Sensation! Marie Lloyd is to appear at Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin music hall in Crampton Court, off Dame Street, Dublin. Monday, June 11th, 1894, for six nights only. Salary £100. No `Miss' in the ads; Marie wouldn't have it - `damned swank'.
"They came from all quarters and from all sections of society, Churchgoers and Chapelgoers, the merchant, the academic and the bricklayer's mate. Young things of the `advanced' set and respectable wives, they all lay helpless with laughter, turned crimson and hid their faces in their hands. The songs were little or nothing; the dire effect lay in the Art of the Other Eye, communicated to the innocuous words by shrugs, stoppages, leers, nods, short laughs, lazy glances, the Marie Lloyd smile. Such was her Twiggy Vous?, sung with subtle tone and knowing wink; her When You Wink The Other Eye; and such was her Almond Rock, on the surface nothing but a ditty of a girl hungering for her first ball:
Only fancy if Gladstone's there
And falls in love with me . . .
If I run across Labouchere
I'll ask him . . . home to tea!
I shall say to a young man gay
If he . . . treads upon my frock
Randy pandy, sugary candy
Buy me some Almond Rock!
" `Almond Rock' became a byword. The blue eyes, the cosy little figure, five feet two, the knee coquettishly leaning to knee, the girly voice asking for the sugarstick, filled the imagination of the Town for years. Those who saw Marie Lloyd felt that they had been in touch with no mere Idol but with the very Goddess of the Rite."
Great stuff. Great fun. Hits the nail on the head. It's not Ms Gillies, though. It was written by Eugene Watters, in the coruscatingly brilliant Infinite Variety: Dan Lowrey's Music Hall 1879-1897, based on Matthew Murtagh's collection of theatre and musichall memorabilia, and published in Dublin in 1975. Midge Gillies's Marie Lloyd is tame stuff by comparison, all diligent research and worthy chronology, but a disappointingly flat business from start to finish.
To wit (of which there's little enough): "Performers had to compete - without, of course, the aid of a microphone - against the noise of pewter on pewter, glass on glass, as well as the hubbub of conviviality and catcalls . . . tobacco smoke and the packed-in bodies gave the hall a fetid atmosphere hardly conducive to entertainment: today's purveyors of comedy recommend that the best way to warm up an audience is to keep them slightly chilled, and American television producers put the ideal temperature for a studio audience at something like
13.3(C (57(F)."
Madam, kindly leave the stage. One thing Ms Gillies does helpfully spell out, however, is to remind us that "Almond Rock was rhyming slang for `cock'." As was "Yummy-yum" slang for the sexual act. But she hastens to add that Marie Lloyd's winks and knowing glances to accompany the blatant sexuality lurking in her early performances as schoolgirl were never explicit. So she pooh-poohs the line quoted by Dan Farson in his 1972 book on Marie Lloyd and Music Hall: Marie struggling to open a parasol, and when finally successful, gasping, "Thank God, I haven't had it up for months."
One of 11 children, raised in Hoxton in London's East End, Matilda Alice Victoria Wood went onto the stage as Bella Delamere in 1885 at 15, was married at 17 - it was a "walking wedding": there was a child on the way - and she developed an act that was the very reverse of the Victorian ideal of femininity, "the Angel in the Household." She had as an early role model the redoubtable Bessie Bellwood, who wasn't Bessie at all but Irish-born Eliza Anna Katherine O'Mahoney, a rabbit-skinner from Bermondsey, whose big hit was Wot Cheer, Ria! - which was probably sung to the gestures of Watch Your Rear.
THE One And Only married three times, and two of her husbands beat her up. In 1905 her first marriage to Percy Courtenay was dissolved. She married her old pal, the Cockney Coster Comedian Alec Hurley, the following year - his repertoire included It's Not The One Who's Richest Who's Got The Biggest Heart, She's Been A Good Wife To Me, and You Can Get A Sweetheart Any Day.
Then, pathetically, she fell for the best man at her daughter's wedding, the Derby-winning jockey Bernard "Ben" Dillon from Tralee, who was 18 years her junior. He fancied himself on the squeezebox singing soothery Irish songs, and he turned out to be even more of a brute than Percy had ever been. He was in and out of court for drunkenness and assault, deserted from the Western Front in 1917, lost his jockey's licence for malpractices, beat his wife up and spoiled her famous smile by knocking out one of her teeth (or two: the experts differ).
