by Karen Abbott
The “film peril,” as theater managers called it, delivered another blow to vaudeville with Warner Bros.’ introduction of Vitaphone, a device that synced sound recording with films. The following year, in 1927, the studio released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length “talkie,” starring erstwhile vaudevillian Al Jolson. Though only five hundred theaters nationwide were wired for sound, it was the best-selling film of the year, and other major singers and comedians signed on for talkies.
Members of the American Federation of Musicians amassed a $1.5 million “defense fund” to prevent the installation of Vitaphone in more than a thousand additional theaters. Their concern, shared by other artists’ agencies, was as cultural as it was mercenary. If this modern technology were implemented nationwide, wouldn’t the American theater and musical traditions stagnate and die? A change in public taste was one thing, they argued; purposeful, absolute lack of choice was quite another.
Still, for now, the century-old art form of vaudeville—“that big boisterous American wench,” as one critic put it—limped along. People continued to pay 50 cents to see vaudeville acts of every provenance and scope, including Jean Boydell, the “Unique Pepologist,” Nancy Decker, “The Joy Girl of Syncopation,” and, of course, Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters, a “festival of splendor, fun, music, and dance.” June was a trouper in every sense of the word, and Louise sensed that she would make a move at the last possible moment, only when she had to—when her performance ceased to please herself or, consequently, her audience, and when Mother was looking the other way.
Rose, too, noticed a change in June after her breakdown. She was at a loss to explain this newly defiant, sulking child who no longer appreciated her gift or the mother who so tirelessly developed it. Louise was old enough to distinguish fear from anger, and terror was Rose’s latest and most severe affliction. It weighted her gait like the grouch bag once did, marched with glum purpose behind her eyes. Mother behaved the only way she knew how when she felt threatened: she stomped and yelled and made a horrific scene. One snide word or seething silence and she would raise her hand to June, striking that face, that cherubic, aging face that could no longer rely on its own practiced expressions. Whether she meant to or not, Louise watched her mother carefully, and learned.
“Malcontent!” Rose yelled at June one night. “After all I’ve gone through for you!” She began to cry, her slight shoulders shaking. “Ungrateful, selfish—oh, God. You were put on earth to make my life a misery.”
Louise rushed to Rose, took her in her arms. She held a handkerchief to her mother’s nose. They switched roles often now, a seamless transition both ways.
“June, it’s bad enough everything’s so rotten,” Mother continued, weeping. “Why must you be a … a … Bolshevik!” She broke free from Louise’s grip and moved forward, cornering her younger daughter. “Undermining the army, challenging the rules!”
June thrust back her shoulders, lifted her chin. Louise saw the words rise inside her sister. A vicious, furtive part of her—the part that once made her bite June’s favorite stagehand, the part that yearned to be closest to Mother—hoped to God June said them.
She did.
“Yes!” June screamed. “Yes I am!”
That was it. Mother was turned wholly inside out; no sweet traces or soft instincts remained. She raised her fist like a scepter and lowered it like a gavel, connecting with June’s mouth. Louise watched her sister spin—graceful even under the circumstances—careening and landing facedown on the carpet. She spat into cupped hands, and her fingers were slick with blood. Crimson bubbles swelled and popped at her lips.
It was the worst blow yet.
Louise braced herself as Mother took another step, but she kept her hand by her side. “Look at yourself,” Rose said, dicing her words. “You’re going to look just fine on that stage, just fine. See what you made me do!”
A streak of blood carved a marionette line down June’s chin. She grabbed the blanket from her cot and crept to the bathroom.
“You’ll see,” Rose yelled at the back of her head. “God will punish you. He’s started already. You’re a failure—a failure. After I’ve spent my whole life on you, too. I can’t book you anywhere anymore.”
Louise curdled with guilt, as if her own mouth had said those hateful words, as if her own hand had split June’s lip. She stroked her mother’s hair and waited until she fell asleep before following her sister. June lay curled up in the tub, her head resting on the drain. When June looked up, Louise pressed a finger against her lips and locked the door behind her.
“Shhh,” she said. “Mother’s asleep. She is exhausted, June. These fights are getting worse and she can’t stand it.”
She was referring, also, to Mother and Gordon. Louise still didn’t trust him, but she marveled at his patience and restraint. When Mother stole from other acts and from hotels, Gordon said nothing. When Mother piled their laundry for him to wash, he hunched over the bathtub and scrubbed each garment without complaint. Their fights were frequent but one-sided. “The kids aren’t babies any longer,” he said recently. “June can’t get by with what she used to get by with—”
Mother lunged at him and rapped at his chest with her fists.
“Shut up!” she said. “She’ll always be a baby. She’ll never grow up. Never, do you hear me?” He stood there and took it, using his forearms as a shield while her nails tore at his skin. Sometimes he disappeared after these episodes, just long enough for Mother and June to miss him. Louise wondered what they would do if one day he didn’t come back.
“What fights?” June said, bringing her back to the moment. “She just slugs me. It’s always one slug and out. That’s no fight.”
Louise considered her next words, weighing what they might give and what they might take, and the fact that she couldn’t empathize with June without betraying Mother.
“I know how you feel,” she said, finally. “About the act, I mean.”
“You do?” June said. Her mouth widened, cracking the line of drying blood. “But you don’t have to do the act—you never have.”
Louise sighed. As if she needed to be reminded she wasn’t necessary.
“That’s right,” she said. “All that sweating, practicing every minute. I’ve watched you enjoying your broken toes and scratches. Dancing so hard you black out in the wings. No, you do the act because you enjoy all that. I never have and what happens? You don’t enjoy the act any more than I do now. Do you? So, we sit here in the same bathroom with the same problem.”
The sisters regarded each other for a long, silent moment. This was the first confidence they had ever shared.
Louise consulted her tea leaves. Peering into the cup, letting all other objects around her recede, a vision appeared that she couldn’t unsee. A steel beam, like a willful, deliberate streak of lightning, shot from the back of a truck and aimed straight at someone she knew, a former Newsboy Songster traveling in the next car. It pierced him, sheering his tendons and veins, severing his head from his neck. Three days later, through the vaudeville circuit grapevine, she learned the boy had been in a fatal accident, so similar to her premonition it was as if she’d choreographed the death herself.
She never read tea leaves again.
Instead, Rose adopted the superstition. Her tea leaves signaled ominous days for the stops in Wichita and Kansas City, but the grouch bag was light and they needed to work. Their bookings were miserable—one theater manager threatened to cancel the act on the ground that they no longer resembled their press photos—but there was, as Louise later put it, “one bright spot”; the blankets on the hotel beds were the nicest she’d ever seen, soft, pure white wool. Rose decided that Louise should make coats out of them. Their trunk was too full, so Rose wrapped them around her body and wore her beaver coat on top. No one in the hotel lobby suspected a thing when they left.
In Omaha, their next stop, Louise made coats for everyone, including her monkey, Gigolo. His had a shawl colla
r, dolman sleeves, and a tam-o’-shanter to match. On closing night, she put Gigolo to bed in his new outfit. She found him in the morning, lifeless and limp, a mess of gorgeous wool coiled tight around his neck. He died because of her, she realized, and began to cry quietly, so no one could hear. Louise promised God she would never again take anything that didn’t belong to her, even if she felt she deserved it.
Mother soothed Louise, promising to get her a new monkey, but her fights with Gordon escalated. They had been laid off for four weeks and had trouble getting booked anywhere, despite Gordon’s connections in Detroit.
“Everything going out, nothing coming in,” he said. “We’re damned near broke.”
“And whose fault is that?” Mother retorted. “The act is as good as it ever was. It’s your fault we’re not back on the Orpheum Circuit, where we belong. A fine man you are, blaming your failure on a baby—a child.”
June found solace with the boys in the act, shooting craps and playing tag, and Louise buried herself in her books. No one knew about her secret hiding place next to the Dixieland Hotel. She spent hours prowling the aisles of the Seven Arts Book Store, where batik scarves looped brightly across the walls and exotic-looking young men talked in low, sure voices about F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce and Carl Van Vechten. She eavesdropped, memorizing fragments of their conversations: “His very lack of pretension is pretentious … having asthma doesn’t make a hack writer another Proust.” The manager was young, too, and he didn’t seem to mind that Louise had browsed for a week without buying anything. She learned that his name was George Davis.
“Have you read Shakespeare’s sonnets?” he asked her one day, handing her a cloth-covered book.
“I don’t care much about reading plays,” she said, making her voice low and deliberate, unfurling each word. “Being in the theater myself I—”
“These are poems,” George said evenly.
Louise didn’t like poems but she liked George Davis. He had kind eyes and an encouraging smile, and he spoke to her as if they were equals. She bought the book with her lunch money and ran back to the Dixieland Hotel, heading straight for the alcove of desks behind the elevators. She yearned to speak in an important voice about characters and themes, to laugh at jokes understood only by the exceptional few, to become someone who inspired second glances and curious whispers. She wanted to write—but what? About herself, maybe—not who she was now but who she’d become: the rich husband, the money money money, the life she would seize for herself when the moment was right and ripe.
On a piece of hotel stationery, she wrote:
PAGE ONE
Scene One
I enter.
That night, hours into the hollering, Gordon pulled on his overcoat. “You’ve told me to get out for the last time, Rose,” he said. Louise had never heard his voice so angry or certain. “I’m leaving, and so help me God, I’m not coming back.” He left behind only a photograph of Rose in a leather frame, set on the bureau. Mother secluded herself in her room with her curtains drawn, weeping and wheezing, and the air grew thick with the scent of her asthma powder. Three of the boys slept on the floor so Louise and June could share their bed; no one wanted to disturb Rose. They brought her food that went uneaten. Ten days later, her eyes still swollen and her hair unwashed, she summoned all of them and announced they were going to New York. She put a down payment on a secondhand Studebaker after realizing that train travel consumed much of their profit, and ticket fares, unlike cars, had to be paid for in cash, all at once. “I’m going to start all over again,” Louise heard Rose whisper to herself. “Alone with my two babies against the world.”
They settled, along with their menagerie, costumes, and props, in the Langwell Hotel on 44th Street and Sixth Avenue. Rose sent the native New Yorkers in the act to stay with their parents so she could save space and money on the hotel room. The two remaining boys slept on a daybed in the sitting room, and Rose, Louise, and June shared the bedroom. It wasn’t clear how much longer the current crop of boys would last, anyway. Meals could no longer be counted on. June was so thin she was nearly translucent, and Louise was hopeful that she might finally lose some weight. Mother gave them pep talks. “We’ll just have to tighten our belts, girls,” she said. “It’s only temporary, until we get going.” Neither Louise nor June asked what happened to all of the money that once weighted Mother’s grouch bag, and they never learned the truth. They had repaid Grandpa Thompson’s numerous loans, bought him a Model T Ford sedan, fixed the roof of the Seattle home, supplemented Big Lady’s and Belle’s meager savings, bought the dogs an entire wardrobe of wool sweaters and red leather shoes with lace-up legs, and spent untold thousands on costumes and transporting their elaborate collection of props. But still, they should have had plenty left over. “That’s interesting,” June said eighty years later. “I don’t know. We had lean times—very lean times.”
By eleven in the morning, Rose had the girls up and dressed and ready to make the rounds. Louise noticed a marked difference in the way the booking agents treated Mother, and she felt humiliated for all three of them. Gordon had sat on the edges of their desks, slapped backs, and handed out cigars. If they made a lowball offer, he laughed and walked out the door. With Mother, they continued to bark on the phone while sifting through scrapbooks and piles of faded clippings, and barely glanced at the old, lucrative Orpheum contracts she “accidentally” dropped on the desk. When they made a lowball offer, she shoved the papers back into her briefcase and spoke in a huff. “Why, that’s an insult,” she said. “Two hundred and twenty-five dollars for eight people! You know our salary and you know how our little act goes over. You’ve been booking us long enough to—”
“Take it or leave it,” was the typical response. “Plenty of acts around will grab it if you don’t.”
And so they took all of them, at theaters with moldy curtains and rank lobbies and marquees dotted with dead bulbs: one day at the Victoria Theatre in Lansford, Pennsylvania, for $116.67; two days at Central Park Theatre in Chicago for $175; four days in Los Angeles for just $70 total. One of the boys, finally fed up with Rose’s antics and the dwindling crowds, decided to quit. “It is understood and agreed upon,” Rose scribbled on the back of the contract, “that Henry Elias is remaining here in Los Angeles with his own free will, transportation has been offered him by Rose E. Hovick to New York City. This he has refused.” Louise and June stared out at the audience, the seats more empty than full. It gaped back at them, a wide black mouth with so many missing teeth.
Hoping to inject some new energy into the act, Rose scoured the streets for talent, telling each boy she’d get him onto the Orpheum Circuit—they wouldn’t believe the paychecks, the acclaim, the adoration of the audience. “The experience will be so valuable,” Rose promised, “and of course the prestige of appearing with Dainty June. You realize, of course, that my baby has headlined all over the country?” A seventeen-year-old boy named Bobby Reed signed on. He “danced like a bubble” and played the saxophone, and he seemed to be auditioning for June alone. Suddenly, Louise noticed, June wasn’t running around outside like a savage in between rehearsals. She and Bobby practiced separately in the wings or climbed to the organ loft when they thought no one was watching.
Louise still played “The Duchess,” holding herself apart and above, but she found herself drawn to another seventeen-year-old, Stanley Glass. June considered him a “snoot,” but clearly she didn’t understand the difference between self-confidence and conceit. True, he was a bit boastful, and did “show-offy” things like changing all of his money into ones and folding a ten over the thick wad of bills—habits Louise told him were “cheap-looking.” But he was ambitious and clever and performed his solo beneath a lobster scope, a metal disk that fitted over a spotlight and was rotated via an electric motor. The contraption spliced the light and seemed to slow it down so it looked as if he were dancing underwater—a sure showstopper, and he wasn’t afraid to say so.
Louise, �
�Bobby Reed,” and June. (photo credit 16.2)
“I like being with you,” he told Louise one night, while they were sitting together in the stage alley at a theater in Trenton. “You aren’t like most of the girls I know, giggling all the time and always talking about themselves. I like serious girls.”
The moon bloomed full and bright, and she leaned against the wall so her face dipped into shadow. She was shy, suddenly, and acutely aware of her double chin.
“I have a very serious nature,” she said in her most sophisticated voice, the one she’d been practicing since meeting George Davis. “Maybe that’s because I read a lot. Do you like to read?”
She’d lost him. He was tap dancing now, listening only to the staccato symphony of his shoes.
“Thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,” she recited, “for thee, and for myself no quiet find—that’s from Shakespeare’s sonnets. Have you ever read them?”
He spun a circle and stopped short, his lithe body outlined against the moon.
“This sure is a dumpy theater, isn’t it?” he said. “I never would have joined this crumby act if your mother hadn’t told me we were going on the Orpheum Circuit.”
“Oh, we’ll be going back. It’s just that vaudeville is in a slump right now. Mother says that’s because of the talking pictures.”
He had big plans, he told her: his own professional act, called Stanley Glass and Company. He’d find a partner, a pretty, dainty girl who could sing and dance. They’d practice right outside the Palace Theatre in New York and catch the eye of the most important agents in town. Would Louise mind humming “Me and My Shadow” so he could show her a few steps? She complied, and he launched into a figure eight and over-the-top, fell into his knee drops, sprang back up, and executed nip-ups and after-beats. He became a blur and she tried to capture each frame of his movement, the right angle of his muscled arms, the perfect arc of his kicks. She felt him land beside her, heaving, soaked through his shirt with sweat. His hand covered hers, and he searched the shadow for her face. “Quickly, like the fluttering of the moth around the electric bulb over the stage door sign, he kissed me,” Louise remembered. “My mouth burned from the light touch of his lips.” For just a moment she relinquished control. As if on cue Rose appeared, her body silhouetted inside the stage door. Louise broke free and scuttled back in the theatre, catching Rose’s look as she passed, and all those years of her mother’s advice rose like cream in her mind.