City of Girls (11 page)

Our drinks made us crazy and lazy. We forgot how to keep track of the hours or the cocktails or the names of our dates. We drank gin fizzes till we forgot how to walk. We forgot how to look after our security once we were good and tight, and other people—often strangers—would have to look after us. (“It ain’t for you to tell a girl how to live!” I remember
Celia yelling one night at a nice gentleman who was politely trying to do nothing more than escort us back home safely to the Lily.)

There was always an element of peril in the way that Celia and I thrust ourselves into the world. We made ourselves available for anything that might happen, so anything
could
happen. Often, anything
did
happen.

You see, it was like this: Celia’s effect on men
was to make them so obedient and subservient to her—until the instant they were no longer obedient and subservient. She would have them all lined up before us, ready to take our orders and serve our every wish. They were such good boys, and sometimes they stayed good boys—but sometimes, quite suddenly, those boys were not so good anymore. Some line of male desire or anger would be crossed, and then
there was no coming back from it. After that line had been crossed, Celia’s effect on men was to make them into savages. There would be a moment when everyone was having fun and flirting and playing taunting games and laughing, but then suddenly the energy of the room would shift, and now there was a threat of not only sex, but violence.

Once that shift came, there was no stopping it.

After
that, it was all smash and grab.

The first time this happened, Celia saw it coming moments before it occurred, and she sent me out of the room. We were in the
Presidential Suite of the Biltmore Hotel, being entertained by three men whom we’d met earlier in the ballroom of the Waldorf. These men had a great deal of loose cash, and they were clearly in a dubious line of work. (If I had to guess,
I would wager that their line of employment was: racketeers.) At first they were all in service to Celia—so deferential, so grateful for her attentions, sweating with nervousness about making the beautiful girl and her friend happy.
Would the ladies like another bottle of champagne? Would the ladies like some crab legs ordered up to the room? Would the ladies like to see the Presidential Suite
at the Biltmore? Would the ladies like the radio on or off?

I was still new at this game, and I found it amusing that these thugs were so servile to us. Cowed by our powers, and all that. It made me want to laugh at them, in all their weakness:
Men are so easy to control!

But then—not long into our visit to the Presidential Suite—the shift came, and Celia was suddenly crammed between two of
those men on the couch, and they were no longer looking servile or weak. It wasn’t anything they were doing per se; it was just a change of tone, and it frightened me. Something had shifted in their faces, and I didn’t like it. The third man was now eyeing me, and he didn’t appear as though he were interested in joking around anymore, either. The only way I can describe the change in the room was:
You’re having a delightful picnic, and then suddenly there’s a tornado. The barometric pressure drops. The sky goes black. The birds go silent. This thing is coming straight for you.

“Vivvie,” said Celia in that exact moment, “run downstairs and buy me cigarettes.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“
Go,
” she said. “And don’t come back.”

I made for the door, just before the third man reached me—and to
my shame, I closed the door on my friend and left her in there. I left her because she’d told me to, but still—it felt rotten. Whatever those
men were about to do in there, Celia was on her own. She’d sent me from the room either because she didn’t want me seeing what was about to be done to her, or she didn’t want it done to me, too. Either way, I felt like a child, being banished like that.
I also felt afraid of those men, and afraid for Celia,
and
I felt left out. I hated it. I paced the lobby of the hotel for an hour, wondering if I should alert the hotel manager. But alert him to what?

Celia eventually came down by herself—unescorted by any of the men who had so solicitously led us to the elevator earlier that evening.

She spotted me in the lobby, walked over, and said, “Well,
I call
that
a lousy way to end a night.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m terrific,” she said. She tugged at her dress. “Do I look all right?”

She looked just as beautiful as ever—except for the shiner over her left eye.

“Like love’s young dream itself,” I said.

She saw me looking at her swollen eye, and said, “Don’t squawk about this, Vivvie. Gladys’ll fix it. She’s the best at covering
up black eyes. Is there a cab? If a cab would be kind enough to appear, I’ll take it.”

I found her a cab, and we made our way home without another word.

Did the events of that evening leave Celia traumatized?

You would think so, wouldn’t you?

But I’m ashamed to say, Angela: I don’t know. I never talked to her about it. I certainly never saw any sign of trauma in my friend. But then again,
I probably wasn’t looking for signs of trauma. Nor would I have known what to look for. Maybe I was hoping that this ugly incident would just disappear (like the black eye itself) if we never mentioned
it. Or maybe I thought Celia was accustomed to being assaulted, given her rough origins. (God help us, maybe she was.)

There were so many questions I could have asked Celia that evening in the
taxi (starting with “Are you
really
all right?”), but I didn’t. Nor did I thank her for having saved me from certain attack. I was embarrassed that I’d needed saving—embarrassed that she saw me as being more innocent and fragile than herself. Until that night, I’d been able to kid myself that Celia Ray and I were exactly the same—just two equally worldly and gutsy women, conquering the city and
having fun. But clearly that wasn’t true. I had been recreationally dabbling in danger, but Celia
knew
danger. She knew things—dark things—that I didn’t know. She knew things that she didn’t want me to know.

When I think back on it all now, Angela, it’s appalling to realize that this kind of violence seemed so commonplace back then—and not just to Celia, but also to me. (For instance: why did
it never occur to me at the time to wonder how Gladys had come to be so good at covering up black eyes?) I suppose our attitude was:
Oh, well—men will be men!
You must understand, though, that this was long before there was any sort of public conversation about such dark subjects—and thus we had no private conversations about them, either. So I said nothing more to Celia that evening about her
experience, and Celia said nothing more about it, either. We just put it all behind us.

And the next night, unbelievably, we were out there in the city again, looking for action
again
—except with one change: From this point forward, I was committed to never leaving the scene, no matter what. I would not allow myself to be sent from a room again. Whatever Celia was doing, I would be doing it,
too. Whatever happened to Celia, it would happen to me, too.

Because I am not a child,
I told myself—the way children always do.

EIGHT

There was a war coming, by the way.

There was a war happening already, in fact—and quite seriously so. It was all the way over there in Europe, of course, but there was a great raging debate within the United States as to whether or not we should join it.

I was not part of this debate, needless to say. But it was happening all around me.

Perhaps you think I should have noticed earlier
that there was a war coming, but truly the subject had not yet landed in my consciousness. Here, you must give me credit for being
exceedingly
unobservant. It was not easy in the summer of 1940 to ignore the fact that the world was on the brink of full-out war, but I’d managed to do exactly that. (In my defense, my colleagues and associates were also ignoring it. I don’t recall Celia or Gladys
or Jennie ever discussing America’s military preparedness, or the growing need for a “Two-Ocean Navy.”) I was not a politically minded person, to say the least. I didn’t know the name of a single individual in Roosevelt’s cabinet, for instance. I did,
however, know the full name of Clark Gable’s second wife, a much-divorced Texas socialite named Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham Gable—a jawbreaker
of a moniker that I will apparently remember till my dying day.

The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium in May of 1940—but that was right around the time I was failing all my exams at Vassar, so I was terribly preoccupied. (I do remember my father saying that all the fuss would be over by the end of summer because the French army would soon push the Germans right back home. I’d figured he
was probably correct about that because he seemed to read a lot of newspapers.)

Right around the time that I moved to New York—this would be the middle of June 1940—the Germans had marched into Paris. (So much for Dad’s theory.) But there was too much excitement going on in my life for me to follow the story closely. I was far more curious about what was happening in Harlem and the Village than
what had happened to the Maginot Line. And by August, when the Luftwaffe started bombing British targets, I was going through my pregnancy and gonorrhea scares, so I didn’t quite register that information, either.

History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.

If I’d been more wise and attentive, I might have
realized that America was eventually going to get pulled into this conflagration. I might have taken more notice of the news that my brother was thinking about joining the Navy. I might have worried about what that decision would mean for Walter’s future—and for all of us. And I might have realized that some of the fun young men with whom I was cavorting every night in New York City were just the
right age to be put on the front lines when America inevitably did enter this war. If I’d known
then what I know now—namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific—I would have had sex with even more of them.

If it sounds like I’m being facetious, I’m not.

I wish I’d done more of
everything
with those
boys. (I’m not sure when I would have found the time, of course, but I would’ve made every effort to squeeze into my busy schedule every last one of those kids—so many of whom were soon to be shattered, burned, wounded, doomed.)

I only wish I had known what was coming, Angela.

I truly do.

Other people were paying attention, though. Olive followed the news coming out of her home country of England
with particular concern. She was anxious about it, but then again, she was anxious about everything, so her worries didn’t make much of an impression. Olive sat there every morning over her breakfast of kidney and eggs, reading every bit of coverage she could get. She read
The New York Times,
and
Barron’s,
and the
Herald Tribune
(even though it leaned Republican), and she read the British papers
when she could find them. Even my Aunt Peg (who usually read only the
Post,
for the baseball coverage) had started following the news with more concern. She’d already seen one world war, and she didn’t want to see another. Peg’s loyalties to Europe would forever run deep.

