Material Girl

Scene III: History

After twenty minutes and a series of fearful moments and with still no sign or news of Dolly, I wonder if there has been some kind of problem; if she has thrown a tantrum on learning of my lack of theatre experience, or is upstairs leading a drunken conga across the stage, or has Gavin pinned to a wall somewhere, teaching him her version of living. Just then somebody begins knocking a tune on the door – tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap … pause … tap tap … I recognise it as the Tapioca song from Thoroughly Modern Millie. I love musicals. Everybody in a musical is so in love with life itself that they keep bursting into song.

When I was very little and Mum had housework to do on rainy afternoons, she used to sit me and Richard in front of BBC2 to watch the likes of Calamity Jane, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Hello Dolly, or Thoroughly Modern Millie. She said she thought them far less harmful than violent cartoons starring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe that were showing on the other channel. Richard would be bored within minutes and sit in the corner scribbling with crayons or banging things. I’d get annoyed at the interruption, but not enough to turn off the TV. After about twenty minutes Mum would wander in with a bottle of polish in her hand and say, ‘Oh I’ll just watch this bit for five minutes’ as the seven brothers high-kicked at a barn dance, or Julie Andrews sang ‘Babyface’, then she’d settle down on the sofa. After a couple of minutes, when I was certain she was staying put, I’d get up and go and sit next to mum, curling up on the sofa beside her. She’d tuck me under her arm and stroke my hair as she hummed along to the songs and the rain poured down outside, flooding the holes in the driveway, and Richard scribbled joyously on his paper – and then the walls – in the corner.

I shout ‘Come in’ but the tapping continues, so I trip to the door and throw it open. Tristan Mitra practically falls through.

‘Tristan?’

‘Make-up!’ he exclaims with a beam. I smile back at him. ‘Why were you tapping the Tapioca song on my door?’ I ask.

‘What better song to tap?’ he asks, and because I don’t have an answer we stand in what could be an uncomfortable silence, before it is mercifully shattered by Tristan exploding with laughter, a false falsetto laugh that catches us both off-guard.

‘Are you looking for Dolly?’ I ask him, straightening my skirt, ruffling up my hair.

‘Not at all, not one bit. I was looking for you! Looking at you. You really are quite gorgeous, but then you know that. Of course you know that, what beautiful woman isn’t aware of the effect she has on the people around her, but is it a curse as well, I wonder? Does it leave you slightly bewildered, Make-up, when somebody isn’t quite as impressed with you as you think they should be? So much so that it has you reaching for the lipstick and the diet books?’

‘I’m sorry, Tristan, I don’t think I remember the question …’

He waves his hand, it isn’t important.

‘I thought you might want me to fill you in on the theatre, and Dolly herself, before the old monster descends.’

He turns his hands into claws, makes his teeth into fangs, and pretends to walk down some stairs. He looks like he is attempting the Thriller dance. I don’t know how to react and he laughs again, hard and loud like a punch in the air.

I think he must have found those uppers.

‘That would be helpful, Tristan, if you wouldn’t mind, if you have time. I really don’t know much about this theatre stuff at all, or Dolly, and I feel that I should …’

Tristan moves into the little room and suddenly it feels crowded and claustrophobic, what with the lilies and the velvet and the cards, and Tristan as well, who seems to be everywhere all at once. He is half the size of Gavin, but twice the presence. I tuck myself away in the corner by my make-up box, but he wanders over and stands in front of the brushes laid out on the table, appraising them seriously.

‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke … and … mirrors …’ He selects a cheekbone brush of fine hair and, with closed eyes, sweeps it down the length of his nose.

Opening his eyes slowly he turns to face me.

‘So, The Majestic Theatre.’ He gestures around him with a sweeping motion of his arms. ‘Well. I always say that if you’re going to fill a gap you should fill it completely. Let’s start at the beginning.’ He taps the end of my nose with the brush delicately, and then steps back to appraise his work.

‘The Majestic Theatre on Long Acre, Covent Garden, was commissioned in 1880. Queen Victoria instructed that somebody build a “beautiful building to fill an ugly space, and quick!”’ he says, doing a fair impression of the Queen’s low, moneyed voice, while simultaneously his eyebrows tango and his chin tucks into his neck to signify an old lady’s multiple chins. ‘But it was twelve spiteful years in the making. The first of those years was spent attempting to evict the tramps and drunks and whores who lived on the intended site, a sprawling old hat factory, wrenched from the family Hobson – hat makers for three centuries – after William Hobson the ninth dabbled with opium to ease the pain from his arthritis and became joyfully addicted. Lucky bastard.’ Tristan smiles and circles the make-up brush on my cheek softly and slowly as if to aid concentration.

