Get Happy (9 page)

Their first stop was Denver, where the “trio unusual,” as the girls awkwardly described themselves, had two jobs, the first at the Tabor Grand Theater, the second at a gambling club that was temporarily without gambling because the police had confiscated its equipment. Colorado Springs was next; then, in mid-July, they reached Chicago, where the World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress,” was in its second year. Ethel had arranged a booking on the fairgrounds, at a nightclub whose other acts included a fan dancer, a society dance team and a comic mule—or at least a woman masquerading as a mule. But the club, the Old Mexico, was so far from the center of things that “it didn’t draw flies,” in Jimmie’s
words, much less customers. After advancing thirty-five dollars of the girls’ salary, the club gave excuses instead of cash, leaving them without so much as a cold tamale when it shut its doors three weeks later. Ethel would be well advised, the managers said in ominous tones, not to press for the money they owed her. She took the hint. The Gumms then moved from the St. Lawrence, which was a first-class hotel, to a less expensive apartment hotel on the North Side.

While they were at the Old Mexico, Ethel had sought other bookings from the William Morris Agency, the city’s chief talent broker. But the agency, which was besieged by hungry entertainers who had come to Chicago for the fair, refused even an audition. Try the Belmont Theater, Ethel was told; every Friday night it offered its stage to acts that were willing to work for free, and a scout from William Morris was always there, looking for fresh faces. The Gumm sisters dutifully performed at the Belmont, and they were so good, as Jimmie remembered it anyway, that they stopped the show. But that Friday no one from the agency had in fact been present: they had stopped the show for nothing. Misery breeds misery. One morning the Gumms awoke to discover that Ethel’s money had run out, that they had nothing to eat but one egg and half a loaf of moldy bread. This was the emergency Frank had anticipated. Ethel cashed one of his traveler’s checks, and she and her girls went out for a big breakfast.

Another, somewhat older trio of sisters—Laverne, Maxene and Patty Andrews—was already staying at the apartment hotel and glowered when they saw competition walking through the door. To prevent the newcomers from using the hotel’s tiny rehearsal space, Maxene got up very early every morning and locked herself inside, then waited for her sisters. Hearing them practicing one day, Babe meekly inquired if she could come in to listen. After they did a couple of numbers, Patty politely asked her to return the favor by singing for them. Like the students at Lawlor’s, the three sisters probably expected only embarrassment from such an ungainly girl. But after a few notes of “Bill,” Maxene found herself in tears, unprepared for the warmth and feeling that poured from that small and unlikely vessel.

After that the Andrews sisters and the youngest Gumm were friends who sometimes met on those hot summer evenings to sit by the big
console radio in the hotel’s roof garden. Babe was already there one night when the sisters arrived, downcast after having been fired by one of Chicago’s top vaudeville houses, the Oriental Theater. Did they know of another girls’ trio? George Jessel, the master of ceremonies, had inquired. Out of loyalty to Babe, they had mentioned the Gumm girls, and that night on the roof Maxene told Babe to get over to the Oriental first thing in the morning. By coincidence, Jack Cathcart, the young trumpet player from the Old Mexico, was just then phoning Ethel with the same recommendation. Rush over to the Oriental, he said.

Jessel was unimpressed by Mary Jane and Jimmie, but, like everyone else, he saw something unique in Babe: she sang, he later said, “like a woman carrying a torch for Valentino.” He had only one problem with the Gumm sisters. When he introduced them, he noticed that their name, which rhymed with words like “bum,” “crumb,” “dumb” and “scum,” made the audience snicker. “These kids should have a new name!” he told Ethel. “I think so too,” she replied, and happily accepted his alternative: Garland, after Jessel’s friend Robert Garland, the drama critic of the
New York World-Telegram
. Though Ethel used “Gumm” a few more times—a typographical error found one theater advertising the Glum Sisters—the Garland Sisters they now were, and the Garland Sisters they remained.

Babe evoked the usual gasps of excitement with her rendition of “Bill,” and the newly christened Garland Sisters saw their star ascend the same day they were hired—Friday, August 17, 1934. After that their mother no longer had difficulty finding jobs for them. Following their week at the Oriental, they went into another Chicago theater, the Marbro, then drove to Detroit for a stint at the Michigan Theater. Finally heading home in mid-September, they stopped off on the way for three more engagements—in Milwaukee and in St. Joseph and Kansas City, Missouri. They reached Los Angeles in mid-October, almost four months to the day after they had left. Though it was three o’clock in the morning when they arrived, Frank, who had been alerted that they were near, was waiting outside. When she jumped into his arms, Babe said, she cried—cried out of happiness. “It’s hard to explain, but all the
times I had to leave him, I pretended he wasn’t there; because if I’d thought about him being there, I’d have been too full of longing.”

Although she did not believe in the magic of names, Ethel was later to say, she could not help observing that after Gumm was changed to Garland, the bookings never stopped. In fact, the girls scarcely had time to unpack before they were in the spotlight at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, with Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles coming soon after. Writing about their appearance at Grauman’s Chinese, the
Variety
critic said that as a trio they were nothing; but when Babe was featured, they became class entertainment—“she has never failed to stop the show.”

