The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  So here it was a hair before one in the morning and my workday was ending. This is not a complaint. I value my job; and not just because in this month of our Lord September 1935, almost six years since the day immortalized in the Variety headline, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG, an employer still doesn’t have to advertise a job. He just has to go into a dark corner, make sure there is nobody in earshot, and whisper quietly up his sleeve: “I need someone to sweep the floor and lift heavy objects. I can pay ten dollars a week.” Before he can make it to the front door, four hundred people will be lined up outside, politely, quietly, hopefully.

  But I not only have a job, I have the job I wanted: amanuensis and legman for Alexander Brass. My name is Morgan DeWitt and I have worked for Brass since the week I arrived in New York four years ago with my suitcase in one hand and my diploma from Western Reserve College in the other, determined to write the Great American Novel before I was thirty. I am still working on the novel. I have five years to go. Wars have been fought and won, dynasties have fallen, obscure army corporals have risen to lead great countries in less than five years; so I still have a chance with the novel. Besides, would it be so bad if I didn’t finish it until I was thirty-five?

  Brass has warned me that working for him will ruin my writing style. He has also said that any writer who is conscious of his style as he writes is an inept farceur. I suppose both could be true. But I like my job. The hours are lousy, the working conditions vary from elegant to dangerous, the pay is barely adequate, even for a young single man with an English degree from a small college in Ohio as his only reference, but I have learned more about life—about people—each week I’ve worked for Brass than I would in ten years of doing anything else. I have dealt with gangsters and their molls, politicians and their molls, stars of stage and screen, con men, kept women, kept men, nightclub owners, nightclub singers, nightclub crawlers, doormen and princes, whores and princesses, and have discovered no universal truth, no rulebook for understanding humanity. But I have learned, faster and more directly than I could have elsewhere, that it is presumptuous for any man to assume that he understands any other man well enough to write about him; and ridiculous for any man to assume that he understands any woman.

  Brass and I separated at the door; he grabbed a cab to the Stork Club and a night of listening to stars and starlets and would-be stars and their press agents and sycophants whispering boozy secrets in his ear. I raised the collar of my raincoat and pulled my hat down against the cold drizzle and headed for the 57th Street subway entrance. One of the city’s saving graces is that the streetcars, buses, and subways run all night. The other is that, though New Yorkers know that their city is the center of the known universe, they are not at all stuck up about it.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later I was home, which is a room in a brownstone rooming house on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. I share the house with an ever-changing assortment of actors, actresses, dancers, singers, musicians, playwrights, waiters, waitresses, and other recent arrivals who are going to make it big in this city without a heart, or die trying. Sometimes reality is surprisingly trite. There is also a young lady who reads cards and tells fortunes at various restaurants around town, a retired New York cop who works as a guard at the Museum of Natural History, and a small-time bookie who works out of a cigar store on Broadway and 86th. My next-door neighbor is a retired circus clown named Pinky. An ever-changing slice of life, my rooming house.

  There is a shared living room where people of the opposite sex can entertain each other, since propriety and Mrs. Bianchi, the landlady, discourage the mixing of the sexes in any of the upstairs rooms; brief visits with the door open are barely permitted. The room has an upright piano (no playing after 10:00 P.M.), a couple of couches, a few overstuffed chairs, some beat-up wooden chairs, a writing desk, and, at the moment I came into the house, a uniformed patrolman in deep conversation with Maureen, our resident card reader, on a couch in the corner. Since they were holding hands and gazing meaningfully into each other’s eyes, I didn’t think Maureen was in any great danger of getting arrested for fortune-telling, so I tiptoed upstairs and fell into bed.

  2

  To compensate for the late hours, I usually don’t arrive at the office until between ten and ten-thirty. Brass tries to make it by eleven. Normally after I get up and ablute, I make a small pot of coffee and spend the next hour at the old Underwood on the desk under my window, working at my novel—can’t be a novelist without writing a novel. But this morning I stared at the last page I had done—thirty-two—and decided to put aside the manuscript and let it age. Perhaps it would improve with age. It was a slice-of-life story called “So Breaks a Heart—A Saga of Broadway.” It was about a young man who works for a famous columnist and what he learns about life and women and other things and how he has his heart broken by a girl who loves him but cannot be faithful to any man.

  It was autobiographical, but it was sappy and it didn’t read true. I think the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that when it is written as fiction, it is not believable.

  When a random stranger—say someone you meet at a party—finds out you’re a writer, even a would-be novelist like myself, one of the first questions is always “Where do you get your ideas?” My friend Bill Welsch, a regular contributor to Black Mask, claims they are mailed to him on postcards from a fellow in New Jersey named Bodo. The truth is that ideas for plots and characters are constantly flung at you by life, and your job is merely to catch them, sort them, and throw back the ones that are undersized. It isn’t the ideas that are the problem, it’s arranging them in a lifelike and realistic manner within the story. The task is one of selection, organization, and staying far enough removed from the material so that it will read like the truth. Truth in fiction is an artfully contrived facade.

  I considered the problems of being a writer as I got dressed, and wondered whether The Writer or Writer’s Digest would be interested in an article by one of America’s major unpublished novelists.

