Ada

by Kaz Cooke

  I would go home from the theatre and replicate her actions holding canes sold for growing runner beans, until I could hardly hold up my arms any more. I soon learned though experiments why she looked so stern, though I taught myself to do it smiling. The costume itself weighed as much as a duckling, but after a couple of minutes of waving them about the sticks weighed a ton or so apiece. The longer the sticks and the faster you moved them, after a few minutes the more your arms wanted to drop off. I hadn’t imagined how strong my back and stomach would need to be, how many new muscles I would grow to help me, in my biceps, forearms and shoulders. Eventually my back grew strong in itself, with training, and I could even leave my corset off.

  These days I’m weaker than a dragonfly with no wings, but I realise I should have been kinder to my body then. Its upholstery, and undercurrents of hard muscles (beg pardon, that’s not too vulgar is it, undercurrents?), its stretching and stamina. It did what was asked of it, and I was a specimen that would have made the Health and Strength Colleges envious had they been able to get a proper look at it. Which they didn’t, I assure you. Unless they were in the first twenty rows or so.

  When I rehearsed in silence, I could hear the billowing and rippling and swish of the silk – of course, all you could hear during a performance was the music – a piano in a small hall, or an orchestra in a big city theatre, always waltz time for the Serpentine.

  Jim and Professor Baldwin were excited about all the money we’d make the sooner we could get the Serpentine onto a stage away from New York. I never told them that dancing within the costume made me feel the opposite of excited. When I was properly Serpentining, I was completely calm. In another world. Enveloped in the costume and moving with it, I could think of nothing else – I was truly in a trance. It felt like I was part of the silk, and the silk was part of me.

  Within months, everyone was at it. Loïe was daft enough to file patents for her costume and lighting designs, and some of her secrets were published in the Scientific American magazine. Beset by imitators she tried to copyright the dance itself, but the American judges told her to go and boil her artistic head. Men with no imagination and talent like to punish those that have. What the law knows about art wouldn’t fill a thimble with a pea already in it.

  Marzella charges me with grand theft but there must have been a hundred counterfeit Loïes thundering about the world by 1895 and still more after the Lumière Brothers and that Edison bloke began to crank out moving pictures of girls doing Serpentines after 1900, some of the pictures hand-coloured to mimic the lighting changes. But there’s one bioscope picture of Loïe herself dancing, only a few feet of film that begins with a papier-mâché vampire bat. Voilà, little batty becomes Loïe in a puff of smoke. And then she launches into a grim Serpentine. It was bad for business when that film of Loïe was shown by every travelling bioscope show in the world. But I couldn’t begrudge Loïe anything.

  I knew how hard she must have worked, year on year, because I was doing it too, only with about thirty-two fewer electricians. You could devise the finest artistic dances in the world, invent the House blackout and coloured-gel lighting equipment, and revolutionise theatrical design, but what did Europe’s dance critics and noted philosophers say? ‘I wouldn’t want to make love to her.’ They reviewed her height and her width and found both wanting. The dances, they said, marked the beginning of a new performance art, elegant and ethereal orgies of luminosity, but Loïe herself, they rushed to remark, was ‘fat and plain’.

  Of course the critics had entirely missed the heart of the matter. Being short and stocky aided the performance. Many nights I wished I was stouter. A weedy performer could prance about the stage giving a tulle butterfly wing a desultory twirl, but for a proper Serpentine dance, light as thistledown is never going to give you satisfaction. You have to be so strong and determined, and stick with it.

  Newspapers are the natural-born enemy of women, though I usually had good notices myself. The Bulletin keeps very busy looking down on the female race, and the dark races, and the Chinese, and who the looked-down-upon souls are supposed to look down on in turn, I don’t know.

  I’ll tell you who I look down on – Bulletin scribblers. Music hall is ‘mere entertainment’, they write.

  When was the last time more than a thousand people a night each parted with a shilling to listen to a desperate chin-fondler from The Bulletin, I asks? Not a one of them could pull an audience of two if it were raining outside and the sign said ‘free cakes’. You can’t understand stage tragedy and earnest improving books unless you also know how to laugh and have a rollick time. Tragedy and comedy masks go on the wall or why bother? For all the clowns with their broken hearts, and for the acrobats with broken bones, and the ballet girls who don’t know where their next breakfast is coming, I’d cheerfully throw a Bulletin writer down stairs before breakfast every morning.

  I will say this for the Serpentine: it was a crowd pleaser. It was big bang-for-buck, as Professor Baldwin called it. Even in the distant mining towns, it quieted a House to reverence for nine minutes. It was a beacon of elegance, purity and beauty, a dream-vision of pastel-coloured silk in a filthy town where all else was roughness and splintery hard edges, where men didn’t take their boots off unless they used them for a pillow.

  Loïe had the last laugh, I think. Loïe Fuller was the huge star turn in Paris at the Folies Bergère for years, had her own pavilion at the Paris Exposition in 1900, and commanded scores of light-men and carpenters to build platforms and construct mirrors for her. What does she care if her imitators looked like moths getting in the flour bin?

  Her gentlemen critics didn’t fancy her? No matter, she wasn’t bothered. She jettisoned her trigamist husband (don’t ask) and took up with a lady friend called Gabrielle who smoked cigars and wore tweed suits. Not as nice as yours, Horrie, of course.

  Now and again the papers let us know of her Edison experiments and her plan to get Marie Curie to help her create radium-painted skirts. So you mustn’t feel sorry for Loïe. The theatre managers in New York and London say she never pays a bill. They have to have men in the corridors to keep out the debt collectors. One Broadway manager got a snake charmer to empty her basket outside Loïe’s door to move them on.

  Where were we? Stealing the Serpentine in New York. I wasn’t the only girl looking to nick the act, who knew how to caper about and where to get a costume made. We knew we had to get it to England before anyone else did. We had to fulfil an engagement in Vancouver but within a month of seeing Loïe on Fifth Avenue we were using it to astonish capacity crowds in the big halls across the North of England. With the Serpentine in the first half and the White Mahatma taking up the second, our show became a leviathan. The dancing dreadnought, they should have called me. Unstoppable. We did three weeks straight in a huge hall in Liverpool, an extended season in Manchester, and Hull and Leeds. In every town people were locked out, and stood in the street and blocked the roads. In a year and nine months we made 16,000 pounds. Don’t faint, you’ll mark the linoleum square.

  I didn’t think about the money not lasting. Or success being like quicksilver. I was too busy dancing, and rehearsing, and blocking it in at every new hall. We did Bells, Committee, Cabinet, Living Pictures, Serpentine, Banjo and bones, followed by intermission, then White Mahatma. Every night for months. And the show began to nudge over three hours. Professor Baldwin was at one of his elevated peaks of mood. Jim tried to tell him the show was too long and taking its toll on all of us. In the end Kitty would signal to Bert at the piano and he’d bang out ‘God Save the Queen’ to get everyone on their feet and thinking about home.

  The money rushed in, and it rushed out again. In those days we all had a pocketful of walking-around nicker. Our cost of living seemed to expand to whatever the takings was. We sent money home to Blackburn where Alice was living with all the children, together for a few precious months. We had never-ending fires in the grate, and silk underthings made from bits of my costumes as they tore
and wore. People pointed me out in the street. I was a sudden sensation – after more than ten years as a performer. And too exhausted to really enjoy it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Jimmy would say, above the applause: ‘You’ve seen her on the splendid posters and now she comes to life before you, the Greatest Terpsichorean Specialist in Living History with Her Daring Dances and Dazzling Disappearances, the Human Butterfly, the inventor of the Serpentine spectacular, the flame that fuels the Fire Dance, the Original. Miss. Ada. Delroy!’ The golden spotlight beam, calcium or gas or electric, would track me on, and come to rest as I arranged my tiny pale satin shoes. From the House, I seemed to float inside the clouds of my rippling, cream silk costume, a gilded, ghostlike dream hovering above the stage.

  The music began, and I lifted the hidden bamboo extension sticks inside the silk so it billowed in rolling waves behind me and then wafted around me. I twirled, unseen breezes lifting the silk to tumble and flow in the air this way and that, like a giant, animated flower. My lips were dabbed with rouge. I arranged my mouth like a kiss and you could hear the stage-door johnnies in the front row, sighing at me.

  Of course Loïe’s next big innovation became mine, too. It was a fire-dance called ‘She’ after the character in the Rider Haggard novel who burns up and disappears. Some dancers just stood there while a magic-lantern slide of a hearth fire was projected on their frock. Mine was artistic, with proper lighting effects from underneath if the stage had a trapdoor and we could get the piece of glass over it. Years later, Under-the-Table Charley worked out a clever slide sequence, clicking them in and out of the lantern so that real flames seemed to lick higher and higher up my costume, here convincing blue flashes, there long tongues of orange and red and yellow. I twisted and dodged and whirled up into a flame shape and seemed to be burning alive.

  Cissie would make a few popping noises from the wings, Bert or Lizzie would pound to a crescendo on the piano, and snap, all the House lights would go out if we could manage it, and then one light would come onto the stage again, where only a little pile of ashes and a bit of gold tinsel would remain. The applause and the foot stamping would shake the hall as I scurried down to the dressing-room. ‘Get the kettle on, smart as paint,’ I’d say. Take the hint, dearie-oh.

  Professor Baldwin helped me get Loïe’s Fire-dance poster from the Folies Bergère and have it reprinted with my name and face on it. I stole everything she did: you have to be thorough. One night in Kalgoorlie the mayor was so convinced by the flames painted upon me by the apparatus, he rang the alarm and we finished the night with six firemen and the water-barrel horse all on stage singing ‘God Save the Queen’. Although perhaps the horse was only humming.

  Mind, a real fire was always a breath of breeze away. I recall at least three fires backstage and two in dressing-rooms. Our early calcium lights would hiss, crackle and fizz chemicals into an unpredictable fountain of sparks that cascaded out of the machine. Baldwin was always setting fire to his trousers or his hair. And those backstage smoothing irons we blithely filled with spirits and put a match to. I think there are only two places in Melbourne that haven’t burned down and had to be rebuilt and one of them is the Princess Theatre and the other is the Yarra River.

  Would you like me to get the Serpentine costume from the trunk, dearie-oh? Of course I still have it. I’ve got one and a spare, although Lizzie stood in for the end of the 1908 season before we retired and I haven’t saddled up since. No strength in my middle or my arms any more. Get one out and you’ll see. Look in the drawstring bag in the trunk. Such delicate silk it is, it packs down into a tiny space. Part of the magic. Hand me those sticks with curved ends, would you?

  Find the hole in the middle of the costume – that’s it, and now, if you drop the hole over my head, and fan out the hem – keep going, keep going. See! Stop laughing, Horrie, this is serious. Now I’m hidden and the bed’s hidden. Get underneath, dearie-oh – can you see how fine it is, thin as a whisper? Feel how it glides on the skin. Now put your hand up inside the silk and make a hill – now waggle your hand. See what I can do with the sticks from underneath – see the way the silk floats and ripples, and undulates? It’s as if there was a cloud in the bedroom, isn’t it?

  And my silly head in the middle of it, like an old skull-prop for Hamlet. But you can see, can’t you, the feel of it? What it might be with lights, and music. Here’s a very peculiar thing: I have worn this costume and created beauty and poetry in it. I know the dance better than almost anyone in the world – but I only know what it looks like from the inside.

  Even when I trained up Lizzie to be ‘La Petite Delroy’, to stand in for me, I only ever saw her in the daylight hall rehearsal. I haven’t seen it done properly, under professional stage conditions, since I saw Loïe doing it for the first season in 1892. What I’d give to see what she was doing with it at the Folies Bergère with her thirty-two lighting technicians. Because I’ll never do it again myself.

  Oh botheration and blarst, now my eyes are leaking. It’s only the morph, that is.

  We stuck with the Baldwins for almost six years. Stick a pin in the red bits of an atlas and we went there. My favourite place was India: servants galore, bearers to put up special tents we lived in, tea wallahs and pigeon-scaring wallahs and firemen in the theatres and in the hot weather, luggage wallahs to cart all the equipment in and out of halls. Hundreds of young Englishmen in uniform, and lovely handsome Indian boys in uniform, and ladies in brightly coloured sarees flitting here and there in the fields as we passed on trains. South Africa had the same feeling – military everywhere and dark solemn faces of natives getting everything done.

