Hard Times (29 page)

The poor Arnold Fletchers had just been inveigled by Insull to buy one of those expensive boxes. We sat with the Fletchers in their box. They couldn’t be happy about what was happening on the stock market that day. They couldn’t be happy about their lives. Moreover, they couldn’t be happy about the music on the stage. It was so awful. The whole performance was so terrible. The staging was dreadful. The scenery was Insull taste from beginning to end. And that curtain! That over-designed, over-decorated gilt thing. I can only remember it as a sheer nightmare.
⁶⁹

They all just hated Insull, the people in the boxes. At that moment, they hated him more than ever. And then they found themselves slithering down the toboggan. With the Insull crash, when his empire folded.

My husband’s losses were really quite shattering. We felt they were perilous days. By 1926, Fred had built up the Corporation.
⁷⁰
It had begun with a lumber company which had belonged to his father. The men who had been presidents of the merged companies were older than he and had more experience. They could hardly wait to get rid of him as soon as the Corporation was formed. In fear of this happening, he borrowed money in order to gain the fifty-one percent control.

When the Crash came, the banks withdrew their support, stock held on margin was called in. Fred, unable to meet this in the falling market, lost everything he had. He was completely wiped out. Fred always laughingly said, “The only million dollars in my life I ever saw were those I lost.”

I felt the fever period was unreal. And the Depression was so real that
it
became unreal. There was a horror about it, with people jumping out of windows.

I remember the first time motoring under the Michigan Avenue Bridge, under those streets, where the
Tribune
is, and seeing not hundreds, but thousands of men, rolled up in their overcoats, just on the pavement.

I remember being so horrified, so overwhelmed. The only other thing that had as great an impact on me happened at the beginning of the First World War. It was 1914, the day of the Battle of Metz. My brother and I sat as children in the coupé of the train, leaving Germany. We could hear the big guns and the cannons. They started to load the wounded onto our train. They pulled in a colonel. They went into war those days with bright suits. This one happened to have one of the most beautiful verdant green, with scarlet stripes going down his trousers. The man had a chest wound and the blood kept dripping, just slowly drip-drip-drip-drip on the floor.

The men, lying under the bridge, was the same kind of first experience of something, of realizing that life was not the way you had thought it. Until you actually see someone dying, you can’t know what war is like. Now I have an inkling of what the Depression was for some people, although I never slept under the bridge.

 

 

I don’t know. I’ve been told it can never happen again. However, there is one thing that does trouble me. I went to Germany in ‘34 and ’38. I saw what Nazism did. I was troubled by Americans saying: “But this could never happen with us. The Germans are a strange people with whom we have nothing in common—beasts.” I knew this wasn’t true. This kind of thing can happen any place, given certain circumstances… .

There was a terrible depression in Germany. Along comes a man who tells them they’re a great nation, all they have to do is believe in themselves and follow him. He promised them the sun, the moon and the stars. The German intellectuals and comedians made fun of him and the Nazis in their night clubs. I heard one in the Platzl in Munich. The audience loved it, adored it. But it didn’t stop Nazism. They won over the lower middle classes… .

The Depression overwhelmed us, yes. It was terrible. But we had hope: This is not going to kill us. I don’t think people can say that nowadays. If a Depression came now, I’d be afraid, terribly afraid… .

A Chicago balladeer. Founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music
.

 

I WAS A SOLOIST at the Fourth Presbyterian Church from ‘33 to ’40. The parishioners were very well-to-do people, whose families had come from New England to Chicago many years ago. I was just beginning to wake up to the fact that there was such a thing as politics and influences in our society. I hadn’t really been conscious of a sort of class distinction between the supporters of Alf Landon and the supporters of Roosevelt.

I remember very clearly the Sunday morning before the election of ’36. When I got up to sing my solo part at the services, I looked out over the congregation, about nine hundred or a thousand, and it was one sea of yellow. Everybody was decorated with large yellow Landon sunflower buttons. Just the impact of the thing suddenly made me realize there is such a thing as class distinction in America.

The pillar of another church, where I had previously sung, was a very wealthy Chicago industrialist. Great deference was paid to him. At one evening service, he gave a sermon. This was about 1933, in the depths of the Depression, and there was a lot of political protest around. He got up and said that he had searched the Bible from cover to cover and he could not find a single word or sentence or phrase to indicate that Jesus was against capitalism. (Laughs.)

In 1937, ’38, I was working with an octet at the Old Heidelberg.
⁷¹
We were infuriated because the waiters would stand around reading the
Völkischer Beobachter,
the official Nazi paper. It had been a traditional
practice, when a customer had a birthday, they would send up a bottle of Rhine wine—the sommelier would bring up a tray and proceed to pour a glass for every member of the octet. I would say, “We’re very happy to salute Mrs. So-and-So,” or whoever it was. Then we’d hold up our glasses and sing
“Soll Er Lieber.”

A couple of us said: Ah, the hell with drinking this Rhine wine. So we announced to the headwaiter: no more Rhine wine. The management was furious. We said, “If you don’t like it, we’ll quit.” So we finally settled on the idea that they’d serve us Cuba Libras. From then on, we saluted birthday guests with Cuba Libras. (Laughs.)

I still had my job at the church. So I’d do the first show in my costume: a red jacket, white pants and long Prussian boots. Of course, we had those little pepperbox hats. Heidelberg cadets. I’d sneak in the back way of the Fourth Presbyterian, put a robe over my Heidelberg outfit and sing sacred songs. (Laughs.)

In the Depression, the business of being a singer had lots of hardships. We were all hurting for dough. During one job, a once-a-week radio broadcast, our compensation was a room in the Allerton Hotel. The idea being: if we showed enough initiative, we’d rent the room and thus have compensation for our singing. I was never able to rent my room. The hotel was only about thirty percent occupied, so they weren’t giving anything away.

We had one sponsor of a Sunday morning radio program, who owned cemetery lots. We sang old-fashioned hymns and talked about the memorial park. We were paid fifteen bucks apiece. He persuaded us to make recordings, so he could save money. Somehow the old codger talked us into taking, not money, but cemetery lots. I still have seven of them. (Laughs.)

In 1939 I was a chorus member of WGN’s “Theater of the Air.” I saw and heard Colonel McCormick every Saturday night. There was a ten-minute segment where he’d expound on the defense of Detroit against the Canadians or how he first observed artillery from a balloon at the Battle of Chantigny.

One time I remember he was sitting on the aisle. Next to him was his wife, next to her was his Great Dane, and next to the Great Dane was (laughs) Governor Dwight Green. When the Colonel began his speech, the dog started to snuffle loudly. The Colonel’s wife reached over into the Governor’s breast pocket, took out his handkerchief and held it over the dog’s muzzle. After the talk, she just reached over, put it back in the Governor’s pocket. (Laughs.)

In 1940, I was fired by the Fourth Presbyterian Church. I had become active, singing for various causes. I hadn’t gotten too much static from this because they were worlds apart. The farm equipment workers were on strike against the McCormick Works. First time since the Haymarket affair. I sang at the union hall. During the evening a film was shown by a
local finance company: how strikers could borrow money, during the emergency, and repay it, with interest.

I had heard the minister of the church had been visited by a woman, complaining of my activity. I received a letter from the chairman of the music committee, a member of an old Chicago family, saying my services were no longer required.

The funny thing about it is this man was head of the finance company whose film was shown. So my conclusion was: It’s all right to loan money to strikers at interest, but don’t sing for ’em for nothing. (Laughs.)

Before my last service, the minister took me up to his study and prayed for me. He asked the Lord to give me guidance, to straighten me out. After the prayer, he strongly suggested I leave town and change my name.

 

A close friendship developed with Mary Pickford. “Later when Doug Fairbanks achieved a more sophisticated marriage with Lady Ashley, Mary turned to religious contemplation. She wrote a book,
Why Not Try God?
Subsequently, she married Buddy Rogers.”

 

THESE BEAUTIFUL YACHTS that cost a half million dollars were sitting around with barnacles on them. These are the people who had jumped out of windows. Who’s gonna buy a yacht? A man came up to me and said, “Hey, any of these yachts for sale?” I said, “Are you kiddin’? They’re all for sale.” This guy was a bootlegger. So I sold half-million-dollar yachts to bootleggers. For five or ten thousand dollars. And took my six percent commission on them. Beautiful.

They used to have their own fast boats, to go beyond the three-mile limit, or eight-mile limit or whatever it was, to pick up their booze. By now, all the federal agents knew their boats. So they took these yachts and decorated them with pretty girls in bathing suits, like going out for a little sail. Load up and come back.

The interiors of those boats were done in rosewood, gold handles on the toilets and all that jazz, great oil painting in the salons. They’re now jammed up with loads and loads of wet alcohol. The interiors of them were gutted and ruined.

Every hotel in the Loop was in 77-B. This was being in bankruptcy to Uncle Sam—legitimately. I couldn’t pay my bill. I didn’t have any food or whiskey or anything. I went to the management and said, “I never ran out on a hotel bill in my life. I don’t have a job, but I’ll get one. Meanwhile, I can’t pay what I owe you.” They said, “Don’t worry. Nobody’s in the hotel anyway.”

One of the boys in the show, Tony, said, “Don’t worry. All my uncles are stagehands and the rest of ’em are bootleggers. Pick out a night club you want to work, we’ll work.” I looked at these freaks, with these little postage-stamp stages… .

Up to this time, the most sexy thing I’d ever done is Scheherazade in the ballet. I thought a girl who went on the stage without stockings was a hussy. (Laughs.) I got a job, $75 a week, only because Tony’s uncles were delivering alky to Frankie, the owner.