The LeBaron Secret Page 17

  Of course Gabe’s new job, as a general-assignment reporter for the Chronicle, kept him out long hours, and kept him moving about the city. He was forever being called to the courthouse, or to investigate a burglary in the suburbs, or to go to the scene of a barroom fight or murder on the waterfront, or a tong war in Chinatown. But that was all right. She tended to feel shy and uncomfortable in Gabe’s presence now. The old easiness between them seemed to have been replaced with—what? An excessive politeness seemed to be what it was. At first, this new distance had distressed and confused her, but now that was all right, too.

  She had decided to do something that would make him very angry.

  He had found rooms for them both in a boardinghouse on Howard Street, but their new landlady was a far cry from the loquacious Mrs. Bonkowski. She was a Mrs. Tristram Dodge, a thin and mousy woman whose principal interest was her cat, a big tiger tom named Pussy, who draped himself across Mrs. Dodge’s shoulders while she sat in her front parlor with her mending basket. Ignored by her landlady, Sari had all the freedom she needed to work on her plan. Gabe seldom came home for supper now, and often did not come home until after Sari had gone to bed. And in the mornings he was usually up and out of the house before it was time for Sari to rise and dress for school. On weekends, he often shut himself in his room, where Sari could hear him—he had a typewriter now—working on his stories. She missed their late-evening talks, but she knew that his work came first. Besides, she herself had not been idle.

  She had waited for a week to tell him her news, wanting to surprise him with the solid proof of it. Then she had tapped on his door, and, when he opened it, she had handed him ten dollars.

  “What’s this?” he asked her suspiciously. “Where did you get this?”

  “I have a job,” she said. “And that’s my first week’s wages.”

  “A job? What kind of a job?”

  “I’m an usherette at the Odeon movie theatre on Market Street. Ten dollars a week.”

  “You’re too young. There are laws—”

  “I lied about my age,” she said triumphantly. “I told them I was fourteen, and they believed me. They gave me a uniform with a blue jacket and a white shirtwaist, and a little flashlight. I help show people to their seats.”

  “But what about your schoolwork?”

  “The job is after school. Afternoons from three o’clock till seven, and Saturdays from noon to eight.”

  “Your homework—”

  “That’s easy. After I’ve shown the people in, I find a seat in the back row and do my homework with my flashlight.”

  “That’s bad for your eyes!”

  “Nonsense. I can read as well—even better—with my flashlight than I can with my bedroom lamp!”

  Standing in the doorway, staring at the money in his hand, he said. “I don’t want you to do this. I can’t take this money from you.”

  “I just want to pay my share of the room and board,” she said. “Why should you do it all when I can help? Isn’t this what you’re always saying about America? If a person works hard, he can get ahead? I just want to work hard and get ahead—just like you!”

  He kept staring at the money, shaking his head.

  “Besides,” she said, “I get to see all the movies free!”

  “No,” he said. “You’ll neglect your schoolwork, watching movies.”

  “But you only have to watch the movie once. When it comes on again, you already know the story. That’s when I do my homework.”

  “No,” he said finally. “I’m not going to let you do this.”

  “What?” she cried. “What do you mean? How can you not let me do it? I’m doing it already!”

  “I’m your guardian. You’re to do as I say.”

  “Well, I won’t!” she said angrily. “I’ve spent six years doing what you wanted me to do. Now I’m going to do what I want to do for a change!”

  “And if I forbid you?”

  “Then I’ll run away. I’ll run away, quit school, find a full-time job, and you’ll never find me, Gabe Pollack!”

  “Job? What kind of job can you get—a girl of thirteen?”

  “I’ll become a prostitute, that’s what I’ll do!”

  His hand, clutching the money, went up, as though he were about to strike her. “Where are you learning gutter talk like that?” he said. “At school? At the movies?”

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “I won’t just become a prostitute! I’ll become the best damned prostitute in the world!” Then she had slammed the door in his face, run down the hall to her own room, let herself in, and bolted the door behind her.

  Alone, she pulled the ribbons out of her hair, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse and, in front of her dressing-table mirror assumed the languid, smoldering pose of Blanche Sweet in Anna Christie, which had been playing just that week at the Odeon.

  Presently there was a tap at her door, and his voice said, “I’m sorry, Sari. I don’t want you to run away. Please don’t run away.”

  But she was giggling so hard at her image as a prostitute that she couldn’t answer him.

  And so, every afternoon, she would run—run the twelve blocks from her school to the Odeon to save the nickel carfare—and change into her usherette’s uniform to be ready to be at work with her flashlight by three o’clock. And, once a week, she would slip ten dollars under Gabe’s door without comment.

  These were some of the movies that she saw: The Three Musketeers, with Douglas Fairbanks; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, both with the dashingly exotic Rudolph Valentino, the new film sensation; Way Down East, with Lillian Gish, whose wide-eyed, pinch-lipped look of injured innocence Sari also tried to imitate in her mirror; Peck’s Bad Boy, with Jackie Coogan; Where the Pavement Ends, with Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry; and A Woman of Paris, with Adolphe Menjou and Edna Purviance …

  These are only a few of the titles and performances that Sari remembers.

