"Why is it," she asked this girl on the bus one day, "that God tells you to do one thing and tells us to do something else?"
The girl shrugged. " 'The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,'" she said. "We are God's children. Blessed be the name of the Lord."
By the time she was fourteen, Golda Graustein was very secretly, but very definitely, a skeptic.
3
When she was fifteen she was introduced to the young man Rabbi Graustein had tentatively decided would be her husband. His name was Nathan. He was a student at the yeshiva, preparing himself for the rabbinate. He was eighteen years old.
Nathan was a slight young man, timid in the presence of the lordly Rabbi Mordecai Graustein, and respectful toward the rabbi's daughter. He was only an inch or so taller than Golda and probably weighed less than twenty pounds more. She disliked the redness of his full lips. She disliked the straggly patches of whiskers that grew here and there on his cheeks and jaw — which he might have shaved, she thought, until he could grow a manly beard. She disliked his totally practical little round silver-rimmed eyeglasses. He wore a calf-length black coat, wore his white shirt buttoned up and without a necktie, and wore his black hat set precisely square on his head — all like her father, only on Nathan these things did not lend dignity. Above all, she disliked his bland sincerity.
He had been in their house four times before he spoke a word to her. Then he said, quietly, bluntly, "Our fathers have chosen us for each other."
"Perhaps," she said noncommittally. "But that's a long time from now."
"Yes," he said. "I must continue to study."
Neither of her parents saw her first dance recital. For six months she had been working with Mrs. Shapiro, her dance teacher, to develop a routine. Her mother didn't know and probably would not have told Rabbi Graustein if she had.
The recital was given in the recreation hall of a temple in Hempstead, Long Island. When Golda mentioned that it was being presented in a Jewish temple, her father frowned but did not ask what kind of house G-d had that included a recreation hall. To the Graustein family, Hempstead sounded like a distant place, certainly one they could not reach conveniently, and they accepted the assurance that the young dance students would be transported there on a bus and returned by nine o'clock in the evening. In fact, that was the only negative reaction they had to the recital — that the bus had returned at 9:46.
They did not see their daughter perform. She was sixteen. She had ripened into a leggy, busty young woman. Some of the dancers in the recital were tap dancers, some essayed ballet. Golda Graustein came on the stage in bright-red hip-high leotards glittering with spangles, wearing a red spangled top hat and net stockings, and carrying a stick. She did a solo piece. She danced, and she sang, and twice she dropped in a one-liner — her own, not authorized by Mrs. Shapiro. She mugged. She rolled her eyes. Her enthusiasm was infectious. The audience stood to applaud and called her back three times.
"I will be a dancer. I will be an entertainer," she told her mother in the quiet of her bedroom that night.
"Your father has chosen a husband for you."
Golda's answer was simple. "No."
It was the first time he called her a shiksa.
He would no longer pay Mrs. Shapiro to teach her. Mrs. Shapiro taught her anyway. He wouldn't give her bus fare to go to her classes. She walked, until Mrs. Shapiro found out and gave her bus fare.
Naomi Shapiro had danced on Broadway in the 1920s and early '30s, without much success; and when her figure began to thicken they had discontinued hiring her.
"They will break your heart, darling," she told Golda. "You must think. You must think — "
Golda was eighteen. "I must think of the alternative," she said. "Marriage to a pale, pimply ... unmanly — "
"I can arrange an audition. You see what you will have to compete with, then you will know."
4
Before this audition, Golda lost her virginity. More accurately said, she did not lose it; she got rid of it, something she had ceased to prize. She gave it away in a darkened rehearsal room at Mrs. Shapiro's studio, to a dancer two years older than she was: a muscular, handsome, manly youth, everything Nathan was not.
Doing this, she made her first great mistake about love. Innocent, she did not understand that a man could do to her what that young dancer did — unless he loved her. Oh, maybe not loved her in the great romantic way they heard sung about on records and radio, but cared for her at least. How could he have struggled with her through the ritual of passion without caring for her?
