Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic - Graham McCann

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would make a beetroot look positively anaemic, knocking over the props in my clumsiness – and embarrassing everyone in my anxiety to please’.40

      When the ordeal was finally over, Mrs Young took him to one side, smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and then asked him: ‘Will you let me help you?’ Astonished that he was not being admonished, he stuttered an eager ‘Yes’ in grateful reply.41

      From that moment on, this gifted and compassionate amateur director worked as Frank’s private – and unpaid – tutor. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, he would spend two taxing but hugely rewarding hours at her house, gradually learning how to overcome his stammer, start the process of mastering his role and, perhaps most importantly of all, begin believing in himself: ‘She taught me how to “ee-nun-cee-ate,” to be calm, to concentrate on the performance – and to forget myself as a self-pitying nonentity.’42

      He would later claim that he owed ‘as much to Winifred Young as to anyone else in my career’, speculating that without her intervention ‘there might not have been any career, merely bitter frustration’.43 There was certainly no doubting her immediate effect: she transformed him, within a matter of a few short weeks, from a painfully awkward-looking nervous wreck into the show’s most notable success.

      Frank came through it all without offering the audience more than barely a hint of his former hesitation, anxiety and self-doubt, and, in spite of the modest size and nature of his role, his performance had drawn the warmest of all the applause. For the first time in his life, he felt triumphant.

      Someone who happened to encounter him backstage after the show told him matter-of-factly: ‘You should be an actor.’44 Those five words, regardless of whether they were uttered out of honesty, politeness or perhaps even a playful sense of sarcasm, triggered a profoundly positive effect on the still-exhilarated novice performer, serving as ‘a sudden and instant catalyst on all my vague hopes and half-dreams, fusing them into an absolute certitude of determination’.45 That moment, the adult Frankie Howerd would always say, was the special one, the turning point, the moment when – all of a sudden – he really knew: ‘[F]rom that night on I never deviated from a sense of destiny almost manic in its obsessive intensity.’46

      There would be no more talk of St Francis. The future was for Frank the Actor.

       CHAPTER 2

       A Stuttering Start

       Well. No. Yes. Ah.

      They coined a new nickname for Frank Howard at Shooters Hill school: ‘The Actor’.1 He loved it.

      He loved the idea that an actor was what he was set to become. It might only have been 1932, three long and arduous maths-and Latin-filled years before he was due to leave school, but already, as far as he was concerned, acting was the only thing that really mattered.

      Having acquired his initial theatrical experience under the auspices of his church, Frank now proceeded to advance his acting ambitions inside his school, joining its own informal dramatic society and establishing himself very quickly as one of its most lively and distinctive figures. Gone, in this particular context at least, was the insecure loner of old, and in his place was to be found a far more sociable, self-assured and increasingly popular young man: his whole manner and personality appeared to come alive, growing so much bigger and bolder and brighter, whenever the action switched from the classroom to the stage. Here, at least, he knew what he was doing, and he knew that what he was doing was good.

      Right from the start, he made it abundantly clear that he was eager to try everything: acting, writing, direction, production, promotion – whatever it was, he was willing to do it, work at it and, given time, perhaps even master it. Everywhere that one looked – backstage, in the wings, centre stage, even at the table with the tickets right at the back of the school hall – Frank Howard seemed to be there, still slightly stooped, still slightly stammering, but now entirely immersed in the experience.

      As a performer, he progressed at quite a rapid rate. Although he was hardly the type, even then, to lose himself in a role – his playful disposition, in addition to his distinctive voice and looks, conspired against the pursuit of such a style – his obvious enthusiasm, allied to his lively wit, ensured that each one of his stage contributions stood out and stayed in the mind. At his most inspired, such as the occasion when he played the spoiled and rascally Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s satire She Stoops to Conquer, he showed real comic promise, relishing the chance to release all of the dim-witted verve that he had found lurking in the original text.2

      As a fledgling playwright, on the other hand, the great amount of faith he invested in his own ability struck most of those whose opinions mattered as gravely misplaced. An audacious attempt to squeeze a rambling one-hour play, entitled Lord Halliday’s Birthday Party, into a tight ten-minute slot in a forthcoming concert was thwarted by the school’s headmaster, the rather dour Rupert Affleck, who deemed the script (which featured a messy divorce, a brutal murder and several other striking themes lifted straight from some of the movies Frank had recently seen) ‘far too outrageous and bold to be performed by young boys’, adding (according to Howerd’s own rueful recollection) that he was ‘appalled that a fifteen-year-old could be so depraved as to write such filth’.3

      Embarrassed but undeterred, Frank proceeded to write several more scripts that Mr Affleck, had he seen them, would no doubt have considered to have been of far too sensational a nature. When, however, a play that he did manage to get performed – his blatantly derivative murder-mystery, Sweet Fanny Adams – elicited nothing more audible (let alone encouraging) from the auditorium than the lonely sound of tumbleweed being blown through the desert, he resolved in future to keep the rest of his ‘masterpieces’ to himself.4 Always a populist, Frank reasoned that if the current market demand was restricted to his acting, then his acting, for the time being, would have to be the sole commodity that he would seek to deliver.

      In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he began attending an evening class in acting offered by what in those days was called the London County Council (or LCC). It was there that he first encountered his next great mentor: Mary Hope.

      Hope – an experienced stage actor herself – became one of Howard’s tutors, and, just like Winifred Young before her, she soon found herself intrigued by the young performer’s quirky appeal. First, she encouraged him to join the LCC Dramatic Society – a vastly more serious and rigorous kind of company than either of Howard’s previous two theatrical troupes – and then, after seeing how richly original was his potential (and also how open he was to instruction), she advised him to aim his sights on securing a scholarship at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). If he was interested, she added, she would be willing to work alongside him as his coach.

      Howard, his eyebrows hovering high and his bottom lip hanging low, was, as he would later put it, ‘a-mazed’. Listening back to the phrase as it echoed around inside his head – ‘Was I interested?’ – the only word that sounded out of place was the ‘was’. He was almost too thrilled to speak: ‘Choked with emotion, I managed

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