Читать книгу Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic - Graham McCann - Страница 13

My agent. He’s a very peculiar man, my agent. He’s got what they call a dual personality. People hate both of them.

It was an extraordinary coincidence. Shortly after Frankie Howard departed from the Army, he met not only the man who would soon prove to be one of the best things to have happened to his early career, but also the man who would end up seeming like one of the worst. These two men were one and the same: Stanley ‘Scruffy’ Dale.

Of all the innumerable managers, promoters and sundry ‘ten-percenters’ who struggled to make a living out of post-war British theatre, none was quite as mysterious, unorthodox and downright odd as Stanley Dale. Invalided out of the RAF after sitting on an incendiary shell that had penetrated his aeroplane (an act of valour for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross¹), he had since built a new career for himself in civilian life as a booker for the band leader-turned-impresario Jack Payne.

A whippet-thin man of average height with a sharp-featured face and short, curly hair that swept back over his head in shiny little ripples, Dale was notorious for his unpredictable office hours, his somewhat insalubrious personal habits and, most of all, for his chronically unkempt appearance. ‘Scruffy was scruffy,’ confirmed the scriptwriter Alan Simpson. ‘I mean, nearly every time I saw Scruffy [he] was in bed! He used to conduct all of his office meetings in bed, with a fag hanging out of his mouth – he never seemed to puff it, it always seemed just to burn away until there was nothing there but a sort of grey stick – and he had all of this ash dripping down on to his pyjama jacket.’²

When, however, Dale managed to summon up the effort to rise from his bed and dress (which happened – if it happened at all – only very rarely earlier than noon), he was capable of giving off a certain ‘loveable roguish’ kind of charm, particularly when telling some of his extraordinary tales (many of them tall, a few of them positively colossal) about the remarkable things he had done, the astonishing sights he had seen and the impressive people he had known over the course of his improbably eventful life. Tony Hancock, for one, fell deeply under his spell for a while during the immediate post-war period, sitting around with him night after night, sharing cigarettes and drinks and listening wide-eyed and open-mouthed to his anecdotes about the countless narrow escapes he claimed to have experienced while serving in the RAF.³

A budding young stand-up comic by the name of Jim Smith was another performer who would find himself drawn into Dale’s orbit. After seeing the teenaged Smith on stage at the start of the 1950s and quickly sensing his potential, Dale put him under contract, continued paying him a regular salary during his two years away on National Service, and, when he returned, gave Smith the ‘gift’ of his own surname – so Jim Smith became Jim Dale, and the comedy performer was promptly re-packaged as a pop star.

One of the qualities that friends and clients alike admired in Stanley Dale (at the beginning at least) was the extent of his apparent devotion to their cause. Behind the risibly indolent image lurked a lively and surprisingly imaginative champion of whomever he found worthwhile. If a performer needed someone to transport a cumbersome trunk, set up a prop or simply flick a particular switch, Scruffy, invariably, would agree to do it. If a friend fell into financial trouble, Scruffy would often be the first to volunteer to fix it. If a client required a change of style, Scruffy would go straight ahead and dream another one up. Nothing, it seemed, was too much trouble for Scruffy Dale – just as long, of course, as it did not need doing before noon.

What tended to dazzle people most of all about Dale was his claim to possess a special range of entrepreneurial powers. At a time when many of London’s theatrical agents still seemed mired in the methods and manners of the pre-war Edwardian era, Stanley Dale appeared strikingly and excitingly progressive, buying and selling stocks and shares at both a speed and a level of complexity that rendered the average Variety artiste breathless and dizzy but also deeply impressed. He was regarded, recalled his former colleague Bill Lyon-Shaw, as ‘a whizz-kid of his time’. Any up-and-coming performer would obviously have craved such lucrative expertise, but with Stanley Dale, Lyon-Shaw noted, there was a catch to the whizz-kid’s promise of a boundless supply of cash: ‘He whizzed quite a lot of it into his own pocket.’⁴

The full extent of Dale’s many deceptions would only be discovered a decade or so later. Back in 1946, he struck most people as merely an eccentric but slyly effective wheeler-dealer, and there was one thing about this unconventional man of which no one was in any doubt: he had a genuinely sharp eye for new talent. It was this sharp eye that would soon spot Frankie Howard.

Howard first encountered Stanley Dale at the Stage Door Canteen in Piccadilly – a bustling little venue (based on the site occupied nowadays by Boots the Chemist) where Service men and women with a passion for performing could ‘meet and see’. Howard, having recently been demobbed, should not, by rights, have been there, but he was already feeling desperate. During the brief time he had been out of uniform, Howard had failed yet another audition – this time at Butlin’s holiday camp at Filey in Yorkshire – and then tramped his lonely way around most of Soho’s well-known (and quite a few of the more obscure) agents’ offices without eliciting more than the faintest hint of sincere encouragement. The problem was always the same: ‘Where can I see you perform?’ each cigar-chomping agent would ask. ‘You can’t,’ came Howard’s stock reply. ‘I’m not working.’⁵’

It was every young performer’s Catch-22: in order to work, one needed an agent, but in order to get an agent, one needed to work. There was no hope to be found in logic; the only hope to be had was in luck.

Just before Howard met Dale, he sat up in his old bedroom in Eltham and hatched an audacious plan to actively make his own luck instead of continuing to wait passively for its possible arrival. Remembering that one of the most sympathetic (or least unsympathetic) agents he had so far encountered – Harry Lowe – was known to be a regular in the audience at the Stage Door Canteen, he resolved to try to sneak his way in.

Late one morning in the middle of the week, he put his old Army uniform back on, retrieved Richard Stone’s short letter of recommendation, passed politely on his mother’s kind offer of another brown paper bag full of cheese sandwiches, and set off ‘with nervous impatience’ to catch the bus bound for Piccadilly.⁶ Marching into the secretary’s office in what he hoped resembled a suitably soldier-like manner, he introduced himself as Sergeant Frank Howard and handed over the positive reference from Major Stone. The ruse worked: he was told that he would be on stage next Friday night at seven o’clock sharp. Racing off to the nearest public telephone, he notified Lowe of the news, and Lowe assured him that he would make every effort to attend.

When Friday arrived, Howard – buoyed by the familiar sight of a boisterous military audience – gave what he felt at the time to be the performance of his life.⁷ Immediately afterwards, however, he was crushed to discover that Harry Lowe had not been present to see it. Fearing that he would probably fail in the future to be as good as that again, he felt that his big chance had already come and gone.

Slumped in a chair back at his home in Eltham, Howard spent the next few days in a ‘state of indescribable melancholy’.⁸ Then, out of the blue, came a request from the Stage Door Canteen: as there was a shortage of performers for the following Friday night, the message said, would Sergeant Howard mind filling in? At first, he was disinclined to take up the offer, feeling that there would no longer be any real point to further exposure, but eventually, after being encouraged and cajoled by his mother, he relented: he would go, he mumbled miserably, but only in order to give ‘a valedictory performance before abandoning all hopes of a show-business career’.⁹

Harry Lowe, once again, was not there, but this time Howard could hardly have cared any less. Expecting nothing of any consequence to come from the performance, he went on stage at his most relaxed, and he proceeded to have some fun. The act went even better than it had the last time: every gag, every routine and every semi-improvised comic exchange with certain individuals among the audience seemed to trigger another crescendo of laughter. Howard could do no wrong, and he knew it – and he loved it.

In an office elsewhere in the building, a visiting booker – there doing business on behalf of a major London agency – grew curious as to what, and more importantly who, was causing so much noise in the auditorium. Setting off along the corridor and down the stairs, he managed to slip inside the door at the back of the theatre and stood there to watch the remainder of Howard’s act.

When it ended, the booker, who had been greatly impressed, raced backstage. ‘Who represents you?’ he panted. ‘Nobody,’ replied Howard, trying hard not to sound bitter. ‘I’m with the Jack Payne office,’ the man announced. ‘Would you like us to represent you?’

Howard, who could still recall with a shudder that awful night at the Lewisham Hippodrome when he had shared the stage but none of the applause with the hugely popular Jack Payne and his band, was incredulous. Looking this stranger up and down for a few seconds – taking in the scuffs on the toes of the old shoes, the deep creases all over the trousers, the stains on the front of the open-necked shirt and the beads of sweat that were now sliding down the brow – he came perilously close to concluding out loud that the whole thing must be some sort of sick joke.

It soon became apparent, however, that the stranger was being serious. ‘You’ll have to see Frank Barnard,’ he added matter-of-factly. ‘He’ll want to see your act.’ Howard, now blushing beetroot-red and starting to lose control over his stutter, managed to reply: ‘Of course … Yes … Um … Yes … Who’s he?’

Informed that Frank Barnard was Jack Payne’s general manager, Howard then asked where he could expect the great man to go to see him perform. ‘In his office,’ he was told. ‘His office!’ a patently horrified Howard shrieked. ‘I c-can’t perform in an office! I need an audience.’ After being told, somewhat tetchily (‘Look, sonny …’), that Mr Barnard – a hugely experienced and no-nonsense old Geordie – already had more than enough people to see, he was handed his final chance: ‘Are you interested, or aren’t you?’ This time there was no hesitation: ‘You bet I am!’ The stranger shook his hand and smiled: ‘Then you will perform in his office.’

Howard was left in a daze. Even the daunting prospect of another audience-free audition failed to dampen down the tremendous feelings of elation: his talent had at last been spotted, and, on the very day that he had contemplated abandoning his long-cherished ambitions, he was finally getting his chance. Just before the unexpected meeting had ended, Howard suddenly realised that, throughout all of the heightened confusion, anxiety and excitement, he had not yet asked the visitor his name. ‘It’s Stanley,’ the stranger revealed. ‘Stanley Dale.’¹⁰

Howard would always claim, on the basis of this encounter, that Dale was the man who discovered him, but this was not strictly true. Dale may have been the first person from the agency to knock on the performer’s dressing-room door, but it was one of his superiors within the Jack Payne Organisation, the production manager Bill Lyon-Shaw, who had made the actual discovery.

