Old Time Variety: An Illustrated History

Introduction

What was the difference between music hall and variety? It is not an easy question. Music hall was a red-blooded, boisterous entertainment aimed at the working man. It was popular from about 1840 to sometime after the First World War. Variety, which took its place, was gentler and more refined. The big theatre owners were responsible for the change. They wanted to appeal to a wider social spectrum. A man was more likely to take his wife or girlfriend to the theatre if there were no risk of anyone being offended by a bawdy comic or a singer revelling in double entendres. That makes variety sound less fun. It was not. There existed as much talent in variety as there was on the halls.

Another problem is dates. When did music hall end and variety start? There was, needless to say, an overlap. Even in the heyday of music hall, the word ‘variety’ was frequently used. The excellent music hall history written by Joe Mander and Ray Mitchenson lists Danny La Rue, Ken Dodd and Des O’Connor as stars of music hall. Undoubtedly, each of those entertainers would have had a scintillating career on the halls, but it was all over before they even started. Somewhat arbitrarily, I choose 1922, the year Marie Lloyd died, as marking music hall’s end.

A further problem is: who was a variety performer and who was not? I have ruled out Arthur Askey, Peter Brough and Frankie Howerd largely because they were better known as radio [and, later, in the case of Askey and Howerd, television] performers. And yet, the BBC was a big supporter and an innovator of variety. There are bound to be anomalies.

You may not find your favourite variety performer in these pages. If everyone worth a mention were in this book, it would be too heavy to carry.

Brackets after sums of money indicate the approximate current-day equivalents.

Acknowledgements

In writing this book, I am indebted to John Adrian, of the Grand Order of Water Rats; the late Clive Allen, Max Miller’s last pianist; Geoff Bowden, the editor of The Call Boy, the British Music Hall Society’s magazine; Martin Breese; Dora Bryan; Peter Burgess, an expert on female impersonation; Wyn Calvin MBE; James Casey, the son of Jimmy James; Frank Cullen, the leading authority on vaudeville; the late Florence Desmond; Ryan Edwards and Mark Macnaughtan for technical help; John Fisher, Peter Lane and John Wade of the Magic Circle; the George Formby Society; Caroline Gibb for invaluable genealogical assistance; Gerald Glover, the co-founder of the British Music Hall Society; Joan Hollman, the daughter of Gladys Morgan; David Howe, of the Savage Club; Roy Hudd OBE for his magnificent foreword; Christine Kimberley, the daughter of Bobbie Kimber; Belinda Langford, the daughter of Saveen; Angela Levin, niece of Issy Bonn; Pamela Loveday, the daughter of Tony Fayne; Richard Mangan, of the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection; the Max Miller Appreciation Society; Norman Morrison; the late Chubby Oates; the late Robert Nesbitt; the late Patrick Newley, The Stage columnist, who gave freely of his time and expertise; Ray Pallett, of Memory Lane; Alf Pearson; Michael Pointon, a close friend of Max Wall; the late Beryl Reid OBE; the late Joan Rhodes; Simon Rooks and Jill Collins of the BBC; the late Don Ross of Thanks for the Memory; the impresario, Keith Salberg; the Scottish Music Hall Society; my perceptive agent, Robert Smith; Jackie Snow, the daughter of Michael Carr; Mary Todd, of the Old Mother Riley Society; the late Wendy Toye CBE; Max Tyler, the historian of the British Music Hall Society and co-editor of Music Hall Studies; the Max Wall Society; the late Elsie Waters; Alan Watts for information about Gaston and Andree; Barry Wiley; Michael Worsley, the son of Arthur Worsley; the late Fred Yule of ITMA; the staff of the Bodleian Music Library, the BBC’s Written Archives Centre, the British Film Institute, the British Library, the British Newspaper Library, the Family Records Centre, the London Library, the London Metropolitan Archive and Tower Hamlets Central Library.

