No Tears for the Clown

by Les Dawson

  Headlines screamed at me that Tuesday morning; some said I was a wife stealer, others noted that Meg hadn’t been dead all that long and quite a few couldn’t resist the usage of the word Barmaid when they ranted on about Tracy. What was once considered a respectable occupation, now appeared as if it was merely a job for busty sluts; the fact that Tracy was a trained hotelier had been totally ignored by the hacks, it made Tracy look and sound tarnished. I have never forgiven the tabloids for that.

  Amongst the printed idiocy there were a couple of items that made me chuckle, I must confess. Some cartoons made me howl and one tongue-in-cheek article called me an ‘off the wall Casanova’.

  It really was all very ridiculous. My self-control was wearing a bit thin when I attempted to go outside the house and was greeted with a positive barrage of flashes, blinding me into retreat.

  Poor Tracy was practically a prisoner in her hotel flat, and other employees stood on sentry duty to stave off the press.

  It was quite obvious that something had to be done otherwise I could foresee the weekend’s papers having a ball at our expense. There were eight reporters standing at the gates to my drive, and that wasn’t counting the ones who hung like figs up the trees with telescopic lenses on their Japanese cameras.… It was all worthy of a Mack Sennett farce. All it needed now was the arrival of Buster Keaton to complete the picture. Once or twice I tried to chat to them; after all, I knew quite a lot of them. I wouldn’t give any statement, I just asked them what they thought the scandal was, if any? Naturally they couldn’t tell me because there wasn’t one and there never had been.

  I was haunted by the thought that Meg hadn’t been given a decent period of mourning … but how do you avoid love when you need it to exist?

  I had to fight to leave the house and drive off to the show in Bradford late that Tuesday afternoon, and sure enough, the black saloon was gliding behind me across the barren moors.

  The stage door was awash with the eager scribes, and a brace of hefty security men flanked me into the theatre. I felt like Crippen stepping off the boat after his arrest. The manager came into my dressing-room looking more than a trifle distraught.

  I paused in putting on my make-up. ‘Look, I’m sorry about all this press nonsense, I know it’s a damn nuisance and you may have a lot of people asking for their money back if they’re offended by what they read.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry about the business, Les. I could sell the seats for twice as much and still not have enough room to pack them in!’

  I felt mortified. I rang Tracy before the curtain went up, and she gasped out, ‘I love you, Lumpy.’

  Oh yes … I must relate at this point that Tracy and I had nicknames for each other; she was Poo and, of course, I was Lumpy.… I know, I know, it’s infantile, but when my children were small I used to tell them stories about Lump the Elf and his pretty wife Poo the Pixie. As I’ve mentioned before, Tracy had a simplicity that brought out the child in me that refused to go when I became a man … and thank God that child didn’t go, because without the child within us we are forever lost.

  It was so good to hear her voice over the phone; she was bearing up well despite the fact that the hotel was still under siege and she was a virtual prisoner.

  With only a scant few minutes to go before the curtain went up on Act I, the telephone rang. I thought hopefully it might be Tracy … it wasn’t, and I was sorry that I’d answered it.

  A few years before I had played a town in the Midlands – a very big town that gave me and the pantomime a warm welcome and capacity business. During the run there, the cast was looked after by a young girl, a very nice young lady. In retrospect I think I was too friendly with her, because I felt that she was looking upon me as if I were the father whom she had recently and tragically lost. She developed an infatuation, I think, and I didn’t realise it at the time. I treated her like a daughter, and that was all.

  It was she who had telephoned me that Tuesday night, very upset about Tracy and myself. She threatened to tell the newspapers that it should be her and not Tracy who was the new love of my life.… That was all I needed.

  The curtain rose and the first act began. Suddenly, as I stood in the wings peering out at the capacity audience, a thunderbolt hit me. Run For Your Wife is all about infidelity, the press, and messy marriages.… I’d never thought about it before but now, with all the lurid headlines, it came as a bit of a shock. It was my entrance; I opened the door in the set and stood for a moment framed in the doorway. In every town and city we had played on the tour, my first entrance had been greeted with hearty applause. Tonight? Nothing. Just an intense silence. It threw me, and the good lines between Peter Goodwright and myself on this occasion were gleaning no laughs. The audience was waiting. We came to the part where my character (Stanley) cannot understand Peter’s not wanting the newspapers to know about his heroism, because at this point in the play Stanley doesn’t know that Peter is a bigamist! Now was the time to step out of character.…

  ME: ‘What’s up, old son?’

  PETER: ‘You don’t understand, Stanley.’

  ME: ‘No, I damn well don’t, with all the rubbish printed in the papers today.’ (At this point I stood and faced the audience.) ‘And when it comes to rubbish in the papers, by hell I know what I’m talking about.’

  The audience roared with laughter and there were shouts of ‘Sod ’em … be happy,’ and ‘Good on you, Les.’ It was like a tonic, all the tension drained away from me.…

  ‘They’ve got me down as a cross between Bluebeard and a randy bull terrier.’

  ‘The last woman I had on the side was a suffragette … and that’s because she was chained to the railings.’