Lyon-Shaw – responding to a tip from a talent scout – had gone down to the Stage Door Canteen on that particular day alongside Jack Payne to take a look at a promising young comedian and impressionist by the name of Max Bygraves. When they arrived, Lyon-Shaw noticed that Frankie Howard was also on the list of artists who were due to appear:

I said to Jack, ‘Oh, God, I know that chap, I’ve seen him before.’ I’d actually seen him a few years before, during wartime, in a little concert party in Rochford. I used to live in Southend, you see, and a lady whom I knew there called Blanche Moore – who never gets the credit she deserves for finding Frank – had written to me and said, ‘If you ever get a chance to come back again to Southend, you must come down and see my concert party. We have a very funny man called Frankie Howard.’ So, one leave weekend, I went down, and saw this grotesque, in Army uniform, come on to the stage, do a whole lot of ‘ooh-aahs’ and the odd ‘oh, no, missus’, tell mostly Army-style jokes and then he ended up with the song ‘Three Little Fishes’ – which, of course, was unusual and very good. So at the Stage Door Canteen, after we’d seen and liked – and decided we’d book – Max Bygraves, I said to Jack Payne, ‘Look, this Frankie Howard: he’s quite funny. Let’s just stay a bit and see what you think of him.’ And so we stayed and saw Frank, and Jack liked him. He said, ‘Yes, he’s a funny man, he’s different, not at all like the typical slick comic – let’s have him, too.’ And that’s how we got Max Bygraves and Frankie Howard at the same time.¹¹

Whether it was Payne, then and there, who dispatched Dale backstage to make the first official contact with the two new potential clients, or just Dale (in all of the noisy chaos of the moment) acting entirely on his own initiative, remains unclear, but it certainly seems that, during his time inside Howard’s dressing-room, he made no attempt to undersell his own importance within the agency. The fact was that the comedian, who was struggling to believe his luck, was in no state to question anything his visitor said.

Howard was just delighted to have made the acquaintance of Stanley Dale. Admittedly, Dale did not fit the image of the conventional show-business intermediary, but then neither did Howard fit the image of the conventional stand-up comedian. What boded rather well, he reflected, was the fact that their relationship had been founded on such an encouraging convergence of opinion: namely, they both had faith in the star potential of Frankie Howard.

What brought Howard straight back down to earth with an abrupt and painful bump was the thought that this faith would still prove fruitless unless he now went on to win a similar vote of confidence from the notoriously gruff and bluff Frank Barnard. Having failed so many auditions in the past that had been held under similarly cold and unwelcoming conditions, he found it hard now to hold out much hope. Barnard was based in an elegantly capacious set of rooms two floors above Hanover Square in Mayfair. Howard had not even climbed the stairs before his big day started going ominously awry.

Vera Roper, his old friend and stooge, had agreed to accompany him there to provide some much-needed moral support, but, in an unwelcome imitation of her on-stage unreliability, she failed to turn up. The reality was that she had fallen ill, but, as neither she nor Howard owned a telephone, he was left to pace anxiously up and down on the pavement outside, waiting in vain until he very nearly made himself late.

Things went from bad to worse when, reluctantly, he entered the building alone and made his way up to Barnard’s office. ‘Got your band parts?’ barked Barnard from behind a fat and angry Havana cigar. Howard (failing to grasp the full seriousness of the faux pas) confessed that he had not thought to bring any sheet music, but added that he would definitely have arrived with a pianist if only his accompanist had not reneged on her promise to accompany him. This provoked plenty of smoke from the scowling Barnard, whose face had just grown redder than the glowing end of his cigar.

Howard, still somehow oblivious to the obvious danger signs, then pointed a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the gleaming new office piano and enquired if there was ‘anyone around who could play “Three Little Fishes”’ for him. This provoked plenty of fire: Barnard, according to Howard’s subsequent embarrassed account, leapt up from behind his desk and promptly ‘went berserk’.¹²

Launching into a screaming tirade that rocked Howard back in his seat, Barnard told him that he was an unprofessional and impertinent timewaster, unworthy of begging the attention of a bored gallery queue in Wigan – let alone a top-notch metropolitan agent. ‘He went on and on,’ the traumatised performer would recall, ‘whipping himself into a frenzy of near-apoplexy – while I sat literally shivering with terror.’¹³ Eventually, having shouted himself into exhaustion, Barnard slumped back down into his chair, reached for another cigar, and, waving a hand dismissively in the direction of Howard, snarled: ‘Wait outside.’¹⁴ Howard did what he was told.

He ended up waiting outside for four solid hours. During that time spent sitting in silence on his own, he went all the way from quivering terror through meek contrition to angry resentment (‘Who the hell does he think he is?’). When, at last, the call came that ‘Mr Barnard will see you now’, Howard was firmly in the mood for retaliation: ‘The worm not only turned, but grew teeth.’¹⁵

‘I wouldn’t go near that man for all the tea in China,’ he screamed at Barnard’s startled secretary. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life, and I’m not so desperate that I’ll go on my hands and knees to that ignorant pig. I’d rather not be in show-business at all – and that’s that.’¹⁶

The secretary had obviously been screamed at before, because, once her ears had stopped ringing, she simply patted Howard on the shoulder and advised him to calm down: ‘Swallow your pride. You may never get this sort of chance again.’ Howard, however, was having none of it. With widened eyes and scarlet cheeks, he raged at all the rudeness, injustice and contempt he had suffered, not only that day but on so many, many days before, and then, folding his hands over the top of his head, moaned that he was in no mood now to put right what had gone so horribly, utterly wrong. ‘Have a go,’ said the secretary with a sympathetic smile, and guided him by the arm back to outside the door of the manager’s office.¹⁷

So many thoughts, so many options, bounced around in Howard’s head during the handful of seconds that he hovered outside that door: turning the other cheek; punching the other cheek; begging forgiveness; offering forgiveness; speaking his mind; biting his lip – countless ticks and an equal number of crosses. In the end, as he moved to open the door, he settled on speaking his mind.

