-manager of Drury Lane, who kept an eye on foreign theatricals and had heard of Grimaldi via contacts in Paris, who assured him he was ‘sublimeetdivin’. Garrick employed Giuseppe as Drury Lane’s maître de ballet, training the dancers and choreographing comic dances, whose names – ‘The Cow Keepers’, ‘The Italian Gardener’, ‘The Millers’ and ‘The Swiss’ (in which he injured himself) – invoked the spirit of Iron Legs and the clamour of the fairs. The tone was perfect for the sort of afterpieces that ended a long night of tragedy and farce, and Giuseppe found himself amply praised in the London press, one critic going so far as to proclaim him ‘a man of genius’. Like his father, he was capable of extraordinary leaps, reaching such heights that it only seemed to be a matter of time before he did himself a serious injury. As the London Chronicle’s review of ‘The Millers’ put it:

  Grimaldi is a man of great strength and agility: he indeed treads the air. If he has any fault, he is too comical; and from some feats of his performing, which I have been a witness to … those spectators will see him, it is my opinion, with most pleasure, who are least solicitous whether he breaks his neck or not.

  Keen to exploit his popularity, Garrick conscripted him into the pantomime in the role of the venal old codger, Pantaloon, for which he received even higher praise, the press describing him as ‘the best Clown we ever saw’.

  With success came rewards: a handsome salary of six pounds a week that put him among the chief earners of the day, and lucrative engagements teaching the children of wealthy families to dance, his most exalted pupils including the young Duke of York and his princess sisters. Then in 1763, he was given the position of maître de ballet at the summer theatre at Sadler’s Wells, Islington.

  As Giuseppe’s public reputation grew, so he began to find himself increasingly at odds with the close-knit theatre community who didn’t know what to make of the strong and savage comedian they nicknamed ‘Grim’, ‘Old Grim’, ‘Grim-All-Day’, or, most often, simply ‘the Signor’. With a manner that seemed constantly to provoke, his relationship with Garrick, in particular, began to sour. It was inevitable, for the great Shakespearean maintained a barely concealed contempt for pantomime, which, while not as extreme as that of The Times correspondent who saw it as ‘an alarming symptom of a nation’s degeneracy’, echoed the opinion of the journalist John Corry, who held its popularity to be proof of the increased imbecility of contemporary audiences, who favoured their ‘glittering pageants’ to literature, ‘which by filling the imagination … prevented the toil of thinking’.

  There was some substance to his argument, as the all-powerful ton, those addicts of pleasure and intrigue who presided over the world of fashion, had set clear limits on how much of Garrick’s art they were willing to endure. They needed something frivolous to help them digest their nightly helping of edification, and were led in their tastes by no less a person than the monarch, George III, who never enjoyed a night at the theatre as much as when moved to tears of laughter by a clown who swallowed carrots whole.

  Garrick remained resolutely allergic, reacting furiously to a mischievous rumour that claimed he’d once appeared as Harlequin at Covent Garden. Accordingly, it was common knowledge that the best way to annoy him was to accuse his acting of being ‘pantomimical’. Professional jealousy was partly to blame – he hated anyone even daring to impinge on his fame, and had once had to leave a puppet show as the applause for Mr Punch was making him sick – but there was also a fair dash of xenophobia in his view. Fondness for pantomime, this miscegenetic Franco-Italian cuckoo, threatened to smother his beloved Shakespeare, an anxiety he had frequently verbalised in entertainments such as Harlequin’s Invasion (1759) and The Theatrical Candidates (1775), which presented it as an immigrant force silencing native genius. Yet, as manager, there were profits to consider, and it was necessary to be pragmatic. Pantomime, as Garrick was reluctantly forced to agree, was good for business. ‘If you won’t come to Lear or Hamlet,’ he wearily conceded, ‘I must give you Harlequin.’

  Such concessions only made it harder to deal with the Signor’s increasingly obnoxious behaviour, and if Garrick had ever borne any respect for Giuseppe Grimaldi, by 1769 it had gone for good. It was the year of Garrick’s Jubilee, the three-day festival in Stratford-upon-Avon he had planned as a devotional hymn to Shakespeare but which had ended as a muddy and expensive fiasco. The Signor had been cast as Falstaff in a pageant of Shakespearean characters that never happened due to torrential rain, though he still insisted on being paid. The dispute dragged on for almost two years, with the Signor persistently pressing his claims, and Garrick fending him off, until he finally snapped, berating the Italian as a ‘Tartar’ and an ‘impudent fellow’, and writing to his brother that he was ‘ye worst behav’d Man in ye Whole Company and Shd have had a horse whip’. His opinion was confirmed when Giuseppe Grimaldi marched into Garrick’s office, dropped his breeches and saluted him with a face that had been freshly painted on his arse.

