The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  So Mr. Mayer, small, rotund, wearing his owl-like glasses, sat in the dark, dwarfed by the lot he’d built with his ambition and determination, ready to be astonished. He loved beauty in part because he found himself so ugly, a hideous caricature of a Jew like the ones scrawled on the pamphlets I’d soon see at the Bund rally. Mayer might be small and ugly—like all those squat, ugly men who sat in judgment of me at my Desert Inn audition—but he reigned like a king. By the end of the next decade, he’d be forced out of the studio he’d built, which would teeter like a B movie monster without him and then fall to the ground in pieces, but right now he could pick up a telephone and reach the President or the Pope. He could speak a few words and my mother would play the lead in one of MGM’s next films—or the role of Kitty in Waterloo Bridge. But none of that happened. Because Mr. Mayer watched the test and shrugged. Eh.

  Robert Taylor later said his role as Colonel Roy Cronin was his all-time favorite role and Waterloo Bridge his favorite picture. Of course, he didn’t act in this picture with my mother but with Virginia Field, who I have to say was really not that much better in the role of Kitty than Dina Wells would have been.

  22

  Las Vegas

  1950

  At first I thought it might just be my imagination that Nate Stein was making a habit of slipping into the back of the Painted Desert Room at the DI at just the second I came on for the floor show, that it might be his shadow I saw as I led the conga line of girls in our classic Step Pause Step Pause with which we crossed from stage left to stage right, a shade that vanished when I myself vanished into the wings. At least, I thought I was imagining this until the other girls began to rib me about it, laughing, “Who’s your daddy, Esme? Have some pity on the poor man. Blow him a kiss.”

  For, obviously, despite Arden’s decision to codify our appearances—twelve of us in the same flat Pan-Cake, same brushstroke of rouge, same double sets of false eyelashes, same blond wigs, strands of pearls from our headdresses swinging over those wigs while the metal apparatus of the headdress anchored great poufs of feathers, thick plumes of feathers rising sky-high, a bevy of identically beautiful girls—Nate managed to locate me, even when I wasn’t working the line as Arden’s lead girl, even when I stood with my sisters on the risers or the portable staircases or swung with them on the ropes and trapezes, all tools Arden employed to maximize the small footprint of our stage, confecting engaging numbers like the ones Buzz had once upon a time designed for my mother and her confederates. It was as if my mother and her fellows had been transplanted to the desert, deposited not onto a soundstage but into a shoebox. Yet, unlike my mother, I was not one of the blurred many, not to Nate.

  Yes, he came to look at me, standing at the back of the showroom night after night, the red-lit end of his cigarette the only other evidence of his desire, all height and Roman nose and power. Nate Stein, back of the house, Donn would hiss, Nate’s appearance setting off a little racket backstage. But whatever it was Nate wanted from me he wasn’t ready yet to take. Because he had a wife, a fourth wife. And a son. And both of them had come to the Desert Inn from Detroit for a visit.

  When I’d arrived at the hotel for rehearsal this afternoon, I saw them both for the first time. For far too long I’d lingered at the back of the lobby to peer through the window at the utterly amazing corporeality of them—they did actually exist!—his wife lying on a chaise, his little boy in the shallow end of the figure-eight pool with Nate, Nate throwing his son in the air and catching him, embracing him. The boy, from what I could see, seemed to be enjoying himself somewhat less than his father. The look on his face was one of uncertain terror, either from the fright of the water play or from the bodily intimacy with this strange man, which was what his father had become for him, a stranger, during these months Nate and his wife had been living apart while Nate was launching the DI.

  Nate’s body unnerved me, too. I had never seen him without his clothes on—without a golf shirt or a tie and a jacket—and he had a thick brown back that spread out like a fan at his shoulders and a big chest and he was not soft, not at all, maybe from all the golf he played. Rising waist-high from the water like that he looked naked. I always thought my father was a prude for not wanting me to amble about the Flamingo poolside in my swimsuit, That’s what everyone wears at a pool, Dad, but now I understood. It was just pretense that a bathing outfit wasn’t provocative. Today, this whole sunny display of almost-nude men and women, in repose or sliding in and out of the blue water, seemed to me erotic. And even odder to me still was the fact that watching a father playing with his young child could be arousing. I hadn’t known that it could be. But it was. I could feel that it was. Everything about the scene was arousing me. It was ridiculous.

