in
The world's first production of
the world's greatest love story
ROMEO AND JULIET
in MODERN clothes
with Andrew Deacon and an all-star
Broadway cast
World Premier in Belluca
AMERICAN THEATRE
Nov. 28--Dec. 3
Before they drove up to the Hotel Buckingham-Bradley (1000 rooms, 1000 baths, your home-town newspaper at your door in the morning), Iris and the squealing Bethel had seen nine more posters. The girls were innocent. They did not know the benevolent deception of what is known as 'depot billing', whereby the company's advance man and the local theatre manager make sure that whether the local citizens ever learn that the show is coming or not, at least the producer, arriving in town in a state of exaltation, doubt and suspicion, will have plenty to gladden him on the way to the hotel section.
Their room in the Buckingham-Bradley seemed to Bethel ten times as large as her den in New York and--she had known so few towns: Sladesbury, Point Royal, Grampion, New York--it looked out over enchantingly different streets: a very fine structure in the way of a granite jail, and a circular park with a statue of General Nelson A. Miles.
But Iris was wallowing in the local Sunday newspapers, the News, the American and the Daily Republican, bought on the way up.
'Look! Look! Beth, look! Here's both our pictures, and stories about us.'
Bethel squatted on the floor with Iris and stared at a group picture of herself, Iris, Charlotte and Vera Cross (Lady Capulet's understudy), all adoringly surrounding Mrs. Boyle. The advance man had done honour to his profession as press agent. In the News Bethel read a spirited account of herself (some inches below the rhetorical splendours devoted to Mrs. Boyle) and learned that--
in college, at a certain famous old institution for women on the banks of the historic Hudson River, she was president of the dramatic club, star in many elaborate college productions. After college her ability was immediately recognized, and she has had such an extensive training in stock as falls to the lot of but few young actresses.
Bethel moaned, 'But they might have put in my studies in the Alva Prindle School of Garage Acting.'
Radio Station WXXW, owned by the Belluca Daily Republican and the most influential fount of wisdom and of jazz in all that section of Indiana, was turning over a whole half-hour of time--magic like to Jehovah's, that can own and turn over Time!--to an interview with the Romeo Company by no less a local prophet than the Indiana Walter Winchell, Mr. Ted Gronitz, mention in whose daily column 'Hot on the Spot' was more sought by Belluca debutantes, prize fighters and pulpit orators than was sleep or raiment. Andy, Mahala and Mrs. Boyle were to broadcast, of course. But at lunchtime--a dozen of the youngsters of the company at three tables down in the Buckingham-Bradley Coffee Shop, being very professional and stagy over Ham and Eggs, Country Style--Bethel was summoned by a bell-boy to report at Andy's suite, to be ready to broadcast.
'Me . . . broadcast?' squeaked Bethel.
'Sure, I done it once. I'm a swell crooner,' said the bellboy.
In Andy's suite--a Louis Seize apartment with the useful additions of a Dinette, and a purple-and-black-tiled Kitchenette, with an electric refrigerator--Bethel found Mr. Ted Gronitz, their broadcaster, pacing and shrieking. He was a squat, bristly haired little man who had been a featherweight boxer, a county fair spieler and a financial reporter. He was a dream in brown--brown suit, brown handkerchief at his breast, autumn-leaf-brown tie, cigar-brown shirt and cigar-brown cigar. He yelled amiably at her:
'Bethel? Listen, kid, I got nidea. Of course I'm going to interview these stuffed shirts here--Andy and Mahally and the Boyle--but how about getting the impressions of an understudy? How do you like having to sit back and listen to the old champ play Juliet when you know you could wipe her out? Ever want to bump her off?'
Mrs. Boyle, listening, looked pained.
Not waiting for Bethel's answer, Ted Gronitz exulted, 'That'll be fine. That'll give the old girls sitting home by the radio something to talk about. One in ten thousand might even go to your show. Now, Andy, I want you to keep off dramatic subjects--you're not so hot on those--and talk about High Sassiety in Newport. Didn't your Old Lady entertain an English Lord there last year? Swell! That's the stuff.'
In panic Bethel had fled to the sheltering side of Andy and was whispering, 'Oh, do I have to do this? I've never talked on a mike. And he seems so--crude.'
'No, kitten, of course you don't have to. But it would help me a lot. We've got to put the show over in this one town, anyway. Can you stand it?'
'Oh, of course, Andy!' she glowed . . . To be able to 'help a lot', to help Andy Deacon! For that she had been born!
The Daily Republican building was an aged pile of pasty-faced yellow brick, and the corridors were inky and lathy, but as the delegation of five from the Romeo Company, headed by Ted Gronitz and Tertius Tully, stepped from the elevator into the top story, devoted to Station WXXW, they were in a set from the Follies. The vestibule, lined with fawn-coloured leather, was filled with 'modernistic' chairs with scarlet-and-yellow leather seats and nickel arms and legs and had, at the end, a tall desk, beneath which stood the chorus: slim girls in uniforms as military as Bethel's on stage, with cocky pill-box caps.
'Peg, go in and tell the old man the Shakespeare and Barnum and Bailey Circus has arrived,' yelled Gronitz, and one seraph darted away. She returned with Andy's cousin, Ingalls, and six eyeglassed men, as portly and solemn as canons. Bethel never did find out just who they all were, but they all looked like observers at an execution as, in terror, seizing Andy's arm, she marched down the cork-floored gallows walk to Studio No. 3.
The broadcasting room itself was cheery enough, and a little on the littered side: a long room managing to contain two grand pianos, a row of nickel-and-ebony folding chairs--immediately occupied by the observers--a harp, a bust of Beethoven, a plaster Tudor fireplace with electric logs, and a directors' table. But in the centre was a thin standard on which was a double-faced microphone, like a double-ended wedge. From the side it resembled the stiffly upreared head of a boa constrictor; from the front, an electric toaster.
Bethel quaked with the thought of the millions about to listen to her, in city homes and automobiles and those farmhouses always designated in radio accounts as 'far-flung'. Far-flung farmhouses with gimlet-eyed, terrier-eared, far-flung farm wives listening to Bethel Merriday!
In a coop shut off from the studio by a glass-window wall was an engineer at a gigantic control board. Would he, maybe, cut her off the air if she wasn't at once very reverent and very witty? He was such a dry, stern, green-eyeshaded engineer, not likely to be tender to dewy young actresses.
She was trembling.
Of course there was no proof whatever that millions were going to listen to her, or ever did listen to her. In fact with the two or three broadcasts every week which she was going to do on the rest of the tour, she had no proof that anybody ever did hear her. Perhaps no one did.
Mr. Ted Gronitz was capering with not the slightest awe. As the red second hand on the clock on the wall reached the exact half-hour, Ted pulled the microphone stand toward him as though it were a lively sweetheart and chuckled, softly, rapidly:
'Hot spots on the air! Ted Gronitz speaking from the Belluca Daily Republican offices. I've got a real hot culturureal hot spot for you this afternoon, boys and girls, but I can't get going before I whet my whistle with a bottle of Corn-Cola, the new thirst quencher and taste tickler. Yum, yum, yum, maybe that wasn't good.'