The Divine Whiff

What precedes is unbelievably dull. And what follows is worse. But right in the middle of Broadway's The Girl Who Came to Supper there is a scene that stops the cold show--and for at least a full minute the audience regularly whistles and bravos and claps itself silly for a 208-pound actress named Tessie O'Shea.

Tessie is a cockney peddler of fish 'n' chips who has been plopped into the show's continuity to provide flavorful exterior background to the otherwise indoor London setting of Terence Rattigan's story about an American girl and a Carpathian prince. With a big straw hat over her blonde hair, her clothing a rag sonata of browns and purples, her feet, encased in high button shoes, kicking up to show legs that would flatter a Tottenham Court soccer player, she belts out a medley of Noel Coward cockney songs--London Is a Little Bit of All Right, Saturday Night at the Rose and Crown--that ring all the bells of Shoreditch.

Raucous, sentimental, funny and bawdy, 49-year-old Tessie O'Shea is--as an admirer has described her in a dressing-room telegram--"a divine whiff of the Palladium." As the Sophie Tucker of British vaudeville, she is as familiar as a pint of mild in every corner of the United Kingdom, but she has never before appeared in the U.S. Her family was part of the Irish wave that settled in Cardiff and built its docks, but by the time she was born her father had solidly established himself in the newspaper-distribution business. She was "a little fat kid with an enormous voice," and the eternal shortage of comediennes was so acute that she appeared in the Bristol Hippodrome as a professional performer at the age of ten.

Her act hasn't varied much since. She sings (sometimes with a partner), plays a banjo at breathtaking speed, and tells ad-lib stories. Between engagements, she has an oddly energetic pastime for a 15-stone woman who coyly says "I'm about ten pounds overweight": she goes off with her musical director and longtime friend Ernest Wampola (a Viennese doctor of music) on camping trips in the bush country of central Africa, where she fishes and photographs game. She has caught tiger fish in the Chobe River in Bechuanaland and fat, Dark Continent catfish in Southern Rhodesia's Lake Mcllwaine. Last summer, from a distance of less than 60 feet, she photographed a lioness chewing up the carcass of a wildebeest.

With relatives in Massachusetts, she has long had a tropism for the U.S. and has always wanted to live here. Now she probably will, since a new show-biz circuit is open to her. She has a twinkle of accomplishment in her eye when she remembers that during her first go at the Palladium "my name, it was down amongst the wines and spirits--the way it is here at the moment."

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