Audition (9 page)

Miami at War

T
HE LAST TIME
I had gone to school in Miami Beach, the only noises I heard outside the classroom were the shouts and laughter from the older kids who had recess an hour after we did. This time the sounds that resonated were loud masculine voices repeating in unison, “Sound off, one two, sound off, three four.”

It was 1944, America’s third year in World War II. While I was in high school, the army was ensconced in virtually every hotel in Miami Beach. They had commandeered almost four hundred of them to house the thousands of servicemen being trained under the palm trees and along the pristine beaches to go to war. The U.S. military had taken over paradise, and there was no room anymore for tourists.

The army was in Miami Beach. Across the causeways the navy was headquartered in Miami. I even remember seeing open trucks carrying German soldiers who were prisoners of war. The Germans weren’t marching or counting off. Dressed in jeans and shirts with
PW
stenciled on the backs, they were being taken to clean the streets in Miami Beach. There must have been prisoner-of-war camps nearby. But was Miami Beach a paradise for the German prisoners of war? I doubt it. Then again, I didn’t give it much thought. As I look back, I didn’t give anything much thought other than my own personal life.

Strangely enough I wasn’t sure then, and still don’t know, why my father wanted to return to Miami Beach. The Latin Quarter on Palm Island had been requisitioned by the army as one of its many commissaries to feed the trainees. The pistachio green house had also been militarized. It was now living quarters for some lucky officers. Our family, however, continued to live on an island, a different one, off the same causeway. Just a short bike ride away from Palm Island, over a little bridge, was Hibiscus Island. Here my father and mother rented a beautiful white house with a lovely lawn and a swimming pool.

So without the Latin Quarter, what were we doing there? I guess my father felt that there was still business to be done, for he rented another club called the Colonial Inn on the outskirts of Miami.

It is not clear to me how long Dad ran the Colonial Inn. There were very few visitors to Miami or Miami Beach because it was almost impossible to get hotel rooms. Perhaps my father felt that he could attract the Palm Beach crowd, just an hour and a half away. There was far less of a military presence there, although how he expected people to drive to his club with such strict wartime gas rationing puzzles me. But I wasn’t thinking too much about my father’s problems that year. I was in a new school, and this time the auditioning wasn’t too tough.

I still knew some kids from our last stint in Florida, and my classmates were nowhere near as snobbish as those in my first year at Fieldston. (I probably still had my white Cuban heels.) Not that there weren’t also cliques. Here the cliques were called sororities and fraternities. They had Greek names, and the deal was this: At the start of each school year the older girls and boys of a particular sorority or fraternity invited some of the new kids to join. Ever since this experience, I have always felt that sororities and fraternities are exclusionary, discriminating, and hurtful. But remember that robin who wanted so badly to belong back in second grade? Nothing had really changed.

The more exclusive of the girls’ sororities was called Kappa Pi. The lesser sorority was called Lambda Pi. I started off at the beginning of the school year and was told that Lambda chose its members first, but if I waited I would certainly be asked to join Kappa Pi. I was afraid, though, that if I waited I might not be chosen by either, and that was something I couldn’t face. So as soon as I was asked to pledge Lambda Pi, I said yes.

Pledging meant giving your total commitment to the group and rejecting friendship with any of the girls in Kappa Pi. Ridiculous? Not at the time. I belonged. I was part of the chorus. I had friends. And I had a good time that year. In case you’re wondering if any black (“colored” was the term in those days) girls or boys were asked to pledge, remember that in the 1940s there were strict segregation laws in the South. Miami Beach was definitely the South. So the answer is a resounding no. But we weren’t thinking of social issues then, only our own small social lives, which were busy and active. We had after-school dances where I learned to do the jitterbug or, as it was also called, the Lindy. Once in a while now when I go to a wedding and the band strikes up the music of the forties, I watch the sixty-or seventy-year-old men take to the floor with glee, twirl their wives around, and all but throw them over their shoulders. Once you learn the Lindy, you never forget how to do it.

