The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  Gloria had a dinner date with a girlfriend and then had to run home and change clothes. I couldn’t see why; the blue frock she was wearing looked sufficiently elegant to me, but then men never understand these things. I would have to change clothes myself anyway. For most men, a plain dark suit would do for the theater, unless it was opening night, but Brass believed in the old virtues like wearing evening garb to evening events: dinner jacket, boiled shirt, black bow tie and all. And I, as his amanuensis and dogsbody, could do no less. We arranged to meet at the theater.

  I addressed an envelope for my last letter, added it to the stack, took a sheet of three-cent stamps out of the drawer, and spent a minute licking and pasting. Then I draped a cover over the Underwood, donned my coat and hat, thrust my afternoon’s work down the mail chute, and allowed Mel the elevator boy to take me down to the lobby. I crossed Tenth Avenue to Danny’s Waterfront Café on the corner of Fifty-ninth right across from the World building, where I sat down to the roast beef dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and okra and a couple of Danny’s fresh-baked rolls.

  After the main course, I had a slab of apple pie and chatted with the boss. Danny is about a one-third owner of Danny’s, and is gradually buying the other two-thirds from her father, Manny, who claims that he is retired. He comes in two or three times a week to be helpful, which consists of telling Danny what she’s doing wrong and how she could do it better, and every night she prays to God that he’ll get himself a hobby or a new girlfriend, or be struck dumb. Occasionally, when he’s being very helpful, she prays that he’ll get hit by a truck.

  We traded gripes for a while, then I got up and put a couple of quarters on the table. “Keep the change,” I said.

  I went home to put on my monkey suit.

  Pinky, my next-door neighbor, followed me into my room. A retired circus clown in his mid-seventies with a story for every occasion, most of them involving circus people and their tenuous relationship with the mundane world outside, he had become a close friend in the two years I had been living in the rooming house. “So how’re you doing, already?” he asked, perching on the edge of my bed.

  “Not bad,” I said. “You?”

  “Can’t complain. Can’t complain.” He held both hands up, palms toward me. “Look at this,” he said. “Maple syrup and vinegar. Wonders, it does. Two tablespoons three times a day.”

  “For what?”

  “The rheumatism.” He waggled his fingers at me. “Just a touch, but it was slowing me down. A clown needs his fingers. Can’t make balloon animals without your fingers. But this stuff—maple syrup and vinegar, with just a touch of cod-liver oil for the emulsification—does the trick. Fellow at Clown Hall told me about it. Syd Lester. Great walkabout clown. Been using the stuff for years. Swears by it. He’s ninety-two. Says he’s only eighty-four, but he’s ninety-two.”

  “Clown Hall?”

  “The Automat over on Seventy-ninth off Broadway. Lot of circus folk hang out there. We call it Clown Hall. You ought to come by some afternoon while we’re chewing the fat. Lot of stories there. Lot of material for that column your boss writes. ’Course if you ask questions, they clam up; it’s the way they are. A fellow could learn a lot if he keeps his ears open and his mouth closed. Come on over with me sometime, I’ll introduce you around.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I adjusted the knot on my bow tie and stood back to admire the result in the mirror over the dresser.

  “You going somewhere?” Pinky asked.

  “Going to see a play. Fine and Dandy at the Royal.”

  “Seen it,” Pinky said with feeling. “Many young girls running around in skimpy costumes. Yaketta yaketta. Dancing. Step-kick, step-kick, like that. The Charleston. Skirts flying. Showing a lot of leg clear up to the pupik.”

  “That sounds right,” I agreed cautiously, deciding not to ask him where one kept his or her pupik.

  “I liked it.” He nodded. “Gets the blood moving. When you’re my age it’s not a bad thing to get the blood moving every once in a while.”

  “It’s good at any age,” I said.

  “As I remember, the girls in the side-show in the Hays Traveling Circus and Carnival showed a lot more than that,” Pinky said. Many of his best stories started with “As I remember.” And he remembered everything.

