Authors: Marc Eliot
Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks and the other first-class passengers disembarked to fireworks and a live brass band, while hundreds of photographers and newsreel cameramen and hordes of well-wishers celebrated the return of the larger-than-life screen legends. By the time Pender's troupe deboarded, much
of the pomp, press, and people had gone. Archie and the others had missed all the excitement because of getting bogged down in the extra-long tedium of customs reserved for steerage passengers. His first steps onto American soil were taken over dead streamers and punctured balloons strewn along the wooden pier, as he and the others made their way to the waiting taxis that Lomas had arranged to take them to their hotel. The entire troupe had been booked into a Fifty-eighth Street “We Cater to the Theatrical Trade” residential hotel, just west of Eighth Avenue, about three-quarters of a mile from where they had docked.
After lugging his own bags up four flights to his small room, Archie barely had time to unpack when a slip of paper under his door informed him that the company was to attend a reception that evening personally arranged and supervised by Charles Dillingham, to be held on the stage of his famed Broadway Globe Theater. Archie was ready to go an hour before departure time.
Dillingham intended the welcome party as a way to formally introduce the Penders to Fred Stone, the star for whom they had been booked to open. The evening went well enough, with relations between Stone and the troupe cordial, if not warm. They cooled even more the next day when Stone caught a glimpse of the troupe rehearsals. He didn't like what he saw—not because they were so bad, but because they were too good. Stone feared that the Penders' spectacular physical feats, far better than he had heard, particularly the stilt-walking routine, would be impossible for him to follow, and he insisted they be taken off the bill.
It was a blow for the Penders and for Dillingham, as well. He had invested a lot of money in this booking, personally financing the trip over from England, and needed to find a way to recoup. The next day Dillingham released a statement to the press saying that because of the physical limitations of the Globe, Pender's stilt-walking “Giants,” as his players were advertised in the American trades, would not be appearing after all, and he had arranged to book them instead into another of his contracted venues, the cavernous New York Hippodrome, billed by the showman as “The World's Largest Theater” (its front curtain was a full city block long). The Hippodrome was the permanent home of his
Good Times
revue, meant to compete with the
Ziegfeld Follies,
the talk of the town at the New Amsterdam Theater.
Good Times
was a world-class extravaganza, complete with elephants, zebras, monkeys, horses, acrobats, fireworks, dazzling light shows, solo singers, cyclists, dancers, chorales, musicians, magicians, and a self-contained water show that featured dozens of female swimmers and male divers in a stage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water. Dillingham hoped the Penders' stilt act would now give the show a dash of old-world music hall. In a sequence squeezed in between the elephants and the zebras the producer billed as “The Toy Store,” the stilt-walkers were all made up to look like toys that came alive at night after all the people went home.
On August 9, barely a week and a half from the day he arrived in America, Archie made his Stateside debut as one of the stilt-walkers in Dillingham's
Good Times
revue. The act received great notices in the press, and the group settled in for a long run. Between performances Archie and the others quickly developed a regular routine of performing, laundering their own clothes, and cooking their own meals on hot plates in their rooms. To avoid homesickness, several of the boys paired off and roomed together.
At one point Archie developed a strong crush on a gorgeous, leggy blonde in the
Good Times
chorus by the name of Gladys Kincaid, his first case of show-business-related unrequited love. As Grant would later recall, “Here I was, seventeen, and incapable of sufficient progression toward testing that birds-and-bees theory.” The self-confessed still virginal Archie never even got to hold Gladys's hand. He spent one afternoon shopping for a present for her at Macy's, but rather than buy her a lover's lure—some fancy lingerie or imported perfume—he chose a multicolored woolen coat-sweater-scarf combination, which got him nothing more from Gladys than a puzzled look followed by a motherly pat on his handsome cheek. (The only physical comfort Archie managed in these days was back at the hotel, engaging in the kind of adolescent games of sexual exploration and experimentation typical of British all-boys boarding school residents.)
