Cheerful By Request by Edna Ferber

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CHEERFUL
BY REQUEST

By

EDNA FERBER

AUTHOR OF "DAWN O'HARA," "BUTTERED SIDE DOWN"
"ROAST BEEF MEDIUM," "FANNY HERSELF"

1918

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. CHEERFUL--BY REQUEST
II. THE GAY OLD DOG
III. THE TOUGH GUY
IV. THE ELDEST
V. THAT'S MARRIAGE
VI. THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD
VII. THE GIRL WHO WENT RIGHT
VIII. THE HOOKER-UP-THE-BACK
IX. THE GUIDING MISS GOWD
X. SOPHY-AS-SHE-MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN
XI. THE THREE OF THEM
XII. SHORE LEAVE

CHEERFUL--BY REQUEST

I

CHEERFUL--BY REQUEST

The editor paid for the lunch (as editors do). He lighted his seventh
cigarette and leaned back. The conversation, which had zigzagged from
the war to Zuloaga, and from Rasputin the Monk to the number of miles a
Darrow would go on a gallon, narrowed down to the thin, straight line of
business.

"Now don't misunderstand. Please! We're not presuming to dictate. Dear
me, no! We have always felt that the writer should be free to express
that which is in his--ah--heart. But in the last year we've been swamped
with these drab, realistic stories. Strong, relentless things, you know,
about dishwashers, with a lot of fine detail about the fuzz of grease on
the rim of the pan. And then those drear and hopeless ones about fallen
sisters who end it all in the East River. The East River must be choked
up with 'em. Now, I know that life is real, life is earnest, and I'm not
demanding a happy ending, exactly. But if you could--that is--would
you--do you see your way at all clear to giving us a fairly cheerful
story? Not necessarily Glad, but not so darned Russian, if you get me.
Not pink, but not all grey either. Say--mauve." ...

That was Josie Fifer's existence. Mostly grey, with a dash of pink.
Which makes mauve.

Unless you are connected (which you probably are not) with the great
firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers, you never will have heard
of Josie Fifer.

There are things about the theatre that the public does not know. A
statement, at first blush, to be disputed. The press agent, the special
writer, the critic, the magazines, the Sunday supplement, the divorce
courts--what have they left untold? We know the make of car Miss
Billboard drives; who her husbands are and were; how much the movies
have offered her; what she wears, reads, says, thinks, and eats for
breakfast. Snapshots of author writing play at place on Hudson; pictures
of the play in rehearsal; of the director directing it; of the stage
hands rewriting it--long before the opening night we know more about the
piece than does the playwright himself, and are ten times less eager to
see it.

Josie Fifer's knowledge surpassed even this. For she was keeper of the
ghosts of the firm of Hahn & Lohman. Not only was she present at the
birth of a play; she officiated at its funeral. She carried the keys to
the closets that housed the skeletons of the firm. When a play died of
inanition, old age, or--as was sometimes the case--before it was born,
it was Josie Fifer who laid out its remains and followed it to the
grave.

Her notification of its demise would come thus:

"Hello, Fifer! This is McCabe" (the property man of H. & L. at the
phone).

"Well?"

"A little waspish this morning, aren't you, Josephine?"

"I've got twenty-five bathing suits for the No. 2 'Ataboy' company to
mend and clean and press before five this afternoon. If you think I'm
going to stand here wasting my--"

"All right, all right! I just wanted to tell you that 'My Mistake'
closes Saturday. The stuff'll be up Monday morning early."

A sardonic laugh from Josie. "And yet they say 'What's in a name!'"

The unfortunate play had been all that its title implies. Its purpose
was to star an actress who hadn't a glint. Her second-act costume alone
had cost $700, but even Russian sable bands can't carry a bad play. The
critics had pounced on it with the savagery of their kind and hacked it,
limb from limb, leaving its carcass to rot under the pitiless white
glare of Broadway. The dress with the Russian sable bands went the way
of all Hahn & Lohman tragedies. Josie Fifer received it, if not
reverently, still appreciatively.

"I should think Sid Hahn would know by this time," she observed
sniffily, as her expert fingers shook out the silken folds and smoothed
the fabulous fur, "that auburn hair and a gurgle and a Lucille dress
don't make a play. Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any
actress I ever saw. A woman with feet like that"--she picked up a satin
slipper, size 7-1/2 C--"hasn't any business on the stage. She ought to
travel with a circus. Here, Etta. Hang this away in D, next to the
amethyst blue velvet, and be sure and lock the door."

McCabe had been right. A waspish wit was Josie's.

The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Josie
Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the
days that led up to her being there--the days when she was Jose Fyfer on
the programme.

Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you may have
guessed. If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you might have
passed the building a hundred times without once giving it a seeing
glance. It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the smart
crowds, and the glittering motors. It was the Forty-third lying east of
the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of
Fifth Avenue--a great square brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and
having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into
disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and
her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up.

A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from the sidewalk to the dim
hallway; a musty-smelling passage wherein you are met by a genial sign
which reads:

"No admittance. Keep out. This means you."

To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a
great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator. To ride in that
elevator is to know adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such
creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor,
like an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his
easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip,
back and shoulder. The corkscrew stairway, broken and footworn though it
is, seems infinitely less perilous.

First floor--second--third--fourth. Whew! And there you are in Josie
Fifer's kingdom--a great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy
with its whir of sewing machines: tables, and tables, and tables, piled
with orderly stacks of every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from
gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and
again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the
width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeard's
wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and
least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they
are, with the key in Josie's pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe,
or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of
these doors, what treasures hung revealed! What shimmer and sparkle and
perfume--and moth balls! The long-tailed electric light bulb held high
in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her
altar.

There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You
remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini
wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how
eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with
its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin
collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it
she had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted for a
long, long time.

Dresses there are that have made stage history. Surely you remember the
beruffled, rose-strewn confection in which the beautiful Elsa Marriott
swam into our ken in "Mississipp'"? She used to say, wistfully, that she
always got a hand on her entrance in that dress. It was due to the sheer
shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it beheld her
loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud. There it
hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet as
fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead
white rose pressed within the leaves of a book of love poems. Just next
it, incongruously enough, flaunt the wicked froufrou skirts and the
low-cut bodice and the wasp waist of the abbreviated costume in which
Cora Kassell used so generously to display her charms. A rich and portly
society matron of Pittsburgh now--she whose name had been a synonym for
pulchritude these thirty years; she who had had more cold creams, hats,
cigars, corsets, horses, and lotions named for her than any woman in
history! Her ample girth would have wrought sad havoc with that
eighteen-inch waist now. Gone are the chaste curves of the slim white
silk legs that used to kick so lithely from the swirl of lace and
chiffon. Yet there it hangs, pertly pathetic, mute evidence of her
vanished youth, her delectable beauty, and her unblushing confidence in
those same.

Up one aisle and down the next--velvet, satin, lace and broadcloth--here
the costume the great Canfield had worn in Richard III; there the little
cocked hat and the slashed jerkin in which Maude Hammond, as Peterkins,
winged her way to fame up through the hearts of a million children whose
ages ranged from seven to seventy. Brocades and ginghams; tailor suits
and peignoirs; puffed sleeves and tight--dramatic history, all, they
spelled failure, success, hope, despair, vanity, pride, triumph, decay.
Tragic ghosts, over which Josie Fifer held grim sway!

Have I told you that Josie Fifer, moving nimbly about the great
storehouse, limped as she went? The left leg swung as a normal leg
should. The right followed haltingly, sagging at hip and knee. And that
brings us back to the reason for her being where she was. And what.

The story of how Josie Fifer came to be mistress of the cast-off robes
of the firm of Hahn & Lohman is one of those stage tragedies that never
have a public performance. Josie had been one of those little girls who
speak pieces at chicken-pie suppers held in the basement of the
Presbyterian church. Her mother had been a silly, idle woman addicted to
mother hubbards and paper-backed novels about the house. Her one passion
was the theatre, a passion that had very scant opportunity for feeding
in Wapello, Iowa. Josie's piece-speaking talent was evidently a direct
inheritance. Some might call it a taint.

Two days before one of Josie's public appearances her mother would twist
the child's hair into innumerable rag curlers that stood out in
grotesque, Topsy-like bumps all over her fair head. On the eventful
evening each rag chrysalis would burst into a full-blown butterfly curl.
In a pale-blue, lace-fretted dress over a pale-blue slip, made in what
her mother called "Empire style," Josie would deliver herself of
"Entertaining Big Sister's Beau" and other sophisticated classics with
an incredible ease and absence of embarrassment. It wasn't a definite
boldness in her. She merely liked standing there before all those
people, in her blue dress and her toe slippers, speaking her pieces with
enhancing gestures taught her by her mother in innumerable rehearsals.

Any one who has ever lived in Wapello, Iowa, or its equivalent,
remembers the old opera house on the corner of Main and Elm, with
Schroeder's drug store occupying the first floor. Opera never came
within three hundred miles of Wapello, unless it was the so-called
comic kind. It was before the day of the ubiquitous moving-picture
theatre that has since been the undoing of the one-night stand
and the ten-twenty-thirty stock company. The old red-brick opera
house furnished unlimited thrills for Josie and her mother. From
the time Josie was seven she was taken to see whatever Wapello was
offered in the way of the drama. That consisted mostly of plays of the
tell-me-more-about-me-mother type.

By the time she was ten she knew the whole repertoire of the Maude La
Vergne Stock Company by heart. She was _blase_ with "East Lynne" and
"The Two Orphans," and even "Camille" left her cold. She was as wise to
the trade tricks as is a New York first nighter. She would sit there in
the darkened auditorium of a Saturday afternoon, surveying the stage
with a judicious and undeceived eye, as she sucked indefatigably at a
lollipop extracted from the sticky bag clutched in one moist palm. (A
bag of candy to each and every girl; a ball or a top to each and every
boy!) Josie knew that the middle-aged _soubrette_ who came out between
the first and second acts to sing a gingham-and-sunbonnet song would
whisk off to reappear immediately in knee-length pink satin and curls.
When the heroine left home in a shawl and a sudden snowstorm that
followed her upstage and stopped when she went off, Josie was
interested, but undeceived. She knew that the surprised-looking white
horse used in the Civil War comedy-drama entitled "His Southern
Sweetheart" came from Joe Brink's livery stable in exchange for four
passes, and that the faithful old negro servitor in the white cotton wig
would save somebody from something before the afternoon was over.

In was inevitable that as Josie grew older she should take part in
home-talent plays. It was one of these tinsel affairs that had made
clear to her just where her future lay. The Wapello _Daily Courier_
helped her in her decision. She had taken the part of a gipsy queen,
appropriately costumed in slightly soiled white satin slippers with
four-inch heels, and a white satin dress enhanced by a red sash, a black
velvet bolero, and large hoop earrings. She had danced and sung with a
pert confidence, and the _Courier_ had pronounced her talents not
amateur, but professional, and had advised the managers (who, no doubt,
read the Wapello _Courier_ daily, along with their _Morning Telegraph_)
to seek her out, and speedily.

Josie didn't wait for them to take the hint. She sought them out
instead. There followed seven tawdry, hard-working, heartbreaking years.
Supe, walk-on, stock, musical comedy--Josie went through them all. If
any illusions about the stage had survived her Wapello days, they would
have vanished in the first six months of her dramatic career. By the
time she was twenty-four she had acquired the wisdom of fifty, a
near-seal coat, a turquoise ring with a number of smoky-looking crushed
diamonds surrounding it, and a reputation for wit and for decency. The
last had cost the most.

During all these years of cheap theatrical boarding houses (the most
soul-searing cheapness in the world), of one-night stands, of insult,
disappointment, rebuff, and something that often came perilously near to
want, Josie Fifer managed to retain a certain humorous outlook on life.
There was something whimsical about it. She could even see a joke on
herself. When she first signed her name Jose Fyfer, for example, she did
it with, an appreciative giggle and a glint in her eye as she formed the
accent mark over the e.

"They'll never stop me now," she said. "I'm made. But I wish I knew if
that J was pronounced like H, in humbug. Are there any Spanish blondes?"

It used to be the habit of the other women in the company to say to her:
"Jo, I'm blue as the devil to-day. Come on, give us a laugh."

She always obliged.

And then came a Sunday afternoon in late August when her laugh broke off
short in the middle, and was forever after a stunted thing.

She was playing Atlantic City in a second-rate musical show. She had
never seen the ocean before, and she viewed it now with an appreciation
that still had in it something of a Wapello freshness.

They all planned to go in bathing that hot August afternoon after
rehearsal. Josie had seen pictures of the beauteous bathing girl dashing
into the foaming breakers. She ran across the stretch of glistening
beach, paused and struck a pose, one toe pointed waterward, her arms
extended affectedly.

"So!" she said mincingly. "So this is Paris!"

It was a new line in those days, and they all laughed, as she had meant
they should. So she leaped into the water with bounds and shouts and
much waving of white arms. A great floating derelict of a log struck her
leg with its full weight, and with all the tremendous force of the
breaker behind it. She doubled up ridiculously, and went down like a
shot. Those on the beach laughed again. When she came up, and they saw
her distorted face they stopped laughing, and fished her out. Her leg
was broken in two places, and mashed in a dozen.

Jose Fyfer's dramatic career was over. (This is not the cheery portion
of the story.)

When she came out of the hospital, three months later, she did very
well indeed with her crutches. But the merry-eyed woman had
vanished--she of the Wapello colouring that had persisted during
all these years. In her place limped a wan, shrunken, tragic little
figure whose humour had soured to a caustic wit. The near-seal coat and
the turquoise-and-crushed-diamond ring had vanished too.

During those agonized months she had received from the others in
the company such kindness and generosity as only stage folk can
show--flowers, candy, dainties, magazines, sent by every one from the
prima donna to the call boy. Then the show left town. There came a few
letters of kind inquiry, then an occasional post card, signed by half a
dozen members of the company. Then these ceased. Josie Fifer, in her
cast and splints and bandages and pain, dragged out long hospital days
and interminable hospital nights. She took a dreary pleasure in
following the tour of her erstwhile company via the pages of the
theatrical magazines.

"They're playing Detroit this week," she would announce to the aloof and
spectacled nurse. Or: "One-night stands, and they're due in Muncie,
Ind., to-night. I don't know which is worse--playing Muncie for one
night or this moan factory for a three month's run."

When she was able to crawl out as far as the long corridor she spoke to
every one she met. As she grew stronger she visited here and there, and
on the slightest provocation she would give a scene ranging all the way
from "Romeo and Juliet" to "The Black Crook." It was thus she first met
Sid Hahn, and felt the warming, healing glow of his friendship.

Some said that Sid Hahn's brilliant success as a manager at thirty-five
was due to his ability to pick winners. Others thought it was his
refusal to be discouraged when he found he had picked a failure. Still
others, who knew him better, were likely to say: "Why, I don't know.
It's a sort of--well, you might call it charm--and yet--. Did you ever see
him smile? He's got a million-dollar grin. You can't resist it."

None of them was right. Or all of them. Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call
boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It
was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often
rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A
little, rotund, ugly man, Sid Hahn, with the eyes of a dreamer, the
wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol'-clo'es man.
His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice.

In September he had come to Atlantic City to try out "Splendour." It was
a doubtful play, by a new author, starring Sarah Haddon for the first
time. No one dreamed the play would run for years, make a fortune for
Hahn, lift Haddon from obscurity to the dizziest heights of stardom, and
become a classic of the stage.

Ten minutes before the curtain went up on the opening performance Hahn
was stricken with appendicitis. There was not even time to rush him to
New York. He was on the operating table before the second act was
begun. When he came out of the ether he said: "How did it go?"

"Fine!" beamed the nurse. "You'll be out in two weeks."

"Oh, hell! I don't mean the operation. I mean the play."

He learned soon enough from the glowing, starry-eyed Sarah Haddon and
from every one connected with the play. He insisted on seeing them all
daily, against his doctor's orders, and succeeded in working up a
temperature that made his hospital stay a four weeks' affair. He refused
to take the tryout results as final.

