FIVE
Within a week, Celia and I had established our own little routine. Every night after the show was finished, she would throw on an evening gown (usually something that, in other
circles, would’ve qualified as lingerie) and head out on the town for a night of debauchery and excitement. Meanwhile, I would eat a late dinner with Aunt Peg, listen to the radio, do some sewing, go to a movie, or go to sleep—all the while wishing I were doing something more exciting.
Then at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night I’d feel the bump on my shoulder, and the familiar command to “scoot.” I’d scoot, and Celia would collapse onto the bed, devouring all my space, pillows, and sheets. Sometimes she would conk right out, but other nights she’d stay up chatting boozily until she dropped off in midsentence. Sometimes I would wake up and find that she was holding my hand in her sleep.
In the mornings, we would linger in bed, and she would tell me about the men she’d been with. There were the men who took her up to Harlem for dancing. The men who took her out to the midnight movies. The men who had gotten her to the front of the line to see Gene Krupa at the Paramount. The men who had introduced her to Maurice Chevalier. The men who paid for her meals of lobster thermidor and baked Alaska. (There was nothing Celia would not do— nothing she had not done—for the sake of lobster thermidor and baked Alaska.) She spoke about these men as if they were meaningless to her, but only because they were meaningless to her. Once they paid the bill, she often had a tough time remembering their names. She used them much the same way she used my hand lotions and my stockings—freely and carelessly.
“A girl must create her own opportunities,” she used to say.
As for her background, I soon learned her story:
Born in the Bronx, Celia had been christened Maria Theresa Beneventi. While you’d never guess it from the name, she was Italian. Or at least her father was Italian. From him, she’d inherited the glossy black hair and those sublime dark eyes. From her Polish mother, she’d inherited the pale skin and the height.
She had exactly one year of high school education. She left school at age fourteen, after having a scandalous affair with a friend’s father. (“Affair” may not be the accurate word to describe what transpires sexually between a forty-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl, but that’s the word Celia used.) Her “affair” had gotten her thrown out of her home, and had also gotten her pregnant. This situation, her gentleman suitor had graciously “took care of” by paying for an abortion. After her abortion, her paramour had no wish to further engage with her, so he returned his devotions to his wife and family, leaving Maria Theresa Beneventi all on her own, to make do in the world as best she could.
She worked in an industrial bakery for a while, where the owner gave her a job and offered her a place to stay in exchange for frequent “J.O.’s”—a term that I’d never heard before, but which Celia helpfully explained to me were “jerk offs.” (This is the image that I think of, Angela, whenever I hear people talk about how the past was a more innocent time. I think of fourteen-year-old Maria Theresa Beneventi, fresh off her first abortion, with no roof over her head, masturbating the owner of an industrial bakery so that she could keep her job and have somewhere safe to sleep. Yes, folks—those were the days.)
Soon young Maria Theresa discovered she could earn more money as a dime-a-dance girl than by baking dinner rolls for a pervert. She changed her name to Celia Ray, moved in with a few other dancers, and began her career—which consisted of putting forth her gorgeousness into the world, for the sake of personal advancement. She started working as a taxi dancer at the Honeymoon Lane Danceland on Seventh Avenue, where she let men grope her, perspire on her, and cry with loneliness in her arms for fifty dollars a week, plus “presents” on the side.
She tried for the Miss New York beauty pageant when she was sixteen, but lost to a girl who played the vibraphone onstage in a bathing suit. She also worked as a photographer’s model—selling everything from dog food to antifungal creams. And she’d been an
artist’s model—selling her naked body for hours at a time to art schools and painters. While still a teenager, she wedded a saxophone player whom she’d met while briefly working as a hatcheck girl at the Russian Tea Room. Marriages to saxophone players never do work out, though, and Celia’s was no exception; she was divorced before you knew it.
Right after her divorce, she and a girlfriend moved to California with the intention of becoming movie stars. She managed to get herself some screen tests, but never landed a speaking part. (“I got twenty-five dollars a day once to play a dead girl in a murder picture,” she said proudly—naming a movie I had never heard of.) Celia left Los Angeles a few years later, having realized that “there were four girls on every corner out there with better figures than me, and no Bronx accent.”
When she came back home from Hollywood, Celia got a job at the Stork Club as a showgirl. There, she met Gladys, Peg’s dance captain, who recruited her for the Lily Playhouse. By 1940, when I arrived, Celia had been working for my Aunt Peg for almost two years—the longest period of stability in her life. The Lily was not a glamorous venue. It was certainly no Stork Club. But the way Celia saw it, the job was easy, her pay was regular, and the owner was a woman, which meant she didn’t have to spend her workdays dodging “some greasy boss with Roman hands and Russian fingers.” Plus, her job duties were over by ten o’clock. This meant that once she was done dancing on the Lily stage, she could go out on the town and dance until dawn—often at the Stork Club, but now it was for fun.
How all that life experience adds up to someone who was claiming to be only nineteen years old, you tell me.
—
To my joy and surprise, Celia and I became friends.
To a certain extent, of course, Celia liked me because I was her handmaiden. Even at the time, I knew that she regarded me as her handmaiden, but that was all right with me. (If you know anything about the friendships of young girls, you will know that there is always one person playing the part of the handmaiden, anyhow.) Celia demanded a certain level of devoted service—expecting me to rub her calves for her when they were sore, or to give her hair a rousing
brushing. Or she’d say, “Oh, Vivvie, I’m all out of ciggies again!”— knowing full well that I would run out and buy her another pack. (“That’s so bliss of you, Vivvie,” she’d say, as she pocketed the cigarettes, and didn’t pay me back.)
And yes, she was vain—so vain that it made my own vanities look amateurish by comparison. Truly, I’ve never seen anyone who could get more deeply lost in a mirror than Celia Ray. She could stand for ages in the glory of her own reflection, nearly deranged by her own beauty. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I swear to you that she once spent two hours looking at herself in the mirror while debating whether she should be massaging her neck cream upward or downward in order to prevent the appearance of a double chin.
But she had a childlike sweetness about her, too. In the mornings, Celia was especially dear. When she would wake up in my bed, hungover and tired, she was just a simple kid who wanted to snuggle and gossip. She would tell me of her dreams in life—her big, unfocused dreams. Her aspirations never made sense to me because they didn’t have any plans behind them. Her mind skipped straight to fame and riches, with no apparent map for how to get there—other than to keep looking like this, and to assume that the world would eventually reward her for it.
It wasn’t much of a plan—although, to be fair, it was more of a plan than I had for my own life.
—
Iwas happy.
I guess you could say that I had become the costume director of the Lily Playhouse—but only because nobody stopped me from calling myself that, and also because nobody else wanted the job.
Truth to tell, there was plenty of work for me. The showgirls and dancers were always in need of new costumes, and it wasn’t as if they could just pluck outfits out of the Lily Playhouse costume closet (a distressingly damp and spider-infested place, filled with ensembles older and more crusty than the building itself). The girls were always broke, too, so I learned clever ways to improvise. I learned how to shop
for cheap materials in the garment center, or (even cheaper) way down on Orchard Street. Better yet, I figured out how to hunt for remnants at the used clothing shops on Ninth Avenue and make costumes out of those. It turned out I was exceptionally good at taking tatty old garments and turning them into something fabulous.
My favorite used clothing shop was a place called Lowtsky’s Used Emporium and Notions, on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Fortythird Street. The Lowtsky family were Eastern European Jews, who’d paused in France for a few years to work in the lace industry before emigrating to America. Upon arrival in the United States, they’d settled on the Lower East Side, where they sold rags out of a pushcart. But then they moved up to Hell’s Kitchen to become costumers and purveyors of used clothing. Now they owned this entire three-story building in midtown, and the place was filled with treasures. Not only did they deal in used costumes from the theater, dance, and opera worlds, but they also sold old wedding gowns and occasionally a really spectacular couture dress, picked up from some Upper East Side estate sale.
I couldn’t stay away from the place.
I once bought the most vividly violet-colored Edwardian dress for Celia at Lowtsky’s. It was the homeliest looking rag you ever saw, and Celia recoiled when I first showed it to her. But when I pulled off the sleeves, cut a deep V in the back, lowered the neckline, and belted it with a thick, black satin sash, I transformed this ancient beast of a dress into an evening gown that made my friend look like a millionaire’s mistress. Every woman in the room would gasp with envy when Celia walked in wearing that gown—and all that for only two dollars!
When the other girls saw what I could make for Celia, they all wanted me to create special dresses for them, as well. And so, just as at boarding school, I was soon given a portal to popularity through the auspices of my trusty old Singer 201. The girls at the Lily were always handing me bits of things that needed to be mended—dresses without zippers, or zippers without dresses—and asking me if I could do something to fix it. (I remember Gladys once saying to me, “I need a whole new rig, Vivvie! I look like somebody’s uncle!”)
Maybe it sounds as if I was playing the role of the tragic stepsister in a fairy tale here—constantly working and spinning, while the more