She almost went crazy the weeks she had to wait for Tony to finish out his contract. Then one day in May, when she tapped on his bedroom door he showed her two hundred dollars in bills he’d saved up and said, “Today we get married… Tomorrow we sail for La ’Avana. We can make very much money there. You will dance and I will sing and play the guitar.” He made the gesture of playing the guitar with the thinpointed fingers of one of his small hands. Her heart started beating hard. She ran downstairs. Frank had already gone out. She scribbled a note to Agnes on the piece of cardboard that had come back from the laundry in one of Frank’s boiled shirts:
AGNES DARLING:
Don’t be mad. Tony and I got married today and we’re going to Havana, Cuba, to live. Tell Father if he comes around. I’ll write lots. Love to Frank.
Your grateful daughter,
MARGERY
Then she threw her clothes into an English pigskin suitcase of Frank’s that he’d just got back from the hockshop and ran down the stairs three at a time. Tony was waiting for her on the stoop, pale and trembling with his guitarcase and his suitcase beside him. “I do not care for the money. Let’s take a taxi,” he said.
In the taxi she grabbed his hand, it was icy cold. At City Hall he was so fussed he forgot all his English and she had to do everything. They borrowed a ring from the justice of the peace. It was over in a minute, and they were back in the taxi again going uptown to a hotel. Margie never could remember afterwards what hotel it was, only that they’d looked so fussed that the clerk wouldn’t believe they were married until she showed him the marriagelicense, a big sheet of paper all bordered with forgetmenots. When they got up to the room they kissed each other in a hurry and washed up to go out to a show. First they went to Shanley’s to dinner. Tony ordered expensive champagne and they both got to giggling on it.
He kept telling her what a rich city La ’Avana was and how the artists were really appreciated there and rich men would pay him fifty, one hundred dollars a night to play at their parties, “And with you, darling Margo, it will be two three six time that much… And we shall rent a fine house in the Vedado, very exclusive section, and servants very cheap there, and you will be like a queen. You will see I have many friends there, many rich men like me very much.” Margie sat back in her chair, looking at the restaurant and the welldressed ladies and gentlemen and the waiters so deferential and the silver dishes everything came in and at Tony’s long eyelashes brushing his pink cheek as he talked about how warm it was and the cool breeze off the sea, and the palms and the roses, and parrots and singing birds in cages, and how everybody spent money in La ’Avana. It seemed the only happy day she’d ever had in her life.
When they took the boat the next day, Tony only had enough money to buy secondclass passages. They went over to Brooklyn on the el to save taxifare. Margie had to carry both bags up the steps because Tony said he had a headache and was afraid of dropping his guitarcase.
Newsreel LIV
there was nothing significant about the morning’s trading. The first hour consisted of general buying and selling to even up accounts, but soon after eleven o’clock prices did less fluctuating and gradually firmed
TIMES SQUARE PATRONS LEFT HALF SHAVED
Will Let Crop Rot In Producers’ Hands Unless Prices Drop
RUSSIAN BARONESS SUICIDE AT MIAMI
… the kind of a girl that men forget
Just a toy to enjoy for a while
Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous Under His Policies
HUNT JERSEY WOODS FOR ROVING LEOPARD
PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING
It had to be done and I did it, says Miss Ederle
FORTY-TWO INDICTED IN FLORIDA DEALS
Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall Berating Couple Near
Murder Scene, New Witness Says
several hundred tents and other light shelters put up by campers on a hill south of Front Street, which overlooks Hempstead Harbor, were laid in rows before the tornado as grass falls before a scythe
When they play Here comes the bride
You’ll stand outside
3000 AMERICANS FOUND PENNILESS IN PARIS
I am a poor girl
My fortune’s been sad
I always was courted
By the wagoner’s lad
NINE DROWNED IN UPSTATE FLOODS
SHEIK SINKING
Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several hours later he underwent
Adagio Dancer
The nineteenyearold son of a veterinary in Castellaneta in the south of Italy was shipped off to America like a lot of other unmanageable young Italians when his parents gave up trying to handle him, to sink or swim and maybe send a few lire home by international postal moneyorder. The family was through with him. But Rodolfo Guglielmi wanted to make good.
He got a job as assistant gardener in Central Park but that kind of work was the last thing he wanted to do; he wanted to make good in the brightlights; money burned his pockets.
He hung around cabarets doing odd jobs, sweeping out for the waiters, washing cars; he was lazy handsome wellbuilt slender good-tempered and vain; he was a born tangodancer.
Lovehungry women thought he was a darling. He began to get engagements dancing the tango in ballrooms and cabarets; he teamed up with a girl named Jean Acker on a vaudeville tour and took the name of Rudolph Valentino.
Stranded on the Coast he headed for Hollywood, worked for a long time as an extra for five dollars a day; directors began to notice he photographed well.
He got his chance in The Four Horsemen
and became the gigolo of every woman’s dreams.
Valentino spent his life in the colorless glare of klieg lights, in stucco villas obstructed with bricabrac oriental rugs tigerskins, in the bridalsuites of hotels, in silk bathrobes in private cars.
He was always getting into limousines or getting out of limousines,
or patting the necks of fine horses.
Wherever he went the sirens of the motorcyclecops screeched ahead of him
flashlights flared,
the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces, waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their autographbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirablytailored dress suit; they stole his hat and pulled at his necktie; his valets removed young women from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and cabarets actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at him under their mascaraed lashes.
He wanted to make good under the glare of the milliondollar searchlights
of El Dorado:
the Sheik, the Son of the Sheik;
personal appearances.
He married his old vaudeville partner, divorced her, married the adopted daughter of a millionaire, went into lawsuits with the producers who were debasing the art of the screen, spent a million dollars on one European trip;
he wanted to make good in the brightlights.