The Girl from the Savoy (38 page)

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The Girl from The Savoy

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HAZEL GAYNOR
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Girl Who Came Home
and
A Memory of Violets.
She received the 2015 Romantic Novelists' Association Historical Romantic Novel of the Year award for
The Girl Who Came Home.
Hazel lives in Ireland with her husband and two children.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
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.

O
NE OF THE GREAT JOYS
of writing historical fiction is discovering lost stories and forgotten voices from the past and breathing new life into them through my imagination and words. In researching
The Girl from The Savoy
, I had so much fun watching old Pathé newsreels of chorus-girl rehearsals and London in the 1920s, and listening to scratchy gramophone recordings. There is something so magical about the way people dressed, spoke, sang, and conducted themselves at that time. (I also developed an alarming obsession with hats—why don't we wear them anymore?!) My research journey also took me to the incredible collection at the V&A Museum Theater Archives in London, where I scoured the scrapbooks and memoirs of the great theatrical producers and actresses of the era. The glamour—and the clamor for entertainment—at that time was palpable in everything I read. I couldn't wait to start writing.

As with my previous novels, I have drawn from my research, building on the historical facts, the important issues, and the outstanding personalities of the era to create my own characters and to tell the story of my imagining. All my leading characters are entirely fictitious—with the exception of Alice Delysia, a highly respected French actress and star of the era (although there is no record of her staying at The Savoy, nor of her having a rather unpleasant American manager).

In creating Dolly, I drew from the many accounts I read of young girls who longed for more and who aspired to dance on the London stage. These ordinary girls had been thrown into the most extraordinary experiences during the war and, for many, the expectation to return to the domestic subservience of the prewar years was almost impossible. After the fear and desolation of war, is it any wonder they wanted to laugh and sing, dance and dazzle? These young girls and women who flocked to the theater night after night were known as gallery girls—ordinary working-class girls and women who lived for their trips to the theater to watch their favorite stars perform and to forget about their troubles at home. Many newspaper reports from the time capture the level of hysteria the gallery girls created, some of which is included in the quote at the start of Act II: “There is a gallery first-nighter—a girl or woman with a shrill treble—who most disconcertingly persists in screaming to actors and actresses, good, bad, and indifferent, ‘You're marvelous! You're marvelous!'” Other press reports I read refer to the audience “yelling themselves hoarse and refusing to let the curtain go down.” These girls really did queue for hours at the stage door, and they really did lose shoes as they ran to get inside to get the best position at the front of the gallery. We might think that the red carpet movie premiere scenes of today, with screaming fans desperate for a glance of their favorite star, is a very modern thing, but I suspect that the gallery-ites of the 1920s would outscream us all.

As for Dolly's progression from working girl to the chorus and beyond, again this was very much based in fact. The Gaiety Girls and Cochran's Young Ladies encapsulated most working-class girls' dreams. I read many accounts of young girls auditioning for a part in these respectable chorus lines. I read of girls being plucked from the obscurity of the second line and brought out to shine, or stepping into a part at the last minute to replace someone struck down with a dose of laryngitis. As Binnie Hale says in her scrapbook, “The chorus teaches you stage presence, how to face the music, so to speak. You learn singing, then dancing. Sometimes get a line to speak. This leads to bigger things. You are always in the eye of the management.” Producers like C. B. Cochran (known as Britain's Greatest Showman and the most prolific London theatrical producer of the 1920s and 1930s) and his counterpart, André Charlot, looked for girls to mold and improve and develop into the next big thing. It seemed that they had an eye for raw talent and often it was that extra indefinable something, some star quality, that shone through, above and beyond a technical ability to dance or sing.

In developing Loretta May, I read widely about the big-name stars of the era. Judith Mackerel's
Flappers
was an invaluable source of detail. She offers a fascinating insight into the lives of women like Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners), Tallulah Bankhead, and Josephine Baker, who blazed a trail, stepping out of the conventions their place in society had set out for them, in order to chase a more daring, fulfilling life. Like Loretta, many society ladies (including Diana Manners) had lived through life-changing experiences during the war, and many could not simply go back to the security of polite luncheons and tea parties, regardless of how much this disappointed their mothers. While famed beauties such as Lily Elsie, Gertie Lawrence, and Alice Delysia had all dazzled on the London stage in the prewar years, they were joined by the new darlings of the postwar years. Alluring, beautiful, ambitious young women like Tallulah Bankhead became new icons to their adoring fans, while Alice Delysia, whom Cochran had first hired in 1914, continued to command enormous respect. She became one of Cochran's biggest stars, returning to London from New York in 1922 to star in
Mayfair and Montmartre
, in which she charmed London theatergoers with her charming accent and accomplished acting.

In Loretta, I wanted to capture the essence of all these amazing women. I wondered what it was like for them to be so adored, and I also wondered what their private lives were like behind the spotlight. James Jupp's memoir
The Gaiety Stage Door: Thirty Years' Reminiscences of the Theatre
(published in 1923 and recounting his life as a stage-door manager at the Gaiety Theatre) offers fascinating and intimate details about the lives of the actors and actresses of the time. He recounts a story of an unnamed actress who developed a romance through exchanging love letters with a soldier serving at the front, and who was subsequently killed within a week of their being married. Fact, as they say, is indeed often stranger than fiction.

