I'll Cry Tomorrrow Read online

  “Lillian, the tall one is for you,” Rose said, trying to cheer me up. I fell in with her mood. “And the short one’s for you, Rose. You know I’m not interested.”

  “He’s looking at you, Lillian,” Rose said, but I refused to glance up from my soda. On the way back to the hotel, Ellen spoke. “I know how you feel about David’s memory, Lillian, but it might help you if you became interested in someone else. You can’t hug a ghost to yourself forever.”

  At noon next day I found myself introduced to Willie Richards, air cadet, stationed at the San Antonio barracks. He had telephoned my room that morning, talked persuasively to Ellen, and arranged to meet me.

  He was a long way from his home, Pittsburgh, he said, and lonely. Would I go dancing with him some night or maybe flying some day? We dined together and he told me about himself. His father was a lumber merchant, but he expected to make his career in the Air Force. He spoke excitedly about his experiences in training; he was gay and uncomplicated and likable and I found I welcomed the chance to get out of myself for a little while.

  He had to be in his barracks each night at 10 o’clock; but for the rest of that week we dined together, I wasn’t the most delightful company. I was reading the. philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in Will Durant’s Outline of Philosophy, and trying to practice each philosophy in turn, as years ago I’d done with Gouéism and Christian Science. Now I was Superman—aloof, beyond good or evil, pain or pleasure. Now I was charming, sophisticated, cynical Now I was pure soul, ethereal and mad as Ophelia, lost in a remote, beautiful other world with my dear, dead David.

  “You’re a funny girl,’’ Willie said at one point. “I can’t make you out but I sure like you.”

  When we were about to leave for Galveston, our next stop, he became serious. He couldn’t bear to think of San Antonio without me. I was in his blood: he loved me. He knew it, he said, holding my arm and looking adoringly at me. He understood the place David had in my heart, but I was young, and he was young, and together we would make happiness ours. He could not live without me.

  I was in my Superman mood. “I’ve had to learn to live without the man I love,” I said tartly. “You’ll have to learn to live without me.”

  Rose and I had a farewell double date our last night in San Antonio. We were to go to the theatre. The four of us stopped in Rose’s room for a quick pick-me-up of Texas corn liquor. I had three drinks and blacked out— the second time in my life. Ellen came, and between them I was helped back to my own room.

  In Galveston the telephone rang every few hours. It was Willie. He was desperately in love. Yes, we’d known each other only a short time, but love was like that: this was it He was ready to resign his commission in the Air Force, fly to meet me in Atlanta, the last stop on my tour, and marry me. All I had to say was yes. Even a whispered “Yes” would do.

  What under other circumstances would have been ridiculous suddenly seemed a good idea. I must break with the morbid past and begin a new life. And why not with Willie? He was decent, clean-cut, he would not interfere with my career, he was the kind of fine young man with whom Katie could find little fault. And he loved me—wasn’t he ready to give up his career for me? I said finally, “All right, Willie. Come ahead.”

  When I told Ellen the news, she took it quietly. I learned only later that she telephoned Ted, who caught a plane for Atlanta and when we arrived there, was on hand to plead his own case.

  Ted listed the reasons against my marriage. The boy had no money; he was too young; it was too soon after David’s death. I had seen Willie all of four—or was it five?—times, and anyway, he, Ted, mature and understanding, could take care of me as I needed to be cared for.

  I wouldn’t listen. A few hours later Willie arrived. He walked into my room. I was dressed in my Huguette costume, posing for a German sculptor who had been assigned to do a bust of me for the German Hall of Fame in Berlin. Willie walked in—wearing a ready-made brown suit with sleeves too short and shoulders too narrow. I had not seen him in civilian clothes before. I thought, panicky, “Oh, no! What have I done? I surely can’t love this boy!”

  Ted was right. But how could I tell Willie? When Ted dropped in later, I introduced them. “Mr. Reiner has come from New York to take me home,” I said. “He’s a friend of the family.”

  “Honey, I know what you’ve been through,” said Willie, “but leave things to me and I’ll make you forget.” He held me close.

  Confusion was added to confusion. The two men argued over me. “Can’t you see she’s a sick girl?” Ted demanded of Willie. “She’s going back to New York and a psychiatrist, and I’m taking her.”

  Willie bristled. “You and what army?” he retorted. “She’ll be all right when she marries me. Why, you’re an old man!”

  While they argued, I slipped out. My David was dead, I thought bitterly, and these two men are fighting over me as though I were something inanimate, without heart; and mind and wishes of my own. What are they trying to do to me? Why don’t they leave me alone!

  I walked the streets, distraught. Then I recalled that an actor I’d known in Hollywood was also in Atlanta, making a personal appearance in connection with one of his films. I telephoned him: I was in trouble, I said. “Two men are in love with me, and I’m completely disgusted with life and don’t know which way to turn. I don’t want to marry either of them.”

  He met me twenty minutes later at a bar. I poured out my heart to him—how wretched I was. One drink followed another. I blacked out: and sometime in the night I found myself in my room, but quite unable to remember how I had gotten there—or what had happened before. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead: what had happened? I raged inwardly, and then I was fitfully asleep, then awake, then asleep.

  Slowly, a soft, steady knocking penetrated to my brain. I struggled awake. I was 5 a.m., and Willie, on the other side of the door, was pleading in an insistent whisper, “Come on, honey, let’s skip and get married before anyone knows what’s going on.”

  As though drugged I rose, dressed, and let Willie take me to an all-night restaurant. We might charter a plane and fly to another state, Willie said, since I was underage to be married in Georgia. He hurried to a pay station telephone and called the airfield, while I waited dully at the table. The gray dawn began to come through the window.

  Willie returned a few minutes later. The ceiling, he said glumly, was too low to fly.

  “O. K. We’ll get married here,” he said masterfully. “You’ll fib about your age.”

  On the outskirts of town, as the milkcarts clattered by, he awakened a minister, whose wife and two daughters stood sleepily at our sides as witnesses. When we got back into the waiting cab, Willie took me in his arms. “Honey,” he murmured exultantly, “we’re married!”

  The words struck me with almost physical force. What had I done now? Why? The first time in my life I had made a decision on my own, without Katie-and look at what I had done!

  When we broke the news at the hotel, Ellen stormed at me. “You’re completely out of your mind!” she cried. “David dead three months, and you married! Ted is right You do need a psychiatrist!”

  What now? The most sensible procedure was for all of us to go to New York. That night I lay in my berth while Willie shaved, making himself handsome for me. Now and then the train whistle sounded—remote, haunting, infinitely sad. I thought of David, how close we had been, the vows we had exchanged, the sweet plans we had had.

  I jumped up, threw a robe over me, and ran through half a dozen cars until I reached Ellen’s compartment. “I can’t, I can’t go through with it,” I said wildly. “I can’t do it.”

  Ellen called Ted, and they comforted me. “We can still handle it,” said Ted. “You stay with Ellen tonight We’ll annul the marriage soon’s we get to New York.”

  Five minutes later Willie was pounding on the door. “Where’s my wife?” he demanded. “Darling, what happened to you?” I sat staring out the window into darkness. Willie wasn
’t to blame. I had said yes. He had quit the Air Force. How could I do this to him? I stood up. “You’d better open the door, Ellen,” I said. “I’m going back with him.”

  In the dining car next morning we sat down to breakfast. Ted said to Willie, “You’ll have to keep the marriage secret or it will ruin Lillian’s career. What will her public think? David dead three months and she married.”

  “You’ve got to cooperate, Willie,” Ellen said. And Willie agreed.

  But as we got off the train, the newspapers thrust in my face had the story: “LILLIAN ROTH MARRIED SECRETLY TO FLYER.”

  Katie came flying in from Chicago, Arthur from Boston. There was a family conference. I was ill, no question of it. I would be taken to a psychiatrist, one of the most eminent in the country, Dr. A. A. Brill, author of Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis.

