Bad Girls At The Ball: Debutantes Gone Wrong

Bad Girls at the Ball

First published in Erotic Review in November 2011

As the Blue Stocking Society prepare for their Bad DebutanteBall on 23 November 2011, co-founder Tricity Vogue hunts down some real-life bad debs.

A debutante is a young lady coming out into society for the first time. Until the 1950s, the female offspring of the British social elite were kept under wraps at home or in all-girl schools until it was time to unleash them on the marriage market, like prize heifers. And then they were dolled up in white dresses and paraded for the duration of the Season, by the end of which, hopefully, they’d be snapped up by a husband.  The social season ran from April to July (so as not to clash with the hunting season), and smart families would take a house in London to attend a round of luncheons, tea parties, and, of course, balls.

The Debutante Season kicked off with the presentation of the young ladies at court. Only a lady who’d been previously presented herself could present a debutante to the monarch (to keep out the riff-raff), and the dress code was rigorous. Strictly white dresses only, or, at a push, ivory or pale pink, with three feathers in the hair, to represent the crest of the Prince of Wales. Young ladies took punishing lessons in the court curtsey, a particularly convoluted manoeuvre, which also had to be conducted at the same time as walking backwards out of the royal presence.  In Victoria’s reign, the heyday of the debutante, the girls and their escorts had to wait for hours in drafty corridors without food or water, or access to the lavatory, for the privilege of kneeling before the queen and kissing her hand. The ordeal sounds uncannily similar to today’s Britain’s Got Talent auditions.

The Decline And Fall Of The Debutante Ball

It was the current queen who ended court presentations in 1958, claiming the practice was undemocratic. Her less tactful sister Princess Margaret was said to remark "We had to put a stop to it - every tart in London was getting in." Undaunted, the society mothers came up with an alternative ritual. At the annual Queen Charlotte’s ball, which traditionally kicked off the season, a bevy of debutantes, pulling on ribbons, towed a lavish tiered cake into the room. An obscure European royal was installed next to the cake on the dais, and the rest of the debutantes approached the platform and dropped their curtseys. The presence of the token royal was of course to deflect the all-too-obvious pagan implications of virginal girls paying obeisance before a huge phallic object, which they would later eat.

Coming-out pageantry corralled high society young ladies down the track their elders had decreed for them: straight out of finishing school and into marriage, after one brief summer of shopping for partners. The eligible young men lined up for them were known as ‘debs’ delights’; although girls approached the romantic possibilities of the season with their eyes open. In her book Last Curtsey  (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Curtsey-Debutantes-Fiona-MacCarthy/dp/0571228593) debutante-turned-literary biographer Fiona MacCarthy records the secret acronyms debs devised between themselves for their various beaux: MSC (“Makes Skin Creep”), NSIT (“Not Safe In Taxis”) and VVSITPQ ("Very, Very Safe In Taxis, Probably Queer"). At some point, a deb would have to decide which of the acronyms she was prepared to settle for, because the season wasn’t about romance so much as family business: make a good match, become a society hostess and beget the next generation of social elite. But of course, there have always been women too wilful, or too nonconformist, to accept their fate. And when debutantes went bad, they really went bad.

Debutantes Gone Bad

The most spectacularly bad debutante has to be Rose Dugdale. After attending Miss Ironside's School for Girls in Kensington, and a finishing school abroad, the millionaire’s daughter was presented at court in 1958, then given a debutante ball in 1959, which she described as "one of those pornographic affairs which cost about what 60 old-age pensioners receive in six months." By the 70s she’d become a revolutionary socialist, donating her share of the family fortune to the poor. But she didn’t stop there. In 1973 she and her lover were arrested for robbing her own family home, and stealing paintings and silverware worth £82,000, to raise the money for the IRA. Dugdale received a suspended sentence, as the judge thought it was unlikely she’d re-offend, but she immediately set off for Ireland to join the IRA.  In 1974 she went on a helicopter bombing raid, dropping bombs in milk churns, and appeared on “Wanted” posters across Britain and Ireland.

