She did a little of this, a little of that. Once in a while she worked in this candy shop Louis owned during the day, but not anything you could count on if you were trying to find her.
But mostly you’d see her on the streets, looking for fun. She went to all the bars on the Bowery, even the bars where the girls weren’t allowed. My mother used to say she had no sense of propriety, but I’ve always thought propriety’s for people who need rules. And Mazie had been making her own rules for too long.
Lots of times she’d come home right when my father was leaving for work in the morning. I should explain that my other uncle, my uncle Barney, had a terrible back and he’d get laid up from time to time, so eventually my father had to take on a second job, this one at a pickle factory. I didn’t get to see him that much after that, so I’d started watching him leave from the window. I wanted to see him every last possible second. Isn’t that crazy? All of us were packed together in that apartment, one bed next to another, no privacy, no quiet. Half the time you’d wake up in the morning under someone else’s covers. And still the minute he left I was missing him. But he was a good man, of course I missed him. He liked his pipes, he had a nice set, and I would watch him pack the tobacco in there. He’d let me pack it too, and then my fingers would smell like tobacco. I loved that smell. I smoked a pipe well into my eighties. I thought about him every time I smoked. He was a workingman — life was work to him — but he had his small joys.
Anyway, he’d be walking down the steps when Mazie’d be walking up hers. She’d wave, he’d nod. Now she was an adult, so all the grown men were scared of her too. No men in the neighborhood would be caught dead talking to her while she roamed the streets like she did. The mothers didn’t like her, the fathers didn’t want to talk to her. But once upon a time she used to be a little girl they all loved. It was not hypocrisy, but it felt something like it.
Mazie’s Diary, June 14, 1916
I sat on the front stairs before I went home. I knew what was coming. Oh boy did I know. I could be standing across the East River and know when that woman opens her mouth. So I waited for a minute. I wanted to see the daylight hit the stairs. I like watching it spread across the street and then the sidewalk. I smoked. I closed my eyes. I let the sun hit me. The sun’s some kind of gift. Another day we’re all alive. I wish she could understand. I’m just happy to be alive.
She was asleep on the couch when I came in, tucked into a quilt. When she’s quiet, she looks like a girl again, with that pudge around her chin. Louis was in the kitchen like always. He had a plate of hot eggs and leftover steak in front of him. He was peppering the steak. He just gave me a nod. He wants nothing to do with the arguing. Poor Louis. He’d give us every cent he has just to keep the peace.
I stumbled into my room. I knocked into a wall. All right I was drunk I guess. So it was my fault I woke her up. My fault, my fault. Everything’s my fault. A minute passed, then there’s Rosie in my room. Didn’t even knock! Just walked right in. Started talking about the neighbors knowing too much, worrying about them being in Louis’s business. Nobody wants anybody’s nose in anything. I couldn’t argue so I didn’t. I just shushed her for Jeanie’s sake.
But then Jeanie was up. She had slept in one of her ballerina outfits again. No one could sleep then so it was into the kitchen with all of us. Rosie got back on the couch, stuffed in her quilt. I braided Jeanie’s hair while Louis made us eggs. Jeanie told us jokes and made us laugh. Louis went to work and I did the dishes while Rosie stared at me from the couch. She looked mean.
Rosie said: One day that door won’t be open.
I told her I’d crawl through the window. I told her she’d never ever get rid of me.
Jeanie danced in circles around the room. Fast, spinning. Jeanie’s braids came out. Rosie was wishing ill on me. I wasn’t going to change a thing.
Rosie said: Enough, Jeanie.
But you can’t stop that girl from dancing.
Lydia Wallach, great-granddaughter of Rudy Wallach, manager of the Venice Theater (1916–1938)
First of all, obviously this is all secondhand information. I’m certainly fine with speaking on the record, but most of this was told to me by my mother and by my grandmother, and a lot of this information came, I believe, from my great-grandmother, whom in fact I never met, or if I did I don’t recall it. There’s a chance she held me when I was just a baby. I vaguely recall having heard that she did once from my mother.
But anyway, essentially, this is all rumor and gossip, family lore, I suppose you could call it, although I don’t know how interesting any of it is. I guess we take what we can get for family lore. And Mazie was the closest thing to a celebrity any of them knew. She was a celebrity because she was written about, and was sort of known about town as this downtown fixture, but beyond that she was a celebrity in my family because she was charismatic and generous, and led a very big life for someone who barely left a twenty-block radius.
One little thing I can tell you for a fact is that Louis Gordon bought the Venice Theater in 1915, and my great-grandfather became the manager of it the following year. For the first few years Louis’s wife, Rosie, worked the ticket booth. There were some other employees here and there, but Rosie was the one who ran the show.
George Flicker
After Louis bought the movie theater, the girls really started running around on the streets. Rosie was too busy working the ticket booth to keep an eye on them. Always Jeanie had been a good girl. But then she became a handful too, in her own way. Sometimes you’d see her dancing on the streets, hustling for change. Bella Barker sang, Jeanie danced. We all clapped and threw a penny or two at them.
And what a pair they were. Jeanie had a smile as long as Broadway. And Bella, even when she was a little girl, had these dark, heavy, sexy eyes that made her look older than she was, and of course that wise woman’s voice. She was born ready for something big. Her voice made everyone stop and listen to her.
Of course Bella was always more of a solo act. She left the neighborhood for a while when she was a teenager. She was off to Pennsylvania for a year or two, working the vaudeville circuit out there. When she came back she was married to a man named Lew, her manager, who seemed like an old man next to her. And she has a new name, a grown-up name. So she’s Belle Baker now, and that’s when she started to get famous. But Jeanie was still just playing at dancing. Nobody believed for a second she had the same hunger in her as Belle did.
Mazie’s Diary, September 12, 1916
On the way home from work who did I see but our little Jeanie twirling around on a street corner. I stood off to the side and watched her for a while in her candy-colored tutu. Our little sweetheart. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the sun. Our father loved to dance, is what I was thinking. You can’t dance on the street forever, is also what I was thinking. But I want her to anyway.
Mazie’s Diary, September 23, 1916
Tonight I met two sailors from California. San Francisco seems so far away, how can it even be real? One was tall and one was short and that’s all I can remember. Names, I don’t know. I got so many names in my head all the time.
They said New York reminded them of home, it being so close to the water. But in San Francisco the mist and the fog come off the ocean so thick you can’t see one foot in front of you, that’s what they told me.
I said they were lying, and they laughed.