Minnie Flynn/Chapter 14
MINNIE'S "Juliet" was held up to ridicule. One critic facetiously called her "the little pink pig in the parlor." Had Deane directed her he might have injected enough whimsical humor into her characterization to have given it a lifelike semblance. But Bacon's delineations were stagy, unreal. In all, it was a grotesque failure. Carlton alone escaped the jibes of the critics and audiences. His "Romeo" was rather pleasing, his movements graceful, his interpretation of the character, eager, boyish, passionate.
Deane saw all this long before the picture was released. He used to steal into the dark projection room while they were running the film to observe Minnie, self-conscious and blundering in a rôle of which she had no conception, her pretty face immobile, her eyes empty, like two blue-glass marbles. Her hands had always attracted him. Slender palms, a concave thumb held close to the first finger, long-pointed fingers with oval nails. Unconsciously her gestures were few and simple, which had made them seem quite eloquent. He had often noticed their similarity to the hands of Japanese women. After Mrs. Lowell's lessons in table manners, he observed the first change in Minnie's hands. In their attempt to be at ease in those conventional relationships with knives and forks, they lost the charm of simple movements. Minnie strained them to ridiculous awkwardness until the fingers sprayed from her palms like the petals of honeysuckle, her little finger bent back and crooked like a trellis. Deane laughed when he saw the movement of her hands in her new rôle. She so exaggerated their gracefulness they became graceless, expressionless. They looked like a child's hands illustrating curlicues. He was certain that Minnie was satisfied with their aimless rotation on her small stiff wrists, because in her close-ups she looked at them, delighted as a child who timidly observes movement and is pleased to discover those pink, intriguing objects a part of itself! The beauty of Minnie's hands was gone. Deane had a feeling that he was seeing Minnie being slowly dissected. Ghoulish thought. It made him look around at the other women in the profession and study them more appraisingly. A few were building, but could they ever go beyond a certain point? They came to the screen bringing their youth. But there were only a few instances where physical youth had been preserved beyond the normal rush of years. It was impossible to hold mental youth very long in the sophisticated atmosphere of the studios; each contract took its toll.
Beauregard was thrown into a panic by the failure of the picture, and he communicated this terror to the Flynn family. Feverishly they read the biting criticisms of Minnie's acting and saw their house of cards tumbling upon them. The production which had gone into one of the big theaters for a three weeks' run was taken off at the end of the first week. This was a news item, universally read. Trades people, landlords, the Broadway jeweler where Minnie had made only a few payments on her diamond ring, saw Minnie's collapse. They feared what so often happens: that she would hide behind that protective subterfuge of bankruptcy. They clamored around her. The photographer whose studio was filled with her pictures threatened suit. She had paid eight hundred dollars on a new roadster, and, not able to make the second payment, the car was held by the company.
Pete tried frantically to see the President of the Ætna Film Company, but Wright sent out word that he was no longer interested in Miss Day. But he was. He sat back and watched her every move. A much more sensible and far-sighted man than Beauregard, he knew that one poor vehicle would not lose public favor for her, that while stars are climbing the public is tolerant of them. But once they have become passé, the public seems to resent personally a poor picture, as if the star were entirely responsible for the story.
Wright was certain that Minnie would be chastened by the experience. He knew Beauregard wanted no further contracts with her. He was too clever to set a trap, but he just sat by quietly biding his time. With Minnie out of work for a month, he knew that he could make any arrangement he wanted regarding salary. She would probably accept two hundred dollars a week. He could tell by Pete's cringing servility and worried patience as he waited hours in the outer office that Minnie had had no offers. It was the policy of some of the other companies (headed by merchants and money lenders) to beat down the actor or actress to his or her lowest salary figure. Wright wanted the best out of them—a half-hearted performance was more expensive to the company than a slightly higher salary, so the day the High-grade Film Organization sent their representative to see Minnie, Wright offered her seven hundred dollars a week for the first six months, and one thousand dollars a week for the last six months—a full year's contract.
Minnie's relief was electrical. Wright, exactly calculating this reaction, was ready. He had bought two comedy dramas, popular, frothy stage successes perfectly suited to Minnie and her present frame of mind, and she proved the keenness of Wright's judgment by playing both rôles with brilliant esprit. Never had she displayed such utter self-confidence: her inner happiness was projected upon the sensitized silver sheet. Summer; autumn; Christmas holidays came and passed by. Minnie had released herself to an orgy of buying extravagant gifts for her family and Gilbert. She drove to church on Christmas morning in her new limousine.
After church she wanted to do some fine, generous thing for the poor. She felt noble, pleasantly conscious of a spiritual uplift. After a rather unhappy scene with Carlton, she had let him go to Hartford to spend Christmas with his baby. The wife's lawyer had made it clear to Carlton that if he and Minnie were to marry, both must secure their divorces. Minnie's lawyer had already seen Billy and there had been secret arrangements for Billy's discovery in a Jersey hotel with a veiled woman, a middle-aged employee of the attorney. Billy was persuaded to do this only when they convinced him that Minnie's happiness and future career depended upon it. Her conscience troubled her about the divorces, they cut her off from the spiritual balm of her creed.
As the limousine rolled through lower Ninth Avenue, over the corrugated streets, Minnie laid her hand caressingly upon her father's. "It gives me the queerest feeling when I think that we actually lived in a rotten neighborhood like this. It's more like a dream than reality. Ugh!" she shuddered.
Michael Flynn did not answer. He was peering out of the plate-glass window. Now they were passing the old familiar landmarks. The once rival plumber shop. Lagomarsino's fruit store. Sullivan's saloon. Hesselman's butcher shop—wasn't that Billy MacNally's name on the sign over the door? Tilden's grocery store. Crazy Pete, the old cobbler. The same cop on the corner, Smiling Big Tim. Around the corner—the Plumbing Shop—the window! Oh, why had they changed the window display? Was the pipe fitter still there? If Michael Flynn were only walking now instead of moving so fast in this terrible hearselike automobile Minnie had bought, he could see a few of his old cronies. His heart was pounding with irregular beats against his body. A fine mist seemed blown upon the pane of glass—or was it his eyes? It had been eight months since Minnie had moved them away from there. Uprooted them, that's what she had done. She said she wanted to make them more comfortable, so she rented a flat on Ninetieth Street. An elevator. How Michael Flynn hated elevators—and it was a long walk, since he had had rheumatism, up and down five flights. Thirty-five years in one neighborhood. It had become a personal, almost a living thing to Michael Flynn. The old houses seemed to lean against each other for support. The dingy brick. The stained and cracking plaster ones. He had known them when they were new, vigorous, upright, and stood like young men with shoulders erect. He had watched them settle, crumble under the weight of years, their stairs worn by the brush of feet; little scuffling shoes; the tap-tap of high-heeled slippers, and hob-nailed boots. The windows once had bright eyes, blinking with open and drawn shades. Now they were dim like the eyes of old people, their lids faded and crumbled. Yesterday's children were today's men and women. Yesterday's men and women were now withered like apples left upon the trees of a forgotten orchard.
There were memories for Mrs. Flynn, too. But she enjoyed them chiefly because they permitted her to dwell upon her own martyrdom. She thought of them as years of patient toil, child-bearing, child nursing, cooking and sewing and washing. Now she was free from it. What would the Molowonskys say when she told them she had a "nigger" servant and that she didn't even have to make her own bed if she didn't want to?
The limousine rolled down the street. The colored chauffeur, at a signal from Minnie, shut off the engine. Children surrounded the car. Like muffled reports came the banging open of windows. Heads and shoulders shot out and collapsed over the sills, like jack-in-the-boxes. . . . Cat calls, whistles, hellos. Voices rising shrill to advise the neighbors who had not seen the car that Minnie Flynn was on the street. . . . Stairs, creaking under the pushing, rushing families who had lived in the same tenement house. . . . The children, hopping as if there were springs in their shoes, wanted to run their hands down Minnie's sealskin coat. . . . The old people were afraid of catching their scaly fingers in the long fine veil that fell from her feathered hat. Mrs. Flynn was crying and talking so excitedly that her new expensive set of false teeth made a strange clacking sound. Minnie was sweet and friendly to them all, but her eyes kept shifting to the colored chauffeur. She knew from Pete how they gossiped at the studio, so she had told him pointedly that she was on a little slumming party to bring Christmas presents to the poor.
Michael Flynn carried all the packages into the parlor of the McCarthys' flat. No fire had ever brought the crowds like Minnie's triumphant return. Her former girl friends stood in awed, giggling, flushed groups. Their eyes saw the diamond rings sparkling on Minnie's hands; the sleeves of real lace; the jeweled pendant hung on a slender chain—she told each one confidentially that it was given to her by her most ardent admirer, that wonderful actor, Gilbert Carlton. They noticed also that she wore sheer silk stockings, and real patent leather pumps.
