Marjorie Morningstar

  Marjorie was appalled at having to ask her parents for fifteen dollars a week. But somehow she choked it out at dinner that night. The father and mother looked grave; then Mr. Morgenstern, with one of his infrequent wistful smiles, reached over and patted Marjorie’s hand. “My God, don’t look so guilty. It won’t kill us.”

  “Oh, I feel so useless, Pop, such an overgrown parasite—”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll earn it all back, I swear I will. I’ll bring back a bonus.”

  “Say, you’ll probably bring back seven hundred dollars, like Katharine Hepburn.”

  “If she lasts out the summer,” said Mrs. Morgenstern.

  So Marjorie went off to the Rip Van Winkle Theatre. Six weeks later, on an extremely muggy August afternoon, she appeared bag and baggage at the Morgenstern apartment, looking flushed, tired, and dirty. She vanished into her room with hardly a word of greeting to her mother. At the dinner table she showed up fresh and elegant, but full of mysterious wrath, and coughing violently from time to time. Her answers to questions about her work at the summer theatre and her reasons for coming home were short and uninformative. She kept up this lowering silence for a couple of days, and spent most of the time on her bed in a housecoat, reading and coughing. The cough gradually improved, but her mood didn’t seem to.

  It was Wally Wronken to whom she finally unburdened herself. He came in from South Wind to see his parents off to Europe. With an evening to spend alone in town, he forlornly called Marjorie’s parents to ask how she was, and found himself talking to her. She readily accepted his happy stammered invitation to dinner.

  “I’m still furious,” she said to him. “I can hardly bring myself to discuss it.” They were at a small expensive steak house in the theatre district. “I know what you probably think and what my parents certainly think—that I ran blubbering home because the work was too hard and I wasn’t getting all the star parts—”

  Wally said solemnly, “Marge, I know you better than that.”

  After a dangerous glance at him she went on, “Well, I don’t much care what anybody thinks. But believe me, I stayed on for weeks after I saw I ought to quit, simply because I didn’t want to have that said about me. I was going to stick the season out no matter what. But then Morris came up last Saturday and when—”

  “Morris? That’s a new name. Who’s Morris?”

  “Don’t you know about Morris? Well, he’s a very nice guy, a doctor—but never mind pulling such a long face, Wally, it’s nothing like that. And it’s about time you stopped all that phony languishing, anyway. You’re getting too old for Marchbanks.”

  “Curious, isn’t it? And you’re getting too young for Candida.”

  “Thank you. I’m beginning to need such compliments—Anyway—listen, Wally, I worked like a dog at the Rip Van Winkle. You can ask any of the kids who were there. I was up late, night after night, sewing costumes, carpentering—I turned out to be surprisingly handy with a hammer and saw. You never know what you can do till you try—”

  Wally wrinkled his long nose at her. “Hammer and saw? You?”

  “Dear, mostly what I did at Rip Van Winkle was build scenery. Oh, and nail up double-decker bunks, and repair the roof when it rained in on us, and such things—”

  “Marge, don’t they have men up there?”

  “Don’t talk to me about men, Wally. That is, actor-men. They’re an aberration of Nature. I swear to you, Wally, compared to the average actor, a peacock is a beast of burden. I think they exhaust themselves with all that running a comb through their hair. You’d think they’d gouge tracks in their scalps with those combs. And a girl is supposed to fall down curling with ecstasy if one of them so much as asks her what time it is. You see, there are four girls for every man at the Rip. Maybe it’s that way at all summer theatres. I don’t know—Anyway, where was I?—Well, I found myself working like a slave, that’s all, my hands all blisters, no sleep—and mind you, I like working on scenery and costumes, I like anything remotely connected with the theatre, but there’s such a thing as enough—”

  “There were other girls, weren’t there? How did you get so loaded with work?”

  “It wasn’t me alone. Me and a couple of others. That’s Cliff Rymer’s fiendishly clever system. Oh, I tell you he’s got it down pat. He’ll work the last drop of blood out of a girl, a girl with any real desire to act, that is. He hardly bothers the boys. Obviously he hates girls. He used to stand around and watch us hammering flats together in the broiling sun, a couple of girls in filthy old jeans and halters, pouring sweat, hair hanging, looking like witches—and he’d just stand there, with a look on his face like a kid pulling wings off a butterfly. He dangles a star part under your nose, see? A star part in one of the September shows. Like for me, Eliza in Pygmalion, my old standby, which they’re doing on Labor Day. Another girl was on the hook the same way for Anna in Anna Christie. Naturally, if you think there’s a chance, you want to please and impress Cliff Rymer. You’re about ready to die to impress him. So, you work, you smile, chin up, you take walk-ons, you kill yourself building sets, you smile sweetly selling tickets or working as an usher—and it gets mighty cold at night in an evening dress in that barn in Sleepy Hollow, let me tell you. I caught the most horrible cough. It kept me out of shows, but not out of carpentering, of course. You can hammer and saw between coughs. And Mr. Rymer is pleased and drops another word about Eliza and you’re happy—”

  The waiter set steaks before them. Marjorie said, “This is something they don’t serve at the Rip. Gad, the food! A herd of pigs would have gone on strike, but the apprentice actresses didn’t dare—we practically lived on peanuts and Hershey bars… Mm! These rolls! Aren’t they exquisite? Our breakfast rolls seemed to come out of a quarry—cold, hard, jagged. You’d tear your gums eating them. I’m not exaggerating, Wally. You’d bite at a roll and there’d be blood on it. Oh well. This is a good steak.”

  “Did you get to play any parts?”

  “A few bits, yes—” She put her napkin over her mouth and had a paroxysm of coughing. “Gad, I thought I was over this. I haven’t coughed all day. Morris had a real fit when he heard me coughing. He’s a doctor, you know. It was Saturday afternoon, and I was staying in bed trying to shake the thing off so I wouldn’t cough during the show. I was supposed to be an usher. Morris said if I left the bed to be an usher that night he’d never talk to me again. When he saw me come into the theatre in a bare-back evening dress he just turned purple. So we had this big battle afterward. He called me an imbecile, said I was just being victimized, and so forth. Well, my back was up, you know, so I called him a Philistine. But he was absolutely right. You see, I’d found out just a couple of days before that I couldn’t possibly play Eliza. The part had been promised way back in June to a girl named Sally Trent—you know, the blonde who did that wonderful drunk scene in the last Kaufman play—I didn’t have a prayer. I never had had a prayer. Oh, I hated, really really hated, Wally, to leave my dad’s money in Cliff Rymer’s little fat paws. No refunds, of course, if you quit. But I’ve figured that out. I’ll get a job, if it’s scrubbing floors, and pay Dad back.”

  Wally said, “Rymer has a fine thing there. He’ll never run out of slave labor, will he? No matter how many he disillusions, there’s always a new crop of girls every year dying to go on the stage.”

  “There sure is. Noel calls it a tropism of middle-class girls. He seems to be right. I think ninety per cent of the kids at the Rip were exactly that, creatures obeying a tropism. For all I know, I’m one too. By the way, I was Marjorie Morningstar at long last—”

  “Congratulations—”

  “Thanks. I have six playbills to prove it. Though I’m an usher on three of them.”

  “How is Noel?” Wally said, carefully pouring the coffee.

  “Oh, fine.”

  “In Mexico, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Heard from him?”

  “Sure.”

&nb
sp; “How long is he going to be there?”

  “Haven’t the vaguest idea. Until his royalties on Old Moon Face run out, I guess.”

  After a moment’s pause Wally said, “What’s all this about his going to Hollywood?”

  With a pang of astonishment, which she did her best to hide, she said, “Hollywood? That’s news to me.”

  “He wrote Greech that he’s got a Hollywood offer. He’s going there when he gets tired of Mexico.”

  “Well, how nice.”

  “Strange he didn’t write you about it.”

  “Strange? How so?”

  “Margie, have you and Noel broken up?”

  Marjorie sipped coffee. “There was nothing to break up, Wally. Noel Airman’s just a pleasant ghost. Now you see him, now you don’t. I had a marvelous time with him, and I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. But he’s melted into thin air now, so far as I’m concerned, and a good thing too, no doubt—” She broke off in surprise, seeing Wally pull a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket. “What happened to the Kools?”

  “I don’t know. Guess I’ve graduated.” His little furtive hunched gesture of lighting was gone; he struck a match and puffed. She had noticed too that he looked directly at her, instead of at the ceiling or the tablecloth. “Margie, why don’t you come back to South Wind for the rest of the summer?”

  “Me? South Wind?”

  “Greech would take you back in a minute. He talks about you a lot.”

  “I’ll never go back there, Wally.”

  His large brown eyes, looking straight at her, were clever, almost girlishly soft, behind the glasses. “Why?”

  “I never will.”

  “Well, of course, it would be too good to be true, having you to myself up there.”

  “Haven’t you graduated from me, as well as Kools? I’m sure you have. You just like to make these melancholy sounds.”

  Wally said, “Maybe you’re a symbol of some kind. I admit it’s gone on too long. I seem to be evolving from Marchbanks to Major Dobbin. The funny part of it is, Margie—and this is where the books are so wrong—Major Dobbin can turn around and be Heathcliff to some other girl.”

  “Well, well. How are you doing as Heathcliff?”

  “Not complaining.”

  “Good for you,” Marjorie said.

  “I’m also writing a brilliant farce. Greech mistakenly thinks I’m coming back next year. Next year I’ll be famous, and rich, and independent. In fact, can’t I beat you into insensibility with my prowess and my prospects, and drag you off by the hair to my cave?”

  “You almost sound like Noel.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to take me dancing? I’m having fun.”

  “Why, of course. I’ll take you anywhere you say, till dawn, you know that.”

  “The thing about you is, Wally, you probably don’t want to get married. You use me as an excuse to the little girls who are beginning to try to trap you. The great lost love, and all that.”

  He stared for several seconds before smiling awkwardly. “Now you sound like Noel.”

  “Oh, sure. The Masked Marvel, he used to call himself. He was an education, all right.” She pulled over her shoulders the cerise shawl Noel had sent her from Mexico. “Seems to be haunting the conversation, doesn’t he? Old trick of his. Let’s go.”

  The first thing she said in the taxi was, “Remember telling me last year that Noel wasn’t going to amount to anything? How about Old Moon Face?”

  “I remember being very drunk on rum and pineapple juice, and I remember an orange sun about six times normal size setting behind the trees,” Wally said. “I don’t remember much else except wanting to choke you, or beat you with a rock. Old Moon Face is a superb song. I’d be an ass to deny it. When Noel is in stride, he’s terrific.”

  “He’s rewritten Princess Jones. It’s bound to get produced one of these days,” Marjorie said. “It’ll be a sensation. Then I guess we’ll all be boasting we knew him when.”

  “Could be,” Wally said, with less good nature.

  His dancing had much improved, too. She said to him during a slow fox trot, leaning back in his arms, “I think you’ve got a girl.”

  “Thousands, if you want to know.”

  “No. One. Somebody’s been working on you.”

  “How do you like the result?”

  “Just don’t get too smooth. You wouldn’t be yourself any more.”

  Later she asked him what his farce was about. He told her the plot rather reluctantly. It seemed to her a wild and unfunny business. “It reads much funnier than it sounds,” Wally said.

  “Is there a part in it for me?”

  Wally grinned. “If you’ll agree to a fate worse than death I’ll write one in.”

  “Sorry, I can’t see you as the seducer of hopeful actresses, Wally. That’s Noel’s side of the street.”

  Wally glanced sidewise at her, twisting the glass stick of his highball in his hands. “Some day you’ll have to tell me how you fended Noel Airman off. It’s one of the marvelous achievements of the twentieth century, like Lindbergh’s flight to Paris.”

  “You’re assuming I succeeded in fending him off.”

  “I think I’d know if you hadn’t.”

  There was another silence. For the first time since she had known him he caused her a stir of enjoyable discomfort. “I think you would. I’m getting bored with all these clever writers. I think I’ll marry a doctor and get it over with, just as Noel prophesied. No use fighting it.”

  “Dr. Morris?”

  “Morris Shapiro is the name. Maybe, who knows? He’s really a great guy, once you get to know him.”

  “He has a discardable sound.”

  “Just for that, I will marry him.”

  “Marjorie Shapiro,” Wally said meditatively. “No. I don’t feel the cold clutch at my heart. There’s no fate in it.”

  “That’s exactly the name Noel predicted for me, strangely enough. Marjorie Shapiro.”

  In a totally different voice, hard and a little shrill, Wally said, “Would it be too great a strain on you, Marjorie, if neither of us said anything more this evening about Noel Airman?”

  “Why, it’s you who keep talking about him, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s dance.” He stood and pulled at her hand.

  When the taxi drew up in front of her home at half-past one in the morning, she held her face up to him unthinkingly for a kiss. “Nothing doing,” Wally said.

  It startled her. She was rather sleepy. She peered at him, dropping her chin. “Huh?”

  He took her hand. “You won’t really marry Dr. Shapiro yet, will you? I mean, there’s another couple of years yet.”

  “Oh, you fool.” She put her hand to his face for a moment. “If it gives you pleasure to carry on like that, I’m sure I don’t mind. I’ll warn you before I marry Dr. Shapiro.”

  “Promise?”

  “Okay. I promise.” She laughed. “Small danger, since you insist on worming it out of me.”

  With the humiliation of the summer-theatre fiasco—of having wasted ninety dollars and six weeks, of having crawled home defeated and bilked, exactly as her mother had predicted—Marjorie struck bottom in her own soul. She told herself that unless she was paid real money for acting—the amount didn’t matter, a dollar would be enough to start with, symbolically—but unless she earned that dollar, and fairly soon, she had better face the fact that she was living a childish fantasy.

  So she set out on an earnest and grim quest for the dollar. She fanatically studied all the theatrical trade papers, and listened hungrily to every scrap of gossip at the drugstore about new plays. Again she trudged to the producers’ offices to try out for any part that seemed in any way suited to her. Again she could never get past the contemptuous office boys and telephone girls. Her amateurishness seemed written on her forehead, a mark of Cain. The same thing happened when she decided to try for radio jobs. The advertising agencies, unimpressed b
y her condescension, turned her away at the outer railings of their offices. So did the networks.

  She made the round of the semi-professional groups on the fringe of Broadway, including two communist enterprises and a little company that sent out shows to tour churches and Kiwanis clubs. She answered every advertisement for actresses that she saw; she followed up every lead that came to her ears in the drugstore, however unpromising. It became clear after a couple of months that she could get all the theatrical work she wanted—of a certain kind. There were radio groups and experimental theatre groups, university groups and temple groups, charity groups and educational groups; an almost infinite number of groups, diverse as they could be in origin, and similar in two characteristics: a willingness to use actresses, and an unwillingness to pay them.

  At any place where money was to be made by an actress, Marjorie was shut out as though she were black.

  Only the fact that this had been the experience of all the kids in the drugstore consoled her. Some of the girls were beautiful, and in her opinion strikingly talented. Evidently this preliminary discouragement was a part of the game. The kids had a folklore of reassuring stories. Helen Hayes had gone through years of rejection. The new star of the new hit comedy had hung around these very booths in despair only two years ago, ready to go home to Nebraska for good. With such tales went a litany of cheering phrases. “One of us is going to make it…. There’s always room at the top…. All it takes is one break….”

  Marjorie began to pay more attention to the talk at the drugstore about other ways of earning money. Some of the kids supported themselves by working as movie ushers or salesclerks. They tried to get part-time or evening jobs, so as to be free in the afternoon when the drugstore buzzed with life. A few of the prettiest girls and handsomest boys worked as photographers’ models. There were less savory recourses. A couple of girls, it was whispered, were posing in the nude, or at least with bared chests, for painters and photographers; and some resorted to posing for lingerie and stocking advertisements, which was considered not much better. One emaciated redhead defiantly admitted working as a taxi dancer. A tall shabby southern boy with a shock of wheat-colored hair was supposed to be keeping body and soul together by writing pornography, though this seemed incredible to Marjorie, because he was so sweet-natured, and so familiar with Ibsen’s plays.