by Simon Brett
It was then, just when interviewer, interviewee and audience had achieved the cosy warmth of a friendly chat, that Johnny Martin threw in the first of his loaded questions.
‘Kenny, I must say you’re looking very fit.’
‘Well, thank you for that, Johnny. I have been working out a bit. I have this very good personal trainer back in the States, and he’s worked out a programme that I’ll be following while I’m over here. Yes, I’m glad to say I am very fit.’
‘And very clean?’ asked Johnny slyly.
But Kenny wasn’t going to be caught out that easily. ‘Perfectly clean, thank you. I shower regularly – as I hope you do too.’
This got a friendly laugh from the audience, but it did not divert Johnny from his line of questioning. ‘I was meaning “clean” in the sense of “clean from all substance abuse”.’
‘Well, I’m clean that way too.’
‘Good news.’ A little pause. ‘Because that wasn’t always the case, was it, Kenny?’
That he was annoyed by this was shown by the slightest change of expression, so minimal that only a behavioural psychologist – or a fellow actor – would have picked up.
‘What’re you saying here?’ asked Kenny Polizzi.
‘Just that you had a reputation in the past for being a bit of a hellraiser.’
‘I don’t know about a hellraiser. I did have a reputation in the past for being considerably younger than I am now. But I guess that goes for all of us, Johnny boy.’
‘So how long have you been completely free of drugs?’
It was a question so leading that it would not have been allowed in any British court of law, but Kenny was wise to it. ‘I’ve been free of any but prescription drugs since I emerged from my mother’s womb.’
‘What about alcohol?’
‘I don’t recall there being any around in the maternity suite.’
That got a big laugh. Unusually, Johnny Martin was being turned over in the contest. And he didn’t like it. ‘Kenny, there were lots of rumours in the gossip columns about you partying rather heavily and—’
‘Sure, I liked to party. Name me an actor who doesn’t. I dare say even you in your time have been something of a party animal, Johnny boy.’ Having coined the diminishing nickname, Kenny was going to stick with it.
‘Well, I, er …’
‘Anyway, do you believe stuff you read in the gossip columns? If you believed everything that’s been written about me, then you’d think I was a drug fiend and alcoholic who’s been to bed with every woman in Hollywood.’
‘Is that not true?’
‘No, I couldn’t manage all of them.’
It was a good riposte. Again it made Johnny look silly. And the implication was there that, although Kenny hadn’t bedded every woman in Hollywood, he’d had his way with a good many of them.
‘So your hellraising days are behind you, are they, Kenny?’
‘You could say that …’
‘I just did.’
‘… but because there never were any hellraising days, it’s kinda hard to put them behind me.’ There was a twinkle in the actor’s eye; he was actually teasing his inquisitor.
‘So how long is it since you last had a drink, Kenny?’
‘If you’d been looking, Johnny boy, you’d have noticed that I’ve just had a sip from your excellent water on the table right here.’
‘I meant an alcoholic drink.’
‘Well, you should have said that, shouldn’t you, rather than confusing me?’
‘How long is it, Kenny, since you had an alcoholic drink?’
‘It’ll be two years on Thursday.’
The directness and the seriousness with which this was said almost threw Johnny. The audience applauding the feat did little to settle him either. He stumbled a little over saying, ‘Congratulations,’ then moved on. ‘And may I ask your current marital status, Kenny …?’
‘I am currently unmarried.’ He turned to face his public. ‘Footloose and fancy-free. On the market once again. Available.’ This was greeted by some raucous shouts and cheers from the female members of the audience.
‘But you have been married?’
‘Don’t know why you bother asking me that question, Johnny boy. You know the answer. Or if you don’t, it doesn’t say much for your researchers.’ Kenny was virtually taking over the interview now. ‘Yep, I’ve had four marriages. I should be getting good at it by now.’
‘And have you got a fifth Mrs Polizzi lined up?’
‘Still sorting out the final paperwork on the divorce from the fourth.’
‘That being Lilith Greenstone?’
‘Yes, your researchers have been doing their stuff.’
‘She’s almost as big a star as you are.’ Polizzi shrugged. ‘And seems to be rather busier than you are at the moment. Was that one of the problems with the marriage – that her career was doing rather better than—?’
‘I’m not going to say anything about Lilith in public. If I do one of her lawyers might hear it and screw another coupla million dollars out of me.’
‘You say you’re currently fancy-free, but you have been seen at some Hollywood events recently escorting the lovely British actress Ann Jordan. Is there anything there?’
‘There’s a very pretty girl there. Who I happen to know. But if I married every pretty girl I happen to know … hell, I’d have to have a camp bed at the wedding chapel.’
‘So you’re not going to tell us any more about you and Ann Jordan?’
‘Dead right I’m not, Johnny boy.’
‘Hmm.’ The host recognized he wasn’t going to get any further there, and did something almost unprecedented. He looked at his notes before starting on a new tack. ‘Kenny, there’s been a lot of controversy recently over American gun laws.’
‘Sure.’ His expression showed he was ready for this one too.
‘And you know that over here we have rather different views on the right of citizens to bear arms.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You have your Constitution …’
‘And the Second Amendment, yeah.’
‘And you have spoken out in public in support of your current gun laws …’
‘I have.’
‘And I believe you have quite an extensive collection of guns …’
‘Yup. With some folks it’s stamps or butterflies. With me it’s guns.’
‘Well, Kenny, now you’re in England, do you wish you had the right to carry a gun here?’
It was a good question, just controversial enough to allow Kenny Polizzi to show himself up. His reply could have quite an effect on his image this side of the pond.
‘Well, there’s a bit of me – a bit of most Americans, Johnny boy,’ he said, ‘that always feels kinda naked without a gun. But the United States, I’m sorry to say, is still quite a violent place. The only reason I need a gun over there is because everyone else I meet will also have a gun.’ Ingenuously, he spread his hands wide. ‘Self-protection. Whereas here in this cute little island of yours it’s only the bad guys who got guns. What use would I have with a gun over here? What could I use it for? To stir my afternoon tea with before I make a start on the cucumber sandwiches – what-ho?’
He said this last sentence in the English accent of a Wodehousian silly ass. The Johnny Martin Show audience loved it.
And back in his digs in Eastbourne, Charles was also impressed by Kenny Polizzi’s media savvy.
TWO
FAIRY GODMOTHER: Now I will use my magic arts
To summon help from foreign parts.
As he was about to enter the rehearsal room, Charles Paris looked at the new Cinderella poster with practised cynicism. Since time immemorial ‘billing’ – literally where your name appears on the playbill and in what size lettering – has been very important to actors. It’s the kind of detail their agents wrangle about endlessly with managements (or they do if their agent is someone other than Charles’s – Maurice Skellern).
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And the rule of thumb is that the more the performer is being paid, the more prominent he or she will be on the poster. In the theatre, billing is an unarguable reflection of success or failure. The highest peak attainable is a position ‘above the title’. The artiste who reaches that level is an undoubted star, more important than anyone else in the show, more important than the show itself (and certainly more important than the show’s writer).
But then sometimes a show has two stars, each of whom has the right to appear in that coveted position. In that situation the wrangling between agent and management becomes even more heated.
The Cinderella poster left no doubt as to who was the star. The size of Kenny Polizzi’s name suggested that he must be being paid about fifty per cent of the production’s budget. This implication was endorsed by the way his photograph dominated the space. The internationally recognized face of Dwight Bredon beamed out, a tribute to expensive dental work, five times the size of any of the other cast pictures. He was dressed in a shabby eighteenth-century frock coat, whose slight misalignment suggested that his head might have been superimposed on the costume by some photographic wizardry. And below his name was the legend: ‘As Baron Hardup’.
