City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “You take him,” Celia said to me that night, right in front of the man who was already boring her. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. You keep this guy warm.”

  “But he’s your guy!” I said, as the man reached for me, most obligingly. “And you’re my friend!”

  “Oh, Vivvie,” she said to me, in a fond and pitying tone. “You can’t lose a friend like me just by taking her guy!”

  I had precious little contact with my family back home that summer.

  The last thing I wanted was for them to know anything about what I was doing.

  My mother sent me a note every week, along with my allowance, filling me in on the most basic news. My father had hurt his shoulder playing golf. My brother was threatening to quit Princeton next semester and join the Navy, because he wanted to serve his country. My mother had defeated this-or-that woman in this-or-that tennis tournament. In return, I sent my parents a card every week telling them the same stale and uninformative sort of news—that I was well, that I was working hard at the theater, that New York City was very nice, and thank you for the allowance. Every once in a while I’d toss in a bit of innocuous detail, such as, “Just the other day I had a charming lunch at the Knickerbocker with Aunt Peg.”

  Naturally, I did not mention to my parents that I’d recently gone to a doctor with my friend Celia the showgirl, in order to get myself illegally fitted for a pessary. (Illegal, because it was not permitted back then for a doctor to outfit an unmarried woman with a birth control device—but this is why it’s so good to have friends who know people! Celia’s doctor was a laconic Russian woman who didn’t ask questions. She suited me right up without batting an eye.)

  Nor did I mention to my parents that I’d had a gonorrhea scare (which had turned out to be nothing more than a mild pelvic infection, thank goodness—though it had been a painful and frightening week until it all cleared up). Nor did I mention that I’d had a pregnancy scare (which had also cleared up on its own accord, thank God). Nor did I mention that I was now fairly regularly sleeping with a man named Kevin “Ribsy” O’Sullivan, who ran numbers around the corner in Hell’s Kitchen. (I was dallying about with some other men, too, of course—all equally unsavory, but none with such a good name as “Ribsy.”)

  Nor did I mention that I now always carried prophylactics in my pocketbook—on account of the fact that I didn’t want any further gonorrhea scares, and a girl can’t be too careful. I also didn’t tell my parents that my boyfriends regularly secured these prophylactics for me as a kind favor. (Because you see, Mother, only men are allowed to purchase prophylactics in New York City!)

  No, I didn’t tell her any of this.

  I did, however, pass along the news that the lemon sole at the Knickerbocker was excellent.

  Which is true. It really was.

  Meanwhile, Celia and I just went right on spinning—night after night—getting ourselves into all manner of trouble, big and small.

  Our drinks made us crazy and lazy. We forgot how to keep track of the hours or the cocktails or the names of our dates. We drank gin fizzes till we forgot how to walk. We forgot how to look after our security once we were good and tight, and other people—often strangers—would have to look after us. (“It ain’t for you to tell a girl how to live!” I remember Celia yelling one night at a nice gentleman who was politely trying to do nothing more than escort us back home safely to the Lily.)

  There was always an element of peril in the way that Celia and I thrust ourselves into the world. We made ourselves available for anything that might happen, so anything could happen. Often, anything did happen.

  You see, it was like this: Celia’s effect on men was to make them so obedient and subservient to her—until the instant they were no longer obedient and subservient. She would have them all lined up before us, ready to take our orders and serve our every wish. They were such good boys, and sometimes they stayed good boys—but sometimes, quite suddenly, those boys were not so good anymore. Some line of male desire or anger would be crossed, and then there was no coming back from it. After that line had been crossed, Celia’s effect on men was to make them into savages. There would be a moment when everyone was having fun and flirting and playing taunting games and laughing, but then suddenly the energy of the room would shift, and now there was a threat of not only sex, but violence.

  Once that shift came, there was no stopping it.

  After that, it was all smash and grab.

  The first time this happened, Celia saw it coming moments before it occurred, and she sent me out of the room. We were in the Presidential Suite of the Biltmore Hotel, being entertained by three men whom we’d met earlier in the ballroom of the Waldorf. These men had a great deal of loose cash, and they were clearly in a dubious line of work. (If I had to guess, I would wager that their line of employment was: racketeers.) At first they were all in service to Celia—so deferential, so grateful for her attentions, sweating with nervousness about making the beautiful girl and her friend happy. Would the ladies like another bottle of champagne? Would the ladies like some crab legs ordered up to the room? Would the ladies like to see the Presidential Suite at the Biltmore? Would the ladies like the radio on or off?

  I was still new at this game, and I found it amusing that these thugs were so servile to us. Cowed by our powers, and all that. It made me want to laugh at them, in all their weakness: Men are so easy to control!

  But then—not long into our visit to the Presidential Suite—the shift came, and Celia was suddenly crammed between two of those men on the couch, and they were no longer looking servile or weak. It wasn’t anything they were doing per se; it was just a change of tone, and it frightened me. Something had shifted in their faces, and I didn’t like it. The third man was now eyeing me, and he didn’t appear as though he were interested in joking around anymore, either. The only way I can describe the change in the room was: You’re having a delightful picnic, and then suddenly there’s a tornado. The barometric pressure drops. The sky goes black. The birds go silent. This thing is coming straight for you.

