Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

It did not. The hand did not stop the knee; the knee started the hand. All that the attempt to end the action achieved was to provide the row of open-mouthed examiners with the even more peculiar spectacle of a crumpled young man and what was left of his crumpled sandwiches being shaken ever more wildly by a wildly shaking left leg. It looked a bit like a dance, and a bit like an exorcism, and a bit like a fit, but it was definitely a disaster. When, eventually, his leg, and the rest of him, finally came to a halt, his sandwiches had showered the examiners in a mixture of shredded cheese and breadcrumbs, and his suit was in almost as bad a shape as his frazzled nerves.

‘Begin,’ he was told, and so, red-faced and reluctantly, he did: ‘Yes … Well … Um … To-to-to … er be … or not-not-not to … um … Yes, well … To be … Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? …’ He was well aware that it was already over, right there and then, but, somehow, he struggled on to the bitter end: ‘I should have thrown up my hands and run for my life,’ he would recall, ‘but beneath the panic lay that hard subsoil of determination, and so I stumbled and stammered and squeaked and shook my way through all of the three set pieces.’14

They thanked him. He thanked them. He went out. The next candidate came in. The grey day turned black.

Howard spent the train journey home slumped deep inside ‘an anguish of desolation and shame’: ‘I’d let everyone down: my mother, my headmaster, my schoolmates, Mary Hope – and myself. I was a complete and utter failure.’15 When he arrived back in Eltham, he found that he simply could not bear to face anyone, not even his mother, and so he went instead to a field at the back of his house, where he sat down in the long grass and started to sob. ‘Never before or since,’ he would say, ‘have I wept as I did on that day.’16

He stayed there for two blank and miserable hours. Eventually, however, once the sobbing had stopped and the tears had started to dry, a bright thought burst through the gloom. Perhaps, he reflected, he had not reached the end at all, but had merely taken a wrong turn. Sitting bolt upright, he then said to himself:

You’re a fool. A fool … You must have courage. Courage. The way you’re behaving is absolutely gutless … Look, you believe in God, don’t you? And you know that God seems to have given you talent. You feel that to be true … Now God is logical. He must be, otherwise life is stupid. Pointless. Without meaning … OK, perhaps RADA and straight acting aren’t for you. What then is the alternative?17

It did not take long for this characteristically brusque internal inquisition to summon up an acceptable response: ‘Comedy? Is that the alternative? If you’re not meant to be a great Shakespearean, are you meant to be a comedian? Is that it? … Why not try and see?’18

There seemed only one answer to such a question, and that was: why not, indeed? ‘I didn’t have anything to lose,’ he concluded, ‘except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’19

He got up, dusted himself down and walked home, where his worried mother had been waiting most of the afternoon for her son to return. When he told her tearfully about his terrible day, she just held him for a while and gave him a consoling kiss on the cheek. When, a little later, he hinted at his belief that his ‘calling’ was now, yet again, about to change, and that this time it was set to be a career in comedy, she simply assured him that she still had ‘an unswerving faith’ in the inevitability of his eventual success.20 Sensing how badly the fallen St Francis felt that he had already let her down, she did all that she could to discourage any further growth in guilt: ‘As long as you’re kind and decent,’ she stressed, ‘I don’t care what you do.’21

According to the neat dramatic myth engendered by the memoirs, what the 16-year-old Howard did next was to leave school (‘I’d betrayed the faith they’d had in me there: the Actor was now the Flop. No, I couldn’t go back’22) and find a job while he waited impatiently for the arrival of some kind of bountiful show-business break. The unromantic truth, however, is that he returned to Shooters Hill, subdued and semi-detached, and, reluctantly but dutifully, saw out the last two years of his secondary education.23 Although his academic studies never recovered (he would leave with only a solitary school certificate to count as a qualification), his actorly ebullience most certainly did: according to the fond recollections of one of his contemporaries,24 Howard managed not only to strengthen his reputation as a much-talked-about ‘character’, but also somehow contrived to ‘bring the house down’ with his portrayal of The Wall in the school’s 1935 production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

When, at long last, the day approached when he really was able to leave – at the start of the summer of 1935 – he intended to start scouring the local area for the kind of relatively well-paid but undemanding short-term job that would complement a young man’s pursuit of a career in comedy. Before, however, he even had the chance to commence such a fanciful plan, his father died, on 12 May, and all of a sudden Frank Jnr, at the tender age of eighteen, found himself elevated to the position of the senior male in the Howard household.

