Authors: Lisa Gee
‘Sometimes,’ Paul Petersen told me, ‘you just get caught up in the life. We’ve all witnessed it, particularly with beauty pageant mums, sitting there and doing their children’s routines and grimacing and mouthing the words to the music, as if they’re up there. And,’ he continued, ‘it amazes me to see auditions these days, where five hundred children will show up for a one-line role in a marginal television show. Five hundred! And there are five hundred parents or more in the immediate environment too. All of this time, all of these resources, which might be better spent on something else, concentrated on one line of dialogue, which might have had a union rate of $750. You spread that $750 out between those five hundred adults who weren’t at work at that particular moment and we’re talking pennies. And the icky part is that the employers know very well that there will be no lack of hopefuls. That outer office in the auditioning process will be full.’
If you’re that way inclined, being up on the stage is addictive. It’s possibly even more addictive watching your child up there. And even if you’re not the addictive type, it’s unlikely that much else in your life will match up to the buzz of a West End musical. Certainly not going to Birmingham the morning after and running a training course. Unfortunately, for the duration of the course, my mind was more on getting back to London that evening in time to catch Dora’s second night than it was on the job in hand. The day was not a success and it was, consequently, the last one I was asked to run. On the up side, I made it back to the Palladium in plenty of time.
Still smiling, Laurie and I filed out of our seats. As we were leaving, Lynette, who I’d met when she measured Dora for her costumes and who had been sitting near us, caught my eye and smiled. I said ‘hello’. She said ‘You made me laugh. I was watching
you
mouthing along with the show. You know all the words, don’t you!’ I hadn’t realised I’d been doing it.
Still smiling, we went to collect Dora from the stage door after her first ever professional show. There was a small crowd there – which wasn’t only made up of parents. Those of us who did have kids to pick up, and had watched the show (most but not all of the parents had been in to catch their child’s first performance) shrieked, jumped up and down, hugged and told each other how much we’d enjoyed the show and how brilliant each other’s kids had been. About twenty minutes later, to applause from all assembled – most of whom were waiting for Connie Fisher and Lesley Garrett – Russ led the children out. A few people asked them to sign autographs. Some of the older children added ‘with best wishes’, or ‘love from’, or ‘x’ by their photos. Dora carefully wrote ‘Dora’.
‘Mummy,’ she asked me once she was safely strapped into her car seat, ‘why did those people want me to write my name when they’ve already got it in their programmes?’
I didn’t have a good answer. Once I’d finished being a teenager, I’d started feeling slightly bemused by the tradition of meeting famous people and asking them to write their name on a piece of paper. Why do we do it? What does it mean? Especially the part where they ask you for your name, so they can address it personally. How personal can a dedication be when it’s written by someone who has to ask you what your name is before they can write it? Fair enough if you were lucky or prescient enough to garner all four of the Beatles’ autographs on the front cover of
Please, Please Me
– or to inherit a precious copy from an older, cooler relative: you could now sell it and take a few months off work to go traveling, or update your kitchen. I did, it’s true, queue up to get Julie Andrews’s autograph. But that was so Dora and I could meet her, not so we could have her name written down in the space under where it was printed. I do also generally get books signed by authors when I meet them, because a long time ago a writer told me that they like being asked to do it.
Some time after the children had finished their stint in
The Sound of Music
, three of the mums took theirs into town to shop together for school uniform (two – Yasmin and Grace – were just about to start at Sylvia Young’s; John had already been there for several years). After a trip to John Lewis, they decided to take them to say hello at the Palladium. Outside, they bumped into Connie Fisher, who was pleased to see the kids and hugged them all and chatted. An elderly couple asked the three mums who the children were. ‘They were in the original cast,’ they explained.
‘Were you?’ the couple asked.
‘Not us, the children.’
‘Can we have your autographs?’
‘Not us,
them
.’
‘Which one were you? Liesl? Can we take your photos?’
The mums gave in, signed their autographs and posed for pictures.
