A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Read online

  • • •

  Ruby worked hard at the Strand Roof. “I learned how to dance . . . and hoofed my feet off” performing an acrobatic dance, and she was soon promoted to the front line. “I tried to outdo myself by kicking higher than any of the other girls.” Lindsay once again pulled Ruby out of the line. “Who do you think you are to be constantly out of step?” he asked her. “You’ve got to learn right now that your job on the stage consists of teamwork. If you want to last, remember that.”

  Ruby’s costumes were ill fitting, either too big or too small, and she was frequently concerned that her underpants would fall down around her ankles while she was onstage. The dancers changed in the bathroom, sweating, struggling to use the one small mirror on the wall. Ruby thought it was a wonder the dancers got onstage at all and didn’t look worse than they did.

  The eighteenth edition of the Follies starred Fanny Brice, Bert and Betty Wheeler, the husband-and-wife comedy team who sang and danced, Ann Pennington, Eddie Cantor, the dancer Lina Basquette, and Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Al Jolson used to stand in the wings so he could be close to the pretty girls.

  One of Ruby’s dance partners, Dorothy Van Alst, was a featured specialty dancer with the 1923 edition of the Follies and before that a dancer in Ned Wayburn’s Demi-Tasse Revue at the Hotel Shelburne in Brighton Beach. Dorothy, nineteen and three years older than Ruby, came from Brooklyn (her father was a vice president of a fleet of tugboats with the Gowanus Towing Company) and was at work on a ukulele act in the hopes of auditioning for a spot in Earl Lindsay’s Revue. By December 1923, Dorothy was dancing at the Strand Roof with Ruby and another dancer who was engaged to Jack Dempsey.

  Ruby Stevens (second from right) in a revue at the Strand Roof, New York, circa 1923. (COURTESY DOROTHY VAN ALST COLLECTION)

  FIVE

  Keeping Kool

  Nils Granlund began working for Marcus Loew as an advance man and publicist several years after Loew had given up manufacturing furs for the acquisition of second-string movie houses and down-and-out vaudeville theaters. Granlund started to broadcast over the new medium of radio and was stunned when listeners thirty miles away in New Jersey heard him speak through it. In 1922, Loew bought the radio gadget that became WHN, which broadcast from a one-room studio in the new Loew State Building on Times Square. The room was large enough to accommodate a small orchestra and an announcer. During the broadcasts, the door to the room and all of the windows except for one were sealed; after a short time the walls felt as if they were closing in from lack of air, so programs were kept to fifteen-minute intervals.

  Harry Richman was playing piano for Mae West at the RKO-Colonial and went to the station to sing and play the piano on the air, as did Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Helen Morgan was earning $60 a week performing at Billy Rose’s Backstage Club but went to the station to sing on the show. Ethel Merman was working as a stenographer for the adventurer, aviator, car and boat racer Caleb Bragg, getting $35 a week, and would sing on the air on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  Ruby was interested in radio and thought it would give her some experience in dramatic speaking. She stopped by the station several times a week to see Granlund, who liked her and felt she had a dignity and honesty he found unusual. Sometimes he took her to a restaurant downstairs called Yohalem’s.

  During the intervals of Granlund’s regular programming or when performers would fail to show up, he would read poetry over the air—Kipling or Poe—and occasionally he would let Ruby read in his place.

  It was the work of the English-born poet Robert W. Service that interested her. Granlund let her read one of his poems several times on the radio. It was Service’s long poem “Cocotte,” about the effects of the war, that Ruby read most frequently:

  When a girl’s sixteen, and as poor as she’s pretty,

  And she hasn’t a friend and she hasn’t a home,

  Heigh-ho! She’s as safe in Paris city . . .

  The eight-stanza poem would have been a challenge for Ruby to read and catch its drama and richness; its sense of danger and joy with life’s opening up; its fullness of heart at finding “a lover who loved me only”; an abandon from the happiness of being together and bereavement, from the young man’s leaving to fight and from his death, “sword in hand on the field of glory.” The poem captures a defiance, an anger, a refusal to bend to convention as “women fix me with eyes of scorning/Call me ‘cocotte,’ but I do not care”; a return to a solitary self as “men look at me with eyes that borrow/The brightness of love” that moves to a feeling of regeneration: “There is wonderful work to be done.”

