Little Me

by Patrick Dennis

  His name, as I understood it, was LeGrande Barnwell, scion of a fine old South Carolina family of enormous wealth. Although LeGrande’s blood was as blue as the flag of the Confederacy, he claimed—like little me—that he had “grease paint flowing in his veins,” although his almost incomprehensible Southern accent had militated strongly against his being cast in any of the rôles he so longed to play. Discouraged, LeGrande, too, was drinking more than was good for him. Having, however, a burning ambition and unlimited funds, LeGrande was determined to succeed or die trying.

  So engrossed did we become in our “theatre talk” that we forgot all about dining and went right on “chinning” until the bar closed and we were assisted out by a bus boy. From that evening onwards our plans materialized rapidly; utilizing LeGrande’s considerable tobacco fortune, we would form our own “package” company and “barnstorm” the entire “straw hat” circuit doing the plays we both enjoyed most. I would serve as the star and big “ticket-selling” attraction and LeGrande, in the lesser rôle of my leading man, would gather invaluable experience. With a sizable advance on my salary, I was in a whirl of hairdresser’s appointments, facials and fittings, leaving such details as minor actors, scenery and bookings to LeGrande.

  When our “caravan” of “strolling players” was ready to “roll” on Decoration Day, we were an impressive convoy indeed! First came a station wagon filled with our six capable supporting players, then a truck containing our costumes, “props” and scenery and last, but not least, LeGrande and I in the tonneau of a splendid Chrysler limousine, driven by LeGrande’s lovable old servitor, “Uncle” Cato. Our répertoire consisted of my friend Noël Coward’s Private Lives (as a “peppy,” sophisticated, up-to-the-minute comedy of manners), George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (as a modern “classic”) and Romeo and Juliet (as our personal tribute to the immortal “Bard”).

  I had rather expected that we would visit the nicer summer theatres such as Westport, Dennis, Bar Harbor, Newport and East Hampton. But, owing to LeGrande’s inefficiency and excessive drinking, our tour took us not to the important “show cases” usually visited by famous stars, but to unheard-of villages and hamlets for “split” weeks and “one-night stands” where we played in abandoned opera houses, disused cinemas, school auditoriums and church basements. Our audiences—whenever LeGrande was sufficiently sober to advertise a play far enough in advance for anyone to attend—were hopelessly provincial and ofttimes extremely rude, shouting indecent suggestions, and obscene responses, to some of the most exquisite passages written by Messrs. Shakespeare, Shaw and Coward. A witty, brittle comedy such as Private Lives, although I was at my most worldly in the rôle of Amanda, was totally wasted on these “bumpkins.” And even so, Tallulah Bankhead and Donald Cook had covered much the same territory a season or so beforehand so that our production was always compared disadvantageously.

  In the larger plays—Saint Joan and Romeo and Juliet —our little company had to be supplemented by strictly “local talent,” and such bumbling amateur performances I have never witnessed—save, perhaps, that of my “leading man,” LeGrande Barnwell!

  While I entertained serious doubts as to LeGrande’s histrionic ability during rehearsals in New York, I charitably “chalked it up” to “nerves” and hoped that he would do better when confronted by an audience. (Indeed, LeGrande could hardly do worse!) But after “running through” our repertory with him “on the road,” I realized that he was hopeless. Try as I would to pass on to him the invaluable voice training and diction “pointers” I had received from Dame Florence Fleming, his Southern accent became thicker with every performance. One evening in Glockalooka Falls, Vermont, there was a power failure just as LeGrande came on as Elyot Chase, dapper “Man About Mayfair,” in Private Lives . Speaking his first line in the pitch dark, he was greeted by a voice from the audience crying “What the hell is this, a minstrel show?” I had to laugh!

  Nor did he even attempt to minimize his heavy drinking. In fact, as our tour progressed, his drunkenness seemed to become increasingly worse. Refused further service at a low “dive” in Moselle, Massachusetts, LeGrande wrecked the place in a fit of pique and was thrown into jail so that our company missed playing nearby Norton entirely. “Fuzzy” as to just which play we were performing one evening in Skowhegan, LeGrande stepped out onto the modern terrace setting of Private Lives dressed for Saint Joan. And, speaking of costumes—or their lack—I was astounded one night, in Pennsylvania, while waiting to appear on the balcony as Juliet, to hear a low snicker in the audience that increased in volume to hooting, catcalls and stamping. LeGrande, as my Romeo, had dressed ever so carefully, neglecting only to put on his tights! And one night, in Ohio, he was so intoxicated that he pulled the whole balcony loose, the result being that I suffered a painful and disfiguring black eye!

  But physical pain was the least of my suffering. Imagine, if you will, my hideous embarrassment to appear as Joan of Arc in a derelict bowling alley in Aspidistra, Indiana, only to learn that Diana Barrymore was also playing Joan at the Elks’ hall across the street! The humiliation! Even worse was when Miss Barrymore and I confronted one another in the local saloon, immediately following our joint portrayals of Jeanne d’Arc! And did LeGrande Barnwell (who, in his drunkenness had arranged the conflicting bookings to begin with) even lift a finger to help me? He did not! He had “passed out” into his drink as I was about to fling it at Miss Barrymore in self-defense.

  Dear Momma had always said, “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.” After this degrading experience, I threw all pretense to the winds. Driving from one provincial backwash to the next, LeGrande and I always took along a thermos of whiskey sours, which we shared as amicably as possible. From then on I insisted on two thermos bottles. I joined him in his dressing room for drinks before, during and after every performance and even insisted on the use of real alcohol on stage. If he felt no obligation to his audiences, why should I? Thus the years of 1948 and 1949 passed by in a dense fog. How long our tour would have continued—could have continued—I cannot say. Everything ground to a halt when LeGrande was institutionalized in Missouri, leaving his brave little band of players stranded.

  Happily, I had been able to save a great deal of my salary while on tour with LeGrande. And, as he had never been in any condition to deal with such details as withholding taxes and so on, it was all free and clear. I also took possession of the cars, the truck, the costumes and scenery, just for safekeeping until their rightful owner would be declared responsible to reclaim them. With all of this equipment, and six professional actors “on my hands,” it seemed only right that I should put it to good use.

  For some time I had been thinking about an original play somewhat similar to Shanghai Gesture in feeling, but entirely different in treatment. It was called Hong Kong Hideaway and I felt certain that, with little me in the starring rôle, it would be an enormous “hit” and re-establish me as an actress to be “reckoned with” almost overnight. But the project was beset by troubles. Even though I had written Hong Kong Hideaway myself, I had terrible trouble remembering my “lines.” I was plagued with alternate chills and fevers and I suffered intense migraine headaches every morning. Too nervous to come

  into New York with the play immediately, I decided that we would open out of town and work eastward. Always having been a keen student of sociology, I decided that “Middleton, U.S.A.” (Muncie, Indiana) would be the ideal place to hold the world première of my play and “iron out” any “wrinkles” before moving on. I was in an extreme state of “nerves” on the day of the opening and, in order to calm myself, indulged perhaps more heavily than I should have. (Bear in mind, please, that I was near both physical and emotional collapse.) “Break a leg!” (the traditional theatrical good luck wish) one of my fellow thespians said to me as I made my unsure way to the “wings” on opening night. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I have only the dimmest recollection of the curtain going up on that ill-fated evening in Muncie and I do not recal
l at all its being lowered. All I remember is awakening several days later, strapped to a hospital bed. A doctor standing over me kept shaking his head and muttering “Delirium tremens—one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen. That and a broken leg.” A long dramatic criticism-cum-news story in the Muncie Evening Post, which I was only able to read several weeks later, described my play, my performance and the tragic fall I took into the orchestra pit.

  It was a shattered and defeated woman who returned, ignominiously, to New York at the end of 1950.

