by Ed Ifkovic
With that he spun around wildly, pushed against Corey’s sleeve. Corey reached out to steady him.
“Well,” Corey began, then gave a benedictory wave as he shuffled Dougie out the door.
“Lord,” Neysa whispered, “that didn’t go as I expected.”
“What did you expect?” I asked.
Neysa clicked her tongue. “Fun and games.”
“Maybe Dougie is right after all.” I sat back. “Idle games, cruel.”
Noel sat back down and looked unhappy. “Somehow Dougie comes off as the class dunce.”
Buzzy nodded in agreement, taking a sip of wine, though he ignored Neysa’s frown. Matter-of-factly, he reached across the table, grasped Neysa’s fork from her plate, and speared a slice of ham. He held it in the air as though it was a campfire trophy from a hunt, and he munched on the edges like a feverish squirrel. A smear of red wine glistened his lips. “Do you still find that whiny brat fascinating, Noel?”
Noel sighed deeply. “A pouting child, yes.” He sat back. “I like him. There’s something about him that’s—simple. And I mean no condescension by that. Fascinating.”
“A simple man,” I spoke up, “though born to incredible wealth, will never have a horse in any race being run.”
Neysa squirmed. “Edna, that makes no sense.”
“Of course it does.”
“I like him, too,” Neysa declared. Then, with a mischievous glint in her eye, she said, “A game. Give me one word that best describes our Dougie. Noel can no longer use—‘fascinating.’ Or ‘simple.’”
Noel bit his lip. In an exaggerated British drawl, purposely effete, he announced, “Yes, ‘fascinating’ suggests some complexity of spirit. Children lack that.”
“What word, then?” I probed.
“Dumb with wonder.”
“That’s three,” I said.
“I can count, Edna. But—confused. Maybe. Or—love-besotted.”
“Me now.” Neysa raised her glass into the air. “Charming.” A pause. “Still.”
“Dangerous,” I offered.
“Why?” Neysa wondered.
“Everything about him suggests disaster.”
“Lord, Edna,” Noel protested. “The prophetess of doom.”
Buzzy was anxious to say something. “Boorish.”
“I have the last word,” Noel said with a smile on his face. “Lost.”
Chapter Four
Noel phoned the next afternoon to warn me to expect an apology from Dougie. “He’s on a tour of stammered regrets and can-you-ever-forgive-me performances. He acknowledges his boorish behavior at Neysa’s.”
Weary, I waited a moment. “It strikes me that it’s habit-forming with him, Noel. Perhaps even part of his failed character.”
Noel scoffed. “Edna, darling.” I could hear the deep intake of cigarette smoke, the chuckle in his words. “You’re so hard on people who try to make amends.”
I’d spent the morning in my Spartan workroom, attempting a short story I’d promised Ladies’ Home Journal. Nothing clicked—dark, unpleasant images of Dougie and Belinda overwhelmed me. Taking a break, sipping hot tea that Rebecca placed at my elbow, I listened as Noel lamented a world that was too severe on that infantile-though-striking young man.
“Noel, I’m not sure such gestures are genuine much of the time.”
“He”—Noel paused a bit, reflecting—“I think he’s not used to being out of control. I mean, a financial wizard in a time of financial chaos. Wall Street wonder drifting in the choppy sea of love.”
“Forgive me, Noel. Your language is a little over the top, no?”
He laughed. “I’ve never been one for understatement.” He clicked his tongue. “But suddenly this love for Belinda…”
I interrupted. “This schoolboy crush…” I emphasized the word.
He challenged me. “Whatever it is, dear Edna, doesn’t matter. When your emotions get twisted into knots, common sense leaves town on the first bus.”
“So you accepted his heartfelt apology.”
“Lord, and I thought we Brits were cynical.”
“You Brits are rank sentimentalists masquerading as world-weary souls.” I stared at my typewriter and the blank sheet on the roller.
“That may be, but he offered tickets.”
My fingers pecked at the keys—hieroglyphics appeared on the sheet. “To another staging of a fit of pique?”
