The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Read online

  Though largely ambivalent about the birth of a fifth daughter, the Signor was overjoyed at the arrival of his first son, and when his own pantomime, The Wonders of Derbyshire, was cancelled due to the indisposition of one of its principal performers, he hit the town hard, boasting to anyone who would listen what a good omen it was to have a child born so close to the new pantomime season and how he would have him on stage as soon as he could walk.

  In theatrical terms at least, Joe was born at the dawn of a new era. On 18 January, when the child was exactly one month old, David Garrick slipped into a coma and died two days later with the parting words ‘Oh dear’. It was an inauspicious end for one who had spent his life at the heart of the Shakespearean maelstrom, though the funeral more than made up for any lingering sense of anticlimax: its long cortège snaked its way from his home at the Adelphi to its final resting place at Poets’ Corner, attended by aristocratic pallbearers and a host of distinguished mourners that included Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. The Signor was not invited.

  For the first few years, Rebecca and her child lived alone in the warren of slums parcelled between Clare Market and the royal theatres, an area peopled by the dancers and supernumeraries who toiled in the vast theatrical mills. It was a particularly noxious part of town, with a perpetual smog, ‘like a great round cloud attached to the earth’, and was notorious for prostitution and the rows of sagging houses that crowded in on one another so closely that the puddles in the street rarely dried.

  The Signor remained elusive, maintaining a number of addresses and probably women too. In Lambeth, he kept a house with a garden that he decorated in winter with artificial flowers, as well as another lodging on the Islington Road, opposite the gates of Sadler’s Wells. His principal residence, though, remained the house on High Holborn with Anne Perry. He was certainly there during the Gordon Riots in the summer of 1780, eight days of anti-Catholic violence that caused more destruction to London than that suffered by Paris during the entire French Revolution. With a sectarian mob descending on Holborn, smashing and looting any property that did not prominently display the words ‘No Popery’, the Signor was in trouble: he’d failed to hang a sign and the rioters were certain to know he was a foreigner and, most likely, a Catholic. With the kind of nerve only a true comedian can possess, he waited until they were almost at his door, before sticking his head from the second-floor window and, ‘making comical grimaces’, called out, ‘Gentlemen, in dis hose dere be no religion at all.’ There was a tense moment before the crowd burst out laughing, gave him three cheers, and moved on to set fire to the Bank of England.

  It was to be one of Anne Perry’s last memories of her ‘husband’, for on 13 September that year, Rebecca delivered another of the Signor’s children, a second boy they called John Baptist in memory of Iron Legs. With thoughts of a profitable theatrical dynasty dancing around his head, the Signor unsentimentally dropped Anne and Henrietta to move in with Rebecca and his sons.

  It was an equivocal promotion for Rebecca, but with it came a marked improvement in her standard of living and the chance to depart the verminous rooms in Clare Market for a well-appointed apartment in Little Russell Street with ‘three or four female servants’, and that once-essential symbol of eighteenth-century urbanity, now become rather gauche, an African footman named Sam. Joe’s Memoirs seek to portray it as a largely happy household, while remaining silent on the topic of his father’s polygamy and his own illegitimacy. Neither do they make any mention of any siblings save John, which is particularly intriguing as the Signor’s will suggests that Rebecca had a third son called William, born around 1786. William remains a mystery, as absent from all other records as he is from the Memoirs, even though he, Joe and Mary Blagden’s daughter, Catherine, all performed together on Boxing Day 1789, billed as ‘the three young Grimaldis’.

  Many of these omissions were required by the standards of decency expected of nineteenth-century memoirs, and wherever Joe finds himself unable to recount the truth, he offers homely platitudes, such as the assertion that the Signor ‘had the reputation of being a very honest man, and a very charitable one … never known to be inebriated’. But even the veil of Victorian decency could not completely silence the Signor’s fury, and Joe confesses that he was as violent, neglectful and overbearing with them as he had been with Mary Blagden and the children of the Royal Circus, being especially fond of lifting them by their hair, throwing them into corners, and promising beatings, which he would then defer for weeks and sometimes months. ‘This was ingenious,’ recall the Memoirs, ‘inasmuch as it doubled, or trebled, or quadrupled the punishment, giving the unhappy little victim all the additional pain of anticipating it for a long time, with the certainty of enduring it in the end.’

