City of Girls (19 page)

“I guess not,” I said.

“It’s that boy,” Edna said. “He’s commanding all your attention.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “He sure is,” I said.

Edna smiled, but indulgently. “When you are around him, dear Vivian, you should know that you look exactly like a little dog in heat.”

I rewarded her for her candor by accidentally stabbing her in the neck with a pin. “I’m so sorry!” I cried out—and whether
it was about the pin-stabbing, or about looking like a little dog in heat, I could not have said.

Edna coolly dabbed at the spot of blood on her neck with her handkerchief and said, “Don’t give it another thought. It’s not the first time I’ve been stabbed, my dear, and it’s probably richly deserved. But listen to me, darling, because I’m old enough to be an archaeological
relic,
and I know some
things about life. It is not that I don’t celebrate your affections for Anthony. It is delightful to watch a young person fall in love for the first time. Chasing your boy about, as you do—it’s very sweet.”

“Well, he’s a dream, Edna,” I said. “He’s a living dream.”

“Of course he is, darling. They always are. But I have a spot of
advice. By all means, take that racy young man to bed with you
and put him in your memoirs when you get famous, but there is something you must
not
do.”

I thought she was going to say, “Don’t get married,” or “Don’t get pregnant.”

But no. Edna had a different concern.

“Do
not
let it capsize the show,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“At this point in a production, Vivian, we all must count on one another to sustain a certain degree of judiciousness and professionalism.
It may seem as though we are just having some larks here—and we are having larks—but much is at stake. Your aunt is pouring everything she has into this play—heart, soul, and all her money, too—and we wouldn’t want to drive her show over a cliff. Here is the solidarity of good theater people, Vivian: we try not to ruin each other’s shows, and we try not to ruin each other’s lives.”

I didn’t understand
what she was on about, and my face must have showed it, because she tried again.

“What I’m trying to say, Vivian, is this: if you’re going to be in love with Anthony, then be in love with him, and who could blame you for wanting your little exploit? But promise me that you will stay with him till the end of the run. He’s a good actor—far better than average—and he’s needed for this production.
I don’t want any disruptions. If one of you breaks the other’s heart, I stand to lose not only a surprisingly excellent leading man, but also a damn good dresser. I need you both right now, and I need you to be in your right minds. Your aunt needs it, too.”

I still must have looked awfully stupid, because she said, “Let me put it to you even more plainly, Vivian. As my worst ex-husband—that awful
director—used to say to me, ‘Live your life as you wish, my peach, but don’t let it bitch up the bloody show.’”

FIFTEEN

City of Girls
was now in the full swing of rehearsals, with the date set for the premiere of November 29, 1940. We would open the week after Thanksgiving, to try to snag the holiday crowd.

Mostly it was going well. The music was sensational and the costumes were
choice,
if I do say so myself. The best thing about the play, of course, was Anthony Roccella—or at least in my opinion. My
boyfriend could sing, act, and dance up a storm. (I’d overheard Billy saying to Peg, “You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a
man—
that’s not easily found. This kid is everything I’d hoped he would be.”)

Furthermore, Anthony was a natural comic, and he was absolutely convincing as a clever delinquent who could hustle a rich
old lady into establishing a speakeasy and bordello in the great room of her mansion. And his scenes with Celia were fantastic. They were such a great-looking couple on stage. They had one particularly outstanding scene together, where they did the tango as Anthony seductively sang to Celia
about “A Little Spot in Yonkers” that he wanted to show her. The way Anthony sang it, he made “A Little
Spot in Yonkers” sound like an erogenous zone on a woman’s body—and Celia certainly responded as though it were. It was the sexiest moment of the play. Any woman with a pulse would have agreed. Or at least I thought so.

Others, of course, would have claimed that the best thing about the play was Edna Parker Watson’s performance—and I’m sure they were right. Even I, in my infatuated daze, could
tell that Edna was brilliant. I’d seen a lot of theater in my life, but I’d never seen a real actress at work before. All the actresses I’d met so far were dolls with four or five different facial expressions to choose from—sadness, fear, anger, love, happiness—that they kept in rotation until the curtain went down. But Edna had access to every shade of human emotion. She was natural, she was warm,
she was regal, and she could do a scene nine different ways in the space of an hour and somehow make each variation seem like the perfect one.

She was a generous actress, as well. She made everyone’s performances look better, by her mere presence onstage. She coaxed the best out of everyone. She liked to step back a bit in rehearsal and let the light shine on another actor, beaming at them somewhat
as they played their role. The great actresses are not often this kind. But Edna always thought of others. I remember Celia coming to rehearsal one day wearing false eyelashes. Edna took her aside to caution her not to wear them in performances, as they would cast shadows over her eye sockets and make her look “corpselike, darling, which is never what one wants.”

A more jealous star would not
have pointed out such a thing. But Edna was never jealous.

Over time, Edna made Mrs. Alabaster into a far more subtle character than what the script suggested. Edna transformed Mrs. Alabaster into a woman of
knowing—
a woman who knew how ridiculous her
life was when she was rich, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be broke, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be running a casino in her
drawing room. Yet she was a woman who bravely played the game of life anyhow—and allowed the game of life to somewhat play her. She was ironic, but not cold. The effect was a survivor who had not lost the ability to feel.

