Malcolm sent Ruby postcards of places he had visited and dreamed about, which she carried in her schoolbooks to show her classmates until she put them away in a box, looking at the photographs of faraway places only at night.
• • •
When Ruby graduated, her class at P.S. 152 put on a pageant to celebrate its commencement, with Ruby as the month of September.
She had decided that she was not going to go to Erasmus Hall High School. She was going to get a full-time job.
FOUR
Heart and Nerve and Sinew
1921–1926
In 1921, Ruby Stevens was fourteen but looked older, with a deep voice that sounded from childhood as if she had perpetual laryngitis.
Now that she’d finished school, she answered a telephone company ad—telling the interviewer she was sixteen—and was hired as a switchboard operator at 15 Dey Street. She made it clear to the other operators that she was working there temporarily; she was going to be a dancer.
Ruby “talked back to a caller” and “got their wires so jammed up,” she said that she was transferred to the billing department as a clerk, packing cards and getting paid $13 a week, a lot of money to her. After the switchboard job Ruby hated hearing a telephone and would answer it within the first or second ring. When she learned that secretaries in the telephone company earned $25 a week, Ruby enrolled in a night school to study shorthand and typing.
As a file clerk she sat all day long, “fiddling with little pieces of paper, and folding envelopes,” matching subscribers’ numbers with the calls made—“a job that could be done by an idiot,” she said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting so long.” After many months “of this [nothingness],” she took “the pieces of paper and all the blasted envelopes and threw them into the air, which made a great paper shower.” The superintendent came rushing over and told Ruby to “sort them into order.” Ruby would have none of it and walked out of the telephone company. “It got me nowhere, that loss of temper,” she said.
Frankie Chauffeur would come to Maud and Bert Merkent’s house to take Ruby to dances at Erasmus Hall High School or to parties in the two-family houses around Flatbush. Sometimes they would go to the pictures and hold hands as they watched Rudolph Valentino or Ramon Novarro or Wallace Reid and Gloria Swanson. When Frank mentioned marriage, Ruby backed away from the idea of it. She didn’t see herself as a wife or mother. She was intent on being a dancer or an acrobat.
Bert Merkent and his brother Ray went to baseball games together at Ebbets Field, and some of the Brooklyn Robins often stopped by the house. Everyone seemed to like Ray, the youngest of the six Merkents, except Ruby. Ray was a man of nineteen; Ruby a girl of fourteen. She was uncomfortable around him and made sure not to be at the house when he was there. One day Ray showed up when Ruby was home alone and began to force himself on her and wouldn’t stop. Ruby was horrified and shaken and told Maud what had happened. “Oh, well, dear,” said Maud, “I think you’re making too much of it . . . You imagined a lot of it.”
“I hate him,” said Ruby, furious that Maud didn’t believe her story. “You know that son of a bitch raped me. You know he did.” She became all the more wary and determined to get out and live on her own.
• • •
Ruby wasn’t any beauty. She “didn’t have a great figure,” she said, but she was intent on finding a place for herself as a dancer in the theater.
Isadora Duncan, the interpretive dancer, was performing at the Century Opera House, Carnegie Hall, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ruby was fascinated by her free dancing. Isadora danced with her pupils without corsets or high-heeled shoes, barefoot and bare legged. Duncan’s free dancing was revolutionary, inspirational; “a return to simplicity, beauty and truth.” Ruby was equally enchanted by the great ballerina Anna Pavlova but knew she would never have enough money for ballet training. She needed a job to pay for her food and board at Maud’s and got a job as a package wrapper at Abraham & Straus, where Mabel and Maud had worked a decade before. Next she worked at the Vogue Pattern Company on Fifth Avenue in New York City. She needed a job so badly that she lied and told the interviewer that she knew how to sew and cut patterns. She was hired at $18 a week.
Each morning Ruby left Maud and Bert’s house on Avenue L, boarded a trolley car to Flatbush Avenue, and took the subway into Manhattan.
