What was it about showtime? Everyone who’d been in the business felt a galvanic current run through him when the moment arrived when the curtain would roll away and the performers and audience would greet each other. At each curtain time, not a few performer were sucking spirits from flasks. Beausoleil checked his acts; the Marbury Trio had applied the burnt cork this time, and looked lean and lanky. That would be one to watch. You never knew how a minstrel act would work. The Genius looked ready to go. He’d improved his line, making himself more and more outrageous, and at the same time more vulnerable to Ethel’s little asides. He would probably pick on the WCTU. Harry stood quietly, waiting for his turn, and the Wildroot Sisters were ready, this time in the shortest skirts in their wardrobe, which showed plenty of white stocking at the calves. Strangely, Ginger had a new dress this time, one borrowed from somewhere, with a bit of ankle showing, and a scooped neckline. That should please the gents, if not their ladies. And there was Wayne Windsor, the old professional, a slight mocking in his face, as if to say he’d reduce this audience to fits, the way he often did.
Let it roll, then, August thought.
Then he was out there, introducing the Follies, waving the curtain up, thanking the crowd, and introducing the Wildroot Sisters.
Another show, another town, another audience to please, one of a thousand or two he had stood before, welcoming them, and welcoming his show.
The girls knocked them dead. What was it, the air? The perpetual smoke? The frowning ladies with their posters? He didn’t know. He only knew that Cookie and Margie and LaVerne were singing, shimmying, and showing a little ankle out there, and Ethel was looking smug. The crowd warmed up. You could feel a crowd warming. It wasn’t applause, it wasn’t laughter, it was something else. Everyone in vaudeville knew what it was, but no one could put a word to it, or explain it to someone not in the trade.
Had Ethel reworked the act?
That proved to be a great opener, and the audience was ripe and warm.
He introduced the Marbury Minstrel Dancers next, and Delilah and her gents clattered out in blackface, their faces pitch black and shiny, the hands encased in white gloves, the men in tuxedos, Delilah in a loose glittery gown that bared some calf. That drew a ripple from the crowd as the trio clattered into the limelight. Minstrel was new to most of them. It had been a part of variety theater for many years, but this was frontier Montana. No one knew just where tap dancing came from. It seemed to combine English clog dancing with the movements and rhythms of southern blacks, and it had swiftly become a staple of vaudeville, with many blacks in blackface as well as whites.
The trio clattered and dodged and set the audience to swaying. They leapt and split and tiptoed and whirled. This was a controlled dance, small gestures, intense and disciplined, and Delilah and her gents were masters of it. The clickety-clack, the explosions of Gatling-gun chatter, the slow and syncopated taps of six shoes with metal cleats toe and heel; it caught an audience that had barely experienced any of it. They used the limelight, working into it, retreating from it, and then, finally, rattling down to a finale, three statues, halting, finally, in the white light center stage, hiding the pumping of their lungs.
That won a surprised gasp, and applause.
They danced two more, the second loose and louche, the accompanist on the accordion discovering ways to coax New Orleans out of his squeezebox. The third round was quite the opposite, the dancers barely moving about the stage, but their legs and feet working in syncopation, bright and chattery.
That won a great and steady round of applause, as August finally strode out and introduced The Genius and Ethel. A quiet act following an expansive one.
The pair bowed.
“Well, Genius,” said Ethel, “is it true that you’re the brightest man in Montana?”
“I wouldn’t want to exaggerate,” he replied. “No doubt the brightest in North America.”
“What makes you so bright, Genius?”
“I didn’t buy a ticket to tonight’s show,” he said.
That got them laughing. It was a good act, getting better as the pair worked out their patter, August thought. The Genius would make outlandish claims, and Ethel would puncture them. And the fun was, the audience usually ended up on the side of The Genius. They didn’t stay long in front of the olio. The joke wore out fast.
They got a cheerful round of applause, and August strode out once again.
“Ladies, and usually gents but not always, I’m pleased to introduce Harry the Juggler. He’s got a last name, but I can’t pronounce it. He comes from one of those little nations near New Jersey. Here’s the Juggler!”
Harry came out, followed by a stagehand pushing a cart loaded with stuff, and after some bowing and scraping, Harry pitched a couple of saucers up, and soon added enough tableware to seat four at dinner, and somehow managed not to break so much as a teacup. The crowd enjoyed that. He bowed long and low, and trotted off.
Then it was time for Ginger. He introduced her softly, conversationally. Some acts he introduced with fanfare, but not this young woman. She floated out on polite applause, wearing a borrowed dress this evening, with some of her golden shoulder and neck glowing in the light.
She seemed different somehow, though August could not say how. Only that she had never seemed more tender.
She sang alone, without accompaniment, her voice floating out upon a quiet crowd. She always chose familiar ballads at first, Stephen Foster or “Shenandoah,” and let the familiar strains find their home in a hundred hearts. The crowd listened quietly, blotting her up. She was reaching them this evening. She seemed a little older, perhaps. August couldn’t tell exactly, but he knew that she was connecting, and that she had the whole crowd in her grasp, and that it was a sweet and memorable moment. She finished her first one to polite applause, slipped solo into another, and finally a third, and after the last note died, she bowed.
Her auditors clapped politely, and kept on clapping, and she bowed again, and they clapped on and on, not letting her leave the stage. August finally rescued her, striding forth and lifting a hand.
“Miss Ginger, that was the most beautiful singing I’ve ever heard,” he said.
The crowd enjoyed it, but finally let her go.
August caught her eye, and winked. She smiled and retreated, the respectful clapping still echoing in that house. It had never happened like that. August made note of it. That performance, Ginger had transformed herself into the biggest draw in the show. There would be some out there who would return for the next performance and the next, just to listen to her.
Wayne Windsor wound up the first half, turning right, turning left, treating the crowd to his profile. His monologues always had a good-humored edge to them, and August knew the crowd would enjoy some good times.
“I understand that Missoula captured the state college,” he began, and paused a moment. “What a pity. You should have applied for the state prison.”
They liked that. He managed to do ten or twelve minutes on the shortcomings of students and professors, with a few asides about how colleges subtracted more from the local economy than added to it, and then he was done, and the audience headed for a halftime break in a very good mood.
The second half went just as well, and the crowd seemed especially eager to hear Ginger sing. But the moment she was done, she vanished into the Green Room, and August knew that the booking at Pocatello was tormenting her. The small bare room was empty, save for her. The show wasn’t over, and he had more introductions, but maybe he could listen and learn in one quick interlude.
“You were great this evening, Ginger. You’ll have top billing.”
She looked haunted, and stared away from him.
“We’ve had to make a few quick changes,” he said. “But once we get to the coast, we have the best houses lined up. Big ones. I just want you to know that, and know how much Charles and I like your act.”
She pushed her golden shoulders back and met his gaze. “Mr. Beauso
leil, after Missoula, I’m leaving the show,” she said.
33
THE OPENER in Missoula was a success. A good box office. A dandy show. A profit. August could meet payroll.
He lingered in the opera house office long after the building had emptied, doing payroll under a naked bulb. He carried with him a stack of small brown envelopes, which he filled weekly with greenbacks and hand-delivered on Saturdays, the last day of the week, when pay was due. All his transactions were cash. His players didn’t want checks they couldn’t redeem. They wanted spending money, and that’s what he gave them. Each show night brought in a load of small bills from ticket sales.
He kept his accounts in a small vest-pocket notebook, often using cryptic initials rather than writing entire entries. Now, in the creaking quiet of the Missoula house, he doled out bills and stuffed them into the envelopes. A hundred fifty for the Wildroot Sisters, who would pay their mother and manager. Eighty for LaVerne, who had a separate act, and would give thirty to her accordionist. A hundred for Wayne Windsor. Seventy for Harry the Juggler. Greenbacks, carefully counted out, stuffed in the envelopes, and an initial or name on each envelope. Fifty for Ginger. He hesitated a moment, and then pushed the folded fives into the envelope. She had earned it.
There were four musicians in the company, paid by the various acts. A guitarist, a banjo player, an accordionist, and an all-around percussion man. He did not pay them. He did pay his sole stagehand, Vince Leo, thirty a week.
He finished the payroll, stuffed everything into the opera house Mosler safe, and swung the door shut. Those safes, used by each company, were common accouterments in opera houses, and resolved a dilemma for touring companies: where to store their cash. The other options were the hotel safe, if one was available, or keeping the cash in his hotel room, under the mattress as a bonus for the chambermaids.
It added up. This payday would eat up the evening’s take, and then some. The take of other matinees and evenings had to pay for train, hotel, theater rental, playbills, advertising, Charles’ expenses, and sometimes payoffs for officials who threatened trouble of one sort or another. All cash. All grubby greenbacks, in heaps, collected at the box office or the drugstores that did advance sales. Arrangements varied from theater to theater. Some simply rented, but others wanted a percentage, and their owners usually hung around through the counting. Keeping it all straight was a headache.
On the road, with its ups and downs, he careened from confidence to panic. There was never enough cash. Sometimes he had to struggle to buy fuel for the lamps, where there was no electricity. Light your own spots, and buy the kerosene. Once in a while, at the end of a tour, there was actually some cash, and this he split with Pomerantz. It was the only salary they ever got.
He sometimes wondered why he did it. It wasn’t because he loved show business or was infatuated with the players and the acts and the excitement. It was because this was the only thing he knew how to do. He had been a part of it, squeezing dimes out of it, since he was a boy, cadging tips and trying to fill the hole in his stomach and quell his loneliness, when he had no home to go to and spent a night in a trolley barn or railroad station. But it had taught him the business from the ground up.
He was slipping deep into the blues. He had lost Ginger. And much more, there were things that filled him with foreboding. The cancelation in Spokane heralded more cancelations. Someone on the West Coast was putting together a circuit. That was the new thing: own a string of houses, put acts out on the circuit in rotation, keep the lights lit with two shows a day. And drive out competition. In New York, that meant building a rival house across the street from whatever house was holding out. The whole vaudeville business was coalescing into a few owners and a few circuits. And the casualties were the touring companies like his own.
There wasn’t much he could do about it unless he had an act so top-dog that he had some power to book his show wherever he wanted. But Ginger had folded her hand for some reason known best to a young woman barely out of school. Show business was a tough game and what she was doing would get her booted clear back to her hometown, but she was his partner’s new wife, and in any case she was wrestling with something no one else could fathom. So he’d just let it go. And his show would be stuck with one less act.
He didn’t feel like going to bed. The opera house was dark, hollow, and as bleak as his own feelings. He was lonely but didn’t want company. He could never make sense of it. The very times when he starved for friends and lovers, that was when he turned solitary. Like now.
He wore a gray cape, a utilitarian garment that could double as a blanket on the road. And now he wrapped the cape about him, pushed his plug hat down low, and departed, switching off the light, locking the opera house doors. Any saloon would do, and he found one a few yards from the hotel. He smacked into a wall of heat, picked up the scent of hot wool and rank armpits, and settled in a dark booth.
“You serving food?’ he asked the pimpled man who loomed over him.
“Chili, that’s all.”
“A bowl, and a glass of red wine.”
“This is a timber town,” the youth said, which translated to the absence of wine.
August would have liked a glass of Beaujolais, but settled for Old Orchard, one of Kentucky’s more lethal products. He had inherited a French palate, and that didn’t include whiskey of any sort.
Too late he spotted Wayne Windsor at the far end of the bar, entertaining some rummies there. Even as Windsor spotted him and waved slightly. The monologuist would stay on his stool, indulging himself with his favorite narcotic, conducting a discourse to an attentive crowd, winning their chuckles, their smiles, their nods. Windsor was doing exactly what he enjoyed most, both onstage or off. With some spirits in him, his monologues edged toward the bawdy, especially late in the evening.
August nodded, slipped chili into himself slowly, savoring the spice, washing it all with sips of bad bourbon.
But then Harry the Juggler materialized, looking as alone as usual. He was by far the most isolated and distant of his acts.
“Have a seat, Harry,” August said.
The juggler did, at once, in a way that suggested that Harry had something in mind.
“I yam working on a new act,” Harry said, his peculiar accent barely discernible. “Maybe not for this tour. The next.”
August smiled. He welcomed new acts, especially by someone with the skills of Harry.
“There’s an illusionist, magician, escape artist back east. Just a boy, not yet twenty, but already causing a lot of talk. His name is Weisz, but he’s calling himself Harry Houdini, same first name, like me, and he’s on the vaudeville circuits in the East.”
“I’ve barely heard of him.”
“His big act is to invite the local police in, tell them to cuff him, manacle him, put on leg irons, and give him a little time behind a curtain, and soon he’s free and walks out. They can’t lock him up.”
“But the audience doesn’t believe it, I hear.”
“Now they do. He’s thrown away the curtain, and they see him wrestling with it. He’s strong. He’s double-jointed. He can move his bones in and out of their sockets. He can somehow compress his muscles, shrink his wrists, like he was India rubber.”
“That’s a good act.”
“Yes, and now he’s adding to it. He’s putting himself in jeopardy. They’re putting him manacled in a tank of water, and he’s got to get free before he dies.”
August pondered that. “Not sure I’d like that on my stage.”
“Houdini never fails,” Harry said.
“Well, that’s the sort of big-time act I can’t afford, Harry.”
Harry stared, checkmated by August’s dismissal. “I am working on such an act,” he said. “I will keep the audience transfixed.”
“You already have one. The scimitars. Drop one, catch one wrong, and you’re likely to lose a finger. And they know it. You can tell. There’s not even a sneeze. It’s so quiet out there, you k
now they’re waiting, waiting, waiting for blood.”
“Yah, it is good. They’re waiting for me to behead myself. That’s going to be the new act. You think this one is waiting for mistake, wait until you see my guillotine act.”
“Your what?”
“I will juggle lying in a guillotine, my head on the block, facing upward. The blade above, held in place by a small cord. If a scimitar drops and cuts the cord, the guillotine falls and my head rolls. That will keep the audience on the edge of their seats, eh?”
August stared at Harry, stared at the soaks along the bar, stared at Wayne Windsor, whose jaw was rising and falling, and stared at his empty chili bowl.
“Harry,” he began delicately, “this is a road show. We can’t be hauling a guillotine around from house to house. Not even if you pay the freight.”
“Houdini has big tanks of water, and derricks, and hoists to lower him in.”
‘Yeah, and a thousand-seat house in New York.”
“I will perfect the act. And join you on the next tour. I could do something like it even now. A small guillotine and a rabbit in it. I make a mistake, and it’s rabbit for dinner.”
“Ah, Harry…”
“That’s the trouble with acrobat acts. Sing and they love you. Talk and they laugh. But acrobats, jugglers, the silent acts, all we can do is worry them. Scare them. And when the bad doesn’t happen, everyone applauds. It’s a small pleasure. That boy, Houdini, he doesn’t talk. It’s all silent. But he does great things. I hear even coppers are amazed. They think they’ve got him locked up solid, but they don’t. Audience likes that. Nothing like a red-faced copper.”
Harry smiled. A rare moment.
August didn’t want blood on his stage. Drama, fine. Getting out of manacles, that was Houdini’s game. But no guillotines. “Harry, there’s something you might do. Magic. Combine juggling with some magic. I’ve always wanted a magician, but they’re hard to find, and don’t like road shows so much. But if you can do some magic, pull rabbits out of an empty top hat, put your assistant in a long box on sawhorses and saw her in two, until she steps out of the box, that stuff would work fine, and I’d put you on.”
Anything Goes Page 22
