Underfoot In Show Business (8 page)

Joe came back to town, full of enthusiasm. The show, he assured us, was great. It had a few weak spots but they’d all be strengthened in Boston. Some wiseacre from an afternoon daily
had
snuck up from New York and had said bluntly the show was corn and wouldn’t last a week on Broadway. But, said Joe, Terry and Lawrence were not worried. They knew they had a hit.

Lois gave him the reporter’s message and Joe returned the call. He listened for a few minutes, thanked the reporter and hung up. Then he told us the news. According to the reporter, Winchell’s Rose had gone to New Haven and seen the show and had wired Winchell her report on it. The wire had read:

“NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE.”

Winchell had shown the wire to the backer who had promised a third of the financing; and as a result, the backer was pulling his money out of the show.

Joe called Terry and Lawrence in New Haven. They’d heard about the telegram. Joe didn’t mention the hacker and neither did they. How they expected to finance the Broadway opening we didn’t know, but when Joe left for Boston the show was still scheduled to open there the following Monday and in New York two weeks later. The show opened in Boston to fair notices—not nearly as good as those Boston had given some of our other flops and certainly not notices you could get last-minute financing on. So we still didn’t know how the show was to open in New York till Jack tossed us the news casually with our mail the next morning: Terry and Lawrence had sold the Guild Theatre and building to a radio network
. Away We Go
would open on March 31, as scheduled.

Joe phoned from Boston
with instructions about the opening-night press release to be sent to 10,000 Guild subscribers. He said that the whole second act had been thrown out, and that the company was working round the clock on a new second act. With a new second act, Joe felt, it would really be a great show.

For the next few days, Lois and I were busy addressing envelopes and grinding out 10,000 copies of the press release on the mimeograph machine to tell the world about the new American Folk Opera,
Away We Go
. We had about 8,000 mimeographed when Joe came back from Boston and broke the news to us that we’d have to throw them all away and start over. There had been a title change.

Nobody, it seemed, liked the title
Away We Go
. The composer had wanted to change it to
Yessirree
, but Joe was thankful to report he’d been talked out of it. The title finally agreed upon—thanks largely to Armina Marshall, Lawrence’s wife, who came from out that way—was
Oklahoma.

It sounds fine to you; you’re used to it. But do me a favor and imagine you’re working in a theatre and somebody tells you your new musical is to be called “New Jersey.” Or “Maine.” To us, “Oklahoma” remained the name of a state, even after we’d mimeographed 10,000 new releases and despite the fact that “Oklahoma” appeared three times on each one.

We had folded several hundred of them when the call came from Boston. Joe picked up the phone and we heard him say, “Yes, Terry,” and “All right, dear,” and then he hung up. And then he looked at us, in the dazed way people who worked at the Guild frequently looked at each other.

“They want,” he said in a faraway voice, “an exclamation point after ‘Oklahoma.’”

Which is how it happened that, far into the night, Lois and I, bundled in our winter coats, sat in the outer office putting 30,000 exclamation points on 10,000 press releases, while Joe, in the inner office, bundled in his overcoat, phoned all over town hunting down and waking up various printing firms and sign painters. We were bundled in our coats because the heat had been turned off by an economy-minded management now happily engaged in spending several thousand dollars to alter houseboards, playbills, ads, three-sheet posters and souvenir booklets, to put an exclamation point after “Oklahoma.”

We were not sold out for the opening, New York subscribers having dwindled to a handful after sixteen flops. Nor did we get any help from the weather. When I woke on the morning of March 31, with a cold, it was snowing.

By six that evening, the snow had turned to sleet and my cold included a cough. As I left the office to go home and climb into a drafty evening dress, Joe took pity on me.

“I don’t need you there, dear,” he said. “Don’t come unless you feel like it.”

I felt guilty about not going as I ate a quick dinner in a cafeteria. But by the time I’d fought my way home through the sleet guilt had given way to self-preservation. I undressed and crawled thankfully into bed. In bed, I reached for the wet newspaper I’d brought home and opened it to the theatre page. Our big opening-night ad leaped out at me: “
Oklahoma!
”

Slowly, surely, with that foggy bewilderment you were bound to feel sooner or later if you worked at the Theatre Guild long enough, I saw that Terry and Lawrence were right. About the exclamation point.

I did not allow myself to speculate on the insane possibility that they might also be right about such brainwaves as a clean, corn-fed musical with no legs and no jokes and with a score by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who’d never collaborated before; a full-blown ballet by an unknown young choreographer named Agnes de Mille; and a cast of unknowns, including Celeste Holm, the ingénue from
Papa Is All.

I switched off the lamp, thinking how typical it was of both this epic and the Guild that the notices would appear on the morning of April Fool’s Day. I coughed, pulled up the blankets and, as I drifted off to sleep, said a silent Good Luck to Alfred Drake, the juvenile from
Yesterday’s Magic,
who was at that moment strolling out onto the stage of the St. James Theatre, singing:

“
Oh, what a beautiful morning!”

WHEN A YOUNG WRITER SETS OUT for New York to crash the theatre, she is prepared to starve in a garret for a while. She has read the solemn pronouncement of a turn-of-the-century writer named Richard Harding Davis, that “a man who can afford a hall bedroom in New York City is better off than he would be if he owned 160 acres of prairie.” She has seen
La Bohéme
and wept as Rodolfo gallantly tossed his poems into the fire to warm his garret on Christmas Eve. And she has seen
Stage Door
—both Broadway and film versions—describing life at the Rehearsal Club, a female “residence club” where young actresses bolster each other’s morale in charming dormitory rooms. She has gathered from all of these testimonials that starving in a garret is a rich, purifying experience, and she wants it. And she gets it.

And of course,
after
she gets it, it dawns on her that when Richard Harding Davis wrote that a New York hall bedroom was better than 160 acres of prairie he was no longer living in a New York hall bedroom, having grown rich enough to afford a town house and nostalgia; she types her play huddled in blankets and sourly informs Rodolfo he should be damn glad he’s got a fireplace to throw his poems into; and she thinks that somebody in
Stage
Door might have mentioned that the Rehearsal Club has a special New York electrical system known as DC—direct current—which means that the day she moves in she’s going to blow her radio, her iron, and all the building’s fuses, and that while the fuses can be fixed, her radio and iron can’t, which in turn means that till next Christmas she’s going to have to do without a radio, press her skirts under the mattress, and iron her scarves, blouses and handkerchiefs by pasting them soaking wet to a mirror.

My first garret—not counting the Rehearsal Club, which took me in temporarily as a favor to Terry and kept me just long enough to ruin my appliances—was one of those hall bedrooms Richard Harding Davis was so crazy about. This was way back in my fellowship year. I rented a hall bedroom on the fifth floor of a brownstone walk-up rooming house on West Sixty-ninth Street. The upper West Side was lined with four-and five-story brownstone houses built in the 1880s as homes for the well-to-do. Fifty or sixty years later the houses were moldering, vermin-ridden rooming houses. Ours had a cavernous entrance hall and a great, gloomy, unlit staircase, the steps adorned with dirty shreds of ancient carpeting and creaking eerily all the way up—and if you passed a dead rat on the stairs you were just very thankful he was dead.

I used to creak my way up four flights each night, grope down the musty hall to the third room on the left, unlock the door, feel for the string attached to the twenty-five-watt bulb overhead and ask myself why I’d left Philadelphia.

My room looked out on a stone wall and I couldn’t see to comb my hair, let alone type my play, so I went out and bought a seventy-five-watt bulb and climbed on a chair and several of my best books to install it. But when I came home that night, the seventy-five-watter was gone and the twenty-five-watter was back. Forced to take the landlady’s hint about saving electricity, I told myself Shakespeare probably never used more than twenty-five candles at a time either.

The room had a chair, a dresser and a bed. Some of the rooms had closets, but mine, being a seven-dollar-a-week room, had nails driven into the wall for clothes.

I stood this hole for six weeks and moved out as a result of two stimulating experiences during the sixth week. The first happened on an unusually warm October night. There was no air in the room and I was lying awake, listening to the tubercular coughing of a man across the courtyard, when there was a knock on my door. Since I knew nobody in New York but the ten men and one woman in the seminar with me, none of whom was likely to knock on my door at 1 A.M., I decided it must be a telegram. I climbed out of bed, put on my bathrobe and opened the door. A large, beefy middle-aged man stood staring at me. He gazed from the curlers in my hair down past my blue-and-white-striped pajama-and-bathrobe set, to my bare feet.

“You Dolly?” he inquired.

“I’m afraid you have the wrong room number,” I said. He looked me over carefully again.

“You open for business?” he asked.

It took me a few seconds to understand him. Then I slammed the door, locked it, pushed the overstuffed chair in front of it, armed myself with a scissors and stood shaking, waiting for him to batter the door down. I knew the difference between rape and prostitution, but at one in the morning in that rooming-house room I wasn’t sure he did.

In a minute or two I heard his footsteps down the hall and a knock on another door. I heard the door open; then it closed and there was silence. I climbed back into bed and lay staring watchfully at the barricaded door till I fell asleep.

Next morning I woke up with hives. The hives got worse all week. On Saturday night I woke about 3 A.M. to find a wild thunderstorm in progress and the wind blowing the rain in on my bed. I got up, switched on the light and began to strip the wet top sheet off the bed. As I did so, two shiny round black objects scurried across the bottom sheet and they weren’t hives.

It took me half an hour to pack. I could have packed all I owned in fifteen minutes but it takes longer when you’re having hysterics. At 3:30 A.M. I hauled my luggage—a suitcase full of clothes, my Girl Scout camp duffel bag full of books, and my portable typewriter—down the four flights of stairs and out the front door. I dragged everything to the corner of Amsterdam Avenue. The rain had stopped and I stood there wondering what to do next, when a cruising cab saw me and pulled up. The driver leaned out and surveyed my tearstained face.

“Whatsamatta, honey?” he inquired.

“I had bedbugs,” I said. “I moved out.”

“Couldn’ya waited till morning?” he asked. “They wouldn’ hurt ya!”

He got out and put my luggage in the cab and when I climbed into the back seat, he said:

“Where to?”

“I don’t know,” I quavered. “I’ve only been in New York two months. I’d like to move out of this neighborhood if there’s any other neighborhood I can afford.”

He was careening down Amsterdam by then and without slowing down, much less stopping, he turned clear around to stare at me.

“Didn’ you know you were living in a red-light district?”

“No,” I said. “What is it?”

He turned back to his driving, shaking his head.

He turned east on a dingy West Side street and came to Central Park, shot through the park to Fifth Avenue and on over to Lexington and careened down Lexington.

I’d never been east of Fifth Avenue before. Even at four in the morning, staring bug-eyed out of the cab window, I could see that the driver had brought me into a noisy, dilapidated, hopeful New York I hadn’t known existed.

“I like it over here,” I thought. And over here I’ve stayed ever since.

“I’m takin’ you to a woman’s hotel,” he said. “It ain’t the Ritz but it’s respectable. You stay there till you know your way around. Hear?”

The hotel room cost eleven dollars a week, more than a third of my weekly thirty-dollar fellowship allowance. Rut if the room was as small and narrow as a convent cell it was also as clean. I crawled thankfully into bed and went to sleep.

When I surveyed the lobby the next morning I seemed to be the only guest in the hotel who was under sixty-five. This had one unfortunate consequence which I got used to. My dates never did, however.

A man from the seminar took me out one Saturday night and when he brought me home he walked me to the elevator, where we had to say good night since Men Were Not Allowed Above the Mezzanine. The elevator arrived, and as my escort leaned over to kiss me good night, two black-suited men stepped out of the elevator carrying a sack between them.

Old ladies were carried out of there at the rate of a sack a month—always late at night, and somehow I was always around to assist. Me and my date. The next morning there’d be a sign on the lobby bulletin board:

“
FOR SALE: Matched luggage.” Or “Caracul coat. Good condition.” I took advantage of one of those sales to throw out my camp duffel bag. I bought a wardrobe trunk for eight dollars, in case one of my plays ever went touring.

From then on, I alternated between small hotel rooms and larger rooming-house rooms that were somehow always on the top floor of a walk-up where you trudged up four double flights of stairs and, with your foot on the top step, remembered you were out of cigarettes. Both the hotel manager and the rooming-house landlady locked you out of your room if they caught you using a hot plate to save the price of a cafeteria breakfast.

