The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (8 page)

Any of the chorus girls and boys backing up the two leads would have been a star him or herself anyplace but Broadway. But the world knows that a star in Dallas is only a chorus girl on Broadway; and those who were serious about their craft would prefer the chorus of a Broadway show to a star turn in the sticks.

At intermission Gloria and I discussed how best to talk to the chorines. “Just talking to one girl is likely to take ten or fifteen minutes, if she has anything to say,” I pointed out, “and the others aren’t going to want to stand around waiting for their chance.”

“True,” Gloria said.

“Why don’t we run around to as many theaters as we can get to in the first half hour after the shows let out,” I suggested, “and invite anyone who knows Two-Headed Mary well or who spoke with her during the week before she disappeared to join us at a table at Sardi’s for a drink or even a bit of food—on Mr. Brass.”

Gloria patted my hand. “Very clever,” she said.

“No chorus girl, in my experience, has ever turned down a free meal,” I added, “particularly when there are no strings attached.”

Gloria smiled the sweet smile of the tiger as it is about to pounce. “Of course not,” she purred. “The pay is lousy, the hours are long, and the work is difficult and demanding, not to mention exhausting. And most of the dinner invitations they get have definite strings attached—with hooks on the end. If you think being a chorus girl is a piece of cake—”

“Of course not,” I assured her. “I have nothing but the greatest respect for those who toil in the vineyards of the theater.”

“And how do you come to know so much about chorus girls anyway?” she demanded.

“Years of research and self-denial,” I told her, “and I feel that I am the better man for it.”

“Better than whom?” she inquired sweetly, “and in what way?”

The rising of the third-act curtain spared me from revealing that I had no clever answer.

* * *

Gloria and I split up as the show ended. I went backstage there at the Royal, and she headed out to the Winter Garden, where
At Home Abroad
should be letting out, and then, she thought probably, to the Alvin and Cole Porter’s long-running
Anything Goes.

The magic name of Alexander Brass got me past the stage doorman without having to appeal to Miss Lelane. The dressing rooms were one flight up an ancient wrought-iron circular staircase. I paused by the star’s dressing room to tell Sandra how wonderful I thought she had been, but the room was already crowded with men doing just that, so I just waved at her from the doorway and slowly and silently faded away farther down the hall to the chorus girls’ dressing room.

Two counters ran the length of the dressing room, one against each wall. There were four or five half-height mirrors distributed along each counter, each framed in light bulbs. The thirty or so chorines in the crowded dressing room were seated before the mirrors, or with their own small makeup mirrors, busily slathering cold cream on their faces or rubbing makeup off when I opened the door. They were in various stages of dishabille, some wearing dressing gowns but most just in what a popular song describes as their scanties. Pinky would have enjoyed the view. I know I did. Loud staccato conversation criss-crossed the room, punctuated by occasional peals of girlish laughter. The girl nearest the door shouted, “Man aboard!” when she spotted me, and several of them hastily grabbed dressing gowns to cover themselves. Most of them didn’t bother: what’s one man in the dressing room, more or less? One of the girls about three seats down on my right, a particularly blond girl amid this bevy of blond beauties, eyed me inquisitively. “You’re cute,” she said, “in a penguin sort of way. Who do you want to see?”

I smiled at her and climbed up onto a convenient, but wobbly, chair, “Ladies, may I have your attention for a moment?” I yelled. The noise level dropped ever so slightly. “My name is Morgan DeWitt; I work for Alexander Brass,” I yelled. The noise level dropped sharply. Brass was an important columnist. There were worse things for a girl’s career than getting her name in a nationally syndicated newspaper column. A chorus of “shush”es ran around the room, stifling the remaining chatter.

“Many of you might have seen the paragraph Mr. Brass did a few days ago on Two-Headed Mary. Well, she’s still missing, and we want to do a follow-up. We’d like to talk to anyone who has seen or spoken with her in the past, say, two weeks.”

“Will it get my name in Brass’s column?” a blond five or six chairs down on the left asked.

“When did you see her?”

“When would you like me to have seen her? The name is Jeanette Winters.” She spelled “Jeanette” for me.

I took a deep breath. “The idea,” I said loudly, “is for those of you who have actually had any dealings with Two-Headed Mary recently to join me at Sardi’s in about half an hour, where you can tell me about it over a hamburger or one of Sardi’s famous chicken salad sandwiches and the beverage of your choice.”