I still wouldn’t wear shorts to school, as many of the other girls did, although, believe me, my legs were probably my best feature. (Even today I think of Marlene Dietrich, who supposedly said, “The legs are the last to go.”) I had a few boyfriends. One I remember was named Ed Klein. We didn’t go steady, as the term for exclusivity was then, but we saw a lot of each other. He was in the class above me. When Ed grew up he became a judge in Miami, and a few years ago he wrote and asked if he and his wife could come to watch my daytime television show
The View.
I introduced him from the audience, and he still seemed like a real nice guy.

Jackie was, by then, a very pretty girl in her late teens, still always by my mother’s side. Now and then friends of the family would tell us about a soldier or sailor they knew from Boston or New York and suggest we call him. I saw a bit of one sweet guy, still in his teens, who was in the army. With my mother still asking, “Can’t you take your sister?” a double date was arranged with a friend of my new friend.

We went to one of the hotels where servicemen could go to relax. Jackie was quiet, and although I was never very comfortable with her, being the technically younger but ever watchful and emotionally “older” sister, things seemed to be going pretty well. Until, that is, I heard her date asking Jackie to leave us and go off with him alone for a drink. Jackie didn’t know what to say or do. I did. I said, “We’re going home.” I was so afraid that Jackie, in her inexperience and innocence, would be taken advantage of. Did I spoil things for her? She never said a word so I just don’t know, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

There was another man who was interested in Jackie, and when we got to know him well and trusted him, my parents let him take her to a few movies. His name was Bert something. He was older, in his late twenties, and I don’t remember how he came into our lives. He was a perfectly pleasant man, not good-looking, a bit short and plump, but he had a very cheery disposition, and my mother in particular liked him a lot. He seemed to be very attracted to Jackie. He talked patiently to her and something might have come of it, but Jackie showed no interest.

Bert continued to visit for a while, then gradually went out of our lives. I don’t remember any other man ever coming around to see her, and although I feel that I am intruding into her very personal being as I write this, I am sure my sister lived her whole life as a virgin.

What I remember most about that period in Florida is not Jackie being with Bert but Jackie again being alone while I was not. This is, of course, a recurring theme in my life. I had a big pool party once at the Hibiscus Island house for my sorority pals and their dates. There was food, music, dancing—a big deal. We were playing Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey records and Lindying away when, at one point, I had to go into the house. There, sitting quietly, were my mother and Jackie. My mother was holding Jackie’s hand as they listened silently to the music drifting in from my party. My mother, knowing how I felt and wanting me to have a good time, did not, this time, ask me to include my sister, nor did I offer to. It’s difficult for me to admit all this, and it makes me feel wretched just thinking about my selfishness. But in general I have to say that year was a happy one for me. We girls of Lambda Pi had get-togethers at one another’s houses and planned events with the boys from the fraternities. We went to the beach and to movies. We experimented with makeup. Tangee Natural was the lipstick of choice. You could really smear it on heavily and it still looked like your own lips.

Now and then we had dances at school. I still had to be picked up and dropped off, and with gas rationing this was no easy thing, so sometimes I stayed over at a friend’s house. That was a real treat. I should mention that my grades were excellent. I was even chosen “Miss French Club,” whatever that meant. It was certainly better than “Most Improved Athlete.” Things were definitely okay.

Then, on May 8, 1945, Miami erupted into a giant celebration when the Allies officially declared victory over the Germans in Europe. The defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific was still three months away, but for the thousands of servicemen in Miami, VE Day was the beginning of life returning to normal. My father, who remained British to the core, took us all to the movies to see the newsreel of the nonstop celebrations in London.

The end of the war in Europe was frosting on the cake for my tenth-grade year in Florida. I was looking forward to the years ahead in sunny Florida. But it didn’t happen. Shortly after school let out for the summer, we moved back to New York. This time for good.

“A very normal girl”

B
Y NOW
you know the drill. The new school, on the Upper West Side, was called Birch Wathen, founded by two proper ladies named—surprise!—Miss Birch and Miss Wathen. There were new friends (much easier this time) and a new penthouse to live in (the biggest and grandest so far).

In the postwar euphoria the Latin Quarter was the hottest nightclub in New York. Returning servicemen and tourists flocked to my father’s lavish shows, making the club second only to Radio City Music Hall as a tourist destination. In the city that never sleeps, neither did the Latin Quarter. It was open 365 days a year, closing for just two days in 1945 to honor the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. All the biggest stars were now playing there. Milton Berle now started his routine: “I knew Lou Walters before he could speak Latin and didn’t have a quarter.”

The Palm Island Latin Quarter also reopened after the war to capacity audiences. America was in the mood to celebrate and Miami Beach was booming. More and more hotels were springing up all over Miami Beach, filled not only with war-starved sun worshippers from the North, but with former servicemen who had trained there. Dressed in Hawaiian shirts now instead of khaki, they were returning by the thousands to celebrate with their families, and they all went to the Latin Quarter.

No reason, then, not to have one of the best possible apartments in all of New York. It was a penthouse in the Sixties on Central Park West. The only apartment on the floor, it was surrounded on all four sides by huge terraces planted with flowers and small trees. My parents’ bedroom overlooked the park, as did Jackie’s. Mine did not, but it had another little room attached to it where other families’ nannies had probably slept. So essentially I had my own suite.

The rest of the apartment was vast. There was an enormous wood-paneled living room, a music room with a piano nobody played, a library, a dining room, a huge kitchen with a butler’s pantry, four bedrooms, and up a short flight of stairs, a playroom with a bar and its own kitchen and bath, which we never used. One of our butlers did, though. He turned out to be an alcoholic and we found all his bottles stashed up there.

The apartment may have belonged previously to the Hearsts, the billionaire publishing family. When, later, my cousin Selig visited the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, he was struck by the familiar paneling and was told by a guard that it had come from the Hearsts’ penthouse in New York. In any case there we were in our own castle in New York, with our own treasures. My father filled the library shelves with his growing collection of first editions, the same books that are now in my own library.

My mother, who had decorated all our previous homes herself, really went to town on this one. She bought red leather couches and chairs for the library, but the pièce de résistance was the living room. Here my mother chose a combination of pale yellow and lavender brocade for the couches and chairs. Lots of pillows and tassels. The whole thing looked like a huge Easter egg.

Mother hired a couple to cook and care for all our needs, but she still worried about our financial future. She’d gone from rags to riches to rags before with my father. Well, maybe not rags. More like going to cloth coats from fur. So I’m not sure she really trusted or enjoyed this newfound good fortune. I shared her unease.

We both recognized my father’s extravagant lifestyle and his equally extravagant approach to the shows he was producing. The costumes alone cost a small fortune. Many were designed by Erté, the famous Russian-born Paris designer and art deco painter who also designed the costumes for the Folies-Bergère in Paris. The fabrics my father insisted on were top quality—silk, satin, velvet—no rayon for him and his girls. The sequins had to be sewn on by hand because they looked better than machine-stitched sequins. The underskirts of the cancan costumes had to have layers of individual ruffles, not cheaper, all-in-one ruffles. Erté kept designing one more lavishly unique costume after another.

His watercolor sketches for the costumes and the sets turned out to be works of art in themselves. I have collected many over the years. One reads, on the back, “For the finale of the first act.” Another reads: “This is for the girl with the red hair.” The sketches now cover a whole wall in my apartment.

The sheer volume of custom-made costumes from the Latin Quarters in New York and Palm Island led my father to open his own costume company in a warehouse in Manhattan. He made a sizable profit by renting the costumes to other shows and productions. He also used the expensive costumes to outfit the Latin Quarter touring companies he now began to launch.