by Juliette Fay
“So . . . your family is wealthy?”
“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re no Vanderbilts. But we have a big house, and my father was the first person in our neighborhood to have a car.”
“How on earth did you end up in burlesque, for godsake?”
Millie felt the ripple of shame that always accompanied thoughts of her parents’ abandonment. It had been her fault, of course. She could never seem to be the kind of girl they had demanded, with diminishing hope, that she should miraculously turn into. Even a burlesque stage had felt strangely less confusing and airless than home.
She didn’t like to talk about it. But it was Irene asking. Irene, with her comforting bossiness and her dogged loyalty—even though Millie knew she was not the kind of person who inspired loyalty. At least she never had been before.
“I let the dog out.”
There it was. Her secret was out now, too, and it was more of a relief than she’d expected. She let the dog out, and as bad as she’d felt at the time, it was funny how it didn’t sound quite so terrible when she said it aloud to Irene.
“You . . . what?”
The whole story came tumbling out of her.
“My mother’s dog. It was this tiny little thing that sat on her lap all day long. One day she was taking a bath, and I thought it might like some fresh air, since it was always cooped up. But then it wouldn’t come back, even though I called and called and looked all over. It never liked me, that dog. I don’t know why. Always growling and snapping whenever I got near Mother.
“Anyway, a fox got it. Or maybe a coyote. I felt terrible, and my mother went straight to bed and canceled the big holiday party for all of Father’s customers and wouldn’t even come out for Christmas. So I got coal in my stocking, and they sent me off to that awful school as soon as it opened the day after New Year’s. I mean, as soon as it opened. The chauffeur dropped me off at seven in the morning, and I waited on the porch in the freezing cold till nine.”
“But that doesn’t explain how you ended up in burlesque.”
“Oh, well, I went to that school until June, and then they packed me off to my father’s blind old aunt. I led her around and read books to her all summer. I was so good! Better than I’d been in years! I didn’t kiss any boys, or kill any dogs, or leave the house without my corset on, or anything! But they still said I had to go back to that awful school—it was better for everyone, they said—and I couldn’t face another day there, so I ran off.”
“Didn’t they search for you?”
“Oh, they didn’t have to search. I told them where I was going.”
“Where did you go?”
“I went and worked on a farm near the blind old aunt. I thought it would be so lovely because they had horses. Growing up I spent every free moment at my father’s stables, and I can do anything—muck out stalls, brush and curry them, or even just talk to them when they feel out of sorts. The farmer didn’t want a girl doing ‘man’s work,’ but he let me work in his vegetable field weeding and such. It was hard, but no harder than the school, and at least I was making a little money. Besides, I was sure my father would come and get me eventually.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You were sixteen years old, working as a farmhand, and he didn’t come get you?”
“Wouldn’t even send train fare. Said I’d already disgraced them more than enough, and running off to work on a farm, with dirt and pigs and farm boys, was the last straw. Then the winter came and the vegetables were all picked and the farmer didn’t need me anymore, and you know how it is—not much work a girl can do without a teaching certificate or a nursing license. I didn’t even have a high school diploma. I waitressed for a while, but I could barely keep ahead of my rent in the boardinghouse I stayed at and I was always broker than broke. So when Chandler came through with the show, I joined up.”
“Oh, Millie.” Irene sighed. “You were so young! How could they let you go like that?”
“You have to understand,” said Millie patiently. “They’re not like me. I used to imagine I was adopted, and I always hoped they’d sit me down one day and tell me, and I’d hide my relief and pretend to be sad they weren’t my real parents. But they never did. I still think I’m adopted, though. Because I don’t think my little apple could possibly fall that far from their tree.”
9
Like my dear old friend Marie Dressler, my ugly mug has been my fortune.
Wallace Beery, actor, director
Henry woke up early—too early—to the sounds of the men in the dormitory around him snoring and snuffling, one clearly having a dream about “Bertha . . . oh, honey . . .”
He should have been able to sleep like a well-fed baby in a cradle. The men’s dormitory in the newly built Hollywood YMCA was clean and airy, the walls a soft white, as were the thin sheets and cotton blankets on the cots laid out in tight but tidy rows across the large room. A gray wool blanket lay folded at the foot of every bed for cooler nights. The mattress was just thick enough to protect from the feel of the metal webbing that crisscrossed the low frame, but unfortunately it did nothing to muffle the creaks and squeaks of forty men rolling over all night long. Henry had slept in far worse places, of course, but never in one so populated. The sheer number of humans alone made the place sound like an overbooked tuberculosis ward. For a dollar a night it was a bargain, but barely.
The California light, almost biblical in the descriptions he’d heard, was softly whispering in around the curtains. Zayde’s watch, which he’d kept tucked under his pillow away from wandering hands, said it was five-forty-five. He rose and tugged on his pants, the one pair he now owned since he’d left his suitcase back on that train in Flagstaff. God only knew where it was now.
He needed fresh clothes. And coffee, as hot and black and free flowing as possible. So he buttoned up his criminally wrinkled shirt and walked downstairs, out to Schrader Avenue and down the block to Sunset. No stores would be open, but he could sleuth out a decent haberdashery or even a secondhand shop. His zayde, a talented and opinionated tailor, would’ve been appalled at the idea of his buying someone else’s ill-fitted clothing. But zayde had taken his leave of this world, and Henry was on his own now, as he had been since the age of fifteen. As much as he missed the old man, there was still a very tiny, petulant teenage part of him that had taken his zayde’s death personally, as if it had been a choice instead of a natural consequence of living to such an old age. And so Henry would buy the used clothes, which would serve the dual purpose of keeping himself minimally appropriate-looking and sticking it to the old man.
He had walked for several blocks, past a barbershop, a milliner, and a small movie theater called the Iris, and headed into a little diner with BETTY’S BOUNTY painted on the window. The shop was deep and narrow, with shallow booths lining one wall only feet from the stools, which stuck out from the long scratched wooden countertop on the opposite side. The kitchen was in back, and Henry could hear the gentle clanging and scraping of metal on metal—spatula on griddle, he figured—the occasional gruff murmur, and the higher pitched, “Get the potatoes on before the rush,” or “Vey ist mir, Zeke, that’s gonna burn.”
Early though it was, they’d already had customers that morning, as evidenced by the lipstick-stained coffee cup and a plate sticky with yoke on the counter. Next to it lay a disheveled copy of the Hollywood Citizen. Henry slid onto a stool and tugged the paper down the counter toward him. He was just beginning to leaf through when a woman approached from the opposite side of the counter. Her gray hair was wrapped tightly in a colorful handkerchief, and she wore a spotless white apron tucked neatly around her ample middle.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, please. And toast.”
“Fried egg is just a nickel more.” She indicated a sign titled SPECIALTIES behind her. It would only be a total of fifteen cents. Henry gave her a nod and a smile of thanks. She turned to go but stopped and glanced back at him. “You in the fli
ckers?”
“Not yet,” he said, grinning. “But that’s the plan.”
“With a face like that,” she said, “you’ll do all right. You want my advice?”
“Absolutely.”
“Just get in—the studio, I mean. Just take anything to get in the door. Then let that face do the work for you.”
Henry colored at this, and she chuckled. “Aw, bashful, too? Even better! Just don’t lose that when you make it big. Women love bashful. It’s confusing, you know? Big star . . . bashful? Doesn’t make sense, so they eat it right up.”
“I should be paying you for all this advice,” Henry joked.
“No need,” she said airily as she turned to deliver his order to the kitchen. “But tipping for good service isn’t frowned upon.”
Henry glanced through the newspaper as he ate the food that soon arrived. Dunn’s Menswear was having its first Dollar Day next week, which would apparently “go down in the history of this community as the greatest bargain event ever attempted up to this time by any of its merchants!” Henry doubted that but hoped he might be able to find some inexpensive yet not too poorly constructed clothing to augment his pitiful wardrobe.
In the Business News section, there was an article titled “Women Reformers Call for Censorship!” It described the growing concern about poor role models in films like Keystone Kops and Gloria Swanson’s Why Change Your Wife?, the plot of which involved a woman dressing more provocatively to recapture her husband from a conniving second wife. “Such films promote the disrespect of police officers and immoral behavior of young girls, and are simply an invitation to indecency!” stated one disgruntled woman from Coffeeville, Kansas.
At the end of the section there were job listings, but no call for extras, which Henry had assumed were always needed. The waitress came back with his bill, and he said as much to her.
“Extras—feh,” she scoffed. “Any fool can do it—they’ve got hundreds of ’em. Now, if DeMille’s shooting, sometimes they need more, ’cause he likes those big numbers. But they generally don’t have to advertise. People get off the train and head right to the studios.” She glanced down at the paper. “Okay, here now,” she said, tapping her bony finger at an ad. “Can you hammer a nail? Because Olympic is looking for carpenters to build sets.”
Of course he could, or any number of other grunt-level construction jobs, as he’d done between comedy gigs for the last six years. But a different ad caught his eye, one that would get his toe, possibly a whole foot, farther in the door and closer to the action. He smiled up at her. “Zei gezunt,” he said and put a quarter on the counter.
“Be well, yourself!” She grinned and tucked the quarter into her apron pocket.
It took twenty minutes to walk down Sunset to Bronson and find the entrance of Olympic Studios—longer than he’d anticipated. It was eight o’clock now and he hoped he could accomplish what he’d come here to do and get back to meet Irene and Millie by nine as promised. A look inside the arched gate of the employees’ entrance on Bronson almost made Henry turn around on the spot anyway. Some unforeseen calamity seemed to be unfolding as people rushed from one window-less building to the next, with calls and screams erupting from one that looked like a barn. As if this were an everyday affair, scores of people of every age, gender, and dress sat on benches along the buildings, reading newspapers or just closing their eyes in the sun. There were women in old-fashioned shirtwaists with their hair done up in buns sitting next to scantily clad, heavily made-up flappers, girls in little frilly dresses and boys in knickers, about twenty cowboys, and even a guy in the goggles and leather jacket of an aviator.
A man in a rumpled suit walked between the benches, glancing up and down, and people began to put down their reading material and sit up straight. “You,” he said, pointing to one of the matronly women, “and you, too,” he said indicating a man in overalls and a battered straw hat.
“How ’bout me?” said one of the cowboys.
“Nah, no westerns today.”
A woman strode by, petite with large eyes and curly brown hair, in her thirties, Henry guessed. She wore a blue serge dress with a dropped waist and long sleeves she pushed up to her elbows. She clasped a file of papers in one hand, a pencil curled in her fingers against it.
“Pardon me,” Henry murmured.
Without breaking stride, she glanced up as if she’d heard some small unusual sound but couldn’t place it. “Pardon me,” Henry said with more force. The woman slowed a moment to make eye contact but kept walking.
In two long strides, Henry caught up and walked with her. “Where can I find the tailor’s shop? I understand there’s an opening . . .”
A wry smile. “You’re a tailor?” Her voice was round and warm.
“Yes, well . . .” Henry stammered. “There’s an ad in the paper here—” He held it out for her, as if she could possibly read the small type as she walked at such a clip.
“There’s no tailor shop, but I’ll take you to costume.”
“Why, thanks! I’m Henry Weiss, by the way.”
“Eva Crown.”
“Are you a secretary?”
That wry smile again, but this time a few degrees cooler. “Some like to think so.” She approached an oversize wooden door and waited for him to open it for her. The sudden darkness in the building after the bright sunlight left him blinking for a moment, but Eva Crown seemed to have no trouble as she led the way down the hall. “Keep going past the set to the far side. When you come to a small man who acts about a foot and a half taller than he actually is, you’re at costume. Good luck, Henry Weiss.”
She turned quickly and double-stepped up the stairs.
Henry followed the hallway down to an open area and had to shade his eyes from the intensity of the arc lights. They hung above the action taking place in what appeared to be a bedroom.
“Scream, dear,” a tall man in a well-cut suit was saying as he stood facing the bedroom. “I mean really scream.”
A girl with brown hair in ringlet curls sat up from a reclined position on the bed. “Obie,” she whined. “The audience won’t know if I’m really doing it or not. Besides, I’m tired of screaming. My head hurts!”
A heavyset man standing behind the large black camera box murmured, “Well, if she hadn’t been tossing ’em back all hours . . .” The director shot him a bitter look, then smiled back at the actress.
“Bess, dear, the camera can tell if you’re pretending. And if the camera can tell, the audience can tell.” The girl flopped back down onto the bed with a huff of annoyance.
“Roll the damn film,” he muttered to the cameraman. “And . . . action!” he called cheerfully.
A large man with a protruding belly and copious black eye makeup stormed into the room and slammed the door behind him. He glared at the girl, face lit with a sinister smile, hands at the ready to grab her. The girl sat up, gasped at the sight of him, and promptly let out an ear-splitting scream.
Henry glanced over at the director in time to see him exhale with relief and murmur to the cameraman, “You got that?”
“Yup,” he replied, without taking his eye from the lens.
“Thank God. Otherwise I might have to kill you.”
“Not today, Mr. Oberhouser. But there’s always tomorrow.”
Henry made his way through the back of the room toward a door on the far side with the words COSTUME CLOSET scrawled across it. He knocked, but no one answered. He knocked again, and the door flew open.
A man, no more than five feet tall, stood there with large shears in one hand. His eyes traveled from Henry’s slicked black hair slowly down his wrinkled shirt and tie to his dusty pants and rested on his scuffed shoes. The short man shook his head and sighed. “No wonder they sent you. Look at you, for godsake.”
Shame hit Henry like a punch in the chest. His zayde would’ve been just as disgusted.
“Take it all off, and I’ll press it,” the short man said, waving Henry in and closing the doo
r. “But if you came here looking for something else to wear, you’re out of luck. I keep telling them, I only dress the girls. The men wear their own clothes unless it’s historical.”
“Oh, no,” said Henry, shaking his head, “I’m not . . . I’m here for the job.” He indicated the newspaper now crumpled in his hand.
The other man looked at him blankly for a moment, then pointed to the door. “Out.”
“No, wait—”
“Wait? For what?” He balled his small fist and leaned it on his hip. “For you to take yourself seriously? When you came in here for a job, looking like that?”
“I know, I know!” pleaded Henry. “I look terrible. I left my case on the train, and I’ve been wearing this for two days. I can barely stand myself!”
“You look like you got thrown off that train,” the small man scoffed.
“Actually,” said Henry. “I jumped.”
“Jealous husband?”
Henry shook his head. “Worse.”
An eyebrow arched in question.
Albert Leroux had been Edward Oberhouser’s tailor, and a year ago had been hired—“conscripted” he insisted to Henry—to produce costumes for the director’s films. Soon he was doing all the costuming for Olympic Studios, “without a shred of help! I went to Obie—that’s what we call him, those who really know him—and I said, ‘I cannot. I can not.’ ”
“How could you possibly do all that yourself?” Henry sympathized.
“Exactly! It’s like you in that horrible burlesque show—absolutely untenable.” Albert stood, holding Henry’s pants high in the air, brushing the dust out of them. Hanging like that, they seemed to be the same length as Albert’s entire body. Henry sat in nothing but his summer union suit. Sleeveless, the thin striped fabric ran only to his thighs.
In his lap was a lady’s dress, pale satin with mere piping for shoulder straps and so little fabric it wasn’t much bigger than a pillowcase. Albert had given him a needle and the perfect matching thread and told him to fix the popped seam at the hip. “She had no business wearing it so small,” Albert muttered. “I told her I’d take it out for her, but she insisted it would fit. That split proves who was right on that score.”