COMEDY OF AN ERROR

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21254, 6 August 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

COMEDY OF AN ERROR

, OVERSIGHT THAT COST £7600 ACTRESS AND HER SON // WORRIES OF A COMEDIENNE Viscountess Peel, who is otherwise known as Miss Beatrice Lillie, recently made a £7BOO mistake. Earlier in the year she was offered a thirteen weeks' , broadcasting engagement in New \ ork at £6OO a week for half an hour's talk each week. Miss Lillie thought that the summer /holidays of her eleven-year-old son Bobby'would begin on Monday, June 20, refused the engagement, and sailed for England in time to present the prizes at the sports meeting of Bobby's school at Hunstanton on June 18, and to wonder why nobody except Bobby will take her / Eeriomsly. The simple mathematics of the situation are that the comedienne could have accepted the New York engagement, done her £7BOO bit of broadcasting for the thirteen weeks, and still have been in time to spend all the holidays with Bobby, / for his school had no intention of releasing him until July 28, when the normal holidays began. Bobby was very pleased to see his mother when she arrived at his sichool on June 18, but he seemed to be a little worried. " Mummy, don't you think people laugh at you too much?" he is 'said to have asked on an earlier occasion. And Beatrice Lillie is, perhaps, says a 5/ writer in the Daily Express, beginning to wonder whether, after all, she should not be content to be one of the great " ' comediennes of the world—whether she can help it. . • • . Miss Lillie has led—and will always lead—two lives. .In one she is Bobby's mother, a gracious lady. In the other ehe is Bee Lillie, who has been the joy of two continents. She is finding it very hard to make up her mind which of them she is. On her last appearance in New York she became Bernard Shaw's latest leading lady, and, after that adventure, declared, " I believe I can play anything from jazz to Mozart now —and somehow everybody laughed. It was not unkind laughter—nobody ■could have anything but the most adoring kindness for Bee Lillie. But there she sat, wearing the most ridiculous little crocheted lace gloves, plucking at them with nervous fingers and looking—oh, everyone knows how she would look. ~ "It is tough to be a comedienne, Miss Lillie mourned. " Everything you do makes people laugh. What's a girl to do?" She stared again at the gloves. " I guess my nose makes them laugh, she said solemnly. " Yes, I gave away the prizes at Bobby's school. I said, ' Boys, I am glad to be here and to give away the prizes,' and they just rolled around and laughed. They gave me three cheers, but Bobby only gave me two and a-half. Oh, I'd love to make people cry! But my nose goes against me." The writer adds:—"Perhaps Bobby is all wrong, and people do not laugh at her too much."