“You hear that, Moon?” Whippy Bird said to little Moon, who was clapping, too. “Your Aunt May Anna-Marion Street is going to be a rich actress and send you to college,” and we laughed, though we did not know then what a true thing she said.
After that, we heard May Anna on the radio all the time. She played the same part over and over—the Visiting Starlet Marion Street. In its “Radio Section,” Time magazine talked about how May Anna was becoming a popular radio guest, calling her the “purr-feet cinemactress Marion Street.”
After I told Buster about listening to May Anna on Jack Benny, he went to the furniture store and bought the biggest Emerson radio they had. When May Anna was on the radio, Buster turned the Emerson up so loud you could hear it all across Centerville. Later on, Buster gave me that radio, and I still have it to listen to the Oakie O’Connor show, live from Butte, Montana.
CHAPTER
9
May Anna was like a shooting star. She went from “no, no, aahhhhh” parts to speaking words you could understand like “Honey, let me fix you something to eat?” Then she became what they call a supporting actress. Mostly she was in gangster pictures, but that was all right because we liked them, and so did most other moviegoers. You could slaughter dozens of people in the movies back then, killing them right and left with machine guns and car accidents, and nobody minded. People didn’t worry about little kids going bad from watching movies the way they do now. Me and Whippy Bird always took Moon to gangster movies, and he didn’t grow up to be an axe murderer.
It was no surprise that May Anna’s looks were the reason for her success at first, though she had talent, too. She was so pretty and vulnerable up there on the screen people just naturally liked her. She made them laugh, and she made them sad. One night, me and Whippy Bird went to the Montana Theater to watch her in Death Mob, the movie where she went off the cliff in the car, when we heard a lady behind us crying. We looked at her, then me and Whippy Bird looked at each other, and it hit us. She wasn’t watching May Anna like we were. She wasn’t seeing somebody she knew playacting. She was watching a poor dumb blonde she felt sorry for go over the edge and die.
May Anna had a few other things going for her besides her looks and her acting ability. Photoplay said she had a photographic memory. She read her lines once, and she knew them. That’s all it took. You heard about your movie stars holding up shooting schedules and costing studios lots of money because they didn’t know their part, but you never heard that about Marion Street. She was a professional. Maybe that came from her training as a hooker. Whippy Bird says memorizing was not what May Anna learned being a hooker.
May Anna was in a lot of movies then because Hollywood turned out a lot of pictures. Everybody we knew went to the movies once or twice a week, and it was always a double bill. The studios filmed a B movie in about a week. That meant you couldn’t make many mistakes—and May Anna with her good memory didn’t—because they liked to get things done in one take. The studios also made movies cheap. There wasn’t much scenery, and they never went on location the way they do now.
May Anna wasn’t supposed to play Stella, the lead, in Mobster Moll. She had the part of the younger sister who got electrocuted. But the actress who was picked to play Stella—me and Whippy Bird don’t think it’s right to tell you her name though you probably know anyway—was doped up that week and hadn’t learned her lines. May Anna knew them, though. By the time that actress had her head cleared up, the movie was in the can, which is the way they say it in Hollywood, and she was canned, which is what we say in Butte. And May Anna was a star. When we saw All About Eve, Whippy Bird said do you think they used May Anna as the model for Eve?
It didn’t matter to me and Whippy Bird how May Anna got the part. We just cared that she did. Mobster Moll wasn’t such a great movie, but people in Hollywood go to your B movies to look for talent, and John Elmoor, the famous director, spotted May Anna, which is how she got to play in Evil City with Arthur Lowe. Before he offered her the part, though, Mr. Elmoor went back and watched some of May Anna’s other movies, and he told her she died better than anybody in Hollywood, which was one of the nicest compliments May Anna ever got up to that time.
That’s why he gave her the part. He was a good director, and May Anna’s best death scene of her career was the one with Mr. Lowe. You could just see the tears in his eyes when May Anna forgave him for shooting her by accident.
