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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Back in the days when Shakespeare still meant something to a lot of people, I wanted to be a great dramatic actress. Before I knew it, I was in Hollywood—but that is to get ahead of the story, mine and that of others whose lives touched me years ago.

I can’t know for certain what made Mother put me on the stage. I can think of two possibilities, one more plausible than the other. Either I was-so adorable that she felt compelled to share me with thousands of other people, or from the beginning I was an insurance policy, indemnity against a failure she sensed was coming. Not that I minded in the least. In no time at all, I knew that if I couldn’t perform, I was lost.

I made my stage debut at the age of five, at the Garden Theater at Thirteenth and McGee Streets in Kansas City in 1913, when Harry Valentine, the comedian, lifted me out of an oversized bassinet to end his act. My tiny body was gauze-draped and fairy-winged, a sentimental filip to ten minutes of jokes about marriage. What was I supposed to represent? Hope? Dreams? An unplanned pregnancy? Whatever, Little Meg, as I was quickly billed, was a hit. Murmurs and applause rained on me; I opened up to the audience like a sunflower. Everyone seemed delighted except my father.

“I do not approve,” I can still hear him saying to my mother after the Garden emptied that night. We were the last people in the greenroom. I was curled up in a chair with my eyes closed; they thought I was dozing.

“A dubious idea,” Father said. “I do not want Margaret on the stage. She is too young.”

“Didn’t you see the reaction?” Mother asked. “There were grown men with tears streaming down their eyes.”

“Precisely,” Father said. “‘Caviare to the general,’” and I heard him slap his gloves into his palm.

“What generals? I saw enthusiasm, that’s what I saw. You mind your business, and I’ll mind my daughter.”

Father strode from the room. I could imagine one of his magisterial turns, like those of Louis Calhern in later days. He said no more. I do not recall his uttering another word against my being onstage for several years after that. In marriage, he played the straight man.

And so I grew up with funnymen and dancing girls, songbirds, plate-twirlers, animal acts, as my companions. Rehearsals took up my afternoons and Saturday mornings, but they were more exciting than anything going on at school. My classmates may have been envious; I drifted from them. To me, theirs was a world without color and light; they were stuck with being themselves, or what a schoolteacher required, learning life’s boundaries. At a later time I would envy them, but for me to be alive was to be in costume, the more fanciful the better; and I grew accustomed to thinking of everyone as putting on an act.

My father was E. P. Spencer. He had built and nominally owned the Garden Theater, bigger than any other in the city, with seats for nearly three thousand people. In actuality he must have held only a small percentage, his backers the rest. But in Kansas City he was known as quite the impresario, a Barnum with a difference: he believed that people craved beauty more than buncombe—an aesthete born every minute. The Garden was pure E.P., a lavish novelty inspired by Babylon and a trip to California, a journey I was too young to remember but which must have included plenty of vegetation and the idea, foreign to the Midwest and perhaps to human nature, that to be out-of-doors, or at least to have the illusion that you were out-of doors, was uplifting. Here, people accustomed to ice in the winter and chiggers in the summer could luxuriate, or so my father’s thinking went, in a perpetual Mediterranean spring.

The theater had trees growing in its lobby, reflecting pools within and without, a women’s lounge with potted plants, flowers, a festooned grand piano, a waterfall tumbling through a millwheel, a stream flowing into a lily pond “where goldfish and downy ducklings disport themselves,” as program notes advised. (Female patrons must have spent a great deal of time in the lounge in those days!)

The main interior was finished in brick and stucco, broken by rooflines and gables and chimney pots. Overhead the arched ceiling was painted blue to represent the heavens, and when the houselights dimmed, one could see tiny electric stars twinkling among the clouds. Vines clung to columns and beams; clusters of wisteria and crimson rambler swayed in the air currents driven by a steam-powered ventilating plant in the basement. In place of proscenium boxes Italianate facades framed the stage, with windows arched and columned and softly lit from within, reminiscent of Cyrano and Romeo. What ideas my father had! Thousands of Kansans and Missourians in those days were flocking to California. Why not bring their dreams to them? he must have thought. He divined the dreariness of their lives, that they could travel in their minds without uprooting themselves, and that theater should be out of this world.

The Garden was all the rage in Kansas City, if only for a while, like everything. People traveled in from Ottawa and Emporia, from as far away as Springfield and Tulsa to see it: farm families and small-town merchants, the newly oil-rich anxious for a kind of culture, folks eager to break the monotony of winter with a smile and a tear.

