“I’ll come back, then. I’ll head back to the club, take a shower, have a rest, come back later, and we’ll get started. Hey, thanks for giving my apartment away, I forgot to mention! Your niece and her girlfriend have stolen my bed and thrown their underwear all over my precious place that I never once used. It smells like a bomb went off in a perfume factory in there.”
“I’m sorry,” I began, but both of them waved at me dismissively, cutting me off. It obviously didn’t matter in the least. I’m not sure I mattered in the least, when Peg and Billy were so focused on each other. I was lucky I got to be sitting there at all. It occurred to me that I should just keep my mouth shut so I would get to stay.
“What’s her husband like, by the way?” Billy asked Peg.
“Edna’s husband? Apart from being stupid and talentless, he has no faults. I will say he’s alarmingly good-looking.”
“That, I knew. I’ve seen him act, if you can call it acting. I saw him in Gates of Noon. He’s got the vacant eyes of a milk cow, but he looked like a million bucks in his aviator scarf. What’s he like as a person? Is he faithful to her?”
“I’ve never heard otherwise.”
“Well, that’s a thing, isn’t it?” said Billy.
Peg smiled. “Yes, it’s a real marvel, isn’t it, Billy? Imagine! Fidelity! But yes, that’s a thing. So she could do worse, I suppose.”
“And probably will someday,” added Billy.
“She thinks he’s a great actor, is the problem.”
“He has offered the world no evidence of this fact. Bottom line—do we have to put him in the show?”
Peg smiled, ruefully this time. “It’s slightly disconcerting to hear you use the word ‘we.’”
“Why is that? I’m simply crazy about that word.” He grinned.
“Until the moment you stop being crazy about it, and you disappear,” she said. “Are you really part of this venture now, Billy? Or will you be on the next train back to Los Angeles as soon as you grow bored?”
“If you’ll have me, I’ll be part of it. I’ll be good. I’ll behave as if I’m on parole.”
“You should be on parole. And yes, we do have to put Arthur Watson in the play. You’ll figure out a way to use him. He’s a handsome man who isn’t very bright, so have him play the role of a handsome man who isn’t very bright. You’re the one who taught me that rule, Billy—that we must work with what we have. What did you always tell me, when we were on the road? You’d say, ‘If all we’ve got is a fat lady and a stepladder, I’ll write a play called The Fat Lady and the Stepladder.’”
“I can’t believe you still remember that!” said Billy. “And The Fat Lady and the Stepladder is not such a bad title for a play, if I do say so myself.”
“You do say so yourself. You always do.”
Billy reached over and laid his hand on top of hers. She let him do
it.
“Pegsy,” he said, and that one word—the way he said it—seemed to contain decades of love.
“William,” she said, and that one word—the way she said it—also seemed to contain decades of love. But also decades of exasperation.
“Olive’s not too upset that I’m here?” he asked.
She took back her hand.
“Do us a favor, Billy? Don’t pretend to care. I love you, but I hate it when you pretend to care.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I care a lot more than people think I care.”
TWELVE
Within a week of his arrival, Billy Buell had written a script for
City of Girls.
A week is an awfully short time in which to write a script, or so I’ve been told, but Billy worked nonstop on it, sitting at our kitchen table in a cloud of pipe smoke, clattering away steadily at his typewriter till the thing was done. Say what you want about Billy Buell, but the man knew how to bang out words. Moreover, he didn’t seem to suffer at all during his creative burst—no crises of confidence, no tearing at the hair. He hardly paused to think, or so it appeared. He just sat there in his fine doeskin trousers, and his bright white cashmere sweater, and his spotless ecru Maxwell’s of London custommade shoes, calmly typing away as though taking dictation from some invisible and divine source.
“He’s monstrously talented, you know,” Peg said to me, as we sat in the living room one afternoon, making sketches for costumes and listening to Billy’s typing in the kitchen. “He’s the kind of man who makes everything look easy. Hell, he even makes it look easy to make things easy. He produces ideas in torrents. The problem is, you can usually only get Billy to work when his Rolls-Royce needs a new engine, or when he gets back from vacationing in Italy and notices that his bank account is down a few bucks. Monstrously talented, but also monstrously inclined toward laziness. That’s what you get for coming from the lolling-about class, I suppose.”
“So why is he working so hard now?” I asked.
“I’m not able to say,” said Peg. “Could be because he loves Edna. Could be because he loves me. Could be because he needs something from me and we just don’t know what it is yet. Could be because he’s gotten bored out there in California, or even lonely. I’m not going to examine his motives too fiercely. I’m glad he’s doing the job, in any case. But the important thing is not to count on him for anything in the
future. By future, I mean ‘tomorrow’ or ‘in the next hour’—because you never know when he’s going to lose interest and vanish. Billy doesn’t like it when you count on him. If I ever want privacy from Billy, I’ll just tell him that I desperately need him for something, and then he’ll run straight out the door and I won’t see him for another four years.”
—
The script was intact on the day Billy typed the last word. I don’t recall him editing any of it. And his script didn’t just have dialogue
and stage directions; it also included lyrics of the songs that Billy wanted Benjamin to write.
And it was a good script—or at least I thought so, based on my limited experience. But even I could understand that Billy’s writing was bright and funny, fast-paced and upbeat. I could see why 20th Century Fox kept him on payroll, and why Louella Parsons had once written in her column: “Everything Billy Buell touches is box office! Even in Europe!”
Billy’s version of City of Girls was still the tale of one Mrs. Elenora Alabaster—a wealthy widow who loses all her money in the crash of 1929 and transforms her mansion into a casino and bordello in order to keep herself afloat.
But Billy added some interesting new characters, as well. Now the play also included Mrs. Alabaster’s fantastically snobbish daughter, Victoria (who would sing a comic song at the beginning of the show called “Mummy Is a Rumrunner”). There was also a gold-digging, penniless aristocrat of a cousin from England, played by Arthur Watson, who is trying to win Victoria’s hand in marriage, in order to lay claim to the family mansion. (“You can’t have Arthur Watson playing an American police officer,” Billy explained to Peg. “Nobody would believe it. He has to be a British dolt. He’ll like this role better, anyway—he gets to wear finer suits and he can pretend to be important.”)
The romantic male lead would be a scrappy young kid from the wrong side of the tracks named Lucky Bobby, who used to fix Mrs. Alabaster’s cars but who now helps her set up an illegal casino in her home—the result being that they both get stinking rich. The romantic
female lead was a dazzling showgirl named Daisy. Daisy has a body that won’t quit, but her simple dream is to get married and have a dozen children. (“Let Me Knit Your Booties, Baby,” would be her signature song—performed in the manner of a striptease.) That role, of course, would be played by Celia Ray.
At the end of the play, Daisy the showgirl ends up with Lucky Bobby, and the two of them head off to Yonkers to have a dozen babies together. The snobbish daughter falls in love with the toughest gangster in town, learns how to shoot a machine gun, and goes on a bank-robbing spree in order to finance her expensive tastes. (Her big number is “I’m Down to My Last Pint of Diamonds.”) The shady cousin from England is banished back to his shores without inheriting the mansion. And Mrs. Alabaster falls in love with the mayor of the city—a real law-and-order type, who has been trying and failing to shut down her speakeasy throughout the entire production. The two of them get married, and the mayor resigns his political post in order to become her bartender. (Their final duet, which would turn into the big closing number for the whole cast, was called “Let’s Make Ours a Double.”)
There were some new smaller roles in the play, too. There would be a purely comical drunkard character who pretends to be blind so he doesn’t have to work, but who is still a mighty fine poker player and pickpocket. (Billy talked Mr. Herbert into taking the role: “If you can’t write the script, Donald, at least be in the damn play!”) There would be the showgirl’s mother—an old floozy who still wants to be in the spotlight. (“Call Me Mrs. Casanova” was her signature tune.) There would be a banker, trying to repossess the mansion. And there would be a large company of dancers and singers—far more than our usual four boys and four girls, if Billy had anything to say about it—in order to make the play into a bigger and more energized production.
—
Peg loved the script.
“I can’t write for free seeds,” she said, “but I know what a smashing story is, and this is a smashing story.”
Edna loved it, too. Billy had transformed Mrs. Alabaster from a mere caricature of a society dame into a woman of real wit and