IN JUNE OF 1950, I began work as a resident singer on a weekly BBC radio show called Educating Archie. Created as an unlikely showcase for the popular ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy, “Archie Andrews,” the show was originally slated for a six-week run as filler, but ended up running for thirty consecutive weeks without a break and playing to a regular audience of about twelve million listeners.
Although Peter Brough was not especially impressive at throwing his voice (one could always see his lips moving), he was charming, sartorially elegant, and came from a family of ventriloquists. Archie, the manic-eyed dummy dressed in a broad striped blazer, played the character of a bratty kid. Peter was his tolerant father who either argued with or placated him. The other cast members included Robert Moreton as Archie’s tutor, Max Bygraves (a budding comedian at the time) as an odd-jobsman, and as the neighbor Agatha Dinglebody, the comedienne Hattie Jacques, who, a few years later, would show me a kindness that changed the course of my life.
I was supposedly the little girl next door. If I was lucky, I got a few lines with the dummy; if not, I just sang. Working closely with Mum and Madame, I learned many new songs and arias, like “The Shadow Song” from Dinorah; “The Wren”; the waltz songs from Romeo and Juliet and Tom Jones; “Invitation to the Dance”; “The Blue Danube”; “Caro Nome” from Rigoletto; and “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark.”
Pop, in one of his sober periods, used the opportunity to make some money by doing my orchestrations. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to sing with a big orchestra on a regular basis.
Though not broadcast live, the program was recorded in front of a live audience, and I was able to sit in on many of the read-throughs and the show itself. I would rehearse my one aria, then watch these brilliant comedians and actors perform for radio. Many wonderful artists appeared on the show, all of whom became big headliners, like Tony Hancock, Harry Secombe, and Alfred Marks. Eric Sykes wrote many of the scripts, but later also became a well-known comedian.
The first broadcast of Educating Archie aired on June 6, 1950. As we only recorded one day a week and I was not in every episode, I was able to continue touring with Mum from time to time.
An impresario, Harold Fielding, promoted a series of elegant concert evenings, usually in the summer, called Music for the Millions. His venues were the concert halls along the South Coast of England, towns such as Eastbourne, Margate, Bournemouth. The shows were purely musical presentations, and quite classy. I was invited to do several of these shows in the late summer.
Mr. Fielding was a diminutive, exquisitely neat gentleman, very kind and enthusiastic, and always in good humor. He seemed to have a soft spot for me, and I loved working for him. His concerts felt to me like a step up in the world, and I appeared on the bill with wonderful performers: The Western Brothers, who did satirical monologues to music; Elsie and Doris Waters, who chatted about inconsequential things; Rawicz and Landauer, a piano duo; Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy of the British stage; Larry Adler, harmonica player, and Joyce Grenfell, a gentle comedienne and singer who many years later played the role of my mother in the film The Americanization of Emily.
One particular Bank Holiday, Mum and I were contracted to appear in Eastbourne. I had said to my mother that I was old enough now to pack my theatrical gear myself, and I did just that. We drove to the south coast in a terrible downpour. It seemed like the wettest Bank Holiday on record.
We waded through the puddles to the stage door of the Winter Garden and shivered through a damp rehearsal. Setting out my clothes for the evening, I discovered to my horror that, though I had packed my frilly party dress, I had omitted my ballet shoes. I had traveled to Eastbourne in a pair of heavy brogues, which were totally unsuited to my outfit. Since it was a Bank Holiday, not a single shop was open, and there were no dancers on the program who could, perhaps, have lent me a pair of appropriate shoes.
My mother despaired. Rummaging through my theatrical kit, she found the white liquid paint that we used to freshen up my ballet slippers.
“There’s only one thing to be done,” said Mum. “I’ll paint a ballet shoe on your socks.”
Alas, my socks were not only mud-spattered, but also full of holes. My mother designed a white shoe on the grayish material and filled in the holes by daubing my bare skin beneath. My socks—and feet—didn’t dry in time for the show, and I made my entrance onto the stage leaving a trail of white footprints in my wake.
There were no footlights in the Winter Garden, and the audience couldn’t be sure that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. Heads craned and a buzz of whispered comments continued throughout my performance. I tried hiding one foot behind the other, then reversing them, all to no avail. Mum thumped away in a spirited fashion at the piano, I sang my songs faster than usual—and was never so happy to leave the stage. I was mortified; no extra bows for me that night.
On October 1, I turned fifteen and was officially freed from the London County Council’s child performer restrictions. My mother decided that Miss Knight, my tutor, was now no longer necessary—and thus ended my formal education.
“Aren’t I going to get any schooling at all?” I asked. I had the good sense to know I would be missing out on something important.
“You’ll get a greater education from life, Julie, than from going to school,” she replied. And because I was busy, and school was an extra burden, I didn’t argue.
To celebrate my “liberation,” Mum threw one of her great parties. There must have been about sixty people in the house. Everybody danced and jitterbugged and had a fine old time. Don and Chris, having been sent to bed, crept out to watch the party through the banister railings.
At some point, we took a break to have something to eat, and Pop made a very inappropriate remark about me and my friends, Susan Barker and Patricia Waters. I don’t recall what he said, but Gladdy Barker had been getting more and more irritated by his drunken behavior. There was a large dish of blancmange—a milky, jelly-like English pudding—sitting on the table nearby, and she suddenly picked it up and hurled it at him. Pop ducked in the nick of time and it hit the wall behind him. There was utter silence in the room as everyone watched the wobbly pink goop slide slowly down the wall and into the bookcase. Then everyone began talking at once. The goop was cleaned up, and the party continued on into the night.
TOWARD THE END of the year, I began to perform occasionally without my mother. She had the two boys and Pop to look after and simply couldn’t be with me all the time. I went on the road with a gentleman pianist who was good, but he didn’t know my idiosyncrasies or have the fine musical instincts my mother had.
In November of that year, I landed the title role in Red Riding Hood, the Christmas pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham, a historic town in the British Midlands, famous for its lace, Sherwood Forest, and Robin Hood lore.
Mum and Auntie came up to help me settle in. We took our trailer and parked it next to the wall of a big cinema, and lived there during rehearsals. After they returned home, I moved into a hotel.
Since I was only fifteen, I still needed a chaperone, and I believe that the leading lady, Cherry Lind, who played Prince Valiant, was asked to keep an eye on me. Happily, she was also in the same hotel.
I was a gauche Red Riding Hood. Tony Heaton was Mother Hubbard (my mother); Tony Hancock, the comedian, was Jolly Jenkins, a bumbling, well-meaning Baron’s page; and the variety artist brothers Albert and Les Ward were the Baron’s Henchmen. They played guitars, bicycle pumps, washboards, and practically anything that would provide accompaniment to their country-and-western-style songs. Kirby’s Flying Ballet were the fairies and woodland creatures. In true panto tradition, the comedians brought their own shtick to the show—and, as always, the songs had nothing to do with the story. I contributed a highly technical coloratura aria called “The Gypsy and the Bird,” which I sang in the forest on the way to Grandma’s house. (So I, too, brought my own shtick, so to speak.)
One matinee, I was performing this aria and I became aware of giggles coming from the audience. I thought, “Oh Lord! My petticoat’s probably falling!” What I didn’t know until I finished the song was that one of the Flying Ballet wires had broken loose from its moorings. The wires were weighted with sandbags and tied off at the side of the stage, and one large sandbag had broken free and was swinging on its wire the entire width of the proscenium, missing me by inches while I was trilling away. I was told later that had I stepped back a mere inch or two, I would have been clobbered.
Being a teenager and much on my own, I became rather unprofessional and would arrive at the theater as late as I possibly could. Sometimes, I washed my hair before the performance, and it would still be dripping wet when I went onstage. Nobody ever said anything; nobody cared.
Mum didn’t visit much, and I was horribly homesick. When she and Auntie came up for a weekend, they found me in tears and quite depressed. They hadn’t the heart to return home right away, so they stayed a few more days and gave me some much-needed cheer.
Fortunately, I was an avid reader, so that took up some of my time. I had a fairly big break between scenes, and I would often read in my dressing room. One day I was so engrossed in my book that I missed my cue. I heard thunderous footsteps as the assistant stage manager came running down the corridor to pound my dressing room door, and the loudspeaker clicked on backstage.
“Julie? Get down here! You’re on!”
I flew down the stairs, and by the time I made my entrance, the audience was chatting loudly, wondering what was supposed to happen next.
The inmates of the local asylum came to a matinee, and following their visit, I received an explicit letter from a patient suggesting that if I cut an orange in half and rubbed it on certain private parts of my anatomy, I would be “purified.” My mother was appalled.
“All the more reason to never open your own mail!” she admonished.
An audience member gushed to me once, “It must be so exciting performing in the theater! Tell me, do you all meet onstage between shows and have picnics together?”
To the contrary, the hotel dining room was always closed by the time we returned after the evening’s performance. The kitchen would leave out a salad and some cold chicken, and Cherry Lind and her mother and I, and sometimes Cherry’s boyfriend, would sit and eat in the empty dining room, which was eerily quiet with only a few lights left glowing in the darkened hotel. I remember Cherry showing me how to make a vinaigrette salad dressing, a recipe I have used ever since. Sometimes I simply ate alone.
Occasionally the cast would get together after the show. Tony Hancock and his wife often entertained at their digs. Since he had performed in Educating Archie, I knew him a little and liked him, although we hadn’t had much connection on the radio show. He was heavyset, with a woebegone clown’s face and large, sad eyes. In his hilarious sketches, life was always tough, and he would stand, gazing out at the audience with thick-fingered, “wet fish” hands at his side, trying to understand the trials and tribulations that befell him. In real life, he was a depressed man, an alcoholic who eventually committed suicide. But he became quite famous long before that sad moment.
Red Riding Hood ended in March of 1951, and I was extremely relieved to go home.