The Fame Game (36 page)

Silky was brilliant on opening night, and the complicated scenery moved without a hitch. There were seven curtain calls. The reviews were pretty bad for the show, and unanimously raves for Silky. The New York opening was put ahead for three weeks so the author could revise the show and the composers could add two new songs. Libra already had a recording contract for the score, and although everyone was frantic and overworked there was an air of optimism about the whole company. The show would improve, and they knew Silky could hold it and make it run. Gerry felt a surge of pride at being involved in this whole exciting business.

She was in a state near euphoria. Over a month before, right after she’d begun to go with Mad Daddy, Dick had taken her to lunch and presented her with a gold unicorn pin with a diamond-studded horn, from David Webb. “You’re the maiden who charms the unicorn,” he told her. He didn’t know anything about Mad Daddy, so Gerry assumed he meant himself.

“The unicorn is a mythical beast,” she said.

“So am I.”

She almost laughed in his face. There he was, his famous kiss-off pin in his hand, trying to get rid of her and keep her tied to him in memory, all at the same time. She didn’t know how Dick could be so dumb and crass as to give her a kiss-off pin when she knew all about that phenomenon. At first she was tempted to give it back, but then she took it and put it into her bureau drawer and forgot about it. Bonnie came down to Boston for opening night, more to chase the stage manager than to see the show, as Bonnie had next to no interest in the theater or anything else that didn’t involve herself. In a moment of bliss, that she’d been in since she started going with Mad Daddy, Gerry told Bonnie to take the unicorn pin out of the drawer and keep it, since she’d always wanted it anyway.

“I knew I’d get one one way or the other,” Bonnie said cheerfully.

When the show got to New York everyone was feeling the effects of the hard work and strain, but Silky had gained five pounds and looked well. She’d had a bad scare and was really trying to take care of herself now. Gerry wished there was a man for Silky, but she knew that once Silky was a Broadway star there would be parties and admirers and she’d have a choice. She hoped Silky would pick better this time around.

Opening night in New York, there were even more flowers, more telegrams, people rushing around, the four Satins recruited, wreathed in saccharine smiles, the B.P.’s and many of their friends, all the inveterate first-nighters, a healthy sprinkling of celebrities. The word was out that the show was nothing much but that there was going to be a bright new star. The columns had been full of Silky Morgan for weeks. Policemen on horseback guarded the sawhorses that kept the first-night civilians at bay, and long black limousines lined the curb. Flashbulbs popped, a klieg light split the sky. Libra had arranged everything—it was an autograph-hunter’s dream.

The first five minutes after the curtain went up Silky seemed a little frightened and unsure. But as soon as she had her first song she was the same old Silky—confident, emotional, soaring, a bright bird you couldn’t shoot down with a firing squad of machine guns. When the show was over, the audience gave her a standing ovation. The audience was as intoxicated by the knowledge that they were in on the emergence of a star as they were by Silky’s charisma. She stood there on the stage, taking bows, looking small and skinny and young, tears pouring down her face. The audience loved the tears—they couldn’t have expected more from a Miss America. Gerry didn’t like the tears at all. She knew Silky too well.

There was a party afterwards upstairs at Sardi’s while they waited for the reviews. Silky came in with Libra and Lizzie and Dick (Dick had an elegant-looking blonde in tow and maneuvered her into all his photographs, then spent most of the evening table-hopping and ignoring her).

Mad Daddy had come with Elaine. Gerry realized suddenly that if she’d needed a date for the opening, instead of hovering around backstage to be of moral support to Silky, she would not have known whom to ask. It was ridiculous; she was loved, cherished, and she had no one. But what no one else might have understood was that she didn’t feel alone. She knew Mad Daddy was with her. She wondered how many people sitting at those tables with the people they were married to, or the people they were being seen with because it was good for them, had other people somewhere else they were with in spirit right this minute.

There was a buffet with food, but Gerry didn’t feel like eating, so she wandered around saying hello to people she knew and then went to the bar and had the drink she felt she really deserved. It was hard to believe the show had finally opened. She would believe it when she saw the reviews. Elaine Fellin was sitting with Lizzie Libra, hoarding her own private bottle of champagne. Mad Daddy spent a polite amount of time with her and then came looking for Gerry.

