Authors: Lisa Gee
We also talked about what she wanted to do when she grew up. Interviewers from both
The Jewish News
and
The Jewish Chronicle
had asked her whether she wanted to be an actress when she was older, and we’d discussed what her answer should be. Her first instinct was to say ‘Yes,’ or, ‘But I’m one
now
.’ But we talked about it and I pointed out that she was still only six years old, and she might find out about lots of other things she wanted to do when she was a bit older. I reminded her that only a year or so previously she had been certain that she wanted to be an astronaut (that was when she had been cross over how unfair it is that children aren’t allowed into space).
She listened. Next time someone asked her if she was famous, she wrinkled up her freckled little nose and said ‘no’. And the end of the
Jewish News
interview read, ‘Asked if she wanted to be an actress, Dora insisted: “I don’t know. I’m only six!”’
Maybe I shouldn’t have directed her and should have let them print her first, unconsidered, six-year-old’s response. Even though that would have been more natural, it felt wrong. I wanted to keep her feet on the ground. I don’t know what the healthiest and most robust idea of self is for a six-year-old, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be ‘I’m an actress’. It’s partly about the difference between doing and being. I was perfectly happy for her, even at her young age, to enjoy – and work hard at – her acting and singing and to do it at a professional level. That was an opportunity to stretch her wings and explore how high she could fly. I wasn’t, on the other hand, happy thinking of her – and for her to think of herself – as an actress. That might sound completely contradictory, but it isn’t. She might have been old enough to do a job, but as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t anywhere near old enough to define herself by it. Definitions – even high-status ones – create limits. If you’re an actress, you’re not something else. If you are a person who does some acting, you can do other things as well.
I also wonder whether, unless they’re specifically researching what children think about a particular topic, the national consumed-by-adults media should have direct access to small children. Grown-up performers in the public eye get advice and training in how to cope with the press. They have publicists helping them to manage their image and still, often, can’t. And shouldn’t one of the joys about childhood be – once you’ve ascertained that your school skirt is long enough to cover any holes in your regulation black tights and that Mummy’s used enough hairspray, hairnets and hairpins to prevent your bun unravelling during your ballet exam – freedom from the awareness that there might be such a thing as an ‘image’ to manage? Isn’t that part of what it means to be innocent?
Also, I didn’t want Dora to identify what she was doing now with what she would spend her adult life doing. I come from a family where several people have performed as children and then chosen to go off and do something completely different. And even though, as
Tracy
Lane – Emily’s mum and David Ian’s wife – is fond of saying about newspapers, ‘they’re just tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings’, once you’ve put something down in print, it’s somehow more binding than just saying it. I didn’t want Dora to feel like she’d already made a decision about her adult life. If childhood should be about anything, it should be about possibilities as yet undreamt-of, about a sense that there are things out there to be discovered, a whole world to be explored. I want Dora to feel that the future is an open, uncharted place, not something that’s already mapped out for her. That being in
The Sound of Music
was just one of a whole host of exciting experiences that her life might hold – that although there might be more exciting acting and singing experiences ahead, she might also get just as big a buzz from a whole range of other activities – and I didn’t want her, at the age of six, to rule anything out. Although, believing that there’s some virtue in maintaining a degree of realism, I did point out that she was unlikely ever to make an Olympic sprinter.
A few months later, one of Molly-May’s older twin sisters, Emily, delivered a speech at school, as part of her GCSE coursework. Its title was ‘To Be Or Not To Be?’. Born into a showbusiness family – both her grandmothers run stage schools and both her parents performed as children, though neither does now – at the age of three Emily and her twin Laura watched their cousin on a TV commercial and announced, ‘We want to be in
there
’. Soon, they were. And on the stage at the Palladium in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. Now, Emily isn’t sure whether she wants to continue to act as an adult. ‘If I was guaranteed good regular pay from theatre and television I would possibly be more inclined to try the profession,’ she said. She’s shocked by the statistic that ‘on any given day almost 95% of actors or actresses are out of work’. But ‘the buzz that I get when I am on stage is unlike any other feeling I have ever felt … the adrenaline rush that you feel is better than anything else I have ever experienced … I love knowing that you are making a difference to other people’s
lives.
