Read Alma Cogan for Free Online Page B

kvel is? It’s a yiddish word meaning I like flip. You really go with the big time, don’t you? You’d never go out with a couple of bums.’
    ‘Harry,’ I said solemnly, ‘I’m sorry, but I find going out with people who are rich, famous and successful simply divine.’
    *
    It all goes back to my mother (who else?). In essence, mine is theclassic pushy-mother story, so I won’t detain you too long with it here.
    I have no wish to stick it to my mother (who is still implacably with us, by the way, minus some other marbles; the lights are on, as they say, but there’s nobody home). But it’s become pretty obvious since I got out from under her that she set out to use me absolutely cold-bloodedly to achieve all the things she was never in a position to achieve herself.
    Family legend has it that she could have been another Callas if she had had the chance. The chance was denied her by her own mother whose violent reaction to the suggestion that Fay be sent to the Conservatoire – this was before the family were forced to flee with their handcarts from Romania – was to become the bane of my life. ‘I’d rather see her dead at my feet!’ my mother would declaim, imitating her mother speaking in another culture (another language ), in an altogether other time. (Cue tragic pose by the chimney-breast; cue revivifying hit of apricot-brandy from the sideboard drawer.)
    A striking facial resemblance between my mother and Fanny Brice as played by herself in The Great Ziegfeld – they shared the same ethnic features: proud forehead, bulbous nose, rolling Can-toresque eyes – encouraged her in her belief that the parade had passed her by.
    She went to see that film (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, Prod. Hunt Stromberg, MGM, 1936; b&w) in the spirit that other people made pilgrimages to Lourdes: repeatedly, religiously, with a vacuum flask in her voluminous mock-croc handbag and me and my father in tow. There was never any doubt in her mind that it was the transformation of herself from rags to riches, from cheap burlesk to queen of the Great White Way, that she was witnessing on the screen. The comedown afterwards, as she rode our family bone-shaker the few hundred yards home, was pitiful to behold.
    Inevitably, as it seems now, my mother met my father at a tea dance at the Café de Paris in Leicester Square. He was a familiar figure outside the stage-doors of the London music-halls and thelegitimate theatres of the West End and as incurably star-struck – he wore it in his eyes – as her.
    The Kogins had disembarked in England from Russia, thinking it was America, and stayed. My father’s father, whom I never met, was a tailor. My father, whose name was Mitya, or Mityusha, or Mityenka, or Mityushenka – less euphoniously ‘Mark’ – sold women’s dresses from a shop in a genteel seaside resort on the south coast. In time he would build the one shop up into a small chain.
    I must have seen the sea every day when I was a child but have retained no memory of it at all. My childhood was miraculously, certainly quite unnaturally, protected from the elements. I was, after all, conceived as an all-singing, all-dancing showtime spectacular and, like the exotic bloodstock that suggests, raised in what virtually amounted to laboratory conditions.
    By the age of two I was being coached in voice and tap by Madame Rogers and her daughter, a stringy girl, splay-footed as well as tone-deaf, known to us as Mamzelle Leonora. There was something about the Studio – two rooms above a Burton’s the tailor, sharing a landing with a dangerously dingy billiard hall from which damp sawdust trailed, as out of a butcher’s or a burst teddy bear – that smacked of the gutter glamour to which I have always found myself ineluctably drawn. My parents, needless to say, saw it as merely glamorous.
    Back home after every lesson I had to stand on one of the broad lino margins around the living-room and give a demonstration of what I’d learned, the