Richard Anthony Baker, Leigh-on-Sea, 2011

CHAPTER ONE

New Readers Start Here

The Stage is Set

It was a day popular performers thought they would never see. Reviled over many years, music hall, that rumbustious and vulgar entertainment of the late Nineteenth Century, had finally been accepted by the Establishment: the first Royal Command Performance was to be staged before George V and Queen Mary at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, on 1 July 1912. Such comics as George Robey, sometimes a little saucy, but never salacious, and Harry Tate, with his up-to-the-minute parody on motoring, were allowed their moment of glory. Interestingly, those two men attracted more laughter that evening than anyone else on the bill and were the only entertainers who successfully carried their careers on from music hall to the variety theatre.

In spite of losing some of its bite, music hall was still popular in the years immediately preceding the First World War. In the year of the Royal Command, there were 48 music hall theatres in London alone. Each night [and often twice nightly] they played to 70,000 people. In the world at large, everything appeared normal. Smart hotels held Tango Teas at which women wearing skirts slashed to near the top of the leg danced with young men known as Nuts and, if the tango appeared too complicated, there was another innovation, the foxtrot:

But everywhere a restless spirit was perceptible, as of people waiting on some impending climax. Nobody knew that we had reached the end of an age, yet everybody in his bones and blood was sensible of something disconcerting, some hovering and pervading disquiet.¹

On the first night of the Great War, there were lengthy queues outside the most popular halls in the West End. At the Palladium, Little Tich, the four foot six comic who danced in boots nearly half that length, appeared as Miss Turpentine. At the London Pavilion, the much loved Marie Lloyd sang I’d Like to Live in Paris All the Time. The only concession to international tension was that, at the end of the evening, the national anthems of Russia and France were played, as well as that of Britain.

Harry Tate: again in mechanical difficulties.

Once the call-up began, the young men of Britain marched to war belting out the latest music hall songs they had heard: Pack Up Your Troubles; Good-Bye-Ee; Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty; and this:

Send out the Army and the Navy.

Send out the rank and file.

Send out the brave old Territorials.

They’ll face the danger with a smile.

Send out the boys of the Old Brigade,

Who made old England free.

Send out my brother, my sister and my mother,

But for Gawd’s sake don’t send me.

Come 1918, it did not seem so funny. Nearly three-quarters of a million British soldiers had died, about two-thirds of them in their twenties.

During the course of the war, so many young men were overseas that their girlfriends and wives had to make their own lives, eating out with each other, some of them drinking and smoking for the first time. Between 1914 and 1918, the consumption of alcohol actually fell by about a half, although smoking increased. Pubs, which had closed at 12.30am, now had to shut at 10pm. A similar curfew was imposed on all places of entertainment, but music halls still drew big audiences, as did cinemas and theatres staging a new type of entertainment, revue. People needed escapism.

By the end of the war, movies were becoming big business. Several music halls had already been converted into cinemas: the Balham Empire; the Bradford Empire; in Brighton, the Empire and the Alhambra; the New Star, Bristol; the Alhambra, Edinburgh; the Hippodrome, Gateshead; the Savoy, Glasgow; the Tivoli, Liverpool; the Grand, Sheffield; the Variety, Shoreditch; and the Empire, Stockton-on-Tees. More importantly, 3,500 purpose-built cinemas were constructed between 1910 and 1914.

Revues, speedy concoctions of unlinked sketches and songs, had been staged at the Empire, one of three major halls in Leicester Square, since it re-opened after refurbishment in 1906. The first, Rogues and Vagabonds, was written by George Grossmith, a leading player in the earliest musical comedies produced by George Edwardes at the Gaiety Theatre. Grossmith also wrote part of the Empire revues, Hello … London! [1910] and Everybody’s Doing It [1912], built around one of Irving Berlin’s earliest hits. By 1912, the craze for revue had London in its grip. At the end of that year, Albert de Courville, who ran the London Hippodrome, staged Hullo, Ragtime! his first big spectacular revue, which capitalised on the fashion for ragtime. It ran for 451 performances and de Courville followed it with Hullo Tango! in which Harry Tate gave an impersonation of how George Robey would play his sketch about golf. Hullo Tango! did even better: 485 performances.

