I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 7

  Well, he went on as we danced, each of us smiling and nodding to others, it appeared I had once deliberately walked off the set; I had complained about Mr. DeMille; I had caused a scene over an insult, real or fancied, in a closeup shot; and I was temperamental and difficult.

  “We’re sending you back to New York to be kicked in the rear by the Marx Brothers until you learn how to behave,” he concluded casually.

  I was stunned. I left him standing on the floor and ran crying into another room. But his word was law. I was to play a love interest in the Marx Brothers’ new picture, “Animal Crackers,” being shot in New York. What neither my mother nor David’s parents had been able to accomplish—separating David and me—was done by a one-sentence ultimatum from Paramount’s front office.

  Mr. Shulberg later salved my wounds. When I returned from New York, a wonderful part would be awaiting me: playing the romantic interest in the new Chevalier picture!

  If anything made bearable my separation from David, it was the zany experience of making a film with the Marxes. It was one step removed from a circus. First Zeppo, the youngest, sauntered into the studio, about 9:30. At 10 somebody remembered to telephone Chico and wake him. Harpo, meanwhile, popped in, saw that most of the cast was missing, and strolled off. Later they found him asleep in his dressing room. Chico arrived about this time. Groucho, who had been golfing, arrived somewhat later, his clubs slung over his shoulder. He came in with his knees-bent walk, pulled a cigar out of his mouth, and with a mad, sidewise glance, announced, “Anybody for lunch?”

  Work resumed at mid-afternoon, and then it was five o’clock, and they were finished for the day.

  Every scene took longer than the director planned, for the ad libs came thick and fast, and the budget soared as the laughs increased.

  Groucho and I had a scene that had to be shot over at least ten times. In this instance I was the culprit. We were supposed to be hunting a thief who had stolen a valuable painting from Margaret Dumont, who played the society dowager Groucho chased. My line, when we stumbled on a fake painting, was, “Oh, if we could only find the real painting!” Groucho’s line was, “I know who the thief is. Here’s his signature.” “Who is it?” I asked. “Rembrandt,” he said. “Don’t be silly, he’s dead,” I retorted. Groucho snarled, “Then it’s murder.” I burst into giggles every time he said that, ruining the take. The line itself wasn’t so hilarious, but I knew Groucho was going to say it with the big cigar jutting from his clenched teeth, his eyebrows palpitating, and that he would be off afterwards in that runaway crouch of his; and the thought of what was coming was too much for me.

  We were running far over schedule, and I was eager to get back to David and the Chevalier picture. Word came from the coast: the film was already under way! Then, a reassuring report—Paramount was using a girl who resembled me in some of the long shots. There had been many newspaper stories reporting that I had won the role opposite Chevalier.

  Finally Katie and I were on the train bound for the coast. During the ten-minute stopover in Kansas City I bought a newspaper and read: “UNKNOWN TO PLAY CHEVALIER’S LEADING LADY.” They ran a picture of the girl, Frances Dee. I died a thousand deaths between Kansas City and Los Angeles.

  The parting of the ways was inevitable. It came after I made one more picture—”Sea Legs,” with Jack Oakie. The final straw was my discovery that when Paramount sent me out on personal appearance tours, they received nearly five times as much for my services as they were paying me.

  Both Katie and David—separately—agreed that I should go out on my own.

  “Lums, you have box-office appeal,” David argued. “You can sing and dance. Most Hollywood stars come out on the stage, say, ‘How do you do?’, and take a bow. They’ve had no stage training.”

  David had so much faith in my potentialities that he joined an agency office to book me. He offered me to the Balaban and Katz Theatre Circuit in Chicago; they engaged me at $1,750 a week, more than twice my Paramount salary. And I was held over for seven weeks, playing north, west and south Chicago, and the famous Loop.

  No question of it—we’d made the right decision. Mounted police held back the crowds as I emerged from the stage door between and after shows. Bids came pouring in. David, delighted, flew to New York to handle them.

  Then, a long distance call from him: “Darling, you’re set to headline at the Palace in November! The Palace— and top billing! And four Paramount short subjects in Astoria, at $3,500 a short!”

  I was overjoyed. David was wonderful!

  Even Katie had to admit that he really was interested in my welfare.

  We arrived in New York to find three of my pictures running simultaneously on Broadway. (First nighters had paid a record $11 a seat to see “The Vagabond King.”) Happily I bought Katie a mink coat, Ann a kidskin outfit, and myself a leopard coat trimmed in seal. Dad came in from Boston to greet us.

  But the joy of reunion was turned to ashes by word that David was suffering violent spells of vertigo that puzzled his doctors. The day I opened at the Palace with Lou Holtz, David was taken to the hospital for tests. I saw him every possible moment “To think I have to miss you at the Palace!” he lamented. “How I would love to be out front, watching you! But I’ve thought of a great plan—a repeat at the Palace—and I’m going to see about that booking right from this bed. I’ll be in the first row next time.”

  No matter how badly David felt, he seemed to be able to forget his pain when I was there. It was difficult for me to realize how ill he really was. As in California, he pushed his sickness aside. “Just nervous headaches,” he said. He was gay, charming, lovable.

  After the Palace I went on tour, carrying out bookings he had arranged for me, flying back between engagements in Buffalo and Washington to be at his side. When I opened at the Palace the second time, two months later, co-headlining with Walter Winchell and Harry Richman, David was still in the hospital. Walter and Harry soon knew about him, and like good troupers they bolstered me through several shows, but I don’t think either knew David’s illness was as serious as it was.

  After three exploratory operations, the verdict of his doctors was brain abscess. Now David was incoherent much of the time. His nurse, a big, motherly Irish woman, sought to calm me. “They always talk a bit disconnected after brain surgery, dear,” she said. “Don’t worry —he’ll come out of it.”

  One morning he was scheduled for still another operation. It was Sunday, and I remember telling the interne early that morning that I had three shows—at two, six and nine-and would he telephone me if David wanted me? I gave him the backstage number.

  Intuitively I knew the call that came at 5:45 p.m. was for me. I was putting on my makeup for the second show. “Oh, God.” I prayed, “don’t let anything happen to him.” On the telephone I heard the interne’s voice, low and grave. “You’d better get down here quickly, Miss Roth. David is going.”

  I left the receiver dangling. I was running barefoot out the stage entrance when I felt someone grab my shoulders and whirl me around. It was Harry Richman. He dragged me struggling back to my dressing room and threw me sobbing into a chair. “Stop it!” he shouted, and slapped me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Let me out of here,” I wept. “Please. David’s dying. Please!”

  “Don’t you realize,” he went on inexorably, “they’re playing the overture and two thousand people are waiting out there for you?’

  Winchell hurried into the room. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “We’re due onstage!”

  “Oh, some damn fool has told her that David is dying,” Harry said distractedly. “What a stupid thing to do! They don’t say things like that on the telephone, do they, Walter?”

  I looked at Walter. He couldn’t answer. He was pulling at his fingers nervously and his eyes were tear-filled. I thought—isn’t that odd? He’s reacting just like me.

  They kept encouraging me while my maid dressed me, and then I was before the audi
ence, singing the ridiculous words of “I’m Flying High, But I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling.” How can they expect me to sing a happy song? I can’t stop crying. I got through my act and came off the stage for a moment. Then I would have to return to do skits with Harry and Walter. Harry hugged me. “Listen, Lil—keep it up—you’re doing swell!”

  Then I was onstage again, alive in a nightmare.

  When the show was over George Wood, Richman’s manager, rushed me to the hospital in a cab. Now David’s parents can’t try to separate us any more, I thought dully. Nobody can do anything to either one of us any more.

  David’s mother looked up as I ran down the corridor, and turned away sobbing. When I opened the door to David’s room, I stared—the bed was made, but he was not there.

  I fled from the room. “No, no, no, no, no!” I screamed. “I don’t believe it! I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!”

  His nurse led me to an adjoining room—a nursery—full of empty cribs. “Oh,” I cried, “we’re never going to have our babies now.”

  She helped me to a chair. “Lillian, dear. Please, now…you mustn’t cry for David. He’s with our Lord.”

  I turned on her. “Don’t talk to me about God!” I shouted. “David’s dead. How could God take him away now? He was so young, we had so many plans—”

  She tried to comfort me. “Maybe you’d like the lifetime plant your mother sent him,” she said. “No,” I said, “the plant will live forever and he’s dead.”

  I heard George’s voice. “It’s time to go back, kiddie. You’re on in half an hour.”

  When I returned to the theatre Harry and Walter were waiting at the stage door. Walter put his arms around me and led me to a chair. Then he broke down and had to walk away.

  Harry talked to me. “Listen, Lil,” he said gently. “You know you’re a great artist. You’re going out before that audience and do what you always do to them. You’re going out there because David’s watching. He wanted this for you. You can’t fail him.”

  I went onstage again. I sang the Huguette waltz, and something of my youth went from me in the words that night:

  “Never try to bind me, never hope to hold,

  Take me as you find me, love and let me go,

  Though the loves we leave behind us

  Change and fade away

  Never mind, we’ll have our love some day.”

  CHAPTER IX

  ADELE ROGERS ST. JOHN wrote a syndicated piece about my tragedy that tore one’s heart out. It was tided, “Take Your Happiness and Love While You May.” Its moral was that youth was the time for romance.

  I wouldn’t let David go. Somehow I managed to complete my week at the Palace. Every entertainer can pull himself together on the stage, even if he collapses a moment later in the wings. Offstage, reality came, and hysteria. I wanted to die. I went into tantrums of self-reproach. Vainly Katie tried to comfort me. “I never realized he meant so much to you,” she wept, and her guilt made me even more despondent.

  I imagined I suffered David’s vertigo, David’s headaches. Dad came to New York and did all he could to cheer me up. Nothing helped. A family friend, Ted Reiner, who had been waiting for me to “grow up,” hoping against hope that I would marry him, also tried to console me. Finally, Mother and Ted hired a psychiatric nurse for me. I was in hysterics most of the time. Everything tortured me: the mournful sound of the ships on the Hudson River, the rasp of automobile horns in the streets below. I could not sleep. I raged about the apartment convulsed with tears.

  My parents called in a neurologist who recommended several months’ rest in a sanitarium. “I can’t sleep even a few hours a night at home,” I screamed. “How can I spend months in a sanitarium?”

  David, from his hospital bed, had arranged a three month tour for me of the Paramount Public theatres through the South and West “Very well,” said the physician. “Let her go on the tour. She ought to get away. She’s had something close to a nervous breakdown. But see that she doesn’t have time to brood. Have her take up bridge. It might keep her mind occupied.”

  I went on tour. My trunks were full of David’s letters and his photographs. In every town I had his pictures tacked on the dressing room walls, pushed into the frame of my dressing room mirror. With me went Ellen, the psychiatric nurse, a tall, compact girl who was to care for me, and Katie, who wasn’t sure whether it was wise to come along, but came when I insisted.

  Time and again I woke in the night screaming that David was in the room with me. Katie and Ellen had their hands full. “He’s alive,” I wailed. “He’s in the room now.” The same vivid dream came night after night. David lay in his hospital bed, his tousled hair as before, talking to me. “When the nurses come in here with the doctor,” he whispered, his eyes twinkling, “they’ll tell you I’m dead. But you know I’m not, Lums. Don’t believe them. They can’t prove it.” Then the nurses and doctor, all sad and sorrowful, walked into the room, and David lay dead, his eyes closed, his head bandaged, his face waxen. “He’s dead, go out of this room,” they chanted. “He’s dead, go out of this room.” Then the nurses and doctor shook their heads in unison, as if to music, and together filed solemnly out of the room, ignoring me as if I weren’t there. Suddenly the bedcovers moved and David was sitting up again, his eyes open and sparkling with all his wondrous vitality, grinning as he said, “See, Lums, they’re wrong. What did I tell you? I’m not dead!”

  I tried to lose myself in activity. Ellen established a routine. As soon as we arrived in town, the management arranged for bridge players to be in my dressing room between shows. I came off stage, removed my makeup, and sat for a little while at my dressing table, staring at a photograph of David. I always had a fresh flower in a glass before him.

