The King's Speech - Mark Logue [31]
Laye herself continued to consult Logue for many years, especially in 1937 when she was faced with the strenuous role of singing a leading role alongside Richard Tauber, the great Austrian tenor, in the operetta Paganini. With Logue’s encouragement, she also began to give the future King singing lessons, which were aimed at improving the fluency of his delivery when he spoke.
Whoever was responsible for the initial introduction, the first meeting between the Duke and Logue almost didn’t come off. Although his wife was keen he should seek professional advice, Bertie was becoming increasingly frustrated with the failure of the various cures he had been persuaded to try – especially those that assumed his stammering had its root in a nervous condition, which seemed to make matters worse rather than better. The Duchess was determined he give Logue a try, however, and, for her sake if nothing else, he eventually succumbed and agreed to an appointment. Those few minutes were to change his life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Diagnosis
Harley Street in 1926
‘Mental: Quite Normal, has an acute nervous tension which has been brought on by the defect . . .’ A card, written in a small, spidery hand and headed ‘His Royal Highness The Duke of York –Appointment Card’, records Logue’s first impressions of the Duke of York after he had climbed the two flights of stairs leading to his consulting room in Harley Street at 3 p.m. on 19 October 1926.
‘Physical [sic]: Well built, with good shoulders but waist line very flabby,’ the card entry continued.
Good chest development, top lung breathing good. Has never used diaphragm or lower lung – this has resulted through non control of solar plexus in nervous tension with consequent episodes of bad speech, depression. Contracts teeth & mouth & mechanically closes throat. Gets chin down & closes throat at times. An extraordinary habit of clipping small words (an, in, on) and saying the first syllable of one word and the last in another clipping the centre and very often hesitancy.
During this first meeting, Logue traced his patient’s problems to the treatment that he had suffered at the hands of both his father and his tutors, who had appeared to have little sympathy for his speech impediment. The Duke mentioned to him the incident when as a child he had been unable to say the word ‘quarter’ and his continuing problems with both ‘king’ and ‘queen’.
‘I can cure you,’ Logue declared at the end of their session, which lasted an hour and a half, ‘but it will need a tremendous effort by you. Without that effort, it can’t be done.’
Logue identified the Duke’s problem, as with many of his patients, to be one of faulty breathing. They agreed on regular consultations. Logue prescribed an hour of concentrated effort every day, made up of breathing exercises of his own invention, gargling regularly with warm water and standing by an open window intoning the vowels one by one, each for fifteen seconds.
Logue insisted, however, that they should meet not at the Duke’s home or another of the royal buildings but at either his practice in Harley Street or his small flat in Bolton Gardens. Despite the difference in rank between them, this meeting should be on equal terms – which meant a relaxed relationship rather than the formal kind that a prince would normally have with a commoner.
As Logue later recalled, ‘He came into my room a slim, quiet man with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of a man upon whom a habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’
Gradually, progress began to be made – as Logue’s case notes, although brief and to the point, reveal: