City of Girls Read Free Page B

down on the boards, but it was a riotous success. All across America, pleasure-starved mine workers and farmers shook out the last bitsof loose change from their pockets in order to see Her Jolly Affair, making this simple, brainless play into a profitable triumph. The play picked up so much steam, in fact, and garnered such bountiful praise in the local papers, that in 1931, Billy and Peg brought it to New York City, where it ran for a year in a prominent Broadway theater.
    In 1932, MGM made a movie version of Her Jolly Affair— which Billy wrote but did not star in. (William Powell did the acting job instead. Billy had decided by this point that a writer’s life was easier than an actor’s life. Writers get to set their own hours, they aren’t at the mercy of an audience, and there’s no director telling them what to do.) The success of Her Jolly Affair spawned a series of lucrative motion picturesequels ( Her Jolly Divorce,Her Jolly Baby, Her Jolly Safari ), which Hollywood churned out for a few years like sausages from a hopper. The whole Jolly enterprise made quite a pile of money for Billy and Peg, but it also signaled the end of their marriage. Having fallen in love with Hollywood, Billy never came back. As for Peg, she decided to close the touring company and use her half of the Jolly royalties to buy herselfa big, old, run-down New York City theater of her very own: the Lily Playhouse.
    All this happened around 1935.
    Billy and Peg never officially divorced. And while there didn’t seem to be any bad blood between them, after 1935 you couldn’t exactly call them “married,” either. They didn’t share a home or a work life, and at Peg’s insistence, they no longer shared a financial life—which meant thatall that shimmering Newport money was now out of reach for my aunt. (Grandmother Morris didn’t know why Peg was willing to walk away from Billy’s fortune, other than to say about her daughter, with open disappointment, “Peg never cared about money, I’m afraid.”) My grandmother speculated that Peg and Billy never legally divorced because they were “too bohemian” to concern themselves with such matters.Or maybe they still loved each other. Except theirs was the sort of love that best thrives when a husband and wife are separated by the distance of an entire continent. (“Don’t laugh,” my grandmother said. “A lot of marriages would work better that way.”)
    All I know is that Uncle Billy was out of the picture for the entirety of my young life—at first because he was touring, and later becausehe had settled in California. He was so much out of the picture, in fact, that I’d never even met him. To me, Billy Buell was a myth, composed of stories and photos. And what glamorous stories and photos they were! Grandmother Morris and I frequently saw Billy’s picture in the Hollywood tabloid magazines, or read about him in Walter Winchell’s and Louella Parsons’s gossip columns. We were ecstatic, for instance, when wefound out he’d been a guest at Jeanette MacDonald and Gene Raymond’s wedding! There was a picture of him at the wedding reception right there in Variety, standing just behind luminous Jeanette MacDonald in her blush-pink wedding gown. In the photo, Billy was talking to Ginger Rogers and her then husband, Lew Ayres. My grandmother had pointed out Billy to me and said, “Therehe is, conquesting his way across the country, as usual. And look at the way Ginger is grinning at him! If I were Lew Ayres, I’d keep an eye on that wife of mine.”
    I’d peered closely at the photo, using my grandmother’s jeweled magnifying lens. I’d seen a handsome blond man in a tuxedo jacket, whose hand was resting on Ginger Rogers’s forearm, while she, indeed, sparkled up at him with delight.He looked more like a movie star than the actual movie stars who were flanking him.
    It was amazing to me that this person was married to my Aunt Peg.
    Peg was wonderful, to be sure, but she was so