Marjorie Morningstar (11 page)

Marsha ate another shrimp, blinking luxuriously. “Well, modesty is becoming. But you’re
an actress, dear. And I mean an actress. For you to do anything else with your life
will be a crime.”

“Ko-Ko is ten times as good as I am—”

“My dear, Ko-Ko is a piece of wood. They’re all sticks, sticks, I tell you, absolute
dummies, except you. Of course they should have given Ko-Ko to you, but Helen had
you down for the Mikado. Poor Helen meant well. She likes you in her fashion. I’m
afraid she doesn’t know her Gilbert and Sullivan. She thought the Mikado part must
be the lead.”

“Marsha, Miss Kimble did the casting—”

“Dora Kimble, dear, is only the director. Helen Johannsen is business manager of the
show, and what’s more she’ll write the review in the paper. If Miss Kimble wants a
show next year she’s not going to do anything to offend Helen. The dramatic society
is Miss Kimble’s one reason for living. She’s substituted it for having a man. So
she damn well jigs to Helen’s tune.”

It astounded Marjorie to hear that political influence could touch so sacred a process
as the casting of a play. “Is that really how I got the part? I can hardly believe
it—”

“Dear, listen, in this school Helen Johannsen can do
anything
.” She began to talk about Hunter politics, amazing Marjorie with revelations of the
interlocking agreements between the Christian and Jewish sororities, the rigid apportioning
of the plums of honor and money.

“Why, it’s crooked, it’s like Tammany,” Marjorie exclaimed.

“Marjorie, really! That’s just the way things are, everywhere in the world. School’s
no different. The girls who do the work are entitled to a little gravy.”

“How do you know all this? You make me feel like a blind fool.”

“You’re just not interested, dear, and I am. I’m ambitious. I tried to buck the system
in freshman year. Ran for class president, tried to organize the great unwashed, the
non-sorority girls. We outnumber them four to one at Hunter, God knows. Only one trouble.
It turns out that the unwashed worship the washed. I got one vote to Helen Johannsen’s
six. Ah, well.” She popped a shrimp into her mouth and drank. “There’s something so
damn wide-eyed about you. How old are you?”

“I’ll be eighteen next month.”

“Lawks a mercy me, a child, and an upper sophomore! You’re a mental prodigy too. It’s
too much.”

“Prodigy! I barely scrape through every term. It was easy to skip in the Bronx where
I grew up, that’s all, and I gained a year—”

“You’re from the
Bronx
?”

“Lived there all my life until a year and a half ago. Why?”

Marsha squinted at her, the red light making black lines around her eyes. “Well, dear,
you
can
act. I’d have taken you for a born and bred Central Park West babe.”

“How old are you, Marsha?”

“Dear, I’m a hag. An ancient battered used-up twenty-one.”

Marjorie laughed. The drink was taking hold. She was finding Marsha more and more
charming, and the Chinese surroundings no longer scared her. “Marsha, will you tell
me one thing, and be absolutely honest? It’s terribly important to me. What makes
you think I have any acting ability? Just from seeing me rehearse a few times—”

Marsha grinned. “Come on, have dinner with me. Call up your folks and tell them you’re
busy with the show. It’s true enough, I have a million things to tell you about your
performance.”

“Well—look, can you—can you order something for me without pork? I don’t eat it.”

Marsha smiled. “I can order a whole banquet without pork. Simplicity itself.”

Mrs. Morgenstern made no difficulty over the phone, merely asking when Marjorie would
be home, and warning her not to work too hard. When she returned to the table Mi Fong
was there, ducking his head and smiling. Marsha was saying, “And jasmine tea, of course,
and rice cookies and—oh, yes, remember now, no pork. Absolutely no pork.”

The Chinaman giggled, glancing at Marjorie. “No polk. Sure thing. Polk too spensive,
sure? No polk, missa. Hokay.” He went off, laughing.

“Mama says it’s all right,” Marjorie said, adding, with a rueful look after the Chinaman,
“She doesn’t know I’m in a chop suey joint.”

“You’re kosher, aren’t you?” said Marsha kindly.

“Well, hardly. My folks are. But pork or shellfish—it’s just the idea, it makes no
sense—”

“Dear, don’t apologize. The power of conditioning is fabulous. Fortunately I’ve never
had the problem.”

“Aren’t you Jewish?”