  I turned from the window and resolved right then and there not to look at Nate or his son or wife again during their entire visit here, no matter how long it stretched, a resolution I kept for about six hours.

  Because when I walked through the casino after my second show and into the Sky Room, I found Nate and his wife there sitting at a table together, her short dark hair a mass of curls, her neck wrapped up in three strands of a pearl necklace like nothing I’d ever owned, her elbows on the table as she leaned in, bare shouldered. A big white corsage had been pinned to her dress, an enormous peony Nate must have given her. So he liked brunettes. Like my mother. A minus for me.

  The Sky Room, like everything else here at the DI, was another of Nate’s inspirations. The lounge lunged upward into the heavens like a boxy glass spaceship, three enormous walls of windows showcasing the desert nightscape. The twinkling lights in the ceiling blended with the starlit world outside, all of it twinkling. And down below us, the pulsating Dancing Waters show by the pool leapt orange and red, rising and falling to organ music we couldn’t hear. Nate often came here to sit at a table and look out at that desert in the dim interior light, a Mr. Mayer looking over his backlots, though Nate’s acres had yet to be filled with façades of distant, exotic places.

  I sat at the bar. I always ate dinner here, late, 2:00 a.m., after my last show, too tired to drag myself home yet to my discouraged father, his fingers stained an insoluble black from the paper money and coins and chips he had handled all night at the Flamingo credit cage. That would have to change, but I didn’t yet have the power by which to levitate him from that cashier’s stool and draw him through those metal bars. I ordered. I waited. Nate would, on occasion, join me at my barstool, laughing as I devoured my usual steak dinner, the steak big and bloody. Nate would tell me, “Slow down, Esme. No one here is taking your plate away,” and then he told the bartender that anything I ate, no matter how much, no matter how many godforsaken ounces of cow I ordered, was on the house, making me laugh, too, but the bartender took him seriously, saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. Stein.”

  But Nate wasn’t coming over to my barstool tonight, and tonight I ate slowly because I was afraid I might choke, my throat closed up with panicked jealousy, talking with the bartender who came to visit me down at my end of the bar between customers, the two of us chatting about who had been promoted, who had gotten fired, who had won big at the tables tonight and whose fault that was. A lot happened in Vegas every single day, up, down, in, out. And because I’d been in Vegas for so long, it seemed I knew almost everyone we talked about, everyone who worked the Strip—the waiters and bartenders and valets, the trumpet players and dancers and comics, everyone from the girls who worked the shops to the celebrity regulars who played the stages, any one of whom would be a more appropriate partner for me than Nate Stein.

  And all the while I talked and ate, I refused to allow myself to look in the direction of Nate’s table, where he sat. With his wife. In fact, I made a screen of my hair to shutter him from view to ensure this. But I’d gathered more than enough impressions of him and of her just by walking into the Sky Room. I saw that Nate’s wife looked more like a woman than a girl, though she couldn’t have been much older than thirty. And it wasn’t just her age
that made her more suitable for Nate’s delectation. All this dancing and performing had me looking like something hauled in from a circus. In fact, I’d begun to remind myself of the blond acrobat I’d spied once at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus my parents took me to see in Los Angeles in early September 1939.

  Around the side of the big-top tent, through rigging I wasn’t supposed to peek through but which demarcated the backstage area, I’d watched a most extraordinary man take a long drink of water. He wore a white leotard and tights, his hands powdered by chalk, his hair a platinum color I’d seen only on women, his skin an artificial orange-brown, and though all of this was amazing enough, the most remarkable thing about him was his muscles—the enormous bulk of his thighs and shoulders and upper arms, his giant-sized hands—the parts of his body he hung by and swung by and used to capture the men and women who flew to him midair. He had been lathed and tooled toward this specific purpose and to see him in the wings, just standing there in his canvas shoes not entirely unlike my own ballet slippers, was like watching a gigolo stroll through a toy store.

