Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [50]
The third party never arrived, and Belle told Miller, “I am often disappointed that way.”
She never said who the third party was, but Miller “surmised that it was to be Dr. Crippen.”
CRIPPEN SAID, “I NEVER INTERFERED with her movements in any way. She went in and out just as she liked and did what she liked; it was of no interest to me.”
He was not being entirely frank, however. “Of course, I hoped that she would give up this idea of hers at some time”—and by this he meant her idea of one day leaving with Bruce Miller.
Her other grand idea, of becoming a variety star, had been rekindled and now burned as brightly as ever. This time, however, she gave up trying to make her career in London and resolved instead to build a reputation at music halls in outlying towns and villages, known as “twice-nightlies” for the two variety programs performed each evening. “She got an engagement at the Town Hall, Teddington, to sing, and then from time to time she got engagements at music halls,” Crippen said. She performed as a comedienne at a theater in Oxford, where she lasted about a week. She did turns at Camberwell, Balham, and Northampton.
Eventually she made it to the Palace, but not in London. In Swansea. Posters for a show there identified her as Miss B. Elmore and placed her performance between two musical groups, the Southern Belles and the Eclipse Trio.
“She would probably go away for about two weeks and return for about six weeks, but used to earn very little,” Crippen said.
She began dying her hair a golden blond, at a time when dying hair was considered an act of suspect morality. “There was hardly any dyed hair,” wrote W. Macqueen-Pope in his Goodbye Piccadilly. “It was considered ‘fast’ and the sign of prostitution.” He recounted how a novelist, Marie Corelli, in one of her books described the owner of a fine country hotel as having dyed hair. The owner sued and won—even though she had indeed colored her hair. The court awarded only one farthing in damages. “She might have got more,” Macqueen-Pope wrote, “but the dyed hair was most apparent.”
Maintaining Belle’s color took a lot of work. “When her hair was down in the morning one could see the original colour on the part nearest the roots,” Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison observed. Belle applied the bleaching chemicals to her hair every four or five days, and sometimes Crippen helped. “She was very anxious that nobody should ever know that she had any dark hair at all,” he said. “She was a woman who was very particular about her hair. Only the tiniest portions of the hairs at the roots after they began to grow could be seen to be dark.”
At one point Belle’s travels brought her to a well-respected provincial theater in Dudley, the Empire, a theater with a sliding roof, where she wound up on a bill that included a much-loved comedian named George Formby. Another performer, Clarkson Rose, went to see Formby’s act that night and happened also to catch Belle’s performance. “She wasn’t a top-rank artist, but, in her way, not bad—a blowsy, florid type of serio,” meaning a seriocomic, a performer who mixed comedy and drama.
With so many turns a night, before boisterous audiences, it was never difficult to judge which performers the crowd favored. Belle was not one of them. Her singing was neither good enough nor sad enough to charm the crowd, and her comedy elicited only a halfhearted response from those accustomed to the likes of Formby and Dan Leno, one of the most popular comics of the day. She failed even in the halls of London’s impoverished East End, considered one of the lowest tiers in the business. Robert Machray in his 1902 guide to the evening delights of the city, The Night Side of London, wrote, “To fail at even an East End hall must be a terrible business for an artiste. It means, if it means anything, the streets, starvation, death.”
But not for Belle. She had Crippen, and she had his money. She did have one talent, however. She was gregarious and had a knack for making friends quickly. She gave