Authors: Jerry Stahl
The Portola attracted all kinds of big names. One evening Jack Johnson stopped by. I pretend-sparred with him and got a laugh when I "knocked myself out" with my own roundhouse. Jack London came in knee-walking drunk at least once a week, and a couple of times we got rubber-legged together, passing a flask of Tokay after hours. Drunk as he was all the time, I don't know how the man could sign his own name, let alone crank out
White Fang.
Then Mr. Grauman turned up again, with the richest-looking man I'd ever seen. The man's skin was golden—a shade I wouldn't see again until I met old money in Hollywood. Even his eyebrows looked rich. The pair planted themselves at one of my tables, and Mr. Grauman crooked his finger for me to come over.
"Roscoe," Grauman crowed, "shake hands with Alexander Pantages."
Pantages!
I was so flummoxed my fingers felt like turkey legs. Pantages had his own vaudeville circuit, as prestigious as the Orpheum, Paramount, or the Hammersteins'. He owned theaters all over the country, plus smart cafes in lots of the same towns.
A job with Pantages was the biggest break you could get—if you could get it. When Mr. Pantages himself complimented me on my singing and asked how I felt about traveling, I told him I took my best naps in train stations. Grauman chuckled like an expensive game hen and said he couldn't pay for my napping, but he'd start me at $25 a week for using my other talents. The next morning I headed north from S.F. to Oregon.
For the next few months I got to play theaters from Eugene up to the top of Washington, then all the way south to Arizona, where I finally scratched out a letter to Daddy. I made sure to tell him I wasn't plucking the gum off theater seats, I was filling them. I did not tell him I'd gotten a raise, to $50 a week. I wanted to impress him—not give him a reason to grift me. Why risk the old man tracking me down to some hall in Bisbee or Speonk and putting the tap on?
Daddy was the one who spent his life scheming about Real Money, and now I was the one making it. I had no doubt that, just as he'd done with Hank and Orville, he'd find a way to convince himself every dime I made was rightfully his. Until I turned 18, he could legally take it, too. I'd seen lots of young performers lose their wages that way. One reason so many folks starting out made up new names to go with their acts—they were runaways. That, or they had warrants out. Or both.
A Frisco Shaker and a Big Decision
Come 1905 my Pantages stint was up, so I got together a little troupe—employing myself as singer, comedian, and manager—and started us swooping up and down the West Coast again. By this time I had to look at a newspaper to know what city I was in. You never notice how many states have towns called "Liberty" until you've played matinees in eight of 'em.
Round about April 1906, my road days nearly came to an end. And not because an irate customer threw a bottle from the balcony, either. (Though that happened, ladies and gentlemen. One Saturday late show in Tucson, a Polish comic named Paps Krakow insulted a cowboy who kept belching during his act. "Gee," Paps snapped after the umpteenth interruption, "I heard you ranch hands sometimes snip your balls off accidental-like—I didn't know it made you
burp!"
Before the crowd even got the joke, Ten Gallon up and brained the Polack with a dead man of rum. I sent Krakow home to convalesce with his mother and filled in with a local Comanche who did rope tricks.)
But back to that April—the 18th to be exact. I'm in my hotel room in San Francisco when I feel the walls wobble.
Now that's
a hangover,
I remember thinking. I figured a little peach brandy would steady things. Before I could get hand to flask, the floor started to shimmy. The pitcher tumbled off the nightstand and the most ungodly sounds of mayhem rose up from the street.
I ran down 10 flights in my dressing coat and breached the sidewalk in time to see a three-story building collapse a block away. I can't describe the sound, the wave of choking dust and rubble that sprayed up to the sky and blotted the sun out. The haze was so unnatural, some people had to remember to scream. A frantic girl with twin babies and a table lamp in her hands ran right into me, shouting "Earthquake!" at the top of her little lungs. Before I could see if she was all right, the young mother careened off again, dragging her lamp and babies in the other direction.
