The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  The theater was silent.

  The cartoon started and the screen exploded in color. Inside the purple, green, and yellow target were words.

  Warner Bros Pictures Inc.

  Presents

  Merrie Melodies

  A Day at the Zoo

  Bugles and xylophone. Two men named Bill, doffing their hats at each other and shaking each other’s hands, “Hello, Bill.” “Hello, Bill.” “Hello, Bill.” Monkeys in a cage throwing peanuts to the people outside it, who caught the nuts in their mouths. A man with a face so much like a baboon that the zookeeper put him in the cage and let the baboon itself go free. A bird in a black-and-white-striped prison jumpsuit and matching cap pacing a cell, saying, “I didn’t do it, I’m telling you, I didn’t do it.” Next to him, a pigeon sat on a stool, saying, “He did it. He definitely did it. I saw it with my own eyes.” A wolf sniffed at the locked door to a cage where cows stood mooing and camels were smoking Camels. A joke.

  It was when the lights went on briefly, gently, at the intermission between the cartoon and the feature that I saw my mother had somehow over the last hour become a wax doll, a figure as beautifully white as she was limp, her head resting against the seat and turned to one side away from me, so all I could see was her jaw and her cheek. Although her lap was dry, the hem of her dress was soaked through with blood, blood that had pooled beneath her and then with nowhere else to go had slowly dripped over the sides of her chair and found its way to the floor beneath where it had set some seed shells afloat. They spun, lazily, black coats among the red liquid. I understood immediately that my mother was dead, her arms at her sides, her palms turned upward to the big fans making their slow spin through the thick, hot air.

  My father would find out later that she’d gone that morning to Long Beach, to one of Benny Siegel’s many abortion parlors, and that, even as early as her drive back north to us, she had begun slowly hemorrhaging, which is, from what I understand, a painless death. You don’t even know you are dying. And I believe she did not. She had made no sound beside me. And so now I made no sound beside her. Somehow I knew that this was my last time to be alone with my mother, and I didn’t want to be separated from her. If I cried out, they would take her from me in the ensuing stir. So I said nothing. I used two hands to turn her head toward me, her pretty face expressionless as it never was in life, and when the lights went down again, I curled up next to her and carefully arranged her right arm over my shoulder.

  Up on the big screen Gold Diggers in Paris laid open its great big silly self. I watched my mother on the deck of a fake ocean liner, the Warner Brothers version of that half ship landlocked on MGM’s Lot Two, saw her strolling behind Rudy Vallee, bundled up in a fur-trimmed coat and a smart fedora and smiling. I watched her do the Can-Can, wearing a beret and tap shoes, kicking the sky, and I watched her do the Charleston on the stage set of a Parisian street, and she appeared again in a Hawaiian number, wearing a patterned bathing suit and lei, with a big flower in her hair, and then she was tap dancing up and down a long, low staircase built to measure in one of Warner Brothers shops and erected in its sky-high soundstage, attired like fifty other girls in a strange long-sleeved black leather top, with a matching black leather bottom and a floor-length swirling black skirt, the girls’ movements syncopated with those fifty boys in tails, arms up, arms down, arms up, arms down, Buzz’s tap shoe-clicking, rhythmic coordination ending when the girls did a backwards swoon, one after the other, into the arms of the boys, all that youth, all that energy, all that eagerness, all that life. The girls fell back, the boys pushed them up, and I watched my mother dancing with them up there as intently as I knew how, as if I could make what had fallen down spring back up, will my mother’s spirit from the celluloid back to her beautiful body. You only lived forever on the screen.

  And when the picture was over, the Betty Crockers all around the huddle of me and my mother started to cry and shriek and wave their spoons.

  That my mother might not have died if I had said something, anything, to one of them between A Day at the Zoo and Gold Diggers was a thought that didn’t occur to me until years later.

