All That Glitters Read Free Page B

boilerplate sluts and easy-virtue ladies. “A glorified lingerie model,” he called her. He didn’t even like Fedora, something I never understood. I don’t think he actually even saw her in anything, certainly not her sound films, but he considered her screen image scandalous. Fedora was a femme fatale like Pola Negri and the rest of that spiderwebby sisterhood. Two screen females he could stomach: Sonja Henie and Minnie Mouse.
    Nevertheless, within four or five years after that first dip into the movies I knew the inside of every first-run house in the central city area, the Poli (MGM and AyanBee, later 20th Century-Fox), the Poli Palace (in the next block north on Main, where the holdovers played), the Strand (Warners and RKO), the Allyn (Paramount, exclusively), E. M. Loew’s (Columbia and Universal), and the Regal (holdover Warners and RKO). Then there were the second-run, outlying houses—the Princess, the Rialto, the Crown, the semi-distant Colonial, as well as the cheap grind houses on North Main, all beyond the moral pale, and that local nadir of moviedom, the Proven Pictures Theatre, where drunks spat in the aisles and the older guys felt up girls in the back rows. And last, the State, at the far North End, where the touring swing bands played, along with a Republic or Monogram feature—if you could call any Monogram a feature!
    Before long we had our weekend moviegoing down to a near-science. As soon as Saturday chores were done, we lit out for whichever show had been picked. Properly managed, you could watch two shows straight through (two ninety-minute features, two co-features, the Coming Attractions, the newsreel, a cartoon, and sometimes even a “featurette” in Cine-color). All this sandwiched in between eleven and five, with a hotdog and a malt at Kresge’s five-and-dime, while you listened to the latest hits being played by a skinny lady sporting hennaed hair seated at the baby-grand piano with an ebony finish that had seen a better day.
    Weekdays, the movies were definitely out, but that firmly stated parental ukase never deterred me. At “Rise and shine,” I’d sometimes report in sick, claiming to have a sore throat and a headache, I couldn’t possibly make it to school. No sooner was my mother out of the house, however, leaving me in Jessie’s care, than I was up and dressed and out on the yellow trolley car, heading uptown to catch the latest “Gold Diggers” when the movie house opened at ten o’clock. Twenty minutes to town, ninety for the picture, twenty minutes back, I’d be safely tucked in bed by the time Jessie appeared with lunch on a tray, and nobody the wiser. That’s how smartass kids got to the movies in 1935. If this kind of illicit traffic had ever been discovered by my father, the consequences are unthinkable.
    Actually, there were moments when he did own up to having enjoyed the performances of, say, an Irene Dunne, maybe a Claudette Colbert—not as in Cleopatra with her snaky hips and cast-iron bra, not as in Sign of the Cross , either, with her asses’-milk baths, but as in It Happened One Night. Irene might act a little jazzy, as in Theodora Goes Wild , but everyone could see she was a lady, he said, and she did a neat little trick with her teeth that he liked. Once he even admitted to liking Roz Russell, who hailed from nearby Waterbury, and he certainly enjoyed Maude Antrim a lot. Maude was his latter-day Bernhardt, and if she’d ever come to town he might even have asked for her autograph. (She did but he didn’t.) Maude Antrim, he claimed, always reminded him of Mother—ours, not his—and he admired Cary Grant extravagantly, especially Cary’s swank wardrobe—the two-tone spectators, pleated slacks, swing-back jackets, Prince of Wales plaids, pencil stripes in his shirtings. Babe Austrian movies, of course, were anathema.
    But the time was fast approaching when not only Babe’s movies but the lady herself were to take an important part, not merely in