In the years following the war, the revues, the movies, the dances and music hall all reflected the spirit of the age, but times were changing rapidly:

The old order had gone … Restrictions imposed in wartime were never quite lifted.² That centuries-old feeling of security had vanished … Life was no longer simple. It was sharper and more brittle. The old code of morality had slackened … and the days of national pride had been veneered over with self-restraint … The conditions which created music hall no longer existed. There was a new thing called sophistication. The old insularity had gone. Men who had never been further than Margate now knew all about Mesopotamia. It was a different world.³

The stars were dying off, too. After years of alcoholism and nervous breakdowns, music hall’s pre-eminent comedian, Dan Leno, had died of syphilis in 1904 at the age of 43 and, after the First World War, Marie Lloyd, now weary and bloated, was showing signs of the maltreatment inflicted on her by two brutal husbands. She died in the arms of one of her sisters in 1922, aged 52.

The night she died, a young Lancashire woman, who was in the fifth year of a touring revue that was to make her name, was appearing in Swindon. Once she was famous, people began to refer to her as Marie’s successor. She was Gracie Fields.

CHAPTER TWO

Amazing Gracie

Top of the Bill: Dame Gracie Fields

That was an enormous compliment to Gracie, if unwelcome. Comparisons are odious. The eminent critic, James Agate, who rated Gracie so highly that he believed she should play George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan,⁴ dismissed the allusion succinctly: ‘London impudence and Lancashire cheek are poles apart’⁵ And Gracie was pure Lancashire, as the northern playwright, J.B. Priestley, who co-wrote the scripts of her films, Sing As We Go and Look Up and Laugh, pointed out:

Listen to her for a quarter of an hour and you will learn more about Lancashire women … than you would from a dozen books … All the qualities are there: shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious.⁶

Gracie was born in the mill town of Rochdale three years before Queen Victoria died. Life was tough, but the no-nonsense kindness of its people made it bearable. If a woman fell ill, her front step was scrubbed, her washing up was done and a stew was left to simmer on the hob. Often, the bedridden woman did not even know who was being so kind. In spite of this close-knit cosiness, one woman, Jenny Stansfield, craved a better existence: ‘We’re going oop in t’world, not down,’ she constantly told her family.

Jenny, a fiercely ambitious and stage-struck woman, introduced Grace, one of her daughters, to the world of show business by way of the Rochdale Hippodrome. Jenny scrubbed the theatre’s stage every Sunday. Grace joined her with a duster and a brush. Then, Jenny began doing the laundry for entertainers at the Hippodrome. All the time, she was teaching Gracie the songs she knew and encouraging her to sing them as loudly as she could. The laundry was returned to the Hippodrome every Friday and Saturday and Jenny and Grace were allowed to stand in the wings and watch the shows. Watch everything you can, Jenny told Grace. It’s the only way you’ll ever learn. After each show, Grace was interrogated: What were the entertainers wearing? How did they look? And, most importantly, what did they sing? If there was a new song, Grace learned it instantly and sang it on the way home. She also learned to impersonate those she saw.

Jennie also exhorted Grace to sing [loudly] outside theatrical digs. One day, the ploy paid off. A music hall singer from the Midlands, Lily Turner, was impressed by what she heard and suggested that Grace entered a singing competition at the Hippodrome. Grace tied for first place and won 10s 6d [£30]. This even impressed Grace’s hard-drinking father, who up to then had foreseen her working life in bleak terms: Shove ‘er in t’factory. For a time, Grace worked with Lily Turner. Then, at the age of 10, she joined in succession two juvenile troupes. At about this time, the Stansfields’ neighbour, old Fred, moved in with them as he was no longer able to look after himself. Grace sang to him and did impersonations and was encouraged by his toothless chuckle. One night, he said that he had heard that Jessie Merrilees,⁷ who was due to appear at the Hippodrome, had been taken ill and that the manager was frantically looking for a replacement. ‘Young Grace Stansfield, Rochdale’s own girl vocalist’ filled the bill and was paid 35 shillings [£60] for the week’s work. Grace’s father, who had a job at an engineering works, was then earning 30 shillings a week.

Gracie Fields [Grace Stansfield]

Born Rochdale, Lancashire, 9 January 1898

Married [1] Archibald Selinger [professionally known as Archie Pitt], Clapham, South London, 21 April 1923 [His previous wife was May Deitchmann] Divorced 1939, died 12 November 1940

Married [2] Mario Bianchi [professionally known as Monty Banks], Santa Monica, California, 19 March 1940. Born Nice, France, 18 July 1897. [He had previously been married to Gladys Frazin, who killed herself in New York in March 1939] Died Arona, Italy, 7 January 1950

Married [3] Boris Abraham Luigi Alperovici, 18 February 1952. Died Capri, Italy, 3 July 1983

Dame Gracie Fields died Capri, Italy, 27 September 1979

Left over £4 million [£15 million]

Soon, Grace Stansfield became Gracie Fields. Jenny was told that a shorter name would stand out better on billboards. At the age of 14, Gracie began a two-year tour with Charburn’s Young Stars and impersonated many of the stars she worked with: George Formby senior [see Chapter 10]; Victoria Monks, who sang Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?; Maidie Scott, whose speciality was The Bird on Nellie’s Hat; and Gertie Gitana, best known for Nellie Dean. [Years later, Gertie Gitana imitated Gracie.]

There followed a season with a Pierrot concert party near Blackpool and a pantomime in which Gracie had a small part. Then, the work dried up. In 1915, old Fred died and left Jenny £100 with a note that read: Tha knows how best to spend it. She did indeed. After paying for Fred’s funeral, she settled the family’s debts, stocked up the larder and took Gracie every day to Manchester to learn tap dancing. Within six weeks, Gracie had mastered all the steps she was to use later in her movies.

After that, a wad of letters was written to agents, one of whom, Percy Hall, asked to see her. He offered her six weeks’ work at £5 a week and then proffered a 10-year contract. Under its terms, Gracie would earn not less than £5 a week. Anything over that sum was to be shared equally by Hall and Gracie. Ill-advisedly, Jenny and Gracie signed.

At the end of the six-week engagement, Hall found her a part in a new revue, Yes, I Think So, starring Archie Pitt, a comedian, who had worked as a shop assistant and a travelling salesman before turning to the halls. Pitt was the first professional to recognise Gracie’s potential, but she neither found him funny nor even liked him much:

He sang a song, Does This Shop Stock Shot Socks with Spots? that made me smile a bit, but the rest of his act seemed like rubbish. When I sang my couple of songs, I noticed he watched me keenly … He disturbed and unsettled me. His eyes were constantly upon me, too penetrating.⁸

Pitt was not interested in Gracie’s looks. She herself admitted that she was not pretty. She was slender, quite tall, with a slight stoop, thin lips and strongly marked, somewhat pointed features. What Pitt saw was a performer with two great gifts: a sense of homely fun and an exceptionally beautiful and flexible voice with an astonishing range, a voice that prompted the coloratura soprano, Luisa Tetrazzini, to suggest that she should abandon music hall for grand opera.