Crashing into the office and racing straight up to the desk, Howard fixed his tormentor with his very best baleful glare and, stabbing the smoky air with his finger for emphasis, he screeched: ‘I am now going to make you laugh, you clot. You’re going to fall about with laughter, you idiot. Because I’m a very funny man, you oaf!’¹⁸ Then he noticed that Barnard was shaking.

He was shaking neither with fear nor rage, but rather with laughter. ‘That’s a great act. Great. It’s a hoot,’ he cried, shaking his head, wiping his eyes and smiling broadly. ‘Can you do any more?’¹⁹

Howard, having purged himself of all fury, did a quick double-take and then proceeded to do his proper act. He was more disorientated than genuinely relaxed, but what he did went down so well that Barnard now thought nothing of summoning a pianist to support his rendition of ‘Three Little Fishes’. When it was all over, Barnard shook Howard warmly by the hand and assured the exhausted performer that it had been the best ‘cold’ audition he had ever seen. He hired Howard on the spot, and then arranged for Jack Payne, the self-styled capo di tutti capi of the post-war Variety world, to see his newest client perform in front of an enthusiastic military audience at Arborfield in Berkshire. Payne (who had no recollection of his pre-war encounter with Howard) arrived in time to watch him steal the show.

Barnard’s initial idea had been for Howard to make his debut as a professional in a relatively run-of-the-mill touring show in Germany. Payne, however, preferred to entrust the monitoring of his early career to Bill Lyon-Shaw, and so he was drafted instead into a far more prestigious new domestic revue by the name of For the Fun of It. Produced by Lyon-Shaw, it boasted such well-established names as the veteran stand-up Nosmo King, the comedy double-act of Jean Adrienne and Eddie Leslie and, topping the bill, the hugely popular singer Donald Peers. Howard joined two other fresh professionals – his fellow-comic Max Bygraves and a contortionist called Pam Denton – at the bottom of the bill in a special showcase for ex-Service performers entitled ‘They’re Out!’

Before the tour began, Howard sat down and invested an extraordinary amount of careful thought into how best to shape his on-stage persona. Desperate to get his professional career off to a strong and certain start, he analysed every aspect of his act – from what he should say (and how he should say it) to what he should wear (and how he should wear it) – and gradually built up an idea, and an image, of the kind of distinctive performer he wanted, in time, to become.

First of all, he reflected on what he most admired about his own comedy heroes – and what he could take from them and then adapt for himself. When he thought, for example, about two of his favourite American performers, Jack Benny and W.C. Fields, he drew inspiration from the prickliness of their respective images (Benny the hopelessly vain and miserly old ham, Fields the drunken and cynical old fraud) and the unusually sharp, self-aware and defiantly pathos-free nature of their material.

What he found especially refreshing was the fact that neither of these fine comedians (in stark contrast to the vast majority of their peers) was enslaved by any obvious need to be loved. It did not matter to Benny if anyone actually believed that he was waited on day and night by an African-American servant (whom he rarely, if ever, bothered to pay), or wore the cheapest toupee in Hollywood, or refused to acknowledge that he had long since passed the age of thirty-nine, or, when asked by a mugger to choose between his money and his life, resented being hurried – ‘I’m thinking it over!’

Similarly, it did not matter to Fields if the odd person took offence when he knocked back one too many treble measures of bourbon, mumbled something insulting about his wife or aimed a large boot at little Baby LeRoy’s backside. Like Benny, Fields was more than happy to use all of his various foibles, failures and flaws – whether they were real and exaggerated or imaginary and stylised – rather than try, like the more typical kind of comedian, to hide and deny them. The only thing that mattered to this exceptional pair of performers was the number of laughs they were able to generate. It was this attitude – a subtly smart, self-mocking and grown-up attitude – that Howard (the hypocritical ‘friend’ of elderly deaf pianists) was ready to emulate.

Turning his attention to the delivery of his material, Howard not only recognised the debt he already owed to George Robey, but also anticipated the impact to be had from studying the style of a more recent favourite, Sid Field. What both of these performers did was to dominate an audience through indirection, preferring to coax the laughs out rather than waiting for them to be handed over on a plate.

Robey had shown how much funnier a clown could be when he acted as if he was labouring under the illusion that he was not actually a clown. Once the first ripple of laughter had rolled towards him from over the stalls, he would stick his hands stiffly on his hips, hoist his nose high up in the air and then snort censoriously: ‘Kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve.’ When this act of pomposity summoned up an even louder and deeper splash of derision, he would, with an air of mounting desperation, urge the audience to ‘Desist!’ – which in turn, of course, would succeed only in prompting an even bigger and more gloriously anarchic burst of playful mockery.

More recently, Howard had been deeply impressed by the classy comic artistry of Sid Field. Like Howard, Field was a peculiar mixture, on stage, of lumbering masculinity and camp effeminacy, of working-class toughness and middle-class gentility – the critic Kenneth Tynan summed it up rather nicely when he likened it to a strangely effective blend ‘of nectar and beer’.²⁰

Besides having the knack of being able to act with his entire body – with his nimble hands and knees as well as his brightly expressive face – Field also had a wonderfully playful way with words and sounds and idioms. Ranging freely from coarse, back-throated cockney, through the nasal, drooping rhythms of his native Brummie, to the tight-necked, tongue-tip precision of a metropolitan toff, he turned common words and simple phrases into a special repertory of colourful comedy characters.

Howard adored the way that Field (a master parodist of effete behaviour) needed only to cry a single ‘Be-ooo-tiful!’ or cluck a quick ‘Don’t be so fool-haar-day!’ to trigger yet another gush of giggles. He warmed to the performer even more when Field paused to interact with the members of the pit orchestra (‘And how are yooo today? R-r-r-reasonably well, I hoop?’), boast to an unseen acquaintance in the wings (‘Did you heah me, Whittaker?’) and bridle at an imagined insult aimed at him from the audience (‘Oh! How very, very, dare you!’). Watching him, Howard felt that he had found a kindred spirit, and drew encouragement to follow suit.

When it came to deciding on how he would look, however, Howard had already arrived at some firm and subversive ideas all of his own. Aside from adopting the old Max Miller trick of applying plenty of blue to the lids ‘to help the eyes sparkle’,²¹ he eschewed the custom of caking the face in layers of make-up. He also elected to do without any of the formal, garish or gimmicky styles of dress.

He chose instead to wear an ordinary, off-the-peg lounge suit and plain tie. The colour of both, he decided, would always be a medium shade of brown, because he thought that this could be relied on to be ‘a colour that didn’t intrude’: ‘It’s warm and neutral and man-in-the-street anonymous,’ he reasoned. ‘If people did notice my suit or tie I thought it would mean that they were not concentrating on my face.’²²

He also resolved to dispense with the way that other comedians ‘framed’ each performance by making a formal entrance and exit. There would be no opening announcements or closing bows from him: he would simply walk straight up to the footlights and start talking – ‘No. Ah. Ooh, I’ve had such a funny day, today, have you?’ – and then, when he had finished, walk off again in a similar fashion, without ever signalling the presence of quotation marks.

The key thing, he believed, was to create the impression ‘that I wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street – as though into a pub, or just home from work. And I’d emphasise the calculated amateurishness of my presence and dress with a reference to the rest of the acts on the bill: “I’m not with this lot … Ooh no, I’m on me own!”’²³

With all of this, he was almost ready: an unusually informal, ordinary-looking, everyday kind of clown with a plausibly flawed personality, a deceptively artful style of delivery and a rare gift for engaging an audience. There was just one further thing, he felt, that still needed to be done: he needed to change his name. He knew that he was stuck with ‘Frankie’, but he decided, none the less, to alter the spelling of’Howard’. There were, he was convinced, simply too many other, far more famous, Howards about.

It was, in fact, an erroneous belief: in the absence of both Leslie (the London-bom Hollywood actor who had perished during the war) and Sydney (the portly Yorkshire comedian who had just died in June 1946), there was arguably only one notable Howard present in British show business at this time whose name had truly impinged on the public consciousness – and that was the actor Trevor Howard, who had only recently shot to stardom after playing the romantic lead in the 1945 movie, Brief Encounter.

Even one solitary Trevor, however, appeared to be one too many for Frankie, who proceeded to change the spelling of his surname from ‘Howard’ to ‘Howerd’. Showing himself to be a surprisingly shrewd (if somewhat over-analytical) self-promoter, he reasoned that the minor alteration, aside from helping to distinguish him from the odd stem-feced matinée idol, would have ‘the added advantage of making people look twice because they assumed it to be a misprint’.²⁴

Along with the name change came the invention of what in those days was called ‘bill matter’ (the slogan that accompanied the name displayed on the poster). There were plenty of examples to study: Max Miller was ‘The Cheeky Chappie’; Albert Modley ‘Lancashire’s Favourite Yorkshireman’: Vera Lynn ‘The Forces’ Sweetheart’; Donald Peers ‘Radio’s Cavalier of Song’; Robb Wilton ‘The Confidential Comedian’; and Sid Field ‘The Destroyer of Gloom’. Frankie Howerd, after much careful thought, came up with an epithet all of his own: ‘The Borderline Case’.²⁵

Now, at last, everything really was well and truly in place. The professional career could commence.

It began in his native Yorkshire, at the massive and Moorish Empire Theatre in Sheffield, on the night of Wednesday, 31 July 1946. Even though he was placed right down at the base of the bill, the act that was ‘Frankie Howerd: The Borderline Case’ proved impossible to miss. It was not just that he was different. It was also that he broke every rule in the book – literally.

In How to Become a Comedian (a compact little manual that had been published in 1945), the veteran music-hall star Lupino Lane had spelled out the conventional code of conduct to be followed by any fledgling stand-up comic. Typical of his schoolmasterly instructions were the following sober decrees: ‘Any inclination to fidget and lack “stage repose” should be immediately controlled. This can often cause great annoyance to the audience and result in a point being missed. Bad, too, is the continual use of phrases such as: “You see?,” “You know!”, “Of course”, etc. These things are most annoying to the listener.’²⁶ Even if some people, at the time, might have resented the intolerant tone, no one really questioned the general advice. No one, that is, except Frankie Howerd.

