Big Money
Page 19
Afterwards they walked on the Drive. He talked English fine with a little accent that Margie thought was very distinguished. Right away they’d stopped kidding and he was telling her how homesick he was for Havana and how crazy he was to get out of New York, and she was telling him what an awful life she led and how all the men in the house were always pinching her and jostling her on the stairs, and how she’d throw herself in the river if she had to go on living in one room with Agnes and Frank Mandeville. And as for that Indian, she wouldn’t let him touch her not if he was the last man in the world.
She didn’t get home until it was time for Tony to go downtown to his cabaret. Instead of supper they ate some more icecream sodas. Margie went back happy as a lark. Coming out of the drugstore, she’d heard a woman say to her friend, “My, what a handsome young couple.”
Of course Frank and Agnes raised Cain. Agnes cried and Frank lashed himself up into a passion and said he’d punch the damn greaser’s head in if he so much as laid a finger on a pretty, pure American girl. Margie yelled out that she’d do what she damn pleased and said everything mean she could think of. She’d decided that the thing for her to do was to marry Tony and run away to Cuba with him.
Tony didn’t seem to like the idea of getting married much, but she’d go up to his little hall bedroom as soon as Frank was out of the house at noon and wake Tony up and tease him and pet him. He’d want to make love to her but she wouldn’t let him. The first time she fought him off he broke down and cried and said it was an insult and that in Cuba men didn’t allow women to act like that. “It’s the first time in my life a woman has refused my love.”
Margie said she didn’t care, not till they were married and had gotten out of this awful place. At last one afternoon she teased him till he said all right. She put her hair up on top of her head and put on her most grownuplooking dress and they went down to the marriage-bureau on the subway. They were both of them scared to death when they had to go up to the clerk; he was twentyone and she said she was nineteen and got away with it. She’d stolen the money out of Agnes’s purse to pay for the license.
She almost went crazy the weeks she had to wait for Tony to finish out his contract. Then one day in May, when she tapped on his bedroom door he showed her two hundred dollars in bills he’d saved up and said, “Today we get married. . . . Tomorrow we sail for La ’Avana. We can make very much money there. You will dance and I will sing and play the guitar.” He made the gesture of playing the guitar with the thinpointed fingers of one of his small hands. Her heart started beating hard. She ran downstairs. Frank had already gone out. She scribbled a note to Agnes on the piece of cardboard that had come back from the laundry in one of Frank’s boiled shirts:
AGNES DARLING:
Don’t be mad. Tony and I got married today and we’re going to Havana, Cuba, to live. Tell Father if he comes around. I’ll write lots. Love to Frank.
Your grateful daughter,
MARGERY
Then she threw her clothes into an English pigskin suitcase of Frank’s that he’d just got back from the hockshop and ran down the stairs three at a time. Tony was waiting for her on the stoop, pale and trembling with his guitarcase and his suitcase beside him. “I do not care for the money. Let’s take a taxi,” he said.
In the taxi she grabbed his hand, it was icy cold. At City Hall he was so fussed he forgot all his English and she had to do everything. They borrowed a ring from the justice of the peace. It was over in a minute, and they were back in the taxi again going uptown to a hotel. Margie never could remember afterwards what hotel it was, only that they’d looked so fussed that the clerk wouldn’t believe they were married until she showed him the marriagelicense, a big sheet of paper all bordered with forgetmenots. When they got up to the room they kissed each other in a hurry and washed up to go out to a show. First they went to Shanley’s to dinner. Tony ordered expensive champagne and they both got to giggling on it.
He kept telling her what a rich city La ’Avana was and how the artists were really appreciated there and rich men would pay him fifty, one hundred dollars a night to play at their parties, “And with you, darling Margo, it will be two three six time that much. . . . And we shall rent a fine house in the Vedado, very exclusive section, and servants very cheap there, and you will be like a queen. You will see I have many friends there, many rich men like me very much.” Margie sat back in her chair, looking at the restaurant and the welldressed ladies and gentlemen and the waiters so deferential and the silver dishes everything came in and at Tony’s long eyelashes brushing his pink cheek as he talked about how warm it was and the cool breeze off the sea, and the palms and the roses, and parrots and singing birds in cages, and how everybody spent money in La ’Avana. It seemed the only happy day she’d ever had in her life.
When they took the boat the next day, Tony only had enough money to buy secondclass passages. They went over to Brooklyn on the el to save taxifare. Margie had to carry both bags up the steps because Tony said he had a headache and was afraid of dropping his guitarcase.