The poster was new because of his relatively late booking. Earlier versions had been dominated by the names and photographs of two British soap stars. Cinderella was being played by Tilly Marcus ‘from TV’s Gatley Road’ while one of the Ugly Sisters, Nausea, was to be Tad Gentry ‘from TV’s Frenton High’. Furious negotiation between the two actors’ agents and the theatre management had led to them being given exactly equal billing, in terms of font and photograph size. But Tilly Marcus, whose name appeared on the left-hand side of the poster and would therefore be first to catch the eye, might feel that she had gained a tiny advantage over her soap-star rival.
The actor playing the other Ugly Sister, Dyspepsia, was called Danny Fitz and he was way down the poster, both in position and font size. The fact that he was one of the most experienced and brilliant pantomime dames in the country went for nothing – he didn’t have any television credits.
The show’s Buttons was to be Felix Fisher, who had plenty of TV panel shows to list after his name. He had started out as a very gay foul-mouthed stand-up, wearing flamboyant costumes and heavy make-up, and was now negotiating the difficult passage towards lovability and hopefully hosting a television game-show. The theory was that Buttons, the cheery kitchen boy of whose adoration Cinderella is unaware, would be a perfect stepping stone on that journey. And no one in the production company putting on Cinderella seemed to have seen anything incongruous in casting in the role someone whose shtick was his gayness. Maybe the thinking was that the kiddies in the audience would not find anything odd in his avowals of love for Cinderella, and the older members would find humour in its irony.
Certainly nobody involved in the production seemed to have thought that changing round the casting of Tad Gentry and Felix Fisher might have been a good idea, thus achieving a straight Buttons and another camp Ugly Sister. But no, the thinking had not gone that far. All the production company wanted was names with television credits to put on the poster.
Charles Paris was amazed that they’d even found a couple to put by his name. Neither series had been much of a success, and both had been an extremely long time ago, but sure enough under his name was the byline ‘from TV’s The Strutters and Stanislas Braid’. Mind you, in the lowly role of one of the Broker’s Men, he didn’t justify a photograph.
His fellow Broker’s Man, however, did. In the bizarre manner of celebrity casting for pantomimes, the part had been given to an ex-boxer. A promising light-welterweight as an amateur, Mick ‘The Cobra’ Mesquito had turned professional at the age of nineteen. Having moved up to the welterweight division and defeated most domestic opposition, he had had one shot at a world title, when he’d been humiliatingly thrashed by a Puerto Rican. He continued fighting against ever less distinguished opposition until a detached retina caused him to hang up his gloves.
It was then that a pushy management company decided to promote the media career of Mick ‘The Cobra’ Mesquito. He was initially put forward as a pundit on boxing coverage, but they had ambitions for him to go further. He was good-looking and the genes from his Caribbean father had given him a colour that was very attractive to television companies in search of diversity. The fact that he was no good at any of the presenting roles he’d been given had not so far impeded the progress of his new career.
Whether Mick ‘The Cobra’ Mesquito was any good at pantomime remained to be seen. But his fellow Broker’s Man Charles Paris was not overly optimistic.
Kenny Polizzi was remarkably affable at rehearsals. He didn’t play the big star. He didn’t seem worried that, in spite of his top billing, Baron Hardup was a relatively small part in the Cinderella story. Maybe he thought he’d achieved enough not to have anything to prove.
And when he was introduced to his fellow cast members, his modest charm was maintained. He twinkled for the girls, and was bonhomous to the boys. There was only one moment of slight awkwardness when he was introduced to Tad Gentry (‘from TV’s Frenton High’). The younger actor gave the star a huge bear-hug and said, ‘Great to see you again, Kenny.’
This prompted a look of puzzlement. ‘Have we met before?’
‘Yes. In LA. At the premiere of that Julia Roberts movie.’
Kenny shook his head. ‘Sorry, don’t recall it.’
The disruption was a very minor one. Kenny had been perfectly courteous, but the peevish expression on Tad’s face showed he felt he’d been the victim of a major public snub.
Kenny’s lack of starriness did not mean, however, that there were no conflicts at rehearsal. Though the imported big name was behaving himself, there were plenty of others in the company who were capable of making trouble.