I believe without music and drama, the world would be a place with no soul.’ There might be other jobs that she finds just as fulfilling, that come without ‘the fickleness of the business, the empty promises, exploitation and false hope of the dramatic world’, that pay the mortgage and fund holidays. On the other hand, ‘I could earn the most money in the world and be the most miserable person. Perhaps sacrificing lifestyle and a good income is worth it to be emotionally, spiritually and totally fulfilled.’
Now in her mid-teens, Emily still has plenty of time to decide. Or to try one path and, if it doesn’t suit, to change course and try another. What’s important is that she understands the implications of making a particular choice. And that’s what I’d like Dora to grow up with: an understanding that it’s fine to choose a career that, in all likelihood, will pay diddly-squat and involve long periods of unemployment, as long as you’re willing to deal with the consequences.
At the time of writing, Dora says that when she grows up she wants to be an actress and – once reassured that she would be unlikely to get blown up if an experiment went disastrously wrong – a scientist. Or a horse-rider. Even though I couldn’t help pointing out that being a horse-rider was probably more dangerous than being a scientist, I’m happy with those three options. They seem like a balanced mix, especially as she seems keen on pursuing them concurrently, and are reasonable aspirations for a child of her age. Only one of the three is probably beyond the bounds of the possible. But there’s some virtue in maintaining a degree of unrealism, too. Especially when you’re under ten.
Meanwhile, the last word on celebrity went, unbeknownst to Dora, to her cousin Millie. One day, shortly after Dora’s stint on the show had finished, we were going over to my sister Nikki’s house for tea. Millie also had a school friend coming to play. In the car on the way home, Nikki overheard Millie telling her friend that Dora would also be there. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘my cousin. She used to be famous.’
On
Sunday, 19 November, Jo sent me an email to say that Dora was ‘deviating from the blocking’, and asking if anyone had come to watch her in the show and had been ‘coaching’ her afterwards. Remembering Jo’s warning about a child she’d had to release from her contract because her mum had been telling her to upstage everyone else, I panicked and sent back a long email saying that no one had been contradicting the director’s instructions, and even if anyone had been, Dora wouldn’t listen to them. Especially if it was me doing the telling which, obviously, I would never have dared to do. I also explained that ‘Dora isn’t the sort of person to do something wrong in order to get a better audience reaction in ANY aspect of her life. She’s very serious about everything she does and always prefers being in the right to being popular, and can feel mortified by her own mistakes.’ Which is true. I asked her about where she’d been on stage and where she thought she ought to have been, and she definitely thought she’d been doing it right. In some cases she thought she’d been the only person getting it right and everyone else had been wrong. Gently I pointed out that as she was the youngest and that Sophie, who was playing Liesl, was a grown-up, maybe, just maybe, everyone else was getting it right and she was making a little, unimportant mistake or two. I also told her that it didn’t matter if she got it a bit wrong sometimes, as she was the youngest, but that she should ask children’s director Frank Thompson where she was going wrong and for help to get it right, because it was important to try.
Jo emailed me back the next day telling me that she thought I was over-reacting: they just wanted to check that there wasn’t anyone else giving Dora contrary advice, no criticism was intended, and Frank would sort it out and everything would be fine. I replied ascribing my hysteria to PMT – which was, mostly, a lie; I suspect I would have (over-)reacted in exactly the same way at any other time of the month – and then called her for more reassurance. She gave me some, reminding me that Dora was six years old and that in the course of a
two-and-a-half-hour
professional show, it’s not actually surprising if a six-year-old makes mistakes and that it can actually increase the ‘aah factor’. I didn’t tell Dora that bit. I didn’t want to give her any ideas.