My father wanted to give them nothing but Shakespeare and other elevated drama, but vaudeville and light comedies and sketches filled the seats. I heard him say over and over that once universal education raised the sensibilities of the audience Americans would settle for nothing less than the classics. Until then, merely entering the Garden would give people ideas of a genteel, earthly paradise and move their minds to higher things. I have no idea how he formed these notions, perhaps from reading Andrew Carnegie or John Dewey. In his optimism he was thoroughly American, his strengths lying elsewhere than in prophecy.

Father also operated E. P. Spencer, Inc., “Producers, Creators and Managers of Theatrical and General Amusement Enterprises,” as his advertisement in Variety announced. “Vaudeville Acts, Sketches, Tabloids and Plays Written, Built, Staged, Produced.” “Spencer’s Fraternity Boys and Girls: A Spectacular Scenic Comedy with 25 Singing and Dancing Collegians,” “September Morn with Violet Greenwood,” and “Kid Days: A Musical Comedy of Childhood” were among the offerings. If you had an empty theater anywhere in the Midwest, E. P. Spencer could provide a show. A new finish for your acts? Some new music, a new song, a number, a gag, or an entire monologue? E. P. Spencer could furnish it.

Or almost. Father must not have had more than twenty-five or thirty people working for him. Everyone had to be able to perform many roles and to sing and dance on demand; in those days actors were able to work, instead of spending most of their lives waiting for the telephone to ring. Compared to the Shuberts or Balaban & Katz, E. P. Spencer was small potatoes, but locally he had a grand reputation. When he entered a room with his fine clothes and dark full beard, everyone deferred to him. If he acted more important than he was, in show business who can ask for anything more? As for me, I adored him. When I think of him now, I see myself running again and again into his arms. To me he played the father’s role well.

So it was a natural, perhaps an inevitable, move for me from the usual child’s playacting to the real thing. What other children did to amuse themselves and relatives on a porch, I enacted at the Garden. My mother, Alice, arranged for tap-dancing and singing lessons; by the age of six or seven I could pick out a few tunes on the piano. If at music and dancing I was competent but no genius, my appeal on the stage then came from the novelty of a small creature’s behaving like an adult, similar to the quirky pleasure people derive from seeing a nun ice-skate or hearing a bird talk. One of the other acts at the Garden consisted entirely in displaying a pair of poodles in various costumes—tiny raincoats, pajamas, dinner jackets, baseball uniforms, sailor suits. At the time I wondered whether the poodles realized how funny they were, or resented being laughed at, or felt as I did, swelled by laughter and applause. They were given bits of meat when they performed properly, and spanked or yanked with slip-collars when they did not. In my case all that was necessary was for my mother to tell me that hard work was the key to success and that lazy people ended up in the gutter. The applause took care of the rest of my motivation. I must have been born a ham; I was very much a trained dog.

Alice and her mother, Nell, stitched all my costumes—milkmaid, goose girl, street urchin, Little Miss Muffet; as I matured I became a miniature Minnehaha and Evangeline. By the time I was seven, I looked ten, and my appearance as a water nymph, addressed by a kneeling tenor who extolled my clean, pale limbs and tumbling auburn tresses, was a minor sensation.

When I gaze now at a photograph of myself in this role, I see a girl undeniably pretty, slim and graceful, perhaps beautiful in a Pre-Raphaelite way; and over the bridge of many years there comes to me a fainter version of the rush, the thrill, I felt at the effect I was having on men. Of course I did not understand then precisely what this effect was; that knowledge would come later, and soon enough. But one understood it instinctively, as all girls do whether they are dull or bright. It did not take a Viennese doctor to discover it, only to publicize something that before his time had required no advertisement. Standing center stage with my live hair shining, the tenor praising me, the presence of the audience palpable, I felt my skin glow and my head lighten with—something, a pressure, an energy that quickened my breath. I did not wonder what this power was—I permitted it and heightened it by moving my body slightly or touching the tip of my tongue to the back of my lips.

The young man singing to me on one knee was not supposed to touch me—I was a dream figure—but sometimes he did, brushing my hand or my arm or my thigh—surreptitiously, behind, out of the audience’s sight. I can’t recall his name, but I enjoyed what he did, more thrilling because the audience couldn’t see it. He must have become a wonderful lover—unless he ended up chasing after little girls! I never said a word to him about the game we played, nor he to me; but each time we performed, I hoped he would touch me, and in me there was a fluttering of anticipation.

My pleasure must have floated out to the audience in invisible waves. I could see four or five rows beyond the footlights, far enough to observe that it was the men who rose for a standing ovation, their wives or companions struggling up later if at all. “The apogee of femininity with the dew still on her,” the Kansas City Times wrote of me, a nice piece of Edwardian lip-smacking. “Margaret Spencer exuded the pinkish breath of girlhood. If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, there was many a shining, grateful eye in the Garden last night.” In another time and place I would have been called an eyeful.

I know that my father was aware of this—what is the word? salacious?—element in my appeal. The idea of his child-daughter slobbered over by potbellied ticket-holders, who were, after all, paying him to look at me, must have seemed like pandering. But if he wanted me to quit the stage, live like an ordinary child, he said nothing about it. To have done so would have been to acknowledge more than he cared to, perhaps, and it would have meant a full-scale confrontation with my mother, which he did not have the stomach for, not then.

Instead he did his best to elevate my sensibilities, rattling off high-flown quotations at me—“Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” was a favorite—and giving me books and poems to read, in general treating me as if I were a creature of a higher order. This flattered and pleased me and made me think of him as sent from some better, nobler world, the one where the idea of the Garden came from; I was his disciple. “‘Full beautiful, a faery’s child,’” he would say to me at the breakfast table when Mother was out of hearing. Patiently, calling me his pixie, his imp, his elf, he coached me in Puck’s “What fools these mortals be” speech so that I could recite it onstage. I did so one night after an act that included pie-throwing. Alone on an empty stage, I spoke Puck’s lines in my small, round voice, lingering over fools as Father had taught me and gaining applause somewhere in the range of polite. He must have believed that what he was trying to make of me had triumphed over others’ ideas, including Mother’s. Maybe he knew something—it is a question that has recurred to me ever since. “Wonderful! Marvelous!” he said afterward, gathering me in his arms and hugging me and twirling me around as if I had achieved stardom or, more to his taste, angelhood. “Your father loves you! The world loves you, and you’re not of this world! My Margaret!”

I buried my face in his beard.

Late in 1916 the Garden went bankrupt, and Father with it. It was too large and too expensive to maintain, moving pictures had already begun to siphon off the vaudeville audience, people were becoming preoccupied with our possible entry into the war in Europe—there were any number of reasons. I have the sense that my dear, lovely father, my dreaming, noble, optimistic, foolish father, had been operating at a loss for some time but could not think what to do until it was too late and he went under. I also believe that he could not bear firing the actors and others who depended on him, and so he paid them until he was hopelessly in debt. That at any rate is what my mother accused him of, and I have no reason to doubt her judgment in this. She was a practical woman, like her mother before her; but of them further on.

E.P. was then in his early forties, and vigorous except for frequent colds and a persistent cough. Outwardly he took a positive view of his failure, cheering us up with quotations—“A minute’s success pays the failure of years,” and so on. Determined to make a virtue of necessity, to turn bad luck into good, he made frequent references to Dame Fortune’s wheel.

One afternoon, a few days after the bank announced foreclosure on our house, with other creditors threatening and my mother saying that if she did not get some grocery money we would have to start roasting mice, my father announced that a fabulous opportunity had come his way and that by God he was going to seize it. From his agitation, thrusting his fists up like a victorious prizefighter, bobbing up and down on his heels and toes, one might have thought he had just inherited a munitions factory.

“Start packing! We’re off to Eldorado!”

As this was the name of a small town in central Kansas, my mother must have thought she had misunderstood him.

“Chicago?” she asked.

“Much farther than that,” he addressed me, sawing the air.

“A storybook land in the realms of gold! Vast cattle ranches where dark men serenade the moon. Exotic cities alive with enterprise. Houses full of flowers. Men and women dining on strange fruits. Caballeros strumming guitars. A place where dynasties have been created overnight. A place the Spaniards settled many, many years ago. We’ll live by the sea and breathe the salty air!”

My eyes must have been wide, but I didn’t know enough geography to venture a guess.

“So we’re going to California,” my mother said brightly. “How nice. I think that is a fine idea. The Pinneys went out last year and haven’t come back. He’s in real estate and doing very well, I hear.”

“Guess again,” my father said.

“The Holy Land!” I shouted. I had been studying colored maps and hearing about milk and honey in Sunday school. “Are we going there? I want to live in Galilee!”

I took hold of Father’s lapel and kissed the rose he always wore there. I must have looked like an engraving called filial devotion.

“Argentina!” he said. “We’re going to live in Buenos Aires!”

It sounded fantastical. I had never heard of it. I cheered and jumped up and down.

Mother rattled dishes.

My father’s South American opportunity was not quite golden, but it did enable him to escape his creditors and to salvage something of E. P. Spencer, Inc. He was to manage a string of theaters down there, two of them in Buenos Aires, three in the Argentine provinces, one in Montevideo. He took with him a handful of his acts and added to them local gourds and castanets, out-of-work divas, fire-eaters. Of the Americans, singers and dancers had preference: Buenos Aires was sophisticated and multilingual, a southern Paris, but acts hoping to conquer the provinces had to be able to transcend the language barrier. Comedians short on slapstick were left behind, along with performers not desperate enough to risk their careers below the equator. Harry Valentine concocted a routine in which he dressed up as a female flamenco dancer.

E.P. must have been paid in dollars and handsomely, for he moved us into a big white house overlooking the harbor. I remember the dark, polished floors, the thick white walls, heavy and colorful dinner plates, and a tiled patio with a fountain where I dipped my toes. In the living room with its tall windows, the breeze off the harbor pushed at the sheer curtains as my mother sat day after day on the couch, writing letters to her mother. Letters and letters, without end. In the late afternoons the wind whipped the curtains and rustled her dress and blew her writing paper around the room—but still she sat and wrote, until it was time to fix dinner. The air, as Father had promised, was fresh, but Alice was rarely out in it except to do the marketing, to take me to school, to the theater, and to the Methodist church on Sundays.

She would begin a letter to Grandmother Nell on a Sunday afternoon, continue with it all through the week, posting it on Saturday. The routine was inviolable. Being curious and a natural sneak, I discovered in her bedroom closet the suitcase in which she secreted Nell’s letters to her and the pages of her letter-in-progress to Nell.

My chance to read Nell’s letters was Saturday mornings, when Mother left to go to the post office. I would lie abed pretending to be asleep. Father would be off to his office or a theater; Alice would leave after checking on me. With the bang of the front door I was into my parents’ room, sitting on the floor reading Nell’s reports from Kansas City. Mother’s key in the lock sent me scurrying back to bed.

What I read upset me. My stomach knotted as I absorbed the disappointments that Mother enumerated. She called E.P. a hopeless incompetent, irresponsible, a failure, a fool, a blowhard, a man utterly lacking in a sense of reality. He reminded her of her cousin Thomas, the crackpot inventor who had disappeared into the West with his rheumatism machine. E.P.’s attachment to the theater and to ideas of culture had caused us to be stuck in a despicable foreign hole. Buenos Aires was nothing like Kansas City. Hardly anyone spoke English, people were indifferent or downright unfriendly. The place was crawling with dagos—the word was new to me, but I gathered it meant something vile. A scattering of English and Germans came to the theater, but real white folks were few on the ground. Everyone was Catholic: it was depressing and irritating to go into a shop to buy sausages and be confronted with a picture of the pope behind the cash register. About the only positive thing she could say about the place was the scarcity of actual niggers.

She had managed to enroll me, she wrote, in the only respectable school in the city, where British and European and American diplomats sent their children along with a few rich Argentines; but these people never socialized with us because we were of the theater and therefore considered beneath them. The food was abominable. She could find few familiar things in the markets; the beef was tough and improperly butchered—cooking times had to be increased by half in the family recipes. Were it not for the church with its friendly old hymns and prayers, she believed she would go mad.

E.P. was working hard, it was true, managing half a dozen theaters; he would probably make himself sick. As for me, I seemed cheerful as ever, and she envied the ignorance of a child, although I was getting too old to lack a sense of sin. Much of my sunny disposition she attributed to the ways in which E.P. treated me, spoiling me and shielding me from the hard lessons I would sooner or later have to learn about life. He was doing me no favors. I was in for a hard fall someday, and it would not be a pretty thing to witness.

Mother’s letters carried frequent references to what she termed “that side of marriage.” Whatever this was, I could tell that it was disagreeable. She also wrote often and bitterly of “the agreement,” for which she blamed Nell. This had something to do with the early years of Mother’s marriage. “If it had not been for you,” she told Nell, “I would never have married him.”

Nell’s letters to Mother were laced with biblical quotations having to do with the endurance of suffering. Job was so frequently mentioned that I read his story, horrified at what that fellow had gone through. His chief effect on me was to make Mother’s complaints seem trivial. About the mysterious “agreement” for which Alice blamed her, Nell insisted that she had only done what she had thought wise at the time. She had tried to protect Alice from the mistakes she herself had made in choosing a husband. As Alice knew, Nell had succumbed to the advances of a locomotive engineer and as a result had been forced to marry him. Now she was stuck subsisting on a railroad pension. E.P., with his tailored suits, crisp accent, and proper grammar may not have been gentry, but had seemed a big step up from locomotives. At least Alice was getting to see the world.

