Around the World With Auntie Mame (2 page)

Auntie Mame and the City of Light

“YOU'RE BEING RIDICULOUS TO WORRY THIS WAY,” I told Pegeen, trying hard to conceal the concern I felt. “How could the boy get into any trouble traveling around the world with his great aunt? An elderly woman, actually, and hardly likely to debauch a ten-year-old child.”

“She certainly tried hard enough with you,” Pegeen said.

“Why, that's outrageous,” I sputtered. “She did no such thing. Take Paris, for example. Now what do most people bring back from Paris?”

“A social disease?”

“Certainly not! They bring back memories—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Versailles—you know, things like that.”

“And what did you do when she took you to Paris?”

“Why, nothing much. I mean we went to the usual places— Notre Dame, the Bon Marché, Maxim's. We did all the museums and galleries and churches and . . .”

“And?”

“Oh, yes, once we even attended the French National Theatre.”

“So?”

“So that was all.”

That wasn't all, but I'd rather be hung by my thumbs than tell poor Pegeen about Auntie Mame in Paris.

AH, PATRICK, my little love,” Auntie Mame said, squeezing my hand, “don't you feel the magic of Paris? Paris mon coeur! La ville lumière!” The taxicab swung off the Rue St. Honoré with a suddenness that threw Auntie Mame to the floor. “
Merde!
” she said.

I said yes, I did feel the magic of Paris and didn't Auntie Mame think
she'd
feel a whole lot better if she just sat back and relaxed until we got to the hotel. She was still adjusting her rakish off-the-face hat as the taxi, somewhat more sedately, circled the Place Vendôme and pulled up at the Ritz.

Paris was to Auntie Mame more a Macy's than a metropolis, and the Ritz was within spitting distance of Schiaparelli and Chanel and Elizabeth Arden and Cartier and most of the other departments that Auntie Mame liked to patronize. And she was enchanted to see a huge bouquet from César Ritz himself waiting in her sitting room.

“Ah, dear old M. Ritz,” she said wistfully. “He never forgets me.”

“Few do,” I said, casing the Louis Seize splendor of the suite.

Auntie Mame drew off her gloves, overtipped the men with the luggage, and gazed dreamily out of the window in the general direction of Schiaparelli's.

“Ah, Patrick, my little love,” she said once again. “
Paris
mon
coeur!
To see this fabulous, civilized city again through your young, blue eyes. Heaven! Now be a lamb and order me a nice sidecar—and something for yourself, of course—while I get organized and call Vera. She's staying here, too.”

The Ritz telephone operator was just recovering from the impact of my St. Boniface Academy irregular French verbs when Auntie Mame swept back into the sitting room and took over the telephone. After a couple of severe electric shocks and a lot of static Auntie Mame was connected with Vera Charles and there was a very brief burst of mellifluous French. “Vera, chérie!” Auntie Mame cried. “C'est moi! Je suis
ici
. . . . I said, Vera,” Auntie Mame translated impatiently, “it's Mame. I'm here in the Ritz. So's Patrick. Come right down.
A
bientôt!
. . . No, silly, that means I'll see you in a moment.”

Auntie Mame rang off and spread her arms dramatically. “Ah, my little love, isn't it divine! Here I have you and all of Europe to show you before you go off to college—an aware, attractive young escort with whom I can share the more gracious culture of an older and wiser civilization. You and Europe and Vera, too. Oh, Patrick, I simply feel it in my bones—this is going to be the most wonderful summer of my whole life! Now where in hell is the waiter with my drink and what's keeping Vera?”

There was a tap at the door and both Vera and the waiter entered, although Vera had managed to sweep Auntie Mame's sidecar off the tray and had half finished it.

“Darling!” Auntie Mame said.

“Dulling!” Vera said.

Vera Charles needs no introduction to anyone who ever went to the theater between the Civil and Korean wars. She was a fabulous clothes horse, an absolute star, and is said to have killed off more producers than alcohol, heart disease, and suicide put together. She was also my Auntie Mame's best friend most of the time. Today she was looking very Parisian in a Molyneux suit, pearls, fox furs, a hennaed upsweep, and a face that was at least ten years younger than the one I'd seen her wearing two years earlier.