"Don't be too bubbly about this thing," he cautioned Sarah Haddon. "I've
seen too many plays that were skyrockets on the road come down like
sticks when they struck New York."

The company stayed over in Atlantic City for a week, and Hahn held
scraps of rehearsals in his room when he had a temperature of 102. Sarah
Haddon worked like a slave. She seemed to realise that her great
opportunity had come--the opportunity for which hundreds of gifted
actresses wait a lifetime. Haddon was just twenty-eight then--a year
younger than Josie Fifer. She had not yet blossomed into the full
radiance of her beauty. She was too slender, and inclined to stoop a
bit, but her eyes were glorious, her skin petal-smooth, her whole face
reminding one, somehow, of an intelligent flower. Her voice was a
golden, liquid delight.

Josie Fifer, dragging herself from bed to chair, and from chair to bed,
used to watch for her. Hahn's room was on her floor. Sarah Haddon, in
her youth and beauty and triumph, represented to Josie all that she had
dreamed of and never realised; all that she had hoped for and never
could know. She used to insist on having her door open, and she would
lie there for hours, her eyes fixed on that spot in the hall across
which Haddon would flash for one brief instant on her way to the room
down the corridor. There is about a successful actress a certain radiant
something--a glamour, a luxuriousness, an atmosphere that suggest a
mysterious mixture of silken things, of perfume, of adulation, of all
that is rare and costly and perishable and desirable.

Josie Fifer's stage experience had included none of this. But she knew
they were there. She sensed that to this glorious artist would come all
those fairy gifts that Josie Fifer would never possess. All things about
her--her furs, her gloves, her walk, her hats, her voice, her very shoe
ties--were just what Josie would have wished for. As she lay there she
developed a certain grim philosophy.

"She's got everything a woman could wish for. Me, I haven't got a thing.
Not a blamed thing! And yet they say everything works out in the end
according to some scheme or other. Well, what's the answer to this, I
wonder? I can't make it come out right. I guess one of the figures must
have got away from me."

In the second week of Sid Hahn's convalescence he heard, somehow, of
Josie Fifer. It was characteristic of him that he sent for her. She put
a chiffon scarf about the neck of her skimpy little kimono, spent an
hour and ten minutes on her hair, made up outrageously with that sublime
unconsciousness that comes from too close familiarity with rouge pad and
grease jar, and went. She was trembling as though facing a first-night
audience in a part she wasn't up on. Between the crutches, the lameness,
and the trembling she presented to Sid Hahn, as she stood in the
doorway, a picture that stabbed his kindly, sensitive heart with a quick
pang of sympathy.

He held out his hand. Josie's crept into it. At the feel of that
generous friendly clasp she stopped trembling. Said Hahn:

"My nurse tells me that you can do a bedside burlesque of 'East Lynne'
that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh.
Go on and do it for me, there's a good girl. I could use a laugh myself
just now."

And Josie Fifer caught up a couch cover for a cloak, with the scarf that
was about her neck for a veil, and, using Hahn himself as the ailing
chee-ild, gave a biting burlesque of the famous bedside visit that
brought the tears of laughter to his eyes, and the nurse flying from
down the hall. "This won't do," said that austere person.

"Won't, eh? Go on and stick your old thermometer in my mouth. What do I
care! A laugh like that is worth five degrees of temperature."

When Josie rose to leave he eyed her keenly, and pointed to the dragging
leg.

"How about that? Temporary or permanent?"

"Permanent."

"Oh, fudge! Who's telling you that? These days they can do--"

"Not with this, though. That one bone was mashed into about twenty-nine
splinters, and when it came to putting 'em together again a couple of
pieces were missing. I must've mislaid 'em somewhere. Anyway, I make a
limping exit--for life."

"Then no more stage for you--eh, my girl?"

"No more stage."

Hahn reached for a pad of paper on the table at his bedside, scrawled a
few words on it, signed it "S.H." in the fashion which became famous,
and held the paper out to her.

"When you get out of here," he said, "you come to New York, and up to my
office; see? Give 'em this at the door. I've got a job for you--if you
want it."

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