I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 4

  Meeting Texas was like meeting a hurricane head on. I walked into Shubert’s 44th Street Theatre and the first sight I saw was a well-proportioned five-foot six blonde on the stage, with blue mascared eyelashes, scarlet cupid’s-bow lips, and beads hanging from her neck to her hips. She was storming at everyone about her. For a moment I was petrified. Suddenly she saw me, and stared.

  “I’m Lillian Roth,” I said meekly.

  She looked me over. “Well, kid,” she rasped, in a voice like a man’s, “I hear you’re pretty good. Let’s hear you sing.”

  Halfway through my number she interrupted me. “Where’s the life in you, kid? They told me you’re a dynamo. What’s doing?” Then, to no one in particular, “I thought this kid was a bombshell.” And to me, again, If that’s all you’re going to do on the stage, it stinks!”

  My face burned, but I became Jeanne Eagels. “I’m sorry, Miss Guinan,” I said icily. “I have just finished my B. F. Keith Circuit and I can go right back to it. In addition, you sent for me, I didn’t send for you. I began to stalk off the stage.

  Texas relented. “Come back, kid,” she said, “don’t get excited.” She put her arm around me. “Just live up to your notices, and well be friends.”

  Never my best at rehearsals—even today I must have an audience—I became more and more jittery. The night before dress rehearsal, I got laryngitis: I was left with a croak. Texas shifted her gum from her left to her right cheek. “I just knew something like this would happen.” Then to me, “Well, kid, I sure hope that by tomorrow night it comes back, because it looks like the finish if you don’t make it by then.”

  I went home in tears. “I’m not ready for it,” I cried. “I’ll be awful.” Even Katie became doubtful. But Dad took control. He hurried to the medicine cabinet and returned with an armful of sprays, syrups and lozenges. “Look, baby,” he said, “stop putting fears into yourself. You’re going to be the best thing in that show and I’m telling you—your voice is coming back!”

  He dosed me with medicines, sprayed my throat, poured hot tea into me, and packed me into bed under a mountain of blankets. I sweated through the night. Whatever the case—Dad’s first aid, Marie Stoddard’s Christian Science, or an inner compulsion to please Katie—my voice came back, strong and clear.

  Since I appeared only in the first act, Katie and I went home early to wait for the morning newspapers. Friends dropped in to keep vigil. Katie bustled about nervously, serving ice cream and cake, and I sat biting my fingernails. The telephone rang. It was Milton Berle.

  “Golly,” he said, and there was awe in his voice. “Lillian, you ran away with the show! Wait until you see the American. Let me read it to you!”

  The critic of the New York American had written: “This little girl comes through the curtains shortly after nine o’clock to smash across three songs in the outstanding performance of the show… She does a number of things marvellously well, and she has more personality to the square inch than any musical comedy actress seen by this reviewer this season.”

  Milton and his mother hurried over. We celebrated until dawn, every newcomer bursting in waving a copy of the American. Dad all but strutted. “Well, I told you, Katie!” And my mother: “Oh, Arthur, you really know my Lilly. O. K., you take the bows!”

  The road up became glamorous. Winnie Lightner, by all odds the top song comedienne of the day, was expected to leave Delmar’s “Revels” because of illness. Frank Fay, co-starring with her, Bert Lahr and Patsy Kelly, told me about it when we met on Broadway shortly after “Padlocks” closed. “You work a lot like her,” said Frank. “Why don’t you catch the show. I think you’d be fine in her part.”

  “Oh, gosh, Mr. Fay, would I?” I had my doubts, and they increased when I watched her perform that night in all her magnificently hoydenish style. I can never be that great, I thought. It was a long way from doing a specialty with Texas Guinan, and filling the shoes of the great Winnie Lightner. But I took home her lyrics and studied them that night.

  I was in the audience the following afternoon just before the curtain rose. There was a tap on my shoulder. It was an usher.

  “You’re wanted backstage, Miss Roth.”

  Winnie was sick. I had to go on immediately.

  A few minutes later I was singing her song, “I Love a Man in a Uniform.” I floated off the stage on waves of applause. Her smash hit had become one for me, too.

  The “Revels” grand finale thrilled me as nothing before. Whereas the finale of “Artists and Models” seemed inane to me, with its nudes and waving hands, this was pure theatre. Frank Fay stood on stage at the left, and announced the cast as they paraded, one by one, down a long center staircase.

  First came the chorus girls, then the smaller principals, then the principals, and then the stars, Patsy Kelly and Bert Lahr. Then Frank’s voice boomed out: “And now— Miss—Lillian—Roth!” I appeared, to a fanfare of trumpets, and descended the steps to the tune of I Love a Man in a Uniform,” with six handsome boys dressed as West Point cadets on either side. The suspense until I appeared, the regal quality I was invested with, the growing crescendo of applause leading up to the thunder when I appeared—I really cried for joy on the stage. The knowledge that Katie, standing in the wings, was almost ready to burst with pride—this was it!

  It was only a step from “Revels” to Earl Carroll’s “Vanities of 1928.” At 17 I was signed, at $400 a week. The new show had a fabulous cast Sidney Skolsky was press agent, Herman Hover, later manager of Ciro’s in Hollywood, was stage manager, and Busby Berkeley, choreographer.

  The afternoon of the opening I came to rehearsal and found the marquée blazing with names. There they were: W. C Fields; Ray Dooley; Joe Frisco; Dorothy Knapp, the most beautiful girl in the world; Barto and Mann; Vincent Lopez and his band. But the name of Lillian Roth was nowhere to be seen. I read the marquée twice, to make sure. Then I walked into the theatre and stalked across the stage to where Earl Carroll stood talking to others in the cast.

  “Mr, Carroll,” I said in a trembling voice, “I see the lights are going up. I’m one of the principals. You have every one on that marquée outside but me and the man who sweeps the stage.”

  Mr. Carroll focused his pale blue eyes on me.

  “Who do you think you are?” he asked softly.

  I told him. “I’m Lillian Roth, Broadway’s youngest star. I was ‘The Roth Kids.’ I was a star on B. F. Keith’s Circuit I replaced Winnie Lightner in the ‘Revels.’ I was in Texas Guinan’s ‘Padlocks.’ I was a star at the Chateau Madrid. And, Mr. Carroll,” I went on, my voice rising as I reached a familiar line, “you sent for me, I didn’t send for you.”

  There was a shocked silence. Mr. Carroll looked at me thoughtfully, as if seeing me for the first time. I met his eye defiantly. He stood there, a tall, thin, baldish man with long whispy hair, a worn gray artist’s smock over his frail body. There were two things he could do. He could take me over his knee and spank me, or he could kick me out of the show.

  Instead, he grabbed my arm and dragged me off the stage, through the stage door and out into the alley into 50th street, crowded with people. “I’ll show you how many people know you,” he muttered. When I caught my balance, he was buttonholing one passerby after another, demanding, “Do you know Lillian Roth? Have you ever heard of Lillian Roth?”

  Some, taken aback by this startling apparition, halted for a moment, then hurried on. “What are you talking about?” one man exclaimed, shaking himself loose. Another went along with what he thought was a gag. “No, who is she?” But he didn’t wait for an answer.

  Mr. Carroll wheeled on me. “All right, young lady, now you know. Remember this: the people who go to see you in vaudeville don’t pay seven-seventy, and the people who pay seven-seventy to see my show don’t know you.”

  I was undismayed. “Well,” I retorted furiously, “if you’d asked them if they knew Winnie Lightner the way you asked them if they knew me, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about
, either. I’m leaving. Goodbye!”

  I was heartbroken. I cried all the way home, and when I arrived there, Katie folded me in her arms. “You’re right,” she declared. “You’ve worked all your life. If you don’t fight for what’s yours, who will?’

  “Oh, Mom,” I wailed through my tears, “imagine, Earl Carroll’s ‘Vanities’!”

  Reality came quickly in an ultimatum from the theatre. If I wasn’t back before the performance, injunctions would be brought against me by both Mr. Carroll and Actor’s Equity. I’d never work a Broadway show again.

  Mother and I tearfully talked it over. We were beaten. My contract had no provision for featured billing.

  But if I failed to make the marquée lights, I had the “Vanities” to thank for Beryl Halley, “The Form Divine,” one of Mr. Carroll’s featured showgirls. She took me under her wing. I weighed 135 pounds. Beryl, who was my height, weighed only 118. The reason for the difference wasn’t hard to find.

  Like all the principals, I had a maid. The maids did little but straighten your makeup table and hook up a few dresses. They were there for prestige, mainly. My girl, though, had a special job. Every few hours she vanished in the direction of the corner soda fountain and returned with a hot fudge sundae or a banana split buried in whipped cream.