Dugdale then turned her hand to art theft once more, this time with a violent twist. She and three other IRA members broke into Sir Alfred Beit’s home, Russborough House in County Wicklow, pistol-whipped, bound and gagged him and his wife, and stole IR£8 million worth of old masters, including works by Gainsborough, Rubens, Vermeer and Goya. Their ransom note demanded IR£500,000 and the release of two convicted IRA bombers on hunger strike in Brixton Prison. The paintings were recovered in a car boot in County Cork and Dugdale was arrested and charged with both the helicopter bombing and the robbery. Dugdale pleaded "proudly and incorruptibly guilty", and was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. Dugdale was pregnant at the time of her trial, and gave birth to a son in Limerick prison in 1974. The father was Eddie Gallagher, an IRA member later jailed for twenty years for kidnapping. In 1978 Dugdale and Gallagher married inside Limerick Prison. It was a far cry from the match her parents hoped for when they orchestrated her coming-out season twenty years earlier.

A dangerous liaison with a freedom-fighter is not every girl’s cup of tea, but other debutantes’ rebellions against the sexual mores of their times seem quite mild today, even if they once rocked the boat dangerously. Fiona MacCarthy, biographer of Lord Byron, appalled her family by working as a journalist (becoming a 60s poster-girl for The Guardian’s female writers campaign: ‘Should women have teeth?’) then marrying ‘working class hero’ and master metal worker David Mellor and moving to Sheffield, a debutante desert. Their disapproval was ironic, considering that MacCarthy is the great-granddaughter of bricklayer-made-good “Concrete Bob”, the founder of construction company Robert McAlpine & Sons. But by the 1950s two generations was all it took to acquire social respectability. MacCarthy was among the last debutantes presented at court in 1958, and remembers that she wasn’t the only rebel: many of her contemporaries were boat-rockers too.  "A few fast girls were quite notorious. People were scared of getting pregnant then because it was a terrible scandal, but a couple of girls in my year did.” Fellow debutante Nicolette Powell married pop star Georgie Fame, and Sally Croker-Poole married the Aga Khan, while MacCarthy’s “docile” friend Teresa Hayter became an outspoken International Marxist, penning in 1971 her book Hayter of the Bourgeoisie.

My own favourite bad debutante dates from further back. Leonora Carrington was presented at court to George V and subjected to a debutante ball at the Ritz. Exactly how much she detested the ritual is evident from her surrealist short story The Debutante, in which the heroine persuades a hyena to take her place at her coming-out ball. Despite several school expulsions, Carrington seemed on course for a respectable future until she went to London’s first surrealist exhibition in 1936 and fell in love with Max Ernst on the canvas. She met the (married) artist in person at a dinner party and promptly eloped with him. Carrington family gossip recalled that “she went to Paris to become an artist’s model” but this belittles the truth. Leonora Carrington ran away to paint, and to become a surrealist in her own right.

Carrington and Ernst hung out in Paris with Picasso ("A typical Spaniard - he thought all women were in love with him,") Dali (“He certainly wasn't extraordinary then: he looked like everyone else. It was only when he went to America that he started looking extraordinary,") and Miro (“He gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself.“) The couple then moved to Provence, where photographer Lee Miller captured their mutual creative idyll as they painted each other in the sunshine. Until the Nazis turned up. Then Ernst was interned as an enemy alien, Carrington ran away to Spain, had a mental breakdown, and ended up in an asylum. Her family sent her old nanny to fetch her, but Carrington gave them the slip a second time, by marrying a Mexican diplomat friend to secure a visa to the States. Dissolving her marriage of convenience in New York, Carrington headed down to Mexico, where she found the perfect environment to paint. She also met new artistic inspirations: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (“I liked her better than him”), and her close friend Remedios Varo. Her family remained ignorant of her international reputation as a leading surrealist painter until four years before her death in May 2011.

Modern-Day Debutantes

Leonora Carrington went to the other side of the world to escape her own debutante fate, but ironically, while the coming-out ritual is long gone in England, it’s thriving on her adoptive continent. The British debutante tradition struggled on through the swinging 60s and female emancipation, becoming less to do with match-making and more to do with charity fundraising, until it petered out in the UK in the 80s. Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico the debutante is still oppressively alive and well, as I discovered at a dinner party a few months ago, when my Puerto Rican dinner companion regaled me with stories of her absurdly lavish ball gown, and ceremonial grand entrance over an ornamental bridge, into the arms of her appointed male escorts. She may have looked like a princess on her big day, but the ritual was anathema to my lesbian friend.

Nor is the tradition extinct in Australia. Chatting to burlesque performer Tallulah Mockingbird at the book launch of The Domestic Burlesque, I heard about her debutante experience down under. “I remember feeling like a very awkward teenager rather than a beautiful young woman being released into society. But my mum did make me a beautiful frock, and I seem to recall that was the most important bit for me. Still is.” Tallulah Mockingbird continues to love dressing up, as her photo in Elsa Quarsell”s book The Domestic Burlesque reveals. Not that she could have attended her debutante ball in the risqué outfits she masterminds for her burlesque routines. Fortunately there is a ball coming up next week at which Ms Mockingbird can wear exactly what she likes.

When I set out to research real-life bad debutantes, I never thought I’d find one among my own cabaret and burlesque circle. I bet a burlesque dancer is just about the worst sort of bad girl those stuffy society mothers of the ‘good old days’ could have imagined. But to me it’s the best sort of bad girl. Exactly the sort of bad girl that Wednesday’s Bad Debutante Ball is intended for. I can’t wait to see what Tallulah wears to it.

The Night of the Blue Stockings: Bad Debutante Ball. Wednesday, 23 November, 20:30. Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 42-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB. £9 (£7 advance).

Special thanks to novelist Josa Young, author of One Apple Tasted (http://www.oneappletasted.co.uk) for sharing two chapters of her new, currently unpublished novel charting the debutante experience over several generations.

Nights at the Office

I love my job. Because the place everyone else goes to get away from the stresses and strains of their job is actually the place I go to work. Which means my office is basically a cabaret club. And the things that are glamorous and escapist for the punters become my routine – it’s like everything’s flipped upside down. Now I’m gigging more often I’m generally at Volupte once or twice a week, and, as always happens once something starts to become more regular, patterns and rhythms begin to establish themselves. Here are some of the ritual patterns of a typical ‘night at the office’.

There’s the meet-and-greet/soundcheck when everyone arrives dragging their gig bags on wheels, and we somehow manage to squeeze in a brief discussion about what numbers we’re going to do in between the conversations about who’s got a new coat and where it’s from (Amber Topaz wouldn’t tell me, to my frustration, even though hers is a one off anyway, so there is no danger of me turning up in a copycat green wool trench) and who’s in what state after last night and why (this conversation also includes the club staff as a rule, who are much more dedicated partygoers than us lightweight performers). Some people take the sound check more seriously than others. Amber’s is like a whole extra floorshow on top of the one she gives for the punters. Yesterday the band were running through “hot stuff”, which Beverley had just rehearsed with them, unbeknownst to Amber, and Amber jumped on the mic and started singing “I want some hot stuff baby tonight” in a broad Yorkshire accent. Beverley’s little face fell: “I’m not going to be able to sing that seriously now.” But she pulled it out of the hat for the show.

Next come the dressing room rituals, involving claiming your bit of mirror and starting work on the make up, with accompanying ‘make up chitchat’ which can cover everything from the current economic climate to who would and who wouldn’t shag Beth Ditto. There’s generally some issue or other with nipple tassels, or pasties (not pronounced the Cornish way, incidentally – I remember being sternly corrected on that point by Gwendoline Lamour). Yesterday the issue was two burlesquers with the same set of black tassels. It’s bad form for two girls to go out wearing the same pasties, apparently – so one party nobly agreed to wear her Swarovski crystal ones instead, even though they were heavier and harder to twirl. Incidentally, I also learned that Anne Summers’ black nipple tassels are very hardwearing and an excellent buy, but the pastel coloured ones are rubbish as they shed diamante – so don’t buy those (in case you were planning to).

Then there’s the arrival of the wine, which is always a high point. It’s generally delivered to the dressing room with a great flourish by the manager and met with squeals of appreciation. There’s always somebody who insists they won’t have any, then changes their mind as soon as it’s in front of them. Everybody has their foibles about what they need to drink before they go on. I have this neurotic need to down loads and loads of water which annoys the staff while they’re trying to set up because I’m always nicking water out of the jugs they’ve got ready for the customers, or helping myself from the tap behind the bar which is meant to be out of bounds to performers. Dusty Limits will only drink white wine before he performs, because red wine is too heavy and clogs him up. I’d been on the red wine before I went on the other day and I noticed it had given me purple teeth – but Dusty told me if I drank enough white wine it would cancel it out. So I did. It’s always a pleasure to discover new excuses for drinking more alcohol.

Another favourite part of the routine is the bit where you get your dinner. It’s always a lottery, what the staff food is going to be, but on a good day it’ll be something fabulous like stuffed chicken breast and dauphinois potatoes. Sometimes it can look a bit weird, like the pumpkin lasagne, but it’s important to keep an open mind until you’ve tasted it. The girls all flirt outrageously with the chefs (and so do some of the boys) so they’ll feed us extra treats. I got a secret rum cheesecake all to myself the other day. I do think that giving people free food is one of the nicest things you can do for anyone – but especially for hand-to-mouth types like musicians and performers, who will generally spend their hard earned gig money on drink rather than waste it on a proper dinner. At least somebody’s looking out for us to make sure we get a square meal.

Then comes the show itself, when you’ll step onstage and do exactly the same material you did at the last show and it will somehow weirdly come out completely different - because it’s the audience who give every show its own vibe. Another big part of the routine is a backstage discussion about the nature of the audience. Small but lively? Packed out but really flat? Into it but drunk and noisy? Polite but a bit on the quiet side? Or totally loving it? The quieter the audience, the harder work it is to win over the room – I’ve seen performers come off stage dripping with sweat and shaking from the effort of exuding energy. Sometimes you can really feel like it’s been a damp squib, only to have people from the audience coming up afterwards saying what a fantastic show it was and how they were completely blown away. They were just being blown away quietly. One of the great things about doing Pete Saunders’ Burlesque’n’Blues shows is that we do everything with a live band – singers and burlesquers alike – and there’s always something ad libbed and impromptu, or some collaboration, rather than everybody just doing their own thing one after the other. I had to get singer Buck Svizz on stage to be my stooge for my song “Sneaky” once because there wasn’t a single man in the audience (it was Saturday afternoon tea – which is hen city), and he walked onstage still eating a scone. There happened to be a line in the song that went “and what is the occasion that has merited you giving me these flowers – and cake?” and on that line Buck started pelting me with bits of scone. Brilliant. It was like the whole thing with the cake was a set up ready for that line, when he didn’t even know it was coming. This week the impromptu moment was an on-the-spot ensemble rendition of Hit The Road Jack as the finale. We had three girls around the mic belting it out, and even made up a dance routine. I’m not sure what the audience made of it - but we enjoyed ourselves.

The other ritual element to every gig is the storytelling. An old flame once told me that artists are longer lived than everyone else, not because they live more years, but because they pack more experience into their lives (he was speaking with authority as an accountant). But it’s not only the actual lived experiences us arty types pack in, it’s all the imagined ones as well – and all the ones we collect from each other in the form of pre and post gig anecdotes. These anecdotes are an integral part of the gig routine, mainly because, as a famous musician once said, performing is about 10% stage time and 90% waiting around. (This quote was offered up by the Slinktet’s guitar supremo Earl Mysterio as an anecdote to fill our own waiting around time before a gig. I now can’t remember who the famous musician was, which is a bit rubbish. Probably someone from a cool boy’s band, like The Rolling Stones or something.) The function of gig storytelling is thus to fill the waiting around percentage of the evening. The stories can be about anything, but ideally, they will reveal some behind-the-scenes secrets or describe a shocking and extreme experience that happened to either the storyteller or their ‘friend’.

