by Gordon Burn
A regular part of life at the home are the ‘chat shows’ in which the residents take part. It is all done along professional lines, with television make-up and a spotlight beamed from the ceiling and a ‘conversation area’ of three armchairs set in a two-on-one formation directly below the alcove containing the remains of Prince and Duke.
The ‘host’ is the resident manager of the home, or ‘Super’, as he prefers, a blot-shaped man with glazed candle jowls and perfect cuticles who talks in the ingratiating, stupefyingly ebullient style that he has perfected from the box.
The unfortunate thing is that the old stagers, who nearly all have a tale to tell, have been pressed into following his example. Which means that originality – of point of view, of experience, of expression – is not only not expected, but not encouraged.
The bland generality, the formulaic utterance, the quip that has been round the block a few times – they are all preferred to the texture of lived experience. The audience has also internalised the rules of the game: they come in with a laugh-track whenever the Super’s bared teeth and lifted shoulders suggest that it’s appropriate, exactly on-cue.
‘It’s been some fun days, I tell you,’ Bubbly Rogers is saying and winning loud murmurs of approval from the hair-dos in the gloaming. (A hairdresser has been in in the afternoon and many faces, including Bubbly’s, are still heat-blotched and par-boiled.)
She was a vocalist with Vic Oliver’s orchestra in the thirties. The bow of her lips is exaggerated and pearly pink, and so is her wispy nest of hair. ‘I think you can control your destiny,’ she says, leaning forward in a confiding manner. ‘You and God.’ (Applause.) ‘No, God and you. Watch out for the billing!’ (Laughter.)
‘I never go to the cinema anymore. You get through the door, and five minutes and they’re in bed. I’m not a prude, I just don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like bad language in films.’ (Loud applause.) ‘I don’t like it on television, it frightens my dog.’ (Loud laughter.)
Norman Long (‘A Song, a Smile, a Piano’) has slipped into the place next to me on the sofa, making me the filling in a sandwich consisting of himself and my mother. He has done it in the casual-conspicuous way that reminds me why I was never able to deaden the tedium of long afternoons in strange towns by going to the cinema on my own.
I half-expect his sclerotic old hand to come sliding over and start working its way up my skirt. Instead he starts plucking at my sleeve and jerking his head in a way that says he wants me to follow him out of the room. I look at my mother; she is moving her lips, silently mimicking Bubbly Rogers’ answers with her, so I do.
The wall-lamps in the corridors are the kind that drip plastic candle grease: many of the shades have toppled sideways and become scorched from the heat.
We pass the doors of the Prince Littler undenominational chapel (there is an artificial Christmas tree on a table, waiting to be dressed) and then bear left in the direction of Norman’s room.
After his solo career was over he’d been props-marr for Tommy Cooper for many years – the person in charge of the doomed tricks and other famous bits of comic business that made Tommy the institution he was.
He’d been let go for some considerable time when Tommy Cooper collapsed and died on-stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre during a live television broadcast in 1984.
The curtains are drawn in Norman’s room. The only light comes from a lamp on the bedside table which has a chiffon scarf thrown over the shade. Illuminated in the light above it – he has insisted I take the only chair, while he himself perches on the edge of the bed – are a number of personal mottos, hand-inscribed and framed in cellophane and black tape: ‘You’ve either got it or you’ve had it’ is one; ‘Teach a kid to blow a horn, and he’ll never blow a safe’ is the only other one I can read.
He offers me a whisky; then an apple or a boxed date. He pours a small drink for himself then bends forward from where he’s sitting and loads a tape into the video machine.
There are a few frames of a man and woman at a kitchen table but these soon stutter into the opening credit sequence for Live from Her Majesty’s. The curtains open on a high-kicking chorus, who are followed by the compère, who tells a few jokes before introducing a girl singer who lip-synchs.
Norman fast-forwards all this. Only when Tommy Cooper comes on to take his first spot does he allow the tape to play at normal speed. Cooper comes in on the revolve with his familiar fez on his head and a purple velvet-covered pedestal of tricks in front of him. But when he opens his mouth to speak, Norman hurries the tape on again.
‘… like a log. Woke up in the fireplace,’ Tommy is saying when Norman takes his finger off the button. During the laugh an assistant comes out of the wings and wraps him in a shiny kimono which causes some camera flare. As she exits, Norman freezes the frame.
‘Now!’ he says, moving the tape on inch-by-inch. ‘Don’t blink. Here it comes!’ On the screen Tommy has begun his backwards fall into the curtain. The next frame shows him with his mouth open gasping for air. By the next – ‘There he goes – he’s going over!’ Norman almost shouts – he is on the ground.
He fast-forwards through the commercial break – the super-laminate images, the galloping colours, the sweat beading on Norman’s head – into part two of the show in which a young comedian has been brought on to cover for the confusion backstage.
‘But he’s still there!’ Norman says, moving back a few frames. He leaps from the bed and stabs with his finger at what he says are a pair of feet pointing skywards amid the static and muck of distortion at the bottom of the screen. ‘He’s still there. They’re breathing in his mouth! They’re jumping on his chest! He’s too heavy to move!’
The deteriorated quality of the tape in this section – it has the milky opaque look of sugar that has been spun and stretched – shows how it has been run and re-run over the heads, freeze-framed and examined pixel-by-pixel, played and re-played in the hope (I assume) of isolating the moment of death.
‘Death deserves dignity,’ Norman Long says as I stand to go (an apothegm that would probably be hanging on his wall somewhere if I cared to look).
He produces a flat tin from the darkest corner of the gloom and opens it to show what is inside. ‘Heroin, morphine, amphetamine. Add gin or whisky and what does that make? The Brompton cocktail! Set sail for happiness! I’m all prepared.’
*
The search for bodies on the Moors has been suspended until the weather lifts. It’s snowing in the North.
Yet here there is no sign of snow. The night sky isn’t its usual depthless city black, but lit up with tea-scum, coffee-scurf clouds of the same pastel spectrum as the inmates’ hair.
Seven
The boats have been lifted out of the water; they are lined up on the quay with tailored hoods and sleeves fitted over the cabins and masts and leaves slicked to their pedigree hulls.
Odd, as old Bob Brotherhood has occasionally remarked, watching members of the happy-go-crazy set and cases from Berry Bros going onboard during the season, that there was once a time when they built boats here from the wood up.
‘Two hundred years ago,’ so it goes, ‘a woman making bread had to start with grain, and a man making a boat had to start with a tree. Simple components, d’you see what I’m saying, simply joined.’
The long nights signal a flurry of social activity in the village – the Friendly Wives’ Club’s ‘Twenties evening’, the cricket club’s ‘Derby night’, tombola socials, jumble sales, domino suppers, talks, demonstrations – cake decorating, ‘Christmas decorations from garden and hedgerow’ – inspirational-religioso choir workouts, and panto rehearsals (Englishmen in frocks – the annual drag-fest, but all for a good cause: Horticultural Therapy, unless I’m mistaken, will be the beneficiary this year).
Most afternoons a Viva or Nova with a couple of oldsters on board will putter to a halt across from the cottage and a performance as stylised as the ghost dance or Kabuki will begin.
He will fill a pipe while, with the concentration of somebody performing triple bypass surgery, she cores and peels an apple, the skin spiralling agonisingly down into a neat pile in her lap. Her offer of a clean scraped section will be refused with an impatient shake of the head.
After the shipping forecast he will check on the movement of his shares (part of a standard retirement package) before turning to the TV page, where, with a series of ticks and circles, he will plan their viewing for the evening.
By this time she will be sleeping with her mouth ajar and an irregular whistly-wheezy noise coming from deep down in her sternum.
The countryside is littered with these tin semi-tombs at this time of the year – whiskery mouths and jellied turkey wattles and slow-flowing drools and dribbles pointed towards glorious ‘Views’ of wooded peninsulas and boiling sun-flecked seas.
When snooze-time is over and spectacles, hearing aids and upper-palates have been pressed back into service, it is time for more tea and biscuits out of tins bearing ancient images of the corps de ballet from Sleeping Beauty or the old king or the Castle Gardens in Edinburgh viewed from Princes Street.
If you ever needed convincing that All life is sorrowful (the first Buddhist saying) here is your proof.
It is scenes such as this which explain why we all eventually devise ways of putting ourselves in places or states of feeling that bring us back to the inner rhapsody of being alive and reconnect us with the now feeling of life.
In my years alone here the formula has been unvarying: a small room, sepulchral lighting, a drink with a kick like a dromedary (a Negroni with Carpano substituted for the Campari, plus a splash of sweet Cinzano, is always guaranteed to hit the button), plus music, including the cheap, thin, popular songs I spent years trying to deny had ever floated on my breath.
I always loved singing. Long before I was alerted to the ambitions my father and mother were hatching for me in that direction, I sang all the time.
There was a man, a neighbour of ours, who used to have me over to help him do things in his garage, and he’d give me a threepenny piece to sing. I sat there and watched him do things, and I sang. I was four or five.
At the peak of my powers I had a voice that could peel lemons. But time takes a toll on voices, particularly those of women. The vocal cords calcify and, in extreme age, the result is a high cracked sound.
These days the only exercise my voice gets is during the cocktail hour here in the cottage, when I am shut into the small spare-room packed with lumber, which, in my single incursion into what I still regard as borrowed space, I have turned into a makeshift mood module.
One of my regrets is that I haven’t spent as many hours in bars in the course of my life as I would if I had been a man. It’s a passion that can be dated back to my first visit to New York in 1956, when I was booked for two appearances on Ed Sullivan, plus three weeks of cabaret in the Persian Room at the Plaza.
It’s something I had been pushing for for long enough (from the beginning). Fog delayed our departure from London for three days. The flight took thirteen hours, and I arrived tired, under-rehearsed, and nervous.
On opening night I was, to quote one of the early notices, ‘tense as nine newly-tuned pianos’. The downbeat critic described me as ‘another femme singer’. (And, in a city that had femme singers coming out of the paintwork, he had a point. I was 100 per cent ersatz Americana; a warmed-over version of the real thing.)
New York didn’t exactly beat a path to my suite at the Plaza, which had what was called a cathedral-ceiling living-room and a terrace overlooking Central Park from where it was possible to watch a polar bear endlessly prowling backwards and forwards in his rocky compound in the Zoo. (It is an image which remains peculiarly vivid, and yet I can’t say for certain it isn’t something I read about later and projected my own predicament on to after the fact.) I remember it now as a gleam among the green, like the light off a naked body.
I was mentally preparing to go out and face them on my second night when the phone rang and a voice from downstairs announced that ‘I have Mr Davis wishing to visit with you.’
Naturally I knew Sammy Davis by reputation – hip-dressing, wise-cracking, finger-snapping, ring-a-ding-ding-ing member of the showbiz inner-élite. ‘More tchotchkies than Sophie Tucker,’ as somebody had it, ‘and twice as sentimental.’
I loved the image. And he was no disappointment in the flesh. He came in through a door to the suite I hadn’t realised existed until then, a tiny black man in a retinue of Italianate white bruisers, and stood ten feet away for maximum effect – the skinny-fitting shiny suit, bluest black, with a blue-black shadow stripe; the eggshell shirt with the generous soft high rolled collar; the boots (with lifts) made from the hide of unborn calf; the saucer-sized St Christopher and other medals bucking on his tie; the black moiré pirate patch covering the eye lost in a road accident eighteen months earlier; the processed electro-violet Congolene pomaded hair.
To say he looked exotic is to seriously undersell the effect – he looked imagineered, cuboid, like a Picasso painting or an Easter Island sculpture. It was plain that here was somebody who didn’t know what it was to take life in small steps.
I, on the other hand (still unversed of course in substance abuse; in chemical coping skills), had never before felt so entirely grounded or earthbound – never so aware of my physical musculoskeletal self.
I felt the dead weight of my plumbing and blubber and heavy organs; saw myself as heaving viscera in a bag of hot skin – and at the same time for what felt like the first time saw my ideal self: a frictionless black man talking jive-talk and living a life whose basic premise was that the normal, the dull and the average – square, white-bread, cutems (I was prepared to put my hand up to all three) – had simply ceased to exist.
He moved to where I was standing and brought both my hands to his lips. ‘I hear last night was a real bitch kitty of a performance, doctor. Tonight you’ll be even better. We’re going to be in forya tonight, and tonight you’re going to knock them square on their tuchis. If you don’t turn ’em on, then they’ve got no switches.’
(They were in; the performance I gave wasn’t a noticeable improvement on the night before’s. In all my performing career I never learned Sammy’s trick of burning off fear and releasing the clean, unimpeded impact of personality which jolts an audience to life.)
But it was what happened next that set the seal on the future pattern of our friendship. I’d been feeling so shredded and put through the wringer since I arrived that the only time I’d been out of the room was to go to work.
So the private lift lined in buttoned white leather that we got into was new, and so was the labyrinthine yet intimate bar buried deep in the Plaza that turned out to be our destination.
We slipped behind a velvet rope into an alcove, Sammy ordered – ‘A little taste for the face, a little toddy for the body, Eduardo’ – and snaky hipped black boys and solid middle-aged men with Cork-American accents danced attendance on us as if we were deities.
I felt a nice exhilaration, sitting in the electric-plotted twilight, drinking from the Steuben glasses. (I was going to have to be sick before going on, but that came later.)
It was the authentication of an experience I had been living through films and pulp novels and music for probably twenty of my twenty-four years: the chink of ice, the clink of glasses, the syncopation of American conversation (it was a language that climbed on the table and danced its energy), the marimba motion of drinks being made, the tinkling of a cocktail piano.
Heroically-scaled paintings in shades of green-black glowed dimly at the backs of the bigger seating recesses – pictures of fir groves or charging horses or medieval armies or moonlight ripply bowers: their surfaces seemed to form and reform by the minute, and refused to settle down to a si
ngle subject or interpretation.
‘Energy without depth.’ ‘Sensation without commitment.’ Those were the standard European criticism of the American experience – of ‘Yank style’ – in the fifties.
But together they represented the American formula for success and were preferable every time (so it seemed to me) to depth without energy, and commitment combined with censoriousness and fire-iron solemnity (the British Way).
I visited many falling-about stations with Sammy in the next weeks (and, in fact, over the next twenty-five years).
Jilly Rizzo’s bar near Madison Square Garden, Tony’s bar on 52nd Street, Jan Walman’s Duplex in the Village, Joe’s Elbow Room in New Jersey; the Crystal Caverns in Washington; the Chez Paree and the Club De-liza in Chicago; the Society in Jermyn Street, and Pal Joey’s at the Angel were some of them.
‘I think I need three inches of money,’ Sammy would tell whoever was holding for him, and we were off for ‘a little see and be seen’.
A place we went to on my first visit that became an established favourite was the bar in the back of the old sleazeball America Hotel on West 47th Street, where Will Mastin, Sammy’s uncle, Lenny Bruce and others kept small efficiency apartments.
The America Hotel was a notorious couch-camp for prostitutes, and more often than not it was being raided. To gain admission you would have to duck under the ‘These premises raided’ sign hanging on a chain that stretched across the doorway.
There was a recording studio on the ground floor, in the back of what had once been an old dining-room. The control room was probably the old kitchen. The bar, which had no name, only a slogan – ‘Open every day 7.00 to unconscious time’ – was fitted into the other half of the dining-room, next to the studio.
It was nothing special – pressed-tin ceiling, granita floor, Formica tables, semi-circular booths, high stools along the long bar where the darkness thinned. There were prawn crackers and peanuts and ketchup squirt tomatoes on the tables, and advertising clocks around the place all giving different times. Overhead in the gloom was a single twenty-two watt circlet bulb of the sort known in the New York of the day as the Landlord’s Halo. El Morocco it wasn’t. On the contrary, it was its low-rent, semi-secret nature and the interplay between the people who washed up there – stellar talent, as it used to be known in those days – Sinatras, Ava Gardners, Garlands, Bogarts, Lena Homes, tossed into the usual stir-fry of mob people, rag-traders, fight promoters, and Fifth Avenue hookers working their Chanel – that made the bar at the America Hotel hum. A certain electricity permeated the air, a magnetism that went in higher revolutions than anywhere else I could name, then or now.