Out of desperation, he took a menial job as a filing clerk with a firm by the name of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at 37–45 Tooley Street in the East End borough of Southwark. The work was dull and the pay was poor (just £1 per week, which was meagre even for those days), and the only solace that Frank would find was within the walls of the nearby cathedral, where he spent most of his free time either sitting alone in prayer or sometimes listening to recitals.

He lived and longed for the evenings, when he could still feel, at least for an hour or two, that he was pushing on with his ‘proper’ ambitions: performing in local plays, pageants, concert parties, benefits, balls and revues – anything, in fact, that seemed to carry even the slightest scent of show business. He not only remained a keen contributor to the various productions put on by his colleagues at the local church, but he was also now an extremely active member of the Shooters Hill Old Boys’ Dramatic Society (where he was free to test his acting talents on slightly more challenging forms of fare).

Not even the playful evenings, however, could make up for the laboured days. As he sat there in Tooley Street, shuffling papers and watching clocks, Frank Jnr could feel himself turning slowly but surely into Frank Snr – another career clerk, another man without any discernible drive or dreams or pride, just going through the motions, just getting on with getting through life. It was demoralising – and it was made even worse by the man who was Frank’s boss.

As far as Frank Howard was concerned, the bluebird of happiness had never even come close to perching on one of Henry A. Lane’s sloping shoulders. With wounds from the Great War that had left him with a tin plate secreted in his head, a patch wrapped over an eye and a limp in one leg, he was no stranger, Howerd would say, to moods of ‘bitter malevolence’.25 The one in-house factor guaranteed to trigger the eruption of such moods, it soon became clear, was the blatantly bored and permanently distracted Frank Howard: ‘If a cup of tea stood ready to be spilled in his lap then I, in my clumsiness, spilled it. If a bottle of ink waited to be knocked over, I knocked it. He truly despised me and terrorised me, and the more sadistic his behaviour, the more of a gibbering idiot I became.’26

Lane was not the only one who found young Frank to be more than a fraction less than adequate. Most of his colleagues – noting his peculiar habit of suddenly making wild facial expressions in the direction of no one in particular, and his equally odd tendency to mutter, shriek and sometimes even squeak to himself behind the covers of a file – considered him slightly mad. The underlying reason for such eccentric behaviour was that Frank was actually spending the vast majority of each day’s office hours furtively studying his scripts (‘I simply had to,’ he later explained; ‘my nights and weekends were almost completely occupied with rehearsals and performances’27).

After ten weeks of trying to combine the day job with his multiple play jobs, Howard was tired, run-down and covered in a rash of unsightly boils. Something had to give, and it was no surprise what did. Thanks to the chronically distracted Frank, a large consignment intended for the United States of America ended up in the Republic of China, and a folder dispatched to Leningrad was found to contain, among other things, a programme for Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. Henry Lane snapped, and Howard was sacked.

After he had endured the humiliation of a fortnight on the dole, his anxious mother intervened. Knowing that one of the wealthy people for whom she now cleaned was a part-owner of the United Friendly Insurance Company, she asked for – and duly received – a favour, and a suitable position as a clerk was found for her son at the firm’s head office in Southwark Bridge Road. Frank had landed on his feet: not only was the pay (thirty shillings per week) a little better, but the hours were better, too: ten to six from Monday to Friday, with half-day shifts on alternate Saturdays. He was also greatly relieved to find that his new boss – a single woman aged about forty – was as kind as his old boss had been cruel (‘I think she fancied me,’ he would later claim28).