The revue ran on Broadway for another nine months, then embarked on a year-long tour on the famous B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit, which took them to the major cities east of the Mississippi. As it happened, the Keith circuit traveled the same route as the New York Giants baseball team, and because all the games were played in daylight, Archie was able to see a good number of them. Having never heard of baseball before coming to America,
he became endlessly fascinated by the intricacies of the game and developed a love for it that would last a lifetime.
He also met quite a few successful actors on the circuit (and a few unknowns, mostly understudies and last-minute fill-ins, among them a young New York hoofer by the name of James Cagney), but none amused him or impressed him more than the Marx Brothers, whose vaudeville routines later became the basis for many of their zany movies. While the rest of the country preferred Groucho, Zeppo, the good-looking straight man and romantic lead, was Archie's favorite, the one whose foil timing he believed was the real key to the act's success. Not long after, Archie began to augment his already well-practiced “suave” Fairbanks look and dress with a Zeppo-like fancy bowtie (called a jazz-bow, or jazzbo, during the Roaring Twenties) and copied his brilliantine hairstyle, adding Dixie Peach, the favorite pomade of American black performers and show business leads, by the palmful to his thick dark mop, to give it a molded, comb-streaked blue-black Zeppo sheen.
THE KEITH CIRCUIT TOUR
ended in January 1922, just days shy of Archie's eighteenth birthday, which roughly coincided with the expiration of his original contract. After four years in America, Lomas was exhausted by all the traveling, especially by the long distances between stops that made touring much more difficult in the States than back in England. He was ready to bring the boys home and assumed that Archie and the others would be eager to depart as well. To his surprise, not only Archie but most of the others chose to stay in America. Lomas agreed, gave them all the equivalent of their passage money and some additional funds to help settle in, and bade them all a warm farewell. He then sailed with his family back to England and obscurity, never again to achieve the level of popularity there he had enjoyed prior to his voyage west. In his absence the world of British music hall had all but vanished, its theaters converted to accommodate the working public's newest favorite form of entertainment, feature-length motion pictures.
BACK IN AMERICA
, Archie, who quickly split from the others, was, for the first time, now on his own in New York City and loving it. Freed from the
never-ending regimentation and grind of traveling and performing, he now intended to relax and enjoy the city. He loved traveling around in open-air buses down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, then back uptown in the enclosed ones that went up Broadway all the way to Harlem. He marveled at the tall residential apartment buildings all along the West Side that were so unlike the one- and two-family dwellings that dotted Bristol. He also enjoyed riding the IRT subway all the way to the Bronx and then back to the Battery. On sunny days he liked walking through Central Park, or visiting Grant's Tomb, or taking the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty up close.
All too soon, however, the little money he had left ran out, and in the fall of 1922 he found himself broke and out of a job. He reluctantly moved out of his single room at the hotel and into the apartment of another struggling artist, George (Jack) Orry-Kelly, who had a small loft on Barrow Street in the Village, situated behind a legitimate theater.
Orry-Kelly, originally from South Wales and named by his mother after her favorite garden flower, was one of the few new friends Archie had made in America, although exactly when and how remains unknown (Grant makes no mention of Orry-Kelly in his “autobiography”). When Archie told him of his current situation, the set designer offered to let him share his living space, and the out-of-work actor quickly and gratefully accepted. It is not difficult to understand why Archie liked him. At twenty-four, Orry-Kelly was seven years Archie's senior, smart, sophisticated, city-seasoned, tall, and good-looking. He dressed impeccably, presented himself with confidence, and benefited from a quick and verbal wit. Like Archie, Orry-Kelly was the son of a tailor (Archie's father, primarily a presser, had done some tailoring for the military while he lived in Southampton). Like Archie, he had migrated at an early age to America to find work in the theater. But unlike Archie, he was extremely effeminate and openly and unashamedly gay. During all the time they lived together, Archie would try to cherry-pick those qualities he most admired in Orry-Kelly, even as he struggled to deal with an undeniable physical attraction to his new and charismatic roommate.
With time on his hands, Archie began to frequent the National Vaudeville Artists (NVA) Club on West Forty-sixth Street, a gathering place for performers like himself in search of a lead on a new job, or word of a traveling
company that was passing through and needed a pickup performer. Most often all he found was a soft chair and a courtesy cup of tea.