Gracie celebrated her 16th birthday during the tour of Yes, I Think So. Archie threw a party for her and wrote a message in her autograph book: To Gracie Fields. One day, you are going to be a big star. Yes, I Think So toured all over northern England for 18 months and at one point in 1915 went into the Middlesex Music Hall in London’s Drury Lane. At the end of the run, Percy Hall found another revue for Gracie, but Archie wanted her to join a show he had written. Gracie thought she would have to do Hall’s bidding, but Archie bought her out of the contract and Gracie opened in It’s A Bargain, which toured for two-and-a-half years. This was followed by another revue written by Archie, Mr Tower of London, which proved even more successful than its predecessors. During its fifth year of touring, Gracie married Archie:

Archie insisted. I am easily dominated and Archie dominated me. For nine years, since I was 16, Archie had drilled me, encouraged me, driven me, helped me and filled my life with work, work and still more work. There had been nine years of touring with him. Nine years of travelling from one cold damp little theatre to another; no heating, no hot water, sometimes no theatre even, just a hall for which we had to hire a piano. Bad food, bad digs and two, sometimes three shows a day and then Archie would keep me up to till one and two in the morning helping him think up new ideas for sketches.⁹

During six years of touring, Mr Tower of London took more than £250,000 [£7.5 million]. When Oswald Stoll booked it for a week at the Alhambra, The Era seemed uncertain about Gracie: ‘her inimitable manner of ornamenting a song one could never overlook. Nor could anyone fail to note her ability to play 101 tricks with her voice. Perhaps, for these very reasons, her potentialities as an actress may be overlooked.’¹⁰

Stoll was more certain. During each performance of Mr Tower of London, Gracie had a 25-minute break. Stoll asked her to fill part of the time by doing a 10-minute act at the Coliseum. She was paid £100 [£3,000] for the week.

Gracie was going ‘oop’ in the world. For appearing in the first half of a play, S.O.S, at the St James’s Theatre, the actor-manager, Sir Gerald du Maurier, paid her £100 [£3,000]. Each night, she went straight on to the second house at the Alhambra, where she earned £200 [£6,000]. The evening ended with a £300 [£9,000] cabaret appearance at the Cafe Royal. Gracie had made Jenny’s dream come true.

George Black, who ran the London Palladium from 1928, was delighted to book Gracie on his opening bill, her first appearance at the world’s most famous variety theatre. George had seen her work in the Cumbrian town of Barrow-in-Furness when she was still unknown and had long tried to work out the secrets of her charm and power. Those secrets, he said, allowed her to break all the rules:

Any manager could have told her that to turn her back on the audience and walk upstage before the applause and laughter were over was one certain way of ruining an act. She did it and it was one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen her do. With her back still to the audience, she paused a moment and began to sing. The crowd, prepared to laugh again, were brought to silence by the clear liquid notes – that ‘third voice’ of hers – of a plaintive melody, Three Green Bonnets. At exactly the right moment, known to her by instinct, she turned her head, then her body and began to walk down the stage singing. The house was hushed, breathless. As the last notes died away, I heard a gasp. And I, who had been a hard-boiled showman since boyhood and thought I knew all the tricks of the trade, felt what the audience felt. For here was no trick. This was blazing sincerity, a heart speaking to the hearts of the world.¹¹

Archie was doing well too. After Mr Tower of London, he put several more touring companies on the road and relished the trappings of success. In Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead, he built a 28-room mansion with a marble bathroom for every bedroom, crystal chandeliers in the reception rooms, a huge ballroom and a magnificent staircase: all this for a girl who had been born above a chip shop. In addition, there were a housekeeper, a butler, two cooks, maids and a chauffeur, who drove Gracie round in a Rolls Royce. She told Archie it was like riding in the back of a hearse. If she was being driven to a theatre, she felt uncomfortable about making the chauffeur wait all evening for her. So, she sent him off and travelled home on the bus. That sort of behaviour drove Archie mad.

Part of Gracie’s appeal was that she never forgot her roots or the down-to-earth people she grew up with. She felt intimidated by Archie’s mansion. In any case, the couple were growing apart. Archie became increasingly close to Annie Lipman, a chorus girl who had been part of the Mr Tower of London company, and Gracie fell in love with an artist, John Flanagan, whom she met at the Café Royal. Two weeks before the opening of Archie’s latest revue, The Show’s The Thing, he and Gracie had a fierce row. She packed a bag, walked out and caught a boat train for France, where Flanagan was on holiday. By the time she reached Paris, she knew she was doing wrong. She could not disappoint the cast of The Show’s The Thing. From Paris, she phoned Archie to say she was returning and, as she made her way back to London, she wept and wept. The Hampstead mansion was put on the market, Archie set up home with Annie Lipman and Gracie moved into a studio apartment in St John’s Wood.