As Ms Gillies po-facedly puts it: "Jockeys and music-hall stars belonged to different strands of the same newly-formed entertainment business that allowed individuals from poor backgrounds to earn huge amounts of money."
And still Marie Lloyd was goddess to millions of devotees. The implications of these song titles hint at why: As If She Didn't Know ; Clever, Ain't Yer? ; G'arn Away! What D'Yer Take Me For? ; The Girl On The Ran- DanDan ; How Can A Girl Refuse? ; I'm A Good Girl Now ; A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good ; Never Let A Chance Go By ; One Thing Leads To Another ; A Saucy Bit O'Crackling ; She Didn't Like To Tell Him What She Wanted ; She Wore A Little Safety Pin Behind ; Very Nice, Too ; What's That For, Eh? ; You Can't Stop A Girl From Thinking. She made quadruple entendres out of She'd Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before. And then there was Every Little Movement Has A Meaning Of Its Own, of 1912, which Ms Gillies refers to as "a return to the opaque social codes of the nineteenth century." The chorus, of course, had Marie looking over her shoulder as she flaunted her figure: When she walks in a hobble/At the back there's a kind of wibble wobble . . .
Naughty! Naughty! Naughty! brings to mind `The Boarding House' from Dubliners, where Joyce wrote: "On Sunday nights there would often be a re-union in Mrs Mooney's front drawing-room. The music-hall artistes would oblige, and Sheridan played waltzes and polkas and vamped accompaniments. Polly Mooney, the Madam's daughter, would also sing. She sang:
I'm a . . . naughty girl.
You needn't sham:
You know I am."
Marie Lloyd's public was well aware of her life of excess, the booze and the beatings. She was always on the go, prone to bouts of prodigal generosity. Scenes were frequent, her temper flared, there were screaming matches backstage, hard drink in the dressing-rooms, and choice bits of colourful and profane Hoxtonese shot from her buck-toothed mouth. As Eugene Watters has it: "She was happy only on the Stage, exercising her power over packed houses that resounded to her superb cheek."
Or cheeks, as the lady herself might have said. (Wibble-wobbling across the stage, she'd plonk herself down on a rickety park bench, rise goggle-eyed in mock distress, and wail: "Ooh, I've been nipped in the bud.")
On Monday, November 14th, 1887, instead of a honeymoon with Percy, she opened a week's engagement at Dan Lowrey's - not an episode that gets a mention in Ms Gillies's book - and was retained for a second week, singing such songs as Sure To Fetch Them, When The Leaves Begin To Fall, and that song John (The Entertainer) Osborne called "one of the greatest songs ever written": The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery.
On Tuesday, October 3rd, 1922, at the Edmonton Empire, she sang her last song of all. She was seriously ill, but she said: "Ten minutes in the footlights will do me more good than ten days in bed." The show went on. A man in the audience was heard to say "She's wonderful, but she's very drunk." She was superb in her serio-comic pathos:
Those that study history
Sing and shout a bit,
And you can bet your life
there isn't a doubt of it
Outside the Oliver Cromwell,
last Saturday night
I was one of the ruins that Cromwell
knocked about a bit.
At one point she staggered and fell. Thinking this was part of the act, the audience shrieked with laughter. "She recovered momentarily," as Ms Gillies puts it, "then collapsed backstage."
One hundred thousand Londoners turned out for her funeral. The eulogists gushed. T.S. Eliot: "Her death is a significant matter in English history." Sir Max Beerbohm: "It is strange that of all the women of the Victorian era, the three most generally remembered are Queen Victoria herself, and Miss Florence Nightingale, and - Marie." As Jimmy Durante might have put it: "They're all trying to get in on the act."
As the woman herself said:
I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,
Lost the van and don't know where to roam,
I stopped on the way
to have the old half-quartern
And I can't find my way home.
Andy Barclay is an Irish Times journalist
Cherry ripe: Marie Lloyd in full fig. Photograph: Popperfoto