The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 35
It was a bear, the first creature Ursula performed with, and the reason she was called Ursula, “Ursa being Latin for bear,” according to her fatstack manager, Joe Considine, who hired me to replace her. This was in Reno, Nevada, where I answered a simple newspaper ad for “Actress, singer, calm demeanor.”
I was from an East Coast performing family, my mother an opera singer, my father a playwright. Just two years earlier I’d wowed six hundred a night on the San Francisco stage as Fanny LeGrand in Sappho. But two years is a hundred in actress time, and I had chosen badly in romance and found myself in Reno in a limited engagement called desperation. That’s when I saw the ad.
For my audition, Joe Considine led me to the stage of an empty variety saloon, and I sang, “A Woman Is a Woman but a Good Cigar Is a Smoke.” I wasn’t even to the second puff when Joe said, “And can you dance?” and I showed him tap and a high kick and he said, “And what about your tits?” and I asked if we could keep those out of it, and he said, “Then how do you feel about animals?”
I met the First Ursula the next afternoon backstage at the theater where she’d been performing for the last month, co-billed with an Orientalist seer. She wore a flowing gown of reds and oranges, her hair wrapped in a scarf, four dollars in costume jewelry on her fingers and neck. Behind her, her costar lay in a ten-by-ten cage, asleep in a narrow slant of sunlight beneath a high window.
Ursula seemed resigned to giving up the act, and gamely showed me the tricks, although, from what I could tell, the main trick was to not get mauled.
“Why are you leaving?” I asked.
“I am not leaving,” she said. “I am being replaced. A week ago, Joe informed me that he was taking out an advertisement for a new Ursula. And look, here you are.”
I chose not to apologize. “Why would he replace you?”
“As he explained it to me, our receipts are down, the show is rarely extended beyond our two-week contracts, and he has begun to suspect my age is an issue in marketing this spectacle.”
“So, you’re too young,” I said.
“Yes, very good.” She smiled. “No, according to Joe, a more mature Ursula reminds them of their mothers and wives, and they have begun to cheer for the cat.”
“What is the age,” I asked, “when a woman becomes more entertaining as meal than singer?”
“I am thirty-six,” she said, “or so.”
Or so. No way First Ursula had seen thirty-six this century. Not that I held any reverence for the accurate measure of one’s age. I had told Considine I was twenty-four, a number I had scrupulously maintained since turning twenty-five a few years earlier.
First Ursula was slated for three more shows while she trained me, and after that I would assume the role, meaning I had only two performances in Reno to get the act down. After that came a two-week run in Boise, followed by Butte and Missoula, then it was on to Spokane in the fall, where we had an open engagement at a theater First Ursula said was the finest house in the best city this side of San Francisco.
It was called the Comique and it was owned, in secret, by a mining magnate named Lemuel Brand—secret, she said, because “his wife remains blissfully unaware of his fondness for actresses.” She was quite taken with this Brand, whom she described as “a cup of charm in a gallon of largesse.” Brand’s wealth came from silver-mining the Coeur d’Alenes and the rather broad range of vices his workers spent their money on—cathouses, saloons, hotels, opium dens, and theaters in Spokane’s tenderloin, positions he held behind a series of paper partners. “Lem likes to say that every dollar that goes out in payroll,” Ursula said, “comes back through bed, brothel, and booze.”
Ursula and Lem Brand had carried on for her entire two-month run in Spokane. He’d even made her a promise: that when her career was over, she could manage one of his flop hotels and turn it into a proper boardinghouse. She planned to open its doors to old variety-show actresses like herself, to teach them secretarial and operator skills so they wouldn’t be reduced to taking on loggers at four bits a throw. Of course, she said, a hotel full of former actresses also appealed to a patron of the arts like Brand.
That’s why she was staying with the show as far as Spokane, so she could dismount the stage for the next segment of her life. She had even picked out a name for her boardinghouse: the Phoenix.
That morning she’d sent a telegram to Brand saying that she would be coming to Spokane with the show, was eager to see him, and hoped to discuss taking over the management of his hotel. “I am ready,” she told me. “I have been at this for too long.”
“May I ask,” I said, “what happened to the bear?”
“Ah, the bear.” This question softened the corners of First Ursula’s eyes. “Boryenka. He fell quite in love with me, I’m afraid. Backstage, he would growl whenever Joe raised his voice. Onstage, he would sit patiently, panting like a dog, his eyes following me everywhere. He was heartsick, and he would moan for me to come into his cage, to sing to him, to stroke his jowls. He was so gentle the audience began to laugh.
“Joe found it unseemly the way the bear looked at me. I suggested we play it as a