“A sandwich?” came a mezzo-soprano voice from the far side of the room, “is that the best he can do?”

“I was concerned about your girlish figures,” I said. “If you wish something more substantial, by all means; Mr. Brass is nothing if not generous. That is, if you know something worth being generous for.”

“How do we know you work for Alexander Brass?” a short brunette with a pug nose demanded.

“How do you know I don’t?” I retorted. “If I’m lying, it’s a pointless lie, since I’m offering to feed you en masse, as it were, and you will all share in that safety that is said to be in numbers. Besides, Brass’s other assistant, the lovely lady who’s known as Gloria, will be joining us.”

“Will Mr. Brass be there?” the nearby blond wanted to know.

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But if you have anything interesting to say, you’ll get a chance to tell him about it.”

It took me another ten minutes to get out of there, with three of the ladies of the chorus thinking that maybe they knew something that would be a reasonable trade for a free meal and a girl named Viola getting my promise that she could come along if she could locate a fellow chorine named Liddy and bring her, since, said Viola, Liddy and Two-Headed Mary had been special friends. Liddy had run out to see someone right after the show, but Viola thought she could find her. I scribbled “Sardi’s ASAP” on the back of one of my cards and gave it to her to pass on to Liddy.

After leaving the Royal, I went to the New Amsterdam Theater where the twelfth edition of
George White’s Scandals
had just opened. George White’s audiences have enjoyed being scandalized since 1920, when the first
Scandals
was produced, and this latest version of the show had opened last week to rave reviews and SRO box office. The chorus of beautiful girls—can’t have scandals without beautiful girls—would not have to seek other employment for some time. I spoke to the girls from the dressing room doorway and got their sympathetic attention; Two-Headed Mary was well liked. Three of the chorines were going out for a late dinner with Rudy Vallee, the show’s star, which I thought was an unfair monopoly in restraint of trade, but they claimed to have nothing for us anyway, so that was okay. Two others thought they had some information that might be worth a sandwich, or at least a drink. Then I scurried over to the Alhambra and
Dames, Dames, Dames
just in time to catch most of the chorus girls at the stage door as they were leaving.

Between us, Gloria and I garnered an even dozen ladies of the chorus who claimed recent acquaintanceship with, or knowledge of, Two-Headed Mary. It was a hair before midnight by the time we got our troupe assembled, what with the removal of stage makeup and the donning of civilian makeup and street clothes. Sardi’s was crowded, as one might expect on a Thursday night. The crowd was “one-half street, one-half straight, and one-half out of state,” as Tiny Benny once put it. Benny, a man of enormous girth who sat in and around a booth against the back wall of Sardi’s front room, said things that other people quoted. What he meant by that particular crack was that the late-evening Sardi’s crowd was made up of theater people, would-be theater people, and midwestern tourists who thought that the theater was evil, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to look if you didn’t touch. If you tried explaining to Benny that one can’t have three halves of anything, he had a ready answer: “Who asked you?”

I went in first to see if we could get a table in a somewhat sequestered location while Gloria gathered our cluster of chorines by the door. Adele Sardi, who ran the place with her husband, Vincent, the original Sardi, nodded to me when I came in. A short, quick woman who had been a noted beauty in her youth, and that not so long ago, Adele ruled the restaurant with a sure hand and an unfailing sense of humor. “Morgan,” she said, “you look tired. Too many late nights and not enough sleep. Mr. Brass works you too hard. Let me get you a strong cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake.”

“What I need is a place to seat a dozen or so people and a little privacy,” I told her. “Gloria and I have to interview some young ladies of the theater.”

“For Mr. Brass?”

“Of course. That is my life. Am I not Mr. Brass’s good right arm?”

“I don’t know. Last week you were his nose and ears.” Mrs. Sardi paused to consider. “The large table in the back room is a possibility. The Waiter’s Union Steering Committee, Local Nineteen, was meeting back there, but they were done an hour ago. Most of them have already left. A few of them are still sitting there, drinking white wine and cursing management. They can do that in the kitchen. Give me a minute.” She darted off.

Ten minutes later we were gathered around the big table in the back room. Florian, our waiter, he of the long face and sad eyes, took the drink orders, and ambled off to get the assorted martinis, gimlets, Rob Roys, champagne cocktails, ambrosias, gin and tonics, and soda waters while the girls studied their menus. When drinks are on their way, can food be far behind? We decided to hold off any meaningful discussion until the drinks were on the table and the food ordered. I did the preliminaries: getting out my little pocket notebook—can’t be a reporter without a pocket notebook—and taking names. They all more or less knew each other; the gypsy community is small and tight.

Terri, Maxine, and Aud (“it’s short for Audrey”) were joining us from the Royal. Dossie and Vera came from the New Amsterdam; Yvette and Gilly from the Alhambra. From the chorus of
At Home Abroad
at the Winter Garden came Trixie and Suze. Honey, Jane, and Didi (“but everyone calls me ‘Knees’”) were the crew from
Anything Goes
at the Alvin. (There, I hold nothing back. I didn’t collect last names.) Their voices ranged from high and giggly to low and sultry. Their ages ranged from nineteen to somewhere around thirty. This is Gloria’s estimation, we didn’t ask and they all looked to be a very healthy nineteen to me. They were all of about the same height—rather shorter in person than they seemed on the stage, I noted—and mostly different shades of blond. Whether natural or suicide, I couldn’t tell. (A suicide blonde, as
Joe Miller’s Joke Book
would have it, is one that’s dyed by her own hand.) Seeing so much youth and beauty en masse it was kind of hard to tell them apart, although any red-blooded American boy would have been glad to spend a year or two trying.

Junior Skulley wandered unsteadily into the room behind Florian as he returned with the tray of drinks. Junior’s eyes were red and bleary from booze and lack of sleep, and his hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his dinner jacket, which bore the spoor of a recent dinner. He spotted our collection of chorines and froze like a bird dog. “Heigh-ho, Morgan,” he said when he regained the power of speech. “Where’d you get the bevy of beautiful dolls? You and Brass putting on a show?”

“This is a private party,” I told him.

“Of course it is,” he agreed, taking two precarious steps forward. “Ah, the beauteous Miss Adams,” he said, his eyes lighting on Gloria. “I find her enchanting and she finds me funny. But one lives in hope.”

“Hello, Junior,” Gloria said. “It’s a free country; you have a right to hope.”

Junior pulled his right hand from his pocket and seemed surprised to find a half-full glass of scotch still firmly in his fist. He sipped at the scotch as he stared soulfully at the girls around the table. Son, heir, and namesake of city contractor Edwin James Skulley Sr., Junior was in his mid-thirties, but looked a boyish fifty. He had no interest in his father’s business; his two vocations were drinking and chorus girls. As these took up most of his time, he had no hobbies.

“A toast!” he said, advancing to behind my chair as Florian passed out the last of the booze order.

“One toast, and then go away,” I told him. “This is business.”

“Of course it is,” he agreed. “Who said it wasn’t?” He extended his glass. “Ladies? A toast to you; visions of beauty all.”

To a woman they all leaned forward and raised their glasses, except for Yvette, who made a show of turning to face the other way, her glass tabled but her chin raised high. Perhaps she just didn’t like his face.

“Yvette, my love, you are even more beautiful than I remember,” he said, raising his glass to salute the back of her head. Perhaps she had good reason to dislike his face. He saluted the rest of the table with his glass, from left to right. “As are you all,” he added. “And, to you all, a toast!” He raised the glass.

“Here’s to the girls in the high-heeled shoes

Who eat our dinners and drink our booze

And hug and kiss us until we smother—

With that he bowed to the girls. “Thank you all for your attention,” he said. “Perhaps I will see you again sometime. Now I have to get back to… to…” He turned and staggered back out the door, still going “to… to…” like a lost and bewildered toy train.

As Junior disappeared out the door there was a brief colloquy among the girls regarding his manners, morals, and general desirability as a dinner companion. Three of the girls admitted to having been out with him and, to the accompaniment of assorted giggles and sighs, they dissected him quickly, cruelly, and, as far as I could tell, accurately. He was a drunk, a wastrel, and had a one-track mind; but he was good for a dinner or two as long it was in a public place and a girl didn’t mind getting slightly pawed over. Essentially, the consensus was, poor Junior was harmless. Yvette flushed red at several of the more intimate comments, particularly regarding how a girl would have to be a fool herself to take a fool like Junior seriously, but she maintained a dignified silence.