Cheerful--By Request.
by Edna Ferber.
I
CHEERFUL--BY REQUEST
The editor paid for the lunch (as editors do). He lighted his seventh cigarette and leaned back. The conversation, which had zigzagged from the war to Zuloaga, and from Rasputin the Monk to the number of miles a Darrow would go on a gallon, narrowed down to the thin, straight line of business.
"Now don"t misunderstand. Please! We"re not presuming to dictate. Dear me, no! We have always felt that the writer should be free to express that which is in his--ah--heart. But in the last year we"ve been swamped with these drab, realistic stories. Strong, relentless things, you know, about dishwashers, with a lot of fine detail about the fuzz of grease on the rim of the pan. And then those drear and hopeless ones about fallen sisters who end it all in the East River. The East River must be choked up with "em. Now, I know that life is real, life is earnest, and I"m not demanding a happy ending, exactly. But if you could--that is--would you--do you see your way at all clear to giving us a fairly cheerful story? Not necessarily Glad, but not so darned Russian, if you get me.
Not pink, but not all grey either. Say--mauve." ...
That was Josie Fifer"s existence. Mostly grey, with a dash of pink.
Which makes mauve.
Unless you are connected (which you probably are not) with the great firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers, you never will have heard of Josie Fifer.
There are things about the theatre that the public does not know. A statement, at first blush, to be disputed. The press agent, the special writer, the critic, the magazines, the Sunday supplement, the divorce courts--what have they left untold? We know the make of car Miss Billboard drives; who her husbands are and were; how much the movies have offered her; what she wears, reads, says, thinks, and eats for breakfast. Snapshots of author writing play at place on Hudson; pictures of the play in rehearsal; of the director directing it; of the stage hands rewriting it--long before the opening night we know more about the piece than does the playwright himself, and are ten times less eager to see it.
Josie Fifer"s knowledge surpa.s.sed even this. For she was keeper of the ghosts of the firm of Hahn & Lohman. Not only was she present at the birth of a play; she officiated at its funeral. She carried the keys to the closets that housed the skeletons of the firm. When a play died of inanition, old age, or--as was sometimes the case--before it was born, it was Josie Fifer who laid out its remains and followed it to the grave.
Her notification of its demise would come thus:
"h.e.l.lo, Fifer! This is McCabe" (the property man of H. & L. at the phone).
"Well?"
"A little waspish this morning, aren"t you, Josephine?"
"I"ve got twenty-five bathing suits for the No. 2 "Ataboy" company to mend and clean and press before five this afternoon. If you think I"m going to stand here wasting my--"
"All right, all right! I just wanted to tell you that "My Mistake"
closes Sat.u.r.day. The stuff"ll be up Monday morning early."
A sardonic laugh from Josie. "And yet they say "What"s in a name!""
The unfortunate play had been all that its t.i.tle implies. Its purpose was to star an actress who hadn"t a glint. Her second-act costume alone had cost $700, but even Russian sable bands can"t carry a bad play. The critics had pounced on it with the savagery of their kind and hacked it, limb from limb, leaving its carca.s.s to rot under the pitiless white glare of Broadway. The dress with the Russian sable bands went the way of all Hahn & Lohman tragedies. Josie Fifer received it, if not reverently, still appreciatively.
"I should think Sid Hahn would know by this time," she observed sniffily, as her expert fingers shook out the silken folds and smoothed the fabulous fur, "that auburn hair and a gurgle and a Lucille dress don"t make a play. Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any actress I ever saw. A woman with feet like that"--she picked up a satin slipper, size 7-1/2 C--"hasn"t any business on the stage. She ought to travel with a circus. Here, Etta. Hang this away in D, next to the amethyst blue velvet, and be sure and lock the door."
McCabe had been right. A waspish wit was Josie"s.
The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Josie Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the days that led up to her being there--the days when she was Jose Fyfer on the programme.
Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you may have guessed. If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you might have pa.s.sed the building a hundred times without once giving it a seeing glance. It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the smart crowds, and the glittering motors. It was the Forty-third lying east of the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of Fifth Avenue--a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up.
A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from the sidewalk to the dim hallway; a musty-smelling pa.s.sage wherein you are met by a genial sign which reads:
"No admittance. Keep out. This means you."
