—
The years passed.
The city continued to change. Midtown Manhattan became wilted and moldy and sinister and vile. We never went near Times Square anymore. It was a latrine.
In 1963, Walter Winchell lost his newspaper column.
Death started to pick at my community.
In 1964, Uncle Billy died in Hollywood of a sudden heart attack while dining with a starlet at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We all had to admit that this was just exactly the death Billy Buell would’ve wanted. (“He floated away on a river of champagne” was Peg’s take.)
Only ten months later, my father died. His was not such a peaceful death, I’m afraid. Driving home from the country club one afternoon, he hit black ice and crashed into a tree. He lived for a few days, but succumbed to complications after emergency spine surgery.
My father died an angry man. He was no longer a captain of industry—hadn’t been one for years. He had lost his hematite mine after the war. He got into such a ferocious battle against union activists that he drove the company into the ground—spending nearly all his fortune on legal battles against his workers. His had become a scorched-earth policy of negotiation: If I cannot control this business, then nobody can. He died never having forgiven the American government for having taken his son in the war, or the unions for having taken his business, or the modern world itself for having chipped away over the decades at every last one of his cherished, narrow, old-fashioned beliefs.
We all drove up to Clinton for the funeraclass="underline" me, Peg, Olive, Marjorie, and Nathan. My mother was silently appalled by the spectacle of my friend Marjorie in her strange clothes with her strange child. My mother had become a deeply unhappy woman over the years, and she responded to no gestures of kindness from anyone. She didn’t want us there.
We stayed only one night, and hustled back to the city just as fast as we could.
Home was New York City now, anyway. It had been for years.
—
More time passed.
After a certain age, Angela, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.
One night in 1964, I was watching Jack Paar on television. I was only halfway paying attention, as I was working on disassembling an old Belgian wedding gown without destroying its ancient fibers in the process. Then the ads came on, and I heard a familiar female voice—gruff, tough, and sarcastic. The cigarette-roughened voice of a real old New York City broad. Before I could even register it in my mind, that voice set off a depth charge in my gut.
I looked up at the screen and caught a glimpse of a thickset, chestnut-haired woman with a great prow of a bosom, shouting in a funny Bronx accent about all her problems with floor wax. (“It’s not enough that I gotta deal with these crazy kids of mine, but now it’s sticky floors, too?!”) She could have been any middle-aged brunette, by the sight of her. But I would’ve known that voice anywhere: it was Celia Ray!
I had thought of Celia so many times over the years—with guilt, with curiosity, with anxiety. All I could ever imagine for her life were bad outcomes. In my darkest fantasies, the story was this: After being exiled from the Lily Playhouse, Celia had lived a life of doom and ruin. Perhaps she had died in the streets somewhere along the way, brutalized by the kind of man she had once so effortlessly controlled. Other times, I imagined her as an old prostitute. Sometimes I would pass by a drunken, middle-aged woman on the street who looked (there is no other word for it) trashy, and I would wonder if it was Celia. Had she dyed her hair so blond that it had turned brittle and orange? Was she that woman over there in the tottering heels, with the bare, veined legs? Was that her, with the bruised circles under the eyes? Was that her, picking through the garbage can? Was that her red lipstick on that collapsing mouth?
But I’d been wrong: Celia was fine. Better than fine—she was selling floor wax on TV! Oh, that stubborn, determined, little survivor. Still fighting her way into the spotlight.
I never saw the ad again, and I never tried to track Celia down. I didn’t want to interfere with her life, and I knew better than to assume that she and I would have anything in common anymore. We’d never really had anything in common in the first place. Scandal or no scandal, I believe that our friendship was always destined to have been momentary—a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men’s heads. That’s all it had ever been, really, and that was perfect. That’s all it had ever needed to be. I’d found deeper and richer female friendships later on in life, and I hoped that Celia had, too.
So, no, I never sought her out.
But it is impossible for me to convey the amount of delight and pride that it gave me to hear her voice blasting out of my television set that evening.
It made me want to cheer.
A quarter of a century later, folks, and Celia Ray was still in show business!
TWENTY-NINE
In the late summer of 1965, my Aunt Peg received a curious letter in the mail.
It was from the commissioner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The letter explained that the Navy Yard would soon be closing down forever. The city was transforming, and the Navy had decided that it was no longer feasible to maintain a shipbuilding industry in such an expensive urban area. Before it closed, however, the Yard would host a ceremonial reunion—throwing open the gates once more, in celebration of all the Brooklyn workers who had labored there so heroically during World War II. Since it was the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, this kind of celebration seemed particularly appropriate.
The commissioner’s office had gone through their files and found Peg’s name on some old paperwork, listing her as having been an “independent entertainment contractor.” They’d managed to track her down through city tax records and now they were wondering whether Mrs. Buell might consider producing a small commemorative show on the day of the Navy Yard reunion, to celebrate the accomplishments of the wartime laborers? They were looking for something of a nostalgia piece—just twenty minutes or so of old-time singing and dancing, in the style of the war days.
Now, Peg would have enjoyed nothing more than to take on this job. The only problem was, she was no longer in good health. That big, tall body of hers was starting to break down. She was suffering from emphysema—not surprising after her lifetime of chain-smoking—and she also had arthritis, and her eyes were starting to go. As she explained it: “The doctor says that there’s nothing much wrong with me, kiddo, but there’s nothing much right with me, either.”
She had retired from her job at the high school a few years earlier, due to her failing health, and she didn’t get around easily anymore. Marjorie and Nathan and I had dinner with Peg and Olive a few nights a week, but that was about all Peg could handle in terms of excitement. Most evenings, she would just stretch across the couch with her eyes closed, trying to catch her breath, while Olive read to her from the sports pages. So, no, unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be possible for Peg to produce a commemorative show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
But I could do it.
—
It turned out to be easier than I thought—and far more fun.
I’d helped to create so many hundreds of skits back in the day, and I guess I never lost the knack for it. I hired some of the drama students from Olive’s high school as my actors and dancers. Susan (my friend with the passion for modern dance) said she would handle the choreography, though it didn’t need to be anything complex. I borrowed the organist from the church down the street, and worked with him on writing some elementary, corny songs. And of course, I created the costumes, which were simple enough: just a bunch of dungarees and overalls for both the boys and the girls. I threw some red kerchiefs around the girls’ heads and the same red kerchiefs around the boys’ necks, and voilà—now they were industrial workers from the 1940s.