  Ruby had no training as an actress, but she was a reader and knew how to use the words. Her inflections, spirit, and deep familiarity with sorrow allowed her to give the poem a power that carried over the airwaves. Granlund was impressed and saw in her an intensity that he didn’t see in most showgirls. He thought her deep voice had dramatic promise.

  Nils Thor (“Granny”) Granlund, also known as N.T.G., circa 1920.

  Granlund put together a vaudeville show in Brooklyn for Loew’s Metropolitan Theatre and put Ruby in it, watching her work. He thought she was beautiful but couldn’t understand why she was wasting herself on an acrobatic dance for which she did splits and rolled around on the floor. Despite that, when he put together shows for nightclubs, cabarets, and benefits, he made sure to hire Ruby, who would perform her specialty number, her acrobatic dance.

  • • •

  The moral outrage against alcohol, jazz, sex, and women who smoked cigarettes was at its height. Nightlife was forced underground—and thrived. New speakeasies opened daily in New York. Along Fifty-Second Street, owners of brownstones put signs in front of their houses that warned, “This Is Not a Speakeasy.”

  There were five thousand speakeasies in New York, a thousand of them along Broadway running north from Fortieth to Fiftieth Streets between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. There was the Club Lido, the Café de Paris, the Mirador, the Club Richman, Club Anatol, Ciro’s. There were cabarets and theaters and dance clubs, as well as the Ziegfeld Follies, Earl Carroll’s Vanities, George White’s Scandals, Minsky’s Burlesque, and the vaudeville circuit with the Palace Theatre on Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street as the pinnacle of vaudeville success.

  Texas Guinan was the hostess at the El Fay Club, owned by a notorious bootlegger, Larry Fay, who started out as a taxi driver and amassed a fleet of taxis distinguished by their extra nickel trim, tuneful horns, and black swastikas (for good luck) painted on the sides of the cab doors.

  Once Prohibition was passed, Larry Fay used his cars to run liquor from Montreal to New York City until his fleet of taxis gave way to a fleet of trucks and then a fleet of boats. Soon he was bringing vast quantities of liquor into the country. Fay opened a nightclub and joined the other bootleggers who owned clubs, like Owney Madden, who had the Cotton Club in Harlem and the Silver Slipper on Broadway, and Legs Diamond, who owned the Hotsy Totsy Club. Granlund finally figured out that the curious but regular requests made by Fay’s men for poems by Kipling, Poe, Service, and others to be read over the WHN airwaves were coded messages intended to help Fay’s bootlegging boats elude the coast guard and make it—stash intact—to Fay’s warehouse in Hoboken. The authorities soon caught on to the ruse, and Fay was listed as New York’s public enemy No. 3.

  Mary Louise Cecilia (“Texas”) Guinan (center; in britches) from Waco, Texas. She played a gunslinger and rode bareback in pictures and claimed (inventively) that she’d ridden broncos, herded cattle, and was the product of a Virginia finishing school.

  • • •

  The El Fay Club was on Forty-Sixth Street, east of Broadway, above a restaurant on the ground floor. It was at the top of a narrow staircase that led to a door with a peephole that opened up to a small room that could hold eighty patrons. The silks on the walls and a tentlike draping over the dance floor gave the room an even more intimate feeling.

  Texas Guinan was forty years old and back from Hollywood with
more than thirty five-reelers to her name, first from Triangle Studios and Frohman Amusement Corporation and then from her own Texas Guinan Productions and Victor Kremer Features. Texas—she was born in Waco—had created a Western heroine on the screen in shorts like Two-Gun Girl and The Lady of the Law; she could ride and shoot like a man but was all woman and became famous as the female version of the cowboy star William S. Hart.

  There were dancers and entertainers at the El Fay Club, but it was Texas Guinan as mistress of ceremonies whom patrons came to see. She was loud, flamboyantly dressed, full of Irish wit—the all-around life of the party. There was only room enough on the small stage for a chorus of six women; most were from Ziegfeld’s Follies.

