Super huge hugs and thanks to Princess Farhana and her mom, Betsy Holland Gehman, for allowing me to reprint this story. It’s another witty chapter of Mama Gehman’s memoirs– a peek into the unglamorous side of showgirl life, 1949 New York. Enjoy.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK

You Won’t Be a Stranger For Long

By Betsy Holland Gehman

1.  In the beginning

On my second day in New York in late August of 1949 I took my first solo flight on the Subway.   My roommate Jill Kraft, born in New York, put me on the IRT train and left the rest to fate.  She’d already instructed me to get off at the Times Square station and walk north to 43rd Street where I would have my first Broadway interview with Louis Schurr, the famous agent.

If he decided I showed any possibilities, Jill assured me, he’d send me on to meet some producer or casting director…or maybe I’d be sent straight over to audition for one of the many Broadway shows now holding auditions for the upcoming season.  She also thought it important for me to know he was once upon a long time ago the agent of record for huge stars like Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr and Bob Hope — which only made me more nervous about my own qualifications for stardom.  Jill explained all that to me as she rushed to get ready for her acting class with Stella Adler.

My trip from West 72^nd Street down to 42^nd took mere minutes.  I climbed up a couple of flights of stairs and found myself on a traffic island in front of the famous New York Times Tower where the ball was dropped every New Year’s Eve.  Traffic, heading in two directions, roared by while crowds of people waited for the lights to change so they could race across either Seventh Avenue on one side of this traffic island or Broadway on the other side.

With rain threatening and thick clouds overhead, I had no idea which way was east, west, north or south; nor which direction was uptown or downtown.

Then I spotted a policemen – a tall, good-looking young policeman.

“Pardon me, officer,” I said in my rarely-used perky ingenue voice.  “Do you know where 43rd Street is?”

He responded with one of those legendary Irish smiles and looking down at me said with complete confidence, “Yes, I do.”

In the long silence that followed I waited for the man in blue to continue.   My own suddenly less certain smile began to crumple; his smile was as fresh as the moment it was born.   Maybe fresher.

Finally, as the light bulb slowly lit up over my head, I took a deep breath and said, “You’re going to make me ask that second question, aren’t you?”

Looking down at me and still smiling he said, “Yes, I am.”

I took a deep breath, and as slowly and as liltingly Irish I could make it, all but sang the question.  “Sure and in which direction might I find this so-called 43rd Street — if indeed ye’d be so kindly!”

New York’s finest took me by the shoulders, turned me 90 degrees to the left, and pointed me in the right direction.   I just stood there nodding my head, my back still to him.  Behind me, I heard a great guffaw.  This brief encounter had just made his day!

“Welcome to New York!” he said happily.

2.     Later the same day

The agent’s office was less than a block away at 1501 Broadway –  otherwise known as The Paramount Building.   The Paramount Theatre dominated the entire front of the building with a five-story marquee in the French rococo style indicating that all who entered got to see a movie and a stage show.  Big stars like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington often played there – live – doing five shows a day.  Don’t ask me who was playing that day; I was far too excited to notice.  The entrance to the office portion of the building was inconspicuously tucked away just beyond the garish, glittering marquee.

Inside the surprisingly ordinary lobby, I found a uniformed, white-gloved attendant waiting in a brass-grilled elevator to Otis me up to the floor where the Schurr Agency was located.   Once through the portal that might lead to my future, I proudly announced to the receptionist, “I have an appointment with Louis Schurr.”

Appointed hours for meetings with agents, I would learn, are as elastic as appointments with members of say … royalty…or the medical professions. They all seem to know the trick of over-booking.  I found an empty chair and counted at least a dozen other Broadway hopefuls sitting and waiting — all avoiding eye contact.  I hoped we weren’t all waiting for the same guy.  I was left to ponder this for two hours, while even more supplicants crowded in to the already SRO waiting room.

When at long last I was ushered into the sanctum sanctorum, I found this tiny, ancient personage, with hair dyed a shockingly unlikely jet black, sitting in a huge fancy chair behind a desk the size of Rhode Island.   He was shouting into the phone and didn’t even look up as the secretary announced my name.  She gave me a little shove to start my engine and pointed to a straight-backed chair directly in front of the desk.  As she exited, she slammed the door as a signal to her boss that he had company.  He continued shouting into his phone.  I remained standing midway between him and the door, too timid to sit down without being invited.

Suddenly Little Louis was shouting in his telephone voice, “You’re a singer, right?”

Unsure whether he was talking to me or to the deaf person at the other end of the phone, I just nodded my head.

“So sing!” he ordered, still holding the phone.

“Where’s the piano?” I asked hesitantly.

“No piano!  No piano player!” he hollered.  “Sing!”

At this particular moment, I could not remember the lyrics to a single song in the entire universe.  And since I wasn’t blessed with perfect pitch, I could not possibly find the right key to start singing.   Then I heard Jill’s voice saying this could be my big chance.

