All That Glitters Page 6

  She was looking hard at me, I could tell. The long eyelashes went bat bat bat. “Haven’t we met someplace?”

  No, I lied, we hadn’t met. “I’d remember,” I said blithely. She studied me some more and I could tell I was bothering her. I was sure I wouldn’t get the job.

  “Say, Slug, how’s about catchin’ yourself a beer,” she told the gorilla by the window. Sluggo took the hint and sauntered into the other room. I wondered what Beata would do to him, or vice versa. Babe sat studying me some more.

  “Care for a cigarette?” I asked, taking out my pack.

  “I don’t smoke. It hurts muh voice. I’d prefer if you didn’t, either.”

  I pocketed the cigarettes. I was sure I’d shot myself down.

  “We got this show,” she said. “You ever heard of it? Sort of a little comedy. Some jokes. This guy wants to bring it in next fall. Nice little part for a young man. ’Bout your height. I like tall men, makes me look small, vulnerable, you know?”

  “Windy City?” I said, trying to sound savoir-fairish.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “‘The Windy City Blues’? I love that Windy City where the men are tall and brown in that oh-so-toddlin’ town’?”

  “Oh. Oh yeah. Heh heh.” That was her song, but my knowing a line didn’t win me any Brownie points so far as I could see. Finally I blurted out that actually she was right, we had met before. Oh? And where was that? On a train, I said. Which train? Super Chief. “Oh? Wonderful train. I take it all the time. I don’t like to fly,” she said. “This fortuneteller said I’d be killed in a plane crash. I always listen to my fortunetellers—you do that, too, you’ll live longer. How’d you say we met?” She drilled me with a look.

  Oh, I said weakly, it was just sort of in passing.

  She touched her hair. “Oh, en passant, so to speak.”

  “I told you then I wanted to be an actor.”

  “No kidding. Small world, isn’t it?” She was staring harder and I felt myself getting hotter. Goddamn air conditioning. Did she remember or didn’t she? I still couldn’t tell. “Yeah,” she said, looking me over again, “you’re tall all right. Dark, too.”

  She sort of rocked around in the chair before posing her next question. “Just how experienced are you?”

  I said I was in a show, that I’d done stock.

  “Stock, huh? Who’d you work with?”

  I mentioned two or three fading names—Ruth Chatterton, Kay Francis, Flossie Reed.

  “She must be ninety, Flossie. This dame who’s your agent. You and she an item?”

  I explained that Beata’s and my relationship was strictly professional.

  “Good. Keep it that way. She says you’re with Tallulah. But Tallulah’s closing. Could you get out of Tallulah and come with me?”

  Not too eager, but: “Sure. I think so. Yes. Very much. I’d like to work with you.”

  She vibrated a little more. “Umm. The feelin’s myutchul, I assure ya.” She touched the platinum scallops in several places.

  When she asked if I’d ever met a movie star before, I said I hadn’t, except Ozzie Nelson, whom I’d met with my Boy Scout patrol when we were taken to the theatre stage door—“in Hartford?” I ventured carefully. “The State Theatre?”

  “Oh yeah. I played the State. You’re too young to’ve seen me.”

  “I saw you.”

  “No kiddin’.” She seemed to come alive slightly. “You really saw me? Betcha don’t remember what I was wearin’.”

  I described her outfit as accurately as I could remember. She inspected her nails and rearranged several bracelets on her arm. “Hartfid, huh? Good town, Hartfid. They had a parade fuh me.”

  I agreed Hartford was okay.

  “Good place to be from, huh?” She laughed at her little joke.

  “Did you enjoy the parade?” I dared ask.

  “Yeah, why not? I rode with the Mayor. He was a screw. Kept puttin’ his hand on muh knee.”

  “I know.” She shot me a look. “I was there.”

  “You were where?”

  “On the running board.”

  “What were you doin’ on the runnin’ board?”

  “I wanted to see you. Close up.”

  “Didja? How’d I look?”

  “Great. You looked swell.” There was a beat while she looked at me and I looked at her. I wanted to look away, but could not do it. “I pinched you,” I confessed.

