Anything Goes

by Richard S. Wheeler

“That’s why I use the name,” Beausoleil said. “I almost used Scandals, but the times aren’t ripe for it.”

  “Those ladies were all Presbyterians or Baptists or something like that,” she said. “There wouldn’t be a Catholic in the lot. Probably not an Anglican, either.”

  “WCTU—ban the spirits, along with Italians, French, Germans, Irish, and the rest,” he said. “Missoula isn’t Butte. All right, we’ll give them something to picket about.” He nodded to Ethel. “Have the girls show an ankle. I’ll want the Marbury Trio in blackface.”

  “Blackface?”

  “Biggest acts back east are blackface. Burnt cork’s selling tickets. And tap dancing’s straight out of minstrel shows. I’ll go talk to the newspaper. The minstrel show’s arrived in Missoula.”

  “LaVerne’s been itching to show a lot more than some ankle, August.”

  “Let her rip,” he said. “A girl needs to make good use of her assets.”

  The waiter delivered the drinks, and The Genius shoved his glass at Ethel, who downed it neat, in three coughs and two sputters.

  “I’m a case history for the WCTU,” The Genius said. “Maybe I can turn it into something.”

  “Give it a shot, and if it bombs, I’ll give you the hook. You play something like this for all it’s worth.”

  August finished up the dregs in his glass, reached for his black topcoat and black derby, and swept into the night, with Ethel and The Genius in tow. The newspaper, the Missoulian, was just a block or two away.

  31

  CHARLES POMERANTZ opened his room door to August, who bore news.

  “We’re in luck. The WCTU’s fixing to picket us tomorrow.”

  “What’s their beef?”

  “Follies. They don’t like follies, so they’ll get more than they bargained for. I’ve asked the Marbury Trio to go blackface, and they’ll be the Marbury Minstrel Dancers. And LaVerne’s going to show a little limb and chest. And The Genius says he’ll try to work the theme. I headed over to the paper and bought a small ad, program change, minstrels, etc. With some luck, we’ll get a lot of picketers.”

  “How’d you get wind of it?”

  “They were at the opera house. Lecture by some temperance lady or other. She doesn’t like spirits or Italians. She doesn’t like Catholics or Episcopalians or Latvians or Norwegians. Half our company was there, enjoying the show. It could give us a few sellouts. Speaking of which, what’s the word?”

  “Won’t know until morning. Wired Pocatello and Boise. We’re covering two weeks, and need two theaters or a long run in Boise, which is big enough.”

  “Let me know fast.”

  “I’ll wire the houses in Washington and Oregon tomorrow to confirm our dates,” Charles said. “And California. If a circuit’s buying houses out there, we need to know, fast. While we can still maneuver.”

  “I sure get tired of the scramble,” August said. “What a business. Nothing’s firm. We need houses that won’t cancel us. We need acts. I’d pay good money for an animal act, but where do you find one in Montana?”

  “So we stir the pot,” Charles said. “Got any more scandals?”

  “I’ll invent some.”

  Charles thought that August looked drawn. Road managers careened from crisis to crisis, and this tour had been full of them. It had always been hard to read August. He was the loneliest man Charles had ever met, keeping everything to himself. He was always affable, always affectionate—and distant. There was an interior life in August that no one knew, or would ever know. A man without intimates carried a terrible burden, especially in critical moments.

  “I will do something,” Ginger said, suddenly. “I have assets.”

  “That’s sweet of you, but you just keep on the way you are,” August said.

  She smiled suddenly. “The way I was. I’ll never be that again.”

  Charles sensed something that he couldn’t quite fathom. She had been almost rigid, silent, withdrawn all evening. Something was burdening her. And then suddenly, this. Her assets. He wished he could fathom what was inside of her. And what she meant. Whatever it was, she wasn’t spilling any beans, not now.

  “You’ll be the draw,” he said.

  “Not if I stay the way I was.”

  This was beyond him. August stared flatly, nodded, and a moment later the door clicked shut.

  She sprang from the chair where she had sat in locked silence, raced to him, and crushed him in her arms with an eagerness that astonished him. She clung fiercely, and only after a long moment did he respond to her, drawn ever closer to her pliant body, which for the first time seemed to shape itself to his.

  He felt the rush of need, and returned her kiss. But still this sudden change in her very nature bewildered him.

  “There, now,” he said, softly. “What is this?”

  She didn’t respond except with her eager hands. And he was discovering a Ginger he hadn’t known, a woman of such intensity and passion and willfulness that he simply surrendered to her, a circumstance as strange to him as marriage itself. He was married, and he hadn’t ever grasped how it happened, or why. A crazy impulse.

  Their brief honeymoon was fraught with tension, and she had surrendered piecemeal, unloosing bit by bit those parts of her that no man had ever known, and always a little removed from him, even analytical as if she were an observer. And when they had at last achieved union, he had no sense of whether she enjoyed it, or whether it repelled, or perhaps made no inroads upon her heart at all. Maybe it didn’t matter. And in the end, before he was compelled to leave Butte, he had concluded that he knew little of her, and might never know much about her, and least of all about their union. He had married a woman far removed from anyone—from him, but also from the world, a woman with a chest of secrets she shared with no one.

  Still, as he thought back, there had been tenderness, and tentativeness, and experiment, and she had not resisted as she experienced his caresses, and weighed his advances. But she had been a mystery, and now in her passion she was even more so, the heat in her shredding the moment, hurrying their bodies along.

  It took little time, actually, a great tugging of clothes, rending of buttons, yanking of stockings, and he discovered a different bride this time, one he had never fathomed. And was it tears he was finding on her cheeks in the midst of passion? When, finally, they lay spent in that narrow hotel room, it seemed that this really was the first of their matings, that all that had gone before was little more than removing locks from doors.

  Then she was there, her tangled hair nestled into his shoulder, an utter stranger in bed with him. And along with his peacefulness was curiosity; who was she, and why?

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “A bird out of her cage.”

  “And what cage?”

  “My mother’s cage. What she expected of me.”

  “Which was?”

  “Charles, you can’t possibly know. It’s beyond, I mean, there’s no words. A clockwork doll. A windup toy. A prodigy to be displayed and put back on her shelf. A prisoner. A girl whose will was trampled, stolen, who could never be herself. My mother has no self, so she invaded me, possessed me, stole me. She doesn’t even see me as a person.”

  “Your father?”

  “He went along, bought the tutors, paid for it all, and never questioned it, or objected, or asked me. But he always, oh, it was like he was the law.”

  An old story, he thought. And no doubt all out of proportion, an eighteen-year-old woman who had yet to see the world. In a year or two, she’d see it differently. Mothers against daughters. Daughters against parents. Escape, somewhere, anywhere, even into vaudeville, so impossibly distant from her quiet, bourgeois life.

  “Ginger, where was this?”

  She didn’t speak for a long time, and he felt her stir in the comfortable dark. “I’m afraid to tell you,” she whispered, and then pronounced it: “Pocatello.”

  No wonder, he thought.

  “My father’s superintenden
t of a Union Pacific division.”

  “And has railroad muscle behind him,” he added, finishing her thought. “So, you don’t want to perform there.”

  “You don’t know my mother,” she said.

  “You’re married. So what’s going to happen?”

  “If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t ask.”

  “Ginger’s not your name, right?”

  “It’s Penelope.”

  “And lots of people there would spot you the moment you walked into the limelight. And you’re hoping we don’t book Pocatello.”

  She clutched him and buried her face in his shoulder. Her fear was palpable.

  “Penelope, there’s no reason to worry about anything. We’re married. You’re old enough.”

  “Please, please, don’t ever call me that. Please.”

  He pulled her tight. “You’re Ginger to me; that’s who I married.”

  He felt her quake, and felt the heat of her tears in the hollow of his shoulder.

  “Hey, it’ll be all right, Ginger. For one thing, we haven’t gotten a booking there. Maybe they’re running something. For another, we need two. If I can book Boise, we’ve got most of what we need.”

  “My mother would pull the ring off my finger. My father would send railroad workers to take me away.”

  That seemed wildly unlikely to Charles. The woman he’d taken to wife was brimming with feverish fantasies. “Ginger, brace up. You go out there, on that stage, on any stage, and you bowl them over. You’ve got it; you’ll strut it.”

  “They’ll take me and lock me in my room. They’ll charge you with things. They’ll say I was stolen.”

  “Ginger, you’re of age. You have a right to your own life.”

  She burrowed closer, and clutched him desperately. It amazed him. Rampant fear had caught her even though the company was not yet booked in her hometown. He didn’t know what to do. Terrified people made bad performers. He’d seen performers quit the stage in the middle of an act. He doubted she would even walk out there, smile at the crowd, and offer up something they might like.

  But there was this: A long run in Missoula, time to get used to the idea of playing Pocatello. Time for her to grow a little, pitch out the demons, collect herself. And time for him to work out a schedule.

  “Hey, sweetheart, you’re a long way from home,” he said.

  “You don’t know,” she replied.

  The dread was there, alive, lashing back and forth like a lion’s tail.

  He hadn’t known the woman he married. Marry in haste, repent forever. But the thing was, he had no regrets. This half-girl, half-woman enchanted him. There was a dimple in her cheek that he loved. It somehow doubled her smile.

  Her quietness signaled sleep, or at least those peaceful moments of surrender to sleep. But he was starkly awake. The troupe was suffering for the lack of acts. Markey and McGivers gone. You couldn’t just add a new one, not in Montana. He and August were pinning their hopes on this girl in his arms, hoping she would soon be a draw, have the magic, the power, the reach, that would bring crowds to their show. All the signs were there, but she hadn’t quite connected yet; still too much recital, and not enough performer, or whatever it was called. Magic, that’s how he described it. She needed magic, and they needed her magic, and so far there was no magic.

  He’d know more in the morning when he heard from the opera houses in Idaho. What houses were dark, what houses weren’t. A two-week break in the tour could be fatal. He had to book something fast, in the sparsely populated Northwest. He’d avoid Pocatello if he could, but even as he considered that prospect, he knew he couldn’t avoid any house that was dark. Any house where the Follies could light up the stage, perform, and bring in the crowds. And cash.

  The next morning, long before she stirred under the thin gray hotel blanket, he dressed quietly, braved sharp cold, and hiked to the railroad station. He didn’t expect responses until the managers began their own quotidian routines and saw what Western Union brought to them. But it turned out he didn’t need to wait; the managers had received the wires in the evening and had responded.

  “I was just going to send a boy out to find you,” the telegrapher said.

  The news was good. Pocatello was dark the first four days, booked two days, and dark the next days. Boise was booked the first four days, dark the rest.

  Pomerantz knew what he had to do. He booked the Grand Opera House at Pocatello for four days, with two travel days following the Missoula run. He booked the Columbia Theater in Boise for the next leg, one travel day after Pocatello. After that the Follies would head west, Washington and Oregon, solid cities, big houses, some safety. And then California.

  From the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide he carried, he wired Pocatello for hotel rooms, Boise for hotel rooms. Then he wired the bill-poster at both sites, saying three-sheet bills would be expressed. The bill-posters would need to add a paste-on with the date of the appearance. They were skilled at that. They would get the sheets, post them on barn sides, walls, structures beside the roads, add the dates. There was more to do: wire the papers with small ads, wire or mail publicity material, find out from the house managers what worked best in their towns.

  That’s what an advance man was for. He would have to leave Ginger behind, set up the shows in Idaho, and hope for the best.

  32

  TWO REDOUBTABLE ladies, armored against the evening cold with thick woolen coats and oversized hats, hoisted picket signs that evening. One sign said AMERICA FOR AMERICANS, and the other said KEEP US FROM FOLLIES.

  They stood placidly in front of the Bennett Opera House, drawing only idle glances from those planning to see the show. August Beausoleil was, in a way, disappointed. A rowdier, snaking picket line would have been more to his liking. But these respectable matrons, armored in the attire of their bourgeois lives, generated only mild curiosity. And they were polite enough to stand to one side, not interfering with theater patrons.

  He knew what the signs were about. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was not just about removing every last ounce of alcohol in the states; it was also about immigration, and about a variety of other sorts of conduct it deemed immoral. It did not open its membership to Catholics and Jews, and was actively opposed to immigration of these groups, as well as Germans, French, Italians, Irish, and most everyone from Eastern Europe. Show business was the peculiar realm of these people, such as himself. So show business itself was the target this cold eve.

  In 1882, a New Yorker named Tony Pastor had turned variety theater into vaudeville. The old variety shows had been racy, and Pastor had reasoned that their bawdiness was keeping women and children away. He could lure them into theaters with the promise of clean, cheerful shows. He called his new variety shows vaudeville, a little French, and swiftly turned them into a bright success. August Beausoleil, along with countless others in the business, had learned the lesson. Especially Oscar Hammerstein, whose shows soon outdid anything that Pastor put onstage.

  August Beausoleil adhered to the new variety forms, but with a small caveat: he believed a little bit of spice could draw people into the theaters. He would even generate a little bad publicity if it improved his sales. But these polite ladies would only disappoint.

  He headed toward the ladies, confronted them with a slight bow, and waved four tickets at them.

  “My show,” he said. “Please be my guests. You and your husbands.”

  “Over my dead body,” said one. But she pocketed the tickets.

  Beausoleil smiled, bowed once again, and headed inside. The ladies probably wouldn’t attend, but they would find friends to “report” what they saw inside.

  He found Pomerantz backstage, looking worn. The other half of the Follies had spent the day in the railroad station, keeping the telegrapher busy.

  “Where are we?” August asked.

  “Looking good. Booked Pocatello December one to four; Boise seven to eleven with two holdover days reserved. I’ve got hotels i
n Boise and Pocatello. I’ve got the paper hangers alerted; they’ll get playbills tomorrow, and they’ll print paste-overs locally. I’ve got rail schedules and worked out the backtrack from here to Butte to Pocatello. I’ll be leaving here tomorrow; got to be on hand forward. But it should get us through the gap, in time for the year-end stuff around Seattle.”

  “Any trouble I should know about?”

  Pomerantz sighed. “My wife.”

  August said not a word. He studied the dark wing, offstage, empty of performers. Stages are sad, bleak places except for the few explosive moments they come alive with light and song and magic.

  “Pocatello is where she’s running away from,” Charles said.

  “And she doesn’t want to return.”

  “Mother-and-daughter deal; sounds bad but I’ve seen a few daughters swear their mothers were straight out of hell.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “I don’t know. She’s silent. She’s a lot of things, but you know what? I’m tied to someone I’m just starting to know. So, all I can say is, coax her along.”

  “We’re short of acts. She’s getting better. We need two more acts, and can’t get them fast around here.”

  “I’m away from here after the show; milk run to Butte. I’ve got more to worry about than mothers and daughters. If I don’t get publicity out, it won’t matter that we’re booked across Idaho. So,” he said, sounding amused, “she’s your cookie.”

  “All right, what’s your guess? At Pocatello?”

  “She’s got a stage mother, nah, call this one a recital mother, and Mama’s spent a few thousand tutoring her little prodigy, and Mama’s gonna drag her out the door.”

  “You married her, right?”

  “Yeah, to a girl named Ginger. Her name’s Penelope. So it’s your guess.”

  “Showtime,” said the stage manager.

  Swiftly, August donned his tux with the snap-on bib, and stole a look out there. The house wasn’t full, but there were people drifting in. And there were four empty seats where the temperance ladies would never sit. Seating in the gallery was spotty. But there were a pair of reporters out there.