by Karl Shaw
The key lay in the gun itself: it was rigged so that the bullets never left the barrel. The gun was loaded with substitute bullets, there was a flash and a bang and Chung appeared to catch the bullets in his hand or his teeth. In some versions, he pretended to be hit, then spit the bullets on to a china plate. On this particular night, however, the gun malfunctioned and the loaded bullets fired in the normal way, shooting him dead.
His last words were: “Oh my God . . . Something’s happened . . . Lower the curtain.” It was a double shock for the audience, as it was the first and last time that William “Chung Ling Soo” Robinson had spoken English in public.
“Four or five frigates will do the business without any military force.”
British prime minister Lord North, on dealing with the rebellious American colonies, 1774
Worst Broadway Play
In 1983, Frank Rich, theatre critic for the New York Times wrote: “There will always be two groups of theatregoers in this world: those who have seen Moose Murders, and those who have not.”
Billed as a “mystery farce”, The Moose Murders, written by Arthur Bicknell, opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on 22 February 1983. The show relates the adventures of a group of characters who are pulled together on one stormy night at the Wild Moose Lodge, where several murders take place. Apparing are a nurse, a blind singer and his tone-deaf wife, some rich people, a character called Stinky who tries to sleep with his mother and a man in a moose costume who is assaulted by a mummified quadriplegic . . . and, legend has it, a wild moose who hacks all his victims to pieces.
The play was beset by problems from the start when the leading lady, Eve Arden, who was supposed to be making a comeback after more than forty years away from Broadway, sensibly quit the opening night. Her role was filled at a week’s notice by the veteran star Holland Taylor, who agreed to step in because she was broke. Ms Taylor later described the production as “a misshapen thing at an almost Shakespearean level . . . there were things that I put my foot down about and changed. But there were things I couldn’t change. Like the play.”
The Moose Murders closed after just one performance amid some of the worst reviews recorded in theatrical history, the mood admittedly not helped by a man reeking of vomit who sat in the third row during the press preview. One critic described it as “the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged”. Dennis Cunningham, the critic at CBS in New York, advised, “If your name is Arthur Bicknell or anything like it, change it.” Brendan Gill of The New Yorker said the play “would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas . . . I won’t soon forget the spectacle of watching the mummified Sidney rise from his wheelchair to kick an intruder, unaccountably dressed in a moose costume, in the groin.’14
Clive Barnes was more succinct: the play was “so indescribably bad that I do not intend to waste anyone’s time by describing it”.
Biggest West End Flop
The writer and director Lionel Bart gave the world Oliver!, one of the greatest musicals of all time. Five years later, he gave the world Twang!! 15
Based on the outlaw Robin Hood and starring Barbara Windsor as a nymphomaniac Maid Marion and Ronnie Corbett as Will Scarlett, Twang!! concerned the efforts of Robin and his Merrie Men to break into Nottingham Castle in a variety of disguises to prevent a marriage between the court tart Delphina and the hairy Scots laird Roger the Ugly, arranged for the purpose of securing the loan of Scottish troops for bad Prince John.
The omens were not good from the off. Behind the scenes there was constant bickering between cast and crew and endless confusing rewrites of a terrible script. At one point, the rewrites were so many and so close to performances that the new scripts were pasted on to the scenery. After a disastrous regional try-out in Manchester, the director Joan Littlewood quit just before the show opened in the West End at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 20 December 1965. Fearing the worst, the show’s backers baled out at the last minute and Bart had to sink his own personal fortune into the show to keep it going.
On the opening night, the musical director, Ken Moule, collapsed from exhaustion and was too ill to orchestrate the second act. The house lights kept going up and down throughout the performance and heated backstage arguments were plainly overheard. Two songs were cut just before the curtain rose. When the line “I don’t know what’s going on here . . .” was spoken, a wag in the audience shouted “Neither do we!”
The show received a universal critical panning with critics asking the same question: how in the name of sanity did it ever get off the ground? Arthur Thirkell reported in the Daily Mirror, “The only memorable song up to the interval was the National Anthem.” The Sun reported helpfully that “Barbara Windsor does manage to thrust her voice a little further out than her chest”.
Twang!! closed on 29 January 1966 after just forty-three performances, playing mostly to empty houses. At one point, there were only fifteen in the audience.
The failure of Twang!! was a personal disaster for Lionel Bart. He lost everything and was forced to sell the music publishing rights of Oliver! to Max Bygraves and Jock Jacobson for £1,000; they eventually resold them for around $1 million.
The only person who came out well was Ronnie Corbett, because he was now free to make his first TV breakthrough in The Frost Report. Corbett said later, “In retrospect, its failure was as important to my career as any of my successes.”
Least Convincing Psychic Act
Pete Antoniou, self-styled performing “psychic detective”, describes himself on his website as a “mind ninja’” with “a unique set of skills and gifts that allow him to read thoughts, pre-empt decisions people will make and influence their thought process”.
On 25 November 2011, promoters were forced to cancel his appearance at the Dovehouse Theatre in Solihull when Antoniou failed to predict that only three people would buy tickets to his show.
Craig Bennett, assistant manager at the venue, noted, “Perhaps Mr Antoniou should have seen it coming,” but added, “he only claims to be able to read people’s minds when they are in the room with him, so I don’t think it would have been fair to expect him to realize people were not interested in his act at the moment.”
“In all likelihood, world inflation is over.”
International Monetary Fund CEO, 1959
Least Convincing Psychic Act: Runner-Up
Eduard Frenkel was one of several self-proclaimed psychic healers operating in Russia during the 1980s. He appeared on the local State-run TV several times with claims of supernatural powers, drawing huge audiences and receiving thousands of letters requesting help.
Frenkel claimed to have successfully used his psychic powers to stop moving vehicles, including bicycles and cars. In October 1989, he decided he was ready for something bigger; he stepped in front of a freight train near the southern city of Astrakhan, according to the train driver, with “his arms raised, his head lowered and his body tensed”.
Associated Press reported that Mr Frenkel died from his injuries.
“Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop – because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.”
TIME magazine 1966, writing off e-commerce before anyone had ever heard of it.
Least Successful Eulogy
Rolling Stones fans were devastated in July 1969 when the band’s founder member Brian Jones died in a tragic swimming pool accident. But for the Stones, the show had to go on.
During the band’s tour of Denmark shortly afterwards, Mick Jagger, dressed in a white frock, announced on stage, “This one’s for Brian.” Then, after touching a faulty microphone stand, he was hurled backwards by an electric shock, landing on top of Bill Wyman, knocking his bass player unconscious.
“Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.”
Herbert Hoover, on Prohibition, 1928
Least Talented Opera Singer
The singing career of Florence Foster Jenkins – known to her admirers as “the diva of din” – was the result of a lifetime of thwarted ambition.
She was born in 1868, the daughter of Charles Dorrance Foster, a rich and successful Pennsylvania banker. She had piano lessons as a child and gave her first piano recital aged eight and attended the Philadelphia Musical Academy. When she was in her teens, she hoped to travel to Europe to study opera, but her father refused to foot the bill.
At seventeen, she rebelled and eloped with a doctor, Frank Jenkins. The marriage ended in divorce and she was forced to support herself, earning a living as a teacher and a pianist but, in 1909, her father died, leaving Florence half his fortune. With her father’s legacy, she was free to pursue the singing career that she felt he had denied her.
She moved to New York where she found her niche as a skilled organizer and fundraiser for assorted charity organizations. She started the Verdi Club for Ladies, which raised money for artists and musicians and sponsored the private, select playing of extracts from the composer’s work. As she was personally financing these events, she also felt entitled to present herself as the featured attraction.
Florence made her début in April 1912 before a few sympathetic friends, accompanied by her pianist Cosme McMoon, singing a variety of standard opera arias, as well as a few written for her by McMoon. She billed herself as a coloratura soprano, but it was obvious from the moment she opened her mouth that she couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket. She had no sense of pitch or rhythm and was incapable of sustaining a note or even of keeping time. When attempting the high note of an aria, her mouth would form the words but no sound would emerge from her throat.
Her stage costumes were almost as startling as her vocals. They were fantastic creations of silk, tinsel, tulle and feathered wings, usually at least three per recital. The highlight of her show was the Spanish waltz “Clavelitos”, for which she would appear dressed as Carmen with a lace shawl, clutching castanets and a wicker basket of red roses. She would click the castanets and toss the roses into the audience one by one. When she ran out of roses, she threw the basket, then she threw the castanets.
For her grand finale, she would appear costumed as the chambermaid Adele from Die Fledermaus singing “Laughing Song”, a good choice as it turns out, because by this point the audience would be falling about in fits of laughter. Her “fans” would invariably call for an encore of “Clavelitos”, which prompted her to send Cosme McMoon into the audience to retrieve roses, basket and castanets. Props back in hand, she would sing the entire number all over again. She always finished to thunderous applause.
As news of her extraordinary talent spread by word of mouth, the curious came from miles around to see for themselves if she really was as bad as everybody claimed. For the next thirty-odd years, America’s east coast upper-crust crammed handkerchiefs into their mouths to stifle their laughter as the hefty soprano murdered their favourite melodies. She paid for several recordings of her work at a New York studio with the intention of selling them to friends, although only two now remain,16 including her rendition of the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute – a demanding work by any standard. Jenkins sang the piece once, unrehearsed, and pronounced the result “too good to be improved upon”. Her recordings, like her live performances, were greeted with universal critical abuse, which she attributed to professional jealousy.
In 1943, she was riding in a Manhattan taxi cab when it crashed. After the accident, she claimed that she could sing “a higher F than ever before”. To express her gratitude, she sent a box of Havana cigars to the driver.