All this time I cherished the dream of finding the ideal garret, a room large and light enough to work in and with what I described to myself as “hot plate privileges.” But a year after
Oklahoma!
opened, the need for such a room became acute. I left the Guild and took a part-time job which would give me more time for my playwriting (see next chapter), but this meant that I’d be working at home and earning less. In the narrow hotel room I was living in that season, I scanned the Furnished Rooms columns in
The Times
without finding anything suitable I could afford. And then, one bright morning, there it was:

“Lg. furn. rear. Share bath.

Kitch. priv. $40 monthly.”

Since I’d had to slog out to the nearest cafeteria for breakfast every morning for five years, rain, sleet or cold-in-the-head—which is a very good way to feel sorry for yourself, especially on a rainy Sunday—”kitchen privileges” was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I hurried around to the address given, on a quiet upper East Side street. The building was a narrow greystone, sandwiched in between a vegetable market and a handsome, discreetly anonymous building on the corner.

I found the super and asked about the furnished rear. He said it had already been rented, but a large furnished front had just come vacant for a few dollars more. It was on the top floor and we rode up in an undreamed-of elevator to look at it. It was a big, sunny room with a studio couch, an armchair, and a table big enough to accommodate my typewriter during the day and two dinner guests in the evening.

The super led me halfway down the hall to show me the bathroom and then on down to the far end of the hall and into a big old kitchen with an assortment of battered community pots and pans; and I knew I was home. He explained that I would share the bath and kitchen with the four other seventh-floor tenants, all of whom, he could assure me, were Ladies.

(That was a very prissy building. The second floor was for bachelors only; the third, fourth and fifth floors were for couples only; and way up on the top two floors—Ladies.)

I moved in on Saturday morning. I tore around to Woolworth’s and bought plates, cups and saucers, knives, forks and spoons, a frying pan and a coffee pot. On the way home, I bought coffee, bread, eggs and oranges for Sunday breakfast, which I was going to cook properly in a kitchen and eat in my bathrobe in my own room, like a lady.

I met the other four tenants in and around the bathroom on Saturday afternoon. Somebody had tacked to the bathroom door a Schedule for Bathroom Hours for each tenant, but natural processes being what they are, it was hard to stick to.

Like me, the other tenants all classified as the Middle-Class Poor. Down at the end of the hall in the room next to the kitchen was Maude E. Bird. We called her Birdie behind her back, or ran it all together and called her Maudiebird, and both names suited her.

Maudiebird was a small, frail, wispy old lady with a thin, prim voice in which she indicated that she had known better days and that this sort of community living was not what she was used to. In her prime, she had been governess to the children of the rich and had lived, we gathered, only in mansions and villas. You’d think such wealthy employers would have given her some sort of pension, but if any of them had, it obviously wasn’t enough because Maudiebird earned a few dollars as companion to a sick woman a couple of days a week and hired out at thirty-five cents an hour as chaperone to small children who went skating in Central Park.

She made her own hats from hat frames bought at Woolworth’s and covered with fabric from Third Avenue remnant stores. I used to watch her set out gamely on cold winter Saturday afternoons in her worn black coat and homemade hat, prepared to freeze on a park bench watching children ice-skate for three hours—to earn one dollar.

Next along the hall from Birdie was Florrie, a middle-aged widow living on a pension. Florrie spent her days reading the
Daily News
and
True Romances
but her chief passion was the radio, which she turned on when she got up and turned off when she went to bed. Her mornings were spent with radio talk shows: Breakfast with the Fitzgeralds, then Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, and Mary Margaret McBride for lunch. A succession of afternoon soap operas carried her up to Lowell Thomas and the six o’clock news, then the Kraft Music Hall, the Lux Radio Theatre and so to bed.

Across the hall from me was Mamselle, a spinster who taught French at a fashionable Park Avenue girls’ school. Mamselle had an inflammable temper and the blackest dyed hair I ever saw. She used to get up at five in the morning one Sunday a month to have the bathroom to herself while she dyed it.