“We look so great together,” he said. “Do you think anybody’s noticing how great we look together?”

“I notice it all the time,” she said. “Wow, I really missed you when I was away.”

“Me too. You don’t have to worry any more, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s good. I hated it. Hey, I have something for you.”

He took something out of his pocket, polished it off on his dinner jacket, looked around furtively and put it on Gerry’s middle finger. It was the new Mad Daddy Secret Code Ring, about to go on the market in a few days. She had always worn rings on her middle finger when she was a kid.

“That’s the original,” he said. “It’s worth a hundred thousand dollars, give or take ninety-eight cents. Now you’re officially my girl.”

“I’ll never take it off.”

“You can take it off when I give you the real one.”

“I thought that was the real one.”

“I mean a real ring, silly,” he said. “You know, a rock. I asked Elaine for a divorce today. I told her it was crazy going on the way we were, miserable all the time.”

“What did she say?”

“She said okay but I’d have to pay for it. She wants a lot but I don’t care; I figure I owe it to her. It’s my bail money.”

“You didn’t tell her about me, did you?”

“Of course not. And I have an appointment to see my attorney tomorrow, and I’m going to move to a hotel. I thought maybe next to the office—then you could run in and see me a lot, like you were going to the water cooler.”

“That would be wonderful! I’ll have Mr. Libra arrange it. He has pull at the hotel.”

“Will he get me a water cooler?”

“
I’ll
get you a water cooler.”

“And then when I’m free,” he said, “will you marry me?”

So this was the way it happened! The knight on the white charger, everything she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl, the proposal … Here he was … standing in the middle of a crowded opening-night party, whispering so no one would hear, standing discreetly away from her so his wife at a far-away table would not see them. And she loved him so much she couldn’t bear it. Well, if this was the way life turned out, then let it be this way. She felt dizzy with happiness and she knew she was blushing.

“Do you mean it?” she said.

“Of course I mean it. Will you?”

“You bet I will!”

“Oh, wow,” he said. The way he looked, stunned with happiness, she could believe this was the first time it had really happened to him. Maybe, no matter how often you’d been through it, there was a real first time for two people, a time that could never have been duplicated if they had not found each other.

The reviews came in then, and they were better than Gerry had expected: mixed—one critic even liked the show, the others said it was weak but fun, and everyone loved Silky. This morning Silky Morgan was a star. It was a wonderful engagement present. Gerry and Mad Daddy held hands under the newspaper.

“I’ll meet you later, okay?” he whispered.

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you at home in about an hour.”

“Okay.”

He squeezed her hand and went back to his table. Elaine was screaming at some woman, standing up with her hands on the edge of the table for support. Poor Elaine. Poor Mad Daddy … no, not any more. Poor everybody who was alone or trapped with someone they didn’t love or respect. Silky was surrounded by well-wishers. She looked happy but tired. As usual, Libra hadn’t spent a moment with Lizzie all evening. All the lonely people … as the song went.

Gerry wished she could talk to Libra alone so she could tell him the news and share her happiness with him. He was her family. And she wanted to tell Bonnie, who was her family too. She couldn’t possibly call her parents back home and tell them; they’d be stone cold furious. But they didn’t really seem like her family any more—as she’d told Libra long ago, her parents were just two people who would come to her wedding. She looked around the room. This was her world now, people she was familiar with and worked with, some she liked and some she didn’t, some she only recognized by sight, some she knew down to the bottom of their hearts. She could pick and choose in this world, and she
had
chosen. This time, she knew, she had chosen right.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

That september the Gilda Look swept the country. Elaine Fellin wore it and looked very good in it. Lizzie Libra wore it, hated it, and looked dumpy and twice as old as she’d looked the year before. Little Penny Potter started all the Beautiful People wearing it; she hadn’t even been born when it came around the first time and she thought it was great camp. Gerry Thompson refused to wear it at all. But everyone else was wearing it, and the framed oil painting of Sylvia Polydor above Sam Leo Libra’s fireplace looked as if it had just been painted and hung there on purpose. Sylvia Polydor was queen of the shoulder pads—she had never stopped wearing the Gilda Look.

Bonnie Parker was hired to wear the Gilda Look for the editorial pages of
Vogue
, along with her old friend Fred, a happy reunion for them both. Bonnie was now a much bigger model than Fred, but Fred was not jealous because she knew she was quitting soon to get pregnant. Besides, Bonnie did not come out too well in those pictures—for some reason the Gilda Look, with its auburn wig and huge shoulders made her look oddly like (as one
Vogue
editor laughingly remarked) a drag queen. They used only one picture of Bonnie in that layout instead of the six full pages they had planned, and afterwards they kept her in more conservative clothes. Bonnie cried for days when they yanked her pictures, but she was soon cheered by the news that Sam Leo Libra had arranged a screen test for her, and she would soon be flying to Hollywood. She’d always wanted to go to Hollywood and meet stars, and she counted the days.

Bonnie/Vincent was now nearly twenty years old. Lately, he had been moody and depressed, his moods going up and down more rapidly than he could control them. He was not crying merely for the pictures of himself as Bonnie that had not been used. He was crying because he had begun to notice some disturbing physical changes in himself.

For one thing, he now had to shave his moustache every other day. Shaving gave him bumps and irritated his tender skin, but he was working so often that he did not have time to go into seclusion and grow his moustache long enough to have it waxed. It was hard to cover the bumps with make-up, and he was actually afraid someone would notice it and his photos would have to be air-brushed. He knew there were other models with facial hair, but they were all real girls and they did not have to worry. Their pictures were automatically retouched and their hairy identity was a secret of the trade. He couldn’t afford to take chances. He worried about it all the time.

The other thing that frightened him was that he had grown two inches in the past two months since he had begun modeling. He knew that Verushka was over six feet tall, but he had no idea how tall he was going to grow. He was now five feet eleven. At first he had not known that he was growing; he had simply noticed that his legs, always a problem, looked skinnier than ever. He always wore two pairs of tights to make them softer looking and less like a boy’s sticks, but he wished desperately that the photographers would take him out of mini-skirts and put him into floor-length gowns and trouser suits before anyone else noticed. Then he realized that his legs were getting skinnier because he was growing and not gaining any weight; he was skinnier all over. Every night he pulled at his semblance of breasts, trying to make them grow, and he wondered if he should start taking hormones—perhaps birth-control pills. Sweets made him break out, so he began eating a loaf of bread a day in addition to his regular food, trying to gain weight.

One of the boys he dated was a married medical student whose wife was putting him through med school. This boy told him that he was probably a case of delayed maturity, that some boys didn’t grow up until they were twenty-three or -four.

“You mean I’m going to turn into a
man?
”

“I hope not,” his lover said.

“But you said …?”

“Well, you’re growing, and you said you shave now. You didn’t shave before.”

“I’m not going to get big, butch shoulders, am I?” Vincent asked in horror.

“You’ve got a pretty good pair of shoulders already, for a girl.”

Later that night Vincent spent the better part of an hour in front of a full-length mirror. He certainly did have a big pair of shoulders for a girl—no wonder the Gilda Look had looked so horrible on him! Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph …! He started to cry and watched his Adam’s apple working convulsively in the relentless mirror. What kind of a man would he turn out to be? He would be a freak then, for sure. He’d never look like a truck driver; he’d just look like another of the thousands of little nippy queens running around the streets. His career would be over. He would never be a movie star. He would kill himself.

He began almost living on Ups to keep away the depression, and the Ups killed his appetite so he found it torture to eat enough to keep his weight. He was as nervous as a cat. He kept wondering when Gerry was going to notice. She’d have to notice soon—he was living right under her nose. But Gerry was so happy and absorbed with Mad Daddy these days that she hardly noticed Vincent at all, except to give him cheerful hugs and kisses whenever she saw him. Maybe love was blind to everyone, not just to the love object. Vincent prayed so.