In December the girls were back at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater. It was there that Babe received the kind of notice entertainers carry with them ever after, like a good-luck charm, for warmth and comfort in dark moments. Her singing, wrote W. E. Oliver, the drama critic for the
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express
, produced sensations the Wilshire-Ebell audience had not experienced in years. “Not your smart, adult-aping prodigy is this girl,” continued Oliver, “but a youngster who has the divine instinct to be herself on the stage along with a talent for singing, a trick of rocking the spectator with rhythms and a capacity of putting emotion into her performance that suggests what Bernhardt must have been at her age.”

As Babe’s fortunes rose, so did Frank’s fall. When his family moved Down Below, he stayed in Lancaster to manage the Valley Theater, forsaking the house on Cedar Avenue for a cheap, one-room apartment off Antelope Avenue, the best he could afford after Ethel and the girls had been taken care of. “Boy, those were miserable days and nights for me,” he later wrote, and he was telling no more than the truth. He ate his meals in restaurants, and his rented room—his shack, he termed it—was so cold in the winter that, to keep from freezing, he had to sleep in his bathrobe and wool-lined shoes.

Though he and his girls exchanged visits, whatever pleasure those meetings brought was soon drowned in the tears of parting. When it came time for Babe to say good-bye, father and daughter both gave way to wrenching sobs. “She missed him,” said Muggsey Ming, “and he was just so lonely.” To Babe, Frank’s mean, uncomfortable little room must have been a tangible symbol of the sorry state to which he had been reduced. What she did not know was that he was largely responsible for his unhappy condition and that for many months the tawdry drama of Grand Rapids had been repeated in Lancaster, act by act, scene by scene.

His family had acted as a shield against rumor: who could have believed that Frank, a man with three lively daughters and a go-getting wife, was chasing after teenage boys? When Babe and her sisters left for Los Angeles in the summer of 1933, they not only removed the shield, but they also stimulated the activity. Lonesome and depressed, Frank became more reckless in his pursuits, just as he had been during the last years in Minnesota. The games he played with boys in the back row of the Valley Theater had not got him into trouble, curiously enough, and he had been safe fooling around with Steve Castle and Lyle Hatley, who were so wild and unruly that nobody watched, or much cared, what they were doing. But when Castle and Hatley graduated and went their own ways, Frank entered into what seems to have been a more intense, more visible and far more dangerous dalliance with another high school student.

Often seen at the Valley Theater, the boy, tall and slim, became a figure of derision in the school’s hallways. “Frankie’s lover boy,” he was called behind his back. This time word spread to the town’s adults, who suddenly remembered things that had escaped their notice before, things they had seen but to which they had paid no attention, such as the number of teenagers who went in and out of the theater during the daytime, when no films were on the screen. All at once Frank’s entire life in Lancaster, past as well as present, came under scrutiny. “When the dominoes started to fall, there was a bunch of them that fell over,” said Ronald Carter, whose father, Whit Carter, owned the building in which the Valley Theater was housed.

“Frank would walk down the street and people would say, ‘Oh, that’s that Frank Gumm, the pansy,’” recalled W. M. Redman, one of Frank’s friends. “The rumor killed him in the community. People kept mouthing about it and mouthing about it, and it just ruined his career here. You get somebody on your back in a small town, and you’d better get your fanny out, because he’ll kill you.” Though they did not give their real reason, many parents now refused to let their children go to the movies by themselves, and Frank fell further and further behind in his rent: even as his daughters were receiving ovations at the Oriental Theater in Chicago, Whit Carter was presenting him with an eviction notice.

If money had been the sole problem, Frank might have muddled through. He was not the only businessman behind in his rent during those Depression years, and Carter was usually lenient with tardy tenants. But toward the end, anyway, he was not lenient with Frank. Gone were the days when Frank had been invited to sing at nearly every club meeting, funeral and wedding. Forgotten was a full-page newspaper advertisement his fellow businessmen had bought to express their appreciation for his contributions to civic life. Now their message was different. No records exist, but it is almost certain that a small group, probably led by Doc Savage, the physician who had charge of the moral as well as the physical well-being of the citizenry, approached him and made it clear, as it had been made clear in Cloquet, Grand Rapids and perhaps other places as well, that he was no longer a welcome member of the community.

This time Frank did not rush to get his fanny out of town. Only after months of delay did he agree, at the end of 1934, to surrender his lease on the Valley Theater. Though he was given three months to vacate, he still seemed unreconciled to what was happening, and on January 3, 1935, a few days after the agreement, he ran a long, extraordinary advertisement in the
Ledger-Gazette
, every sentence of which shouted his rage and resentment. “The New Year finds me still sole owner and operator of the Valley Theater,” he said defiantly, then proceeded to lay down a list of rules for anyone who wished to enter his domain. From then on, patrons would not be allowed to sit through the same show
twice, there would be a strict limit on charity benefits, and “let’s have a definite understanding about the
FREE LIST.
There is None.” No longer would his movie house be the relaxed establishment of previous years; no longer would he be the generous, easygoing Frank who had stood by the door to make everyone welcome.