Underfoot in Show Business

  It took me half an hour to pack. I could have packed all I owned in fifteen minutes but it takes longer when you’re having hysterics. At 3:30 A.M. I hauled my luggage—a suitcase full of clothes, my Girl Scout camp duffel bag full of books, and my portable typewriter—down the four flights of stairs and out the front door. I dragged everything to the corner of Amsterdam Avenue. The rain had stopped and I stood there wondering what to do next, when a cruising cab saw me and pulled up. The driver leaned out and surveyed my tearstained face.

  “Whatsamatta, honey?” he inquired.

  “I had bedbugs,” I said. “I moved out.”

  “Couldn’ya waited till morning?” he asked. “They wouldn’ hurt ya!”

  He got out and put my luggage in the cab and when I climbed into the back seat, he said:

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know,” I quavered. “I’ve only been in New York two months. I’d like to move out of this neighborhood if there’s any other neighborhood I can afford.”

  He was careening down Amsterdam by then and without slowing down, much less stopping, he turned clear around to stare at me.

  “Didn’ you know you were living in a red-light district?”

  “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  He turned back to his driving, shaking his head.

  He turned east on a dingy West Side street and came to Central Park, shot through the park to Fifth Avenue and on over to Lexington and careened down Lexington.

  I’d never been east of Fifth Avenue before. Even at four in the morning, staring bug-eyed out of the cab window, I could see that the driver had brought me into a noisy, dilapidated, hopeful New York I hadn’t known existed.

  “I like it over here,” I thought. And over here I’ve stayed ever since.

  “I’m takin’ you to a woman’s hotel,” he said. “It ain’t the Ritz but it’s respectable. You stay there till you know your way around. Hear?”

  The hotel room cost eleven dollars a week, more than a third of my weekly thirty-dollar fellowship allowance. But if the room was as small and narrow as a convent cell it was also as clean. I crawled thankfully into bed and went to sleep.

  When I surveyed the lobby the next morning I seemed to be the only guest in the hotel who was under sixty-five. This had one unfortunate consequence which I got used to. My dates never did, however.

  A man from the seminar took me out one Saturday night and when he brought me home he walked me to the elevator, where we had to say good night since Men Were Not Allowed Above the Mezzanine. The elevator arrived, and as my escort leaned over to kiss me good night, two black-suited men stepped out of the elevator carrying a sack between them.

  Old ladies were carried out of there at the rate of a sack a month—always late at night, and somehow I was always around to assist. Me and my date. The next morning there’d be a sign on the lobby bulletin board:

  “FOR SALE: Matched luggage.” Or “Caracul coat. Good condition.” I took advantage of one of those sales to throw out my camp duffel bag. I bought a wardrobe trunk for eight dollars, in case one of my plays ever went touring.

  From then on, I alternated between small hotel rooms and larger rooming-house rooms that were somehow always on the top floor of a walk-up where you trudged up four double flights of stairs and, with your foot on the top step, remembered you were out of cigarettes. Both the hotel manager and the rooming-house landlady locked you out of your room if they caught you using a hot plate to save the price of a cafeteria breakfast.

  All this time I cherished the dream of finding the ideal garret, a room large and light enough to work in and with what I described to myself as “hot plate privileges.” But a year after Oklahoma! opened, the need for such a room became acute. I left the Guild and took a part-time job which would give me more time for my playwriting (see next chapter), but this meant that I’d be working at home and earning less. In the narrow hotel room I was living in that season, I scanned the Furnished Rooms columns in The Times without finding anything suitable I could afford. And then, one bright morning, there it was:

  “Lg. furn. rear. Share bath.

  Kitch. priv. $40 monthly.”

  Since I’d had to slog out to the nearest cafeteria for breakfast every morning for five years, rain, sleet or cold-in-the-head—which is a very good way to feel sorry for yourself, especially on a rainy Sunday—”kitchen privileges” was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  I hurried around to the address given, on a quiet upper East Side street. The building was a narrow greystone, sandwiched in between a vegetable market and a handsome, discreetly anonymous building on the corner.

  I found the super and asked about the furnished rear. He said it had already been rented, but a large furnished front had just come vacant for a few dollars more. It was on the top floor and we rode up in an undreamed-of elevator to look at it. It was a big, sunny room with a studio couch, an armchair, and a table big enough to accommodate my typewriter during the day and two dinner guests in the evening.

  The super led me halfway down the hall to show me the bathroom and then on down to the far end of the hall and into a big old kitchen with an assortment of battered community pots and pans; and I knew I was home. He explained that I would share the bath and kitchen with the four other seventh-floor tenants, all of whom, he could assure me, were Ladies.

  (That was a very prissy building. The second floor was for bachelors only; the third, fourth and fifth floors were for couples only; and way up on the top two floors—Ladies.)

  I moved in on Saturday morning. I tore around to Woolworth’s and bought plates, cups and saucers, knives, forks and spoons, a frying pan and a coffee pot. On the way home, I bought coffee, bread, eggs and oranges for Sunday breakfast, which I was going to cook properly in a kitchen and eat in my bathrobe in my own room, like a lady.

  I met the other four tenants in and around the bathroom on Saturday afternoon. Somebody had tacked to the bathroom door a Schedule for Bathroom Hours for each tenant, but natural processes being what they are, it was hard to stick to.

  Like me, the other tenants all classified as the Middle-Class Poor. Down at the end of the hall in the room next to the kitchen was Maude E. Bird. We called her Birdie behind her back, or ran it all together and called her Maudiebird, and both names suited her.

  Maudiebird was a small, frail, wispy old lady with a thin, prim voice in which she indicated that she had known better days and that this sort of community living was not what she was used to. In her prime, she had been governess to the children of the rich and had lived, we gathered, only in mansions and villas. You’d think such wealthy employers would have given her some sort of pension, but if any of them had, it obviously wasn’t enough because Maudiebird earned a few dollars as companion to a sick woman a couple of days a week and hired out at thirty-five cents an hour as chaperone to small children who went skating in Central Park.

  She made her own hats from hat frames bought at Woolworth’s and covered with fabric from Third Avenue remnant stores. I used to watch her set out gamely on cold winter Saturday afternoons in her worn black coat and homemade hat, prepared to freeze on a park bench watching children ice-skate for three hours—to earn one dollar.

  Next along the hall from Birdie was Florrie, a middle-aged widow living on a pension. Florrie spent her days reading the Daily News and True Romances but her chief passion was the radio, which she turned on when she got up and turned off when she went to bed. Her mornings were spent with radio talk shows: Breakfast with the Fitzgeralds, then Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, and Mary Margaret McBride for lunch. A succession of afternoon soap operas carried her up to Lowell Thomas and the six o’clock news, then the Kraft Music Hall, the Lux Radio Theatre and so to bed.

  Across the hall from me was Mamselle, a spinster who taught French at a fashionable Park Avenue girls’ school. Mamselle had an inflammable temper and the blackest dyed hair I ever saw. She used to get up at five in the morning one Sunday a month to
have the bathroom to herself while she dyed it.

  In the room between Florrie and Mamselle was Gale, a tall, dark-haired, good-looking girl from Texas. She and I were the only young ones on the floor, and a few months after I moved in, we became close friends due to an arithmetic problem posed by the community kitchen.

  There were two kitchen cabinets, each with three shelves, which divided evenly into one shelf per tenant (half the shelf for your staples, half for your private kitchen equipment), leaving the sixth shelf for community property: pots, pans, an iron and a hand-operated toaster. But any way you divided it, the stove had only four burners. On nights when all five tenants were cooking dinner at the same time, we were a burner short.

  Gale and I solved the problem by pooling our money and cooking and eating together every night. She cooked one week and I cooked the next. Sometimes we put our dinner under the broiler or on one of the two oven racks to save our burner for the coffee pot. On nights when one of us had dinner company, the other obligingly ate out. This was after I’d lived there for a few months and had learned to cook.