  52

  Las Vegas

  1953

  Although I avoided the Strip now, I still kept nightclub hours, to bed at 5:00 a.m., up at 3:00 p.m., which in February was just a couple hours from dusk, when small children, the almost invisible inhabitants of Las Vegas, made their way home from elementary school, tiny chorines with book bags in a sidewalk parade. Their parents and almost every other adult in Paradise Palms worked the Strip and my neighbors kept my time clock. To amuse myself, I’d watch their lit-up windows wax yellow late into the night until suddenly they blinked and went black, snuffed out, just before sunup. Whatever news of the Strip that found its way to me came, though, not from my neighbors, but from my father, who arrived home each night with tatters of gossip stuck to him as if he’d walked through some salacious tickertape parade. That’s how I kept up with everything, and that’s also how I learned Nate had begun dating Milton Prell’s secretary from the newly opened Sahara, news about which my father was clearly happy, though my own response was somewhat muddled, a hash of pain and relief and disbelief, because he had found someone new so quickly and because I wasn’t there to see it, and therefore, as I’d learned from my parents, what you didn’t see wasn’t entirely real.

  My father came home almost every day just before dawn, every inch of him and every pore stinking of cigarette smoke, something that had not really registered with me before as it was as much a part of my environs as chips and dice, but now the smell made itself quite distinct here away from the Strip. He would fall onto his bed at the end of the hall into a rumpled, reeking sleep. Occasionally, he didn’t come home until late in the day. He, like Nate, was seeing someone new, though he never said so, another someone I would never meet, other than to run into, accidentally, in a casino, as I had met, once or twice, the others. He never brought women home, not to the bungalow, not here to Paradise Palms—at first because I was a young girl and now because he didn’t need to. If Vegas had anything, it was a surplus of hotel rooms. Seven years ago, his girlfriends had been young women, but as he had aged, so had they, as if he were dating serial versions of my mother, as if she were growing older alongside us. The women had looked somewhat like her, young, white, dark-haired, and they were, as she had been, either dancers or singers. Then, as my father got older, he seemed to tire of the constant replication of the young Dina Wells, all those reimages of her in some crazy Busby Berkeley reprise, and these later girlfriends looked tough, weather-beaten, soft-jowled, as if worn down by the heat and the smoke and the late hours. And they were waitresses.

  Whether my father slept here or elsewhere, he made it a point to spend the late afternoons and evenings with me, the hours we had together before his shift started at 10:00 p.m. I’d sit out on one of our aluminum and plastic-slatted lawn chairs and watch him swim his steady awkward feet-flapping laps and when he was finished, he’d shower and cook us dinner on the rickety three-legged coal grill we had out by the pool. Steaks, usually, often my only meal of the day. I had little appetite. I’d gotten thinner. I’d taken up smoking, which seemed to have supplanted my need for food. I understood now why all the Donn Arden girls had smoked, especially the ones who’d had children and whose bodies had changed and wanted to thicken under that biological imperative, an imperative it seemed only tobacco or diet pills could undercut.

  When it got too dark and too cold to sit outside any longer, we went in to watch the new television programs exploding over all the new networks, better programming than the fledgling producers of Bathing Beauties could ever have imagined. Girls swimming and lolling about? No. Not at all. We watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a radio show I’d listened to in the forties, now reformatted. In real life, Ozzie Nelson was a Los Angeles band leader and his wife, Harriet, a blond bombshell of a nightclub act, but on this show, they were homebodies, as the fifties seemed to
demand. If the Andy Hardy serials had been television shows, they would have looked like this.

  And vaudeville, too, had found its way to the small screen, some Ozzie and Harriet sanctioned version of it. The Jackie Gleason Show had Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra and the June Taylor Dancers, both sandwiched between comics and singers. Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town had the dancing Toastettes pinched together with singers, comics, puppeteers, and circus acts. Their chorus girls did on television what we girls did here in the desert showrooms, what Hollywood did in its thirties musicals, what girls in the teens and twenties once did in New York’s cavernous vaudeville theaters. If the Nelson family could watch this now at home, what new and different thing would Vegas find to fill its seats in all our new hotels?

  For the Riviera had opened, the Sands had opened, the Sahara had opened, and the Dunes, the New Frontier, and soon the monstrosity of the Stardust. Every one of these hotels would need a draw—not only headliners from Hollywood and Broadway, but also some new kind of showgirls and novel extravaganzas for their lounges and showrooms. Rumor had it Harold Minsky was negotiating with the Dunes to bring out his Follies, his revue of topless girls, but that Jack Entratter, who liked pretty faces and securely costumed bodies and who was president of Nate’s newly built Temple Beth Shalom, was balking. But surely that was one way to differentiate ourselves from the girls on CBS. By our costumes—by what they were or were not.

  So somehow I wasn’t entirely surprised when Donn Arden knocked on the door one evening after my father had gone off to the Riv. Not entirely surprised to find myself summoned, but surprised by the messenger. Donn Arden? Donn Arden in Paradise Palms? I think I’d only ever seen him in the hotels, in their showrooms or stages or wings or backstage hallways. I didn’t even know where Donn lived. For all I knew, he could be my neighbor here on Silver Mesa Circle. He wore a jacket and tie, because, apparently, this was an official visit, his dark rumpled hair oiled almost into submission, and he shifted his choreographer’s feet uncomfortably on the concrete slab that served as Model 2A’s unceremonious minimalist front porch. He seemed nervous, something I never was anymore, now that I was a Harriet Nelson housedaughter, albeit one who had discovered Miltowns.

  “Esme, may I speak with you?”

  I let him in and we went to the living room, which held just a single couch and our television set, rabbit ears of its antennae askew, box tuned to one of my programs, blue-and-black television screen flickering almost like neon. Donn seated himself on the sofa, pants hiked up to show his blue socks, but not, thank God, anything further. I sat on the fireplace’s low brick hearth, gas fire warming my back. Have I mentioned I was in pajamas? I didn’t always dress, left the house only for cigarettes and groceries and doctor appointments. In fact, the past month or so I’d talked to no one but my father or the grocery store salesgirls, so I wasn’t entirely sure what would come out of my mouth when the time came to speak.

  Arden cleared his throat, little of his usual arrogance in evidence here. So I was right, he was nervous. What he eventually said was not, How are you, Esme, or Nice to see you again, Esme, but, “Mr. Stein would like to know if you’re ready to come back to work.”

  Donn may have blurted this out, but he sounded dubious about the prospect, now that he had seen me. And smelled me. I might have been wearing this particular set of pajamas for a few days.

  So Mr. Stein wanted to know if I was ready to come back to work. Apparently, I hadn’t been entirely drummed out of Nate’s mind by the glamorous clamor of Milton Prell’s executive secretary at the typewriter keys. He had read her memo that told him I had become a recluse, a pixie-cut in a nightgown, one who ate smoke instead of food. And so he planned to draw me out, a little desert animal coaxed forward with a berry. Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you?

  “Mr. Stein has taken over part ownership of the Stardust.”

  Of course he has.

  “And the plan is to bring in sixty dancers and singers from the Lido club in Paris for a permanent engagement at the hotel.”

  For which, apparently, Arden’s talents had been commissioned.

  Lido de Paris. It sounded continental, by which I meant it sounded racy. Racier than the Ed Sullivan or the Jackie Gleason television shows.

  “The show will be called ‘C’est Magnifique’ and the nudity’s going to be classy, European, no bump and grind, just a seamless part of the show. Some girls will be topless, some not, you definitely not.”

  So some covered wagons, some not, as we girls referred to the bra portions of our costumes. I’d be in a covered wagon. Covered by Nate’s orders. As if my bare skin had been the factor that had unhinged me.

  “And Mr. Stein would like you to be the headliner.”

  Ah.

  Also Nate’s orders.

  “It will be a big show, Esme. The Stardust is going to be the biggest hotel on the Strip.”

  Yes, so I’d heard, with more rooms to fill than any other hotel, two thousand rooms, as the Stardust had been put together somewhat haphazardly, stolen out from under Tony Cornero and then bound with boards and nails to the hotel standing next door to it, the failed Royal Nevada, the two big hotels now conjoined. That’s why it was so massive and why every single element of it therefore needed to be larger than life, a display colossal enough to fill up the skies, galaxy-size, to rival the brilliance of the stars.