Archie auditioned for several Broadway shows, but the advantages of his handsome face and tall, athletic body were offset by the still noticeable traces of his working-class British accent, which made casting directors reluctant to hire him. He became increasingly intimidated by the act of auditioning—a fear (he later recalled) that manifested itself in the form of a recurring dream. Standing in the center of a lighted stage, Archie is surrounded by a large cast of actors and unable to remember his lines. The result is always the same: public humiliation for not being able to perform and deliver. The dream, with all its socio-sexual implications, appears by all accounts (including Grant's) to have begun approximately the same time period Archie moved in with Orry-Kelly.
Also around this time, Archie managed to earn some money by serving as a male escort to several of the most socially acceptable women in the city. He fell into this type of work after he befriended a fellow he would later identify only as “Marks,” an easy-time hustler of the type that operated on the fringes of the New York theater community. One night Marks set him up to accom- pany Lucrezia Bori, the world-famous Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano, to a swank Park Avenue affair.
The idea of “acting” the role of a black-tie escort appealed to Archie, and Marks easily convinced him that his good looks made him well equipped to play the part. The evening with Bori proved to be the successful debut of a character who would one day be recognizable to all the world—a handsome, charming rake, dressed in the finest tux, with an appealing manner, cleft chin, and devastating smile.
That night, mingling with the upscale crowd, Archie met a fellow by the name of George Tilyou Jr. Over cognac and small talk, a relaxed Archie revealed his “secret” to Tilyou, that he was, in fact, less than he appeared to be. Beneath all his gloss, tails, and sheen, he told his new friend, he was just one more out-of-work actor picking up a few dollars playing Bori's “date.” Tilyou got a great kick out of it, and when Archie told him his best talent was walking on stilts rather than carrying on airs, Tilyou burst out laughing and told him he might be able to help him out with a real job. His late father, he
said, had created—and his family still owned and operated—Coney Island's famous Steeplechase Park amusement attraction.
They exchanged phone numbers, and when Archie called the next day, Tilyou proved as good as his word. He had managed to secure a park job for Archie as, of all things, a stilt-walker. A few hours later Archie found himself dressed in a bright green coat, jockey's cap, and long black pants. Tilyou directed him to walk around the boardwalk on stilts, wearing a wooden sand- wich board advertising that the steeplechase was open. It was undeniably a step down, and Archie knew it, but escort work was far from steady, and he desperately needed the money to extend his stay in America. The forty dol- lars a week he received from Tilyou, in a job that earned him the nickname “Rubber Legs,” was almost enough to make ends meet.
To get the rest, besides occasional escorting gigs, he sold hand-painted ties that Orry-Kelly made in their Greenwich Village apartment, which had lately become a bit more cramped when Orry-Kelly took in another roommate, an Australian fellow by the name of Charlie Phelps, whose financial contribution was badly needed. How and when Phelps first appeared in Orry-Kelly's life remains unknown, although it may actually have been Archie who met him first, aboard the
Olympic
on his voyage across the Atlantic, for which Phelps, a bit of a vagabond, had hired on as a steward in order to gain his pas- sage to America.
Archie sold Orry-Kelly's ties on street corners during the day and at night served as the household cook, specializing in the fried and breaded Dover sole and crisp chips all three were so fond of from their youth. Fresh sole was available daily at the nearby docks, and after spending several hours selling his wares, Archie always enjoyed walking over and picking out a couple of freshly caught fish, then buying his other ingredients from the many small ethnic shops that flourished on the streets of the West Village, in preparation of that evening's “family dinner.”
A FEW MONTHS LATER
, Dillingham announced auditions for
Better Times,
his sequel to
Good Times
scheduled to play that summer at the Hippodrome. Archie quickly contacted the other members of the Penders still in America
and suggested they reunite, train, and try out as a unified act for the show. When they felt ready, they auditioned for Dillingham, who immediately hired their stilt act as a featured spot for his new extravaganza.