All the best, etc.
Vincent.
This is a typical Vincent letter, careless, condescending, implying that he does all the work and I do nothing. He does not even call me by my name, just ‘Bro’ which I’ve always hated. An ill-disguised contempt for the stage and theatre people lurks in the background. Mention of the escritoire was another thing that annoyed me. It is a genuine Louis XVI piece and I had always admired it. I thought Great Aunt Cecily was going to leave it to me, but I expect Vincent got round her when he was visiting the Home and pretending to manage her affairs. I did not see her as often as I would have liked in her last year because I was on tour.
Cecily had been an actress in her youth and was over a hundred when she died. She gave up professional acting in the late twenties when she married a military man. It was a happy marriage by all accounts but there were no children. To the last she retained a love of the theatre, so she and I had a lot in common. I was very fond of her, and I thought she was fond of me, but all I have to show for it are a few scrapbooks and an unopened parcel. This is Vince’s doing.
For some reason I decided to take the parcel with me unopened into the theatre and beguile the useless moments when I was off stage by studying the contents in my dressing room. This evening as I was going in through the stage door I heard someone say:
‘Ye have it with ye?’
The voice seemed to come from the little huddle of Book People who stood by the door. I felt sure that the words were addressed to me. It was a strange accent to hear in London: lowland Scottish at a guess, thick, uneducated. I stared at the Book People and they stared back with mean, uncomprehending expressions. Then two of them at the back of the crowd began to bicker about something.
‘All right! You don’t have to push. There’s no call for that.’
‘I was not pushing you thank you very much.’
‘Excuse me, but are you calling me a liar?’
‘I’m sorry but I do not push. I do not push people. I don’t know who pushed you, but, I’m sorry, it wasn’t me.’
I left them, still squabbling in their little hell.
It was not until the interval that I got round to the parcel. It had been sent from the United States to England and the postmark was dated 1918, day and month illegible. It had been elaborately done up in brown paper with string and sealing wax, and I had to borrow a knife from the Assistant Stage Manager to open it. Inside was a loose folder containing over a hundred sheets of hand-written manuscript. On the folder itself was written in a painstaking round hand:
Countess Otho, a drama in four acts by Richard Archer Prince.
It was a play. Clipped inside the cover of the folder was a typewritten letter on company notepaper.
Sammons Plays Ltd, for the Finest in Today’s Drama,
303 W 57th St. NY. U.S.A.
December 19th 1918
My Dear Cecily,
On May 17th this year our mutual friend Mr William Abingdon came to the offices of my publishing house in West 57th Street to discuss the MS of Countess Otho which he had left with me some days previously. I told him that the work was certainly a curiosity, but that my firm published plays of proven merit and not curiosities. Had I known that Mr Abingdon was so down on his luck I would have given him something for his pains, but, as soon as he heard my verdict he went away without even giving me the opportunity of returning the MS. As you know, he committed suicide the following day. No one seems to want it, so I send it to you, because you have an interest in such things and because you knew some of the folk connected with this little curiosity.
As a tribute to our former friendship.
Jacob R. Sammons.
I could make nothing of this, or for that matter, of the play which was hand-written on various sheets of paper, some lined and torn out of a cheap exercise book, some headed with the addresses of provincial hotels. The writing itself was variable. It was an uneducated hand but parts had been written with great care and neatness; other parts, particularly those on unlined hotel notepaper, were erratic and barely legible scrawls.
My cue was called over the Tannoy. The effort of reading only a few lines had exhausted me and I decided to postpone further study of it until tomorrow. I have left the manuscript in the theatre.
15th December
I have not had time to write for several days. Things have happened. There was a cold snap, black ice on the streets, even in the Strand. In Maiden Lane five days ago Ricky Dee slipped, fell and smashed his hip. Now he’s in hospital and can’t move. There was a tremendous fuss because he claimed he’d been pushed. Luckily I could prove that I was nowhere near or they might have suspected me, I suppose. So, being his understudy, I went on for him as Poe. I have had to put on this ridiculous moustache, otherwise it’s fine. Of course the management is already talking about a ‘name’ to replace him, or rather me, but they may be thinking better of it. People have been saying great things about my performance and no-one has asked for their money back at the box office. There have been jokes about a ‘lucky break’ for me, but I can take it. It’s all good publicity.
Yesterday when I had finished the big number ‘Dark Streets of my Mind’, the audience cheered and clapped for what seemed like several minutes. I have stopped the show. It was strange: I found that my eyes had filled with tears and all I could see was a spangled web of coloured light, purple-orange, blue-green from the floods and spots shining down on me. I was wrapped round with light and applause, and for a moment the world stopped pinching.
Outside before the show I have been signing things for the Book People. No, I haven’t changed my mind about them. They’re still losers. The other day while I was signing I heard that voice again with the thick Scottish accent.
‘Have ye read it yet?’
‘Who said that?’ I said, but the BPs looked blank. They just shook their greasy little heads and kept thrusting their filthy biros into my hand to write for them. There was someone else in the crowd, behind the rest. He was dark and hung back, unlike the others, and he looked more like a tramp, but it was dark so I couldn’t see properly.
18th December
Now, I’m into my part and I have done all the interviews and running around associated with being the latest star, I have had time to have a look at Countess Otho. I keep it in my dressing room, and sometimes I come in early to study it. It’s like a hobby.
Of course as a play it’s utterly hopeless, written by a complete no-talent, probably a madman of some kind.
The plot is only intermittently comprehensible, but it seems to reflect the turn-of-the-century vogue for Ruritanian Romance. The Prisoner of Zenda published in 1894 began it all. It concerns a Princess Sar, rightful heiress to the throne of Adelphia (sometimes spelt Adelfia) who is tricked into marrying the evil Count Otho. Otho is a plausible villain: and only the Countess sees through his mask of virtue. ‘To others he is a god,’ she says at one point, ‘but I see only a sink of shattered turds.’ On the King’s death, Count Otho usurps the throne. In order to regain power and exact revenge, the Countess, like Hamlet, pretends to be mad. Count Otho wants to put her away for good, but cannot do so before her madness has been established in open court. ‘Countess Otho’ triumphantly proves her sanity and, at the moment of victory, stabs the Count to death. This bloody act brings the play abruptly to a close.
I think I have made Countess Otho sound more accessible than it really is. Much of it is more dull than strange. Large chunks of it have quite obviously been lifted from other plays and clumsily transposed. The only glimmerings of talent or originality occur in the scenes in which the Countess is feigning insanity. One speech sticks in my mind because of its suggestion of theatrical imagery. I have corrected the spelling which is appalling throughout, though in some parts it has been corrected by another hand.
COUNTESS OTHO: The worm squeals on the dunghill. All the sky is blotted out. The wind and the rain are blotted out. The sea is blotted out. The houses are flat. The trees and moun
tains are flat. The little hills have been put into the scene dock, and the brook is starved of water. The fairy daggers of the stars have been put into the property cupboard. I have walked on and I have seen what is behind, and it is nothing. You call me mad? Mad? You will hear of my madness. The whole world will ring with it.
As I was going into the theatre tonight, I was stopped by Alf in his little glass fronted booth by the stage door. Alf, like quite a few West End stage doormen I have known, is a middle-aged ex-con (armed robbery) who will tell you stories of bank jobs and gang warfare if you can spare the time. He is not at all stage struck which I find refreshing and he is usually very cheery, but not tonight for some reason.
‘Some bloke’s been asking for you,’ he said. ‘Says he knows you. Big bloke. Scottish accent.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Did he give a name?’
‘Yes. I’ve got it here somewhere. Yes. Mr . . . er . . . Archer, I think he said. Hard to tell. You could cut his accent with a fucking knife.’
‘No. Means nothing to me. Can you describe him?’
‘Not really. Had on this big overcoat, smelt of mothballs. He wanted to come in to the theatre. Said he’d worked here once. I wasn’t having any of that.’
‘Well, I know nothing about him.’
‘Anyway, sir, I’d rather you didn’t let him come into the theatre, if you don’t mind.’
‘Why not, Alf?’ There was a long pause.
‘I know his sort,’ said Alf. That was all he had to offer me.
The show went well and I signed a dozen or so programmes on the way out. As I was doing so I heard someone close behind me say:
‘So what d’ye think, eh? What d’ye think.’
It was that Scottish accent again, the one which, according to Alf, you could cut with a fucking knife. I turned round and met only pink faces and programmes pleadingly held out. There was someone dark in the background, and, oddly enough, a smell of mothballs. Probably my imagination, though: people don’t use mothballs much these days.
19th December
I can’t get this Countess Otho out of my head. Perhaps there is something to it after all. I seem to be finding parts of it that I had overlooked. There is a whole scene, for instance, in which the Countess, shut up alone in a cell, talks to a fly that she finds crawling over a loaf of bread. At the end of the scene the stage direction reads:
The fly begins to laugh. It grows to the size of a Kirk clapping its wings in her face and blowing her hair to flinders. Then in a flash of lightning it is gone.
Impossible of course, but oddly memorable. . . . Memorable indeed, because I have just looked for this scene to see if I’ve got the words right and I can’t find it in the ridiculous nest of paper, all different sizes, shapes and colour, that make up the manuscript. I’ll try again later when I’ve been in and done the show.
(Later.) Can’t be bothered to look for it. I’m not interested. I came off after the first half and was confronted by Jill, the Company Stage Manager. She’s a stocky, truculent, crop-haired girl with a permanent sense of grievance about something. I’m not saying she’s a Lesbian, but I’ve met that attitude towards men before.
‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘I don’t know how your father got into the theatre, but he is not allowed backstage. It is against all regulations, and I’m sorry but I do not want him standing behind me in the prompt corner talking the whole time.’
I was astonished. I explained to her that she must be mistaken because my father had died three years ago. She seemed unwilling to take my word for it.
‘Was he Scottish?’ she asked.
I told her that my father’s family came from Derbyshire and that he had spent his entire life as a solicitor in Reading. ‘Anyway, what makes you think this man was my father?’
‘He kept saying that you were his “bairn” and that if it weren’t for him you wouldn’t be there.’
Jill was unable to give an accurate description of him, because it was dark, she said, and she had been ‘trying to concentrate on the show’. (This last spoken in an indignant self-righteous tone, as if I were somehow responsible for the disruption.) She told me the man had on a big heavy black overcoat and hadn’t shaved for a few days, and that he gave off a smell that was ‘half way between a distillery and a chemist’s shop’.
I suggested we look for him, but we drew a blank. Nobody else had seen him and Alf vehemently denied having let any strangers in at the stage door. I glanced at Jill and the words ‘are you sure. . . ?’ formed themselves in my mind, but I did not say them. Jill’s look told me that they would have lit a very short fuse.
The man, whoever he was, did not reappear after the interval, but, when the show was over and I had left the theatre, I was just turning into Maiden Lane when I heard the voice.
‘I have made ye; I can break ye.’
I look round and see no-one. Maybe there is a shadow back in the alley leading to the stage door. It is suddenly very cold so I move on quickly.
20th December
Rumours are flying around the company that I am going to be replaced as Poe in the New Year by a ‘name’. This so-called name is Bill Terry, the star of a TV soap called Magnolia Buildings. Everybody in the company seems to be quite indignant on my behalf, and I’m pretty angry myself, but somehow I don’t think it will happen.
Today another parcel arrived from Vince. (He likes to be called Vincent, so I call him Vince.) It contained Great Aunt Cecily’s scrapbooks and albums. I am surprised she never showed them to me in her lifetime.
