Get Happy (8 page)

Searching for a hiding place from the Gilmore children one afternoon, she and Muggsey ran into an abandoned pump house on the Gilmore property, scampering up its creaky wooden stairs to find refuge in an empty storage room on the second floor. It is not hard to imagine Babe’s astonishment when she burst through the door to discover that instead of being empty, the room was occupied by Gilmore and her mother. The lovers were as astonished as she was, and by the time Muggsey arrived a few seconds later, an angry Gilmore was already at the door. He pushed them both out. Babe never revealed what she had seen, but as she walked down the stairs, Ming recalled, she looked stunned, as if someone had struck her across the face.

Many people resented Ethel’s obvious desire to say good-bye to Lancaster, to move Down Below where the action was. Frank, by contrast, was admired as much in Lancaster as he had been everywhere else. Always most at home in small towns, he settled down to a comfortable routine: a morning shave at John Perkins’s barbershop, lunch at the
Jazz Candy Shop, dinner at home, then a walk to the theater to give a big hello to incoming patrons. Sunday mornings were reserved for services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where he sang in the choir. A booster by nature, Frank soon became one of the town’s movers and shakers, a vice president of the Kiwanis Club and a prominent figure at many important gatherings. Even in his forties he retained his youthful zest and exuberance, the essence of which was captured in a snapshot from May 1930. Taken on a golf course, it shows a slightly pudgy, unremarkable-looking man who is memorable for one reason alone: a huge, all-embracing grin that seems to say, “Isn’t life grand?”

But there was also another Frank, and for that man life was not so grand. This second Frank was a lonely, middle-aged man who constantly humiliated himself, as he had done with such disastrous results in Grand Rapids, by panting after teenage boys and young, good-looking men. It was this Frank who sometimes patted their rear ends when they walked into the Valley Theater. “Boy, those look nice!” he might exclaim when he saw one of them wearing a pair of tight-fitting trousers. It was this Frank who invited them to sit beside him in the Valley Theater’s dark back row for mutual masturbation. “Don’t you want to sit back here, boys?” he would say beguilingly. “I’ve got some popcorn.” And it was this Frank who also made advances to his young employees. To fend off such overtures, one of his projectionists, John Carter, often asked Irma Story’s brother Tom to keep him company in the projection booth.

In the high school locker room, two of the school’s top athletes, Steve Castle and Lyle Hatley, bragged about the pleasure Frank was giving them with oral sex, not neglecting a description of how they made him beg. Since they were doing the same thing with the track coach, no one doubted that they were telling the truth. If further evidence had been needed, it could have been found at the Valley Theater, where Castle and Hatley strolled through the doors without paying while their friends were lining up at the box office outside. “Hi, Frankie,” the cocky Hatley would yell as he sauntered through the lobby.

Still, what was common knowledge among the town’s teenage boys remained a secret from their parents. None of the boys wanted to make trouble for likable Frank. “I don’t see any harm in talking to those boys
back there,” Frank himself explained to Henry Dorsett. “Once in a while I get a little lonesome.” Though Babe later heard rumors of her father’s activities, she refused to believe them, angrily denouncing them as a “ghastly dirty lie” spread by that “horrible man”—the hated Will Gilmore.

Almost from the day she arrived, Ethel had been trying to escape Lancaster. Her first attempt had come in March 1929, when, misled perhaps by the girls’ early successes into thinking that stardom was near, she had gone so far as to rent an apartment in Los Angeles. She and her daughters would return to Cedar Avenue only on weekends, she had told the Lancaster newspaper. But the breakthrough never came, the apartment was given up and once again she and her girls became reluctant commuters on the Mint Canyon Highway.

Ethel sometimes admitted setbacks, but defeat never, and every month that followed made her more eager to pack her bags and to find a home Down Below. Not only were the Saturday morning trips becoming harder and harder on Babe, but the Gilmores had already made the move, which meant that Ethel and Will could meet less often. She had every reason to want to leave Lancaster, in short, and only one reason to stay—money. The girls often spent more traveling to their performances than they were paid, and except for the small sums Ethel herself earned teaching piano, the box office of the Valley Theater remained the primary source of family income.

To Ethel, it must have seemed like a miracle, therefore, when she was offered a job in Los Angeles by Maurice Kusell, the stylish young impresario who had spotlighted the Gumm sisters in his 1931 “Stars of Tomorrow” show at the Wilshire-Ebell. Impressed as much by the girls’ mother as he had been by the girls themselves—“she was a hell of a woman, and I liked her immensely”—he had hired Ethel to lead the show’s eight-piece orchestra, then, at the end of 1932, asked her to also teach popular singing at his school of song and dance. Ethel brought her mother and sister, Eva and Norma Milne, from Minnesota to take care of the girls for the rest of the school year, and at the beginning of 1933 she finally settled Down Below.

Although Frank stayed behind to manage his theater, the girls began saying their own good-byes to Lancaster after Mary Jane’s graduation from high school, and on July 30 they joined Ethel in a house she had rented near downtown Los Angeles, in the Silver Lake district, not far from Kusell’s studio. They did not have long to make themselves at home, however. Twenty-four hours after leaving Lancaster, Ethel put them on a ship bound for San Francisco and a week’s run at the Golden Gate Theater, which was quickly followed by three big jobs in Southern California—in Long Beach, Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

For Babe, the youngest and most vulnerable member of the family, the long separation from her father was particularly difficult. But Ethel had been right to jump at Kusell’s offer. It was time, and past time, for the Gumms to leave the desert: a family whose chief interest was show business had always been out of place in a town whose biggest excitement was the annual Alfalfa Festival. In Los Angeles, by contrast, where a good part of the population worked for the movie studios, or wanted to, the Gumms found many others just like themselves. They were not only among friends; they were among colleagues.

Babe discovered that on her first day at the Lawlor School for Professional Children, or Ma Lawlor’s as it was nicknamed. Located on Hollywood Boulevard, right next to the offices of Central Casting, the school taught the usual academic subjects, but on an unusual schedule. Classes were held only in the mornings, leaving afternoons free for auditions and rehearsals, and no fuss was made when a child missed school to take an out-of-town job. Providing an education was not the primary reason for the school’s existence—
Variety
received more attention than Shakespeare—and one sometime student, Mickey Rooney, was undoubtedly right when he said that “if the truth be known, Ma Lawlor’s school was a dodge, a way of pacifying the LA Board of Education.”

Mary Jane and Jimmie had attended the school briefly in 1926 and 1927, during the months when Frank was searching for a theater. Now Jimmie, who was sixteen, returned with her younger sister. A plain girl whose dress was a little too long: that was how Babe looked on that first
day to a girl who had been known to moviegoers of the twenties as Baby Peggy. When Mrs. Lawlor asked Babe to introduce herself to her classmates with a song, Baby Peggy thought it a cruel humiliation. She changed her mind the instant she heard Babe’s “incredibly rich voice,” which, she said, already possessed the emotional power of a mature woman’s. The song Babe sang was “Blue Moon,” and when the last note sank into silence, that sophisticated audience of show-business kids was clapping and cheering.

Admired and appreciated—an enthusiastic Lawlor claque crowded into the front row whenever the Gumm sisters appeared nearby—Babe was all high spirits at Lawlor’s, with “more bounce to the ounce than everyone else in the school put together,” in Rooney’s words. But Rooney, who was two years older, bounced just as high himself. “Well, I met Mickey Rooney,” Babe said when she came home that first afternoon. “He’s just the funniest… . He clowns around every second!” With another Lawlor student, Frankie Darro, who was dating Jimmie, Rooney drove out to the desert whenever the girls did a show at the ailing Valley Theater, both boys sometimes jumping onto the stage to join in, an unexpected bonus for Frank’s customers.

The Kusell studio fell victim to the Depression early in 1934, leaving Ethel, suddenly out of a job, with nothing to do but push her girls. Their schedule became more hectic than ever, and thanks to the Lawlor school’s tolerant attitude toward absences, she was able to take them on their first extended trips, beginning, in mid-February, with a month’s tour of the Northwest and Northern California. Frank, who always tried to see his daughters at least once wherever they performed, drove more than twelve hundred miles to meet them in Seattle. “When they were on stage, he would stand, whistle and clap,” said Muggsey Ming. “He would get so emotional that tears would run down his cheeks. Then when they were through, Babe would jump into his arms and he would give her a big hug and tell her how good she was.”

Perhaps in response to a bad review on their previous trip to San Francisco—one critic had accused Babe of shouting her numbers—Ethel had revised the act. Now when the curtain opened, Babe was seen sitting atop a piano, only her face visible in the spotlight, her head and body hidden under a dark shawl. She sang “Bill,” the lovely, melancholy
torch song Helen Morgan had sung in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s
Show Boat
, and not until the applause had begun did she jump down from the piano to reveal that that rich, womanly voice had come from a girl—and a small girl at that. “Of course the house then went crazy because you did not know that it was a child!” recalled a witness to one of those performances. “It was a marvelous presentation.” The reaction was so encouraging, indeed, that when the Gumms returned from the Northwest in mid-March, Ethel made a bold announcement: she and her girls would soon be venturing even farther, all the way to Chicago and New York. “She was sure,” said Dorothy Walsh, “that the trip would be the making of the Gumm sisters.”

Though New York was dropped from the itinerary, Frank opposed the expedition anyway, strenuously arguing that it was too dangerous for four unescorted females to drive more than halfway across the country. He lost the argument, of course, and on the afternoon of Sunday, June 17, 1934, several family friends, Will and Laura Gilmore among them, came to Silver Lake to say good-bye to Ethel and her adventurous daughters. Ethel had saved up money of her own, but Frank also gave her about three hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, a considerable sum for a man who was even then several months behind in his rent for the Valley Theater. Frank’s checks were meant only for an emergency, however, and when they started driving east on Monday, June 18, just a week after Babe’s twelfth birthday, the Gumm women were thinking of triumph, not trouble.