NEWSREEL LII 3 страница

One warm afternoon in the late fall, Margie was lying
on the bed reading a copy of the Smart Set Frank had
bought that Agnes had made her promise not to read. She
heard a shoe creak and jumped up popping the magazine
under the pillow. Frank was standing in the doorway look-
ing at her. She didn't need to look at him twice to know
that he'd been drinking. His eyes had that look and there
was a flush on his usually white face. "Haha, caught you
that time, little Margo," he said.

"I bet you think I don't now my part," said Margie.

"I wish I didn't know mine," he said. "I've just signed

-181-

the lousiest contract I ever signed in my life. . . . The
world will soon see Frank Mandeville on the filthy stage
of a burlesque house." He sat down on the bed with his
felt hat still on his head and put a hand over his eyes.
"God, I'm tired. . . ." Then he looked up at her with his
eyes red and staring. "Little Margo, you don't know what
it is yet to buck the world."

Margie said with a little giggle that she knew plenty
and sat down beside him on the bed and took his hat off
and smoothed his sweaty hair back from his forehead.
Something inside of her was scared of doing it, but she
couldn't help it.

"Let's go skating, Frank, it's so awful to be in the house
all day."

"Everything's horrible," he said. Suddenly he pulled
her to him and kissed her lips. She felt dizzy with the
smell of bayrum and cigarettes and whiskey and cloves
and armpits that came from him. She pulled away from
him. "Frank, don't, don't." He had tight hold of her. She
could feel his hands trembling, his heart thumping under
his vest. He had grabbed her to him with one arm and was
pulling at her clothes with the other. His voice wasn't like
Frank's voice at all. "I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you,
child. Just forget. It's nothing. I can't stand it any more."
The voice went on and on whining in her ears. "Please.
Please."

She didn't dare yell for fear the people in the house
might come. She clenched her teeth and punched and
scratched at the big wetlipped face pressing down hers.
She felt weak like in a dream. His knee was pushing her
legs apart.

When it was over, she wasn't crying. She didn't care. He
was walking up and down the room sobbing. She got up
and straightened her dress.

He came over to her and shook her by the shoulders.

-182-

"If you ever tell anybody I'll kill you, you damn little
brat. . . . Are you bleeding?" She shook her head.

He went over to the washstand and washed his face.

"I couldn't help it, I'm not a saint. . . . I've been
under a terrible strain."

Margie heard Agnes coming, the creak of her steps on
the stairs. Agnes was puffing as she fumbled with the door-
knob. "Why, what on earth's the matter?" she said, coming
in all out of breath.

" Agnes, I've had to scold your child," Frank was say-
ing in his tragedy voice. "I come in deadtired and find the
child reading that filthy magazine. . . . I won't have it.
. . . Not while you are under my protection."

"Oh, Margie, you promised you wouldn't. . . . But
what did you do to your face?"

Frank came forward into the center of the room, pat-
ting his face all over with the towel. " Agnes, I have a con-
fession to make. . . . I got into an altercation downtown.
I've had a very trying day downtown. My nerves have
all gone to pieces. What will you think of me when I tell
you I've signed a contract with a burlesque house?"

"Why, that's fine," said Agnes. We certainly need the
money. . . . How much will you be making?"

"It's shameful . . . twenty a week."

"Oh, I'm so relieved . . . I thought something terrible
had happened. Maybe Margie can start her lessons again."

"If she's a good girl and doesn't waste her time reading
trashy magazines."

Margie was trembly like jelly inside. She felt herself
breaking out in a cold sweat. She ran upstairs to the bath-
room and doublelocked the door and stumbled to the
toilet and threw up. Then she sat a long time on the edge
of the bathtub. All she could think of was to run away.

But she couldn't seem to get to run away. At Christmas
some friends of Frank's got her a job in a children's play.
She made twentyfive dollars a performance and was the

-183-

pet of all the society ladies. It made her feel quite stuckup.
She almost got caught with the boy who played the Knight
doing it behind some old flats when the theater was dark
during a rehearsal.

