The Blue Moon Club in Soho. What a far cry from this place. Do not imagine anything too wicked. Nor, on the other hand, too demure. This is the year of our Lord 1957: half-way between the age of rationing and the age of permissiveness; half-way between the syrupy ballad and the full frenzy of rock-and-roll.
The Blue Moon was a “night-club,” not a dive, and definitely not a strip joint. There was no disrobing, even if there was scant attire. Its atmosphere was charged with a piquant ambiguity in which it was hard to distinguish failed innocence from failed sophistication. The girls (there were three of them — as many as the tiny stage could hold — along with three musicians and a “resident” singer, a buxom, brassy trouper called “Miss Rita”) were only “passing through” this slightly risqué venue en route (you could gauge their degrees of conviction) for “real” work in the “real” theatre. Hence their fondness for an impoverished student who, like them, was only dabbling in this dubious night-work to serve his aspiration to higher things. He was no more interested, therefore, in their frivolous titillations than they were in teasing his callowness. So when, in the narrow, rear-of-house passage, they scampered past him in single file (Mandy, Diana, Barbara — where are they now?), forcing him to press his back against the wall and smile weakly while he was successively brushed by their frills, plumes, flounces and tassels; or when one of them slipped in or out of their cramped communal dressing-room and he caught a glimpse of fevered undress — this was only accidental. Their winks, tut-tuts and little blown kisses were just their excuse-mes.
He is callow, he is studious. Brought up on ballerinas worshipped from afar and the high jinks of Sam and his mother just across the landing, he has acquired a certain tentativeness in a certain area (in which Hamlet himself did not exactly have plain sailing). He is gauche, he is guarded (believe me, he is no Errol Flynn), but he is Paris-trained. And here he stands again, on his army-exempting flat feet, with his brain in a spin, gawping at dancing-girls.
At a certain point in the “show,” around midnight, when Miss Rita took her solo spot, it was my task — a strangely domestic ritual — to slip out to the kitchen behind the bar and make the girls mugs of hot, sweet tea (they drank nothing stronger while they performed). I would knock on the dressing-room door, while from the stage would come Miss Rita’s husky imprecations—“Got a crush on you, swee-eetie pie …” A polite pause. “Entrez.” And I would enter, bearing the tray on the outspread fingers of one hand, consciously imitating the gestures of a waiter I had once seen in a Left Bank café. An aroma of perfume, talc and cigarettes never quite disguised the smell of sweat. Three pairs of eyes would greet me. And then one night, in June 1957 (it was Barbara, I think, who left with unexplained suddenness), a new pair of (melting-piercing, greenish-brown) eyes.
You could say I saw her in her first performing role. Girl Number Three at the Blue Moon Club. When she had yet to make her name. Though her name was then just as it would be later, and she was surely no less herself. Ruth: a first-year drama student (en route, yes, for the real theatre), who had jumped into the deep end of this haunt of pleasure in order, like me, to make a little needed money, but also to cure — her stage fright.
In a diamanté-plastered leotard, white gloves, tiara and plume. In a little feminine mockery of black tie and tails, with fish-net tights. Wiggle, kick, smile, turn. She couldn’t dance as well as Mandy and Diana. But she had something that made you not realise this. Something which Mandy and Diana didn’t have.
A look of delicately courted danger, a look which, even as she cradled her mug of sweet tea, made you feel as if you were out on an adventure …
“Ruth, this is Bill, our tea boy. Watch him, he’s a tiger.”
Giggles.
One night Miss Rita couldn’t perform — stricken with flu — and Mr Silvester, proprietor of the Blue Moon Club, a self-possessed East-Ender who had a way of suggesting he had steered himself capably through all manner of roughness to reach this haven of (as he liked to call it) “class,” was thrown into untypical panic.
She volunteered. She had to do it. Of such stuff are show-business fables made. She even uttered a plucky “Don’t worry, Mr Silvester.” And she proved, not exactly that she could sing, but that she could disguise impeccably the fact that she couldn’t sing, could act impeccably the part of a singer; and that she had, moreover, that indefinable, spell-casting quality called (but why don’t we all have it, since we are all present?) “presence.”
I think I saw — and perhaps only I saw — just for a moment, the terror in her eyes, the hidden absence out of which the presence emerged. Then it was gone, she had overcome it, a little internal victory, and I was caught in the spell. And I knew then what I would always be and always want to be and need to be for the rest of my life: a perpetual stagehand waiting for the leading lady’s kiss; a lurker amidst lights and scenery; a shambling devotee of poets and performers; a humble thrall to this business of show-business.
Somewhere in this vision was already a scene in which, in some hotel suite stuffed with flowers and invitations, where Ruth held court to journalists and photographers, I would open the door from the bedroom, a preposterous figure in a dressing-gown, blink, pause, then withdraw again with a mumbled apology. But in that brief instant she would have turned to me with a smile and a look quite different from that reserved for her sycophantic retinue. And the retinue would have noticed and would think (much in the manner of some new acquaintances in this place): Can that really be—? Him?
A spotlight’s moonbeam. A shimmering creature in a clinging dress, hurriedly spirited up from somewhere, of midnight blue, hung with silver sequins and slit to mid-thigh. Smoke-furls. The piano’s tiptoe; the drum’s whisper. Her lashes flutter over the microphone, her lips part, noiselessly for a moment, as if inviting the audience to take delicious pity on her girlish trepidation.
Then: “I’m wild again, beguiled again …”
Pause: for the heavy-jowled patrons at the front tables to pull on their cigarettes, tap their cigars; for the old soak at the bar to bring his glass safely to his lips:
“… a simpering, whimpering child again …”
Who would not have been smitten? Who would not have been bewitched? And yet it was strange how this little world of smoochy melody and sugared lubricity seemed to make way specially, deferentially, for us, its hesitant protagonists. How Mandy and Diana, professional sirens, became as gooey and conniving as bridesmaids. As if everyone could see it even before we did. As if it weren’t supposed to happen, not the real thing, not in this dim-lit domain given over to the hint, the dream, the starry promise, but not the substance of love. But since it was happening — how sweet, how touching, how truly remarkable; and when were they going to get on with it?
When indeed?
Call it, also, stage fright. This stomach-fluttering period of waiting in the wings of love, this nervousness of lovers rehearsing the lines they will inevitably, redeemingly fluff. How strange to think, now, that there was a time when I did not know every inch of her body, every nook and niche and curve, when I had to imagine it — flaunted as it was, within proper limits, by her Blue Moon costumes. When there was as much a sweet shock of nakedness, of disclosure, to realise that this woman who could shine in the spotlight was the same woman who, backstage, would wrap round herself a simple fawn raincoat, run her fingers through her damp hair, light a cigarette or yawn with a sort of surprised intentness, one hand patting her lips the way boys make Red Indian noises. It was her, it was her, you see, never those roles she dressed in.