CELESTIAL DUST

Max Bygraves has died. I couldn’t stand the man. Talk about a jumped-up Butlin’s redcoat. He seemed to me to embody all that was awful about old-fashioned showbiz: reactionary in every way, sentimental in the nauseating sense, exuding complacency, never putting a toe outside the comfort zone, assuming entitlement over every audience.

Born Walter Bygraves, he took the name Max because his impersonation of Max Miller got him noticed. Miller’s was a long shadow in which to labour and I don’t see how Bygraves was ever worthy of the name, let alone of sharing it with the genius Max Wall.

Bygraves vintage 1956

And yet he was phenomenally successful. He had thirty gold discs – imagine that, One Direction – and he appeared in twenty Royal Variety shows. In his time, the London Palladium was the mecca to which all comedians and singers aspired, but for Bygraves it was practically a second home. He first scored there as a support act for Judy Garland, surely the greatest star ever to take the Palladium by storm. But apparently she adored him and got him a long engagement. Ah well; history relates that Garland had terrible judgment when it came to men.

The vein of golden recording that Bygraves tapped was the “singalongamax” gimmick: karaoke avant la lettre. The star would croon a familiar tune in an unhurried manner and tone-deaf listeners were encouraged to join in. You might think it would presage the death of music as an art form. Bygraves turned out dozens of these long-players. In 1974, when the concept album was the new thing, the satirically-inclined John Collis, music editor at Time Out, named Singalongamaxmas as “concept album of the year”.

Singalongamaxmas

How come Bygraves was so successful? I never saw him live and perhaps that is the key and perhaps it is my loss. Many stars thrive on an audience in a way that cannot be replicated on television. If you’ve only ever seen Ken Dodd on the box, for instance, you cannot know what an astonishing and unique act he has. Audiences reel from the theatre utterly exhausted.

In a BBC news tribute, Jimmy Tarbuck (another ghastly specimen in my book) reckoned that there were plenty of stars who could have the audience eating out of their hands within five minutes but that Bygraves uniquely managed to do it simply by strolling onto the stage. And in a curious way, I see that Tarbuck might be onto something.

Dorothy Lamour in her heyday

At the Palladium in November 1989, there was a gathering of old Hollywood in a gentle, nostalgic songfest. Stairway to the Stars comprised in its succulent line-up Jane Russell, Arlene Dahl, Virginia O’Brien, Kathryn Grayson, Van Johnson, Gloria DeHaven, Tony Martin, Lorna Luft, Georges Guétary (who of course sang 'I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise') and, particular treats for us, the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Nelson and Dolores Gray. Each performed numbers with more or less vim and accuracy. But one soared above the rest. Her fishtail sheath was so clinging that someone must have propelled her on from the wings. Her body was stout, her gait frail and her voice in a medley of mostly forgettable numbers was flat and wavering.

Yet she simply took the place by storm. She was Dorothy Lamour. Few who do not cherish the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby Road movies will entertain any inkling of whom I write. I have no psychological qualifications or indeed language with which to analyse what made La Lamour so entrancing. But with all her frailties and lack of conventional talent – did she have any of that, even in her youth? – she was absolutely unmistakeably a 24-carat gold star. None of the others came close. And she – like all but Dahl, DeHaven and Luft – is gone now. So you’ll just have to take my word about her remarkable presence.

Lamour in later life

At the top of the bill for the Royal Variety Show in 1978 was a woman who won and then lost the hearts of the British public, first by being a real working class entertainer, then by leaving her country early in World War II because her new husband, as an Italian citizen, would have been interned had they stayed. Again, she was someone whose appeal escaped me. Strident and bossy and with a voice that seared the eardrums, she seemed to me nearly as repellent as Bygraves.

Yet as soon as she strode onto the stage, Dame Gracie Fields had the audience in the palm of her hand. Her last public appearance at 80, it was mesmerizing. I cannot say what she did or how she did it. Perhaps it’s a chemical reaction.

Gracie's last show

Al Jolson must have had that effect on a live audience, for you look in vain in his surviving movies for what made him so greatly loved. That he was so is undeniable. His widow, Ruby Keeler, once remarked: “my husband was the greatest star in the world … as he never failed to tell me every day”. This is almost certainly the only witty remark that Keeler is ever known to have made, so she must have meant it.

Jolson's blackface act on stage 1916

Danny Kaye too had that galvanising effect on audiences, if contemporary accounts are to be believed. On screen he seems merely strenuous and irritating. Perhaps the distance in an auditorium, the lack of the camera’s unforgiving gaze, eliminates the sense of the wheels going round. Or perhaps it is the adrenalin buzz of performing live. Judy Garland’s charisma is palpable on film and video – you know she must have been sensational on stage. I knew people who saw her and they had no doubt. George M ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ Cohan will have had that elusive magic too. And Callas and Caruso. And Jack Benny and Jackie Gleason. And Piaf and Josephine Baker. And Marie Lloyd and George Robey.

Legendary Garland at Carnegie Hall 1961

Was Bygraves in this sort of class? I don’t think so. The thing about all those stars – Fields and Jolson, Garland and Piaf, Benny and Kaye – is that they were one-offs, that no one was like them. And they seemed fired by some unfakeable vibrancy, no doubt the charge that came from a live audience. Bygraves was just nonchalant and smug, an untalented and unsexy British equivalent of Dean Martin to whom his background, chutzpa and career arc could be compared. But he clearly entranced a live audience. You could posit that anyway the sort of people who would turn out for Bygraves must have been a bunch of idiots. Nevertheless, that still makes him a great big star.