THE IDOL WHO JUST WANTED TO MAKE MONEY

VOLUME 2: THE AMERICAN STAGE

PART ONE

The morning Ruby Martinez opened her eyes on Forty-first Street, she knew three things with the clarity of scripture. She knew that her name was Ruby Kane now, not Martinez, and that Martinez was a life she had lived somewhere far away in a language that no longer existed. She knew that she had been a chorus girl in a small production at the Apollo Theatre on Forty-second Street, earning six dollars a week and sleeping on a cot in the basement beneath the stage. And she knew, with a certainty that made her hands tremble on the thin cotton sheets, that the entire history of Broadway was sitting in her head like a library she had already read, page by page, act by act, note by note.

She sat up in the darkness and counted the coins beside her mattress. Four dollars and thirty-seven cents. It was October 1924, and the air through her cracked window smelled of coal smoke and something sweeter, something like possibility, the way the whole city seemed to smell on the eve of something that had not yet announced itself.

The knowledge arrived the way water arrives after rain, gradually then all at once. She knew which plays would open and which would close. She knew the names of directors who would be forgotten and directors who would build empires from stage lights and backroom deals. She knew that a girl named Vivian St. Clair held files on every performer who walked through a casting door, black or gold depending on what the room needed that day.

Ruby pulled on her dress, the same one she had worn to rehearsal three nights ago, now worn thin at the elbows. She washed her face with cold water from the tap, looked at her reflection in the crack of a mirror, and decided that she would not be anyone else today. She would be Ruby Kane, who knew things other people did not know, and she would use those things the only way she knew how: to stand in the light and be seen.

The audition was at the Empire Theatre at half past ten. Ruby walked the six blocks in the early morning fog, her heels clicking against the wet pavement like a metronome keeping time for a song only she could hear. Inside the Empire, a pianist sat at a grand piano in the lobby, warming up scales. He stopped when she entered and watched her walk past. He was a thin man with dark hair and sharp eyes. He introduced himself as Elias Goldstein, though Ruby already knew his name the way she knew the words to the songs she would sing.

They sat in the empty theater and he played the opening chords of a number he was developing. Ruby closed her eyes and heard everything the piece was not yet, the bridges it needed, the way the chorus should swell and then drop to a whisper that would pull the audience forward instead of pushing them away. She opened her eyes and told him.

He played through the revisions twice. By the third time, the piece sounded like something that had always existed and was only now being discovered.

The audition itself was a small room at the back of the theater with a casting table and a woman who had the demeanor of a judge at a sentencing. This was Vivian St. Clair. She was tall and thin in a way that seemed deliberate, her dress tailored to military precision, her dark hair pulled back so tightly that her face looked carved from ice. She examined Ruby from her worn shoes to her thin dress and said, We do not do chorus work for girls who smell like their mothers.

Ruby stood very still. She had prepared a speech, but the speech belonged to the Ruby who arrived yesterday, the Ruby who did not know that Vivian St. Clair kept a private ledger of debts and favors, that every actress who cried in her office eventually signed something she did not understand, that Vivian built her power on a foundation of stolen credit and ruined reputations.

I am not here for chorus work, Ruby said. I am here for the lead.

Vivian smiled slowly, and it was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a woman watching something predictable unfold. Sit down, she said.

Ruby sat. She sang. She sang with everything she had, which was not much in the way of training but was a great deal in the way of certainty, the kind of certainty that comes when you know exactly what the audience needs before they know it themselves. She sang the notes Elias had written and the notes Elias had not yet written, the ones that lived in the spaces between the bars.

Vivian did not look up from her notebook. When the last note faded into the empty theater, she closed her notebook and said, You are raw. You are untrained. You are not ready for a lead.

She was wrong. But she was wrong in a way that Ruby recognized, because she could see the file that Vivian was constructing in her head, the one that would live in the desk drawer and be used later, when another producer needed a reason to say no or a reason to say yes.

Get out, Vivian said.

Ruby stood and walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the brass handle and turned back. There is a producer named Jack Callahan. He works out of a basement on Forty-fifth Street. He was a soldier in the Great War and he lost three friends in the Argonne. He does not want to produce plays because he loves theater. He produces them because he does not know how to stop making things. Call him.

Vivian's pen stopped moving. She looked up, and for the first time, the ice cracked.

Get out, she said again, and her voice was thinner now.

Ruby left the Empire Theatre and walked into the afternoon, which was turning gold as the fog burned off Forty-second Street and the city announced itself to everyone who bothered to look up.

PART TWO

Jack Callahan's basement was beneath a saloon on Forty-fifth Street and smelled of stale beer and ambition, which were the same thing in 1924. Jack was a big man with a broken nose and hands that looked like they had been used for things that had nothing to do with theater. He listened to Ruby sing through a speaker hole in the floor and did not say anything for a long time after she stopped.

When he came upstairs, his eyes were wet. He said, You know how to do that.

I know things, Ruby said.

