Some Sunny Day. Dame Lynn Vera

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      I don’t know whether it was cheek, candour or lack of being able to see where my proper future lay, but I seem to have told the writer of that Echo article that what I really wanted to do was to go into films. It was true. I had actually worked in a film studio even before I did my first broadcast with Joe Loss. Trivia fans might like to look out for a 1935 film called A Fire has been Arranged, starring Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen—the famed comedy duo—and actor Alastair Sim, and provided you don’t blink at the crucial moment you might spot me in a crowd scene. It all came about because another act appearing with me at a club in Woolwich one night said they did some occasional film extra work, and why didn’t I try it—it might be a way of getting my nose into something new. I was given the address of an agent and not long afterwards I went along and put my name on the books. When they asked me what I could do, I said I was a singer.

      ‘What else? Can you ride a horse?’

      ‘Yes.’ (I couldn’t.)

      ‘Can you play tennis?’

      ‘Yes.’ (I was a lousy, if keen, tennis player.)

      I said yes to everything, because I was convinced they’d never send for me. And of course they did, and I had to go to Twickenham, not, as it happened, to ride horses and play tennis and sing, but to wander about those terrible front sets at the very generous rate of one pound a day. For this infinitesimal part I made myself a whole outfit in grey flannel, including a big cape with a red lining, and a little grey hat. When the film came to the local cinema I just had to go and see it, and Mum came with me. I caught a glimpse of myself wandering by in a street scene, and that was it—my first and only piece of film extra work, but it had been enough, obviously, to whet my appetite. That I got the chance later to star in three films had nothing to do with that little episode, but arose out of my real career as a singer.

      This crowd work led, indirectly, to another strange little episode. At the top end of Charing Cross Road there was an Express Dairy Tea Room, where I used to go after I’d been the rounds of the publishers’ offices. It was used a lot by theatrical and musical pros, and I was sitting over a cup of coffee there one day when a tall, thin young man struck up a conversation with me. It emerged that he was out of work, and on the strength of my recent experience in the Flanagan and Allen film, I told him he ought to try the agencies to see if there was anything going as a film extra. He thanked me and said he would. It turned out years later that I’d been talking to Cardew Robinson, the comedian and actor who became famous as ‘Cardew the Cad’. (Many years later he was in Carry On Up the Khyber and Last of the Summer Wine.)

      I appeared briefly in one other film during this time. It was in the great days of the ‘short’, a film of anything between five and fifteen minutes, which formed part of that buffer between the second feature and the big picture. The newsreel, the Disney cartoon, the travel film, the interval with the icecreams and, in big cinemas, the organist who rose out of the floor—some, or all of these, would give the audience a chance to go to the loo and find their seats again before Clark Gable or Errol Flynn captivated them for the next hour and a half. One of a series of six ‘British Lion Varieties’—the type of short that went into that slot—was by the Joe Loss band, and I sang one of the numbers, ‘Love is Like a Cigarette’. I was hardly a film star, but it was an improvement on a fleeting glimpse of me in a crowd scene.

      For a time I was destined to be heard rather than seen. Although I did all the Casani Club radio work with Charlie Kunz, I was never one of the regular artists at the club itself. From my point of view this was a very good arrangement, because it meant that I got the cream of the work without having to cope with those gruelling club hours, which force entertainers to become nocturnal animals and live their lives upside down, so to speak. I would do Saturday-night broadcasts with Charlie, and all his overseas programmes. Not only that: being the kind and considerate man that he was, he also used to take me on his Sunday concerts—not because he needed anyone to help him with his act, for he was enormously popular, but just to give me an extra few quid and a little more exposure and experience.

      In my dress and mannerisms I must have been completely unsophisticated still, but musically he respected me, and from the start he gave me complete freedom of choice over what I sang. By that I mean he never pressed songs on me or insisted that I sang any particular number, which really was a lot of rope to give a girl of eighteen. Obviously he had to approve my choices, but that was the only control he imposed. I would go round the Denmark Street publishers, as I had been doing for years, and make my own selection from what was offered me. Then, no matter what publisher it had come from, Wally Ridley, in his helpful encouraging way, would find the key for me and rehearse me in it. Since, as I said before, for radio work and even for some work in front of live audiences, it was the done thing to have the song sheet in front of you, I had none of the old nightmare of learning new songs, and could concentrate on presenting them properly. It also meant that we didn’t have to prepare too far ahead, and very often one week’s find would be in the following week’s broadcast. Once Charlie had approved my choice, it would be given to one of his music arrangers, usually Art Strauss, and that would be it. If you could assure the publishers in advance that you would be able to sing the song over the air not fewer than three times, they would often undertake to pay for the arrangement themselves.

      That was perfectly fair and above board. But this was also the golden age of ‘plug money’, the undisguised backhander from a publisher’s plugger to a bandleader or a singer in exchange for an undertaking to perform a given song over the air. Some bandleaders made a lot of money in this way, and some vocalists, too, did quite well out of it. But apart from the ethics of the thing, it always struck me as a very dangerous game to play. The risk of being stuck with an unsuitable number appeared to me to far outweigh the short-term benefit of a tax-free fiver. A singer should be grateful for the occasional right song when it comes along, for it’ll do her more good than any amount of under-the-counter subsidy. I was the target of this sort of approach, of course, because as soon as anyone started broadcasting they’d be sent stacks of music, and one or two people left you in no doubt that there’d be a little something for you in an envelope if you just happened to choose the piece they were working on. But it quickly became obvious that I had very clear ideas of what lay within my emotional and technical range, and wouldn’t be diverted from them, and after that I was left alone.

      It was at this period—on the edge of big things, as it were—that I realized that the entertainment business could bring conflicting emotions. One day, going up to the West End on the bus on the way to do a broadcast, with my cloth coat over my long dress and my song copies rolled up under my arm, I’d be assailed by two contradictory feelings at once. I’d be so nervous that I would find myself wishing that something—anything—would happen to the bus to hold it up so that I wouldn’t have to go. Why have I let myself in for all this? I’d ask myself as we rattled down the East India Dock Road. At the same time I used to get a little smug glow out of looking at the other passengers and thinking, Wouldn’t all you lot be surprised to know that this young lady sitting so quietly in the middle of you was on her way to do a broadcast?

      Within a few weeks of starting to broadcast with Charlie Kunz I was also making records with the Casani Club Band. The first one was ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, a very pretty Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields song from a 1935 film called Every Night at Eight. It’s extremely satisfying to know that not only was it popular at that time, but it went on being popular and became a standard. It wasn’t a hit for me particularly, but at least it meant I could rely on my nose for a good song. That wasn’t my first record, though. Right at the start of 1935 I’d gone into a private studio with Howard Baker’s band and recorded a song called ‘Home’. It was on the label of Teledisk, a firm which specialized in making records for individuals—a bandleader might have one of his own broadcasts recorded, СКАЧАТЬ