somewhere along the way, Peg had discovered that she was more talented at organizing entertainments for the injured soldiers than she was at tending to their wounds. She had a knack, she found, for turning out shows in field hospitals and barracks that were cheap, quick, gaudy, and comic. War is a dreadful business, but it teaches everyone something; this particular war taught my Aunt Peg how to put on a show.
I knew that Peg had stayed in London for a good long while after the war, working in the theater there. She was producing a revue in the West End when she met her future husband, Billy Buell—a handsome and dashing American military officer who had also decided to stay in London after the war to pursue a career in the theater. Like Peg, Billy came from “people.” Grandmother Morris used to describe the Buell family as “sickeningly wealthy.” (For years, I wondered what that term meant, exactly. My grandmother revered wealth; how much more of it would qualify as “sickening”? One day I finally asked her this question, and she answered, as if it explained everything: “They’re Newport, darling.”) But Billy Buell, Newport though he may have been, was similar to Peg in that he shunned the cultured class into which he had been born. He preferred the grit and glitter of the theater world to the polish and repression of café society. Also, he was a playboy. He liked to “make fun,” Grandmother Morris said, which was her polite code for “drinking, spending money, and chasing women.”
Upon their marriage, Billy and Peg Buell returned to America. Together, they created a theatrical touring company. They spent the better part of the 1920s on the road with a small cadre of troupers, barnstorming towns all across the country. Billy wrote and starred in the revues; Peg produced and directed them. The couple never had any highfalutin ambitions. They were just having a good time and avoiding more typical adult responsibilities. But despite all the effort they made not to be successful, success accidentally hunted them down and captured them anyhow.
In 1930—with the Depression deepening and the nation tremulous and afraid—my aunt and her husband accidentally created a hit. Billy wrote a play called Her Jolly Affair, which was so joyful and fun that people just ate it up. Her Jolly Affair was a musical farce about an aristocratic British heiress who falls in love with an American playboy (portrayed by Billy Buell, naturally). It was a light bit of fluff, like everything else they’d ever plunked down on the boards, but it was a riotous success. All across America, pleasure-starved mine workers and farmers shook out the last bits of loose change from their pockets in order to see Her Jolly Affair, making this simple, brainless play into a profitable triumph. The play picked up so much steam, in fact, and garnered such bountiful praise in the local papers, that in 1931, Billy and Peg brought it to New York City, where it ran for a year in a prominent Broadway theater.
In 1932, MGM made a movie version of Her Jolly Affair—which Billy wrote but did not star in. (William Powell did the acting job instead. Billy had decided by this point that a writer’s life was easier than an actor’s life. Writers get to set their own hours, they aren’t at the mercy of an audience, and there’s no director telling them what to do.) The success of Her Jolly Affair spawned a series of lucrative motion picture sequels (Her Jolly Divorce, Her Jolly Baby, Her Jolly Safari), which Hollywood churned out for a few years like sausages from a hopper. The whole Jolly enterprise made quite a pile of money for Billy and Peg, but it also signaled the end of their marriage. Having fallen in love with Hollywood, Billy never came back. As for Peg, she decided to close the touring company and use her half of the Jolly royalties to buy herself a big, old, run-down New York City theater of her very own: the Lily Playhouse.
All this happened around 1935.
Billy and Peg never officially divorced. And while there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between them, after 1935 you couldn’t exactly call them “married,” either. They didn’t share a home or a work life, and at Peg’s insistence, they no longer shared a financial life—which meant that all that shimmering Newport money was now out of reach for my aunt. (Grandmother Morris didn’t