  Joe found it hard to extricate himself from his father’s madness, which inevitably set him so far apart from his peers that he became a target for the taunts of local children, especially when he was forced to walk every Sunday to his grandfather’s house in Bloomsbury in the Signor’s bizarre idea of Sunday best – an emerald green jacket and satin waistcoat embroidered with large flowers, matching green breeches, and a laced shirt and cravat, with ruffles at his wrists and buckles on his knees and shoes, the ensemble completed with a jewelled cane and a cocked hat that gave him the appearance of a particularly prosperous leprechaun. Invariably he’d attract a barracking pack of children ‘a street or two long’, and though he claimed to enjoy the attention, it was an early introduction to an alienating dynamic that would persist throughout his life: a figure of ridicule apart from the crowd.

  By far the Signor’s most oppressive attribute was the long shadow of morbidity he cast over his family, thanks to an acute obsession with death and, in particular, being buried alive. Every idle moment would find him poring over a smeared and grubby copy of The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, a book by the French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow that purported to be a medical manual for ascertaining the difference between real death and mere death-like trances, but was little more than a series of horrific anecdotes. Pale and trembling, the Signor would let out long, heartsick moans as he read of the young lady of Auxbourg who, believed dead, was interred in the family vault, until, some years later, ‘one of the same Family happening to die, the vault was open’d and the Body of the Young Lady found on the Stairs at its entry without any fingers on the right hand’, gnawed down for food; or the unfortunate woman of Basingstoke, discovered by boys who heard screams emanating from the vault beneath their school and came across her having clawed her face into ribbons, ‘to that Degree, that notwithstanding all the Care that was taken of her, she died in a few hours in inexpressible torment’.

  Though many of his superstitions had taken root in the fairgrounds of his youth, where forains relied on a polytheistic array of talismans and saintly intercessions to preserve them from breaking their necks, the Signor’s fear of being buried alive was not entirely irrational. In 1785, the Morning Post reported that Giuseppe Grimaldi had been found dead in Brighton, sitting upright in his chair at breakfast. In fact, he had simply slipped into unconsciousness, something he did ‘three or four times a year [when] he eats himself into a second sleep, and he appears as dead’, possibly as the result of a diabetic condition. More irrational was his conviction that he would die on the first Friday of the month. The comedian Jacob de Castro recalled being told of a recurring dream in which the devil appeared to the Signor to inform him he was coming to collect him on that day, though, infernally, omitted to specify which month. As the first Friday of each month came, the Signor kept an anxious vigil in a room he had filled with clocks, blanched with terror until daybreak, whereupon he let out a relieved sigh and said, ‘Now I am safe for anoder month.’ It was a fear he immortalised in a piece of pantomime business known as the ‘skeleton scene’, a skit that remained popular for more than a century after his death, in which ‘the clown depicts in a most woefully comic manner all the horror and alarm which may be supposed to seize upon
a nervous person when alarmed by the vagaries of a visitant from the world of spirits’.

  The boys were not preserved from these horrible fantasies, for, haunted by phantoms and sunk deep in ghoulish accounts of last-minute resurrections and scratched coffin lids, the Signor frequented the neighbourhood graveyards, speculating aloud on the causes of death as his reluctant children scuffed along in his wake. The church of St Clement Danes, a mere spit from their lodgings, was the favourite destination for these morbid peregrinations, and in particular, the grave of the actor Josias Miller. ‘Honest Joe Miller’, read the headstone, ‘was a tender Husband, a sincere Friend, a facetious Companion, and an excellent Comedian.’ Looking down at Miller’s grave, the Signor must have wondered how much of this epitaph, if any, could be truthfully applied to himself.

  * A popular turn on the Pont-Neuf was ‘Big Thomas’, a tooth-puller who accompanied his operations with jokes, impressions and a performing monkey.