“Tonight.” I heard him striking a match, a deep intake of cigarette smoke, followed by a sigh. “To a show we’ve all avoided, despite the rave reviews—and Dougie’s rhapsodic praise. Tommy’s Temptations at the New Beacon Theater. To see the lovely Belinda dance and sing and feign coyness.”
I shut my eyes. “And you said yes to this?”
“Actually, I told him you would be delighted to go, and reluctantly I would be your escort.”
I smiled. “So you made up my mind?” Idly, I played with the space bar until the machine pinged.
“Dangerous territory for anyone, true?”
“Often lethal. I’m afraid.”
“Third row center seats, dear Edna. A premium.”
I glanced around my room. My wastebasket was filled with crumpled sheets. A few lines of a story, abandoned. Inky smudges on my fingertips. “Noel, everything comes with a price.”
“Now who’s being cynical.”
I pulled the sheet from the typewriter, crumpled it, tossed it into the trash.
Noel laughed into the phone. “Edna, I can hear you battling with your typewriter. Do you ever not work?”
“Not since I was nineteen and a cub reporter in Appleton. Wisconsin.”
“Edna, you know you cherish my company. You know you can’t live without me at your side—or at least somewhere in the neighborhood. Once I travel to forsaken Cleveland—I hear it’s dreadful in winter, snowdrifts higher than the Rockies, rivers of buckling ice—you may never lay eyes on me again. So, yes, darling, a call from Dougie—be nice to him—and then a call from me when I’m downstairs waiting for you in a taxi.”
I shook my head. “You knew I’d say yes?”
“What I knew is that I’d have to reach you before Dougie phoned.”
“Have I become that predictable?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
The line went dead.
***
I sat snugly between Noel and Dougie third row center at the New Beacon on Forty-third Street. I wasn’t happy. On my left, Noel kept squirming in his seat, nodding at folks he claimed he knew, feigning surprise when a playgoer rudely slipped a program over reluctant heads and begged for his autograph. Each time he shuffled, his right shoulder banged into my arm and I twitched. No better was Dougie Maddox, one moment bubbly as a kindergarten mother watching her child sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the next moment anxious, shoulders slumped, his teeth gnawing at a corner of a fingernail.
“Where’s Neysa?” I asked. “How did she escape this royal fiat?”
Dougie didn’t answer, his gaze suddenly intent on a party of nattily dressed businessmen filling seats to our right.
“She begged off,” Noel answered. “Tickets to the Mite Club benefit. Handsome Jack is back in town. You’ve been there?”
I shook my head. “No.”
The Mite Club, a popular spot, devoted one night a week to benefit the staggering numbers of unemployed and homeless of Manhattan, thousands strong, five dollars to get in, the money buying food and clothing for struggling families.
“We should be there,” Noel commented.
“Isn’t our being here enough of a charitable contribution?”
“Play nice, Edna.”
Dougie nudged me, his voice frantic. “Do you see who’s here?” He pointed to a pot-bellied man in a pinstriped suit, a gold-buttoned vest, watch
fob, even a gold-tipped walking stick. A gaggle of men circled him.
I shook my head. “Should I know them?”
“The tall one with the walrus moustache—Wallace Benton.”
I widened my eyes. “Of course.”
Of course—the man whose florid face was splattered on the front pages of the Times, the New York World, the Herald, even the splashy subway tabloids. A ubiquitous grainy photograph that reminded those stumbling through the windy Manhattan streets looking for work that not everyone lost a fortune in the Crash. Wallace Benton had taken New York by storm just before that awful October day in 1929, splashing his cash around. But hadn’t everyone been doing the same thing? The pink-cheeked elevator boy who lifted me to my nineteenth-floor oasis insisted that we discuss the stock market. “Gasoline Alley” in the funnies talked of bullish markets. The waitress at Rutley’s Restaurant on Forty-first bragged about her stock market winnings.
Benton declared war on cautious city planners. In competition with the now-open—though largely unrented—Empire State Building, whose height challenged Walter Chrysler’s own Art Deco confection, Benton began building the skyscraper to dwarf them all. Rising on the East Side like an unwanted child sticking his head into the clouds, the building was the talk of the town. His famous and ridiculed line—“Somebody gotta spend money in this dead town”—drew the spotlight on him when a Pathé newsreel captured his nails-on-glass Midwestern drawl that was equal parts smugness and wonder. In those dark theaters the haunted moviegoers who paid a nickel to escape their dead-end lives, and maybe win a cheap rose-tinted dinner plate on Dish Night if they were lucky—those souls nodded numbly. Yes, money to burn.
