by Axel Madsen
Ruby’s only school was the backstage, her teachers other performers. She learned quickly and worked hard. Her memory would be selective. “I was in the 16th row of the chorus and wore a beaded thing and occasionally sat on an elephant,” she would say in 1949. No mention of riding the elephant in a scanty costume or, in a famous Ziegfeld Shadowgraph tableau, standing naked to the waist behind a white screen.
For young Ruby, hypocrisy, repressed sexuality, and the power of real acting came together in Jeanne Eagels’s brilliant acting in Rain. The stage adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story was a sensation when it opened on Broadway in November 1922. Eagles was an actress of irresistible freshness and strangely corrupt beauty, who electrified audiences for the four-year run of the play. Any actress with a brain and a figure wanted to repeat the performance, and Tallulah Bankhead went to London to persuade Maugham she was the actress for the West End version. We do not know what Ruby thought of Sadie Thompson and the missionary who, after reducing her to misery, shame, and repentance, falls prey to her vitality, commits suicide, and leaves her scornfully calling all men dirty pigs. We do know that Ruby was so fascinated by Eagels that she returned four times to see her play.
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RUBY SHARED HER FIRST APARTMENT WITH TWO FELLOW CHORINES. Mae Clarke and Walda Mansfield were also in the Follies lineup, and together the trio took a cold-water flat on Forty-sixth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
“We lived over a laundry, which could be steamy at times and especially hot in the summer,” she would recall. “The heat seemed to come through every crack in the floor and ceiling. Then there was the noisy Sixth Avenue El that shook the walls. Sometimes we felt we could reach out and touch the trains.”
Walda was a skinny girl with a small mousy face. Mae was born Mary Klotz in Philadelphia, the daughter of a movie theater organist, and had danced in amateur musicals in Atlantic City, where she had caught the eye of Earl Lindsay.
As chorus girls, Ruby, Walda, and Mae managed as many as thirty-eight routines a night. Ruby would remember working a restaurant job on West Forty-eighth Street and rushing from there to the Shubert Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street at 8:15 every night with nothing on but a coat and a pair of shoes—”stark naked, I swear, in freezing weather, and the coats were not so hot either,” she’d say in 1943. “Ask Mae Clarke—she used to do the run with me every night. I tell you we worked like dogs, were strong as horses. But don’t ask your baby Duses to do that now, they’re worrying about their psyches.”
From midnight to 7:00 A.M., Ruby and Mae worked shows in the succession of nightclubs that Mary Louise “Texas” Guinan opened—and police closed. By serving booze, the zany, wisecracking queen of nightclubs broke the law nightly in her many elegantly designed clubs. Guinan paid police a fortune to stay open. But, as one cop put it, “Temperance crackpots had to be appeased,” and her clubs were regularly raided. Federal agents who pretended to be customers so they could be served and pour the contents of their drinks into small bottles as evidence usually waited for the girls to finish their act before standing up and announcing, “Okay, everybody, stay where you are. This is a raid!”
Guinan billed herself as “God’s Masterpiece and the Most Fascinating Actress in America” and was famous for greeting her rich male patrons with “Hello, suckers” before singing a few songs and browbeating her audience with insolent remarks that everyone adored. Following blues and torch singers, Ruby and six other girls danced a furious Charleston for three hundred revelers. Guinan’s clientele ranged from fun-loving Mayor Jimmy Walker to newspaper columnists, stellar figures of the underworld, W. C. Fields, Ann Pennington, Al Jolson, and—her lifeblood—blue-chip suckers. She ordered her waiters to shout risqué words to the dancers and to refill customers’ glasses without being asked. “Give the girls a great big hand,” Texas demanded in her trademark comment at the end of the act. With winks toward the big spenders, Texas had the young women run through the cramped table area and do short shimmies in front of sugar daddies to encourage them to stuff banknotes into their scanty costumes.
Ruby and Mae were also on call as dance instructors at a speakeasy for gays and lesbians owned by Guinan’s less-renowned brother. Jimmy Guinan’s lover was a New York City cop who made it his business to know when a police raid was planned. On nights when police activity appeared imminent, Jimmy borrowed several of his sister’s girls and transformed his nightclub into a dance studio. Ruby later neglected to remember her tours of duty as teacher at Jimmy Guinan’s, but Sheldon Dewey, who wrote a society column under the pen name Harry Otis, would recall taking impromptu tango lessons from the future Barbara Stanwyck during a vice squad raid.
