Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  Slipping into a room where the buzz was on and gorillas were mock-menacingly twirling worry-beads at the door (I knew most of them by name) to me was like being lifted out of a rough sea by helicopter. The noise, the smoke, the fracturedness, the social treachery and superficiality … all the things that so many people of my acquaintance would cross continents to avoid, were what drew me and started my juices flowing.

  (The thing I would cross continents to avoid, even now, are the faces of those friends and contemporaries which I remember – it does seem only yesterday – as being emulsified, as being rich with optimism and confidence, and are now, to greater or lesser degrees, opaque with disappointment and the baggy accommodations we have all had to make with reality.

  (I’m not talking here only about money: some of the richest are also the most disappointed. Or even about disappointed ambition. Probably the most chilling look is the look of ambition realised – the hollow haunted look of disgust with achievement. You know: Pa-dum-da-da-dum-dee-dum … Is that all there is to the circus? That one.)

  Most afternoons now, in these weeks close to the end of the year, I come back from my walks with the smell of wood-smoke and garden bonfires rising off me in waves with the cold. This was the smell of my pillow on all those woozy mornings after the nights before. By washing my hair less often than it should be washed – not difficult, given the state of the plumbing (and the condition of my follicles) – it can be the smell of my pillow here in turniptown.

  On my infrequent trips to London I can still pull on a coat or a jacket in the reasonable certainty of stabbing my finger on the toothpicks and cocktail stirrers that have collected in the pockets.

  My clothes and the bags I carried in those days are littered with match-books for enterprises that went under almost as soon as they were launched and invitations to bashes which nobody in their right mind could ever have hoped would pay their way. Also with cards giving the addresses in ‘toney’ raised copperplate of men whose names would add up to a bizarre network if anybody – the police, say, or a reporter or freelance snoop – ever went to the trouble of tracking them down.

  (I have no idea why this thought should suddenly occur to me now; but the picture of my life which would emerge from such an exercise – sparked off by … what? my disappearance? my death? – would be so distorted and grotesque that I have made a mental note to have a major clear-out the next time I go back.)

  My determination to be always next to the action was a standing joke among my friends, none of them exactly wallflowers themselves.

  One example. One afternoon sometime in the fifties when I was up there, riding high, my agent asked me what I was doing for the weekend.

  ‘After Sammy’s finished his show on Saturday,’I said (Sammy Davis was in town filming with Peter Lawford and playing the Pigalle), ‘I’m flying to the Italian Riviera with him, Betty Bacall, Sarah Churchill and Cary Grant. We’re staying with the Rex Harrisons in wherever it is they live overlooking the sea.’

  This reply – I honestly couldn’t see why at the time – broke him up. His face turned the unbecoming kippered maroon of the leather inlaid into the top of his desk, he laughed until tears streamed from his eyes. ‘I kvel when I think of you, Alma,’ he said. ‘Do you know what kvel is? It’s a yiddish word meaning I like flip. You really go with the big time, don’t you? You’d never go out with a couple of bums.’

  ‘Harry,’ I said solemnly, ‘I’m sorry, but I find going out with people who are rich, famous and successful simply divine.’

  *

  It all goes back to my mother (who else?). In essence, mine is the classic pushy-mother story, so I won’t detain you too long with it here.

  I have no wish to stick it to my mother (who is still implacably with us, by the way, minus some other marbles; the lights are on, as they say, but there’s nobody home). But it’s become pretty obvious since I got out from under her that she set out to use me absolutely cold-bloodedly to achieve all the things she was never in a position to achieve herself.

  Family legend has it that she could have been another Callas if she had had the chance. The chance was denied her by her own mother whose violent reaction to the suggestion that Fay be sent to the Conservatoire – this was before the family were forced to flee with their handcarts from Romania – was to become the bane of my life. ‘I’d rather see her dead at my feet!’ my mother would declaim, imitating her mother speaking in another culture (another language), in an altogether other time. (Cue tragic pose by the chimney-breast; cue revivifying hit of apricot-brandy from the sideboard drawer.)

  A striking facial resemblance between my mother and Fanny Brice as played by herself in The Great Ziegfeld – they shared the same ethnic features: proud forehead, bulbous nose, rolling Can-toresque eyes – encouraged her in her belief that the parade had passed her by.

  She went to see that film (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, Prod. Hunt Stromberg, MGM, 1936; b&w) in the spirit that other people made pilgrimages to Lourdes: repeatedly, religiously, with a vacuum flask in her voluminous mock-croc handbag and me and my father in tow. There was never any doubt in her mind that it was the transformation of herself from rags to riches, from cheap burlesk to queen of the Great White Way, that she was witnessing on the screen. The comedown afterwards, as she rode our family bone-shaker the few hundred yards home, was pitiful to behold.

  Inevitably, as it seems now, my mother met my father at a tea dance at the Café de Paris in Leicester Square. He was a familiar figure outside the stage-doors of the London music-halls and the legitimate theatres of the West End and as incurably star-struck – he wore it in his eyes – as her.

  The Kogins had disembarked in England from Russia, thinking it was America, and stayed. My father’s father, whom I never met, was a tailor. My father, whose name was Mitya, or Mityusha, or Mityenka, or Mityushenka – less euphoniously ‘Mark’ – sold women’s dresses from a shop in a genteel seaside resort on the south coast. In time he would build the one shop up into a small chain.

  I must have seen the sea every day when I was a child but have retained no memory of it at all. My childhood was miraculously, certainly quite unnaturally, protected from the elements. I was, after all, conceived as an all-singing, all-dancing showtime spectacular and, like the exotic bloodstock that suggests, raised in what virtually amounted to laboratory conditions.

  By the age of two I was being coached in voice and tap by Madame Rogers and her daughter, a stringy girl, splay-footed as well as tone-deaf, known to us as Mamzelle Leonora. There was something about the Studio – two rooms above a Burton’s the tailor, sharing a landing with a dangerously dingy billiard hall from which damp sawdust trailed, as out of a butcher’s or a burst teddy bear – that smacked of the gutter glamour to which I have always found myself ineluctably drawn. My parents, needless to say, saw it as merely glamorous.

  Back home after every lesson I had to stand on one of the broad lino margins around the living-room and give a demonstration of what I’d learned, the metal taps cracking out into the room like gunfire.

  ‘Don’t stop ’til I tell you,’ my father would cry. ‘I want my shilling’s worth.’ My mother, meanwhile, perched on the edge of the sofa scrubbing on a ukelele, Formby-style. (She can still, at a pinch, and even out where she’s orbiting, play accordion, trumpet, clarinet, trombone and harmonium, God help us.)

  By the time I was ten I could walk into a cinema and tell you which studio – Warners or Metro or Fox or Gaumont-British – had made what was showing just by looking at the print. MGM’s lion; Paramount’s snow-topped mountain; RKO’s radio beacon, and Columbia’s diaphanous Miss Liberty were the dominant images in my childhood, the last two especially so because I wasn’t altogether sure what they were meant to represent.

  Monday nights and Thursday nights – the night programmes changed at the Troxy – were when we went to the cinema together as a family. We usually made up the head of the queue at what my father still quaintly called the Electric Palace
(it was only years later, many years after his death, that I noticed these words done in plaster, amid baroque twirls, high above the contemporary façade).

  The balcony at the Troxy was thrillingly raked and cantilevered and we would dash to claim seats in one of the two curved corner sections which swung out over the stalls like Waltzer cars.

  This was part of what, in the late thirties, was the owners’ much-vaunted Odeon-modern look. My mother was super-taken with a colour scheme she insisted was ‘carnation and mango’, and with the way the gilded sconces and scrolls that went with a past that pre-dated even their past had been blocked and negated and streamlined out.

  A game I liked to play – only with myself, who of course was too young to know the Troxy as Mark and Fay had known it – was to seek out evidence of what the Troxy had been like in the days of the silents, when the decorative theme was apparently south-coast Samarkand; in the days, that is to say, immediately before my arrival on the scene.

  I would gaze about me and quietly note a palm cornice here, the tip of a barley-sugar column there, a swan-neck gas bracket concealed behind a sweeping parabolic plaster screen. Stupid, I know, but it was almost as though Mark and Fay – Poppa and Momma, Tateh and Mameh – had been trying to keep something from me and I’d found them out.

  I was a strange little girl. But not as strange as the little girl who, singing, dancing, acting and dimpling, would tower over us, spit curls bouncing, hammy knees hamming, toxic in her winsomeness.

  Baby Take a Bow, Our Little Girl, Bright Eyes, Little Miss Broadway, Curly Top … There was no end to them. Shirley Temple films came thick and fast. And we sat through everything One-Take-Temple, America’s Sweetheart, ever made.

  There was always a special tension between the three of us when we went to see a Shirley Temple picture. I could sense meaningful glances being exchanged over my head each time the precocious one launched into another number. Many encouraging smiles were flashed at me in the flickering half-light and there was a marked amount of cosying down in seats and metaphorical clucking.

  I felt them willing me to like her and want to follow her down the thorny path she had beaten. I was given a Shirley doll for my third or fourth Christmas with moving and sleeping eyes and jointed arms and legs and her name branded into her head under the human hair wig.

  But I pointedly ignored what I have no doubt is now a much-coveted collectible, and instead lavished all my affection on the plastic likeness of the ice-skater-turned-movie-queen, Sonja Henie.

  Too late in my own career – the Teds were on the rampage; Elvis was being denounced as morally insane – somebody put an Alma doll on the market. The manufacturer took the bath on it that I predicted. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you can still sometimes spot me sitting on the top of a TV set in place of the lava-lamp or the Spanish lady that film-makers invariably dig out when they want a shorthand way of establishing a certain kind of birdbrained, latently violent, Darren-and-Sharon fish-finger ambiance.

  In the event, it was the other regular weekly fixture in our life as a family which was to prove most effective in realising Mark and Fay’s ambitions. On Wednesdays, halfday closing in town, we would join many of our neighbours and friends from the business community at the tea dances which were held in the Famous Name Danse Salon on the front.

  I don’t think I need to go into a great deal of detail about this. The Famous Name is the kind of place that is familiar from a thousand period reconstructions. Suffice it to say that it was peach-mirrored and below pavement level and suffused with the smell of naphthalene fur protection from the ladies’ Persian-and beaver-lamb coats and chinchillette hug-me-tights. They carried their own and their husbands’ shoes for dancing in homemade bags with draw-string tops.

  In the films, there was never any suggestion that fur, which was constantly being tossed and draped and trailed across nightclub floors, could ever be in any danger of infestation or rotting. Or that the stars were ever anything less than the flawless beings they appeared. I was too young then to appreciate the important part played by lighting, camera angles, and the scalpel.

  I just knew that the scrutiny demanded by the movies terrified me. I was a little Jewish girl: dark-skinned, lank-haired, shortsighted, horribly fat; no amount of reassurance that my big nose would ‘photograph cute’ was enough to convince me. The cinema demanded perfection, and I didn’t have it.

  I remember the day I decided I could make a singer, though.

  I was wearing a touch of something from my mother which smelled strongly of cantaloupes and oranges (‘You want a man to like it, go after the food groups’ was her position on perfume, which she still calls scent) and gliding around the floor in the arms of my father at the Famous.

  I danced with Mark and Fay by turn, and had tea and cakes with semi-transparent icing while they took their turns with each other. I came up to chest-height on my mother, whom I seem to recall having heavy, pendulous breasts even as a young woman. The part of her where my hand rested had a stiff, packaged feel and was gently corrugated from her boned girdle.

  I came to just above waist-height on my father who, as usual, was wearing a suit of a heavy winter fabric which lightly inflamed my cheek. The band had only one shantooz or canary, a lilting lovely and curvaceous cutie whose general standards of presentation and personal grooming were as formidable as anything I encountered at the Troxy.

  In her dress of rhinestone lights, standing in a pool of light, never making eye-contact, singing always above the heads of the dancers to the middle-distance, she was a mirage – bleached, evanescent, shimmering. It was as though she was both standing in the light and at the same time helping to create it.

  It was an effect she was able to sustain (and I was able to learn from) by never appearing in the public parts of the hall. She seemed to dematerialise when she was out of the spotlight. I had never seen her arrive or leave, and had never spotted her anywhere in town while shopping with my mother.

  June Satin (not her real name – that has gone, unfortunately) was as other-worldly, as unearthly as anything coming out of the Hollywood dream factories. Her farts even probably smelled of violets, to revive a saying I was rather fond of (but never allowed to utter) in those days.

  On the day the scales fell from my eyes, she was wearing a dress of yellow (blue?) tussore with blue (yellow?) ornaments and bright lemon-coloured gloves extending to the creamy upper part of her arm.

  The bandstand wasn’t very far from the ground and I had skirted it several times in the stiff embrace of both my father and my mother before I noticed something that seemed impossible in my eyes: June Satin had a mend in her stocking!

  Her immaculate toes were as usual framed in the brilliant straps of her slippers. But there, in addition to the dark hint of nail polish that was always visible, on the cusp of her big toe, at the summit of the pretty stairway of her perfect foot squatted what looked like a medulla, a tarantula of last-minute mending. Hallelujah! Succour for the week! Hope for the suffering! Was blind but now I see!

  June Satin’s toe-hole was a chink through which the light suddenly seemed to come flooding; it exploded off the mirrored ball turning slowly under the ceiling (people were walking above us), lighting up a world of the possible. Suddenly now the shoes of the band personnel, for instance, weren’t uniformly glassy, but horizontally striped with the dust in the creases. There was a button hanging by a thread from the sleeve of the double-bassist’s jacket. The band desks, monogrammed and slickly finished from a distance, proved to be scuffed and jerry-built on closer inspection. (And offered a microcosm of the show-business life, as I was to learn with experience. You should have seen some of the things those boys kept back there – pictures of their wives and kids, pornographic pictures, chewing-gum, packets of biscuits, rags to hawk and spit in.)

  So hats off to Junie. Hers was an invaluable lesson in the crucial part attention to detail plays in sustaining an illusion. I became a fanatic about footwear as a result of that small
moment of awakening, and a perfectionist with a prickly and enduringly ‘difficult’ reputation.

  The strongest memory I have of my mother is of her in turban and apron in a steam-filled kitchen, boiling dyes in order that a pair of shoes might exactly match the colour of my latest over-the-top stage creation.

  This was our regular drama: her sweating and stirring, mixing and matching; me shaking my head dismissively and sending her back to come up with something better. A heartless image, I agree, loaded with pathos.

  So let me quickly set beside it another – of me, the biggest-drawing entertainer in the country and a mature woman, through television and radio a virtually inescapable presence, living in trepidation (I was a baroque, moygashel-and shantung-hung definition of the word) in case anything should happen to prevent me putting in my nightly call to the widow Cogan.

  Wherever I happened to be, whatever I happened to be doing, a call, preferably on the stroke of eleven, is what she expected. Failure to deliver resulted in extraordinary scenes and recriminations.

  Anguished calls to the police and the papers, for example, reporting my disappearance (they knew to humour her). Locks changed on the flat we lived in together after my father’s death in London (although she always saw it as me living with her). Records smashed (my records – records, that is, with my voice on them – for preference). Clothes that turned out to be slyly mutilated the next time I went to wear them …

  Oh she was something, my mother.

  *

  This peculiar ménage, of just myself and Fay and no sign of a male presence, was something which, understandably I suppose, people used to find intriguing, even in an era when nice girls didn’t.

  The conversation would always proceed along predictable lines whenever the ‘human interest’ scribblers (gossip-mongers) came calling: uneasy opening pleasantries, then a trade-off of industry gossip, leading to the interview proper – biographical background (no matter how many times they’d read it); current hopes/ambitions/corny quips/crackerbarrel philosophising – ‘I have always prided myself that my fans are not the unruly type. I feel the attention of the fans is flattering to me as an artist.’ The usual bushwah, in other words.