  The hotel already boasted the biggest sign on the Strip, the word Stardust repeated twice, this Stardust Stardust stretching itself across the entire front of the building, which featured a huge pastiche of a mural with every planet and star in the solar system spackled colorfully across endless blue space and crowned by rays of golden light. The buildings were to be named for the planets, the swimming pool christened the Big Dipper. There were to be lounges and restaurants and shops and salons and cafes, and they and every other aspect of the hotel would operate around the clock, always open, unlike any other hotel on the Strip, but like the universe itself, no wee hours for this place.

  At the parking lot entrance to what was now the biggest parking lot in Vegas rose yet another sign, the Stardust this time mounted above the blue globe of the earth itself, with satellites orbiting endlessly about it, the satellites captured by earth’s gravity the way we earthlings found ourselves captivated by green tables and one-armed bandits. And within that orbit, black letters across the blue earth would soon advertise the biggest show on the Strip. Because as befitted the largest hotel on the Strip with the most hotel rooms and the largest casino, the king of the Strip hotels, the showroom would need a great big new king-size spectacle.

  Esme Wells

  Lido de Paris

  C’est Magnifique

  Adults Only

  So.

  I lit a cigarette and said nothing.

  Donn looked at me somewhat apprehensively, more so, I thought, than my silence or my garb could account for. Why could this possibly matter so much to him? Only because it mattered to Nate. And judging by Donn’s expression, it mattered to Nate a lot. And if Donn failed here in his entreaty, perhaps he thought Nate would scratch him from all the shows he ran, have Jack Entratter and Harold Minsky take over what were now Donn’s stages, Donn’s domains. And whom Nate might send out here next to reason with me.

  I put my cigarette out on the fireplace brick. “What’s my salary?”

  He told me. Stardust-size.

  Another unexpected gift from Nate, like the Ambassador. Or maybe it wasn’t a gift. Maybe it was what I was worth. I was a draw—and Nate liked a draw, because a draw brought money to the casino, whether it be a cheap buffet, a Bingo game, free drinks, or a burlesque act. The Lido would be a new kind of draw, the first French revue in Vegas, soon to be copied, of course, by the other hotels—who would hastily concoct the Nouvelle Eve at the El Rancho, the Folies-Bergère at the Tropicana, the Casino de Paris at the Dunes.

  Minsky’s Follies with its jiggle and grind would have to wait.

  I looked down at
my fingers, at the hearth, at the living room stretching out before me to the ends of this big wide earth. What else was I going to do with myself? I wasn’t six anymore. Or twelve. Not any longer a soundstage rat, a stooper, a cigarette girl. My mother hadn’t lived long enough to lay track any farther than to the nightclub stage. What was out there beyond the footlights? TV, groceries, and boredom.

  So I nodded. A small nod.

  “Still have your dancing shoes? You didn’t throw them out?”

  Ah. Arden was joking now, relieved. He could go back to Mr. Stein and say, We got her out of her pajamas. She’s coming to the Stardust.

  And so Arden designed his new Lido de Paris show with me as its centerpiece. Which was only fair, I supposed, as I had, however unwittingly, helped clear the way for Nate to secure the Stardust for himself.

  53

  For the Stardust’s July opening, at the giant ribbon-cutting, I joined the Lido’s cast of sixty. We appeared in our costumes, top hats and tuxedos for the boys, feathers and sequins for the girls. And right alongside Governor Charles Russell and Senator George Malone and the Hollywood VIPs imported for the occasion—Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, Bob Hope, the McGuire Sisters—stood the full panoply of the hotel brass. Hyman Goldbaum, John Factor (né Iakov Faktorowicz), Morris Kleinman, Nate Stein. Look how high the Jewish big boys had climbed. Right up to the stars they’d been dreaming of for five decades, up high enough to see their brothers the moguls, 260 miles away in Hollywood. A hundred newsmen covered every event of the day and every facet of the ten-million-dollar hotel and its million-dollar stage and its million-dollar show.