Books
Gin and limelight
Peter Ackroyd
Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell Margot Peters (Bodley Head £15)
The most striking characteristics of the young Mrs Patrick Campbell (or Stel- la, her all too appropriate Christian name) were her lustrously black hair and her thinness; the tragedy of thin people is that they believe they will stay thin for ever, and, although Mrs Campbell's hair re- mained dark above and beyond the call of duty, the body beneath it grew ever larger. Those who had known her in her dazzling youth found the transition difficult to accept; when in 1925 she waddled on stage in yet another revival, Lord Lowndes wrote of her, 'She was old . . . she was — I loathe to use the word — fat; and I was cured.' She herself realised what she had become; Cecil Beaton remembered how 'She bellowed like a sick cow, throwing her hands to the skies, "Oh why must I look like a burst paper bag".' It is evidence from this last remark that her merciless tongue had not deserted her, even though it was directed against herself, but those who could forgive her physical decrepitude could not forget that she had spent a long career in the theatre making more enemies than the Lord Chamberlain. Towards the end of her life, she arrived at a party given by John Gielgud: 'Who is there here,' she cried in that dark contralto, 'who still loves me?' The answer, if any, is not recorded.
It may seem odd to begin at the end of her life in this fashion, but the most interesting sections of Margot Peters's biography are concerned with the last years of a woman who could not be said to have grown old with dignity. As with other mid-Victorians (she was born in 1865), she outlived her real period almost too rapidly; for a woman who achieved fame overnight by taking The Second Mrs Tanqueray and ramming it down the throats of the London public, there must have been a certain unreality in the world of Hollywood and the wireless to which she later tried to accommodate herself. Her natural en- vironment was that of the well-padded Nineties, with its supper clubs and han- soms; somehow, in the even and unfalter- ing light of the new century, a part of her brilliance disappears.
But this is what makes her life intriguing: so intriguing, in fact, that one can excuse her biographer's use of Christian names throughout and forgive her sometimes excessive redeployment of material found in the archives of theatre collections. Mrs Campbell's real name was Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner. Her father was a boisterous
but incompetent Anglo-Indian who is sup- posed to have died with the words 'Mrs Tanqueray' on his lips, and her mother a melancholy Italian. At an early age, she married the man who is remembered only as the provider of her stage name, and their first years together were marked by that genteel but abysmal London poverty of which George Gissing is the great chronicler. And then at the age of 21, with nothing but debts and children ahead of her, she came to one of those mysterious but ineluctable decisions which shape the fate of those who believe them- selves to stand apart from the ordinary world: 'Slowly I became conscious,' she wrote, 'that within myself lay the strength I needed, and that I must never be afraid.'
Easier said than accomplished, of course, but her instincts were quite correct. All she had to find some way to become herself. She was naturally equipped for such a task: even the letters she wrote as a girl showed an instinctive power of self- dramatisation, and, in her conversations, she could describe her woes with such force that her companions were weighed down with pity and foreboding while she emerged from the recitals feeling quite cheerful. And so, naturally, she became an actress; almost at once, she seemed able to command the attention of an audience by summoning up emotions from nowhere in particular and then flinging them beyond the footlights. But it was not until she found The Second Mrs Tanqueray (or, more accurately, until Pinero and George Alexander found her) that she was given the opportunity to become what might be called a Victorian anti-heroine — doomed, reckless, magnificent even in death.
It was a character she continued to play, in one guise or another, for most of her life; and Margot Peters documents in some detail the death of her husband, the death of her son and the innumerable squabbles which alienated her family and friends. It was inevitable, under the circumstances, that art should fall short of life, and Mrs Campbell squandered what little reserves of energy she was able to retain upon generally feeble and often trite melodra- mas or comedies of which she was the sole attraction. There were memorable mo- ments, however — most of them concerning her ability to create havoc in any company with which she was associated. The insults flew like killer-bees, and yet there is a sense in which everything connected with her becomes a form of comedy: she seems to have had so little hold upon her own identity that nothing to do with her seems quite real. For the lovers of kitsch, for example, there is nothing more enthralling than the idea of Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs Campbell touring England together in Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande (the divine Sarah of course played the male role). Their con- duct off the stage was more inspiring than anything the Belgian could have written, however, and Margot Peters describes one evening in Blackpool when Stella (Mrs Campbell) knocked on Sarah's door: "Entrez", said Sarah. Stella went in and found her sitting in front of the bay window looking out at the great stretch of sand and sky bathed all red and gold in the setting sun. Stella sat down silently next to her. After a few moments, Sarah turned toward her and said, "Les morts sont toujours avec nous", and Stella felt she understood.' Blackpool has seldom provoked reflections of such an impractical nature.
Margot Peters also dwells in some detail on Mrs Campbell's ability to inspire pas- sion beyond the confines of the theatre the most interesting example being that of Bernard Shaw, who was for a while the Androcles to her lion. But it seems to have been almost entirely a literary romance and, like most literary romances, it ended in wrangles over copyright. She seems to have had a number of lovers — 'seems' because Margot Peters is that rare thing, a discreet biographer. Although she can on occasions display a surprising knowledge of the emotional life of her subject (`Her first thought was of music . . .'), she stops at the bedroom door and does not even put her eye to the keyhole; and what a relief that is. It is partly for this reason that the most absorbing passages in this book do occur during the concluding chapters where we can see the plump Mrs Campbell struggling through the Thirties, always accompanied by a small dog; she died in France in 1940, poor, bewildered and practically friendless.
The only really interesting question ab- out her remained, and remains, un- answered: was she a great actress, to be compared with Bernhardt and Duse, or was she a ham? No records of her work exist, of course, except for two or three unmemorable appearances in Hollywood films which were granted to her out of respect. We have some photographs, ex- cellently reproduced in this volume: draped over what seems to be a dead fisherman in Deirdre, looking wistfully (perhaps at the Royal Box?) in Pelleas et Melisande, suffering unendurable anguish in Beyond Human Power. Many of her colleagues (especially those whom she abused in her usual merciless fashion) believed that she could not act at all; one of them said of her, `. . . that she wasn't a genius, that she had no dramatic instinct, I knew, but that she hadn't one throb of artistic feeling which might have led her to approach her task seriously or at least to have a little consideration for the possible nervousness of others, I only learned last night . . . I pray that I might never have to act another scene with her as long as I live.' Such a reaction is characteristically provoked by those 'stars' who employ their personality in a marked manner and do not feel it necessary to acquire other skills in the process. In that sense, Mrs Campbell was universal.
I suspect that her personality was of such an insecure or unreal kind that the ques- tion of 'acting' does not come into the matter: she merely lived for the effects which she produced, whether on or off the stage. And, since she was all personality
and no character, her reckless disregard for ordinary consistency of behaviour is quite understandable: she could be a saint at one moment, a bitch at the next. As an actress she was triumphantly successful when one of her parts caught up with her moods, but she had neither the skill nor the training to `work up' a character or to create one out of observation and sympathy. Although this may have in the end ruined her career, it worked wonders in a life which was itself a theatrical tour de force.
Previous page
