Of Mahala Vale and Doc Keezer and Maggie Sample, she had heard nothing whatever; of Andrew Deacon, nothing beyond a note, in Leonard Lyons's column in the New York Post, that Andy, with his mother and Miss Joan Hinterwald, had been staying at a Great Neck château, and telling some very funny stories about summer theatres.
Flushing as she lay there trying to sleep, Bethel hoped that none of the funny stories had been about her.
She was out on her gaggingly familiar round of job hunting at ten next morning, after the actress's toilet of bathing and powdering and manicuring and hairdressing, and choosing between the blue silk frock and the grey suit, and after saving ten cents by having only orange juice, toast and nice refreshing hot water for breakfast. (She was young rather than fundamentally imbecile.)
She walked to the office of Equity, the actors' organization, and, with a milling of other girl crusaders, studied the bulletin board with its notices of who was casting, who was organizing a road company.
She was not a member, and not supposed to intrude there, but as she couldn't join Equity till she had a contract, and as she probably never would get a contract till she was a member of Equity, such trespass as hers was tolerated. The paradox which ruled all young actresses was that you couldn't get a job if you hadn't the experience, and you certainly could not get experience till you had a job, and so you just weren't going to get a job.
Bethel started another day of high artistic hopes with the usual matutinal conclusion that there were no jobs left in the world.
She walked--every dainty young flower of the stage walks far enough every day to disable a hairy infantryman--to the palatial offices of Hochwohlgeboren & Schnitzel. In the outer room was a sign 'No casting', and a twitter of young ladies who were trying to ignore the sign. She walked to the offices of Sam & Rufus Kitz, and got no farther than a cold-hearted girl reception clerk who gabbled, 'Wha's name any-experience cnleaveyrtelephone number'. She walked to the offices of Thorncroft, Inc., where a graceful young man murmured 'Cast's all full for California Cavalcade except big rangy blondes, and that let's you out, darling'. She walked to the office of Cyril Sassoon Solobar, and found that Mr. Solobar was his own secretary and office boy. A round man, bald in layers, he sat hunched at a scarred desk, held her hand, pinched her side and whined, 'No, I haven't got the script of Towers of Teheran yet. The author's holding out on me. How's for lunch, babe?' She walked to the office of a new agent of whom a girl waiting at Kitz's had said that he took beginners and got them nice jobs.
He didn't.
And now, at one-thirty, she walked for her one comparatively substantial meal of the day to the Olde Roanoke Drug Store.
Forty years ago, two bustling pharmacists from Maine named Rowen and Oaks, opening a drugstore in the wilderness at Broadway and Forty-sixth, were moved to be facetious, to pretend that they were from the flower of what they called Ole Virginny, and to combine their names in the designation Ole Roanoke.
It is an urban version of the Rex Pharmacy of Sladesbury, and, even in alien New York, it is as American as flapjacks.
It still has a kingly trade in perfumes and soaps and face powder, and a small rush of prescriptions, but its glories are the lunch counter upstairs, where the least prosperous of would-be actors deceive their miserable stomachs with sandwiches and jumbo malted milks while they listen anxiously to the news over the theatrical grapevine, and, downstairs, the vast restaurant, which fills the basement floor, where, in daily hundreds, the not-quite-so-impoverished actors meet to look at each other, to show off their new costumes and makeups, to hear the labour-market news and subordinately to eat.
The basement room itself is of battleship grey, and the ceilings bristly with water pipes, but the proprietors have craftily covered the walls with mirrors, so that, as they talk, the young things can stare at their images, study their own experiments in the Arch Smile, the Appealing Smile, the Wistful Regret. They eat in booths along the wall, or at tables elbow to elbow out on the floor. The waitresses, showy in white-and-cherry uniforms with green berets, are hostesses, comforters, reconcilers, and free employment agents.
Alone, rather alarmingly filling up on the 'Hot Spot Speciaclass="underline" Salisbury steak, julienne carrots, whipped potatoes, lemon chiffon pie, coffee, 40 c.' Bethel watched and, since they were at the next table and not at all shy about their humour, listened to one 'Bunk', a young man with grey, double-breasted jacket, green, purple, and brown chequed shirt, and red plaid handkerchief, 'Ally', a girl with a wolf jacket and a tall, cone-shaped lettuce-green hat with royal blue streamers setting off a chartreuse-coloured dress that disdained her knees, and 'Peg', a child of nineteen with yellow hair to her shoulders and a cartwheel straw hat hung with a black ribbon on the back of her neck.
Bethel, in grey suit and frilly jabot exquisitely ironed (by Bethel, in her bathroom), felt a cool and collegian superiority to these plush flowers until she remembered hearing a handsome girl in black, at the Roanoke, snarl, 'I'm a B.A. of Vassar and an M.A. of Columbia and I'd swap 'em both for a two-line bit in a show that opened in Cain's Warehouse.'
'Gee, you got a lovely tan, Bunk,' said Ally. 'Where you been? Steal somebody's Alpine lamp?'
'No, I'm an actor, b'God. Been stealing applause!'
'Quit it or I'll wake up.'
'Fact. I've been out on the Borsch circuit all summer. Nineteen dollars a week and coffee and cakes and a nice bed over the garage--three in the bed. We had a swell bilclass="underline" the six dirtiest scenes from the six dirtiest plays in the last six years. Symbolism, heh? We played a seven-hotel circuit, one a night. I can't kick. I come back engaged to the daughter of the biggest kosher butcher in Schenectady--if I can find her address--and I got a swim every day.'
Bunk studied Ally in a bright, sexless, beaming way and jeered, 'I see you've got new lashes and a new mouth.'
'Yeah, my complexion's been bad, so I've been giving up make-up for a while and concentrating on my eyes and mouth. Maybe some producer will see me here and say, "I never knew Ally had a mouth like that. We ought to be able to use a mouth like that for something!"'
From Peggy, jeering, 'You know what he'll use the mouth for now that you've gone coy and got your hat out of the way of kissing.'
From Bunk to Peg, 'That'll be all from you, you heel. I swear to God, you like appearing with the Y.W.C.A. nonprofessional groups! Go on back home!'
From Peg, 'Not me! I was there all summer. In Elmira. God, was I bored! The folks had a fit if I wanted to sleep after ten. They wanted me to play tennis and marry a lawyer--calls hisself a lawyer!--he's a clerk in a law factory with six partners! So I come back looking for a job where I can prove what bums Kate Hepburn and Tallulah are. But I dunno. My big trouble is I'm too individual a type--a marked ingénue and yet sophisticated. My sister's got more sense than me. She's taken up Physical Ed. She's already got a job. She's safer than I am, in this lousy theatre racket. I dunno. Yesterday I got to see this bum Mack Pzister that calls himself a producer. He's new to the show business. I think he makes his dough out of some kind of mine promotion.'
'He's a heel. He's an exhibitionist,' said Ally. 'It peps up his dirty little snow-white personality to think he's a real the-at-ri-cal producer. He just lu-loves the dray-ma, and seeing he can't act and he can't direct and he can't write and he's too lazy and dumb to shift scenery, that makes him a producer, the sweet potato that puts up the money--only I understand Mack ain't got any money either. I know for a fact, six times in the last two years he's sent out a call for casting and interviewed about a thousand bright young things and kept 'em coming back, and nobody ever heard anything more about the show. Did he make a pass at you, Peg?'