Full Transcript for Joseph Grimaldi, the First Modern Clown

some other kind of well known story. Then would come the Harlequinade, which, like Comedia de l'arte, used a collection of stock characters that were recognizable to the audience. Harlequin and Columbine were usually the heroes and were devotedly in love with each other, and their antagonist, Pantaloon, schemed to keep them apart. Pantaloon might be Columbine's tyrannical father or a malicious rival for Columbine's affections. Pantaloon often had some kind of servant or side kick who could be known by any number of names, and sometimes was just called clown. 00:07:05 Speaker 2: Part of this production usually took place with the performers wearing these oversized paper mache heads or masks, which would then be removed at a transitional point in the performance. The action often included a lot of physical comedy and slapstick, including literal slapsticks that were primed with gunpowder so they made a very sharp, cracking noise when they were struck as part of the action. These were often really high energy productions, with a lot of acrobatics, dancing, music, and various other spectacles. Ji Sepa trained Joe and John Baptist to be performers in This World from a very early age. Joe took the stage for the first time on April sixteenth, seventeen eighty one, for what his father described as his first bow and tumble. He was not yet three years old. Soon he was working as a child dancer in pantomime productions. This can actually be dangerous times. He played the role of a monkey, with his father holding a chain tied to his waist and sometimes flinging him around by that chain. In one performance, the chain broke and Joe was thrown into the audience. When he was six, Joe fell through a trapdoor and broke his collar bloom because no one had cut eye holes in his mask. By coincidence, this happened during his father's last public performance. He became ill that night, and Giuseppa never returned to the stage. While still a child, Joe Grimaldi started working at two London theaters, Drury Lane and Sadler's Wells, both of which were established in the seventeenth century. Both theaters performed some similar material, but dury Lane catered to a somewhat more affluent audience than Sadler's Wells did. The Jury Lane season went from September to late spring, and then Sadler's Wells ran from mid April to mid October. So during the weeks when these two seasons overlapped, Joe often performed at both theaters in one night, either taking a Hackney coach or running from one to the other. He also went to school for a time at a boarding school in Putney called Mister Ford's Academy, which was for performers' children. 00:09:14 Speaker 1: In seventeen eighty eight, Joe's father died. We also mentioned that Jisseppe could be irrational. For years, he had been so preoccupied over the idea that he was going to die on the first Friday of the month, that he spent each first Friday locked alone in a room staring at the clock. He was also terrified of being buried alive and left instructions to prevent that from happening, including waiting forty eight hours to bury him after his death and applying lit candles to his feet. His will also specified that his oldest daughter Mary had to cut off his head before he was buried. She paid a surgeon to do this and put her hand on the knife so that she could say that she had fulfilled this order and had done it. Giuseppa's death left Joe, who was only nine years old, as the family's primary breadwinner, so this is a terrible responsibility for a little boy, and then to make things worse without the looming influence of his father, who a lot of people were scared of. Theater managers he worked for cut his pay. Since Joe was making less money, and they also no longer had any income from Giuseppa, the family couldn't afford to live in their home anymore. They started lodging with a furrier in an area that was described as a slum. While Giuseppa had been paving the way for both of his sons to follow him on stage. Joe's brother, John Baptist, decided to go in his own direction. At the age of eight, he used a false identity to get a job as a cabin boy on a ship, and he disappeared from his family's life for the next sixteen years. 00:10:51 Speaker 2: We'll have more about this after a sponsor break. Joe Grimaldi spent most of his childhood and teens working, gradually being cast in bigger and better roles and learning set design while he was on the job. In seventeen ninety one, the dury Lane Theater was demolished and Grimaldy did most of his performing at the Haymarket Theater instead. When dury Lane reopened three years later, it was the largest theater in Europe, but it stopped doing Christmas pantomimes in seventeen ninety eight, which meant Grimaldy had to find other work than what he was usually doing. During those months, he also started expanding his skills as a performer, including doing more sword play and acrobatics. When he was about seventeen, Grimaldy met Maria Hughes, daughter of Richard Hughes, who was one of the proprietors of the Saddlers Wells Theater. Maria had become friends with Joe's mother, Rebecca, who was a dancer at the theater and also spent a lot of time sewing in the dressing rooms. After a three year courtship, Joe and Maria got married on May eleventh, seventeen ninety nine. It's probably possible that she said this Mariah, because a lot of folks back then did, but we don't really know. As Grimaldi had progressed in his career, he'd gotten his share of detractors. Some of this was because of his father's reputation and some was because of the trajectory of his own work. Joe also didn't get along with Jean Baptiste Dubois, who was a very prominent pantomime performer and had taken on some of Joseppa Grimaldi's roles after his death. Joe had spent some time working with Dubois, and a lot of people thought that Joe had learned all of his techniques from the older performer. That's something Joe seems to have resented and continually denied.

