Marjorie Morningstar (77 page)

There was a handwritten postscript:

When Marjorie arrived at rehearsal that day she took another blow, ill prepared as
she was for more evil news.

The play she was in was called
The Bad Year
. She was cast as a whore. The play was a farce about a small-town spinster of thirty-five
who inherited a fortune and came to New York to live wildly for a year, before settling
back into small-town life. There were complications involving city gangsters, and
a doctor from the small town who was in love with the spinster. The chief comic idea
of the play was that the spinster rented a room in a brownstone bordello in Manhattan,
under the misapprehension that the place was a boardinghouse. It took her most of
the play to be undeceived. All Marjorie had to do in the play was to sit around in
her underwear with five other girls for a few minutes during each act, smoking, drinking,
and in general conveying depravity as well as she could with pantomime.

In the original script each of the whores had had a few lines to speak. But Guy Flamm
had pointed out to the author that as soon as an actress uttered a syllable on stage,
she had to be paid the Equity minimum salary for all rehearsals and tryout performances;
whereas if she said nothing, she could be signed on as an extra for a fraction of
the cost. The author, a sad little bald man with limp-hanging long hands, was putting
up all the money to produce the show himself. It was his Broadway debut, though he
had written (so the report went among the cast) seventeen unproduced plays. He made
his living as a partner in a firm manufacturing lawn sprinklers. His approach to the
production was consistently frugal; and he had willingly revised the script so that
there were now five silent whores, and one loquacious slut who spoke all the lines
the others had had. Marjorie was a silent whore.

It wasn’t much of a part, and it wasn’t much of a play, as Marjorie had frankly admitted
to Noel. But she had come a long way since the day after her graduation from college,
when she had hesitated over taking the part of Clarice in Guy Flamm’s production of
Down Two Doubled
. Her only reservation in going to the first tryout of
The Bad Year
had been that Flamm might be embarrassed at the sight of her, so that she would have
no chance at all. But he had picked her out of a line of girls on the stage, along
with several others, and thereafter at rehearsals had made no sign of recognition.
Evidently he had forgotten his short encounter with her.

Marjorie had been haunting all the producers’ offices and all the tryouts, for two
years: and this was her first break. She had undergone enormous and almost unrelieved
frustration. Perhaps half a dozen times she had been given the lines of some minor
part to read at a tryout, but she had never gotten the part.

She was such an habitué of the drugstore, and of another haunt of the hopefuls, the
bar in Sardi’s restaurant, that nobody looked around any more when she came in. They
could see out of the corners of their eyes that it was only Margie Morgenstern (or
Morningstar—she was known by both names), the pretty girl whose boy friend had written
the fearful flop
Princess Jones
. Even Renée, the hat-check girl at Sardi’s, called her Margie. Renée was far from
a nobody; the Broadway columnists often printed anecdotes about her. It seemed to
Marjorie that all was not lost—that she did have a desperate little toehold in the
theatre, after all—because this celebrated hat-check girl called her by her first
name.

In such a frame of mind, Marjorie could hardly have helped regarding a chance to appear
on the Broadway stage, even in a Guy Flamm production, as a turn in her luck. It was
too bad that she was merely playing a silent whore; but one obviously had to start
at the bottom of the ladder. She had tried very hard to get the part of the talking
whore. It would have meant an Equity card, more money, a true leap into the theatrical
profession. For a day or two she had actually seemed to be favored for the role by
Guy Flamm; then suddenly another girl had been chosen. It was believed among the cast
that the talking whore was sleeping with Flamm; certainly they were always taking
their meals together, and leaving rehearsals arm in arm.

The bad news that Marjorie learned, upon coming to rehearsal the day Noel sailed,
was that she was in danger of losing even the tiny part she had. The assistant stage
manager, a pale thin would-be playwright, who was having an affair with a redhead
playing a silent whore, had confided to his love that one of the five was going to
be axed from the show to save expenses, after the dress rehearsal Saturday night—two
days off. He had of course extracted a promise of secrecy from the redhead, and she
had of course violated it as fast as she could get to the theatre.

With nerves already worn, Marjorie all but broke down at the news. She really feared
what such a disappointment might do to her at this wretched moment of her life. In
desperation she decided that her best chance for survival lay in being a little pleasanter
to the leading man of the show, Dane Voen, who had been trying hard to work up a romance
with her. She wasn’t desperate enough to sleep with Voen, of course; but measures
short of that, she thought, might serve at least to get her past the fatal Saturday
axing.

Voen was a tall, fantastically vain man of forty or so, who wore a hair piece to mask
a very bald forehead. He played the chief gangster, and he was an excellent actor;
he made a truly fine growling villain. His one difficulty lay in understanding what
his lines meant. He was virtually an imbecile. The director had to explain to him,
as though he were a child of nine, what the language of each scene implied. Once he
grasped the meaning, however, he read the lines with amazing clarity and force. Since
the first day of rehearsals, he had been ogling Marjorie violently, all but licking
his lips at the sight of her, and not in the least discouraged by her freezing indifference.

The trouble with Marjorie’s little scheme for survival was that Dane already had a
mistress, a vulturous dark little woman who watched all the rehearsals from a back
row of the orchestra, and who looked capable of throwing sulphuric acid in the face
of anyone who meddled with Dane. Dane himself feared her. He made all his passes at
Marjorie in the wings, in whispers, and glancing over his shoulder. Moreover, Dane
was in the process of divorcing his second wife, and was being sued by his first wife
for back alimony. Marjorie had little stomach for getting involved, even for a day
or two, with this bird-brained Don Juan, but panic drove her to try it.