  Ellen would slip in silently. “All right, Lillian, our guests are here.” I would rise like a sleepwalker, walk into another room where a bridge table had been set up and a man and woman were already seated, two decks of cards before them. I would acknowledge the introduction automatically, sit down, and immerse myself in the game.

  Nothing helped. My dreams tormented me. When I did not dream, I lay awake. Ellen tried—with little success—to read me to sleep. David, I sobbed, always knew how to cheer me up. Even when he was in his sick bed, he could do an impression—a hilarious, double-talking salesman selling the Brooklyn Bridge; Douglas Fairbanks leaping across the boudoir of a Persian princess, only to discover he’d left his sword on the window-seat just as the prince bounded in, scimitar in hand; the corner newsdealer doing a slow burn at a man who read the newspapers but never bought them. Even in our most trying times, when our families were so hard on us, we laughed together. He had been my only shield against melancholy —and now he was gone forever.

  I sought to keep his memory fresh. He had died at 6:20 p.m., Sunday. Each Sunday at that hour, in whatever city I found myself, I went to my room and remained alone for a little while.

  We played Minneapolis. Then Des Moines. In Kansas City Katie left for Chicago, to join my sister Ann, who had returned to show business briefly with Benny Meroff’s act. Katie was almost as despondent as I: she was convinced that she had only made me feel worse by coming along. Chicago—and Ann—seemed a sensible idea.

  Goodman Ace, then dramatic critic for the Kansas City Journal-Post, reviewed my opening night favorably. He wrote sympathetically of my courage in performing so soon after my great loss. Later he telephoned me. He and his wife Jane conducted a Sunday radio program, “The Easy Aces.” He had heard I was a bridge enthusiast. They talked about bridge on their show: would I like to be his guest this Sunday at 6 p.m.?

  Reluctantly I agreed, for I had no heart to meet strangers. Before the program, the Aces chatted briefly with me. Then Mr. Ace said, “By the way, what will you sing this evening?”

  I looked at him is dismay. “Oh, I can’t sing on your program, Mr. Ace,” I said. “Not on a six o’clock program on Sunday.”

  Perhaps I failed to explain it well. But next day i
n his column, under some such title as “Mourning Becomes Roth,” he took me apart. I couldn’t sing on his program because of my bottomless grief, he wrote, but I could dance at a nightclub the very same evening. What gave with Roth? What kind of phoney publicity play was she trying to make out of her fiance’s death?

  I threw down the newspaper and burst into tears. This was the unkindest cut of all. “And I didn’t even want to dance,” I cried over and over again to Ellen. “I didn’t want to dance.”

  What happened was easily explained. After the show Ellen and the theatre manager, in an attempt to cheer me up, persuaded me to go out to supper. “It will be good therapy,” Ellen assured me. Later, our escort asked me to dance. I begged off. “Oh, snap out of it, Lillian,” Ellen said. “Go ahead and dance!” Too indifferent to make an issue of it, I danced—and one of Mr. Ace’s informants had seen me.

  I got through my show, but by midnight I had worked myself into near hysterics. Nothing Ellen could do helped put me to sleep. Finally she decided to do something not found in the psychiatric rule book. “Listen, Lillian,” she said, going to her bureau drawer and returning with a bottle, “I want you to take a little drink. It will make you feel better about everything.”

  I took the drink she gave me. Then another. A third— and I was off to sleep, my first dreamless night in many nights. And when I woke, rested, I thought: if this is all I must do to get sleep, I’ll do it. It’s wonderful. I enjoyed the taste no more than when I drank on New Year’s Eve with Leo. No matter. I could sleep, and that was a blessing.

  The drink Ellen gave me was the fifth I had ever had.

  Kansas City. Houston. San Antonio. And nightcaps each midnight to bring sleep. One night Rose Thurston, a chorus girl in our vaudeville unit, Ellen and I went for a stroll alongside San Antonio’s pretty lagoon. We came to a drug store, went in and ordered sodas. Standing at the counter were two aviation cadets. One was tall, with laughing blue eyes, blond hair and a winning smile. I couldn’t actually say that he looked like David, but his smile was engaging and had the same boyish quality.