considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was already in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.
I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.
“She’s the real deal, kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”
—
Amore problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.
Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about all I can say in his favor.
When it became evident that Arthur couldn’t manage the role, Billy pared down the character’s lines as much as possible, to make it simpler for the poor man to get through a sentence. (For instance, Billy had changed Arthur’s opening line from “I’m your late husband’s third cousin, Barchester Headley Wentworth, the fifth earl of Addington” to “I’m your cousin from England.”) He also took away Arthur’s solo. He even took away the dance number that Arthur was meant to have with Edna as he was attempting to seduce Mrs. Alabaster.
“Those two dance as though they’ve never been introduced,” Billy said to Peg, before finally giving up on the idea of having them dance at all. “How is it possible that they are married?”
Edna tried to help out her husband, but he didn’t take direction well and got sputteringly offended at any efforts to refine his performance.
“I never understand what you’re talking about, my dear, and I always will!” he snapped at her once, insensibly, when she tried to explain the difference between stage right and stage left for the dozenth time.
The thing that drove us the craziest was that Arthur could not stop himself from whistling along with the music coming from the orchestra pit—even when he was on stage, and in character. Nobody could get him to stop.
One afternoon, Billy finally shouted, “Arthur! Your character can’t hear that music! It’s the theme from the goddamn overture!”
“Of course I can hear it!” Arthur protested. “The bloody musicians are right there!”
This had caused the exasperated Billy to go on a long rant about the difference in theater between diagetic music (which the characters onstage can hear), and non-diagetic music (which only the audience can hear).
“Talk English!” Arthur had demanded.
So Billy tried again: “Imagine, Arthur, that you are watching a western with John Wayne in it. There is John Wayne, riding his horse all alone across a mesa, and suddenly he starts whistling along to the theme music. Do you see how ridiculous that would be?”
“I just don’t see why a man can’t whistle these days without being attacked,” sniffed Arthur.
(Later, I heard him ask one of the dancers, “What the devil is a mesa?”)
—
Iused to look at Edna and Arthur Watson and try with all my might to imagine how she coped with him.
The only explanation I could come up with was that Edna genuinely loved beauty—and Arthur was undeniably beautiful. (He looked like Apollo, if Apollo were your neighborhood butcher—but, yes, he was beautiful.) This made a certain amount of sense, because there was nothing in Edna’s life that wasn’t beautiful. I never saw anybody who
cared about aesthetics more than that woman did. I never once saw Edna that she wasn’t exquisitely put together, and I saw her at all times of the day and night. (To be the kind of woman who is perfectly kempt even at the breakfast table or in the privacy of her own bedroom requires a certain amount of labor and commitment—but that was Edna for you, always ready to put in the hours.)
Her cosmetics were beautiful. The tiny silk drawstring purse in which she held her loose change was beautiful. The way she read her lines and sang onstage was beautiful. The way she folded her gloves was beautiful. She was both a connoisseur and a radiator of pure beauty, in all its forms.
In fact, I think part of the reason Edna liked to have Celia and me around her so much was that we were beautiful, too. Rather than being competitive with us—as many other older women might have been— she seemed enhanced and invigorated by us. I remember one day the three of us were walking down the street together, with Edna in the middle. She suddenly clasped us each by the arm, smiled up at us, and said, “When I walk around town with the two of you towering young ladies at my side, I feel like a perfect pearl, set between two gleaming rubies.”
—
It was now a week before our opening and everyone was sick. We all had the same cold, and half the girls in the chorus line had pink eye
from sharing the same infected cake of mascara. (The other half had crabs, from sharing their costume bottoms, which I had told them a hundred times not to do.) Peg wanted to give the performers a day off to rest up and heal, but Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He still felt that the first ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.
“You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate the first one.”
“They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.
And they were tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.
“Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”
He made them do the opening number three more times that day— and each time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.
The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere. An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.
One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch, and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.
“Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.
“Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”
“What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del Rio.”
“That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What? No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.
—
Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she
would take frequent nips. Careless as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.
Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught Anthony and me necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal, and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.
“Goddamn it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for ten minutes to keep your lips off my leading man?”
(The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)
And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.
Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read City of Girls. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but ADMISSION), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one of my stupid girlie shows.”
Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”
Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”
“Our audience can’t afford that, either.”
“Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”
“We don’t serve the carriage trade,” Olive said. “We serve working people, or do I have to remind you?”
“Well maybe the working people of this neighborhood would like to see a quality show, Olive, for once in their lives. Maybe they don’t like being treated like they are poor and tasteless. Maybe they think it