However, this was New York, adventurous, bewildering, a little frightening. Paris, on the other hand, had been friendlier. Even though I could not speak the language, Paris had welcomed me on every street corner with its bistros and outside cafés. But New York was essentially a place of big business. The tall skyscrapers seemed ruthlessly arrogant and to care little for the convenience of ordinary people; even the saloon bars had no place for the customers to sit, only a long brass rail to rest a foot on, and the popular eating places, though clean and done in white marble, looked cold and clinical.
I took a back room in one of the brownstone houses off Forty-third Street, where the Times building now stands. It was dismal and dirty and made me homesick for London and our little flat. In the basement was a cleaning and pressing establishment and during the week the fetid odour of clothes being pressed and steamed wafted up and added to my discomfort.
That first day I felt quite inadequate. It was an ordeal to go into a restaurant and order something because of my English accent – and the fact that I spoke slowly. So many spoke in a rapid, clipped way that I felt uncomfortable for fear I might stutter and waste their time.
I was alien to this slick tempo. In New York even the owner of the smallest enterprise acts with alacrity. The shoe-black flips his polishing rag with alacrity, the bartender serves a beer with alacrity, sliding it up to you along the polished surface of the bar. The soda clerk, when serving an egg malted milk, performs like a hopped-up juggler. In a fury of speed he snatches up a glass, attacking everything he puts into it, vanilla flavour, blob of ice-cream, two spoonfuls of malt, a raw egg which he deposits with one crack, then adding milk, all of which he shakes in a container and delivers in less than a minute.
On the Avenue that first day many looked as I felt, lone and isolated; others swaggered along as though they owned the place. The behaviour of many people seemed dour and metallic as if to be agreeable or polite would prove a weakness. But in the evening as I walked along Broadway with the crowd dressed in their summer clothes, I became reassured. We had left England in the middle of a bitter cold September and arrived in New York in an Indian summer with a temperature of eighty degrees; and as I walked along Broadway it began to light up with myriads of coloured electric bulbs and sparkled like a brilliant jewel. And in the warm night my attitude changed and the meaning of America came to me: the tall skyscrapers, the brilliant, gay lights, the thrilling display of advertisements stirred me with hope and a sense of adventure. ‘That is it!’ I said to myself. ‘This is where I belong!’
Everyone on Broadway seemed to be in show business; actors, vaudevillians, circus performers and entertainers were everywhere, on the street, in restaurants, hotels and department stores, all talking shop. One heard names of theatre-owners, Lee Shubert, Martin Beck, William Morris, Percy Williams, Klaw and Erlanger, Frohman, Sullivan and Considine, Pantages. Whether charwoman, elevator boy, waiter, street-car conductor, barman, milkman or baker, they all talked like showmen. One heard snatches of conversation in the streets, motherly old women, looking like farmers’ wives, saying: ‘He’s just finished three a day out West for Pantages.* With the right material that boy should make big-time vaudeville.’ ‘Did you catch Al Jolson at the Winter Garden?’ says a janitor. ‘He certainly saved the show for Jake.’
Newspapers each day devoted a whole page to theatre, got up like a racing chart, indicating vaudeville acts coming in first, second and third in popularity and applause, like race-horses. We had not entered the race yet and I was anxious to know in what position we would finish on the chart. We were to play the Percy Williams circuit for six weeks only. After that we had no further bookings. On the result of that engagement depended the length of our stay in America. If we failed, we would return to England.
We took a rehearsal room and had a week of rehearsing The Wow-wows. In the cast was old Whimsical Walker, the famous Drury Lane clown. He was over seventy, with a deep, resonant voice, but had no diction, as we discovered at rehearsals, and he had the major part of explaining the plot. Such a line as ‘The fun will be furious, ad libitum’, he could not say and never did. The first night he spluttered: ‘Ablib-blum’, and eventually it became ‘ablibum’, but never the correct word.
In America, Karno had a great reputation. We were, therefore, the headline attraction over a programme of excellent artists. And although I hated the sketch, I naturally tried to make the best of it. I was hopeful that it might be what Karno called ‘the very thing for America’.
I will not describe the nerves, agony and suspense that preceded my entrance the first night, or my embarrassment as the American artists stood in the wings watching us. My first joke was considered a big laugh in England and a barometer for how the rest of the comedy would go over. It was a camping scene. I entered from a tent with a tea-cup.
ARCHIE (me): Good morning, Hudson. Do you mind giving me a little water?
HUDSON: Certainly. What do you want it for?
ARCHIE: I want to take a bath. (A faint snicker, then cold silence from the audience.)
HUDSON: How did you sleep last night, Archie?
ARCHIE: Oh, terribly. I dreamt I was being chased by a caterpillar.
Still deadly silence. And so we droned on, with the faces of the Americans in the wings growing longer and longer. But they were gone before we had finished our act.
It