Newsreel LIV
there was nothing significant about the morning’s trading. The first hour consisted of general buying and selling to even up accounts, but soon after eleven o’clock prices did less fluctuating and gradually firmed
TIMES SQUARE PATRONS LEFT HALF SHAVED
Will Let Crop Rot In Producers’ Hands Unless Prices Drop
RUSSIAN BARONESS SUICIDE AT MIAMI
. . . the kind of a girl that men forget
Just a toy to enjoy for a while
Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous Under His Policies
HUNT JERSEY WOODS FOR ROVING LEOPARD
PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING
It had to be done and I did it, says Miss Ederle
FORTY-TWO INDICTED IN FLORIDA DEALS
Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall Berating Couple Near
Murder Scene, New Witness Says
several hundred tents and other light shelters put up by campers on a hill south of Front Street, which overlooks Hempstead Harbor, were laid in rows before the tornado as grass falls before a scythe
When they play Here comes the bride
You’ll stand outside
3000 AMERICANS FOUND PENNILESS IN PARIS
I am a poor girl
My fortune’s been sad
I always was courted
By the wagoner’s lad
NINE DROWNED IN UPSTATE FLOODS
SHEIK SINKING
Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several hours later he underwent
Adagio Dancer
The nineteenyearold son of a veterinary in Castellaneta in the south of Italy was shipped off to America like a lot of other unmanageable young Italians when his parents gave up trying to handle him, to sink or swim and maybe send a few lire home by international postal moneyorder. The family was through with him. But Rodolfo Guglielmi wanted to make good.
He got a job as assistant gardener in Central Park but that kind of work was the last thing he wanted to do; he wanted to make good in the brightlights; money burned his pockets.
He hung around cabarets doing odd jobs, sweeping out for the waiters, washing cars; he was lazy handsome wellbuilt slender good-tempered and vain; he was a born tangodancer.
Lovehungry women thought he was a darling. He began to get engagements dancing the tango in ballrooms and cabarets; he teamed up with a girl named Jean Acker on a vaudeville tour and took the name of Rudolph Valentino.
Stranded on the Coast he headed for Hollywood, worked for a long time as an extra for five dollars a day; directors began to notice he photographed well.
He got his chance in The Four Horsemen
and became the gigolo of every woman’s dreams.
Valentino spent his life in the colorless glare of klieg lights, in stucco villas obstructed with bricabrac oriental rugs tigerskins, in the bridalsuites of hotels, in silk bathrobes in priva
te cars.
He was always getting into limousines or getting out of limousines,
or patting the necks of fine horses.
Wherever he went the sirens of the motorcyclecops screeched ahead of him
flashlights flared,
the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces, waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their autographbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirablytailored dress suit; they stole his hat and pulled at his necktie; his valets removed young women from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and cabarets actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at him under their mascaraed lashes.
He wanted to make good under the glare of the milliondollar searchlights
of El Dorado:
the Sheik, the Son of the Sheik;
personal appearances.
He married his old vaudeville partner, divorced her, married the adopted daughter of a millionaire, went into lawsuits with the producers who were debasing the art of the screen, spent a million dollars on one European trip;
he wanted to make good in the brightlights.
When the Chicago Tribune called him a pink powderpuff
and everybody started wagging their heads over a slavebracelet he wore that he said his wife had given him and his taste for mushy verse of which he published a small volume called Daydreams and the whispers grew about the testimony in his divorce case that he and his first wife had never slept together,
it broke his heart.
He tried to challenge the Chicago Tribune to a duel;
he wanted to make good
in heman twofisted broncobusting pokerplaying stockjuggling America. (He was a fair boxer and had a good seat on a horse, he loved the desert like the sheik and was tanned from the sun of Palm Springs.) He broke down in his suite in the Hotel Ambassador in New York: gastric ulcer.
When the doctors cut into his elegantlymolded body they found that peritonitis had begun; the abdominal cavity contained a large amount of fluid and food particles; the viscera were coated with a greenishgrey film; a round hole a centimeter in diameter was seen in the anterior wall of the stomach; the tissue of the stomach for one and onehalf centimeters immediately surrounding the perforation was necrotic. The appendix was inflamed and twisted against the small intestine.
When he came to from the ether the first thing he said was, “Well, did I behave like a pink powderpuff?”
His expensivelymassaged actor’s body fought peritonitis for six days.
The switchboard at the hospital was swamped with calls, all the corridors were piled with flowers, crowds filled the street outside, filmstars who claimed they were his betrothed entrained for New York.
Late in the afternoon a limousine drew up at the hospital door (where the grimyfingered newspapermen and photographers stood around bored tired hoteyed smoking too many cigarettes making trips to the nearest speak exchanging wisecracks and deep dope waiting for him to die in time to make the evening papers) and a woman, who said she was a maid employed by a dancer who was Valentino’s first wife, alighted. She delivered to an attendant an envelope addressed to the filmstar and inscribed From Jean, and a package. The package contained a white counterpane with lace ruffles and the word Rudy embroidered in the four corners. This was accompanied by a pillowcover to match over a blue silk scented cushion.
Rudolph Valentino was only thirtyone when he died.
His managers planned to make a big thing of his highly-publicized funeral but the people in the streets were too crazy.
While he lay in state in a casket covered with a cloth of gold, tens of thousands of men, women, and children packed the streets outside. Hundreds were trampled, had their feet hurt by policehorses. In the muggy rain the cops lost control. Jammed masses stampeded under the clubs and the rearing hoofs of the horses. The funeral chapel was gutted, men and women fought over a flower, a piece of wallpaper, a piece of the broken plateglass window. Showwindows were burst in. Parked cars were overturned and smashed. When finally the mounted police after repeated charges beat the crowd off Broadway, where traffic was tied up for two hours, they picked up twentyeight separate shoes, a truckload of umbrellas, papers, hats, tornoff sleeves. All the ambulances in that part of the city were busy carting off women who’d fainted, girls who’d been stepped on. Epileptics threw fits. Cops collected little groups of abandoned children.
The fascisti sent a guard of honor and the antifascists drove them off. More rioting, cracked skulls, trampled feet. When the public was barred from the undertaking parlors hundreds of women groggy with headlines got in to view the poor body
claiming to be exdancingpartners, old playmates, relatives from the old country, filmstars; every few minutes a girl fainted in front of the bier and was revived by the newspapermen who put down her name and address and claim to notice in the public prints. Frank E. Campbell’s undertakers and pallbearers, dignified wearers of black broadcloth and tackersup of crape, were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even the boss had his fill of publicity that time.
It was two days before the cops could clear the streets enough to let the flowerpieces from Hollywood be brought in and described in the evening papers.
The church service was more of a success. The police-commissioner barred the public for four blocks round.
Many notables attended.
America’s Sweetheart sobbing bitterly in a small black straw with a black band and a black bow behind, in black georgette over black with a white lace collar and white lace cuffs followed the coffin that was
covered by a blanket of pink roses
sent by a filmstar who appeared at the funeral heavily veiled and swooned and had to be taken back to her suite at the Hotel Ambassador after she had shown the reporters a message allegedly written by one of the doctors alleging that Rudolph Valentino had spoken of her at the end
as his bridetobe.
A young woman committed suicide in London.
Relatives arriving from Europe were met by police reserves and Italian flags draped with crape. Exchamp Jim Jeffries said, “Well, he made good.” The champion himself allowed himself to be quoted that the boy was fond of boxing and a great admirer of the champion.
The funeral train left for Hollywood.
In Chicago a few more people were hurt trying to see the coffin, but only made the inside pages.
The funeral train arrived in Hollywood on page 23 of the New York Times.
Newsreel LV
THRONGS IN STREETS
LUNATIC BLOWS UP PITTSBURGH BANK
Krishnamurti Here Says His Message Is
World Happiness
Close the doors
They are coming
Through the windows
AMERICAN MARINES LAND IN NICARAGUA
TO PROTECT ALIENS
PANGALOS CAUGHT; PRISONER IN ATHENS
Close the windows
They are coming through the doors
Saw Pigwoman The Other Says But Neither
Can Identify Accused
FUNDS ACCUMULATE IN NEW YORK
the desire for profits and more profits kept on increasing and the quest for easy money became well nigh universal. All of this meant an attempt to appropriate the belongings of others without rendering a corresponding service
“Physician” Who Took Prominent Part in Valentino
Funeral Exposed as Former Convict
NEVER SAW HIM SAYS MANAGER
Close the doors they are coming through the windows
My God they’re coming through the floor
The Camera Eye (47)
sirens bloom in the fog over the harbor horns of all colors everyshaped whistles reach up from the river and the churn of screws the throb of engines bells
the steady broken swish of waves cut by prows out of the unseen stirring fumblingly through the window tentacles stretch tingling
to release the spring
tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the dotted line enlist become one of
to rebuild yesterday to clip out paper figures to simulate growth warp newsprint into faces smoothing and wrinkling in the various barelyfelt velocities of time)
tonight now the room fills with the throb and hubbub of departure the explorer gets a few necessities together coaches himself on a beginning
better the streets first a stroll uptown downtown along the wharves under the el peering into faces in taxicabs at the drivers of trucks at old men chewing in lunchrooms at drunk bums drooling puke in alleys what’s the newsvendor reading? what did the elderly wop selling chestnuts whisper to the fat woman behind the picklejars? where is she going the plain girl in a red hat running up the subway steps and the cop joking the other cop across the street? and the smack of a kiss from two shadows under the stoop of the brownstone house and the grouchy faces at the streetcorner suddenly gaping black with yells at the thud of a blow a whistle scampering feet the event?