STAGE-DOOR JOHNNIES WERE A FACT OF LIFE, AND WHEN MAE, Walda, or Ruby accepted a date they had their swains drop them off at one of the theater-district hotels, both to pretend they could afford to live there and also not to let their admirers know their real address. Even in the early 1920s, $40 a week only covered the necessities and sometimes not even that, she would remember. Chorines usually had three choices when it came to men—musicians, gangsters, or millionaires. The musicians, who were in the pit every night and rubbed shoulders with the girls backstage and in the hallways, usually won out. Bea Palmer, one of Ruby’s colleagues, managed all three. She had married a banker from Baltimore, left him to marry a banjo player from the George Olsen band, and, after curtain time every night, was escorted by the enforcer for the Yellow Cab Company. A blue-eyed Shubert chorine named Lucille LeSueur married James Welton, a saxophone player in the pit orchestra of The Passing Show of 1924. Two years later, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave her a screen test, shipped her to California, and changed her name to Joan Crawford.
Ruby left no written memories of her time as a Ziegfeld and George White chorine, but a young woman who joined the 1924 edition of White’s Scandals did. Long after she had flamed out as an icon of film history, Louise Brooks would paint a lively picture of backstage life in the Scandal lineup in her autobiographical novel, Naked on My Goat.
Eligible bachelors in their thirties were eager to escort showgirls to places like the Colony and “21.” Finding debutantes a threat, [they] turned to pretty girls in the theater, whose mothers weren’t husband hunting. Café society developed about this time. The theater, Hollywood, and society mingled in the monthly Mayfair danced at the Ritz, where society women could monitor their theatrical enemies and snub them publicly.
All the rich men were friends who entertained one another in their perfectly appointed Park Avenue apartments and Long Island homes. The extravagant sums given to the girls for clothes were part of the fun—part of competing to see whose girl would win the Best-Dressed title. Sexual submission was not a condition of this arrangement, although many affairs grew out of it.
In self-defense against lechers in tuxedos and ballroom rakes, Ruby, Mae, and Walda made the caustic Oscar Levant their “mascot.” The boyfriend of an Irish chorus girl, Levant was a pianist and knew everybody. He played in orchestras in the smartest nightclubs, at social functions in private homes, in jazz dives, and had recorded George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for Brunswick records. He knew LeRoy Pierpont Ward, for whom speakeasy doors flew open and who called most of New York society by first name, and he played for Jimmy Walker, who wrote lyrics for Tin Pan Alley, kept showgirls on the side, and took seven vacations during his first two years in office.
Levant took Ruby, Mae, and Walda to Harlem, where the after-theater limousine crowd looked for new thrills. The “class white-trade” nightclubs like the Cotton Club on Lenox and 142nd Street featured jazz, chorus lines, comedians, singers like Ethel Waters, and marvelous dancers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Louis Armstrong performed at Connie’s Inn on 131st Street and Bessie Smith at the Lafayette on Seventh Avenue and 132nd Street. The Park Avenue sophisticated also frequented the mixed basement speakeasies like the Drool Inn and the Clam House, where transvestites performed and lesbians flaunted themselves. Bessie Smith’s lesbia
n interests were well known, and her mentor, Ma Rainey, was just out of jail for arranging a lesbian orgy in her home involving the women in her chorus. One night Ruby was introduced to Jeanne Eagels, high on opium and clinging to the butchy singer Libby Holman.
Levant would remember Ruby as “wary of sophisticates and phonies.” She was fascinated by the gritty realities of backstage life, but for the most part remained aloof. It was provocative for an enter-tainer to admit to a “touch” of lesbianism, but most dancers expected to marry and live as heterosexuals. As Mae West said, the theater was full of odd men and odd women. Ruby knew show business couldn’t exist without them.
RUBY WAS ONE OF THE SIXTEEN “KEEP KOOL CUTÍES” IN THE KEEP Kool revue when the show opened at the Morosco, May 22, 1924. Variety said of them, “The sixteen girls are pips, lookers and dancers, kicking like steers and look like why-men-leave-home in their many costume flashes.” Hazel Dawn was the star. Ruby had a number with Johnny Dooley called “A Room Adjoining a Boudoir.” When the show closed in August, Ziegfeld decided to take some of the sketches on his Follies road show. Ruby was invited to go on tour. In an imitation of the deleted “Comic Supplement” number, she did a striptease behind a white screen in a Ziegfeld Shadowgraph tableau. Her salary jumped to $100 a week.
