Nobody told her when to stop
Anthony Blond
HOW TO GROW OLD DISGRACEFULLY by Hermione Gingold Gollancz, £12.95, pp.224
In another play, I was a bullfrog. The BBC had no library of recorded sound effects then and when the director asked, 'How can we make the background noise of a bullfrog in the next scene?', I said, 'I'll have a go.' All I had to do was croak, and I was sent down to the basement and told to start croaking when the green light went on. Unfortunately, no one switched the light off. I thought perhaps the play was overrunning and I carried on croaking for about three-quarters of an hour until someone came down and asked me what on earth I was doing. I always carry on until I'm told to stop.
The difference between Olivier and Wolfit is between a tour de force and forced to tour.
So, Hermione was not only a tremendous success (or, as she wished the cast of an ornate 18th-century play, luc- fess') and a wit; she was also a great worker.
After an unhappy start, when she gave birth to, but did not mother, two boys by her first husband, Michael Joseph, the boring but eventually successful publisher of middle-brow literature, Hermione Ging- old was in work and into sex for most of her 89 years. She was not just a queen's moll or a fag-hag (USage), because she bedded the boys and delivered the lines
stagy homosexuals ache for. Very occa- sionally did they get the better of her, and she has enough style to record one such moment. A couple of young men retrieved her wig from the ocean when she was walking on the shore of Fire Island, saying, `We're terribly sorry, Miss Gingold, but your little dog has just drowned.' Don't worry,' said Hermione, throwing the wig back into the sea, 'I've plenty more at home.' Her ripostes were usually sharper. One wonders what happened to the young men. Since Fire Island has become the eye of the Aids storm, they may have perished. They would certainly have applauded her last serious lover, 53 years her junior and 'tall, dark, young, wealthy and very hand- some', but not, as the Daily Mail critic has written, her chauffeur, though he did begin by driving her around the canyons of California before moving into her New York apartment where he stayed for five years — longer than either of her hus- bands.
If it wasn't money and it wasn't looks which enabled an octogenarian Jewish disease to pull such a dishy guy, how come? That may be the exact word, because Hermione stresses that their relationship was definitely orgasmic. Her success with chaps may have stemmed from her sexual ability and proclivity.
Unsurprisingly, most women, including her most famous partner, Hermione Bad- deley, did not like her at all. My step- mother, whom John Osborne has de- scribed in these pages as the rudest woman he has ever met outside British Rail, was thrown by Miss Gingold who, when she came to stay at Saint Hill, left lipstick marks inside the bath.
Hermione was a trouper from the age of eight, with another equally ambitious and proficient child, Noel Coward, whom she well understood, viz from Sweetest and Lowest:
In a dressing-gown exquisitely flowered Mr Coward At the conference which he daily sat on Advised both Eisenhower and Mountbatten On the private habits of the lower decks.
Hermione couldn't sing or rhyme (or scan) as well as the Master, but she probably had more fun. In this, her third and last autobiography, respectfully and competently 'tidied up' by her friend, Anne Clements Eyre, first a 12-year-old fan and later an amaneuensis with rather grand connections, there is not a whisper of the despair and self-abasement which occasionally affected Coward. Old age did not agree with Noel, but when Hermione last saw him she was engaged to two much younger men and on the eve of the first night of A Little Light Music. She was never down-hearted; she was usually over the top. She was a monster who preferred her cats to her children and laughter to anything.
This is a most uplifting book. Read all about her.
Previous page