The Show’s The Thing was another success. It opened at the Lyceum in August 1929 and then transferred to the Winter Garden, where it ran until February 1930. Later that year, Gracie accepted a two-week booking at the Palace Theatre, New York, where, at first, she was not a success. She introduced Americanisms into her act and sounded insincere. She quickly reverted to doing what she did best, being herself, and ended the fortnight amid great acclaim.

By the end of 1930, Gracie was a theatre star; she was also a radio star, having made her wireless debut in February 1927; she was selling gramophone records too [four million between 1928 and 1932]; and she had proved that she knew how to handle an American audience. There was one more medium to overcome, the movies.

Gracie made her first feature film in 1931, Sally in Our Alley, co-starring the impressionist, Florence Desmond, and produced by Basil Dean, who had founded Associated Talking Pictures, later to become the Ealing Studios. Dean had many skills, but dealing with people was not one of them: in the words of one film historian, ‘he was an autocratic manager of people, he had a talent for wounding sarcasm and a reputation for reducing his employees to tears.’¹²

Gracie hated both the routine of making films and the lack of contact with a live audience. In one small scene, she had to greet a taxi driver with the words ‘Good morning, George.’ Two days were spent trying to complete the scene. Gracie told Dean that from then on he would have to accept either the first or second take. She earned herself the sobriquet ‘One Take Joe’.

She was propelled into a second film, Looking on the Bright Side, another feel-good movie aimed at dispelling worries about recession and unemployment – and another huge success. As a result, her agent, Bert Aza, told her that Archie had negotiated a contract for six films to be made over the coming six years. The purse: £72,000 [£2.5 million]. Gracie turned it down. ‘Tell Archie I won’t sign with him, Bert. No hard feelings, but I can’t live that sort of life for the next six years.’¹³ A week later, Bert phoned her in some excitement to say that RKO had offered her £20,000 [£700,000] to make This Week of Grace. But the ordeal proved just as unbearable and, when it was over, Gracie told Bert: ‘We’ll never sign for another film … I’m really only happy on the stage. So, turn all film offers down.’¹⁴

Gracie Fields’ filmography

[The movies, the studios, the well-known songs, any other variety performers]

1931 Sally In Our Alley [ATP (Associated Talking Pictures)]. Director, Maurice Elvey. Sally, written by Will Haines, Harry Leon and Leo Towers. Florence Desmond [see Chapter 21], wrote ‘What a dear Gracie was to work with and what energy she had! She never seemed to get tired. A rehearsal was a performance to her.’¹⁵

1932 Looking On The Bright Side [ATP]. Co-directors, Basil Dean and Graham Cutts. Julian Rose.

1933 This Week of Grace [RKO]. Director, Maurice Elvey. Vivian Foster and Henry Kendall: ‘Gracie was always cheerful and smiling, although her language occasionally made even the electricians blush. She would smooth everything over by inviting the whole production unit over to the local for drinks all round. No wonder she was worshipped by everyone who worked with her.’¹⁶

1934 Love, Life and Laughter [ATP]. Director, Maurice Elvey. Horace Kenney and Robb Wilton [see Chapter 7].

1934 Sing as We Go [ATP]. Director, Basil Dean. Sing As We Go, written by Harry Parr Davies. Stanley Holloway: ‘[Gracie] is generous in the way she gives of herself and her affection to her friends and her public … I think this sort of big-heartedness is partly what’s made her loved all over the world.’¹⁷

1934 Look Up and Laugh [ATP]. Director, Basil Dean. Robb Wilton and Harry Tate. ‘Harry Tate, poor fellow, could not remember a single line for more than a few minutes together … This great comedian [has] now lapsed into senility.’¹⁸

1936 Queen of Hearts [ATP]. Director, Monty Banks.

1937 The Show Goes On [ATP]. Director, Basil Dean. I Never Cried So Much in All My Life, written by Will Haines, Jimmy Harper and Harry Castling. Billy Merson.