So I started singing a capella at full volume, when suddenly the phone rang.   Again!  In total disbelief, I watched the little ferret pick it up while casually waving at me to continue singing while he chatted away relentlessly.

Bravely – no, make that angrily – I kept on singing, pushing the decibel level higher and “sparkling” (which Marge Champion had long ago told me was her foolproof way to keep the audience focusing on her).   It did not work on my audience of one; he just talked louder into the phone.

That’s when I decided to improvise gibberish lyrics, stringing together nonsense syllables that formed wordlike sounds with no meaning whatsoever.   When he simply upped the noise ante and continued to out-shout me, I changed my line of attack and substituted a litany of four-letter words in place of the gibberish.  I was hoping against hope that the shock of hearing “*%#@” “@#!?” and the like, sung in a strident girly voice, might be noticeable enough to catch his attention.  He never stopped barking into the phone.

I kept singing this newly invented x-rated version of my favorite audition song as I inched my way backwards to the door until I felt the doorknob bumping into my backside.  I made my escape just as I reached the last yodel of the refrain.   Banging open his office door, I raced through the jam-packed reception room and out the door leading to the real world.

Once back on street level and the relative sanity of Times Square, I started walking along the sidewalk, trying to avoid collisions with all the people rushing somewhere or other so imperatively.  As I shambled along, trying to quell the residual shaking caused by the recent peak humiliation of my life, I noticed a forty-ish man who was wearing dark glasses, carrying a red-tipped white cane in one hand and a tin cup sprouting two long yellow Ticonderoga pencils in the other, walking directly toward me very slowly, sweeping his cane as he moved.

Instantly I felt a ripple of shame for allowing myself to indulge in such unrestrained self-pity.  If this blind man had the moxie to get up every day and face the callous, hard-bitten denizens of The Great White Way — I could do it, too!  Nothing could stop me now, I thought.

Filled with gratitude, I began foraging for coins in my handbag to offer thanks to this brave man who had unknowingly helped set my priorities straight.  Pedestrians kept rushing by as he and I drew alongside one another. I dropped a quarter and a half-dollar into his tin cup; they hit bottom with a surprisingly sharp clank.

My new mentor’s head snapped up and he said with a broad smile, “Welcome to New York…enjoy your visit!”

There’s a wonderful interview with Living Legend Satan’s Angel on American Ethnography that you should read!

Satan’s Angel, known for her fiery tassel twirling, to me also epitomizes total rock n’ roll. Though sweet in nature, she’s also known for her blunt, take-no-shit sort of attitude. And if you’ve ever seen her perform, you know she puts on one hell of a dynamic act that leaves you feeling energized and wanting more!

In the interview, Satan’s Angel dishes about today’s burlesque:

At the Miss Exotic World pageant you took the stage as part of “the legends” section of the program. In the recent years there’s been renewed attention to the art of exotic dance. What do you think of the new burlesque acts?

See … Burlesque is all about the tease. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. So when we came out there, back when I used to dance, we had gloves on, coats, and we used fur stoles, we used feathers, we used props. And it was tease, it was sexy! And so the thing is, you’re there to please the whole audience, and that’s including the women. That’s hard to do! The problem with some of the contemporary burlesque performers is that they are not very good at that, they’re not good at pleasing everyone. I think a lot of them are closer to performance art than they are to burlesque.

But surely some of them do burlesque the old way?

I like Dita Von Teese. She does old style burlesque, and I love her for that! She started from the bottom, and worked her way up. And she was very well known before Marilyn Manson! But now she’s more notorious. There’s Dita, and then there’s Catherine D’Lish. And Michelle L’Amour. Vivienne Vavoom … Kalani Kokonuts! She’s gorgeous! There’s a lot of them that I do like.

… and talks about her own experiences starting out and creating her acts.

So, you started out in the early 60’s, right?

My first time on stage was in an amateur strip contest in this place in North Beach. My friend and I went to see it. I decided that it looked easy, and I figured I could win. So I went home that night and practiced in the mirror, and the next day I went back and entered the competition. And I won. And the next day I entered, too, and won again. And then, instead of me coming to win the amateur strip competition every night, they offered me a job.

How much money could you make?

I had worked as a telephone operator, earning $99 every two weeks. And in the amateur strip contest I would pocket $100 a night. So I thought this is the type of jobs they should have told us about at the career fairs in school! Working as an exotic dancer I could make $350 a week. In other words, 7 times the pay I had as a telephone operator.

Link: Read the full interview.

The following is a wonderful story by Betsy Holland Gehman, vaudevillian and Broadway chorus girl (and Princess Farhana’s mom). It’s a glimpse of her experience working in the waning vaudeville circuit in the 1940’s.

My many thanks to Princess Farhana and Augusta for allowing me to repost this.

V A U D E V I L L E 1939

By Betsy Holland Gehman

Here’s one of my Show Biz moments. I don’t have many photos from those days. Somehow I had the idea that collecting photos and making scrapbooks of one’s theatrical “triumphs” was vulgar and rather vain. I felt the work should speak for itself…you didn’t have to “prove it” with pictures. It never occurred to me I’d be old one day and might just enjoy looking backward.