  ‘Since the papers have been having a go at me, I keep dreaming that I’m playing cricket for England. A pal of mine said, “I thought you would have been dreaming about making love to a beautiful woman.” I said, “What? And lose my chance to bat?”’

  The audience loved the silly gags and it took a long time to get back into the play. I felt close to tears that night, it was wonderful to feel that ordinary people were on my side. What nobody knew was that only about forty minutes earlier, in the dressing-room before the play began, I had stared into the mirror and faced a moment of truth.…

  Many, many years ago I had been under contract to the great Max Wall. He had meant well enough but I was having a hard time in London. I’d been thrown out of my lodgings in Battersea and I’d spent some nights on a bench in Hyde Park, and I don’t recommend it.

  Occasionally Max would give me a fiver to get myself a cheap room. I eventually found one in an old house in Notting Hill Gate, a tiny, cramped attic with just a bed and a gas ring. Rent? Two pounds. Eagerly I took it.

  Max Wall was the biggest comedy star of the day. He was playing Hymie, a leading character in a hit musical play called The Pyjama Game with Joy Nicols and Edmund Hockridge. Most performances I would sit in the great comedian’s huge dressing-room doing odd jobs for him and listening to his stories and hopes for my future.

  The world was his; I watched him in Regent Street surrounded by literally hundreds of fans; in cafés and restaurants people crowded around him, each one vying for his attention. Max Wall was at the very top of the theatrical tree, until he fell in love with a beauty queen over twenty years his junior. The newspapers and the morality of the day destroyed his career almost overnight. I watched him hold his head in despair and I could do nothing to comfort him.

  People now crowded at the box office to get their money back. One night after the show, when Max and I came out of the stage door, people turned their backs on him. I remember there was a light drizzle falling, and it was misty. Max had had a lot to drink and I caught him as he stumbled against a wall. ‘What have I done that is so terrible?’ he whispered to me. ‘All I did was to fall in love.’

  Max went into oblivion after his affair with the young beauty queen was plastered on every billboard, and it would be many years bef
ore his greatness was once again acknowledged.

  Now here I sat, at the top of my profession, facing the same situation. Would my love for Tracy destroy me?

  Thankfully things had changed, and I reached out to an audience who understood that no man can be an island, and that happiness, when it comes, must be grasped tightly.

  Wednesday’s headlines became more bizarre … on the front page of the paper was a photograph of the young lady whom I had apparently spurned. The caption read: ‘I should have been the next Mrs Dawson.’ That really hurt me because it was untrue, but the one that really made me consider homicide was: ‘Spiritualist says, Carry on Bonking, Les.’

  This newspaper had brought in a medium who was supposed to have got in touch with Meg’s spirit, and my dead wife was supposed to have told her to tell me to ‘carry on bonking’. Along with this garbage was a photograph of Meg’s grave. The maudlin caption, supposedly spoken from beyond the grave, was so uncharacteristic of Meg that it was beyond belief – and beneath contempt.

  It was high time to put the record straight about Tracy and myself. Hilary Bonner of the Mirror Group has never written anything spurious or untrue. Both Tracy and I look upon her as a friend, and it was to her that we turned to put an end to the ridiculous speculation. We gave her an exclusive and it was the best thing we could have done. Once the true story had been printed, the other newshounds vanished in a cloud of ink and by Friday it was some other poor bugger’s turn to be castrated by the press.

  Tracy and I still held sway in the newspapers but on a much happier note. We did interviews with magazines in which we declared our love for each other, and several newspapers printed follow-up stories after the furore died down. However, one paper would not leave well alone, and persisted in taking pot shots with a camera that looked so old it flared on magnesium. Their ‘sleazy’ pictures of the pair of us, were given ridiculous captions – one of Tracy, for instance, half vanishing into a supermarket, was trumpeted as: ‘Les’s lover on the town’. You’d have thought she was going for a binge in a Triad nightclub instead of popping in for a cabbage in Safeways.… One photograph of me was obviously taken through a hole in the garden fence. It showed me wearing shorts and nothing else plucking weeds from a stretch of rockery, and the headline read: ‘The Loneliness of a Comic’.

  Something had to be done about these clowns, and this realisation helped us to come to a major decision. By this time, Tracy’s divorce had come through and she was now a free woman, but we had made no arrangements to live together and eventually get married. I still felt it was improper to wed so soon after my bereavement. There was also, of course, the fact that Tracy needed to get used to her new-found freedom and to make sure I was the right partner before going ahead.… At least, that’s how I saw the situation.

  Tracy could see her children whenever she wished, and she stayed on at the hotel. The need we felt for each other created many arguments, and we were never off the telephone to each other.

  My children had now accepted her but they still blamed me for not being honest with them at the start, and they deserve an apology for that. We were in a state of emotional limbo – until the day Tracy rang me from her flat in near hysterics: ‘Les – that awful newspaper wants me to talk about my marriage and tell them everything.… I can’t leave the flat even; they’ve left a security man with me in case I try to contact another newspaper. Please, love, help me … I’m scared.’

  I am not the stuff that heroes are moulded from, I’m too scared to fight and too fat to run, but Sir Galahad stirred in my bones.… The bastards! Now was the time for action.

