| David: | What do you want? |
| Aunt: | Well, who are you? |
| David: | Who are you? |
| Aunt: | Who are you? |
| David: | What do you want? |
| Aunt: | Well, who are you? |
| David: | I don’t know. I’m not quite myself today! |
BRINGING UP BABY
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,and it was an age of satire. A stuffed shirt, squirming to blackmail in alifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish youngman hurried over to represent to us the throne of England.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Good manners and a pleasant personality, even without a collegeeducation, will take you far.
CARY GRANT
Archie Leach wanted to become a self-made man. The idea of being a self-made man appealed to him. It made sense. He had a fair idea of what he wanted to make of himself. As Pauline Kael observed, he ‘became a performer in an era in which learning to entertain the public was a trade he worked at his trade; progressed, and rose to the top’.1 Archie Leach craved realism, not magic: he did not want to be dazzled, he wanted to learn: ‘Commerce is a bind for actors now in a way it never was for Archie Leach; art for him was always a trade.’2 Not for Archie Leach the debilitating struggles with one’s conscience about the artistic merit of what one was doing; what he was doing was, it seemed to him, eminently preferable to what he would otherwise have been forced to do back home in Bristol. His initial struggles were, primarily, materialistic rather than intellectual; the practical experience he acquired furnished him with a certain toughness of spirit that subsequent generations of performers, from more privileged, middle-class backgrounds, lacked. In Bristol, he had seen the future, and it was work – work of the soul-destroying, demeaning kind which his father had come to accept as the bald and bleak sum of his life and identity. It was not a fate that Archie Leach was prepared to face: ‘I cannot remember consciously daring to hope I would be successful at anything, yet, at the same time, I knew I would be.’3
Archie Leach was there, at the ship’s rail, as the RMS Olympic steamed into New York harbour in the early morning sunshine of 28 July, and he thought he knew precisely where he was going; he had seen the famous sights of New York many times before, back in Bristol, on the movie screen. He had spent much of his free time, as a child, gazing at visions of American life in the dark. Archie Leach had imagined America long before he set foot on Manhattan Island.
The Pender troupe was met by a Dillingham representative, who took them directly to the Globe Theater. It was explained, as soon as they arrived, that the plans had been changed; instead of appearing in the comic Fred Stone’s show, the Pender troupe would now open in a new revue, Good Times, at the Hippodrome. Although there was little time for them to rehearse, the troupe was not disappointed about the unexpected change. The Hippodrome, then on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets, was the world’s largest theatre:4 it could accommodate several hundred performers at once on a huge revolving stage; it had a ballet corps of eighty, a chorus of one hundred, and it required around eight hundred backstage employees to mount a show that included over ninety of the most celebrated and spectacular acts from around the world; the auditorium seated 5,697 people.
Archie Leach and his companions had arrived at a fortuitous time. New York, in 1920, was the centre of the world’s blossoming entertainment business. Not only was it a period in which vaudeville theatres were attracting huge audiences, but it was also a period in which a new popular cultural medium – the movies – was in the process of transforming, and expanding, the realm of commercial entertainment in America.5 At the turn of the century, vaudeville exploited movies as a new attraction; a pattern of movie presentations as single acts in commercial vaudeville had soon been established, and, indeed, vaudeville provided the forum in which many urban Americans were introduced to the movies. By the 1920s, however, the relationship had changed, and one of the ways in which the heightened sense of competition between the two showed itself was the determined pursuit by vaudeville producers of increasingly grand and elaborate stage shows and a greater range of unusual and eye-catching acts.6 The Hippodrome housed many of the most spectacular of these.
When they arrived the Pender troupe, with its modest if expert knockabout routines, must have felt rather intimidated (or possibly even, as Cary Grant put it, ‘petrified’7). The other acts were certainly diverse: Joe Jackson, the tramp cyclist; Marceline the clown; the Long Tack Sam Company of Illusionists; ‘Poodles’ Hanneford and the Riding Hanneford Family; and, perhaps most memorable of all, Powers Elephants, described by Cary Grant as ‘an amazing water spectacle in which expert girl swimmers and high divers appeared in an understage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water’.8 Looking back, he reflected: ‘Today you cannot imagine the size of it … It really was show business.’9 The Hippodrome was not a place for the disorganised or the undisciplined: all performers were obliged to check in for work at a time clock – a necessary measure, as far as the management was concerned, in order to keep track of the extraordinary number of acts.
Archie Leach, along with the other boys in the troupe, lived under the authoritarian eyes of Bob and Margaret Pender in a cramped apartment just off Eighth Avenue. The Penders were severe taskmasters. After each evening’s performance at the theatre, the troupe would return to the apartment and line up at the kitchen sink to wash their socks, handkerchiefs, towels and shirts, and then on to the ironing-board – a ritual that usually lasted until well into the night. Leach was also given his own special duties, such as keeping accounts and cooking many of the meals. He grew up quickly.
Good Times was a considerable success, and the Pender troupe, although appearing in just one sequence in the show, attracted praise from several critics. Archie Leach found himself part of a ‘remarkable international family’, an ‘astonishing assemblage’10 of talented performers from diverse backgrounds, and he made the most of the opportunities open to him to learn everything that