It lasted all that winter, and in July Janis went away to summer stock. We picked up again in the fall, but there was something different about it now. I had stopped saying things like, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”
Janis had been promised tests by both Fox and the company that finally hired her. She was very tense that fall and one night in my apartment she began to cry. She couldn’t stop. Finally I had to walk with her to St. Vincent’s, where they gave her a sedative.
Janis was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.
We tried to write after she left for California but neither of us was a good correspondent.
I saw her first picture. She had a bit part in a Cary Grant movie. She was only on the screen twice. Once for about a minute. And once for about half that long. I read somewhere that they got over fifteen hundred letters about her from those two short scenes.
After that, though, I didn’t go to see her pictures any more. I couldn’t take it.
I threw the cigarette away and walked slowly to Sixth Avenue. I stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought a paper. Then I went into the drugstore, sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I looked through the paper. I wanted to see if there was anything more about the accident at the gay Fifth Avenue party. There wasn’t.
And it was too early for there to be anything about the big agent from Hollywood who had handled so many big people.
I turned the pages of the paper.
I was not really reading, just turning the pages, when the name jumped out at me.
I’d just been thinking about her and it seemed funny to see her name.
It was in the amusement section. A big, half-page ad for the picture that was opening that day at the Music Hall. “Two a Day,” a musical extravaganza (it said) in new, glorious Technicolor. With that pretty young man who is always in Technicolor musicals, an ex-Broadway comedian, and Janis Whitney.
I had a hunch. Perhaps I’d find Janis on a busman’s holiday.
I finished the coffee and began walking the two blocks up Sixth Avenue to the theatre.
The picture was on when I came in.
I stood in the back for a minute watching the screen and letting my eyes get used to the darkness.
The scene was a vaudeville theatre somewhere. There was a broken down backdrop and in front of it, Janis and the chubby young man, both dressed in high hats and carrying canes, were dancing and singing a song.
Have you noticed that in Technicolor musicals everybody looks alike? I don’t know what it is, but all the character seems to disappear from their faces.
Even Janis Whitney.
She looked beautiful. That is, she looked like a wig-maker’s dummy with a beautiful painted face. She was wearing black tights and black sheer stockings. Her legs were obviously beautifully formed. But they were without any sex appeal.
And in this case the Technicolor cameras were certainly lying. In the flesh Janis Whitney was, if nothing else, a very sexy-looking girl.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark now.
I stopped watching the picture and began examining the last few rows of seats.
I walked slowly around the back of the theatre, taking it easy and scanning the last dozen rows of seats carefully all the way around.
There was no sign of Janis.
I got back to my starting point, and paused for a minute to watch the picture.
The number on stage was over and Janis and the young man were in their dressing room afterward. He was highly excited. It seemed that a big producer had been out front. And had caught the act. And apparently for masochistic reasons of his own wanted to bring it to New York.
Janis seemed downcast by this news.
The boy was sparkling with teeth and excitement. But Janis stood with her Technicolor eyelids drooping to indicate sorrow. Or nervousness. Or something.
Then finally, with tremendous effort, she spoke.
“You don’t understand, honey,” she said. And you could see something was killing her. Either this news or her feet. “You don’t understand, honey. He doesn’t want the act. He just wants me.”
Then I wondered how they did it, how they could make a girl like Janis seem so utterly devoid of talent.
I went back into the lobby and up the stairs to the loge seats, where smoking was permitted. Again, no Janis.
As I said, it was just a hunch-and a lousy one.
When I stepped out of the warm theatre onto Sixth Avenue the cold wind nearly took my breath away.
I felt aimless and useless. I didn’t know what to do about anything.
I began to walk down Sixth Avenue looking at the crummy stores and the twenty-five-cents-a-drink saloons and the broken-down movie theatres. I stopped in front of one of the movie theatres.
The marquee was plastered with gaudy colored lithographs. They were showing a picture called “Passion Island” a documentary-type film about some South Sea Island. First time on any screen! Primitive Love Rites and Dances! Adults Only! The second feature was a little lulu called “Lure of the City,” which, according to the bills, fearlessly exposed the big city’s vicious love racket. Whatever that might be.
“Lure of the City,” to judge from the stills outside, was a ten-year-old third-rate horror.
There was a picture of a fierce-looking man pointing a gun at a girl who was pressed back against a wall with a terrified expression on her face. The hair was real long and skirts were real short. It looked so silly and out of date that it took me a minute or two to recognize the girl.
I gave the cashier thirty-five cents. Who says the picture business is off? I personally was creating a one-man boom in the industry.
The promise of primitive love rites and an expose of the big city’s vicious love racket had not attracted many customers. The theatre was about a quarter full. Even in the semidarkness you could see that everything was dirty and needed painting.
“Lure of the City” had just begun, the usherette who was perspiring, chewing gum, and scratching herself inside her uniform, told me.
I stood in the back, watching it for a while.
Janis Whitney played a little girl from the country who had come to the city and gone wrong. She had become involved with a group of unshaven gangsters who were going to knock over a bank. The youngest and least whiskery of the gangsters turned out to be an FBI man who was working to break up the vicious mob. There was no mention of a love racket, and I felt somewhat cheated.
In many ways it was a splendid picture.
By that I mean it was a terrible picture. But terrible in a far different way than “Two a Day.”
“Two a Day” was big, slick, expensive, machine-made, so completely sterile from the very beginning that even as earthy a thing as Janis Whitney’s legs had no appeal.
“Lure of the City” must have been shot in about two weeks. A lot of it didn’t even seem to be very well rehearsed. It was slapped together by someone who thought if he could make a movie fast enough and cheap enough he could probably make a few dollars.
The story was absurd. The dialogue was very, very bad. But at least the whole thing wasn’t sterile.
The head gangster was played by a fairly well-known Broadway actor. He was nobody in the movies. But fairly well known in New York. And he was giving a great performance. All by himself. His performance had nothing to do with the rest of the picture at all. But he was acting for his own amusement and having a fine time, playing the head gangster right into the ground.
Finally the FBI man, who, on the other hand, was terrible in the plain old-fashioned sense, told Janis who he really was and gave her her big chance to go straight and get away from her miserable existence. All she had to do was help him. She agreed. Then when everything was all set and the vicious love racket was about to be busted wide open, the boss gangster found out about Janis and the FBI man.
It was really great.
Then, I looked away from the picture for a minute and saw her.