And when Edna sang her romantic solo—a simple ballad called “I’m Considering Falling in Love”—she brought the room to a state of silent awe, every single time. It didn’t matter
how many times we’d heard her sing it already; we all stopped whatever we were doing to listen. It’s not that Edna had the best singing voice (she could be a tad chancy sometimes on the high notes), but she brought such poignancy to the moment that one couldn’t help but sit up and pay attention.

The song was about an older woman who was deciding to give herself over to romance one more time,
against her own better judgment. When Billy wrote the lyrics, he hadn’t intended them to be quite so sad. The original point, I think, had been to create something light and amusing:
Look, how cute! Even older people can fall in love!
But Edna asked Benjamin to slow down the song and alter it to a darker key, and that changed everything. Now when she got to the last line (“I’m just an amateur
/ But what are we here for? / I’m considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was
already
in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.

I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.

“She’s the real deal,
kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”

A more problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.

Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy
diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome
in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about all I can say in his favor.

When it became evident that Arthur couldn’t manage the role, Billy pared down the character’s lines as much as possible, to make it simpler for the poor man to get through a sentence. (For instance, Billy had changed Arthur’s opening line from “I’m your late husband’s third cousin, Barchester Headley
Wentworth, the fifth earl of Addington” to “I’m your cousin from England.”) He also took away Arthur’s solo. He even took away the dance number that Arthur was meant to have with Edna as he was attempting to seduce Mrs. Alabaster.

“Those two dance as though they’ve never been introduced,” Billy said to Peg, before finally giving up on the idea of having them dance at all. “How is it possible
that they are
married
?”

Edna tried to help out her husband, but he didn’t take direction well and got sputteringly offended at any efforts to refine his performance.

“I never understand what you’re talking about, my dear, and I always will!” he snapped at her once, insensibly, when she tried to explain the difference between stage right and stage left for the dozenth time.

The thing that drove
us the craziest was that Arthur could not stop
himself from whistling along with the music coming from the orchestra pit—even when he was on stage, and in character. Nobody could get him to stop.

One afternoon, Billy finally shouted, “Arthur! Your character can’t
hear
that music! It’s the theme from the goddamn overture!”

“Of course I can hear it!” Arthur protested. “The bloody musicians are
right
there
!”

This had caused the exasperated Billy to go on a long rant about the difference in theater between
diagetic
music (which the characters onstage can hear), and
non-diagetic music
(which only the audience can hear).

“Talk English!” Arthur had demanded.

So Billy tried again: “Imagine, Arthur, that you are watching a western with John Wayne in it. There is John Wayne, riding his horse
all alone across a mesa, and suddenly he starts
whistling along to the theme music
. Do you see how ridiculous that would be?”

“I just don’t see why a man can’t whistle these days without being
attacked,
” sniffed Arthur.

(Later, I heard him ask one of the dancers, “What the devil is a
mesa
?”)

I used to look at Edna and Arthur Watson and try with all my might to imagine how she coped with him.

The only explanation I could come up with was that Edna genuinely loved beauty—and Arthur was undeniably beautiful. (He looked like Apollo, if Apollo were your neighborhood butcher—but, yes, he was beautiful.) This made a certain amount of sense, because there was nothing in Edna’s life that wasn’t beautiful. I never saw anybody who cared about aesthetics more than that woman did. I never once
saw Edna that she wasn’t exquisitely put together, and I saw her at all times
of the day and night. (To be the kind of woman who is perfectly kempt even at the breakfast table or in the privacy of her own bedroom requires a certain amount of labor and commitment—but that was Edna for you, always ready to put in the hours.)

Her cosmetics were beautiful. The tiny silk drawstring purse in which
she held her loose change was beautiful. The way she read her lines and sang onstage was beautiful. The way she folded her gloves was beautiful. She was both a connoisseur and a radiator of pure beauty, in all its forms.

In fact, I think part of the reason Edna liked to have me and Celia around her so much was that
we
were beautiful, too. Rather than being competitive with us—as many other older
women might have been—she seemed enhanced and invigorated by us. I remember one day the three of us were walking down the street together, with Edna in the middle. She suddenly clasped us each by the arm, smiled up at us, and said, “When I walk around town with the two of you towering young ladies at my side, I feel like a perfect pearl, set between two gleaming rubies.”

It was now a week before
our opening and everyone was sick. We all had the same cold, and half the girls in the chorus line had pink eye from sharing the same infected cake of mascara. (The other half had crabs, from sharing their costume bottoms,
which I had told them a hundred times not to do
.) Peg wanted to give the performers a day off to rest up and heal, but Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He still felt that the first
ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.

“You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t
matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate
the first one.”

“They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.

And they
were
tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.

“Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”

He made them do the opening number three more times that day—and each
time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.

The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere.
An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.

One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch,
and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.

“Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.

“Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”

“What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del
Rio.”

“That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What?
No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.

Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she would take frequent nips. Careless
as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.

Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught me and Anthony necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal,
and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.

“
Goddamn
it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for
ten minutes
to keep your lips off my leading man?”

(The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)

And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.

Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets
for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read
City of Girls
. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but admission), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one
of my stupid girlie shows.”

Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”

Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”

“Our audience can’t afford that, either.”

“Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new
audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”