“My goal was to become the Toast of Broadway,” Constance Tomkinson writes in her 1962 memoir, What a Performance. So is that of a thousand other bright-eyed young women and men who come to New York each year. While she failed to make a name for herself on Broadway, or in the nightclubs of Europe, or in the theatres of London, Tomkinson succeeded in writing some of the most entertaining books of her time.
Indeed, she may still hold the record for most money earned per word by an author. MGM bought the film rights to her first book, Les Girls (1956) for £20,000 even before the book hit the stores, but after much script doctoring and studio diktats, the resulting musical bore almost no resemblance to Tomkinson’s story — which led some wits to quip that she was paid £10,000 each for “Les” and “Girls.”
Tomkinson was born in Canso, Nova Scotia in 1915. Her father was a Non-conformist Protestant minister; her mother, Grace Tomkinson, was a writer who published a number of well-regarded novels of Canadian life. Her parents must have had tremendous faith in their daughter, for they allowed her to board a boat in Halifax bound for the sinful city of New York when she was just 18.
She’d been accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied drama, speech, and dance under such teachers as Tamara Borzoi and Martha Graham. During her first summer break, she auditioned for a summer stock company that producer Izzy Gordon was organizing. Having spent a year studying the dramatic arts with a capital Ah, Tomkinson wasn’t prepared for the hard-nosed practicality of a working theater company:
“How many plays are we doing ?” I put both elbows on the table and gazed at him earnestly.
“Ten. We open with Tobacco Road. You’ll be playing the daughter with the hare-lip.”
“A play well worth doing.” I nodded. “It has the feeling of truth.”
“It has everything. One set. Small cast. No costumes, much. About costumes, you provide your own.”
After graduating, she soon learned that the lot of a working actress was less passion and high ideals than cold-water flats and meals at the Automat. She rushed to auditions, slunk home dejected time after time. Quickly, she began to expand her definition of “theater,” which allowed her to land a well-paid, steady, but perhaps less than prestigious gig:
It was with pride I announced that I was to play the female lead in the Mario and Maria dance team and that we were to open at Atlantic City’s most exclusive night club, from where we hoped to go on to the Plaza…. I told my family I was to dance in a club, without disclosing its name, which was not reassuring, or its location. I hoped my father would think it was a country club with the more wholesome overtones of golf. My mother and sister would guess the truth and classify their suspicions as Top Secret.
Next, she went from suggestive tangos to solemn pageants. She and a friend decided to set up, under the auspices of a company that franchised Biblical dramas to small troupes that toured churches around the U.S. The work might have been more respectable but it came with many logistical headaches, many of them involving the great trunks of heavy costumes. It only took a few months before Tomkinson’s friend bowed out: “You may go on with the Biblical Boys from success to success but I’m retiring,” she said. “I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.”
So, Tomkinson 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 a first audition. Growing hungry and desperate, she answered an add for chorus girls, part of a touring revue known at the Millerettes, that was scheduled to depart on a tour of nightclubs in Scandanavia. Blonde, pretty, and roughly capable of dancing in synchronization with the other 15 Millerettes, she got the job, the start of a string of chorus line jobs she chronicles in Les Girls.
This experience emboldened her to apply for the most famous chorus line in the world at that time: Les Girls at the Folies Bergère in Paris. She got this job, too, and was soon up on stage with the great Josephine Baker. The show, she found, was not the precision machine she’d anticipated:
The first night I was in the show I was led to believe, by the babble of voices, the running feet and the feeling of excitement and urgency, that there must be some crisis; but I learned that every night there seemed to be a crisis at the Folies. There were great dash and elan 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.
One of Tomkinson’s goals in joining the Folies girls was to “do” Paris. Feeling after six months that “I was now scraping the bottom of the Baedeker barrel,” she started looking for other opportunities. History and luck laid one in her lap soon after. The Basil Beauties, managed by Reginald Basil, considered the glamour girls of the chorus line business, came to the Folies for a short run before heading to a long turn of 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, Tomkinson 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 Tomkinson conspired with a friend to change his mind. The friend brought her name up, then assured Basil there was little chance she would deign to joint them. This bit of reverse psychology did the trick and she soon bundled aboard the train to Berlin with the rest of the Beauties.
It was something of a bizarre tour. While nightclubs and parties were still lively places, there was an ominous spectre hovering over even the most sophisticated venues. Even the relatively naive Tomkinson began to notice it:
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].
By the time the Beauties made it to Rome, it was clear that Fascism was making it too hard to carry on as if nothing had changed from 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.”
Les Girls follows the Beauties on to Amsterdam, where “Tommie” toyed with a Dutch diamond merchant, then back to Italy as part of a touring Carnevale, then finally back to London for a run at the veddy upper crust Dorchester Hotel. It’s at the Dorchester where she parts ways, but for reasons she only explains in her second book, African Follies (1959).
One night at the Dorchester, she was introduced to an older gentleman she refers to only as Mr. Doe who kept ordering lemon squashes instead of champagne cocktails. He explained that he had made a fortune in toffees and thought alcoholic beverages interfered with the taste of sweets.
