Elsa's Gazebo

To many a moviegoer, Elsa Lanchester is just Charles Laughton's wife; but to Hollywoodians she is the burlesqueen of what is probably the world's toniest vaudeville palace: Los Angeles' Turnabout Theater. Last week Elsa gave her 2,000th performance at Turnabout, a full house gave her a rousing curtain call, and the management gave her a party.

She loves her work so much that for seven years, six nights a week, she has done it without pay. She finds payment enough in "the chance to use every ounce of creative energy that I have." That energy bubbles through about 50 musical skits (written by Turnabout's Forman Brown); in some of them Elsa rivals Bea Lillie at her best.

Many of them concern shady ladies and double meanings. All are delivered in a scrape-fiddle soprano, with a prodigality of gesture and squirrel teeth. Perhaps Elsa's audiences like best the one about a wealthy, overstuffed New England heiress who builds a gazebo (latticed bower) in which to trap a mate. She coyly invites:

If you peek in my gazebo as you are

passing by, You will see a sight that will delight the

most fastidious eye . . .*

The air of London music hall is no accident. She calls herself a Cockney, though she was actually born in the London suburb of Lewisham, beyond the sound of Bow Bells. Her parents, she remembers, were "a bit arty--went in for pacifism, vegetarianism, Socialism and all that." At ten, she met Raymond Duncan, who sent her to study dancing with his sister Isadora. At 16, Elsa organized a London theater company, which put on one-act plays by Chekhov and Pirandello.

Soon she was singing in a West End revue, working in a nightspot after the show, and changing costumes in a taxi going from one to the other. Once the taxi was stopped for speeding, she recalls, "and when the bobby looked inside the car, he discovered a naked lady." She married Laughton in 1929, went to Hollywood with him in 1931.

In 1941 she asked for the chance to work with Turnabout, which had just started. Its name means what it says: it's two theaters in one. At one end of the hall a puppet show is staged; when it ends, the revue begins at the other. The audienca sits on slipcovered streetcar seats, reverses them between shows; front seats for the puppet show are back seats for the revue (a nearsighted person has to sit in the center, or decide which he would rather see well, Elsa or the puppets).

Its first year, Turnabout made $10,500 profit; last year it was up to $54,000. Every show night for the last six years every seat in the house has been sold.

* Copyright, 1947 Elsa Lanchester.

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