Show Business: Bea’s Blast

As Turkish baths go, the establishment beneath London’s Imperial Hotel in Russell Square is one of the best. From its Gothic galleries, stone monarchs and prophets (Queen Elizabeth I, Erasmus) have gazed through the steam at generations of bare, Blimpish backsides. One night last week the steam rooms and massage parlors presented a shocking sight: crowds of people who were fully dressed, or almost. To celebrate the London premiere of Auntie Mame, starring Bea Lillie, Producer David Pelham had picked the Turkish bath as the logical place for a party. The result was as wacky a shindig as any the Madwoman of Beekman Place herself might have improvised.

Great blocks of ice were brought in to cool the pool, and enough pent-up steam was allowed to escape into the London air to sweat out a whole year’s hangovers. The cavernous chambers were abustle with well-stacked nautch girls, brushing bare bellies with Indian waiters serving cha-patties. The only washroom was carefully labeled “Co-educational—On Your Honor Please!” Behind the bar a lily-twined manneken-pis arched a thoughtful stream at a stone death’s head that looked like many a guest would feel on the morning after. There were two dozen freshly made beds spotted strategically for the incapable or the incautious.

While a six-piece combo whanged away, dukes and duchesses danced alongside Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Hollywood’s Mike Romanoff. The dueling balletomani-acs, the Marquis de Cuevas and Serge Lifar, were almost friendly, and Angry Young Man John Osborne giggled at the fun. Dame Margot Fonteyn turned up along with Gracie Fields. At midnight, when Bea Lillie, alias Lady Peel, arrived, the party reached its peak. Someone peeled off his dinner jacket; someone else pushed him into the pool. A fully dressed couple staged an underwater race. The bar closed at 2 a.m., but 35 cases of whisky, gin, beer, champagne, vodka, sherry had given the party enough momentum to last till 4.

There was only one thing wrong: everyone already knew that the British critics were dismissing Auntie Mame as a sad, soggy, American-style flop. But the party was (as even the British have learned to say) socko.