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"G." Gertrude Lawrence, known to her intimates as "Gertie" or "G," has long had this sort of effect on the most bilious critics. After her Broadway debut in 1924, one of the most acid reviewers, the late Percy Hammond, said that "Every man in town is, or will be, in love with her." Struggling to describe her power over them, otherwise manly reviewers have often found themselves dithering about her large wistful eyes, her tiptilted, crinkling nose, her mischievous smile; or else about the huskiness of her voice, her exquisite back, or the grace of her slim, long-legged, clotheshorse figure.
Last week, ignoring these well-known physical data, the critics fell to raving about her theatrical versatility. In Lady in the Dark she does virtually everything but play a trombone solo. She is on the stage almost all the time. Gertie (age 42), who offstage has never been in a psychoanalyst's office, runs an emotional gamut from the romanticism of a schoolgirl in her teens to the neurotic distress of a mature young woman. She sings sweetly, does high kicks and jazz steps (though with the years they seem somewhat angularly British). She models as few other women could an ar ray of costumes — from a trig purple suit to a sequined man-killer— that had Designer Hattie Carnegie's telephone ringing constantly on the morning after the opening. Once, in changing costumes, Gertie does the next thing to a striptease' exposing herself in a cobwebby black lace slip. Naturally in Lady in the Dark she has no understudy. The show business knows no one who could fill the bill.
"An Orange & Dirty Stories." Versatile as she is, mankind is probably not so much affected by the Lawrence looks and talent as by the enduring Lawrence charm. She suggests the rakish, amusing, grey hound-style young women who in the middle '205 obsessed the fastidious heroes of Michael Aden's novels of Mayfair. Actually this Mayfairian tone is something Gertie only gradually acquired. She did not come to the theatre from England's upper crust. Born in London on July 4, 1898, baptized as Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen, she was the daughter of a Danish interlocutor of a traveling minstrel show, and an Irish actress.
Since her parents were divorced when Gertie was very small, she was brought up by her mother. At ten she made her stage debut in London in a Christmas pantomime of Babes in the Wood. In another children's play she met a lisping small boy named Noel Coward. In his autobiography, Present Indicative, he has written: "She . . . gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards." For a while she went to the Convent of the Sacre Coeur, Streatham, studied dancing under a Madame Espinosa, and acting at Italia Conti's London school. She had cards printed reading Miss Gertie Lawrence, Child Actress and Toe Dancer.