Free All That Glitters by Thomas Tryon Page A

the same perfume as seven years before. Tigress, she said, and made a noise like one. Grrrrr… Every time she moved her legs she moved her purse, this giant-sized pocketbook, and every time it moved it clinked. I was wondering what was in it that made it look so weighty and made such a noise. By now we were somewhere west of North Platte and she and I were about the only passengers in the car. Finally the porter came with his little round tray and said it was last call. We had a nightcap. Pretty soon they began shutting off the lights and giving us looks. The next time she moved her purse she unclasped the flap and I took a gander inside. It was filled with bottles, those miniatures they sell on planes and trains—Smirnoff and Vat 69 and Johnnie Walker Red Label. She said it was always well when traveling to be prepared.
    “Like a Boy Scout?” I ventured.
    “Don’t mind if I do,” she replied pokerfaced.
    Ha ha. She was a card. Then she suggested that since they were turning out the lights on us, I might care to come back to her stateroom and have another nightcap. Maybe I’d like to change from rye to brandy, it made a nice nightcap. Would I? I did.
    The next day found me at breakfast with a minister from Indianapolis. Talk about the Reverend Davidson in Rain. I got a heavy morals lecture with lots of hellfire and brimstone thrown in; penises were designed by the Almighty for purposes of procreating and urinating only, nothing else! I asked him if he was acquainted with “Old Lady Five-Fingers,” but this geezer was a real coconut.
    Shortly after I returned to my seat the conductor arrived with a note.
    “From Miss Lillie,” he said almost in a whisper.
    I read,
Dear Charlie, it was nice meeting you as we did. Didn’t we laugh a lot? You’re very smart, very. You’ll go places some day. I won’t be able to see you again this trip since I’m having a migraine, they usually last a couple of days. I wish you well and don’t forget, the club car’s air-conditioned. Yours truly, Gladys Lillie.
    And I didn’t even get an autograph; she hadn’t signed her real name. But I wasn’t despondent for long, because when we went through the next tank town, there were people lined up on the station platform and along the tracks with placards reading “War Ended!!!” “Japs Surrender!!!” “It’s All Over!!!”
    Boy, I thought, was it all over.
    And now, seven years later, I was about to go into rehearsal with her. No one could blame me for my trepidation, because even though the play was a so-called pre-Broadway tryout, everyone concerned knew going in that the thing was a stinker.
    Babe was a tartar to work with. Being the acknowledged star, she loftily appropriated anything good out of anybody else’s lines, if she thought she could get a laugh with it. At one point I devised what I believed to be a catchy piece of business with a bunch of flowers, and when the director chuckled at it, she whirled on him and said, “Don’t you think it might be funnier if I smelled the bouquet?” Our director, a notorious alkie, didn’t care if she or Garbo smelled the roses, so Babe kept my bit. By the end of the day a distinct froideur had arisen between us.
    We rehearsed to little avail, but there was no help for it, open we must, and did. This was up in Connecticut, and everyone from the city came up to see this “pre-Broadway tryout.” It was Turkey City all the way; they were gobbling “disaster” everywhere. Babe got out her trusty pencil and began cutting, rearranging, and rewriting. Her jokes were corny, but she got more laughs than before. In the second act she came on in this monster fur coat—it was monkey fur, looked more like a gorilla suit, she’d bought it out of a Paris fashion show—and when she appeared in it, she brought down the house. Strictly a sight gag. She entered stage right, stopped, got her laugh, then crossed to left and lit a cigarette, then shed the coat, handed it to me, and said to