that’s not even close to how I looked this evening. I wasn’t dressed to go dancing at the Stork. I wasn’t wearing an evening gown or furs, or jewels that I’d borrowed from Celia. On the contrary—as per Olive’s directions for sartorial modesty, which, thankfully, I’d had the good sense to obey—I was wearing the same simple frock I’d worn on the train to New York City all those many months ago. And I had on my good school coat. My face was scrubbed clean of makeup. I probably looked about fifteen years old.
What’s more, I was keeping a different sort of company that night (to say the least) than what the doormen were used to. Instead of being on the arm of the luscious showgirl Celia Ray, I was in the company of one Miss Olive Thompson—a dour lady in steel-rimmed spectacles and an old brown overcoat. She looked like a school librarian. She looked like a school librarian’s mother. We certainly did not look like the sort of guests who would elevate the tone of a place like the Stork, and so both James and Nick put up their hands to stop us, just as Olive was marching in.
“We need to see Mr. Winchell, please,” she announced, briskly. “It’s rather an emergency.”
“I’m sorry, madam, but the nightclub is full, and we are not accepting any more guests for the evening.”
He was lying, of course. If Celia and I had been trying to get in—dressed in all our glory—those doors would have flung open so fast they might have lost their hinges.
“Is Mr. Sherman Billingsley here this evening?” Olive asked, undeterred.
The doormen exchanged glances. What did this homely librarian know of Sherman Billingsley, the club’s owner?
Taking advantage of their hesitation, Olive pressed on.
“Please tell Mr. Billingsley that the manager of the Lily Playhouse has come to speak with Mr. Winchell, and that it’s a grave emergency. Tell him that I come on behalf of his good friend Peg Buell. We haven’t much time. It’s regarding the potential publication of these photographs.”
Olive reached into her unassuming plaid satchel and pulled out the ruination of my life—that manila folder. She handed it to the doormen. This was a bold tactic, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Nick took the folder, opened it, looked at the photos, and let out a low whistle. Then he looked from the photos to me, and back to the photos. Something changed in his face. Now he knew me.
He gave me a raised eyebrow and a lewd grin. He said, “We haven’t seen you around here in a while, Vivian. But now I see why. I guess you’ve been busy, huh?”
I seared in shame—while at the same time understanding: This is just the beginning of it.
“I will ask you to take care with how you speak to my niece, sir,” said Olive, in a voice so steely it could have drilled a hole through a bank safe.
My niece?
Since when did Olive call me her niece?
Nick apologized, cowed. But Olive wasn’t done. She said, “Young man, you can either bring us to see Mr. Billingsley—who will not appreciate your rude treatment of two people he essentially considers to be family members—or you can bring us directly to Mr. Winchell’s table. You will do one, or you will do the other, but I will not be leaving. My suggestion is that you bring us directly to Mr. Winchell’s table because that’s where I’ll be ending up this evening—regardless of what it takes me to get there, or who has to lose their job along the way for trying to stop me.”
It’s amazing how frightened young men will always be of dowdy, middle-aged women with stern voices—but it’s true: they are terrified of them. (Too much like their own mothers, or nuns, or Sunday-school teachers, I suppose. The trauma from those old scoldings and beatings must run very deep.)
James and Nick exchanged a glance, looked at Olive one more time, and then decided as one: Give the old bird whatever she wants.
We were delivered straight to Mr. Winchell’s table.
Olive sat down with the great man, but gestured at me to remain standing behind her. It was as though she were using her squatty little body as a shield between me and the world’s most dangerous newspaperman. Or maybe she just wanted to put me at a far enough remove from the conversation that I wouldn’t speak and ruin her strategy.
She pushed Winchell’s ashtray aside and placed the folder