Back in New York, she had no trouble finding jobs. In April 1925, she and Mae Clarke danced in the chorus in Anatole Friedland’s Club on Fifty-fourth Street. They never went to bed before dawn.
After the nightclub stint, Lindsay offered both girls parts in the Shuberts’ Gay Paree at the Winter Garden. The show satirized the folks of an imaginary Hicks ville, and not one song dealt with Paris. The score was by J. Fred Coots, the former Chicago song plugger and Sally; Irene and Mary composer who, in 1931, would write “I Still Get a Thrill Thinking of You” for Bing Crosby. Most of the comedy fell to Chic Sale, who portrayed an announcer at a church social. Ruby and Mae danced in lavish production numbers that had chorus beauties parading in “Glory of Morning Sunshine” and shimmying to “Florida Mammy.”
The thirteen-year period between 1924-37 has been called the golden age of the Broadway musical, and the 1925-26 season was enthralling. George and Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter gave new sophistication to their rhymes. The world hummed “Oh, Lady, Be Good!” and No, No, Nanette ran for 321 performances after a year in Chicago while The Desert Song and Rio Rita nearly topped five hundred shows.
Ruby danced in the 1926 version of George White’s Scandals. White had danced with Ann Pennington in Ziegfeld’s dazzling war shows and in 1919 had become the producer of a lavish new revue, Scandals. The 1926 edition at the Apollo ran for 424 performances, almost double the series’ previous record. Pennington led the dancers, Eugene and Willie Howard headed the clowns. The McCarthy Sisters were joined by an eye-filling chorus line dressed by Erté. Ruby danced the black bottom.
The city elders were uneasy about the morals of Broadway people. Jimmy Walker threatened managers with punitive action unless they cleaned up their acts. Mae West spent ten days in the workhouse and was fined $500 for her play Sex, and New York’s district attorney closed down The Captive and hauled away cast and management in paddy wagons because the heroine in Edouard Bourdet’s play was seduced (offstage) by another woman.
Ruby, Walda, and Mae moved in together at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Forty-fifth Street. Walda was the first to go steady. Her boyfriend was Irving Berlin’s partner, Walter Donaldson. A large, ruddy man at home in the knockabout world of Tin Pan Alley, Walter had been a piano demonstrator when he wrote his first hit song, “Back Home in Tennessee,” without ever having visited the state. As a composer, he had followed up with Al Jolson’s “My Mammy,” “Carolina in the Morning,” and Eddie Cantor’s new hit, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” It is not known whether Walda was the inspiration for Walter’s most famous song, “My Blue Heaven,” but in 1935 they got married.
Mae married Fanny Brice’s brother, Lew, who was twice her age.
Ruby went out with a boy named Edward Kennedy. She would have little to say about this first boyfriend except that he wanted them to get married. She told him they should wait.
A photo of Ruby, Mae, and Walda shows three young women in a theatrical pose on a sofa, Ruby and Walda revealing long, silk-stocking legs. The blond Mae is in black, sitting on the armrest, strumming a guitar. Walda and Ruby sit below Mae, chiseled-faced Walda in profile looking at Ruby with one hand on her shoulder. Ruby’s face is fuller than in her 1930s movie stills, but with her clear, straight gaze she is unmistakably the future Barbara Stanwyck.
The roommates generally paid for their own dinners, usually at The Tavern, Billy LaHiff’s Forty-eight Street hangout for show people. LaHiff liked to have attractive girls sprinkled about in his restaurant and let showgirls between jobs eat on credit. On occasion, he served as self-appointed talent scout and go-between.
One night, LaHiff came over and said, “Ruby, I’ve got a chance for you.”
He introduced her to Willard Mack, producer, director, playwright, screenwriter and actor, and husband of the strikingly beautiful actress Marjorie Rambeau.
Twenty years later she would remember:
Mr. Mack was a director of legitimate plays. He was more famous than anyone I’d ever met, up to that moment. When I’m frightened, even now, I try to act bold. I was really scared then. So I looked at Willard Mack with impudent assurance, just to keep from turning around and running away.
