City of Girls Page 5

  Peg came by to check on me as I was hanging up my dresses in the wardrobe.

  “You’re comfortable here?” she asked, looking around at Billy’s immaculate apartment.

  “I like it so much here. It’s lovely.”

  “Yes. Billy would accept nothing less.”

  “May I ask you something, Peg?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What about the fire?”

  “Which fire, kiddo?”

  “Olive said there was a small fire at the theater today. I wondered if everything is all right.”

  “Oh, that! It was just some old sets that accidentally got ignited behind the building. I have friends in the fire department, so we were fine. Boy, was that today? By golly, I’d forgotten about it already.” Peg rubbed her eyes. “Oh, well, kiddo. You will soon enough find out that life at the Lily Playhouse is nothing but a series of small fires. Now off to sleep or Olive will have you detained by the authorities.”

  So off to sleep I went—the first time I would ever sleep in New York City, and the first (but decidedly not the last) time I would ever sleep in a man’s bed.

  I do not recall who cleaned up the dinner mess.

  It was probably Olive.

  FOUR

  Within two weeks of moving to New York City, my life had changed completely. These changes included, but were not limited to, the loss of my virginity—which is an awfully amusing story that I shall tell you shortly, Angela, if you’ll just be patient with me for a moment longer.

  Because for now, I just want to say that the Lily Playhouse was unlike any world I’d ever inhabited. It was a living animation of glamour and grit and mayhem and fun—a world full of adults behaving like children, in other words. Gone was all the order and regimentation that my family and my schools had tried to drill into me thus far. Nobody at the Lily (with the exception of the long-suffering Olive) even attempted to keep the normal rhythms of respectable life. Drinking and reveling were the norm. Meals were held at sporadic hours. People slept until noon. Nobody started work at a particular time of day—nor did they ever exactly stop working, for that matter. Plans changed by the moment, guests came and went with neither formal introductions nor organized farewells, and the designation of duties was always unclear.

  I swiftly learned, to my head-spinning astonishment, that no figure of authority was going to be monitoring my comings and goings anymore. I had nobody to report to and nothing was expected of me. If I wanted to help out with costumes, I could, but I was given no formal job. There was no curfew, no head count in the beds at night. There was no house warden; there was no mother.

  I was free.

  Allegedly, of course, Aunt Peg was responsible for me. She was my actual family member, and had been entrusted with my care in loco parentis. But she wasn’t overprotective, to say the least. In fact, Aunt Peg was the first freethinker I’d ever met. She was of the mind that people should make their own decisions about their own lives, if you can imagine such a preposterous thing!

  Peg’s world ran on chaos, and yet somehow it worked. Despite all the disorder, she managed to put on two shows a day at the Lily—an early show (which started at five, and attracted women and children) and a late show (which started at eight, and was a bit racier, for an older and more male audience). There were matinees on Sunday and Wednesday, too. On Saturdays at noon, there was always a magic show for free, for the local children. Olive was usually able to rent out the space for neighborhood usage during the daytime, though I don’t think there was danger of anybody getting rich off dry swimming lessons.

  Our audience was drawn from the neighborhood itself, and back then, it really was a neighborhood—mostly Irish and Italians, with a scattering of Catholic Eastern Europeans, and a good number of Jewish families. The four-story tenements surrounding the Lily were crammed full of recent immigrants—and by “crammed,” I mean dozens of souls living in a single flat. That being the case, Peg tried to keep the language in our shows simple, to accommodate these new English speakers. Simpler language also made the memorizing of lines easier for our performers, who were not exactly classically trained thespians.

  Our shows did not attract tourists, or critics, or what you might call “theatergoers.” We provided working-class entertainment for working-class people, and that was it. Peg was adamant that we not kid ourselves that we did anything more. (“I’d rather put on a good leg show than bad Shakespeare,” she said.) Indeed, the Lily did not have any of the hallmarks that you would associate with a proper Broadway institution. We did not have out-of-town tryouts, or glamorous parties on opening nights. We didn’t close down in August, like so many of the Broadway houses did. (Our patrons didn’t go on vacations, so neither did we.) We were not even dark on Mondays. We were more like what used to be called “a continuous house”—where entertainment just kept being served up, day after day, all the year round. As long as we kept our ticket prices comparable to those at the local movie houses (which were, along with arcades and illegal gambling, our biggest competition for the neighborhood dollars) we could fill our seats fairly well.

  The Lily was not a burlesque theater, but many of our showgirls and dancers had come from the world of burlesque (and they had the immodesty to prove it, bless them). We were not quite vaudeville, either—only because vaudeville was nearly dead by that point in history. But we were almost vaudeville, considering our slapdash, comic plays. In fact, it would be a stretch to claim that our plays were plays at all. It would be more accurate to say that they were revues—cobbled-together bits of stories that were not much more than excuses for lovers to reunite and for dancers to show off their legs. (There were limits to the scope of the stories that we could tell, anyhow, given that the Lily Playhouse only had three backdrops. This meant that all the action in our shows had to take place on either a nineteenth-century city streetcorner, in an elegant upper-class parlor, or on an ocean liner.)

  Peg changed the revues every few weeks, but they were all more or less the same, and they were all forgettable. (What’s that you say? You never heard of a play called Hopping Mad, about two street urchins who fall in love? Why, of course you didn’t! It ran at the Lily for only two weeks, and it was swiftly replaced by a nearly identical play called Catch That Boat!—which, of course, took place on an ocean liner.)

  “If I could improve on the formula, I would,” she once told me. “But the formula works.”

  The formula, to be specific, was this:

  Delight (or at least distract) your audience for a short while (never more than forty-five minutes!) with an approximation of a love story. Your love story should star a likable young couple who can tap-dance and sing, but who are kept apart from each other’s arms by a villain—often a banker, sometimes a gangster (same idea, different costume)—who gnashes his teeth and tries to destroy our good couple. There should be a floozy with a notable bustline making eyes at our hero—but the hero must only have eyes for his one true girl. There should be a handsome swain who tries to woo the girl away from her fellow. There should be a drunken hobo character for comic relief—his stubble indicated by application of burnt cork. The show always had at least one dreamy ballad, usually rhyming the word “moon” with the word “swoon.” And there was always a kick line at the end.

  Applause, curtain, do it all over again for the late show.

  Theater critics did an excellent job of not noticing our existence at all, which was probably best for everyone.

  If it sounds like I’m denigrating the Lily’s productions, I’m not: I loved them. I would give anything to sit in the back of that rotting old playhouse and see one of those shows again. To my mind, there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues. They made me happy. They were designed to make people happy without making the audience work too hard to understand what was going on. As Peg had learned back in the Great War—when she used to produce cheerful song-and-dance skits for soldiers who’d just lost limbs, or had their throats burned out with
mustard gas—“Sometimes people just need to think about something else.”

  Our job was to give them the something else.

  As for the cast, our shows always needed eight dancers—four boys and four girls—and also always needed four showgirls, because that’s just what was expected. People came to the Lily for the showgirls. If you’re wondering what the difference was between “dancer” and “showgirl,” it was height. Showgirls had to be at least five foot ten. That was without the heels and the feather headdresses. And showgirls were expected to be far more stunning than your average dancer.

  Just to further confuse you, sometimes the showgirls danced (such as Gladys, who was also our dance captain), but the dancers never showgirled, because they weren’t tall enough or beautiful enough, and never would be. No amount of makeup or creative padding could turn a moderately attractive and medium-sized dancer with a fairly decent figure into the spectacle of Amazonian gorgeousness that was a midcentury New York City showgirl.

  The Lily Playhouse caught a lot of performers on their way up the ladder of success. Some of the girls who started out their careers at the Lily later moved on to Radio City or to the Diamond Horseshoe. Some of them even became headliners. But more often, we caught dancers on their way down the ladder. (There is nothing more brave or touching than an aging Rockette auditioning to be in the chorus line of a cheap and lousy show called Catch That Boat!)

  But we had a small group of regulars, too, who performed for the Lily’s humble audiences in show after show. Gladys was a staple of the company. She had invented a dance called the “boggle-boggle,” which our audiences loved, and so we put it in every performance. And why wouldn’t they love it? It was nothing but a free-for-all of girls boggling about the stage with the most jiggling of body parts imaginable.

  “Boggle-boggle!” the audience would shout during the encores, and the girls would accommodate them. Sometimes we would see neighborhood children on the sidewalks doing the boggle-boggle on their way to school.

  Let’s just say it was our cultural legacy.

  I would love to tell you exactly how Peg’s little theater company remained solvent, but the truth is that I do not know. (It could be a case of that old joke about how to make a small fortune in show business: by starting with a large fortune.) Our shows never sold out, and our ticket prices were chicken feed. Moreover, although the Lily Playhouse was marvelous, she was a white elephant of the highest degree, and she was expensive. She leaked and creaked. Her electrical wiring was as old as Edison himself, her plumbing was occult, her paint was everywhere peeling, and her roof was designed to withstand a sunny day with no rain, and not much more than that. My Aunt Peg poured money into that collapsing old theater the way an indulgent heiress might pour money into the drug habit of an opium-addicted lover—which is to say bottomlessly, desperately, and uselessly.

  As for Olive, her job was to try to stem the flow of money. An equally bottomless, desperate, and hopeless task. (I can still hear Olive crying out, “This is not a French hotel!” whenever she’d catch people running the hot water too long.)

  Olive always looked tired, and for good reason: she had been the only responsible adult in this company since 1917, when she and Peg first met. I soon learned that Olive wasn’t joking when she said she’d been working for Peg “since Moses was in nappies.” Just like Peg, Olive had been a Red Cross nurse in the Great War—although she’d been trained in Britain, of course. The two women had met on the battlefields of France. When the war ended, Olive decided to abandon nursing and follow her new friend into the field of theater instead—playing the role of my aunt’s trusted and long-suffering secretary.

  Olive could always be seen marching about the Lily Playhouse, rapidly issuing commands, edicts, and corrections. She wore the strained and martyred expression of a good herding dog charged with bringing order to an undisciplined flock of sheep. She was full of rules. There was to be no eating in the theater (“We don’t want more rats than audience members!”). There was to be promptitude at all rehearsals. No “guests of guests” were allowed to sleep overnight. There were to be no refunds without receipts. And the taxman must always be paid first.

  Peg respected the rules of her secretary, but only in the most abstract way. She respected those rules in the manner of someone who has lapsed from their faith but who still has a fundamental regard for church law. In other words: she respected Olive’s rules without actually obeying them.

  The rest of us followed Peg’s lead, which meant that nobody obeyed Olive’s rules, although we sometimes pretended to.

  Thus Olive was constantly exhausted, and we were allowed to remain like children.

  Peg and Olive lived on the fourth floor of the Lily, in apartments separated by a common living area. There were several other apartments up there on the fourth floor, too, that were not in active use when I first moved in. (They’d been built by the original owner for his mistresses, but were now being saved, Peg explained to me, “for last-minute drifters and other sundry itinerants.”)

  But the third floor, where I got to live, is where all the interesting activity happened. That’s where the piano was—usually covered by half-empty cocktail glasses and half-full ashtrays. (Sometimes Peg would pass by the piano, pick up someone’s leftover drink, and knock it back. She called it “taking a dividend.”) It was on the third floor where everyone ate, smoked, drank, fought, worked, and lived. This was the real office of the Lily Playhouse.

  There was a man named Mr. Herbert who also lived on the third floor. Mr. Herbert was introduced to me as “our playwright.” He created the basic story lines for our shows, and also came up with the jokes and gags. He was also the stage manager. He also served, I was told, as the Lily Playhouse’s press agent.

  “What does a press agent do, exactly?” I once asked him.

  “I wish I knew,” he responded.

  More interestingly, he was a disbarred attorney, and one of Peg’s oldest friends. He’d been disbarred after embezzling a considerable amount of money from a client. Peg didn’t hold the crime against him because he’d been off the wagon at the time. “You can’t blame a man for what he does when he’s drinking” was her philosophy. (“We all have our frailties” was another of her adages—she, who always gave second and third and fourth chances to the frail and the failing.) Sometimes in a pinch, when we didn’t have a better performer on hand, Mr. Herbert would play the role of the drunken hobo character in our shows—bringing to that position a natural pathos that would just break your heart.

  But Mr. Herbert was funny. He was funny in a way that was dry and dark, but he was undeniably funny. In the mornings when I got up for breakfast, I would always find Mr. Herbert sitting at the kitchen table in his saggy suit trousers and an undershirt. He’d be drinking from his mug of Sanka and picking at his one sad pancake. He would sigh and frown over his notepad, trying to think of new jokes and lines for the next show. Every morning, I would bait him with a sunny greeting, just to hear his depressed response, which always changed by the day.

  “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!” I would say.

  “The point is debatable,” he might respond.

  Or, on another day: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

  “I will half allow it.”

  Or: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

  “I fail to see your argument.”

  Or: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

  “I find myself unequal to the occasion.”

  Or, my favorite ever: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

  “Oh, you’re a satirist now, are you?”

  Another inhabitant of the third floor was a handsome young black man named Benjamin Wilson, who was the Lily’s songwriter, composer, and piano player. Benjamin was quiet and refined, and he always dressed in the most beautiful suits. He was usually to be found sitting at the grand piano, either riffing on some jaunty tune for an upcoming show, or playing jazz for his own entertainment. Sometimes he would play hymns, but only when
he thought nobody was listening.

  Benjamin’s father was a respected minister up in Harlem, and his mother was the principal of a girls’ academy on 132nd Street. He was Harlem royalty, in other words. He had been groomed for the church, but was lured away from that vocation by the world of show business. His family didn’t want him around anymore, as he was now tainted with sin. This was a standard theme, I would learn, for many of the people who worked at the Lily Playhouse. Peg took in a lot of refugees, in that respect.

  Not unlike Roland the dancer, Benjamin was far too talented to be working for a cheap outlet like the Lily. But Peg gave him free room and board, and his duties were light, so he stuck around.

  There was one more person living at the Lily when I moved in, and I’ve saved her for last, because she was the most important to me.

  That person was Celia—the showgirl, my goddess.

  I had been told by Olive that Celia was lodging with us only temporarily—just until she got things “sorted out.” The reason Celia needed a place to stay was because she’d recently been evicted from the Rehearsal Club—a respectable and inexpensive hotel for women on West Fifty-third Street, where a good many Broadway dancers and actresses stayed back in the day. But Celia had lost her place at the Rehearsal Club because she’d been caught with a man in her room. So Peg had offered Celia a room at the Lily as a stopgap measure.

  I got the sense that Olive disapproved of this offering—but then again, Olive mostly disapproved of everything that Peg offered to people for free. This wasn’t a palatial offering in any case. Celia’s little room down the hall was far more humble than my fancy setup over in Uncle Billy’s never-used pied-à-terre. Celia’s bolt-hole wasn’t much more than a utility closet with a cot and a tiny bit of floor upon which to strew her clothing. The room had a window, but it faced a hot, stinking alley. Celia’s room didn’t have a carpet, she didn’t have a sink, she didn’t have a mirror, she didn’t have a closet, and she certainly didn’t have a large, handsome bed, like I had.