American Rose

by Karen Abbott

  Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters were in the middle of the matinee finale, a military number featuring a gun drill, when a whistle pierced the orchestra’s cheery tune. No questions this time, just two officers marching down the aisle, motioning for everyone to exit the stage. They wrapped Louise and June in coats and herded all eight members of the company into the back of a police van. Through the windows, Louise watched her mother in the taxi behind them, weeping on Gordon’s shoulder.

  “They won’t make me talk,” Sonny whispered, squeezed between the girls. “My father talked once, and the gang busted two of his ribs and almost poked his eye out.”

  The other children at the station were all cases of neglect or abuse and June noticed she stood out even among them, with her prop badges of honor and face painted like a watercolor. What a relief, she thought, that the officers did nothing more than lock them in a stuffy room that smelled of bleach. But Louise hoped they would fingerprint or interrogate or at least throw them in a cell—something exciting to make for a good story. She hushed the others and listened to Rose plead with the officers. Would they please let the children go? They had another show scheduled for that night, and the contract … fine. Well, would they at least let her contact her father in Seattle? He could straighten out this whole mess right away.

  The officers consented, and Rose sent a Western Union wire to Charlie Thompson:

  GO IMMEDIATELY TO MASTER OF YOUR MASONIC LODGE TELL HIM TO WIRE HORACE OLIVER MASONIC TEMPLE ROCHESTER NY THAT HE KNOWS YOU AND ME TO BE OF GOOD CHARACTER AND PROPER GUARDIANS FOR LOUISE AND JUNE DO THIS IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE LABOR AUTHORITIES HOLDING CHILDREN FOR INVESTIGATION

  Twenty-six hundred miles away, Grandpa Thompson read his daughter’s plea. He sighed and did as Rose asked. The lodge master hurried with a response:

  SEATTLE WASH

  HORACE OLIVER

  CARE MASONIC TEMPLE ROCHESTER, N.Y.

  HAVE KNOWN CHAS J THOMSON AND DAUGHTER FOR PAST 5 YEARS THEY ARE OF EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD CHARACTER AND WORTHY GUARDIAN OF TWO CHILDREN NOW PLAYING ORPHEUM CIRCUIT NAMELY JUNE AND LOUISE YOUR EFFORTS IN THEIR BEHALF WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED SAMUEL A. COX WORSHIPFUL MASTER IONIC LOGE NO. 90

  The judge, an active and honorable Shriner, dismissed the case with the stipulation that Rose hire a tutor immediately.

  A graduate of the Minnesota State Normal School, Miss Thompson was formally certified to possess the “character, skill, and experience required by law.” The girls liked their tutor immediately, but Rose thought her too pretty. To dowdy her up a bit, she suggested that Miss Thompson wear horn-rimmed glasses, flat, sensible shoes instead of black patent pumps, and a black dress with white piqué collar and cuffs—proper attire for a governess. Newspapers were intrigued by this insight into troupers’ lives, the strange logistics of a migratory classroom. Rose arranged real school desks in the dressing room, hid the makeup mirror behind a large blackboard, and stole a prop globe from another act on the bill. Gordon encouraged the press to come see for themselves how stars were educated on the Orpheum Circuit, a vaudeville act in its own right.

  Math and spelling made June nervous. Between acts, the stagehands taught her the alphabet and how to sound out words phonetically. They listened as she read vaudeville advertisements aloud and corrected her pronunciation. Slowly she was learning, although she much preferred the “See for Yourself” field trips Miss Thompson organized in each city, tours through carpet plants and steel mills and salt mines. But Louise, for all her trouble memorizing dance steps, remembered everything her teacher said. She tried on new words as if they were her mother’s gleaming rings, recoiling at June’s “hideously” thin arms and proclaiming her sister “gauche.” June couldn’t tell if she should be flattered or offended, but she envied Louise’s brilliant, facile mind, the way it left nothing unexamined or unclaimed.

  By now Rose’s grouch bag held at least $25,000 and swung pendulously between her legs. She did not believe in banks. Once, June watched while her mother fanned piles of bills across the floor, counting them one by one.

  “It’s a trillion dollars, I bet,” June whispered to Louise that night. They had made a pretend tent, pulling the bedspread taut over the foot posts. “Even more than a trillion, maybe. So I don’t see why I can’t have a doll that goes ‘Mama’ wiff a buggy to match. I could even have a live pony if I wanted it, and a stove wiff a real oven—”

  “I want a boat,” Louise interrupted. “A boat that’s big enough for me to sit in with a sail and oars.”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Rose said, standing in the doorway that connected their two rooms. She threw on the light and whisked up the bedspread, ruining the tent. “We’re taking an early train tomorrow, and here you are talking all night. What are you talking about?”

  Louise kept quiet. This was June’s game, and she was obligated to explain herself.

  “We were saying what we’d do wiff the money in the belt,” June said.

  A pause. Rose stepped closer and calibrated her words.

  “Who told you about any money?” she asked.

  “Nobody,” June replied, quick and adamant. “I seen—I mean I saw it.”

  Rose sat down on the foot of the bed. The windows were open, and the wind gusted her flannel nightgown around her hips. Her cheek bore deep creases from her pillow.

  “Remember the story about the poor little match girl?” she asked.

  Louise and June nodded, waiting.

  “Well,” their mother said, “her mother was a very foolish woman. She gave all her money to a bad wolf and the wolf left her alone with her little girl to starve. Remember how hungry she was? And how cold? And how they found her dead one morning, all frozen?”

  June began to sob. “Please don’t tell any more,” she whimpered. “It’s too sad.”

  Rose patted June’s foot. “Mother doesn’t want that to happen to her babies,” she said. “That’s why she hides the money away so no one can find it. That money belongs to the three of us. You mustn’t tell a soul that we have it.”

  June studied her mother. “Not even Uncle Gordon?” she asked.

  Rose yanked the bedspread up tight, pulling the top around her daughters’ necks. She kissed them both, and the room went dark again.

  “Not even Uncle Gordon,” she said, closing the door gently.

  It was quiet until June rustled and turned. Louise felt her sister’s breath soft against her cheek.

  “That wasn’t the story about the poor little match girl at all,” June said. “There was no wolf in that story.”

  Neither girl questioned Rose about the grouch bag again.

  Each afternoon during break, Louise and June took one dollar apiece from Rose, a sum expected to stretch for all three meals. They strolled to the local Woolworth’s, by now used to stares from the civilians. Look at the little blonde dressed cap-à-pie in dirty white rabbit fur, the pumpkin-sized muff encasing her hands, the missing buttons, the tattered hems, how precious and peculiar she was, all at once. And the taller one, with knickers tucked into boots and—could that be?—a monkey perched on her (or was it his?) shoulder. It was easy for June to distract the clerk with her blond curls and eager little face and talk of how she loved “Woolworff’s,” while Louise skulked up and down the aisles, grabbing here and there, nothing she wanted or needed. A tin spectacles case, a compass, a jar of pomade, a can opener, a tea strainer. Then they switched places and, once safe outside, compared their booty to see who won. After one such trip a pair of flat, sensible shoes appeared next to their pile, and they looked up to see Miss Thompson glaring down.

  “Where did you children get those?” she asked. Clamping a hand on each girl’s shoulder, she turned them around, guided them back into Woolworth’s, and made them confess. “I’m sowwy and I’ll never steal again,” June said. Louise repeated that line, her voice sounding hollow and far away.

  An hour later, back in the dressing room, the story came tumbling out. June began to cry and Rose joined in
, a raspy gasp chasing each sob. Louise cried into the dip of her mother’s neck and they all rocked back and forth. “We were together,” Louise said. “We were warm and safe from outsiders who didn’t understand us.”

  Without warning Rose unclasped Louise’s grip and pushed June aside. She took a step toward Miss Thompson. Her face took on an expression of terrifying calm, those violet, coin slot eyes, that fault line of a mouth.

  “How dare you?” she said. Even the pauses between words carried a threat. “How dare you subject that little bundle of nerves to such a strain?”

  June sniffed from the corner. Miss Thompson knew better than to defend herself.

  “Get out! You’re fired!”