Pretty soon you couldn't move for all the terrified citizens scrambling for their lives. I still wonder what that good mother was thinking when she grabbed a table lamp along with her offspring. At the time I imagined she was simply panicked. In my dopey dotage, I realize that she probably looted the thing while passing a lamp store. (Life is bound to do something to your view of human nature.) Either way, a fire had begun to rage in the wreckage of the fallen building, spewing smoke thick enough to make your hair gray. Genius that I am, my first thought was to run back into the hotel. My money clip and my brandy were upstairs. But no sooner did I step inside than I felt a hand grab my shoulder, followed by something hard and round, jammed with no politeness into my back. "Stop right there, suet."
I turned to see an Army fellow with a handlebar mustache spotted white from plaster. Behind him was a colored boy dragging a wagon full of shovels. The soldier grabbed one and shoved it in my hands. "I could shoot you right now for intent to loot," he barked. "Dig or die!"
The soldier pointed his revolver somewhere between my belly and my bellringer. "Happy to help," I heard myself yelp. So, for the next 24 hours, I dug, along with every other man around with matching arms and legs. Including, I am told, the great John Barrymore. It was the first and last occasion in which I'd get to play the same role as a Barrymore. Had I known, at the time, scared stewless and digging up bricks at gunpoint, I could not have found a moment to gloat. Debris seemed to be falling out of the sky. Screaming came from all directions. Worse than the screams were the muffled cries from under the chest-high piles of rubble. The way they died out. . . . By my 20th hour on the job, arms heavy as coffin lids, all I could think, stupidly, was,
San Francisco can be a dangerous town.
If I had any idea how dangerous, I might have asked Sergeant Shovel to shoot me on the spot.
Yuck Huckster
M
Y MOTHER'S favorite saying was "God can stand on one leg longer than you can." I never did figure out what that meant, but one day, back in Portland at the Star Theater, I was halfway through an illustrated rendition of "Silver Threads Among the Gold" when I noticed an amputee in the front row. One trouser leg had been trimmed to the hip. A stump like a puckered fist poked out of it. I took that as a sign—as if Mama herself was telling me,
"Look, Son, one leg! That could have been you!"
Then and there I made a decision I'd been wrestling with since surviving the San Francisco shaker.
I was done being the Illustrated Singer! This time I meant it.
Illustrateds made a fine career when I was a young sylph. Now they just seemed old-timey. But to be a cracker jack comedian, a high-tone actor . . . that was the new thing.
There
was a future worth pursuing. You could come up with your own acts. You could do some soft shoe, tell a joke in wiener-schnitzel German, or fall off the stage. I'd seen enough of the greats to know how much I had to learn. But I would devote myself.
After the show, I locked myself in the dressing room and pulled out the stocking I'd filched from Mother's bureau after she'd passed. I pressed it to my face. I inhaled her astringent scent—witch hazel, cedar, and vinegar—and made a pledge to her loving memory: I
will work harder than any boy ever worked.
When the stranger in the checked suspenders opened the door and tumbled in, I barely had time to hide Mom's stockings before he got up and dusted himself off. His look was appraising but not judgmental. A long-faced clown without makeup. "I don't know what you were doing and I don't care," the man said, in what I soon learned was an Australian accent. "I'm Leon Errol, theatrical manager and comedian, and I think you're a natural. Join up with me and I'll show you all the tricks."
I was so stunned I forgot to ask how he'd picked the dressing-room lock. Leon took me out for soup, and after five minutes I was halfway sold. Maybe there was something in my oyster crackers. I followed him from the greasy spoon back to the Orpheum and caught his act. Talk about a hodgepodge! Leon mixed up burlesque comedy, funny ditties, tumbling, black-faced monologues, and, when the spirit moved him, the odd birdcall.
We opened a bottle in his dressing room and by the time we closed it I had agreed to go on tour with him, for barely more than a third of what I was making now. Still. . . . The way I looked at it, the money I wasn't making was paying for my education. Seeing as how I'd dropped out in second grade, it was about time I went back to class.
Funny School
Starting right there in Portland I got lessons in funny dialects, in tumbling (the trick was hitting the ground without cracking your tailbone), in picking the right makeup, keeping the sweat out of your eyes, and making your stage-clothes into cutaways. All the tricks of a world-class burlesque yuck huckster. My graduation was held in Idaho, at the Last Chance Saloon.