Billy [LaHiff] said, “Mr. Mack, you said one of your characters in the new play is a chorus girl. Why not cast a real one in the part?”
Ruby would have two versions of what happened next. In one, Mack said, “All right, Ruby. I’ll give you a try.” Emboldened, she said she lived with two other girls. “We all need jobs. All of us, or nobody.”
“Mack looked furious. Then he burst out laughing. ‘So you won’t walk out on your friends?’ he said. ‘Well, you’re quite a girl, Ruby.’ So he gave us all jobs.”
In her seventies, she would not mention Mae and Walda, only Mack telling her the part had already been cast for New York but she could have it out of town.
4
REX
I WAS A DANCER, NOT A GREAT ONE, BUT I KNEW LEFT FROM RIGHT,” Barbara would sum up her apprentice years. “But I was no actress. It never occurred to me that I could make the grade as an actress. I didn’t even try. It was as a chorus girl that I was signed for a very small part in Mack’s play. All I did was dance on stage in the second act. I did have six lines to say, but they were incidental. Mack just began training me.”
Little is known today of Willard Mack (né Charles Willard McLaughlin). In the teens and early twenties when the commercial stage was at its zenith and the twin mechanical entertainment sources, radio and films, were in their infancy, the Canadian actor-playwright was a significant presence in the popular theater. He wrote thirty-four plays, twenty-six of which were produced on Broadway, acted in many of them, and moved to Hollywood to become a writer-director. A native of Morrisburg, Ontario, he was married four times to noted actresses. Kick In, his first Broadway play, was an expanded version of the vaudeville skit that brought him from San Francisco to New York in 1913 and starred John Barrymore. Three years later, David Belasco, Broadway’s premier impresario, produced a Mack drama. As an actor, Mack created the part of Captain Bartlett in Eugene O’Neill’s Gold in 1921. Oscar Levant called Mack a “Belasco hack,” one of the dramatists writing plays to order for Belasco and his contract stars.
When Mack met Ruby at LaHiff’s, he was forty-eight, a man with expressive, almost bulging eyes, who combed his dark hair forward over his high forehead to cover a receding hairline. He was married to his fourth wife, Marjorie Rambeau.
Mack’s new play, The Noose, was a death-row drama. It told the story of Nickie Elkins, a young man whose involvement with bootleggers has led to him being convicted of murder. As the curtain rises on the first act, Nickie is awaiting execution and two women, a society lady an
d a chorus girl, are in love with him. Helen Flint would play the female lead, the society lady. Mack cast George Nash as the bad guy, and for the Governor chose Lester Lonergan. His choice for the leading role of the noble convict was Rex Cherryman, an exciting young face on Broadway who had made his New York debut two seasons earlier in The Valley of Content opposite Rambeau. The handsome Cherryman came to The Noose fresh from Downstream, a little-remembered play that nevertheless established him as a promising newcomer. Before that he had made a noted impression as the young lawyer opposite Carroll McComas in a revival of the 1908 drawing-room drama Madame X.
WALDA AND MAE GOT TO GO TO PITTSBURGH FOR OUT-OF-TOWN tryouts with Ruby. The three friends spent Ruby’s nineteenth birthday competing for the part of Dot, the chorus girl with the six lines in the third act. Walda didn’t make it and returned to New York. Ruby got the part, and Mae was cast as a second chorus girl in the second-act bootleg cabaret.
Ruby was happy with her walk-on and with watching Rex Cherryman rehearse. Later in life she would tell how her Brooklyn accent made her insecure, how she went around saying she wasn’t sure she had the voice for acting. In fact, she had already declaimed on radio. In 1922, Marcus Loew had decided that if he owned one of those new radio stations, vaudeville players performing in Loews theaters could advertise their acts. He bought WHN and had headliners like Eddie Cantor and Mae West perform on radio. With airtime to fill, aspiring actors were invited to go on the air. Ruby Stevens recited poetry.
Ruby thought The Noose was wonderful. Mack liked what she tried to do and began showing her how to take advantage of entrances and exits. “I was temperamental, but I was scared,” she would recall. “I told him I couldn’t act, that it was hopeless. I couldn’t and what’s more, I wouldn’t. Then Mr. Mack did a turnabout and in front of the entire company said I was a chorus girl and would always be a chorus girl, would live like a chorus girl, so to hell with me! It worked, I yelled back that I could act.”