Authors: Rona Jaffe
Silky didn’t like to see the girls getting hard this way. They had all had such fun when they were kids together on South Street, but being alone in New York had changed them. Sometimes at night, alone in her corner of the crowded apartment, she cried, pulling her coat over her head so none of the others would hear her. Maybe they should just all go home and get married. But even when she was crying she couldn’t believe that was what would make them happy. No, they had to make it, they just had to. Otherwise she’d end up like her mother and die young, she was sure of it.
She became obsessed with death. A rat could come and bite her in the night and she would die. She could get TB. Maybe TB ran in families. Maybe she would get malnutrition and her teeth would fall out. She bought vitamins at the drugstore and ate everything that looked healthy at the restaurant where she worked. She began to fill out, and even though she had never felt more miserable she had never looked prettier. She was really getting curvy. She looked at her body in the cracked mirror on the bathroom door and thought how really good she would look in a slinky evening gown when she got to be a big singing star and could perform at the Apollo.
Then they cut another record, but this time it got a little attention and they made some money. The next song they cut was “You Left Me.” Silky thought of her father when she sang it, and the way she loved him and felt about him leaving her made her voice come out in a new way she had never dreamed possible. Listening to the record she thought:
My God! That girl has really lived and suffered! Who would dream it was only me?
The song became a hit. They even played it in the restaurant where she worked, and while she was slinging dishes she hummed along with it, but nobody ever knew it was her. Then she quit her job.
They cut “Take Me Back,” and it was a hit, too. Everybody who was anybody in the business had heard of Sam Leo Libra, who made people into stars, so Silky and the Satins took their two records to the Libra office listed in the phone book and found only a secretary there. The secretary mailed the records to Sam Leo Libra in California.
Then one day, in late winter, almost a year from the time the girls had hitched to New York, they were in a big hotel suite talking to this terrifying, marvelous man himself, and he had one of their two records spinning on his stereo set, and he was looking at them with distaste as if they were bugs.
“That make-up has to go,” he said. “Mr. Nelson will tell you how to make up. Your hair is ridiculous. He’ll fit you with some wigs. I’ll lay out the money and you can pay me back. I’m going to handle all your money; you obviously don’t look competent. You’ll get enough to live on. I want you out of Harlem and into a downtown hotel. You can all stay in the same room; I’m sure you’re used to it. If anybody asks you, you’ll say you each have your own room. You are never, do you hear me,
never
to invite men up to your room. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mr. Libra,” they chorused.
“None of you finished high school, I suppose?”
“No, sir,” Honey said.
“I trust you can read and write?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” None of them looked at Honey.
“Well, then, look at this contract, sign all of the copies, and return them to me. This contract says I’ll be your manager and publicist for a period of one year. If you’re good and it works out, we can renew it. If you’re bad and it doesn’t work out, you’re all out on your asses.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to present you as sweet, clean-cut, wholesome American girls. That means no night clubs, no drinking in public, no pot, no dope, and no swearing. Do you know what swearing is?”
The girls nodded.
“It is fuck, damn, shit, and screw,” Mr. Libra enumerated. “It is also cunt, cock, balls and hell and anything else your evil little minds can think up. You are never to refer to white people as honkys. Every time you curse or swear I will dock ten dollars from your allowances. I want you to get used to even
thinking
clean. You are never to say anything controversial, and if anyone asks you about civil rights you say you are all for it of course and then shut up. You are never to discuss Black Power. I doubt if you can carry on an intelligent conversation about the subject anyway.”
Silky looked at Honey and Tamara nervously. They were the two with tempers, and she was afraid Honey might blow it and tell this man to go shove it up his ass and rotate. She fixed them with a desperate stare. They were seething, but they kept still. She hated him as much as the other girls did, but she knew he was the only man who could make them become famous. They would have to listen to him. Maybe he knew more about how ladies acted than they did. After all, they had almost raised themselves. It would be nice to be a lady.
Mr. Libra thrust a pile of contracts at them. “Take them home and read them and sign them. And wash that filthy hair. Tomorrow I want you here at nine sharp for styling, make-up, and gown fittings. I’m going to put you on television.”
“Television!” The girls looked at each other wonderstruck.
“Shee-it!” Honey said in delight.
“That’s ten dollars,” said Mr. Libra.
“Oh, f … fudge!” Honey stammered. Ten dollars was a lot of bread.
“Very good,” said Mr. Libra. He handed them some money. “Here’s fifty dollars for carfare and shampoo for all of you. Be back tomorrow. Good-bye.”
They left the suite, counting their money, and took a taxi, the first taxi they had been in since they got to New York.
“That Whitey sure is one ugly-lookin’ motherfucker, ain’t he?” Honey said in the cab.
“He sure is,” Tamara agreed. “When he was born I bet they threw out the baby and saved the afterbirth.”
The girls laughed. “That motherfucker talked to us like we was his
maids
,” Beryl said.
“Carfare!” Honey stormed. “Up his syphilitic ass!”
“Cocksucker!” said Cheryl.
Silky decided the present was none too soon to start thinking clean, so she said nothing.
The next morning they showed up promptly at Mr. Libra’s hotel suite, and for five hours they were terrorized by a nitty faggot hairdresser named Mr. Nelson, who was wearing a really sharp white leather suit. He fitted all the girls with Buster Brown wigs and a couple of extra hairpieces to change off. Then the dress designer arrived—Franco, who was very young but completely bald—and he and Mr. Libra consulted on what the girls were to wear. No one asked them for their opinion on anything, so the five of them kept a sullen silence. They had been through a lot in life, but they had never met anyone like Mr. Libra or Mr. Nelson or that Franco, so the truth was they were rather awed.
“I’m going to dress them all alike,” Franco said.
“But no sequins,” said Mr. Libra. “I’m sick and tired of sequins—you see them on every singing group in the business. The Supremes
invented
sequins. I don’t know how anyone else gets a chance; there isn’t a sequin left on Seventh Avenue after those three get through. I want Silky and the Satins to be unique. And no fishtail mermaid dresses, either. I want them to look young.”
Franco suggested baby dresses, but Mr. Libra said his wife and all her friends wore baby dresses and they were a hundred years old. Young, he kept saying, young, young. Silky privately thought that she would like nothing better than to look like Diana Ross of the Supremes, who was her idol, except Diana Ross
was
awfully old—twenty-four or something. Finally Mr. Libra and Franco decided to dress them all in knicker suits like little boys.
“We’re going to look like a bunch of dikes!” Tamara protested.
“I know you’d rather look like whores,” Libra said, “but I’m managing you now, and you’ll do what I say.”
“Couldn’t we wear tuxedos?” asked Honey.
“Oh?” said Libra. “So you want to look like
elderly
dikes?” That shut them all up for good, and Franco said he would make them knicker suits in black velveteen, burgundy velveteen, and white brocade to start off, with maybe one in a nice plaid wool for the daytime teen-age show Libra had booked them on.
It was the first the girls had heard of their booking. “What teenage show?” they chorused. “What show? What show?”
“The Let It All Hang Out Show,” Libra said triumphantly. “You’ll be on next month.”
The girls squealed with delight. The Let It All Hang Out Show was the top afternoon teen-age song and dance show on television, and everyone they knew at home who had a TV set always watched it.
The next morning Mr. Libra installed the girls in the Chelsea Hotel, and after that there was a round of more fittings, more experiments with make-up with Mr. Nelson until all the girls could do their own make-up properly, both for street wear and public appearances, and then there were their dance lessons, which they all loathed. Mr. Libra even put them all on a diet to clear up their skins and keep them trim. He constantly corrected their grammar, and gradually they were all becoming conscious that there was a world they knew nothing about.
Silky got a card to the Public Library, and faithfully read her book a week, carrying it with her all the time because there was so little free time to read now. The other girls kidded her about it, and said she was carrying a book so she could meet an intellectual fellow and that she never actually read it.
Their first album was making it big, and the new single, “Lemme Live Now,” was in the top ten. The money was pouring in, but they never saw any of it, except their allowances and living expenses. It didn’t matter, though, because they had more money now than they had ever seen before. They haunted the five-and-ten, as purchasers now, and were thrilled to flaunt a ten-dollar bill to pay for a lipstick.
Meanwhile, Mr. Libra booked them on every free benefit in town. All those shows needed free talent to fill up the bill, and were glad Silky and the Satins were so available. Mr. Libra said the exposure was invaluable, because eventually they would be invited on the Tonight Show. Silky was amazed that there were so many free benefits. You could work your whole life away and never make a cent. But it was thrilling to see all those other
real
stars in person, and the dresses and jewels on the rich ladies in the audience fascinated her. She made it a point to study them carefully so that when she got to handle her own money she would know how to dress.
Their room in the Chelsea was a shambles, with clothes and empty boxes, bags, and tissue paper flung everywhere. The twins’ cousin, Lester, arrived from Philadelphia with his girl friend and moved in with them, sleeping on the floor, because with the five beds the sofa had been removed. The girls decided that family was not considered men, and Mr. Libra could not possibly object, but anyway they did not tell him. Then the twins’ sister, Ardra, arrived, and after her, Silky’s brother, Cornelius. The girls sent down for more pillows and blankets, and all their guests settled comfortably on the floor. Rich Marvin wanted Tamara to live with him in the Village, but she thought the Chelsea was more fun. The boys bought beer and Bourbon with money the girls gave them, and there were parties every night. Sometimes they would buy big bags of fish and chips and break their diets, drink and stuff themselves, and dance and sing to the stereo the girls had chipped in to buy. They bought about a hundred and fifty records, and then they bought a color television set, and nobody ever got much sleep except Silky, who was terrified that she would lose her voice if she didn’t take care of herself, and who had long ago learned how to fall asleep through any kind of racket.
The Chelsea was really a groovy place, full of nuts like themselves, and they made a few new friends. One of them was a good-looking black boy named Hatcher Wilson, who was a singer, too, and played the electric guitar. He was twenty-four, and he liked Silky. She liked him, too, but she remembered her vow, and she told him she wanted him for a friend, not a boyfriend. He hung around anyway, mainly because she didn’t pay much attention to him and he wasn’t used to that. Hatcher was a real ladies’ man, and terribly vain about his looks and his clothes. The other girls thought Silky was crazy not to get some use out of a fine-looking stud like him, and they flirted with him and made him feel right at home.
“If you don’t grab that Hatcher Wilson,” Tamara kept threatening, “I’m goin’ to grab him and
marry
him.” Tamara was going to marry everybody; if it wasn’t rich Marvin to get his money, it was her own cousin Lester to raise halfwits.
“I ain’t goin’ to marry
anybody
,” Honey said. “Not me. I been married a hundred times.”
They all wondered about Mrs. Libra, how she ever could have married an ugly freak like Mr. Libra. “What do they ever do in bed?” Honey would ask, and they would all howl with laughter trying to imagine that ape in bed with his wife.
“She jus’ throws him a banana and says: Come git it, King Kong!” Beryl screeched, rolling on the bed with laughter.
They all agreed Lizzie Libra was a good-looking woman. “I bet she’s got somebody else,” Cheryl said wisely.
“You think so?”
“Yeah,” Cheryl said. “Wouldn’t you, married to
that?
”
“She looks kind of dried up,” Honey said.
“Don’t you kid yourself,” Cheryl said. “Did you ever look at her eyes? That woman got
real
man-hungry eyes.”
They all decided to take a good look at Mrs. Libra’s eyes the next time they saw her.
It was a good time, that month before their first television show. It was a real good time. Later Silky was to look back on it and remember it as the last good time of her life.
The girls rehearsed the Let It All Hang Out Show for two days. Silky was so nervous she couldn’t eat a thing the entire time, except for many cups of tea laced with honey for her throat. She kept feeling her throat close up, as if she would never be able to get a note out of it, and although she was not a religious person she prayed almost constantly that everything would be all right. The only thing that kept her going was the young director, Dick Devere. He was a tall, skinny, distinguished-looking man, with a calm, professional attitude that set her at ease whenever he spoke to her. It was only when she was not actually the focus of his attention that the panic began again. This show wasn’t just one of those free benefits; it was the big time.