The Last Chance featured a diva named Lilly-Bell, a big blond maneater who cake-walked across the stage like she had hot coals in her drawers—which, if her reputation was accurate, more than a few members of the audience had shoveled. The crowd was nothing but tough-as-nails miners. We even got paid in gold dust, in little sacks that tied up tight at the top. But on our second day, the Sweetheart of Boise failed to show, and Errol got as nervous as I'd ever seen him. Lilly-Bell was nowhere to be found.
Out front the natives were stomping their feet, causing a thunderous racket. Errol and I both peeked through the curtain to see what we were up against, and backed off without a word. There was no question one of these woman-hungry gold dusters was going to grab the six-shooter he checked at the door and put holes in our clothes.
Then I had an idea. Without telling Errol, I slipped into Lilly's dressing room, fished around, and managed to slip out again in a tight ruby dress and a blond wig big as a birthday cake. Call me a cat burglar. Errol saw this burly female stroll onstage and gulped. "May I help you, madam?" He had no idea it was Yours Truly. Neither did the wide-eyed miners, who began to clap and stomp all over again when I broke into my first song.
We did four shows that night with me as the opening blonde. But the next night, when I sashayed out in gown and cake wig, the real Lilly swept in and came after me with a steak knife. My wig flew off as I ran through the joint, jumping tables, careening up the aisles, scrambling back onstage, and knocking Errol over when I tumbled into the curtains. The miners thought the chase was staged, and rolled on the floor. Errol was so impressed he said we should keep it in the show till the run was over. Lilly-Bell would have none of it, however, as she felt it impugned her womanly dignity.
Errol's company zigzagged north and south, from the West Coast halfway to the East and back. One long afternoon on a train I took out a map and pencil and connected all the dots we'd visited. The result looked like a run-over porcupine. And after a couple of months of hard traveling, Errol announced he was dissolving the act. He had a chance to join with Ziegfeld in New York City, and he wanted to take it. That's showbiz. I wished him well—by then I was calling him "Professor"—and knocked around till I snagged a spot with the Ellwood Tabloid Musical Company as—never say never, you big ninny—illustrated singer.
I convinced myself it was temporary, and, besides, it was that or find a brothel that needed a towel boy. The entire run was in San Francisco—you'd have never known that whole chunks of the city had burned and crumbled in a quake—and when it was over Ellwood offered to bring me down to Southern California. We were to play the Bide-A-Wee Theater in Long Beach, with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle getting star billing.
The Professional
So here I am, free, fat, and 21. Rolling into Long Beach with a hotel bed and a slot as headliner in my future. At that moment about the only thing I was less interested in than romance was a job in movies.
Working in "flickers," as they were still being called, was out of the question. Everyone knew that the only people who'd lower themselves to step in front of a camera were stage actors who couldn't get work—or couldn't stay sober enough to keep it if they got it.
As for the romance part, love and marriage were for other people. Why would anybody who had survived my family want to even
think
about starting another one? How many prisoners of war reenlist?
Well, tickle my knickers! No sooner did I step onto the streetcar from Los Angeles than I spied the tiniest, sweetiest-petitiest creature I'd ever laid eyes on. I soon learned that what she lacked in stature she more than made up for in attitude. When I asked if I might help her stash her suitcase on the overhead rack, the tiny lovely acted positively indignant. "No,
thank
you!" Even as she shunned me, I could not help but notice those beautiful brown eyes. They were dark as chocolate-covered onyx. Though the way she glared they might as well have been matching stop signs.
"My mother warned me never to talk to strange men," she went on, standing on tiptoes to hoist her bag on to the rack.
"How do you know I'm strange?" I heard myself say, helping stash her baggage in spite of her protest. I was more surprised by my retort than she was. I've always been painfully shy around the fair sex. Up to now I'd pretty much just let them feed me. But this girl looked more likely to hit me with a brick than slip me a ham sandwich.
"Well, for one thing," she replied, her face tilted up to mine like a gorgeous pixie's, "your derby's too small for your head." Without thinking, I whipped off the offending hat, then stood there looking at it with no idea what to say next. I was tongue-tied, and felt myself flushing up, until I raised my eyes and saw that she was aiming a sly half-smile at me. Then we both burst out laughing.