Evil City was a big hit. Of course, most people went to see it because of Arthur Lowe, but May Anna got her share of publicity. She was on the cover of Modern Screen, and there were articles about her in all the other movie magazines. They weren’t just pictures of May Anna taken at a party, but real articles about her. That was when me and Whippy Bird learned you can’t believe everything you read. There were stories about May Anna’s happy childhood in Butte and about her being discovered by a news crew on Broadway in front of the Finlen when she was a high school girl planning to go to college. One article said that May Anna hoped to retire from the screen some day and go back to Montana and live on a ranch and have a family, which is about as false as anything ever written about May Anna.
The one that made me and Whippy Bird laugh out loud was a story about how May Anna loved to cook. There was a picture of May Anna all made up and wearing high heels and a strapless cocktail dress covered by a little organdy apron, standing in front of the stove with an eggbeater in her hand. Me and Whippy Bird wondered how she knew which end to hold on to. The only thing May Anna could operate in the kitchen was a can opener. The other pictures showed her stirring batter in a big bowl and taking a pan out of the oven, and finally there was one of May Anna sitting down to eat what she’d cooked. There was even a recipe for Marion Street’s Nut Loaf, but it wasn’t May Anna’s recipe. It was mine. May Anna called me long-distance and asked me to send a recipe quick because she had promised to write down one for her fans. She promised to tell them it came from me, but that didn’t get printed. The only thing May Anna ever cooked was Campbell’s Pork & Beans. Whippy Bird says one of the attractions of working in a hookhouse for May Anna was that the meals came with.
When Pink saw that recipe in the movie magazine, he said he bet May Anna never knew you could break up nuts and put them into a loaf of bread, ha ha. But I was proud. One of the pictures showed May Anna feeding a piece of my nut loaf to Donald O’Connor, and I got a swelled head because May Anna told me after they finished taking the pictures, Mr. O’Connor asked her could he have another piece.
Because of Mobster Moll and Evil City, May Anna got a contract with Warner Bros. They planned to develop her into a blond Bette Davis and star her in what May Anna called weepers. May Anna wrote us that one of the Mr. Warners called her the broad with the platinum blond halo. They also gave her a nice salary so she could move out of the hotel where she lived into a deluxe apartment that she shared with another Warner Bros, movie starlet, Anne Bates. Me and Whippy Bird see Anne Bates on the television today selling diapers for senior citizens.
May Anna wrote us that the two of them had twin beds, which made her the first person we ever knew who slept in a twin bed. They also had a blond dressing table with a big round mirror, which we thought was swell. I wanted a blond bedroom suite in the worst way after that, but me and Pink never could afford it. He surely would have bought it for me if he had the money, because that man never denied me a thing. May Anna may have had millions of men falling at her feet, but I had Pink Varscoe. Whippy Bird says Pink never would have bought me twin beds though. I guess you can tell why without me explaining.
It was the Warner Bros. publicity department that brought May Anna and Buster back together after Buster went to New York and became famous.
Buster had been doing just fine himself. He was on his way. People knew about him, and a Buster Midnight fight drew a big crowd from as far away as St. Louis.
That year Buster fought Killer McGillis in Spokane just before election day. As the two of them slugged away, somebody ye
lled, “Kill the Democrat son of a bitch!”
Then another fan yelled, “Clobber the Republican bastard!”
Before you knew it, everybody in the audience took sides and yelled for the Democrats or the Republicans and slugged it out with each other, too. The only thing was, nobody knew which one of the fighters was the Republican or the Democrat’or whether they belonged to the same party. That didn’t matter. When Buster won, both sides claimed him. For the record, as the fellow says, Buster was a Democrat.
That was also the fight where Toney sold about twice as many tickets as there were seats, and the men who didn’t get in talked mean. After that, Toney decided it was time to take Buster to New York. He was talking Madison Square Garden. And this time Toney and Buster got on the right train.
We went to see them off, and so did some of the local fight fans and a couple of newspaper reporters and a bunch of girls that you always see hanging around prize-fighters. Toney knew it was important to get publicity, so he was in good with the writers and photographers. They took pictures of Buster mugging with the girls and another with his mits up like he was getting ready to fight. The one the Montana Standard printed, however, was Buster giving me a good-bye kiss. The caption read: BUSTER BUSSES HOMETOWN GIRL BEFORE MONTANA PUGILIST HEADS FOR BIG TIME.
We all laughed at that when it appeared in the paper. Chick and Whippy Bird joked with Pink that his marriage was on the rocks. “Didn’t I see you in Venus Alley?” Chick kidded me. Pink didn’t care. He thought it was a big joke on me, and he even went down to the Standard and got a copy of that picture and gave it to me, framed, on my birthday. It still sits on my living room mantel today though I recently got a new frame for it. I picked the frame that had a picture of Glenn Ford in it because he was a friend of May Anna’s.
Whippy Bird sent a copy of the Montana Standard picture to May Anna with a letter saying Buster was two-timing her with me. May Anna sent me a telegram back that said: ANYTHING MINE BELONGS UNHOLY THREE STOP LOVEANDKISSES MAYANNA.
Buster loved that trip to New York. He said one of the benefits of being a famous fighter was riding across the country on a streamliner, watching the world go by and eating bread-and-butter pudding in the diner. They rode coach on that trip, but later on, Buster had a private compartment. When he was the champion, he rode in private railroad cars that rich boxing fans loaned him. Buster liked that. They were as sleek as the Jim Hill Cafe. There was always a waiter in a white jacket to fix drinks or broil a steak, and he was allowed to invite all the friends he wanted to come along.
Buster ran with a fast crowd that liked the parties he and Toney threw, which is one more reason the two of them never had much money. When they had it, though, they surely did have a good time. You’d think me and Whippy Bird would have been mad at them for not being sensible about their money, but we weren’t. Maybe that’s because they spent it on us, too. Buster never forgot us during those years. He was just as generous as May Anna. I remember the Christmas when he sent Moon boxing gloves and a punching bag, and me and Whippy Bird got red fox fur wraps. We went to lunch at the Finlen just to wear those furs and never took them off, though they got in our way and we had to eat with our arms out in front of us. Whippy Bird spilled lime Jell-0 salad on hers.
Anyway, there weren’t any reporters and photographers waiting at Grand Central Station in New York when Buster and Toney arrived there the first time. So as soon as they got off the train, the two of them made the rounds of the newspapers. Buster Midnight was a big deal in the West, but not many people cared about him in New York. Toney changed that fast.
People just naturally liked Toney the way they did Buster. He was friendly and generous, and he was good copy, as the reporters say. After he visited the papers they wrote articles about Buster, even using the pictures that Toney brought along that were taken at Buster’s best fights. By handing out the pictures free, the papers didn’t have to bother their own photographers to take snapshots.
Toney also talked to the fight promoters. Now, you might think that Toney, being from Butte, would get taken advantage of, but he was no damn fool. May Anna knew what she was doing when she walked down Broadway in front of a newsreel camera, and Toney knew what he was doing when he lined up fights for Buster in New York City. He wanted exposure, and he knew the exposure that would do Buster the most good was winning fights. After that they’d go back west and develop Buster into a contender, and that’s just what happened. Toney arranged half a dozen fights, and Buster won every one, four with knockouts. Toney made sure the sports reporters were there. They wrote that Buster was a tough fighter from the hard-rock mines of the West, just like Dempsey. There was even a story about Buster swimming across Pipestone Lake in the winter to build up his stamina. Whippy Bird asked me do you suppose Buster swam under or on top of the ice?
When Buster left New York, there was a crowd of reporters and photographers at the station, and the papers all had stories about the new western contender for the heavyweight title. Even the new Look magazine mentioned Buster’s name in an article about future sports stars. This was the first time Buster and May Anna were mentioned together in print. It said:
Every kid who grows up in the smelter smoke of Butte dreams of just two things—prize fights and beautiful women. For most, the dreams are as murky as the Copper Town sky. But not for Buster McKnight, a rawbones giant and latter-day Dempsey who fights under the moniker of Buster Midnight. Promoters are betting this cowboy contender will be the next heavyweight champion. And nobody has greater faith in Buster Midnight than his high school sweetheart—who is none other than Warner Bros.’s pure platinum dish, Marion Street, the Butte Bombshell.
