Get Happy (3 page)

By his own count, Frank visited twenty-eight states during the months that followed, once again, it seems likely, traveling the vaudeville circuit and performing in out-of-the-way towns like Cloquet and in theaters like the Bijou and the Diamond. Eventually he landed in Portland, Oregon, where, for a year or more, he managed the Crystal on Killingsworth Avenue. But Portland, which was then a bustling, rambunctious port city much like Superior, did not keep him, either. By the autumn of 1913 he was back in Superior, singing at the Parlor on Tower Avenue and resuming his romance with Ethel, whose determination to marry him apparently had never wavered during the many months he had been away.

Since leaving Tennessee, Frank had moved around the country at a dizzying pace, like a bullet that had missed its mark and now ricocheted aimlessly. At times his behavior—his sudden departure from Cloquet, for example, which was followed by an equally hasty exit from Superior—
seemed bizarrely erratic. But Frank was not crazy, and actions that appeared irrational were in fact eminently sane. For Frank had a secret that explained everything: he was basically homosexual, and his advances to young men and teenage boys sometimes made him unwelcome in the towns in which he took up residence. Cloquet was one of the places he had been forced to leave. “He was accused of being a pervert and he had to skip town and get out fast,” said Ayres.

When the news reached Superior, he found it expedient to leave there as well. “Everybody in Superior was talking about it,” said Ayres. “I was shocked because I had had no idea that there was anything like that going on.” What Ethel thought, no one can know, but when Frank returned at last in the fall of 1913, she was ready to say yes to his proposal. Their wedding on that cold afternoon in January was indeed a victory for the god of love, just as the Superior newspaper had said it was. What the paper did not say—what it did not know—was just how impressive little Cupid’s triumph had been.

Frank’s days of frantic zigzagging were over, and for a decade and more he and Ethel seemed likely to conclude their story with a happy ending. As if adhering to the newspaper’s hopeful script, they left Superior soon after their honeymoon for one of those star-spangled, all-American towns that movie studios would later go to elaborate efforts to reproduce on Hollywood back lots. There, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, surrounded by lakes and forests and all the bounty of a generous nature, they made their home. And there they begat three daughters who followed them onto the stage as soon as they were out of diapers. All three had talent. One, the youngest, possessed genius.

This new life began on March 5, 1914, when the newlyweds were hired to run the New Grand, one of Grand Rapids’ two theaters. Frank was the manager and singer; Ethel was the piano player, providing sound effects for the silent pictures, as she had done in Superior. The team of Gumm & Gumm was an instant success—“Frank Gumm continues to please his audiences by that rich Southern brogue,” the
Grand Rapids Herald-Review
was soon to say—and their arrival quickly spelled
the doom of the New Grand’s only competitor, the Gem. Frank and Ethel had found their niche in show business, small though it was.

At the beginning they probably did not think of Grand Rapids, which was just eighty miles northwest of Superior, as much more than a temporary stop, a way station at the start of a long journey. Like all other young performers, they nursed ambitions to play on bigger stages in bigger cities: Minneapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, someday perhaps even New York. During their months together, they had worked up an act, and they were eager to try it out on the circuit. Jack and Virginia Lee, Sweet Southern Singers, they called themselves. “Gumm” was not a name that danced across theater marquees.

Jack and Virginia may have sung sweetly, but Frank and Ethel did not want to give up the security of steady jobs in Grand Rapids on the mere hope of success. They therefore asked the New Grand’s owners, James Barlow and Fred Bentz, to let them go for the winter, then come back in the spring. Bending the truth to suit the need, they said that they wanted to spend the winter in Florida with Frank’s parents, both of whom were permanent residents of a cemetery in Murfreesboro. To make it easier for the owners to say yes, they recruited two of Ethel’s siblings, Jack and Mary Milne, to fill in for them while they were gone. Barlow and Bentz agreed, and in the middle of December 1914, Frank and Ethel set out to make it in vaudeville.

Their first stop, which was not so far away, was Cloquet, where Frank’s indiscretion of three years before was overlooked, if not forgotten. Their second was Superior. Florida may indeed have been their eventual destination, but both their trip and their dream ended in Chicago, where Ethel came down with such a severe case of the flu—it bordered on pneumonia—that she could not rise from her bed for three weeks, and then only to exchange it for another one in her parents’ house in Superior. On February 20, 1915, two months after they had left, the Gumms were back in Minnesota, their visions of bright lights reduced to just one, the solitary lamp that hung over Grand Rapids’ main intersection, the only streetlight in the entire village. Yet Ethel’s illness may have been a blessing. Talented as they were, their act had more spirit than polish, by all accounts, and Jack and Virginia Lee
almost certainly would not have risen to the top, or anywhere near it. A case of the flu had probably saved them from years of futile struggle and a succession of dreary, third-rate hotels.

If they felt defeated at being back in Grand Rapids—and so soon—they did not admit it. Whatever disappointment they experienced was lightened, in any event, by the record crowd that greeted them their first night at the New Grand. He had seen a large number of towns, Frank told the
Herald-Review
, but “not one of them looked any better to him than Grand Rapids and that the chances are that he will hereafter be content to remain here.”

And so for many years he was. Pokegama Avenue may not have been as glamorous as Broadway, or even Tower Avenue in Superior, but audiences clapped just as loudly at the New Grand as they did at any of the other theaters in which Jack and Virginia Lee had hoped to appear. Grand Rapids, moreover, had at least one advantage over the perilous vaudeville trail: it was a good place to raise a family. Suddenly that was a matter of concern, for Ethel was pregnant, and probably had been even when they were in Chicago. Perhaps luck, which seemed to have conspired against them then, had been on their side all along.

Their future decided at last, the Gumms did not waste time settling down, and in mid-March, three weeks after their return, Frank purchased a half-ownership in the New Grand. No longer were he and Ethel show-business gypsies, and on September 1, 1915, after nearly twenty months of living in hotels and rooms, they rented a house on Kindred Avenue. They had scarcely unpacked when Ethel gave birth to an eight-and-a-half-pound girl. Born on September 24, she was named Mary Jane.

As far as outsiders’ eyes and ears could tell, the next few years were happy, almost halcyon ones for Frank and Ethel. Since both had grown up in small towns, they had no trouble adjusting to Grand Rapids, which had a population of no more than three thousand, not counting wayward deer, wolves and bears. For those who did not mind the Siberian winters, it was a spot of natural enchantment. Adorning the landscape in every direction were dozens of lakes—not oversized ponds
pretending to be lakes, but real lakes, sparkling sheets of sapphire blue, four within the village itself. As if they did not provide enough of a watery vista, flowing through the middle of town was the Mississippi River, which began its long journey not far to the west, in the chilly depths of Lake Itasca.

Timber gave Grand Rapids its start, and although the dense pine forests that had once covered Itasca County had largely disappeared by the time the Gumms arrived, the manufacture of wood products was still the major local industry. Business was generally good. If few in Grand Rapids were rich, few were poor, either. Just about everybody could afford the ten or fifteen cents it cost to get into the New Grand, which, under Frank’s direction, was not just a place of entertainment but a social center. “The public likes Mr. Gumm because he not only insists upon an entertaining but also a clean performance,” said the
Herald-Review
, and the theater’s Thursday afternoon matinees became a childhood ritual in Grand Rapids.

Though they had banished their hopes of becoming vaudeville stars, Frank and Ethel had not given up the stage. Jack and Virginia Lee were never to play the big cities, but they did play Bigfork, Bemidji, Hibbing, Taconite, Warba, Floodwood, Coleraine and Deer River. As if working at the New Grand and touring with Frank were not enough, the indefatigable Ethel also directed amateur musicals and joined a jazz quartet. “Just one busy lady,” was how one frequent visitor described her, always noisily rushing up or down the stairs, singing at the top of her lungs.

Frank moved at a slower, Southern pace, but he was no less active. Half-ownership of the New Grand had not made him rich, and to supplement his income, he took a part-time job as a reporter for the
Itasca County Independent
. Most of his information he gathered walking around town and stopping off, as he did most mornings, for a dish of ice cream and a song at the confectionery store. “We had a piano in the store,” said Mabel MacAdam, who was the manager. “He’d come in early to get the news and sometimes we’d play the piano and sing for half an hour or so.” Seen here, there and everywhere, Frank and Ethel were as well-liked as any couple in town—an ideal pair, as far as outsiders could judge.

So life progressed for the Gumms, in a steady, unsurprising way. They rented several different houses before at last buying a simple frame house at the corner of Hoffman Avenue and West Fourth Street, a short walk from the New Grand. They often visited Ethel’s relatives in Superior and in Duluth, and they were visited even more often by the Milnes, who joined them in their favorite pastime, singing and playing: a grand piano sat in the living room, and atop the piano sat a violin. The Southern Gumms, Frank’s sister, Mary, and his brothers Bob and Will, dropped in for a week or two, and twice Frank drove his own family down South. “I always liked his little wife,” said one of his aunts. “But, you know, she was a Northern girl.”

On July 4, 1917, Ethel gave birth to a second daughter, Virginia, and both girls eventually made their debuts, singing and dancing, on the stage of the New Grand. As far as Ethel was concerned, two children were enough, however, and when she became pregnant again in the fall of 1921, she did everything she could to induce a miscarriage, swallowing strong doses of castor oil and sitting through stomach-churning car rides over bumpy roads. Nothing worked, and in November Frank drove to Minneapolis to ask the assistance of a young friend, Marcus Rabinowitz, a second-year medical student at the University of Minnesota whose father ran a theater much like Frank’s in a little town northeast of Grand Rapids.

“Marc, I’m in trouble,” Frank told Rabinowitz. “I’ve got to talk to you. You know, we don’t have much money and we’re just getting along decently. We’ve got the two little girls and Ethel’s pregnant. We cannot have another baby.” Could Rabinowitz help with an abortion? The answer was a loud and emphatic no. “Frank, it can cost Ethel her life,” replied Rabinowitz. “You can’t do this. I will not permit you to. It’s impossible. I want you to go back and tell Ethel that I personally guarantee that she will think that it was the luckiest day of her life when she didn’t do it, and that she will have the happiest baby in the world.”

Convinced or not, Ethel now had no choice in the matter. Preparations were made, friends were told—“the Gumms are expecting another stick,” went the joke—and a name, Frank Junior, was selected: after two girls, a boy was expected. Nature had other plans, and on June 10, 1922, Ethel gave birth to her third child, a seven-pound girl. Not
giving up entirely, the disappointed parents gave her the first name of Frances. For her second name they chose Ethel. Thus, in name as well as body, she was a combination of both of them: Frances Ethel. But she was rarely called that. As she was the youngest, she was known as Baby, and Baby was the name to which she answered.