The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  That’s why I doted on him, and he on me. “One lies and the other swears by it,” Mother would chide after she’d discover one—or both—of us had eaten all the pudding but denied the deed to her face. And yet Mother depended on Ducks—had ever since they’d hooked up on the road and he’d joined her company as leading man. He was there to secure our bookings, to rustle up an audience when necessary, to tuck me into my makeshift bed in a gypsy wagon as we rattled over the desolate roads between shows.

  He was a round, balding man with an enormous mustache. The picture I carried of him for years showed him in his usual slouch hat and bow tie, his trusty old side-by-side shotgun at his belt—to protect us from the bandits and thieves that prowled the backroads then. Ducks was our defender, yet I could never imagine him firing a shot. He was such a marshmallow, always taking the young, handsome juveniles in our company under his wing, buying them new hats and frock coats, spoiling them with sweetmeats until they left him for someone else in another company and broke his heart. That was the story of Ducks’s life. Over and over again.

  I loved Ducks like no one else. He was everything to me: father, brother, companion, friend, nurse. If not for him, I might have been merely a girl, terrified and frail, the way they grew them in those days. Ducks taught me about chance, about risk, about love. I remember how he fell so hard one time for one of our juvenile actors, a strapping lad from Missouri with wavy hair and violet eyes who let Ducks buy him new clothes and a pocket watch and tickets to see Lillian Russell—and slugged him in the kisser when he attempted just to hold his hand.

  “Why did you even try?” Mother had scolded, placing a slab of raw beef on Ducks’s swollen lip. “Why take that chance without being surer?”

  He’d looked over at me to answer. “If love is worth pursuing,” he said, and I’ve never forgotten it, “you’ve got to risk a few fat lips and bloody noses here and there.”

  Ducks was always first in my heart. Not that I didn’t love my mother. Quite the contrary. I adored her. There was no one more enchanting than Mother. She was a beautiful, glamorous figure with giant hats and great big eyes outlined with thick black mascara. If Ducks’s harmonica is my earliest memory, my mother’s face hovering over my crib—enormous and beautiful—is the next.

  She was an imperious woman, a woman whose steely determination to succeed shone from her black Irish eyes, whose fierce insistence on independence left Ducks to do the coddling and nurturing of her daughter. From the time I was very young, my image of my mother was one of supreme struggle and sacrifice. She had suffered grandly in her life, as grandly as any of the roles she had played on the stage—that was obvious. But it would be left for me to gather clues about just what her suffering was all about. Mother would never share a word of insight about her past—our past—with me.

  During our run at the Majestic Theater in Indianapolis, I was six years old. Six, seven, eight—somewhere around there. Already I’d been on the stage for several years, on the road with Mother and Ducks much of that time. I remember little of Hamilton, the town where I was born, at the point of Lake Ontario. Mother provided only the most superficial of details and then only her version of events. But she delighted in telling the story, time and again, of how I won the children’s amateur talent contest in Hamilton. “That child has more talent in her little pinky than most gals got in their entire body,” the theater manager had told my mother, and she believed him.

  “I’m taking Flo on the road,” she announced to Ducks. “She can sing and dance like no other child her age. She’ll be a hit in between acts of our plays.”

  We left Canada in a horse-drawn calash, one of those old-style carriages with two wheels and a collapsible top. I remember sitting between Ducks and Mother, watching the flies on the shiny brown butts of the horses, their tails flicking this way and that. We passed the cabinet-making shop, where I knew the strange old man I called “Father” lived. My brother Norman stood out in front—all cowlick and freckles—and waved to us with such a sad look on his little face.

  “We’ll send for you,” Mother called out cheerily to him.

  But we never did.

  She pulled the comb through my hair, snapping a snarl. I made a little sound of pain as my hair was yanked away from my scalp.

  “Hush now,” Mother reprimanded me. “Don’t start crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

  My eyes found Ducks’s. He stuck out his bottom lip in a silent symbol of support.

  “There,” Mother said finally. “Now you look like the little lady they’ve all come to see.”