I enjoyed Dora’s second night more than her first, partly because I cried less and my contact lenses stayed transparent throughout, which meant I could actually see the show, but also because I was much less anxious. Dora was obviously enjoying the whole experience. ‘I was
so
nervous, I nearly
threw up
before we marched on that first time!’ she’d announced bouncily on the way home from her West End debut. It was perfectly clear from her untroubled cheerfulness and her first ever use of the phrase ‘
threw up
’ that she was simply parroting what some of the older kids had said and hadn’t felt remotely nauseous. She might, I conceded, have had slight butterflies, but the idea of ‘stage fright’ was, for her, evidently oxymoronic, and so I assumed she was unlikely to suffer a paralysing second-night bout of it. And I knew – objectively – that the show was terrific, that you didn’t need to actually be related to someone on stage to be utterly entranced.
Tuesday night found me sitting with my sister Nikki, brother-in-law Richard, my niece and nephew Millie and Freddie (aged five and three respectively) and my father (aged seventy-three) right at the
back
of the gods. It gave me a completely different perspective from the previous night. On the up side, you get a much better overall view of the action, a much better sense of how everyone and everything on stage – people, scenery, props – jigsaw together to create the whole effect: it’s more like watching a film. On the down side, from where we were sitting, when Maria first appeared behind the oval window in the curtain, it looked as if she’d been decapitated. But as it was only a matter of seconds before the curtain was raised, this didn’t spoil our fun. And even three-year-old Freddie sat happily through the two-hour show, thumb in mouth, index finger up nose, occasionally extracting them to point and shout, ‘Look! Dorwa!’, which ensured that everyone sitting near us soon knew that we were connected to someone on stage.
When other people in the audience find out that you’ve got a child in the show, nine times out of ten their response is ‘You must be
so
proud.’ Even though the standard reply is to nod equivocally, laugh and say, ‘S/he is having a very nice time,’ one or two mums were irritated to distraction. ‘If one more person says that to me …’ fumed one, through gritted teeth. But it’s the natural response. Except that it isn’t exactly pride that you feel. I felt proud when, one day, waiting in the school playground for the bell to ring, I overheard Dora stick up for a friend of hers who was being teased by some other children. I felt proud of her when another mother at school told me that her daughter had said that Dora was always kind. I felt proud of her when, despite going out to work two nights a week at the age of six and not getting to bed until eleven o’clock at night, she still knuckled down at school and also got her homework done. I didn’t feel proud of her for doing something that felt, to her, like the most fun she could possibly have, ever.
What I did feel when I saw her on stage was different and also had the potential to be more damaging to our relationship. Pride in your child is something you feel partly because of your closeness – and your proprietorial relationship – to her. The awe and wonder you
experience
as you watch her singing, dancing and acting her little heart out up there in front of the audience that you are part of are distancing. On the one hand, this can help you step back from your child and view her as an individual in her own right, rather than as a mini-me (or mini-you). But it can also tempt and encourage you to put your child on a pedestal, to see her as – and treat her as if she is – more grown-up, more worldly-wise than she can possibly be.
It is, in fact, very easy to forget that these small people, who’ve learned their lines, music and moves, and are strutting their stuff on stage with the confidence of seasoned professionals, are, in real life, children. That although, because they are good at what they do and are being paid, they can be described as actors, actresses, singers and/or dancers, a child’s real job is – to paraphrase what Lizzie Maguire’s mum says during one episode of the children’s comedy series – to hang out with friends, do well at school, and be good. There’s a big difference between treating a child as an individual and allowing her all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of adulthood – especially when she’s only halfway between nappies and puberty. But in circumstances like these, it’s a fine line to locate and keep on the right side of. You don’t have to be an evil pushy stage mother, Machiavellianly planning your six-year-old’s ascendance to superstardom to end up on the wrong side of it. Being temporarily dazzled will do just fine. Or simply enjoying the guilty pleasures of reflected glory a little too much. After all, spotlights can feel too bright and exposing. How much more pleasant just to bathe in the gentle light of the moon, instead of the fierce burn of the sun. Especially when that someone else is your child and you can, almost legitimately, claim some of the credit. After all, if your child’s doing something that brilliant, you must have done something right, mustn’t you?
Nancy Carlsson-Paige – a child psychologist and professor at Lesley University in Massachusetts, who also happens to be Matt Damon’s mother – told me that she feels there are risks to sending children into the entertainment business at a young age, some of
which
are down to parental attitude. ‘Honestly, I often observe that the motive to do this lies more with adults than with children. What kids want to do is play creatively and this is their best foundation for going into the creative arts later on. I do know that some kids have a wonderful time being in plays and seem to thrive doing it. I hope when this happens such children also get a lot of time creating their own characters, scripts and scenarios in imaginative play.’ Dora certainly did: to the amusement of the chaperones and some of the older kids, she and Molly-May devised their own ‘horror film’, called
Greenaway
.
But a firm line needed to be drawn between backstage playtime and backstage work time – and when you’re six years old, it’s not one that’s easy to recognise. When he brought the children out after Dora’s second preview performance, Russ took me aside. There was a problem. Towards the end of the show, there was a tricky scene change to negotiate, when the children had precisely sixteen seconds to come off stage, change out of one costume into another, and file back on again. It was a tense moment. And Dora had been bouncing around excitedly, delaying the process unacceptably. The dressers – under pressure to get six kids and three adults changed in an impossibly short time – were, understandably, not happy. Could I, Russ wanted to know, have a quiet word?
On the way home, I asked her what had happened. ‘Mummy. It was brilliant! On the quick change, we all did it in the right order!’ she shouted excitedly. ‘Liesl first, then Friedrich and me last!’ I understood. She had wanted the von Trapp children to be ready for their next entry in age order – which meant she had to be last and had done what she could to slow her dresser down. Exactly the kind of thing that would feel thrilling to a child that age, but completely inappropriate in the circumstances. I had a lot of sympathy for her point of view and so explained gently:
‘They need you to stand still. Otherwise you might be late for the concert scene.’
She didn’t want to be late.
Not only do the children have to behave in a very grown-up way, but they are also catapulted into what is, very much, an adult world. That doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly surrounded by shocking levels of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – at least not when they’re working on
The Sound of Music
. But it does mean that they’re spending a lot of time around adults, going about their business in an adult way. This has its moments. ‘Mummy,’ Dora said seriously, during a morning walk to school, ‘once while we were rehearsing, me and Liesl and Brigitta come in and Uncle Max is supposed to say “We’re in the Salzburg Festival”, but he said the F word. He said “We’re in the F-u-k-i-n-g [
sic
] Festival.” Then we skipped straight to “The Hills are Alive”.’ She was slightly shocked but, mostly, amused. ‘Naughty Uncle Max,’ I replied, only just restraining myself from correcting her spelling. Nothing much out of the ordinary there: Dora had already heard plenty of swear words and showed no inclination to repeat them. But it did get me thinking. Not every show is as upliftingly innocent as
The Sound of Music
and not all chaperones as good, as on–the-ball, funny and compassionate as Russ and his team. What happens to kids who are working on shows or films that they’re not old enough to be allowed to watch themselves? Where there are no other children working with them?
While Dora and her friends were prancing around being cute and Austrian, over in the US, twelve-year-old child star Dakota Fanning was filming
Hounddog
. Her role included portraying the victim in a rape scene. Paul Petersen of A Minor Consideration contends that ‘for a gifted child actor asked to portray a difficult, emotionally loaded scene,
over time
there is NO difference between reality and pretend’. That is, the child may appreciate the difference between acting and reality while she’s acting the scene out, but later on the memories of filming will become jumbled up with the memories of having watched the finished movie, and with the audience reaction to it. Before
Hounddog
was released, despite the director’s insistence
that
the scene was filmed bit by bit rather than in one take, done sensitively, and that the child was wearing a bodysuit and had her parents’ consent, Petersen condemned it. He wrote on A Minor Consideration’s website that it was likely that Fanning would fetch up with ‘memories’ of being raped: memories which would be reinforced by the way people responded to the images of her being violated during the film: ‘The internal workings of a child on the threshold of womanhood who has been raped … and raped for public con sumption … cannot be predicted, nor can her encounters with people exposed to that image be guaranteed to be in any way “uplifting”.’