Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  The female members of the chorus, present as themselves, looked like husks. They looked slighter; softer. The softness was emphasised by the cigarettes and brittle painted nails they waved in front of their faces all the time like shields.

  Show girls in those days weren’t necessarily brassy: it wasn’t a condition of the job; and the word itself had yet to become a euphemism for ‘tart’. Most of the ones I knew who didn’t marry comics married accountants, doctors, commercial travellers and ambitious local government yes-men. They were content to keep house and take their place on the church flower-roster until the children grew up, when they would become, as many of them now are, marriage guidance counsellors, animal welfarists, Earth Firsters, prison visitors and JPs.

  Kathie Moody, a former Breams Breezy Babe and seaside hoofer, had graduated in style a few years earlier by marrying Law Grade. Audrey Smith, a Tiller Girl and can-can dancer, had married Leslie Grade. Then there was old Nora Docker, as if we could forget, who had worked her way up from high-kicking and hostessing at Murray’s Club in Soho, to Sir Bernard and the gold-plated Daimler.

  Even Rita, the Grades’ sister, who would soon be constantly on the phone trying to recruit me for her charitable functions and good works, started off on the boards. (‘We’re all going to feel a little bit taller at the end of the day, would I lie to you, Alma?’ Rita would launch into her familiar schmooze, well aware that any refusal to put in an appearance amounted to professional suicide. ‘It’s for a good cause. That road home is going to seem a little bit shorter.’)

  In the meantime, it was a life of cheap chat-ups and dried-out boarding-house suppers for those who were less well-connected. That night at the Helmet most of the chorus didn’t know where they were going to be the same time the following week. This accounted for the cigarette-ends piling up in the saucers and the wreaths of pale smoke that clung to their hair and played around their lively, laughing faces.

  ‘… so he said, “I’ve slept with more people than are in here tonight – and that was on my honeymoon,”’ I heard a brunette on my left say. She was shouting to make herself heard above the noise which had already reached a level where talking made you worry about preserving your voice for the next night’s performance. Somebody was banging away at a piano; somebody else was murdering a banjo.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way. But are you ever worried‚’ the brunette, whose name was Glennis, was addressing me now, ‘about being, you know, a five minute’s magic?’ But before I could answer I was being tapped on the shoulder by Trevor, known throughout the business as Big Rita. (Later in life, when the drink and ‘trolling’ had begun to take their toll, it would become ‘Rita Hayworth’s mother’.)

  He was gesturing at the table with thick fingers covered in glass rings the colour of table jellies. I thought it was my drink he was after, which was just lemonade mixed with vermouth. But he wanted my cigarette packet: I passed it to him and he slid the silver foil out gently, removed the membrane of tissue paper from the back of it and elaborately blotted his lips. He let the lipstick-stained tissue drift down onto the table and made his way towards the stage.

  ‘Electric drill groaning,

  Office telephoning,

  Gracie Fields funning,

  The gangsters gunning,

  Talk of our love‚’

  Trevor started to sing.

  A part of the evening’s entertainment, being quietly relished by those of us not directly involved, came from the cross-currents caused by the appearance on the scene of some of the band wives, breaking up various cosy liaisons that had lasted through the summer. A number of the girls who had been displaced were drinking more heavily than usual and hostilely eyeing up the opposition. Margaret, a full-figured but otherwise rather plain girl from Coventry, was one of them.

  ‘I was expecting to be able to come here tonight and let me back hair down,’ she complained loudly. ‘Then she has to put in an appearance. She hasn’t got the, excuse me, guts to look me in the eye, if you’ve noticed. She looks like one of them that’ll go fat when she gets older.’

  There was a lot more in this vein. Fortunately most of it was swallowed up in the general hubbub which, every so often, gave way to the loud singing of sentimental songs. Then, just as suddenly as the singing had started, it would stop, and everybody would go back to bawling at each other over their glasses.

