“I have the worst desire to get falling-down drunk just about now,” said Peg. “I can’t bear the wait for the notices. How do you remain so calm, Edna?”
“How do you know I’m not already falling-down drunk myself?”
“Tonight I should be sensible and mind my intake,” said Peg. “No, never mind, I don’t feel like it—Vivian, will you chase after Arthur and tell him to bring back about three times the number of drinks he had originally planned?”
If he can manage the math, I thought.
I headed to the bar. I was trying to wave down the bartender when a man’s voice said, “Could I buy you a drink, miss?” I turned around with a flirty smile, and there was my brother, Walter.
It took me a moment to recognize him, because it was so incongruous to see him in New York City—in my world, surrounded by my people. Also, the family resemblance threw me for a loop. His face and mine were so similar that for a disorienting instant, I almost thought I’d bumped into a mirror.
What on earth was Walter doing here?
“You don’t look too happy to see me,” he said, with a careful smile.
I didn’t know if I was happy or unhappy; I was just tremendously disoriented. All I could think was that I must be in trouble. Maybe my parents had gotten wind of my immoral behavior and sent my big brother to retrieve me. I found myself glancing over Walter’s shoulder to see if my parents were with him, which definitely would have signaled the end of a good time.
“Don’t be so jumpy, Vee,” he said. “It’s just me.” It was as if he could read my mind. Which didn’t serve to relax me any further. “I came by to see your little play. I liked it. You kids did a fine job.”
“But why are you in New York City at all, Walter?” I was suddenly aware that my dress was revealing too much cleavage and that there was a hickey remnant on my neck.
“I quit school, Vee.”
“You quit Princeton?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Does Dad know?”
“Yes, he does.”
None of this made any sense. I was the delinquent member of the family, not Walter. But now he had dropped out of Princeton? I suddenly got a vision of Walter breaking wild—throwing away all his years of good behavior to come to New York to join me in a carnival of drinking, carousing, and dancing himself to smithereens at the Stork Club. Maybe I’d inspired him to be bad!
“I’m joining the Navy,” he said.
Ah. I should’ve known better.
“I start Officer Candidate School in three weeks, Vee. I’ll be in training right here in New York City, just up the river, on the Upper West Side. The Navy’s got a decommissioned battleship moored on the Hudson and they’re using it as a school. Right now, they’re short of officers, and they’ll take anyone with two years of college. They’ll train us in just three months, Vee. I start right after Christmas. When I graduate, I’ll be an ensign. I’ll ship out in the spring and go wherever they need to send me.”
“What does Dad have to say about you quitting Princeton?” I asked.
My voice sounded weird and stilted in my ears. The awkwardness of this encounter was still throwing me off, but I was doing my best to make conversation, pretending as though everything was perfectly normal—pretending as though Walter and I chatted with each other at Sardi’s every week.
“He hates it like gum,” Walter said. “But it’s not his call to make. I’m of age, and I can make my own choices. I called Peg and told her I was coming to the city. She said I could stay with her for a few weeks before OCS training begins. See a bit of New York, take in the sights.”
Walter would be staying at the Lily? With us degenerates?
“But you didn’t have to join the Navy,” I said dumbly.
(To my mind, Angela, the only people who became sailors were working-class kids with no other options for advancement. I think I’d even heard my father say that, at some point.)
“There’s a war on, Vee,” said Walter. “America will be part of it sooner or later.”
“But you don’t have to be part of it,” I said.
He looked at me with an expression that was both puzzled and disapproving. “It’s my country, Vee. Of course I have to be part of it.”
There was a wild cheer from the other side of the room. A newsboy had just walked in with a handful of early editions.
The raves were already coming in.
And look here, Angela, I’ve saved my favorite for last.
From Kit Yardley, in the New York Sun, November 30, 1940:
It is well worth seeing City of Girls, if only to enjoy Edna Parker Watson’s costumes—which are delectable, from stem to stern.