  The Ziegfeld girls arrived at the El Fay Club in time for the midnight show after the curtain went down at the New Amsterdam Theatre; performances at the club followed every couple of hours until 5:00 a.m.

  The El Fay’s watered-down liquor, which cost $10.00 a case, was sold for $1.25 a drink (Fay got a hundred drinks per quart); the champagne cider, spiked with alcohol, was $35.00 a bottle.

  While the doctored liquor made the club profitable, it was the irresistible energy of Texas Guinan that made the club a success. (“Give the little girl a big hand,” she would say to the packed audience about her entertainers.) She promised her guests “a fight a night or your money back.” She played to the men in the audience who spent large sums of money at the club. “Hello, sucker,” she would call out to them. As the evening wore on, Texas would invite those audience members who had just arrived and who she knew would be lavish spenders to come sit down by the stage to be near her. Chairs were brought forward and placed on the edge of the dance floor. By the second show there was hardly any dance floor.

  Ruby Keeler at fourteen was one of the six who danced in the chorus at the El Fay; George Raft tap-danced on the small stage for $75 a week. Ruby Stevens was hired by Granlund to perform her acrobatic dance.

  On the first night of her dance, Texas had invited a number of men to sit down in front with her. The remaining stage space was small. Ruby began her acrobatic routine. Her splits and rolls carried her beyond the small stage, out from the spotlight, and she landed under the table, between the legs of the chairs. After that, for her own protection, Ruby did a constrained tap dance.

  Often the two Rubys—Keeler and Stevens—went out on dates together, Ruby Keeler introducing Ruby Stevens to the many gangsters she knew.

  • • •

  At the Strand Roof, Earl Lindsay often asked Ruby to watch out for newcomers to the show. One was Mae Klotz. Lindsay said to Ruby, “Look, I’ve got a little kid coming in, but she’s a cute dancer, and I think she’s got potential. I want you to watch over her and teach her the ropes.”

  Mae Klotz was fourteen; Ruby, seventeen.

  Like Ruby, Violet Mary “Mae” Klotz had graduated from the eighth grade and didn’t go on to high school. Mae studied dance, first toe, then interpretive dance. Soon she was one of Dawson’s Dancing Dolls. It was when Mae Klotz was onstage in a disastrous solo that Earl Lindsay saw her during his annual summer holiday with his wife and his mother and asked Mae to come to New York to be a showgirl.

  Ruby said to Mae when they were introduced, “First of all, kid, those curls gotta go.” Mae said later, “[Ruby] talked real low and real tough. I think she put it on to make me feel that she was my superior.” But Mae was thrilled to be around one of the girls who had so much experience; she was even more thrilled to be dancing in New York and be paid for it.

  Mae came from Atlantic City, though she was born in Philadelphia. (“Our name was a very honored name. We had Klotzes in Philadelphia who were millionaires.”) Mae was a family girl, close to her parents, and she hated to leave them in Atlantic City. Her father was “Atlantic City’s Premier Organist,” the accompanist for two-reelers and then for ten-reel photoplays (“He managed to perform in every theater in Atlantic City”). Father and daughter went to work together: he to play the organ; she to watch the pictures his music punctuated. Mae’s family needed extra money, and she had a dream of New York, “where all the theaters were one after another . . . one great stream of white.”

  Mae and Ruby became close friends and soon went everywhere together. Ruby taught Mae about sex and sophistication.

  “This is going to make you look older than what you are,” Ruby said as she taught Mae to smoke. “And make you appear sexier.”

  “I’m not sure how to do it,” Mae said.

  “Don’t be silly. You put it in your mouth. You light it up and the rest just comes natural.”

  Ruby told Mae about men.

  “There’s a big difference between boyfriends and lovers,” said Ruby. “You’ve had little boyfriends, but that’s all over now.”

  Ruby taught Mae how to charm men, how to woo them, how to get what she wanted from them. “If ‘once over lightly’ is what it took to do the job, we’ll do the job. No emotions attached.”

  Mae needed a new coat and saw the one she wanted. Ruby told her how to get it.