They told Michael Flynn he was as dressy as the undertaker, and were delighted to hear that Mrs. Flynn had had her hair "done up" by a regular hairdresser. Her nose was powdered, and she wore white kid gloves like Minnie's; but they noticed when she took them off her hands were still red and the joints swollen. When she spoke it was with a peculiar hesitancy. Whenever she faltered, she glanced nervously toward Minnie, but none of them guessed that it was because she was trying to guard against any mistakes in her grammar. "I done," and "you was" seemed as natural to her as these old familiar faces. Why was Minnie so particular?
There were toys for the children. Handkerchiefs, silk stockings for the ex-girl friends. Money for the old people. And their tearful gratitude gave Minnie a floating sensation.
Now she must walk down the street to the Minks' flat, and see old lady Minks, who was bedridden. The neighbors in turn drew her into their homes. . . . Horrible places, Minnie was thinking, low, damp walls, they made her ill. They closed over her like hot, fetid bodies. Minnie was famous now. Posters of her and newspaper clippings were pinned upon the stained wall paper in every flat.
The Central. Where she had lived! Michael Flynn walked through the dingy old flat. . . . Minnie said laughingly, as fearfully as if a coffin lay in state in every room. . . . All the old furniture. . . . Minnie had made them leave that dreadful stuff there—she had sold it to the O'Briens, who had moved in. That red tablecloth! The paper palm, all flyspecked. The tinkling glass on the Chinese lantern. Even the morris chair, its arms looking like crutches. In the kitchen a new calendar pinned over the old one—Hesselman's annual gift. . . . In the bedroom, the lopsided bed Minnie and Nettie had slept in. The piece of broken mirror which had reflected her eager, white, scared face the first morning that she had gone to the studio with Al Kessler.
"Papa, you're walking as if you were drunk," said Minnie. "I don't blame you. Doesn't it give you the creeps to come through this hole in the wall, and to think we used to live here! Oh, darling," as she linked her arm through his, "thank God, I got you and mama away from it!"
Michael Flynn asked Mrs. O'Brien if he could take the starfish nailed on the wall of the room he had occupied with the boys. In the excitement of their departure he had overlooked it. The starfish was Jimmy's. They had found it together on the Coney Island beach when Jimmy was a little boy, and it had been a prized possession of Jimmy's childhood.
Out in the crowded street again. Minnie made a farewell speech when it was time to leave. She mouthed prettily, saying: "It may be some while before I see you all again. Papa and mama will probably drive down, but as you know I'm awfully busy with my pictures, and you have probably read in the papers that I signed a contract with the biggest organization in the industry."
"Hooray!" shouted Isidor Ginsberg, who hadn't understood what Minnie had said, but had caught from her rising inflection a triumph worthy of salute.
Minnie silenced the clamor that followed: "I am not used to making speeches, that is—if they're not written for me. I guess you've all read in the papers that I made quite a big hit making a speech at the DeLuxe Theater where my latest picture was shown—the one called 'The Slavey'—but I must be truthful and say that somebody had to write it out for me, and here I am trying to make it all up and"
"Hooray!" interrupted the children again.
"Shut your damn mouths!" yelled O'Brien. "Can't you be decent enough and be quiet when a lady's talkin'!" Minnie smiled a deep, pleased smile; she was now a lady to them all.
". . . But I do want you to know from the bottom of my heart that I or the folks will never forget you, even when we are clear out to Hollywood, where we are going next spring when I start on my new contract. Furthermore, I'm going to send you all tickets when my latest picture, 'The Slavey,' is playing in the lower Broadway theaters—everybody says it's by far the best thing that I've done—in fact, if you get up past Forty-second Street you'll see my name is over the theater in electric lights, so high"—holding her hand over Timmy Dwyer's shaved head. "Yes, and you'll be happy to know that Nettie—(she had a date this morning, or she'd have been here with us)—is going to have a part in my next picture."
"Oh, gee! Net a movie, too!" from Nettie's old chum, Lilla Swartz.
"Yes, I made them promise Nettie a part, and if you girls haven't seen her for a long time, you'll be surprised at the change in her. She's gone on a pineapple and lamb chop diet. You ought to try it, Mrs. Molowonsky." Laughter. Mrs. Molowonsky weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Her huge, bloated chin colored fiery red. "And she's had her hair done in a permanent wave. You can't imagine the improvement. It has just changed her entire personnel." She paused, wondering if she hadn't made a mistake in the use of the word, but caring little—they wouldn't know the difference. She would look it up when she got home.
The men began to think that Minnie was getting a little silly. They hated the colored driver. He curled his thick, blue lips at them and rolled his eyes. If he hadn't belonged to Minnie's automobile, they would have pelted him as the car drove down the street.
They were all talking about her. "Can you imagine?—She says she's gonna get two thousand dollars a week with this new movie joint she's working for! Do you think it's a lie?"
"Sure!"
"But it ain't all a lie. What d'ya say she paid for that bus she rides around in?"
"Two thou?"
"Two thousand, my foot! More like four!"
"Maybe she only rents it."
"To come down here and show off?"
"Yeh! You seen the way she acted when she drove off? Threw a kiss to us like she was French, and we was manure!"
"Aw! can that, Louie! You'd knock the block off a guy in any other neighborhood that pulled anything against her."
"Sure, but ain't we gotta right to knock her? She belonged to our gang, didn't she?"
"Yeh, she did!"
"It's somethin' to brag that a friend o' ours is a movie queen. Old Fish here, he's got a stamp photo of her in his watch. She's wrote her name on it. I guess he's some oil can at the gas works, showin' it around!"
"Say, if she gets two thou a week, you'd 'a' thought she wouldn't have had the nerve to only hand us out silk stockin's marked down to one ninety-eight a pair, and only one measly pair apiece, now would you, Madge?" Madge Connors' throat relaxed. It had been clutched in painful tension. Minnie hadn't seen her standing in the shadows of the bakery shop watching the crowd gathering around the limousine. Madge was terrified. What was Minnie MacNally doing down there if it wasn't to try to see Billy again? Madge had a date with him. He was going to eat lunch at her flat. She had made doughnuts and cranberry pie. Billy had told her that Minnie wanted a divorce from him. He would be free again—and she had always loved him.
On their way home, Minnie hummed a little ragtime tune. "Lord, I'm happy!" she kept saying over and over. "I shudder every time I think of that terrible neighborhood. Isn't it wonderful, papa, to think all that I've accomplished in the last two years? . . . You remember how Nettie used to say I was born with a gold horseshoe in my mouth?" She pulled down the shade to shut out the ugly buildings. "I wonder what California is like! I'm crazy to see Hollywood. Gilbert says he would rather live out there than Italy. He's never been to Italy, but he goes with an ultra class that have traveled all over the world. We'll be going to Paris ourselves, maybe on a honeymoon."
Michael Flynn winced and crossed himself.
"Oh, papa! You're such a fool about a little simple thing like a divorce."
"It's against your religion."
Minnie interrupted him, annoyed: "As Gilbert says, papa, one creed is as good as another. If you're a Christian at heart, that's all that is necessary."
Mrs. Flynn was uneasy only about the newspaper notoriety. "Alicia Adams' mother was telling me the other day that a divorce almost ruined the career of one of the biggest movie stars, the public's gettin' so particular."
"It's none of their business!"
"They helped to make you," ventured Mr. Flynn.
"Oh, papa, you read that somewhere. That drives me almost crazy. We don't ask them to make idols of us, do we? False idols they've got to fall down before and worship—totem poles, as Gilbert says. We're human, aren't we? So long as we amuse them and give them pleasure, what business is it of theirs what our private life is? Private life! That's the laugh . . . public life, I'd call it."
"Mrs. Adams says this star lost all of her church following, and the mothers' clubs wouldn't let their kids go to see her, even in her purest pictures!"
"Mrs. Adams should talk, with everybody knowing how Alicia got to be a star!"
"They might suspect it, Minnie, but they give her the benefit of the doubt. They ain't sure of it. It ain't somethin' you can put your finger on like you can a divorce."
Minnie looked contemptuously at her mother. "Mama, you've got an awfully dirty mind! Your idea of virtue is keeping the blinds down so the neighbors can't see how naughty we are!"
"Shame on you, Minnie, talking to your own mother that way! I never done"
"Did!"
Mrs. Flynn clicked her false teeth and sank back against the velour upholstery.
Michael Flynn looked unhappily at Minnie. "Little girl, mama don't mean to butt into your business—only to help you. We like Gilbert Carlton a whole lot, mama and I—he sort of scares us, he knows so much about everything, and I guess we're kind of old-fashioned folks to him. But he's a sensible fellow, I hope, and if he thought that your life is gonna be ruined by a divorce, he'd give you up and forget you, and maybe later marry some nice girl who wasn't already married."
Minnie would rather give up her career, all the comfort that the money brought, all the promises of her future, than lose Carlton. She smiled tolerantly upon her father. "I love you, papa," she said, nestling close to him, "in spite of the fact that you're a funny old fuss-buttons." But she hoped it would be a long time before he found out that Carlton was married, too.