  The door shut behind her. The next time a reporter visited their dressing room, his camera captured the children bent over desks and Rose standing before the blackboard, posing as Miss Thompson, complete with proper governess uniform and horn-rimmed glasses.

  Louise conducted her own private lessons, updating her reading list, carving out private niches of time to scavenge for unfamiliar phrases and exotic words. She replaced Sarah Crewe, Tanglewood Tales, and A Child’s Garden of Verses with Boccaccio’s Decameron, Indian Love Lyrics, and Das Kapital, always carrying one or another under her arm. June regarded her with unabashed awe and the boys mocked her playfully. Look at this bookish, haughty version of plain old Louise, the clumsy girl who couldn’t even carry a tune—“The Duchess,” they now called her. She taught herself to sew, too, a gift passed on from Big Lady, and made costumes for the entire company during long train rides from town to town. They all read tea leaves, a popular pastime for troupers, but Louise insisted she had a true gift for seeing the future; the veil over her face at birth, which Grandma Dottie had pressed between the pages of her Bible, had marked her as special.

  “I’m going to marry a king or somebody,” she boasted to June. “In any case, I’ll be rich.” As reinforcement, she doodled just one word, “Money,” in her careful child’s cursive script, until the page was filled edge to edge with her intent.

  By now, Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters were so successful other acts spied on them, memorizing Sonny’s solos, imitating June’s steps. There was even a rumor that the Pantages Circuit was developing a new young starlet named “Baby June” to follow Dainty June’s act across the country, a ploy Rose grudgingly admired. Gordon occasionally altered the roster of boys; they succumbed to the grueling schedule or demands of their families back home, but new talent waited in every city. Dainty June played after intermission, a coveted position on the bill, much preferable to opening or closing (called “playing to the haircuts,” since the audience typically began exiting the theater). One of their programs featured a cover image of June clad in angel wings, so high on her toes that her feet arch perfectly, improbably, like crescent moons.

  Dainty June

  (HOVICK)

  “The Darling of Vaudeville”

  (Reg. U.S. Patent Office)

  and Her Newsboy Songsters

  OPENING: Dainty June and

  Her Newsboy Songsters

  “Dear Mary” Dainty June

  “Just a Step” George Trailord

  “Duet” Dainty June and Danny Montgomery

  NOTE: The Rhinestone Dress worn by Dainty June contains 24,000 imported stones and cost $1000.

  “Ballad” Joseph Dare, “the boy Caruso”

  “Nobody’s Darlin’ ” Dainty June

  “The Dumbells” Danny Montgomery and George Trailord “Sole Mio,” sung in Italian, Joseph Dare “Two Little Wops” Dainty June and Sonny Sinclair Fast Eccentric Dancing: George Trailord

  “Hello! Mag!” Rose Louise, Danny Montgomery and Dainty June

  FINALE: Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters

  Not one false note in any of their performances, according to the critics. George’s dancing was phenomenal—not surprisingly, since he performed before the royal court in Italy, according to Rose. The skit done in blackface by two boys named Nixon and Sans was “hilarious.” Another boy’s solo was made more “interesting” by the fact that his cracking, pubescent voice slid between tenor and bass. Louise displayed a flair for comedy and character acting, especially during her “excellent” Scandinavian singing impersonation and “Frances, the Bowery Tough” number. They loved everything about Dainty June, especially her rendition of the melody “Won’t You Be My Husband?,” during which the star, “still in her babyhood,” crossed the footlights to find an elderly gentleman with a gleaming bald head. Reaching into “parts unknown,” she produced a massive powder puff and caressed the man all over, performing as if for him alone.

  No one seemed quite sure of June’s age—the guesses ranged from eleven to fourteen to sixteen—and despite the “wealth of chuckles” and “world of laughter,” there was something disturbing, something off, about the whole spectacle.

  “Dainty June and Company,” one critic noted, “are not very childish, with their uncomfortable sophistication. The more meager is the period of childhood, the hastier, relatively, does withering old age creep on.”

  It would not be long before Dainty June had her first nervous breakdown.

  Outside the insular world of vaudeville, the 1920s were updating everything America knew about itself. Sigmund Freud introduced the idea that all people are born bisexual. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy, got enmeshed in a scandal when young sailors went undercover to collect evidence against homosexuals in Newport, Rhode Island. President Warren G. Harding met with his mistress, a pretty young blonde named Nan Britton, in clandestine corners of the White House. There was, she said, “a small closet [where] we repaired many times, and in the darkness of a space no more than five feet square the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.” America had finally completed her noble task overseas and now anticipated a promising future.

  But the future had ominous undertones. The deaths of more than 15 million people, 130,000 of them Americans, ushered in an era of violent change—the great turning point of modern history. A postwar malaise gripped the country. People felt untethered. Their traditions were uprooted, their belief systems unmoored. Two Chicago boys named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murdered a neighborhood boy “just for the thrill of it.” On a cloudless September day, a brown wagon draped in canvas and pulled by an old bay horse stopped at 23 Wall Street, the headquarters of J. P. Morgan in lower Manhattan. The driver crept away, and as the clock on Trinity Church struck 12:01 p.m., a blast rattled the entire district. Shards of iron shot through the air, shattering pedestrians’ skulls. Windowpanes blasted out as far as ten blocks away and clerks in sixth-floor offices suffered severe burns. The property damage neared $3 million, 39 people died, and 130 were injured. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil to date, and the perpetrators would never be discovered. In this new world of random bombings and genocide and poison gas and machine guns that fired six hundred rounds per minute, it wasn’t difficult to believe that young men could kill each other over a truckload of booze.

  Drastic change was encroaching on vaudeville, too, and even the best insurance bits were no guarantee against the growing new threat. Since KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the 1920 presidential election returns, radio, though still an inchoate and primitive medium—one would be lucky to tune in and hear a harmonica played by whomever, wherever—seemed poised to revolutionize every aspect of daily life. It could cure disease, solve crimes, soothe the lingering tensions with Europe. And to say nothing of the entertainment possibilities! Mme. Luisa Tetrazzini, standing in her apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel McAlpin, gave an opera concert for hundreds on board naval ships cruising the Atlantic Ocean. The Park Avenue Baptist Church, where John D. Rockefeller, Jr., worshiped every Sunday, had an evening service broadcast by station WJZ. An engineer in Ossining, New York, hosted a “wireless vaudeville” performance from the comfort of his own home. Music and comedy soared invisibly across prairies and lakes to reach au
diences in Connecticut, Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, and Colorado. A family could enjoy a night out without paying a single dime for admission.

  “Those earphones will never take the place of vaudeville,” Rose insisted, but she consented to tweak the act. A cow would join them, she announced. Yes, a cow. It had appeared to her in a dream and told her exactly what to do. Gordon understood that such omens were not to be ridiculed, and immediately ordered the cow to be made. It had a papier-mâché head with nostrils the size of rabbit holes, a brown-and-white body made of felt, trousers for legs, and leather spat hooves. One boy occupied the head, two crouched inside its torso, and one controlled the hind legs. Louise, contrary to the myth she would one day create, never played any part of the cow’s body. In June’s opinion, “she couldn’t dance that well.”

  “I’ve got a cow and her name is Sue,” June sang, while the cow pranced and dipped alongside her, “and she’ll do most anything I ask her to.” The cow became an Orpheum headliner in its own right. “Bring the kiddies,” the advertisements exhorted, “to see Dainty June and the Funny Dancing Cow.”

  The cow helped, but Rose still relied on her own version of insurance: stealing from other performers’ acts (although she was now more selective about who was worthy of the effort). When she learned they would be on a bill with the great Fanny Brice, on break from the Ziegfeld Follies, during an upcoming stop in San Francisco, she reminded the girls to watch every single show, and closely.

  Fanny Brice was a star not easily copied, a true original with a honed philosophy about her craft, and she would have scoffed at Rose’s plan to spy on her act. “Every successful artist, no matter what his medium,” Fanny wrote, “has his own individual methods of getting his result, and anyone who attempts to borrow another’s method becomes a mere impersonator.… You never can tell what an audience is going to do. That is what makes the search for the feel of the audience such a fascinating and lucrative pastime.”