Read atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business Online
Authors: Peggy Pope
atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (3 page)
In the pop-up book of my life, I find moments that jump out to hand me knowledge, gratis. I love that. A surge of energy thrills through me. It’s like a life promotion.
The Junk Man delivered one of these moments to me. I loved the Junk Man. He’d come by in a wagon drawn by a bony old horse at 2:30 every afternoon. Cowbells, strung across the wagon, announced him, clanging to the rhythm of the clippety-clops. I counted on him. Clang, clang, clippety-clop. Half past two. I’d run across the front lawn to look at what was new.
He was old and had whiskers that started in his ears, grew all around the lower part of his face, and covered his neck. He looked like a retired Santa Claus who’d lost a lot of weight and didn’t wash. He didn’t say “Hello” or “How do you do?” or anything like that. He was from some other country and hardly spoke any English. He bought and sold stuff, all secondhand, used, broken stuff. He always had something new to sell or trade, some new old thing.
One day my parents had gone to the hospital to be with my brother, Bruce. He was having another operation Jim was away at college, and Adeline had shut herself up in her room and wouldn’t play with me anymore. We had been wrestling, my favorite thing to do. I would make her get down on her knees so we’d be the same height and I could knock her over. But that day she had gotten up suddenly and said, “I have to go upstairs for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t come back. And she locked her door.
In a rage, I took my Betty Boop doll, my best friend, and swung her by her feet at Adeline’s door, expecting the door to open on impact. But it was Betty Boop’s head that cracked open instead, and I saw that she did not have supernatural powers after all. There were chips from her face all over the hall floor. And she’d lost one of her eyes as well. I was devastated.
Then I heard cowbells, and I ran down to the Junk Man and asked him what to do.
“Give me,” he said.
I handed cracked-headed, half-blind Betty Boop to him. He looked at her, shook his head, looked at me, and said, “I got.”
He leaned back in his wagon, pulled out a Raggedy Andy doll, and handed him to me.
“Take. Good trade.”
It was the best trade we ever made—a Betty Boop doll with one eye missing for a Raggedy Andy with no trousers. A pop-up day.
When Bruce got well, I planned to show Raggedy Andy to him, make him laugh.
“Life is a sea filled with shipwrecks,” Dad would say. “You need to know how to survive in this dog-eat-dog world. You gotta outwit the next guy. Be a step ahead.”
That winter when I was six, I went downstairs to breakfast and saw my dad outside the kitchen window spraying the garden hose.
“Why is Daddy watering the snow?” I asked.
“He’s making a skating pond for you to learn to skate on. Here’s your orange juice,” said my mother.
So after breakfast, wearing my two-tone-green ski suit and hat and my sister’s cast-off double runners, there I was on my own private skating pond. My father placed a kitchen chair in front of me and said, “Face the chair, grab hold of the seat, and push! See, that way you won’t fall down.” I looked up at him through the spindles of the chair back, his white hair shining in the sun. I pushed the chair toward him.
“Good. Good. Keep pushing! That’s it! That’s how you learn to skate.”
“Oh,” I said.
He watched for a minute or two till he was satisfied I’d gotten the idea, and while I wasn’t looking, he went off to the city to take out other people’s children’s tonsils.
My father was there until I was thirteen. There was a lot of him. He taught me many things. He taught me how to whittle a stick with a penknife and shoot a .410-gauge shotgun, as well as how to spin a lariat and hop in and out of the loop, like Will Rogers was doing on the stage in New York. We built a jitney to get around in and planted a vegetable garden. He paid me fifty cents a bushel for crabgrass correctly pulled, so it wouldn’t grow back. “Thar’s gold in them thar hills,” he would say. Then he taught me how to win at badminton by slamming the shuttlecock straight down at my opponent’s feet and at croquet by knocking my opponent’s ball so far out of the court that there was no way he’d get back before I got to the end post. The day I was about to beat him at checkers on the DL&W. commuter train, he pretended the train had lurched, causing his knee to upend the board and send the checkers flying just as I was making the final move, so the game didn’t count. I was disappointed. He took out the New York World-Telegram and turned to the editorials, which irritated him more than usual. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe he didn’t want me to win for some reason. But wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t he always telling us to go out there and win? I chose to see this as a lesson, too—one I would understand later on, perhaps.
Another day, he brought home a bow, some arrows, and a bull’s-eye target, which he set up among the peonies in the backyard.
“Here, try this,” he said. “Take a firm stance, legs apart.”
He stood behind me, guiding me. I raised the bow and pulled back on the bowstring to sight along the arrow at the target.
“That’s it. Now aim above the highest circle, take a half-breath, hold it, and let go the string.”
Pfft—thwap! Bull’s-eye. I heard the “oowuh, oowuh,” of a mourning dove behind the garage.
“Son of a gun,” said my father. Then he said, “Do it again. It’s all right to breathe now.”
A few arrows later, he was off doing other things that needed his attention around the property—the grass, the roses, the grill for the picnic next day. I was left alone to prepare for my role in this dog-eat-dog world.
It was a Saturday. I liked how the stillness of the afternoon was broken only by the zinging of my arrows and, once in a while, the cooing of the mourning dove. Doves usually sang only in the evening when I was trying to get to sleep or in the morning to wake me up when I didn’t want to get out of bed and go to school.
I practiced for a while, and then I shot a tree. Then I shot right through an old tire hanging from the tree. I shot the head off a peony, a sock off the clothesline, my dog’s water dish, a birdbath, the lawn mower, the wheelbarrow, a new invasion of crabgrass, the garage, and the house, just as my father was coming up out of the cellar.
To hit a moving target, you have to aim ahead of it. How far ahead hangs on how fast it’s moving, how far away it is, how heavy your bow is, how fast the arrow flies, and how much your body moves while trying to hold still. And on the beat of your heart. I was hitting everything that day. I was a natural at this.
Pfft—thunk. My arrow shot right across the bridge of my father’s nose and shivered in the wood of the open cellar door. My father stood as still as the afternoon. Then, in slow motion, he turned his head and looked at me. He looked at the bow and arrow, the target, the rose garden, and the lilac bush. Then he went up the porch steps and into the house.
I sat down where I had been standing on the hot crabgrass and waited for him to come back out and punish me. But he didn’t. I listened to the dove practicing. I put the target away in the garage so it wouldn’t get wet if it rained. I puttered around in there until I could get back into my body, which had gone numb. Finally, I went into the house to look for my father. I found him in the living room, asleep on the sofa with the dog asleep on top of him.
With our toy closet full of discarded lethal weapons, my father moved on to the world of entertainment. Undaunted by the archery incident, he turned his concentration to our somewhat proficient ice skating. He got a family membership to the New York Figure Skating Club, which was just down the street from where he practiced medicine. He was raising money for the new Midtown Hospital, at which he was the executive surgeon, and was reaching out to people like the Prentices and other influential citizens of the city who might become supporters.
“This can lead to all sorts of opportunities,” he said. “You know Newbold Morris is there every Thursday night? He’s the president of the City Council of New York City. Right up there with LaGuardia. And Rod Stephens Jr.? Builds sailing ships? In the America’s Cup race every year. There’s a Miss Kasser in a mink coat, greets the children in the afternoon sessions. We’ll be in the ice show they put on in the spring,” he said as he drove us into the skating rink in the city.
The annual Club Carnival took place in the old Madison Square Garden. It was directed over a loudspeaker by Leon Leonidoff of Radio City Music Hall and Rockettes fame. He singled me out at one point and gave me my first direction: While delivering notes to a group at the other end of the arena, he suddenly boomed out, “Will the little girl in the pink tutu at the Forty-Ninth Street side of the rink please stop spinning?”
My part in the show was as one of the seven dwarfs, Bashful, in the Snow White number. I wore a huge mask that covered my whole head and made it hard to see. My job became one of negotiating with the ice while tilting my head back as far as I could in order to see Dopey in front of me and not fall down and screw up the line. Adeline was a sugarplum fairy. Dad and Mom were pushing a sleigh.
My father was excited by our debut. When it was over and we were back home eating turkey sandwiches in the kitchen, he announced as he ladled out the homemade cranberry sauce, “Here’s what we’re going to do. You girls can put together a little act.”
“What?” said Adeline.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ll do a little pair skating together. Call it something. Get some music. It’ll be fun! Do it at the Garden next year.”
Adeline, the first to recover, said, “Daddy, I’m going to college.”
“You can do that, too. Don’t be a wet blanket.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“See? You want to deprive your little sister of this opportunity? Here, have some more turkey. Peggy, pass your sister the cranberry sauce.”
My father, being a doctor, probably knew about the sleep inducing attributes of the tryptophan in turkey. He was not only bribing her but drugging her as well.
In the end, Adeline was enlisted. We needed her. It couldn’t happen without her.
Dad was passionate about figure skating.
“It’s a helluva lot more graceful than ballet dancing,” he said, driving home from the rink one night. “None of that stop-and-start stuff, trying to get your bearings after a jump or a spin. If you happen to fall down, you just keep going. The ice’ll give you a slide. No hopping around on tortured feet in crippling toe shoes. You’re wearing beautiful, white suede boots made to order by G. Stanzione, boot maker to the stars. You glide and flow on flashing silver blades. Fantasy blends into fantasy. It gives me chills. It’s—I don’t know—it’s just indescribably glorious. It’s fun. Connections can be made while you’re having fun.”
While I was trying to connect the dots of this final statement, a car cut across the lane in front of us and nearly caused a collision. Dad blew the horn, slowed down, muttered “Sonofabitch,” and was quiet the rest of the way home.
We were swept up by his commitment, which was usually short-lived but this time seemed different. He wasn’t going to lose interest and disappear this time, leaving us in the middle of a project for which we still needed him. Butterflies hatched in my stomach. We pitched in. We practiced our figure eights and threes and loops. We were deeply influenced, secondhand, by a disciple of Isadora Duncan. We called ourselves “The Wind and the Thistle.” In a series of jumps and spins, a fox trot, a waltz, and a tango, Adeline as the Wind would chase me, the Thistle, around the rink as we channeled Isadora’s principles of the free spirit. My father, at random, got a 78 rpm record off a shelf in his closet—“Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night)” from Gounod’s opera Faust—for our music.