  † Some accounts of Joseph Grimaldi’s ancestry claim his great-grandfather was the Neapolitan opera singer Cavaliero Nicolini Grimaldi. Nicolini, whose several triumphs included creating the title role of Handel’s Rinaldo, enjoyed five years of unprecedented popularity in London, thanks to the frenzy for Italian opera that swept through the capital at the beginning of the eighteenth century. ‘Every limb, and every finger, contributes to the part he acts, insomuch that a deaf man might go along with him in the sense of it,’ wrote Joseph Addison in 1710, having found himself utterly enraptured one winter evening by his graceful physique and the ‘greatness of air and mien [that] seemed to fill the stage, and at the same time commanded the attention of the audience with the majesty of his appearance’. While there is a strong temptation to find a hint of Joe in the singer’s command of mime and striking voice, until now biographers have failed to notice that Nicolini was a castrato, who, like all of his kind, had been unmanned by the Church as a boy. He retired to a luxurious Venetian villa in 1730, childless and rich.

  2

  THE WIZARD OF THE SILVER ROCKS

  … here more than once

  Taking my seat, I saw (nor blush to add,

  With ample recompense) giants and dwarfs,

  Clowns, conjurers, posture-masters, harlequins,

  Amid the uproar of the rabblement,

  Perform their feats. Nor was it mean delight

  To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds;

  To note the laws and progress of belief;

  Though obstinate on this way, yet on that

  How willingly we travel, and how far!

  William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

  SADLER’S WELLS OPENED ITS DOORS at five o’clock on Easter Monday 1781 for the first night of the new season. By the time the curtain went up at six, the house was packed with noise and expectation. The bill included ‘the inimitable Mr. Saunders’, standing on his head on top of a drinking glass balanced on a swinging rope; tumbling by Placido Bussart, a gymnast who had once amazed Marie Antoinette by somersaulting over a file of eighteen grenadiers with upright bayonets; and a tightrope act by Paulo Redigé, the ‘Little Devil’, who was conducting a torrid affair with another of the evening’s main attractions, ‘La Belle Espagnole’, a busty Spaniard who danced the fandango on a tightrope while accompanying herself on the castanets. Acrobatics were followed by a ‘serio-comic, prophetic, political, musical piece’ entitled The Medley; or, a Masque in a Masquerade, and a pantomime called The Wizard of the Silver Rocks; or, Harlequin’s Release. Somewhere in the midst of this mish-mash of variety that was the speciality of the Wells, Joseph Grimaldi made his full theatrical début at the age of two and a half years old.

  It was not the first time Joe had been before an audience: six months before, the Signor had made good on his promise to have his son on stage as soon as he could walk, bringing him out at Drury Lane for his ‘first bow and first tumble’. Tonight was a different proposition, dancing with one of his half-sisters in a fully rehearsed and choreographed routine. His performance was flawless. It had to be: any nerves he felt were entirely subsumed by the thought of his father’s wrath should he set a foot wrong.

  As the eldest son, Joe had the dubious honour of being the most closely tutored of his father’s protégés. Like most theatrical parents, the Signor saw little point in allowing his son to go idle when he could be learning a trade and earning a wage. By the age of two, Joe was already used to long days being drilled in the skills necessary for a career in harlequinade: lessons in mime, dancing, gymnastics and buffoonery, to which he brought his abundant gifts, an expressive face and ‘eloquent legs’. Eight months after his Sadler’s Wells début, he had already progressed enough for the Signor to try him in his very first pantomime, and on Boxing Day 1782, Joe made his début as Little Clown in Drury Lane’s The Triumph of Mirth; or, Harlequin’s Wedding. It was a double début for the Grimaldis as, with the exception of one solitary performance in 1778, it was the first time the Signor had taken the role of Clown – all the more remarkable given that it was one of the most physically demanding roles in the theatre and he was in his seventies. Thus, Drury Lane saw both its youngest and oldest ever Clowns take the stage on the same night, father and son dressed as exact replicas of each other, Joe mimicking the Signor’s actions like an impish familiar, a routine he managed so well it produced a rare flush of parental pride in the old man, who boasted of such ‘great doings for a mere baby ting’.

  Also in the cast was Carlo Delpini, a legend of pantomime who had arranged all the tricks for the piece. Delpini was king of the transformation scene, the instantaneous conversion of one object into another at the hand of its hero, Harlequin, the prince of mutability and cipher for the age of revolutions that saw the potential for change in everything. Harlequin achieved his effects through the expert timing of the stagehands, who released catches on hinged flats, letting them drop to reveal new objects painted on the reverse side. Alternatively, canvas flaps or holes might be cut into trick backcloths, allowing Harlequin to leap into a fireplace or through a mirror, while semi-transparent sheets could be painted to change entire scenes, depending on whether they were lit from the back or the front.

  Delpini was well known to the Grimaldis, having been an apprentice of Iron Legs back in the 1740s and, for years, a regular fixture of the London theatres. His influence on Joe would prove enormous, as the young Grimaldi would soon begin his own experiments in tricks and transformations, although for now Delpini just seemed like a younger version of his father, strong and athletic, outspoken in his heavily accented English, and more than a little insane. Most uncannily, Delpini cherished superstitious fears about death and was particularly sensitive about the number eight, being convinced that he would die in 1788. Inculcating a fertile sense of doom had clearly been an important part of Iron Legs’s tutelage.

  In fact, Delpini wouldn’t die for another thirty years, although it wasn’t for want of trying. He was just as reckless as the Signor and constantly running risks. ‘Delpini fears nothing; he runs all hazards,’ wrote The Times, as if to say, ‘Catch him while you can.’ Several weeks later he was gravely injured in The Death of Captain Cook, a serious pantomime performed at the Haymarket. At a royal fête in Frogmore, he was nearly killed when a Pierrot levelled a musket at him and accidentally let it off in his eye. The Prince of Wales was horrified, and declared the accident had entirely ‘dampened the remainder of the day’s entertainment’. He had been inordinately fond of bald little Delpini ever since he had commissioned him to supply entertainments for his coming-of-age ball at the Pantheon. He had also failed to pay the bill, thereby granting the pantomimist the great honour of being bankrupted by a prince.

  Together, the luminous cast saw to it that The Triumph of Mirth was successful enough to survive until almost the end of March 1783, a respectable run for the day, which meant that young Joe was often in the theatre until well past midnight. When he wasn’t needed, the Signor placed him in a corner of the green room, commanding him to be st
ill and silent on pain of death, although his compliance rarely lasted longer than the time it took his father to leave. This was especially the case when there were actors around to tempt him with a toy or a guinea in exchange for a trick – gifts his father would later lock away with the characteristically morbid warning, ‘Mind, Joe, ven I die, dat is your vortune.’

  At these times, the all-too-familiar threat of a beating was no match for the new and intoxicating lure of laughter, to which Joe was becoming increasingly alive. Given his background, it was hardly surprising that these comedic instincts should emerge as, besides the relentless training, he’d spent his young life immersed in the Signor’s madness, where arbitrary justice and irrationality had led him to understand the world as a shifting plane of ambiguities, void of the anchors of reason and authority a parent conventionally provides. The result was an acute sense of the ludicrous that acted as a sanctuary. When Joe performed, it wasn’t merely the attention he was seeking, or the beaming delight he felt at making adults burst into loud guffaws, it was that feeling of being taken away by laughter, laughter that was both a giddy lightness and tumbling mudslide, an invisible hand leading him to absurdity and smothering him in its inimitable suchness. It was, wrote Henry Downes Miles, one of Joe’s first biographers, in a typically Victorian phrase, ‘what opium is to the Turk … the “life of life’’’, and Joe was instantly hooked.

  Coaxed by a coin, he would jump up and run through a full repertoire of faces and tumbles that could only be stopped by warning of the Signor’s return, whereupon he’d dart back to his corner and look cowed and obedient. Soon, the extravagant contrast between these exuberant pranks and feigned servility became the best part of the joke, and the green room kept itself amused by shouting ‘Joe, your father’s coming,’ just to enjoy the transformation. This often backfired, as it did one night when the Earl of Derby, frequently backstage as he conducted his affair with the actress Elizabeth Farren, offered Joe half a crown if he’d throw his own wig on the fire. Joe did it without thinking and the room went up in a blaze of laughter that lasted as long as it took the company to notice the Signor standing in the doorway. Incandescent, he fell on his son, delivering several sound thwacks before the Earl could intercede by proffering the smouldering wig on the end of a poker.