Speed Dating Events

In fairness, even the most dreadful line can work. A handsome Aussie has made himself the Terror of Earl’s Court with his killing parodies of the Private Eye gag, ‘Let’s uncoil the one-eyed trouser snake’. He could also pull out ‘pyjama python’ and the whole armoury of cod okkerisms when he felt like a textual variant.

Some men are more conscious than others that even with a Welsh lilt, a cap for Wales, and the best replacement set of false front teeth that the Land Of Your Fathers can afford, a man might not be enough in himself. In the past, especially, it was customary to accompany a proposition with the inducements thought necessary to make the lady likely to accept it. Sir Charles Dilke, the noticeably Liberal politician and famous fornicator, used to offer women a signed photo of himself in return for their favours!

But most men know that something more tangible than this is expected, and if it’s a serious business proposition, it’s going to be more than a quid pro quo. A man looking for a long-term arrangement would often fix on a particular woman, and make his proposition, just like a proposal, in full and in form. Actresses were particularly vulnerable to these approaches, as they were often unjustly held to be not as respectable as they ought to be. So they often found themselves fighting off the johnnies who weren’t content to remain safely at the stage door.

In Masks and Faces the leading character is the actress Peg Woffington, who had flourished as the leading female star of the stage a century earlier. Charles Reade, the author, was a close life-long friend of the actress Laura Seymour, and this love affair gave him a rare insight into what really went on behind the scenes. Here one admirer has called on La Woffington to take possession of her as his mistress:

POMANDER: I had the honour, madam, of laying certain propositions at your feet.

WOFFINGTON: Oh, yes, your letter, Sir Charles. I ran my eye down it as I came along, let me see — ‘A coach’, `a country house’, ‘pin money’ — Neigh ho! And I am so ired of coaches, and houses, and pins. Oh yes, here is something — what is this you offer me, up in this corner? POMANDER: That? — My heart!

So far, so good, we may think — especially those of us who are not exactly overwhelmed with such offers. Dorothy Parker summed it up:

Why is it no-one ever sent me yet

One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Oh no, its always just my luck to get One perfect rose!

But unfortunately Pomander himself would have to be taken along with his goodies. And he is an odious, vain, arrogant man. Mistress Peg wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole, and takes an indecent delight in telling him

POMANDER: Favour me with your answer.

WOFFINGTON: (tearing the letter up) You have it.

POMANDER: (aghast) Tell me, do you really refuse?

WOFFINGTON: My good soul, are you so ignorant of the stage and the world, as not to know that I refuse offers such as yours every week of my life? I have refused so many of them, that I assure you I have begun to forget they are insults.

POMANDER: Insults, madam! These are the highest
compliments you have left it in our power to pay you.

WOFFINGTON: Indeed! Oh, I take your meaning. To be your mistress could be but a temporary disgrace — to be your wife might be a lasting discredit!

Game, set and match to Woffington in this encounter. But perhaps the suitor had a lucky escape. In real life ‘lovely Peggy’ had scores of lovers, among them small but sexy star actor David Garrick, the Dudley Moore of the eighteenth century, and was openly unfaithful to them all. She had an actress‘ temperament, too. Once, in a fit of jealousy, she followed a rival actress off the stage and plunged a knife in her back!The men whose propositions she turned down generally had more to be thankful for than those who were accepted.

Nowadays, the proposition direct is more likely to be an unpretentious one-liner, than the old-style offer that sounded more like a legal contract. When the heroine has her hair blonded ‘all white and silky’ in To Have And Have Not, the Hemingway hero, perennially short on words at his best, throws around no more of the magic monosyllables than it takes to say:

Let’s go to the hotel.

Sometimes the proposition is slipped in unannounced, and even with a kind of innocence, like this boy-girl number from Brendan Behan’s hit musical play, The Hostage:

SOLDIER: I will give you a golden ball,
To hop with the children in the hall,

TERESA: If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,

If you’ll marry me.

SOLDIER: I will give you the keys of my chest,

And all the money that I possess

TERESA: If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,

If you’ll marry me.

I will bake you a big pork pie, And hide you till the cops go by,

SOLDIER: If you’ll marry, marry, marry, marry,

If you’ll marry me.

But first I think that we should see If we fit each other —

TERESA: (to the audience) Shall we? SOLDIER: Yes, let’s see.

And they jump into bed together like two puppies in a basket, children of a divided Ireland finding a moment of peace and happiness against the never-ending backdrop of the Troubles.

The great one-line proposition isn’t usually as sweet and child-like as this. But it is by way of being an undiscovered art-form of the twentieth century, practised by all manner and degree of men. Inevitably, ‘would you like to come up and see my etchings’ has now been superseded by the invitation to view a video. Home computers are also often kept in bedrooms, strangely enough (`I like to relax with it before I go to sleep’) Well, yes. This is the age of the chip. But chips with everything?

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Love Proposition, Let’s Do It part 2

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• Proposal, Love and Happiness, the Tender Trap part 1
• The Art of the Proposition, Enshrines Classic Marriage Proposal part 1
• What a Nerve! Man proposes, God disposes part 3
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