Over the course of that summer, both Peg and Olive became increasingly passionate in their belief that the Americans must
join the war effort. Somebody had to help out the British and rescue the French! Peg and Olive were in full support of the president as he tried to garner backing from Congress to take action.

Peg—a traitor to her class—had always loved Roosevelt. This had
been shocking to me when I’d first heard about it; my father
hated
Roosevelt and was a vehement isolationist. A real pro-Lindbergh sort of
fellow, was old Dad. I assumed that all my relatives hated Roosevelt, too. But this was New York City, I guess, where people thought differently about things.

“I’ve reached my
limit
with the Nazis!” I remember Peg shouting one morning over breakfast and the newspapers. She slammed her fist on the table in a burst of rage. “That’s enough of them! They must be stopped! What are we waiting for?”

I’d never heard Peg get so upset about anything, which is why it stuck in my memory. Her reaction pierced my self-absorption for a moment and made me take notice:
Gee whiz, if Peg was this angry, things really must be getting bad!

That said, I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do about the Nazis, personally.

The truth was, I didn’t have any inkling that this war—this distant, irritating war—might
have any real consequences until September of 1940.

That’s when Edna and Arthur Watson moved into the Lily Playhouse.

NINE

I’m going to assume, Angela, that you’ve never heard of Edna Parker Watson.

You’re probably a bit too young to know of her great theatrical career. She was always better known in London than New York, in any case.

As it happens, I had heard of Edna before I met her—but that’s only because she was married to a handsome English screen actor named Arthur Watson, who had recently played the
heartthrob in a cheesy British war movie called
Gates of Noon
. I’d seen their photos in the magazines, so Edna was familiar to me. Now, this was a bit of a crime—to have known Edna only through her husband. She was by far the superior performer of the two, and the superior human being, besides. But that’s just how it goes. His was the prettier face, and in this shallow world a pretty face means
everything.

It might have helped if Edna made movies. Maybe then she would’ve achieved greater fame in her day, and maybe she’d even be
remembered now—like Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh, who were every bit her peers. But she refused to act for the camera. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity; Hollywood came knocking on her door many times, but somehow she never lost the stamina to keep turning down
those big-shot film producers. Edna wouldn’t even do radio plays, believing that the human voice loses something vital and sacred when it is recorded.

No, Edna Parker Watson was purely a stage actress, and the problem with stage actresses is that once they are gone, they are forgotten. If you never saw her perform onstage, then you would not be able to understand her power and appeal.

She was
George Bernard Shaw’s favorite actress, though—does that help? He famously said that her portrayal of Saint Joan was the definitive one. He wrote of her: “That luminous face, peeking out from its armor—who would not follow her into battle, if only to stare at her?”

No, even that doesn’t really get her across.

With apologies to Mr. Shaw, I’ll do my best to describe Edna in my own words.

I met
Edna and Arthur Watson during the third week of September 1940.

Their visit to the Lily Playhouse, as with so many of the guests who came and went from that institution, was not exactly planned. There was a real element of chaos and emergency to it. Even beyond the scale of our normal chaos.

Edna was an old acquaintance of Peg’s. They’d met in France during the Great War and had become fast
friends, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then, in the late summer of 1940, the Watsons came to New York City so that Edna could rehearse a new play with Alfred Lunt. However, the financing for this production vanished before anyone could
memorize a single line, and so the play never came into being. But before the Watsons could sail back home to England, the Germans began the bombing
of Britain. Within just a few weeks of the German attacks, the Watsons’ town house in London had been obliterated by a Luftwaffe bomb. Destroyed. Everything gone.

“Splintered to matchsticks, apparently” is how Peg described it.

So now Edna and Arthur Watson were trapped in New York City. They were stuck at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which is not such a bad place to be a refugee, but they couldn’t
afford to go on living there, as neither of them was employed. They were artists trapped in America without jobs, without a home to return to, and without safe transit back to their besieged country.

Peg heard about their plight through the theater grapevine, and—of course—she told the Watsons to come live at the Lily Playhouse. She promised that they could remain there just as long as they needed.
She told them she’d even put them into some of her shows, if they needed income and didn’t mind slumming it.

How could the Watsons have refused? Where else were they going to go?

So they moved in—and that’s how the war made its first direct appearance in my life.

The Watsons arrived on one of the first crisp afternoons of autumn.

