CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

If it sounds like I’m denigrating the Lily’s productions, I’m not: I loved them. I would give anything to sit in the back of that rotting old playhouse and see one of those shows again. To my mind, there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues. They made me happy. They were designed to make people happy without making the audience work too hard to understand what was going on. As Peg had learned back in the Great War—when she used to produce cheerful song-and-dance skits for soldiers who’d just lost limbs, or had their throats burned out with mustard gas—“Sometimes people just need to think about something else.”

Our job was to give them the something else.

—

As for the cast, our shows always needed eight dancers—four boys and four girls—and also always needed four showgirls, because

that’s just what was expected. People came to the Lily for the showgirls. If you’re wondering what the difference was between “dancer” and “showgirl,” it was height. Showgirls had to be at least five foot ten. That was without the heels and the feather headdresses. And showgirls were expected to be far more stunning than your average dancer.

Just to further confuse you, sometimes the showgirls danced (such as Gladys, who was also our dance captain), but the dancers never showgirled, because they weren’t tall enough or beautiful enough, and never would be. No amount of makeup or creative padding could turn a moderately attractive and medium-sized dancer with a fairly decent figure into the spectacle of Amazonian gorgeousness that was a midcentury New York City showgirl.

The Lily Playhouse caught a lot of performers on their way up the ladder of success. Some of the girls who started out their careers at the Lily later moved on to Radio City or to the Diamond Horseshoe. Some of them even became headliners. But more often, we caught dancers on their way down the ladder. (There is nothing more brave or touching than an aging Rockette auditioning to be in the chorus line of a cheap and lousy show called Catch That Boat!)

But we had a small group of regulars, too, who performed for the Lily’s humble audiences in show after show. Gladys was a staple of the company. She had invented a dance called the “boggle-boggle,” which our audiences loved, and so we put it in every performance. And why wouldn’t they love it? It was nothing but a free-for-all of girls boggling about the stage with the most jiggling of body parts imaginable.

“Boggle-boggle!” the audience would shout during the encores, and the girls would accommodate them. Sometimes we would see neighborhood children on the sidewalks doing the boggle-boggle on their way to school.

Let’s just say it was our cultural legacy.

—

Iwould love to tell you exactly how Peg’s little theater company remained solvent, but the truth is that I do not know. (It could be a

case of that old joke about how to make a small fortune in show business: by starting with a large fortune.) Our shows never sold out, and our ticket prices were chicken feed. Moreover, although the Lily Playhouse was marvelous, she was a white elephant of the highest degree, and she was expensive. She leaked and creaked. Her electrical wiring was as old as Edison himself, her plumbing was occult, her paint was everywhere peeling, and her roof was designed to withstand a sunny day with no rain, and not much more than that. My Aunt Peg poured money into that collapsing old theater the way an indulgent heiress might pour money into the drug habit of an opium-addicted lover—which is to say bottomlessly, desperately, and uselessly.

As for Olive, her job was to try to stem the flow of money. An equally bottomless, desperate, and hopeless task. (I can still hear Olive crying out, “This is not a French hotel!” whenever she’d catch people running the hot water too long.)

Olive always looked tired, and for good reason: she had been the only responsible adult in this company since 1917, when she and Peg first met. I soon learned that Olive wasn’t joking when she said she’d been working for Peg “since Moses was in nappies.” Just like Peg, Olive had been a Red Cross nurse in the Great War—although she’d been trained in Britain, of course. The two women had met on the

battlefields of France. When the war ended, Olive decided to abandon nursing and follow her new friend into the field of theater instead— playing the role of my aunt’s trusted and long-suffering secretary.

Olive could always be seen marching about the Lily Playhouse, rapidly issuing commands, edicts, and corrections. She wore the strained and martyred expression of a good herding dog charged with bringing order to an undisciplined flock of sheep. She was full of rules. There was to be no eating in the theater (“We don’t want more rats than audience members!”). There was to be promptitude at all rehearsals. No “guests of guests” were allowed to sleep overnight. There were to be no refunds without receipts. And the taxman must always be paid first.

Peg respected the rules of her secretary, but only in the most abstract way. She respected those rules in the manner of someone who has lapsed from their faith but who still has a fundamental regard for church law. In other words: she respected Olive’s rules without actually obeying them.

The rest of us followed Peg’s lead, which meant that nobody obeyed Olive’s rules, although we sometimes pretended to.

Thus Olive was constantly exhausted, and we were allowed to remain like children.

—

Peg and Olive lived on the fourth floor of the Lily, in apartments separated by a common living area. There were several other

apartments up there on the fourth floor, too, that were not in active use when I first moved in. (They’d been built by the original owner for his mistresses, but were now being saved, Peg explained to me, “for lastminute drifters and other sundry itinerants.”)

But the third floor, where I got to live, is where all the interesting activity happened. That’s where the piano was—usually covered by half-empty cocktail glasses and half-full ashtrays. (Sometimes Peg would pass by the piano, pick up someone’s leftover drink, and knock it back. She called it “taking a dividend.”) It was on the third floor where everyone ate, smoked, drank, fought, worked, and lived. This was the real office of the Lily Playhouse.

There was a man named Mr. Herbert who also lived on the third floor. Mr. Herbert was introduced to me as “our playwright.” He created the basic story lines for our shows, and also came up with the jokes and gags. He was also the stage manager. He also served, I was told, as the Lily Playhouse’s press agent.

“What does a press agent do, exactly?” I once asked him.

“I wish I knew,” he responded.

More interestingly, he was a disbarred attorney, and one of Peg’s oldest friends. He’d been disbarred after embezzling a considerable amount of money from a client. Peg didn’t hold the crime against him because he’d been off the wagon at the time. “You can’t blame a man for what he does when he’s drinking” was her philosophy. (“We all have our frailties” was another of her adages—she, who always gave second and third and fourth chances to the frail and the failing.) Sometimes in a pinch, when we didn’t have a better performer on hand, Mr. Herbert would play the role of the drunken hobo character in our shows—bringing to that position a natural pathos that would just break your heart.

But Mr. Herbert was funny. He was funny in a way that was dry and dark, but he was undeniably funny. In the mornings when I got up for breakfast, I would always find Mr. Herbert sitting at the kitchen table in his saggy suit trousers and an undershirt. He’d be drinking from his mug of Sanka and picking at his one sad pancake. He would sigh and frown over his notepad, trying to think of new jokes and lines for the next show. Every morning, I would bait him with a sunny greeting, just to hear his depressed response, which always changed by the day.

“Good morning, Mr. Herbert!” I would say.

“The point is debatable,” he might respond.

Or, on another day: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

“I will half allow it.”

Or: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

“I fail to see your argument.”

Or: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

“I find myself unequal to the occasion.”

Or, my favorite ever: “Good morning, Mr. Herbert!”

“Oh, you’re a satirist now, are you?”

—

Another inhabitant of the third floor was a handsome young black man named Benjamin Wilson, who was the Lily’s songwriter, composer, and piano player. Benjamin was quiet and refined, and he always dressed in the most beautiful suits. He was usually to be found

sitting at the grand piano, either riffing on some jaunty tune for an upcoming show, or playing jazz for his own entertainment. Sometimes he would play hymns, but only when he thought nobody was listening.

Benjamin’s father was a respected minister up in Harlem, and his mother was the principal of a girls’ academy on 132nd Street. He was Harlem royalty, in other words. He had been groomed for the church, but was lured away from that vocation by the world of show business. His family didn’t want him around anymore, as he was now tainted with sin. This was a standard theme, I would learn, for many of the people who worked at the Lily Playhouse. Peg took in a lot of refugees, in that respect.

Not unlike Roland the dancer, Benjamin was far too talented to be working for a cheap outlet like the Lily. But Peg gave him free room and board, and his duties were light, so he stuck around.

—

There was one more person living at the Lily when I moved in, and I’ve saved her for last, because she was the most important to me.

That person was Celia—the showgirl, my goddess.

I had been told by Olive that Celia was lodging with us only temporarily—just until she got things “sorted out.” The reason Celia needed a place to stay was because she’d recently been evicted from the Rehearsal Club—a respectable and inexpensive hotel for women on West Fifty-third Street, where a good many Broadway dancers and actresses stayed back in the day. But Celia had lost her place at the Rehearsal Club because she’d been caught with a man in her room. So Peg had offered Celia a room at the Lily as a stopgap measure.