  “Is zat who zey’ve come for?” Mademoiselle Gaby Dubois sauntered by in her plumes and feathers. I looked up at her in awe. A pink fluff drifted from her large hat and landed on my sleeve. I could not take my eyes from it.

  She laughed. My mother seemed suitably embarrassed. “My, my,” Gaby asked the stagehands around us in her lilting French accent, “did you know zey’ve all come to see Baby Flo? Well, zen, I might as well go home.”

  They joshed her, flattered her, begged her not to leave—precisely what she wanted them to do. She had a way with men. Ducks always said that Gaby’s voice sounded as if it were covered with confectionery sugar. It was low and breathy, but Mother called it all an act.

  “She’s from Mackinac City, Michigan,” she’d tell anyone who’d listen. “She’s never been to Paris any more than I have, so don’t let her fool you.”

  Ducks picked me up and sat me on his lap. Onstage, the dancers were finishing their act. Mother was watching them with disdain. “Don’t mind your mother, Florrie,” Ducks told me, stroking my hair. “She’s just high-strung because all them important birds are gonna be in the audience tonight.”

  I’d seen them. No, they hadn’t come to see me. They hadn’t even come for Gaby. They’d come to see the Vitascope, that strange machine the stagehands had lugged up the stairs and propped in the balcony. We’d heard the hype, of course, seen the bills posted along the fences and theater walls. But I couldn’t imagine what in God’s heaven it was.

  I touched Ducks’s bushy mustache and found a flake of food there. I brushed it off. “Why does everyone want to see the Vitascoper?” I asked him petulantly.

  He smiled. “The Vitascope, Florrie. Mr. Edison made it. It makes real pretty pictures. You’ll see.”

  I sniffed. “It might be that they came to see the Vitascoper, but it’ll be Baby Flo they remember.”

  It’s strange how one remembers things. The flake of food in Ducks’s mustache, the pink fluff from Gaby’s hat. Maybe it’s because that night turned out to be so memorable. I remember that gig at the Majestic Theater better than any of the others on that tour, as if it were yesterday. I remember the cramped little room we were given, a cold-water, one-room flat with no toilet over a dry goods store. It was like so many of the rooms we stayed in as we made our way from city to city, from Chicago to Little Rock to Fort Bend to Cincinnati. Ducks and Mother slept in the bed; I was given a mattress on the floor. I remember how cold it got in our little room at night and the musty blankets Mother piled on top of me. It was during the fall, I think, getting near on to Thanksgiving, because I remember Ducks buying a turkey and tying it up in the hall, planning to kill it later that week. Poor creature. I remember it gobbling all night, leaving droppings everywhere. I recall how people came and went, in and out of that small flat, and all they talked about was the Vitascope.

  “I never imagined we’d be sharing billing with a machine,” Mother had harrumphed.

  I knew, even then, how much Mother despised playing the tanks. How much she hated these little theaters out in the sticks, how superior she felt to the lowbrow performers around us: the gin-swilling chorus girls, the pratfall comedians, the Michigan-born Gaby Dubois.

  “Your mother is a great actress, one of the greatest of all time,” Ducks would often remind me. I believed him. I had no reason not to. Mother’s stage name was Charlotte Lawrence, and she was the head of the Lawrence
Dramatic Company, one of the most respected companies in Canada—or so Ducks assured me. But when the company folded—temporarily, Mother insisted—it was Baby Flo who became the family’s chief breadwinner.

  I had quite the following, too. I could whistle, you see, whistle like a man, and I was just a little girl. They loved novelty acts in those days, especially ones with adorable little moppets with oversize ribbons in their hair. I played the part superbly, even if—like most of us child performers—I thought the whole sugary-sweet routine was a toxic farce. Backstage, after a particularly cloying song about the little match girl or some such trifle, I’d mock vomit into a bucket. But I learned to smile pretty and bat my eyelashes whenever in view of the audience or the press.

  In Akron, there was a big story in the local paper. A large picture of me with my giant hair ribbons and crooked smile.