There was still not the slightest danger, however, of him ever wavering in his show-business ambitions and warming to his work as a clerk. He continued to pour all of his creative energies into his countless amateur performances, and even found the time, and the vanity, to form his very own tiny troupe – consisting of himself, his sister Betty, and one or two of their mutual friends – called Frank Howard’s Knockout Concert Party (‘the ego was in full flight again’29). This troupe went on to stage innumerable 21-sketch-long revues – all of them strictly for charity (Edith was still watching) – based on whatever Howard had time to write in the office and whatever he and the others found the wit and the will to improvise in front of the audience. They toured all of the scout huts, church halls and retirement homes in the Eltham area, carrying their homemade scenery, costumes and props along with them on the tram, and did far more good than harm.

Even when he was part of a group, however, Howard always remained, in spirit, an incorrigible solo artiste. His instructions to his fellow-performers tended to take the following self-serving form: ‘Now you, Betty, will go on the stage and say something. Anything. Then I’ll say something. Then Charlie here will say something. We’ll make it up as we go along – always remembering that we’re aiming for the tag-line … Which I will deliver!’30

Few talent contests in South London went ahead without the participation of Frank Howard. It was easy enough to execute: most of the old music-halls used to accommodate some sort of cheap and cheerful ‘Talent Night’ spot once a week on one of their bills, and all any amateur performer needed to do was to turn up, sign on and then try their luck. Such occasions were not for the faint-hearted – a bad act, or a good act that just happened to be having a bad day, would soon be loudly booed and crudely abused – but, for those with thicker skins or stronger dreams, these events were the places where hope would spring eternal, because, regardless of how awful it might have been on any one particular night, there would always be the promise of another week, another audience and another chance.

Howard, in spite of his notoriously pronounced susceptibility to stage fright, was one of those determined characters who kept going back for more. The first time, he walked on, delivered a comic monologue, and then walked back off again to the lonely sound of his own footsteps. The following week, he returned to try out a few impressions (the list included Noël Coward, Charles Laughton, Maurice Chevalier, James Cagney and Gary Cooper), but, once again, the act fell horribly flat. The week after that, he reappeared dressed like an overgrown schoolboy and proceeded to sing a novelty comedy song: that, too, sank like the proverbial stone.

One week, he even tried changing his name to ‘Ronnie Ordex’, but when that failed to change his fortunes, he promptly changed it back again, and then proceeded to try something else. He went on, and on, and on, into his early twenties, trying anything and everything that did not demand any great degree of physical dexterity. ‘I kept trying,’ he later explained, ‘because the utter conviction that I did have talent was stronger than the flaws of personality that crucified me when it came to an actual performance.’31

Not even an exceptionally humiliating on-stage experience at the Lewisham Hippodrome would shake this underlying faith in his own potential. It was during a talent night here – on a bill that boasted some of the biggest names (including the band leader Jack Payne and the crooner and stand-up comic Derek Roy) on the current Variety circuit – that Frank Howard discovered just what it really meant, in the cutthroat world of show business, to ‘die a death’ in front of a large live audience.

The root of the problem was the fact that, as the slot for new talent came straight after the interval, Howard was obliged to follow the comedian who closed the first half – and the comedian who closed the first half was Jimmy James. Soon to be dubbed ‘the comedians’ comedian’,32 Jimmy James was already widely admired as an inimitable performer, an inspired ad-libber and an exquisite timer of a line. With his woozily lugubrious looks (suggestive of a bulldog whose water has recently been laced with Scotch) and downbeat demeanour, he was a masterful droll, and Howard, who watched him fascinated from the wings, was left, quite understandably, feeling utterly awestruck.

