Free City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

began her career—which consisted of putting forth her gorgeousness into the world, for the sake of personal advancement. She started working as a taxi dancer at the Honeymoon Lane Danceland on Seventh Avenue, where she let men grope her, perspire on her, and cry with loneliness in her arms for fifty dollars a week, plus “presents”on the side.
    She tried for the Miss New York beauty pageant when she was sixteen, but lost to a girl who played the vibraphone onstage in a bathing suit. She also worked as a photographer’s model—selling everything from dog food to antifungal creams. And she’d been an artist’s model—selling her naked body for hours at a time to art schools and painters. While still a teenager, she wedded a saxophoneplayer whom she’d met while briefly working as a hatcheck girl at the Russian Tea Room. Marriages to saxophone players never do work out, though, and Celia’s was no exception; she was divorced before you knew it.
    Right after her divorce, she and a girlfriend moved to California with the intention of becoming movie stars. She managed to get herself some screen tests, but never landed a speakingpart. (“I got twenty-five dollars a day once to play a dead girl in a murder picture,” she said proudly—naming a movie I had never heard of.) Celia left Los Angeles a few years later, having realized that “there were four girls on every corner out there with better figures than me, and no Bronx accent.”
    When she came back home from Hollywood, Celia got a job at the Stork Club as a showgirl. There,she met Gladys, Peg’s dance captain, who recruited her for the Lily Playhouse. By 1940, when I arrived, Celia had been working for my Aunt Peg for almost two years—the longest period of stability in her life. The Lily was not a glamorous venue. It was certainly no Stork Club. But the way Celia saw it, the job was easy, her pay was regular, and the owner was a woman, which meant she didn’t haveto spend her workdays dodging “some greasy boss with Roman hands and Russian fingers.” Plus, her job duties were over by ten o’clock. This meant that once she was done dancing on the Lily stage, she could go out on the town and dance until dawn—often at the Stork Club, but now it was for fun.
    How all that life experience adds up to someone who was claiming to be only nineteen years old, you tellme.
    To my joy and surprise, Celia and I became friends.
    To a certain extent, of course, Celia liked me because I was her handmaiden. Even at the time, I knew that she regarded me as her handmaiden, but that was all right with me. (If you know anything about the friendships of young girls, you will know that there is always one person playing the part of the handmaiden, anyhow.) Celia demandeda certain level of devoted service—expecting me to rub her calves for her when they were sore, or to give her hair a rousing brushing. Or she’d say, “Oh, Vivvie, I’m all out of ciggies again!”—knowing full well that I would run out and buy her another pack. (“That’s so bliss of you, Vivvie,” she’d say, as she pocketed the cigarettes, and didn’t pay me back.)
    And yes, she was vain—so vain thatit made my own vanities look amateurish by comparison. Truly, I’ve never seen anyone who could get more deeply lost in a mirror than Celia Ray. She could stand for agesin the glory of her own reflection, nearly deranged by her own beauty. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I swear to you that she once spent two hours looking at herself in the mirror while debating whether sheshould be massaging her neck cream upward or downward in order to prevent the appearance of a double chin.
    But she had a childlike sweetness about her, too. In the mornings, Celia was especially dear. When she would wake up in my bed, hungover and tired, she was just a simple kid who wanted to snuggle and gossip. She would tell me of her dreams in life—her big, unfocused dreams. Her aspirationsnever