  “Get off my porch! How old?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Jeeze, you kids start early.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Lotsa bozos pinch me. It’s muh type. How’m I s’posed to remember some kid with merit badges? Get serious. Time’s up, so long. Tell her we’ll call you.”

  “But don’t call us,” I said, the old show-biz kiss-off.

  She summoned Sluggo, who quickly showed himself. “This number’s leavin’. Show him the door.” I waited for her to put out her hand, which she did not do.

  “Well? What happened?” Beata was steaming because she’d been excluded; an agent should be allowed to stay with the client.

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her I’d blown it with the Hartford Pinch. “She’ll call us,” was all I said.

  Beata owned some street verbiage and used it. “What’d she do? Unzip you in there? Give you some head?”

  “Jesus, Beata, can it.”

  I found out later that Sluggo had overheard her crude remark and it went straight back to Babe. Babe didn’t like it, not at all. And they never called about the show. I read in Variety that another guy—tall, dark—had the part. I thought, Screw it. It was two more months of Tallulah showing her crotch.

  But as things turned out, I did get a summer in the country—of sorts. The guy Babe hired came down with mononucleosis and took to his bed, and I got this hurry-up call from Max saying I was to go right over to the producers’ office and sign a contract, then I was to go down to a Second Avenue rehearsal hall.

  “Should I put on my blue suit?” I cracked; Beata used her vocabulary again.

  As I mentioned, the interview in her hotel suite wasn’t the second time I’d met Babe Austrian but the third. By now I’d begun to count. If she hadn’t remembered the first time, I wondered if she’d remember the second, the time on the Super Chief, heading west at the end of the war. I was a navy signalman and had been granted liberty. While I was visiting home the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it seemed the war in the Pacific would quickly end. But before this could happen I found myself stuck in a coach seat all the way from Chicago to the Coast. It promised to be a tedious and uncomfortable trip until I chose to visit the club car.

  So there I am all duded up in my best pressed whites downing my rye-and-ginger-ale. I’m feeling hot and sharp and all man, and who do I see sitting across the aisle from me reading Look, with these itty-bitty shoes and a silver fox chubby over the shoulders, but this movie blonde. I counted back the years; only seven had passed, but though I was now grown up, she hadn’t changed at all. As I sat debating whether it was appropriate to refresh her memory, she kept flipping the Look pages and absently tugging the hem of her skirt over her kneecaps. Every time she bent forward she showed her cleavage and I knew she knew I was looking at her.

  She got up, dropped the magazine in her chair, and ankled on out of there without a look left or right, up or down. That evening, after dinner, I went back to the club car. It was around ten-thirty and there were few drinkers on tap. But there she was, this time reading Photoplay. The car was swaying and I sort of let it throw me into a seat, not right next to her but one chair away.

  “Yeah,” she says to me, “take a load off.” Then she asked me my name and I told her. Then I said, “I guess I don’t have to ask yours.”

  Heh heh. Oh, really? Who did I think she was? Her name, she said, was Gladys Lillie, “but just call me ‘Glad.’” She came from Battle “Crick” and was the Popped Rice heiress—“you know, exploded
out of cannons?” Where was I going? What was my ship? What did I do? Like that. She could have been Axis Sally, but she wasn’t. Neither was she “Gladys Lillie.” But I called her “Glad” anyway. I told her my life story, she told me hers, part, anyway, but longer than mine. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. She had real nylons on, or maybe it was her underwear that made slicky sounds, and she was wearing the same perfume as seven years before. Tigress, she said, and made a noise like one. Grrrrr… Every time she moved her legs she moved her purse, this giant-sized pocketbook, and every time it moved it clinked. I was wondering what was in it that made it look so weighty and made such a noise. By now we were somewhere west of North Platte and she and I were about the only passengers in the car. Finally the porter came with his little round tray and said it was last call. We had a nightcap. Pretty soon they began shutting off the lights and giving us looks. The next time she moved her purse she unclasped the flap and I took a gander inside. It was filled with bottles, those miniatures they sell on planes and trains—Smirnoff and Vat 69 and Johnnie Walker Red Label. She said it was always well when traveling to be prepared.