Then, after the short interval, it was his turn. The curtain rose back up, he strode on to the stage, and was immediately blinded by the most powerful spotlight he had ever encountered. He winced, blinked, shifted from side to side in search of a shadow, winced and blinked again, and then gave up and began his act. It was no good: whatever he tried to remember, whatever he tried to say, he could not get that blinding light from out of his eyes or out of his mind. His mouth dried up, the beads of cold sweat crept down his brow, the eyes froze open and one of his knees, inevitably, began to tremble. The stage seemed to be getting bigger, and he was getting smaller. He squinted out at the audience, and the audience stared back at him. For one puzzled moment, there was just silence and rapt attention, but then, as the unmistakeable scent of sheer naked fear drifted its way slowly out over and beyond the stalls, there came a reaction: ‘The audience began to laugh, but it was the most dreaded of all laughter for a performer – derision. And the more they fell about, the worse I became. The orchestra leader hissed from the pit: “Do something, or get off!” I stumbled off – in tears.’33

He realised, as he sobbed backstage, that he could not take any more of this, but he also recognised, as he dried his eyes, that he would be unable not to take any more of this. He was trapped, and he knew it, and so, yet again, he resolved to go on.

He tried more talent nights, but won none. He staged more plays, concerts and revues, but most of them faded from memory soon after they were done. He auditioned on no fewer than four separate occasions for Carroll Levis, the powerful talent scout, but the result of each one of them was the same: rejection. The recurring problem was not that people failed to glimpse any potential; it was just that, far too often, the nerves kept getting in the way. No matter how many times someone said ‘No,’ however, Frank Howard never stopped believing that, one day, someone would say ‘Yes’: ‘I was the most undiscovered discovery of my day!’34

This, for the foreseeable future, was what he would remain. A war was about to break out. His own personal breakthrough would have to wait.

CHAPTER 3

Army Camp

So, anyway, he said, ‘I was wondering if you could go to the lads,’ he said, ‘and give them a turn. ’ Yes! That’s what I thought – cheeky devil!

This time, he did not even need to audition: the British Army showed no hesitation in signing him up for the duration. It had taken the outbreak of a war, but, at last, Frank Howard was able to feel that he was wanted.

The precise date of his admission is a matter of some dispute. Howerd – that notorious biographical dissembler – would claim that it had arrived one day in February 19401 – more or less a month short of his twenty-third birthday, and a decidedly dilatory-sounding four months after his name was first registered for conscription.2 On this particular occasion, however, he was probably telling the truth: his call-up papers remain unavailable for public scrutiny, but, given the bureaucratic inefficiency that is known to have dogged the entire process of mobilisation, the date is not quite as implausible as, at first glance, it might seem.3

His initial hope, once war was declared, had been to join ENSA (an acronym that stood formally for ‘Entertainments National Service Association’, and informally for ‘Every Night Something Awful’).4 The motivation, he later took pains to explain, had not been ‘to dodge the column’, but rather ‘to try to be of service at something I thought I was good at: entertaining’.5 Even at that early stage, however, the ENSA organisers were already managing to attract a sufficient number of suitably-qualified applicants (ranging from ageing music-hall performers to a younger breed of actors, comedians and musicians) to make them feel able to pass on such a raw and unconventional talent, and so Howard was forced to try his luck elsewhere.

He ended up as just another regular soldier in the Royal Artillery – his father’s old regiment – and was posted to Shoeburyness Barracks, near Southend-on-Sea, in Essex. It was there that, within a matter of days, ‘The Actor’ acquired a new nickname: ‘The Unknown Quantity’.6

The name was first spluttered in exasperation by the latest authority figure to loom large in Frank Howard’s life: a loud and irascible little man called Sergeant-Major Alfred Tonks. Howard – a gangling, slouching, stammering and startlingly uncoordinated creature in crumpled khaki – managed to make his Sergeant-Major angry, distressed, amused and confused in broadly equal measure.

He always struggled to look half-smart, made a shocking mess of stripping down his rifle, never seemed to know when he was supposed to march quick or slow, mixed up ‘standing at ease’ with ‘standing easy’, and was often a positive menace on the parade ground. ‘Frank just couldn’t get it together,’ one of his former comrades recalled. ‘When the sarge shouted “Right wheel!” once, Frank actually headed off to the left. And when the order came to “Mark time!” – guess who bumped into my back and sent me sprawling into the bloke in front? Right first time.’7

