My Name is Not Wigs!: Or.... the day I thought PAVAROTTI was a stagehand

By Angela Cobbin

An enthralling journey through time, fashion and theatreland: from hairdressing student in the early 1960s to theatrical wig creator for the biggest shows of our time over five decades – from the West End to Broadway – Box Brownie to Cinemascope. My Name Is Not Wigs is the ultimate read for fans of witty behind-the-curtains memoirs, especially those with a penchant for the bright lights of stage and screen: tears and accolades aplenty!



‘A unique backstage story – honest and good-humoured, like the author.’ – Sir Ian McKellen

‘A glorious cavalcade of theatrical gossip and professional achievement in a department of our profession that largely goes unsung.’ – Frances de la Tour

‘A wonderful read and so well written with plenty of fascinating stories.’ – Sir Michael Gambon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self Publishing Partnership
• Release date: Nov 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839523489

Book preview

ONE

Early Days

My first gong!

This theatre showbiz thing should not have happened to me. My sister and I were steered away from any ideas to do with it; not that we had ever entertained the thought. Our parents had been professional dancers in the theatre back in the day. My mother did tap-dancing and ballroom; she also rode elephants in the circus and appeared as a ghost in pantomime. She had been taking her dance finals when the Second World War broke out and so immediately joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army). I remember her telling me that she had been called for an audition by the ATS Entertainments Section at such short notice and having no time to change, she had to tap-dance in her army boots managing to pass the audition with flying colours.

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Albert Hall, 1931.

My father was an adagio dancer, which is a form of acrobatic dancing. In 1931 he was cast in a leading role as the handsome warrior Pau-Puk-Keewis in the famous production of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast by Coleridge-Taylor at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. Later he formed a troupe of six dancers – two to throw and two to catch – who would throw a couple of girls one over the other in mid-air across the stage in a very artistic and balletic fashion. They enjoyed considerable success in the UK and abroad during the 1930s. I was to learn much later that over the years Dad had used several different titles for the dance troupe, beginning and ending with The Vadim Trio, which was a comedy act. This was followed by the Six Marvels, the Continental Six, and the Georgian Quartet when they performed in France and Germany. He was in Germany before the onset of the Second World War and was asked to perform before Adolf Hitler but they were not allowed to wear their usual costumes. These were beautiful long, loose-sleeved shirts gathered at the wrist and broad-waisted cummerbunds above their britches. Their white wigs were tied back with a dark silk bow but they were ordered to appear in front of Hitler wearing the brown-coloured shirts of the storm troopers. Of course this was long before my sister and I had arrived on the scene.

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE

My father, Eric Vadim, performing with his adagio dance troupes: the Vadim Trio (Eric on the left), the Georgian Quartet and the Six Marvels.

On his return to Britain at the outbreak of war, Dad worked on the land as a farmer, losing contact with most of his fellow dancers, but later the Vadim Trio was formed once again using just one girl dancer for the two gentlemen to artistically throw about. Much later on he was ably assisted by my mother who, no longer being in the ATS, was still playing the odd ghost or two in pantomime. This title of the Vadim Trio is the name I mostly remember because they used to practise with me. I hasten to add that I was only eight or nine at the time and a lot smaller than I am today, though very acrobatic.

The fact is, that by the time I was ten years old they never knew where the next job was coming from, and before this they had often been on tour in seasonal shows living out of a suitcase in what were known as ‘Digs’ (boarding rooms), like so many in the performing arts. Sometimes they would have to take part-time employment elsewhere, such as work at the post office, sorting letters in the run-up to Christmas, where they often met the same people each year and quite a few from a theatrical background. This was the main factor in them wanting their children to have more stable careers because theirs had been too insecure.

My mother Eve as Principal Boy in panto 1936.

I was four years old and my sister Pip was seven when we were sent away to Seaford Ladies College, a boarding school for young ladies. I recall Miss Philips, one of the teachers who used to take us for music, dancing and would you believe it, deportment. There were six girls in my class, the average age being five. It must have been the very first wig I’d ever seen on anyone because Miss Philips’s hair looked odd and I was fascinated by the hairnet that adorned it – covered in little velvet brown bows. During the dance class she played the piano, while we all skipped around the room, then the moment she stopped playing, we had to fall down flat to the floor. ‘Relax, gels,’ she would say, ‘relax!’

Myself on left and Vanessa, boarders at Seaford Ladies College, 1951.

She would then come down from her platform and having a limp she used a stick, which made her approach sound like the pirate Long John Silver. She’d pick up the spread-eagled arm of one of us, where we lay there in trepidation, only to let it go crashing back to the floor. Like the others I always hoped that she wouldn’t pick on me but when she did, I tensed my arm so that when it dropped, it wouldn’t hit the floor so hard. ‘Relax, gel, relax!’ she’d say. There was no escaping her; she would just pick the offending arm up again only to repeat the exercise. The reward for her endeavours was many a bruised elbow.

I did, however, manage to spend one half term in the sick bay with my new friend Vanessa: we both had the chicken pox. I learned to knit on four needles, roller-skate and play Shipwreck (a game of pirates) in the gymnasium, leaping on to the benches and wall bars without touching the floor – this was meant to be a sea full of sharks – but I learned little else. Morning assembly was taken every day before class and held in the gymnasium with all the teachers lined up on the stage in front of us.

On seeing the games teacher for the very first time, I noticed that he was quite thin and wiry and wearing khaki knee-length shorts. He had very curly hair that he wore very short, similar to the journalist Bernard Levin, and I was to learn a lot later that this haircut was called a short back and sides. We said good morning to each teacher in turn and I had always said ‘Good morning, Mr Hodson,’ to the games master, but after a few days I was told that he was in fact a she. At such a tender age and without question thereafter, I said, ‘Good morning, Miss Hodson.’

By 1955 Variety and the music halls were declining but it was quite a few years before that when my parents realised that they would have to stop touring, and for the very first time I began to feel more secure. Pip, my sister, along with yours truly, had often been shared out during the school holidays. Me, sometimes with my grandmother or with various friends who were known in those days as aunts and uncles. So by the time I had reached the age of seven and a half, my parents were finally settling on a home in Hove and schools in Brighton, Sussex.

I say schools because there were many Pip and I attended, but after a couple of years they had a tendency to close down. By the time I was approaching thirteen, I was sent to the Blessed Sacrament, a convent school. It was at the same time that the beehive hairstyle was all the rage, which my father called a bird’s nest because it was backcombed high off the face and smoothed over at the front with some sort of fringe. But the back was just left in a backcombed mess.

My sister was now at the polytechnic college in Brighton while I was at the convent, so this was my fifth and last school, based in Kemptown, which was on the east side of Brighton. Unfortunately the school my parents had wanted me to attend was Avondale College but it closed before I got there and that would have made six schools altogether. My education was, to say the least, somewhat lacking in stability.

As a family having no television, we had gone to the cinema every Monday evening, sometimes twice a week, so during the course of one year we saw more than sixty films. Dad could get in free at the Essoldo cinema in Brighton as it doubled as a theatre and it was where he and my glamorous mother and a dancer called Jackie, had often performed as the Vadim Trio.

Mum and Dad in Variety, 1940s.

It didn’t matter what film was showing but the X-rated Brain Eaters followed by The Spider nearly finished me off as an eleven-year-old.

Another wonderful source of entertainment had been Brighton’s pantomimes at the Hippodrome, and not only that but having heard my parents talk so often about the brilliant tap-dancer Sammy Davis Junior, I just had to go and see him there doing his amazing one-man show. It was sold out but with some standing room only for seven shillings and sixpence (38p today) for which, because I was so eager to see him, my mother gave me the entry money. It was for a matinee performance in which he sang, danced and toted his six-guns. Blooming marvellous and never to be forgotten – what an artist. Another amazing moment was when the drummer from his band played a solo of the British national anthem. I mean, Dad was a member of The Magic Circle and could also play the spoons, but that’s not quite the same.

I had attended co-educational schools after Seaford Ladies College, so this all-girls school in 1959 was a new experience for me. My friend Vanessa was also at this school but she was a boarder. She and I had known one another since our days together at Seaford and we have remained firm friends ever since. Vanessa soon showed me the ropes with the rigmarole of the obligatory little curtsey when meeting the nuns. No talking or running in the corridors, which unbelievably managed to retain their marble statues unscathed on their plinths. Remembering to stand up when the bell rang, calling us during the end-of-morning lessons to say the Angelus, a prayer of devotion.

I loved all the games of sport and had received the Victrix Ludorum at one school, Preston College, and this was as the junior girls’ athletic champion, when among other races, I managed to run the fifty-yard sprint in six seconds. Sport or games at the convent were taken by Sister Xavier. When she took us for netball, Sister enjoyed playing the role of referee as she ran up and down the court in her nun’s habit blowing her whistle, her keys and rosary beads jangling noisily from round her waist.

And there was Mrs Dan who taught music and singing, standing by the piano waving a ruler about like a baton, instructing us to ‘Breathe!’