  ‘Scientists are busy proving the big part personality and looks play in your life. It’s all written, you know.’ Margaret again. ‘They’re going to prove that your life is mapped out for you. So why regret what was inevitable? I’m a total fatalist.’

  But I had started to experience, and covertly enjoy, the gently rolling sensation you sometimes get when you have spent time surrounded by water; the floor and the table both seemed to be moving. That, combined, I suppose, with the fact that I was now a little lit myself and the noise in the Helmet which had reached the sort of pitch where it was as unobtrusive as silence, dredged to the surface something somebody – an eminent artist, as it happens, his face as red as the wine he was anxiously looking around for more of to put in his glass – had said to me not long before at a London party.

  ‘There are only two things I know that I can look at forever: waves breaking in a long slow rolling turn along a sandy beach with the spray being blown off the top. And – oh yes’ – a waiter had finally arrived with a refill; he relieved him of the bottle – ‘the movement of a tall poplar’s topmost branches and leaves. The poplars I can watch endlessly with the lovely movement they have all the time.’

  Everything that happened next seemed to happen at the same languorous tempo; waves breaking on a beach; a tall poplar brushing the sky.

  I had been aware of a dancer called Gerard, who I knew was from a small town in the west of Ireland, sitting astride an upright chair on the stage miming to a tape of Doris Day’s ‘The Deadwood Stage’. He was batting black spiked lashes and had his own blond hair turned back in metallic brackets either side of his face to look like Doris Day’s; he was wearing a red-and-white bandanna and something that roughly resembled the buckskin jacket Doris Day wore in Calamity Jane. Every time he got to ‘whipcrack away, whipcrack away, whipcrack away’ he waved around a piece of clothesline and everybody joined in.

  Now, though, he was suddenly being jerked backwards off the chair by a man in a dark, American-cut sharkskin suit and what we knew in those days as a Billy Eckstine shirt, who was accompanied by another man who was less flashily dressed. The second man caught Gerard as he fell, then flipped him upright in a single unbroken movement so that he was facing stage-front. This was done with such panache that for an instant you might have been fooled into thinking you were watching a top-line, if somewhat dated, adagio act. If you hadn’t been paying attention you might have thought that this was cod-violence; knockabout; pantomime aggro.

  But already, of course, you know different. What we were about to witness was an act of violence of the sort that, up to that night, I’d believed no human capable. From that point on, though, it was the sort of vile craziness I would suspect everybody of having the potential for.

  Very soon, I could tell – we could all tell; you could already smell it – there was going to be blood. And now – was that a drum-roll I heard? – here it came: a thick rope of blood which twisted lazily through the air, followed by a fine spray which settled on the shoulders of those nearest the stage like sparks from an anvil, like snow. There was a thick slick of it on the leading player’s sharkskin jacket that looked like blood on the flank of a tormented bull. Except that it was the bull in this case which was handing out the punishment.

  Both men had inserted their fingers into the boy’s carefully painted mouth and had looked at first as if they were going to force open his teeth like a vice until he resembled the turkey-necked, screaming grotesques in my friend Francis Bacon’s painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

  But these were learner performers. They needed
cruder results than that. They weren’t prepared to trust the patience of their audience. The brass-ringed fingers hooked into his mouth and tore open the flesh of his cheeks like the wrapping round a promising-looking parcel; they ripped upwards towards his eyes and outwards towards his ears; they simply peeled his face like an orange.

  Nobody was ever able to give an explanation for the attack, but it seems reasonable to suppose that there could only be two motives: sexual or financial. If I opt for the former it is because of a comment made to me some years later by somebody who had also witnessed what happened at first-hand. ‘There is nothing more vicious than a villainous poof‚’ he said, and he spoke as one who was in a position to know.

  *

  The ‘American invasion’ of entertainers was at its height in 1954 – Lena Home, Johnny Ray, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Eddie Fisher and Guy Mitchell had all been over to play the Palladium. Nobody excited as much public interest, though, as Doris Day.

