Vivian In Red (19 page)

It’s painstaking, and could very well settle me down. Instead of picking up where I left off, though, I instead flip to the glossy photograph pages, at intervals in the book.

There aren’t many pictures from the thirties, but I study what ones there are, thinking back to my grandfather in the earliest days of his career, when he was not much older than I am now.

I’ve learned so far that he lucked into a job writing songs for a revue called
Let’s Live on Hilarity
, when other songwriters failed to deliver. I’ve learned that it was mostly Bernard Allen’s contacts that got them the gig, contacts he made through his job managing and composing at TB Harms. What remains a mystery is why my grandfather quit writing lyrics. I’ve got the songs from
Hilarity
, though not a script, and no recordings. Not even any still photos of that show survived. His songs are funny, sharp, the rhymes amusing and inventive. The lyrics don’t age well, with all their references to Herbert Hoover and automats and such. But there’s a liveliness that I recognize in my grandfather even today; well, until he collapsed.

Speaking of liveliness, as I turn past photos of the exteriors of buildings where my grandfather worked, and the Orchard Street tenement where his father first emigrated and where he’d have spent his youngest years, I smile at a picture of Grampa Milo and Bernard Allen in their prime. Allen’s got one arm slung around my grandfather, and they’re both holding drinks with their free hands. Allen’s got that unfocused, woozy look of the tipsy, though I might be projecting, based on his reputation. The caption says it’s a gathering at the Stork Club of people working on
Let’s Live On Hilarity.

I trace Grampa Milo’s face with my finger, as if in a caress. Another picture from the same night shows him alone at a table, gazing at some point across the room, relaxed and pensive. I turn the page, then something makes me turn back and look at the photo again.

A woman with wavy dark hair is in the background of the photo, one arm across her chest, supporting the opposite elbow. In that hand she’s got a cigarette balanced in her fingertips with the nonchalance of an era long before the Surgeon General’s warning. A man in a suit leans in for conversation with the woman, but I can’t imagine she heard a thing he said. She isn’t even looking at him. Her expression is curiously intense. Her jaw seems clenched, her eyes slightly narrow. And she’s staring straight at my grandfather.

“G
eez, will you get a load of this place?” Milo took in the draping on the walls, and the vertical mirrored panels, but mostly, he was looking for famous people.

Allen jabbed him with an elbow. “Close your mouth, what’s wrong with you?”

Vivian squeezed Milo’s arm. “It’s out of this world. Oh! I think that’s Ethel Merman!”

Milo could barely keep his feet under him he was so tired, but back at the New Amsterdam, Allen had insisted that he show his face, since their producer, Max Gordon, wanted to treat them to drinks. Allen had hissed into his ear as Milo slumped over a music stand near the rehearsal piano, “Half of staying afloat in this business is staying in front of people’s faces, people that matter. So they think of you later when they have work to give. Now look alive, Milo”—at this he raised his voice and slapped him on his cheek just lightly enough to be considered playful—“because we’re painting the town.”

Vivian had heard this last part and asked to come, too, and what could Milo say? Allen’s face had pruned up when he saw Milo walking up to him with Vivian on his arm.

In the club, having deposited their coats and hats with the check girl, Vivian excused herself to find the powder room and fix her hair, because the breeze from the walk over had disturbed her curls. Allen whirled on Milo. “Why is that dame here? They almost didn’t let us in out there because Max had only put in a good word for us two. They don’t let nobodies into the Stork Club unless a somebody wants them here.”

“Because she wanted to go and I’ve got nothing against a pretty girl on my arm, and apparently the man with the golden rope out there didn’t mind the pretty girl, neither.”

“She’s got no business being around this show at all. She’s distracting.”

“Oh, go on. And why are you talking to me about distracting? I gave you the words just yesterday for the torch song and I’m still waiting for the melody for that dance number they added. I can’t write the words if I don’t even know how many beats to a phrase. Can you give me that much, eh? How many? Seven and a rest? Gimme a hint, I’m begging you.”

Allen snorted. “I just don’t understand why she’s got to be underfoot all the time. Even that chorus girl who took a shine to you doesn’t follow you around half so much. I should be so lucky.”

“You’re a happily married man, now straighten your tie, you look like you got dressed in the dark.”

Allen turned to one of the many mirrors and yanked the knot into place. “I did. I was in a rush.”

Vivian was approaching them now, sashaying along in her silky dress that seemed expensive for an errand girl hanging around their rehearsals. Milo had gone to the director and asked if they needed help somewhere on the show for his friend. The man had taken one look at Vivian from afar and told Milo he didn’t have the budget “to be giving jobs to everyone’s piece of tail.” Milo had let fly with his indignation and said he hadn’t so much as kissed her hand, but that he’d been “sorta responsible” for her losing her last job. The director raised one eyebrow on his tired, unshaven face and declared that if she could make herself useful he could probably pay her a little, “but if she intends to be ‘discovered’ as a singer or a dancer, or goes around batting her eyes at the talent…” He made a slicing motion across his throat. “Don’t think I haven’t seen girls try to get on stage all kinds of ways. She’s not hanging around you for your good looks, pal.”

Max Gordon waved them over from his table, so Milo, Allen, and Vivian began to wend their way through the crowd as the band played a foxtrot, and the glittering crowd swelled to and fro like waves.

Max beckoned them to sit down, and launched the evening with a toast to “the newest Rodgers and Hart!” If he was put out at having to rustle up an extra chair for Vivian, he did a fine job of acting like he wasn’t.

At one point, Allen grabbed Milo around the shoulders and pointed him at a camera, which flashed painfully in his eyes. “If we were somebody that’d be in Winchell’s column tomorrow, and everybody’d be talking about us.”

“Was that him taking the picture?”

“What are you, a moron? He sits at his table and watches all the beautiful people and writes it up the next day, and everybody in the city hangs on his every word, for good or ill. Ill, often enough. Nah, what we saw just now was the Stork Club’s own photographer. Billingsley will have all the pictures of the famous people in all the papers tomorrow. J. Edgar Hoover’s here somewhere, I bet.”

Gordon shouted, “Hey, Short! Dance with your girl here, or I might have to.”

Milo swallowed a golf ball in his throat. “I’m not much of a dancer—”

Gordon shrugged as if to say,
then I guess it’s up to me,
and rose. Milo remembered the director’s warning about Vivian tangling with the fancy people and figured the producer of the whole show would count in that forbidden group.

He stood up so fast he bonked the table and spilled his martini. A passing waiter swooped in with a cloth, and Milo bobbed in the tide of his embarrassment.

Vivian rose and accepted the hand that Milo had started to offer before the spill. “I’d love to dance.”

She all but dragged him onto the dance floor, where the tune was a slow, lulling rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Milo relaxed by a degree; he could get by with shuffling in a rough square shape rather than actually dance. He held Vivian at a respectful distance for a moment, but she stepped so close she could bite him on the nose.

“It’s too crowded to take up so much space,” she said to him, her eyes level with his. “That would be quite rude, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” he replied, and then looked over Vivian’s shoulder because to look straight in her greenish-gold eyes was like to give him a stroke. He’d never seen a gal stare so hard before.

“Why don’t you like me?” Vivian asked him, raising her voice to be heard over the band.

“I like you fine, Vivian. You’re a swell girl.” Her curls were almost tickling his face. In her shoes they were the same height.

“You don’t take me out anywhere.”

‘I don’t take anyone out anywhere. I’m too busy writing and rewriting an entire show in just a few weeks. Allen tells me a chorus girl liked me and I didn’t even notice.”

“Oh well, chorus girls,” she said. “You should take a night off and take me to a show. Or even a picture, if you want to save your pennies. A picture and a soda, how about it?”

Vivian tried to pull away to get a better look at Milo’s face, but he continued to hold her close so he could look past her shoulder. It was easier, that way, to say it. “I don’t think your family would like it if you were seeing a Jew.”

“My family is a thousand miles away and if I cared what they thought I wouldn’t be in this goddamn city.”

“But my family’s just a short ride on the El.”

Vivian froze in place, and pushed back away from him. “You won’t take me out because your family wouldn’t like it?”

“No one would like it. We should either dance or move, we’re blocking up the floor here.”

Vivian whirled on her heel so fast she stumbled, and began to carve a path on a diagonal to the other side of the floor. Milo tried to keep up with her without knocking people down, keeping up a stream of “Excuse me” and “pardon” as he tried to keep Vivian’s glossy brown hair in view.

At the other side of the dance floor, she jabbed a finger at his chest. “Irving Berlin’s wife isn’t Jewish and no one cares.”

“I’m sure plenty of people do care, but he’s Irving Berlin so they don’t talk about it, not to his face, anyhow. Don’t you read the papers? You heard that Father Coughlin on the wireless ever? You shoulda seen what someone scrawled on our awning at the shop the other day; I won’t repeat it to a lady. I don’t know what you see in me anyway. I’m a funny-looking Jew with almost no money of my own, in a career that’s not exactly respectable and at which I will most likely fail. I’m working all the time, too, so I’m no fun, either, as you yourself pointed out. You’re a beautiful girl and a hundred guys would fall at your feet if you so much as blinked in their direction.”

“But not you.”

“Maybe someday I’ll get married and have a family but it’ll be a Jewish girl that probably my mother picks out, and only after I have enough money that I could afford a wife, and that’s nowhere near right now.”

“That sounds dreadful.”

“It’s normal. I’ve never expected anything else and why should I? Kid, I don’t mean to insult you. You’re a beautiful girl but I’m the wrong guy. I promise you that.”

“Some promise.”

Quick movement caught Milo’s eye. It was Allen striding toward them. “Milo! Get back here already! Gordon wants to talk about staging and might need more verses in the swing number. And he says Bell doesn’t like the melody in the duet.”

He looked over his shoulder but Vivian had dissolved into the crowd. Allen grabbed his arm. “I knew she’d be a distraction. This is a working dinner, pal.”

Allen staggered as he swerved around a pert cigarette girl in her red and blue outfit, swiveling his head as he passed to ogle her gams.

“No thanks,” Milo said to the girl’s tray of smokes. “I should make sure Vivian’s all right.”

“She’s fine. What, is she going to get mugged in here?” Allen stopped short, wobbling as he did so, and seized Milo by his upper arms. Allen was shorter and smaller, and Milo had a crazy moment of wanting to laugh at how they must have looked just then. Allen said, “Forget her, look. You didn’t hear what I heard just now. Gordon’s worried. Shows are closing all up and down Broadway and people are losing their shirts. No one wants just a bunch of flash and girls with hardly no clothes on, and they can’t afford to put that kind of show on anyhow. It’s all up to us. It’s gotta be the songs.”

Milo nodded and shrugged his arms away from Allen, who led the way in a looping, twisty path back to their table. Allen sat down hard, nearly coming out the other side of the chair, and slugged back his drink.