  He turned and looked at me, mid-drink, took in both my gawk and awe, and he smiled, even half shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t help it if he were superhuman, so extraordinary as to be practically extraterrestrial. It was with considerable effort that I had forced myself to close my mouth, still looking back even as my mother dragged me toward our destination, the ladies’ room, if the portable bathroom at a big top can be called that. And now I looked exactly like a female version of that man, my body shaved to my own particular purposes as a performer, just as waxed and polished and not of this world. I wasn’t sure how I would look in pearls and peonies.

  Then suddenly and all at once, the gamblers guzzling up liquor in the Sky Room let out a startling cheer. I thought someone had scored at the Lady Luck bar, where every hour a big roulette wheel spun and a stream of silver coins poured from the hands of the nude neon Lady Luck. But when I looked around, I saw the room wasn’t cheering at that, but at the sight through the big plate glass Sky Room windows of an atomic bomb going off, one of the nighttime tests of the great nuclear secret.

  Most of the tests were run at dawn, but it was the nighttime tests that were the most spectacular, the great red mushroom cloud rising up like hell on a stick at the horizon, like the stem of a champagne glass, globe of the glass inverted, pouring down not champagne, but the hazards of destruction. Because a hundred miles north of the Strip that seemed the center of everything, there was another center of everything, the Nevada test site, complete with its own little suburb not entirely dissimilar to Andy Hardy Town, this one ominously named Survival City, with its own dusty streets and little two-bedroom houses and picket fences and kitchens with counters and tables and refrigerators and mannequins of husbands and wives, Mr. and Mrs. America, and their children, sets of families within homes constructed variously of concrete, aluminum, brick, and wood in order to see which substance could best resist the atomic blast.

  The oblivious mannequins were posed to watch television or tucked into beds, blankets pulled up to their chins, though why the scientists bothered with this silliness, I couldn’t fathom. Other mannequins were dressed in clothing made variously of cotton or wool or linen or silk and lashed to posts at the edge of the city, their blank faces turned toward ground zero. If their eyes could see, they would have been able to take in as well the forest of trees that had been trucked to the desert and bolted to the sandy floor, so the scientists could study what the bomb would do not only to houses and people and the food tucked in tins and paper packaging inside refrigerators and pantries in the perverse life-size doll houses erected in companion with the real houses only a hundred miles away, but also to foliage. And when the bombs were detonated, as they were, with regularity, the force of them blew the trees around like match sticks, tore the houses apart, tossed the Mr. and Mrs. America dolls into the air, rolled the refrigerators across the sand and dirt, irradiating everything there before the winds carried the radiation here. And then all of this chaos would be set right again, pins in a too-hot bowling alley, making ready for the next blast.

  Survival City was a peek into the hopeful post-apocalypse, in which the properly built home, the properly suited man, the properly packaged food would survive into some kind of viable future, if one could stand to live that future and find some kind of merry to make there. And people believed there could be. Children were taught to duck and cover, to pull a blanket or even a newspaper over themselves if the A-bomb hit. Bars up and down the Strip concocted special well drinks and served rounds of them whenever the tests went off at night, lighting up the sky more fearsomely than any neon casino sign possibly could. And so now there was a big rush to order the Sky Room’s two-dollar Atomic Cocktail or Mushroom Cloud Martini or Radioactive Rum and Coke in honor of it all, and everybody raised his glass to the amazing sight to the north. Drink and toast.

  With all that as distraction, I turned on my bar stool, ostensibly to look for my bartender, not because I wanted the cocktail but because I wanted to do what I knew I shouldn’t, what I had commanded myself not to do, what I had restrained myself so far from doing with, I thought, admirable tenacity. And that’s when I saw Nate was not looking out the window at the great bomb that had just been detonated but was looking right at me, something he had probably not been restraining himself from doing the whole time I was talking to the young bartender.