  Four months after the events described here, I met her at a reception held in her honour in the River Room at the Savoy. With its kind, modulated lighting, circulating flunkies and stiff linen napiery it was a world away from the sleaze of the Helmet. Inevitably, though, when we were introduced I found myself scrutinising the star guest’s ivory porcelain mask for signs of mutilation and invisible mending. (The boy Gerard survived, hideously disfigured.)

  The main focus of interest, for obvious reasons, was her mouth. ‘No successful singer has an ugly mouth’ was something that had been drummed into me by a woman with a perpetually glistening crimson gash who I had gone to for voice lessons when I was younger. And I found myself following the ellipses and painted puckerings of Doris Day’s (surprisingly full) lips with such concentration that afterwards I would be able to recall barely a word of our bright, brief cocktail conversation.

  It seemed inconceivable then and for many years afterwards that anything could eclipse that as my most vivid memory of the occasion. Events conspired, however, to place even the Gerard episode in a perspective that suggested how far the world had rolled in a direction that no one at the time could have predicted.

  My escort at the Savoy that day was a friend called Sammy who had started out in the Delfont office and was now working as a song plugger in Denmark Street. It was a job he did well; Sammy was what he described as a ‘people person’. He had extra-finely-tuned antennae. He had a nose for an opportunity; an unerring instinct for the profit-pulse. And at the Day reception he quickly ingratiated himself with a small boy who was sitting alone and bored at the edge of the action.

  It didn’t take a genius to see that the boy was American – his skin was honeyed, compared to the dishwater grey of English children; and he was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt and saddle-oxfords. Sammy still maintains he didn’t work out until afterwards that his new chum Terry had to be the son of Doris Day and her first husband, the trombonist Al Jorden, who committed suicide.

  But he was, and for the rest of their stay Sammy did ‘Deedee’, as she almost instantly became, and her husband, Marty Melcher, the favour of keeping Terry occupied. Unlike his mother’s husband, Terry Melcher wasn’t a shlump; he was a nice boy who was remarkably well adjusted for somebody who had grown up on the Hollywood celebrity circuit.

  I went with him and Sammy to watch a baseball game at a U.S. army base in Oxfordshire and a couple of nights later to see the speedway at the White City. Both times, Terry fell asleep in the car afterwards, and slept with his head in my lap – I can feel his hair now, smell the soapy, boyish smell – all the way back to the hotel. My instinct all the time was to comfort him for the terrible thing I thought I had seen happen to his mother.

  Unlike Sammy, who wasted little time in acting on Marty Melcher’s invitation to give him a call if he was ever on their side of the Big Ditch, I made no attempt to follow through or build on the DD connection.

  I followed Terry Melcher’s career at a distance – the records he made in the early sixties as ‘Bruce and Terry’, with Bruce Johnson of the Beach Boys (I was pleased – if mistaken – to be able to vote one of them a hit during a stint on Juke Box Jury); his successful production work for the Byrds and others who had helped turn his mother and myself into show-business dinosaurs.

  It was odd, then, that I should react to news of his narrow escape from involvement in the Manson murders with such a sense of alarm and personal foreboding.

  It emerged that Terry Melcher had been the previous occupant of the house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where Sharon Tate and a number of others were ritually butchered by the Manson ‘Family’ in August 1969. Terry had apparently auditioned Manson for a recording contract and turned him down; it was Terry who the ‘Family’ intended to slaughter that night, rather than Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring and the others.

  Terry, I read, had hired round-the-clock bodyguards for himself and his mother; he had suffered a breakdown, gone into the bottle, and had to be given tranquillisers before testifying at the trial.

  This was all understandable. What was less easy to fathom were my own feelings of profound unease bordering on panic as a result of events taking place ten thousand miles away, halfway round the other side of the world. It was like a door had opened and the draught had blown out my pilot-light. I was on mood elevators to get me up, Oblivon to bring me down, as well as stuff I took without knowing where it was supposed to take me.

  It seemed to me at the time that we were embarked on an unstoppable downward spiral of dementia. That, anyway, is how I rationalised it to the doctors I consulted. And there’s a chance I might even have slightly believed it in 1969.

  What I very much believed – I couldn’t not believe it, faced with the evidence of depleted date-books and what I saw every time I more than glanced in a mirror – was that I was thirty-seven and over the hill; yesterday’s papers.

  When I made the decision to fade away with as little self-pity and as much dignity as possible, I made it quickly, two days into a six-day engagement at an armpit of a club on a newly-pedestrianised shopping street in the Manchester suburbs.

  What was the alternative? To hang around until I became the kind of game old dame, the kind of gutsy old shtarker who nurses her nervous breakdown on third-division chat shows and whose every public appearance turns into a psychodrama.

  In 1969I was so far from being on the crest of a vogue that I no longer registered as even a blip on the drug-fuddled, booze-addled, youth-annexed national consciousness.

  I decided to return to a commonplace existence, and cut the pretence. (What am I saying, ‘return’? All my life I had lived in the anticipation, and then the realisation, of being one of those recognised names. The commonplace was virgin territory as far as I was concerned.)

  From now on, I told myself, climbing in behind a bombed-looking teenage minicab driver outside The Recovery Room noshery/nitery in Wythenshawe, I was going to wind down from ambition. From now on I was going to live in real time.

  Two

  The tide is almost out and I am standing at the window watching a man in waders making his way across the river-bed towards a boat called The Terri-Marie. The Terri-Marie (the man’s wife? his daughter? his wife and daughter? one of the eighties crop of lost-in-the-mix girl singers? none of these?) is lying at an angle in a gully gouged deep in the mud. There are coils of rope, pieces of equipment I don’t have the names for and old paint cans on the weathered and possibly slippery deck (it is close to the end of the year; the year is 1986; it rained loudly in the night).

  A bird is pecking at an orange-red berry on the old stone wall directly below where I am standing. Clear water from the surrounding hills runs swiftly along the gullies. Seagulls circle overhead yowling like cats. Other seabirds perch on roofs and on the showily customised cabins of cabin-cruisers, depositing fresh coats of lime. Smoke rises from the pastel-washed bungalows littering the hillside opposite. Something which I now recognise as an aerial root flickers at the top of the window, at the edge of vision, li
ke a hair in the frame.

  These are the touches of local colour attaching to my present life.

  But my previous life – the life I gave the kiss-off to what seems a lifetime ago, outside The Recovery Room, Wythenshawe, Manchester; the life I surrendered as reluctantly as somebody getting up from a fire to step out into the cold and bring coal – still tugs at me, often when I least expect it. It is tugging at me at this moment, for example, in the form of music that I’m being force-fed down the telephone.

  ‘I have ——— —— for you. Please hold,’ the voice (I imagined glasses on a plastic-linked chain, tusky Streisand-length nails) had said. The next thing I heard was the click of technology engaging, a half-second of tape-slip, then over-loud muzak which it took me less than a bar to identify as the Bert Kaempfert version of ‘Bye Bye Blues’.

  Virtually the only way I could shift records by the mid-sixties was at personal appearances in those big stores which retained the same older department heads who were in charge in the days when I could be depended on to pull the crowds in for them.

  I suppose they went along with the charade out of sympathy and nostalgia and, in a few cases, out of the delight that most of us have taken at one time or another in seeing somebody heading for a fall. This particular form of schadenfreude showed itself in a manic eagerness to prise people away from whatever purchase they were considering and force them to witness the spectacle of a career in unpretty decline.

  Only two records ever seemed to provide the background to these desultory, progressively unedifying side-shows: ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’ by Horst Jankowski, and Bert Kaempfert’s ‘Bye Bye Blues’. The push was on then to sell stereo equipment and the paraphernalia of home music-centres; and the Kaempfert especially was perfect for demonstrating the bass-to-treble range and fidelity of reproduction of the new audio technology.