Alma Cogan

by Gordon Burn

  A red circle hovers around the head of one of a party of tadpole figures slithering across the lunar landscape of snow. It encloses a black hood worn over a black balaclava which, when they blow it up, pushing as far as it will go, hovers on the edge of disclosing who or what is in there, but in the end dissolves into dots of primary colours.

  That she has an existence independent of the image that has represented her for twenty-one years – the trowel nose, the defiant eyes, the peroxide hair – is a mystery that seems hard to get to grips with. Hindley was twenty-three when she was arrested. Now she’s forty-four. It is as if by changing her appearance, and keeping her current identity secret, she has effected some form of escape.

  ‘The senior detective leading the investigation said that Hindley’s recollection of bleak moorland she has not visited for over twenty years was surprisingly vivid. It had led police to a new search area where she believes more young bodies may be buried, and where digging may begin tomorrow.’

  The wind-burned face of one of the searchers (filmed from above, probably from a ladder, over the heads of the other camera crews and reporters) now fills the screen. ‘We will be using the new digging techniques we have been taught by experts in buried body detection, removing the topsoil and then using a trowel and a hoe to identify the different layers of soil and looking for signs that the natural layering has been disturbed,’ he says.

  Extract from Tate Gallery Archive Tape TAV 499A, recorded 3.10.74

  COMPILER: I sense a certain sexual ambivalence in the figure of Alma Cogan as you have portrayed her in the painting. The hands, for instance, are very big. This could be a woman imitating a man imitating a woman.

  PETER BLAKE: That was intentional. On the occasion when we met to discuss the painting, I remember her saying something along the lines of her learning all her make-up tricks from drag queens – what kind of mascara lasts longest, how to apply eyeshadow, ‘all the important decisions’.

  Later, some years after the portrait was finished, in the mid-sixties, I believe there was a drag act who billed himself as’... in the gowns of Alma Cogan’, which is very strange.

  A thing I realised many years ago is that nobody believes what they read in the papers more than the people who write for them.

  Similarly, the biggest suckers for the old ‘roar of the greasepaint/no people like show people’ routine are performers themselves. The bigger they get, the more they buy it. Sammy Davis has always been particularly susceptible. ‘Sammy, dear boy, don’t be so blasted gauche,’ Larry Harvey was always telling him. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

  But Sammy has gone on building up his collection anyway. John Wayne’s stetson from Stagecoach, James Dean’s jacket from Rebel Without a Cause, the bullfighter Dominguin’s suit of lights, a ‘Grecian-style’ lamé dress belonging to Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland’s dancing shoes … They’ve all been given places of honour in the house in Beverly Hills.

  The market in showbiz tat and memorabilia has boomed in the last few years. It used to be that they were content with an autograph and a snap. Now they’re prepared to bid for your family albums, contracts, letters, old clothes and bed-linen. Once or twice a year I get a letter asking me to authenticate the latest piece of my past that has found its way into the saleroom.

  ‘Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it’: Indian proverb. I’ve tried to make that my philosophy in the past decade: I had been there, but now it looked as though I had never been. I had made a deeper and apparently more permanent mark than most, but all the signs had been obliterated, swept away. ‘As soon as you leave the room you are forgotten’: something we used to tell each other in our cups.

  But it seems now that this is not the case. What’s happening is like a real-life enactment of those television title sequences where an atomised image shinily reassembles itself, like an explosion in reverse.

  I’m finding out that a lot of what I thought had been bonfired, Oxfam-ed, used for land-fill, has in fact been tidied away in sound archives, stills libraries, image banks, memorabilia mausoleums, tat troves, mug morgues.

  It’s an odd experience to find yourself catalogued, card-indexed, museumised, a speck of data for the information professionals to bounce around.

  It seems that as long as you’re in print or on film or a name on a buff envelope in an archive somewhere, you’re never truly dead now. You can be electronically colourised, emulsified, embellished, enhanced, coaxed towards some state of virtual reality.

  You can be reactivated or reëmbodied; simulated and hologrammed. In just the last two years my voice has been artificially reprocessed for stereo effect and reincarnated in half-speed remasterings and on digital compact disc.

  The spare-parts that make this possible are housed in a proliferating number of noninvasive environments in London, where they may be viewed (fingered, sniffed, listened to) by appointment.

  The basement door at the rear of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden clicks open without me having to lift a finger. There’s a TV monitor in the security man’s cubicle and he has seen me coming. I sign the visitors’ book. He slaps an identity sticker on my jacket. Security Heightened Awareness it says on a sign next to his electric kettle.

  ‘Please ensure that your hands are clean. Washbasins are situated on the back staircase’, a sign says at the door to the Research Room. ‘No fountain, ball-point, felt tip or any other sort of pen. Pencils only.’

  The work surfaces are dark and polished, the lighting indirect, the walls lined in green baize.

  ‘C’ is for ‘Cogan’. I pull open one of the catalogue drawers and run a finger over the coloured cards indicating the main categories.

  Cakes

  Calypso Music

  Cartoons

  Cassettes

  Chart rigging

  Charts

  China and Rock

  Clubs

  Competitions

  Computers

  Concerts for Causes

  (Red Wedge,

  Apartheid/Sun City,

  Prince’s Trust, etc. –

  see individual entries)

  Copyright

  Country Music Hall of Fame

  C & W Rock

  A reading of the ‘How to use this resource’ notice tells me I’m fishing in the wrong pond. Personal Files is where I should be looking.

  Cochran Eddie

  Cocker Joe

  Cockney Rejects

  Cocteau Twins

  Cogan Alma

  Cohen Leonard

  Cole Lloyd

  ‘Cogan Alma: See ‘H’ – ‘Has Beens, Whatever Happened To … articles etc.’

  ‘Has Beens – Cogan Alma – See ‘P’, Pop Personal Effects Index’

  Chastened, my heart hammering behind my ribs by now, I approach the Personal Effects Index anti-alphabetically.

  Vaughan Frankie

  Cane. Black painted wood with silver coloured metal top. 36”. Used on-stage by Frankie Vaughan. Purchased from Christie’s South Kensington, ‘Stars’ Memorabilia’ sale, December 1985

  Stardust Alvin

  Part of black leather glove worn at Birmingham Cresta nightclub, June 7,1975.

  Champagne cork from same occasion.

  Presley Elvis

  Ornate custom-made stage belt designed for Elvis Presley by Bill Belew, the white leather belt 4in. wide, decorated with brass eagles, enamel ‘stars and stripes’, and two layers of brass ‘rope work’ chain looped from lower edge, the inside signed and inscribed by designer ‘Elvis sample of belt Bill Belew’ and initialled by Presley ‘E.P.’ (p. Sotheby’s 1985)

  Moon Keith

  Two-piece denim suit in ‘western’ style, the jacket trimmed with brass and chrome studs and decorated with leather and sable tails attached by Buffalo and Indian-head nickels on the sleeves, the flared trousers trimmed with leather to simulate chaps, similarly decorated with sable tails attached by nickel heads, (p. Christie’s, 1982)

  Harrison George
>
  Letter and cards to a fan Doreen comprising a letter from the Star Club, Hamburg … ‘Did I tell you your hair was looking good at the Majestic?’ dated December 1962, four publicity photographs signed by George, a Mersey Beat card at the Cavern, George’s novelty handkerchief made as a miniature pair of French knickers and a hazelnut signed from George, 1962. (p. Sotheby’s 1984)

  Bolan Marc

  Gold lamé suit held together with safety pins. Made circa 1967/68 but a favourite suit of Bolan’s and worn on his penultimate TV show, in its held together state to appeal to ‘punk’ tastes. (Donated by estate of Marc Bolan, 1979)

  I dawdle back towards my own entry, which I have caught a glimpse of in passing, via David Bowie, Elkie Brooks, Bucks Fizz, Kate Bush and The Carpenters. There are two cards.

  Cogan Alma

  Décolleté full-length stage dress from the 1950s of opulent duchesse satin, pearl trompe-I’oeil, sapphire cornucopia and silver abstract glitter, gathered at the bust, the front draped over a-symmetrical fastening. With matching cape of grass-green faille, weighted at hem. (Extended loan, collection F.McL.)

  Cogan Alma

  Two-piece outfit comprising bell-shaped dress of ivory coloured silk crêpe, embroidered with silver gilt thread and decorated with vermicelli beadwork, with shoestring straps and cropped jacket of exotic osprey and paradise plumes and matching feather fan with tortoiseshell sticks. (Extended loan, collection F.McL.)

  Our cleaning woman for many years was a man – Ricci Howe, a veteran of the all-male ‘Soldiers In Skirts’-type touring revues that were popular with provincial theatre audiences immediately after the war. It wasn’t unusual to see him wearing something from my wardrobe, a pair of shoes belonging to my mother and a fluffy platinum wig while he pushed a Hoover around.

  ‘Her face is the sort of face that looks as if the rest of the body is making love,’ he’d croon while he worked, quoting imaginary reviews. ‘She just laps you up with her eyes and lips and tongue.’

  ‘She has the equipment of a bitch in the long shot. And yet when you look in her eyes in close-up‚’ he’d tell the mirror, ‘she’s like a baby. You can’t tell if she’s an angel or a bitch.’

  In the mid-sixties, when I was often out of the country for long periods and had anyway abandoned my old style, he took an act on the road in which he billed himself as ‘Mr Ricci Howe, appearing in the gowns of Miss Alma Cogan’.

  I only went to see him once, at a large pub called the Four Chimneys close to the power station and the dogs’ home in Battersea. I understood, as he had told me, that it was meant to be an affectionate take-off, ‘a way of keeping the legend alive’. But I probably don’t have to explain the confusion I felt seeing a man on a stage in my clothes, moving his lips to the sound of my voice.

  I felt disembodied. I felt as if some strange voodoo was going on.

  He did well for a time. He was making a better living out of being me than I was. Then eventually the audience for even the camp version melted away and he went back to working for the cleaning agency. I have assumed that the relics that have been coming on to the market in the last few years are from his collection (nobody else had any), earning him a modest pension.

  Now, courtesy of their current owner, ‘F.McL.’, a couple of characteristic examples have been made available for serious students of showbiz in the Crypt, the name given by the people who work here to the below-ground storage area at the Theatre Museum.

  We’re not far from the river, and the barrel-ceilinged tunnels where the reserve stock is stored give the sense of interconnected culverts or drains. It is cobbled underfoot with here and there heavy cast-iron grates through which it seems it is possible to hear the sound of distant running water.

  When the uniformed minder who has accompanied me asks for the code written on the inevitable form, his voice echoes and a trace of his breath lingers on the air.

  The smaller parts of the collection are stored in brown box files, rubber-stamped ‘Supplied for the public service’ and stacked on crude industrial shelves. The clothes are hung on hangers on long metal racks which, in some instances, sag under the weight.

  They are protected by bin-liners, which emphasises the no-man’s-land they occupy, somewhere between treasures and refuse, or (and this is the case with my old threads) zippered plastic bags.

  Half the trick of getting a dress to live on stage lay in the lights and the lighting-plots – getting the beads and heaped-on glitter to catch the light streaming from the gantry in a way that broke it up and sent it flying around like tracer fire.

  Off-stage, out of the lights, the dresses always had something forlorn about them. They were so solidly constructed they stood up unaided when you took them off. Tony Hancock once poked his head into an empty room and saw one standing on its own and said he found it as disturbing as the occasion he glimpsed Peter Brough’s dummy, ‘Archie Andrews’, hanging on a hook behind a door. Both experiences gave him occasional nightmares for months afterwards.

  I was expecting the tinsel to have tarnished, the sequins to have sloughed off like cells, the fabric to be distressed to some degree. What I wasn’t prepared for was the total deadness; the lack of human imprint. What I am holding in my hands don’t feel like clothes emptied of their owner, at least not if I think of the owner being me.

  Ricci Howe had a slight build and the slender hips of a dancer, and both dresses have been cut down to fit this shape. The discrepancy – the grotesque shrinkage – is obvious when I measure them against my body, in a gesture that for a second revives memories of Wednesday afternoons and taking turns dancing with my father and my mother in a pre-war dancehall near the sea.

  I leave by way of the museum proper, with its doomy showcases of dummies in famous dead people’s clothes. The only visitors are a party of schoolchildren who are rough-housing it, acting out how they got the fake black-eyes and cuts and fat-lips that are the obvious highlight of a dreary outing.

  The make-up girl responsible for the effects is leaning into a mirror fixing her own eyes, preparing for home. ‘What is it with kids and scars?’ she says, a droplet of black glop poised in midair. ‘They’ve all got to have one.’

  *

  In the clippings libraries of some newspapers, I know there are A4-size brown envelopes with my name on them and the information: Obituary Available.

  The contents have been subtracted from‚ rather than added to, the further I have drifted away from my celebrity. I would guess that I now merit three paragraphs, bottom of the page, plus, depending on whether it’s a slow day, a one-column head-and-shoulders and a sub-head that says something like ‘A significant practitioner of the amusement trade’.

  Those old enough to remember will be surprised to learn that I am not dead already. When you stop appearing on television, the assumption, natural enough I suppose, is that you’ve died.

  I have in front of me a collection of pictures which the obits editor, if it is a day when they need filler, will be able to select from. Some of them are already marked up from past use, with ruled lines in red biro round my head, cropping me out from the other people in the photograph.

  In this one, for example, taken at the Beatles MBE party at Brian Epstein’s house in Belgravia, I am standing next to Brian in a group which also includes George Harrison, Judy Garland, Mick Jagger and Brian’s mother and grandmother. In this one, taken three or four years earlier, I’m performing the opening ceremony at the second Epstein family business in Whitechapel in Liverpool.

  There are a number of early publicity pictures – period pieces of me posing at home with LP records, a dog, a flamenco guitar. There’s a dressing-room shot of me and Danny Kaye, another with members of the Crazy Gang, a third with Princess Margaret and Cliff Richard.

  One of Sammy Davis’s collecting enthusiasms was Hammer horror – bits of scenery, props, even masks and fangs from the films. Often they would be delivered to his suite at the Mayfair hotel direct from the set by members of the cast still c
ostumed as vampires, sexy witches and ghouls. It was always an excuse for an instant party. In this shot I’m squeezed in between what could be Ken Connor in Latex and a boffin wig and a bimbette wearing not much more than body powder and gauze.

  And here I am with Cary Grant, pondering, as the caption writers would say, the menu at the Ivy. (‘Cary Grant’s Secrets – His Wild Temper, His Male Lovers, How He Dressed in Women’s Underwear’ one paper ran as a front-page flash following his death last month. It was all news to me. We’d just come from a matinée performance of Humpty Dumpty at the Palladium when this picture was taken.)

  In the end, I have to say, it wouldn’t matter which picture they settled on. I’m wearing the same expression, giving the same value, striking the same attitude in all of them.

  This was before the fashion for violent and unflattering lighting; before fish-eye lenses and unnatural angles. The smudgers of those days touched out wrinkles, spots, heat rashes (tell-tale hands, overflowing glasses) without waiting to be asked. They weren’t looking for the ‘real’ you. They weren’t looking for the real anybody. They wore Tootal scarves and trilbies; carried rolled umbrellas.

  Cut out and set down alongside each other, the images of me in the photographs I have here would show as little variety of expression as the faces in an Andy Warhol ‘repeater’ painting of Mao or Marilyn.

  Only two pictures stand outside the formula. One because it isn’t, no matter what the labelling says, a picture of me at all but of Ricci Howe in full drag: he’s too eager – you can see him coming on to the camera in the parodying way he came on to the mirrors during the hoovering, rather them holding back.