The day after Richard Hughes gave his permission for his daughter Rebecca to marry Joe. Somebody came to the theater to warn him that Joe Grimaldi had designs on her. Almost twenty years into his career, Grimaldi made his stage debut in the role of clown in the spring of eighteen hundred. This was in a production of Peter Wilkins or Harlequin in the Flying World, adapted from Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock. 00:13:17 Speaker 1: This is a story about a Cornish castaway who winds up on an island where people can fly. This staging had two actors in each of the harlequinad roles. The two clowns were Joe Grimaldi and his rival Jean Baptiste du Bois, as Guzzle, the drinking clown and Gobble, the eating clown. On stage, they had something of a competition to see who could drink the most beer or eat the most sausages. 00:13:43 Speaker 2: While Grimaldy had occasionally performed clown roles as an understudy or a stand in before this, this was the first time that he had actually been cast in the role of clown, and this production made some departures from the way clown had been portrayed. Stretching back to the beginning of British pantomime, clown had usually been kind of an unsophisticated bumpkin with ruddy makeup and rustic, baggy clothes, but theater manager Charles Dipden wanted to change things up. Grimaldi and Dubois were both in dramatically colorful, flamboyant costumes, and Grimaldy had gone to great links to completely change the style of his makeup. He tinkered with this a lot and revised it over time. All the exposed skin on his face and neck were totally covered in white grease paint, and he had a big, bright red smile and a curving red triangle on each cheek. He also exaggerated his eyebrows and made his hair really big and bushy, so basically it was the white face clown makeup that still exists today. There was a near disaster during this performance when Divden realized a trapdoor was open on stage and fell through it while rushing out to close it. O yere Wise, it was an enormous success, particularly for Joe. He seemed to embody the idea of clown. He and Dubois continued to be cast together after this, sometimes playing off each other as rivals, including Harlequin, Benedict or the ghost of Mother Shipton. Sadly, Grimaldi's life took a tragic turn just a few months later. His wife Maria died giving birth to their daughter on October eighteenth, eighteen hundred, and the baby died as well. Joe had been at rehearsal when Maria went into labor, and although somebody was sent to get him, she had died by the time he got home. Maria's pregnancy had been difficult, and deaths during childbirth at this time were just extremely common. She had actually left burial instructions and a poem to be inscribed on her headstone. Her last words were reportedly poor Joe. 00:15:53 Speaker 1: Joe was devastated. Although he threw himself into his work to distract himself from his grief, he was also prone to disappearing, sometimes

for days at a time, and people would find him wandering inconsolably. During this time, he accidentally shot himself in the foot during a performance and had to recuperate in bed for five weeks. His mother was so concerned about his well being that she hired Mary Bristow, who was in the chorus at Drury Lane to look after him while he recovered from this injury. They wound up falling in love and they got married in eighteen oh two. They had a son on November twenty first of that year, who they named Joseph Samuel William Grimaldy. They called him JS. By eighteen oh two, Jean Baptiste Dubois had left Sadler's Wells Theater and Grimaldy was being called King of Clowns. Grimaldi had really established all of the hallmarks of his signature clown character, with its slap in motley or grease paint makeup and party colored costume. He became so associated with the idea of clown that soon all Harlequanod clowns were being called Joey. He also had a couple of catchphrases, here we are again and shall I, which he said with a mischievous or even sinister intonation. I have obviously never seen one of his performances, but I can just imagine this clown and like whiteface clown makeup going, shall I? 00:17:23 Speaker 2: Uh. This was not always what he wore, though. Another stock character in British pantomime was the so called Noble Savage, who was usually a black or indigenous character played by a white actor. Grimaldi's black face performances included Friday and Robinson, Crusoe and Canto in La Peruse or The Desolate Island. In eighteen oh two, Grimaldi also joined the Dreary Lane Theatrical Fund, which actors could pay into in order to receive a pension when they retired. He was only able to do this thanks to having done a number of small speaking roles over the years, because this was not open to people who only did pantomime. In eighteen oh three, England declared war on France as the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Although there have been periods when war just put an end to theatrical productions, in this case, theater became even more popular as a relief from the stresses of wartime. Not long after, Joe Grimaldi very briefly reunited with his brother, John Baptist after sixteen years. John showed up by surprise at the theater one night, but then disappeared when Joe went into his dressing room to get ready. Joe looked for his brother for about a month, and it is really not clear what happened to him. By this point, most people in their lives had thought that John was dead, so people wondered if Joe had hallucinated the entire thing. During these same years, Grimaldi moved around a bit as a performer as Sadler's Wells closed down for refurbishment, and he also had a falling out with management at Jury Lane. He started performing at theaters outside of London, including going to Ireland. Then in eighteen oh six he made his debut at Covent Garden Theater, which was seen as one of the most prestigious theaters in England. He was cast as orson the wild Man

in Valentine and orson a role that had previously been associated with his old sort of nemesis, Jean Baptiste Dubois. The role of Valentine was played by Charles Farley, who had also played Valentine opposite Dubois. Farley knew that Grimaldi would be apprehensive about stepping into Dubois's shoes in this role, given their history, but he also thought Grimaldi had the potential to turn it into something really incredible, and he did. In this play, Valentine meets the wild Man while he's out hunting for meat and attacks him, and then the wild man fights back in just an astoundingly vigorous series of leaps. He's also throwing rocks and swinging a club. This role involved so much just explosive physicality, and Grimaldy played it with such intensity that he was continually pushing his own limits, and he repeatedly hurt himself. People described him sobbing in a small room backstage in between his on stage performances. Grimaldy's best known performance started in eighteen oh six with Harlequin and Mother Goose or the Golden Egg. This was a Christmas pantomime by Thomas Dibden that ran for ninety six performances, and it was extremely successful and well reviewed. In eighteen oh seven, The Monthly Mirror wrote, quote, Grimaldy is the principal cause of crowded lobbies and scarcely standing room. Many of our second and third rate tragedians would give their ears to meet with half the plaudits which are every night conferred on Grimaldi for his inimitable exertions. His clown has not been equalled. We never expect to see it surpassed. He has arrived at an acme of all clownery, but Grimaldy. Apparently he hated his own performance in Mother Goose and experienced a lot of depression and self doubt about it. A series of disasters struck the London theater world around this time. On October fifteenth, eighteen oh seven, eighteen people died in a stampede at Sadler's Wells, apparently after somebody yelled fight and people mistook it for someone shouting fire. Grimaldi had performed earlier in the night and had already gone home. Sadler's Wells had to close for the season, and since alcohol had played a part in this panic, it was allowed to reopen the following year, only under the condition that it no longer sell wine. 00:21:41 Speaker 1: On September twentieth, eighteen oh eight, the Covent Garden Theater caught fire, possibly due to a spark from a stage firearm that had smoldered in a wall without anyone noticing. Twenty three people died, including several firefighters who were killed when the ceiling collapsed. The theater and all of its contents and scenery were destroyed, including an organ belonging to George Frederick Handel. And then on February twenty fourth, eighteen oh nine, the Dreary Lane Theater also burned. There was no performance that night, and the fire was believed to have spread from a fireplace in an unattended room. 00:22:19 Speaker 2: These theaters did eventually reopen, which we'll get to you after a sponsor break. When the Covent Garden Theater reopened in eighteen oh nine, it