The two soap stars, for a start, didn’t see eye to eye. Tilly Marcus reckoned that because she was still currently in Gatley Road, this gave her automatic superiority over Tad Gentry, whose regular role as sexy villain in Frenton High had been curtailed by a spectacular fictional motorbike crash some three years previously. Also, Tilly was playing the name part in Cinderella, which by her reckoning meant she was the show’s real star. And being the star gave her automatic full flouncing rights.
Nor was there much warmth between Tad and his fellow Ugly Sister. A large man whose bulky body tapered down to very tiny feet, Danny Fitz was a legend amongst aficionados of pantomime. His dame was mentioned in the same breath as those giants of the role, Dan Leno, Nat Jackley, Arthur Askey, Billy Dainty and Jack Tripp. But such names meant little to the contemporary television-obsessed world.
Nor did the traditional pantomime routines over which Danny Fitz had such mastery. Previously, whenever he’d done Cinderella, his fellow Ugly Sister had been a comic actor called Bobby Crowther. Though both had been gay, their partnership had never been anything but professional. In fact they hadn’t even liked each other very much, but the magic they created together on stage was hailed by audiences and critics alike. With Bobby’s death the previous year, this was the first time Danny was doing the Ugly Sisters without him.
And Tad was not proving the ideal substitute. Like many soap stars, he couldn’t actually act … or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he could only act one part and that was himself. Which was fine and indeed simplified the process of the soap-opera production line whereby endless indistinguishable scenes were being recorded at great speed, but it didn’t help a lot when Tad was playing an Ugly Sister.
He made no attempt even to change his voice. Each time Danny suggested that he might try a bit of falsetto, Tad would say, ‘No, if I do that, my fans won’t know it’s me.’
‘But they’ll be able to see it’s you.’
‘No, I’m not putting on a funny voice.’
‘It’s not a funny voice,’ said Danny, his large body looming over Tad. ‘It’s a voice that’s right for the character.’
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‘No, that’s not the way I work.’
This kind of disagreement could have been sorted out by a strong director, but Bix Rogers didn’t fit that job description. Showing his background as a choreographer, the only bits of Cinderella that really interested him were the musical numbers. He lavished rehearsal time and attention on those and basically reckoned the actors could work out the dialogue scenes on their own.
This behaviour was not as unusual in pantomime as it might have been in other areas of theatrical performance. Pantomime scripts had always been rather fluid, passed on year by year. Charles Paris remembered being in an Aladdin in which the gap between two songs was simply marked ‘Trombone Biz’. It turned out that the previous year’s Abanazar had been an elderly comic whose speciality was a routine with a trombone, which had been duly shoehorned into the story. The year Charles was in it, the Abanazar was an elderly comic whose shtick was making animals out of balloons. No doubt, the gap between the two songs in the following year’s script read ‘Balloon Biz’.
Pantomime songs also frequently had very little relevance to the story that was being told. In the days of music hall, comedians in pantomimes would simply insert the songs that were a regular part of their act. And in the age of pop stars a slot was usually found for the character’s latest single. While the number was belted out, the plot would simply be put on hold.
The situation wasn’t quite that bad in the Empire Theatre Eastbourne’s Cinderella. There was a basic script and there was even reputed to be a writer. Certainly someone must have created the routine in which Kenny Polizzi used all of his Dwight House catchphrases. And the songs, though not original, had been standards chosen more or less to fit in with the mood at various points in the storyline.
The exception to this of course was the song that Cinderella sang when left alone in the kitchen after her father and the Ugly Sisters had gone off to Prince Charming’s ball. Normally for this moment a wistful ballad of loneliness is selected, but the Empire Theatre production was scheduled to feature the single from Tilly Marcus’s first album, which had only recently been released. Called ‘Dance With Your Body’, its connection to the Cinderella story was tenuous to say the least, but it did give Bix Rogers a wonderful opportunity to choreograph a big number with a chorus of rats, mice, kettles and saucepans.