  The girls had been with us on a few continents by then. By the time we got back to Australia in 1895 Lizzie was a sensible young woman, helping Jim with the accounts. Arithmetic, she said, was as easy as reading music for her and had a similar rhythm and sense of getting it right. She kept Share of House, Income from Postalcard Pictures, Expenses. Every week of that season in the North of England, she’d solemnly write ‘brassed up’ in the margin. Cissie, on the other hand, never had any interest in the times tables whatsoever. A story – or a song or a rhyme – was her delight. It was beyond her how anybody could care about a situation that was solved by the figure seven instead of by a man wearing long boots and a cape dashing onto the stage to rescue everybody. She was still the wide-eyed baby of the family, aside from Thomas. She was wont to sing blithely to herself on the hotel stairs and be startled when one of us rushed out to shoosh her. ‘What’s wrong? I was only singing “My name is Fanny Breeze, I promise not to tease, and you should see my knees”!’

  Eventually we exhausted the Serpentine market in England and everywhere else. Too much competition. We decided we had better get it back to Australia and New Zealand before anybody else did, or before Professor Baldwin went entirely barmy – whichever came first. In 1895 we parted pals in New York and the Baldwins sailed for San Fran. We relieved them of two butterfly brooches – I’ve got a photograph of me in them, somewhere – and our clippings album, and headed home with his clairvoyant act. The Professor took ten pounds and a kiss for it from Cissie, for perpetual Southern Hemisphere rights.

  Are you coming to visit me on the weekend, Horrie? I only ask because Irving and Bob are in Melbourne, on their way to a tour of New Zealand, and they’ve sent a note home with Jimmy saying since I’m too lazy to move myself to see Houdini with them, they’re coming here on Sunday to sit in the front hall and throw apple cores at me through the bedroom door. There will be lots of good-natured vulgarity and they won’t know where to look, and won’t stay long. You can’t blame anybody – it must be like visiting a skeleton you used to know.

  A year ago Irving came to see me with his wife Edith, and they arrived breathless with laughter. They sat apart on the tram as usual, so they didn’t get an earful about black men with white ladies, when a girl got on at the Domain and began flirting with Irving like it’s the last day on earth. By the time she asked i
f she could squeeze his arm muscles to see if he was really an acrobat, Edith stormed over from the cross-breeze benches waving her parasol and the girl got out at High Street and stood in the gutter and bawled at Edith, ‘Sorry, Missus! I thought he was anybody’s!’

  It might seem strange to you, Horrie, but what I’ve learned is it’s just what you get used to. I looked down on genuine Negro people before I met Irving, and Hosea Eaton and Orpheus McAdoo and his gospel singers. Not all black people are poppets, I’ll tell you that. Mr Hicks Sawyer was a long suck on a lemon, that’s for certain. But The Bulletin says they’re all a bad lot so it’s bound to be a lie.

  Irving had a bit of stage business about race. He would say he didn’t mind the Chinese, or Irishers, or his brother Africans, but then he’d burst out with eccentric and sudden unexplained fury about the character shortcomings of the ‘South Swedish’. ‘I can’t abide the thieving terrible curs!’ he would rage, which was Charlie Pope’s cue to ask, ‘Why do you hate them so, Irving?’ And Irving would wait a bit, look affronted and declare, ‘A man’s got to have a hobby, doesn’t he?’ But then again he did the joke about being horrified by the idea of a wife from La Perouse – that means a native woman, you see. It isn’t a very nice joke, to be honest.

  Have you been trying to get out and see some theatre, Horrie? You ought to, in your line of work, because seeing non-decayed actors will help you spot the decayed ones when the time comes. Jim can find you House seats to see Mr Houdini, I’m sure. That means free tickets, dearie-oh. Take your dear mother, I’m grateful to her. For the scones, of course.

  Who else is on in town? Did you bring a newpaper? Fold it up to the amusements, there’s a lamb. If you can’t stomach the music hall, there’s some animated pictures of Annette Kellermann being shown at the Glaciarium. High-diving, I should think. Fancy swimming and whatnot. We knew her mother, Mrs Alice Kellermann. She used to fill in on the piano for Bert if he had the brandy-shakes. Alice had a dear little girl who had rickets, a shade younger than our Tom. That’s the same Annette Kellermann in the water ballets and film reels now, the very same, right as a trivet. Good luck to her. Who would have thought you could have a swimming career on stage? That’s pluck and brains, that is.