staged a revival of its previously successful Mother Goose, but it also raised its prices to help cover the cost of rebuilding. This price hike did not go over well. It led to more than two months of fighting and rioting as audiences called for op or old prices. As each of the theaters rebuilt and reopened, they he increasingly competed with one another and tried out new styles of productions. Grimaldy's performances started to become more satirical. He was nicknamed Hogarth in action. He also started performing a lot more songs, many of them written by Thomas Dibden and featuring nonsensical lyrics, and he was famous and became friends with people like George Gordon Lord Byron. In Byron's words, he had quote great and unbounded satisfaction in becoming acquainted with a man of such rare and profound talents. Byron left England in the late eighteen teens, though, and that left a hole in Grimaldy's off stage life. Grimaldy was also really starting to struggle, both physically and financially. His clown performances were just so athletic and vigorous, and beyond the ongoing demands on his body, he experienced the number of injuries. As one newspaper described it in eighteen thirteen, quote is absolutely surprised that any human head or hide can resist the rough trials which he volunteers. Serious tumbles from serious heights, innumerable kicks, and incessant beatings come on him as matters of common occurrence, and leave him every night, fresh and free for the next night's flagellation. Over time, he did start taking some parts that leaned more toward acting than clowning, But while he was still working steadily, including in some well paying roles, his wife Mary seems to have had some really expensive tastes, and he also lost some money to unscrupulous managers. In eighteen twelve, he almost went bankrupt. Although Grimaldi had been performing in multiple venues for most of his career, sometimes simultaneously. This seems to have become an issue for some of the theater managers. In the eighteen teens, he fell out with longtime collaborator Charles Dibden after Dibden denied his request for time off to perform at another Grimaldi had also become chief judge and treasurer of the Saddler's Wells Court of Rectitude, which enforced the theatre's code of conduct for its performers. Apparently, Dipden thought Grimaldy was way too lenient in this role. This all came to a head with a salary dispute in eighteen sixteen, and Grimaldy left the theater and went on tour. About two years later, Richard Hughes's widow, Lucy, who had become majority shareholder in the theater after Richard's death, convinced Grimaldi to return, and Grimaldy actually bought a small stake in the theater as part of that deal. This was after he had finished a tour of Scotland, Manchester and Liverpool, during which he had repeatedly been injured, including one injury that temporarily left him unable to walk. 00:25:49 Speaker 1:

His first appearance back at Sadler's Wells was not a success. Though. He played grimalda cat in an Easter pantomime called Marquis de Carabas or Puss in Boots, and he wound up being booed off the stage. This may have been in part due to an extemporaneous gag in which he ate a prop mouse, which the audience did not like at all. In eighteen twenty, he played the wife of Baron Pompazini in Harlequin and Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper. At this point, the pantomime dame or drag pantomime performance was still fairly new. The first recorded example was in the eighteen oh six Mother Goose at Covent Garden. 00:26:31 Speaker 2: That might not sound like it was that new, because like fourteen years passed between eighteen oh six and eighteen twenty, but like these seasons ran for a long time, so there had not been that many people performing a role in drag by that point. Uh that same year, though, Grimaldi once again left Sadler's Wells, this time after a dispute with management and his years as a performer were just really really affecting him physically. He started having to cut his rehearsal periods or even runs of shows short because he just wasn't well enough to continue. In May of eighteen twenty one, he collapsed after a performance and a doctor told him he was suffering from premature old age. In eighteen twenty two, he wound up handing over one of his roles to his son JS when he couldn't complete the run himself. Most sources cite his years of performing as the cause of his illnesses and disabilities, but it also just seems like there might have