It was awful living in the same room with Frank and
Agnes. She hated them now. At night she'd lie awake with
her eyes hot in the stuffy cubicle and listen to them. She
knew that they were trying to be quiet, that they didn't
want her to hear, but she couldn't help straining her ears
and holding her breath when the faint rattle of springs
from the rickety old iron bed they slept in began. She
slept late after those nights in a horrible deep sleep she
never wanted to wake up from. She began to be saucy and
spiteful with Agnes and would never do anything she said.
It was easy to make Agnes cry. "Drat the child," she'd
say, wiping her eyes. "I can't do anything with her. It's
that little bit of success that went to her head."

That winter she began to find Indian in the door of his
consultationroom when she went past, standing there
brown and sinewy in his white coat, always wanting to chat
or show her a picture or something. He'd even offer her
treatments free, but she'd look right into those funny blue-
black eyes of his and kid him along. Then one day she
went into the office when there were no patients and sat
down on his knee without saying a word.

But the boy she liked best in the house was a Cuban
named Tony Garrido, who played the guitar for two
South Americans who danced the maxixe in a Broadway
cabaret. She used to pass him on the stairs and knew all
about it and decided she had a crush on him long before
they ever spoke. He looked so young with his big brown
eyes and his smooth oval face a very light coffeecolor with
a little flush on the cheeks under his high long cheekbones.
She used to wonder if he was the same color all over. He
had polite bashful manners and a low grownup voice. The
first time he spoke to her, one spring evening when she

-184-

was standing on the stoop wondering desperately what she
could do to keep from going up to the room, she knew he
was going to fall for her. She kidded him and asked him
what he put on his eyelashes to make them so black. He
said it was the same thing that made her hair so pretty
and golden and asked her to have an icecream soda with
him.

Afterwards they walked on the Drive. He'talked Eng-
lish fine with a little accent that Margie thought was very
distinguished. Right away they'd stopped kidding and
he was telling her how homesick he was for Havana and
how crazy he was to get out of New York, and she was
telling him what an awful life she led and how all the men
in the house were always pinching her and jostling her on
the stairs, and how she'd throw herself in the river if she
had to go on living in one room with Agnes and Frank
Mandeville. And as for that Indian, she wouldn't let him
touch her not if he was the last man in the world.

She didn't get home until it was time for Tony to go
downtown to his cabaret. Instead of supper they ate some
more icecream sodas. Margie went back happy as a lark.
Coming out of the drugstore, she'd heard a woman say to
her friend, "My, what a handsome young couple."

Of course Frank and Agnes raised Cain. Agnes cried and
Frank lashed himself up into a passion and said he'd
punch the damn greaser's head in if he so much as laid a
finger on a pretty, pure American girl. Margie yelled out
that she'd do what she damn pleased and said everything
mean she could think of. She'd decided that the thing for
her to do was to marry Tony and run away to Cuba with
him.

Tony didn't seem to like the idea of getting married
much, but she'd go up to his little hall bedroom as soon
as Frank was out of the house at noon and wake Tony up
and tease him and pet him. He'd want to make love to
her but she wouldn't let him. The first time she fought

-185-

him off he broke down and cried and said it was an insult
and that in Cuba men didn't allow women to act like that.
"It's the first time in my life a woman has refused my
love."

Margie said she didn't care, not till they were married
and had gotten out of this awful place. At last one after-
noon she teased him till he said all right. She put her hair
up on top of her head and put on her most grownuplook-
ing dress and they went down to the marriagebureau on
the subway. They were both of them scared to death when
they had to go up to the clerk; he was twentyone and she
said she was nineteen and got away with it. She'd stolen
the money out of Agnes's purse to pay for the license.

She almost went crazy the weeks she had to wait for
Tony to finish out his contract. Then one day in May,
when she tapped on his bedroom door he showed her two
hundred dollars in bills he'd saved up and said, "Today
we get married. . . . Tomorrow we sail for La 'Avana.
We can make very much money there. You will dance and
I will sing and play the guitar." He made the gesture of
playing the guitar with the thinpointed fingers of one of
his small hands. Her heart started beating hard. She ran
downstairs. Frank had already gone out. She scribbled a
note to Agnes on the piece of cardboard that had come
back from the laundry in one of Frank's boiled shirts:

AGNES DARLING:

Don't be mad. Tony and I got married today and we're
going to Havana, Cuba, to live. Tell Father if he comes
around. I'll write lots. Love to Frank.

