by Sally Koslow
On the third night, on the third rematch, John deflowered me. I believe he was as relieved by his performance as I was, though it failed to mirror the bonfire of passion novels had led me to expect. Yet John delighted me in so many ways that I laughed off our tepid sexual union, telling myself that with practice, our relations would improve.
At my husband’s insistence I stopped working, and my days crawled by. I adored choosing his clothes every morning, taught myself to cook, and filled the hours by reading and, no matter the weather, walks in Hyde Park. This gave me ample time to ruminate on why John hadn’t introduced me to his sister, despite vigorous hints. One morning I dressed in a mushroom-brown suit that shouted married lady, grabbed my gloves, and decided to rectify the situation. I wanted to meet my new sister, who I hoped would embrace me with the affection I hadn’t known since I’d abandoned my brother Morris. By the time I rang at Mrs. William Ashton’s home, perspiration soaked the dotted blouse beneath my jacket.
“I work with Sir John Gillam,” I stammered to a butler. “I’m Lily Shiel,” I chirped when ten minutes later the lady of the house appeared, stiff as a lamppost. My scripted speech evaporated into “I ’ope this won’t come as too gryte a shock but, I may as well say it, your brother and I, we’re . . .” Mrs. Ashton appeared to be holding her breath . . . “married . . . a few weeks ago,” I added, as if to illustrate the longevity of our relationship.
She backed away as fast as if I’d set fire to the fat dachshund by her side. “No!” she shouted. “My half-wit brother has really done it this time,” and then composed herself, patting her silver-streaked bun. Her ring was half the size of my bauble from Monte. “What, may I ask, do you expect from me?” She exuded contempt. “A dowry?”
I summoned my dignity, as well as my brand-new accent. “I merely wanted to meet. We are, after all, kin.”
“Ah, that’s rich. Did John put you up to this?”
“I’ll say not. He has no idea I am here.” I regretted that I could not meet her eye to eye: like John, Mrs. Ashton was a tall, thin birch, and I, ground cover.
“Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know, young lady? You do understand he’s bankrupt?”
Surely she was exaggerating. Yet I also knew that few people see a person with greater clarity than a sibling. Nonetheless, choosing to ignore grace and good manners, I huffed, “I ask nothing from you.”
“Then that is exactly what you will get. Please relay to John that he’ll never see another penny from me in this lifetime, and I never wish to see him again.”
“But he adores you.”
“And I love my brother, but . . . Miss Shiel, is it?”
“Mrs. Gillam.” I strived for the self-respect the name warranted.
Mrs. Ashton opened her mouth, but closed it quickly, like a dummy whose ventriloquist has lost his script. Had this been Stepney Green, she’d have flung profanity or at least a shoe. Since Mrs. William Ashton was a fine lady, she merely slammed a door in my face.
Brooding on the insult, I roamed through London. I bought the makings of a fish and chips dinner, and filled the flat with smoke as I prepared it. I was afraid to tell John about my ambush, though more afraid not to. We had enough secrets. After dinner, I acted out my disgrace, expecting John to be enraged. He appeared unruffled, yet another outstanding trait.
“This is not the first time my sister has threatened to cut me off. Once she gets to know you, Lily-love, she will adore you. How could she not?”
As John embraced me, I did a mental tally of all the reasons why. During my wandering I’d also thought about how I’d pushed John’s hand when he was in no position to support a wife. The kindest gift I could give my husband would be to leave him. But an annulment would break two hearts. I loved John, and I was sure he loved me. I also admitted to a second truth: I felt as if I was leading another woman’s life. I’d known deprivation but never boredom, and idleness was making me blue. In the gentlest way I knew, I told John I wanted to work again.
I was afraid he would suggest waiting for motherhood, which given the rate at which we were having marital relations, was remote. Yet in equally mild but frank tones—a fusion not easy to achieve—he explained that until I thoroughly erased my Cockney curse, I’d never find another job. While I was absorbing his remark, he grabbed me by the shoulders and cried out, “But I know the solution—drama school!” Sir John Gillam had failed to launch a stage career, but based on no evidence—not even in my dreams had I seen myself onstage or in a film—he insisted that I was a natural. He would immediately contact the director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. “The investment’s worth it, because soon you’ll earn money hand over fist.”