  “Like a Boy Scout?” I ventured.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” she replied pokerfaced.

  Ha ha. She was a card. Then she suggested that since they were turning out the lights on us, I might care to come back to her stateroom and have another nightcap. Maybe I’d like to change from rye to brandy, it made a nice nightcap. Would I? I did.

  The next day found me at breakfast with a minister from Indianapolis. Talk about the Reverend Davidson in Rain. I got a heavy morals lecture with lots of hellfire and brimstone thrown in; penises were designed by the Almighty for purposes of procreating and urinating only, nothing else! I asked him if he was acquainted with “Old Lady Five-Fingers,” but this geezer was a real coconut.

  Shortly after I returned to my seat the conductor arrived with a note.

  “From Miss Lillie,” he said almost in a whisper.

  I read,

  Dear Charlie, it was nice meeting you as we did. Didn’t we laugh a lot? You’re very smart, very. You’ll go places some day. I won’t be able to see you again this trip since I’m having a migraine, they usually last a couple of days. I wish you well and don’t forget, the club car’s air-conditioned. Yours truly, Gladys Lillie.

  And I didn’t even get an autograph; she hadn’t signed her real name. But I wasn’t despondent for long, because when we went through the next tank town, there were people lined up on the station platform and along the tracks with placards reading “War Ended!!!” “Japs Surrender!!!” “It’s All Over!!!”

  Boy, I thought, was it all over.

  And now, seven years later, I was about to go into rehearsal with her. No one could blame me for my trepidation, because even though the play was a so-called pre-Broadway tryout, everyone concerned knew going in that the thing was a stinker.

  Babe was a tartar to work with. Being the acknowledged star, she loftily appropriated anything good out of anybody else’s lines, if she thought she could get a laugh with it. At one point I devised what I believed to be a catchy piece of business with a bunch of flowers, and when the director chuckled at it, she whirled on him and said, “Don’t you think it might be funnier if I smelled the bouquet?” Our director, a notorious alkie, didn’t care if she or Garbo smelled the roses, so Babe kept my bit. By the end of the day a distinct froideur had arisen between us.

  We rehearsed to little avail, but there was no help for it, open we must, and did. This was up in Connecticut, and everyone from the city came up to see this “pre-Broadway tryout.” It was Turkey City all the way; they were gobbling “disaster” everywhere. Babe got out her trusty pencil and began cutting, rearranging, and rewriting. Her jokes were corny, but she got more laughs than before. In the second act she came on in this monster fur coat—it was monkey fur, looked more like a gorilla suit, she’d bought it out of a Paris fashion show—and when she appeared in it, she brought down the house. Strictly a sight gag. She entered stage right, stopped, got her laugh, then crossed to left and lit a cigarette, then shed the coat, handed it to me, and said to put King Kong in the hall closet “and don’t forget to feed him.” That kind of stuff. They lapped it up.

  The young actress who played the other half of the love interest was cute and pert and we began sleeping together right off. Her name was Jenny Burton and she simply moved into my room at the inn where we were staying. But when Babe got word of this arrangement she didn’t like it and made no bones about it. I stood my ground. She could steal my flower-smelling onstage, but offstage my life was my own. “Besides,” I told her prophetically, “we plan to get married.”

  “What’re you talkin’? You just met her.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?”

  Her fuse began to sputter. “Never mind the hell about love at first sight or anything else, just you don’t let anything get in the papers you’re shacked up with this piece-goods.”

  Thereafter our relationship grew more and more icily polite. By now I wasn’t so sure but that she remembered the Super Chief and didn’t want to let on, which was okay with me, since I didn’t want Jenny to get wind of my brief relationship with the star.

  It was during that initial week’s run that I met Frank Adonis for the first time. He’d come up to Westport to catch Babe’s show and he stuck his head in my dressing room while I was making up. He gave me this maybe/maybe-not look of appraisal, then told me I was going places. “Maybe I’ll catch you in Hollywood, kiddo.” I didn’t want him to catch me in Hollywood, I wanted him to catch me now—and sign me and make me a goddamn star! But he shot me with his finger and was gone, whistling a tune. I caught him passing my window and hollered that he’d been whistling in my dressing room and we were in for nothing but bad luck.