Your grateful daughter,
MARGERY

Then she threw her clothes into an English pigskin suit-
case of Frank's that he'd just got back from the hockshop
and ran down the stairs three at a time. Tony was waiting
for her on the stoop, pale and trembling with his guitar-

-186-

case and his suitcase beside him. "I do not care for the
money. Let's take a taxi," he said.

In the taxi she grabbed his hand, it was icy cold. At City
Hall he was so fussed he forgot all his English and she
had to do everything. They borrowed a ring from the
justice of the peace. It was over in a minute, and they were
back in the taxi again going uptown to a hotel. Margie
never could remember afterwards what hotel it was, only
that they'd looked so fussed that the clerk wouldn't believe
they were married until she showed him the marriageli-
cense, a big sheet of paper all bordered with forgetmenots.
When they got up to the room they kissed each other in a
hurry and washed up to go out to a show. First they went
to Shanley's to dinner. Tony ordered expensive cham-
pagne and they both got to giggling on it.

He kept telling her what a rich city La 'Avana was and
how the artists were really appreciated there and rich men
would pay him fifty, one hundred dollars a night to play
at their parties, "And with you, darling Margo, it will be
two three six time that much. . . . And we shall rent a
fine house in the Vedado, very exclusive section, and serv-
ants very cheap there, and you will be like a queen. You
will see I have many friends there, many rich men like me
very much." Margie sat back in her chair, looking at the
restaurant and the welldressed ladies and gentlemen and
the waiters so deferential and the silver dishes everything
came in and at Tony's long eyelashes brushing his pink
cheek as he talked about how warm it was and the cool
breeze off the sea, and the palms and the roses, and parrots
and singing birds in cages, and how everybody spent
money in La 'Avana. It seemed the only happy day she'd
ever had in her life.

When they took the boat the next day, Tony only had
enough money to buy secondclass passages. They went over
to Brooklyn on the el to save taxifare. Margie had to carry

-187-

both bags up the steps because Tony said he had a head-
ache and was afraid of dropping his guitarcase.

NEWSREEL LIV

there was nothing significant about the morning's trading.
The first hour consisted of general buying and selling to even
up accounts, but soon after eleven o'clock prices did less fluc-
tuating and gradually firmed

TIMES SQUARE PATRONS LEFT HALF SHAVED

Will Let Crop Rot In Producers' Hands Unless Prices Drop

RUSSIAN BARONESS SUICIDE AT MIAMI

. . . the kind of a girl that men forget
Just a toy to enjoy for a while

Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous Under His Policies

HUNT JERSEY WOODS FOR ROVING LEOPARD

PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING

It had to be done and I did it, says Miss Ederle

FORTY-TWO INDICTED IN FLORIDA DEALS

Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall Berating Couple Near
Murder Scene, New Witness Says

several hundred tents and other light shelters put up by
campers on a hill south of Front Street, which overlooks
Hempstead Harbor, were laid in rows before the tornado as
grass falls before a scythe

When they play Here comes the bride.
You'll stand outside

-188-

3000 AMERICANS FOUND PENNILESS IN PARIS

I am a poor girl
My fortune's been sad
I always was courted
By the wagoner's lad

NINE DROWNED IN UPSTATE FLOODS

SHEIK SINKING

Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly
yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several
hours later he underwent

ADAGIO DANCER

The nineteenyearold son of a veterinary in Cas-
tellaneta in the south of Italy was shipped off to
America like a lot of other unmanageable young Ital-
ians when his parents gave up trying to handle him, to
sink or swim and maybe send a few lire home by inter-
national postal moneyorder. The family was through
with him. But Rodolfo Guglielmi wanted to make
good.

He got a job as assistant gardener in Central Park
but that kind of work was the last thing he wanted to
do; he wanted to make good in the brightlights; money
burned his pockets.

He hung around cabarets doing odd jobs, sweep-
ing out for the waiters, washing cars; he was lazy
handsome wellbuilt slender goodtempered and vain;
he was a born tangodancer.

Lovehungry women thought he was a darling. He
began to get engagements dancing the tango in ball-
rooms and cabarets; he teamed up with a girl named

-189-

Jean Acker on a vaudeville tour and took the name of
Rudolph Valentino.

Stranded on the Coast he headed for Hollywood,
worked for a long time as an extra for five dollars a
day; directors began to notice he photographed well.

