Ada Read online

  Is there anything a man won’t piddle on, Horace? Perhaps a moving train? I hear the statue is moved now, but I don’t know where. Burke and Wills, completely bloody lost again.

  I would never have said ‘bloody’ then. I was a different girl. If you must know how I felt, it was exciting. Looking back, a lot of things went over my head. In the midst of it, I was the innocent girl who knew a wink and a naughty joke would get the house roaring – but most of the time I didn’t understand the joke myself. That’s how far from the mark Madam Marzella was. And if a backstage goldfish gaped that he wanted to see all my dimples, it never occurred to me he was talking about more than my face. I don’t like to think of them having a joke at my expense, but on the other hand, what you don’t know doesn’t blow clouds across your sunshine.

  When I look back, I see there was a joy and a power in making people look at me and admire me, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was as innocent as the clergy thought all us theatre girls were wicked. I went where I was told. I didn’t even pause to think how far away from home I was – I didn’t think I had a home, or that I could have one. When I was more than thirty-five years old we talked about settling down in a nice little Newcastle pub and staying put, but we never quite managed it. And perhaps I would have been bored into a coffin sooner if we had.

  So that was Melbourne, Horrie. We were there on and off for two years or so after we arrived in Australia – with steamer trips to New Zealand, and Far North Queensland, and coaches to the goldfields. The Brisbane papers said my performance was to be relished. (Chutney again.)

  Any road, it was those early years touring Australia and New Zealand when I honed myself, as they say. Harry taught me that stagecraft is like love: you have to seduce the audience, flirt with ’em, let ’em know you think they’re marvellous, get ’em to like you, and then make sure you ‘get orf ’ as he put it, while they still wanted more of you. When things went along beautifully, the audience lifted you and rocked you with loving arms.

  You could feel a good House even from backstage or in a dressing-room, before a show: you don’t want to hear silence, or strange shouts in the House. You want what Professor Baldwin called the Serendipitous Susurrations; happy chatty murmurings like thunder very far off. If they arrived the right sort of drunk they’d be a ‘Holiday House’: shiny rows of happy folk wriggling gleefully like pigs in slutch.

  But too much drink, or a snatch of patriotic song they took the wrong way, or the moment they felt they’d overpaid for what they got, and the house turned. Turrrrned. No longer individual citizens in their seats but one beast, a living, breathing leviathan that would smack you round the chops with a sullen, hulking silence, or pelt you with jeers and hurtful insults in a mob roar. We knew some butterfingers German acrobats who’d had the chairs torn up and thrown at them.

  So Harry taught me how to get a crowd back, too, when we started our first season at St George’s Hall in Melbourne. We got them in, but oftentimes at least half of them were shickered. ‘Restless house,’ Fred Davys would warn as he came off, walking his cat puppets into the wings. Poor old Georgie Devoe with her baby not yet six weeks old was apt to react to a bad House by bursting into tears mid-song, even frazzling the boys up in the gallery with some choice insults. It was considered the height of bad manners in our profession to finish with a fiasco and then leave the next act on the bill to mop up, but she couldn’t help it.

  A proper professional could cajole the lads up in the gallery to stop dribble-spitting on the people in the dress circle below, or eat their orange instead of throwing it (that shows you how many brains they had, throwing away an orange). If you planted your feet and gave as good as you got you could wheedle back most of the audience to your side. Jim could do it in thirty seconds unless things had entirely gone to Mr Crapper’s.

  Never shout at them, Harry said. ‘A proper designed funnel-shaped theatre makes the stage into a megaphone, carries the blarsted sound to every seat in the house, so don’t lose your head, or shriek like blazes, Dellie. Be ladylike.’

  Harry said if the House really turned, the best thing to do was whip backstage, rummage in the soubrettery, find as many ballet dancers with good legs as you could and shove them out on stage, never mind if they’ve already done their turn, or they were having a smoke at the stage door.

  Everyone had their own way of making pals with the audience. When Dante the Great, the magician, came on stage, he would say, ‘Understand, I will cheat you.’ We didn’t like him saying that, because he did a version of the clairvoyance like the one we did later with the Baldwins, and the way we did it was, as Professor Baldwin said, ‘on the level’.

