Underfoot In Show Business (5 page)

SINCE KIDS TRYING TO CRASH the theatre require expensive instruction (which includes seeing the best plays and films) as well as expensive clothes in which to be Seen on occasion, and since they never have any money, they have to master the delicate, illegal art of getting everything for nothing. In the cultivation of this art, my friend Maxine had no equal.

Maxine and I saw every Broadway show and neighborhood movie free. I went to producers’ lunches attired in Saks’s best, Maxine took vocal lessons and I was tutored privately in Latin and Greek, and none of it cost us a dime. All I can remember us paying for were the ballet lessons we took from the Greek gentleman. Thanks to Maxine’s negotiations, we paid him a dollar a week in a class where everybody else was paying two dollars.

What specially equipped Maxine for this art, besides an unflagging imagination and the nerve of Napoleon, was her unique ignorance of finance. I couldn’t add or subtract too well, but Maxine’s innocence in money matters was so total it amounted to a whole new theory of economics. I’ll give you an example:

The autumn when I finally got back to New York after a six-month exile in Philadelphia I had difficulty finding a job. My capital finally dwindling to $15, I told Maxine I couldn’t meet the $10 weekly rent on my hotel room the next week unless I cut down to one meal a day. We were riding on the upper deck of a double-decker Fifth Avenue bus at the time, on our way up to Maxine’s house for dinner, and Maxine stared thoughtfully out the window and down at the street as she worked on the problem.

“All right,” she said finally. “The ten dollars a week for rent you can manage by putting a little away every day. Put fifty cents away every day; that way you won’t miss it. And I can get the money for food for you. As long as I’m working part-time, you can collect my unemployment insurance; it’s just sitting there!”

Given a mind like that, it’s easy to evolve your own economic theory. Maxine’s was simply stated:

“Nothing should cost anything.”

It went into operation that fall, when I finally got a job as assistant to a press agent. Salary: $25 a week. Ten dollars paid for the hotel room, three dollars went toward paying off a large dental bill, and the remaining twelve dollars were flung away carelessly on food, cigarettes, toothpaste, typing paper, typewriter ribbons, nylons, shoe repairs, carfare, semi-annual haircuts and taxes. So by the time Friday—payday—came around, I was wiped out.

Since Maxine was living at home, her room, board and essential clothes were supplied. She was also working part-time taking street-comer surveys at one dollar per surveying hour. Surveys of corporation vice-presidents paid two dollars, but you didn’t get this work often, and when you did, half the vice-presidents coldly refused to be surveyed; and since you got paid per vice-president instead of per hour, even that didn’t pay too well. Her average weekly gross for four or five afternoons was twelve to fifteen dollars, which was distributed among hairdressers, theatrical makeup, street makeup, professional photos, Equity dues, audition accessories, nylons, cigarettes, carfare, agents’ commissions, taxes and a monthly lunch at Sardi’s. (If-you’re-an-actress-you-have-to-be-Seen.) So as a rule, she had even less cash than I did.

I was therefore mildly startled when, shortly after I got the job, Maxine phoned me at the office on a Wednesday morning and inquired casually:

“Do you feel like seeing the new Odets tonight?”

I said I had $1.85 to last me till Friday if that answered her question.

“I don’t mean buy tickets!” said Maxine impatiently. “Where would I get the money to buy tickets? I mean Just Go.”

I had no idea what Just Go meant but I said I’d love to.

“Meet me at the drugstore on the corner of Forty-fifth Street at quarter to nine,” she said. “Don’t wear a coat.”

It was a chilly November evening and the curtain time for Clifford Odets’s play was eight-thirty, but I did as I was told. Maxine met me at the door of the drugstore and said briskly:

“We’re all set. I phoned the box office and they’re not sold out; they have a few seats downstairs.”

We climbed on stools and ordered coffee and Maxine explained the Just Go method of seeing every show in town. We made our coffee last twenty minutes, during which we took turns running to the front door, at two-minute intervals, to glance up the street at the theatre where the Odets was playing. At nine-ten, it was my turn to be lookout and I saw the theatre doors open and the crowd begin to stream out onto the sidewalk for intermission.

We left the drugstore and hurried up the street to the theatre, to light cigarettes and mingle with the crowd of smokers on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, we drifted into the lobby and mingled with the smokers there. And when the bell rang, we mingled into the theatre along with the paying customers who went down the aisle to their seats. We stood at the back while Maxine, under pretext of wanting a last puff on her cigarette, cased the house for empty seats. These were easy to spot because they had no coats or programs on them. Maxine saw a pair down front on the side and said: “Come on.”

She sailed down the aisle, her burnished head arrogantly high above her best black cocktail dress, her mother’s marten scarf dangling negligently over one shoulder, and me pattering nervously behind her. She said, “Excuse me” graciously to a man sitting in the aisle seat and we climbed past him and sat down in the two empty seats. Maxine shook out her fur, draped it over the back of her chair and turned to survey the house.

“There are two better seats back there in the center,” she said, and stood up. “Come on.”

“You go if you want to,” I said. I was pale with terror.

“Is this really your first time?” she asked sympathetically. I nodded and she sat back down.

“All right,” she said. “We forgot to get programs. After the second act, remind me.”

The house lights dimmed and I sat frozen in the certainty that at any second an usher’s hand would drop to my shoulder and a waiting cop would haul Maxine and me off to night court. But no usher materialized: we saw the second act of the Odets, which was excellent; and after the second intermission we picked up a pair of programs and moved to the better seats on the center aisle.

From then on, we went to theatre several nights a week. We never saw a first act, but in a three-act play nothing ever happened in the first act. Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Occasionally the house proved to be more crowded than the box office had indicated when we phoned; and as the houselights dimmed, we’d find ourselves still standing at the back or, worse still, wandering up and down the aisle looking for empty seats—at which moment an usher was likely to loom up and helpfully ask to see our stubs.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost them,” Maxine would explain in her best stage diction. “We must have dropped them in the lobby during intermission.” And we’d flee out to the lobby and across the street, and wait around to mingle with the intermission crowd at the musical there. (Musicals were in two acts instead of three and had a single later intermission.)

Since the biggest hits somehow always opened in the winter months, we caught a lot of colds. You can’t mingle into a theatre with an intermission crowd in your winter coat. The ushers would spot you at once as a gate-crasher, since no matter what the weather theatregoers always leave their coats behind on their seats when they go out for a smoke. So on cold nights, Maxine caught sore throats walking to her subway and I got coughs standing on windy corners waiting for my bus. But if you go to theatre regularly, it ought to cost you
something
. Especially if the show was a rare and wonderful one like
Lady in the Dark.

Lady in the Dark
was the only musical ever to win the hearts of us two serious students of the drama. It had Gertie Lawrence, who had been our idol in half a dozen Broadway comedies, and it had an astonishing new comedian named Danny Kaye. We must have mingled into it half a dozen times and I remember the night when we made a momentous decision and spent our own money to see the first act. And still, when the show finally closed, our appetite for it was unappeased.

Soon after it closed, it went on the road and opened in Philadelphia. Philadelphia being my home town, I considered it squarely up to me to get us there. My father knew the box-office men, so getting in to see the show free would be no problem. The problem was the fare to Philly. Neither of us had it.

On the Monday
Lady in the Dark
was to open in Philly, I brooded over the problem during breakfast at the cafeteria. Then I opened
The Times
and turned to the theatre section. In the middle of one page, an ad announced that tomorrow evening, the Philadelphia Orchestra would give its regular Tuesday concert at Carnegie Hall. Right there, the problem was solved.

On my way from the cafeteria to the office, I worked out a story to give my boss about having to go to Philadelphia Wednesday for a funeral. Then I phoned Maxine.

“Meet me at Carnegie Hall at eight-thirty tomorrow night,” I said. “Bring a nightgown. Tell your folks you’ll be back Wednesday night late.”

I had in my adolescence been one of several thousand bobbysox worshippers of Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. With all my friends I had got happily in the orchestra’s hair, I knew all the first-desk men personally and was especially palsy with Marshall Betz, the orchestra librarian.

Therefore when Maxine met me at Carnegie Hall, we went around to the stage door and said hello to Marshall, who passed us in to hear the concert. During intermission we went backstage to say hello to my many friends in the orchestra and put through a call to my father on the Carnegie Hall office phone asking him to meet us at Broad Street Station at approximately one in the morning. We heard the rest of the concert and then rode to Philadelphia on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s private train.

I had one bad moment on the train when Maxine, looking extremely high-fashion in a dark green wool suit and her mother’s fur jacket, turned to me and said simply:

“Stick close to me, will you? I only have a nickel.”

My father drove us home and we slept in the twin beds in my old bedroom.
Lady in the Dark
was sold out, of course. But we got passed in to hang over the back rail at the matinee performance, dined with my parents, hung over the back rail again for the evening performance and touched my father for the fare back to New York. He also drove us to the station so that when we reached New York, Maxine still had her nickel. It took her home on the subway.

We had an easier time seeing neighborhood movies free. We only had to miss the credits, and the M-G-M lion or J. Arthur Rank’s naked friend banging his gong. Maxine and I were selective moviegoers: we only saw half a dozen films a year, but we saw each of them five or six times. We’d get a crush on James Mason, say, or Humphrey Bogart, and follow his current film from the upper West Side to lower Third Avenue. We saw
The Maltese Falcon
seven times and
I Know Where I’m Going six.
With
The Seventh Veil
, I lost count. This kind of moviegoing was ideally suited to Maxine’s system, which ruled out patronizing any one movie theatre often enough for the box-office girl to get to know our faces.

What we did was, we phoned the box office and asked when the last feature started. If the box office said eleven o’clock, we’d get to the movie house at eleven-ten, and lurk outside a few minutes till the box-office girl closed up and went home. Then we just walked in and sat down. Any usher not in the men’s room changing into his street clothes was asleep in the back row.

Only once did we have to wait outside an extra ten minutes till the manager came out and went home. This was at a movie theatre where, on a previous nerve-racking evening, we had unexpectedly bumped into him coming out as we were going in.

You may have noticed I was careful to specify neighborhood movie houses. Only once did we attempt a first-run Broadway house. The Broadway movie palaces were great, plush Hollywood temples crawling with doormen and uniformed ticket takers and different grades of ushers, and you couldn’t possibly sneak in free, even at midnight. It was this impasse that led Maxine and me to commit our only prison offense.

I was working late that evening at the press office, folding, inserting, sealing and stamping five hundred press releases which had to be mailed that night to newspapers all over the country on behalf of a second-rate tenor who was going on a cross-country tour. I was dining on a sandwich and a container of coffee and folding the last hundred letters when Maxine wandered in. She’d had a late rehearsal at a theatre across the street and had seen the light in the press office window.

“The new Bogart opened today at the Capitol,” she remarked.

The Capitol being a very overstaffed palace, I told her plainly I only had ninety cents. She only had ten. As tickets were $1.25 per person, I considered the subject closed. I went on folding and Maxine sat down and inserted the letters for me and we sealed and stamped them. As I put away the leftover releases and envelopes and the leftover sheets of stamps, Maxine rose.

“I think I’ll phone the Capitol,” she said.

She found the number and dialed it. I took a last mouthful of coffee and then nearly choked to death on it as I heard Maxine’s most gracious stage voice inquire of the Capitol box office: