“I just can’t believe you can walk away from all this!” I wailed.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of walking away from, kiddo.”
Peg was dead right, by the way, about the fact that there was “nothing to fight here.” In taking over the neighborhood, the city was exercising a civic right called “the power of condemnation”—which is every bit as sinister and inescapable as it sounds. I had myself a good sulk over it, but Peg said, “Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end. The Lily has outlasted her glory, anyway.”
“That’s not true, Peg,” corrected Olive. “The Lily never had any glory.”
Both of them were right, in their way. We had been limping along since the war ended—barely making a living out of the building. Our shows were more sparsely attended than ever and our best talent had never returned to us after the war. (For instance: Benjamin, our composer, had elected to stay in Europe, settling down in Lyon with a Frenchwoman who owned a nightclub. We loved reading his letters—he was absolutely thriving as an impresario and bandleader—but we sure did miss his music.) What’s more, our neighborhood audience had outgrown us. People were more sophisticated now—even in Hell’s Kitchen. The war had blown the world wide open and filled the air with new ideas and tastes. Our shows had seemed dated even back when I first came to the city, but now they were like something out of the Pleistocene. Nobody wanted to watch cornball, vaudevillelike song-and-dance numbers anymore.
So, yes: whatever slight glory our theater had ever possessed, it was long gone by 1950.
Still, it was painful for me.
I only wish I loved bus terminals as much as I’d loved the Lily Playhouse.
—
When the day came for the actual demolition, Peg insisted on being present for it. (“You can’t be afraid of these things, Vivian,” she said. “You have to see it through.”) So I stood alongside Peg and Olive on that fateful day, watching as the Lily came down. I was not nearly as stoic as they were. To see a wrecking ball take aim at your home and history—at the place that really birthed you—well, that takes a degree of spinal fortitude that I did not yet possess. I couldn’t help but tear up.
The worst part was not when the façade of the building came crashing down, but when the interior lobby wall was demolished. Suddenly you could see the old stage as it was never meant to be seen—naked and exposed under the cruel, unsentimental winter sun. All its shabbiness was dragged into the light for everyone to witness.
Peg had the strength to bear it, though. She didn’t even flinch. She was made of awfully stern stuff, that woman. When the wrecking ball had done all the damage it could do for the day, she smiled at me and said, “I’ll tell you something, Vivian. I have no regrets. When I was a young girl, I honestly believed that a life spent in the theater would be nothing but fun. And God help me, kiddo—it was.”
—
Using the money from the settlement with the city, Peg and Olive bought a nice little apartment on Sutton Place. Peg even had enough money left over after the purchase of the apartment to give a sort of retirement subsidy to Mr. Herbert, who moved down to Virginia to live with his daughter.
Peg and Olive liked their new life. Olive got a job at a local high school working as the principal’s secretary—a position she was born to hold. Peg was hired at the same school to help run their theater department. The women didn’t seem unhappy about the changes. Their new apartment building (brand new, I should say) even had an elevator, which was easier for them, as they were getting older. They also had a doorman with whom Peg could gossip about baseball. (“The only doormen I ever had before were the bums sleeping under the Lily’s proscenium!” she joked.)
Troupers that they were, the two women adapted. They certainly didn’t complain. Still, there is poignancy for me in the fact that the Lily Playhouse was destroyed in 1950—the same year that Peg and Olive purchased their first television set for their modern new apartment. Clearly, the golden age of theater was now over. But Peg had seen that development coming, too.
“Television will run us all out of town in the end,” she’d predicted the first time she ever saw one in action.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because even I like it better than theater” was her honest response.
—
As for me, with the death of the Lily Playhouse I no longer had a home or a job—or for that matter, a family with whom to share my daily life. I couldn’t exactly move in with Peg and Olive. Not at my age. It would have been embarrassing. I needed to create my own life. But I was a twenty-nine-year-old woman now—unmarried, no college education—so what could that life be?
I wasn’t too worried about how I would support myself. I had a decent amount of money saved and I knew how to work. By that point, I’d learned that as long as I had my sewing machine, my nine-inch shears, a tape measure around my neck, and a pincushion at my wrist, I could always make a living somehow. But the question was: what sort of existence would I now lead?
In the end, I was saved by Marjorie Lowtsky.
—
By 1950, Marjorie Lowtsky and I had become best friends.
It was an unlikely match, but she had never stopped looking out for me—in terms of salvaging treasures from the bottomless Lowtsky’s bins—and I, in turn, had delighted in watching this kid grow up into a charismatic and fascinating young woman. There was something quite special about her. Of course, Marjorie had always been special, but after the war years, she blossomed into an atomically energetic creative force. She still dressed wildly—looking like a Mexican bandito one day, and a Japanese geisha the next—but she had come into her own, as a person. She’d gone to art school at Parsons while still living at home with her parents and running the family business—while at the same time making money on the side as a sketch artist. She’d worked for years at Bonwit Teller, drawing romantic fashion illustrations for their newspaper ads. She also did diagrams for medical journals, and once—quite memorably—was hired by a travel company to illustrate a guidebook to Baltimore with the tragic title: So You’re Coming to Baltimore! So really, Marjorie could do anything and she was always on the hustle.
Marjorie had grown into a young woman who was not only creative, eccentric, and hardworking, but also bold and astute. And when the city announced that it was going to knock down our neighborhood, and Marjorie’s parents decided to take the buyout and retire to Queens, suddenly dear Marjorie Lowtsky was in the same position I was in—out of a home and out of work. Instead of crying about it, Marjorie came to me with a simple and well-thought-out proposal. She suggested that we join forces in the world, by living together and working together.
Her plan—and I must give her every bit of credit for it—was: wedding gowns.
—
Her exact proposal was this: “Everyone is getting married, Vivian, and we have to do something about it.”
She had taken me out to lunch at the Automat to talk about her idea. It was the summer of 1950, the Port Authority Bus Terminal was inevitable, and our whole little world was about to come tumbling down. But Marjorie (dressed today like a Peruvian peasant, wearing about five different kinds of embroidered vests and skirts at the same time) was shining with purpose and excitement.
“What do you want me to do about everyone getting married?” I asked. “Stop them?”