  Professor Baldwin taught us to tell the audience that the clairvoyance was real, but we weren’t claiming spiritual or unnatural powers. That kept the religious happy. And then we’d say there were things we could do that nobody could understand, and that kept the believers in spiritualism and magic happy. And then we’d offer one hundred pounds to anyone who could prove any trickery and that only went horribly wrong once, which I’ll tell you about another time.

  The whole first half of Professor Baldwin’s show was about showing up the spiritualists and exposing their tricks. He and Mr Houdini shared a lively correspondence about how to take on the quack etherealists, and a propensity to get into a pair of handcuffs.

  Oh, there’s no comparison with our clairvoyant act. We didn’t claim any ungodly powers, and we put on a proper show on a respectable stage. There’s a nobility in a beautiful illusion performed as part of an invisible contract with an audience. And after all, we weren’t doing it with stocks and bonds or land booms, or cleaning honest, ordinary people or mourners out of their life savings. We only took a shilling apiece, and our customers always left smiling. They came to be amazed and confounded and we obliged.

  Cinquevalli was the opposite of Dante. Nothing hidden, or taunting, no sleight of hand: just hard-won skill. The greatest juggler there’ll ever be. He’d tell you what he was going to do and then do it. It took him eight years to get three billiard balls to balance on top of a cue stick. He heaved a real cannonball into the air and caught it on the back of his neck. It was impossible, but he did it. I’m just saying, some tricks are really worthy ventures with a good pay-off. Some feats are there for everyone to see, and some, like clairvoyance, can be just as admirable but not in plain sight.

  I wish I’d seen Casedio – every night at the Princess he walked the wire from the stage to the dress circle and halfway there fell, and caught himself on the wire, swaying upside down by the spurs on his thigh-high boots. Speaking of Dante . . . were we? I think somebody shot him while he was rabbiting in Dubbo. Poor thing, he was only twenty-eight. Harry always said the rabbits did it in revenge for their brothers being stuck in top hats.

  You keep asking about the morals of theatre ladies. It doesn’t reflect well on you. You’re correct to say there is a shadow over the reputation of girls in the theatre but you can’t cast a shadow over yourself, can you? Think about that for a moment. It comes from somewhere else – like the ‘morals crusader’ Mrs Ormiston-Chant, chief busybody more like. She’s always in the paper saying women of ill repute are ‘of the theatre’. They probably just popped in out of the rain for a matinee. Look here, if I go up to the butcher’s for a chop, am I ‘of the slaughterhouse’?

  Shall I tell you the real sin of theatre girls? It’s envy. I would happily bludgeon dear old Fanny Dango to insensibility with her own banjo to get her career, or to bag her elderly stage-door johnnie who turned out to be the richest squatter in Western Australia, with about sixty hundred millions of thousand to his name. Thereabouts. Oh yes, soon to be married into blessed leisure and ease. Fanny will sail between her estates in the first saloon with her own satin sheets and here am I in a three-room wooden house we can’t pay the rent on, with linoleum in the scullery that appears to have been laid by rats. Everything held together with bits of wire, like the gate latch.

  But spare a
thought for Fanny; does the Press say what a lady, and good luck to her? They do not. The gossip columns say, and I quote, ‘Miss Dango is clever from the waist downwards, pretending to talk about her dancing, you see. I don’t mind telling you she is certainly clever enough from the neck up to get herself engaged to a millionaire. Word says she’ll inherit it all after he dies, unless she ever marries again. I imagine he’s quite pleased with himself about that impediment to be imposed from the grave. Not as pleased as she is, I think you’ll find. She can stay a widow, summon swarms of her own servants with a pneumatic bell and never again be bossed about by a husband.

  Fanny was one of five sisters and they all did powerfully well for themselves. One of them was Letty Lind, the premier Skirt dancer when I was at the London Gaiety in the year before we came out to Australia. Skirt dancing is the one in which girls have masses of skirts and picked up the hems and hold them this way and that: there were sometimes thirty-six Gaiety girls on stage at once swirling their drapings about. There was a fair amount of incidental glimpsings involved, of an underneath variety, in the matter of legs. A variation on this was the butterfly dance, which was flappier Skirt dancing with a giant butterfly painted on your costume. The Serpentine, which I was known for, is something altogether more difficult and artistic and wonderful, and I am not yet up to that part of the story, Horace.

  In my own defence, and I rather think I shouldn’t need one, even though Alice didn’t approve of it, Skirt dancing was the bee’s knees then and a way to marry well. The Skirt dance inventor, Kate Vaughan, married the son of a genuine Earl. Another Gaiety girl, Belle Bilton, bagged the actual Earl of Clancarty. I don’t know who Letty married but she had gold taps in her flat.

  You won’t believe what Fanny’s other sisters called themselves on stage: Adelaide Astor and Lydia Flopp. Their dad, Mr Rudge, was a smithy, I think. Or did he make brass? Not like Fanny did, that’s for sure.

  I was a very good Skirt dancer. Oh, don’t ask me what the critics said, the moth-eaten apes. They are. But they liked it. At least they didn’t criticise my figure, which as you know is usually how they review a dance. I do hate the critics. I remember the slights on others, not just me. Lillie May Bryer’s Aunty Rose Edouin was once reviewed by an insect from The Argus, who denounced her for having ‘false hair’ and ‘high heels’! On stage! You don’t castigate a carthorse for having blinkers and hairy ankles – that’s what’s required.

  Millie Hylton. That was the other Rudge sister.

  You’ll like this one, dearie-oh, I’ve a good story about a Gaiety girl called, shall we say Florence? She was introduced to her aristo-beau’s Lady Muckety Muck of a mother, who stared at her through a lorgnette – you know, the little eyeglasses with the long handle, Kate Rickards used to call them ‘a dirty look on a stick’. Lady Muck took in all of Florence by looking down her nose and said, all toity, ‘I hear you reveal your legs for money.’ And Flo shot back, ‘That’s right, Mum. The same way ‘is Lordship pays you to keep yours ’idden.’

  I knew one day I’d hear you roar, dearie-oh.

  You’re grand though, getting the kettle on while I’m still stuck here. When I’m gone, it will just be the scrapbook left, and what I’ve told you versus the nasty talk what Madam Marzella has managed to spread about. So I’m relying upon you to do the right thing by me and defend my honour with the Homes Committee, Horrie, should it come to that.

  Do you know, I’m swimming about in this nightdress. It’s almost like wearing the Serpentine costume, which was 170 yards of silk. At least. Sixty, for sure. I’m shrinking, Horace, like a magic trick myself, I am. Soon I’ll disappear entirely. As Professor Baldwin always said, ‘Making somebody disappear is easy; bringing them back is the difficulty. I was always petite, but I liked to feel my upholstery. And if we’re being candid, so did Henry junior of the Lynch Family Bellringers. He was a bit serious, but had kind eyes. We were never long enough together in the right place to do any more than fumble about in corners and make eyes at each other, and as Jim said we had no use for a stray bellringer, and what would the Ada Delroy company do without its Ada Delroy? So everyone was stuck where they were. You remind me a little of Henry, you do, Horace. You have kind eyes, too.

  After all, I hardly had the time for firkytoodling, even if I’d had the inclination. Aside from other theatricals, in a world as big as a jam jar that was just as transparent, I didn’t really meet other men unless they was grocers or drapers. It’s not easy to feel overwhelmed by romance when you’re buying borax to kill fleas. Jim avoided having single men in our company – couples would be easier to manage, he said, though we saw some legendary ding-dongs between Maud Lita and Ed Ford on the road, I can tell you. Bert Phillips, the pianist, usually brought his wife. And Zeno and Hall, the comedy equilibrists, were as good as each other’s wives. Jim hired people who weren’t plagued by nerves to the point of shrieking (we learned that lesson anew with Gertie McLeod, who was wont to wave her dancing swords around too much off stage as well as on).