The Blessed Sacrament and the lower fifth, which was now the class Vanessa and I were in, had won the shield for the Inter-schools singing competition three years running, thanks to Mrs Dan. The chosen song was ‘Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind’, where wind is pronounced like kind. Funny the things we remember, such as trying to carve my initials on the desk, which had proved impossible as the lids were made of Formica, but I did manage to keep a large photo of Charlton Heston from the film Ben-Hur stuck to the inside of the lid with chewing gum.

What I really wanted to be was an artist. I loved drawing and painting and I had achieved nearly all the grades from the Royal Society of Arts – and in some of them I had achieved Honours. I think this was at my third, or was it my fourth, school but I didn’t sit any other exams. ‘No,’ said my parents, which was pretty emphatic. I knew that they didn’t want me to be an artist, as to them it would be as bad as going into the theatre. ‘We’re not supporting you while you starve in a garret trying to earn a living.’ After dismissing the idea of my becoming a shop assistant or, would you believe, joining the police force (I think that was my grandmother’s idea), in the end they settled for a career in hairdressing. The thinking behind this was that it would be the nearest thing to being an artist. And me? Well, I just couldn’t think of anything else I might do. Later I was able to continue with my painting.

Jetty, Isle of Wight.

Trick Cyclist.

The Ruck.

Relaxing Figure, Corfu.

That being the final decision, in 1961 at the end of the summer term, I left the Blessed Sacrament having only turned fifteen years of age in the July. There were quite a few older girls leaving and they had sat their O and A levels, most of them passing with flying colours. To this day, I have not taken any Os or As and I never sat the eleven-plus. I was probably in the middle of moving schools.

Maria Theresa, the Reverend Mother at the school, spoke encouragingly to everyone who was going, especially to all those who were following an academic career and many of those wanting to be nurses – like my friend Vanessa or perhaps a girl who had serious thoughts on becoming a nun. She listened and chatted to all of these girls with great interest and approval but when she stopped next to me and asked what career I was to follow, I said, ‘I’m going to be apprenticed to a hairdresser.’ The very Reverend Mother Maria Theresa swept straight past me without a word. I suppose today that might be called a put-down.

TWO

1961

The Apprentice

I entered the world of hairdressing and joined a rather grand salon called Laurence of Mayfair in Western Road, which was the main part of the fashionable thoroughfare in Brighton. I had been one of nine apprentices and also the last to enter the establishment. So there I am, fetching sandwiches for everybody’s lunch, sweeping the floor and running errands. I was very shy (it’s hard to believe now) but here, I was feeling like a fish out of water, out of my depth and missing my friends in this very adult world.

Lacking in confidence in this large busy salon, with the hairdressers completely unaware of my presence except when barking their orders at me. Consequently, not knowing which client belonged to which stylist, I would frequently be taking the wrong customer from under the hairdryer, but worse was to come.

I speak of the tutorial Monday evenings, which were sheer torture, due entirely to the owner of the salon, Monsieur Bernard. He would lose his temper at the drop of a hat and in my case quite a bit, especially when I was all fingers and thumbs. He used to hover about, scowling, and this made me so nervous that the slippery permanent-wave curlers would shoot out of my fingers to fly across the salon floor, immediately giving him an opportunity to shout and shake his walking stick at me. So after the three months’ trial of both the salon and me, the torture of it all came to an end. However, this was not to be the end of my rather unsuccessful attempt at hairdressing.

The decision to try another, smaller salon was considered by my parents and it was to be my second chance to make a go of it. Much to everyone’s surprise, including mine, I did make a go of it but this was because of the superb tutelage of Peter (Roy) Maskell, who earlier had also left the salon of Laurence of Mayfair, where he had been their top assistant. He opened his own salon, called Peter Hair Fashions, which was situated over a very nice shoe shop in Boundary Road, Portslade and West Hove, and where there was only one other apprentice, Liz, and myself to assist him, and two other hairdressers, Joan and Betty.

Peter Maskell, my boss.

I can’t speak highly enough of Peter. He was always well dressed and had a very pleasant personality and ready smile. A lot of people thought he looked a little like the film star Leslie Phillips, but more importantly he was a brilliant hairdresser whose well-to-do clients had followed him when he decided to leave Laurence of Mayfair to go it alone. Peter also had the gift of being an excellent teacher of his craft, enabling me to control, style and cut hair wet, or dry for those clients with natural curls and waves, enabling me to see the fall of the hair and cut it accordingly. The skills I have acquired through his guidance have lasted me throughout my career. Yes, even the use of those elusive permanent-wave curlers.

Examples of finger-waved hair.

I remember in particular while learning the art of finger-waving that the depth of the waves should be even and about the size of an old penny and that somehow one had to lose a wave