He got his chance in The Four Horsemen
and became the gigolo of every woman's dreams.

Valentino spent his life in the colorless glare of
klieg lights, in stucco villas obstructed with bricabrac
oriental rugs tigerskins, in the bridalsuites of hotels, in
silk bathrobes in private cars.

He was always getting into limousines or getting
out of limousines,

or patting the necks of fine horses.

Wherever he went the sirens of the motorcyclecops
screeched ahead of him

flashlights flared,

the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces,
waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their auto-
graphbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his
admirablytailored dress suit; they stole his hat and
pulled at his necktie; his valets removed young women
from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and caba-
rets actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at
him under their mascaraed lashes.

He wanted to make good under the glare of the
milliondollar searchlights

of El Dorado:

the Sheik, the Son of the Sheik;

personal appearances.

He married his old vaudeville partner, divorced
her, married the adopted daughter of a millionaire,

-190-

went into lawsuits with the producers who were debas-
ing the art of the screen, spent a million dollars on one
European trip;

he wanted to make good in the brightlights.

When the Chicago Tribune called him a pink
powderpuff

and everybody started wagging their heads over
a slavebracelet he wore that he said his wife had given
him and his taste for mushy verse of which he pub-
lished a small volume called Daydreams and the whis-
pers grew about the testimony in his divorce case that
he and his first wife had never slept together,

it broke his heart.

He tried to challenge the Chicago Tribune to a
duel;

he wanted to make good

in heman twofisted broncobusting pokerplaying
stockjuggling America. (He was a fair boxer and had
a good seat on a horse, he loved the desert like the
sheik and was tanned from the sun of Palm Springs.)
He broke down in his suite in the Hotel Ambassador
in New York: gastric ulcer.

When the doctors cut into his elegantlymolded
body they found that peritonitis had begun; the ab-
dominal cavity contained a large amount of fluid and
food particles; the viscera were coated with a greenish-
grey film; a round hole a centimeter in diameter was
seen in the anterior wall of the stomach; the tissue of
the stomach for one and onehalf centimeters immedi-
ately surrounding the perforation was necrotic. The
appendix was inflamed and twisted against the small
intestine.

When he came to from the ether the first thing

-191-

he said was, "Well, did I behave like a pink powder-
puff?"

His expensivelymassaged actor's body fought peri-
tonitis for six days.

The switchboard at the hospital was swamped with
calls, all the corridors were piled with flowers, crowds
filled the street outside, filmstars who claimed they
were his betrothed entrained for New York.

Late in the afternoon a limousine drew up at the
hospital door (where the grimyfingered newspapermen
and photographers stood around bored tired hoteyed
smoking too many cigarettes making trips to the nearest
speak exchanging wisecracks and deep dope waiting for
him to die in time to make the evening papers) and a
woman, who said she was a maid employed by a dancer
who was Valentino's first wife, alighted. She delivered
to an attendant an envelope addressed to the filmstar
and inscribed From Jean, and a package. The package
contained a white counterpane with lace ruffles and the
word Rudy embroidered in the four corners. This was
accompanied by a pillowcover to match over a blue silk
scented cushion.

Rudolph Valentino was only thirtyone when he
died.

His managers planned to make a big thing of his
highlypublicized funeral but the people in the streets
were too crazy.

While he lay in state in a casket covered with a
cloth of gold, tens of thousands of men, women, and
children packed the streets outside. Hundreds were
trampled, had their feet hurt by policehorses. In the
muggy rain the cops lost control. Jammed masses

-192-

stampeded under the clubs and the rearing hoofs of
the horses. The funeral chapel was gutted, men and
women fought over a flower, a piece of wallpaper, a
piece of the broken plateglass window. Showwindows
were burst in. Parked cars were overturned and
smashed. When finally the mounted police after re-
peated charges beat the crowd off Broadway, where
traffic was tied up for two hours, they picked up
twentyeight separate shoes, a truckload of umbrellas,
papers, hats, tornoff sleeves. All the ambulances in
that part of the city were busy carting off women who'd
fainted, girls who'd been stepped on. Epileptics threw
fits. Cops collected little groups of abandoned chil-
dren.

The fascisti sent a guard of honor and the anti-
fascists drove them off. More rioting, cracked skulls,
trampled feet. When the public was barred from the
undertaking parlors hundreds of women groggy with
headlines got in to view the poor body

claiming to be exdancingpartners, old playmates,
relatives from the old country, filmstars; every few
minutes a girl fainted in front of the bier and was re-
vived by the newspapermen who put down her name
and address and claim to notice in the public prints.
Frank E. Campbell's undertakers and pallbearers, dig-
nified wearers of black broadcloth and tackersup of
crape, were on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Even the boss had his fill of publicity that time.

It was two days before the cops could clear the
streets enough to let the flowerpieces from Hollywood
be brought in and described in the evening papers.

The church service was more of a success. The
policecommissioner barred the public for four blocks
round.

-193-

Many notables attended.

America's Sweetheart sobbing bitterly in a small
black straw with a black band and a black bow behind,
in black georgette over black with a white lace collar
and white lace cuffs followed the coffin that was

covered by a blanket of pink roses

sent by a filmstar who appeared at the funeral
heavily veiled and swooned and had to be taken back
to her suite at the Hotel Ambassador after she had
shown the reporters a message allegedly written by one
of the doctors alleging that Rudolph Valentino had
spoken of her at the end

as his bridetobe.

A young woman committed suicide in London.

Relatives arriving from Europe were met by
police reserves and Italian flags draped with crape.
Exchamp Jim Jeffries said, "Well, he made good."
The champion himself allowed himself to be quoted
that the boy was fond of boxing and a great admirer
of the champion.

The funeral train left for Hollywood.

In Chicago a few more people were hurt trying
to see the coffin, but only made the inside pages.

The funeral train arrived in Hollywood on page
23 of the New York Times.

NEWSREEL LV

THRONGS IN STREETS

LUNATIC BLOWS UP PITTSBURGH BANK

-194-

Krishnamurti Here Says His Message Is
World Happiness

Close the doors
They are coming
Through the windows

AMERICAN MARINES LAND IN NICARAGUA
TO PROTECT ALIENS

PANGALOS CAUGHT; PRISONER IN ATHENS

Close the windows
They are coming through the doors

Saw Pigwoman The Other Says But Neither Can Identify
Accused

FUNDS ACCUMULATE IN NEW YORK

the desire for profits and more profits kept on increasing
and the quest for easy money became well nigh universal. All
of this meant an attempt to appropriate the belongings of others
without rendering a corresponding service

"Physician" Who Took Prominent Part in Valentino
Funeral Exposed as Former Convict

NEVER SAW HIM SAYS MANAGER

Close the doors they are coming through the windows
My God they're coming through the floor

THE CAMERA EYE (47)

sirens bloom in the fog over the harbor horns of all
colors everyshaped whistles reach up from the river and
the churn of screws the throb of engines bells

-195-

the steady broken swish of waves cut by prows out
of the unseen stirring fumblingly through the window
tentacles stretch tingling

to release the spring

tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the
dotted line enlist become one of

hock the old raincoat of incertitude (in which you
hunch alone from the upsidedown image on the retina
painstakingly out of color shape words remembered light
and dark straining

to rebuild yesterday to clip out paper figures to
simulate growth warp newsprint into faces smoothing
and wrinkling in the various barelyfelt velocities of time)

tonight now the room fills with the throb and hub-
bub of departure the explorer gets a few necessities to-
gether coaches himself on a beginning

better the streets first a stroll uptown down-
town along the wharves under the el peering into faces in
taxicabs at the drivers of trucks at old men chewing in
lunchrooms at drunk bums drooling puke in alleys
what's the newsvendor reading? what did the elderly
wop selling chestnuts whisper to the fat woman behind the
picklejars? where is she going the plain girl in a red hat
running up the subway steps and the cop joking the other
cop across the street? and the smack of a kiss from two
shadows under the stoop of the brownstone house and the
grouchy faces at the streetcorner suddenly gaping black

-196-

with yells at the thud of a blow a whistle scampering
feet the event?

tonight now

but instead you find yourself (if self is the bellyaching
malingerer so often the companion of aimless walks) the
jobhunt forgotten neglected the bulletinboard where
the futures are scrawled in chalk

among nibbling chinamen at the Thalia

ears dazed by the crash of alien gongs the chuckle of
rattles the piping of incomprehensible flutes the swing and
squawk of ununderstandable talk otherworld music
antics postures costumes