But he had. He was a nice Jewish boy, too. He thrust his big fat organ into her and caused her pain and pleasure and afterward treated her as a nuisance he didn't want to tolerate anymore.
A week later Mrs. Shapiro accompanied her to her first audition. It was, of course, a revelation. Golda discovered that she was only one of thousands — tens of thousands? — of girls who were dedicated to dancing and yearned for a place in the chorus lines of Broadway shows. She was seen at all only because someone felt he owed a favor to Naomi Shapiro.
She did not make the first cut.
As they stood on the street outside the theater in the rain looking for a cab to take them to the subway station — Golda depressed, wearing a scarf over her head, a too-short raincoat, saddle oxfords, and bobby sox, everything unstylish — a man walked up to them.
"Hi, Naomi," he said. "Disappointed?"
"I'm not," said Mrs. Shapiro. "I warned her. I suppose Golda is. Golda Graustein, meet Ernie Levin."
Golda looked at this man. He was maybe fifty years old. He wore a pork-pie rain hat and a black raincoat. He was not as tall as she was. His face looked squashed down, as if the jaws of a vise had been tightened on his skull and jaw, but an irrepressible smile shaped his eyes and mouth.
"Nice to meet ya, Miss Graustein. The first thing to do is change that name. The next thing — What are you, Hassidic? The next thing is to toss away the scarf, get your eyebrows plucked, get your hair cut, and learn to wear makeup."
"Ernie is an agent," said Mrs. Shapiro without enthusiasm.
"I was back there," said Ernie Levin. "I saw the audition. I can get ya work, kid. I can place her in the Catskills this summer, Naomi. Next fall, off Broad-way maybe. Forget the chorus line, Golda. You got a shtick. That's why you'll never make it in the chorus line. You'd pull too much attention. What they want is uniformity. It's grunt work anyway. How old are ya?"
The family schism followed.
"You will do no such thing. You will marry Nathan before the summer is over and settle down to a proper and honorable life."
"No, Papa. I will not marry Nathan. I do not want to marry him. I don't love him."
"He is a good young man. He will be a rabbi. You will be the wife of a rabbi. Every girl wants to be the wife of a rabbi. You will share in the respect and honor that will be accorded him. The matter is settled, Golda. I have promised you to him. I will hear nothing to the contrary."
"I know a little of the law myself, Papa. You can't force me to marry Nathan. What is more, I am seventeen years old and will soon be eighteen. I can leave your home."
"SHIKSA!"
5
She worked that summer — the last summer when the world was at peace — at two borscht-belt hotels. To her disgust and shame, she discovered that she was expected to wait tables at lunch as well as to perform on the stage, two shows each evening. Ernie Levin told her not to worry, that was the way you broke in. He told her she was getting experience. He pointed out to her that she was allowed to work solo, to dance and sing, to crack jokes, and most of all to learn her trade.
A comedian was the star of each show, and she worked behind five of them that summer. There were other singers and other dancers, but what Levin told her was true, that she had a small lead role in each show and was allowed to polish her shtick.
She wore leotards and net stockings, sometimes a top hat, and sometimes she used a cane. Levin
urged her to study her audiences, to see how they reacted to what she did. It was essential, he insisted, that she develop a rapport with audiences. She must not just offer a prepared shtick, like merchandise on the counter of a store: take it or leave it. She must learn to respond to the audience's reaction, changing not just tomorrow night but right now if she saw she was not carrying the audience with her. The worst mistake of all, he told her, was to resent an audience that did not seem to like her, and to defy it. The customer is always right, he said.
She wrote to her mother that she lived in the waitresses' dormitory and that she ate kosher. She wrote that they did not perform on the Shabbat. What she did not write was that she no longer covered her head whenever she went outside. She did not write that she had given herself to one of the comedians. She did not write that once again she had misunderstood the quality and nature of a man's attentions and had annoyed him by falling in love.
When she returned to New York she was pregnant.
Resourceful Ernie Levin moved her into a flat with another client of his and arranged for her to have an abortion. It was not done by a back-alley abortionist but by a White Plains gynecologist. The doctor was a woman, and she was competent and sympathetic. Even so, the operation was painful, and it left Golda feeling she had committed an unpardonable sin.
"You have two choices, my child," Ernie had told her. "You can go home to your family, since after all you must have a home and support for you and your child; or you can abort the pregnancy. I have work for you. I can book you into clubs. God forbid, I should ever urge a young woman to have an abortion, but I want you to know what your options are."
"I have no options," Golda had said tearfully.
"I have a word of advice," said Ernie. "Do not be so ready to give your person to a young man. You are naive. You must be less trusting."
The doctor who performed the abortion gave her more specific counseling about birth control.
Ernie took her to a tiny comedy club in Lower Manhattan, where she auditioned for the owner — who had been told she was twenty-one. He wanted a different act. She could dance a little, okay, and she could sing a little, okay; but he wanted more jokes. It was, after all, a comedy club. And the songs — He wanted bawdy songs. And no bra under the leotard, okay? If she bounced around a little, the audience would love it.
In his office Ernie rehearsed her with a string of jokes. He bought some, stole others. Some were coarse, some weren't.
Golda used them all, and the audience liked them. Ernie got her permissions to use several songs from what were called party records. She got wild applause when she danced and sang, "Bounce your boobies."
It was a tough grind. The club didn't open until nine o'clock, and it closed at three in the morning, by which time she had done four shows. But the owner renewed her contract three times, and she performed there for a month.
Her last night someone yelled from the audience, "Hey, Golda! Where'll you be next?"
"Yellow Calf," she said. Ernie had already arranged her next booking.
"See ya there!" yelled the man in the audience.
6
Clubs announced new shows by running little block ads in the tabloid papers, and before the winter was over those little ads were promising a performance by the hilarious dancing comedienne Golda Graustein.
She polished her act. Comedy-club audiences were far tougher than the audiences in Catskill hotels. They were unforgiving. They didn't see her as a kid trying to please them but as part of a show they'd paid good money to see. They demanded earthy humor, filled with sexual innuendo. Sometimes insinuation wasn't enough for them; they wanted their comedy literally raunchy. Golda had to be taught, and Ernie Levin was her teacher. He began to buy jokes for her. A young writer fed her lines for ten dollars apiece. One night she got a huge laugh from a parody on the song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," including the line "I suck like an Electrolux," and later she blushed when she found out what it meant.
What she was doing was not what she had meant to do and be when she was first inspired to dance and sing. But she had to make a living.
Eighteen years old, Golda had to make a living. She was allowed to visit her family home in Queens, but never to eat a meal there, never to stay overnight. Her father absented himself from the house if he knew she was coming. He declared she degraded the family name and left word that he would appreciate it if she would call herself something else.
Ernie Levin said she would probably do better if she did change her name. So ... Glenda Grayson.
18
1
"ERNIE ... OH, ERNIE, ERNIE!"
Glenda wept over the pallid figure lying in the wooden coffin. Ernie Levin. At Forty-eighth and Broadway he had toppled off the curb and fallen on his face on the rainy street. His signature pork-pie rain hat had rolled out into the street and was run over by a cab. He'd been hustling a deal, always hustling. His heart quit. Just quit. He was fifty-five years old.
"What'm I ever gonna do without him?" Glenda asked quietly, of no one in particular.
Gib Dugan put his arm gently around her waist. "The Irish do these things better," he said.
"Meaning ... ?"
"A wake," he said. "We could all be drunk."
"I'd like to be drunk," she said, "but I have to work tonight. And so do you."
In two years, thanks to Ernie, she had moved uptown in more ways than one. She was working in a club called Dingo's in the Bronx, where she was part of a fully produced show with live music, a chorus line of six dancers, a comedian, and Glenda Grayson. She was the headliner. Her name was outside.
Her act had matured. She danced. She perched on a piano, crossed her handsome legs, and sang. Her comedy was no longer just one-liners but a monologue that included touching lines about the way her family scorned her.
"Hey, you remember Jack Benny's great line? His father had wanted him to be a rabbi, not a comedian. But he said to him, 'Anyway, whatever you do, don't change your name, Benjamin.' What'd my father the rabbi say to me? 'Golda, as a favor to your family ... change your name! Please!' "
Gib Dugan was one of the three male dancers in the chorus line, which meant he was not good enough to dance on Broadway. He was a big muscular good-looking guy, though; and, in Glenda's term, "hung like a horse." He satisfied her. She told herself she had learned enough to allow a guy to get in her pants but not to allow any guy, especially a goyish guy, to get into her head. Still, she had to admit she would be sorry if she lost this one.
"One or two won't hurt anything," he said. "C'mon. Ernie was a great guy, but — "
"No buts, Gib. We have to work." She glanced a final time at the corpse of her mentor. "Ernie ... How'm I gonna get jobs without him?"
They worked two shows, and when they went home to her flat in Brooklyn, she was again tearful. Performing exhausted her, and while she was in the shower, Gib poured her a heavy Scotch over ice and handed it past the curtain. She drank while the water was still pouring over her and managed to relax.
She sat then in her living room, naked except for the towel that soon fell down, with the Scotch almost exhausted. He put in two more ice cubes and poured her some more.
"Ernie," she whispered tearfully.
"There was a limit to Ernie, Glenda," Gib said. "There was a limit to his vision. You can do better than anything he could ever get you."
"C'mon. Meaning what?"
"You gotta get out of New York, baby. You've done all you can do here. Look at it. Things are changing. The hotels have quiet lounges. They want a gal who can play the piano and sing — but not so loud it interferes with the business talk over the tables. Clubs. There are fewer and fewer every year. The ones that survive have gone over to strippers. You wanta work with stripteasers? You wanta take off your clothes on stage?"
"So what the shit am I supposed to do?"
"Gotta get out of town," said Gib. "The Poconos. Miami Beach. Texas. L.A."
Glenda tossed back her Scotch. "Yeah, sure.
I got an offer to make some party records."
"No," he said firmly.
"What do you mean, no?"
"That won't do your reputation any good. You got a name as a club act. You — "
She put her hand on his crotch. "Don't gimme advice," she said. "Gimme what you got better of."
"Sure. In a minute. But be serious, Glenda. You gotta get a new agent. Hey. Let me make a couple of calls. I know some people. Maybe I can get you something out of town."
2
"Maybe it was G-d's will," said her mother.
"God? The man was my friend."
"You thought so. And what about this shegetz you are seeing now? Is he your friend? The Katholischer?"
"He is my friend."
They sat together in her family's living room on a Thursday afternoon. Rabbi Mordecai Graustein was, as always when his daughter visited, absent. Glenda stared at the crocheted antimacassars on the chairs, which had seemed so natural, inevitable in fact, when she was a girl and looked so antiquated now. She had come to the house in a cab, her head uncovered — without in fact bringing anything to cover it. That year shorter skirts were in fashion — it was women's patriotic duty to save fabric — and hers crept back above her knees when she sat. She was out of place in her own home.
"It is not too late for you, Golda," her mother said. "It is never too late for hope, always too early for despair."
"Which means what, Mother?"
"You did not marry Nathan. You should have married Nathan. He is a fine educated young rabbi, with a reputation that will one day rival your father's. And he married a girl who knew how to respect him. But there is another. This young man came late to his studies, but he is devout in them. He is rich! His father died and left him more than two hundred thousand dollars, which is what allows him to leave business and take up his studies. He wants only a devoted wife. Your father is sure you could win him."
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