I tried to believe that Mother had written so bitterly to Nell only to make Nell feel better about her own disappointments. But what was so bad about Grandfather? He didn’t even chew tobacco in the house. He kept rotgut hidden in his toolshed, he had shown it to me, but what else was he supposed to do, since Nell wouldn’t allow it within sight?

Imagining him miserable at home with Nell snarling at him, I wrote telling him how much I missed our excursions to the railroad yards, where he boosted me into engines and showed me how to work the controls. I recalled the pleasures of sitting in his lap as he told me stories:

“This fella was pointing a .45 at me and I could see that it was loaded. ‘What would you do,’ he says, ‘if a man was to tell you he was Jesse James and asked you to hand over that strongbox?’ ‘I’d hand it over real quick,’ I says. ‘Well, mister,’ he says, ‘I am Jesse James,’ ‘Take it,’ I says, ‘and the best of luck to you.’”

Even today I can remember Grandfather’s description of what it was like on the Chicago run at night. A hundred miles or so from the city, he said, rushing toward that great metropolis where men drank beer all night in the saloons and you could find people dancing in the streets at dawn, he would lean out of the window of his cab, and with the wind hitting his face at sixty or eighty miles an hour, he could see Chicago glowing in the heavens. God’s magic lantern was reflecting the lights of State Street and Michigan Avenue in the sky! And when he pulled into the station and the boys told him he was on time, he’d just laugh at them and say that he had already arrived, hours ago. “I been here,” he told them. “You just didn’t see me.” How could my grandmother wish she hadn’t married this man?

Of all the confidences exchanged between Mother and Nell, only Mother’s references to the coldness of my schoolmates rang true to me. I had not fathomed the reason for it, but I had nothing like the rapport I remembered with American children. In Kansas City it had been I who had drawn away from the others because of my passion for the theater: they may have thought me different, but they were curious, even a little awestruck. Here, I had attempted to make friends and had not met with much success. Father tried to explain as gently as possible that my school was filled with the social elite who thought owning cattle or apartment buildings was more respectable than show business. Actors were regarded as low-class, unreliable folk, mainly because their incomes were irregular and because they tried to entertain people instead of cheating on their taxes, bribing public officials, and exploiting the poor. And they showed their emotions.

It was my father I turned to when I had important questions. Mother tended to put me off, saying that she would explain some other time, or when I was older, or referring me to a passage in the Bible. The Alice-Nell correspondence bothered me so much that I lay in wait for the opportunity to quiz Father, however indirectly. Partly I was upset, and partly I was confused. Why would Mother encourage me to go onstage if, as her letters indicated, she was not herself enamored of the theater? Why would she wish me to go to a snobbish school where students looked down on me? What was this “agreement,” and what did it have to do with me? I knew I could not ask Father whether he thought Mother loved him, but I had to weasel some answers out of him.

One Sunday afternoon when Mother was in the kitchen and Father was reading, I came up to his chair and asked him if he liked living in Buenos Aires. He said he thought it fascinating, and his theaters were doing well. He would have preferred to stay in America, but sometimes you had to take opportunities as they came along. It was a great adventure, wasn’t it?

“Oh, yes. But I don’t think Mother likes it here.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“Because she thinks there are too many dagos and that the best thing about it is that there are very few niggers.”

Father put down his book and called to Mother that he and I were going out for a walk.

A few blocks from our house was a park. We sat on a bench opposite a fountain and admired the beds of flowers. Then Father asked me to repeat what Mother had said.

I was unable to lie to him. I confessed everything, or nearly. I admitted reading the letters and repeated most of their contents, omitting the criticisms of him. I emphasized my curiosity about the “agreement.”

Father said that I had done wrong to read the letters. People needed privacy; if you took that away, you could destroy a person. What people said in letters didn’t necessarily represent the truth. Sometimes people wrote what they thought the other person wanted to hear. For himself, he would never look at those letters. They were private conversations between Alice and Nell. He hoped I would promise not to pry again, although he understood my curiosity. I promised.

He said that I should understand my mother’s anxieties. She had never been far from Kansas City before, except to California. She was not educated and not well-read. We had to forgive her for that. I would have a better chance to appreciate life’s infinite variety. And we had to understand that the ups and downs of show business were very hard on her. He wanted to give me advantages Mother had never had, so that I could grow up unafraid of life.

Father made me feel mature, and I became bold. I asked him straight out what this “agreement” had been.

He appeared troubled. He looked at the clouds and wondered if there would be rain. He began by saying that this was a difficult matter to explain, because I was still young. It was like this. Mother had been only fourteen when he had proposed marriage. Maybe he should have waited, but he had been very much in love with her. Nell had not been sure of him, and he understood that. So he had given his word not to make love to Mother for the first ten years of their marriage. A formal agreement had been drawn up, witnessed by a judge. That way, if the marriage had not worked out, it could have been annulled. It would have been as if it had never happened, because they had not actually lived together as man and wife.

Naturally I had to ask what making love was. I was nearly as much in the dark as I had been before his explanation. Father said that making love was when a man and a woman got very close in bed together. It was how they made babies. I was too young to understand it completely, but that was the main reason people got married. To make love and have babies and raise a family.

Suddenly, in my mania for truth, I got the idea. “Is it like what you see dogs doing?” I asked.

Father emitted something between a groan and a laugh. He said it was, sort of, and then he announced that it was time for dinner and that we should keep this conversation between ourselves. Mother was a little skittish about these subjects.

Instead of satisfying my curiosity, Father had ignited it. I could not help but think it odd that people would enter into such an agreement. And what a shame that they had waited all that time to make love and then ended up having only the one baby. Were they still trying, and how exactly did you try? I began administering prolonged anatomical examinations to myself, and discovered the pleasures of doing so. I vaguely decided that whenever I got married, ten years would be far too long to wait to experience whatever making love was. It is too strong to say that I became obsessed with the subject, but it was never far from my mind. I began to experience acute longings of an indefinite kind. I felt like my grandfather, leaning out of his engine, searching for Chicago in the sky. I was speeding toward something, and I wanted to get there.

Little Meg was as admired in Buenos Aires as in Kansas City, perhaps more so, since a pale nymph inspires greater enthusiasm in Latins than among Kansans and Missourians. Whatever I did down there depended primarily on visual appeal. It was my mother’s inspiration to include me in several numbers in which I stood out as a child, dressed identically to young women in a chorus line, for instance; I would be singled out by the brawniest male to dance, giving the comical but subliminally titillating effect of Lemuel Gulliver’s alleged affair with the wife of the Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput.

Father hired a typical Latin American master of ceremonies, hysterical in delivery, who announced each act at the top of his voice in a torrent of syllables, explaining what was about to take place. I was learning Spanish in school, and I marveled at his shrieking introductions of me. I was the sensational Margarita Spencer, a thimbleful of romance, a tornado in a teacup, the toast of New York City, coveted by the cinema, adored by the courts of Spain, England, and Belgium. After winning the hearts of the South American continent, I would drive brokenhearted Berliners and Parisians to suicide. That my tender age, my obscurity, and the conditions of the war made all this improbable bothered no one. I have said that Buenos Aires was sophisticated, but it was also Roman Catholic and therefore deeply sentimental. I was welcomed with an enthusiasm that might better have been reserved for an appearance of the real Virgin. Father confined my sub-equatorial performances to the more respectable of his Buenos Aires theaters, the Florida, and did not permit me to perform in the provinces, where I might have caused a riot.

I may have been corrupted by all this attention, which I did nothing to discourage but which Father tried to control, permitting no press interviews and making sure I was whisked home and to bed well before the final curtain each night, thereby frustrating stage-door Juanitos. His protectiveness kept me more or less innocent, except for those moments onstage when I could feel the adoration. Basically I understood my role was to please, to make myself subservient to the crowd’s emotions rather than to control them. I was too young to understand that once a woman has learned how to please men, she has in her grasp the means to control them—but then how many women ever learn this, or care to act on it?

Many of my routines were strictly for laughs, others a mixture of the comical and the sentimental. In one skit I played monkey to Harry Valentine’s organ grinder, dancing about at the end of a tether holding a tin cup, peeling a banana and handing it to him to eat. I had watched organ grinders and had always seen more sadness than humor in the monkey, but it was easy for me to play one. All I had to do was to imagine myself as a prisoner for life. Harry would tug on my tether and pull me over to give me a peck on my cap. We sang a duet of “Santa Lucia,” which, my mother told me happily, drowned laughter with tears. Harry did an “O Sole Mio” encore as I stood with my arms about his middle.

E.P.’s work kept him on the run—to Montevideo, to La Plata and Santa Rosa on the Pampas, where the audiences were mostly drunk males. He returned from these road trips worn out. I remember bringing hot tea with honey and lemon to his bedside for his cough. I implored him to take me with him to the provinces, but he refused, saying that my schoolwork was too important and that it was enough for me to grace the stage of the Florida.

When he could, he read to me from the trunk of books he had brought with him—Byron, Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, Gulliver’s Travels, Penguin Island. He told me that the kingdom of the penguins had flourished just off the southern Argentine coast, an exciting half-truth that brought to life for me this satire on the folly of mankind. Over several weeks he read aloud most of Jane Eyre—I recall imagining through his baritone the voice of my heroine and picturing her in my mind. I finished the novel on my own. It was my favorite story then, and I think it remains so.

Every so often we would entertain three or four of the troupe at dinner. Father would drink wine with them; Mother was teetotal. At the table they would try to come up with new ideas for acts and tell their stories of great and disastrous performances. Much to Mother’s irritation, Father would mix a little wine with the water in my glass, and I would sip at it and feel grown-up.

Eventually the actors would get around to talking of their ambitions and, soon enough, of their homesickness and other afflictions—a broken love affair, a parent’s death, a husband or a wife who had run off. I took it all in and even then I sensed that the conditions of their work, the long absences and the demands of daily performance, invited troubles. Father acted as spiritual counsellor to these lost ones—parent and priest and psychiatrist to whom in a later day they would have been handing over a big chunk of their salaries. Usually he cited some Shakespearean analogy to their predicaments, believing as he did that the Bard had anticipated every form of human behavior.

One young dancer, whose golden hair and turquoise eyes I envied, confessed one night that she was in despair. She was weary of the same old routines, her work had alienated her from her disapproving family, her boyfriend had cheated on her. Worst of all she had come to accept that she had no real talent and would end up with no name, no money, and no future. Harry Valentine tried to joke her out of her mood, saying that he would be glad to trade places with her but looked silly in revealing costumes. She kept on. She hated show business. It was a fraud, a deception, nothing but a form of prostitution. She had never met a happy actor. Look at the people around the table. How many of them could honestly say they were happy?

In the silence I mulled over what this exquisite young woman had been saying. I could feel my father’s eyes on me, and when the actress began talking about killing herself and tried to start a discussion about the relative merits of poison, a pistol, or throwing oneself out a window, E.P. gently reminded her of my presence. She rested her head on the table.

“I have the glooms,” she mumbled. “Oh, how I have the glooms. Everything is plain rotten.”

I’m glad my father didn’t send me from the room, as Mother would have had she not been fussing in the kitchen—or had she already gone to bed? Instead he launched into a speech in praise of the actress, whose name, at least for the stage, was Louise DeWitt, recalling the success she had had when still in her teens. Why, hadn’t the New York critics raved about her when, in The Great Divide, she had personified the freedom of the West? Someone had written that her hair could inspire men to the madness of the Gold Rush, or so he recalled from her clippings. She should enjoy this brief South American holiday. Her career was undergoing a mere hiatus—it happened to everyone. Persistence was the thing! She should try to save a few dollars and then try her luck again in New York. If her boyfriend had two-timed her, well then, he was no good and she could get another. Or, here was another thought, perhaps she should think about getting married. It might lend some stability to her life.

“Who am I going to marry,” she asked, her cheek resting on the table, her hand curled around her glass, “some rich slob of a producer? I’m too old for that. They go for teenagers.”

Father, trying to roll over her with rhetoric, launched into a speech in praise of life’s wonders and opportunities. He said that she should try to avoid misinterpreting things, as Othello and Ophelia had.

Harry Valentine was usually invited to these dinners. I loved him. When Father was away, Harry paid special attention to me, making sure rehearsals didn’t tire me, asking about my schoolwork, hugging and kissing me and saying that his fondest wish was one day to have a daughter like me. For an actor he was unusually generous, less wrapped up in himself than most, and very talented. He was as funny in his own crazy way as Oliver Hardy: both graceful big men, delicate, airborne—for all his bulk, Harry could walk a tightrope. He could transform himself into anything from a trolley conductor to a hillbilly guzzling moonshine. His versatility may have cost him; show business rewards types.

When Father was away, I badgered Mother to invite Harry Valentine to Sunday dinner. She resisted; she was too tired, not up to his antics; I should wash my hair. She did not approve of him, but often she gave in.

Harry must have weighed three hundred pounds—no bigger than a young female polar bear, he liked to say. He had a huge round head, thin brown hair slicked straight back above his child’s small-featured face, with the beady black eyes of his Cherokee grandmother, who, he claimed, had scalped her first husband. His hands were huge, powerful as a blacksmith’s, but his feet were scarcely bigger than my own. He had been thrown together out of a mismatched set of body parts, he liked to say, and could have made a living in a freak show. He used to try to squeeze his foot into my shoe, and was nearly able. He claimed to have a collection of little shoes back home.

“Why do you have such tiny feet, Harry?” I would ask.

“Because I like little shoes,” he would say, “don’t you?”

Harry professed to adore Alice’s cooking—that it was produced in large midwestern quantity was probably the point. He kept me limp with laughter and occasionally even managed to amuse my mother, babbling in nonsense talk that sounded like Spanish or German or Italian or whatever he chose. He could render a song from Babes in Toyland in what seemed like twelve different languages. He crawled around our living room on all fours barking, did his macho-gaucho routine with a bath towel as his sash and a length of twine as his bullwhip. Mother was fairly tolerant of all this, except when Harry would grab me, pull me into his lap, and become the villain about to ravish the maiden in a melodrama. He’d let me go when she said sternly that that sort of thing was all right on the stage, but not in her home.

There was no wine allowed when E.P. was away. Behind Mother’s back Harry whipped out his flask and nipped, putting a finger to his lips and raising his eyebrows to swear me to secrecy, a game I happily played because the more Harry nipped, the crazier he became. He would dab whipped cream all over his face and say he was Rip Van Winkle or, often, ask me if I had been window-peeking lately. It was a routine between us, one too peculiar for the stage. I would say that I had never been window-peeking. And Harry would begin:

“That’s because you’re a girl. Little girls don’t go window-peeking, but little boys do. That’s what I did when I was your age. I’d go window-peeking all over the neighborhood. You’d be surprised what I saw!”

“What did you see, Harry?”

“I saw old Mr. Winterbotham naked in his kitchen pouring himself a whiskey!”

“You did?” And I would start to giggle.

“And I saw Mr. Winterbotham naked in his kitchen washing his dog naked in the sink!”

“And then what did you see?”

“I saw Mrs. Winterbotham come naked down the stairs!”

“And then?”

“I saw Mr. Winterbotham naked and Mrs. Winterbotham naked washing that naked dog in the sink!”

Harry would be shouting by then, and Mother would order him to go home.

But I was always anxious for him to linger. He would take out his harmonica and blow a few bars before singing the words of a song in a warm tenor. I hummed along, sitting cross-legged at his feet. Always before he left, I asked him to sing the strange verses he knew of “Home on the Range”:

How often at night

When the heavens are bright

With the light from the glittering stars,

Have I stood here amazed

And asked as I gazed

If their glory exceeds that of ours.

Here his voice swelled and soared:

O give me a land

Where the bright diamond sand

Flows leisurely down the stream;

Where the graceful white swan

Goes gliding along,

Like a maid in a heavenly dream!

Then I would not exchange

My home on the range,

Where the deer and the antelope play . . .

There were tears in our eyes, Mother’s, too.

“You’re the swan,” Harry said to me, “gliding along. You’re the maid in my heavenly dream, my darling.”

“It’s so beautiful,” I said, “why don’t you sing it on the stage? No funny business. We could have a backdrop of a stream and a green meadow, and I could dress like a swan and glide along.”

“No, no,” Harry said. “If I try to be a serious singer, I’ll end up as Victor Herbert’s houseboy.”

“But the organ grinder isn’t all funny. People love it when you sing in that.”

Harry put his big fist up to his lips and made a rude noise.

“I think it’s time,” said Mother, clearing the plates.

“Harry, how old are you?” I asked.

“Eight,” Harry said in a child’s voice.

“No, you’re not! Are you thirty years old?”

“I’m twenty-eight,” Harry said, “but I’m younger than you are, and a whole lot sillier.”

I thought of Harry as somebody who had figured out how not to grow up. He was my younger brother who needed me, or something like that.

was

“Shh! Don’t you know? You don’t, do you?”

“Maybe I do. Let me guess. Were they making love?”

“You could call it that,” Harry said. “Are you in shock?”

I said I was fine. I hadn’t had time to think about it. If I’d been seen by anyone but Harry, I would have been mortified.

“Is that what people do?” I asked.

“What were they doing?”

“You know. She was, you know, never mind.”

“Tell me.”

Harry sweated as I described the scene. All at once I was embarrassed and stopped. I wanted to leave, and I started giggling.

Harry grabbed a fedora from a rack and did a little dance. I wondered how we were going to get through our routine tonight.

“This will be our secret,” Harry said, “okay? Just you and me. You’re not going to tell your parents, are you?”

“Of course not!”

The performers were returning. I hurried out.

I floated through my act that night. I was especially graceful, according to Mother. When I watched Louise and her partner, the man from the basement, perform a new dance called the tango, I undressed them in my mind. I decided that I preferred them with clothes on, but I may have been jealous.

Margaret in Hollywood

Darcy O’Brien