“Well now, strangely enough, I don’t rightly know. My father’s a crusading atheist.
My mother doesn’t know what she is, she grew up in France as an orphan. I guess Hitler
would call me a Jew, all right. But Zelenko, if you don’t know it, is the name of
one of the noblest old Russian families. How our family comes by it my father doesn’t
know, or won’t say. Maybe my great-grandfather was a noble bastard. For all I know
I’m a Russian princess, isn’t that a sobering thought?”

“Marsha, did Gertrude Lawrence really come to dinner at your house?” Marjorie said.
The stout girl had casually thrown out this startling fact during their conversation
at rehearsal.

“Dear, Gertrude Lawrence has loved my mother for years. But then, everybody does.
I don’t think there’s anybody in the theatre she doesn’t know. Damn few I haven’t
met, in fact. Not that I pretend they’re my buddies or anything, it’s just through
Mama.”

Marsha proceeded to tumble out anecdotes about well-known people, all magic names
to Marjorie. She knew the funny things Noel Coward did at parties, and where Margaret
Sullavan bought her clothes, and which famous actors were conducting adulterous affairs,
and with whom, and which celebrated writers and composers were homosexual, and what
plays were going to be hits next season, and which producers Marjorie could expect
to be assaulted by. She was rattling on in this vein, with Marjorie listening hypnotized,
when Mi Fong brought the first course.

As nearly as Marjorie could make out in the crimson gloom, it was a white soup—dirty
white. She had an ingrained dislike of white soup. There were things floating in it,
some gelatinous, some shredded, some fleshy-looking. She glanced at Mi Fong, who grinned,
“No polk, missa.”

“Fall to, it’s ambrosia,” said Marsha, plunging her little china spoon into it greedily.

Marjorie took a few spoonfuls, straining the liquid. The taste was very spicy, not
bad. But when she found herself chewing what seemed to be a couple of rubber bands,
or possibly worms, she emptied her mouth and pushed away the dish. Then she was ashamed,
and afraid she had offended Marsha; but the other girl spooned up her soup obliviously,
talking on about the theatre. Marjorie reminded her of Margaret Sullavan, she said,
“Not in technique, of course. You couldn’t be more raw or awkward, you haven’t an
atom of experience and it’s perfectly obvious you haven’t. I’m talking about star
quality, about inner magnetism. You walk on stage, Margie, even in a stale old part
like the Mikado, and somehow you’re alive, and inside the part, and yet you’re projecting
a peculiar note, your own. That’s it, kid, believe me. Everything else is peripheral,
it can be learned, it can be taught, it can be bought.
That
, you’ve either got or you haven’t. You’ve got it.”

“Good Lord, I hope you’re right—” Marjorie broke off because a steaming heap of food
appeared under her nose: a great bed of white rice, and piled on it a number of greasy
objects, some vegetable, some animal.

“No polk, missa,” said the Chinaman. “Assolutely.” Marjorie, however, had smelled
pork in restaurants and cafeterias very often. This was pork: if there was such an
animal as a pig in the world, this was the remains of a pig.

Marsha said, “You’ll love it. It’s his masterpiece. Moo yak with almonds.” Marjorie
nodded and smiled, casting about wildly in her mind for an excuse not to eat it. “They
make it with pork in most places,” Marsha went on. “Mi Fong makes it with lamb, though.”
She began shovelling it into her mouth.

“Oh you betcha ram,” said Mi Fong, his teeth gleaming redly at Marjorie. “Sure ’nough
ram.”

“Isn’t that meat sort of white for lamb?” said Marjorie, screwing up her eyes and
her nose at the dish.

“Assright, missa. White. Chinese ram. Chinese ram alla time white.” He poured the
tea, which smelled like boiled perfume, in fragile cups, and went away chuckling.

Not wanting to insult Marsha by seeming to call her a liar, Marjorie made a hearty
show of enjoying the dish, whatever it was; she scooped the rice from under the meat
and ate that. But the light was dim and her instruments greasy for such delicate work.
She soon found herself chewing a large piece of rubbery meat. She went into a coughing
fit, got rid of it in her handkerchief, and pushed the food around on her plate without
eating any more. Partly to distract Marsha from what she was doing, and partly out
of the general stimulation of the Singapore sling and Marsha’s flattery, Marjorie
disclosed to her—for the first time to anybody—the stage name she had invented for
herself. Marsha stopped eating, staring at her for several seconds. “Mar-jorie Mor-ningstar,
eh?” She lingered over the syllables. “That’s you, all right. A silver gleam in the
pink sky of dawn. It’s an inspiration. It’s perfect.”

“I don’t know—doesn’t it sound awkward, sort of forced?”

“Maybe to you it does. You’re used to your own name. I tell you it’s perfect.” Marsha
crammed the last scraps on her plate into her mouth and drank tea. “Some day when
that name’s up in lights over the Music Box, I’ll come backstage and remind you of
the time we ate in Mi Fong’s, and you told it to me, and I insisted that it was exactly
right. And you’ll turn to your maid and say, ‘Give this person a quarter and show
her out.’ ”

They both giggled, and began again on that endless topic, the theatre. Marsha said
she was going to be a producer some day after she had made a lot of money in another
field. She knew she lacked the talent to be a great designer of costumes or sets.
“And I’m not interested in being anything but great, dear.” She rejected tolerantly
Marjorie’s insistence that she was probably a genius. “Wait till you see some of my
work. Dull plodding competence, that’s all.”

“But where are you going to make a pile of money, then, Marsha?”

“That’s
my
secret.”

“I’ve told you mine.”

“So you have.” Marsha looked at her cannily. “Well, it’ll do no harm to tell you,
at that. I’m going to be a buyer—a big-time buyer of women’s clothes for department
stores. There’s fortunes in it, fortunes! Mother’s a good friend of Edna Farbstein,
the head buyer at Macy’s. Do you know what Edna’s worth? Well, dear, the miserable
pauper just has one house in Larchmont, another in Palm Beach, a boat, and two Cadillacs,
that’s all, and both her sons go to Princeton. All I need is a start—one connection,
I’ll find one somehow—and I’m off to the races. One thing I can do is pick clothes.”

Marjorie could not stop a skeptical smile from flickering across her face. Marsha
said sharply, “Look, baby, don’t say it. This stuff I wear, well, I’m no millionaire
yet, and anyway, what can you do for a big fat black-haired slob? Exotic is the word.
If you look this way you’ve got to
lean
on it, and pretend that’s exactly what you love to look like.”

“I think you dress very attractively,” Marjorie said. But she remained a shade skeptical,
and they drank their tea in silence for a while. Given Marsha’s face and figure, she
thought, she would diet away a lot of weight, cut and thin her hair, underplay the
makeup, and dress very severely. That way Marsha might achieve a certain theatrical
attractiveness, instead of seeming overblown and frowzy. She was afraid to say so,
however.

When they came out into the street Marjorie was surprised at the sweet clean smell
of the misty air. A Manhattan street seldom smelled this good to her, but after Mi
Fong’s it was almost like a meadow.

“Which way do you go, Marsha?”

“Ninety-second Street and Central Park West.” Marsha pulled her patchy squirrel coat
close about her, looking for a cab.

“What! Why, I live in the El Dorado!”

“Gad, next-door neighbors, how lovely. One cab for both—”

“Cab? The cross-town bus is a block from here.”

“Oh, the hell with the cross-town bus. This is an occasion.” A cab stopped, they got
in, and the fat girl snuggled happily into a corner of the seat. “What’s the matter
with me? Why do I love cabs so? I’m always in hock, just from taking cabs. Anyway,
tonight I just had to. After all, my first dinner with Marjorie Morningstar—” She
offered Marjorie a cardboard box of cigarettes, and lit one with a practiced cupping
of her hands. The smoke was peculiarly aromatic.

“Marsha, you have no idea how queer that name sounds to me when you say it. I haven’t
told it to a soul before.”

“Not even to Sandy Goldstone?”

Marjorie peered at her through the wreathing smoke. “Sandy Goldstone? What about him?”

“Dear, the price of eminence is that you become a goldfish, better get used to it.
Everybody at school knows about you and Lamm’s, junior.”

“Isn’t it ridiculous? Marsha, I’ve just had a few dates with him now and then.”

“Well, I hope that’s how it is. Don’t tie down Marjorie Morningstar at eighteen, kiddo.
Not for all the girdles in Lamm’s, don’t you do it.”

“Believe me, nobody’s asked me to.”

Marsha studied her face. “Well, all right, but don’t think it may not happen some
day. Lamm’s, junior is not above you. The question is whether you’re not above him.”

Marjorie blushed. “The way you go on—”

“Sugar bun, tell me, are mine really the first mortal ears to hear your stage name?
I can’t believe it.”

“It’s the truth. Please don’t tell it to anyone either, will you? I mean—it’s no state
secret, I don’t want to seem absurd, but—”

“Darling, I’m a tomb, a silent tomb. Well, history has really been made tonight, hasn’t
it? Do have a cigarette, they’re just Turkish, it’s like smoking warm air—”