Her finest hour came on the evening of 25 October 1944, when Madame Jenkins took the plunge and braved Carnegie Hall. Her charity performance was sold out weeks in advance with touts charging £20 per ticket; 2,000 people were turned away. It was an unforgettable night of opera. Reviewing her Carnegie triumph, TIME magazine glowed, “Mrs Jenkins’ night-queenly swoops and hoots, her wild wallowings in descending trill, her repeated staccato notes like a cuckoo in its cups, are innocently uproarious to hear.” The Bulletin advised, “Madame Jenkins’ vocal art is something for which there is no known parallel.” Newsweek observed, “In high notes, Mrs Jenkins sounds as if she were afflicted with low, nagging backache.” Another critic complained of “dizziness, a headache and a ringing in the ears”.
Sadly, she had shrieked her last. A few weeks after her Carnegie Hall début, she suffered a fatal heart attack in her hotel suite. Her obituary noted, “She was exceedingly happy in her work. It is a pity so few artists are.”
Most Accident-Prone Opera Singer
During a production of Aida at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen in 2005, opera singer David Rendall was crushed by a stage set when it collapsed on top of him midway through a performance, knocking him flat on his arias.
The singer subsequently began a £250,000 law suit, claiming his career had been ruined by the accident. The sixty-one-year-old tenor said he was unable to perform due to his injuries – his hip and knee had been shattered, and he’d sustained damage to his shoulders – and he had been forced to sell his house because work offers had dried up.
It was not his first onstage misadventure. In 1998 during a performance of I Pagliacci in Milwaukee, he accidentally stabbed a fellow singer in the stomach with a flick knife. The blade was supposed to be a retractable “prop” knife but, instead, he plunged a real knife three inches into the abdomen of Kim Julian, who required emergency surgery.
“It will be years – not in my time – before a woman will lead the Party or become Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher, future Prime Minister, 26 October, 1969
Least Successful Stage Introduction
The actress Diana Dors was a blond bombshell known as “the British Marilyn Monroe”. Her real name was Diana Fluck. The dangers posed by a missed consonant led to a rapid change of name when she was spotted at the age of fourteen by a talent scout at the London Academy of Music and Drama.
When she returned to her home town of Swindon to open a fête in 1950, a local alderman insisted upon introducing her by her real name. He stepped forward and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our very own Miss Diana Clunt . . .”
“You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.”
Kaiser Wilhelm II, to the German troops, August 1914
Least Dignified Stage Exit
The American magician Benjamin Rucker was better known by his stage name, Black Herman. His most popular feat was his act called “Black Herman’s Private Graveyard”. In this, he would gather an audience a few days before his next performance to watch him fake his death. A few selected spectators would then check for a pulse and, upon verifying that he had none, the magician would climb into a coffin and allow himself to be buried near the venue of his next scheduled show. On the appointed day, the audience would witness the magician miraculously emerge from the coffin alive and well.
Black Herman performed for the last time in 1934 in Louisville, Kentucky. During his trademark performance, he collapsed and died on stage from a heart attack. The audience, assuming that it was all part of the act, followed the corpse all the way to the funeral home, anticipating the end of the “trick”. It was reported that people had brought pins with them hoping to poke the body to see if he really was dead.
Black Herman’s newly redundant assistant, making the best of a bad situation, charged admission to spectators to see his late employee post mortem. He explained, “It’s what he would have wanted.”17
“That virus is a pussycat.”
Dr Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at UC Berkeley, on HIV, 1988
Most Self-Deluded Artist
Benjamin Robert Haydon was born in 1746 into a well-to-do middle-class family from Plymouth. When he was young, he hoped to join the medical profession and become a surgeon, but abandoned the idea when
the sight of an amputation caused him to faint.
At school he had shown some talent for drawing, although not enough for anyone to give him any encouragement that he could make it as an artist. As soon as he was eighteen, undeterred by the objections of his parents, or the warning of a good friend who told him that he would probably starve, Haydon set off for London to become a student at the Royal Academy.
His career as an artist got off to a promising start when the RA agreed to exhibit one of his pictures. Haydon was delighted, until he found out that they had decided to hang his painting in a small side room instead of the main hall. He never forgot or forgave the RA, the beginnings of a lifelong feud with the art establishment.
Although short on genuine talent, Haydon was very ambitious and full of enthusiasm. He believed that it was his destiny to become one of the greats of painting in the style of Raphael, and he wasn’t shy about blowing his own trumpet. He submitted anonymous articles to several art journals praising his own work. He thought that at least three of his canvases showed “indisputable evidences of genius”. A couple of art critics took him at face value and described him as a promising young historical painter. Thanks in no small part to his self-publicity, he was soon rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. These connections led to several important commissions, including a huge picture to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill.
Not quite everyone was taken in by Haydon’s self-delusion. As early as 1826, the novelist and critic Aldous Huxley wrote that Haydon “had absolutely no artistic talent”, but it took the rest of the art world some time before they came around to agreeing with him.