  BABY FLO, THE CHILD WONDER WHISTLER

  She can whistle prettier than a songbird, the paper wrote.

  That night, they lined up around the block to see me. I peered out the side door to see them. “You see, Flo?” Ducks had said. “All for you.”

  “They’re daft,” I said in awe of their stupidity.

  But if my silly little songs and whistles made them applaud—so be it. I’d give them what they paid to see.

  Afterward, when we tried to exit by the theater’s back door, a throng of little girls crushed around the old brownstone steps. “May we see her?” they cried. “May we see Baby Flo?”

  My heart was in my throat. Ducks held me up over his head and the little girls all clapped. One threw me a bouquet of daisies tied with a bright pink ribbon. “Doesn’t she have beautiful hair?” Ducks asked them. “Have you ever seen such beautiful hair?”

  “You’re going to be a big, big star,” Mother had promised me many times since then. “You and I will be the most famous mother and daughter in the theater!”

  But not here, not at the Majestic Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana, the tenth theater we’d been to this season, traipsing all through the American Midwest, here in this dingy, musty place that couldn’t seem to rid itself of the smell of skunk—one had crawled under the stage and died six months earlier. Here the bill included a number of folks with whom we’d worked before: Gaby Dubois. Huber and Cohen, the Mystifying Mesmerists. Frank McGinty, the one-legged acrobat.

  Poor old Mr. McGinty didn’t speak or sing or tell jokes—he just got up there and swung from his wires and hopped through his hoops. I always felt terribly bad for him. He worked so hard, always dripping with sweat when he came off the stage, and nobody seemed to notice. He had the first slot in the program, and that was the worst. People were still filing into their rows during the first slot, taking off their coats, switching seats with the person next to them. But the Great McGinty never complained. He’d always finish to a scattering of applause and then hobble down the wooden steps leading from the stage to our waiting area. He never said a word to us, just covered his sweaty face with a damp cloth and disappeared into the dressing room.

  I peered out into the audience from between the old dusty curtains. Men with high silk hats had entered and were taking their seats. They seemed somber and serious, not at all impressed by the dancers on the stage. These were the important birds Ducks had said were coming. My eyes sought out the strange machine sitting in the second balcony. That was what they had come to see. Not me. Not the Great McGinty. Not Gaby.

  The Vitascope.

  I didn’t care about any old machine, I decided. I’d make them applaud for me. I’d be the reason they’d be glad they came. I wanted to be as big a star as Gaby. I cared little for Mother’s grand dreams of great roles, great acting. I wanted to be adored as Gaby was adored, whistled at and cheered by the men in the front seats. I pressed the delicate pink fluff to my lips. I wanted to be Gaby Dubois.

  The dancers had finished. They clattered back down the steps. The piano was playing fast and furious, the stagehand switching the card on the easel to read:

  BABY FLO

  THE CHILD WONDER WHISTLER

  The crowd ignited into applause. I stood for a moment relishing it until Mother pushed me forward. I tossed my blond curls as I danced out onto the stage. I wished I could see the men in the tall hats. Were they smiling? Did I manage to break the stone of their faces? Or did they still sit there in the dark, waiting only for that silly machine, the machine Ducks had promised would make pretty pictures on the wall?

  My dance ended. I approached the footlights and positioned myself close to the edge of the stage. As practiced, I looked up innocently into the crowd. I could only see the outlines of people, my eyes caught in the glare of the gas lamps. I scanned the crowd, finding the cluster of tall hats. Then I lifted my eyes upward to the balconies, where I knew the poor children sat, where indeed I sat with Mother on days we were not performing. “Sing to the balconies,” Mother always urged. “If the balconies can hear you, everyone can.”

  In the center of the second balcony squatted the strange contraption that Mr. Edison had made. I wouldn’t look at it. I opened my mouth to sing, projecting my voice as far as I could, as far as my six-year-old lungs could muster, to the farthest seat in the topmost balcony. This one was my showstopper—an old Scottish tune Ducks had taught me, one he’d sung as a boy on the music hall stages of London during the Crimean War. It was a man’s song, which made my singing it even more of a novelty, a paean to a bonny lass—the kind of goo I’d barf up later to the delight of the stagehands backstage. But here, in the footlights, I was heartbreakingly earnest.

