READERSVOICE.COM aims to give a few interesting samples from out of print books. There is a good account of a clown’s performance in Les Girls, a 1956 memoir by Constance Tomkinson (1915-1995). Ms Tomkinson was an adventurous Canadian who travelled Europe performing as a dancer in the late 1930s.

Ms Tomkinson had gone to a drama school in New York in 1934. Then she performed in a pantomime in London. In 1937 she became one of eight singers and dancers in the chorus line of the Millerettes, a singing and dancing troupe managed by Trixie Miller and her husband. They travelled to Sweden but ran out of work in Gothenburg. So Ms Tomkinson and several of her fellow dancers traveled to Paris. She performed with the Folies-Bergère. Later the author joined an English group called the Basil Beauties, managed by Reginald Basil, and they toured Germany, the Netherlands and Italy in the years just before WW2. At one stage they joined a revue in Italy run by a clown named Charlie Rivel. Here she describes the clown’s routine.

Ms Tomkinson writes: When the cast of the ‘Rivel’s Carnevale’ collected in Naples there were no animals among us, but the Rivel family had lived and worked under canvas for so long that they carried the atmosphere of a circus with them. During rehearsals we watched Charlie Rivel, an insignificant little man in a brown jacket, meander about the stage with his fellow clowns, Alfredino and Pauli, muttering a few lines and giving faint indications of mime and movement.

‘It’s pathetic,’ I said, ‘when you think he was once a famous clown.’

‘I don’t believe he ever was,’ Kit was emphatic.

‘He never played Olympia,’ Carol declared. ‘Reggie’s just dreamed that up.’

‘Oh, I think he was something once,’ I insisted.

‘He’s got such a sad face,’ remarked Babs. ‘He knows he’s finished.’

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