Later, during my professional wanderings through Europe, I could not but contrast the treatment I received in France and Italy with that meted out to me in Germany and Austria. Our allies, the French and Italians, are gentlemen by instinct; kindly, considerate, and courteous. The Germans I found exactly the reverse, and the Austrians are not much better. Nor are either of them above snatching a mean business advantage from an artiste if they get half a chance to do so.
As an example of their churlishness—I shall come to their sharp practice later—I cannot do better than cite a little incident that occurred in Vienna just before the war. I had been given a two months’ engagement at the Apollo Theatre there, and sharing the top of the bill with me was Miss Ethel Levey (now Mrs. Graham-White).
She had never performed there before, and was a trifle nervous. Hers was the turn before mine. She sang her first song, and came off. There was practically dead silence throughout the theatre; she hardly got a single “hand.”
Naturally she was very much upset, but by dint of coaxing her I managed to persuade her to go on and sing her second song—“There’s a girl in Havana.” She sang this first in English, and then in her pretty broken German, which she had specially coached up for the occasion.
Miss Levey is, I need not say, an artiste to her finger-tips, and her singing and acting on this occasion were absolutely faultless. Yet the churlish Viennese would have none of it. There was no applause, or at all events so little as made no odds, and the general tone of the audience was, if not exactly hostile, at least not favourable.
Just try and imagine a London audience at, say, the Empire or the Alhambra, behaving in this fashion to a continental lady artiste of standing and repute on her first appearance! It made me mad. And I made up my mind then and there that they had just got to hear Miss Levey, and not only hear her, but applaud her into the bargain.
To this end I suggested to Mr. Ben Tieber, the manager of the hall, that he should have a sheet put up at the back of the stage with the words of the chorus on it in English and German. This he promised should be done. He also fell in with my suggestion to have the waiters (for on the Continent it is customary for people to dine in the hall) taught the tune and words, and to engage half-a-dozen chorus men, and put them in different parts of the building.
The result was that the next night the song went exceedingly well, and within a week the lilting melody had taken Vienna by storm, and was being sung and whistled in every café, on the streets, in the parks, everywhere in fact. All the same, I can never forgive the churlish Viennese for their first reception of the lady who popularised it there.
My own experience of German manners and customs was a far more serious matter for me. It took place some three years before the war, and when, therefore, our relations with Germany were supposed to be of the best. I had been booked to appear, with my company, at the Winter Gardens, Berlin. In my show was a dwarf, and also a giant. The latter, an American named Bobby Dunlop, was a veritable mountain of flesh, the fattest man in the world. He weighed over forty stone, and as he could not pass his immense bulk through the door of an ordinary railway carriage, he had to be accommodated in the luggage van.
Also he had to be taken from the station to the music-hall on a lorry, drawn by two huge dray-horses, a source of wonderment to the Berlin people, and likewise an excellent advertisement for my show. I remember, too, by the way, that once, when we were performing in London, I had him driven in a similar lorry down the Strand to a tailor’s shop there, where they were advertising for sale thirty shilling suits. Bobby marched in and ordered one.