At her job with Vogue patterns, Ruby discovered reading. She read “nothing good,” but she read “books on all subjects,” she said, “lurid stuff about ladies who smelled sweet and looked like flowers and were betrayed, about gardens and ballrooms and moonlight trysts and murders.” She began to be aware of herself in a new way, how she looked, the clothes she wore. “I bought awful things at first, pink shirtwaists, artificial flowers, tripe.”
Soon she was reading Conrad, Hardy, Hugh Walpole, Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, and Kipling, including Rewards and Fairies, in which Ruby came across what became one of her favorite poems. “If,” published in 1910, was a guidepost for her. To “hold on when there is nothing in you/Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on.’ ”
It was a way of being that Ruby understood, that seemed true for her. Kipling’s poem offered a standard of courage, balance, and strength that she embraced. She had lived with that kind of determination, with the desire to fight wholeheartedly. Kipling’s words “Meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same” summed up for her the belief that nothing was permanent, that nothing could be taken for granted.
Reading Hugh Walpole’s novel Fortitude, published in the United States in 1913, Ruby recognized the truth of the book’s opening lines: “ ’Tisn’t life that matters! ’Tis the courage you bring to it.” Walpole’s words inspired and comforted her and gave her strength.
She read Sarah Bernhardt’s Memories of My Life, in which the actress described “the debut of [her] artistic life,” when she attended the theater and watched as the curtain went up and the stage was revealed, “as though the curtain of [Bernhardt’s] future life were being raised.” Ruby read of the moment when Bernhardt at age fifteen, in order to be admitted to the conservatoire, recites the unlikely choice of the La Fontaine fable “Les deux pigeons.”
She read of the change that began to take place in the young French actress, whose “soul remained childlike” but whose “mind discerned life more distinctly.” And about how, years later, the Divine Sarah, with a hostile French and English press relentlessly at her, was consoled by a friend who said to her, “You are original without trying to be so . . . [Y]ou have a natural harp in your throat . . . [Y]ou never accept any compromise, you will not lend yourself to any hypocrisy, and all that is a crime of high treason against society.”
Ruby was reading a book a day and “felt a sense of doors opening.”
• • •
She was made a hostess at the Vogue Pattern Center, a showplace for Vogue magazine, owned by Mr. Condé Nast, and met a young salesman in the advertising department.
Edwin Kennedy was in his early twenties and was working his way up through the company. He thought Ruby was “a knockout, sultry but wary.” He knew that Ruby was a girl who didn’t have love affairs, and he said “it was quite a feather in my cap” when she agreed to go out with him.
Their first date was at the Biltmore hotel, where, because of Prohibition, “tea dances” were held from five in the afternoon to seven in the evening with actual tea as refreshments. Ruby loved to dance, and she’d never been to the Biltmore, with its Palm Court, Italian garden, ice-skating rink, and sliding roof where diners could eat under the stars.
Ruby and Ed began to see each other often. After their evenings together, he accompanied her back to Avenue L. Sometimes there were extravagant evenings that ended with his bringing Ruby back to Flatbush by taxi.
Ed was falling in love with Ruby. She was fond of him and felt comfortable enough to confide her plans of becoming a dancer. He told her about how he was going to be a magazine publish
er like Mr. Nast.
Women went to the Vogue center to buy patterns and to learn how to put them together. Ruby one day gave a woman incorrect instructions. The customer returned and complained to the manager, who asked Ruby how to put the pattern together. “Of course I was stumped,” she said. “And then there were too many complaints from people who put paper patterns on cloth and expected a sleeve and got a belt.”
Ruby was fired and began to study acrobatics with a young man who was willing to instruct her for $2 a week.
One night Ed took Ruby to a large party. “I loved to show her off,” he said. “She was so beautiful.” At the party was an executive of a music publishing company. At the end of the evening Ed brought Ruby back to Flatbush, but he kept thinking about the party and how the music executive might know someone who would be able to help her. “Ruby had a driving ambition,” said Kennedy. “And I was so in love that above all things I wanted to help her.” It was after one in the morning when Ed returned to New York and went back to the party. The music executive promised to help Ruby get a job.
• • •
The Jerome Remick music publishing company was located at 219 West Forty-Sixth Street, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley. Inside its offices, the sound of pianos being played and “all the hub-bub and noise” scared Ruby. “Girls and fellows singing and dancing in every direction.” But Ruby felt at home after all the years with Millie: being around chorus girls who joked and kidded; watching dance routines; good-natured stagehands; lights and costumes.
It occurred to Ruby that these singers and dancers were trying out for an opportunity on the stage. “In a fraction of a second,” she said, “I forgot what I had really come for.”
A man from the Remick music company asked her what she wanted. “I made no mention of the job, but instead I told him that I could sing and dance and wanted to have a tryout.”
Ruby was brought into a crowded office. Against the background music of pianos coming from other cubicles, she showed Jerry Cripp how she could dance and sing. She didn’t know any routines, but after studying acrobatics she made it up as she went, high kicking and cartwheeling.
The audition was over before she knew it. “If I had gone [to the Remick music company] with a try out in mind I would have been too self-conscious. But I had so little time to think about the change in my plans.” Cripp thought Ruby’s dancing was “okay.” He was not impressed with her singing. “In fact,” she said, “he made some mention of it being terrible.” He could see that she wasn’t an inspired dancer but she had something; she was young and she had an appeal, and he thought he could get her a job “with a friend of his who was looking for some girls for his club.” Cripp sent Ruby over to the Strand Roof, a supper and after-theater club on top of the Strand Theatre on Broadway between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth Streets, and told her to speak to Earl Lindsay, the dance director there. Ruby told Lindsay that she’d been on the stage, that she’d danced at the Marigold Café in Chicago, a club where Millie had danced, and that she sang as well. She was hired.
She was now in the chorus of Earl Lindsay’s Revue.
• • •
The Strand Roof was a large dance hall with a balcony around its upper reaches. It had opened during the public craze for dancing in 1913 and was the creation of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt and other society women who conceived of it as an alternative to the usual form of charity work and saw its cafeteria-lunch-dansant as a place where the working girl could go during lunch hour. No liquor was served; admission was fifty cents plus twenty cents for lunch.
The Strand Roof was popular; stenographers went there to dance the hoochie coochie, eat lunch, and be served by Mrs. Vanderbilt and her friends, who, for a brief stint, were the Strand’s waitresses.
Over time the Strand was used in other ways. The New York Drummers held a competition there with Jerome Kern as one of the judges. Two years later the Strand was raided in a vice cleanup that swept across major cities. It was charged with solicitation taking place under its auspices: women were soliciting men via the waiters, and the supper club temporarily lost its dance license.
In 1921, the Strand Roof offered a dinner deluxe for $2 with a revue “twice nightly” at 7:15 and at 11:30 following the theater. Diners could dance “on the city’s largest, perfect floor” with forty massive floor-to-ceiling windows that opened out on New York’s Great White Way.
There were eight cast members in the Strand revue, including a comedian, a male singer, and a young woman equal to the singer who would appear in love scenes and be a foil for the comedian. Ruby was put in the back row of the chorus and figured she could get by “with giving something less than my best.” Lindsay caught her at it and “gave her hell.”
With her salary at the Strand Roof, Ruby could afford to move out of Maud and Bert’s house on Avenue L in Flatbush and move in with the family of one of the other Strand chorus girls, Claire Taishoff, who lived in Manhattan on 135th Street and Riverside Drive.
• • •
Florenz Ziegfeld was opening a new Follies and was looking for dancers. The Ziegfeld girls were from all over the country: waitresses, runaway debutantes, escapees from convent schools, file clerks, and beauty contest winners from county fairs and beaches.
At the Ziegfeld audition, the women in the front were told to come forward in an orderly line and walk toward the footlights. Mr. Ziegfeld sat in the first row and looked at the women before him, discussing their qualities with his stage manager and secretary, who sat behind him. Ziegfeld pointed from right to left those women he wanted. The stage manager called out their numbers, and those chosen walked down a small flight of stairs into the theater and were told when to report for rehearsals. Out of five hundred or so women trying to find parts in a Ziegfeld show, fifty would be chosen.