He was preparing to leave for Africa, he told Tomkinson, and was in the market for a secretary to accompany him. She heard Africa and ignored the rest. He ignored her utter lack of secretarial skills and offered her the job. “Availability was my chief qualification for the post,” she writes. She did, however, take the precaution of going to see Mrs. Doe just to make sure everything was above board.
His plan was to trek from Timbuktu to Khartoum by truck, a journey he estimated would take ten days. It ended up taking two months. He intended to travel as a proper English gentleman should. “Essential bring cummerbund,” Mr. Doe telegraphed her in setting out requirements for provisions.
The pair ended up being complementary companions. Though Mr. Doe insisted that the pot be heated up when making tea, even in the middle of the sweltering desert, he also proved handy when it came to coaxing a malfunctioning truck back to life. And though Tomkinson struggled to keep up with the long memos Mr. Doe would dictate (even when there was no way to send them to anyone), she proved better suited than he when it came to coaxing French border guards to let their group past.
The Africa they saw was that of empires beginning to fray at the edges. As Michael Hogg put it in his Daily Telegraph review of African Follies, “It was not the Dark Continent that they saw but the seedy hinterland, with its decayed expats and hotels magnificent in name only; not adventure that they got but discomfort, as they trekked dustily from barely-existing towns to uninhabitable resthouses living on sardines and brandy.”
Hogg also noted the particular gift Tomkinson has for telling her stories. “Even at her funniest she rings true — or very nearly so.” Was it true that one of the more remote outposts they stopped at in British Sudan, with a white population of three had a country club with just two members? “No matter; it undoubtedly ought to be so.” In her review of Les Girls for The Tatler, Elizabeth Bowen echoed this sentiment: “The story is simple first because it is true, also because it bubble and trills from the writer’s pen.” “Only nasty readers will be disappointed,” she promised.
The disappointment is that no matter how publishers try to suggest otherwise, there is little or nothing risque in Tomkinson’s memoirs. “Miss Tomkinson is a lady,” Bowen wrote. “I don’t mean she stresses it, but it shows.” Most of her fellow dancers in the various groups were too smart to give in to their stage door Johnnies. “A girl’s best friend is her virtue” was Tomkinson’s motto. As Helen Beal Woodward wrote in Saturday Review, though she “masqueraded as a champagne cocktail, at heart she was as wholesome as a bottle of Seven-Up.”
Partly this was because by the time Constance Tomkinson started writing her memoirs, she was, as she told one interviewer, “anchored to a well-ordered life as the wife of a one-time economic planner.” She took up writing after finding that her only daughter, Jane, was a good nap-taker and gave her time each afternoon to get a few hundred words in.
This was around 1952, after marrying her second husband, Sir Hugh Weeks, one of the leading economic advisors to the Conservative Party, and becoming Lady Weeks. But “Tommie” Tomkinson still had plenty of adventures in her when she got back from Africa with Mr. Doe.
In the summer of 1939, she returned to New York with her mother, planning to get Broadway a try again. But there they met Albert Batchelor, a cousin of Grace Tomkinson’s, who had set himself on taking a trip around the world by the most modern transportation means available. He invited Constance to come along and she happily accepted.
They headed west across the U.S. by train, then flew to Hawaii and on to Hong Kong by clipper plane, then by British Airways to Singapore. They arrived on the day the Second World War broke out. Albert was unfazed, though. An experienced pilot, he knew how to talk his way around an airfield and through a combination of persuasion, good fellowship, and (probably) bribery, he managed to get hops all the way to Egypt. Though the British and Italians were observing their own version of the Phony War in North Africa at the time, direct access across the Mediterranean was cut off and they had to hop their way inland through British and French colonies.
It was early November by the time Albert and Constance, along with a band of American expats fleeing Europe, managed to return to New York by way of Lisbon. They hadn’t managed to beat Phileas Fogg’s 80 days, but undaunted, Albert booked a clipper ship to the Caribbean and continued on his journey.
Constance remained in New York and went to work for the British mission coordinating the purchase and delivery of supplies and weapons from America. While there, she met and married Lt Peter Twiss, a Royal Navy fighter pilot (and later world air speed record holder) who was touring American building support for the Allied cause.
She traveled to England to rejoin Twiss after the war ended, but their marriage fell apart and Constance was once again on her own. She turned again to entertainment, but this time in a supporting role. She spent two years working for the Sadler’s Wells ballet company, where she dealt with prima personalities like Margot Fonteyn and Ninette de Valois. Then, after divorcing Peter Twiss and marrying Sir Hugh, she moved over to the theatre, working as secretary to Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic until she quit in 1952 to have her daughter. She wrote about this time in Dancing Attendance (1965).
Though motherhood gave her time to write, it didn’t give her inspiration. When she finished Dancing Attendance, she capped her pen and devoted her energies to the duties of Lady Weeks.
All of Constance Tomkinson’s book had an effortless charm that wins over even the hardest-boiled reader. But though she had no training in writing, she took great care to achieve that effortlessness. She once told an interviewer, “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.
Constance Tomkinson Twiss, Lady Weeks, died in Sussex in 1995 at the age of 80. Her memoirs are all, sadly, long out of print.