It happened that I was standing outside the theater talking
to Peg when their car pulled up. I’d just returned from shopping at Lowtsky’s, and I was carrying a bag of crinolines which I needed to fix some of the “ballet costumes” of our dancers. (We were putting on a show called
Dance Away, Jackie!—
about a street urchin who is rescued from a life of crime by the love of a beautiful young ballerina. I had
been tasked with the job of trying to make the Lily’s
muscular hoofers look like a company of premier ballet dancers. I’d done my best with the costumes, but the dancers kept ripping their skirts. Too much boggle-boggle, I suppose. Now it was time for repairs.)

When the Watsons arrived, there was a small flurry of commotion, as they had a great deal of luggage. Two other cars followed their taxi, with the remaining trunks and parcels. I was standing
right there on the sidewalk, and I saw Edna Parker Watson exit the taxi as though she were stepping out of a limousine. Petite, trim, narrow-hipped and small-breasted, she was dressed in the single most stylish outfit I’d ever seen on a woman. She was wearing a peacock-blue serge jacket—double-breasted, with two lines of gold buttons marching up the front—with a high collar trimmed in gold braid.
She had on tailored dark gray trousers with a bit of flare at the bottom, and glossy black wingtip shoes, which almost looked like men’s shoes—except for the small, elegant, and very feminine heel. She was wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses, and her short, dark hair was set with glossy waves. She had on red lipstick—the perfect shade of red—but no other makeup. A simple black beret sat angled on
her head with jaunty ease. She looked like a teeny-tiny military officer in the chicest little army in the world—and from that day forward, my sense of style would never be the same.

Until the moment I first glimpsed Edna, I’d thought that New York City showgirls and their spangled radiance were the pinnacles of glamour. But suddenly everything (and everyone) I’d been admiring all summer looked
gaudy and glitzy compared to this petite woman in her sharp little jacket, and her perfectly tailored slacks, and her men’s-shoes-that-were-not-quite-men’s-shoes.

I had just encountered
true
glamour for the first time. And I can say without hyperbole that every day of my life since that moment, I have tried to model my style after Edna Parker Watson’s.

Peg rushed at Edna and pulled her into
a tight embrace.

“Edna!” she cried, giving her old friend a spin. “The Dewdrop of Drury Lane makes an appearance on our humble shores!”

“Dear Peg!” cried Edna. “You look exactly the same!” Edna released herself from Peg’s arms, stepped back, and took a look up at the Lily. “But is
all
this yours, Peg? The
entire
building?”

“All of it, yes, unfortunately,” said Peg. “Would you like to buy it?”

“I haven’t a farthing to my name, darling, or I absolutely would. It’s
charming
. But look at you—you’ve become an
impresario
! You’re a theater
magnate
! The façade reminds me of the old Hackney. It’s lovely. I
do
see why you had to buy it.”

“Yes, of course I had to buy it,” said Peg, “because otherwise I might have ended up wealthy and comfortable in my old age, and that would’ve been no good
for anybody. But enough about my dumb playhouse, Edna. I’m just
sick
about what’s happened to your home—and what’s happening to poor England!”

“Darling Peg,” said Edna, and she placed her palm gently on my aunt’s cheek. “It’s wretched. But Arthur and I are alive. And now, thanks to you, we have a roof to sleep under, and that’s a good deal more than some other people can say.”

“Where
is
Arthur?”
asked Peg. “Can’t
wait
to meet him.”

But I myself had already spotted him.

Arthur Watson was the handsome, dark-haired, movie-star-looking fellow with the lantern jaw who was, at that instant, grinning at the cab driver and pumping the man’s hand with altogether too much enthusiasm. He was a well-built man with a good pair of shoulders, and he was much taller than he looked on the movie screen—which
is highly abnormal for actors. He had a cigar clamped in his mouth, which somehow looked like a prop. He was the best-looking
man I’d ever seen at close quarters, but there was something artificial about his good looks. He had a rakish curl that fell over one eye, for instance, which would have been a lot more attractive if it hadn’t looked so deliberately cultivated. (The thing about rakishness,
Angela, is that it should never seem intentional.) He looked like an
actor,
is the best way I can describe it. He looked as if he were an actor hired to play the part of a handsome, well-built man, shaking the hand of a cabdriver.

Arthur marched over to us in great, athletic strides and shook Peg’s hand just as forcibly as he’d done to the poor cabbie.

“Mrs. Buell,” he said. “Awfully good of
you to give us a place to stay!”

“A delight, Arthur,” said Peg. “I simply adore your wife.”

“I adore her, too!” boomed Arthur, and he caught Edna in a tight squeeze that looked like it might hurt, but which only made her beam with pleasure.

“And this is my niece, Vivian,” said Peg. “She’s been staying with me all summer, learning how to run a theater company into the ground.”