  Initially, I confined myself to two dinner guests, neither to be envied. Maxine, of course, was the first guest. She came over, on my second Sunday there, to help me hang blue burlap drapes, tack a makeshift blue burlap slipcover to the armchair and cover the stained wooden floor with a fluffy white bathroom rug. As a special treat for helping me, she was invited to eat the first dinner I ever cooked: hamburger and two canned vegetables. But it was Tom Goethals, the Latin and Greek teacher I’d found through the Saturday Review Personals column, who was really put through the wringer.

  I decided that the least I could do was give him dinner every week before my lesson, in lieu of salary. Like most neophyte cooks, I had an unbridled imagination and a childlike faith in newspaper recipes, so every time Tom came to dinner he came braced. I remember one mess I cooked up, compounded of chicken livers, green peppers, hard-boiled eggs, scallions, and a couple of other things in a dank, livery sauce, which we both gave up on, and I went back to the kitchen and made us an omelet out of my breakfast eggs and the bologna for my lunch sandwiches. But everything else I cooked him Tom gallantly ate, and some of it was just incredible.

  With five tenants living a community life in very close quarters, there were bound to be small family fights. We averaged three or four a week. They stemmed from the community kitchen, the community bathroom and the community pay phone in the hall.

  The phone fights began whenever a phone call came for Gale or me after 9:45 P.M. By that time the rest of the floor was in bed. The phone would ring at quarter to ten and as Gale or I dashed for it, three doors would open and three heads pop out simultaneously. Then the caterwauling started.

  Mamselle would scream that she needed her rest, she got up early and worked hard, and phone calls had got to stop coming in the middle of the night. Whereupon Florrie, who’d been all set to complain herself a moment earlier, would turn on Mamselle and bawl:

  “Lissen, Queen Mary Anto-Nette, if you’re so damn stuck on yourself you have to lay down the law to everybody and make a big stink because a couple nice kids get a phone call, you better go live at the Waldorf!”

  Whereupon Maudiebird would quiver into the conversation with the tearful announcement that having waked her up out of a sound sleep, we had now given her a headache with all the shouting.

  The kitchen fights were incessant. In the first place, who was going to clean it? Each of us cleaned up her own cooking mess, but none of us considered that this included scrubbing the entire kitchen floor, or cleaning the entire stove or the entire refrigerator of which each of us was allotted only half shelf. In open discussion one evening as we cooked, the rest of the tenants hinted that as Gale and I were young and strong, we were chosen by Natural Selection to clean the kitchen. We spent the following Saturday morning at it and then tacked up a sign on the kitchen wall:

  “Schedule for Scrubbing Kitchen Floor, Cleaning Stove, Oven and Refrigerator.

  First Week of Month: Gale and Helene

  Second Week of Month:

  Third Week of Month:

  Fourth Week of Month:”

  But nobody else filled in her name for the available weeks, and after a while the schedule got splattered with grease and we took it down and went on having open discussions, attended by all five tenants and an increasing number of cockroaches.

  That was a great kitchen for signs.

  “I accidentally overturned the sugar bowl on the middle shelf of the right-hand cabinet.

  I cleaned it up.

  I will replace sugar if owner will see me.

  FLORRIE.”

  “Please leave this oven at 350 degrees until my casserole is done. I will take it out at five o’clock.

  M.E.B.”

  “PLEASE MOVE THIS COFFEE POT ONTO YOUR CLOSET SHELF. IT CAN NOT STAND ON THIS BURNER ALL DAY. OTHER PEOPLE ARE ENTITLED TO USE THIS BURNER.

  (unsigned)”

  Maudiebird caused a whole series of kitchen spats because her room was next to the kitchen. She ate her meager supper early and generally retired to her room with it just as the rest of us arrived in the kitchen to start our dinners. If one of us sang or laughed or spoke above a library whisper, Birdie was sure to appear in the doorway and say that we would have to stop making so much noise, she was working on her figures.

  “How long can it take her,” I demanded when she’d gone back to her room, “to add up twenty hours of companion-sitting and six hours of park-bench-sitting?”

  And Florrie, when anybody laughed, would mutter:

  “Be quiet: Birdie’s doing her Examples.”

  The bathroom crises were caused entirely by Gale and me.

  I mentioned that there was a discreetly anonymous building next door to us on the corner. It was six stories high, so that our seventh-floor bathroom overlooked its roof. Gale and I, through the bathroom window, had made the acquaintance of two young men who sunbathed on the roof occasionally, after their work in the discreet building, which was a very upper-class funeral parlor. One Saturday afternoon not long after I moved in, Gale and I were washing our hair and doing our nails in the bathroom when one of the boys called up to us:

  “Have you girls got dates for tonight?” For a wonder, we both did.

  “Would you like some flowers to wear?” he inquired. We said we’d love some and the boy told us he’d be right back. He and his friend disappeared and came back five minutes later carrying between them a blanket of gardenias.

  “Compliments of the corpse!” one of the boys said cheerily. “They came too late for the funeral.”

  They upended the gardenia blanket and hoisted it up and Gale and I leaned down and hauled it up and through the window.

  Honesty compels me to admit that he did not say “the corpse,” he told us whose corpse. It was the body of a distinguished statesman and if I wasn’t afraid the funeral parlor would sue me I’d tell you his name. Gale and I were reluctant to steal his flowers but the boys explained that famous corpses often got flowers from total strangers, with cards reading “An Admirer,” “An Unknown Friend,” and so forth; and when these offerings were too ostentatious or came too late for the funeral, the family of the deceased directed that the flowers be sent to some hospital. Several hospitals having done very well by this particular corpse, the boys saw no reason to consult the family about giving us one gardenia blanket.

  Thus reassured, Gale and I sat down on the bathroom floor to detach ourselves a pair of corsages. Let me tell you it was no easy trick. Each flower was wired to the greenery with heavy wire and you nearly ripped your fingers off detaching a corsage spray. It therefore took us some time—and of course, while we were working, there was an importunate knock on the bathroom door.

  “Let’s carry it to my room,” I said to Gale.

  “I am not,” she said in her Texas drawl, “paradin’ through the hall with a funeral blanket on my head.”

  Instead, she turned on the bath fau
cets to indicate we’d be in there for some time. This brought a stream of French invective from Mamselle, so as soon as I heard her door slam, I tiptoed out of the bathroom with the blanket in my arms, and when I’d made it safely to my room, Gale called loudly to the rest of the hall:

  “Bathroom’s free!”

  and we finished our corsages in my room.

  During the single season the two boys worked next door, we had perfectly glorious flowers to wear and bowls of lilies as centerpieces for our dinette tables. We also got mildly ghoulish. I’d read in The Times that a certain famous actress had died and was on view at our parlor, and I’d hurry down the hall, knock on Gale’s door and when she opened it cry: “Guess who’s next door!”

  All in all, it was garret living at its best, and it was a sad day for all of us when we received notice that the building was to be renovated and we’d have to move.

  This was 1948, and there was a severe post-war housing shortage in New York. Gale and I each found a friend willing to take us in temporarily; Florrie moved in with her recently widowed sister; Mamselle’s school found her a room in a residence club; and Maudiebird, after three months of searching, finally found a fourth-floor walk-up. It gave me a pang to think of her thin old legs climbing four flights several times a day, but she told me wistfully that a room in an elevator building was too expensive for anybody.

  We bade each other farewell and went our separate ways. My way took me into the sharp teeth of the housing shortage. The friend who took me in had barely helped me get settled in her apartment when it was completely gutted by fire. The next day I was out on the street with my salvageable clothes in a suitcase in one hand and my portable typewriter in the other, looking for a place to live.

  Whole families were living in their cars that year. I met them on Saturday nights when all of us who were homeless gathered at The New York Times office to get the earliest edition of the Sunday real estate section. During the next eighteen months I had eleven addresses, most of them two-week and one-month sublets from people going on winter or summer vacations. When there was no sublet I slept at Maxine’s—she had twin beds in her room—until I became so acutely embarrassed at seeming to move in on her that I couldn’t bring myself to do it one more night and paid a doorman to let me sleep on two lobby chairs instead.