  And of course she had lied to Gabe Pollack, at least a little bit, because some of her favorite films she watched two, three, or as many as half a dozen times.

  “Only a B in history?” Gabe Pollack would say to her. “You’re watching too many movies.”

  “History bores me. It’s nothing but memorizing the dates of wars and the names of generals. Everything else is an A—and an A-plus in math.”

  The movies and the people who made them were very much on the public’s mind in those days. Around that time, as some of you may remember, there had been a dreadful scandal involving a movie personality, and it had happened right there in San Francisco, in a fancy suite at the St. Francis Hotel. A popular movie comedian named Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle had been arrested in connection with the death of a young woman during a wild orgy at the hotel. The woman was said to have been a local prostitute, and there were other, darker implications of misdeeds involving illicit narcotics, illegal alcohol, and bizarre sexual practices. Apparently, the actual details of what had gone on were so shocking and ghoulish that even the most lurid of Mr. William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers would not print them, and there was only whispered speculation about what might really have happened. The only consensus seemed to be to the effect that the girl’s death had somehow been caused by Fatty Arbuckle’s great weight. At Assaria Latham’s school, her schoolmates, knowing that she worked at a theatre where Arbuckle’s films had been shown—though no more, since all his films were now banned—naturally assumed that Sari must somehow know all the sordid facts. Of course she knew no more about the affair than anyone else. But it pleased her to think that the other girls suspected that she knew more than she was telling.

  Meanwhile, during those years of the early 1920s, a new phrase had entered the American lexicon: “movie star.” To be a movie star, Sari had read, it helped if a girl happened to be small. Somehow, small women seemed to fit better into the celluloid frames and, despite their appearances on the big screen, she read, many of the actresses she adm
ired the most—the Gish sisters, Nita Naldi, Mary Pickford—were slightly built women. And Sari herself, as her fourteenth birthday approached, could see that she was going to be small, barely five feet three inches tall. Studying herself in front of her mirror in those days, practicing the mannerisms and expressions and gestures of the silent-film stars she had watched on the screen, Assaria Latham was able to see herself maturing into a tiny, almond-eyed, olive-skinned, almost Oriental-looking beauty with extraordinary thick, dark red hair, which she caught back with ribbons at the nape of her neck. She had not worked at the Odeon for long before she had decided that, with luck, becoming a movie star might be something that she could reasonably aspire to.

  All over America, it seemed, pretty girls were being plucked from beauty contests and from amateur theatrical productions to be screen-tested and offered movie contracts. And it was all happening just a few hundred miles away, in Hollywood, California.

  Naturally, she did not confide any of these ambitions to Gabe Pollack at the time. She knew he would thoroughly disapprove.

  But Mr. Moskowitz, the Odeon’s manager, she decided might prove a useful ally. He dealt directly with the men who distributed the films, as well as with the men who owned the theatre, who, in turn, were the same men who produced the movies. The theatre’s full name in those days, in fact, was Loew’s Odeon, and it was owned by Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, and Louis B. Mayer—producers all.

  Mr. Moskowitz had told her that most usherettes did not last in the position long. They found the routine tedious, and the wages low. But Sari, always punctual, appeared to be a different sort. At the end of six months, he raised her pay by a dollar a week. After a year, he presented her with another, two-dollar raise, and suggested that the two of them might have dinner some evening. To this latter invitation—knowing that there was a Mrs. Moskowitz—Sari had responded with a polite demurral.

  But it was with all these things in mind that Sari, who was by then sixteen and in her last year of high school in early 1926, spotted a small item in the afternoon paper and read it with interest.

  TRYOUTS TONIGHT

  The Bay Area Amateur Theatre Troupe will hold tryouts tonight for She Who Is Seized, a new romantic drama by the internationally renowned playwright Wilmarth L. Fears. The drama offers speaking parts for six female and five male characters, plus four walk-ons, according to Millicent Simmons, the troupe’s president, who will also direct the production. Interested local thespians are invited to appear for readings and casting tryouts tonight at Miss Simmons’s house, 815 Sutter Street, at 8:30 P.M.

  That night, Sari went to Miss Simmons’s address and was given two pages of dialogue to read. About thirty other people had shown up, and so Sari had not held out much hope that she would be chosen for any sort of part. But the next morning, to her everlasting wonder and surprise, she received a note from Millicent Simmons saying that she would like to cast Sari in the leading, and title, female role. “My dear, you will be perfect as Sabrina!” Miss Simmons wrote.

  As Sari would later find out, the chief attraction of She Who Is Seized to Miss Simmons and her Amateur Theatre Troupe was the fact that its production rights could be acquired for a very low fee—fifteen dollars is the figure that comes to Sari’s mind today. And, looking back, the play was a terribly silly piece of costumed and melodramatic claptrap. It told, in three crowded acts, the story of a wealthy and beautiful American woman named Sabrina Van Arsdale who was pursued across the face of Europe by a handsome Russian prince named Ivan Troubetskoy, or something like that. For three acts, and through many costume changes, Sabrina resisted the prince’s blandishments and costly gifts and amorous advances as she fled from Moscow to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Paris to Capri, and finally to a doge’s palace on the Grand Canal in Venice. There where she had been hiding, protected by the doge, the prince, disguised as a peasant, at last succeeded in finding her, and burst in on her, brandishing a sword in one hand, and speaking lines Assaria would never forget: “Madam, I am mad with love for you! I am intoxicated with your beauty! I am made insane by love! If you continue to repel me, I shall destroy your loveliness with this blade, and then fall upon it myself!”

  This was the cue for Sabrina, played by Assaria, to cry, “I am seized by love! I am your princess for all time!” And to fall into the prince’s arms as the curtain descended.

  “My dear, I want you to play this last scene with passion,” Millicent Simmons, the play’s directress, said to her. Miss Simmons was an ample, marcelled spinster of a certain age, much given to breast-beating gestures. But despite her age, Sari learned, Miss Simmons was considered to be frightfully daring and “Bohemian.”

  “You are not just seized by love here, you are seized by passion! Passion, sexual passion, of the deepest, most visceral sort! It is lust that you must express here. I want you to project all that feeling into those two lines! Let your voice growl—growl out those lines—with passion!”

  Despite the creakiness of the material, and the director’s almost impossible demands, the largely inexperienced cast had worked hard rehearsing the production, and when She Who Is Seized finally opened before an audience in the auditorium of the Odd Fellows Hall, one February evening, the play was an astonishing success. And Assaria, holding the hand of her young prince, was required to bow and curtsy her way through a total of thirteen curtain calls, to a standing ovation. The originally scheduled run of three performances was extended to eight, then to ten, then to twelve. No previous production of the Bay Area Amateur Theatre Troupe had ever achieved so long a run, and the play seemed to delight audiences of young and old alike. Gabe Pollack himself was assigned by his paper to do a story on the city’s surprising new hit drama. (“You were very good,” he said to her almost shyly after coming to see the play, and she did not tell him that the only way she had been able to perform the last scene had been to try to hold, in her head, the memory of the time he had held her in his arms and kissed her nearly three years before.) The story in the Chronicle created a new demand for tickets, and the play’s run was extended four more nights. Then She Who Is Seized and its cast were invited to perform the play for the patients and staff of the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children. That story made the papers, too.

  The grand climax to the dramatic history of She Who Is Seized came after that performance. Sweeping into the dressing room, Miss Simmons threw up her hands and announced, “My dears, I have some extraordinary, astonishing, absolutely breathtakingly wonderful news for all of you! We have been invited to perform for the students, parents, and faculty of Miss Katherine Burke’s School! Need I tell you what this means? Miss Burke’s is the educational emporium of San Francisco’s most elite young ladies! It is to other schools in the city what Russian ermine is to muskrat! These are the daughters of Crockers, Floods, Fairs, Mackays, and Spreckelses, the flowering of the city’s finest families, the backbone of the financial community and the heart of the Social Register! My dears, what we have enjoyed thus far is mere popularity. This, my dears, is prestige. Up to now, we have been casting our pearls before swine, the hoi polloi, the proletariat. Now we have been invited to perform our talents for the aristocracy! This is an equivalent to a command performance before the kings and queens of all the high courts of Europe. What can possibly follow this, my dears? Only—” and Miss Simmons placed one hand dramatically across her broad bosom, “Only—Hollywood!”

  As it happened, however, the performance at Miss Burke’s was the group’s last. And it was after this that Sari was sitting backstage at her dressing table, removing her makeup, and looked up into her mirror and saw, standing behind her, one of the most beautiful girls she had ever seen. Tall and slender and blonde, the girl was about her own age, and even her Miss Burke’s uniform—blue and white middy blouse, long, pleated, dark blue skirt—which had been starchily designed and crafted to reveal as little as possible of a girl’s good looks, could not disguise this particular young woman’s beauty. In a husky, th
roaty voice that seemed as honeyed as her hair, the girl said, “You were wonderful. You were absolutely wonderful. I had to come backstage and tell you.”

  “Thank you,” Sari had said.

  “Assaria Latham. What a beautiful name. What a beautiful name to go with such a marvelous talent. When you said those last lines, I felt I was going to faint.”

  “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “I want you to be my friend,” the girl said. “Will you be my friend?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “Good. I want you to be my friend, and I want to be your friend. When can we meet? Can you meet me tomorrow after school?”

  “I’m afraid I have to work after school.”

  “Saturday, then. Saturday afternoon.”

  “I also work Saturday afternoons,” Sari said.

  “Then Sunday. Nobody works on Sundays, do they?”

  “Yes, I guess that would be all right.”

  “Good,” the girl said. “I’ll meet you at four o’clock on Sunday, at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. We’ll have tea.” She touched Sari’s shoulder lightly with her hand. “I’ll see you then.” She turned on her heel to go.