My ‘day job’ is meant to be writing stories, but I have to admit that time after time my feeble attempts at anecdotage pale in comparison to those offered up by my colleagues. Pete Saunders, being slightly longer lived than the rest of us (strictly in the ‘artist’ sense outlined above, of course), has some of the best. I talked about the time I wrote off my car skidding on an oil spill, and he topped it with the time he rolled his car over three times, miraculously got out, then had to decide whether or not to risk going back to free his girlfriend from the wreckage before the car blew up (he did – because he decided the social embarrassment of leaving her in the lurch outweighed the risk of being burnt to a crisp). I had a story about going to a carol service in Armley Jail when I was a kid which Vicious Delicious topped with a story about how she used to rent a flat in the Brixton prison complex with windows overlooked by all the prison cells, and got treated to a running commentary on everything she did in her flat from the prisoners. I also enjoyed the stories about what bored musicians get up to on the big musicals, after they’ve been performing exactly the same score, note for note, for a year. The entire orchestra playing a whole show naked on the last night of the run was my favourite.

I’m back at Volupte twice next week – on Tuesday for the Lost Supper, and on Thursday for Club d’Amour – which means more treats. If I’m lucky, another chocolate cheese cake. And if I’m really lucky, some even more outrageous gig anecdotes to add to my collection. Plus, I’ll get to wear my gorgeous new black and white gown as well, which is a bit like getting to wear your wedding dress twice in one week. As jobs go, it’s not bad, is it?

xxx

Hot and Cold Running Dressing Rooms

I've decided there have been enough nipple tassels in my blog for now, so this entry I'm going to give you a dressing room audit instead. Ooh the excitement, I hear you cry. But seriously, this is a matter close to all performers' hearts, and therefore deserves its place in a 'behind the scenes" diary.


A few years back a stand up comic friend used to invite me backstage now and again when I went to watch his gigs. This was before I was a regular performer around London myself, and I was completely gobsmacked to discover that even in the pretty big-time comedy clubs the dressing rooms were uniformly tawdry, peeling affairs with strip lights and seats with the foam sticking out through holes in the vinyl. However, what interested me more than the décor was finding out what stand up comics talk about backstage. Would there be badinage? Would they try out new material on each another? Would there be some sort of comedy haka?

Guess what? Stand up comics talk about dressing rooms. They start off doing an audit of the dressing room they're in, and then they go into a compare-and-contrast with the dressing rooms of all the other comedy clubs around the country. It didn't take me long to pick up on the fact that there was a subtext going on, namely "let me give you a list of all the comedy clubs I've played in all over the country, and then you can list all the ones you've played in, and let's see if mine's bigger than yours." But even with the subtext it was not exactly scintillating conversation.

Only now I've been performing for a bit myself do I realise that the chitchat you make in dressing rooms before you go on stage is not a fully functioning conversation, it's more like verbal chewing gum, giving you something to do with your mouth while your mind runs around the act you're about to do on stage, what your opening line is going to be, whether you've left a set list somewhere you'll be able to see it, whether your ukelele is in tune etc etc. I know women are supposed to be good at multi-tasking but I've discovered I can't actually put my make up on and retain any information from a conversation I'm having at the same time. I'm like a goldfish while I'm sticking my false eyelashes on; a few weeks back I had a whole ten minute reminiscence conversation with Vile-een of Pustra and Vile-een about Edinburgh Fringe experiences, and two minutes later I asked her whether she'd gone last year, a question which she had just spent ten minutes answering.

But if there is one conversation guaranteed to get a dressing room full of musicians, burlesquers and cabaret performers' animated attention, it's a discussion about dressing rooms. Now that I am one of the performers engaged in these conversations on a weekly basis, I don't think they're about willy waving any more. I think they're partly a sort of comfort conversation, and partly a sort of solidarity conversation ('we're all in this together"). They're also about straightforward curiosity, stemming from the fact that sometimes a dressing room comes as a big surprise when you compare it to the side of the venue that the punters get to see.

