Get Happy (5 page)

When they thought of California, Frank and Ethel were thinking of the Los Angeles they had visited in July, a place of sandy beaches, Hollywood glamour and perpetual spring, where the sting of winter and the sullen weight of summer were equally unknown. What disappointment, then, they and their children must have experienced when their California turned out to be not that Camelot by the Pacific, but a dull and dusty, decidedly unglamorous town in the Mojave Desert—hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and windy all year round.

Frank had hoped to buy a theater in or near Los Angeles, and for several months the Gumms lived in West Hollywood while he searched. No theater could be found, however—none at a price he could afford, anyway—and Marc Rabwin persuaded him to take a look at Lancaster, a little desert community he had discovered on his medical rounds. About forty-five miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, a two-to two-and-a-half-hour drive across the San Gabriel Mountains, it not only had a theater but had the only one for miles around, the only one in the entire Antelope Valley. As luck had it, the owner was eager to be freed of his obligation, and at the end of May 1927 Frank became proprietor of a five-hundred-seat theater, so new—it had been open only since Christmas—that its upholstered leather seats were as smooth and shiny as the day they were unpacked.

Thus it was that the Gumms, who had come from a land of blue waters and green forests, found themselves surrounded, except where man had intervened, by an endless dun-colored expanse shaded only by sagebrush, greasewood and an occasional yucca tree. Movie cowboys galloped through Red Rock Canyon—the area was a favorite location for Hollywood westerns—and real cowboys still came into town for supplies and a good time, tying their horses to the hitching posts along Antelope Avenue, where Frank’s new theater was located.

Situated in what was called the high desert—it was 2,350 feet above sea level—Lancaster never got quite as hot as towns in the low desert to the south. Nor was it entirely barren. After a wet winter, flame-red poppies would suddenly burst forth in March or April—miles and miles of them, dancing in the wind and setting the hills ablaze with their fragrant fire. Given enough water, the Antelope Valley could grow almost anything, and well water had, in fact, transformed hundreds of acres of sunbaked earth, hard as pottery, into fertile and productive soil: fields of alfalfa, wheat and barley; orchards of pears, peaches, apples and apricots. A rapidly expanding Los Angeles had an insatiable appetite for such produce, and the twenties were boom years for Lancaster, whose population almost quadrupled, from four hundred in 1920 to more than fifteen hundred in 1930.

“It Pleases Us to Please You,” which had been the motto of the New Grand, became Frank’s slogan in Lancaster as well, and he worked hard to ingratiate himself with his new neighbors, lowering prices for children and installing the town’s first neon sign atop the entrance. Red and blue and fifteen feet high, it lit up that drab and colorless downtown like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

The Valley Theater’s biggest draw was something brighter than that flashy sign, however. It was Frank’s own family, which he wasted no time in introducing to the plainspoken people of the desert. He signed his lease on Saturday, May 21, and on May 22 and 23 he was onstage with Ethel and the girls. They were an instant hit. “Gumm Family Wins Lancaster Approval” read the headline in the next edition of the
Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette
. “Mr. and Mrs. Gumm are accomplished musicians and gave two very pleasing songs,” said the paper, “while the little
daughters completely won the hearts of the audience with their songs and dances.” Separately and together, the Gumms were soon performing throughout the Valley, at everything from Kiwanis Club meetings to teachers’ conventions; no major gathering could be called a success, it seemed, without a Gumm in attendance.

Rarely has a family had such an immediate impact on a town as the Gumms had on Lancaster. By the end of 1927, seven months after their arrival, they had become an indispensable part of life in the Valley. “One of the finest assets of the community” was how the
Ledger-Gazette
characterized Frank’s theater. Entertainment is not usually put on the list of civic resources, but a town without joy might as well be bankrupt. The Gumms had given Lancaster something it did not even know it was missing: they had put a smile on its weather-beaten face.

During their first year the Gumms lived on the outskirts of town, east of the railroad tracks. In May 1928 they relocated nearer the center, to a large house on Cedar Avenue, in what was considered one of the best parts of town; Bankers Row, it was sometimes called. Three years later they moved to the even larger house next door, on the southwest corner of Twelfth Street, directly across from the grammar school. Both houses were so central—and Lancaster was so small—that Frank had only to stand outside and whistle when he wanted his daughters. Wherever they were, they could hear him.

Like the land around them, the denizens of the desert were capable of pleasant surprises. Beneath their sometimes gruff exteriors they were naturally friendly, and it was not long before all five Gumms had settled in. Frank and Ethel joined what passed for the fast set, meaning those who played cards and gave parties, and their girls quickly made friends of their own. For the most part, however, Baby, or Babe as she was known in Lancaster, spent her time with just one friend, an athletic tomboy who was two years older but ideally matched in size and temperament. Ina Mary Ming was her name—Ming was Scotch, not Chinese—but nobody ever called her anything but Muggsey.

During summer vacation, the girls could be found every afternoon at the high school’s outdoor swimming pool, the only cool place in
town. Frank often visited for a few minutes, causing a scramble of upturned bottoms when he threw a handful of the theater’s pennies into the water. When they were not in the water, Babe and Muggsey were usually on their bikes, endlessly cruising those dusty streets or riding a mile out past Marble’s Dairy for a picnic lunch in the grudging shade of a sagebrush.

They also made frequent stops at the Jazz Candy Shop, a few doors from the Valley Theater. Babe always seemed to be eating—“she was forever with a candy bar in her hand,” recalled Muggsey’s brother Wilber—but never seemed to gain weight. Most people remembered her as downright skinny, with a tiny body connected to long, outsized arms and legs. As far as anyone in Lancaster could see, Babe had a conventional, normal childhood, unremarkable in every respect but one. That single exception made all the difference. She may have been an ordinary girl, but her voice had been touched by magic.

Patrons of the New Grand had been the first witnesses to that magic, small and embryonic as it then had been, and now the citizens of Lancaster saw it as well. Despite the fact that she was so much younger than her sisters, everyone knew that Babe was the chief attraction of the Valley Theater. “All three of them were talented,” said Henry Ivan Dorsett, the young man who distributed the theater’s handbills. “But little Frances was beginning to shine like a star. She had a voice that just boomed over the others. That tiny gal opened her mouth and, boy, her voice carried all over that theater.” So brightly did she shine and so far did that voice carry that her parents worried that the older girls would suffer from the comparison. “We didn’t want this to happen,” Frank told Dorsett. “Baby is getting all the attention.”

The girls performed at nine o’clock, before the second show. When they finished, they rushed to their father, who was waiting on a couch in the empty lobby. Mary Jane and Jimmie anxiously sought his approval. “Well, Daddy, did I do all right? Was I okay?” they would ask. Always careful to give equal praise, Frank hugged all three and invariably exclaimed: “Good show! It was great again!” But the only way he could have made them equal onstage was to have put a gag over Babe’s
mouth. Settling down on her father’s lap, Babe alone neither showed any anxiety nor inquired how she had done. “She knew that she had done well—and that was it,” said Dorsett. “Every word and every action seemed to say, ‘I know it was good. It had to be good because I did it.’”

Her mother, who played the piano for those performances, also knew that she was good. Ethel began to look beyond the Valley Theater, to Los Angeles and its schools of song and dance, its big variety houses and, ultimately, its movie studios. Most people in the Antelope Valley journeyed across the San Gabriel Mountains to Los Angeles perhaps two or three times a year. “Down Below,” they called it. But if those squat and ugly hills had been the High Sierras, they would not have deterred Ethel, who careered through the twists and turns of the Mint Canyon Highway with brake-burning speed. “The girls and I used to say that it was like a roller coaster,” said Dorothy Walsh, a next-door neighbor who sometimes went along for the ride. “We had to hold on to something in the backseat. But Ethel was fast in everything she did. She wanted action, action, action!”

Action was what Ethel got, and her shrewd dark eyes searched restlessly for an opening through which she could propel her daughters into show business. Never too proud or too shy, she pushed every door, hoping to find one unlocked. In August 1928, she finally succeeded. Learning that Los Angeles radio station KFI was planning to hold auditions for its Wednesday afternoon children’s show,
The Kiddies Hour
, she promptly presented her daughters to Big Brother Ken, the show’s host. That was the moment she had prepared them for, and they did so well that Ken gave them a regular spot. Once a week she drove them to the station, and every Wednesday afternoon at five the voices of the Gumm sisters could be heard all over Southern California.

Shortly after her arrival in California, Ethel had become friendly with another indefatigable Ethel, Ethel Meglin, who ran a well-known children’s dance school. Months later, Ethel Gumm enrolled her daughters in her friend’s school; early every Saturday morning, she would drive them to Hollywood for Saturday and Sunday classes, all four spending Saturday night at a nearby hotel. At four o’clock Sunday afternoon, she
would start up the Gumm Buick again and put them back on the roller coaster to Lancaster.