No. Scratch that. My mother could never stand transvestites. They gave her the squeams. She felt mocked by them on every level. I think I liked the idea of my mother learning to drag from a queen.
Turning off at Grants Pass, I pulled into a strip mall and headed straight for the music department at Wal-Mart where I rooted around until I finally found Carmen Miranda in the Easy Listening section. From what I remembered of her, she wasn’t all that easy. I drove across parking lots and headed into Applebee’s for lunch.
A couple of years younger than me, the waitress had my old-colour hair, mixed with a little more ash, and a slow easy gait. She called me sweetheart and said “Uh-huh” each time I said thank-you. As I ate my Sante Fe Chicken I read liner notes on the short life of Carmen Miranda and scribbled into my notebook.
“I don’t want to be a female impersonator anymore.”
“Oh, here we go. You don’t want to be in the chorus, you don’t want to be a showgirl, you want the spotlight—you-youyou—well, here’s your damn chance! … think I’m going to support you forever? Go have a shower and get dressed, you’re making me nauseous. Tomorrow we’re getting ourself some Carmen Miranda albums and you’re going to get this damn job.”
By night Annie’s booked doing her Mae West show downtown. Days, she spends with Celia arguing presentation, material and hair colour—early Carmen was dark, later Carmen blonde. They nearly come to blows over the essence of Miranda.
“Bigger!” Annie barks over Celia’s vocals. “Vivacious like a hot tamale! … use your arms! … It’s World War Two and your country’s counting on you to be the Brazilian ambassador—win their hearts!”
“You’re making me a caricature.”
“Carmen was a caricature. Tutti-frutti! The Brazilian Bombshell! Hollywood loved that fiery-Latina shit. They wouldn’t let her be anything else. And soon the Brazilians went from loving her to hating her for making them look like dopes. She was the highest-paid woman in America and she was wearin’ eighty pounds of fruit on her head. What is that if not a caricature?”
“People don’t believe I’m Italian. You want them to think I’m Brazilian?”
“Yeah. Well. We’ll wig you. Should use a Portuguese name too.”
“What difference does that make?”
“You should even talk with a Portuguese accent for the audition. Directors are morons. They have no imagination. If you act like a Portuguese and quack like a Portuguese …”
When the casting director calls her name, Celia comes onstage wearing a dress of Annie’s chopped in half and taken in, a dark wig piled high on her head and bangles on either wrist. Jittery from lack of sleep and too much coffee, she introduces herself to the two men sitting down front of the empty theatre and hands sheet music to the piano player. Annie sits in the back.
As the music begins, Celia bounces her hip and sings, “‘Would you like to spend a weekend in Havana?…’”
The two men in the seats up front, director and choreographer, are motionless. When the last note plays, the pianist turns an eye to Celia and winks.
“Rosa Ramos?” asks the director, tilting his long angular body toward her.
She nods.
He pushes glasses back up his nose. “Got an agent, sweetheart?”
“Nope.”
“Picture and resumé?”
“Nope.”
He exchanges looks with the choreographer who asks, “Any theatre experience?”
“Chorus mostly,” she replies, hiding behind a Portuguese accent as if it were a bush.
From the start, Michael Stark, the director and producer, looks moony-eyed at Celia, worrying over her voice, the chill of the theatre, the draft on her throat. He takes her for dinners to discuss the role, drapes her shoulders in a sable stole to ward off cold. He once knew and loved Carmen Miranda, he says. He wanted to marry her but she wasn’t interested in domestication. That is, until she married that wife-beater who never deserved her, until the studios and agents gripped her so tightly her heart gave out. Now that she’s gone, Stark says, he’s going to make damn sure the world knows what part they played in her demise.
The first time they go to dinner, Celia arrives without the wig. He asks that in future, she wear it in his presence. She listens intently and speaks little.
“But what about the marquee? Christ, I didn’t think this through. I thought you’d be able to dump the Ramos after you got the part,” Annie says later.