1938 Keep Smiling [Twentieth Century Fox]. Director, Monty Banks. Eddie Gray [see Chapter 5].

1938 We’re Going to be Rich [Twentieth Century Fox]. Director, Monty Banks. Walter, Walter (Lead Me to the Altar), written by Will Haines, Jimmy Harper and Noel Forrester.

1939 Shipyard Sally [Twentieth Century Fox]. Director, Monty Banks. Wish Me Luck as you Wave Me Goodbye, written by Phil Park and Harry Parr Davies. Oliver Wakefield [see Chapter 17].

1943 Stage Door Canteen [Sol Lesser Productions]. Director, Frank Borzage.

1943 Holy Matrimony. Director, John M. Stahl.

1945 Molly and Me. Director, Lewis Seiler.

1945 Paris Underground. Director, Gregory Ratoff.

Gracie’s other well-known comic songs included The Biggest Aspidistra in the World, written by Jimmy Harper, Will Haines and Tommie Connor; I Took My Harp to a Party, written by Noel Gay and Desmond Carter; and Turn ‘Erbert’s Face to the Wall, Mother, written by Max Kester, William Ellis and Ronald Hill.

She was then offered £25,000 [£875,000] and, after that, £30,000 [£1 million]. Gracie capitulated and made two more films. ‘Now, that’s the lot.’ Bert nodded. ‘I know how you feel, Grace. If anybody asks, I’ll tell them you won’t make another film for less than £40,000.’¹⁹ A few days later, Bert told her he had an offer for four films, each worth £40,000 [£1.35 million]. ‘Now, I know they’re all barmy,’ Gracie said.²⁰ Barmy or not, by the end of the 1930s, Gracie became Britain’s highest paid film actress. Her appeal was neatly summed up by a cinema magazine:

You need look no further than to Gracie herself. She is big because she doesn’t care a jot [about] whether she is earning a fortune or not. Gracie is always just herself.²¹

It was through her seventh film, Look Up and Laugh, that Gracie met Monty Banks. He had just directed his first film for Associated Talking Pictures and Basil Dean wanted him to direct Gracie. They gelled instantly and, in Dean’s words, this jolly little ‘cosmopolite’, an Italian citizen with an American accent and a British passport, made Gracie laugh at a time when she had great need of laughter. Monty was known as both a gambler and a womaniser, but in 1940 he and Gracie married.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Gracie sang at as many troop concerts as she could. Arthur Askey²² witnessed her indefatigability:

Often, when I’d had enough and they said, There’s a bit of an isolated camp down the road, she’d go … She could be tired out, but she’d climb into the lorry … and, when she got on the stage, no matter how rough and improvised it might be, she seemed to shed that tiredness and become a different person.²³

Gracie’s second husband, Monty Banks.

But once Italy joined the war in support of Germany, everything changed. As an Italian, Monty instantly became an enemy alien and could have been interned. Gracie was faced with a dilemma. Should she stay in Britain or go abroad and be with her husband? She chose the latter and became the focus of questions in Parliament and ill-informed criticism by journalists who accused her of deserting Britain.

In fact, across Canada and America, she staged concerts in aid of Britain’s war effort. Once America declared war on Japan at the end of 1941, the situation eased for Gracie. By then, Monty had become an American citizen and the couple were able to travel the world entertaining the troops.

Even so, Gracie was granted only a temporary British passport, which she had to renew every six months. In 1945, she applied for British nationality, but was refused because of Monty’s American citizenship. Shamefully, the Foreign Office recommended that she should be treated as an alien. She withdrew her application and remained an Italian citizen until she died. Gracie herself said ‘I may have an Italian passport, but no matter what is written in it,