  Nate looked away, then looked back, lit a cigarette, then looked back, and now that I was pivoted his way, it seemed each time he looked at me a little longer as if he couldn’t help it, sucking on his cigarette as if he could suck me in along with the vapor, flicking his eyes over to me so much that eventually his wife noticed, and she turned her head from the window and stared flatly at me, her expression a little weary, a little knowing.

  But what was there to know? Truly, there was as yet nothing between me and Nate.

  And since we were nothing, a zero hanging between us, why shouldn’t he bring his wife here, to the popular Sky Room, even if he knew I ate dinner at this time every single evening?

  Maybe this meant that I was nothing to Nate or maybe this meant only that he wanted his wife to enjoy the big wide view of the desert and the novelty of the Dancing Waters down below with the music and the colored lights.

  I told myself this, and though I knew almost nothing about men despite all these years in Vegas, I didn’t quite believe it.

  Nate could have taken her poolside to dance or to the nearby Lady Luck bar or to the casino. He could have ordered room service for them in his suite. But he had brought her here and seated her twenty feet from me.

  I saw her reach her hand across the table for Nate to take, which he did, and the ease of their familiarity spoke of their history together. Whatever this visit was to the hotel, it wasn’t simply to bring Nate his son for a week or two. She wouldn’t have come here if not at Nate’s behest, and I understood that whatever the two of them decided tonight would directly affect me. She might move here, take her place as one of the ladies of the Desert Inn, link arms with Wilbur Clark’s wife and Moe Dalitz’s, plan charity luncheons for the Painted Desert Room, the showroom a debauchery by night but a proper Plain Jane by day. And I would remain the acrobat, backstage at the big top. Or. Perhaps not.

  I took a minute to gather myself, determined to walk through the Sky Room without looking down or around, as if I were in costume on the showroom stage, where even when we weren’t making our perilous descents on a staircase, we were trained to look past the audience, to avoid direct eye contact, to focus on the exit sign glowing red at the back of the club. I sometimes ambulated with a bit of wobble because I always wore stiletto heels offstage, still determined, even when I walked casually among the Arden Amazons, to trick them into thinking I was approximately their size. And as I skirted this table and that in the low lights, heading for the exit, Nate called out my name and waved me over to his table.

  “I w
ant you to meet my wife,” he said when I arrived, and she held out her hand, her eyes tiny, fierce pinballs in a chute.

  Her hand was small and warm, which meant my hand must be cold with discomfort.

  “Hello,” she said.

  And we had nothing else to say.

  The two of them looked up at me, her face unhappy and Nate’s creased with the smile he always gave to me, couldn’t help giving me, the smile I worried spelled paternal pride. Paternal. Maybe. Maybe I just wasn’t adept at interpreting a man’s face. I knew I wasn’t any good at conversation, my silence at this table attested to that, and I wasn’t exactly sure why Nate had called me over, but I had the uncomfortable feeling I was just like one of those bombs dropped on a target to demolish it beyond recognition.

  Viable future? Not for the two of them.

  23

  The next night Nate was waiting for me when I left my dressing room. He took my hand without a word. I was wearing my eyeliner still, and my lashes, and this lent our suddenly fused hands a certain theatricality. He was not shaking my hand, though my hand was shaking, he was holding it, with no intention of letting go, and I understood from it that his wife and son had been packed up and sent off. Because of me.

  We walked together through the showroom and the Lady Luck bar where the staff was clearing and re-laying linens and tableware, across the small casino floor where the dealers and players were closing down the baize-covered gaming tables, along the half-abandoned lobby where the desk staff said, “Good evening, Mr. Stein,” as we passed, and I felt as much a spectacle as if we were walking a tightrope at that circus before the peanut-crunching thousands. Everyone who was awake and upright at this hour, and in Las Vegas, that number was not small, stared at us as we walked together, hand in hand, our processional a statement, a confession even.