Volupte is my favourite club in London, but it hasn't won my heart through the charms of its dressing room I can tell you. Not exactly palatial at the best of times, trying to find a corner of mirror to use to put your make up on when there's a full compliment of burlesquers on the bill is an exercise in human origami. The other week I put my foot through my dress with my stiletto and ripped it, because I was squatting in the corridor in my gown while trying to put my make up on in a mirror propped on the floor because there was no room in the dressing room itself. Thank God for iron-on fabric repair kits. And then a couple of gigs back I was just about to put my vintage Christian Dior pink satin court shoes down on the floor when I noticed that I was in fact standing in a puddle, and the whole dressing room floor was flooded. Apparently this is a side effect of the washing machine, which the staff themselves have got so used to that they don't even notice any more. The human origami got even more advanced when we had to try and share a corner of the mirror and avoid standing in an inch of water in our best shoes at the same time. I'm tempted to give Volupte the 'worst dressing room' award.

'Smallest dressing room award' may well go to the Glass Bar at Euston Station, but since the whole women-only bar is so tiny it fits inside one of the two stone lodges at the entrance to the station, its dressing room is charmingly to scale, and it seems churlish to complain that you can only fit one person in it at a time. 'Biggest dressing room award' goes to the Sideshow dressing room above the Arts Club near Leicester Square, because the 'dressing room' is in fact the dance studio one floor up from the club, which has vast acreage of mirror – and a bar, in case anybody fancies some warm up demi pliés. This much space can go to a performer's head. In fact, last time I was there, I witnessed Matt Fraser run across the room, slap burlesquer Lamb Chop Magoo on the arse, then run back to the other side of the room (as if to conceal the fact it was him). He also tried out some high kicks on one of the pillars in the middle of the room – his footprint may well be still there, 6 feet above the floor.

'Most glamorous dressing room award' goes to Paradise By Way of Kensal Green. The other day I was doing a little ukelele interlude in between dazzling burlesque numbers at Roxy Velvet, Ivy Paige and Kitty Bang Bang's night "Head over Heels." The dressing room was an elegantly appointed space with a huge gilt-framed mirror at one end, a wall full of mirrors of every shape and size at the other end, and a range of beautifully upholstered couches in between. What really ratcheted up the glamour factor, however, was the fact that there was not one, not two, but three photographers roving the room while the girls were getting changed, taking candid snaps of them sticking on their nipple tassels, pulling up their stocking etc. It was like the photos of the bride getting ready that you get in wedding albums, but with about six brides at once. I was in the midst of blowing on the glue on one of my false eyelashes when I looked up to find a camera lens trained on me from about a foot away (I sensed there was some sort of arty 'reflection in the mirror' shot going on). I think I ruined the potential glamour of the shot by looking up, startled, as if I'd been caught out with my false teeth or my glass eye in my hand after the ball was over. I'm not sure how I feel about close ups of my false eyelashes, to be honest, particularly since I've been wearing the same pair for about six months now (does that make me an eyelash slut?). Not that I needed to worry about intrusive lenses too much since I was in the weird position of being so low-key as to barely register on the glamour radar in the company of Misses Velvet, Paige and Bang Bang and their guests, despite the fact I was wearing a full-length turquoise fringed evening gown and feather fascinator. Ironically, I was both over- and under-dressed at the same time.

I'm going to give my 'Favourite dressing room award' to the BFI Southbank after last night's gig though. I'd asked if there was a room we could dump stuff and get changed in, and was shown into a big square room with a mirrored ceiling, a coffee table with bottled water laid out for us, and loads of smart-looking chairs. The Lady Greys were draped around the room getting ready to do their Edwardian skirt dance, pouring themselves into vintage underwear or sitting in the splits, and generally making the place look like an Edward Degas painting. Okay, so the dressing room wasn't entirely functional, since the only mirrors in the room were on the ceiling.

This led to a lot of cricks in necks as we all craned our heads backwards to check head gear, hair and make up. But once we'd finished our gig, me and Connie discovered a giant leather bean bag we could lie on and look up at ourselves on the ceiling, which has got to be my favourite post-gig chill out position ever. Claire the organiser popped in for a chat and revealed that we were in the green room that had been used by all the stars who'd made personal appearances at the BFI Southbank, reeling off a list of names that included Anjelica Huston and George Clooney. I wonder if George Clooney lay on his back on the same beanbag, looking up at his reflection in the ceiling? I bet he did.

Or maybe he had a chat with Anjelica Huston about how this room compared with other dressing rooms they'd both been in. I'd love to know how they rated it.

xxx