Harry tightened his grip on their shoulders.
Don looked at Charles for a long time. “I think a musical can do anything—for one evening, at least.”
Eleanor could see his mind working. He was already rewriting the show. This was how it happened—in both long hours at the piano and moments of inspiration backstage.
Eleanor wanted to contribute but was afraid of angering Harry. “Won’t the New York audience be more receptive?”
Charles laughed. “They’d certainly like to think so.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means sure, they’re better,” Charles said. “But they’re still white.”
“If we can’t at least convince this crowd, we won’t have a hit in New York.” Harry made a fist. “Damn it if this ruins my streak.” He turned to Charles and Eleanor, pointing wildly. “Get your heads straight. If you let this ruin your second act, you’re fired.”
* * *
The performances became experiments; the rehearsals during the day were for the adjustments. Every morning, they received edits to the music, lyrics, and lines, and during the performances, Harry and Don would sit in different places in the audience, listening to the reactions. The following day, they’d repeat. They could spend an entire rehearsal learning a scene that would be scrapped the next day, or else have nothing to change but a few lines. Sometimes the smaller changes were the most difficult to remember. Don and Harry found an endless amount to change in the musical.
Don rewrote the opening number into a rousing group song that illustrated the cross-section of cultures in one mile of Chicago streets. But the applause after that number was lax; it was too much information. They restored the original opening.
Don thought maybe the show needed comic relief and added jokes.
“I feel ridiculous,” Eleanor told him after the tenth show, when all her punch lines fell flat.
They swapped out “With You” for a song called “Walking Home” that Don thought would do more work to establish their living situation. To Eleanor, it sounded like a funeral dirge transposed into a major key. Charles, whose pitch was normally precise, kept falling flat. Don told him to get it together, but the key just did not agree with his voice. The song went in for one performance, and then, after they’d rehearsed it half a dozen times the following day, Harry stood up. “Enough! This is out!” He swatted the air. “Back to the original!”
So Don banned the idea of any more “quick fixes” and went back to old-fashioned musical theater writing: late nights at the piano, dissecting rhyme schemes and fiddling with individual words. More than once, he invited Eleanor to join him. She had ideas, plenty, for reshaping the show. Don didn’t always agree, but these suggestions provoked vigorous debates that often produced a compromise that was worked in the following evening.
She often stayed late in the theater after rehearsals, elbows on the edge of the stage, looking into the orchestra pit while Don fiddled over the piano.
“How’s this?” He worked well with instant feedback. “What would Molly say here?”
Eleanor had a sense of Molly that Don couldn’t grasp. He often expected her to be more cautious, but Eleanor knew the central fire of her character. She understood Molly’s will, the hard strength inside her, how the girl was given to blunders when not careful. They spent long evenings in the theater, Eleanor’s confidence growing each time she told Don something and he nodded. She loved to watch him work, his left index knuckle in his teeth as he scrawled out a lyric, his shoulders moving under his ubiquitous sweaters as he thundered on the piano. She loved being this close to him. Their minds seemed to fuse in these sessions. Don would speak the lyrics, his voice trailing off, until she picked up the sentence and suggested a word, his eyes lighting up, his hand going to the page. The hours added up until her nerves around him waned into more of an awareness than a fear. He stopped inviting her and instead just told her what time he would start working. Every evening, they took a cab together back to the hotel, and he thanked her for her help and praised her instincts. She felt like a mixture of a pupil and a partner.
Her relationship with Tommy had not afforded her any experience in moving forward with a man like Don, but she sensed that this intellectual relationship was the beginning of an even greater intimacy. Don would not flirt—the way to his heart was through his mind, through the vitality that linked them, the music, the lyrics. She was meeting him in his territory and sensed that he was waiting for her to flinch. She would not.
* * *
No matter what she said, Don always kept the original ending: Molly and Luke escaping from the picnic. Molly’s parents chased after them, but Molly brought the gun, waving it wildly at the crowd. They would get away. At the very end, they sang a reprise of their first love song while waiting for a train. But instead of beholding each other with wonder, the verse was tweaked to reflect triumph: “My love, with you / Forever now, with you / I believed we’d find a way / And now, we’re one / The two of us are one / For every night, and every day.” Luke kissed her. They boarded the train to their future.
“If we make the audience sit through two acts of despair, we have to reward them for it. We can’t expect them to suffer for nothing,” Don said any time someone suggested a change to the ending. “These characters have to end up together. This story is about love, people, not tragedy!”
Eleanor wanted the show to work more than anything, but no matter what lines they changed or songs they added, people hated it. When people saw Luke put a ring on Molly’s finger, they hissed. It was such an ugly, disturbing sensation, being hissed at by a crowd. Eleanor began to internalize it, leaving the stage hyperventilating. The daily protests outside the show made her angrier, until being in the show started to matter less than the message. Performing the show again and again, and her friendship with Charles, made her more comfortable with the subject matter. She felt herself changing. With each performance, she felt herself sink deeper into Molly’s love for Luke, until her character’s journey was pushing her own. Their love began to feel as natural as breathing. Each night, she lived as Molly, who, each night, chose Luke. When the curtain went down, she could not entirely leave Molly behind.
* * *
One morning, the theater was on the cover of the arts section of the Boston Herald: BROADWAY-BOUND “A TENDER THING” STRUGGLES TO FIND FOOTING. The article detailed their poor ticket sales, how people walked out at intermission. It used clumsy summaries from audience members to spoil the plot. The article concentrated on the sex, the scene in which Luke steals money to run away with Molly, and the image of Molly with the gun. Unsatisfied customers provided quotes like “upsetting,” “inflammatory,” and “vulgar.” The byline: Connor Morris.
Eleanor read the article and seethed but could not dispute one fact: people did not like the show.
“If people don’t want to like something, there’s nothing you can do,” Charles said when they walked to the theater that evening.
“Why are you so resigned?”
“I’m not,” Charles said. “You think I want the show to flop? You think I like performing for a group of bigots every night, knowing they wish me dead?”
Eleanor blushed. “No. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Some people will never be able to look at me and see anything but a threat.”
“What can we do?”
They reached the theater. The crowd had swelled to over a hundred people. Charles looked at her, held out his hand.
“It’s safer through the back way,” she said. “Otis lets me in every morning.”
“I’m not taking the back door.” He looked at her steadily. “It’s the stage door or nothing. I’d love if you joined me.”
She thought of the headline in the paper. Was she proud of the show or not?
She took his hand. The voices in the crowd swelled as they approached. Protestors
raised their signs, seeing that they had an audience. RACE MIXING IS COMMUNISM. Eleanor had crossed the protestors before, but never with Charles. She held on tight to his hand as the yelling got louder. Usually, people screamed at her, but this time, the words were directed at Charles. She heard filthy words lobbed his way. Eleanor held her head up, refusing eye contact with the protestors, even though tears burned behind her eyes.
Finally, a white-haired man spoke to her. She recognized him from the first day. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Charles tugged her on, but someone gripped his arm, wrenching them apart.
“Get your hands off that girl!”
She grabbed Charles once more and pushed through the crowd. Whoever had touched Charles had broken an invisible barrier, and the screams went louder, the people pushing and trying to separate them. Charles grabbed her shoulders and covered her back with his body, moving through the crush with as much efficiency as he could without shoving.
When they reached the stage door, Eleanor cried out and touched it with both hands. She hauled it open and Charles pushed her inside, following behind. Together, they slammed it in the protestors’ faces.
* * *
“Can Harry do anything about the protests?” Eleanor asked Don that night. Anxiety riddled her body and she knew she wouldn’t sleep, so she’d decided to speak to Don. She couldn’t let go of the idea of violence erupting outside the theater. “This could get dangerous. You should have seen the way they treated Charles.”
Don’s eyes tracked a lyric on the page. “I had the exact rhyme in my head this morning but forgot to write it down. I hate that.”
“Don.”
“Eleanor, don’t validate those idiots by paying them attention.”
“What about Charles? You weren’t there, you didn’t hear them.”
Don opened a folder of notes and spread them out in front of him. “I expected this musical to ruffle feathers. But I’m beginning to think I’ve plucked the whole chicken.”
Eleanor sat in the only available seat: on his bed.
He spread out the music, the crossed-out script pages and blank staff paper. “I confess I was a bit naïve. For this to work, I’m going to have to write the best musical of my career,” he said. “No, I’m going to have to become a better writer than I am. Charles was right. If people don’t want to see something, they won’t. There is no more powerful flavoring than dislike.”
“Don, would you have written this musical if you didn’t think it would cement you in history?” She felt a sudden need to know.
Don ran his finger over the second woodwind line in the score.
“I would never have started it,” he said. “But I will finish it. Even if we never make it out of Boston.”
Despite the bad performances, that had never occurred to Eleanor. She’d won a part in a show with Don Mannheim. Would she really be thrown back into the sea of auditioning girls so quickly? She imagined a chorus call, standing in a line of sopranos. Even if she booked another part, what would the experience be like? Surely no other composer would share his piano bench. The thought of losing this side of the process made her anxiety kick up again.
He looked up at her. “I’ve always found Charles to be magnetic. Toss him into any role and he’d charm an audience. I thought if we combined him with a good story, a girl people believed in, and beautiful music, that we could change hearts. But every night, when the show ends, hundreds of people are still stuck on the first step. They don’t want to be moved by him.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to change people’s minds in the only way I can,” he said.
Eleanor looked at the music. For the first time in her life, she struggled to see how it could possibly be enough.
* * *
Eleanor liked to eat breakfast at the hotel restaurant alone so she could review the changes to her scenes. Duncan and Lucille ate calmly nearby. They probably escaped the bulk of the protests. The black cast members were usually the targets, with the rest reserved for her.
Eleanor had turned her attention back to her script when someone approached her table.
“Mind if I sit?”
It was Connor Morris, the Herald reporter. She pulled the script closer so he could not read it. He interpreted this as her making room and sat down.
“I’m busy.”
“Just a quick chat.” He held a pad of paper and pen.
“We’re not supposed to speak to the press,” she said. “So—no comment.”
He smirked at her. He really was very handsome.
“Your show is flopping.”
“Thanks to your horrible piece.”
“I let the audience speak for itself.” He turned his head to the side as if he was examining her. “Tell me about your costar. Charles Lawrence.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t going to say anything that he could twist.
Connor flipped through his notebook.
“Eleanor O’Hanlon, straight from Wisconsin.” He looked up. “Quite the gig for a girl from a pig farm.”
“Who told you a pig farm?”
“I took a trip to New York,” he said. “You know a guy named Tommy Murphy?”
“What on earth did he say?”
“Calm down. Tommy made it clear your amorous history is over, but as soon as I started digging he told me to go ‘stuff’ myself.”
She felt a rush of affection toward Tommy.
“I got the basics out of him before he figured out I wasn’t a buddy of yours. Smart guy. Why did you break up?”
“I had to focus on the show.”
Connor wrote that down. Eleanor slapped her hand on the table. “I didn’t say you could write that.”
“Your friend Rosie was even quicker,” he said. “Wouldn’t give me your parents’ names. I had to find those on a parish registry.”
She stopped chewing. “You met Rosie?”
“I went to your apartment. That’s also where I met your Tommy.”
Connor watched her. Eleanor felt her cheeks grow hot, even worse for trying to tamp down the reaction, but she managed not to say anything. So, she’d been right. A flicker went through her, of satisfaction and sadness. Rosie hadn’t told her.
Eleanor set her expression. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“I was right about your parents,” he said. “They said I was asking about the wrong Eleanor. Said . . .” He riffled through his notepad. “‘She wouldn’t be involved with that trash; we raised our girl better than that.’”
Eleanor tried to wrench it away. “Did you even tell them you were putting that in print?”
He shrugged and laid his pen down. “Now, Charles. Are the two of you friends?”
Connor’s mention of Charles made something rear up inside of her. She wanted to scratch his face.
“Are you aware of his violent history with women?”
Connor spoke like he was asking the time.
Eleanor gripped her coffee to avoid hitting him. “You’re lying.”
He gave her a patient look and then riffled through his notebook until he pulled out a folded clipping from the New York Times from 1954.
NEGRO STRIKES WOMAN IN HARLEM BAR.
Less than a hundred words, stating that Charles had broken a woman’s nose during a riot.
Eleanor read it, read it again. Her hand shook, so she put it under the table.
“If that’s true,” she said, speaking slowly, “then why isn’t he in prison?”
“She didn’t press charges.” Connor took the clipping back. “God knows why. But you know what they say about men who hit women.”
She didn’t respond. The banana was coming back up.
“It’s never just once.”
She stood. “I have to get ready
for rehearsal.”
“Remember what I said.” He stood with her. “If you get in trouble.”
She handed him back the article. “I’ll never come to you for help.”
“You say that now.” He tapped his notebook. “But blood runs thicker than water.”
She knew she’d think of plenty of comebacks as soon as he was gone. For the moment, it was all she could do to leave the restaurant.
* * *
She arrived at the theater early and went straight to Charles’s dressing room. She had no plan; she was not even positive she would have the nerve to ask him about what Connor had shown her. But when she arrived, Charles was not there. Gwen sat on the couch in his dressing room, her feet up on his vanity chair.
“What’s the matter, Eleanor? Sit down.” Gwen had one of those faces, the kind Eleanor trusted at once. Big eyes, round cheeks.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. The protestors. Everything. It’s so much pressure. Everyone wants us to fail.”
“You probably will.”
Eleanor looked up. “How can you say that? I thought you liked the show.”
“I do. But I’m in the audience every night, and I hear what people say. I’ve been telling Charles from the beginning, it’s too big a pill to swallow.” Gwen leaned forward and adjusted her skirt over her knees. “You can’t go from segregation to marriage in two hours.”
Eleanor wanted to prove her wrong. But she felt inept. “People should be able to see what’s possible.”
“If this could be solved in two hours, Eleanor, I have to hope someone would have done it already. It’s all so complicated. But I think you can make people care about Molly and Luke.”
“How, when the audience is against us?”
“Do you really understand how hard it would be for them?”
But it shouldn’t be hard, she wanted to say. If it’s about love, like Don always said, then they would risk everything. It shouldn’t be a hard choice for Molly and Luke. It was hard for the world to accept, not hard for them.
A Tender Thing Page 21