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 he could from all of the acts – including special acrobatic tricks, drunken walks, dance steps and illusions. It was an extraordinary time for him.
‘The first thing I loved about America’, he said, ‘was how fast it all seemed.’11 He found New York itself endlessly fascinating. It was a place that breathed possibility. With the Hippodrome dark on Sundays, he was free to explore the city: ‘I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses … I contentedly rode from Washington Square, up the Avenue and across 72nd Street, to the beauty of Riverside Drive, with its quiet mansions and impeccably kept apartment buildings.’12 He wanted to feel at home in New York, and, in time, he would do so, but, to begin with, he found it simply exhilarating: the size, the sights, the sounds, the scope, the pace, the opportunities (real and imagined) – the initial exoticism of it all was thrilling.
Good Times ran for nine months, giving 455 performances before closing at the end of April 1921. Exploiting the success of the show, Bob Pender was able to book the troupe on a tour of the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit (the major vaudeville power at that time in the eastern United States), visiting most of the major cities east of the Mississippi River. In mid-1922, the tour closed with an appearance at the prestigious New York Palace, and then, without definite prospects, Pender – ever the pragmatic professional entertainer – decided to return to England. Not all of his troupe, however, agreed with the decision; some of the members, including Archie Leach, were keen to stay on in New York.
Although Pender clearly had a great deal of respect and affection for Leach, as, indeed, it was evident that Leach had for him, it seems that their relationship had, by the end of the tour, grown tense. Pender by now was tired, middle aged and increasingly cautious; Archie Leach was eighteen years of age, good looking, tall (6′ 2″), fit, energetic, with an increasingly forceful personality, and relishing life away from home. The manner in which they parted reflected the change in the relationship, with Leach, along with some of his fellow members of the troupe, deceiving Pender about their plans for the immediate future. Pender’s letter to Elias Leach not only marks – with regret and exasperation – the end of his association with Archie, but it also suggests that he had been knowingly misinformed as to Archie’s real intentions:
244 West Thayer Street,
Philadelphia, PA
May 21, 1922
DEAR MR. LEACH:
I am writing this to inform you that Archie is coming home. He leaves New York by the Cunard Liner Berengaria on May 29th and should arrive Southampton June 2 or 3. He has made up his mind to come home. I offered him 35 dollars a week which is about G8 [eight guineas] in English money, and he will not accept it, as he says he cannot do on it so I offered him £3/10 a week clear and all his expenses paid but he says he wishes to come home. The wage I have offered him is the same as my daughter and also another of my boys have been getting so I know he could do very nicely on it but I must tell you he is most extravagant and wants to stay at the best hotels and live altogether beyond his means.
I promised him if he improved in his work and was worth it, I will give him more money, but he is like all young people of his age. He thinks he only has to ask and have. I must tell you he has very big ideas for a boy of his age, and he seems to have made up his mind to come home.
He has been a good boy since he has been with me and I think he is throwing away a good chance but he does not think so. Mrs. Pender has talked to him but it is no use. He will not listen. So I should like to hear if he arrives home safely … I shall be glad to do anything for him when I return to England.
I remain,
Yours truly, BOB PENDER13
Recollecting the event forty years later, Cary Grant commented, ‘It must have been very disappointing and difficult for [Pender] to leave so many of his boys behind in America, our land of opportunity: but youth, in its eagerness to drive ahead, seldom recognises the troubles caused or the debts accrued while passing.’14 He was a young adult who, as he put it ruefully, ‘knew that I knew everything’.15
