“Stage-door johnnies?”
“You’ll get used to it,” she said. “We just smile, thank them and walk on. You ready, Olive?”
“You bet I’m ready,” I said.
We pushed open the back door and there they were, just as she’d promised.
“Miss, miss, you were stunning tonight, can I take you out to celebrate?” one called.
“I heard you’re new in town,” another said. “My friend told me to look you up, show you around.”
“Ignore them,” Ruthie warned. “They say that to everyone.”
Some johnnies were looking for specific girls, bouquets in one hand, jewelry boxes in another, while other gents were there to take out whoever would say yes. But it didn’t matter, it was all such fun.
“Let me treat you, miss… miss…”
“Hey, Miss Spicy,” said one johnny as he pushed through the others toward Ruthie and me. “Come on,” he said, leaning right into me, smooth as pomade. “Let me take you away from all these boys.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a slim navy box and gave me just a peek. I couldn’t help staring at the string of pearls inside.
“Stick with me, doll,” Ruthie said as she took my arm in hers. “We won’t have any shortage of champagne and lobster once we get there, and there’ll be plenty of fellas showing you lots of ice as the days go by, just wait. Why don’t you take it all in before you say yes, see how it all works?”
The guy wasn’t my type anyway, not that I really knew what my type would be. I hadn’t had an appetite for romance in the last year, but he was a sharp dresser, and my, those pearls, were they for me or anyone who’d take him up on his offer? I wondered. I glanced back athim and smiled. “We’re going to Casa Blanca on Fifty-sixth Street,” I said excitedly. “Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.”
“Oh, boy,” Ruthie said, tugging me along to Broadway. “You have a lot to learn. Come on, or we’ll never get out of here.”
Just five months earlier when I first set foot in New York City, I’d looked up at the bright lights on Broadway with the celebrated names of headliners and the towering billboards advertising all the things they assumed I needed to be prettier, thinner, more elegant, more capable. But now, walking up Broadway, made up like a doll, with a buzzing high from the first performance, I felt as though the lights were just for me, that the man smoking his cigarette above the Great White Way was tipping his hat in my direction. Well done, Olive, he was saying, you do know how to shine.
I felt like skipping. I didn’t even feel the blisters on my toes or the tightness in my neck from the twenty-pound, foot-and-a-half-high headdress I’d worn along with the rest of the girls in the last act. All I could feel was the giddy sensation rising up in me, a mix of pride and excitement at what would come next.
When we arrived at the club, there was a line out the door, but Ruthie walked us right up to the front, introduced me to the doorman and led us through the revolving door into a grand and ornate gilt lobby.
Ruthie pointed across the expanse to a commanding staircase. “Loraine, Marylin and the other principals will wait until we’ve all arrived before they make their grand entrance down those stairs,” she said. “But don’t worry, we’ll have our chance one day.”
The dining room must have seated at least five hundred, and the walls were covered in green velvet with gold trim everywhere. Trumpets and saxophones and the roar of chatter and laughter filled my head. I couldn’t hear a thing Ruthie was saying, but she was already laughing, as if some laughing gas were filling the atmosphere and we were all drinking it in. The dance floor up front was small in comparison with the room and crowded to no end, but the people—they were the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, all under one roof. And everyone had a drink in hand, clearly not giving two hoots for the Volstead Act. It was festive and gay and here I was, right in the middle of it.
Ruthie caught sight of some girls from the show and waved them over. They swarmed toward us, enveloping me into their circle. Someone grabbed my hand, another put her arm around my waist. Ruthie handed me a glass of champagne out of nowhere, and I felt that I was being carried en masse by these beautiful girls. We approached the teeming dance floor and it welcomed us into its heaving, spirited arms, opening up for us, then closing in around us. I had arrived exactly where I wanted to be.
I was one of the Ziegfeld girls.
CHAPTER SIX
Edward, the Prince of Wales, had been to see our show on opening night. The stage manager came to the dressing room right before the curtain went up and told us of Prince Charming’s attendance. It sent some of the girls to pieces, but it didn’t rattle me. In the paper the next day he said he’d never laughed harder in all his life than when he heard Eddie Cantor, with all of his peculiar inflections and slurs, sing “The Star’s Double,” about an actor who called for his double when he was about to be slugged by an irate husband who’d caught him with his wife. A handful of girls were in a huff that the prince hadn’t mentioned their performance. Rumor had it that one of the principals, Irene, had allowed him to take her to dinner, but she wouldn’t admit or deny it, which led me to believe it was all horsefeathers.