“Mame, dulling,” Vera said dramatically, “what a pity you missed my conquest of London, but now yoah heah in Peddiss to see me wow these frogs.” Vera was born and brought up in Pittsburgh, but she spoke with such a determined Mayfair elegance that not even the English could understand much of what she was saying. This may or may not have accounted for her enormous success on the London stage. The ladies embraced once more and rubbed their cheeks together and then Vera got down to cases.

By cases I mean that Vera talked exclusively about Vera for the next half hour. She told us how she had been a sensation in London and the darling of Palace circles; how they had begged her to come to Paris as a special feature of the Exposition Summer, presumably to add a little luster to such unknown performers as Noël Coward, Yvonne Printemps, Sacha Guitry, Maurice Chevalier, and Josephine Baker, who were all playing in Paris that season. The waiter reappeared with a tray covered with sidecars and as the ladies drank, Vera grew more and more expansive.

“Yais, dulling,” Vera said, “it's one thing to have ull of Ameddica at one's feet; one thing to be the toast of London; but what an ecktress of may
statuah
ecktually needs is a trayumph on the Continent. And heah you ah, may uldest and diddest chum, on hand to share this victory with me!” Vera simpered elegantly and reached out for another sidecar.

Auntie Mame was very interested in the theater. As a matter of fact, she and Vera had first met in a road company of
Chu Chin Chow
during the first World War where they had kicked away happily in the second row of the chorus until my grandfather found out about it and sent Auntie Mame back to school. But even so she was still sort of a theater buff and claimed to have grease paint in her veins.

“How divine, Vera,” Aunt Mame cooed. “Patrick and I will be right there on opening night clapping our hands off. But, tell me, darling, um, what language are you going to . . .”

“Frrrench.
Net
-turally,” Vera said with great hauteur.

That struck us both as very odd. Vera could barely speak English.

“But, Vera,” Auntie Mame said, “what's the play?”

“Well, it isn't ecktually a drawma, de-ah,” Vera said uneasily. “It's the Folies-Bergère.”

“
Vera!
” Auntie Mame said. “You're
not
going back to burlesque after all these years?”

If there was one thing Vera did not like to be reminded of it was her humble beginnings in a traveling burly—not that it wasn't more wholesome in those days, but it just didn't seem suitable to the First Lady of the American Stage. “Certainly
not
, Mame,” Vera said coldly. “It just so happens that the Folies happens to be the
commedia dell' arte
of Frahnce. They don't even have a runway—just a sort of ill-yewminated promenade around the awkestra pit.
I
have accepted a sidious role— that of Catherine the Great. It's a dremetic paht. And, what is more”—and here Vera's voice lost its staginess and lapsed back into the pure Pittsburgh accent Vera used when angry or discussing money—“they're paying me two thousand clams—dollars, not frances—a week for fifteen minutes' work each night and
no
matinees.”

Auntie Mame was still very dubious about Vera's undertaking any venture so
declassé
as a music-hall appearance, even if the Folies-Bergère was, so to speak, the Palace of Europe. So, goaded at last to expenditure, Vera strode elegantly to the telephone and instructed the hall porter to get three Bergère seats for that very night and to charge them to her, Vera Charles.

WE GOT INTO OUR SEATS JUST BEFORE THE ORCHEStra started its erratic tuning up and just after I'd learned that in France one tips the ushers—an unsettling and expensive experience if you don't happen to have any small change on you. Then the lights went out, the curtain went up, and the Folies-Bergère began with a bang in all its tawdry splendor. Actually, the Folies was then, as it is now, a kind of Radio City Music Hall with bosoms—only much more elaborate and not nearly so professional. In fact, it was even more elaborate in those pre-war days; probably because the costumes and scenery were all a lot newer then and the girls a lot younger.