‘Of course, the family didn’t realise before it was too late that their profits and their business were going up in smoke – ha! So, ignored by the bank, which had more pressing concerns in India and America, Hobson’s hat factory became three floors of filth and sin. But the drunks and the tramps and the whores are the most resilient of us all, Make-up, clutching on to life, so far down that there are no rules, getting by because not getting by is the graveyard. Hobson’s hat factory was their home, and there’s no place like home. They kept coming back. And who can blame them?’

Bored with the cheekbone brush, Tristan replaces it on the side and addresses the counter as he searches for a new and exciting tool.

‘Each night they were herded up and horded out with horns and whistles and truncheons and punches, to allow the necessary preparations for the following night’s demolition. But by midday they were grubbily sneaking past the hired security, or getting them drunk on cheap vodka, or laid, or high! Wonderful, wonderful, ingenious! And so the process would begin again that night, with whistles and bells and punches, a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’

‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’

‘Research, Make-up.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’

‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eye-shadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.

‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.

‘Where was I?’ he asks.

‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.

‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’

Tristan widens his eyes.

‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.

‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’

‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.

Tristan nods his head theatrically.

‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “Charles Lee uses line with a conventional splendour.” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.

‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.

‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’

‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’

‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’

‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.

‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’

I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.

‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, and which had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a forest but Henry didn’t care. She had large pendulous breasts that sat heavily on her chest, ravaged by little stretch marks where the pendulums began to swing. This was Henry’s favorite spot – he would lay his head on those tears after six or seven minutes of furious drunken lovemaking that inevitably ended shamefully limp. He would weep quietly as she tickled his cheek with strands of her long, black, infested hair.’

‘Yuk,’ I whisper, grimacing.

‘Close your eyes and have some humanity,’ he says to me, as he sweeps a brush across my eyelids. ‘All of the money from The Majestic’s commission was quickly slipping away, spent on cheap sloe gin and night after night with Vanessa, who had got wise to the drunken architect’s feelings and upped her prices. But that’s women for you. And poor Henry was in love, helpless in the face of her inflation. When his pockets were finally empty he began stalking her late into the night, jumping clumsily out from the shadows, tripping over his drunken size twelve feet only to blow her a kiss and run away. Vanessa carried on whoring, Henry carried on behaving erratically, and The Majestic’s construction faltered as more plans were thrown on the fire. Finally, the foreman, frustrated by Henry’s absence from the site for five straight days, called his brother, Charles Lee, to report Henry missing. Henry was found three days later on the floor of an old boarding house in Hoxton, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other, and the original set of plans laying face up on his chest, dusted with blood. A single gunshot to his head had finished him off, or maybe it was Vanessa, or maybe it was The Majestic.’

‘Oh no, how terrible!’ I say, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand.

Tristan removes it and places it on my lap.

‘Wait, it gets worse. Charles Lee wiped the blood from the plans, accepted the commission to finish The Majestic for five times the fee that had already been paid to his dead brother, and reworked them. A strangely sober three-tier theatre was completed on Long Acre in 1892. It still had the curved lines of Henry’s original plan, shaped like a sympathetic woman, but the softer edges had been hardened, to ensure it stayed up when horses trotted past.

‘Unfortunately for the theatre’s investors the shows that had been scheduled to appear at The Majestic had long since found alternate sites, some of them enjoying splendid runs that had already come to an end! The theatre, although completed, stood empty for fifteen months. Then in 1893 Dickie Black and Leonard White of the Black and White Circus enquired whether the large, vacant, sad and lonely building on Long Acre with a flaking painted sign hanging over its curved entrance still had its entertainment licence, and whether it was for sale. The investors had just that week taken the expensive decision to have it demolished and the land sold on, but instead took a very reasonable price, and had none of the trouble of getting rid of the sad old girl.

‘Black and White immediately posted a huge red and gold sign below The Majestic that read, “Coming Soon! Black & White’s Freaks Circus of Passion, Politics, Fairytale and Violence.” Six weeks later they replaced the ‘Coming Soon!’ with a ‘Now Open!’. It became an instant hit with local workers, soldiers in from the docks, drunks and whores and commoners and thieves. Bearded ladies and midgets galloped around the stage nightly, drinking their way through every show, spraying their audience with whiskey and ignoring the fights and the flatulence, laughing and shouting and swearing at the audience and each other. The performances became more and more debauched, full nudity was de rigueur by the time the police moved in one sticky summer night in 1899, closing the act and the theatre down for breaching public decency laws and open acts of pornography.