The Prince of Wales could sit in the box and watch me perform any day of the week, and it would just make me sing sweeter and dance lighter on my toes, but it was my father’s attendance a fewnights after opening that had me sweating in the dressing room ten minutes to call time.
Though they didn’t say it outright, my parents had been mildly impressed that I’d been cast in a Ziegfeld show, or it could have just been relief that it was more reputable than the show at Olympia Theatre. My mother had insisted that they come and see it right away, I think as a way to assuage my father’s concerns, but it didn’t help; in fact, it made everything worse.
The performance opened with “The Follies Salad,” a number featuring several girls from the chorus and me dressed as ingredients for the dish, while Eddie played chef and sang about his culinary creation. We all knew, of course, that it was a metaphor for the show: Eddie was Ziegfeld, the creator, and we chorus girls were the essential ingredients for the revue. At first I’d been over the moon when I was cast as “Spicy” while some of the others got stuck with “Chicken” or “Lettuce,” but then, when I knew my father was in the audience, the thought of walking onstage in a skimpy red lace costume while Eddie sang that the spice adds “just a little tingle” and that it’s “nottoonaughty,” well, it had me biting my nails off with worry. It was obvious that I had seduction written all over me. I cursed myself in the minutes before the music started. Why couldn’t I have been cast as “Oil” for the orchestra with a melody that makes the show run smoothly, or “Salt” for the proper seasoning, or “Paprika” to add a dash of “class and smartness.” Hell, I’d even be “Chicken”—“young and tender,” he sang—anything was better than “Spicy” with my father sitting up front.
Up until that evening, the audience had just been a mass of people that formed one body; I didn’t think of them as individuals.They applauded, they stood, they applauded some more. I’d never caught the eye of any one person, and I told myself this had to be the same as any other night. But as soon as I set foot on that stage, I saw the sheen of my father’s parted hair. Lower right, orchestra. The grey plaid suit and burgundy tie he’d worn to work that day. Arms crossed tightly across his chest. My mother to his left, my brothers to his right. I repeatedly looked away, out to the blur of the audience, but my eyes kept going back to him, that shine of his hair transfixing me. It made me nervous as hell.
As the number was coming to an end and all of us girls, the ingredients, sashayed across the stage and gathered around Eddie, some drunken fool in the audience began calling out obscenities and was quickly escorted out of the theater to the street. We did exactly as we’d been told to do in rehearsals in a situation like this: we carried on with grace. But I could feel the weight of disapproval from my father’s seat and it stirred in me a heavy mix of emotions. Worried that he’d think the whole thing was too provocative, I felt my stomach twist at the thought of how he’d react. But I clung to a faith that he’d see this performance was more than that, hopeful he’d see that most people in the audience were wealthy, respectable gentlemen taking their wives out for an elegant show of beauty and charm. In the next instant, I felt angry, knowing all too well that it was too much to ask of my father to think that way, my defenses up already at the thought of his bristly response at the end of the night.
Later, as part of the chorus, I sang “Shaking the Blues Away,” in front of a beautifully designed backdrop of a cotton field and a white wooden house with real Spanish moss hanging from a cut drop, and I had a short solo in the sweet “Maybe It’s You” number wearing arose-trimmed hoop skirt and a floppy hat. I thought I’d given the previous night’s performance my very best, but this night I sang with everything I had. When I walked slowly down the enormous staircase in a gorgeous full-length gown with fifty other women while Franklyn Bauer sang “The Rainbow of Girls,” I walked with all the grace and elegance I could muster; I was going to impress my father if my life depended on it. But despite all of that, I knew that damned salad number was the act he would latch on to.
After the show, I took off as much of my stage makeup as I could and met my parents and brothers in the front of the theater—I didn’t want them to see the shenanigans going on at the stage door with the johnnies begging for our company.
My mother hugged me. “Darling, you were wonderful, just wonderful,” she said more enthusiastically than I would have expected from her. “You were a star, I’m so proud of you,” she whispered into my ear. She had forgiven me for all that had happened, I thought with relief. My time in Rockville with Aunt May was all in the past now. Maybe we could move beyond it after all.