Earl Lindsay helped Ruby get a job in Ziegfeld’s 1922 Follies. She was fifteen years old, just under age, and was hired, using the name Dolly Evans, for the sixteenth production of the Follies.
Skits and songs in the show were written by Gene Buck, Ziegfeld’s right-hand man. Buck hired many of the performers who became synonymous with the Follies: Will Rogers, Lillian Lorraine, Ed Wynn, W. C. Fields. Ziegfeld’s set designer, Joseph Urban, who was trained as an artist and an architect—he had designed a new Viennese town hall as well as a bridge in St. Petersburg for the czar—had worked with Ziegfeld since 1915.
It was assumed that Florenz Ziegfeld found the dancers who made his shows so famous, but it was his dance director, Ned Wayburn, and ballet dancer/choreographer, Pearl Eaton, who hired the Follies’ dancers. Wayburn had produced revues, musical comedies, and vaudeville acts and had taught Ann Pennington, Marilyn Miller, Fanny Brice, and Fred and Adele Astaire at his studios on West Forty-Fifth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.
The girls of the Follies made up an enormous ensemble, a hundred dancers with a class system all their own. There were twenty-five showgirls, many of whom were six feet or taller, who performed the famous Ziegfeld walk first introduced by Ned Wayburn in the Midnight Frolics at the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre: it was straight backed, shoulders squared, chest out; a step with a slide, arms outstretched, bodies draped in magnificent costumes, balancing elaborate large hats. The showgirls who were courted offstage were disdainful of the other dancers.
Florenz Ziegfeld, Follies and musical comedy producer, known as the “glorifier of the American girl,” with his wife, Billie Burke, New York, circa 1910.
The chorus dancers, approximately twenty-five of them and five feet three, performed in the production numbers; sixteen ballet dancers, five feet tall, performed the works of Ned Wayburn and Michel Fokine (the dancers thought Fokine flighty and wanted to quickly learn his choreography so “they could get rid of him”). Sixteen ponies, five feet to five five, tap-danced; ten girls were in musical numbers or comedy numbers with a specialty act, singing or dancing, and eight girls were understudies. Ruby was one of the ponies.
• • •
The 1922 production of the Follies opened on June 5. Ruby danced in a number, “Bring on the Girls,” that appeared late in the first act, following “Frolicking Gods,” a ballet composed and produced by Fokine in which a young man and woman in the mid-nineteenth century are mistakenly locked overnight in a Paris museum and watch spellbound as the marble statues of Greek gods on display come to life and dance. Will Rogers was on next and talked to the audience about his “Yankee philosophy.” Ruby’s number, “Bring on the Girls,” followed. Then “Sure-Fire Dancers of Today” built up to “The English Pony Ballet” with Ruby again dancing in the number that brought down the curtain on act 1.
Ruby stayed with the Follies through July, was out of the show in August and back in September, through Christmas and New Year’s of 1923 as it traveled to Boston, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit.
The sixteenth edition of the Follies cost Ziegfeld $265,000 to produce; Ziegfeld cut the cost of the top ticket from $5 to $4.
When the tour was over, Ruby returned to New York and to the Strand Roof.
• • •
Malcolm had worked his way to Panama and asked everyone he met if they knew his father. Frequently the answer would be yes; Byron Stevens, or Big Mike, as he was called, had worked on the canal, and when it opened in 1914, he’d stayed on. Most said they didn’t know where he was until Malcolm met two men who told him that Byron was dead, that they themselves had buried him.
Malcolm was two years older than Ruby, but he worried about her as if she were his child. He returned from Panama and made his way to the East Coast and to Brooklyn to tell Ruby about their father and went to see her at the Strand. He was in New York for a short time; he had signed up with the merchant marine and was going back out to sea as soon as he could. He told Ruby only that their father was dead, deciding it would be better for her not to know the rest, which he told his older sisters; that there had been an epidemic in Panama; that Byron had fallen ill from it; that Big Mike had been buried in the “dirt without a casket.” Malcolm’s dream of the Stevenses being together again as a family was over.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 4