John’s sister may have sent her brother an ugly message, but she couldn’t defeat his optimism—or delusion. His spark of ambition was lit in the cradle, and he hoped to transfer its flame to me. Not for the first time, he seemed to think that confidence could be slipped on like a coat. Because John was showing such zeal, I was willing to give acting a try.
I auditioned a few weeks later on the same day as a young roly-poly from Yorkshire who, while waiting for his turn, sat on his hat. When he discovered this he blushed and mumbled an unnecessary apology. I snickered when he left the room. But once Charles Laughton and I were both accepted—in my case, I have to assume because the Academy had been hard up for blondes—and I heard him perform, I never laughed at him again.
Under the Academy’s instruction, my speech improved. My acting, however, never did. Two months into my course, I was asked to play Ophelia to Mr. Laughton’s Hamlet . After ten minutes of butchering I was heartily urged to trade Shakespeare for musical comedy. I had, after all, won applause in mime class when I played a cow. John borrowed more money, and I enrolled in lessons for singing and dancing, which I practiced with gusto, using the kitchen sink as a barre.
I was not tone deaf, but my voice was quivery, and I stomped about as if I had stones in my shoes. Stage dancing, I learned, required an entirely different set of skills than social dancing, which I did easily enough. After six weeks, feeling guilty about the cost of lessons, I told John I was ready to apply for a spot in a chorus, hoping that my inevitable rebuff would convince him that our mission was madness.
“You must choose a stage name—you don’t want to be dismissed as a housewife,” he said. Not that many years ago George V had anglicized the royal family’s indigestibly Teutonic name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the properly British, thoroughly benign “Windsor.” Why couldn’t I do the same? I loved the idea of cutting “Shiel” loose. John suggested “Graham,” his mother’s maiden name.
“I want to get rid of ‘Lily,’ too.” Monte’s lilies had fouled that name.
My husband warmed to this exercise. “Why not ‘Sheila’? Our little joke.”
“Yes, but ending with an h.”
“Whatever for?”
“Greater distinction.”
I decided who I wanted to be and willed her into existence. John thought it would be advantageous for my career to be seen as unmarried. Sheilah Graham was born and baptized—and she was single.
Chapter 13
1924
To my surprise Sheilah Graham— I—was hired for a chorus, most likely because the show, Punchbowl, was soon closing. I had three days to practice catapulting into the unfortunate arms of an elfin boy who would hoist me to his shoulders after I did a cartwheel rotation. John and I went through these motions at home seventeen times. The night of my first performance, before my husband—whom I introduced as my uncle—walked me to the back of the theater, he reminded me to smile. Always. I remembered this advice only when I was upside down.
The show folded on schedule, but I got a second big break: winning the silver cup in a competition for London’s most beautiful chorus girl. All I had to do was sashay before the judges and dance the Charleston, yet John considered this achievement, for which I was awarded a trophy engraved with Be Faithful, Brave, and O Be Fortunate, in the
same category as the beatification of a saint. He persuaded a playwright friend to arrange for an audition with C. B. Cochran, the London impresario whose revue was inspired by the Folies Bergère of Paris. After I sang half a stanza of “Rose Marie,” Mr. Cochran asked me to do the Black Bottom, and then ordered me to his office.
While his eyes buttered my curves, I, London’s second most beautiful chorus girl, bloated with hubris, declared, “I want to be something better than a member of the chorus.”
Mr. Cochran hired me on the spot—at four pounds a week—for the new Rodgers and Hart musical, One Damn Thing After Another, though I remained in the chorus, third from the right.
One damn thing after another. Story of my life.
The first day of rehearsal I asked Mimi Crawford, the show’s lead, “How do you become a star?”
She replied with earnest condescension. “When you’re onstage, Miss, think of nothing but your part.”
Every moment I was in the theater, offstage, I memorized her steps and songs, appointing myself as her de facto understudy. This gained some notice. “If you don’t get rid of that lunatic sycophant I will bloody quit,” Mimi Crawford wailed to C. B. Cochran after a few days. I retreated—slightly—but influenza intervened. Several weeks into the run Miss Crawford fell ill and I wore down Mr. Cochran with pleas to play her role. Following a hasty costume fitting I heard the audience sigh with disappointment at “Miss Crawford’s part will be taken by Miss Sheilah Graham.” An overture blared. Curtains parted. I trembled like the earthquake I had brought on by presuming I could be a star, then froze, arms akimbo, chin up, until the stage manager exhorted me to move, pushing me into a circle of apricot light.
I danced. I sang. I seduced the crowd lost in the blackness. When the curtain fell, applause exploded and I swam in glory. I liked it. Oh, I liked it very much.
“Chorus Girl Leaps to Fame,” declared my first review, read aloud by John, who might have been even more enthralled than I. “Her fair beauty and dulcet voice enchanted a packed house . . .” I performed for seven evenings, after which the Daily Express exclaimed, “Miss Sheilah Graham . . . a great success . . . stepped into her part without even an hour’s rehearsal. C. B. Cochran considers her one of the most promising young actresses on the London stage.”
My performance seemed to me like a singular act of God, not the result of bona fide talent. But the hyperbole must have convinced Mr. Cochran, who signed me for a small speaking role in the next production, This Year of Grace. My salary would more than double: ten pounds a week, which would allow me to help John pay off his debts. “There’s no limit to what you can do!” he said. I wanted to believe him.
At our first rehearsal, I did not expect to meet the playwright, who stood at the director’s side. “As you sing, look at the male lead disdainfully,” instructed Noël Coward, a young man with a permanent sneer and jug handle ears.
With no idea what “disdainfully” meant, I grinned and warbled, “I am just an ingénue, and shall be till I’m eighty-two.”
He glowered. I sang again, trying a funereal expression. Mr. Coward ground his cigarette into the floor. As bad as my singing was, my dancing was worse. Whatever aptitude I’d shown for movement had vanished. I was out of step, kicked half as high as requested and twirled in the wrong direction. But I smiled so much my face hurt and by default, I became a comedienne. When the show opened, my pictures appeared in tabloids, captioned with the likes of “Sheilah Graham, Winning Her Way.”
This led to invitations to midnight suppers that John insisted I accept, “because they will be good for your career—and maybe you’ll convince people to invest in my company.” Some requests came from Mr. Cochran, who exhibited me as he might a tropical bird, but increasingly, others arrived from the legion of toffs in black tie, tails, and blinding white shirts that filled the theater’s boxes.
Among this elegant crowd was Sir Richard North, a man in his fifties who boasted of his stables in Ireland, and how he always wished he’d had a daughter like me. I relayed this to John as a girl might to her mother. What I did not tell John, when I tumbled into bed past two in the morning, was that while I might be fulfilling the brave and fortunate engraved on my loving cup, I could not say the same for faithful. On several occasions, Sir This or Lord That—not Sir Richard, but some of the younger men—had made me their dessert at the end of the evening. I accepted their lascivious summons out of curiosity. I wanted to know how real, completed sex felt. Pleasure was part of the package, I discovered, although I reserved true affection for Johnny.
In short order I became a regular at the Savoy, where some evenings I discovered that every dish had been named for me, from Potage à la Belle Sheilah to Bombe à la Belle Sheilah . The conversation was a mist of hilarity, gossip, and praise punctuated by admiring glances. Within this world my speech began to take on more of John’s low, musical quality and I felt increasingly at home. One evening Sir Richard danced me close to the Prince of Wales, whom he referred to as Pragger-Wagger. Later, he told me that the prince had asked who I was. I began to forget who Lily Shiel had ever been, so suffused was I with the myth and marvelousness of Sheilah Graham.
When I came home late soon after that, John was struggling to write an article about Easter eggs, hoping to earn a few shillings. Without fiscal transfusions from John’s sister—who failed to come ’round, as he predicted—our bills were past due, despite my contributions.
“Who gives a whoop about Easter eggs?” I asked, immediately regretting my tone.
“What topic would be better?” he snapped.
I was sufficiently self-centered to think people would like to read about a chorus girl, and said as much. My husband skulked off to bed, saying over his shoulder, “Then you write it.”
I sat down and scrabbled a breathless reporting of stage door Johnnies in top hats waiting for the chorus girl lovelies after a performance. The next night, John corrected my grammar and mailed my account. A month later he opened one of Fleet Street’s tabloids and there was my piece under my name. I called the editor, who told me I would be paid two guineas. Had our rent not been past due I would have framed the check.
I’d like to say that overnight I became a journalist, but I tried to sell seven more articles, and all were rejected. As the months passed I became too exhausted to continue to write.
My days and nights had become a carousel of lessons, rehearsals, pontificating directors, line-dropping performances, late-night suppers, Champagne, flirtations, and occasional trysts before I fell into a fitful sleep in the arms of a husband who never asked indelicate questions. My worry about money was matched only by the fear that our marriage—and my origins—would be exposed. I suffered from unbearable stomach cramps and constant headaches.
Sir Richard, who’d stayed a friend, became concerned about my obvious fatigue. I must see his physician, he insisted, at his expense. The doctor diagnosed me as being on the verge of a collapse, and urged me to rest in a warm climate. Sir Richard wanted to send me abroad and foot the bill. In a spasm of honesty, I told him I could never accept such generosity: I was someone else’s wife, Mrs. John Gillam. Full stop.
“Good lord, woman. You must divorce this Gillam at once,” he bellowed. “I will be the correspondent.”
Only genuine tears convinced him that my husband was not the problem. To his enormous credit, Sir Richard refused to rescind his offer. Not only did he send me to Cap-d’Ail for six weeks of rest, he insisted that John accompany me.
At first John resented that another man was paying our way. But it did not take him long to agree to join me in the south of France, where he quickly bathed in its extravagance as much as I did. “I will reimburse Sir Richard—business will get better,” he said, the leitmotif of our marriage.
When we returned, I was twenty-one and close to bilingual, but after weeks of neglect, the John Graham Company went belly-up.
Chapter 14
1926
John took a sales position that requi
red not much more than snake charming, at which he excelled. I also made a change. When we were in France, I admitted to myself that my performances sagged between meager and mediocre. Eventually, I’d be expected to sing and dance at full strength and I did not have the talent or the drive to be a star. I decided to leave the theater. I wanted more.
Then I met my neighbor, whom I’d noticed flying down the stairs, a sapphire blue cape sailing behind her. One day she knocked on our door. Her ice box was broken and could she please store her corsages in mine? Gardenias. Carnations. Tea roses. With her mother, Judith Hurt was renting the flat above us for the season, she explained in a soft Scottish burr.
A lack of friends had been the collateral damage of leading a life bulwarked by fibs. Judith was fresh and lively, and with her I had no need to hide that I was Mrs. Gillam, the young wife upstairs. I liked her immediately and enormously.
“Would you care to join us for skating at Grosvenor Hall?” she asked the next day. I don’t skate, I confessed. “My friend Nigel will teach you.” He was a classmate of her cousin’s. They’d met at Eton in Pop. Whatever that was.
When I considered my plans for the afternoon, shopping for the makings of bubble and squeak, I realized that even if she’d invited me to a sack race, I’d have said yes.
“I hear you were in Pop,” I said later to Nigel, practicing my most precise articulation. “Could you tell me about it?” The question lit his face as we circled the rink, my hands in his. He gushed that Pop was the most exclusive eating club at Eton. Its sole reason for being seemed to be to prevent other people from belonging.
Requests to skate continued. I bought a red turtleneck sweater, a black flared skirt that showed off my ankles, and a pom-pom’d tam-o’-shanter. I learned not only how to skate, but also to play tennis and once again took up the squash at which I’d excelled at the Asylum. There was something hypnotic about the thwack of my paddle or racquet hitting the ball. I could practice for hours, and sometimes did. Others at the club, I guessed, considered me acceptably unconventional, the pretty young wife who’d been onstage and whose husband was conveniently absent.