Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ attending school while he travelled, and it was during his brief – sometimes just single-day – visits to the schools at each venue that he was struck by how much more worldly-wise other boys of his age appeared to be: ‘Their knowledge of sex, of smoking, of swearing and so on left me completely puzzled and made me feel like a very much younger brother learning the facts of life from his elders.’⁴¹ Although he was delighted to have the opportunity to perform professionally, there was, perhaps, some lingering sense of regret at the life he had been forced to overlook: ‘I led a very confined life, sheltered from ordinary boyhood influences and rigorously shielded by adults themselves from the raw adult world outside the theatre.’⁴²

      He also found himself feeling just a little unsettled when, in the spring of 1939, he came across another juvenile performer, even younger than himself, whose ability to make people laugh caused him to wonder to himself if he might soon have a serious rival to contend with. When Eric Bartholomew went with his mother to the Manchester cinema for his audition before Jack Hylton, he was oblivious to the fact that among the audience, casting an ‘experienced’ eye over the new acts, was Hylton’s thirteen-year-old protégé, Ernie Wise. Wise, however, was extremely impressed by this unknown comic – as, indeed, was everyone else among Hylton’s entourage: ‘So much so that the boys in the band turned round to me and said (only half-joking!), “Bye, then, Ernie. Things won’t be the same with this new lad around, but I dare say we’ll soon get used to him. What are you going to do now?”’⁴³ Eric and Sadie, after receiving the not entirely reassuring news from Hylton that he would ‘let you know’, returned home to Morecambe without discovering just how popular the act had been, but Ernie, now sitting a little less comfortably than before in the darkness of the auditorium, knew exactly what had happened: ‘I had a lot of push in those days … but I have to admit my self-esteem took a bit of a knock from Eric even though we never said a word to each other.’⁴⁴

      For the moment, however, Ernie Wise remained, without much doubt, the country’s pre-eminent child star. He continued to tour with Jack Hylton, and, when war broke out in September and the theatres closed down, he was invited to stay with Hylton and his wife and two daughters at Villa Daheim, the impresario’s country house in Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex. Hylton and his wife had a chauffeur, a German cook, a German maid and a nanny. Arthur Askey was a near-neighbour, as was George Black – another powerful West End impresario. Wise was given pocket money, substantial meals, a generous supply of sweets and was generally treated like one of the family. Surrounded by the self-conscious grandeur of a self-made man, as well as the bright appeal of an upmarket holiday resort that nestled snugly between Bognor Regis and Worthing, Ernie Wise would have been forgiven for wanting to stay as long as possible: ‘For a young lad from East Ardsley’, he recalled, ‘it could have been Hawaii.’⁴⁵ After a while, however, he became homesick, and so, with Hylton’s blessing, he made his way back North to his parents’ new home in Leeds.⁴⁶

      His return only served, in a cruel way, to help him to sever most of the remaining emotional ties that had pulled him back there in the first place. He was shocked to see his father, now showing the physical effects of rheumatoid arthritis, looking so much older, and he was profoundly saddened by the greeting he received from him: ‘Why did you come home?’ his father asked him. ‘You had it made.’⁴⁷ It suddenly seemed a mistake to have left Villa Daheim. Without the prospect of resurrecting the old father–son act, and without any enthusiasm for the odd solo spot in venues he had long since grown out of, he felt, at the age of fourteen, a burden: ‘I was, after all, just another mouth to feed, and hadn’t Mum said often enough to Dad, “When there’s no money in the house, love flies out the window”?’⁴⁸

      After working for a few difficult months as a coalman’s labourer, he was very relieved to receive a telegram from Bryan Michie, inviting him down to the Swansea Empire to join the touring version of Youth Takes a Bow. It was the opportunity – and the excuse – that he had been waiting for. He left immediately, desperate to resume his career in entertainment. He would never go home again.

CHAPTER IV

       Double Act, Single Vision

      It was fate – I happened to pull the Christmas cracker and Ernie was in it.

      ERIC MORECAMBE

      We’re a real Hollywood film, us – all the drama, the comedy.

      ERNIE WISE

      When Eric met Ernie, it was the former who found himself nursing feelings of envy towards the latter. Watching from the shadowy wings of the Swansea Empire, Eric was left in no doubt as to who was now the star of the show: Ernie. It was Ernie, the newcomer, Ernie, whose reputation as ‘The Jack Buchanan of Tomorrow’, ‘The Young Max Miller’ and ‘Britain’s own Mickey Rooney’ had preceded him,¹ Ernie, taller – at that stage – than Eric and, indeed, better paid than Eric, who was now the real star of Youth Takes a Bow. As this supremely self-assured young man glided through his polished act, his immaculate made-to-measure suit accentuating each crisply competent step and gesture, Eric, standing silently to one side with arms tightly folded, could only think to himself: ‘Bighead.’²

      Just two short months ago it had all been very different. After the worryingly long silence that had followed his audition for Jack Hylton in Manchester, Eric – in the company of Sadie, his chaperone – had been invited to join the cast of Youth Takes a Bow as one of Bryan Michie’s Discoveries. He made his debut at the Nottingham Empire, and, on a salary of £5 per week plus travelling expenses, the future seemed bright. He grew rapidly in confidence, attracted a fair number of complimentary notices and won the respect of the other members of the cast. Then, however, the rumours began: Ernie Wise, it was whispered, was about to join the show. Ernie Wise overshadowed them all. They had all heard him on the wireless exchanging comic repartee with the likes of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch; they had all read about his triumphant performances on the West End stage; and they all knew that he was regarded in the business as Jack Hylton’s ‘golden boy’. When, therefore, he bounded on to the train at Crewe, his thick, shiny hair flopping over his forehead, his expensive-looking overcoat flapping loosely as he moved, he became – without any discernible effort on his part – instantly the centre of attention, and Eric, like many of the other boys in the carriage, was more than a little jealous.

      It did not help, of course, that Ernie, almost as soon as he arrived, had taken to calling Eric ‘sonny’; nor did it help that Ernie, at the age of fifteen, was no longer required to go to school; and it certainly did not help that the combination of his greater height, more adult-looking clothes (long trousers, in contrast to Eric’s baggy shorts), superior wage (£2 per week more than Eric’s), fame and freedom from parental interference in his affairs caused him to appear, in Eric’s anxious eyes, a far more attractive proposition to the girls in the company. It must have seemed to Eric as though everything that he had begun to achieve over the past few weeks was now set to be eclipsed in an instant by the presence of this noisy bundle of energy and dreams.

      Eric’s mother, however, knew better. Sadie saw straight through Ernie’s bravado and understood that, underneath, he was actually an insecure and forlorn little boy, far younger emotionally than he seemed, still struggling to repress the sadness he felt over his father’s broken spirit and only just beginning to settle into a peripatetic existence on the road. She observed him, to start with, from a distance, watching admiringly as he took complete responsibility for all of his travel and accommodation arrangements, sent the usual proportion of his weekly wage back home to his parents and, of course, banked the majority of the remainder. For all of his private problems, he never seemed, to the casual spectator, anything less than the very model of a self-reliant young professional, solid СКАЧАТЬ