He got us excused from school four afternoons a week to go into New York to practice. He drove over to the Kimberley school and flirted shamelessly with Miss Flannery, my homeroom teacher.
“Miss Flannery,” he said, “may I have a moment of your valuable time?”
“Yes, Dr. Pope?” She wasn’t sure. She was curious, though.
“Do you like pheasant?” he said. “I find it the most delicious fowl on the menu.”
“Really?” said Miss Flannery. “I’m not all that familiar—”
“Oh, believe me. They are the best, and you know, I have a couple of them here that I felled from the skies of Pennsylvania for you. May I present them to you in honor of your work with my daughter, Peggy? She has grown so smart in your class this year. What a lovely cameo you’re wearing.”
“Why, thank you.” Miss Flannery was totally flustered and would have granted my father any wish he might ask for after that.
My dad was the captain, my mother his first lieutenant. He assigned her to drive us into the city after school to rehearse. As we passed through the stench of the Jersey meadows and the pig farms of Secaucus, we rolled up the windows and ate a hot lunch in the Packard. The aromas of steamed vegetables and thermoses of tomato soup mixed with the leathery scent of our skating boots and filled the car. We changed our clothes as we ate so we’d be ready to step out and walk, with rubber guards on our skates, across the sidewalk, into the elevator, and directly on to the practice rink of Madison Square Garden. There we’d greet Miss Kasser in her mink coat and Robin Hood hat with the feather, and as the bell rang for the session to begin, we’d race to win a practice patch on the ice in front of the mirror before anybody else could get to it.
We created a scenario of the wind blowing a thistle across the ice for two minutes and thirteen seconds. That could be a very long time, depending on whether I fell down or not after the pull-through. There was a series of spins and jumps, the pull-through, and a speeding up toward the end so we could finish when the music did. I usually fell down following the pull-through because my father, concerned for my safety, had forbidden me to do it properly. The right way was to grab my sister’s hands between her legs from behind, squat down, shoot one of my legs ahead, and lean back parallel to the ice while she pulled me through the bridge made by spreading her legs out wide.
Dad said to me, “You can’t lie back flat because you could hit your head on the ice, knock yourself out, and end up an idiot for the rest of your life.” Going through Adeline’s legs in a hunched squat didn’t work. I was too big and didn’t fit under the bridge.
Meanwhile, my father had organized a number of out-of-town tryouts for us on the frozen putting greens of the golf clubs in New Jersey. We attracted audiences. Every time I fell down after the pull-through, I would slide and scramble to my feet amid gasps from the crowd. My sister was able to keep her balance throughout and, in a brilliant act of denial, improvise a distraction during the chaos. Beautiful and graceful, she’d twirl in an arabesque until I could pull myself together. Once, the fellow playing the record for us assumed we were finished after my fall and lifted the phonograph needle off our record. Without hesitation, Adeline, Sweet Adeline, sang the opening from The Happy Farmer as she did an extra swoop around the rink to cover for his gaffe as well as mine. But if nobody interfered, we would cut some of the dance steps and join up just as “Walpurgisnacht” scratched to a final crescendo.
After a while, Adeline started to lose interest—something about meeting boys going to college. She was five years older than I, and she had become distracted. Once in the car, she sat on “Walpurgisnacht,” and it broke into shards. Unbeknownst to her, my dad and I had arranged to carry spares. It was a conspiracy, and she didn’t have a chance. Nothing was going to stop the team.
In 1940, against the background of World War II, the war to end all wars, my father’s perseverance was to pay off. We got a booking in New Haven. We were to perform during halftime at the Yale versus Brown game, the biggest college hockey game of the year.
Although I had stashed “Walpurgisnacht” in four separate places in the car, Adeline, worn out by her studies, decided to take a nap in the backseat. She stretched out, broke one record with her feet and one with her elbow, and then she smashed the other two when she dropped the carrying case on the way to the rink.
Yet there we were waiting on the ice between halves. The first half of the hockey game had been violent. Blood tinted the surface of the ice. It had become a soft pink that actually went well with our costumes. We waited for the man on the loudspeaker to explain about the Wind and the Thistle, about “Walpurgisnacht,” about my father, about—.
“Adeline and Peggy Pope!” suddenly boomed out through the arena. There was no explanation. There was no music. The ice was not supposed to be bloody.
The startled fans on their way for beer and hot dogs turned, as if choreographed, to see a flash of silver chasing a bundle of lavender around a rosy rink in a sort of silent film.
I could sense their reaction. It enveloped me, made me feel like play dough and tipped me off that this was not an experience I wanted to have. But the Wind and the Thistle had a destiny. We didn’t need an explanation, music, or Isadora Duncan. We went on. We were heroes like you see in the movies, soldiers going into battle facing certain death with heads held high, fierce, proud, loyal to the end.
When it was over, the audience seemed somewhat stunned. They sat like people on the subway waiting for the next stop. I looked for my father. He wasn’t there. He’d gone to get the car. A sense of abandonment engulfed me. It was beginning to dawn on me that show business could be a tough racket.