Travelling for Kicks

‘Do chorus girls think?’ asked the headline of a newspaper article that appeared around the time that Constance Tomkinson won a spot in her first chorus line. As one soon discovers from her gloriously comical Les Girls (1956), they not only thought but were experts in navigating the rackety worlds of show business, finance and sex while defending their virtue as energetically as a Samuel Richardson heroine. Not that a spot in a chorus line was Constance’s goal when she started out in show business. Born the daughter of a Canadian Nonconformist minister, she headed to New York in 1933 at the age of 18, hoping to become ‘the Toast of Broadway’. Instead, she joined the mass of unemployed actors turned away from countless casting calls. She and a friend toured churches around the East Coast per forming Biblical dramas for a few months, but then the friend quit, declaring: ‘I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.’

So Constance decided to try her luck in England. Despite its legendary theatre scene, London proved even tougher than New York when it came to making it past the first audition. Growing hungry and desperate, she answered an ad for chorus girls, part of a touring revue known as the Millerettes which was scheduled to depart on a tour of Scandinavia. Blonde, pretty and roughly capable of dancing in sync with the other girls, she got the job. The troupe was, she admits, the Export Model, as there were several more proficient Millerette ensembles busy touring theatres around Britain. Two days into their first engagement in Gothenburg, Sweden, she was rudely reminded of her shortcomings as a dancer. While spinning around in an ersatz Viennese waltz,

with every turn I became shakier. The faces in the audience were swimming, as I reeled stage right towards a gap in the footlights. Suddenly I was in mid-air and sinking fast. With a muffled thud and a faint tinkle of cymbals I landed on the bass drum. The drummer, muttering Swedish curses, untangled me from the cymbals, pulled me off the drum, propped me up with his right hand and went on drumming with his left.

Most of the other Millerettes were working-class girls happy to be employed and dutifully sending their spare pennies home. Although grateful for gifts of cheap jewellery or offers of a free meal from admirers, they guarded their virtue with care, if only to avoid a rapid slide out of the chorus and into a more dubious profession. If a girl wanted to go further and ‘sleep casual’, however, the others reserved judgement: ‘It was a rather-you-than-me-dear attitude,’ Constance recalls. Gothenburg was the beginning and end of the Millerettes’ Scandinavian tour. No other bookings materialized, and the troupe had to extract their fares home from the promoter. As they sat in a café bemoaning their fate, one of the girls had an inspired idea: ‘Why not go to Paris? We could all get jobs there.’ Constance and five other girls exchanged their second-class tickets to England for third-class tickets to Paris. What with missed connections and a dwindling supply of funds, the journey proved more challenging than expected, but a few days later they arrived at the Gare du Nord ‘visibly thinner, our faces smeared with dirt’, but still laughing. The laughter died quickly, though, when it became apparent that jobs were as hard to get in Paris as they had been in England. The group filed down to the stage door of the Folies-Bergère to audition for the chorus maîtresse, Madam Bluebell. The first pair entered and were promptly rejected. So were the second pair. Constance and the last remaining girl, Angela, approached Madam Bluebell, expecting the same reception. ‘I’m afraid not, dear,’ Bluebell told Angela. Turning to go, Constance was startled to be asked, ‘Do you want a job?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered cautiously, to which the reply was, ‘When can you start?’ And so Constance found herself one of Les Girls, appearing on stage with the great Josephine Baker. The show was not the precision machine she’d anticipated:

I learned that every night there seemed to be a crisis at the Folies. There were great dash and élan backstage, but little apparent co-ordination. Many orders were given, but few taken. I expected the organization to fall apart at any moment, but miraculously it held together. I decided it must be the French way.

The French way did not extend to the chorus members. Madam Bluebell hired few French dancers, finding them too inclined to improvisation compared with their more disciplined Northern European sisters. Constance’s ambition to get ahead in show business was balanced by a thirst for self-improvement. She spent her free time conscientiously visiting Paris’s museums and churches. After six months, though, she realized she was now ‘scraping the bottom of the Baedeker barrel’, so she began to look for other opportunities. Luck – and politics – soon presented one. The Basil Beauties, managed by Reginald Basil and considered the glamour girls of the touring revues, came to the Folies for a short run before leaving for a longer tour in Germany. Concerned that the Nazis might make trouble for a Jewish woman in the group, Basil was looking for a replacement. Though not as drop-dead gorgeous as the rest of the Beauties, Constance figured that ‘in Paris, where the supply of English girls was limited’, she might do. Basil was stand-offish at first. His was no ordinary ensemble. ‘They’re not a troupe,’ he warned her. ‘None of that one, two, three, kick, kick, heads, heads sort of thing.’ But Constance conspired with one of Basil’s acquaintances who brought her name up in conversation with Basil and then hastily assured him there was little chance she would deign to join the Beauties. This bit of reverse psychology did the trick, and she was soon bundled aboard the train to Berlin with the rest of the company. It was a bizarre tour. While the nightclubs were still lively, there was an ominous spectre hovering over even the most sophisticated venues.

Once my eyes were sharpened, I registered things that at first had gone unobserved: laughter in the streets or in a Bierkeller suddenly being checked when the shadow of a uniformed, truncheon-swinging thug passed by; the notice in small lettering outside restaurants and hotels – Juden unerwünscht [Jews not wanted].

The Basil Beauties moved on to Rome, where they received a rapturous reception (‘As we moved down the Via Tritone and along the Corso Umberto, men ran alongside the carriages shouting ecstatically, “Bella! Biondina! Fantàstica! Buona!”’). It soon became clear however that Fascism was making it hard to carry on as if nothing had changed since the Roaring Twenties. ‘We knew that the Basil Beauties were deteriorating,’ Tomkinson writes. ‘The stick make-up was worn down to little stumps and there was not an unbroken eyebrow liner.’ In Amsterdam, the earnest margarine manufacturers for whom the Basil Beauties performed and who entertained them afterwards presented a different problem:

They were portly men in their forties, looking as if they had partaken generously of their own commodity. Our hosts were improving their English and their minds. Around me I heard their eager questions and the girls’ gallant efforts to satisfy them. ‘You will explain, please, the Parliamentary system. I do not understand these House of Lords . . . When do you attend the public school in England? . . . How long would a labourer work in your country to earn a loaf of bread?’ Reluctant to disappoint them, the girls spoke with authority on an astonishing range of subjects.

From the Netherlands it was back to Italy as part of a travelling circus alongside a famous family of clowns, then finally to London for a run at the Dorchester Hotel. While in London, Constance took the manuscript of a play she’d written to a West End producer, hoping he might take an interest. Returning a few days later, she was crushed to be shown the reader’s report: ‘This play has no plot. No shape. No characterization. Obviously the first work of this author, if she could be so described.’ ‘You’re a nice little dancer, dear. Stick to dancing,’ said the producer. And so she might have. Les Girls ends as she bids farewell to the Basil Beauties, her future uncertain. In reality, while still per forming at the Dorchester, she’d been introduced to a man who’d made a fortune in toffee and was planning a trip to Africa to assess its prospects as a market. Wanting a secretary to manage his correspondence on the journey, he offered the job to Constance, and she accepted. The tale of the resulting adventure is told in African Follies, her second book, published in 1959. She wrote two more comic memoirs, What a Performance! (1962), about her early days in theatre in America, and Dancing Attendance (1967), about her time as secretary to Ninette de Valois, director of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, before setting aside her writing career to focus on social commitments as the wife of the director of a merchant bank. First excerpted in the Atlantic magazine, Les Girls attracted the attention of the film producer Sol Siegel, who purchased the film rights for £20,000. Once the story was in Hollywood’s hands, however, it took a radical turn and was transformed into a musical with songs by Cole Porter. So little of Constance’s story remained that some joked that she had become the world’s highest-paid author, earning £10,000 a piece for the words Les and Girls. Frustrated by the experience, she insisted her name be kept off the film’s credits. Les Girls, like all of Constance Tomkinson’s books, has a fizz and an effortless charm that win over even the most hard-boiled reader. That easy charm took considerable work. As she once told an inter viewer, ‘I feel I must polish a book within an inch of its life, because if you haven’t anything important to say, as is the case with comedy, you must say it well.’ A quote that belongs on the wall of anyone who aspires to write comedy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Brad Bigelow 2025