Not many remember him today, but Joseph Grimaldi may have been the world’s first genuine show-business celebrity. For almost 20 years, he stood astride the London stage in ways that were unprecedented at the time and prefigured the mass entertainment industry. The play “Mother Goose,’’ in which he starred, was the longest-running pantomime in history and packed in some 300,000 paying visitors, almost one-third the population of London. He was beloved by the humble and the powerful, including the poet Lord Byron and mad King George III, who attended his shows even after surviving an assassination attempt in the same theater.
One of the world’s first celebrities
At his height, around 1820, Grimaldi was so well known that his clownish visage was plastered in a proto-Warholian craze on teacups, prints, pocket watches, board games, children’s coloring books, and statuettes that still pop up today at curio shops. Among the first actors to perform literally in the limelight — a movable cone of incandescent lime that made its debut in his day — Grimaldi lived in “a culture of personal fascination that was born in the first decade of the nineteenth century,’’ writes Andrew McConnell Stott in this exuberantly detailed biography.
Grimaldi was raised in the anarchic dregs of Industrial Revolution-era London by a savagely abusive father, a traveling actor from Italy given to dragging his children onto the stage to beat them in front of an audience. Acting was more servitude than employment, but theaters attracted huge crowds nightly with lavishly staged melodramas and operettas. Directors were known to bring on live bears and elephants. Grimaldi’s home theater, Sadler’s Wells, diverted the course of a nearby stream to turn the stage into a shallow lake in which actors reenacted Napoleonic naval battles, to the public’s ecstatic delight. Bored audiences were known to throw fruit, bottles, or worse. A stampede following a Grimaldi performance killed 18 people, and fire at another theater killed 23.
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