Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [33]
“‘Semen?’ he asked.
“Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.”
The dividing line between Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, as the neighborhood around the Fitzroy Tavern eventually became known, was Tottenham Court Road, which happened also to be a fault line in the world’s political crust and a part of London of no small interest to New Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté. For years the basement at No. 4 Tottenham had housed the Communist Working Men’s Club, where firebrands of all stripe had spoken, raved, and cajoled. Nearby at No. 30 Charlotte was the equally notorious, though more radical, Epicerie Française, a center of the international anarchist movement, kept under periodic watch by French undercover detectives. Here men seethed at the rift between the poor and the rich that was then so glaring in Britain.
Each morning, as Crippen made his way to work at the sumptuous Munyon’s office in Shaftesbury Avenue, he walked down Tottenham Court Road, past the notorious basement and past the Special Branch and Sûreté detectives who kept watch on the street and its surroundings.
None took the least notice of the little doctor, his eyes large behind his glasses, his feet thrown out to his sides as he walked, oblivious to the forces simmering around him.
CORA CRIPPEN NOW LAUNCHED her bid for fame in the variety halls of Britain. She had one significant advantage: British audiences loved acts from America. She resolved to make her debut in a brief musical of her own creation, in which of course she would play the leading role. She asked Crippen to pay the production costs, and he gladly assented, for the work seemed to improve Cora’s outlook and her behavior toward him, though she remained prone to dramatic swings of mood, as if she believed volatility were as necessary to a diva as a good voice and an expensive dress, the purchase of which Crippen also cheerfully funded.
Cora drafted a libretto for her show but recognized that it needed work. She arranged a meeting with a woman named Adeline Harrison, a music hall actress and part-time journalist who also worked as an adviser helping other performers craft new acts and improve scripts. Crippen may have had something to do with recruiting Harrison, for the two women met at Munyon’s suite of offices on Shaftesbury.
Harrison recalled her first glimpse of Cora. “Presently the green draperies parted and there entered a woman who suggested to me a brilliant, chattering bird of gorgeous plumage. She seemed to overflow the room with her personality. Her bright, dark eyes were twinkling with the joy of life. Her vivacious rounded face was radiant with smiles. She showed her teeth and there was a gleam of gold.”
A photograph from about this time captured Cora in a pose for the stage. It shows her seated and singing from a songbook, beside a basket heaped with flowers of some lush species, possibly orchids or calla lilies, or both. She is on the far side of plump, with thick fingers and almost no neck. Her dress and the many layers underneath make her appear still larger, more weapon than woman. The dress is printed with daggerlike petals. Its billowing shoulders amplify the breadth of her bodice but also highlight the impossible narrowness of her abdomen, corseted perhaps in the famous “Patti” from the Y.C. Corset company, named for Adelina Patti, one of the world’s most beloved sopranos. Cora wears an expression that conveys both confidence and self-satisfaction. Not quite haughty, but vain and smug. Mighty.
Harrison read Cora’s script. There wasn’t much of it—“a few feeble lines of dialogue,” Harrison wrote.
Cora told Harrison she wanted to make the act longer and asked how that might be achieved. Cora wanted it to be more of a freestanding operetta than a simple variety turn.
“I suggested that a little plot might improve matters,” Harrison said.
The resulting show was called The Unknown Quantity and debuted at the Old Marylebone