‘Wanted. Dancers for Scandinavian tour. Must be experienced tap and ballet,’ read the advertisement in The Stage. Constance Tomkinson was experienced at neither but, as she tells us in her gloriously funny memoir Les Girls, she was broke and desperate. To her astonishment she passed the audition and soon found herself in the chorus line of a company called the Millerettes and on her way to Sweden.
It was 1937, and work of any kind was hard to come by. Constance, the daughter of a Canadian Nonconformist minister, had already tried her luck as an actor after drama school in New York and then had moved on to London, where her only job so far had been in the pantomime chorus of a touring production of Dick Whittington.
There was nothing very high class about the Millerettes but a certain degree of competence was required. Constance didn’t have it but she was up for anything, and one of the delights of the book is the picture of its author as she gamely struggles to obey instructions, at one performance early on in the tour losing her balance and landing in the middle of the orchestra (‘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’). Alas, after Sweden no further bookings were forthcoming, so the girls decided to try their luck in Paris where, after a stint at the Folies-Bergère (then starring the fabulous Josephine Baker), Constance eventually joined a group called the Basil Beauties, touring the European capitals.
The delectable memoir that came out of all this is not only a wryly observed picture of the seedy world of the chorus line and the touching esprit de corps that kept the girls going – even when ‘the stick make-up was worn down to little stumps and there was not an unbroken eyebrow liner’ – but an unusual glimpse of Europe on the eve of the Second World War, with Hitler and Mussolini in power, not long before the curtain finally came down.
A Nova Scotian and the daughter of a clergyman, CONSTANCE TOMKINSON was in her early twenties, eager to see the world, and lacking only the cash to do so. She had studied ballet with Martha Graham in New York City; under the more seemly pretext that she was going to England to study drama, she actually went abroad determined to pay her way by dancing in any chorus that offered. The techniques which she learned from Miss Graham did not altogether prepare her for the requirements of the Folies-Bergère.