Get Happy (4 page)

“The beginning of my life was terribly happy,” she was later to say, and in the years to come the woman who had been Baby Gumm looked upon Grand Rapids as her own lost Eden, a place of peace and serenity hidden amid the lakes and forests of that northern latitude. The prism of memory transformed an ordinary Midwestern community into “a magnificent-looking town” and exalted a plain house, whose only visible attraction was a purple honeysuckle bush next to the front door, into “everything that represents family: clean, old-fashioned, beautiful, not frightening, and a gay, good house.” What she really remembered—and what made a homely house beautiful—was the contentment she had known there, a contentment shared, so she thought, by everyone around her. “That’s the only time I ever saw my mother and father happy,” she said, “in that wonderful town.”

That wonderful town provided the kinds of innocent pleasures that can be recalled today only with a twinge of nostalgia. In the summer there were family excursions to nearby lakes, secret forays to steal cherries from a farmer’s orchard, walks to the blacksmith’s shop to watch the sparks shooting from his anvil, and tearful burials of the unfortunate birds that ended their lives in the Gumm backyard. Parked across the street was the candy wagon, a never-ending delight for a little girl with a sweet tooth. A cheerful contraption with a bright red body and yellow wheels, it sold everything good: popcorn, chocolate, caramel apples and ice cream.

Winter meant the snow that was to symbolize the unsullied simplicity of those years. Highlight of the season was Christmas Eve, when Frank left work early to help his daughters make angels in the snow. Falling backward into that thick blanket, they waved their arms and legs, then jumped up, leaving behind the impressions of angels, complete with wings and gowns. All four then rushed inside to marvel at
their handiwork from an upstairs window and to warm themselves with the cups of hot malted milk Ethel had waiting in the kitchen. Almost every night, winter and summer, Frank brought home a treasure from the box office, a sack of pennies for their trips to the candy wagon.

The only dark spot on that agreeable picture—the only blotch that Baby saw, anyway—was illness. Frequent ear infections required her to endure painful lancings, followed by hours in which her ears were covered by socks filled with hot salt. More serious was a stomach ailment, most probably acute acidosis, that threatened her life in September 1925. Frank and Ethel rushed her to a specialist in Duluth, where she was hospitalized for nearly a week. Neither of her sisters had suffered such afflictions, and Baby was all but smothered with attention, as sickly children often are. As much as she had been unwanted in the fall of 1921, so was she wanted—spoiled, pampered and petted—in subsequent years.

No one could have accused Ethel, who made Baby’s dresses, filled the socks with hot salt and sat by her bed in the hospital, of being an inattentive mother. But Frank was more than attentive. He worshipped her, and Baby reciprocated with all the ardor of a small but passionate heart. “At night before he went to the theater,” she said, “I used to crawl up into his lap in a white flannelette night suit while he sang ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen’ for me. It was a bedtime ritual in our house for Daddy to get me ready for sleep, and it was one I loved.” The older girls spent their days in classrooms, while Baby sat beside her father as he drove around town. No princess on her throne could have looked prouder than did the little girl on the front seat of Frank’s Ford.

By 1924 Mary Jane and Virginia—Jimmie was her nickname—were appearing regularly at the New Grand. No one asked whether Baby would join them; everyone knew that she would. The only question was when. The hint of an answer came in August. Ethel was in Duluth for a goiter operation, and to cheer them up, Frank took his daughters to see the newest act at the New Grand, the Blue Sisters, three girls who ranged in age from five to eleven. Baby, who was only two months past her second birthday, was all but uncontrollable with excitement, humming when the sisters sang, bouncing up and down when they
danced. When the youngest sang a solo, she suddenly became quiet, as if transfixed. Only at the end did she break her silence. “Can I do that, Daddy?” she asked.

She had seen her future and she liked it, in the following weeks badgering both parents for permission to go onstage with her own sisters. “Later, not yet, honey,” they said. “Wait a bit.” Finally, toward the end of the year, Ethel started rehearsing her for her debut. Eva Milne made plans to come from Superior, and a date—December 26, the night after Christmas—was announced in the
Independent:
“Added attraction for Friday evening: The three Gumm girls will entertain in songs and dances featuring Baby Frances, two years old, Virginia seven and Mary Jane 9. The little girls will appear between the shows at 9 o’clock.”

There are several versions of what happened between nine and nine-twenty that night, but Jimmie’s version is probably the most reliable. As Jimmie told the story, the curtains opened to reveal the two older sisters. They were midway through their newest song, “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” when a third voice was heard and they made room for a tiny figure with huge dark eyes who had been hidden behind them. After two more numbers, Baby was left alone to sing “Jingle Bells,” which she punctuated by jingling a real dinner bell. Laughter filled the theater, and Baby was so thrilled that instead of bowing off at the end, she sang all the verses again—and again and again. As delighted as everyone else in the audience, Frank at last motioned to Eva, who emerged from the wings and carried her granddaughter off. If she cried at such an undignified exit, Baby’s tears soon gave way to the rapture of for the first time hearing applause meant only for her, the most beautiful music in the world, she was later to say. Not only had she seen the future, she had heard it: she was, at the age of two and a half, an entertainer.