But it was more or less the same old endless show it still is, for the French musical stage prides itself on quantity rather than quality. There were the customary English chorus girls and Hungarian show girls (hardly anybody in French musicals is French), who shrieked “Allo, 'oney!” from time to time in a mélange of fake French accents for the benefit of the English-speaking members of the audience. There were the usual high-wire acts and low-comedy acts; the cyclists, the acrobats, the sopranos, the female impersonators, the contortionists. Then there were the
tableaux vivants
involving water effects, fountain effects, fire effects, mirror effects, and, of course, girls.

Girls were lowered from the roof and catapulted up from the cellar. Girls were suspended precariously from wires or atop swaying columns. Girls trooped up the duty aisles or meandered down long stairways. Girls traipsed about in tarnished sequins, dirty wigs, molting plumes, and balding furs, dragging grimy trains behind them.

Toward the end of the first act Auntie Mame began to doze and Vera jabbed her viciously.

Still the girls came on. Girls listlessly waggled hips and maracas in the Latin American Number. Girls staggered beneath huge panniers in the Versailles Number. Girls sweltered beneath their furs in the Winter Number. Girls shivered in mermaid tails and goose flesh in the Underseas Number. Girls sagged under the weight of fake ivory masks in the Chinese Number and came back gamely in hoop skirts and sausage curls in the Ole Plantation Number, for which a medley of Negro spirituals had been considerately translated into French. Well, as I said, the Folies-Bergère gave the customers an awful lot for their money.

“Vera,” Auntie Mame said, stifling a yawn during the Birds of Paradise Number, “surely you're not serious about lending your talents to a dreary charade like this.”

“Be still,” Vera hissed. “The big dramatic number comes on next.”

Sure enough, it did.

In those days the management of the Folies-Bergère always treated its customers to at least one dramatic episode, usually involving a Tragic Queen, always featuring a Great Star, at least half a dozen changes of costume and scenery, quite a lot of girls, and a boy or two. It is a practice mostly abandoned since the postwar tourist boom. The Tragic Queen for that edition of the Folies was Mary Queen of Scots. It was tragic, all right, but at least she kept her clothes on. Auntie Mame was terribly relieved to see that all her friend Vera had to do was stomp around the stage bellowing of love and sorrow and do a series of quick changes from one elaborate gown to another.

“All right,” Auntie Mame said. “Now I've seen it. Let's get out of here.”

As we left, the girls—blowzily got up in soiled lace and tricornes—came bobbing out in the most unseaworthy gondolas for the big Venetian Number.

“Tacky” was Auntie Mame's word for the Folies-Bergère. But she realized that Vera's sole motivation was greed, and two thousand dollars a week was an unheard-of amount of money in Paris of 1937. And, as a matter of record, Vera would have sold her own mother to the devil for two dollars cash.

AFTER THAT FIRST EVENING OUR LIFE IN PARIS SETtled down to a sort of routine. In the mornings I'd go off on little sight-seeing excursions of my own while Auntie Mame and Vera ordered lots of new clothes with daring fifteen-inch hem lines from Vionnet and Alix and Maggy Rouf and Lucien Lelong. They would both appear at lunch in new outfits which they described as having “a whole lot of pizazz.” Don't laugh. Women looked much better in 1937 than they do this year.

In the afternoons Vera would excuse herself to rehearse for her dramatic debut as Catherine of Russia at the Folies-Bergère and Auntie Mame would take me along on some mission of her own. She knew quite a lot of famous French people and was usually more than welcome to drop in on Colette or André Gide or Christian Bérard or somebody arty like that. Auntie Mame kept something of a
salon
herself in New York and she liked to see how the foreign competition was making out. If no one she knew was holding a
jour
on any particular afternoon, we'd set off to see something interesting or go to the Paris Exposition. The Exposition stretched along the Seine from the Place de la Concorde to above the Trocadéro, and after we'd sopped up enough culture there we'd end up at Mme. Lanvin's Club des Oiseaux on top of the Pavillon d'Elégance, where Auntie Mame could rest her feet, have a stiff drink, and look at some more new clothes.