  Sowing backstage rancour was Giuseppe Grimaldi’s speciality. A dispute with the scenic artist Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg ended in an impromptu duel, the Signor wielding his violin bow and the painter his brush, leaving Grimaldi
with a daub on his face that ‘looked as if he had cut his head into two parts’. De Loutherbourg, an amateur faith healer and acolyte of the shadowy magician and con-artist Count Cagliostro, seethed with an intensity that prophesied doom: ‘As they are both sprung from great families,’ wrote a witness, ‘it is expected this affair will not end so comically.’ But backstage spats were nothing compared to his behaviour during his brief tenure at a new venue, the grandly styled Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy, which opened its doors on Great Surrey Street (now Blackfriars Road) in 1782.

  The manager of the Royal Circus was Charles Dibdin, one of the eighteenth century’s most prolific writers and composers, who was hoping to cash in on the vogue for equestrian entertainments, exhibitions of trick riding and daring horsemanship, which, remarked one Continental visitor snottily, ‘a certain class of Londoner cannot see too often’. The star was the dashing Charles Hughes, who, accompanied by his beautiful and quixotically named daughter, Sobieska Clementina, thrilled audiences by flipping backwards and forwards from the backs of three galloping horses and vaulting over them forty times in succession. The equestrian shows were to be followed by lavishly staged spectacles performed by a company of all-singing, all-dancing children that included such future stars as Maria de Camp and Maria Romanzini – fifty of them, ‘of both sexes, from six years old to 14,’ wrote the London Chronicle, ‘intended to act speaking pantomimes, operas, medleys, drolls, and interludes’.

  Dibdin hired the Signor to train the children, but it was a disastrous choice. Grimaldi started scheming almost immediately, weaselling his way in with the backers and driving a wedge between them and the manager, despite earnest protestations to Dibdin’s face that he ‘conceived himself under the highest obligations’ and ‘would rather die’ than do anything against his interest. This was nothing compared to his treatment of the children, whom he subjected to regular beatings and sadistic punishments, which included locking them into a specially built cage that was pulled forty feet into the fly-tower and left to dangle for hours above the stage. When it was full, he put others into a set of stocks he’d brought to the theatre, although they were too big for most of the children, who simply slipped out their legs and wrists and started ‘playing at top or marbles’ until the Signor came to set them free.

  Even in an age that believed strongly in the improving qualities of corporal punishment, Grimaldi’s methods were extreme. Dibdin was constantly called away from business to deal with complaints from angry parents until eventually the local magistrates intervened and ordered ‘a compleat investigation into the morals of the place’. Dibdin appeased them, only to have them return almost immediately after Grimaldi choreographed a comic dance for the children called ‘The Quakers’, which was so libellous and potentially obscene that the usually docile Society of Friends got a court injunction to have it stopped. Legal action proved unnecessary, as the wrangling and disarray that had plagued the Circus from its first day meant that they failed to secure the requisite licence and were forced to shut down only six weeks after opening. The order came in the middle of a performance, and so upset the rough and ready Lambeth crowd that a riot was averted only when the magistrate ran away. Hughes and Dibdin were immediately dispatched to Bridewell prison and the Royal Circus fell apart.

  On his release, Hughes turned his back on the affair, working in England only briefly before taking his family to St Petersburg, where he found favour with Catherine the Great. Giuseppe Grimaldi, meanwhile, threatened to sue the proprietors for four hundred pounds he believed he was owed ‘for teaching the children’. But the threatened lawsuit never came to pass, possibly because he was forced to lie low in order to avoid the attentions of the Reverend Rowland Hill, a vicar who accused him of sending the Circus children out to steal the lead from the roof of his new chapel across the road.

  Dibdin never forgave Grimaldi, and blamed him for everything, convinced that he had been on a demonically inspired mission to destroy him. Even twenty years later, he retained an untempered spleen for this ‘practised Italian’, recording in his memoirs that his ‘nauseous history would sully the foulest paper’ and insisting that,

  he knows, in himself, exactly, the degree of merit he actually possesses; and, in the same proportion that you give him credit for any thing beyond it … you become his dupe … the milk of human kindness which you afford him, mixing in him with the malignant qualities of his mind, turns to slow poison; which, unseen, he spits upon you as it may, occasionally, serve his purpose.

  Reports of the Signor’s erratic behaviour from 1769 onwards might be explained by the onset of syphilis, a disease he had contracted two or three years earlier. There were ample opportunities for sex in his profession, though the Signor indulged to extreme lengths. His particular taste was for gamine dancers, especially those who had barely passed puberty. As maître de ballet, he was surrounded by attractive young women, and in the feudal world of eighteenth-century theatre, where maestros ran their departments like personal fiefdoms, sleeping with the dancers was an ancient right.

  One of these mistresses, Mary Blagden, was a girl he had met in his initial season at Drury Lane when he was in his mid-forties and she just thirteen. Shortly thereafter, she became the Signor’s wife. They married in 1762 at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, after the Signor had sought and received consent from her father because she was still a minor. The marriage flourished at first, and over the next five years they had four daughters: Mary, baptised at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 19 January 1763, Isabella Louise, baptised at St Paul’s on 14 October 1764, Margaret Charlotte (b. 1765) and Catherine (b. 1767). But though she was young and fruitful, Mary Blagden’s own testimony reveals the Signor to have been a cruel and neglectful spouse.

  Many years later, Mary Blagden would take the unheard-of step of initiating divorce proceedings against him, citing systematic abuse that had gone on for more than sixteen years. According to the petition, he ‘began to behave cruelly towards her’ almost immediately after their wedding. Just days after the birth of their first child, as she lay nursing, he attacked her without provocation, beating her badly and pulling her around the floor by her hair. The attacks became habitual and, having beaten her up, he would lock her in the bedroom for hours at a time, attacking his daughters should they dare to intercede. At mealtimes, he threw knives, forks and plates at her, inflicting injuries so bad she was unable to dance at the theatre. To physical cruelty, he added psychological torture. At night, he consorted with prostitutes, hanging around in brothels until four or five in the morning, at which time he would go home and wake his wife and tell her ‘of the several acts of debauchery he had on the preceding nights been guilty of and would then without the slightest provocation very much abuse and ill-treat her’. There were also some long-standing affairs with the young dancers and acrobats at Sadler’s Wells, including Isabella Wilkinson, a handsome tightrope dancer and virtuoso of the ‘musical glasses’, who turned his head with her fur-lined shorts and ability to play the cymbals, violin, pipe and tabor while standing in mid-air. Having dallied with her, he moved on to her sister Caroline, from whom he most likely contracted syphilis.

  Despite falling to the disease, the Signor still insisted on having sex with his wife, then pregnant with their fourth child, and, inevitably, she became infected. In 1770, he abandoned them all, setting up house on his own in Chelsea and returning only twice a week to order dinner for himself and his servant before sending the scraps to Mary, ‘who chiefly lived in the kitchen of the said house, by reason he … constantly locked up and took with him the keys of the several other rooms’. During one of these visits, he beat her so badly she was blind for ten days, while on another, he imprisoned her in her bedroom for six weeks, commanding his mother to stand guard at the door with her ever-present pistols.

  Somehow, Mary Blagden managed to escape, taking refuge with her own mother while living in constant fear of her husband’s return. Yet by this time the Signor had lost interest in his
family and was living with a woman named Anne Perry, who had taken to calling herself ‘Mrs Grimaldi’. In spite of her airs, Anne Perry had no claim to exclusivity, for the Signor was having another affair with a ‘short, stout, very dark’ dancer named Rebecca Brooker. Rebecca had been dancing at Drury Lane since the age of three, encouraged by her father Zachariah, a tough Cockney butcher who kept the Bloomsbury slaughterhouse, and made money on the side by renting her out to Garrick as an ‘occasional fairy’. In October 1773, with a view to setting her up in a career, Zachariah bought his daughter an apprenticeship with the Signor, placing her on the roster of apprentices known as ‘Grimaldi’s scholars’ and handing over a substantial fee in return for ‘exercises in music, dancing, oratory, etc.’.

  When the Signor came across Rebecca he added an additional clause to her contract that went far beyond the usual demands for cash and obedience. Henceforth, she was to renounce the company of men and be prohibited from ‘contracting herself in matrimony or committing any other acts whereby the said … Grimaldi shall lose the benefit of the said Indentures’. Having legally ensured her chastity and marked her off as his personal property, Giuseppe Grimaldi set about seducing her. Rebecca was less than fourteen, the Signor at least fifty-five.

  From now on, the Signor divided his time between the house he shared with Anne Perry at 125 High Holborn, and Rebecca Brooker’s tiny room in Stanhope Street in the parish of St Clement Danes. In 1778, both women fell pregnant and gave birth within days of each other. Anne Perry had a daughter on 16 December they named Henrietta Marguerite, and two days later, as Drury Lane held a benefit performance for the City of London Lying-in Hospital, Rebecca Brooker gave birth to a son they called Joseph Grimaldi.