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He began taking lessons in ground tumbling and stilt-walking and acrobatic dances. He practised using stage make-up. He studied the best ways to make full use of a wide range of stage props. He was also coached in the ways of ‘working’ an audience, of conveying a mood or a meaning without having recourse to words, establishing silent contact with an audience – a skill that he later acknowledged as having helped prepare him for the special challenge of screen acting.
Archie Leach had found a teacher he trusted. Bob Pender, a stocky, robust man in his early forties, was one of the most experienced and versatile physical comedians in England at that time. His real name was Lomas, the son and grandson of travelling players from Lancashire. His wife and co-director, Margaret, was former ballet mistress at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Archie, once he joined the troupe, lived with the Penders and the other young performers, either in their house in Brixton (the area long established, because of its close proximity to the forty-one London music-halls, as the home base of many professional entertainers40) or in boarding-houses on the tour circuit. It was an intense, practical and rapid education. Three months after he had left Bristol, Archie returned with the troupe to appear at the Empire. After the final curtain, Elias Leach, who had been in the audience, walked with his son back to his home. ‘We hardly spoke, but I felt so proud of his pleasure and so much pleasure in his pride, and I remember we held hands for part of that walk.’41 It was the closest that he had ever felt to his father.
The Pender troupe toured the English provinces and played the Gulliver chain of music-halls in London. The theatre became Archie Leach’s world, the source of his new identity; when he was not on stage, he was usually studying the other acts. ‘At each theatre I carefully watched the celebrated headline artists from the wings, and grew to respect the diligence it took to acquire such expert timing and unaffected confidence, the amount of effort that resulted in such effortlessness.’42 He became determined to learn how to achieve the illusion of effortless performance: ‘Perhaps by relaxing outwardly I thought I could eventually relax inwardly; sometimes I even began to enjoy myself on stage.’43
While on tour, the troupe was informed that it had been engaged for an appearance in New York. It was an extraordinary opportunity for all the young performers. There were twelve boys in the company, but provision for only eight in the contract that Pender had signed with Charles Dillingham, a New York theatrical impresario. Archie Leach – much to his relief – was one of the first of the troupe to be selected. On 21 July 1920, he joined the others on the RMS Olympic – sistership to the Titanic – and set sail for the United States of America.
| Hughson: | You’re a man of obvious good taste in, well, everything. How did you, I mean, why did you … |
| Robie: | You mean, why did I take up stealing? Oh, to live better. To own things I couldn’t afford. To acquire this good taste which younow enjoy. |
| Hughson: | You know, I thought you’d have some defense, some tale of hardship. Your mother ran off when you were young, your father beat you, or something. |
| Robie: | No, no. I was a member of an American trapeze act in the circus that travelled in Europe. It folded, and I was stranded, so I put my agility to a more rewarding purpose … TO CATCH A THIEF |
| 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,