  “’Course most of them wasn’t that good-looking. But when they’re young and pretty near naked, a fellow don’t notice their looks in any kind of detail. I remember there was this one girl—Flossie, we called her—who joined the show in Cleveland back in ’sixteen or ’seventeen. She—”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, grabbing my black Homburg—Homburgs were in this year, toppers were passé—and heading for the door. “Finish your story when I get back.”

  “I will,” Pinky promised. He smiled. “I think I’ll just spend some time thinking about Flossie, now that I’ve got her on my mind.”

  I got off the subway at Forty-second Street and, after performing my usual obeisance to Times Square, walked up Broadway to Forty-fourth. The sights, sounds, and smells of the Great White Way fill me with a sense of wonder no matter how many times I experience them. This great outdoor cathedral to Mammon and the arts is vibrant and alive twenty-four hours a day, and the bright lights drive away the night. When I first arrived in Gotham fresh from Ohio, the hayseeds still scattered through my hair, I could stand for an hour at a time in front of the Times Building and stare uptown, past the giant billboards, past the brilliantly lit marquees for the Paramount, the Loews Criterion, the Loews State, and feel a part of the great, vibrant living organism that is Broadway.

  Now that I am a native New Yorker—having been here four years—I still stop and stare, and I am still awed. As I walk past the Rialto and the Nora Bayes and the Schubert and Broadhurst Theaters, I remember all the clichés and feel all the trite emotions that playwrights are always putting into plays about the theater. Kids from all over America do come to New York every year trying, hoping to make it in the theater. Most of them find other jobs or go home in a few years, crushed or strengthened by the experience according to what they brought to it and just what hand was dealt them. Some of them make it big, some make it just enough to keep trying, and some keep trying regardless. Broadway is a lure and a trap and a soul destroyer, and yet it is a myth-maker and a spirit-lifter and a magical land and the greatest place in the world for those with enough talent—or luck—to make their mark. But enough about me.

  It was about quarter past eight when I got to the Royal Theater. The audience was just beginning to drift in to take their seats. Gloria was already there, having an earnest discussion with the man behind the will-call window in the corner of the lobby. She was wearing a dark blue evening dress that looked prim and proper at first glance, but managed to suggest several improprieties at second or third view. She turned around as I walked over to her and nodded to me.

  “You look swell,” I told her.

  She eyed me from hat to shoes. “You’ll do,” she said. “Let’s go in.” We passed into the theater and were ushered to our seats.

  “Nobody out front has any clear memory of the last time they saw Two-Headed Mary,” Gloria told me in an undertone, sounding annoyed. Gloria has an elephantine memory, and small respect for the failings of others. She would have remembered.

  The curtain went up on Fine and Dandy, and we were thrust a decade back, to a fantasy vision of the carefree days of yore, when every office boy could become a king and every shop girl a queen; when life was a glorious cycle of song, to crib a line from Miss Dorothy Parker, and we didn’t yet have even fear itself to fear. The songs were sprightly and the dances exuberant. The beautiful carefree flappers sang and danced with their ardent beaux and had no troubles that a kiss wouldn’t cure, and, for an hour and a half, neither had we. The show was an unabashed pastiche of Twenties musicals; a romantic fantasy with overtones of early Cole Porter and the Gershwins and a hint of George Cohan, and a patter song that owed a debt t
o Gilbert and Sullivan. What plot there was, was subordinate to the joy of the moment, and the audience reveled in a yesterday that never was.

  John Hartman, the male lead, was better than good, he worked hard, moved well, and sweated charm. But the audience made it clear that it was Sandra Lelane that they had come to see. Sandra danced until she couldn’t possibly have had any breath left, and stopped and sang, her clear soprano easily reaching to the back of the house. And the audience gave freely of its applause. Once or twice she sang and danced at the same time and she did both with the grace and presence of a born star. She was alternately ethereal and earthy, and always infinitely desirable.

  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.

  6

  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 girl
s 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.”