I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 12

  CHAPTER XIV

  ALL MY HOPES lay in Regina. I marked time, and marking time was intolerable without drinking. And I told myself that I could always stop when Regina came.

  A letter arrived from Ben. Something had gone wrong. Our little orphan wasn’t coming to America after all. But he and Katie would be with me in six weeks.

  The news was like a physical blow. I had counted so much on the baby! That night the Ritzes, knowing my dejection, took me to a club party. Brought to our table by mutual friends was a man, perhaps ten years older than I, who was introduced to me as Art Art looked a little like Bing Crosby, and a little like my father—blue-eyed, light brown hair, an engaging grin. He had a dry sense of humor.

  “Do we have to stay at this party?” he asked after a while. “Let’s take a little drive around.”

  Harry and Charlotte didn’t mind. Perhaps they understood better than I knew at what loose ends I was. “We’re just a bunch of old married couples,” Harry said. “You go ahead and have some fun.”

  We drove to an all-night bar, where Art quietly matched my bourbon and water with ginger ales. “Don’t you drink?” I asked. “Once in a while,” he said. “But when I do, I get bad. Nobody’s safe around me then, because I go wild.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. Here was a kindred soul. I grew to know him better in the days that followed. We spoke the same language. He seemed to enjoy my company, and I—I found it easy to relax with him. Thus I rationalized the fact that I enjoyed parties, nightclubs, prize fights and long drives with him. He was morose more often than not, but I could cheer him up: he leaned on me, and that gave me strength.

  Things began to look up a bit. I got an offer to appear at the Trocadero, one of Hollywood’s smartest nightclubs, and Art helped me pull myself together.

  I took a lovely suite nearby. The morning after my opening M-G-M phoned me. They wanted to test me for a part. Perhaps I would be launched on another picture career and forget the loss of Regina.

  Ben wired me the night before he and Katie arrived. I telephoned Art. “It will have to be goodbye,” I said. “You were wonderful to me when I needed a friend-but I’m awfully fond of you, and that isn’t good. It would be better if I don’t see you again.”

  He took it philosophically. “Anything you say,” he said. “But I’ll be around town.”

  That night I went to Lita Chaplin’s home and began to drink. At midnight I drove to my apartment Once inside, I felt utterly dejected. There was no Regina, no Art. And I had to face the judge and Mother in a few hours.

  When Katie and Ben arrived at three a.m., they found me on the couch. They shook me. I managed to say blearily, “Hello, Ben. Hello, Mom.” In my stupor I heard them.

  “There’s just nothing that can be done with this girl,” the judge was saying. “What are we going to do, Katie?”

  And my mother’s despairing voice: “I don’t know what’s gotten into Lilly. She’s such a good girl, Ben; she must be sick.”

  Miserable days followed. As usual Ben wanted to do nothing. He refused to play golf; neither did he wish to go swimming, or play tennis, or go nightclubbing, or do anything but join Katie in gin-rummy-and read his newspapers.

  I found myself turning again to Art for comfort I could face him being myself, without a sense of guilt or incompetence. Art was anything but suave and dapper: I discovered now that he belonged to the betting world, about which I knew little. He can’t quote Gladstone, and Roosevelt never congratulated him, I thought, but he can cheer me up.

  Finally I spoke to Ben, “I can’t go back to New York with you. My future is here. M-G-M wants to test me. I must try my career again. I just can’t go back to New York and that empty life…. Ben, without the child there’s nothing. Let’s face it.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Lillian,” he said. “But you’ve been drinking. Sleep on it, and we’ll talk it over tomorrow.”

  Next morning I felt the same. I tripled my pre-break-fast drink to give me courage to tell Ben I had to go through with my plans. We had words and at one point Ben, pale with anger, approached me. I stumbled and fell down a flight of stairs just as my mother appeared.

  It was the Katie of old who raged at Ben. “That’s no way to treat my daughter, drinking or not drinking,” she shouted. “You know she hasn’t any balance when she’s like that. She could have killed herself.”

  Ben apologized. “It was an accident,” he protested. I was in a red haze of fury as I got to my feet.