  “You say to your date, ‘Oh, I really love that coat, but I can’t afford it now. But it would mean so much to me.’ Unless he’s stupid, he’s going to say, ‘Oh, let me get it for you.’ And then you’re going to play it like this: ‘No, no, I don’t want to be indebted to you.’ Look forlorn. Put it in the face. Use the voice a little bit, tremble the voice about how you certainly need it but there’s no way you can afford it, but wouldn’t it be wonderful. He’s going to say, ‘Come on, let me do it as a favor to you.’ Play it that way and you’ll get the coat. Don’t come on too strong. He can’t know what you’re doing.”

  Mae tried it out. She and her date went into the store. Mae did as Ruby told her and wore the coat back to her room. Once in the door her date said, “And now . . .”

  Mae said, “Oh no, I can’t do that.” The coat was yanked from Mae’s body, and her date walked out.

  “Listen, stupid,” Ruby said. “Part of the deal is if you want something, you’ve got to give out.”

  • • •

  Ruby brought Mae home to Maud and Bert’s for Sunday suppers; at other times Mae brought Ruby home to Atlantic City and her family. When Ruby’s friend Claire Taishoff announced that she was getting married to a violinist from the New York Philharmonic Society, Mae and Ruby decided to move in together and found a small apartment, above a Chinese laundry on Forty-Sixth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Ruby described it as “a cute place. The first real home I ever had. We never admitted that we lived there, though.”

  When they went out on dates, they were dropped at the Knickerbocker or Astor hotel and would “run like the dickens to get home,” Ruby said.

  They were earning $35 each per week and “put every cent on our backs. We did our own washing, ironing, dry-cleaning,” said Ruby. “Each night we washed our stockings and lingerie. I never had more than one of anything. We shampooed and manicured each other. We did our own cooking, many times, over the old reliable gas-jet.”

  In the winter the windowsills were used as iceboxes. In the summer the bathtub was filled with water for fruit.

  Ruby and Mae went to Gray’s Drugstore to buy makeup and get “cut” tickets on a professional discount for the theater. They went to see musical comedies on Wednesdays and Saturdays and dramas—“legit”—on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  “We couldn’t wait to get together and say, ‘Hey, what’d you see last night?’ ‘Well, I went over to the so-and-so, and I saw such and such. Gee, there’s a scene in there, let me tell you about it.’ And that’s how we learned, by telling each other stories of what we saw.”

  Most chorus girls learned from watching one another—mannerisms, how to dress, put on makeup, manage men. Lucille LeSueur from San Antonio, Texas, with wide blue eyes, generous mouth, clean freckled face, and frizzy auburn hair, who danced in the chorus at Detroit’s Oriole Terrace for eight weeks and made “end girl,” was new in town, dancing at the Winter Garden in the Shu
bert musical Innocent Eyes, which starred Mistinguett, the unrivaled star of the French musical, who was making her debut in America at age forty-nine. Lucille got help with her costumes from the other girls who lent her their clothes, lipstick, and powder. Lucille—some called her Freckles, others, Billie—was confident at nineteen, plump, garish, shy, with a restless seeking energy; her frenzied dancing was spontaneous; what she didn’t know, she made up. Lucille lived in a tiny brownstone on Fiftieth Street, just off Seventh. She was consumed with becoming a stage star, a musical-comedy favorite. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do if it helped make her a success and carry her away from the shame and drudgery of her ugly childhood past in Lawton, Oklahoma, and Kansas City.

  It had been said of LeSueur that when waitressing in Detroit, between shows at the Oriole Terrace, the town’s biggest nightclub, she had spilled a glass of water onto Jake Shubert’s lap as he was dining with his star Mistinguett. LeSueur soaked up the water with a napkin, promising Shubert that she gave “good head” and was as well a “capable dancer.” Shubert had smiled and given her his card. Afterward, Mistinguett whispered in the ear of the youngest Shubert, “She’ll go a long way in life, but she’ll eat you whole, cock first, and spit out the pips!”

  On days when the stars performed benefits for each other, Ruby and Mae and the others went to the Winter Garden. Their one main benefit was for the Actors Fund. “At intermission,” Mae said, “lights came up and all the actors in plays would pass the hat . . . and those hats would come back full. Most of the audience were actors.”