Looking for a Love Story (17 page)

I punched the button on the tape recorder. “Mom and Pop met in a theater in New Rochelle,” Chicky’s voice said. “Mom and her sisters had the second spot on the bill. To be honest with you, that was the slot the managers usually reserved for a weak act because the patrons would still be straggling in, so you’ve got to think that the Dancing Doran Sisters weren’t all that good. Masters and George had a much better position; they were closing out the first half of the show, which meant the manager figured their act for a crowd-pleaser.

“Whenever Pop and Benny played a new theater Pop liked to go down to the stage early to get a feel for the house. So he was in the wings when Mom and her sisters were getting ready to go on.”

I listened to the rest of Chicky’s account of the scene; then I started writing again. This time there was no deep breath. I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

CHAPTER 16

New Rochelle, New York
1919

The backstage at the New Rochelle Opera House was narrow and dusty. As the orchestra out front began to play for the Dancing Doran Sisters, Joe Masters picked his way carefully through the darkness behind the backdrop, making sure he didn’t brush up against anything. He and Benny wore white costumes because white caught the lights onstage, but it also showed every speck of dirt, and they only had enough in their budget to get their suits cleaned five times during this tour. New Rochelle was their first booking, and they had twenty weeks to go.

Joe kept on making his way to the side of the stage. Walking around during a show seemed to steady his nerves. Besides, he wanted to watch the rest of the bill he and Benny would be working with. Especially the tall strawberry blonde who was the lead in the Doran Sisters’ act. He’d seen her back in New York when all the performers in the show got on the train at Grand Central
Terminal, and Lord, she was a beauty! He’d gladly look at her for the next twenty weeks if she and her sisters were going to be on the full tour. You never knew what was going to happen when you were on the road. Sometimes you worked with different acts in different theaters, and sometimes you worked with the same people for the whole time. An act could be canceled out of town if the booker heard from theater managers that it was no good, and a whole tour could be canceled somewhere out in the sticks because there weren’t enough customers to fill the theater seats, leaving the actors with no way to get home. There were no guarantees in show business. But on a good small-time circuit like this one the managements were pretty decent, and he and Benny had a solid little act, so he figured they’d be safe. The strawberry blonde and her sisters were in the weak spot on the bill, so he was a little worried about her.

The Dancing Doran Sisters had just run onstage. Joe made his way to the left side of the stage, where the stage manager’s box was, and, after nodding to the man, stood in the wings to watch. After a second he frowned. The girls were starting out with a little patter, after which, presumably, they would dance. There was nothing wrong with that setup—it was standard for an act of this kind—but the patter was all wrong. They were doing what was essentially a kid’s act, and they weren’t that young. The strawberry blonde—according to the program her name was Ellie—had to be sixteen if she was a day. At the train station she’d been a dreamboat in a stylish traveling suit. Now she looked overgrown and ridiculous in a kiddie costume, with her lovely hair scraped into pigtails. Someone had told her to deliver her lines with a lisp.

When the girls had started their act, the audience snickered a few times, waiting for a punch line that would explain why they were pretending to be children. But the punch line hadn’t come so the audience was confused. That was bad, as Joe knew too well
from his own past mistakes. You lost the audience fast if they didn’t understand what you were doing. The beauty—Ellie—seemed to know it, because she was racing through the dialogue as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, her sisters weren’t keeping up with her, so it only made things worse. The audience had started coughing—a fatal sign that its patience was at an end—but then, mercifully, Ellie gave the conductor the sign to strike up the orchestra and, as Joe heaved a sigh of relief, the girls went into their dance. The house could understand that.

The sisters weren’t bad dancers, and Ellie Doran had a nice little air about her, so you could almost forget the silly costumes. But just as Joe was thinking she might even get a small hand when it was over, she took a pratfall, a hokey pratfall that came out of nowhere. It had to be a part of the act, because her sisters clustered around her and they all went back to doing baby talk again. The audience was completely turned off by now, and there was no way to get them back. Joe could tell that Ellie Doran knew they were dying; the flop sweat had started to come out on her. He almost couldn’t watch. Suddenly, as if to back up what he’d been thinking, the girl looked offstage and he saw rage in her eyes.

A whiff of something familiar hit his nostrils, the sour-breath smell of someone who’d been at the whiskey bottle. It was early, but morning drinking wasn’t uncommon in Joe’s world. He turned to see who the boozer was. Standing next to him, weaving dangerously, was the man who had gotten on the train with the Doran Sisters. Joe remembered that one of the girls had referred to him as Pa. So this was Ellie’s father. And when she’d thrown that look of fury offstage, she’d meant it for him.

The girls finished and bowed to a house that was sitting on its hands in disgust. The Doran Sisters had laid a big fat egg. If they hadn’t been young and pretty they’d have been booed. They made their way offstage, with Ellie shooting fire out of her beautiful
blue eyes. Joe backed up to see what would happen, and sure enough, she strode over to her inebriated parent as he swayed back and forth and fixed him with a blazing stare. “Are you happy, Pa?” she demanded in a whisper. “We flopped again. Are you happy now?”

What happened next was as quick as it was stunning. The drunk balanced himself and before Joe or the nearby stage manager could stop him, he hit the girl hard in the face with his open hand. “Bitch,” he hissed. “I’ll teach you to talk that way to your old man.”

The fire went out of her eyes, and she put up her hands as her sisters tried to get between her and their father, who was winding up to swing again. Joe’s fists clenched and without thinking he moved toward the man, but he felt himself being pulled back.

“No, you don’t,” the stage manager said in his ear. “You’re not gonna start a fight back here while I got a show to run. Besides, you and your partner ain’t gone on yet, and you got no time to be a hero.” He signaled to a stagehand, who grabbed the drunk and threw him into the alley next to the theater. Meanwhile, Ellie had caught Joe’s eye. Realizing that he must have seen her humiliation, she pushed her sisters away and ran to the back of the stage, where there was a staircase leading to the dressing rooms above. Her sisters huddled together for a few more seconds and then followed. Neither of them seemed shocked or even terribly upset by the fact that their father had just hit their sister broadside. That was bad.

The stage manager was motioning to the next act to get ready to make their entrance, and Joe backed off to the side to give them room. He was still thinking about what he’d just seen.

“It’s just as well you kept your suit clean,” the stage manager whispered as he gave the cue for the curtain to go up. “The owner here doesn’t put up with bum acts. Those girls will be getting their pictures back by the end of the night.”

All vaudevillians traveled with glossy photos of their act, which were hung in the lobby of the theater they were playing. When a management wanted to cancel you, they gave you your pictures back. Ellie and her sisters were going to be canned that night. Joe sighed; he couldn’t blame the management, the girls’ act was bad, but as he stood backstage watching the show and waiting to make his own entrance with Benny, he couldn’t help thinking about the look in Ellie Doran’s eyes.

M
ASTERS AND
G
EORGE
did their turn and got their usual solid response from the house. After the curtain came down, Joe made his way to the dressing room he and Benny shared. Benny was off somewhere, probably flirting with the chorus girls who danced in the big flash act that opened the second half of the bill. In the five years since he’d left home, Benny had changed. The cynical fat boy with a chip on his shoulder was now a handsome man who seemed to need to make every girl he met fall in love with him. And the girls usually did. Benny had learned to hide his cynicism behind a façade of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm that females found very appealing. Also, they sensed a sadness in him—a sadness Joe knew to be real. The girls were convinced that there was some mystery behind Benny’s sorrow and they all wanted to be the one who took it away. But, as Joe knew, they were all doomed to fail. Benny’s pain came from the death of a mother who had never forgiven him or said good-bye. None of the girls who fell so hard for Benny had ever mattered enough to him to make that hurt go away. He just needed them to prove to himself that he was no longer fat Benny Gerhardt.

But Joe did have to admit that Benny was a cut above the other vaudevillians. He had never bothered to try to cover his boundless ambition, and with his refined air and the classy way of speaking
his mother had insisted on, Benny always seemed like a man destined for great things, even when he didn’t have two dimes to rub together.

There were several hooks on the dressing room wall where performers could hang their costumes. Joe took a piece of white linen out of his traveling trunk, stretched it between the hooks, took off his white suit, and hung it up so the linen protected it from the dirty wall. He put on his street clothes, checked his face in the mirror, and saw that the greasepaint was holding. If he didn’t go out to eat between shows he probably wouldn’t have to redo it. Finally, after all his backstage rituals were completed, he sat down and began to run through the performance he and Benny had just finished. He wasn’t very happy about it.

The applause they’d gotten was respectable—nothing like the stony silence that had greeted the Doran Sisters—but it wasn’t the kind of response he and Benny had dreamed of when they won the contest in Coney Island that launched them in the business. It certainly wasn’t the roaring approval that elevated an act to the big-time and to an eventual shot at that vaudevillian holiest of holies, the Palace Theater in New York City. Masters and George were stuck in the small-time.

The problem was their material. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good enough. They should start over, but it was hard breaking in a new act, and Joe was afraid Benny wouldn’t want to put in the work. However, Benny also knew they weren’t getting ahead and he was frustrated about it. That was a big worry. Benny had never been one to put up with something that wasn’t going his way. If he were to walk, Joe would be without a partner, and Joe wasn’t sure he could do a single. Not that he hadn’t thought about it. When Benny skipped a rehearsal or
dried
while they were onstage—the performer’s term for forgetting your lines in front of an audience—being on his own would seem real good to Joe.

If he were to try going solo, it would be as a monologuist—a man who stood on an empty stage all alone and held the audience by telling stories and jokes. A good monologuist needed an ear for comic voices and an ability to slip in and out of a variety of characters, as well as having the ability to come up with one-liners. These were all talents Joe knew he had. But the move would be risky.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. This was a debate he’d been having with himself more and more lately. Benny was exasperating, it was true, but he knew how to make friends in the right places. When they were between jobs, back in New York, Benny was the one who hung around the joints where the booking agents had lunch and sold Masters and George to them over a hot pastrami or a corned beef on rye. It was Benny’s charm that got them many of their gigs, and Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what would happen to him without it. Besides, they had an act that worked—even if it wasn’t great enough to play the Palace. The history of vaudeville was littered with tales of partners who broke up a decent act and went out on their own, only to bomb horribly.

Joe opened his eyes. He wasn’t going to rock the boat, no matter how tempting the idea. The real question was, what was Benny going to do? Because Joe knew his partner would leave him high and dry in an instant if he thought it was in his own best interest.

Joe sat up and shook his head to clear it. There was no need to think about any of this now. For the next twenty weeks he and Benny were committed to the tour, and Benny wasn’t the kind to welsh on a contract. Their act had gone well enough today, and the management had to be pleased with them, No one was talking about handing them their pictures.

That thought brought up a vision of the lovely Ellie Doran and the way she’d looked at Joe when she realized he’d seen her father hit her. She’d been angry and humiliated and she’d run upstairs to
hide. Joe looked up at the ceiling. He’d already checked, and he knew her dressing room was on the floor above his. Ellie Doran was probably up there right now. Her father’s hand had caught her near the eye, so it was probably turning black and blue—her whole face had to be hurting. Joe looked at his watch. There was a restaurant across the street from the theater and he didn’t have to be onstage again until the final curtain call, which was at least an hour from now. He picked up his hat and hurried out of the dressing room.