To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator. To ride in that elevator is to know adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor, like an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip, back and shoulder. The corkscrew stairway, broken and footworn though it is, seems infinitely less perilous.
First floor--second--third--fourth. Whew! And there you are in Josie Fifer"s kingdom--a great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy with its whir of sewing machines: tables, and tables, and tables, piled with orderly stacks of every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeard"s wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they are, with the key in Josie"s pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe, or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of these doors, what treasures hung revealed! What shimmer and sparkle and perfume--and moth b.a.l.l.s! The long-tailed electric light bulb held high in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her altar.
There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted for a long, long time.
Dresses there are that have made stage history. Surely you remember the beruffled, rose-strewn confection in which the beautiful Elsa Marriott swam into our ken in "Mississipp""? She used to say, wistfully, that she always got a hand on her entrance in that dress. It was due to the sheer shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it beheld her loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud. There it hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet as fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead white rose pressed within the leaves of a book of love poems. Just next it, incongruously enough, flaunt the wicked froufrou skirts and the low-cut bodice and the wasp waist of the abbreviated costume in which Cora Ka.s.sell used so generously to display her charms. A rich and portly society matron of Pittsburgh now--she whose name had been a synonym for pulchritude these thirty years; she who had had more cold creams, hats, cigars, corsets, horses, and lotions named for her than any woman in history! Her ample girth would have wrought sad havoc with that eighteen-inch waist now. Gone are the chaste curves of the slim white silk legs that used to kick so lithely from the swirl of lace and chiffon. Yet there it hangs, pertly pathetic, mute evidence of her vanished youth, her delectable beauty, and her unblushing confidence in those same.
Up one aisle and down the next--velvet, satin, lace and broadcloth--here the costume the great Canfield had worn in Richard III; there the little c.o.c.ked hat and the slashed jerkin in which Maude Hammond, as Peterkins, winged her way to fame up through the hearts of a million children whose ages ranged from seven to seventy. Brocades and ginghams; tailor suits and peignoirs; puffed sleeves and tight--dramatic history, all, they spelled failure, success, hope, despair, vanity, pride, triumph, decay.
Tragic ghosts, over which Josie Fifer held grim sway!
Have I told you that Josie Fifer, moving nimbly about the great storehouse, limped as she went? The left leg swung as a normal leg should. The right followed haltingly, sagging at hip and knee. And that brings us back to the reason for her being where she was. And what.
The story of how Josie Fifer came to be mistress of the cast-off robes of the firm of Hahn & Lohman is one of those stage tragedies that never have a public performance. Josie had been one of those little girls who speak pieces at chicken-pie suppers held in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Presbyterian church. Her mother had been a silly, idle woman addicted to mother hubbards and paper-backed novels about the house. Her one pa.s.sion was the theatre, a pa.s.sion that had very scant opportunity for feeding in Wapello, Iowa. Josie"s piece-speaking talent was evidently a direct inheritance. Some might call it a taint.
Two days before one of Josie"s public appearances her mother would twist the child"s hair into innumerable rag curlers that stood out in grotesque, Topsy-like b.u.mps all over her fair head. On the eventful evening each rag chrysalis would burst into a full-blown b.u.t.terfly curl.
In a pale-blue, lace-fretted dress over a pale-blue slip, made in what her mother called "Empire style," Josie would deliver herself of "Entertaining Big Sister"s Beau" and other sophisticated cla.s.sics with an incredible ease and absence of embarra.s.sment. It wasn"t a definite boldness in her. She merely liked standing there before all those people, in her blue dress and her toe slippers, speaking her pieces with enhancing gestures taught her by her mother in innumerable rehearsals.
Any one who has ever lived in Wapello, Iowa, or its equivalent, remembers the old opera house on the corner of Main and Elm, with Schroeder"s drug store occupying the first floor. Opera never came within three hundred miles of Wapello, unless it was the so-called comic kind. It was before the day of the ubiquitous moving-picture theatre that has since been the undoing of the one-night stand and the ten-twenty-thirty stock company. The old red-brick opera house furnished unlimited thrills for Josie and her mother. From the time Josie was seven she was taken to see whatever Wapello was offered in the way of the drama. That consisted mostly of plays of the tell-me-more-about-me-mother type.
By the time she was ten she knew the whole repertoire of the Maude La Vergne Stock Company by heart. She was _blase_ with "East Lynne" and "The Two Orphans," and even "Camille" left her cold. She was as wise to the trade tricks as is a New York first nighter. She would sit there in the darkened auditorium of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, surveying the stage with a judicious and undeceived eye, as she sucked indefatigably at a lollipop extracted from the sticky bag clutched in one moist palm. (A bag of candy to each and every girl; a ball or a top to each and every boy!) Josie knew that the middle-aged _soubrette_ who came out between the first and second acts to sing a gingham-and-sunbonnet song would whisk off to reappear immediately in knee-length pink satin and curls.
When the heroine left home in a shawl and a sudden snowstorm that followed her upstage and stopped when she went off, Josie was interested, but undeceived. She knew that the surprised-looking white horse used in the Civil War comedy-drama ent.i.tled "His Southern Sweetheart" came from Joe Brink"s livery stable in exchange for four pa.s.ses, and that the faithful old negro servitor in the white cotton wig would save somebody from something before the afternoon was over.
In was inevitable that as Josie grew older she should take part in home-talent plays. It was one of these tinsel affairs that had made clear to her just where her future lay. The Wapello _Daily Courier_ helped her in her decision. She had taken the part of a gipsy queen, appropriately costumed in slightly soiled white satin slippers with four-inch heels, and a white satin dress enhanced by a red sash, a black velvet bolero, and large hoop earrings. She had danced and sung with a pert confidence, and the _Courier_ had p.r.o.nounced her talents not amateur, but professional, and had advised the managers (who, no doubt, read the Wapello _Courier_ daily, along with their _Morning Telegraph_) to seek her out, and speedily.
Josie didn"t wait for them to take the hint. She sought them out instead. There followed seven tawdry, hard-working, heartbreaking years.
Supe, walk-on, stock, musical comedy--Josie went through them all. If any illusions about the stage had survived her Wapello days, they would have vanished in the first six months of her dramatic career. By the time she was twenty-four she had acquired the wisdom of fifty, a near-seal coat, a turquoise ring with a number of smoky-looking crushed diamonds surrounding it, and a reputation for wit and for decency. The last had cost the most.
During all these years of cheap theatrical boarding houses (the most soul-searing cheapness in the world), of one-night stands, of insult, disappointment, rebuff, and something that often came perilously near to want, Josie Fifer managed to retain a certain humorous outlook on life.
There was something whimsical about it. She could even see a joke on herself. When she first signed her name Jose Fyfer, for example, she did it with, an appreciative giggle and a glint in her eye as she formed the accent mark over the e.
"They"ll never stop me now," she said. "I"m made. But I wish I knew if that J was p.r.o.nounced like H, in humbug. Are there any Spanish blondes?"
It used to be the habit of the other women in the company to say to her: "Jo, I"m blue as the devil to-day. Come on, give us a laugh."
She always obliged.
And then came a Sunday afternoon in late August when her laugh broke off short in the middle, and was forever after a stunted thing.
She was playing Atlantic City in a second-rate musical show. She had never seen the ocean before, and she viewed it now with an appreciation that still had in it something of a Wapello freshness.
They all planned to go in bathing that hot August afternoon after rehearsal. Josie had seen pictures of the beauteous bathing girl dashing into the foaming breakers. She ran across the stretch of glistening beach, paused and struck a pose, one toe pointed waterward, her arms extended affectedly.
"So!" she said mincingly. "So this is Paris!"
It was a new line in those days, and they all laughed, as she had meant they should. So she leaped into the water with bounds and shouts and much waving of white arms. A great floating derelict of a log struck her leg with its full weight, and with all the tremendous force of the breaker behind it. She doubled up ridiculously, and went down like a shot. Those on the beach laughed again. When she came up, and they saw her distorted face they stopped laughing, and fished her out. Her leg was broken in two places, and mashed in a dozen.
Jose Fyfer"s dramatic career was over. (This is not the cheery portion of the story.)