“The
niece
!”
Edna said, as though she’d been hearing fabulous things about me for years. She gave me a kiss on each cheek, wafting a scent of gardenia. “But look at you, Vivian—you’re simply stunning! Please tell me that you’re not an aspiring actress and that you won’t ruin your life in the theater—although you’re certainly pretty enough for it.”

Hers was a smile far too warm and genuine for show business.
She was paying me the compliment of her undivided attention, and thus I was instantly smitten.

“No,” I said. “I’m not an actress. But I do love living at the Lily with my aunt.”

“But of course you do, darling. She’s marvelous.”

Arthur interrupted, to reach in and crush my hand in his. “Awfully
nice to meet you, Vivian!” he said. “And how long did you say you’ve been an actress?”

I was less
smitten with him.

“Oh, I’m not an actress—” I started to say, but Edna put her hand on my arm and whispered in my ear, as if we were dearest friends, “It’s quite all right, Vivian. Arthur sometimes doesn’t pay the
closest
attention, but he’ll get it all sorted out eventually.”

“Let’s go have drinks on my verandah!” said Peg. “Except that I forgot to buy a home with a verandah, so let’s go have
drinks in the filthy living room above my theater, and we can pretend that we’re having drinks on my verandah!”

“Brilliant Peg,” said Edna. “How
violently
I’ve missed you!”

A few trays of martinis later, it was as if I’d known Edna Parker Watson forever.

She was the most charming presence I’d ever watched light up a room. She was a sort of elfin queen, what with her bright little face, and
her dancing gray eyes. Nothing about her was quite what it seemed. She was pale, but she didn’t seem weak or delicate. And she was awfully dainty—with the tiniest shoulders and a slender frame—but she didn’t look fragile. She had a hearty laugh and a robust bounce to her step that belied her size and her pallid coloring.

I suppose you could call her a non-frail waif.

The exact source of her
beauty was difficult to place, for her features were not perfect—not like the girls I’d been romping about with all summer. Her face was quite round, and she didn’t have the dramatic cheekbones that were so much in vogue back then. And she wasn’t young. She had to be at least fifty, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. You couldn’t tell her age from a distance (she had been able to play Juliet well into
her forties, I would later learn—and had easily gotten away
with it, too), but once you looked closely, you could see that the skin around her eyes was crumbling with fine lines, and her jawline was getting soft. There were strands of silver in that chic, short hair of hers, as well. But her spirit was youthful. She was utterly unconvincing as a fifty-year-old woman—let’s just put it that way.
Or maybe her age didn’t matter to her, so she didn’t project any concern about it. The trouble with so many aging actresses is that they don’t want to let nature do as it wishes—but nature seemed to have no particular vengeance against Edna, nor did she have a gripe against it.

Her greatest natural gift, though, was warmth. She delighted in all that she beheld, and it made you want to stay near
her, in order to bask in her delight. Even Olive’s normally stern face relaxed into a rare expression of joy at the sight of Edna. They embraced as old friends—for that is exactly what they were. As I discovered that night, Edna and Peg and Olive had all met on the battlefields of France, when Edna was part of a British touring company, putting on shows for wounded soldiers—shows that my Aunt Peg
and Olive helped to produce.

“Somewhere on this planet,” said Edna, “there’s a photograph of the three of us in a field ambulance together, and I would give anything to see it again. We were so young! And we were wearing those terribly practical frocks, with no waistlines.”

“I remember that picture,” said Olive. “We were
muddy
.”

“We were always muddy, Olive,” said Edna. “It was a battlefield.
I will never forget the cold and damp. Do you remember how I had to make my own stage makeup out of brick dust and lard? I was so nervous about acting in front of the soldiers. They were all so horribly wounded. Do you remember what you told me, Peg? When I asked, ‘How can I sing and dance for these poor broken boys?’”

“Mercifully, my dear Edna,” said Peg, “I do not remember anything I have ever
said in my entire life.”

“Well, then, I shall remind you. You said, ‘Sing louder, Edna. Dance
harder. Look ’em straight in the eyes.’ You told me: ‘Don’t you dare degrade these brave boys with your pity.’ So that’s what I did. I sang loud and danced hard, and looked ’em straight in the eyes. I did not degrade those brave boys with my pity. My God, but it was painful.”

“You worked very hard,”
said Olive, approvingly.

“It was you nurses who worked hard, Olive,” said Edna. “I remember the whole lot of you having dysentery and chilblains—but then you’d say, ‘At least we don’t have infected bayonet wounds, girls! Chins up!’ What heroes you were. Especially you, Olive. Equal to any emergency, you were. I’ve never forgotten it.”