Warner Bros. saw that article and called May Anna in and asked was it true she knew Buster Midnight. She said she surely did. The studio had just finished filming a May Anna picture called Trouble on the Waterfront. It was about gangsters, of course. May Anna played a school teacher who tried to clean up the waterfront, which was run by criminals. There was a scene in the movie where May Anna talks a washed-up boxer into fighting his best instead of throwing the fight.
When Warner Bros. heard about Buster, they thought it would be swell to refilm that part using Buster. So they called up Toney, but he turned them down. Toney didn’t want anybody to think of Buster as a has-been or to believe Buster would ever throw a fight. Buster was disappointed, though he did what Toney told him to.
So Warner Bros. came up with the idea of sending May Anna to Butte on an airplane for a publicity tour. They could hold the pre-miere at the Montana Theater and reunite May Anna and Buster. That way, they could take plenty of pictures of the two of them together, getting both May Anna and Buster into the newspapers. Me and Whippy Bird thought it was the best idea we ever heard because it would get the Unholy Three back together again, too.
There was a big crowd at the airport that afternoon. Me and Whippy Bird, Pink and Chick and Moon, and, of course, Buster and Toney were there to see May Anna arrive. There were reporters and photographers, too. Buster was in the first suit I ever saw him wear, and he got a haircut for the occasion. You could see the skin through his hair it was cut so close at the sides. He carried a big bouquet of white roses that he shifted from hand to hand. He was nervous, all right. May Anna wrote Buster letters, and he sent her postcards, and sometimes they talked long distance, but they hadn’t been together in almost four years.
“You think she’ll recognize me?” Buster asked Pink.
“Probably not,” Pink said, which made Buster laugh and settle down a little.
When the plane landed, everybody got off except May Anna. It was like a dramatic entrance in the movies. The stairs up to the airplane door were empty. The crowd was quiet—until May Anna ducked out the door and everybody cheered, me and Whippy Bird the loudest. She was dressed all in white with a white fox stole and a little white hat with a veil tied over her face. She waved, and Buster rushed up and gave her the roses and a big hug. May Anna was acting like a cool movie st
ar, but you could still tell she was excited to see Buster. For a tiny minute she was May Anna Kovaks, squeezing Buster’s arm and hugging him back. Then she turned into Marion Street again, and took little dainty steps down the stairs, holding out the roses for the crowd. Me and Whippy Bird could see she was wearing silk stockings with no runs.
We were standing off to the side so May Anna didn’t notice us at first. She was blowing kisses and signing autographs. Then Buster led her to the microphone, where the most important people in Butte like the mayor and the theater manager and the head of the power company were waiting for her.
All of them shook hands with May Anna, then the mayor gave a speech, and the theater manager gave another speech, but Buster didn’t say anything. He just grinned at May Anna. Then May Anna, sounding like she had a mouth full of Tootsie Roll, said what a thrill it was to return to the best town in America and how she had traveled all over the United States, which wasn’t true, and no place was as beautiful as Butte. She told the crowd her fondest hope was to return to Butte one day and live here.
Now me and Whippy Bird knew where the reporters got all that wrong information.
May Anna was right in the middle of talking when she spotted me and Whippy Bird. She forgot her snooty voice and yelled like a Centerville ragpicker, “Whippy Bird and Effa Commander! You come right up here! Let those girls through!” We ran up and hugged her, and everybody cheered. “These are my best friends,” she said, and they cheered again. We never did find out who all those people were. Then May Anna asked where Moon was, so Chick and Pink brought him up, and May Anna kissed him and got Max Factor lipstick all over her veil. The photographers snapped away, which is why Moon was the youngest person we personally knew to get his picture on the front page of the Montana Standard.
After May Anna finished her speech and everybody left, her press agent came up and tried to shoo us off, but May Anna gave him a hard look. “These are my friends. They stay,” she said in her gangster moll voice. So we stayed. Or rather we all went up to May Anna’s suite at the Finlen and drank gin. We realized how far May Anna had come when she walked into the Finlen Hotel. She didn’t have to register at the front desk or pay in advance or even wait for an elevator. They had one waiting for her.
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