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eyeliner on my eyelids so the audience would notice my eyes, a standard routine for any theater actress. But before the curtain went up, and in the kind of loud, dramatic voice I had worked to eliminate from my own persona, I heard her on the other side of the theater. The whole cast and crew heard her, too. “That girl is covered in makeup,” she was yelling. “This show will not go on until she removes every last bit of it, do you hear me?” To be honest, I didn’t even know whom she was talking about. So I couldn’t believe it when the stage manager walked over to me, and with a sheepish voice said I’d have to wash my face. It was mortifying. But I didn’t argue. I knew what was going on. She wasthreatened by my youth, and wanted to keep me as barefoot and dowdy as possible.
    â€œSo that’s what it means to be the star,” I told myself as I washed my face.
    Then it got worse. I had a beautiful song in the show called “Don’t Like Goodbyes.” It was Harold Arlen at his finest, and the audience was wild for the song. After a performance in our out-of-town rehearsals, there was a knock on my door. The producer, Saint-Suber, and Mr. Arlen were standing there. He was a terribly dapper-looking man, but he was also nurturing, and spoke to performers with respect and kindness. This was, in fact, a man whose personality was equal to the loving and idealistic songs he wrote.
    â€œThis is going to sound awful, and it isn’t very pleasant, so get ready,” he said. “And I have to apologize because we never should have allowed this to happen.”
    My heart skipped several beats. What could this be? I knew I wasn’t being fired.
    Then the producer quietly said, “We’re going to have to take the song ‘Don’t Like Goodbyes’ away from you. Pearl wants to sing it.”
    I didn’t say what I wanted to say, which was, “Are you all crazy?”
    I might have suggested that the song would make no sense if her character sang it. But I knew the rules well by then—don’t argue with the star. So I didn’t cry or carry on at all. I simply told myself that there was nothing to be done about this situation. If there’s something that you can do, then you have to fight for it. Or maybe you get the people you are paying to dothe fighting for you. But this? Nothing to be done about it. She wanted my song.
    So it was decided that to help the song make sense, I would remain onstage as Miss Bailey sang it to me. The director put me at her feet. I was looking out to the audience, wistfully, as she sang:
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    Don’t like goodbyes,
    Tears or sighs…
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    She was playing the loving woman who had adopted me, and I was this girl whom she had raised to become a lady. It was decided that I would rest my face on her lap and she would tenderly rub my cheeks and forehead as I looked outward and she sang the song that was one of the most beautiful I’d ever heard, a song that gave me chills when I sang it. But the first night she sang my song, she took my head into both her hands, and slowly but forcefully turned my face completely upstage, away from the audience, and then she buried my face in her ample lap.
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    I’m not too good at leavin’ time…
    I got no taste for grievin’ time
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    While breathing into the fabric of her dress, I waited for her to lift my face back up so I could continue breathing freely and looking out at the audience. But it soon became clear that she was going to keep my head placed right there where she decided it should be. I wanted to bite her, but I told myself, “You can’t change this, leave it alone.” And when the song ended, and she had let me go, I heard the audience applaud her instead of me. Everyone tried to convince her it made no sense for her character to sing that song.
    â€œNo, it’s fine,” she said. “We’ll leave it just like it