SEVENTEEN
We had a hit on our hands.
Within the space of a week, we’d gone from begging people to come see our little play to turning them away at the gates. By Christmas, both Peg and Billy had made back all the money they’d invested, and now the shekels were really pouring in—or so Billy said.
You might have thought that with the success of our show, tensions would have tamped down between Peg and Olive and Billy, but it was not the case. Even with all the accolades and the sold-out house every night, Olive still managed to be anxious about money (her brief experiment with celebration apparently having ended the day after opening night).
Olive’s concern—as she diligently reminded us every day—was that success is always fleeting. It is all well and good, she said, to have City of Girls bankrolling us now, but what will the Lily Playhouse do when the play closes? We had lost our neighborhood audience. The working-class folks whom we’d humbly entertained for so many years had been driven away by our new high ticket prices and our cosmopolitan comedy—and how could we be sure they would return once we went back to business as usual? Because certainly we would be getting back to business as usual sooner or later. It wasn’t as though Billy would stay in New York forever, nor had he promised to write us any more hit shows. And once Edna was lured to a better theater company for a new production—which was bound to happen eventually—we would lose City of Girls. We couldn’t very well expect somebody of Edna’s prestige to stay in our slipshod little playhouse forever. And we couldn’t afford to attract other actors of her caliber once she left. Really, all this abundance had been built on the talents of one woman alone, and that’s an awfully shaky way to run a business.
And on and on it went from Olive—day after day. So much gloom. So much doom. She was a tireless Cassandra, constantly reminding us that ruin was right around the corner, even as we were all intoxicated with victory.
“Be careful, Olive,” said Billy. “Make sure you don’t enjoy a minute of this good fortune—and don’t let anyone else enjoy it, either.”
But even I could see that Olive was correct about one thing: our ongoing success with the show was all due to Edna, who never stopped being extraordinary. I watched that play every night, and I can report that she somehow managed to reinvent the role of Mrs. Alabaster each time. Some actors will get a character right and then freeze the performance, just repeating the same rote expressions and reactions. But Edna’s Mrs. Alabaster never stopped feeling new. She was not delivering her lines, she was inventing them—or so it seemed. And because she was always playing with her delivery and changing the tone, the other players had to stay attentive and vibrant, too.
And New York City certainly rewarded Edna for her gifts.
Edna had been an actress forever, but with the wild success of City of Girls, she now became a star.
The term “star,” Angela, is a vital but tricky designation that can only be bestowed upon a performer by the populace itself. Critics cannot make someone a star. Box-office receipts cannot make someone a star. Mere excellence cannot make someone a star. What makes someone a star is when the people decide to love you en masse. When people are willing to line up at the stage door for hours after a show just to catch a glimpse—that makes you a star. When Judy Garland releases a recording of “I’m Considering Falling in
Love” but everyone who saw City of Girls says that your version was better—that makes you a star. When Walter Winchell starts writing gossip about you in his column every week, that makes you a star.
Then there was the table that came to be held for her at Sardi’s every night after the show.
Then there was the announcement that Helena Rubinstein was naming an eye shadow after her (“Edna’s Alabaster”).
Then there was the thousand-word piece in Woman’s Day about where Edna Parker Watson buys her hats.
Then there were the fans, deluging Edna with letters, asking questions like “My own attempt at a career on the stage was interrupted by the financial reversals of my husband—so would you consider taking me on as your protégée? I believe you will be surprised to find out that we have much the same style of acting.”
And then there was this incredible (and very out of character) letter, from none less than Katharine Hepburn herself: “Darlingest Edna—I have just seen your performance, and it drove me insane, and of course I shall have to come and see it about four more times, and then I will jump in a river, because I shall never be as good as you!”
