Last Dance

Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen was a thin, gawky cockney child born to a Danish father and an Irish mother within sound of London's Bow Bells. The most exciting times of her childhood were the nighttime flights from creditors with the family's scanty possessions piled on to a friendly grocer's cart.

She was already calling herself Gertie Lawrence when she won a scholarship at London's Conti Dancing Academy. Another student, Noel Coward, remembers her as a lively 14-year-old with ringlets: "Her face was far from pretty but tre mendously alive. She gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards." Once, her teacher led her to a piano, put a piece of paper under the strings, and struck a chord. "That," she said, "is what your voice sounds like." Gertie worked hard to get rid of her cockney twang. On a Sunday excursion to Brighton, she put a penny in a fortune-telling machine. The pink card she got told her her fate: A star danced, And you were born.

Limehouse Blues. Gertrude Lawrence danced her way through the provinces.

When a show was stranded in Shrewsbury, she earned her keep as a barmaid. In Lon don, she got a job in the chorus of one of Andre Chariot's revues, understudied Bea trice Lillie, and married a director named Francis Gordon-Howley. During World War I, Gertrude, though both ill and pregnant, took over in Bea's place and stopped the show. In the midst of one of the heaviest Zeppelin raids of the war, she was rushed from the theater for the premature birth of her daughter, Pamela.

Whirling into the dizzy '205, Gertrude separated from her husband. In 1924, she landed in New York. Co-starring in Charlot's Revue with Bea Lillie and Jack Buchanan, Gertrude captured Broadway by singing Limehouse Blues. Critic Percy Hammond wrote that "every man in New York is, or was, in love with Gertrude Lawrence." Whenever she entered a nightclub, the band played Limehouse Blues.

Viennese Comedy. Gertrude danced through the stock-market crash and the depression '30s. She played her first straight role in the Viennese comedy Candle Light, and Noel Coward wired her: "Legitimate at last, darling. Won't mother be pleased?" Coward wrote Private Lives especially for her, and as Amanda, whose heart "was jagged with sophistication," she profoundly affected a generation of theatergoing young women. In Tonight at 8:30, Susan and God, Skylark and Lady in the Dark, Gertrude made as much as $5,000 a week. All the money ran through her fingers as fast as it poured in. She was declared bankrupt in England and hounded by creditors in the U.S. Somehow, she paid off everyone while managing to keep, in Coward's phrase, her "quick humor, insane generosity and loving heart."

Moss Hart remembers that "she had, in a true sense, glamour. She had more of it than anyone else." Her range as an actress was extraordinary. She could be gay, sad, witty, tragic, funny, touching. She was as capable of fine subtlety as of noisy overemphasis. She was, according to Coward, "barely pretty," but she "appropriated beauty to herself . . . along with all the tricks and mannerisms that go with it." Possibly the narrowest view of her talents was held by Gertrude herself: "I am not what you would call a wonderful dancer, but I am light on my feet and make the best of things."

During World War II, when her second husband. Producer Richard Aldrich, became a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, Gertrude flew to London, played before factory workers and troops. She crossed to Normandy in the wake of the invasion and swam ashore in her brassiere and a pair of trunks borrowed from cheering U.S. sailors.

Gertrude Lawrence's last hit was The King and I, a return to her first love, the musical. As Mrs. Anna Leonowens, tutor to the children of the King of Siam, she lived her part so intensely that she signed her personal letters "Mrs. Anna." Last month Gertrude was admitted to New York Hospital for treatment of what seemed to be a minor liver ailment (it was cancer). Last week, after a sudden crisis, the dancing feet were forever stilled. To her friends, it was as though the lights on Broadway had gone out. This week Gertrude Lawrence was buried in the shell pink satin dress she wore in The King and I sequence called "Shall We Dance?"

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