After rehearsals were over that evening, therefore, she consented to go with Dane
for a drink. The mistress had departed half an hour earlier to cook supper for him,
and he was as happy, taking Marjorie to the bar across the street, as a boy with a
new toy pistol. Nothing would do for the occasion but champagne cocktails; and though
Marjorie choked over the raw bar champagne, which tasted like lemon soda gone bad,
he kept ordering more. Voen’s conversation was full of variety, in that he discussed
himself from a surprising number of aspects. He described the enormous sums of money
he made in radio as a baritone, whenever he wanted to. He revealed that he was a playwright
and a novelist, and that he expected shortly to have a couple of his plays produced
and a novel printed. He narrated the true facts about a couple of notorious occasions
when he had been dropped from shows during out-of-town tryouts; what had really occurred,
he explained, was that he had understood the plays better than the directors, and
had showed them up so badly in analytic disputes that they couldn’t endure his continued
presence in the cast. He described his “methodology” in playing a part; the amusing
illusion he gave of not understanding the lines was due, he said, to his methodology.
He believed in reading the lines for the first week or so in every possible way but
the right one, in order to dig out hidden nuances of character that had lain in the
author’s unconscious. The surface meaning of the lines was trivial, he said, compared
to the author’s unconscious meaning; Freud proved that; Marjorie ought to read Freud,
Voen said, if she wanted to develop a solid methodology.

His mistress telephoned the bar in the middle of this rodomontade, asking for him;
Voen told the bartender to say he had left for home ten minutes ago, and went on talking
about his methodology. Marjorie began to get uneasy, but Voen talked smoothly over
her attempts to break away. From methodology he switched to the subject of marriage,
and in a fatherly way explained to her that his first two marriages had failed because
his wives were undeveloped emotionally, owing to lack of experience with older men.
No girl should venture into marriage, Voen asserted, before she had a sound backlog
of experience with an older man, because an older man was tolerant and wise, and could
nurture her sexual nature past all the pitfalls of shyness and repression, so that
she would open like a flower into full bloom. Tenderness and wisdom, said Voen, were
what a girl needed in her first sex partner, and then later on she could have a stable
marriage with someone else. Halfway through his lecture, when Marjorie felt she would
burst out laughing in his face in a moment or two, she told him that she had to make
a phone call instantly; and Voen let her get out of the cubicle.

She actually did call home, saying she would be a little late for dinner; and it was
rather lucky that she did, for when she stepped out of the phone booth, a hideous
yammering was going on in the bar between Voen and his little mistress, who had arrived
with her hair wild, in a moth-eaten fur coat, and had him backed into a corner, waving
curved claws near his eyes. Voen was frantically putting on his Tyrolean hat and white
camel’s hair coat, dodging the claws as best he could, and making explanations in
a rich soothing baritone voice, while the woman screeched. Frankly a coward in such
a situation, Marjorie dodged back into the booth, and pretended to be talking into
the telephone. She had a moment of cold horror when the mistress suddenly appeared
at the window of the booth, with a face like Dracula’s, making hideous clawing gestures,
and shouting obscenities. Marjorie shrugged, smiled, and held the booth tightly shut
with her foot, and the woman at last went away.

So ended Marjorie’s feeble first effort to use sex in forwarding her theatrical career;
she seemed to lack the touch, somehow. She cowered in the booth for another ten minutes,
then peeked out into the bar, and went home when she saw it was safe.

Noel had certainly been right in one respect: the show did take her mind off his letter.
She lay awake for hours that night, thinking sometimes of him, but mostly searching
her brain for a way to stay in
The Bad Year
as a silent whore. She dropped asleep about four in the morning, having devised a
plan. Her intermittent thoughts about Noel had not been very painful. Their sum was
that he could go to Paris and be damned. She would pursue her career, forget him,
and in the end marry a man worth ten of him.

In the morning she took her passbook to the bank and drew out fifty-seven dollars,
leaving a balance of a dollar and a half. She had earned these dollars at odd times
in recent months as a receptionist, a typist, a model, and a movie usher. From the
bank Marjorie went to Bergdorf Goodman’s and bought fifty-five dollars’ worth of black
French underwear heavily trimmed with lace. She put the things on in a private dressing
booth, and strutted before the mirror for a while, cigarette in hand, experimenting
with various degenerate leers and wiggles. It seemed to her that she made quite a
fetching and vicious whore.

On the night of the dress rehearsal Marjorie’s expensive underwear caused a lot of
envying comment among the girls in the dressing room. She put on a robe to walk out
in the wings, and shed it only at the last moment before the curtain went up. She
felt ashamed and highly ridiculous all during the performance, prancing around in
the glare of stage lights in underwear. She was miserably aware of Dane Voen and the
other actors crowded in the wings, coolly enjoying the sight of six undressed girls,
and cracking jokes among themselves. She darted for the robe each time she came off
stage.

Her heart sank when the assistant stage manager came to her at the end of the rehearsal,
eyes averted and face glum. “Mr. Flamm wants to see you, Margie.” She braced herself
and went to the cubbyhole of plywood partitions backstage which Flamm used for an
office.

It was the axe, of course. His popping eyes somewhat more bloodshot than they had
been two years ago, a genial fatherly smile on his face, his fingers alternately caressing
his sporty green bow tie and neat gray hair, Flamm explained that the budget had been
exceeded, and he couldn’t afford to keep her in the show. Marjorie desperately offered
to work for nothing, to forgo the rehearsal money due her, to pay her own transportation
and expenses for the Philadelphia tryout. He shook his head. Her artistic spirit was
admirable, he said, but the bloodsucking rules of Actors Equity, which were killing
the theatre, prevented him from accepting her offer.