been some kind of progressive muscular or skeletal condition involved, possibly a digestive disorder as well. 00:27:35 Speaker 1: Grimaldy mostly retired from the stage in eighteen twenty three and started overseeing the pantomimes and clowns at Covent Garden. He occasionally did cameos on stage, and his last public performance was at Drury Lane in June of eighteen twenty five. Joe and Mary Grimaldy lived mostly on charity starting in eighteen twenty eight, and on June twenty seventh of that year, a benefit performance was held in Grimaldi's honor. Although he didn't do any clowning during that he did give a speech written by journalist Thomas Hood, in which he said, quote, I can no longer wear the motley. Four years ago I jumped my last jumped, filched my last custard, and ate my last sausage. I cannot describe the pleasure I felt on once more assuming my cap and bells tonight, that dress in which I have so often been made happy in your applause. And as I stripped them off, I fancied that they seemed to cleave to me. 00:28:32 Speaker 2: I am not so rich a man as I was when I was basking in your favor formerly. For then I had always a foul in one pocket and a sauce for it in the other. I thank you for the benevolence which has brought you here to assist your old and faithful servant in his premature decline. Eight and forty years have not yet passed over my head, and I am sinking fast. I now stand worse on my legs than I used to do on my head. But I suppose I am paying the penalty of the course I pursued all my life. My desire and anxiety to merit your favor has excited me to more exertion than my constitution could bear, and like vaulting ambition, I have overleaped myself. 00:29:16 Speaker 1: Joe seemed dazed by the applause that he got after he finished this speech, and a crowd followed his coach all the way back to his home. Once he got out, he bowed to that crowd from the steps. Grimaldi's son JS died on December eleventh, eighteen thirty two, in what was described as a sudden illness. This was likely alcohol related. Joe had really been trying to train JS as his theatrical successor, including having started doing father and son performances in the eighteen teens, but over time JAS had become increasingly estranged from his parents. It really can't have been an easy position for him to have been in. Joe was really encouraging JS toward a career on stage, but JS could just never really get out of his father's shadow. Joe's wife, Mary had a stroke not long before the death of their son, and sometime after that she and Joe both attempted suicide, which they both survived. Mary died in eighteen thirty four. 00:30:19 Speaker 2: Joseph Grimaldi died on May thirty first, eighteen thirty seven. The coroner described his cause of death as died by the visitation of God. By this point, theatrical tastes had really started changing, and Grimaldi's style of pantomime and clowning was falling out of fashion. Some of the obituaries were dismissive or even insulting, like his death notice in Figaro read in part quote, he certainly could cram more sausages down his throat and make uglier faces than any man alive. But as he had for so long rendered himself unfit to do anything of this kind in public, we cannot look upon his death as a national calamity harsh In the last years of his life, Grimaldy had been working on an autobiography. It was mostly a collection of notes when he took it to Thomas Edgerton Wilkes to try to get help shaping it into an actual book, but Grimaldy died before Wilkes could finish the project. Wilkes sold the manuscript to publisher Richard Bentley, who asked Charles Dickens to edit it. Dickens had seen some of Grimaldy's performances when he was a child. Really, a lot of people had. He was an incredibly popular performer. Dickens sketches by Boss, had this to say about pantomimes in general. Quote, before we plunge headlong into this paper, let us at once confess to a fondness for pantomimes, to a gentle sympathy with clowns and pantaloons, to an unqualified admiration of harlequins and columbines, to a chaste delight in every action of their brief existence, varied in many colored as those actions are and inconsistent that they occasionally be with those rigid and formal rules of propriety which regulate the proceedings of meaner and less comprehensive minds. But passages that specifically mentioned Garibaldi are not

