Material Girl. Louise Kean
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a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’
‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’
‘Research, Make-up.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’
‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eye-shadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.
‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.
‘Where was I?’ he asks.
‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.
‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’
Tristan widens his eyes.
‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.
‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’
‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.
Tristan nods his head theatrically.
‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “Charles Lee uses line with a conventional splendour.” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.
‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.
‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’
‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’
‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’
‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.
‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’
I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.
‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, and which had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a forest but Henry didn’t care. She had large pendulous breasts that sat heavily on her chest, ravaged by little stretch marks where the pendulums began to swing. This was Henry’s favorite spot – he would lay his head on those tears after six or seven minutes of furious drunken lovemaking that inevitably ended shamefully limp. He would weep quietly as she tickled his cheek with strands of her long, black, infested hair.’
‘Yuk,’ I whisper, grimacing.
‘Close your eyes and have some humanity,’ he says to me, as he sweeps a brush across my eyelids. ‘All of the money from The Majestic’s commission was quickly slipping away, spent on cheap sloe gin and night after night with Vanessa, who had got wise to the drunken architect’s feelings and upped her prices. But that’s women for you. And poor Henry was in love, helpless in the face of her inflation. When his pockets were finally empty he began stalking her late into the night, jumping clumsily out from the shadows, tripping over his drunken size twelve feet only to blow her a kiss and run away. Vanessa carried on whoring, Henry carried on behaving erratically, and The Majestic’s construction faltered as more plans were thrown on the fire. Finally, the foreman, frustrated by Henry’s absence from the site for five straight days, called his brother, Charles Lee, to report Henry missing. Henry was found three days later on the floor of an old boarding house in Hoxton, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other, and the original set of plans laying face up on his chest, dusted with blood. A single gunshot to his head had finished him off, or maybe it was Vanessa, or maybe it was The Majestic.’
‘Oh no, how terrible!’ I say, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand.
Tristan removes it and places it on my lap.
‘Wait, it gets worse. Charles Lee wiped the blood from the plans, accepted the commission to finish The Majestic for five times the fee that had already been paid to his dead brother, and reworked them. A strangely sober three-tier theatre was completed on Long Acre in 1892. It still had the curved lines of Henry’s original plan, shaped like a sympathetic woman, but the softer edges had been hardened, to ensure it stayed up when horses trotted past.
‘Unfortunately for the theatre’s investors the shows that had been scheduled to appear at The Majestic had long since found alternate sites, some of them enjoying splendid runs that had already come to an end! The theatre, although completed, stood empty for fifteen months. Then in 1893 Dickie Black and Leonard White of the Black and White Circus enquired whether the large, vacant, sad and lonely building on Long Acre with a flaking painted sign hanging over its curved entrance still had its entertainment licence, and whether it was for sale. The investors had just that week taken the expensive decision to have it demolished and the land sold on, but instead took a very reasonable price, and had none of the trouble of getting rid of the sad old girl.
‘Black and White immediately posted a huge red and gold sign below The Majestic that read, “Coming Soon! Black & White’s Freaks Circus of Passion, Politics, Fairytale and Violence.” Six weeks later they replaced the ‘Coming Soon!’ with a ‘Now Open!’. It became an instant hit with local workers, soldiers in from the docks, drunks and whores and commoners and thieves. Bearded ladies and midgets galloped around the stage nightly, drinking their way through every show, spraying their audience with whiskey and ignoring the fights and the flatulence, laughing and shouting and swearing at the audience and each other. The performances became more and more debauched, full nudity was de rigueur by the time the police moved in one sticky summer night in 1899, closing the act and the theatre down for breaching public decency laws and open acts of pornography.
‘Black and White hotfooted it to Venice rather than face the pornography rap, plus a second and more sinister charge of attempting to breed freaks by mating them. The Majestic stood cold and lonely again through two punishing winters.’
‘No, Tristan,’ I put my hand up. ‘Stop it now. You are making it up. Nobody breeds freaks,’ I say, shaking my finger at him reproachfully.
‘Oh, Make-up, so naïve. They still do it to this day in some of the southern states of