—
It was now a week before our opening and everyone was sick. We all had the same cold, and half the girls in the chorus line had pink eye from sharing the same infected cake of mascara. (The other half had crabs, from sharing their costume bottoms, which I had told them a hundred times not to do.) Peg wanted to give the performers a day off to rest up and heal, but Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He still felt that the first ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.
“You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate the first one.”
“They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.
And they were tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.
“Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”
He made them do the opening number three more times that day—and each time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.
The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere. An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.
One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch, and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.
“Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.
“Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”
“What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del Rio.”
“That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What? No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.
—
Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she would take frequent nips. Careless as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.
Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught Anthony and me necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal, and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.
“Goddamn it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for ten minutes to keep your lips off my leading man?”
(The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)
And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.
Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read City of Girls. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but ADMISSION), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one of my stupid girlie shows.”
Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”
Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”
“Our audience can’t afford that, either.”
“Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”
“We don’t serve the carriage trade,” Olive said. “We serve working people, or do I have to remind you?”
“Well maybe the working people of this neighborhood would like to see a quality show, Olive, for once in their lives. Maybe they don’t like being treated like they are poor and tasteless. Maybe they think it would be worth it to pay a bit extra to see something good. Have you considered that?”
The two of them had been bickering about this for days, but it all came to a head when Olive burst in on a rehearsal one afternoon—interrupting Peg while she was talking to a dancer about some confusion over blocking—and announced, “I’ve just been to the printers. It’s going to cost two hundred and fifty dollars to print the five thousand new tickets you want, and I refuse to pay it.”
Peg spun on her heel and shouted: “Goddamn it, Olive—how much money do I have to pay you to stop talking about fucking money?”
The whole theater fell silent. Everybody iced over, right where they stood.
Maybe you remember, Angela, what a powerful impact the word “fuck” used to have in our society—back before everybody and their children started saying it ten times a day before breakfast. Indeed, it was once a very potent word. To hear it coming out of a respectable woman’s mouth? This was never done. Not even Celia used that word. Billy didn’t even use that word. (I used it, of course, but only in the privacy of Anthony’s brother’s bed, and only because Anthony made me say it before he would have sex with me—and I still blushed whenever I spoke it.)
But to hear it shouted?
I had never heard it shouted.
It did cross my mind for a moment to wonder where my nice old Aunt Peg had ever learned such a word—although I guess if you’ve taken care of wounded soldiers on the front lines of trench warfare, you’ve probably heard everything.
Olive stood there with the invoice in her hand. She had a distinctly slapped look about her, and it was something terrible to behold in one who was always so commanding. She put her other hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears.
In the next moment, Peg’s face went sodden with remorse.
“Olive, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m an ass.”
She stepped toward her secretary, but Olive shook her head and skittered away backstage. Peg ran after her. The rest of us all looked around at each other in shock. The air itself felt dead and hard.
It was Edna who recovered first, perhaps not surprisingly.
“My suggestion, Billy,” she said in a steady voice, “is that you ask the company to start the dance number again from the top. I believe Ruby knows where to stand now, don’t you, my dear?”
The little dancer nodded quietly.
“From the top?” asked Billy, a bit uncertainly. He looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him before.
“That’s correct,” Edna said, with her usual polish. “From the top. And Billy, if you could please remind the cast to keep their attention on their roles and the job at hand, that would be ideal. Let us be mindful to keep the tone light, as well. I know you are all tired, but we can do this. As you are discovering, my friends—making comedy can be hard.”