Ada Read online

  The next time I saw him was eighteen months later in Auckland. He had a girl holding onto his arm for dear life and looking up at him like he was reciting beautiful poetry, even as he picked his teeth with a pencil. So much for romance. Should we get down to business now that we’re such good pals? I have a couple of secrets up my sleeve you’d like to see, but I don’t see why I should shake them out unless I’m vouchsafed something very like a cottage. I’m beginning to think this whole house business is a bit of a furphy. They won’t give them to 43-year-olds with a frightful cough, will they? You have to be more ancient, and not a married lady, I hear.

  I’m not sure what the story is that you’re after, or if I fancy telling it to you before I get a cottage in the bag. And perhaps you won’t sign off on a cottage for me until you’ve heard the story you want. So perhaps, despite becoming such pals, we have reached an impasse. Or perhaps the whole Homes for Devastated Actors business is a furphy, and you’re a ghostie conjured by my medicine, or one of Superintendent Gleeson’s constables trying to winkle some sort of a confession out of me. If you’re a copper, you’ve got Buckley’s chance. Buckley’s and None, if you see what I mean.

  Speaking of which, I’ll thank you for passing me that dear little blue bottle on the windowsill afore ye go with my blessings. But next time you come I should like an explanation and a currant bun.

  Apology accepted, Horace. I might seem drifty, but every now and again I’m awfully sharp, and I don’t just mean my elbows. But I’m too far gone to hold much of a grudge; I’d forget what it was by the end of a sentence that started off cross. If you say you’re not a constable and you’re just enjoying my reminiscences, and I’m always pleased to see you, then who am I to hold your feet to the fire? Not that you’d want a fire in this weather, would you, dearie-oh? Unless you needed to burn a few copies of The Bulletin. Goodness, I shan’t say ‘reminiscences’ too many times today if I can help it, I’m rather indistinct on the corners of my words this morning. I had a good belt of medicine this morning before Jim and Lizzie were off out, and after that I’m not sure what happened until I opened my eyes again and there you were perched on the end of the coverlet like a top-drawer spiritualist materialisation.

  I’ve got this new chair in for you. What do you think? Does Sir approve of his overstuffed horsehair item from the storeroom at the Tivoli? Possibly last used in the billiards juggling act by W.C. Fields in his celebrated tramp act. It’s comfy, and perhaps the great man himself made that cigar burn on the arm. Gives it character. I’ve had a sit in it and I felt funnier straight away.

  Even if you’re not under a sergeant Horrie, I cannot quite fathom why you keep visiting. Even if the Old Colonists’ Homes Committee is deliberating, you don’t need to keep traipsing out here. Your poor mother must wonder why she’s required to make elevenses for an old theatrical bag of bones – what are these? Drop scones stuck together with jam, ooh la la. She must be a charitable soul. Much obliged, I am. Afternoon teatime, is it? Fancy that.

  Ah, you’ve found a poster for the Baldwins and their famed White Mahatma act. We were good before we hooked up with them, but with the Professor we went all the way up to the top of the theatre business, like trapeze artists being dragged up to the top of the circus tent by their teeth. I shall tell you all about the Baldwins, as soon as you can get that kettle on.

  It made sense for the Bells to team up with them in 1889, you see, because Jim knew his way around the theatres of England, and Baldwin was full bottle on America and could teach us a lot about showmanship.

  Not to mention Professor Baldwin polished us up good and proper. Before Baldwin, as we called it, we had good, solid acts – skipping, say, and eccentric songs. We kept all those, but he turned Jim’s banjo turn into ‘Senegambian Oddities and Funniosities’, and I became ‘the Premier Serpentine Dancer of the World’ and of course we learned the Rosicrucian Somnomancy clairvoyance (which in the end he called the White Mahatma because nobody could remember the other). With Baldwin, anything was possible – even the impossible. It was exciting all the time with him, on and off stage. You never knew what flight of fancy he’d conjure up, or sudden adventure he’d scamper off to. He never used an ordinary word as magician for himself. Escacamateur, Escape Artiste, Spiritualism debunker, star of the Funniest Show on Earth (No Babies Admitted). That’s a good one, no babies admitted. All right, all right, I’ll get there. I know Madam Marzella said something to you about me and an inexplicable infant and I shall clear that account in short order.