Like William Chrysler who ostentatiously bought his mistress a 134-karat diamond—“a skating rink,” said the tabloids—or CBS’s William Paley who flaunted his own ravishing mistress, the vampish Louise Brooks, Benton believed money needed beauty at its side, usually in a penthouse atop one of the new skyscrapers going up around town. You saw him in the tabloids, a Jean Harlow blonde attached to his money belt.
So here he sat, a large man with a neat barber trim, a man who repeatedly checked the gold pocket watch he held too close to his eyes. As I watched, hypnotized by his bluster and bulk, he said something to a man on his right, a remark that caused the young man to guffaw, too long and too hearty. A ripple effect because the other three men laughed loudly. Underlings, I thought, a servile claque.
Dougie wasn’t happy, squirming in his seat.
“What?” I asked him.
He debated what to tell me. Finally, he hissed in my ear, “A dreadful man. He actually sent a note backstage to Belinda. He invited her to dinner at the King Cole Room at the St. Regis.”
I whispered back, “I assume she said no.”
He waited a heartbeat. “She said she did.”
That remark bothered me because Dougie’s face tightened, a scowl on his lips—the good-looking face, that of a spoiled child denied a treat.
“Hardly surprising,” I began. “Belinda is the shiny Broadway light of the moment.”
Noel, irritated, tapped me on the shoulder, as the curtain rose.
Tommy’s Temptations was a musical revue that mimicked a run of current Broadway escapist shows. It stole from the notorious George White’s Scandals, long-running and dizzyingly successful, in which barely clad beauties pranced about the stage provocatively while singing tunes that skirted the limits of censorship and common decency. But it also stole from Irving Berlin and Moss Hart’s thunderous Face the Music, the satirical romp that skewered the rich in a time of Depression and gave the world songs to hum as they counted the pennies in their rainy-day jars.
Tommy Stuyvesant had not only stolen Belinda Ross from Cyrus Meerdom’s short-lived revue the day after it closed, he’d also appropriated bits and pieces of other shows: a skit that mocked a snobbish society dame in ermine and cultured pearls trying to edge her way into a snake-like breadline outside the Grand Central Station depot, a song-and-dance number in blackface that echoed Al Jolson, high-stepping dancers in skimpy pink tutus, a sentimental Irish ditty that mourned the death of a sacrificing mother in Galway. I fully expected Rex the Wonder Horse to make an appearance. Breezy stage patter that was dangerously close to Noel’s own satirical blasts. At one point Noel leaned into my neck and said, too loudly: “In the lovely gay years before the Crash, Mrs. Cartier never asked for cash.” Behind us a playgoer applauded.
I whispered to Noel, who was yawning so dramatically and vocally he drew stares, “I don’t understand.” Yes, delightful, if humdrum inanity, but—rave reviews?
Dougie heard me, and simmered. “Just you wait.” I stared into his face. His cheeks were flushed. “Just wait, Edna.”
I waited. And then I understood the eager crowds that forked over their coins to sit in this dark theater. With perfect timing—an audience squirming, clutching watches—the curtain rose on Belinda Ross, the spotlight lingering on her curvaceous figure, dressed in glittery pink-spangled tights and an outrageous sequined boa. She danced a couple of energetic steps, recited a comic monologue, but then, approaching stage apron, simply stopped, one focused light on her face, and she began to sing. A spirited ditty about blighted love, a lyric that was mostly ribald and jesting, but also little-girl coy. My mind shot to Fanny Brice with a surprising dollop of Sophie Tucker as a chaser.
The audience sat up, a sudden stillness in the crowd as folks leaned forward in their seats. Then rounds of applause.