From that time on the Gumm sisters were a trio—the Gumdrops, they were sometimes called. It cannot be said that Baby immediately outshone her older sisters. But her talent grew as she did, and gradually it became clear that she was indeed the star. No one knew it better than her mother. When they visited the Milne relatives, Ethel carried in the car a small portable stage, a folding table with short legs. Out it would come at some point during the stay, and Baby would be told to jump up
and do a couple of tap dances. She had been performing constantly since the age of two, she later said, and in no way was she exaggerating: her mother had packed a stage next to her dresses and dolls.

Sunlit years they had seemed, but it is doubtful that the marriage of Frank and Ethel was ever as blissful as it had appeared. If they were never heard to argue, it was because Frank always did what he was told. Theirs was not a relationship of equals. “A Northern girl,” Frank’s aunt from Murfreesboro had called Ethel, which may have been a Southerner’s way of saying that she was pushy. But Northerners, her own relatives included, also found Ethel bossy and overbearing. “We referred to her as Gabby,” recalled her nephew, James Milne. “‘Be quiet! I’m talking!’ she would say.”

Love can be expressed in many ways, but one thing is constant: people in love long to be together. That could never have been said of Frank and Ethel. Early on, at a time when most brides can scarcely be torn from their husbands, Ethel had formed the habit of spending several weeks each year with her relatives in Superior and Duluth. Frank and Ethel, it became clear, were as happy apart as together. Yet even when they were together, they seemed to be uncomfortable without the company of other adults. The bonds that joined them, ties of affection and common interest, were genuine enough, but they were those of performing partners rather than husband and wife. Theirs was a singular, decidedly odd marriage. For a long time it seemed to suit both of them, however. Frank did not complain about constant visits by Ethel’s family, and Ethel did not object to her arid sex life—she later talked to Marc Rabinowitz’s wife about Frank’s failures in bed. What she doubtless did object to, however, was his behavior in other beds. After seven apparently tranquil years, Frank was behaving recklessly again.

He was no longer the slim, good-looking young man who had turned heads in Murfreesboro—those daily stops at the confectionery shop had rounded his face and added several inches to his waistline—but Frank still had the magician’s gift for making those around him feel good, for transforming frowns into smiles. If, during the first few years
of his marriage, he had engaged in homosexual activity of the kind that had sent him scurrying from Cloquet, he had been discreet about it. That he delighted in the company of younger men was obvious, but not something that worried anyone. But all that changed in the early twenties.

For many months in 1923 and 1924 the chief object of his esteem was the high school basketball star, with whom he often journeyed to other towns, sometimes with Ethel and the boy’s parents, sometimes alone. On at least one occasion Frank and his athletic companion spent a night by themselves in Minneapolis. Apparently nobody, including the boy’s parents, thought there was anything odd about such a curious friendship, but as the months passed, Frank became increasingly careless, as if he wanted to set off alarm bells. When two of the New Grand’s ushers reported that he had made sexual advances to them, the bells did ring. Frank’s actions could no longer be ignored. Measures had to be taken. Though nobody in Grand Rapids wanted to hurt amiable Frank, much less his family, with a public fuss, those in charge made it clear to him that he was no longer welcome. The Gumms would have to find a home elsewhere.

Forced to move, Frank and Ethel, like thousands of other Midwestern-ers in that decade after World War I, looked west, to Southern California. Marc Rabinowitz—Marc Rabwin, he now called himself—was a doctor at Los Angeles County Hospital, and he suggested that they consider California: they would love it, he assured them. They took his advice, and on June 8,1926, two days before Baby’s fourth birthday, the five Gumms boarded a train and began their journey to the Pacific.

In no hurry to get there, they followed a roundabout northern route, defraying some of their expenses by entertaining in such colorful spots as Devils Lake, North Dakota, and Whitefish, Montana. In Los Angeles, where Marc Rabwin’s parents opened their house to them, they picnicked on the beach, attended a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and toured no fewer than four movie studios. To get into one of the biggest, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Frank boldly stood in front of the entrance
and stopped a convertible driven by Fred Thomson, the studio’s cowboy hero. “My kids have been dying to meet you!” he shouted, to which Thomson responded by escorting them inside.

Their inspection trip had been a success, and the Gumms returned to Grand Rapids on July 18 only to pack. A buyer was found for the New Grand, and in October, as the trees glowed with the dazzling reds and yellows of a Minnesota autumn, their friends gave the Gumms a series of good-bye parties. Most of the valedictions were for Ethel. The farewells to Frank, who had done so much for Grand Rapids for so many years, seemed muted, scarcely even perfunctory. By the end of the month the Gumms were gone, and a new family had moved into the house on Hoffman Avenue.