“Yais, dulling,” Vera said, “it’s one thing to have ull of Ameddica at one’s feet; one thing to be the toast of London; but what an ecktress of may statuah ecktually needs is a trayumph on the Continent. And heah you ah, may uldest and diddest chum, on hand to share this victory with me!” Vera simpered elegantly and reached out for another sidecar.
Auntie Mame was very interested in the theater. As a matter of fact, she and Vera had first met in a road company of Chu Chin Chow during the first World War where they had kicked away happily in the second row of the chorus until my grandfather found out about it and sent Auntie Mame back to school. But even so she was still sort of a theater buff and claimed to have grease paint in her veins.
“How divine, Vera,” Aunt Mame cooed. “Patrick and I will be right there on opening night clapping our hands off. But, tell me, darling, um, what language are you going to . . .”
“Frrrench. Net-turally,” Vera said with great hauteur.
That struck us both as very odd. Vera could barely speak English.
“But, Vera,” Auntie Mame said, “what’s the play?”
“Well, it isn’t ecktually a drawma, de-ah,” Vera said uneasily. “It’s the Folies-Bergère.”
“Vera!” Auntie Mame said. “You’re not going back to burlesque after all these years?”
If there was one thing Vera did not like to be reminded of it was her humble beginnings in a traveling burly—not that it wasn’t more wholesome in those days, but it just didn’t seem suitable to the First Lady of the American Stage. “Certainly not, Mame,” Vera said coldly. “It just so happens that the Folies happens to be the commedia dell’ arte of Frahnce. They don’t even have a runway—just a sort of ill-yewminated promenade around the awkestra pit. I have accepted a sidious role— that of Catherine the Great. It’s a dremetic paht. And, what is more”—and here Vera’s voice lost its staginess and lapsed back into the pure Pittsburgh accent Vera used when angry or discussing money—“they’re paying me two thousand clams—dollars, not frances—a week for fifteen minutes’ work each night and no matinees.”
Auntie Mame was still very dubious about Vera’s undertaking any venture so declassé as a music-hall appearance, even if the Folies-Bergère was, so to speak, the Palace of Europe. So, goaded at last to expenditure, Vera strode elegantly to the telephone and instructed the hall porter to get three Bergère seats for that very night and to charge them to her, Vera Charles.
WE GOT INTO OUR SEATS JUST BEFORE THE ORCHEStra started its erratic tuning up and just after I’d learned that in France one tips the ushers—an unsettling and expensive experience if you don’t happen to have any small change on you. Then the lights went out, the curtain went up, and the Folies-Bergère began with a bang in all its tawdry splendor. Actually, the Folies was then, as it is now, a kind of Radio City Music Hall with bosoms—only much more elaborate and not nearly so professional. In fact, it was even more elaborate in those pre-war days; probably because the costumes and scenery were all a lot newer then and the girls a lot younger.
But it was more or less the same old endless show it still is, for the French musical stage prides itself on quantity rather than quality. There were the customary English chorus girls and Hungarian show girls (hardly anybody in French musicals is French), who shrieked “Allo, ’oney!” from time to time in a mélange of fake French accents for the benefit of the English-speaking members of the audience. There were the usual high-wire acts and low-comedy acts; the cyclists, the acrobats, the sopranos, the female impersonators, the contortionists. Then there were the tableaux vivants involving water effects, fountain effects, fire effects, mirror effects, and, of course, girls.
Girls were lowered from the roof and catapulted up from the cellar. Girls were suspended precariously from wires or atop swaying columns. Girls trooped up the duty aisles or meandered down long stairways. Girls traipsed about in tarnished sequins, dirty wigs, molting plumes, and balding furs, dragging grimy trains behind them.
Toward the end of the first act Auntie Mame began to doze and Vera jabbed her viciously.
Still the girls came on. Girls listlessly waggled hips and maracas in the Latin American Number. Girls staggered beneath huge panniers in the Versailles Number. Girls sweltered beneath their furs in the Winter Number. Girls shivered in mermaid tails and goose flesh in the Underseas Number. Girls sagged under the weight of fake ivory masks in the Chinese Number and came back gamely in hoop skirts and sausage curls in the Ole Plantation Number, for which a medley of Negro spirituals had been considerately translated into French. Well, as I said, the Folies-Bergère gave the customers an awful lot for their money.
“Vera,” Auntie Mame said, stifling a yawn during the Birds of Paradise Number, “surely you’re not serious about lending your talents to a dreary charade like this.”
“Be still,” Vera hissed. “The big dramatic number comes on next.”
Sure enough, it did.
In those days the management of the Folies-Bergère always treated its customers to at least one dramatic episode, usually involving a Tragic Queen, always featuring a Great Star, at least half a dozen changes of costume and scenery, quite a lot of girls, and a boy or two. It is a practice mostly abandoned since the postwar tourist boom. The Tragic Queen for that edition of the Folies was Mary Queen of Scots. It was tragic, all right, but at least she kept her clothes on. Auntie Mame was terribly relieved to see that all her friend Vera had to do was stomp around the stage bellowing of love and sorrow and do a series of quick changes from one elaborate gown to another.
“All right,” Auntie Mame said. “Now I’ve seen it. Let’s get out of here.”
As we left, the girls—blowzily got up in soiled lace and tricornes—came bobbing out in the most unseaworthy gondolas for the big Venetian Number.
“Tacky” was Auntie Mame’s word for the Folies-Bergère. But she realized that Vera’s sole motivation was greed, and two thousand dollars a week was an unheard-of amount of money in Paris of 1937. And, as a matter of record, Vera would have sold her own mother to the devil for two dollars cash.
AFTER THAT FIRST EVENING OUR LIFE IN PARIS SETtled down to a sort of routine. In the mornings I’d go off on little sight-seeing excursions of my own while Auntie Mame and Vera ordered lots of new clothes with daring fifteen-inch hem lines from Vionnet and Alix and Maggy Rouf and Lucien Lelong. They would both appear at lunch in new outfits which they described as having “a whole lot of pizazz.” Don’t laugh. Women looked much better in 1937 than they do this year.
In the afternoons Vera would excuse herself to rehearse for her dramatic debut as Catherine of Russia at the Folies-Bergère and Auntie Mame would take me along on some mission of her own. She knew quite a lot of famous French people and was usually more than welcome to drop in on Colette or André Gide or Christian Bérard or somebody arty like that. Auntie Mame kept something of a salon herself in New York and she liked to see how the foreign competition was making out. If no one she knew was holding a jour on any particular afternoon, we’d set off to see something interesting or go to the Paris Exposition. The Exposition stretched along the Seine from the Place de la Concorde to above the Trocadéro, and after we’d sopped up enough culture there we’d end up at Mme. Lanvin’s Club des Oiseaux on top of the Pavillon d’Elégance, where Auntie Mame could rest her feet, have a stiff drink, and look at some more new clothes.
Every night Auntie Mame and Vera would put on new evening dresses with a whole lot of pizazz, get me into my dinner jacket, and we’d go off to some place spiffy like Maxim’s or Les Ambassadeurs, where Auntie Mame and Albert, the headwaiter, would go about ordering dinner as though they were planning the Creation of Man. Then we’d go to the theater—something of Auntie Mame’s choosing like the Comédie-Française or a good gloomy French tragedy or a light, airy thing like Three Waltzes .
Then we’d do a night club like Bricktop’s or Suzy Solidor’s or Le Boeuf sur le Toit. And finally back to the hotel, where Auntie Mame would open al
l the windows, take me out to the balcony for a good-night cigarette, and tell me all sorts of interesting things about the history of France—like the time she was inadvertently caught in a bordello, the wise thinking behind the installation of bidets, and how the Maginot Line had made France forever impregnable. Every day was a full one.
HOWEVER, OUR PARISIAN IDYLL CAME ABRUPTLY TO an end in the Gardens of Versailles when we ran face to face into my trustee, Dwight D. Babcock of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, armed with guidebook, camera, and shooting stick, and reinforced by his wife, Eunice, and his son, Dwight Junior.
I was orphaned at the age of ten, and Auntie Mame was my guardian. But, by the exotic terms of my late father’s will, Mr. Babcock, as trustee, had complete control over my upbringing and education and he had a free hand to exercise his authority whenever he felt that Auntie Mame was doing something too eccentric. For the past seven years that authority had been exercised like a race horse. Mr. Babcock was in banking. He lived in Scarsdale. He wore rimless glasses and Herbert Hoover collars. His opinions were formed by the LiteraryDigest, Dun and Bradstreet Reports, and the Wall Street Journal.
