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There is nothing so grim and grimy as the British provincial theatre, and Gertrude Lawrence had nearly eight years of it, in her teens, before she had a London engagement. When she got a call from the London revue producer, Andre Chariot, Gertie sneaked her clothes from the theatre where she was playing, borrowed the fare to London, and landed a three-year contract with Chariot starting at $16 a week. Shortly afterwards she married a showman named Francis Xavier Gordon-Howley who, as the justice remarked at the divorce proceedings several years later, seemed to have intended to spend the rest of his life living on her income.
"G" and "Bea." For some time Charlot's Revue was mostly hard chorus work for Gertie. But twice when Beatrice Lillie left the show (once on falling from a horse, again on getting married) her understudy Gertie had her chance to shine. In 1924 Chariot's Revue came to the U. S. featuring the ludicrous Lillie, the elegant Jack Buchanan, and Gertie. They arrived on Christmas Eve and while waiting for the customs Bea and Gertie sat on their trunks, cried, and sang carols. The revue flopped in an Atlantic City tryout, but a few weeks later it wowed Broadway. Twenty-five-year-old Gertie sang Philip Braham's murmurous Limehouse Blues and a sly comedy song beginning: "I don't know what you think he did that evening. . . ." She was still comparatively unknown in her native England, but that evening the Manhattan audience felt sure they were seeing the quintessence of Mayfair talent.
From then on express liners shuttled her back & forth across the Atlantic from hit to hit. Some of her plays were dramatically feeble — but she was always the delectable Lawrence. The London Times's dramatic critic observed: "Miss Lawrence's performance is nearly always a matter of making bricks without straw." The management of His Majesty's Theatre once had to serve breakfast, lunch and tea to a queue of 300 who had lined up 24 hours before a Lawrence first night. In the U. S. she played in another Chariot's Revue, the Gershwin musicomedy Oh, Kay!, Treasure Girl, Candle Light with Leslie Howard, Lew Leslie's International Review, Noel Coward's Private Lives and Tonight at 8:30 with her old friend, recently Susan and God and Skylark.
To begin with she was not the finished, versatile actress she is today. She had a tendency to overplug her comedy with exaggerated gestures and grimaces, and she had little emotional range. But gradually, especially by working with the hyper critical and candid Coward, her acting began to acquire sureness and scope. After Private Lives even Robert Benchley was encouraged to say: "Certain curmudgeons m these parts will hear with relief that Miss Lawrence has somewhat abated since her last didoes in New York. She can now express wild surprise without such feats of contortion as really ought to be saved up for the more startling details of the Last Judgment."