Grizabella like a crooked pin." The character of Grizabella featured in an unpublished poem that T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren, intending to include it in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". However, as his widow, Valerie Eliot pointed out, he thought it was too "sad for children" and so did not include it in the finished work. Valerie Eliot came to the 1980 Sydmonton Festival concert where Andrew Lloyd Webber premiered some of his settings of the Old Possum poems, and gave him the paper with the fragment of Grizabella written on it. From there Lloyd Webber and director
Cats (musical) Suddenly, after they finish, they are caught off-guard by the rest of the Cats, who scold them for trying to scare them to death. Finally, the Jellicle patriarch, Old Deuteronomy, arrives ("Old Deuteronomy") before the tribe. He is a large old Cat that "has lived many lives" and "buried nine wives (And more, I am tempted to say—ninety-nine)". He is the Cat who chooses which Jellicle Cat will go to the Heaviside Layer every year. While the patriarch is welcomed by his loyal subjects, the Cats put on a play for Old Deuteronomy, called "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes