The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  In the event, JS would not return home until September 1827, when Joe and Mary were roused by a noise outside their house. Going to investigate, Joe found his son shivering in the doorway, his eyes rolling into his head from the effects of a high fever. Together, they carried him in, laying his pale and emaciated body on the bed and covering him with blankets. His hair was lank and thinning, his straggly moustache and sideburns failing to compensate for an expansively tonsured dome that made him look considerably older than his twenty-five years. JS offered no explanation for how he had come to be in such a dangerous state, though the newspapers claimed it was the result of a drunken argument with a lover they called ‘a female of a certain class, styled by a contemporary “a young lady’’ ’. According to the Morning Herald, which erroneously reported his death,

  On Friday evening, he went, rather intoxicated, to the house of a young lady, and informed her that he had occasion to go out, and she, being remarkably attached to him, persuaded him not to go, and flew to the door, in order to prevent him leaving, when he struck her a blow in the eye, and left her, which she took so much to heart that she went into the kitchen and drank a large draught of vitriol, upon which she was immediately taken to hospital, where she now lies in a most precarious state, and without the slightest hope of recovery.

  ‘Mr. Grimaldi, jun., is not dead,’ countered the Globe, ‘but at the house of his father in Exmouth Street. His illness is a brain fever.’ The Globe also revealed that his lover, ‘although not quite out of danger’, was expected to survive. In the days that followed, JS got worse. He began to suffer from hallucinations and apoplectic fits so severe that the doctors required him to be put in a strait-jacket. He stayed like this for two months, upstairs in a room in Exmouth Street, confined and raving. The moment he was recovered, he left Islington to go back to his lover, turning his back on his parents for another year.

  Some comfort was to be found in the friendship of Fanny Kelly, the beautiful niece of the singer Michael Kelly. Fanny had been apprenticed to her uncle as a little girl, and actually managed to prosper under her famous name in spite of his neglect, developing a talent that was admired by Sheridan and Sarah Siddons, and winning countless hearts, including those of the essayist Charles Lamb, whose offer of marriage she declined, and a manic obsessive called George Barnett, who bombarded her with ardent letters before attempting to shoot her from the pit of Drury Lane. A piece of the cartridge landed in Caroline Lamb’s lap.

  Besides her obvious gifts, Fanny Kelly was caring, sweet-natured and scrupulously honest. She had known Joe for almost thirty years, although the two only became close following his retirement. He was now entirely reliant on crutches to walk, and consequently left the house much less often. Fanny would call in to see how he was doing and take tea with him, and it was during one of these visits that the conversation undoubtedly turned to Joe’s boyhood hero Carlo Delpini, the old pantomimist who had finally realised his life-long fear of the number eight by dying in February 1828, aged eighty-eight.

  Delpini’s last years had been spent in an ‘obscure lodging’ off St Martin’s Lane, dogged by ill health and grinding poverty that was caused to some degree by the burden of having been the King’s favourite. He had been bankrupted years before by the then Prince of Wales’s inability to reimburse the three thousand pounds he had laid out on his coming-of-age ball, and the Prince had failed to repair Delpini’s finances by refusing to intercede in his attempts to gain a licence to produce plays at the Little Theatre, Haymarket. After Delpini had resorted to picketing the gates of Carlton House, the Prince advised him to join the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, commanding Sheridan to provide him with some dialogue that would permit him to qualify. Given that Delpini had terrible English and was only engaged for pantomime, this presented Sheridan with a considerable problem, until a solution was hit upon whereby Pantaloon could come across Harlequin and Columbine in a stolen embrace and cry, ‘Pluck them asunder.’ Delpini practised his line for weeks, intoning the words in every conceivable formulation, performing them before every member of the company and badgering them for their opinion, while they in turn made mischief by giving as much contradictory advice as possible.

  When the big moment at last arrived, Delpini ran on, discovered the lovers and instantly dried, staring dumbstruck into the audience, deaf to the urging of the prompter. Tension rose and a shuffling, uncertain silence descended on the house, until Delpini suddenly blurted out a piece of gibberish that sounded like, ‘Masson dire plock et,’ that caused the entire company to dissolve into a fit of convulsive laughter. ‘Nevare you mind,’ said Delpini, marching off. ‘Dose may laugh dat lose … by Gar! I ’ave gained de Pension, ha! ha!, and I care not’ing at all for nobody.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong, as while the Fund made him a number of small individual payments, he never acquired a pension. A solitary gift of two hundred pounds was all he received from the King in his final years, and though it went some way to recognising the many hours of loyal service, it came too late to alleviate his suffering. When Delpini died, his widow, who had spent her own declining years lovingly devoted to her husband’s care, was left penniless and destitute.

  Delpini’s death proved a salutary moment for Joe. No Clown had ever died rich, and given how worried he was by his own potential destitution, Fanny Kelly urged him both to apply to the Fund for a pension, and to fill his pockets by taking a proper farewell benefit at Sadler’s Wells. Within days she had established an organising committee and was making the arrangements. The proprietors agreed to loan the theatre at no cost, and Thomas Dibdin likewise convinced the performers to offer their services for free. A date was set for the next St Patrick’s Day, 17 March. ‘O yes! O yes! O yes!’ announced the bills. ‘Mr Grimaldi’s Last Appearance on the Islington Stage’, followed by a few lines of Joe’s appalling doggerel: ‘For “forty years” they’ve back’d him,/’Til Sickness and Old Time attack’d him –’

  The crowd numbered two thousand by lunchtime on the day of the benefit, their noise reaching the open windows of Joe’s bedroom in Exmouth Street, where he lay, unable to move. A friend of William Oxberry called at the house in the afternoon and, finding him in ‘a dreadful state of debility’, pleaded with him not to perform. ‘I pressed him not to think of it,’ said Oxberry’s friend, ‘but I found him inflexible; and upon my further entreaty, he exclaimed, “I’ll play to-night, if it costs me my life!” – and he was in so weak a state, that he burst into tears.’ Whether visited by a spasmatic seizure, or simply unable to face a final journey to the Wells, he did not leave for the theatre until the doors had already been opened and the house filled in a single forward rush.

  In the company of his doctor, the clown who used to run from Islington to Drury Lane in under eight minutes took an age to walk up the short hill from his house to the theatre, seemingly growing older with each laboured step. He arrived looking hollow and distracted, apparently oblivious to the energising buzz of the crowd, dressing himself for his first appearance as if in a dream. Performances began with Dibdin’s melodrama, The Sixes; or, the Fiends, in which Joe performed the role of Hock, a German soldier, ‘who being shut up in prison, finds plenty of consolation in a flask of wine’, a piece Dibdin had written specially for the occasion. It was the sole piece of acting he would attempt that night as there would be no appearance as Clown. At last he came alive, keeping the audience ‘in a roar of laughter’ with his impression of a drunken sailor, until he tottered off, exhausted. The audience sat restlessly through a number of other pieces in which Joe played no part – a burletta, Humphry Clinker, some songs and rope-dancing – until he returned to sing a duet with his estranged son, though he was unable to manage the encore the audience called for so vociferously, retiring instead to the wings, where he sat tearfully watching JS and Tom Ellar perform the famous pas de deux from Mother Goose.

  It was almost midnight by the time the entertainments finished, and Joe returned to the stage, dressed in a black dinner jacket with
white waistcoat and white gloves. All the performers filed out from the wings to form a guard of honour silently around him as he advanced to the footlights, and the house rose in unison as he took his long, final look around the auditorium that had sustained him for almost half a century. The cheering and applause were deafening, but Joe could focus only on the finality of the moment, and when at long last he came to speak, his ‘many-toned voice’ was so weighted with emotion that it threatened to fail him entirely. Recalling the years he had appeared on the stage, he thanked them for their faithful patronage and announced, ‘My race is ended,’ as shouts of ‘No! No! No!’ rained from the crowd. When they at last fell silent, Joe gratefully acknowledged the generosity of the proprietors (‘They ought to have given you a pension for life,’ cried a voice from the gallery), and the performers and musicians who had donated their time. Wishing ‘uninterrupted health’ upon the assembly, he clasped his hands together and took his leave, saying, ‘God bless you all! Farewell!’

  As the ovation seemed never-ending and Joe could hardly stand, the performers closed around him and bore him away. Fireworks were lit, illuminating the words ‘GRIMALDI’S THANKS’ at the upper end of the stage. The applause had not abated by the time he reached the green room, utterly distraught and weeping (according to the New Monthly Magazine), ‘with an intensity of suffering that it was painful to witness and impossible to alleviate’. Prior to the show, he had planned to distribute mementoes from his costume as favours to the apprentices, but he was too inconsolable to manage it and quit the theatre limp with exhaustion, and ‘in a high state of fever’.

  He was carried from the Wells and taken home to bed, where he lay sick for several days, unable to see the crowds of well-wishers who came to his door, and reading the reviews that sounded like obituaries. ‘Wearied out with struggling against ill health for more than four long years, and finding no hope of amendment,’ wrote one, ‘[Grimaldi] quietly resigned his theatrical life at twelve o’clock last Monday night.’ Another said, ‘That clown of clowns, and most classical clown that ever raised a laugh in this care-corroded world, has bid farewell to the stage for ever. He is, as the learned would say, theatrically dead.’ Was there any other kind?

  But Joe was not quite ready to be precipitately interred, and Sadler’s Wells proved only to be a dress rehearsal for an even grander and more emotional farewell to come. A week after the benefit, partially recovered with the aid of receipts totalling £230, plus a host of anonymous gifts that amounted to an additional £85, Joe was persuaded to plan a second benefit for Covent Garden. Before anything could be arranged, however, there was one last insult to endure from the Kembles. Joe had called on Charles Kemble to ask if he might take the theatre for a night as he had done at the Wells. Kemble, in the midst of a financial crisis that had arisen from the nonpayment of rates and taxes that had resulted in the theatre being put into the hands of the Court of Chancery, paid him little mind, ignoring follow-up enquiries until many weeks later when an answer arrived second-hand: the management apologised but, given present difficulties, regretted that they were unable to accommodate his wishes. Chancery or no, Fanny Kelly interpreted it as a calculated snub, a gesture of rank imperiousness, and made her displeasure known directly to its source.

  Joe, of course, was immensely wounded, retreating into the familiar state of persecution that the Kembles so often inspired. ‘So much for my long and faithful services,’ he wrote to his friend, Richard Norman. ‘Oh! my poor master, Mr Harris; God bless him! had he still been in possession, I should not have asked such a favour a second time.’ A note then arrived from Stephen Price, the American lessee of Drury Lane, who had heard of Joe’s predicament from Colonel Berkeley, himself apprised of the situation via the good offices of Fanny Kelly. Keen to oblige ‘so distinguished a veteran’, Price offered his theatre free of charge for the penultimate night of the season, an offer Joe not only accepted but shoved in Kemble’s face, making a special visit to Covent Garden to show him a copy of a bill he had printed that contained numerous damning allusions to the short shrift he had received from his former employer.

  Kemble was furious, going so far as to vindicate Joe’s feelings of persecution by declaring that ‘You should have had a night for nothing, sooner than you should have gone there,’ an admission that he had been happy to refuse when he had thought Joe had no other options. The moment was made all the better by the fact that John Fawcett, also present, magnanimously took Joe’s side and, in the version offered in the Memoirs at least, the meeting culminated with Joe delivering a dressing-down that went some way to redressing a career’s worth of injury. He would count himself lucky if he never met another Kemble again.

  In spite of Kemble’s slight, there was an auspicious circularity to ending his career at the theatre in which it had begun and, with the Drury Lane benefit set for 27 June, Joe was intent on delivering a farewell address to befit the occasion. Not trusting his own powers of composition, he looked around for an author and hit on the young poet and journalist Thomas Hood, a Londoner with a genuine regard for the city’s popular culture, who three years earlier had published a valedictory verse on the clown’s withdrawal from the stage in a collection of poems called Odes and Addresses to Great People. It was a commission Hood was happy to accept, especially as Joe stipulated that it be short – after all these years, he professed to still being a ‘bad study’.

  Joe’s visit made a big impression on Hood, who was struck first by the beam of delight that fell across his housemaid’s face when she opened the door to him, giving him reason to reflect on Joe’s ability to exorcise care with a simple hello. It was followed by a much sadder realisation. He recalled,

  Slowly and seriously my visitor advanced and with a decided stoop. I could not forget that I had seen the same personage come in with two odd eyebrows, a pair of right-and-left eyes, a wry nose, a crooked mouth, two wrong arms, two left legs, and a free and easy body without a bone in it, or apparently any centre of gravity. I was half prepared to hear that rare voice break forth smart as the smack of a waggoner’s whip, or richly thick and chuckling, like the utterance of a boy laughing, talking, and eating custard, all at once; but a short interval sufficed to dispel the pleasant illusion, and convinced me that Grimaldi was a total wreck … The lustre of his bright eye was gone – his eloquent face was passive and looked thrown out of work – and his frame was bowed down by no feigned decrepitude.

  Hood was not alone in finding Grimaldi’s condition distressing. The epitome of the élan vital, famously invulnerable to the assaults of death, he had become his own opposite, an abject symbol of time’s unstoppable creep that made an entire generation pause for thought. ‘We who have laughed long and hard at his drollery’, wrote one commentator as the bills went up, ‘are suddenly reminded of our approach into the vale of years by his chilling advertisement for a farewell benefit.’ Prompted by shades of mortality, scores of envelopes began to arrive at Exmouth Street as the day of the Drury Lane benefit drew near, fans and well-wishers from all over the country sending cash, mementoes and expressions of thanks, like those of Richard Brinsley Peake, whose note conveyed the sentiments of thousands of pantomime-goers: ‘If I was a rich man,’ he wrote, ‘the enclosed would have been ten times its amount, and I consider that I am your debtor in begging your acceptance of it – I have laughed to the full value, and the best recollections of my life are the merry hours you have caused to one who considers that a slice of solid pudding is better than empty praise.’

  It was a sentiment echoed by the full house that packed Drury Lane, declared neutral territory for the evening as it contained almost the entire company and backstage staff of Covent Garden, whose season had ended the night before. The entertainments provided not only a celebration of Grimaldi’s life, but a celebration of pantomime itself, performed by the greatest collection of pantomimical talent ever to be assembled on a single stage, including JS, James Barnes, Tom Ridgeway, William Southby (a pupil of Laurent and Clown at Ast
ley’s), and ‘such a concatenation of Clowns and Columbines, Harlequin and Pantaloons’ that it was hard to keep track. The only obvious omission was Jack Bologna. Louisa had recently given birth to a son, prompting the family to leave London and tour the provinces with an attraction built from one of Jack’s designs, described by Charles Dibdin as ‘a very ingenious mechanical and philosophical Exhibition’.

  The pieces began with Jonathan in England, and then The Adopted Child, but the fun really started with Thomas Dibdin’s parody of pantomime, Harlequin Hoax, in which Fanny Kelly re-created the argumentative and unwilling Columbine she had played in the original production fourteen years ago. It was in the middle of this that Joey appeared in full motley for his final outing, flanked by five other Clowns, all identically dressed, though ‘nobody failed to recognise Grimaldi’. ‘His entrée was the signal for a shout enough to rend the roof,’ reported the New Monthly Magazine, as ‘he stood up, his knees tottering, and every feature of his face convulsed’. Waiting in the wings was John Pritt Harley, director of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, who tried to run on and support him, but was restrained by JS, ‘who knew that his father had taxed his energies for a last effort, and that those energies would not desert him’.

  Having stood for his applause for as long as possible, Joe fell backwards into a chair that had been brought up against the footlights for his only scene of the evening, a bit of business from Harlequin Captive; or, the Magic Fire, a pantomime he had not performed since briefly replacing Dubois as Clown back in 1796. It was chosen, no doubt, because it called for Clown to be seated while a barber worked busily around his chops (a part filled by his devoted apprentice, Tom Matthews). Holding a tub of soapy water between his knees and ‘much affected’, he gave ‘Hot Codlins’ for the very last time although, according to The Times, he bore ‘unstiffly’ against the pain and emotion ‘with so much humour, that the audience laughed as lustily as of old’. They called for an encore, which he was unable to give, tearfully acknowledging their applause from his chair until JS finally permitted Harley to lead him off.