  “Last night you agreed with me. I’m not so drunk I don’t remember. Now you can get out. You haven’t supported me, you haven’t done one thing for me. I loaned you money, when you needed it, I don’t owe you anything. You can get out—and get out this afternoon!”

  After he left I paced the room. What had I done now? It helped matters little that Art met me an hour later at a bar. I expected him to comment on the news of my breakup, but he was silent.

  In the next few weeks we drank together and Art began to show a different side. “You’ve got to control your liquor,” he said unexpectedly one night, and there was a flicker of disgust in his eyes. For a moment I had a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “All right, I’ll try,” I promised. And since he was so interested, would he tell me what all this led to? We were seeing a great deal of each other. Was he going to marry me?

  “Look, kid,” he said, “you’re not even divorced yet.”

  “If I knew we were going to be married, I’d go to New York and make arrangements.”

  He thought that over for a moment. “If you don’t know what you want, why don’t you traipse back to the judge?”

  That shocked me into two days of sobriety. Then Katie had to return to New York: Ann was not well. I was alone and started to drink again. I was not accountable to anyone now.

  Art walked in one night, his mood sullen. “Still drinking, eh? If you want to see what drinking is, I’ll show you.” He brought out three bottles of bourbon and began to drink steadily. “You know what you are,” he said suddenly. “You’re a no-good bum!” He began to slap me. I broke away, only to have him put out his foot and trip me. I scrambled to my feet and managed to make the door. “I’ll show you what liquor is—” he flung after me.

  I was frightened. Never had a man treated me like this before. I tried to explain away the episode. Hadn’t he warned me how liquor affected him? I wasn’t so charming when I drank, either. When he met me again, one night, at the Clover Club bar, I attempted a middle course. “Just one bourbon, Art,” I said, as I slid onto a stool next to him. “That’s my limit tonight.”

  He guffawed, and I knew he had been drinking. “Set up ten in a row here,” he ordered the bartender, then turned to me. “Show the customers, Lillian. Drink ‘em all. You know you can do it.”

  Rather than create a scene, I downed five in succession. Later, at the bar, as I clung to him glassy-eyed, he suddenly shoved me away. “You’re a bum,” he said thickly. “Why don’t you go back to New York? I’m sick of looking at your face” He reeled away.

  Next day I called the William Morris agency. Could they book me in the East? At once? The answer was yes —Billy Rose’s Casa Manana, in New York.

  Something of my old gaiety returned with my name in lights. Everett Marshall and I co-starred in the revue, and the critics were cordial. The week was also brightened by a visitor, Mr. Mark Harris, who sent his card in first, and then came backstage with orchids for me. He was a powerfully built six-footer, in his late thirties, distinguished in appearance, with an easy smile and a smooth continental manner.

  “Do you recall meeting me, Miss Roth?”

  Vaguely I remembered him. I had met him once with the judge, hadn’t I? That was right. Was I busy this evening? If not, would I like to go places and have fun, all around town?

  Why not? I thought. We made the rounds: the Stork Club, “21,” El Morocco, Toots Shor, the Plaza. He telephoned me every day. He called for me every evening. The New York World�
��s Fair of 1939 was in full swing at Flushing Meadows, and Mark was engaged in public relations there. He was delightful company. He knew how to order correctly at the best restaurants, insisted upon the proper wine with each course, and never failed to send orchids. He was solicitous: gallantly he opened doors, pulled out chairs, made sure I wasn’t sitting in a draft, saw to it that I received the best of everything. He was ardent and masterful; and at the end of a week, he told me he was madly in love with me.

  As I considered this, my dressing room telephone rang. It was the judge. He invited me to go to dinner, one evening, and I accepted. Later, in my apartment, he told me he was glad to see that I had calmed down. Hollywood, he went on, was no place for me. I belonged here, in New York. So saying, he became amorous.

  “If that’s the way you feel,” I said, repentant, “perhaps we should go back together again. The decree won’t be final for a year, you know.”

  But Ben wasn’t prepared to make it official again. He suggested that we could, however, see each other often, as if nothing had happened. He was ready to take a little house for me in Long Island….

  I exploded. “I was your wife! Do you think I’d become your mistress?” I screamed, and pushed him away. I downed a drink of bourbon, and then another…I blacked out. When I woke, it was morning. The aroma of Ben’s cigar was still in the room.

  The days that followed were chaotic. Art began to call me from the coast. Would I accept his abject apologies? He’d warned me he was ugly when he drank. He missed me terribly: I must come back to him.

  Now it became impossible for me to cope with the situation. Mark telephoned me at all hours trying to persuade me to marry him. The judge upbraided me for ruining our marriage, yet refused to take me back as his wife. Art telephoned from the coast, pleading with me to return. I was confused, my life upset and bewildering. There was only liquor to help me escape trying to think at all. Finally, in my fourth and last week at the Casa Manana, although I pulled myself together for my act, I was in agony in the finale, because the alcohol had worn off and I needed more. My jaws stiffened, perspiration dripped from me, my voice faded to a whisper.

  “I don’t understand it,” Billy Rose said. “Something must have happened, Lillian. You’ve been doing such a swell job—”

  I barely made it through the last days, and when the show closed, I collapsed.

  Katie was frightened as never before, and watched apprehensively as the doctor examined me. He gave his verdict. “Young lady, you need at least a six months’ rest.”

  “You mean a ranch?” I asked, weakly.

  “No. I mean a quiet sanitarium where you won’t drink.”

  “Me, away for six months?” I cried out. Katie held my hand. “I won’t make you go, Lilly. Don’t worry, baby, I’ll take care of you myself.”

  But I wouldn’t let her. She had suffered enough. Instead, I hired a nurse and rented a cottage in the country. My nurse gave me the salt-water cure, which causes a revulsion toward alcohol. She dosed me with salt-water at every meal: it made me so ill I retched constantly. “I’m carrying out the doctor’s orders, dear,” she said. “I’m not taking any liquor away from you.” She left a fifth of rye near my bed. When I tried to take a drink to halt my shakes, the nausea and cramps were excruciating. It was unbearable.

  “Call Mr. Harris,” I begged her. “I want to go back to town. Tell him we’re flying back.”

  The Newark Airport was a sea of fire when Mark and my nurse helped me off the plane. I was a sight. I was bloated. I bore the marks of the mental anguish of the last few weeks, and I shook uncontrollably. “Good Lord!” exclaimed Mark. “You look awful—what happened to you?”

  The nurse smiled thinly. “She doesn’t like to drink any more, do you, Lillian?”

  I could only glare weakly at her.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mark. “Everything will be all right.” He took me to a hotel. Had I any money? “I have a few hundred dollars in my purse,” I moaned. He explained that he had no money with him. “I’ll take it down and pay your rent in advance.” He left.

  A few minutes later the desk clerk called up. “If you’re taking the room by the month, you’ll have to pay in advance.”

  “Didn’t a man just come down and pay you?” I asked, bewildered.

  No one had paid the bill.

  I was distraught. I dismissed my nurse and telephoned Evie Jabon, a girl friend, to come over. By the time she arrived I was in a state of collapse. “Kiddo, you need a drink,” she said, and ordered a bottle of rye. A few drinks calmed me down, and we managed to get into a cab and move to the Hotel Delmonico, where I was known.

  Mark telephoned an hour later.

  “I just thought of something I had to do when I left you,” he said. “Then I went back and you were gone. I’ll be right over.”

  I was confused. He didn’t offer to return the money. In the next week I wrote checks constantly. I was under medical care, given vitamin injections, fruit juices, bromides, sleeping pills.

  A new doctor came on the case. The dope and medication had taken their toll: I lay in a half-stupor. We were alone. He approached my bed and bent over me: I felt his warm hands on my body. I tried to protest, but the words would not come. He began caressing me, and suddenly my arms were pinned. It was a nightmare, in which “I struggled wildly but my limbs were powerless: I seemed to be in a straitjacket, awake and yet not awake, paralyzed in a coma.

  When Mark arrived later, I had come out of my stupor, but I knew what had happened. The doctor was gone. For the first time in my life I had been completely incapable of taking care of myself. I stammered out the story.

  Mark looked at me incredulously. “Are you trying to tell me that he attacked you?”

  “Yes,” I moaned. “Yes.”

  Mark did not believe me.

  “Ask him,” I wept. “See what he says.”

  Mark returned later. “Lillian, you must have had a hallucination from the drugs,” he said, soothingly. “I spoke to him in his office, face to face. He was stunned when I told him.”

  What can I do, I sobbed. Nobody will believe me.

  Two days later the doctor entered my room. I shrieked, “What are you doing here? Get out—”

  “You’re ill, Miss Roth,” he said blandly.

  “Get out!” I screamed at the top of my voice.

  He got out.

  Six months passed in a blur. Mark helped me prepare a statement to the press about my divorce from Ben. It read well:

  I’ve been on the stage since I was a child. It’s part of me and all my friends are stage people. I love parties—the kind that last until the small hours. However, it’s different with my husband. He has to have sleep and a clear mind for his work in court. We had a long talk the other day and decided things just wouldn’t work out. I still think he’s a wonderful man.

  For the rest, it was like a bad dream with vaguely familiar characters: Mark, my mother, myself. I remember day-long vigils in bars, driving a car eighty miles an hour through Long Island, plowing speedboats through Hell’s Gate at fearful speeds on stormy nights, my mother crying as I drank and Mark drank with me.

  In my lucid moments Katie warned me. “He’s borrowing twenties and fifties from you. It will be thousands later. I know his type.”

  What difference did it make? I thought. Mark and I had something in common. We suffered the same weakness, the same agony: he could drink with me. We inhabited our private universe which others might not understand. I didn’t love him, but who knew what love was, anymore? And who cared?

  I had missed the newspaper stories about Mark—about his habitual drunkenness, his criminal record. He’d had several federal indictments, usually on confidence matters. At the time I met him he was out on bail on a charge for which he had been arrested a few months before. No one volunteered to tell me, but there was plenty to be learned about Mark’s past.

  He did tell me that he had a nine-year-old son by a previous marriage. The child was in
boarding school. I saw Sonny once—blue-eyed, blond, helpless and lonely.

  I fell in love with the idea of caring for him. I thought, this is what I need. At last, a child to mother!

  CHAPTER XV

  IT STARTED in the Glass Hat on Lexington Avenue, where we ordered dinner. The date was January 22, 1940. The world outside was in turmoil. Hider’s armies were rolling across Europe, and violence raged over thousands of miles of earth. But Mark and I were working out, in our own tiny way, our salvation. We had been on the wagon for two weeks, each sustaining the other. For the first time in a long time tomorrow was beginning to promise a little more than yesterday.

  Mark leaned across the table and said, “Mommy”—his pet name for me—”we’ve been so good, let’s just have one little martini before dinner.”

  One couldn’t hurt. Neither could a second, particularly since we firmly stopped at that. We smiled at each other over our glasses. We were proud of ourselves. Alcohol was our worst enemy, and at last we were doing something about it. And we got along well. “Why don’t we get married?” Mark asked. “Maybe we will,” I replied. “Let’s start a brand new life together,” he said—”you and I and Sonny.”

  “Maybe we will,” I repeated. It was an attractive picture. My divorce from the judge, obtained on grounds of mental cruelty, had become final months earlier. I put one condition to Mark first and above all else: “Let’s see if we can keep on the wagon,” I said. “That’s the key to everything.”

  Mark was carrying out his part. He was to leave early tomorrow for Detroit where, he said, he had an important war contract on tap. He was short of money, he remarked as we strolled to my apartment after dinner. Could I spare a little cash? I gave him $90 for his fare, and a check for $500 for expenses. Then we relaxed with a quiet game of Klabyash.

  About nine o’clock, feeling hot and tired, I decided I’d take a shower. Then we would play one more hand, and he would go home and get a good night’s sleep in preparation for his journey.

  I came out of my room to find him slumped on the couch with a silly grin on his face. A quick glance into the kitchenette told me what had happened. He had consumed a fifth of gin in twenty minutes!