The Bloke Who Is Doing Everything

For a man who is a classic clown, hoofer, hit lyricist (Georgy Girl), pop-music headliner and Shakespearean actor, Jim Dale began with a simple ambition. When he was nine, his father took him to a London music hall. "We sat up in the gods [top balcony], and everyone onstage looked an inch high," Dale recalls. "But I was looking at the audience. I never saw 2,000 people laugh before, and I felt so happy for that little bloke onstage. I thought then: What I want to do is make people laugh."

Dale has accomplished his goal, but he is emphatically not a little bloke onstage. Currently starring in Scapino (TIME, June 3), he is the spring season's biggest sensation -- over, under, beside, beneath, across, atop and flat on his back upon the Broadway stage. Tall and lanky, he seems endowed with a flamingo's limbs -- concave knees; one-legged, plumb-line balance; flapping, winglike arms. Playing the duplicitous Neapolitan servant Scapino involves at least as much acrobatics as acting. At one point he keels over from the edge of a 10-ft. platform, grabs onto a hanging rope just before his feet leave the edge, and continues his dialogue suspended in perfect parallel to the floor, belly up and legs languidly crossed.

But Dale, 38, does not depend on gymnastics. He is one of the rare per formers whose magnetism rills every cubic inch of the house while his eyes count it. Working from a slapdash adaptation of Moliere's classic farce, Les Fourberies de Scapin, he keeps the evening fresh with the pleasure of his company. For one thing, he is a flirt. He vamps fellow actors even as they trade invectives. But the audience gets his most collusive winks and slanted asides.

Rubber Doll. By now he is pretty sure of a good reception, but he has never taken anything for granted. He flopped with his first audience, the Northamptonshire clan of 53 among whom he grew up. "I wasn't a natural comedian. I was not funny at home. I entered talent contests, but usually the girl in the ballet dress won." Not even this humiliation was lost on Dale. He took ballet lessons, along with a course in "eccentric dancing"--an outre British art that Dale describes as "learning to move the body as if it had no joints, like an India rubber doll."

At 16 the dogged Dale joined a touring music-hall company as a fifth-banana comic. "I was no good, but I learned a lot," says Jim. He adds rather chillingly: "There is something about walking offstage with no one clapping that forces you to think."

Many young men would think their way into another line of work, but Dale diversified into rock singing. "I had my own little amplifier and guitar," he remembers--Dale is full of dry, self-deprecatory anecdotes. "What I did not realize was that it was a receiver too. Suddenly in the middle of a song, out would come, 'Zebra 2, Zebra 2, go immediately to Pimlico Road.' It made quite a contrast to folk-rock."

A melange of show business careers followed, some of them successful. Dale cut a few records, but "after a while that got boring." He followed with a six-month spin as a disc jockey, spent two years as host of a daytime TV comedy show and wrote songs for films like Georgy Girl and Shalako. He also played a variety of antic characters in 13 films in the Carry On ... series, and there he perfected his tumbledown, knockabout maneuvers. "Falling is an art," he says. "It's a matter of relaxing and of knowing which part of the body will take the fall best. Otherwise you smash yourself badly." In fact, he has. In a London repertory performance of Scapino last year, he missed his Tarzan-like lunge for the rope and broke his heel. For the next few performances he played the show in a leg cast and a wheelchair. "Just like a joust," he recalls fondly.

Comic Kaleidoscope. One kind of clowning that Dale had not considered was Shakespearean. He had not even read the plays when, in 1966, Director Frank Dunlop called to ask him to do The Winter's Tale at the Edinburgh Festival. "I said, 'No, I can't do that.' He said, 'How the bloody hell do you know you can't do it?' I turned to my wife and told her, This guy I don't even know is swearing at me because I won't do Shakespeare.' " But Shakespeare he did, later joining the National Theater, where he has played Lancelot Gobbo in Sir Laurence Olivier's revival of The Merchant of Venice, in The Captain of Kopenick with Paul Scofield and the lead in Peter Nichols' The National Health.

Dale has been married for 17 years and is the father of four. "My wife Tricia, she's the oldest. The children are Belinda, 16, Murray, 14, Adam, 12, and Toby, who will be 10 this year if we let him." Because of his family, Dale is undecided about the onslaught of American offers since his Scapino triumph. "I am very selfish about family," he says. "I have only another few years until the children leave." Then, too, Director Dunlop is talking about a possible Jim Dale Henry V.

Maybe, but the kaleidoscope of comedy that is Jim Dale keeps on shifting. Right now he is more enthusiastic about doing another Days of Wine and Roses. He explains, "If I can crawl as a clown and make them laugh, it should not take much more to crawl as an alcoholic and make them cry."

He will probably play both warrior and drunk. In fact, he is a quiet, ambitious realist. "I want to cram everything into my life. I think it goes back to what I started with. I was nothing as a person and I had nothing. What could I be by the time I was 70? I thought, I am going to live. I don't want anything left at the end that I wanted to do. I want the marvelous knowledge that when I am finished, I have done everything."

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