This photo’s caption: “Between shows at the State Theatre in Indianapolis: Betty Bennett (that was me), featured singer with the Pinky Tomlin Orchestra, and Donald O’Connor.” Donald was on the bill as part of The O’Connor Family, a popular singing and dancing comedy act, well-known on the vaudeville circuit.

The year was 1939. I was 17, Donald was 16. Pinky Tomlin (the one-hit wonder who wrote, “The Object of My Affections”) was a lanky red-haired, freckle-faced good ol’ boy from Oklahoma. He was married to a Native American woman whom I never met. She was busy back in Ponca City tending to her family’s oil interests. I learned at that point that only the Oklahoma Native Americans (the Ponca Tribe) had been permitted by the Great White Father to keep their mineral rights. Who, back in Washington, could possibly have guessed there was oil in that wasteland? So the entire tribe got very rich and, undoubtedly, heads rolled in D.C.

As a historical note, some thirty years later I noticed a little office building in Beverly Hills with a sign that read, “Pinky Tomlin Oil Co.” So I guess he either outlived his very rich wife or finally cajoled her into letting him move to Hollywood where he had longed to be all those years ago. But back to the ‘Thirties.

I found Pinky loathsome, and not merely for the way he chose to introduce me at five shows a day:

“Well, folks,” he’d say in a voice weary with the immensity of this intrusion into his time in the follow-spot, “every band has to have a girl singer … so here’s ours.”

Faced with that kind of “enthusiasm”, I learned how to really take stage. Out of sheer self-defense I managed to stop the show at every performance with one of my favorite numbers, “The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish”.

I should have mentioned at the start that Pinky had not been the one to hire me. In fact, it wasn’t even his band. He was hired help, just as I was. The Wm. Morris Agency had put together the “package”, and sent us off into the midwest to make some money for them in the waning days of Vaudeville.

So, the package: Pinky signed on as putative star; an already existing band from Milwaukee (which until now had specialized in playing polkas), complete with its actual leader who sat with the band and played the accordion while Pinky stood in front, waving his arms and pretending to be the leader. And of course little me because, well, as Pinky said, every band had to have one.

Donald loved what he was doing, loved show biz and, above all, loved his family. His big brother John, John’s 9-year old daughter Patsy, and Donald were what remained of a larger family theatrical unit. Like Judy Garland, Donald had been born in a trunk. Now, at 16 he was not quite ripe enough to be welcomed back to Hollywood where he had been a huge kid star, co-starring with the likes of Bing Crosby. Now he was going through what Hollywood considered the “awkward stage”, meaning those years that made the movie studios so uncomfortable because they didn’t yet know how to write sellable movies about pubescent angst and tentative sexuality.

Shortly, however, H’wood would be discovering the Teen Market, thanks to Judy Garland and Micky Rooney who literally overnight had become the newest pot o’ gold over at MGM. Because of their success, Donald suddenly found himself worthy of Hollywood attention again, and soon he was co-starring with Peggy Ryan in a long series of successful Teen song and dance flicks at Universal Studios.

Then came WWll, and Donald and Francis the Mule made a new kind of movie couple – one that became hugely popular in wartime America. Francis could talk to Donald, which started a new trend in Second Bananas. Together, they made many money-making sequels during wartime. Ultimately, Donald wound up at MGM, most notably in “Singin’ in the Rain” creating and performing “Make ‘em Laugh”, the greatest single comedy dance number ever filmed, in one of the greatest movie musicals ever made.

Here’s the thing. All those incredible falls, leaps, aerials, wall-walking and split-second timing that Donald dazzled audiences with in that number, the 16-year old Donald had done five times a day – every day – in the family vaudeville act back in 1939. And he would do it all for a total of maybe 10 or 20 people at some of the midweek matinees. It didn’t matter: the most miniscule audience got exactly the same go-for-glory show a standing room only audience would get. I learned the meaning of the word “professional” from the O’Connor Family – it was the highest praise you could get from a vaudevillian.

This photo catches Donald and me when we were both young, giddy, in love with life, and just having fun in those few short hours between our five shows a day – every day – while some movie or other was running. We never watched the movies … we were much happier getting out into the daylight once in a while.

To bring this story full circle I, too, can be heard on the soundtrack of “Singin’ in the Rain”. Got my Screen Actors Guild card somewhat earlier by singing on Disney soundtracks for Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons. A humble beginning, but it led to singing on soundtracks at all the major studios, primarily those huge, lavish musicals at M.G.M.

Then, suddenly, the movie musical – like vaudeville – was dead. That’s when I headed East to Broadway, where I found myself on stage in what has come to be called “The Golden Age of the Broadway Musical” during The Great White Way’s last memorable, pre-corporate days.

The other thing I learned that year was that the kind of camaraderie found in live theater is unlike anything else in life, with its instant intense relationships and no baggage attached. Very existential.

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Copyright 2005, Betsy Holland Gehman. All rights reserved.
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