Hard Times (30 page)

Now I’ve got to find a number to do. I can’t do a toe dance there. I went down to Maybelle Shearer’s costume shop. She had a lot of old fans laying on the counter. I’d been wanting to do “White Birds Fly in the Moonlight” for a long time. I used to see these white herons come down on my grandfather’s farm. I’m harking back to Pavlova and her bird dance, “The Swan.” As a youngster, I tied wings on my shoulders. I’m glad I had the good taste even then to know this wasn’t it. Then I saw pictures of Isadora Duncan. I may have been a fine dancer, but I wasn’t ready to create. So, necessity being the mother of invention… .

I picked up a pair of these feathered fans that prima donnas used to hit the high note with. Any time any female puts a fan in her hand, she instantly becomes a
femme fatale
. A coquette. I’ve seen this happen down in the Ozarks at Baptist revival meetings. The lady in a poke bonnet and calico picks up a palmy fan and instantly becomes the Queen of Sheba. So I picked up the fan and looked in the mirror. I immediately tried my inscrutable smile and the whole thing. Suddenly I saw the fans did exactly what I wanted.

I ordered a beautiful pair from New York. The fans came C.O.D. and I couldn’t spring them, having no money whatsoever. Ollie, a girl I knew, who was running a floating crap game, said, “Don’t worry about a thing. Petey’s coming in from Canada with a load. He’ll be loaded.” When Petey
came back, the rear end of his Buick looked like a sieve. He’d been hijacked and no money to spring the fans. But he hocked his rings, and they sprung the fans for me.

I went to the club for my opening, but Frankie didn’t remember me: “Who the hell are you?” So I called Tony: “He won’t let me open.” So Tony, Petey and another boy came into Frankie: “It’d be a terrible thing if this place got a stink in it.” Frankie was horrified: “Wha-wha-wha-what?” So I rehearsed the whorehouse piano player, and Tony went over and clouted two of the Chez Paree’s
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best blue spotlights. So there I stood… . I intended to take my chiffon nightgown and make a classic little Grecian tunic out of it
à la
Isadora Duncan. I was saving that nightgown for an occasion, but it hadn’t come yet. I didn’t have a chance to get back to the hotel… . I was announced!

So I stood on the threshold of decision, in a pair of slippers and a pair of fans, period. Either I went on or Frankie would have every excuse to fire me. So I rationalized, I said, “All righty, who’s gonna know what’s behind these fans anyway?” And they didn’t. That night I proved the Rand is quicker than the eye.

No one was vaguely interested. They were waiting for the table singers. These were the folk who went around with a little push-around piano and sang sad songs while customers cried in their beer. It was weeks before anybody discovered I wasn’t wearing anything. It was economically sound, because I didn’t have any money to buy anything.

It’s now the spring of ’33. I’d met Charlie Weber, who was County Commissioner for forty years. Charlie had the beer concession at The Streets of Paris.
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Meanwhile, they had the Beaux Arts Ball at the Congress Hotel. There were bread lines, and people were starving. Yet, women in Chicago had the bad taste to have themselves photographed in gowns they were going to wear at the Ball. One was made of thousand-dollar bills. People went to Paris to get these gowns that cost thousands of dollars, wearing jewels, while people are starving in the streets, and people are marching in Washington and being shot at. It was such bad taste.

A friend was doing press work for me. We were socially conscious. She said, “Why don’t you have your picture taken in the costume you’re going to wear at the Beaux Arts Ball?” I didn’t have a costume. She said, “How about Lady Godiva?” She sent out a blurb to all the papers.

We had to hire a horse. So I had a picture taken as Lady Godiva. It was like saying: How dare you have a dress of thousand-dollar bills when people are hungry? The girl sponsoring the ball was a little upset because of all the publicity my pictures got. So I went to the Congress, and they
wouldn’t let the horse in because he didn’t have rubbers on his shoes. They put me and the horse on a table, and all the guys carried us in: Lady Godiva’s riding into the ballroom floor on a white table top. The Hearst papers came out the next day with the whole double column, front page. All righty.

Now I’m harassing Charlie Weber for that job at the World’s Fair, and he’s not coming up with it. Because The Streets of Paris was sponsored by the high and mighty of this town, the social set. It was all French entertainment. Mr. Weber just didn’t swing it big enough to get a job for me there. He suggested I crash the preview, the night before it opens. Mrs. Hearst was giving one of her famous Milk Fund dinners: “You’ll get your foot in the door… .”

I hired the horse again, but the gates of the Fair were closed. No wheeled vehicle could come in until the next day when Mrs. Roosevelt would be there and the ribbon, cut. I took the horse out of the truck: “O.K., no wheeled vehicle, it’s a horse.” But no animals were allowed. O.K. Back into the trailer, we go up to the Wrigley docks. The Streets of Paris had a yacht landing there. The clientele is so posh, huh.

So I paid $8 for the tickets to the boat. He said, “Who’s going with you?” I said, “Just a friend.” So I brought the horse on the boat, and the man demurred. I said, “What do you care if it’s a horse or a human?” At the yacht landing of The Streets of Paris, there was a little Frenchman who spoke no English. He figured that a broad that arrives in a boat with a horse is
supposed
to be there. So he opened the gate. The master of ceremonies, poor soul, figured: God, here’s a woman with a horse and nobody told me about it.

Up to this time, the party’d been pretty dull. They had two bands. It kind of takes people’s appetite away at a hundred dollars a plate. The fanfare sounded and the MC announced: Now, Lady Godiva will take her famous ride. Music played. Every photographer in the business, especially the Hearst ones, were there. Flashlights went off and the music played, and everybody was happy. They said: do it again. So I did it again. I had to get back to the show at the club.
⁷⁵

The next day I went down to The Streets of Paris to importune somebody for a job. I couldn’t get in. There was a riot. All the people were waiting to tell them when Sally Rand was going to appear. You see, the Fair had opened. To hell with the cutting of the ribbon. Every newspaper in America came up that morning with Lady Godiva opening the Fair. The place was jammed. When does she go on? Nobody knew. (Laughs.)

A poor soul was walking the floor: “Nobody’s gonna come in unless Sally Rand’s gonna be here.” I said, “I’m Sally Rand.” Whaaat? They hired me at $90 a week. I had to go home immediately and get the fans. They had no piano, just a xylophone. That’s how we got started.

They planned this Fair to bring business to Chicago, into the Loop. But you could have fired a cannon down State Street and hit nobody, because everybody was out at the Fair sleeping in their Fords. No business in the Loop. They figured they’d better get a Fair attraction down there. It wasn’t easy to bring the Streets of Flags or the Hall of Science. I was the most mobile. So they hired me in the Chicago Theater.

There was a big scandal on in City Hall. A reporter got a hold of this tax business that Mayor Kelly was stealing. Taking property for taxes and hadn’t even sent out tax notices. It hit the front pages. So City Hall had to do something to attract attention away from their own nefarious business. They got an old jim-dandy slogan: Clean Up The Loop for Fair Visitors.

Their first net brought in a little prostitute who wasn’t paying the right madam. And a guy selling rubber goods in a back alley. Everybody else was protected. They paid. Well, you’re not gonna get a headline that way. You gotta get a hold of somebody big.

So on my opening night, this enormous policewoman, a giantess, came crashing through the scrim curtain. I thought she was a sex maniac. She came screaming…. Here I am locked in my dressing room with a tiny little reporter trying to get a story. The police sirens are going, and the whole detective squad is out there. It’s the biggest thing since sliced bread. Finally, John Balaban
⁷⁶
had to get his firm of lawyers to get me to come out of my dressing room. Why … I’m arrested!

By this time, it’s all on the radio, and the lines are beginning to queue up. I went down to the police station, signed the necessary papers, came back, did my show. I was arrested again. Four times that day. Finally, a little policewoman said, “Honey, don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t make any difference if you were wrapped up in the back drop. They’d still arrest you.” I was trying to conform to whatever the hell they wanted, but nobody would say.

That was the point. They had to get headlines to distract away from the tax thing. That was the whole bag. The lines queued up for eleven solid weeks, four deep. I was doing seven shows a day at the Chicago Theater and seven shows a day at The Streets of Paris. I got my first $1,000 a week that week, and the first thing I bought with it was a tractor for my stepfather.

In June, ‘33, $1,000 a week was a lot of money. I did the Fair again in’34. On the eleventh of November, 1934, mass hysteria took over. They completely demolished the Century of Progress. They tore down flags,
they tore down street lights, they tore down the walls. It started out being souvenir hunters, but it became mass vandalism. Anybody who witnessed it had this terribly frightening feeling….

When we say “our society,” it has a smug kind of ring to it. We seem to be a people who can’t get out of our childhood. We don’t believe what we see, what we hear….

The rich still eat rich and wear mink coats, while people in Chicago literally freeze to death in the streets.
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When I first went to India and saw dead in the streets, I couldn’t eat. When I think of the garbage that goes into our garbage can, and here are people dying in the streets. And it’s happening in our country, too. And I’m wearing a mink coat. Yeah.

I truly believe we shall have another Depression. I think people will just go out and take what they need. I don’t think there will be any more people queueing up on bread lines waiting to be fed by charity, God damn it. I’m not condoning this, but we’ve let it happen. Take the television. It isn’t food they’re hungry for now, it’s a different kind of food. Not only the Negroes. All the poor.

The middle class look upon the deprived smugly: the poor we’ll have with us always. Oh yeah?

 

THE DEPRESSION meant the glorification of “Tony’s.” I had three leases, three blocks east of Sixth Avenue. I sold them for $104,000. In ‘29. So for me, ’29 was the biggest year I had in my American life. Glorification, money-wise and in friends, too. I had the greatest friends and from both continents, Europe and Hollywood.

 

 

They didn’t went broke—they went crazy. They were still rich. Americans never broke. It’s a question of figures. Oh yes, I had stock. Paper went into paper. City Bank stock when I bought it, $518. Went down to $35. The same stock, the same people. It was the figures that changed. To me, money was paper. My ego is meant all the moneys in the world. I am an egotist.

I am a capitalist myself, but I think money rules too many human beings. No, I am not enlightened, I’m just a capitalist. After all, this is a capitalist country, and I am entitled to live like a capitalist. But I know the propertied classes, the conservative element kept the Depression going. Roosevelt changed the country back into the United States today. We are still adventurous today. I would give credit not to F.D.R., but to Mrs. Roosevelt. She was the genius of that family. He was a vain man.

I thought I was going to be well protected, but I had at that time a lawyer—he did not understand the procedures of business. It was on the night of Repeal, the vestibule of Seventy-Seven
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was piled up with cases of liquor, which we were not supposed to have. The name Seventy-Seven brand. A retailer was not supposed to have a wholesaler’s license. Only one license. So I had a retail license, that was enough. But the Seventy-Seven Corporation could be many things. I always thought what I did was responsible. I should have had for myself a corporation. Today that’s why they are millionaires. Double standard of laws being made for the protection of money and not for the protection of human beings. Still today.

My business was better than ever in the Depression. Never changed my mode of life. I’m a very humble man. Many, many of my customers were in the paper. They were my friends: Wolfe, Fitzgerald, any of the big names. I never suffered economically because I never looked at economics. To have credit in an individual like Robert Benchley and to have credit in a bank—Benchley was better than a bank.

I give you an instance. I met him at Seventy-Seven to settle certain matters. In those days, they were the place you had to meet certain people that was of value to my business. We had a little contract, it was in four figures. He gave to me, he says, “Tony, if I die today, you can collect.” Just a piece of paper. That’s the type of customer. It was a kind of mutual sympathy.

 

 

Raided? No, never. A visitor was here. They wanted to know what business we had to be open with liquor. Well, I don’t do anything here, I’m drinking here. It was not by the authorities considered bad, unless you had bad liquor, unless you had dope, unless you had prostitution. My
place was a place where you could go and sit down and have liquor with a bottle on the table. I never measured it. They were my guests and they had their friends. Absolutely, there was no crime.