The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  These were symptoms Joe’s mother’s friend Charlotte Lewis, wardrobe mistress at the Wells, recognised immediately. Having witnessed countless backstage romances and met her own husband in the same way, she was well attuned to Maria’s subtle enquiries into Joe’s health, and the way in which she tried to uncover, with all apparent artlessness, if his absences were due to a romantic attachment elsewhere. Offering her services as an intermediary, Mrs Lewis persuaded Joe to convey his feelings in a letter. He set reluctantly to it, taking a whole day to compose a note that filled less than half a sheet of paper. Thankfully, her instincts were spot on, for the moment she passed the note into Maria’s trembling hands and watched her devour its crabbed and crooked contents, it was clear that the manager’s daughter had been a hostage to emotion herself. Sobbing with relief, Maria ran immediately to her father’s box to see Joe on stage and give him a signal that she shared his feelings. Her simple smile released Joe from an agony of anticipation, and he was suddenly so disoriented by elation that he lost his place in the performance and only returned to his senses when he was flattened by a falling table and badly injured. The table was carrying sixteen men, suspended from the teeth of the Sicilian strongman, Concetto Coco.

  Maria went to see the patient the next morning and found him lying on the sofa with his arm in a sling, in high spirits even though he had passed the night in intense pain. Confirmed in their mutual affection, he pressed her on the question of marriage, although she refused to consider it on the entirely reasonable grounds that he was only seventeen. Moreover, she insisted there could be no correspondence between them without the full knowledge of her parents, which Joe didn’t relish as Hughes had the power to halt his career in an instant and was formidable when he felt betrayed. After lengthy pleading from Joe, Maria agreed to tell just her mother, who, as a member of the afternoon tea set, was fond of him and sufficiently indulgent to keep the secret, thus allowing Joe to court her while buying time to secure his place in the proprietor’s favour.

  The problem of backstage gossips remained: although Dubois was in New York, his cronies still packed the theatre. Under the protection of the maternal triumvirate of Mrs Brooker, Mrs Lewis and Mrs Hughes, Joe and Maria were forced to embark upon a long and secret courtship that was a model of discretion. Clandestine meetings and stolen walks took place in the meadows behind the theatre and along the New River. Sometimes they met in the neat little tea garden across from the Wells, with its chalybeate spring and the zigzag borders that sheltered them from prying eyes. Maria admired his solid figure, his tenderness and touching vulnerability. While not exactly handsome according to the mutton-chopped, Light Dragoon standards of the day, his face was kind, expressive and without guile. He was also very funny – deliberately so, but also with a disarming tendency to mix up his words when he was nervous. To Joe, Maria was the perfect Columbine, beautiful, swift and spirited. She was considerate and nurturing, enjoyed the quiet of his pastimes, while the strong sense of self-possession she had inherited from her father made her confident and apt to take control. Joe and Maria were falling deeply in love.

  If Sadler’s Wells was the bower of bliss, then Drury Lane was the castle of doom. Having embraced Gothic drama in the wake of the French Revolution, Kemble’s theatre remained firmly in its terrible thrall, casting aside the mannered dramas of Garrick’s day for the dark anachronisms of plays like George Coleman’s Blue-Beard, and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis’s The Castle Spectre. The haunted and hysterical tone on stage permeated the green room, where, fuelled by the culture of wine and opium, it poisoned relationships and set nerves on edge. There was little appetite for pantomimical absurdities in such a palpitating atmosphere but, keen to maintain the momentum of his recent success at Sadler’s Wells, Joe pressed on, using a benefit night in October to lay out his ambitions before the public of Drury Lane. The bills announced ‘an humble attempt at the Clown by Master Grimaldi’, wording that said it all: it was a tentative experiment, a dry run he hoped his audience would indulge.

  Whether it was pure coincidence or a calculated ploy, Joe’s performance as Clown coincided with Dubois’s return from America. Piqued by the boy’s presumption, Dubois immediately restated his authority by stepping into the Clown shoes in Harlequin Captive, which demoted Joe to the role of a servant. It was particularly irksome, then, when only two days later a small injury forced Dubois temporarily to withdraw, leaving Grimaldi as the natural choice to succeed. Even though he had played Clown in Harlequin Captive only once, Kemble asked him to cover for Dubois twice more in a dance called The Scotch Ghost. These small, incremental advances culminated on Boxing Day 1796, when Kemble cast Joe as Pero, the clown manqué, in Robinson Crusoe, the pantomime his father had helped to make famous almost a decade before. Once more, Joe made a good impression, undoubtedly helped by playing alongside the poor, tired and diminutive Hollingsworth, who took Clown. But if Joe was hoping he had taken an irreversible step on the road to recognition at Drury Lane, he was sorely mistaken, as following the close of Robinson Crusoe, Kemble decided to discontinue pantomimes altogether to make room for yet more blood and thunder.

  Though his progress at Drury Lane was blocked, Thomas Dibdin’s tenure at Sadler’s Wells continued to provide Joe with a stream of good roles. Dibdin, however, was unsatisfied, becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to break into the patent theatres. At the close of the 1796 season, after only two years at the Wells, he left Islington for a place on the Kent circuit, preferring to write legitimate drama in the provinces than remain a pantomime author in a London minor. The gamble paid off: within eighteen months, he had had a major hit in Maidstone and was offered a job at Covent Garden.

  Dibdin’s departure was followed by a bad season for the company, resulting in considerable losses for the Wells. A short-term solution was found by William Siddons, who asked his famous wife Sarah to hand over two thousand pounds, which she did, although there were those who hinted she’d done it only to quell the rumour that she had ostracised him for passing on a venereal disease from his mistress in Chelsea. Richard Hughes, meanwhile, was forced to economise. He cut salaries and dismissed a number of performers, including La Belle Espagnole, without hiring replacements. The one new face he took on was a foul-mouthed comic singer called William Davis, known as ‘Jew’ Davis for his purported excellence in playing Jewish caricatures. Hughes knew his core audience, and he wasn’t taking any risks.

  Ultimately, the Wells’s financial troubles worked in Joe’s favour, as Hughes was compelled to make use of what he had, thus pushing him to the fore in a steady procession of bigger and better roles and forcing him to try his hand in untested areas, like singing in burlettas. The increased exposure brought him to the attention of a number of rival managers, the most eager of whom was John Cartwright Cross, an energetic impresario who had made a success of the Royal Circus in the wake of the original Dibdin–Grimaldi débâcle. Cross had successfully lured the Bolognas to the Circus the year before, where Jack was walking the tightrope as his father, Pietro, clowned below. Pietro remained popular but, as the Monthly Mirror noted, he was getting older and starting to look fat, and it may have been that Cross was already imagining a pantomime troupe centred around Jack and Joe. He courted Joe persistently, appearing at his shows and sending him letters that invited him to name his terms, but with Maria as his anchor, Joe remained loyal to the Wells.

  To underline his attachment to Islington, Joe and Rebecca decided to leave the rooms they shared with the Baileys in Great Wild Street and rent a six-roomed house on the Pentonville estate with Charlotte Lewis and her actor husband. When first pegged out twenty years before, Pentonville had been imagined as a garden suburb for ‘gentlemen and affluent tradesmen’, and though it was not as fashionable as its developers had hoped, it was quiet and offered airy gardens that backed on to miles of villa-dotted common and a pleasant prospect of Somers Town. Though idyllic, these same fields gave safe harbour to thieves, in particular a gang of housebreakers who
had worked the area for several years. At least sixteen had been hanged or transported during the past few months, which served to make the remaining few more desperate.

  The Grimaldis and the Lewises had been blissfully unaware of the danger until one night the entire household returned from the Wells to discover a burglary in progress. As the thieves fled, Joe went after them, grabbing his father’s broadsword and chasing them into the pitch-black fields, wounding one before he almost cut himself in half by running into the side of a cow. Inside, the house was chaos, with everything overturned or missing. The worst had been saved for his butterfly cases, which, too cumbersome to carry, had been mindlessly smashed save for one solitary box, an act of vandalism Joe found so traumatic that he never had the heart to go butterfly hunting again. A dawn search recovered a parcel of their belongings wrapped in a bloody sheet, abandoned by the wounded thief.

  The shaken household tried to return to normal, but within three nights the thieves were back for their swag, forcing the garden door while the occupants were again at the theatre, and fleeing only after the servant’s screams roused a group of neighbours who summoned the Watch. The next morning, Joe went down to Hatton Garden to solicit the aid of a shrewd officer named Constable Trott. The constable ordered them all out of doors for the evening, left the garden door ajar and set a trap, taking the villains as they were preparing themselves to murder the inhabitants in their sleep.

  Three years of steady progress and surreptitious courtship went by before Maria would finally agree to marriage, and after keeping their affair secret for so long, the circumstances of the proposal were suddenly very hurried. Rumours had been in circulation for some time, but as Joe became increasingly prominent in the company, his rivals, led by Dubois, were even more determined to uncover the truth. The lover’s hand was forced, and when Grimaldi wrote to Hughes, away on business in Exeter, to ask for his daughter in marriage, he had no idea what kind of answer to expect.

  In the meantime, the ill-wishers gathered momentum. Maria and her brother Richard had gone to Gravesend to visit friends, and when Joe was invited to join them five days later, word of the visit got round the theatre, exciting the curiosity of Hughes’s treasurer, Vincent de Cleve. Nicknamed ‘Polly’ for his tendency to prattle on about other people’s business, de Cleve was an oddity. Believed to be of independent means, he kept the theatre’s books as a hobby, along with composing music and collecting so many curious objects that his room looked like ‘a conjuror’s study’.

  Polly was an inveterate ‘croaker’, a backstage doom-merchant who took pleasure in others’ bad luck and who ‘hated Grimaldi most cordially’, being a confirmed ally of Dubois and Frank Hartland, Dubois’s favoured apprentice whom Joe had been putting in the shade for the past four years. His suspicions aroused, Polly took himself down to Gravesend to see what he might uncover. He missed Maria, but found Joe in the cabin of the ferry on the way home, and with his letter to Hughes still unanswered, the snide insinuations of de Cleve made for an uncomfortable trip back to town.

  Five anxious days passed before an answer arrived, but even then it did little to soothe. ‘Dear Joe,’ it read baldly, ‘Expect to see me in a few days. Yours truly, R. Hughes.’ Hughes returned the following week, and by the time Joe finally stepped into his office the accumulated worry of the previous days had left him haggard and drawn. Hughes treated him civilly enough, but when the pleasantries were over, he surprised him by sternly enquiring if he had forgotten the terms of his contract. Confused, Joe replied that he had not, at which point Hughes launched into an angry harangue, demanding to know the meaning of his correspondence with John Cross. Joe stared at the carpet-rods as Hughes recounted the many rumours that had reached him in Exeter, though of the morsels that had come his way none had incensed him so much as the thought of contractual infidelity.

  The charge was easily refuted. Along with the original letters from Cross, which Joe had in his pocketbook, there were also copies of his many polite refusals of a place at the Royal Circus. Satisfied, Hughes surprised the boy again by proposing to extend his contract at the Wells for three more years at six pounds a week for the first season, seven for the second and eight for the third. The papers were already on his desk, and he could sign them on the spot. It was shrewd business by Hughes, who had used Joe’s anxiety to secure an increasingly key performer on terms that were greatly favourable to the house. The deal concluded, he made to leave, absent-mindedly adding, in his flat Midlands accent, ‘Have you anything else to say to me?’

  Joe came to his senses and, newly conscious of his original errand, fumbled through a prepared speech, to which Hughes listened impassively. If he’d examined himself sincerely, he would have found scant grounds to object, as the tactic of personal advancement through strategic marriage was something both he and his friend William Siddons had employed with considerable success. At the same time as Roger Kemble had banished William for romancing his fourteen-year-old daughter (thereby guaranteeing her devotion to a dashing chancer who might otherwise have been forgotten), Hughes got his first foothold in management by courting, then marrying the daughter of the proprietor of the Plymouth Dock. At least the boy seemed sincere and he was certainly likeable, if somewhat too earnest.

  After a short dictum against the youth of both parties, Hughes gave his consent before throwing open the door to reveal Maria sitting in the next room. ‘Joe is here,’ he said. ‘You had better come and welcome him.’ The timing was perfect, for the very next day an unnamed detractor came to the manager’s office to denounce Grimaldi for ‘winning the affections of a young lady infinitely above him, and, at the same time, the daughter of one to whom he is so greatly indebted’.

  Now that they were to be married, Maria insisted that they find a new house, and they took a pleasant one at 37 Penton Street along the same stretch of road as the White Conduit House tavern, famous for its fishpond and cricket pitch. On 11 May 1799, the last night of the Drury Lane season, Joe and Maria were married at St George’s, Hanover Square. It was a small ceremony, in keeping with eighteenth-century practice, witnessed by Charlotte Lewis and celebrated five days later with a supper for the entire company at Sadler’s Wells and one for the carpenters the following day.

  That summer they settled into a quiet suburban existence, exactly the kind of uneventful domesticity Joe had craved since childhood. They spent every day together at the Wells, and when Drury Lane reopened in the autumn Sheridan added Maria to the free list, telling Joe that it was a ‘very bad thing … to let a pretty young wife be alone of a night’. Sheridan should know. In February, Maria announced that she was expecting a child. Life was finally getting into its stride and, as the Memoirs had it, ‘all went merry as a marriage bell’.

  To blissful contentment was shortly added professional advancement. In the three years since Thomas Dibdin’s departure, Richard Hughes had failed to find a satisfactory replacement. The job of management had temporarily fallen to Mark Lonsdale, a hardworking but unfortunate writer, but when he also left to join Covent Garden a year later, Hughes was left with no one. It was then that a letter arrived from Thomas Dibdin’s brother, Charles junior, asking for the job.

  Charles Dibdin junior was thirty-two, another Pitt-turned-Dibdin whose middle names, ‘Isaac Mungo’, were a doleful reminder of his father’s better days. He was a cheerful, tireless and frequently preposterous man with a love of patriotic ballads and convivial dinners. Though a less experienced dramatist than his brother, his ambitions were more in step with his talents, with the result that his temperament was ideally suited to Sadler’s Wells. He had been destined for the minors ever since he’d first presented himself to the public as a singer and raconteur, modelling himself on his father’s one-man shows, yet stage fright and an inability to remember the words of songs he’d written made a career as a performer untenable.

  After running up debts and marrying a querulous dancer named Mary Bates (whom Hughes had sacked four years earlier for demanding a pay
rise), he set on the family line of authorship, getting his first job at Astley’s Amphitheatre, where he’d been told that the owner, a fearsome, barrel-chested, Northumbrian war-hero called Philip Astley, would ‘buy anything’. Dibdin offered him a pantomime based on Don Quixote, hoping to increase his chances of a sale by providing a mock-up of every single one of the show’s twenty-four scenes, which he lugged with fourteen tricks and eighteen bits of scenery all the way to Hercules Hall in Lambeth. This was Astley’s curious, gated mansion, stuffed with steaming horses and snarling dogs, which he’d named after a human pyramid trick called the Force d’Hercule. The poet William Blake was a neighbour.

  Though perfectly aware that many of his tricks wouldn’t actually work if they were built, Charles relied on Astley’s love of the gaudy by painting everything in gilt and bold colours for, as Dibdin recalled in his own Memoirs, ‘the Astleyian fancy was apt to be fascinated by such an Exhibition’. It worked. The pantomime was purchased and a three-year contract followed, although working for Astley was more akin to servitude than employment. A man who held that the way to get the best from his performers was to ‘never let ’m have anything to eat till they’ve done acting’, Astley required Dibdin to write twelve burlettas, twelve serious pantomimes and twelve harlequinades a year, as well as to compose the eight or nine daily puffs required by the newspapers and provide the comedian, Richard Johannot, with a constant stream of comic songs. Thankfully, Charles was as prolix as his fellow Dibdins, and his reward for this enormous volume of work was a weekly salary of a guinea and a half, though only for those weeks the theatre was open. In vain he tried to negotiate this up, but Astley was immovable and Charles had to content himself with a clause in his contract stipulating that his wife would never have to appear on stage in breeches.