Cecily Payne, as she was in those days, came from a good family, but was set on becoming an actress from an early age. She began her career as respectably as any young woman could in the Edwardian Theatre by joining the chorus at the Gaiety Theatre as one of Mr George Edwardes’ ‘young ladies’. Her name appears in programmes at first simply as ‘Miss Payne’. In Play Pictorial she is pictured in a group of bouffant-haired beauties with identical white floor length gowns. I think she stands out: her large eyes are intelligent and knowing; she is slimmer, less pigeon-chested than the others.
I see from the programmes that she features in several musical shows starring Seymour Hicks and his wife Ellaline Terriss, daughter of the celebrated actor William Terriss who was murdered by a lunatic. In one of Hicks’s shows, The Dashing Little Duke (1909), my Great Aunt appears for the first time on a programme as ‘Miss Cecily Payne’ in the role of ‘Lady Kitty’. After this she graduates to straight dramatic roles in the West End and on tour, but in 1915 there is a sudden break. Pasted into the album is the stub of a second class ticket on the Oceanic travelling from Southampton to New York. There she resumes her theatrical career, but, it would appear, on a rather lower level than in England. I never knew till now that she had been in America and could only guess at the cause of her migration. A loose newspaper cutting in her scrapbook records the death of a Lieutenant James Sullivan of the London Rifle Brigade in the attack on Vimy Ridge on September 26th 1915. A smudged, black-bordered photo, shows the head and shoulders of a man in uniform. There is a touch of flamboyance about the look and the set of the head: perhaps in life he had been an actor.
In one or two of her American theatre programmes I notice that William Abingdon is in the cast. He is mentioned in the letter that came with the parcel. Along with these programmes, Cecily had stuck into the book a number of little cards with a printed floral decoration in the corner and handwriting on them. The pinholes in them suggest that they had been attached to bouquets, and the words written on them, all in the same hand, would appear to confirm this:
‘These roses will see you tonight before I do. Lucky old roses! J.R.S.’
‘You will be wonderful tonight. Remember what I said. Jacob.’
‘From your Master and Slave! Jacob.’
‘Dine with me after the show tonight at the St Regis. I have something important to say to you. Jacob.’
I could confirm by a comparison of the handwriting that this was the Jacob R.
Sammons of the letter that accompanied Countess Otho.
By the end of 1918 Cecily is back in London and her career picks up remarkably quickly. She appears in the West End, but mostly as a leading lady on tour or in the better repertory companies. Then in 1927 she meets and marries Colonel George Arthur, and the programmes and press cuttings stop.
‘By that time,’ Cecily told me once, ‘I had run out of ambition. I still loved the theatre, but I’d seen what it did to people, so I gave it up quite happily. I just wanted to be with George and breed Fox Terriers in the country.’ And that is what she did until her husband died and old age confined her to a home. It was not a bad life, I suppose. I have been haunted by that phrase of hers ‘I had run out of ambition’. I wonder if the same will happen to me. Sometimes I hope it does; sometimes I don’t.
Now I understand her career better, but mysteries remain. Why did Jacob Sammons send her the manuscript? The reasons he gives in the letter are vague and unconvincing. Above all, why did she never open his parcel?
My life is quite strange at the moment: its only centre is the few hours I spend on stage six days of the week. The rest of the time is curiously unreal. I see friends; talk to my agent about future prospects, go to films and art galleries, but none of it means much. I sleep in the afternoons before a show, but afterwards I am restless and can’t go to bed till at least three in the morning. Sometimes I go to the clubs with mates, but, to be honest, I can’t take the noise any more. What I really like doing is walking about London on my own. It’s quite safe: people talk a lot of rubbish about muggings and knife crime. I’ve never met any. I feel invulnerable which perhaps I shouldn’t, but I’m fit and I could outrun any attacker.
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories Page 4