  The piano player began the first chords. “For bonny Annie Laurie, I will lay me doon and dee,” I sang, substituting the Scots for “down” and “die.” “Her brow, it is a snowdrift, her neck is like a swan.…”

  I turned my eyes. There was Mother, as always, in the wings, mouthing the words along with me.

  “Her face it is a fairy, that the sun shone on—”

  Now Ducks began his accompaniment with his harmonica in place of the song’s usual bagpipes. Some in the audience were singing along with me. “Then glory is serene … and bonny Annie Laurie … I will lay me doon and dee, I will lay me doon and… dee!”

  There was no time for applause. Ducks had taught me to take a deep breath quickly after finishing the song and launch immediately into the whistled version. This is what they came to hear—loud and shrill. Men hooted as I whistled; little girls clapped their hands. And when I’d finished, I wasn’t ready to leave—not yet—not when I had them just where I wanted them. I quickly broke into another tune—I don’t remember what now, something light and sentimental I’m sure, maybe the one about the little boy being put off the train as he tries to get back to his dying mother. Or else the slightly naughty one about sweet, sweet Mary Jean and all the good times she’s seen. That one would always—as they used to say—bring the house down.

  How they cheered. I curtsied left, right, and center. Still they cheered. I saw even the men in the high silk hats stand and applaud. I imagined that the hoots came from them, that I had won their hearts, that they might even forget about the silly old machine they’d come to see. I winked at the audience, a little trick that no one had taught me, that I’d started doing on my own. Those closest to the stage called out to me, “That’s the girl, Flo!” I lingered in the applause a trifle too long, as I often did; the stagehand had already changed name cards to announce the Mystifying Mesmerists. Mother looked cross, motioning for me to get off the stage. I obeyed, reluctantly.

  “Never overstay your welcome, Florence,” she told me, shaking her finger at me as I scurried down the steps. “If there’s one rule you should never, ever forget, it’s that. Never overstay your welcome.”

  It was time for the Vitascope. “Come along, Florrie,” Ducks said. “They’re letting us sit out in the audience to watch.”

  This was a special treat. Usually the performers were kept securely behind the curtain at all times. But tonight even Gaby slipped into a seat in back.
I sat between Mother and Ducks.

  It’s funny how unprepared we are for the moments that influence our lives. I may have been young, but I considered myself wiser than most, certainly more clever than the children who flocked around the stage entrance to throw me daisies. I was only six—or seven or eight or maybe nine—but I had already seen a great deal, already been to more places than many people visit in their entire lives. I’d seen a man collapse on stage and die. I’d seen Ducks go off with a sailor and close the door behind them, barring my entrance—but I already knew what they did behind that closed door. I’d seen Mother naked with a man in her bed, and her silent mouthings of ecstasy left more of an impression on me than her frantic attempts to cover her breasts when she caught me standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

  I was wise to the world. But sitting there that night at the old Majestic Theater in Indianapolis, I was thoroughly unprepared for what I was about to experience.

  The lights dimmed. My eyes did not adjust right away. The theater became as black as a night without a moon, and I felt Ducks’s warm hand take mine in case I became frightened. Suddenly a strange whirring sound came from above and behind, like the spinning of a fan or the flapping of wings. I had not noticed the white sheet that had been hung down from the rafters once Gaby had finished her dance. Now it flickered with a bright silver light, and the whirring sound increased.

  Then, all at once, the figure of a woman flashed forth upon the sheet—but it wasn’t just a pretty picture, as Ducks had promised. The woman was moving, whirling through the twists and spins of a serpentine dance. “That’s Annabelle!” proclaimed Ducks, and there was a gasp and murmur from the crowd, a ripple of startled appreciation. The woman danced and kicked as if suspended there in the darkness, her filmy dress rising and falling and floating every which way. Then, without warning, she was gone, and the theater went dark again.