As the show, the kids and their parents bedded in, everything started to settle down into a regular rhythm. Within a few weeks, we mostly knew what would be happening when, which made having a life marginally more possible: although, as
The Sound of Music
was such fun, I didn’t necessarily want one. I found myself watching the show about once every two weeks. Around the middle of November, I’d discovered www.theatremonkey.com, which not only provides reviews of West End shows, but also features some very useful information about which seats in each theatre are the best value for money, which offer sufficient legroom for people who need it more than I do, and which are restricted view. Here I found out that there are, at the Palladium, standing tickets. Unable to afford the top-price tickets that Jo had organised for us, I took to buying one of those for £20 each time I wanted to watch the show. You stand at the back of the stalls, where you can lean on a brass rail. The view isn’t bad at all – because you’re underneath the royal circle, you miss out on the enormous red banner with the German Imperial Eagle on it, but other than that, you can see just about everything. There’s also seat XX1 that, for health and safety reasons, is never sold. If you get in quickly, you can sit in it once the show starts. But I found myself often choosing to stand, even when no one else had taken the seat. There were often one or two other parents or strangers there to chat with (the most exciting of whom was Sister Mary, the Real Life Nun from the US) and, as quite a fidgety person, I enjoyed the freedom of movement. Also – a bonus – if I needed the loo in the interval, I could beat the queue, even if I waited until the last glorious note of Lesley Garrett’s ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’.
While I was loving being in the audience, Dora was loving her time on stage and beginning – uh-oh – to enjoy signing autographs at the stage door afterwards. Even though I hadn’t wanted her to get any ideas, over the next few weeks she started to get some anyway.
In Noel Streatfeild’s classic
Ballet Shoes
, when Pauline Fossil, the actress of the family, lands her first job (she’s twelve) in the theatre as Alice in
Alice in Wonderland
, she becomes ‘very conceited’. The combination of the applause, the reviews and the fan letters, and the fact that the adult cast members are kind to her and obviously think she is good at her job, all go to her head. She starts expecting her adoptive sisters Petrova (the aspiring mechanic) and Posy (the dancer) to fetch and carry for her at home, and Winifred, her talented but plain understudy, to do the same for her in the dressing room. Eventually Pauline’s behaviour spills over into the rest of the theatre, and the boss of the company makes her the understudy and Winifred Alice for one performance. This upsets her enough that a good cry (privately, in the bathroom at home, naturally), initially about how unfair the whole business is, segues, as she calms down, into a consideration of her own behaviour, which then mends itself. Shirley Temple Black wrote in her autobiography
Child Star
about her own ‘sense of self-importance’ as a child – which affected her behaviour towards others in a way she regrets (and she seems to be a woman with very few regrets): ‘Only an idiot could have lived in the glare of such a central spotlight and been unaware of her prominence.’
2
It is nigh-on impossible for anyone to remain completely unaffected by public adulation, let alone a child.
When Dora was on stage, every time she opened her mouth, a large chunk of the 2,300-strong audience went ‘aaah’. After the show, there would usually be a crowd of people hanging round the
stage
door. A few would ask the children for their autographs, but most would clap and cheer when they came out and tell them how brilliant they were – and in the case of the little ones, how cute. Dora didn’t remain unaffected by public adulation.
It started with her coming home from school and announcing, ‘You can call me Gretl.’
‘Er, no. We will call you Dora because that is your name.’
‘But I want you to call me Gretl.’
‘Well we’re not going to.’
And ‘It doesn’t matter if I get things wrong, because I’m the youngest’. Yes, well, but that’s not quite the attitude …
Her tantrums increased in both frequency and, although I hadn’t thought it physically possible, volume. She was, evidently, receiving some excellent vocal training.
‘I am cute,’ she insisted on one occasion when she had been anything but. I explained that in my eyes, cute is as cute does.
‘But I
am
cute. Everyone says so.’
She started expecting more things to be done for her: ‘I have a dresser at the theatre. Why can’t
you
help me put my school uniform on at home?’