  I washed, brushed, and dressed in a brown single-breasted suit that said, or at least strongly implied, “man of the world,” and had set me back thirty-five dollars, and was headed downstairs, trench coat over my arm, by quarter to nine. I walked along Central Park West, observing the pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, small children and their nannies, and other fauna, and thinking over the state of the world and trying to decide what sort of book to attempt next. Starting a novel is easy. Taking it to completion is, for me so far, a distant goal. Perhaps I should switch to short stories or squib fillers for newspapers. Who knows—I might write the Great American Squib.

  My thoughts moved, mercifully, on to the missing Two-Headed Mary. The lady was a true Broadway character of the sort that Damon Runyon might write about. Telling her tale would present certain problems in delicacy and restraint, but Alexander Brass had solved worse. In his coverage of the Hall-Mills case a decade ago, he had managed to convey what the minister and his choir singer were doing in their time alone together with mostly biblical references, and without getting more than a couple of dozen letters from readers whose sensibilities were offended (but who nonetheless had read every word). Theodore Garrett, Brass’s man-of-all-work, had done a montage of those letters, and it hung in the entrance hall to Brass’s apartment.

  Brass had two people working for him in his office on the sixteenth floor of the New York World building on Tenth Avenue and 59th Street. There was Gloria Adams, his researcher and copy editor, who doubled as the receptionist when there was any receiving to be done; and there was me. Gloria, whom I privately think of as the Ice Princess, is blond, five-foot-two, beautiful, and of indeterminate age. She can’t be as young as she looks, and she looks far too young to be as knowledgeable and self-assured as she is. (If Gloria were to read that last sentence she would red-pencil it heavily and write something about “balance” in the margin. But I think it means what I think I want to say, so I think I’ll just leave it alone.) />
  I got into the office about ten-thirty, nodded hello to Gloria, who was behind her desk in the front room, carefully hung up my tan British trench coat, which gives me that air of elan that I otherwise lack, and tossed my dark brown fedora on the hat tree. Gloria looked over my suit and gave me an approving nod. She thinks that people should always dress as though they are in imminent danger of meeting their maker, and will be judged 20 percent on their good works and 80 percent on their tailor. “Are there any news?” I asked her.

  “Not a new,” she responded. “But here’s the mail.” She indicated a wicker basket stuffed with envelopes on one side of her desk. It is part of my job to sort the mail and answer that part of it not destined for other ends. I took the basket and retreated to my little cubbyhole office in the short hall between Gloria’s well-appointed reception room and Brass’s vast sunlit chamber with a view of the Hudson River, which flowed past some three blocks away for Brass’s personal amusement.

  Brass came in about an hour later and settled in his office. I brought him the three letters that he had to look at, and placed them carefully on the blotter in front of him. He was staring out the window at the passing scene. A couple of old four-stack destroyers were puffing their way up the Hudson, working their way past two tugs that were pushing a long row of barges the other way. It was very nautical. Inspired, I snapped to attention and saluted. “Good morning, Commodore Brass,” I said. “Ensign DeWitt reporting for instructions.”

  “Good morning, Mr. DeWitt.” He turned to look at me. “Go keelhaul the mizzenmast. And don’t annoy me until at least twelve bells.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said. I did a smart about-face and went back to my office to begin answering the stack of letters. A little while later I heard the steady clatter of Brass’s Underwood typewriter over the intermittent clacking of my own. It was a sweet sound, the sound that paid my salary as well as that of Gloria and Garrett. It also kept Brass well supplied with those toys that made his life worth living. In addition to the cars—he now had six—he had recently developed an interest in science and scientific instruments. A couple of months ago he had purchased a six-inch reflecting telescope from a pawn shop—Brass was fascinated by pawn shops—and had installed it on the terrace of his Central Park South apartment. Last Tuesday night, he showed Gloria and me the moons of Jupiter with paternal pride. He had some old maps of Manhattan, purchased from a Cortlandt Street dealer, and was tracing the island’s early streams and water-courses to find out what happened to them as the city spread its concrete around and over the original landscape. What, if anything, he intended to do with the water when he found it I don’t know.

  About an hour after the typing started, he called me in to pick up the column, triple-spaced just like a real reporter would type it, and bring it to Gloria for copy editing and fact checking. I was expected to read it and comment if I saw anything I didn’t like, but usually he just glared at me or shook his head sadly when I did. Gloria’s opinion he respected, mine he tolerated.

  I paused at Gloria’s desk to see if he had included anything about Two-Headed Mary. The opening piece said nice things about Senator Huey Long, who was not expected to live out the day. The piece on Two-Headed Mary was the third item, sandwiched between a favorable mention of Clarence Day’s new book, Life with Father, and a long think piece on how the world was getting ever smaller, what with the S.S. Normandie just crossing the Atlantic in four days, eleven hours and thirty-three minutes, and the China Clipper flying boat going into regular service between San Francisco and Manila. The piece on Mary read:

  THE GREAT WHITE WAY is missing one of its lights tonight. We know her as Matinee Mary and, in the casual, uncaring way of New Yorkers, know little more about her except that for much of the past decade this earnest matron in the print dresses and flowered hats has stationed herself outside Broadway’s theaters during intermissions and dunned the matinee audiences for worthy causes. She learned what shows would open the purses and wallets of the audience and which would not, and stood, rain or shine, where she could do the most good. She has a kind heart, and has been known to help a chorus girl in trouble with advice, friendship, and perhaps a folded-up bill slipped into her hand.