  I wasn’t wrong, either. Our concerted efforts would never see the bright lights of Broadway. Yet as we continued our tour, every management insisted we fulfill our obligations, and because of Babe’s name we played to packed houses at every performance. Even the blue-haired matinee ladies tittered at the risqué lines she had interpolated into the script, and some of her ad libs brought down the house. We never, any of us, lost track of the fact that we were on a stage with the famous Babe Austrian.

  When we traveled, the rest of the cast, myself included, went by bus or train, while Babe rode alone in her car, always with the trusty Sluggo at the wheel and with her little Chihuahua, Tiny, in her lap. Everywhere we played, it was a scandal among the theatre apprentices that the star was doing it with her chauffeur, which managed to add a certain frisson to what was otherwise a boring, in fact embarrassing, tour. Only once or twice did she allow her reserve to break down. It was just hello, good morning, good night, have a nice day off, and that was about it. Everyone called her “Miss Austrian,” including myself, who’d known her more intimately. She never mingled, either with the cast or the backstage crews, never gave a party, never bought anyone a token good-luck present. Never let her hair down—except once.

  Passing her dressing-room door one night, I glanced in and saw her at her makeup table, staring into the mirror at herself. Her robe was partly open and those major boobs were hanging out. Without looking at me she extended a hand to halt me; then, covering herself, she asked me to come in. “Sit down,” she said, “take a load off. You know, you’re pretty funny out there. I ought to squash you like a bug, but I let you have your head. You know why? There’s only one star in a show, but the star’s got to have support. The better the support, the better the star; the better you are, the better I am, get it?”

  I said I got it, and soon we were getting along better. She wasn’t so bad, when you got to know her. Problems—she had problems, like all those ladies, wanting love and acting neurotic as hell. She needed someone around to talk to, to make her laugh, tell her she was terrific. I did all three. It wasn’t so hard; she was terrific, after her fashion. She started writing this play about an o
lder star and a young man—said we’d take it to Broadway, her and me. I suggested she write in a part for Jenny. That was the end of that.

  One night, in the middle of a scene, a very Lubitschy one—Babe and I were supposed to be dancing and drinking champagne—she dropped her glass and swooned outright in my arms. I stood there staring blankly at the audience with this dead weight hanging on me, while the stupefied stage manager merely goggled. I hauled Babe to the couch, where she lay softly moaning and clutching her abdomen, then I hustled offstage and rang down the curtain.

  She was suffering an appendicitis attack and was in need of immediate attention. She couldn’t walk, but lay there sweating on the sofa until a hastily summoned ambulance carted her off to the local hospital. The rest of the cast went back onstage; the wardrobe girl read Babe’s role, tendering one of the more interesting performances of a femme fatale known to the American theatre.

  We were scheduled to end the tour over in the Poconos, but due to Babe’s unexpected surgery, we found ourselves back in New York before the end of August. I started pounding the pavements, occasionally with Jenny Burton at my side. This was in the days of “making rounds,” going to each casting office and putting in your bid for a part, making sure they had your résumé and pictures. By the time September was out, Babe Austrian and summer stock were things of the dim past; Jenny had moved in with me on West Thirteenth Street; we were going to be the new Lunt and Fontanne. Before long things began to break for me. Max Hollywood landed me a part, I was seen by an important casting person, was sent to be interviewed by an even more important Hollywood figure, and pretty soon I was on my way west. Jenny went, too, not just for the ride: we were Mr. and Mrs. Lunt by then.

  If my troubles seemed to be ending, Babe’s seemed to be just beginning—medically, anyway. We read that she was going into Harkness Pavilion for tests. The papers hinted that she was having the whole thing tucked, but I got it straight from our director that she was having female problems and that her ovaries were being offed. It was hysterectomy time for Babe Austrian.