For all of his myriad insecurities, powerful bouts of crippling self-doubt and near-paralysing second thoughts, when it came to the true heart of his art, Howerd always knew exactly what he was doing – and what he was doing, on that first and on subsequent nights, was walking out in front of as many as 3,000 people and redefining the very nature of what being a stand-up was all about. He made it seem real. He made it into an act that no longer appeared to be an act. He pumped some blood through its veins.

What made the newly professional Frankie Howerd so impressively sui generis as a performer was the very thing that made him seem, as a character, so very much like ‘one of us’. He stood out as a stand-up by refusing to stand out from the crowd. For all of his many influences, the thing that really made him special was his willingness to be himself.

‘In those days,’ he would recall, ‘comics were very precise: they were word-perfect, as though reading their jokes from a script, and to fluff a line was something of a major disaster.’²⁷ Howerd, in contrast, told these same jokes just like the average member of the audience would have told these jokes: badly. He shook up the old patter from within, via a carefully rehearsed sequence of increasingly well-timed stutters, sidetracks and slip-ups, until, eventually, the whole polished package was scratched and then shattered – leaving people to laugh not so much at the jokes as at the person who was trying to tell the jokes.

No audience, back in 1946, had anticipated such an approach, but, when it was witnessed, it worked. It worked, explained Howerd, because, unlike the conventional comedy style, the approach invited identification rather than mere admiration. By daring to appear imprecise, he brought his art to life:

[The approach] worked, because the ordinary chap whom I was portraying is imprecise. You’ve only to listen to the answer when a TV interviewer asks what someone thinks of the Government: ‘Well … You know … Yes … Well, the Government … Yes, well … What more can I say? …’ People in real life don’t talk precisely as though from scripts, and neither did I attempt to on stage. My act sounded almost like a stream of consciousness, which is why I often didn’t finish sentences. ‘Of course, mind you …’ trailed away into silence – as again happens in real life.²⁸

It was the perfect post-war comedy persona: a ‘proper’ person, with no airs or graces but plenty of fears and frailties – just like the vast majority of the people he was entertaining.

Right from the start of his nine-month run in For the Fun of It, he was rated a performer of rare potential. Semi-hidden in the small print at the bottom of the bill, he soon became many theatregoers’ special discovery, the unknown performer who inspired them to exclaim at work the next day: ‘You should have seen this act!’ He soon started winning even more admirers once Bill Lyon-Shaw had coached him in the craft of commanding, as a professional, an ever-changing audience:

He was actually a very poor timer in the earliest days of the tour, and this was simply because he’d previously spent about two years playing in camp concerts to soldiers, who’d laughed the moment he went on. The reason they’d laughed was that they knew him, and they knew that he was going to take the mickey out of the Major, and the General, and send-up the Sergeant-Major. So they were a dead-cert audience to start with. Whereas once he went into Civvy Street, it was a different matter. When he got up North, for example, and into Yorkshire – where they’re a bloody hard lot anyway – they’d be saying, ‘What’s this bugger doin’ ’ere, ey? Does he not know what he’s about yet?’ He had all of that carry on. And so he had to learn timing, and learn to adjust his pace to the audience he was playing – you’ve got to be much faster in the South and much slower in the North, and you’ve got to be impossible in Scotland – and learn to pay far more attention to that kind of detail.²⁹

Grateful for the expert advice, Howerd proceeded to do just that, and, as a consequence, gathered an even greater quantity of praise as the tour progressed. The other two novice professionals on the bill, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton, were also attracting an increasingly positive audience reaction. Both of them, as the tour evolved, would grow increasingly close to Howerd.

The friendship with Bygraves was probably one of the firmest Howerd would ever have. Sharing both a dressing-room and digs throughout the duration of the tour, the two young comedians became each other’s primary advisor, sounding-board, supporter and all-purpose ‘cheerer-upper’.

The first time that Bygraves (a much more traditional type of comedian) saw Howerd in action, he thought him ‘the most nervous performer I’d ever met’.³⁰ The act, however, impressed him – as, indeed, did the high degree of courage it took to do it – and he became very protective of his very talented but horribly anxious new friend. At the end of the tour’s first week, for example, Bygraves discovered that an over-cautious Frank Barnard was attempting to pressure Howerd into cutting out the most audacious aspects of his act. ‘Why don’t you stop bullying him?’ he shouted at the boss. ‘You can see the boy’s a nervous wreck, so why don’t you leave him alone until he gets settled?’³¹

His intervention was only partially successful – Howerd did have to squeeze into his routine a few things that were more immediately recognisable as jokes – but the gesture, none the less, could hardly have touched the co-performer more deeply. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Max for speaking up for me,’ Howerd later said, ‘and I’ve always admired his guts: after all, like me he’d been in the business just a week, yet there he was arguing the toss with the management and risked being tossed out of the show on his ear.’³²

The pair went on to evolve together as performers. ‘We were about the same age, same weight and height,’ Bygraves reflected, ‘and both had the same dreams of making our way in show business.’³³ Both certainly benefited from being taken under the wing of the senior pro on the tour, Nosmo King.³⁴

An asthmatic, cigar-puffing stand-up comic in his sixtieth year (whose somewhat ironic stage name had been inspired by a ‘NO SMOKING’ sign he once spied in a railway carriage), King used to stand and watch his two young protégés every night from the wings, and then afterwards, over a cup or two of hot tea in his dressing-room, he would advise them on what they had done well and what he believed they could learn to do better.

One of his most useful tips of the trade concerned the art of voice projection. Sensing that both Howerd and Bygraves, as they began to work the large and noisy halls, were sometimes struggling to make themselves heard (and were therefore vulnerable to heckles of the ‘Oi! We’ve paid out money – don’t keep it a secret!’ variety), King took each of them to the centre of the stage, made them look at the EXIT sign in the middle of the circle, and then said: ‘Now pretend that sign is somebody’s head. Don’t talk like we are talking now. Don’t shout, but throw your voice at that sign.’ The increase in power, clarity and authority was evident, to both, immediately: ‘It worked,’ exclaimed Bygraves gratetfully, ‘it really worked!’³⁵

While all of this comic bonding was going on, it appears that Howerd was also forming a far less predictable romantic attachment to the female third of the tour’s troupe of youngsters: Pam Denton. How real (and how intimate) this relationship actually was remains unclear – he would make no mention of it in his memoirs, and she would subsequently disappear without a trace from public life – but, according to Max Bygraves, Denton was one woman with whom Howerd became ‘totally enamoured’.³⁶

He certainly liked her, and liked spending time with her, and she, in turn, appears to have enjoyed being with him. He had always been fascinated by speciality acts (he would be joined on a subsequent tour by strongwoman Joan ‘The Mighty Mannequin’ Rhodes), and had been drawn right from the start of the tour to Denton’s carefully choreographed on-stage contortions. He also warmed to her calm, down-to-earth and friendly personality – and, like any other comedian, he loved the fact that she laughed so long and so loudly at so many of his jokes.

Tall and thin with an engagingly open face and a bright, gap-toothed grin, he had, in those days, a far from unpleasant physical presence, and, when his spirits were high, he was quite capable of exuding a considerable amount of charm. His problem, however, was that while it took something extraordinary to lift his spirits up, it only took something trivial to drag them down to the floor. As Bill Lyon-Shaw recalled:

Poor Frank was very shy, very introverted, and terrified of everybody – especially women. I think the main reason for this was that he’d been turned down by a lot of the girls of the ATS – let’s face it, he was no oil painting! – and I gather that they’d been rather cruel to him. So that was the thing that had made him so frightened of women.³⁷

Denton, however, was different. She admired his talent, and was touched by his vulnerability; whether she wanted ultimately to make love to him or merely to mother him, she certainly wanted to share many of her spare hours with him. He was gentle, attentive and very, very funny, and, in her eyes, he made even the toughest times of the tour seem tolerable.

He dubbed it ‘Our Tour of the Empire – The Empire Sheffield, Wigan, Huddersfield, Glasgow …’³⁸ When things had gone well for both of them, he would relax, sit back, and entertain her with a selection of dialogue and one-liners he had memorised from the movies of W.C. Fields. When things had gone badly for her, he would put an arm around her shoulder, mock her critics and make her laugh. When things had gone badly for him, he would slump down, hold his head in his hands, and explain, in his inimitable gabbling manner, what he believed had actually happened – which often made her laugh even more.

Neither Denton nor Bygraves, for all of their deep affinity for their friend and fellow-performer, could ever quite fathom the full reason why a man so marked by self-contradictions soldiered on with such faith and fortitude. One day it was all about carpe diem: he would lecture all and sundry on the importance of making one’s own luck, staying true to one’s ambitions and never, ever, giving up. The next day it was all about embracing one’s fate: fancying himself as a serious reader of palms, he would often grab Bygraves’ hand, gaze at it for a moment and then assure him solemnly that he could look forward to one day becoming a millionaire (‘Frank,’ Bygraves would always say with a world-weary sigh, ‘I think you’ve got your wires crossed’).³⁹

There seemed to be something equally contradictory about his attitude to his audience. He dreaded rejection, but, whenever he sensed that it might be about to happen, he appeared to actively invite it. If ever a routine or a gag threatened to fall flat, the heart would duly pound, the sweat would seep and the clothes would stick to his flesh, but there was never a wave of a white flag. ‘What are you,’ he would snarl into the darkness, ‘deaf or something?’⁴⁰ He was a vulnerable man who dared to live dangerously.

‘Frank would go out and bait his audience,’ Max Bygraves recalled with a mixture of admiration and incredulity. ‘He was living on a knife-edge on that stage. Don’t forget we were all unknown. He’d insult them, pretend to forget his lines – then miraculously remember them just before it got embarrassing. When it worked it was great. I’ve seen him tear the place up, and it was wonderful to watch. Other times …’⁴¹

There were quite a few of those ‘other times’. One of them came at Sunderland.

It happened at the start of the week’s run, right in the middle of Howerd’s act. Just after his last ‘um’, and just before his next ‘er’, a loud cracking sound – like an axe cutting into a steel pipe – came up suddenly from the stage. It shook him and stalled the routine, and, even though Howerd soon recovered, he could barely wait to finish and leave. Once the curtain came down, someone found the cause of the noise: a ship’s rivet, thrown down from the ‘gods’ by a distinctly unimpressed docker, had missed the top of the comedian’s head by a whisker and left a large dent in the stage floor. ‘Obviously they can’t afford tomatoes up ’ere!’ Howerd remarked once he was safely backstage, trying hard to laugh the incident off, but Max Bygraves could see that, beneath the show of defiance, the reaction had rendered him ‘a nervous wreck’: ‘He was terrified of an audience like that.’⁴²

Another one of those ‘other times’ occurred at the Glasgow Empire – the deservedly legendary ‘graveyard of English comics’ – where any performer not bedecked from top to toe in tartan could expect to be sent rushing back to the wings with the cry of ‘Away hame and bile yer heid!’ ringing in their ears. Howerd knew all about the venue’s terrifying reputation – indeed, as soon as he arrived at Sauchiehall Street, he felt an urgent need to find and make use of the nearest backstage lavatory – but he was determined to see all of the next six nights through.

He managed it, but only just. A combination of him stammering rather more speedily than usual, and the Glasgow crowd (bemused by the unconventionality of his act) summoning up its antiquated anti-English bile a little more slowly than usual, contrived to buy him some time, but, by the arrival of the dreaded second-house on the climactic Friday night, the customised ‘screwtaps’ (the sharpened metal tops from the bottles of beer) were being hurled at the stage with all of their customary velocity and venom. The conductor – hairless and blameless – was hit on the head, and was carried, bleeding profusely, from the orchestra pit, but Howerd survived, more or less, unscathed.

It was quite the opposite of the proverbial ‘water off a duck’s back’: Howerd absorbed every single drop of negativity. It was just that he kept on going regardless of how much it hurt. Even when he seemed to lose faith in himself, he never lost faith in his act.

He also took comfort from the knowledge that, beyond the confines of the tour, there were people working hard on the advancement of his career. Apart from his sister, Betty, who (fresh out of the ATS) was now acting as his unofficial manager, script advisor and cheerleader, there was also Stanley Dale. Dale, in his own inscrutable, uniquely post-prandial way, was up to all kinds of schemes and tricks to enhance his client’s profile. Contacts were nurtured, sympathetic critics were cultivated and – even though Howerd was only earning a paltry £l3 10s per week – investments started being made in his (and Dale’s) name. Whenever the comedian’s spirits started to sag, Dale would invariably intervene, either in person or via the telephone, to reassure him that all was still going to plan.

To be fair to Dale, he did, through one means or another, get results. While Howerd was on tour, Dale called him with some extraordinarily exciting news: he had been sent an invitation, via the Jack Payne Organisation, from the producer Joy Russell-Smith (one of the most knowledgeable and perceptive judges of comic potential to be found in those days in British broadcasting) to audition for variety Bandbox, the top entertainment radio show on the BBC.

There has been, in the past, some confusion as to the timing of this call. Howerd would remember it arriving a mere ‘six weeks’ into his professional career, which would have placed the date in mid-September.⁴³ It really happened, in fact, about three weeks after that.

Early on the morning of Wednesday 9 October 1946, Frankie Howerd travelled down to London and went straight to the BBC’s Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. It was grey and damp outside, and it was grey and damp inside as well. He found himself in a large empty room with a battered microphone in one corner, a pile of sandbags strewn around all four of the walls, and a dull plate of glass that passed for an audience. He struggled to suppress a squeal of horror: it was, after all, yet another audition without anyone with whom to play, and the atmosphere could not have felt more flat. This, however, was an audition for the BBC, and the show it was for was Variety Bandbox, and so he took a deep breath and went ahead: ‘Now, Ladies and Gentle-men, I, ah, no …’

The act itself was something of a dog’s dinner: some of the material had been taken straight from For the Fun of It, some had been invented expressly for the occasion and some had been ‘borrowed’ from other comics and tailored to suit his needs. It was rough around the edges, the timing was slightly off, but the impact was still there. At the end of the performance, the studio door opened, Joy Russell-Smith emerged, stretched out a hand and congratulated Howerd with a remark that showed him just how well she understood what he had been up to: ‘A completely new art form’.⁴⁴

The following day, Russell-Smith submitted her formal internal report:

FRANKIE HOWARD [sic] (Auditioned 9.10.46)

c/o Scruffy Dale.

Very funny, original patter and song.

Eric Spear and John Hooper present and agree. Seeded.⁴⁵

It was brief but immensely encouraging: this time, without the chance to interact with a ‘proper’ audience, Howerd had managed to win the approval of not only the redoubtable Russell-Smith but also Eric Spear (an experienced producer and composer who would later be responsible for, among other things, the theme tune of Coronation Street) and John Hooper (another broadcaster with a sure sense of what it took to make any form of entertainment truly popular). As a consequence, he could now look forward to playing a part in the next, crucial, stage of the selection process – a recorded, ‘seeded’ audition in the form of a private ‘show’ before a special board of BBC producers.⁴⁶

Howerd duly returned to Studio 1 at Aeolian Hall on the morning of Friday, 25 October, nursing a bad migraine but otherwise feeling – for him – fairly hopeful. Rehearsals took place at 9 a.m., followed at 3.00 p.m. by the recording itself. He only had five minutes to show what he could do, but he enjoyed being back on a proper stage, playing to what was admittedly a very special, but none the less reassuringly audible, studio audience, and he left believing that he had acquitted himself rather well.

He was soon proven right. Just over a fortnight later, a telegram arrived: ‘YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN’.⁴⁷His career in radio was about to begin.