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Except for the Hot Dog, I had nothing to wear. I was either too thin or too fat for my old clothes, and the new clothes I’d had made were unthinkable, ranging from a Tribute—to—Bacchus number in hot-pink polyester peckered all over with vine leaves and plastic grape clusters, to an ensemble my designer called Man’s Best Friend, made from a Dalmatian-print polyester and complete with rhinestone collar and leash. How could I have let myself be talked into any of it?
    “If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.”
    I was desperate. Clothes were, and are, as important to me as an Entrance. If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything. Every minute, every hour I should have spent rehearsing I spent getting into and out of clothes. I was needed onstage for a lighting check, for a sound check, for a music rehearsal, for a run-through. And still I was up in my dressing room, trying on this with that; wrapping a belt here; sticking a flower there; putting things on backwards, upside down, inside out. And of course, each new invention had to be tried on with twenty different pairs of shoes. Maybe a spiked heel would make it work. Maybe a low one. Boots? Sneakers? Shower shoes? Nothing helped.
    My wardrobe dilemma brought everything to a standstill. And the time pressure was enormous. Tempers flared. Fights broke out. Some threatened to quit if I didn’t come out of the dressing room. Finally, having no other choice, I swallowed my pride and called my designer in Los Angeles, the nut who’d made the clothes I loathed so much, and begged him to come to Seattle. Always the soul of honesty, I told him he’d be walking into an atmosphere charged with tension.
    “Nothing fazes me” was all he said.
    When he arrived, that very same evening, he looked like the brash young man in his late twenties that he was. But a mere twenty-four hours later, he was unrecognizable. His entire body sagged. The flesh fell from his eyes. His face became wrinkled and puffy. If you asked him for the time or the salt, he would cry. His gait, once so confident and strong, became halting. His hands began to shake. At the end of rehearsal, we carried him sobbing to his hotel room, where he spent the night sewing— the sheets to the bedspread; the towels to the shower curtain; his shoes to his socks.
    Oh, it was not an easy time. For any of us. Only Miss Frank, exhausted though she was from zipping and unzipping, hemming and unhemming, was able to smile. In fact, she seemed very pleased with herself, forever mumbling in my ear about just deserts and the terrible wages of sin.
    But as is so often the case in a business where you lose fifty grand if it doesn’t, the show did go on. Two hours late and in a shambles, but a show nevertheless. The audience was, as most audiences usually are, unthinkably patient and forgiving. Dolores and The Magic Lady were ragged but wonderful. The crowd even liked my dog dress, which I actually wore and which became the surprise hit of the evening, retrieving for my designer both his reputation and his youth.
    Of course, I kept telling myself, trying not to let the elation go to my head, this was still America, home sweet home. The real test lay about six thousand miles away. In London. And that night of reckoning was getting closer by the second.
    “. . . in a business where you lose fifty grand if it doesn’t the show did go on.”
    PALLADIUM LONDON STOP AM ON MY WAY STOP ARRIVING MOMENTARILY STOP TALLY HO STOP BETTE

• OPENING NIGHT •
    “I’m just crazy about royalty, especially queens.”



• OPENING NIGHT •
THE L ONDON P ALLADIUM
    O h, my, my! London! At last! What a thrill it is to be here playing the Palladium right in the very heart of The Old UK— or The YUK, as we sometimes call it. Well, there’ll always be an England, they say. Tonight we put that to the ultimate test. Oh, I tell you, we are so excited. We have done it