  Down and out

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SING FOR YOUR SUPPER!

  1952

  My long illness, aggravated by drink • From bad to worse • Eugene • A near-fatal

  accident • The Women’s Detention Home • “Billie” Divine • “Billie” takes me in

  A supper club diseuse • A fearful shock • All’s well that ends well

  OF THE NEXT SEGMENT OF MY LIFE, the less written the better. Suffice it to say that I existed—certainly one could not employ the term “lived”— through it somehow.

  Returning to New York, I thought only of finding a dark, lonely “hole” and crawling into it. Although I had some money left, I felt no desire for the niceties of such hostelries as the St. Regis, Hampshire House, the Plaza, the Ambassador—any of the addresses which were almost as much a part of me as my name. Instead, I moved from one wretched hovel to another, not caring about my looks or my surroundings. I rarely dressed, almost never left whatever room I was living in. I was usually able to get on friendly enough terms with a bell boy—usually one who was very young or very old—so that he would bring me an occasional sandwich, a bowl of soup and a bottle.

  I was sick with an illness no doctor could cure and I wanted only enough liquor to stifle the pain until the Great Casting Director would call little me to the Celestial Set.

  From time to time I found the energy to move myself and my belongings to a still cheaper hotel, more sordid than the last had been. In the ultimate of these—a miserable establishment on West Twenty-ninth Street called, I believe, the Tarantula Arms—I planned to end my days alone and unknown. It was small, dirty and impersonal, which suited me perfectly. It was finally Eugene who was able to rouse a spark of life in the empty shell that had once been Belle Poitrine.

  Eugene was the only bell boy employed in the hotel. In addition to carrying what little baggage went in or out of the place, he also ran the elevator and the switchboard. He was a sweet “kid” of about sixteen, forever reading Photoplay, Variety, Theatre Arts—any show “biz” magazine he could get his hands on.

  Carrying my one bag to the dingy little air shaft “cubby-hole” that had been assigned to me, Eugene scrutinized my face quizzically and said, “Pardon me, lady, but ain’t you Belle Poitrine, the old-time movie actorine?”

  “I might be,” I said listlessly, too ill and distrait to care even for flattery.

  “Gee, my Mom she thought you were great. No Sarah Bernhardt, maybe, but awful pretty and good for a lot of laughs.”

  “Did she?” I said, sinking wearily to the bed.

  “You bet. I seen you on TV and my Mom used to catch your pictures at the Buchsbaum Babylonia. That’s up in the Bronx. It’s a supermarket now. She used to get you and free china for a dime. That was, if you got there before six-thirty when the prices changed.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “One thing my Mom always says about you,” Eugene went on, “if it wasn’t for you she wunt of got a lot of laughs and dinner service for sixty persons. She’s only got a dinette but the plates—they’re the Bird of Paradise pattern—are real handy for leftovers in the Kelvinator. That’s a gas-type refrigerator, I guess you know.”

  Handing him a dollar bill I said, “Please run out and get me a pint of muscatel—Four Star brand. Keep the change.”

  “Aw, I wunt never do that, Miss Poitrine. The change is more’n the booze.”

  “Take whatever you like, then,” I said. I was ill with fatigue.

  “I wunt take nothing if you could maybe gimme your autograph. Gee! Would Mom ever die, though. She was always crazy about you blonde comics. Carole Lombard, Thelma Todd, you, Lyda Roberti. You ever know anya them?”

  “Intimately,” I said. “They’re all dead. And so am I.”

  “An’ there was Marion Davies and Mae West and Una Merkel . . .”

  “My bottle, please,” I whispered.

  Eugene, who cared

  “Mom an’ me, we watch Eve Arden and Lucille Ball and like that on T.V., but we don’t get the laughs out of them we got outta you old-timers. Gee, will she ever be excited when I tell her you’re stayin’ here.”

  When he came back, bringing exact change, I tried to sign my name on a slip of paper for him, but my hand shook so that I could hardly read my own writing. “I’ll try again tomorrow,” I told him. After drinking off half the bottle, I went to sleep for a long, long time.

  The next afternoon I was feeling like death, the last of my muscatel had spilled onto the grimy coverlet. It was then that I heard a tap at my door. It was the bell boy, Eugene. He had gone out, on his own volition, and purchased a fresh pint of Four Star. In addition, he brought me a pot roast sandwich from his home in the Bronx. He reiterated how amused his “Mom” had been by my Nights on the Nile. I thanked him, paid him for the Four Star and requested that he deliver another bottle the following afternoon.

  It got so that every day Eugene would stop in for a cozy “chat,” sometimes bringing me some delicacy from his “Mom’s” fragrant kitchen, perhaps a “movie” magazine or a copy of Confidential —we were both avid readers.

  He also undertook to run such errands for me as cashing my modest

  checks at the nearby liquor store, fetching aspirin or cigarettes from the druggist. One day he even brought me a lipstick and a bottle of nail varnish that had been on sale at the pharmacy. (I had quite forsworn artifice, not caring any longer how I looked.) “Try some of this, Miss Poitrine,” Eugene said. “I bet it’d look swell on you.” And it did!

  Bit by bit, Eugene began luring me back to life. Hair sprays, combs and brushes, astringents and nourishing creams would mysteriously appear in my tiny bathroom. Although I cared nothing for a beauty I felt had long since vanished, I did try to “arrange” my face and coiffure if only to please the young admirer who had purchased the “beauty aids.”

  On Christmas Eugene even arrived with a gaily wrapped box. It contained a négligée from an inexpensive lingerie shop on Broadway! I was moved almost to tears. I felt that I must do something to repay this loyal and selfless lad. “What time do you go off duty, Eugene?” I asked casually.

  “Four o’clock, Miss Poitrine. Same as always.”

  “Is your, uh, ‘Mom’ expecting you right home?” I inquired.

  “Oh, no. Mom an’ me we celebrate our Christmas the night before on accounta I gotta work days, see? So today she goes out to see my married sister that lives in Massapequa. She owns her own home.”

  “Then why don’t you and I have our own private little celebration, as soon as you get off?” I slipped a five-dollar bill into his hand. “See if you can’t pick up a fifth of rye from someplace. I mean, after all, it’s Christmas.”

  Eugene looked almost handsome standing there in his ill-fitting maroon livery. There’s just something about a man in uniform!

  I “got myself together” as best I could, put on the new deshabille my “swain” had purchased, rinsed out two bathroom glasses and draped pink Kleenex over the stained lampshade. It lent a soft, subtle, flattering glow to my quarters and to little me. I then “polished off” the pint of muscatel all at once, knowing that “relief” was on the way.

  I had not long to wait. Shortly after four there was a rapping at my door and Eugene entered with a fifth of Imperial and two bottles of ginger ale. He was wearing a sateen jacket with the name of his bowling group—the “Tremont Tigers”—embroidered on the back and a necktie with the likeness of �
�Lassie” painted on it by hand. The eyes, he confided, “lit up” in the dark. Always the perfect hostess, no matter how bedeviled by Fate, I indicated to him a place on the bed where he might sit and poured out two “highballs.”

  The warm, strong drink “hit” me much faster and much harder than I had expected. And, as I later learned, Eugene was quite unaccustomed to drink, coming from a family background which, though appreciative of the arts, was in many ways extremely strait-laced.

  “Merry Christmas, Eugene,” I said and emptied my glass.

  One of my last recollections was a sentimental one. I thought of how many, many men in my life Eugene reminded me of. He had—or so it seemed at the time—the shy gentleness of my beloved Fred, the dash of George Jerome Musgrove, the tense, animal vitality of Letch, the suave good manners of Bruce, and the devil-may-care grandeur of LeGrande.

  “You know, you could be very attractive,” I said. “Let’s have another.”