The Bright Young Things with whom Loretta and Perry socialize were just emerging during these early postwar years, although it would be toward the end of the 1920s when their infamy really became synonymous with the Roaring Twenties. Within this group of privileged young men and women were many who dabbled in recreational drug use or became dependent on alcohol. They walked a fine line between impossible glamour, intriguing scandal, and downright debauchery. Their way of life must have been shocking and intriguing to an ordinary girl like Dolly.

Many actresses at the time also suffered notoriously with their nerves and other medical conditions, relying on a dangerous cocktail of alcohol and drugs to see them through. When we consider how relentless their schedules were and how physical some of the parts were in revue, it is hardly surprising that their physical and mental health suffered. Binnie Hale refers to revue being hard work and that she was, “black and blue with bruises from the many knockabout stunts” she performed on stage. Beatrice Lillie also said, “one must really suffer to produce beautiful things.” After writing the story line about Loretta's illness and her insistence on keeping it a secret from Perry and those around her, I was shocked to learn of the late Jackie Collins's long-term illness, which she had kept secret from her family and fans, not wishing to burden them with it. Proud, determined, gutsy women inhabit every decade, and many transcend the characters of our wildest fiction.

In the 1920s, the dresses and costumes and those who designed and photographed them were almost as famous as the women who wore them. Dress designers like Lucy “Lucile” Duff Gordon (as famous for having survived the sinking of the
Titanic
as for her couture dresses), Vionnet, Poiret, Chanel, and Lelong, dressed the stars of the time, just as contemporary designers dress the stars of today. Lucile was, perhaps, the first to create a special bond with her muse, Lily Elsie, the most photographed woman of the Edwardian era. Excerpts from Lucile's memoirs,
Discretions and Indiscretions,
published in 1932, made for fascinating reading during my research. They highlight how close her bond was with Miss Elsie, and how her costume designs became an essential component of a show's success, with theatrical reviews and notices often dedicating as many column inches to descriptions of the costumes as they did to the actual performances. Lucile famously gave many of her couture models romantic names such as Hebe and Dolores, and she may—as a result—be credited with creating the first supermodels in these women and in actresses like Lily Elsie who wore her stunning creations and, in so doing, became the fantasy of ordinary women everywhere.

Finally, in the characters of Perry and Teddy, I wanted to portray the impact of war on the young men who survived. In the present day, as we mark the centenary years of the Great War, it all seems so very distant; the images so unfathomable to us as we struggle to imagine the sheer numbers of young boys and men who lost their lives in such horrific conditions. Sadly, there are also many accounts of the emotional and mental scars that men returned with, and it was that particular aspect of war that I wanted to explore through Perry and Teddy. In very different ways, they carry the burden of war with them into a new and ever-hopeful decade. In writing their stories, I hope to share some of the realities of war and to capture a part of our collective history that we must never forget.

Anyone wishing to learn more about shell shock, women in the 1920s, or the theater in London during this time, might like to read the following, which I used during my research:
Love Letters of the Great War
, Mandy Kirby;
Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived without Men after the First World War
, Virginia Nicholson;
The Great Silence
, Juliet Nicolson;
Women in the 1920s,
Pamela Horn;
Flappers,
Judith Mackrell;
Bright Young People,
D. J. Taylor;
Up in Lights,
Marjorie Graham;
Shell Shocked Britain: The First World War's Legacy for Britain's Mental Health,
Suzie Grogan;
Testament of Youth,
Vera Brittain.

W
HILE
I
WAS WRITING
The Girl from The Savoy
, I often listened to music from the era. There is something so haunting about these high-pitched, warbling voices and something so exciting about the music of the emerging jazz bands, such as the Savoy Orpheans, the resident band at The Savoy during the period in which the novel is set. I hope you enjoy discovering some of these forgotten songs, most of which you can listen to on YouTube while watching some fabulous footage of the era!

“Good-bye, Good Luck, God Bless You,” Henry Burr, 1916

“If You Were the Only Girl in the World (and I Were the Only Boy),” Henry Burr, 1917

“There's a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway,” Elsie Baker, 1916

“Parisian Pierrot,” from
London Calling!
, 1923

“Fascinating Rhythm,” from
Lady, Be Good
, Carl Fenton Orchestra, 1924

“Look for the Silver Lining,” from
Sally
, Marion Harris, 1921

“The Merry Widow Waltz,” Marek Weber and His Orchestra

“The Charleston,” various recordings, but I love the Savoy Orpheans, HMV recording, 1925

“Charleston, Charleston, Show Me the Way,” Savoy Havana Band, 1925

“It Had to Be You,” The Savoy Orpheans, 1924

“Tiger Rag,” The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 1917

“Limehouse Blues,” Gertrude Lawrence

“I Don't Believe It, But Say It Again,” The Savoy Orpheans, 1926

“Baby Face,” The Savoy Orpheans, 1926

“Yes Sir, That's My Baby,” Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra, 1926

“Yes! We Have No Bananas,” Fanny Brice

“The Girlfriend,” The Savoy Orpheans, 1927

   
1.
      
The novel is set in the years just after the Great War when social boundaries were changing and women, especially, were fighting for greater independence. What did you enjoy about this period? Was there anything that surprised you?