I marveled, frankly. Here was serendipitous metamorphosis. In Noel’s living room, tipsy, gliding across the floor on Dougie’s possessive arm, she struck me as one more ambitious showgirl, a modicum of talent perhaps, cookie-cutter good looks. One of the sleek blondes populating Manhattan, enchanting, expensive. All silk stockings, and no runs. But onstage her sweet melodic voice carried across the rows of seats. Belinda Ross was—mesmerizing. I hesitate to use that word but no other will do. The stage lights danced around her face, highlighted her wide mouth and high cheekbones. Stunning, another word that came to mind—breathtaking. With the stage makeup punctuating those dark eyes, that alabaster creamy skin, that long swan-like neck—a beauty. Lillian Russell with a dash of Jean Harlow. On my right, Dougie gasped, and I thought he’d weep.
Even Noel, fidgeting in his seat, got quiet, leaning forward, his face transfixed on the young performer.
The alluring magic of theater, I told myself—the primal, hypnotic power of performance beyond the proscenium arch that sometimes—with the coming together of heavenly forces—transforms the prosaic into wonder. That was Belinda Ross, something I never expected. The song ended, a languid bow and flashing eyes, and she disappeared into the wings.
“Lord,” Noel sputtered, “this explains everything.”
I nodded. “Talented,” I said, a little breathless.
He shook his head. “More than that, Edna dear. A little rough at the edges, yes, new to this…adulation, but she is—I don’t know—Eleanor Duse, maybe, Lily Langtry.” An infectious smile on his face.
“You’re foaming at the mouth, Noel.”
He laughed out loud. “Look.”
Wallace Benton, surrounded by his lackeys, struggled to his feet, his fat hands smacking together like a circus seal, sustained applause that covered the room, his head awash in a big grin.
Dougie fretted. “Goddamn it.”
“But she’s superb,” I told him. “I didn’t…”
“I don’t care.”
Dougie’s only concern, I realized, was Belinda’s devotion to him. He refused to share her with anyone—especially a fat cat builder who vaguely resembled a pompous William Howard Taft. A look of sickly possession covered Dougie’s face. Yes, a man thrilled, not because of her sweet voice or her stage presence, but because she’d be on his arm dancing and hobnobbing late that night at Ciro’s. Or dancing to Paul Whitman at the Palais Royal.
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Dougie slipped away during intermission, so I stood in the lobby with Noel, chatting with theatergoers we knew. Aleck Woollcott, currently feuding with me, grunted as he walked by, swathed in silk scarf and red-satin-lined opera cape, an incongruous beret on his head, but he swiveled back to lean into Noel’s shoulder, whispering, “Noel, the company you keep.” An exaggerated shrug as he waddled away. At his side Helen Hayes tsked and tossed an apologetic glance at me, offering me a slight smile. We were old friends. Aleck grabbed her elbow and pushed through the crowd, loudly greeting Deems Taylor. “Music to my ears, that girl,” he hummed to the music critic of the World.
“Louisa May Woollcott,” I told Noel.
“Not nice, Edna,” Noel said, but then he smiled at me. “But nicety is overrated, wouldn’t you say?”
I drew my tongue into the corner of my mouth. “It’s not my jibe, dear Noel. Dottie Parker owns the rights to it. And, oddly, Aleck found it—delightful.”
“But I thought all your lines were original.”
“Are yours?”
“Look over there,” Noel pointed.
I found myself staring at a solitary man dressed in a sharp-cut seersucker suit a dismal shade of mottled gray, a pretentious tangerine ascot circling his neck, and a slicked-back haircut that gleamed under the overhead lights as though he were shellacked.
“A stage-door Johnny?” I wondered.
Noel shook his head. “Jackson Roswell.” At my blank stare he went on. “Belinda’s brother. The owner of the theater where she performed before stardust settled on her pretty shoulders. I had the misfortune to have lunch with him and Belinda and Dougie one afternoon. A let’s-introduce-the-famous-Britisher-to-the-family occasion. Also unfortunate is that Dougie slipped him my phone number so he could discuss the future of Broadway. He’s called once or twice about my writing some skits for his own revue. Lord, Edna, a bore. I ignore him.”
“He’s dressed like a drummer from Oshkosh,” I said. “Out on the town in slick new duds. Babbitt from Keokuk. What’s his story?”
The man was talking to no one, though his eyes surveyed the crowd, an anxious look on his face.