I got the sense that Olive disapproved of this offering—but then again, Olive mostly disapproved of everything that Peg offered to people for free. This wasn’t a palatial offering in any case. Celia’s little room down the hall was far more humble than my fancy setup over in Uncle Billy’s never-used pied-à-terre. Celia’s bolt-hole wasn’t much more than a utility closet with a cot and a tiny bit of floor upon which to strew her clothing. The room had a window, but it faced a hot, stinking alley. Celia’s room didn’t have a carpet, she didn’t have a sink, she didn’t have a mirror, she didn’t have a closet, and she certainly didn’t have a large, handsome bed, like I had.

All of this probably explains why Celia moved in with me my second night at the Lily. She did so without asking. There was no discussion about it whatsoever; it just happened—and at the most unexpected time, too. Somewhere in the dark hours between midnight and dawn on Day Two of my sojourn in New York City, Celia stumbled into my bedroom, woke me up with a hard bump to the shoulder, and uttered one boozy word:

“Scoot.”

So I scooted. I moved over to the other side of the bed as she tumbled onto my mattress, commandeered my pillow, wrapped the entirety of my sheet around her beautiful form, and fell unconscious in a matter of moments.

Well, this was exciting!

This was so exciting, in fact, that I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I didn’t dare to move. For one thing, I’d lost my pillow, and I was now pressed against the wall, so I was no longer comfortable. But the more serious issue here was this: what is protocol when a drunk and fully dressed showgirl has just collapsed onto your bed? Unclear. So I lay there in stillness and silence, listening to her thick breathing, smelling the cigarette smoke and perfume on her hair, and wondering how we would manage the inevitable awkwardness when morning came.

Celia finally roused herself around seven o’clock, when the sunlight that was glaring into the bedroom became impossible to ignore. She gave a decadent yawn and stretched fully, taking up even more of the bed. She was still wearing all her makeup and was dressed in her reckless evening gown from the night before. She was stunning. She

looked like an angel who had fallen to earth, straight through a hole in the floor of some celestial nightclub.

“Hey, Vivvie,” she said, blinking away the sun. “Thanks for sharing your bed. That cot they gave me is torture. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

I hadn’t been fully confident at this point that Celia even knew my name, so to hear her use the affectionate diminutive “Vivvie” flooded me with joy.

“That’s all right,” I said. “You can sleep here anytime.”

“Really?” she said. “That’s terrific. I’ll move my things in here today.”

Well, then. I guess I had a roommate now. (That was fine with me, though. I was just honored that she’d chosen me.) I wanted this strange, exotic moment to last as long as possible, so I dared to make conversation. “Say,” I asked, “where’d you go out to last night?”

She seemed surprised that I cared.

“El Morocco,” she said. “I saw John Rockefeller there.”

“Did you?”

“He’s the pits. He wanted to dance, but I was out with some other fellows.”

“Who’d you go out with?”

“Nobody special. Just a couple of guys who aren’t about to take me home to meet their mothers.”

“What kind of guys?”

Celia settled back into the bed, lit a smoke, and told me all about her night. She explained that she had gone out with some Jewish boys who were pretending to be gangsters, but then they ran into some real Jewish gangsters, so the pretenders had to scram, and she ended up with a fellow who took her to Brooklyn and then paid for a limousine to take her home. I was entranced by every detail. We stayed in bed for another hour as she narrated for me—in that unforgettably gruff voice of hers—every detail of an evening in the life of one Celia Ray, New York City showgirl.

I drank it all down like spring water.

—

By the next day, all of Celia’s belongings had migrated into my apartment. Her tubes of greasepaint and pots of cold cream now

cluttered up every surface. Her vials of Elizabeth Arden competed for space on Uncle Billy’s elegant desk against her compacts of Helena Rubinstein. Her long hairs laced my sink. My floor was an instant tangle of brassieres and fishnets, garters and girdles. (She had such prodigious quantities of undergarments! I swear, Celia Ray had a way of making negligees reproduce.) Her used, perspiration-soaked dress shields were hiding under my bed like little mice. Her tweezers bit into my feet when I stepped on them.

She was outrageously entitled. She wiped her lipstick on my towels. She borrowed my sweaters without asking. My pillowcases became stained with black smudges from Celia’s mascara, and my sheets were dyed orange from her pancake makeup. And there wasn’t anything this girl wouldn’t use as an ashtray—including once, while I was in it, the bathtub.

Incredibly, I didn’t mind any of this. On the contrary, I never wanted her to leave. If I’d had a roommate this interesting back at Vassar, I might’ve stayed in college. To my mind, Celia Ray was perfection. She was New York City’s very distillation—a glittering composite of sophistication and mystery. I would endure any filth or befouling, just to have access to her.

Anyhow, our living arrangement seemed to suit us both perfectly: I got to be near her glamour, and she got to be near my sink.

—

Inever asked my Aunt Peg if this was all right with her—that Celia had moved into Uncle Billy’s rooms with me, or that the showgirl seemed

intent on staying at the Lily indefinitely. This seems awfully illmannered, when I think back on it now. It would have been the most basic act of politeness to at least clear this arrangement with my host. But I was far too self-absorbed to be polite—and so was Celia, of course. So we just went ahead and did whatever we wanted to do, without giving it another thought.

What’s more, I never really worried about the mess that Celia left behind in that apartment, because I knew that Aunt Peg’s maid, Bernadette, would eventually take care of it. Bernadette was a quiet and efficient soul who came to the Lily six days a week to clean up after everyone. She tidied up our kitchen and our bathrooms, waxed our floors, cooked dinner for us (which we sometimes ate, sometimes ignored, and sometimes invited ten unannounced guests to). She also ordered the groceries, called in the plumber nearly every day, and probably did about ten thousand other thankless tasks, as well. In addition to all that, she now had to clean up after me and Celia Ray, which hardly seems fair.

I once overheard Olive remark to a guest: “Bernadette is Irish, of course. But she is not violently Irish, so we keep her on.”

This is the kind of thing that people used to say back then, Angela.

Unfortunately, that’s all I can remember about Bernadette.

The reason I don’t remember any particular details about Bernadette is because I didn’t pay much attention to maids back then. I was so very accustomed to them, you see. They were nearly invisible to me. I just expected to be served. And why was that? Why was I so presumptuous and callow?

Because I was rich.

I haven’t said those words yet in these pages, so let’s just get it out of the way right now: I was rich, Angela. I was rich, and I was spoiled. I’d been raised during the Great Depression, true, but the crisis never affected my family in any pressing manner. When the dollar failed, we went from having three maids, two cooks, a nanny, a gardener, and a full-time chauffeur to having just two maids, one cook, and a part-time chauffeur. So that didn’t quite qualify us for the breadline, to put it mildly.

And because my expensive boarding school had ensured that I never met anybody who wasn’t like me, I thought everyone had grown up with a big Zenith radio in the living room. I thought everyone had a pony. I thought every man was a Republican, and that there were only two kinds of women in the world—those who had gone to Vassar, and those who had gone to Smith. (My mother went to Vassar. Aunt Peg went to Smith for one year, before dropping out to join the Red Cross. I

didn’t know what the difference was between Vassar and Smith, but from the way my mother talked, I understood it to be crucial.)

I certainly thought everyone had maids. For my entire life, somebody like Bernadette had always taken care of me. When I left my dirty dishes sitting on the table, somebody always cleaned them up. My bed was beautifully made for me, every day. Dry towels magically replaced damp ones. Shoes that I tossed carelessly upon the floor were straightened out when I wasn’t looking. Behind it all was some great cosmic force—constant and invisible as gravity, and just as boring to me as gravity—putting my life in order and making sure that my knickers were always clean.

It may not surprise you, then, to learn that I didn’t lift a finger to help out with the housekeeping, once I moved into the Lily Playhouse —not even in the apartment that Peg had so generously bestowed upon me. It never occurred to me that I should help. Nor did it occur to me that I couldn’t keep a showgirl in my bedroom as a pet, just because I felt like it.

I cannot comprehend why nobody ever throttled me.

You will sometimes encounter people my age, Angela, who grew up experiencing real hardship during the Depression. (Your father was one such person, of course.) But because everybody around them was also struggling, these people will often report that they were not aware as children that their deprivations were unusual.

You will often hear such people say: “I didn’t even know I was poor!”

I was the opposite, Angela: I didn’t know I was rich.