The bad news that Marjorie learned, upon coming to rehearsal the day Noel sailed, was that she was in danger of losing even the tiny part she had. The assistant stage manager, a pale thin would-be playwright, who was having an affair with a redhead playing a silent whore, had confided to his love that one of the five was going to be axed from the show to save expenses, after the dress rehearsal Saturday night—two days off. He had of course extracted a promise of secrecy from the redhead, and she had of course violated it as fast as she could get to the theatre.
With nerves already worn, Marjorie all but broke down at the news. She really feared what such a disappointment might do to her at this wretched moment of her life. In desperation she decided that her best chance for survival lay in being a little pleasanter to the leading man of the show, Dane Voen, who had been trying hard to work up a romance with her. She wasn’t desperate enough to sleep with Voen, of course; but measures short of that, she thought, might serve at least to get her past the fatal Saturday axing.
Voen was a tall, fantastically vain man of forty or so, who wore a hair piece to mask a very bald forehead. He played the chief gangster, and he was an excellent actor; he made a truly fine growling villain. His one difficulty lay in understanding what his lines meant. He was virtually an imbecile. The director had to explain to him, as though he were a child of nine, what the language of each scene implied. Once he grasped the meaning, however, he read the lines with amazing clarity and force. Since the first day of rehearsals, he had been ogling Marjorie violently, all but licking his lips at the sight of her, and not in the least discouraged by her freezing indifference.
The trouble with Marjorie’s little scheme for survival was that Dane already had a mistress, a vulturous dark little woman who watched all the rehearsals from a back row of the orchestra, and who looked capable of throwing sulphuric acid in the face of anyone who meddled with Dane. Dane himself feared her. He made all his passes at Marjorie in the wings, in whispers, and glancing over his shoulder. Moreover, Dane was in the process of divorcing his second wife, and was being sued by his first wife for back alimony. Marjorie had little stomach for getting involved, even for a day or two, with this bird-brained Don Juan, but panic drove her to try it.
After rehearsals were over that evening, therefore, she consented to go with Dane for a drink. The mistress had departed half an hour earlier to cook supper for him, and he was as happy, taking Marjorie to the bar across the street, as a boy with a new toy pistol. Nothing would do for the occasion but champagne cocktails; and though Marjorie choked over the raw bar champagne, which tasted like lemon soda gone bad, he kept ordering more. Voen’s conversation was full of variety, in that he discussed himself from a surprising number of aspects. He described the enormous sums of money he made in radio as a baritone, whenever he wanted to. He revealed that he was a playwright and a novelist, and that he expected shortly to have a couple of his plays produced and a novel printed. He narrated the true facts about a couple of notorious occasions when he had been dropped from shows during out-of-town tryouts; what had really occurred, he explained, was that he had understood the plays better than the directors, and had showed them up so badly in analytic disputes that they couldn’t endure his continued presence in the cast. He described his “methodology” in playing a part; the amusing illusion he gave of not understanding the lines was due, he said, to his methodology. He believed in reading the lines for the first week or so in every possible way but the right one, in order to dig out hidden nuances of character that had lain in the author’s unconscious. The surface meaning of the lines was trivial, he said, compared to the author’s unconscious meaning; Freud proved that; Marjorie ought to read Freud, Voen said, if she wanted to develop a solid methodology.
His mistress telephoned the bar in the middle of this rodomontade, asking for him; Voen told the bartender to say he had left for home ten minutes ago, and went on talking about his methodology. Marjorie began to get uneasy, but Voen talked smoothly over her attempts to break away. From methodology he switched to the subject of marriage, and in a fatherly way explained to her that his first two marriages had failed because his wives were undeveloped emotionally, owing to lack of experience with older men. No girl should venture into marriage, Voen asserted, before she had a sound backlog of experience with an older man, because an older man was tolerant and wise, and could nurture her sexual nature past all the pitfalls of shyness and repression, so that she would open like a flower into full bloom. Tenderness and wisdom, said Voen, were what a girl needed in her first sex partner, and then later on she could have a stable marriage with someone else. Halfway through his lecture, when Marjorie felt she would burst out laughing in his face in a moment or two, she told him that she had to make a phone call instantly; and Voen let her get out of the cubicle.