‘Black and White hotfooted it to Venice rather than face the pornography rap, plus a second and more sinister charge of attempting to breed freaks by mating them. The Majestic stood cold and lonely again through two punishing winters.’

‘No, Tristan,’ I put my hand up. ‘Stop it now. You are making it up. Nobody breeds freaks,’ I say, shaking my finger at him reproachfully.

‘Oh, Make-up, so naïve. They still do it to this day in some of the southern states of America.’ Tristan nods his head at me convincingly.

‘Shut up, no they don’t, you are being ridiculous.’ I stand up but Tristan pushes me back down onto my stool.

‘Make-up, I’m not finished. And who has done the research, you or me? And who wants to look like a fool in front of Dolly Russell, perhaps the last true Hollywood starlet, when she asks you what you know about theatre?’

‘I can just say some stuff about plays and things. I’ve read some … Arthur Miller,’ I say, thankful that I could remember the name of an American playwright.

‘And the cartoon section in the Sunday Times as well, Make-up? Come on now, sit down, you need to know this.’

Tristan is obviously enjoying himself.

‘But don’t you have stuff to do?’ I ask, exhausted.

‘Yes. This. Now, in March 1901, looking for a venue to stage his dancing act The Sabines, Pierre Christophe Magrine, a French businessman who had made a name for himself as a slick mover amongst his contemporaries, and the chorus girls if you get my gist, bought The Majestic as a venue for his style of evening entertainment. On the day the renovators removed the boards from the entrance, triumphantly kicking the door down, an evil stench seeped out. Covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, swiping at their watering eyes, they weaved their way to the back of the stage, following the smell as it became increasingly passionate, leading them finally to a small locked cupboard, big enough for a chair and a mirror and a shelf. Evil curiosity made them break that door down too, and a dozen well-fed screaming rats hurtled out across their feet. The workmen found the bearded lady decomposed in her dressing room. She still sat stiffly on a small chair in front of a mirror that had been smashed. By the streaks of blood on the glass it was fair to say that punching her reflection had been the dying act of a circus freak. The floor of the theatre was littered in rat droppings, and the walls were stained sticky and brown with cigarette tar, but The Majestic was cleaned up again.’

‘She killed herself because she was ugly?’ I ask, appalled.

‘Not just ugly, Make-up, a freak.’

‘But lots of women have hair on their faces, most girls wax, or laser, or whatever …’

‘Not back then, Make-up. Back then it made you a freak, and freaks don’t get married and have kids and get loved back.’

‘Yes they do, that’s an awful thing to say! You don’t just love somebody because of the way they look …’ I admonish him, slapping away the brush he’s been running up and down my nose.

‘Hush, Make-up. No lies in here please, let me finish my story. The Sabines – feathered, sequinned and high-kicking – remained at the theatre for nine years before Magrine set sail for Hollywood and the moving pictures. By this time The Majestic had established itself as a popular venue for light entertainment. Magrine sold the theatre on to a fresh set of investors, and a new management board was established. A series of light comedies played throughout 1910 and 1911, decadent and fun and attended mostly by lower middle-class workers, but disaster struck in 1912 when a discarded cigarette in a props cupboard sparked a blaze that had, by the time the firemen arrived, gutted the entire front and back of stage. All sets were destroyed, as was the curtain and the boxes. The roof had substantial fire damage, as the heat had crept quickly up the walls, and the building was judged to be unsound unless the top tier was pulled out. One unusually mild September night in 1913, The Majestic went from holding a spectacular one thousand seats to a mere six hundred and forty-three. Some of the bigger bitches of the time suggested that “The Majestic” was far too grand a name for a two-tiered theatre, and that it should be changed … But after an extensive renovation that lasted five years and employed the art deco style so popular in Paris at the time, although in clumsy contrast to the front of house, The Majestic, still known as The Majestic, reopened in 1918.’

‘Ta da!’ I say. ‘And then they showed some plays, and then it was Dolly Russell’s turn, and then …’

‘Stop it. I’ve nearly finished.’ Tristan glares at me.

‘Do you promise? I feel like I’m back in my history A-level,’ I say.

‘But weren’t they good times?’ he asks.

I think about history class, sitting next to Helen, flirting with Simon Howells across the room over textbooks filled with black and white pictures of war.

‘Yes, actually,’ I admit with a shrug.

‘Good. Then learn something new. The Majestic became known for its musical theatre, staging 267 performances of No, No, Nanette before it transferred to The Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus. And although The Majestic fared well in the Twenties with numerous Noël Coward productions, nothing ever seemed to really take off. The Majestic just couldn’t get a hit. It became known amongst actors and crew as a “warm up” theatre, with shows that sold reasonably but rarely sold out. It was then that The Majestic earned its nickname, in theatre circles, as The Bridesmaid. For example …’ He takes a step back and strikes an affected pose.

‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “What’s next for you, darling?”’

He jumps a foot and turns to face the space he has vacated.

‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “I’m starting rehearsals next month for Noël Coward at The Bridesmaid, darling.”’

A jump. ‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “Where were you hoping for, darling?”’

Jump. ‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “The Apollo. Damned shame. Maybe next year. Drink, darling?”’

He stands still and straightens his now-crooked glasses.

‘A faulty oil lamp started the blaze that ravaged the old girl again, in 1931. It swept through The Bridesmaid like fleas in a halfway house, killing two tramps who slept under the sympathetic curves of the front entrance each night. The theatre was left for dead for two years, occasionally sighing and groaning to let Londoners know it was still there. She was past her best, charred and black with soot, damp from fire hoses, with rotting carpets and rats, the terrible rats, infesting her again, chewing at her insides. A sad and lonely old Bridesmaid, hoping for a little luck and love.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that, I have luck and …’ My words trail off.

‘Make-up, don’t be so sensitive. The Majestic was spectacularly reopened on the third of September 1939! Ta da! Of course, the timing was a little unfortunate, and her big night was dampened spitefully by the speech made by Neville Chamberlain at eleven fifteen that morning –

“This country is at war with Germany … now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against …” Still, the old girl was up and running again just in time: some nights they acted by candlelight, some nights they acted in the dark, which was more than could be said for other prettier theatres who dropped their curtain at the first sound of a siren.

‘Ivor Novello musicals trilled though the Forties and Fifties, with their beguiling talk of kingdoms of love and beauty and starlight, stepping lightly aside for the more sombre, stern faces of The Postman Always Knocks Twice and A Streetcar Named Desire as the Sixties drew in. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore first opened in 1968.’

‘With Joanna Till?’ I ask, feeling, finally, like I can contribute – I read that name in the press pack.

‘That’s right. Well done. Gold star. Initially it was a far from controversial or even noteworthy opening. Lacking the public pulling power of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Streetcar, the critics called it a “strange little play for the strangest little theatre in the West End, and surely only being staged as a vanity project for Joanna Till.”’

‘Joanna Till had been one of the first studio stars in her youth, an international beauty with platinum curls that framed a pale complexion and a perfect cupid’s bow permanently painted on her delicate lips throughout the 1920s. By the time she came to play Mrs Goforth, the dying monster at the heart of the play – who has seen off numerous husbands and is now a recluse in an Italian villa dictating her memoirs to her young and beleaguered assistant – Joanna was an alcoholic who ate barely one meal a day, and whom few saw out of make-up. But an old beauty still sang in her eyes, reminding those close enough that she was once the greatest prize to be won, the cup on the table, the lady in the booth at the front of the mile-long “dime for a kiss” queue. The memory of what she had been haunted all of her movements. Her fingers danced and flickered nervously about her face, trying to cover every line simultaneously, attempting to distract any audience from the age that had set in and which now clung to her once-beautiful features like an evil moss to smooth pebbles in a lake.

‘One of the only members of the company that she allowed close was her young co-star Edward “Teddy” Hampden, who played the impertinent but handsome visitor Chris, and who, at thirty-five, was twenty-eight years Joanna’s junior.’

‘Good for her!’ I mutter, but Tristan ignores me.

‘Joanna could be heard giggling from behind her dressing-room door in the afternoons, after matinee and before evening. She rarely spent any time alone, aside from “the half” – the half an hour before each performance when she would shoo away her young admirer and compose herself. But even then, occasionally, he was allowed back in. The controversy murmured in every nook of The Bridesmaid. Teddy shot Joanna through the heart, six hours after she finished their affair over a cajun salmon lunch at the Savoy.’