  “Vivvie,” said Celia in that exact moment, “run downstairs and buy me cigarettes.”

  “Right now?” I asked.

  “Go,” she said. “And don’t come back.”

  I made for the door, just before the third man reached me—and to my shame, I closed the door on my friend and left her in there. I left her because she’d told me to, but still—it felt rotten. Whatever those men were about to do in there, Celia was on her own. She’d sent me from the room either because she didn’t want me seeing what was about to be done to her, or she didn’t want it done to me, too. Either way, I felt like a child, being banished like that. I also felt afraid of those men, and afraid for Celia, and I felt left out. I hated it. I paced the lobby of the hotel for an hour, wondering if I should alert the hotel manager. But alert him to what?

  Celia eventually came down by herself—unescorted by any of the men who had so solicitously led us to the elevator earlier that evening.

  She spotted me in the lobby, walked over, and said, “Well, I call that a lousy way to end a night.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m terrific,” she said. She tugged at her dress. “Do I look all right?”

  She looked just as beautiful as ever—except for the shiner over her left eye.

  “Like love’s young dream itself,” I said.

  She saw me looking at her swollen eye, and said, “Don’t squawk about this, Vivvie. Gladys’ll fix it. She’s the best at covering up black eyes. Is there a cab? If a cab would be kind enough to appear, I’ll take it.”

  I found her a cab, and we made our way home without another word.

  Did the events of that evening leave Celia traumatized?

  You would think so, wouldn’t you?

  But I’m ashamed to say, Angela: I don’t know. I never talked to her about it. I certainly never saw any sign of trauma in my friend. But then again, I probably wasn�
��t looking for signs of trauma. Nor would I have known what to look for. Maybe I was hoping that this ugly incident would just disappear (like the black eye itself) if we never mentioned it. Or maybe I thought Celia was accustomed to being assaulted, given her rough origins. (God help us, maybe she was.)

  There were so many questions I could have asked Celia that evening in the taxi (starting with “Are you really all right?”), but I didn’t. Nor did I thank her for having saved me from certain attack. I was embarrassed that I’d needed saving—embarrassed that she saw me as being more innocent and fragile than herself. Until that night, I’d been able to kid myself that Celia Ray and I were exactly the same—just two equally worldly and gutsy women, conquering the city and having fun. But clearly that wasn’t true. I had been recreationally dabbling in danger, but Celia knew danger. She knew things—dark things—that I didn’t know. She knew things that she didn’t want me to know.

  When I think back on it all now, Angela, it’s appalling to realize that this kind of violence seemed so commonplace back then—and not just to Celia, but also to me. (For instance: why did it never occur to me at the time to wonder how Gladys had come to be so good at covering up black eyes?) I suppose our attitude was: Oh, well—men will be men! You must understand, though, that this was long before there was any sort of public conversation about such dark subjects—and thus we had no private conversations about them, either. So I said nothing more to Celia that evening about her experience, and Celia said nothing more about it, either. We just put it all behind us.

  And the next night, unbelievably, we were out there in the city again, looking for action again—except with one change: From this point forward, I was committed to never leaving the scene, no matter what. I would not allow myself to be sent from a room again. Whatever Celia was doing, I would be doing it, too. Whatever happened to Celia, it would happen to me, too.

  Because I am not a child, I told myself—the way children always do.

  EIGHT

  There was a war coming, by the way.

  There was a war happening already, in fact—and quite seriously so. It was all the way over there in Europe, of course, but there was a great raging debate within the United States as to whether or not we should join it.

  I was not part of this debate, needless to say. But it was happening all around me.

  Perhaps you think I should have noticed earlier that there was a war coming, but truly the subject had not yet landed in my consciousness. Here, you must give me credit for being exceedingly unobservant. It was not easy in the summer of 1940 to ignore the fact that the world was on the brink of full-out war, but I’d managed to do exactly that. (In my defense, my colleagues and associates were also ignoring it. I don’t recall Celia or Gladys or Jennie ever discussing America’s military preparedness, or the growing need for a “Two-Ocean Navy.”) I was not a politically minded person, to say the least. I didn’t know the name of a single individual in Roosevelt’s cabinet, for instance. I did, however, know the full name of Clark Gable’s second wife, a much-divorced Texas socialite named Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham Gable—a jawbreaker of a moniker that I will apparently remember till my dying day.

  The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium in May of 1940—but that was right around the time I was failing all my exams at Vassar, so I was terribly preoccupied. (I do remember my father saying that all the fuss would be over by the end of summer because the French army would soon push the Germans right back home. I’d figured he was probably correct about that because he seemed to read a lot of newspapers.)

  Right around the time that I moved to New York—this would be the middle of June 1940—the Germans had marched into Paris. (So much for Dad’s theory.) But there was too much excitement going on in my life for me to follow the story closely. I was far more curious about what was happening in Harlem and the Village than what had happened to the Maginot Line. And by August, when the Luftwaffe started bombing British targets, I was going through my pregnancy and gonorrhea scares, so I didn’t quite register that information, either.

  History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.

  If I’d been more wise and attentive, I might have realized that America was eventually going to get pulled into this conflagration. I might have taken more notice of the news that my brother was thinking about joining the Navy. I might have worried about what that decision would mean for Walter’s future—and for all of us. And I might have realized that some of the fun young men with whom I was cavorting every night in New York City were just the right age to be put on the front lines when America inevitably did enter this war. If I’d known then what I know now—namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific—I would have had sex with even more of them.

  If it sounds like I’m being facetious, I’m not.

  I wish I’d done more of everything with those boys. (I’m not sure when I would have found the time, of course, but I would’ve made every effort to squeeze into my busy schedule every last one of those kids—so many of whom were soon to be shattered, burned, wounded, doomed.)

  I only wish I had known what was coming, Angela.

  I truly do.

  Other people were paying attention, though. Olive followed the news coming out of her home country of England with particular concern. She was anxious about it, but then again, she was anxious about everything, so her worries didn’t make much of an impression. Olive sat there every morning over her breakfast of kidney and eggs, reading every bit of coverage she could get. She read The New York Times, and Barron’s, and the Herald Tribune (even though it leaned Republican), and she read the British papers when she could find them. Even my Aunt Peg (who usually read only the Post, for the baseball coverage) had started following the news with more concern. She’d already seen one world war, and she didn’t want to see another. Peg’s loyalties to Europe would forever run deep.

  Over the course of that summer, both Peg and Olive became increasingly passionate in their belief that the Americans must join the war effort. Somebody had to help out the British and rescue the French! Peg and Olive were in full support of the president as he tried to garner backing from Congress to take action.

  Peg—a traitor to her class—had always loved Roosevelt. This had been shocking to me when I’d first heard about it; my father hated Roosevelt and was a vehement isolationist. A real pro-Lindbergh sort of fellow, was old Dad. I assumed that all my relatives hated Roosevelt, too. But this was New York City, I guess, where people thought differently about things.

  “I’ve reached my limit with the Nazis!” I remember Peg shouting one morning over breakfast and the newspapers. She slammed her fist on the table in a burst of rage. “That’s enough of them! They must be stopped! What are we waiting for?”

  I’d never heard Peg get so upset about anything, which is why it stuck in my memory. Her reaction pierced my self-absorption for a moment and made me take notice: Gee whiz, if Peg was this angry, things really must be getting bad!

  That said, I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do about the Nazis, personally.

  The truth was, I didn’t have any inkling that this war—this distant, irritating war—might have any real consequences until September of 1940.

  That’s when Edna and Arthur Watson moved into the Lily Playhouse.

  NINE

  I’m going to assume, Angela, that you’ve never heard of Edna Parker Watson.

  You’re probably a bit too young to know of her great theatrical career. She was always better known in London than New York, in any case.

  As it happens, I had heard of Edna before I met her—but that’s only because she was married to a handsome English screen actor named Arthur Watson, who had recently played the heartthrob in a cheesy British war movie called Gates of Noon. I’d seen their photos in the magazines, so Edna was familiar to me
. Now, this was a bit of a crime—to have known Edna only through her husband. She was by far the superior performer of the two, and the superior human being, besides. But that’s just how it goes. His was the prettier face, and in this shallow world a pretty face means everything.

  It might have helped if Edna made movies. Maybe then she would’ve achieved greater fame in her day, and maybe she’d even be remembered now—like Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh, who were every bit her peers. But she refused to act for the camera. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity; Hollywood came knocking on her door many times, but somehow she never lost the stamina to keep turning down those big-shot film producers. Edna wouldn’t even do radio plays, believing that the human voice loses something vital and sacred when it is recorded.

  No, Edna Parker Watson was purely a stage actress, and the problem with stage actresses is that once they are gone, they are forgotten. If you never saw her perform onstage, then you would not be able to understand her power and appeal.

  She was George Bernard Shaw’s favorite actress, though—does that help? He famously said that her portrayal of Saint Joan was the definitive one. He wrote of her: “That luminous face, peeking out from its armor—who would not follow her into battle, if only to stare at her?”

  No, even that doesn’t really get her across.

  With apologies to Mr. Shaw, I’ll do my best to describe Edna in my own words.

  I met Edna and Arthur Watson during the third week of September 1940.

  Their visit to the Lily Playhouse, as with so many of the guests who came and went from that institution, was not exactly planned. There was a real element of chaos and emergency to it. Even beyond the scale of our normal chaos.

  Edna was an old acquaintance of Peg’s. They’d met in France during the Great War and had become fast friends, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then, in the late summer of 1940, the Watsons came to New York City so that Edna could rehearse a new play with Alfred Lunt. However, the financing for this production vanished before anyone could memorize a single line, and so the play never came into being. But before the Watsons could sail back home to England, the Germans began the bombing of Britain. Within just a few weeks of the German attacks, the Watsons’ town house in London had been obliterated by a Luftwaffe bomb. Destroyed. Everything gone.