Read All That Glitters for Free Online Page B

business before the week was out, and what was more he’d take her to Havana for the weekend and screw the hell out of her at the Nacional. He bided his time, waiting for his chance, which he seized on another matinee day when the doorman was still at lunch, slipping the relief man a box of Corona Coronas to look the other way, and sneaking into Babe’s dressing room.
    Hiding himself behind a painted screen, he waited until Babe entered with her maid. When the maid stepped out to fill the water pitcher and Babe was in the can, Frankie locked the door and was waiting for her.
    From all reports it was quite an encounter, a noisy brouhaha in which Babe lobbed the entire contents of her dressing table at him, Frank fielding the rouge pots and cold-cream jars until he managed to get close enough to tackle her and by sheer force bear her to the floor—except it wasn’t the floor but a pillowed chaise longue where he fell on top of her, and pretty soon there were no more protests from the lady. Frank, a smart businessman, was finally giving her the business.
    They held the curtain nearly an hour that day “due to technical difficulties,” and when Babe finally went on it was said she gave the best performance of her career as Lola. That night there was a champagne supper at Luchow’s at which Frankie reputedly downed three and a half dozen oysters—“for purposes of fortification only”—and the next day Babe returned Mr. Ho-Ho-Kus’s car and uniformed driver. The morning papers reported that she would be taking a short hiatus—in Miami Beach, as it happened—and that her understudy would not go on in her place.
    After that Frankie collected the bets he’d chalked up and it became quickly known that Babe Austrian was strictly his territory and that he was running the whole show, his intention from the beginning. He went into his Pygmalion act, revamping her from top to bottom; he changed her name, redesigned her figure, and sent her to Pelletti, who saw to such streamlinings in those days. He got her top salary for the show, got her dressing room redecorated, got her a new wardrobe, onstage and off, got her a bigger, brighter sign on the marquee, and ran the show to sold-out audiences for eleven more months.
    The rest is, as they say, history. Babe Osterreich was no more; Babe Austrian was born, and within a year had become a major star on Broadway, one of the prevailing sex images of the time. The next step, inevitably, was Hollywood and the movies. Frankie saw to that, too, and at the train station the “Mothers for a Moral America”—the same contingent of belligerent females he had corralled to storm the Eltinge Theatre—were on hand to send Babe off on the 20th Century Limited with a floral wreath, this time naming her “Star Performer of the Year.” To say the least, Frankie’s ex-girlfriend Cora Sue was miffed—Frankie was supposed to have made a star out of her. Before leaving town, however, he did pay for some rhinoplasty and dance lessons, then gave her a kiss and said toodle-oo; he and Babe were off to Lotusland.
    It was an interesting coincidence that the Broadway house Babe had packed in Lola Magee was the Julian Eltinge, named in memory of the most celebrated female impersonator of the period, whose genteelly rendered portrayals of fashionable “ladies” carried him to vaudeville stardom and eventually to Broadway, where he was regarded, not as any sort of show-biz freak, but as a genuine “artiste” plying his legitimate and hard-learned craft.
    Eltinge bowed offstage in 1941, after a long and successful career that spanned some forty years, from vaudeville and the Palace to his name in lights on the Great White Way. Having retired from the scene, he staged a comeback during the war at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, where he succumbed to a heart attack, just coming offstage, still in high drag. Julie died for his art.
    I mention this merely as a sidelight, since Babe Austrian was