  I’m not saying I never flirted, or felt a frisson. I like being kissed while wedged between a rattan trunk and a pile of scenery backdrops as much as the next girl. And what else are you supposed to do with a French-horn player who winks at you. But it was considered beneath you to kiss a stage-crew person, and all the stage managers and other performers knew Jim would punch them right on the boko if they were caught with me. And let me tell you, if Jim and I had been doing anything we oughtn’t back then, Jim would have had to punch himself and Alice would have killed him with an axe or a look, whichever was more close to hand, so don’t think it for a moment.

  At any rate, neither of us thought about each other in that way, then. I suppose I worshipped him in a way, excuse the blasphemy. And it suited him really, to be worshipped, I suppose.

  Since you ask I didn’t think too hard on having somebody, a husband, all to myself. You’re not lonely in a family troupe, but I’ll own to having a few stabs of envy for the girls who had sweethearts, who were special to somebody. Girls who had regular kissing. But what you don’t know you don’t miss, they say. There’s no point crying over spilt horses when the glasshouse door’s been bolted, Horrie. Eyes a’forrad, as we said in Lancashire – look to the future and jog on.

  The way Marzella made it sound I was running about the continent flinging myself at every goldfish, sailor and barrow boy, performing nightly, looking after my nieces and carrying on an affair with Jim while he was either with Alice or smoking in the saloon bar with fifteen witnesses and the barman’s cocker spaniel.

  I don’t know how many times I must say it: Jim was my boss and my big brother, and one of those things changed years later, after Alice was gloried. And I’ll swear to that in front of any old frighty judge. When it comes to any moral standing required for your purposes, Horace, I am as unbesmirched as they come in the theatrical annals with no turpitudiousness to speak of. I don’t drink spirits or ale – only morphia – and that’s ordered by the doctor who trots about the respectable suburbs in his trap and orders me wee blue bottles from the apothecary.

  Jim joked there was probably nobody good enough for me and good enough to join the show, too. Though I noticed when it came to it, Cissie married Doc Rowe and he was a pretty ordinary young magician, bless him, and he was in the show a week later. And if I had managed to find a man to marry me, and I couldn’t put him in the show, I’d have had to clear off with him and leave everyone in the lurch. If you’re working for an outfit called the Ada Delroy Company and you’re Ada Delroy, and everyone you know is earning their money from it, and they’re family, then what can you do?

  Harry once asked me up to his Melbourne office, high up in the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Opera House Tivoli Theatre. Did I want to try a solo act, he asked me. He said he would back me if Jim agreed. But I didn’t even ask Jim. How could I? The Bells had taken me in when I had nobody else in the world. And that would have left only him to support everybody else. If I got married I’d ha
ve my own children to look after and . . . oh, never mind. A mother is supposed to keep a home, Horace. You can see it on the lid of any biscuit tin you come across. So what’s a mother, Horace, who can’t provide a home that stays in one place? One who has to leave a child behind? No mother at all, if you don’t mind me saying.

  The truth is, all the men in my life were there to tell me what to do, not to kiss me. Jim, Harry and Professor Baldwin, all my dear old avuncular managers. They taught me what to do on stage, and how to say it. They told me where to stand on stage and which stage to do it on, and what time the train was leaving the next morning to take me to the next stage. I was always a good girl, and I did what I was told. The only thing I had to myself was the Serpentine dance. None of them knew the first thing about dancing. Bob Bell and I could eat licorice straps and make jokes for hours when we were on the same bill, but he’d rather take a sailor home than me.

  It was hard enough to make friends, let alone find the opportunity for a romance when we had to keep moving. I did like the way Henry Lynch kissed me, so it was always nice to cross paths with the Bellringers. The last time he did it we were leaning on the wall of the alley outside the stage door in Rockhampton and he was having a smoke. He touched my cheek, and put a curl right, and kissed me and I felt completely odd in my middle and the skin on the top of my head went all prickled. We went a bit further than we ought in the paint room. That’s twenty years ago now, but it may as well be a hundred. You wouldn’t hang a girl for that, would you? Though Marzella would plait you the rope.