As if intent upon making matters even worse, Howard sometimes also failed to fight the urge to answer back. On one particular occasion, straight after Sergeant-Major Tonks had shrieked out his standard sequence of critical clichés – ‘You ’orrible shower!’ – young Private Howard actually had the temerity to mutter in response: ‘Speak up!’ It was ‘merely a nervous reflex’, he later explained, but it was more than enough to spark another noisy rant from his ruddy-cheeked tormentor.8

The only thing that saved him from spending one long spell after another stuck in the glasshouse was the fact that Tonks, though clearly impatient to hammer this risibly unconventional soldier into some kind of vaguely acceptable shape, could never quite decide whether he was dealing with a ‘truculent rebel’ or merely a useless idiot.9 He settled for thinking of Howard as his ‘Unknown Quantity’ – partly because the act of classifying the unclassifiable made him feel as if he was restoring at least the semblance of order to his environment, and partly because he was probably quite relieved to leave the true nature and extent of that ‘quantity’ undiscovered.

Once the trauma of basic training was finally over, Howard was transferred away from Tonks – no doubt much to their mutual relief – and into B Battery in another section of the barracks. Accorded the rank of Gunner, Frank began busying himself with the business of providing a proper form of defence for an area of Essex surrounding Shoeburyness.

His thoughts, however, were seldom far removed from the much more pleasant world of show business. As soon as he started to settle, he found that all of the old ‘passion’ and ‘fire’ that had recently been ‘damped down by the practicalities of circumstance’ now suddenly ‘burned hot again’.10Hearing that some of his fellow garrison personnel were putting on a concert each Sunday night in the local YMCA, he eagerly sought out the Entertainments Officer and offered his services as a stand-up comic. The out-of-his-depth officer, who had been anxiously patrolling the corridors asking anyone and everyone he encountered if they might just possibly be able to ‘do anything’, accepted the offer without hesitation. Frank Howard the performer was free to make his comeback.

When he stepped on to the stage the following Sunday, however, he was more than slightly surprised to hear himself introduced by the compère as ‘Gunner Frankie Howard of B Battery.’ He did a quick double-take: ‘Frankie Howard?’ He had never allowed anyone to call him ‘Frankie’ before – ‘I didn’t like Frankie a bit; it seemed positively babyish’ – but, once the show was over, he soon came to find that it had caught on, and, in time, he would reluctantly become resigned to the fact that the name was destined to stick (‘A pity, really’).11

The performance itself had gone down rather well. Most of his four-minute spot was filled with the kind of tried and tested material that had been blatantly ‘borrowed’ from professional comedians – most notably Max Miller – but he did manage to make at least one elderly gag sound vaguely original:

I was at a dance the other night in Southend. At the NAAFI. And this girl was there. Very nice, she was. Yes. So after the dance I said to her: ‘May I see you home?’ And she said: ‘Oh, er, yes. Thank you very much!’ So I said: ‘Where do you live?’ She said: ‘I live on a farm. It’s not very far from here. It’s about a half-an-hour walk.’ So I said: ‘Oh, right, that’s fine.’ Then she said: ‘The only thing is, you see, I’ve got a couple of packages to pick up, from my uncle, to take back home to the farm. Would you mind?’ So I said: ‘No, no, we’ll call in. What are they, by the way, these packages?’ She said: ‘Two ducks.’ I said: ‘Ducks?’ She said: ‘Oh, it’s all right. They’re not dead. They’re alive. But they won’t flap. They’re all sort of bound up a bit.’ So we went down to this uncle, and he gave her these two ducks. So I – the perfect gentleman – said: ‘Please, let me. I’ll carry them.’ So I put one under each arm. And then off we traipsed, down this lane and across this field. Pitch dark it was. And all of a sudden this girl fell back against a hedge and went: ‘Ooo-aaa-eee!’ I said: ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ She said: ‘I’m frightened!’ I said: ‘What on earth are you frightened of ?’ And she said: ‘I’m frightened of you!’ I said: ‘Frightened of me?’ She said: ‘Yes. I’m frightened that you’re going to try and make love to me!’ I said: ‘How the hell can I make love to you with a duck under each arm?’ So she said: ‘Well, I could hold ’em for you, couldn’t I?’