  One day while I was devouring one of these, Beryl came into my room. She watched me silently for a minute, until I came up for air. Then she spoke. “Lillian, you disgust me.”

  “Really,” I said complacently. “Why?”

  “Look at me and look at you! I could slice you in half and you’d still look better. Don’t you ever want to be anything in the profession? Don’t you ever think of stardom?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I’ve known some fat stars. There’s Sophie Tucker and Belle Baker—they’re doing all right.”

  “But your face calls for something else. Don’t you see yourself playing the love interest in motion pictures some day?”

  “Me? I’m no beauty,” I replied, flicking a blob of whipped cream off my nose. “They have people like you to be beautiful. I just sing songs.”

  Beryl sighed. “Oh, Lillian. Take a good look in the mirror. You’ve got potentialities if you wouldn’t stuff yourself like a little pig.”

  I looked in the mirror. There might be something in what Beryl said. I went on a diet, under her guidance: apples, oranges and lamb chops. In addition, Mr. Carroll had installed a vibrating machine for the girls in a corner of the rehearsal room, and I dutifully strapped myself into that. I was in its grip one night, shaking vigorously, when Mr. Carroll strolled in. “Well,” he said, “you’re really taking care of yourself.” He walked up to me, lifted my face to his, and kissed me, a far-from-ethereal kiss, while the vibrater vibrated me and him along with it, giving me the oddest sensation. “You’re such a little girl,” he said, his words trembling with everything else. “This kiss is a little present from me.” And he went on to his office.

  As I unhooked myself from the machine, I thought: this is the first time Earl Carroll has given me more than casual notice since the day I walked out on him. I began to understand. Perhaps it wasn’t the talent you had, or the personality—it was the form divine.

  After all, I had slimmed down from 135 to 116.

  Perhaps it was the form divine. A few days later the William Fox Picture Company asked me to make a screen test. “What did I tell you?” demanded Beryl, triumphantly. “You were just hiding your potentialities.”

  As we viewed the test later, the director said, “My dear, if I were you, I’d forget all about a picture career.”

  My heart sank. “Why?”

  “Don’t you notice anything about your smile? Your smile is crooked. In pictures,” he said, in the voice of a man stating a law of nature, “in pictures one must have perfection. Nothing less will do.” I could not know that a year and a half later I was to be engaged by Paramount because—among other reasons—my smile, being crooked, was full of personality.

  I was so discouraged I went home and ate a chocolate eclair.

  CHAPTER V

  IHAVE a vivid memory of my first drink. I had just turned seventeen. A few minutes before midnight, 1928, I stood excitedly in my new formal at the “Vanities” stage-door. Inside, the cast were wishing one another a riotously Happy New Year. (Only an hour before the performance W. C. Fields almost broke us all up by grabbing a broom and chasing a process-server up and down the empty aisles, yowling at the top of his voice.) I was waiting for Leo Fox to pick me up: Katie had given me permission to stay out late that night for a New Year’s Eve party with our classmates from Clark, and to greet 1929 with a class breakfast.

  There was Leo, jaunty in a new tuxedo, holding open a cab door. “Come on, LiL We’re late.”

  “Gosh, you look slick, Leo,” I said admiringly, and I thought how lucky I was, because all the girls admired him, but he had eyes only for me. On the way over in the cab, Leo pulled out a flask. “Lil, I’ve got something here. We’ve got to catch up with the other kids.”

  Leo and I had never drunk anything but ice-cream sodas together. But this was an occasion. He put the flask to my lips. “Have a nip.” I took my first drink. It burned my throat, and I felt the blood rush to my face. “Gee, Leo, that’s great What is it?”

  “Fermented prune juice,” he said. It was his own prohibition home-brew, he added proudly. I thought, it’s probably good for my complexion. Sure speeds up the circulation. I felt warm all over. As we stopped before the hotel, I said, “I think I’ll have another one of those just before we get in, Leo.”

  When we reached our table, someone said, “Have a drink.” I drank. This was much stronger. I coughed and sputtered, but again I felt wonderful. Suddenly the sirens sounded, the bells rang, the horns tooted: it was midnight. People hugged and kissed each other. Gaily colored streamers shot through the air, the orchestra became alive, and the lights went out.

  I loved everybody. My shyness vanished. The clock in my head slowed down. “Oh, this is glorious,” I thought “I’m walking on air. I’m going to hug every person in this room and disappear. I’ll vanish. Leo will have to search for me.” I began to weave my way through the enormous ballroom, amid the flying streamers, the voices shouting “Happy New Year,” the music rippling and throbbing and cascading all about me. At each table it seemed my arm was grabbed. “Come on, little girl, down the hatch!” I drank with everybody and I drank everything they gave me. I glowed; an indescribable sense of freedom, a desire to open my heart and enfold the whole shining rapturous world overwhelmed me.

  The room began to spin. Then I was sitting in the dimly lit lobby, violently sick over my beautiful dress, over Leo’s new tuxedo. The music was far away, in the ballroom two flights above, and a bellboy was trying to help Leo clean me up. I was utterly ashamed.

  “We’d better go home,” Leo was saying.

  “What time is it?” I asked dazedly.

  It was 12:50. In fifty minutes I had gone through an entire gamut of emotions, and passed out. My experience wasn’t unusual, I know now. Other girls my age, drinking as much as I had for the first time, would have reacted much the same. There wasn’t the slightest hint, that New Year’s Eve, that between alcohol and me there would soon develop a bond so overpowering that until almost the very end I believed only death could break it.

  Leo managed to get me into a cab. Minutes later we rang our doorbell. “Home so soon, baby?” my mother’s voice came sleepily. “Oh, Mom, go back to bed,” I said. “I had a little accident. I’m going to change my dress and we’re going right out again” I said it gaily. I was confident that however sick I was, all I needed was will power to conquer it.

  I sat on the daybed for a moment, Leo beside me, holding me up. Then it was daylight, and Katie was shaking me. We had fallen asleep, fully-dressed, half stretched out, half-propped up against the wall, shoulder to shoulder. My mother gave Leo coffee and sent him home.

  “Oh, Mom,” I said. “I sure don’t know why D
ad likes to drink. It’s awful! I feel terrible—if for those few minutes of fun I could get this sick—I’ll never touch that stuff again.”

  Katie laughingly bathed and rubbed me down, then sent me off to bed.

  My father wasn’t there to give his expert advice. He and Katie had separated—permanently.

  Florenz Ziegfeld sent for me, just as “Vanities” was about to close. He sat at his big desk with half a dozen miniature elephants on it, and Gene Buck, his Man Friday, sat off to one side. “I’m told you’re a talented little lady,” Ziegfeld said quietly. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.” He called in an accompanist, and we did one of my favorites, “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will You, Huh?”

  Not once did Ziegfeld look up. He sat there, thumbing through papers, doddling, and rearranging his elephants. I thought, bravely, if you can sing to J. J. Shubert’s back, you can sing to the top of Mr. Ziegfeld’s head. My song over, I bowed a “Good afternoon, Mr. Ziegfeld,” and began to leave.

  He looked up then. “When is the show closing?”

  “Next week,” I said automatically.

  “Then we start rehearsing next week—my new Ziegfeld’s ‘Midnight Frolics.’ You’ll be the ingenue lead.”

  I was engaged, at $500 a week.

  There was no question that Ziegfeld’s New Amsterdam Theatre Roof was the smartest nightclub in New York. After they finished “glorifying” the Follies in the theatre downstairs, Ziegfeld’s gorgeous show girls trouped upstairs to appear in the Frolics. It was a glittering show. Ted Husing was master of ceremonies, and Paul White-man conducted the orchestra, opening with “Rhapsody in Blue,” with Henry Busse at the trumpet. Ziegfeld’s girls paraded to “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” after which Ted brought me on for a song and dance. In the cast were Helen Morgan, the Duncan Sisters, and the Rhythm Boys—Al Rinker, Harry Barris and Bing Crosby.

  As Lenore Ulric had once been, now Helen Morgan became my idol. Her exquisite beauty, her charm even when she had been drinking, worked their magic over the audience. Perched on her piano, singing her plaintive melodies in that sad, husky voice, twisting her handkerchief in the bitter-sweet anguish of her song and her life, she sang straight into your heart. She had just finished a long run in Ziegfeld’s “Showboat,” and was still the toast of Broadway. But something was happening to her, and presently Ruth Etting was brought up from “Whoopee,” and took Helen’s place.