“I tried. He said, Rosa Ramos is who you are for the duration of this production. He calls me Carmen most of the time anyway. Last night he took me to the cinema. He’s got this projectionist friend and after the last show, they ran Springtime in the Rockies for us—you know, with Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda. And he kept pointing out his favourite dance moves, the expressions on Carmen’s face—except he’d say your face. I thought he meant he wanted me to learn that look but then he says, ‘And look at your legs. Grable’s don’t hold a candle to yours.’”
Annie is incredulous. “This bastard’s buggy.”
Celia shrugs the way a person might at a wealthy cross-dressing uncle. “Maybe it’s like method acting.”
Stark picks Celia up and drops her off after each rehearsal. When a young man in the chorus is seen kissing her hand backstage, he gets fired. After seeing Celia to the door of her apartment building, Stark calls minutes later from a phone booth to make sure she’s reached her suite and again two hours later to assure himself that she is readying herself for bed, gargling with salt water, avoiding caffeine, eschewing cigarette smoke.
The night before the musical opens, Celia falls asleep on the couch and wakes with a yelp as Annie comes in the door. “It’s just me, hon.”
“I was dreaming about my dad.” Celia falls back into the cushions. “My real one. I think. Except he looked just like Michael Stark. He was pushing me on this tall swing in the park and I was going back and forth in these great big swooshes. And sometimes I looked down and my legs were long but when I remembered my dad was there, they were little like I was a kid and I had to keep remembering I’m Audrey or … or I don’t know what and my dad kept saying, ‘Don’t tell Mummy.’ And then suddenly Cyd Charisse was there and she reached out with a cigarette like she was going to burn my leg but my dad—or Michael—gave me one last push and I went shooting off into the air.”
“You’re just nervous. You’ll feel better after tomorrow night.”
“I hardly remember him. My mother never talked about him after he left.”
Her father is with Mrs. Kent, the widow next door, again. Audrey’s mother thinks it only right that her husband help out around the neighbourhood. Flat feet shouldn’t have kept him from serving his country on the home front. The Japanese capitulated two years ago but still, most weekends he is the Lonely Lady’s Handyman. Thin and frail, Mrs. Kent needs him the most.
The evening her mother sent her to collect him for dinner, Audrey walked through Mrs. Kent’s open front door, calling Daddy as though it were a question. She expected to hear nails being hammered, the growl of a saw, but there was only the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby on the radio.
As she neared the kitchen, soft murmurs mixed with shy giggles. Feet shuffled on linoleum. She could see shoes moving, snatches of bodies passing in and out of the door frame. As the song ended, it was as though they were eating something awfully tasty in that kitchen, mmm-ing, and lip-smacking. Audrey stood small and awkward in the entrance as The Andrews Sisters started “Near You” and her father held Mrs. Kent and sang into her ear, “‘It’s like heaven to be near you…’” They danced in a slow rocking circle.
Mrs. Kent gazed dreamily over her handyman’s shoulder only to see a curious four-year-old. She pushed him away. Audrey’s father cut in with “Hi, honeybun. We’re just taking a break from work, goofing off a little. You want to dance with me too?”
She grinned and went to his hands, stepping onto the toes of his shoes. After a few turns, he picked her up. “We better go see Mot
her, shouldn’t we? Well, goodbye, Mrs. Kent. Screen door ought to be fine now. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Mrs. Kent’s hand flitted about her temple. She didn’t meet Audrey’s eyes.
As her father carried her down the steps, he said, “Mrs. Kent is very lonely since her husband went away to fight the Germans and sometimes she misses dancing the way you and I get to do. So now and then I cheer her up and we dance around the kitchen like this,” and he twirled in circles down the sidewalk as he carried her. “The problem is it makes Mummy sad when I dance with other ladies—she likes all the dances for herself. So I don’t tell her.” He stopped and kissed her nose. “I think you better not tell her either because if she gets very upset, I might have to go away and then we’ll all be sad. See?” She nodded. “Good girl.”
Audrey’s mother, Nancy, was a bit funny when they came home. She looked at her husband as though she thought he might have stolen pennies from her purse. From then on, whenever Audrey’s father went to Mrs. Kent’s, he was told to bring his daughter along.
Sometimes the three of them dance. Sometimes Mrs. Kent gives her crayons and paper and asks her sit out on the back porch with the dog and draw his portrait.
She’s seen them kissing. Mrs. Kent likes to kiss; her mother doesn’t. Audrey doesn’t talk about it.
One day, Audrey comes inside from Mrs. Kent’s porch and is surprised to see they aren’t dancing. Audrey is in the midst of opening the icebox when she hears a light rap at the front door. She can see the top of her mother’s head through the door window.
Audrey looks through to the parlour where Mrs. Kent and her father are on the sofa: Mrs. Kent’s blouse undone, her father touching her brassiere, making that noise as though he’s eating cake.
Couldn’t they all just dance? She reaches up to the counter and turns up the radio.
Nancy walks quietly into the kitchen. Audrey twists her fingers, glancing from her mother to her father as he bites into Mrs. Kent. In a voice that sounds to Audrey like the devil, her mother growls, “You goddamn whore.”
She grabs her daughter by the arm and yanks her from the house.
“You knew all along.” Nancy hauls her down the sidewalk and up the walkway of their own house. “All along, you never said a word.” Pulling her up the front steps, her hands shake as she stops and grabs her child’s face. “How could you betray me?” And slaps her.
Opening night, even with comps to reviewers, friends and relatives, the theatre is less than half-full. Stark hits the streets out front asking passersby if they would like to see the finest Brazilian performer to ever hit the American stage. Some take him up on it, some laugh—“Sure, pal, like I wanna spend my night watchin’ some broad dance with bananas on her head.”
Between strays off the street and the friends Annie brought, the audience is fluffed to a little over half capacity.
When Celia comes out for her curtain call, the crowd is checkered with a few diehard Carmen aficionados on their feet while most clap politely from deep in their seats, relieved that the night was a freebie. Stark rushes to her onstage, his face wet with tears, his arms cradling a monstrous bouquet. She takes the flowers and Stark’s hand and together they bow.
She is sponging off her makeup when he opens her dressing-room door.
“Michael,” she says uncertainly. “Do you have notes—”
He raises a hand to quiet her and, getting down on one knee, takes a deep and shuddering breath. “These past weeks with you have been the most glorious of my life. And I believe they have been the doorway to a love and a joy few people will ever know.” Taking a small velvet box from his pocket, he flips the top. “Carmen, I have always loved you. If you will marry me I promise to bring you joy each and every day of our lives together.”
“Oh my goddamn Christ!” Annie shrieks later at the apartment. “This guy is the original loser! What did you say?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I think I lost my accent even. He said, Don’t answer me now. Think about it. And have the sort of sweet dreams a woman has knowing she is truly loved. Then he slipped the ring on my finger and left.”
“So where is it?”
Celia goes into her purse and opens the box.
Annie whistles. “This sonuvabitch is cracked.”
“I’m scared to lose the accent now. What if he goes funny?”
“Goes?”
The next day, Annie trots to the door and steals the neighbour’s paper. “Hang on to your bird, vee are turnink to zee t’eatre section undt see vat Herr Warner said about zee extravaganza.”
Celia stands in her housecoat, wringing the belt.
“I saw Albert Warner there so he should—There we go.” Annie’s eyes scan the text.
“Out loud, please.”
“Oh. Ah. Well, the caption is, ‘Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.’ For the Love of Carmen is the new musical by first-time director-producer Michael Stark and God help us if it’s not the last. The play, to put it kindly, is a love letter to the former toast of Broadway, Brazilian superstar-cum-has-been Carmen Miranda. Stark would have better spent his time and money on a truckload of graveside flowers … Oh boy … all right … blablabla—cast in the lead is newcomer Rosa Ramos whose uncanny ability to capture the once-beloved voice of Miranda is overshadowed by her …”
“Keep going,” Celia says.
“… her, at best, mediocre acting skills. While singing, it’s as though Ramos can feel the grip that must have taken Miranda’s heart once she realized the world didn’t care for her worn-out tutti-frutti camp. But once the music— Honey, he’s a cocksucker and everyone knows it.”
Celia drops her head against the back of the sofa. “Just read it.”
“—once the music stops, Ramos truly is the walking dead. But to be fair, her soggy attempts at emoting are difficult to qualify since this wet dog of a script soaked cast, orchestra and audience alike in a drooling damp.” Annie tosses the paper. “Jaded old hack.”
Celia sighs. “Least nobody knows my real name.”
“No, you were good! I’m sure the other reviews will be better.”
There are only two other reviews and they are no kinder. At the theatre that night, there’s a message from Stark saying he will not be in attendance. The cast wander about like hapless zombies.
After the players limp through a second night’s performance, fifty-one audience members mope to the exit. Backstage, the dreariness has become a black joke. The cast decide to go out and get blotto.
As they come out the back door, one of the chorus kids makes a show of checking first to see if there are tomatoes to be hurled. Except for a man in a trench coat, the coast is clear.
“Audrey?” the trench coat calls softly.
“Sorry, Mac,” a chorus kid bellows. “Ain’t no Audrey in this dog-and-pony show.”
Celia’s feet are paralyzed. The others trip past.
“Audrey. I knew it was you.”
She stares a moment then unearths her feet.
“Honey, please. Just five minutes.”
She freezes again. Her stage-husband comes back and drapes his arm across her back. “You okay, Rosa?”
“Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll catch up.” Soon she is alone with him. Stewart steps toward her.
“I’m not coming home.”
He nods. “She’s sick. Same cancer as her sister.”
Celia stares down the alley.
“Audrey, you should come home. At least for a visit.”
“She doesn’t want me there.”
“I know things were lousy before you left and you got the brunt of it but—”
“She threw me out. And you let her.”
The back door opens behind them. Annie pokes her head out. “There you are! I thought I—sorry, did I interrupt something?”
“No.” Celia’s voice falls icy flat. “Everyone’s gone up the street for a drink. You coming?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m comin’.” Annie clips down the ste
ps, eyes flitting toward the guy. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”
“Audrey.”
“I’m not Audrey anymore.”
“For godsake, we all made mistakes. Can’t you—”
“No, I can’t. Go home and look after your wife.”
Stewart is speechless a moment. When he sees her shoulders slump, he reaches out for her. Celia lets him hug her a moment. “I should’ve handled it better,” he says into Celia’s hair. “I shouldn’t have let things get so out of hand.”
She pushes him away when she starts to cry. “I can’t. Please, just leave me alone.” Reaching behind her for Annie’s hand, she rushes off down the alley.
When they reach the street, Celia buckles and Annie hails a cab. They spend the rest of the evening at the apartment in front of the television, Celia’s head on a pillow in Annie’s lap, a blanket heaped over her body as though it weren’t warm enough to wander around in pasties. The funeral for Audrey’s aunt had been in Chicago. Nancy stayed on but she thought it best that Stewart and Audrey go back and leave her to sort things out, pack up her sister’s belongings.
Back in New York, Audrey took the train into town after school for ballet rehearsals and afterward, she and Stewart would head to a restaurant. They spent hours talking about politics, the future, analyzing dreams. It didn’t look like her mother would be back in town for a while so Stewart asked what she wanted to do for her birthday.
“Don’t suppose you’d ever take me to the El Morocco, would you?”
“Big bad Elmo’s, huh. We could arrange that.”
The day before her birthday was Saturday and late that afternoon, Stewart presented her with a suitcase-sized box. Inside was a new dress, slim-fitting emerald, silk and strapless, with a matching bolero jacket.
She gulped at the sight of herself in the mirror. Nancy wouldn’t approve. When she came out of her room to show Stewart, he spun her around. “Spectacular! Put your pearls on!”
They drove into town that evening, Audrey in her new dress and Stewart in his tux.
Seeing the finery as they came through the front doors—the elegance of the clientele against the rich decor—she went weak in the knees. First dinner: duck à l’orange. Baked Alaska for dessert. Later: champagne and the main attraction—beautiful sun-kissed Harry Belafonte onstage. They waltzed to his crooning, and salsaed to the calypso beat.
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