  We were the junior company in terms of popularity, so we fitted our acts into Baldwin’s show. The first half of the programme de-bunked all the usual spiritualism séance tricks, such as table rapping and hurling tambourines, with a few extra mysteries of his own, and the second half was the White Mahatma act. All the other acts were ‘Mrs Baldwin’s Butterflies’ – Alice’s skipping dance, Jim’s banjo business, and Baldwin’s wife, Kitty Russell, doing quick-change character comedy. As well as being the clairvoyant in the second half, she was an old maid, a sea captain with whiskers and a pipe, and Mrs Caudle the hen-pecker. In another version Kitty kept the same clothes on but thrust her head through holes in portraits on stage, creating ‘living pictures’, with snippets of monologues. And she had a puppet act with a knee-high blackface marionette called ‘Baby Nick Russell’, who was insufferable if you ask me, but nobody did.

  Between us, we had three to four hours of top-shelf show, which means we could do entire change-of-programmes, which makes people come and see you two nights running.

  At the time I became a Butterfly I was a specialist in comic songs, funny bits of Scottish business, ballads – and I was doing the bells act with Jim, dashing about in the farces, and everything required, as Alice only did the skipping act when she was up to it – and soon began to understudy the Mahatma act.

  My Serpentine dance didn’t come till later, after we’d Baldwinned about the world for nearly three years. When we added that, it made the bill into a gangbusting shout-from-the-bell-tower show that caused riots in the streets of North England when people were locked out and the Full House sign went up outside. Well, fair’s fair, dearie-oh, I couldn’t steal Loïe Fuller’s dance act until I’d seen it, could I? And she didn’t think of it until 1892, so we’ve got a little way to go before we get there. I’m not a miracle worker.

  I’ll tell you how we used to get the stories in the newspapers. The first time the Professor showed us what to do was in Perth when we joined forces, a month before our ship was due to leave Albany for England. The Professor rented a hotel parlour for an hour or so to entertain a journalist, as if such expansive rooms were always part of his usual accommodations. Lizzie and Cissie were dispatched to lurk about the foyer of the hotel hopping from rose to rose on the carpet. When the reporter arrived, they got a hold of his hat, simpered, and led him up the stairs. A three-knock code and away we went.

  From New Jersey to Port Darwin, the reporter sent to interview a theatrical troupe is invariably one of those self-regarding fools of ‘colour writers’ who gives himself a pen-name, as if he needs the anonymity from accolades. This one in Fremantle – “Cerviculus”, if you don’t mind – was the usual bag of bones held together with baling wire (I’m the pot calling the kettle black on that one now), a scarry-crow with a middle part, each side plastered down with oil so his head shone like a Christmas beetle. His Adam’s apple was always making a bold bid for freedom.

  True to form, he showed us some leaves of his frightful published doggerel that his mother thought rather clever and the editor used to fill columns. We had the routine with reporters down pat. ‘This is capital stuff!’ Baldwin would say. ‘Do you mind if I keep these?’ So the hot-buttered-up reporter sat down with the Professor at the card table, while his wife Kitty came in with a borrowed cat and a witty aside was made about Kitty Russell, kitty rustling. Oh ho ho, indeed.

  Kitty would fan her lashes like a hummingbird’s wings and open her big blue eyes like a sh
op-window to the soul as the reporter barraged on. ‘Really, Mr Cerviculus?’ ‘They must be powerful pleased to have you at the West Australian Bulletin!’ Alice never came in for these get-togethers as her customary facial expression did not help. It takes a man’s mind off being flattered by an ingenue, being fixed with the bucket-splash glare of a matron. Especially if she then remarks, ‘You and I both know you’re getting a flannelling, you inflatable baboon.’ Breaks his stride, rather.

  The reporter was offered a whiskey in a shot glass and then a tumbler. In came Jim by means of a front somersault, shouting allaaaay-oop, without spilling a drop, and then your Ada in my red stockings on tippy-toe holding the jug. I’ll tell you something curious – the being on tip-toes always got a mention in the article. Professor Baldwin, once a reporter himself, taught me that. ‘It makes a man look at your feet. He’ll write that you’re as light as thistledown and refer to your flashing ankle. Especially, I think you’ll find, if you delicately lift up your skirts to go around the armchairs.’ He was right about that. Have you noticed the way newspaper artists draw ladies’ feet, always so very tiny? Perhaps men would rather we didn’t have toes at all, just little piggy trotters.

  So Professor Baldwin always showed the reporter his scrapbook, full of stories about how crowned heads have given him jewels, and Kitty would reappear with a velvet bag for the Professor, who carelessly scattered ‘diamonds and rubies’ on the table. ‘He’s forever losing them,’ scolded Kitty, dropping them safely down the front of her bodice. The reporter, now as pink as a boiled prawn, with eyes on sticks to match, would attempt a few tepid jokes. We all laughed like lovestruck kookaburras. Still more whiskey while the reporter wrote some secrets on some scraps of paper and screwed them into little balls. And Kitty took up a twist of paper and held it to her forehead while I leaned closer to the gentleman and hummed low in his ear and refreshed his tumbler, and lo, he’s told what he has written on the paper, and is astonished.

  Eventually the reporter would take his leave, with a few paragraphs (printer’s markings already appended) already tucked into his pocket by a kindly Baldwin, as a sensitivity to the tyrannical deadlines and ill-tempered editors, of which the Professor had firsthand acquaintance as a newspaperman in Cincinnati. It was the least he can do for a pal. Pinker still, and brimful of fine feelings, Cerviculus walked at an angle out into the street to bowl along to his office and get his report about the marvellous Baldwins onto page seven.

  All right, you’re wanting to know about the Baldwins’ giant poster you’ve pulled out of the scrapbook. It takes some unfolding, don’t it? Here’s a hullaballoo. I suppose you’re wondering how we found horns in the prop basket for a hundred little red demons. It’s all right, they didn’t exist. This is a colour lithograph poster extravaganza for the ‘White Mahatma’ act. After we parted pals with Harry and Katie we Bells sailed from Western Australia and teamed up with the Baldwins for three world tours over the next few years. The ‘White Mahatma’ was the anchor act in in which Mrs Baldwin – Kitty – answered secret questions from the audience received by telepathy. Though I don’t believe anyone ever asked, like that little devil at the front, ‘Where are my pants?’

  The first time I saw Professor Baldwin he didn’t have pants on either. He yanked open our dressing-room after a show in the Fremantle town hall, his top half dressed like a riverboat dandy, and his lower half in red silk undershorts. He threw his arms into the air and shouted in his American barker’s voice, ‘Outstanding artistes and brilliant Bells, I’m collecting you all! Come and be my Butterflies!’ Then he dashed out, yelling over his shoulder, ‘Any amount of fame and fortune, that’s all I’m offering!’ And then, at the door of his dressing-room, he shouted, ‘Kitty, for God’s sake, put that clergyman away and kiss me!’

  ‘Well, he seems nice,’ said Cissie.

  When Sam Baldwin wasn’t shouting, he was storming out a door in high dudgeon, only to turn around and burst back in, with a new idea for a publicity spectacle or a conjuring trick to impress a reporter. He was like his pal Houdini in that way, creating capers for ‘publicity stunts’ to tickle the reporters and the public. Professor Baldwin was the first to escape from handcuffs on stage, a fact Mr Houdini readily acknowledged.

  Baldwin’s chief Butterfly was Mrs Baldwin. Not really a wife at the beginning of our travels, as there hadn’t been time for proper paperwork by then. Kitty played the Modern Witch of Endor, or the White Mahatma, with a nod to the Indian fakirs they claimed to have studied with, extensively, for practically thousands of years. As the Professor said, people like a robe and a turban. In the end he wasn’t bothered, just strolled out onto the stage in his day clothes.

  When we met him, Professor Baldwin had been touring the same show in Australia with his wife for fifteen years. The only change – which nobody in the audience noticed – was that the wives weren’t the same. The show worked no matter who was Mahatma-ing so there wasn’t much need to change the act. It’s easier to keep moving yourself and get to new audiences than it is to stay put and create new material for the same people.

  In fact, Horrie, Baldwin was more exciting off stage. That twinkle in his eye would snap on like a calcium light when you put a match to the powder. I’ve seen him dance on pianos and shoot a stuffed moose in a Vancouver bar. ‘Damned big mouse with the hat on loomed at me funny,’ he said.

  He sewed a reverend into a sack at our Brooklyn boarding house and then told him it wasn’t part of a magic act, just a compulsion, and kept him in there until after supper. Professor Baldwin could go out for a newspaper in Singapore and come back with a bass drum and an ice-cream cart. He was customarily exultant and kindly but was subject to fancies and wild spending and plunging moods, when he’d take to his bed. He had beautiful luggage full of secret drawers and cunning, curious bottles. He shot himself slightly in Goulburn, and poisoned himself occasionally elsewhere, with the wrong chemical powder. Was he a real professor? I’ll give you three guesses, Horrie, you’re bound to hit on the answer.

  In America he was arrested for waving a gun at the man in the next hotel room for being too rowdy. Professor Baldwin chased him down the stairs and shot at him. The judge heard a fair bit of Baldwinage from the stand and declared himself in full sympathy, too often exposed to hotel ruckus while travelling for circuit hearings. Case dismissed. Baldwin paid for the hotel landing to be re-papered and he was soon on the train gluing the newspaper report of his acquittal into his Press album.

  He loved doing magic, loved the oohs and ahs and the delighted, confounded faces. He said gasps were music to his ears, but a delighted and surprised laugh was the pinnacle of his work. ‘Nectar of the gods!’ he would declare. ‘I met a god in Colorado once, I had to drink eight nectars until he materialised.’ Don’t get him started on his career as a Union Army drummer boy almost hanged by the Confederates in the last moments of the war, whatever you do.

  This poster you have hold of is from his latest American show – he’s doing the White Mahatma with a girl called Shadow Baldwin, billed as his daughter. Daughter, my foot. Shall we say protégée? That might be nicest. He’s doing the act in Washington and San Francisco and sent us the latest posters. He always had the very fanciest pastings, he was the first to print colour lithographs in Australia, as big as the side of a house. He’d pay for new wooden hoardings to be erected in the country towns and plaster them with repeating, giant posters, together as big as a house wall.

  In Ballarat he had two advance men with a sixty-foot ladder in Lydiard Street to put up a bill-poster that covered one whole storey. It was a spectacle in itself and enough to make the newspapers and provide some advance clatter of his arrival. People used to put their posters on over his: he instructed his advance men to send for a policeman, and when one hove into view, to punch the interloping bill-sticker right on the bugle. This usually resulted in more publicity from the court case.

  He complained about himself to the Bendigo Advertiser under a pseudonym and then wrote furi
ous letters of defence as himself, citing the ‘windy ammunition of cheap abuse’ and ‘dribbling stream of cheap talk’ of ‘pitiful cowards’, otherwise known as charlatan spiritualists, or in this case, secretly S.S. Baldwin of Cincinnati.

  All right, Horrie, you’re not fiercely interested in publicity wheezes or innovations in colour printing. You want to know about the show. Was Mrs Baldwin truly clairvoyant? Was she truly in a mesmeric trance? Where are your pants? Kettle on, and we’ll get there. I don’t think there’s so much as a rock cake. What’s in that twist of paper you’re grinning at there, you sly duck? You haven’t. You have! MacRobertson’s mixed sweets. I’ve never seen a more welcome sight. Oh, how did you know I am a fiend for Treacle Poles! When we used to visit Irving – did I tell you about Irving? On the verandah at his boarding house in Fitzroy opposite the Exhibition building on a Monday would always be a bunch of minstrels and performers, black and white. We would have singalongs up there and smell the sweeties cooking at the MacRobertson’s factory. Monday it was heliotrope lozenges (how could something smell like purple, but they did), Tuesday fig toffee.

  Did you ever see our old mate from Parer’s, the chocolate king, Mr Macpherson Robertson, about town? These days he wears a white suit, and a white hat, and all his factory and delivery employees wear white uniforms. It’s a symbol of purity. He brings his mistress to the music-hall fare at the Tivoli, and takes his wife to His Majesty’s for the extravaganzas. But I’m not one to gossip. Which reminds me, Pansy Montague’s dumped her quick-draw stage caricaturist and gone off to London with a Turk. I’ve got the clipping somewhere.

  I wouldn’t say no to another Treacle Pole. You can come any time.

  You’re like most people, Horace, dearie-oh. You think you want to know how the clairvoyancy’s done, but you don’t. If you knew how it was done you’d be cross you never guessed the secret. Why be sadly disappointed when you can be happily baffled? Professor Sam Baldwin taught us the act and when you’ve been sworn to secrecy by a six-shooter wielding, gem-hoarding, much-married, Mark Twain doppelganger who’s a Catherine wheel of a human, you stay sworn. Of course we all had to know how it was done. We all helped – even the children handed out paper and pencils, and Jim was always sorting things backstage.