I'll Cry Tomorrrow

  I am grateful to

  EARL WILSON

  a man who believed in me

  COPYRIGHT MCMLIV BY LILLIAN ROTH

  All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information address:

  Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc.

  386 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10016

  Published simultaneously in Canada by:

  Thomas Nelson & Sons, Limited

  Don Mills, Ontario, Canada

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  ISBN 0-88391-074-8

  eBook ISBN - 978-0-88391-570-7

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  TO MOTHER

  FOR A LIFETIME OF PATIENCE

  AND AN ETERNITY OF LOVE

  Unhappy am I that this has happened to me? Not so. Happy am I, though this has happened to me, for I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the past nor fearing the future; for such a thing as this might have happened to any man.…

  —Marcus Aurelius Antonius

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  THIS BOOK has been a long time in the writing, and a long, long time in the living. It is the story of a child star who grew up too soon—or perhaps too late—the account of a life which has held a great deal of tragedy, not only for me but for many dear to me. I haven’t found it easy to open these doors to the past, to tell things which most people would hesitate even to confide to friends, let alone put in a book for strangers to read.

  I recall the mingled hope and fear I felt not so long ago when my story was sketched on Ralph Edwards’ “This Is Your Life” program. I was told a television audience of 40,000,000 people would see me as I came on the stage.

  I thought then, almost desperately, “What will they think of me? Will they remember that I was once famous and then infamous? That I was a drunk for so many years? Will they think that I am flaunting my past or making a bid for sympathy?…”

  Some of these emotions are mine now. Why am I writing this book? The reasons are mixed. For one thing, I believe the very writing will help clarify myself in relation to the world about me. I think it will help reestablish my integrity in my own eyes, and I hope it will help reestablish my integrity and my dignity in the eyes of those who knew me when I had neither.

  But I am also writing this book in the hope that it will help others. You will find this easier to believe after you’ve read these pages and discovered how much others have helped me.

  If someone were to ask me, “Lillian, what made you drink?” I’m not sure I could answer the question satisfactorily, even for myself. Unhappy childhood, tragic love affairs, anxieties, deep-seated complexes—such psychiatric labels will come to mind as you read this book. Can the answer be stated so simply? I don’t know. I can only present my own experience for what it is worth. I do know that psychiatry, which has an excellent record in mental and emotional problems, reports comparatively small success in the field of alcoholism.

  For sixteen years I existed in a nightmare world, one which many enter but not many leave. That one can come back, that there is a way out from shame and despair and utter hopelessness—this is the sum and substance of my book. And this, I believe, justifies opening the doors to a past that sometimes—when I look back at it—seems utterly incredible and unbelievable to me who lived it.

  In some instances in these pages I have given fictional names to people, but these persons were and are real. All that is in this book is true.

  —LILLIAN ROTH

  Fort Lauderdale, Florida

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER I

  I HAVE thought of many ways to start my story. I could begin it at a moment of triumph, when as a Hollywood star my escorts to a world premiere were Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier, when three of my pictures were running simultaneously on Broadway, and I earned $3,500 for an afternoon’s work. That would be a glamorous beginning.

  I could begin it at an awful moment, when I stood before an open window, behind me years of alcoholic horror and degradation, about to leap to the pavement eleven stories below. That would be a melodramatic beginning.

  Or I could begin it at the age of thirty-four, when as an ex-inmate of a mental institution, I was released to start my life over again. But that might be a puzzling beginning, and difficult for some to understand.

  Perhaps, as my husband Burt suggests, the way to tell it is the way it happened, allowing it to unfold in the order dictated by whatever mysterious forces mold us into the persons we become. “That’s the only way it will make sense, “he cautioned me. “Tell it as it happened.”

  This is how it happened, then.

  My life was never my own. It was charted before I was born.

  My parents were hopelessly stagestruck, and as a result, I literally waited for my very first entrance cue in a theatre. My mother, who had firm ideas about pre-natal influence, spent as much time in theatres as she could. She laughed and cried with Eva Tanguay and Nora Bayes and Sarah Bernhardt, delighted to think that in some occult fashion her enjoyment was shared by the child she carried. She wanted me to be a singer; and because her greatest idol, almost to the point of worship, was Lillian Russell, I was named for her when I finally arrived on December 13, 1910.

  My father saw another future for me. He dreamed of me as a great dramatic actress. Born Arthur Rutstein in Russia, he had been brought to Boston, my mother’s birthplace, when he was four. Handsome, happy-go-lucky, and gifted with contagious charm, he played a bit part in “Peck’s Bad Boy” at sixteen. To hear him describe it, he was the star. For years my mother laughingly chided him for never getting over it—and teased him about his voice. Dad’s voice was an off-key tenor, and temperamental in the high ranges, but it didn’t stop him from teaming up with a friend who played the accordion, and singing on the Boston ferry for coins tossed by the passengers. When Dad took Mother along for the ride, during his courtship, he called it “serenading” her. She would sigh with the memory. “Juliet had her Romeo and I had my Arthur. Sometimes I think I suffered more than she did.” Actually, Mother didn’t mind, because it meant more money to go to more shows.

  Arthur was 24, working in his father’s produce market by day and ushering in theatres by night, when he first met my mother, Katie Silverman. They were married soon after. My baby sister Ann made her appearance two and a half years after me.

  I have often tried to trace my parents’ passionate love for the theatre. Perhaps it answered some deep need in them. Perhaps it was the result of unfulfilled dreams about which I never knew. My mother, a strong-willed but emotional woman, felt that show people—those with real talent, and she was a stern critic—were th
e chosen of the gods. “We took you to see the greats and neargreats,” she told me when I was old enough to understand. “They all had something to offer, or they wouldn’t be up there making people laugh and cry.” She had a small, sweet singing voice herself. “That’s all I had, Lilly baby, but there was a lot of harmony in my soul, and I gave you that.”

  Dad, however, was always acting, forever putting on a show for us. He gave a song everything: his left hand over his heart, his right outstretched to a cruel unfeeling world, big tears rolled down his cheeks as he sang, “Just a Cousin of Mine,” or “Please, Mr. Conductor, Don’t Put Me Off the Train, My Poor Old Mother is Waiting, Waiting for Me in Pain.” I remember, in a room off the parlor, bouncing on my little bed to the rhythm of his songs. It was Dad who taught me recitations and despite my shyness brought me out to recite before Sunday company.

  Whatever the case, the stage was my life and that of my sister Ann as far back as I can remember.

  Ann and I were not alike. No matter how miserable I felt when called upon to perform for guests, I never rebelled. Dad would say, “Lillian is so good. She always minds me. Stand up, darling, and do something for us.” Ann, however, refused. Dad might plead, beg, threaten— she would not budge. I was also a silent child, keeping much to myself. My father sometimes worried aloud. “She’s so quiet, Katie,” he would say. “You ought to find out what she thinks about, what goes on in that little head of hers.” Mother would pick me up and hug me. “Oh, Arthur, what can she be thinking of? She’s only a baby!”

  I thought—and felt—many things. Looking back now, I know that what I felt most during my childhood was fear—and loneliness. I feared my mother’s displeasure. Though she loved me, she was a perfectionist. Quick to kiss, she was quick to slap. Her dedication to my career was single-minded: to her the theatre was the magic door to everything she dreamed for her Lilly, and she would allow nothing to get in the way. My sense of loneliness is more difficult to explain. I was lonely for—I knew not what. I always felt inadequate. No matter what I was told, I thought every other child was prettier, more charming, more likable—in short, nicer than I. I never liked the person I was, and later, I found alcohol helped me run away from myself.

  In 1916 we moved to New York, to a cold-water walk-up on 43rd Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Arthur, who was always going to make a million, thought he’d find more opportunities in the big city. Even more important was the fact that New York was the center of show business.

  Hearing that jobs were available for talented little girls, Katie used to dress Ann and me each morning near the coal stove in the kitchen, and then make the rounds with us of the producers and theatrical agents. Their offices were invariably crowded. Each was like the other—a desk, a bored girl behind it, and the same answer, day after day: “Nothing doing” Mother refused to be discouraged. One blustery winter’s day in 1916 she dropped in with us at Educational Pictures. Yes, there was a job, then and there—for me!

  It was to be my first assignment in show business, to pose as Educational Pictures’ screen trademark, a living statue holding a lamp of knowledge.

  Katie’s excitement as she signed me in possessed me too. It was always to be like that. Her wish became mine. In later years I always looked into the wings, where she stood during my act, to see what her face said. A smile meant I had done well. The merest shadow of a frown, that my performance wasn’t perfect, no matter what the critics wrote the following morning.

  Now, in preparation for my first job, she undressed me and a fatherly looking old gentleman with a cigar clenched in his teeth started to paint me with white body makeup. When lunch time came, Katie left me in his charge while she and Ann went out to buy sandwiches for all of us, including the old gentleman. Left alone with me, he went to the door, looked outside, and locked it “Cold in here,” he said. I had been standing on a box. “Better lie down, where it’s warm,” he said, taking me in his arms and carrying me to a couch near the stove. He painted my thighs, then worked his brush upwards and began painting me where it made me uneasy.

  He daubed me with the brush, again and again, on the same part of my anatomy. The cigar moved from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then back again. “Only five years old,” he said. “My, you’re a nice little girl.”

  I covered my eyes with my hands. I knew there was something wrong in what he was doing, but I couldn’t stop him or cry for help. If Katie found out, something terrible would happen. She would scream, her face would contort, and I could not bear to hear her scream or to see her face like that.

  When he heard her footsteps in the hall, he hurriedly unlocked the door and stood me up on the box again; he was just finishing my feet when Katie came in and spread out our lunch.

  An unknown fear held my tongue. I never told her. But for years afterward I dreamed constantly about a man with a cigar in his mouth, who locked me up in a room and did dreadful things to me. A popular Admiration Cigar advertisement at the time pictured a smiling, moonfaced man with a cigar in his mouth, and he was repeated, cigar and face, on and on into infinity, growing smaller and smaller in the background. Whenever I caught sight of him in subway or trolley ads, I shut my eyes tightly and hid my face in Katie’s skirts until all his heads faded away.

  Katie learned that Sam Goldwyn was producing motion pictures in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the Hudson River. If Educational Films could use me, why not Goldwyn? Each morning we took the long trip by bus, ferry and bus again, Katie, Ann and I. Once in the barracks-like studios, we waited hopefully for calls as extras—we two among perhaps a hundred children, with their mothers. We were always cold. Someone distributed tin cups of hot coffee, and Katie hurried about looking for hot water to dilute it for us. We stood, sometimes for hours, stamping our feet to keep warm, until we were called. Our assignment usually was to mill excitedly about, shouting and waving our arms, while the cameras ground. Sometimes Katie was in the same scene.

  “What are you doing, Mommy?” I asked her once.

  “I’m earning three dollars, too, today. Now I’ll be able to buy you that little muffler you wanted.”

  One day we waited a long time. We grew blue with cold. Suddenly she exclaimed, “The devil with this! My children aren’t going to freeze!” She bundled us up, took us all the way back home, and put us to bed under warm blankets. It was like a party, we told each other: we had never been home so early in the day before. “Babies,” she said, “I’m going to heat some nice big rolls for you, with lots of butter and hot cocoa, and I’m going to bring it to you right in bed.”

  After our treat, she read us the Sunday comics until we fell asleep.

  Later Ann and I were rewarded with steady acting jobs. While Ann played Theda Bara as a child on one set, on the other I was an angel in white gauze and lace, waiting to be born. We angels stood perched on a high platform facing a row of dazzling Kleig lights. Just before the action began, a man shouted a warning, “Children, don’t look at the lights!”

  They flashed on. I blinked, then stared, fascinated. As I watched, they changed shape; the slender incandescent spiral in the center became a winged man, then a glowing giant, growing taller and taller yet remaining the same.

  We were homeward bound later, and I was trailing Mother, who was carrying Ann, when my eyes began to smart. I shut them tight, but the pain only increased. “Mommy, where are you!” I screamed. “I can’t see you.”

  She thought I was playing a game. “What are you talking about, Lilly?” she asked over her shoulder. “I’m right in front of you.”

  “Mommy, I can’t find you, I can’t see you,” I wailed.

  She put Ann down and grabbed me up. I felt the pounding of her heart. She began to run, crying hysterically. “Oh, my baby, my baby,” and I clung to her, my arms around her neck, my eyes feeling as though a million needles were stuck in them.

  The doctor called it “Kleig eyes,” and prescribed a rest in bed for me. My father comforted me. “Baby,” he said, “you
’ll get used to those lights and become a great actress. Let’s start right now.” He taught me, “The Making of Friends,” by Edgar A. Guest. I still remember the words, for they were my first dramatic lines.

  They began:

  “If nobody smiled and nobody cheered

  And nobody helped us along,

  If every each moment looked after itself

  And the good things all went to the strong …”

  “What’s the use of that?” my mother asked. “She needs ballet, and singing lessons, and so many things—”

  “She’ll have those, too,” said Dad. “But right now I want her to learn this, with all the hand motions, with expression!”

  Quite without warning, I had to test my dramatic skill on Dad himself. Katie got word that children were being interviewed for parts in the film, “The Bluebird,” and hurried down with me. Several children and their mothers were already eagerly on hand. When the casting director came out to look us over, he pointed at a little girl who sat next to me. She rose and walked over to him. “Everybody else excused,” he announced.

  Katie and I and the others straggled out disconsolately. I sensed rather than knew that Mother was boiling.

  It came like an explosion once we were outside. ‘‘Why didn’t you get up when he pointed at you!”

  “No he didn’t, Mommy. He wanted that little Violet Mae sitting next to me.”

  My mother walked faster. I ran along in the snow, frightened, tripping, trying to keep up with her as she strode along. “He pointed at you and you wouldn’t stand up!” Turning suddenly, she slapped me. The blow struck me as I tripped forward toward her: I was knocked off balance into the snow.