  Meanwhile, for whatever it might mean, I could brood over the fact that so far as the New York Daily Graphic was concerned, the two major news stories of the day were the abdication of King Alfonso of Spain, and my marriage to Willie. Between us the King and I took over the entire front page of the newspaper. “Throne gone through his abdication, former King Alfonso of Spain today faces problem of all ex-kings—what to do with free time,” read the caption beside the King’s photograph. Under mine, the words read: “Lovely Lillian Roth, who left town in tears when her fiancé died, returns today smiling, accompanied by her husband, William C. Richards, son of a Pittsburgh lumber magnate.”

  Dr. Brill saw me after talking in turn to my father, mother, Ellen and Willie. When I entered his office, he greeted me with a smile. “You’re not at all the wild woman I expected to see,” he remarked, and told me to sit down. He looked at me searchingly. “Suppose you tell me what this is all about?”

  “Haven’t the others told you already?”

  He chuckled. An elderly, paternal man, with a short goatee, he had an air of complete relaxation about him. “Yes, but they’re a little upset. You look like a sensible girl. You tell me.”

  “Doctor, I’m all mixed up.” I told him about David, of the romance not consummated, of the almost hypnotic hold his memory had. I told him of my dreams, my uncontrollable tears and tantrums. I told him of the pent-up energy that made me, sometimes, feel I would burst. I told him of my feelings toward men: I was physically attracted to men, but repelled by intimacies. I told him of the man who had painted me when I was five, of my confusion about sex. We spent hours reviewing my childhood, my relationship with my mother, my sense of being everywhere and belonging nowhere.

  “You don’t love Willie, do you?” he asked.

  No. But he was sweet. I liked him.

  “You married him before you recovered from the shock of David’s death,” Dr. Brill observed. “You weren’t ready for marriage. Suppose we get Willie reinstated in the Air Force. Then you could get an annulment and Willie, from what I’ve seen of him, won’t be too badly hurt by this brief episode.”

  The reinstatement, however, didn’t go through. Dr. Brill called me in again. The best thing to do for the time being, he said, was to go away with my husband. “You’re a nice little girl basically,” he went on. “But you’ve had a couple of bad shocks and a great sorrow. You can afford a trip to Europe, can’t you?” I nodded. ‘Well, then, take it. Get away from your family and from nurses for a few weeks. Then come back and see me.”

  It was sixteen years before I saw Dr. Brill again. He sent me to a mental institution then.

  CHAPTER X

  HAD I not been drinking, would I have married Willie? I was not much of a drinker then. When I took liquor, it was for escape—or, as I liked to say, medicinally. Without knowing it, I was being given my first lesson in the witchcraft of alcohol. For after a drink or two, liquor made me the kind of girl I wanted to be-free of repressions, unfettered by conscience, able to take love and life in my stride.

  When I first saw Willie, an idea floated temptingly on the far edge of my mind: Wouldn’t it be glorious to go off with such a dashing, handsome, soldier-flyer?

  But Lillian, my sober conscience warned me, that isn’t right. You’re in mourning. You mustn’t, you mustn’t….

  It was the drink—the quick drink or two—that made me forget this pious thought. The quick drink opened all the closed doors.

  Dr. Brill had told us to get away as soon as possible. However, I had personal appearances to do in Toronto and Montreal, and Willie was eager for me to meet his parents, so we stopped off in Pittsburgh en route to Canada.

  In Pittsburgh I discovered that I was pregnant. I was almost beside myself. Ought we to go to Europe, now that I was to have a baby? Ought we have a baby, in my mental condition? If it couldn’t be David’s baby, I wanted no one’s. Desperately I took medicines.

  After my Canadian engagements we stopped for a week end in Atlantic City. I still carried David’s pictures; they were on our dresser where Willie couldn’t help seeing them. He was miserable, and I was miserable. One rainy night we both became gloriously drunk. We walked, arm linked in arm, on the boardwalk, reeling and singing, the rain in our faces, stopping every little while to drink from the bottle of bourbon Willie carried on his hip.

  Later we staggered to our room. Depression seized us. Gusts of rain pattered against our windows. The roar of the surf was in our ears. It was a night for high deeds and final acts. I found myself telling Willie that I could never love him: my heart was still with David. I cried, and Willie broke down, too. I was no good for leading him on and he was no good for making me marry him. And now the baby was on its way to complicate matters still more.

  “We could kill ourselves,” Willie said. “That would be final. That would settle everything.”

  We wept for our young lives that were to be snuffed out so soon. But how? Would it be more in the great tradition to join hands and walk into the ocean to our death? Or should Willie charter a plane and crash-dive us to eternity?

  We woke next morning with excruciating hangovers. We looked at each other, slowly packed, and went on to New York. I bought Willie half a dozen suits at $165 each and we sailed for Europe, in the bridal suite of the Ile de France.

  I lay ill at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Paris. We had done the French capital swiftly and madly, sleeping all day, playing all night. I was ill not only from drinking, but from all I had attempted to prevent an unwanted baby from coming into the world.

  One afternoon I managed to go with Willie to the Grand Prix at Deauville. I fainted during the third race: Willie rushed me back to Paris. I lost our baby on the operating table at the American hospital.

  I was very ill. I feared I would die. I wanted desperately to see Katie. Though I had scarcely enough strength to speak, I telephoned her in New York. “Mom, I miss you terribly,” I said. “Come over here. You always wanted to see Europe, and now you’re going to see it”

  Her happiness bubbled over three thousand miles of cable. “Lilly, I’ll be on the next boat! With bells on!”

  Suppose I should not last until she arrived? The doctors, suggesting wine as a blood builder, had prescribed a glass of red wine for lunch, a sparkling Burgundy for dinner, and a pint of champagne before retiring. I tripled the dose.

  When Katie arrived, we drove to meet her at Le Havre. In the following weeks we took her everywhere: the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Folies Bergere, Maxims. We drove to Versailles and Fontainebleau. Ill as I was, I enjoyed her delight, for she was like a child in fairyland.

  After Paris, Geneva. The doctors had ordered me to avoid strenuous exercise. I disregarded their orders: I went riding daily, even learned to jump hurdles. I wanted to live hard and fast. I drank heavily. From fits of wild gaiety I sank into deep melancholia. It was the same in Brussels, in Berlin, in London. David began to reappear in my dreams. One night I knew: I’d had enough. I said to Mother and Willie, “What do you say we go back home?”

  We returned to America, arriving in New York in late August, 1930. The trip had taken two months. It had cost me $25,
000.

  Now I was earning a great deal of money, but it was meaningless. In addition to my appearance in the new Earl Carroll Vanities, I made short subjects for Paramount. Among these were the Fleisher cartoons in which I led the audience in songs while a ball bounced from word to word of the lyric as it flashed on the screen, a verse at a time, I sang “Down Among the Sugar Cane,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” and “Let’s Fall in Love.” Every song was an ironic parody of my own state of mind.

  Willie and I threw at least two big parties a week in our new terrace apartment overlooking Central Park. We hired a secretary, maid and butler-chauffeur. I bought a custom-built ruby-red Hudson, a display model that had cost the Hudson people nearly $10,000 to manufacture, but which they sold me for $4,800 in consideration of my appearance in their ads.

  The car would have delighted an Indian prince. It was upholstered in beige lambskin. The handles were 14-carat gold. An ivory vanity with gold-trimmed mirror was built into the horn of the steering wheel. In the back was an ivory French lacewood bar. The car also held compartments in which were fitted a motion picture camera and an overnight case. My Filipino chauffeur had beige uniforms that matched the color of the upholstery.

  I bought more furs for Katie and myself: minks, ermines, Persian lamb, silver fox capes. I did a Lubitsch, all in gray—gray suede suit, gray kidskin boots trimmed with gray fur cuffs, gray stockings, gunmetal gray Russian hat. I had a similar costume in black Persian. I had a $10,000 diamond ring, a $1,000 wedding band, gloves monogrammed in diamonds. I spent wildly. David and I had saved so frugally to have a home. But David was dead, and why save money now?

  Nothing consoled me. Night after night, after Willie fell asleep, I cried for David, thinking, if only he were lying close to me.

  When I worked, my drinking was subconsciously timed. No more than four whiskey sours each night, after the show. On Sundays, however, the secret strategist hidden in my brain plotted it more elaborately.