Auntie Mame was the first to regain her speech. “Why, Mister Babcock! What a pleasant surprise. And how nice to see you again, Alice.”
“Eunice,” Mrs. Babcock said, correcting her primly.
“Of course, Eunice. And Junior!”
“Hi,” Junior said flatly.
Junior Babcock and I had shared the same room at St. Boniface and the less said about him the better. He was just like his father—only with acne.
“W-well, hrumph, this, um, certainly is a surprise,” Mr. Babcock said, implying that he had rather expected us to be found tossing fitfully in an opium den on the Rue Mouffetard. “I understood that you and Patrick had run off to Europe—without my permission, needless to say—but I didn’t . . . um, ah . . .”
Auntie Mame could charm birds off trees when she chose to. Even Mr. Babcock was not entirely immune to her magnetism, although she’d given him good reason to be damned suspicious of it. “Dear Mr. Babcock,” she said, dimpling prettily, “why would I bother a busy executive like you over a trifling little thing like taking my nephew off on a cultural tour of Europe before he starts college this fall? I can imagine how you financial wizards must feel—sitting down there in Wall Street plotting a big stock-market coup and then having some hysterical old widow derail your whole train of thought by calling with silly questions about the grocer’s bill. It must be maddening.”
“Well,” Mr. Babcock conceded with a constipated smile, “um, yes, um, sometimes that sort of thing is annoying.”
I could see that Auntie Mame’s charm was beginning to work, and I was awfully thankful because I still had a few months to go before I became eighteen and would be set free of Mr. Babcock’s insidious power.
“Well, I’m sure you need a good vacation, Mr. Babcock,” Auntie Mame said. “And don’t you adore France? Your first trip?”
“Indeed not,” Mr. Babcock said dryly. “I was over here with the A.E.F. in seventeen. Had I known then what I know now about these decadent, arrogant, dishonest French, I would have gone to jail before raising a finger to help them. Of all the corrupt, indolent, swindling . . .”
I could see Auntie Mame getting that old Joan of Arc look and this was no time for her to get into an argument with Mr. Babcock over ethnic groups or over anything else, for that matter. “Where are you staying, Mr. Babcock?” I asked too loud and too fast for Auntie Mame to start in on one of her bigger speeches.
Mrs. Babcock answered me. “We’re staying with some cousins of mine, Patrick. Dr. and Mrs. Gilbreath. They were missionaries in Saigon for many years and they now have a hostel out near Neuilly for young divinity students en route to Indochina.”
Auntie Mame shuddered.
“Isn’t that nice!” I said quickly.
“Nice?” Mr. Babcock snarled. “If you were to see what passes for plumbing in that house, you wouldn’t . . .”
“Yes, it’s nice, Patrick,” Mrs. Babcock said dubiously. “They lead a very simple life. Serve good, plain American food—we brought over a whole case of Beechnut peanut butter; that seems to be one thing the students really crave. And they show the most interesting lantern slides of their travels every night after dinner.”
“Isn’t that nice,” I said again, but without much conviction.
“Ye-ess,” Mrs. Babcock said a little wistfully, “it is nice, but somehow I’d always thought of Paris as—well—sort of gay and . . . oh, I don’t know. Out-of-door cafés and pretty clothes and . . . Well, it is restful and my cousins the Gilbreaths are a perfect peach of a couple . . . but . . .”
It didn’t take any great insight to sense that Mrs. Babcock’s first trip abroad was being something of a washout. Even Auntie Mame took pity on her, because she suddenly said, “I know what let’s do, Eunice. There’s a marvelous little restaurant right here in Versailles with a terrace and a garden and a superb cellar and . . .”
“Are you going to eat in the basement?” Mr. Babcock asked darkly.
“They don’t ink-dray,” I said to Auntie Mame under my breath.
“Well, it’s a divine little place,” Auntie Mame went on rapidly, “and I wish you’d all come as my guests. It’s so hot here and . . .”
Mrs. Babcock looked wanly hopeful, and Auntie Mame cinched the deal before Mr. Babcock could open his mouth to say no. “Here I am, a poor, silly widow just like the ones you have to deal with, Mr. Babcock, and I really need a good, sound financial head around to help me count out the francs and pay the bill and tip the waiter. And, oh, you know. . . .”
It was a direct appeal to Mr. Babcock’s patriotism, and I felt that he would have gone to hell if only to save a fellow American from the rapaciousness of the French. Under a sort of armed truce we were off to the little restaurant of Auntie Mame’s choosing.
IT WAS A GOOD RESTAURANT—ALMOST A GREAT REStaurant—and since the staff remembered Auntie Mame from previous trips, they fell all over themselves making us comfortable. Auntie Mame was being very much the Gracious Hostess and there were only two or three bad moments.
The first occurred when the captain said, “Does Madame wish a cocktail, wine?”
“Why, I think . . .” Auntie Mame began.
“No!” Mr. Babcock said, taking over completely.
Auntie Mame looked as though she’d been stabbed, but she recovered quickly. With a sly grimace she said, “Nothing alcoholic, please. Just bring a nice cool bottle of Veuve Cliquot. A magnum, I think.”
“What’s that?” Mr. Babcock asked.
“It’s a kind of carbonated grape juice, Mr. Babcock. Catawba grape juice. I think you’ll enjoy it. So cooling on these warm days.”
“How nice,” Mrs. Babcock said.
The champagne was poured and nobody seemed to mind it at all.
When Mr. Babcock asked what we’d been seeing in Paris I was eager to tell him all about the interesting people and restaurants and night clubs and plays Auntie Mame had taken me to see, but Auntie Mame was too quick for me. “Oh, you know, Mr. Babcock,” she said. “The sort of thing boys of Patrick’s and Junior’s age should visit—museums, cathedrals, things like that.”
“Catholic cathedrals?” Mr. Babcock asked loudly. He was a sort of Inquisition in reverse.
“Well, I don’t think there are very many Protestant ones, Mr. Babcock. And I just hustle him through. Here, do let me fill up your glass.”
Lunch was delicious and the champagne was beginning to have its tranquilizing effect. Over the salad Mrs. Babcock, who had become quite rosy, turned vivaciously and said, “Tell me, Mame dear, how is your dear friend Vera Charles?” It was the first time she had ever called Auntie Mame anything other than Mrs. Burnside or—in Auntie Mame’s unmarried days— Miss Dennis. Auntie Mame was so pleased with the champagne’s effect that she beckoned to the waiter and, with a broad wink, called for another bottle of that good Yankee Catawba grape juice.
“Why, as a matter of fact, Eunice, Vera’s right here in Paris at the Ritz. She’s opening in a new play tonight.”
“Oh, what?” Mrs. Babcock trilled. “You know I’ve seen every one of her plays twice. So refined. Such a great, great lady. I can’t wait to tell all the girls in Scarsdale that I’ve seen Vera Charles in Paris.”
“Why, Mrs. Babcock,” I began, “Vera’s working at the Fo . . . Ouch!”
Auntie Mame fetched me a kick under the table that nearly broke my ankle. Then she took over. “Isn’t that dreadful, Eunice. Here Vera’s my dearest friend and I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the play or the theater or anything. Hahahaha! Can you, Patrick?” she asked ominously.
“No,” I said. “Isn’t that funny? My mind’s gone completely blank.”
Other than that, the lunch went splendidly. So well, in fact, that Eunice and Junior were nodding into the Grand Marnier soufflé and Mr. Babcock was decidedly tipsy. “No joy dee veever,” he kept saying of them.
The luncheon party broke up with Eunice and Junior being sent chez Gilbreath in a taxi and Mr. Babcock unsteadily joining us in Auntie Mame’s car bound for Paris. He said it was to pick up some mail at the American Express. It was around four when Auntie Mame finally waved him out of the car with the tenderest of good-byes and drove back to the hotel.
“What I need now is a real, honest-injun snort,” Auntie Mame said, tossing her hat across the sitting room. “All that sweetness and light has undone me. Now, my little love, be a pet and pour poor Auntie Mame about twelve fingers of cognac and I’ll cheer up poor Vera. You know how these actresses get on opening nights.”
There was a faint rapping at the door. I opened it and there stood Vera. She was dressed in black with a wide straw hat hung with heavy black veiling.
Around the World With Auntie Mame Page 2
