still felt that the first ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.
“You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate the first one.”
“They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.
And they were tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.
“Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”
He made them do the opening number three more times that day—and each time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.
The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere. An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.
One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch, and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.
“Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.
“Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”
“What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del Rio.”
“That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What? No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.
Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she would take frequent nips. Careless as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.
Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught me and Anthony necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal, and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.
“Goddamn it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for ten minutes to keep your lips off my leading man?”
(The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)
And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.
Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read City of Girls. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but admission), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one of my stupid girlie shows.”
Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”
Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”
“Our audience can’t afford that, either.”
“Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”
“We don’t serve the carriage trade,” Olive said. “We serve working people, or do I have to remind you?”
“Well maybe the working people of this neighborhood would like to see a quality show, Olive, for once in