She actually did call home, saying she would be a little late for dinner; and it was rather lucky that she did, for when she stepped out of the phone booth, a hideous yammering was going on in the bar between Voen and his little mistress, who had arrived with her hair wild, in a moth-eaten fur coat, and had him backed into a corner, waving curved claws near his eyes. Voen was frantically putting on his Tyrolean hat and white camel’s hair coat, dodging the claws as best he could, and making explanations in a rich soothing baritone voice, while the woman screeched. Frankly a coward in such a situation, Marjorie dodged back into the booth, and pretended to be talking into the telephone. She had a moment of cold horror when the mistress suddenly appeared at the window of the booth, with a face like Dracula’s, making hideous clawing gestures, and shouting obscenities. Marjorie shrugged, smiled, and held the booth tightly shut with her foot, and the woman at last went away.
So ended Marjorie’s feeble first effort to use sex in forwarding her theatrical career; she seemed to lack the touch, somehow. She cowered in the booth for another ten minutes, then peeked out into the bar, and went home when she saw it was safe.
Noel had certainly been right in one respect: the show did take her mind off his letter. She lay awake for hours that night, thinking sometimes of him, but mostly searching her brain for a way to stay in The Bad Year as a silent whore. She dropped asleep about four in the morning, having devised a plan. Her intermittent thoughts about Noel had not been very painful. Their sum was that he could go to Paris and be damned. She would pursue her career, forget him, and in the end marry a man worth ten of him.
In the morning she took her passbook to the bank and drew out fifty-seven dollars, leaving a balance of a dollar and a half. She had earned these dollars at odd times in recent months as a receptionist, a typist, a model, and a movie usher. From the bank Marjorie went to Bergdorf Goodman’s and bought fifty-five dollars’ worth of black French underwear heavily trimmed with lace. She put the things on in a private dressing booth, and strutted before the mirror for a while, cigarette in hand, experimenting with various degenerate leers and wiggles. It seemed to her that she made quite a fetching and vicious whore.
On the night of the dress rehearsal Marjorie’s expensive underwear caused a lot of envying comment among the girls in the dressing room. She put on a robe to walk out in the wings, and shed it only at the last moment before the curtain went up. She felt ashamed and highly ridiculous all during the performance, prancing around in the glare of stage lights in underwear. She was miserably aware of Dane Voen and the other actors crowded in the wings, coolly enjoying the sight of six undressed girls, and cracking jokes among themselves. She darted for the robe each time she came off stage.
Her heart sank when the assistant stage manager came to her at the end of the rehearsal, eyes averted and face glum. “Mr. Flamm wants to see you, Margie.” She braced herself and went to the cubbyhole of plywood partitions backstage which Flamm used for an office.
It was the axe, of course. His popping eyes somewhat more bloodshot than they had been two years ago, a genial fatherly smile on his face, his fingers alternately caressing his sporty green bow tie and neat gray hair, Flam
m explained that the budget had been exceeded, and he couldn’t afford to keep her in the show. Marjorie desperately offered to work for nothing, to forgo the rehearsal money due her, to pay her own transportation and expenses for the Philadelphia tryout. He shook his head. Her artistic spirit was admirable, he said, but the bloodsucking rules of Actors Equity, which were killing the theatre, prevented him from accepting her offer.
“Every damned actor in the show would walk out, my dear. They’re a lot of money-mad hogs, these actors. There isn’t a true artist in Equity. Soon there won’t be any on Broadway. It’s all dying, strangled by Equity and the stagehands’ union. They’ll be sorry, those two boa constrictors, when they find themselves constricting a rotten corpse. Then maybe they’ll constrict each other to death, and the theatre will be born again. Ah, but that’s far from little Margie Morningstar and her problem, isn’t it? My dear, I’m terribly, terribly sorry, I truly am.—Now, no sniffles, put away the handkerchief, child. This isn’t the end for you. I hope it’s the beginning, and a glorious beginning. You haven’t gone unnoticed, dear.”
She raised her bowed head and blinked at him.
“Frankly, Margie, you never have fitted the part. If I hadn’t disliked upsetting you I’d have let you out the second day you rehearsed. You just don’t look like a prostitute, my dear. You’re much too fresh and sweet. That underwear you had on was really exquisite, by the way. Trouble was, it made you look less a bad woman than ever. I’m afraid you looked like a nice Vassar girl fresh out of the shower, dear, in the middle of getting dressed for a big evening. Now, don’t pout, don’t you realize what a precious quality that is? There are a million girls on Broadway who can look like strumpets. Where did you get that slip, my dear?”
“B-Bergdorf’s.”
“Bergdorf’s, eh? What does your father do, Margie?”
“Why… he’s an importer, Mr. Flamm,” Marjorie said, with a dim incredulous suspicion of what Flamm might be getting at.
“Marjorie dear, would it be a consolation to have a star part in a brilliant comedy, instead of a walk-on in a trivial farce? Because between you and me, dear—and we can be frank now—that’s all The Bad Year is. Now this play is something else again, believe me!” And to Marjorie’s mingled disgust and amusement, he brought out of a drawer an extremely worn script of Down Two Doubled—it might have been the same one Marjorie had been handed two years ago, the cover was a scuffed faded red—and slapped it dramatically on the desk.
He had had his eye on her from the first tryout day, he said, for a star part in this play, the most massive opportunity any young actress could ever hope for; and now, just this evening, the very charm which had disabled her for a whore’s part had practically convinced him that Clarice was Marjorie’s destined break into Broadway. He ordered her to absorb Clarice into her very soul, and then come to see him the day after The Bad Year opened. It seemed utterly beyond belief to Marjorie that he should fail to remember her, even at this point. She sat staring passively at him while he gyrated through the Clarice discovery scene, complete with whirls and eye-poppings, waiting for him to recognize her and collapse into embarrassment. She could recall every detail of that first encounter with him; he had even commented on her name, Marjorie Morningstar! How could it have passed so totally from his mind?
But the fact was, it had. The old faker had done this, or things like this, so often with so many girls that she was no more to him than a face in a parade; and she was still trying to think of a devastating way to denounce him when he shook hands and ushered her out of the office, thrusting the script into her hand as he opened the door. “This isn’t an end, Marjorie, believe me it isn’t. Something tells me, deep down, that it may be the start of the road, for both of us. The golden road, my dear,” he exclaimed, his eyes all but starting from his head, “the glory road!”
She went to her dressing room and gathered up her few belongings, including an advance copy of the Philadelphia theatre program with her name in it. Stolidly enduring the sympathy of the girls, she turned off their questions about the red script with a shrug, and put it in her little valise. She said goodbye to the silent whores and the talking whore, all of whom shared the dressing room. The talking whore evinced a surprising sentimental streak, sobbing wildly and kissing Marjorie. Dane Voen was lying in wait for her just inside the stage door. He told her not to be discouraged; she was a great actress, and he would like nothing better than to meet with her evenings, and coach her in methodology. He offered to take her out then and there, and help her forget the setback with a little fun and drinking. She declined, pleading a headache, and she was very glad she had done so when she came out on the street. Dane’s mistress was waiting in the alley of the stage entrance, with red reflections from a nearby neon sign dancing in her eyes.
It was a little after midnight. Marjorie bought a morning Times at the corner and noted wryly that it was April Fool’s Day. She walked up Broadway in a cool foggy night. Light seemed to be dissolved in the air all around her, brilliant yellow; she was walking in a great effulgence, a universal bath, of electric light. There was no plan in her walking, she simply walked, enjoying the cool air on her hot face. After a while she passed out of the blazing square, and after another while she was standing in the misty gloom on Central Park South, the valise at her feet, staring up at the hotel where she had given her virginity to Noel Airman a year ago. She stared so, dry-eyed, for perhaps a quarter of an hour.
Then she walked up to the Fifty-ninth Street subway. At Columbus Circle she stopped beside a trash basket, opened her valise, and took out the script of Down Two Doubled. She glanced at the battered red script with a smile which, for complexity and secret sadness, might have rivalled the Mona Lisa’s, had a painter caught it. The script fell in the basket with a dry rustle and disappeared under tumbling loose newspapers; and the girl went down into the subway.
Chapter 40. A FIRST-CLASS TICKET TO EUROPE
“Papa, I’d like to work for you. Is the job still open?”
The business section of the Sunday paper fell out of Mr. Morgenstern’s left hand to the floor, and he put down the coffee cup in his right hand very shakily, squinting at his daughter as though she shone too brightly. “What?”
Mrs. Morgenstern, placidly pouring coffee for herself, said, “Nazimova is in a humorous mood this morning.”
Marjorie said to her father, “I’d like to go to work. Tomorrow if I can. My typing and shorthand have improved. I think I can be useful to you. I want a steady job.”
Seth paused in buttering a piece of toast. “Margie, what are you talking about? You have to go down to Philadelphia this afternoon with the show.”
“I’m not going to Philadelphia, Seth. I’m out of the show.”
She told her family the facts lightheartedly, but she was watching their reactions. The father seemed stunned. Seth was first angered, then downcast. Mrs. Morgenstern took the news with good cheer. “I’m sorry, darling. You must be very disappointed. But from everything you’ve told us it was a rotten show. Something better will come along. It wasn’t very nice, anyway, that part they gave you. I was almost ashamed to tell people.”
“I agree with you, Mom,” Marjorie said. “I shouldn’t have taken it, and I’m well out of it.”
“What goes on? Is Broadway composed entirely of morons?” Seth said, his jaw thrust out. “I’ve seen a bunch of plays this year, and I haven’t seen a young actress yet who looked any better than you. Most of them don’t look half as good. I’ve seen you act. You’re better than any of them.”
Marjorie leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a loyal brother.”
Seth turned red, pushed his chair back from the table, and went through several grotesque gestures intended to show that he felt quite at ease. He was seventeen, he had grown another two inches, and his complexion was somewhat spotty. Often, as now, he seemed to have an indefinite number of elbows, legs, and hands. “Well, hell, I mean it. I’m not saying it because you’r
e my sister. I don’t think you’re any world-beater by a long shot. But isn’t it the truth?”
Marjorie said, “I’ll tell you, Seth, you mustn’t be fooled by my amateur work. Naturally I looked pretty good in Pygmalion and A Doll’s House. Those are just about the best parts in the world. Mama could look good in them.”
“No, thank you,” said Mrs. Morgenstern. “I’m not ambitious like you.”
“The girls you’re talking about have a few dull lines in a Broadway play to create a character with,” Marjorie said to Seth. “There’s not much they can do, usually, with such thin stuff. If they get the jobs, they’re pretty good actresses, most likely.”
“Aw, if the truth were known, it probably just depends on who you sleep with,” Seth said.
The mother said, “Look, smart boy, talk that way at college. Not at this table.”
“I don’t care,” Seth said. “If you ask me, that’s the one thing that’s been holding Marjorie back. She’s probably the only virgin on Broadway.”
In the short awkward silence, a glance passed among the two parents and the daughter, while Seth lit a cigarette. Marjorie and her father both started to talk at once. The girl laughed. “Sorry, Papa—”
“Are you serious? Do you want to go to work? Because it happens I can use a girl very much right now. I just laid off my secretary, I was going to call the agency Monday.”
“I’m serious. I’ll start today, if you’re going to the office.”