Free The Sunday Gentleman by Irving Wallace

newspaper photograph of Major Jimmy Stewart being decorated by a lieutenant colonel; a newspaper photograph of a radio actress; an advertisement for a newly published book on the Marines; newspaper photographs from a film called The Hitler Gang ; a political cartoon of Adolf Hitler; three more cartoons about Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler facing defeat; and a picture from The New York Times drama section showing the sheet music and the casts of five musical comedy successes created by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammer-stein n.
    I was strangely moved by this first letter from a sixty-six-year-old former madam of the world’s most elegant house of rendezvous in recent times—moved by her elaborate and pathetically transparent story of having been a “socialite” who had known the real Everleighs, and knew them still. And I was touched by her lovely, banal quotations, and by her need to sell the precious album of photographs of the Everleigh Club.
    I wanted to write her immediately, write her anything, but write her nicely, yet I did not—and soon I could not. I found myself traveling around the country to various army installations, researching and writing material for top-priority military films. I had neither time nor energy to devote to Minna Lester, friend of Minna Everleigh. Too, I began to have misgivings about my play project, about the possibility of securing clear-cut legal rights to use the Everleigh Club from one who was an Everleigh and yet denied it. How much of what Minna had written me, I wondered, was conscious pretense based on elementary caution and how much was the sublimation of an old lady who had come to believe in a dream identity that she had invented for herself out of Wish? Did I want to become seriously involved with such a person? I did not know. I had no time to think it out I was on army time.
    But suddenly, late in 1945, I knew . I was being transferred from Los Angeles to the Signal Corps post on Long Island, New York, and I would be very close to 20 West 71st Street and to the “socialites” named Aida and Minna Lester. The play that I had in mind was one thing, but the lesser one, I decided. If I could reach the real Aida and Minna Everleigh, and from them secure the rights to their story for my play, that would be fine. More interesting to me, to that persistent curiosity built into every writer, was the desire to know firsthand more about those remarkable and legendary sisters, those sweet relics of the bawdy past.
    And so, shortly after my arrival in New York, on my first free Sunday—December 16, 1945—I sat down at the desk in my room in the Royalton Hotel on West 44th Street and addressed myself to “My dear Minna Lester.” I had made my decision. I would join their game, on their terms.
    “Perhaps you will not remember my name,” my letter began. “Certainly, it is with a sense of guilt that I write you now. But if I may, permit me to refresh your memory. Early in May of last year, while I worked as a writer for the United States Army, I was briefly in New York where I obtained your address through the kind offices of Mr. Jack Lait…” Then, for four pages, I went on to explain why I had not been able to write the sisters in almost twenty months, how much I still wanted to create the play based on their lives, how eager I was to purchase the album of photographs of their club (“if the price is not prohibitive”), and, now that I was back in New York, how much “I should enjoy the pleasure of meeting you and talking with you.”
    The following evening at seven o’clock—I had just returned by subway from my army chores, and was preparing to go out for dinner—the telephone in my room rang. I lifted the receiver, and then I forgot about dinner. The voice on the other end was that of Minna Everleigh. I still have my notes, jotted down immediately after our half hour’s conversation. “Minna sounds very old,” I had observed. “Her voice is quavery, it goes up and