Читать книгу The Book Of Lists - David Wallechinsky - Страница 51

1. HADJI ALI

Billed as ‘the Amazing Regurgitator’, Hadji Ali enjoyed an improbably widespread popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century as a vaudeville drawing card. His act consisted of swallowing a series of unlikely objects – watermelon seeds, imitation jewels, coins, peach pits – and then regurgitating specific items as requested by his audience. It was impressive, if tasteless, stuff – but his grand finale brought down the house every night. His assistant would set up a tiny metal castle on stage while Ali drank a gallon of water, chased down by a pint of kerosene. To the accompaniment of a protracted drumroll, he would eject the kerosene across the stage in a 6-ft arc and set the castle afire. Then, as flames shot high into the air, he would upchuck the gallon of water and extinguish the blaze.

2. THE CHERRY SISTERS

When impresario Oscar Hammerstein found himself in a financial hole, he decided to try a new approach. ‘I’ve been putting on the best talent and it hasn’t gone over,’ he told reporters. ‘I’m going to try the worst.’ On November 16, 1896, he introduced Elizabeth, Effie, Jessie and Addie Cherry to New York audiences at his Olympic Theatre. A sister act that had been treading the vaudeville boards in the Midwest for a few years, the girls strutted out onto the Olympia’s stage garbed in flaming red dresses, hats and woollen mittens. Jessie kept time on a bass drum, while her three partners did their opening number:

Cherries ripe Boom-de-ay!

Cherries red Boom-de-ay!

The Cherry Sisters

Have come to stay!

New York audiences sat transfixed, staring goggle-eyed in disbelief, but they proved more merciful than audiences in the Midwest. They refrained from pelting the girls with rubbish and overripe tomatoes at first. Eventually, the Cherry sisters had to put up a wire screen to protect themselves from the inevitable hail of missiles showered on them by their outraged audiences. In later years they denied that anything had ever been thrown at them. Said a writer in the New York Times: ‘It is sincerely hoped that nothing like them will ever be seen again.’ Another critic wrote: ‘A locksmith with a strong rasping file could earn steady wages taking the kinks out of Lizzie’s voice.’ Despite their reputation as the world’s worst act, they played consistently to standing-room-only crowds, wowing their fans with such numbers as ‘The Modern Young Man’ (a recitation), ‘I’m Out Upon the Mash, Boys’, ‘Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight’ and ‘Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?’

3. RONALD COATES

This nineteenth-century British eccentric may well have been the worst actor in the history of the legitimate theatre. A Shakespearean by inclination, Coates saw no objection to rewriting the Bard’s great tragedies to suit his own tastes. In one unforgettable reworking of Romeo and Juliet, in which he played the male lead, he tried to jimmy open his bride’s casket with a crowbar. Costumed in a feathered hat, spangled cloak and billowing pantaloons – an outfit he wore in public as well – he looked singularly absurd. Coates was frequently hooted and jeered offstage for his inept, overblown performances. Quite often he had to bribe theatre managers to get a role in their productions, and his fellow thespians, fearing violence from the audience, demanded that he provide police protection before they would consent to appear onstage with him. He was slandered and laughed at throughout the British Isles and often threatened with lynching, but he persisted in his efforts to act. During one dramatic performance, several members of the audience were so violently convulsed with laughter that they had to be treated by a physician. Coates was struck and killed by a carriage – but not until 1848, when he was 74.

4. SADAKICHI HARTMANN

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Billing himself as a Japanese–German inventor, Hartmann was, briefly, a fixture in the New York theatre in the early 1900s as he offered soon-to-bejaded audiences what he called ‘perfume concerts’. Using a battery of electric fans, Hartmann blew great billowing clouds of scented smoke towards his audience, meanwhile explaining in thickly-accented English that each aroma represented a different nation. Hartmann, who frequently had trouble with hecklers, rarely made it beyond England (roses) or Germany (violets) before being hooted from the stage.

5. FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS

A taxi collision in 1943 left would-be diva Florence Foster Jenkins capable of warbling a higher F than she’d ever managed before. So delighted was she that she waived legal action against the taxi company, presenting the driver with a box of imported cigars instead – an appropriately grand gesture for the woman universally hailed as the world’s worst opera singer. The remarkable career of this Pennsylvania heiress was for many years an in-joke among cognoscenti and music critics – the latter writing intentionally ambiguous reviews of the performances she gave regularly in salons from Philadelphia to Newport. ‘Her singing at its finest suggests the untrammelled swoop of some great bird’, Robert Lawrence wrote in the Saturday Review. Edward Tatnall Canby spoke of a ‘subtle ghastliness that defies description’. But Newsweek was the most graphic, noting: ‘In high notes, Mrs Jenkins sounds as if she was afflicted with low, nagging backache.’ On October 25, 1944, Mrs Jenkins engineered the most daring coup of her career – a recital before a packed Carnegie Hall. That concert, like her others, saw the well-padded matron, then in her 70s, change costume numerous times. She appeared variously as the tinsel-winged ‘Angel of Inspiration’; the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and a Spanish coquette, draped in a colourful shawl, with a jewelled comb and a red rose in her hair. Inevitably she seasoned her ‘coquette’ rendition by tossing rose petals plucked from a wicker basket to the audience. On at least one occasion she inadvertently tossed the basket as well. But she always made certain to retrieve the petals for the next performance.

6. MRS ELVA MILLER

While growing up in Kansas, Elva figured that with practice and training she might have a shot at a career in singing. Her friends and family thought otherwise. However, she made the high school glee club and the church choir and even studied voice at Pomona College in Claremont, California. But with it all, her voice was reminiscent of cockroaches rustling at dawn in a rubbish bin. In the 1960s, still convinced she could sing, Mrs Miller – by now a 50-ish California housewife – recorded on her own a few favourite melodies ‘just for the ducks of it’. She persuaded a local disc jockey to give her an airing and finally cut a nightmarish 45” single of the hit song ‘Downtown’. It sold 250,000 copies in barely three weeks and made ‘The Kansas Rocking Bird’, as she was dubbed, the darling of TV variety shows. ‘Her tempos, to put it charitably, are freeform’, said Time magazine. ‘She has an uncanny knack for landing squarely between the beat, producing a new ricochet effect that, if nothing else, defies imitation … [She] also tosses in a few choruses of whistling for a change of pace.’

7. WILLIAM HUNG

Hung, a 21-year-old engineering student from the University of California at Berkeley, auditioned for the 2004 season of the American Idol television show. After Hung sang a tuneless, but enthusiastic, rendition of Ricky Martin’s song ‘She Bangs’, judge Simon Cowell observed, ‘You can’t sing, you can’t dance, so what do you want me to say?’ Despite the rejection, repeated showings of the Idol clip turned Hung into a cult star. Soon, ‘The Real American Idol’ was giving off-key performances on talk shows ranging from the Today Show to the Tonight Show, singing at a nationally televised NBA game, and sharing the stage with the likes of Janet Jackson, Outkast, and Lenny Kravitz at the Wango Tango Music Festival at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. He signed a contract with Koch Entertainment and recorded an album, Inspiration, that sold more than 200,000 copies – outselling the debut album by Idol’s season one runner-up, Justin Guarini.

– B.F.