Funny Girl(14)

‘You want me to change my name?’

‘You can always change it back, if it doesn’t work out.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

That was all it took for her to decide that she never wanted to be Barbara again: it would be a mark of failure, and she wasn’t going to fail. It didn’t matter. She could change her name and change her voice and she would still be her, because she was a burning blue flame and nothing else, and the flame would burn her up unless it could find its way out.

‘Have you got a name for me already?’

‘Of course not. I’m not that much of a little Hitler. We choose it together.’

So Barbara chose Honor and Cathy from The Avengers, Glynis and Vivien and Yvonne from the movies, even Lucy from the television. And when all the names she liked had been turned down, they settled for Brian’s very first suggestion, Sophie Straw. Sophie sounded posh, she understood that.

‘Why Straw?’

‘Sandie Shaw. Sophie Straw. It sounds good.’

‘But why not Sophie Simpson?’

‘The shorter the better.’

‘Smith, then.’

‘What’s wrong with Straw?’

‘What do you like about it?’

‘I’m a happily married man.’

‘You’ve told me before.’

‘But if even I, a happily married man, somehow end up thinking about rolls in the hay, imagine how all the unhappily married men will feel.’

Sophie Straw wrinkled up her nose.

‘That’s a bit creepy.’

‘I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, my sweet. But there are some aspects of this business that are a bit creepy.’

The following day, Brian sent Sophie Straw up for a part as a young housewife in a soap commercial. She was pretty sure that he was trying to break her spirit. She’d spent the evening listening to Brian’s elocution records on Marjorie’s record player and practising her best Jean Metcalfe voice, but this time they stopped her even before she was asked to speak. A man from the soap manufacturers was sitting in the room with the director, and he smiled and shook his head.

‘I’m sorry, Sophie,’ said the director. ‘Not this time.’

‘Can I ask why not?’

The man from the soap manufacturers whispered into the director’s ear and the director shrugged.

‘He says you’re nobody’s idea of a housewife. You’re too pretty, and your shape is all wrong.’

‘What’s wrong with my shape?’

The soap man laughed. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with it. We’re looking for something a little mumsier.’

She remembered the mayor of Blackpool: kiddies and cream buns, kiddies and cream buns.

‘I could have just got married recently,’ she said, and once again she was sickened by her own hunger. She should have walked out, tipped the table over, spat at them; instead she was begging.

‘It’s an advertisement for soap, darling. We haven’t got time to explain how long you’ve been married and where you met your husband and how you’re still watching your figure.’

‘Thanks for coming in anyway,’ said the director. ‘I’ll certainly remember you if I’m doing something that’s a better match.’

‘What would that be?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you know. A glamorous drink. Babycham, Dubonnet, that sort of thing. Maybe cigarettes. Something that isn’t, you know, the opposite of you.’

‘I’m the opposite of soap?’

‘No, no. I’m sure you’re lovely and clean. You’re the opposite of domestic, though, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’

‘Are you married, Sophie?’

‘Well. No. But I think I could pretend to be married, for two minutes, in a soap advertisement.’

‘I’ll walk you out,’ said the soap man.

The director smiled to himself and shook his head gently.

When they were out of earshot, the soap man asked her out to dinner. He was wearing a wedding ring, of course.

She was approaching the end of her third week of unemployment. She had failed to convince men in studios, clubs and theatres all over the West End that she could be a housewife, a teacher, a policewoman, a secretary … She had even failed an audition for a part as a stripper, despite being more or less told by everybody else that she looked like one. She looked too much like an actress playing a stripper, apparently. The irony of this particular obstacle to employment as an actress was lost on them. The rejections, it seemed to her, were becoming more and more inventive, more and more humiliating, and Brian didn’t have a lot left for her anyway. Everything he made her go up for seemed to prove him right. She wasn’t cut out for this. And anyway, if she was prepared to play strippers in horrible little theatres, she could hardly pretend that Brian’s plans for her were sordid. There wasn’t much difference between playing strippers in vulgar plays and stripping.