She told him about the play she wanted to produce, which was a piece about women who worked in factories and the women who worked in theaters and the ways those two groups of women were treated by men who controlled both spaces. She told him about the Mercury Theatre, which did not exist yet but would exist soon, and how it would be built on a principle that sounded simple and was impossible: the company would be all women. Women would perform. Women would write. Women would direct. Women would own the building.

Jack sat at his table and poured two fingers of whiskey and gave one to Ruby. He drank his standing up and hers sitting down, because some traditions survived everything.

You will need a building, he said.

I will need a building, she agreed.

You will need money.

She counted her coins again in her head. Four dollars and thirty-seven cents. We will find it.

He believed her. He believed her because she said things with her voice that other people could not say with theirs, and because she carried herself like someone who had already survived the worst part of the story and was just now getting to the good part.

They found a building. It was a small space on Forty-third Street, a former print shop with high windows and a stage that looked out over a wall. They painted it cream and red. They hung curtains from a fabric store that gave them scraps because Jack Callahan was a big man with a broken nose and women liked him. They recruited. They found women who were tired of waiting in rooms with Vivian St. Clair and wanted a different kind of room, one with a stage and a door that opened and a ledger that belonged to them.

Elias joined them with four new pieces. The first was a song about a woman who learned to play the piano at thirty and became the best player in the room by forty. The second was a duet between two sisters who shared a dressing room and a secret. The third was a solo that started as a whisper and ended as a declaration. The fourth was a chorus number that made the audience stand up, which was what happened when you wrote music that respected the people who sang it.

Opening night was a small affair. The Mercury Theatre held forty people and they filled it. There were mothers and daughters and girls who worked in offices and girls who worked in factories and girls who worked in rooms with women like Vivian St. Clair and they all came because they had been told that this would be different.

Ruby stood in the wings and watched the theater fill. She thought about the morning in Brooklyn, the cracked mirror, the four dollars and thirty-seven cents, the way the city had smelled like possibility. She thought about Vivian's file, which she knew would still be sitting in the desk drawer, waiting for the next girl who came in with hope in her voice and holes in her shoes.

The curtain rose.

PART THREE

The performance was not perfect. It never is. But it was alive in a way that theaters on Broadway rarely were, because the people on stage believed in what they were doing and the people in the audience believed in them, and that belief created a current that ran from the stage to the back wall and back again, a circuit of something that could not be measured in ticket sales or reviews or the gold or black marks in Vivian St. Clair's ledger.

After the show, a woman in a fur coat came to see Ruby. She introduced herself as Margaret Sullavan and she said that what Ruby had done was dangerous and that she liked dangerous things. She said she wanted to invest in the Mercury Theatre and she said she wanted Ruby to know that dangerous things tended to attract dangerous people.

Vivian St. Clair did not come to opening night. But three days later, Ruby received a letter on heavy cream paper with a wax seal. It was from Vivian and it was not a threat. It was a memorandum, a detailed accounting of every weakness in the Mercury Theatre, every financial gap, every artistic compromise they had made for the sake of survival. At the bottom it read: You will fail. But you will fail well. And when you do, I will be here to decide what happens to your name.

Ruby folded the letter and put it in her desk drawer, right beside the four dollars and thirty-seven cents, which had grown to seven dollars and twelve cents and was growing every day. She did not feel fear. She felt something closer to recognition, the way a player recognizes an opponent whose game they have already studied.

She called Jack. She called Elias. She called the women of the Mercury. They met in the theater after midnight, sitting on the stage in the dark, the way actors sometimes do when they are afraid and cannot go home to be afraid alone.

We will open next season, Ruby said. We will open with a piece that cannot be ignored. We will open with a piece about what it costs to be a woman who wants something in a city that wants women to be quiet.

They would. The Mercury Theatre became something that Broadway could not dismiss, not because it was loud but because it was precise, the way a surgeon is precise, the way a woman counting her coins is precise, the way a woman who wakes up with the whole history of the stage in her head is precise when she decides to rewrite it.

PART FOUR

Years later, when the Mercury Theatre was no longer small and the cream and red paint had been renewed twice and the women who had started it were running companies and teaching classes and writing plays that filled houses across the country, Ruby would sometimes sit in the back of the theater on a Wednesday matinee and watch the young women walk onto the stage and feel the current begin.

She would think about Vivian St. Clair, who had died in 1931, whose name had been remembered mostly for the files that had been discovered in a warehouse in Jersey and the women who had used those files to build their own companies. She would think about Jack, who had stayed with the Mercury until the end, his broken nose and wet eyes and his belief in things that could not be proved. She would think about Elias, who had composed until his hands could no longer play, and who had written a final piece that no one understood until she performed it and everyone wept.

She would think about the morning in Brooklyn, the cracked mirror, the coins on the mattress, the way the city had looked like a promise.

She would not think about the knowledge that had arrived, because it belonged to a life that was not entirely hers, a life that existed somewhere in a version of this city where the women had waited their turns and accepted their places and believed that the stage belonged to men. She would not think about that, because it did not matter anymore. What mattered was what had been built, what had been sung, what had been done in a small print shop on Forty-third Street by women who refused to be quiet.

The curtain rose. The current began.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: