Alma Cogan Read Online Free PDF Page A

going to try anything violent or unflattering. I’m just going to make you look beautiful … Super … Hold it there … And again … One more … Relax. Marvellous. Don’t look so … Did I ever tell you I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin? … Better. I’m not one of them that’s going to poke the camera up your skirt or down your throat … Think happy. Wet the lips. Think top-ten … A little less grin , sweetheart … Better.Skirt up just a little. We’re getting it … This new record’s top-five. Cert.’ And so on.
    The result was pictures I could only bear to squint at at the time and haven’t been able to make myself look at for almost thirty years.
    There has been a single cursory ‘Sorry to keep you’ in the three or four minutes that I have been holding for ——— ——. Almost involuntarily, I hang up on Karen Carpenter in mid-trill, bored with the arrogance of the nothings and nobodies who think a job in publishing or journalism, of either the print or broadcast varieties, is a licence to jerk the strings and watch you jump.
    The telephone down here hardly rang at all for years. On days when I was feeling particularly laid-by and out of things, I’d pick it up whenever I was passing, just for the purring reassurance of the tone.
    The phone still doesn’t ring very often. But when it does these days the likelihood is that it’s one of the people who seem to have got together and, with striking unanimity, decided that Alma Cogan is once more somehow viable .
    No longer merely a washed-up relic of the past, apparently; a piece of pop marginalia of interest only to the unyoung, the untrendy, the unmoneyed and the terminally whacko. But – and I have it here in black-and-white – ‘an iconic performer’, ‘a leisure icon’, redolent of happier, less complex times. She is an ‘emblematic’ figure ‘reflecting the historical moment’; ‘irrefutably part of the fifties Zeitgeist’. Not to mention the fact that she had a colourful reputation in the past for keeping rough as well as more salubrious company, and turns up increasingly in the biographies of dead contemporaries.
    I should feel flattered. Instead, it makes me feel like one of those villages that were flooded to make reservoirs at the end of the war and that then miraculously reappeared during the long, parched summer of 1976. They became popular tourist attractions, drawing picnickers like flies, and provided an excuse for a great deal of misty-eyed, inter-generational reminiscing: there was the dairy and over there the Big House; therewas the steeple that seemed to reach miles into the sky. All of course only identifiable now as mossy scabs and stunted earthworks.
    There’s a national characteristic you must have noticed: if there’s one thing people in this country like better than pulling somebody down, it’s putting them back again. They beat you about the head then pass you a bandage. It’s so British.
    I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have welcomed the gesture at certain moments in the past, when I was finding the applauseless life an inconsolably hard one to live.
    To be famous, it was once put to me, is to be alone but without being lonely: like Achilles in his tent; like Lindbergh in the Spirit of St Louis , flying over the Atlantic, while the world waits for him to land.
    An alternative definition, of course, is the inability to be alone or be yourself without an audience; to be unable to exist without constant, positive feedback.
    ‘Do you know who you are!’ a man cried out in excitement once, rushing up to me in the street. ‘And you’re standing here ! I can’t believe it! You’re here.’
    ‘Well I have to be somewhere,’ I said, and he seemed to find that a satisfactory answer: it seemed to confirm for him that I wasn’t merely made up of light and Ben-Day dots, equal parts cathode ray and newsprint; that somewhere behind and beyond all that I was in fact flesh and bones
    It’s a long way from that