  I stopped at Meg’s headstone on my way and poured out my feelings to her, and again I felt that her spirit energy was guiding me.

  I drew up in the hotel’s forecourt and walked to the door of Tracy’s flat. I didn’t ring the bell – I banged on the door.

  A large man opened it and I brushed past him. He was most indignant at first but when he recognised me he smiled and said he was sorry.

  ‘Tracy!’ I shouted. She came out of the kitchen. Her soft eyes were clouded with sadness and she looked tired and drawn. My heart went out to her and I knew she was the one for me. ‘Please God, make her feel the same about me,’ I thought.

  As though to allay my doubts Tracy ran towards me and embraced me. ‘Les, I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough, love. Tell him to leave me alone, please.’ She spoke urgently.

  I pushed her gently away. I had made my decision. I turned to the man and said politely but very firmly: ‘You can leave now, mate, because Tracy is going out of this flat and she is moving in with me. There will be no story, but you can tell your editor this. Tracy and I intend to marry as soon as possible, and we will announce our engagement this year. Now, my friend, go.’

  I half expected some sort of argument but all he said was, ‘Fine, and good luck to you both.’

  Within two hours, Tracy was in my home and in my life forever.

  It took her a while to recover from the experience of publicity. If you have never undergone the trial of exposure to the glare of public scrutiny then you cannot begin to understand how it can affect one’s personality. For three days Tracy refused to leave the house. She believed that all eyes would be upon her, and I know that she felt the publicity had made her unclean in some way.

  The oddest thing happened soon after. Several of the newspapers which had so hounded us now sent flowers and cards of good wishes! I forced Tracy to go out into the town and it helped her enormously when people smiled at us and wished us well. Never once did we encounter any hostility in the streets, although we did receive a mixed bag of mail. Some letters were so sick, the writers obviously needed some sort of treatment. Others carried religious messages; one from an amiable crackpot even suggested that Tracy was probably a Martian!

  Most of the mail was nice and sincere; quite a lot came from men and women who had lost their partners and had never sought for another one. Now they regretted it. Loneliness in a crowded civilisation is a dreadful disease.

  Being together was utter bliss and our love for each other seemed to bring out a glow in other people. It was like being born again. All the shadows in the house seemed to drift away and the light of happiness came in and created a warmth that Garth House had lost with so much sadness. With my encouragement, Tracy changed the furnishings and imposed her own personality on the décor of the house.

  Two weeks later, the tour of Run For Your Wife ended and an exhausted band of players said their farewells – somewhat tearfully, because we had been together for so long we had become a family. So much had happened … I knew I’d made the right choice in Tracy, because at the foot of the stairs one night, the smell of freesias was almost overpowering. I knew then that I didn’t need to talk to Meg’s headstone any more, for it is my sincere belief that Meg led me to Tracy and gave my life a purpose again.

  Work beckoned in the shape of a couple of cabaret functions for companies. Frankly, although the money is a big temptation, I’m not keen on performing at these do’s. Too much drink is plied and with the best will in the world, businessmen en masse can be a difficult and noisy audience at times and it makes for hard work whilst performing for them. The nice thing now, of course, was that I no longer trotted all over the country on my own. I had Tracy at my side and it made all the difference: I no longer drank as heavily as of yore, and she frowned every time I lit up a cigarette, which was about fifty times a day. Someone cared about me. There can be no greater bliss.

  Blankety Blank loomed on the horizon, and it was off to London for the recordings.

  Although the BBC provided a car and a driver to take us to London and back, it was nevertheless tiring and Tracy voiced her concern at our workload. On one trip to London, we saw two horrific accidents – one in which a woman was burning to death before our eyes. I had the shakes for the rest of the journey, knowing that at the other end, in a few short hours, I’d have to be funny.…

  Because of this we approach
ed the BBC and told them that fatigue was becoming a major problem, and they agreed to fly us on the Manchester shuttle to London instead. This was a much better arrangement and our good friends at the St James Court Hotel gave us one of their apartments at a special rate. It was an ideal situation: fly down from the north on one day, do the programme, stay the night at the apartment and fly home the following day.

  Despite flying instead of driving, it was still a pretty exhausting period, but our happiness was a stimulant and just being together without some idiot poking a camera in our faces was contentment enough.

  Public opinion had swung in our favour when good and honest folk realised that ours was no fly-by-night affair, but a fine old full-blooded love story worthy of Mills and Boon. One thing that the glare of publicity had taught us was that it is an excellent method of finding out who your true friends are … and we had a sort of spring-clean of fair-weather friends out of our lives, and felt the better for it.

  Tracy was growing more and more confident with people with each passing day, and her bubbling personality and good looks won everyone over. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the whispered comments from admiring males … ‘What does she see in him?’ or (my favourite exclamation); ‘Lucky little sod.’ I must confess that in those early days I often pondered the same question … what did she see in me? A much older man, raddled with excesses, and not very attractive to the female sex.… It certainly wasn’t my wealth, because thanks to a lifetime of stupid over-indulgence and income taxes, I was far from being on Easy Street. God sparing me, I was destined to have to work for many years to attain even a passable level of comfort.