as flattering, and Dickens wasn't impressed with the manuscript at all. After reading it, he said to Bentley, quote, I have thought the matter over and looked it over too. It is very badly done, and so redolent of twaddle that I fear I cannot take it up on any conditions. But he did take it up. Dickens rewrote Grimaldi's first person notes as a third person narrative that really reads a lot more like a Charles Dickens novel than any autobiography or memoir. The original notes seem to be lost at this point, so we don't really know how they compare to Dickens's finished product. Dickens also did this work very quickly, dictating it to his father John. It was published in eighteen thirty eight as Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldy, with illustrations by George Crookshank. Something this book really select is the idea that Grimaldy was full of energy and made people laugh endlessly with his clowning and comedy, but that inwardly he was depressed and had a life full of tragedy. This was something that Grimaldy himself had alluded to. He liked to say, quote, I make you laugh at night, but I am grim all day. Some people had also called his father grim all day, but for somewhat different reasons. But the memoir really emphasizes this dichotomy, continually pairing Grimaldy's success with his tragedies and the joy that he brought audiences with his own depression and melancholy. So, for example, after describing how Grimaldy was badly injured when a platform fell on him, on the very same day that he met his first wife, Maria Hughes. The autobiography reads quote, it is singular enough that throughout the whole of Grimaldy's existence, which was a checkered one, enough, even at those years when other chills and are kept in the cradle or the nursery, there always seems some odd connection between his good and bad fortune. No great pleasure appeared to come to him unaccompanied by some accident or mischance. He mentions the fact more than once and lays great stress upon it. In nineteen eighty nine, a blue plaque historical marker was installed at the site where Grimaldy lived from eighteen eighteen to eighteen twenty eight, and his burial site, at what was formerly the burial ground of Saint James's is now Joseph Grimaldi Park. His grave is still there in a little fence decorated with a comedy tragedy theatrical masks. There is also a clown church service honoring Grimaldi every year the first Sunday in February at Holy Trinity in Dalston, London. This was originally held at the church where Grimaldi was buried, but it was later moved and that church has since been demolished. At it's Joseph Grimaldy have a little bit of listener mail. 00:35:06 Speaker 1: Fantastic. 00:35:07 Speaker 2: This is from Samantha and it's about an episode. This has been out for a while, our Packard versus Packard episode. I don't actually I should have looked up when that came out. I did not, so, Samantha, says Hollia Tracy. Hello, just wanted to give you an update on previous podcast subject Elizabeth Packard. There was a mental health facility here in Springfield, Illinois that was named after the doctor who abused her, doctor McFarland. There was a strong push to rename it and that finally happened. It is now named after Elizabeth in recognition of her being the true hero for mental health with her activism following her release. I'd also suggest maybe throwing in the nineteen oh eight Springfield Race Riot as maybe an impossible episode edition, as it had direct ties to Lincoln and also directly led to the founding of the NAACP. I'm also attaching photos of my pets. Mike Cat's name is Midna and my dog's name is Navi. Yes, we are a legend of Zelda fans haha, appreciate all you and your team do. Samantha, Thank you Samantha for these pictures. I, as also a fan of Zelda, did not need the pronunciation notes that you very helpfully included about how to say their names. I'm not knocking the like, I'm always happy to see the pronunciation notes, but I immediately was like, Midna, yea, these are so cute. Oh my goodness, a kitty cat, a black kitty cat, lion in front of a in front of a lap, and a puppy dog. Thank you so much for this note. I had I had not heard anything about this renaming of this mental health facility, so thank you so much. If you would like to send us a note, we're a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're also on social media had Missed in History Us, where you'll find our Facebook and our Pinterest and our Instagram and that thing that used to be Twitter that is now called x I guess. You can also subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.