I know about all these letters because Edna asked me to read and respond to them for her, since I had such nice handwriting. This was an easy job for me, now that I didn’t have any new costumes to design. Given that the Lily was running the same production now, week after week, there was no further need for my talents. Aside from mending and maintenance, my duties were over. For that reason, in the wake of our show’s success, I more or less became Edna’s private secretary.
I was the one who turned down all the invitations and pleas. I was the one who arranged the Vogue photo shoot. I was the one who gave a reporter from Time a tour of the Lily for an article called “How to Make a Hit.” And I was the one who escorted around that terrifyingly acerbic theater critic Alexander Woollcott, when he profiled Edna for The New Yorker. We were all worried that he would savage Edna in print (“Alec never takes a nibble out of somebody when a chomp will do,” said Peg), but we needn’t have been concerned, as it turned out. For here was Woollcott on Watson:
Edna Parker Watson possesses the face of a woman who has lived her life in a state of upward dreaming. Enough of those dreams have come true, it appears, to have kept her forehead unlined by worry or sorrow, and her eyes are bright with the expectation of more good news to come. . . . What this actress now possesses is something beyond mere sincerity of feeling; she has an inexhaustible catalogue of humanness at her disposal. . . . Too spirited an artist to limit herself to Shakespeare and Shaw, she has recently donated her talents to City of Girls—the most dizzy-headed and heel-kicking show we have seen in New York for quite some time. . . . To watch her become Mrs. Alabaster is to watch comedy transmogrify into art. . . . When a breathless fan at the stage door thanked her for coming to New York City at last, Mrs. Watson replied, “Well, my dear, it is not as though I have so many claims on my time just now.” If Broadway is wise, that situation shall soon be remedied.
Anthony was becoming a bit of a star, too, thanks to City of Girls. He’d got cast in some radio dramas, which he could record in the afternoons without interfering with his performance schedule. He’d also been hired as the new spokesman and model for the Miles Tobacco Company (“Why sweat, when you can smoke?”). So he had good money coming in now, for the first time in his life. But he still hadn’t upgraded his living arrangements.
I’d started leaning on Anthony, trying to convince him to get his own place. Why would such a promising young star still be sharing quarters with his brother in a dank old tenement building that smelled of cooking oil and onions? I was pushing him to rent a nicer apartment, with an elevator and a doorman, and maybe even a garden in the back—and definitely not in Hell’s Kitchen. But he wouldn’t consider it. I don’t know why he so resisted moving out of that filthy fourth-floor walk-up. All I can guess is that he suspected me of trying to make him look more marriageable.
Which was, of course, exactly what I was doing.
The problem was that my brother had now met Anthony—and needless to say, he did not approve.
If only there was a way to hide from Walter the fact I was dating Anthony Roccella at all! But Anthony and I were pretty obvious in our lust, and my brother was far too observant to have missed it. Plus, since Walter was now staying at the Lily, he was easily able to see what was going on in my life. He saw it all—the drinking, the back-and-forth flirtations, the rowdy repartee, the general depravity of theater folk. I’d hoped that Walter might get pulled into the fun (certainly the showgirls tried to lure my handsome brother into their embraces many times), but he was far too straitlaced to take the bait of pleasure. Sure, he’d have a cocktail or two, but he wasn’t about to cavort. Instead of joining us, he seemed to monitor us.
I could have asked Anthony to tone down his carnal attentions to me so as not to stir up Walter’s disfavor, but Anthony wasn’t the sort of guy who was going to change his behavior to make anybody feel more comfortable. So my boyfriend still grabbed me, kissed me, and slapped my bottom just as much as ever—whether Walter was in the room or not.
My brother watched, judged, and then finally delivered this condemning analysis of my boyfriend: “Anthony doesn’t seem very marriageable, Vee.”
And now I couldn’t get that weighty word—marriageable—out of my mind. I should say that I had never before even thought of marrying Anthony, nor was I sure that I would ever want to. But suddenly, with Walter’s disapproval hanging over my head, it mattered that my boyfriend wasn’t seen as marriageable. I felt insulted by the word, and maybe a little challenged by it. I felt that I should take this problem on and solve it.
You know—clean up my man a bit.
With this in mind, I had started making suggestions to Anthony—not too subtly, I’m afraid—about how he could boost his status in the world. Wouldn’t he feel more grown-up if he didn’t sleep on a couch? Wouldn’t he be more attractive if he wore slightly less oil in his hair? Wouldn’t he seem more refined if he wasn’t always chewing gum? How about if his speech was somewhat less slangy? For instance, when my brother, Walter, had asked Anthony if he held any career aspirations outside of show business, Anthony had grinned, and said, “Not so’s you’d notice.” Might there have been a more cultivated way to answer this question?
Anthony knew exactly what I was doing—he was no dummy—and he hated it. He accused me of trying to get him to “turn square” in order to make my brother happy, and he wasn’t having it. And it certainly didn’t endear him to Walter.
In those few weeks Walter stayed at the Lily, the tension between my brother and my boyfriend grew so thick you could have busted it up with a sledgehammer. It was an issue of class, an issue of education, an issue of sexual threat, an issue of brother versus lover. But some of it, too, I suspect, was just a matter of unfettered, competitive young maleness. They each had a lot of pride and a lot of machismo, which made every room in New York City too small for the both of them.
Finally it all came to a head one night when a group of us had gone out for drinks at Sardi’s after the show. Anthony had been manhandling me at the bar (to my delight and pleasure, of course) when he caught Walter giving him the stink-eye. Next thing I knew, the two young men were chest to chest.
“You want me to back outta this deal with your sister, dontcha?” Anthony demanded, pushing a little farther into Walter’s space. “Well, just you try to make me do it, captain.”
The way Anthony was grinning at Walter in that moment—leering, really—had an unmistakable edge of threat. For the first time, I could see the Hell’s Kitchen street fighter in my boyfriend. It was also the first time I’d ever seen Anthony look like he cared about something. And in that moment, what he cared about was not me—but the pleasure of punching my brother in the face.
Walter held Anthony’s gaze without blinking and replied in a low tone, “If you’re trying to take a crack at me, son, don’t do it with wo
rds.”
I watched Anthony size up my brother—taking note of the football shoulders and the wrestling neck—and think better of it. Anthony dropped his eyes and backed down. He gave a careless laugh and said, “We got no beef here, captain. You’re all right, you’re all right.”
Then he slid back into his customary air of nonchalance and stepped away.
Anthony had made the right call. My brother, Walter, was many things (an elitist, a puritan, and uptight as all hell), but he was not a weakling and he was not a coward.
My brother could’ve pounded my boyfriend straight into the pavement.
Anyone could see that.
The next day, Walter took me out to lunch at the Colony so that we could “have a talk.”
I knew exactly what (or, rather, whom) this talk was going to be about, and I dreaded it.
“Please don’t tell Mother and Dad about Anthony,” I asked Walter as soon as we sat down at our table. I hated to even bring up the subject of my boyfriend, but I knew that Walter would, and I figured my best bet was to start off with a plea for my life. My biggest fear was that he was going to report my misdoings to my parents, and that they would barrel right down upon me and clip my wings.
It took awhile for him to answer.
“I want to be fair about this, Vee,” he said.
Of course he did. Walter always wanted to be fair.
I waited, feeling the way I often did with Walter—like a child who has just been called before the headmaster. God, how I wished he was my ally! But he had never been. Even as a boy, he’d never kept a secret for me or conspired with me against the adults. He’d always been an extension of my parents. He’d always behaved more like a father than a peer. Moreover, I’d treated him as such.
Finally he said, “You can’t fool around like this forever, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” I said—although my actual plan, in point of fact, was to fool around like this forever.
“There’s a real world out there, Vee. You’re going to have to put away the balloons and streamers at some point and grow up.”
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