  But for the past week Matinee Mary has not been standing under the broad, protective awnings of the Broadway theaters, and no one seems to know where she has gone. Mary, the chorines at the Broadhurst and the Belasco miss you. Forty-sixth Street is a little darker without your smile. We hope you’re o.k., Mary, and we want to see you back under the awning of the Majestic or the Alhambra with your collection tube and your sempiternal smile real soon.

  “Matinee Mary” was a pretty good invention. Brass couldn’t very well call her Two-Headed Mary in print, not without explaining the name, which wouldn’t have been nice.

  “So,” Gloria said, seeing what I was reading, “Two-Headed Mary is missing. Maybe one of the audience members actually read what it says on that collection tube of hers.”

  “They might have punched her out,” I said, “but they wouldn’t have kidnapped her.”

  “You never can tell,” Gloria said. That being the unofficial motto of the office, I couldn’t argue with her. The joke is that kind, sweet Mary was a con woman. But she gave her marks a fighting chance. If anyone ever stopped to read the legend wrapped around her donation tube they would have known that this was no ordinary charity that Mary was collecting for. “Give,” it said, “GIVE—for the Two-Headed War Orphans of Claustrophobia—Give—GIVE.”

  And thus her nickname.

  * * *

  The column appeared on Wednesday, September 11. By that afternoon we were fielding phone calls from actors, dancers, stage managers, and other people in “the business,” as the showbusiness folk call their occupation, as though it were the only business on the planet worth considering. And a few from those denizens of Broadway whose professions couldn’t be classified, at least not if they wanted to stay out of jail. None of them had any worthwhile information regarding Two-Headed Mary’s whereabouts, but they all wanted us to know that they thought well of her. By the next morning, we had several letters from chorus girls, and one from a chorus boy, detailing how Two-Headed Mary had helped them with money, advice, or a place to stay when they were in need. I gave the letters to Brass with a note clipped to them that read: “St. Mary of the Grift. Maybe we should pass the story on to Damon Runyon.” He walked by my cubical later and glowered at me and muttered “Runyon indeed,” under his breath.

  The next day, which would make it Thursday, at noon I was in the outer office discussing with Gloria the sensitive question of the acquisition of office supplies when the slender, well-groomed scion of the aristocracy, K. Jeffrey Welton, appeared in the doorway. He sported a red and blue striped tie and a red carnation boutonniere in the lapel of his gray cashmere suit jacket. His shoes were glossy black patent leather. His was the sort of elegance that makes we mere mortal men identify with toads; and we envy him but we do not like him. Women, I believe, feel differently—although how a woman can like a man who is habitually prettier than she is, I do not understand.

  There are those who claim that the United States of America has no aristocracy; they are misguided. The Weltons and the Vanderbilts and the Astors and the Rockefellers and one particular set of Adamses and some Dutch families whose ancestors were burghers in Nieuw Amsterdam, and some others whose families have been here so long that their names no longer reverberate in casual conversation, are the American aristocracy. Some of these families are social, and are high up in the society Four Hundred, some irrepressible souls make up a part of café society, some pay lawyers and other servants large retainers to see that their names do not come before the public at all.

  The Weltons made their money manufacturing shoes in Massachusetts. Welton boots covered the feet of both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and American, British, and, it has been alleged, German soldiers during the World War. There was a congressional investigat
ion about the latter incident, but it came to naught.

  “Ta, all,” K. Jeffrey said in his clipped, slightly nasal, aristocratic voice. He leaned on his walking stick and smiled into the room. “What’s the good word?” Welton’s father still made shoes, but K. Jeffrey had taken his pittance of the family fortune and shifted it from the shoe business to the show business. You can imagine how his family must have felt about that. But whatever they felt about his choice of profession, they couldn’t argue with his success. He had come straight from Yale to Broadway and started in the esoteric field of play production about the same time I came to New York and began working on the Great American Novel. I had never gotten past page sixty in any of my attempts. K. Jeffrey had already produced four plays: one flop, two that just eked out their nut before closing, and a reasonable success. The success, the musical Lucky Lady, was even now in its sixth month at the Monarch Theater.

  “Mr. Welton,” Gloria said, smiling sweetly up at him as he approached her desk. “Mr. Brass supplies the words, we just work here. What can we do for you?”

  “This bloody Mary business,” he said, leaning on the desk and smiling down at Gloria. “Has she turned up yet?”

  “Two-Headed Mary?” I asked.

  “That’s her,” he agreed. “Very clever calling her ‘Matinee Mary,’” he said judiciously, “but then your boss is a clever man.”

  “If she has reappeared we have not been told,” Gloria said. “Would you like to speak to Mr. Brass?”