Second-Act Curtain
They were trying out a play in Newark. The play was to open in New York the following week. Washington had liked it pretty well and business had been picking up in the big New Jersey metropolis until a full house at a rainy Wednesday matinée had just about convinced the authors and the manager that they had something.
The three were standing in the lobby before the evening performance.
“We’d be all set,” said Mr. Rose, the manager, “if we just had a curtain for the second act.”
The authors, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Booth, walked away from him as fast as they could go. Neither of them wanted the blood, even of a manager, on his hands; and they had been told so often—by the manager, the company manager, various house managers, the entire office staff, every member of the cast and the citizens of New Jersey and the District of Columbia—that they lacked a second-act curtain (just as if it were news to them), that both had spent most of their prospective profits on scimitars, stiletti, grenades and sawed-off shotguns, and it was only a question of time before some of these trinkets would be brought into play.
After a while the good folks from the Oranges and Montclair began looming up in such numbers that Chambers and Booth thought Mr. Rose’s mind might be on some other subject and they ventured back into the lobby. “Boys,” said Mr. Rose, “we’ve got a hit. If we only—”
Chambers grabbed Booth by the arm.
“Come here a minute,” he commanded, and Booth obeyed.
“Now, listen,” said Chambers, “we’re not going to find a second-act curtain by watching another performance of this clambake. Let’s leave it flat for tonight and go to our respective homes and do a little real thinking.”
Chambers’ respective home was a mansion in the lower sixties. Booth’s was a hotel room in which he had spent nearly all of the summer working, because he found it impossible to work out on Long Island where everybody else was having a good time. The collaborators parted at the Thirty-third Street terminal of the Hudson Tube and Booth went first to a speakeasy to buy himself some thinking powders and then to his room—the number doesn’t make any difference because each is equipped with radio, and all you have to do to avoid it is not open the drawer of the table by the bed.
Booth’s room was not an expensive room. It was a $4.00 room and opened on a court, and the people in the other rooms opening on the court were nice and friendly and hardly ever pulled down their window shades, no matter what they were doing. For three days the room right across the court from Booth’s had been occupied by a comely and frank lady of about twenty-six, so Booth took a powder before settling down to real thinking. The room across the court was dark. Booth got into his thinking costume, consisting of pajamas, slippers and bathrobe, had another powder and decided he had better eat something.
Enter the Heroine
While waiting for the food, he began a letter to somebody at Syracuse University who didn’t know him and wanted him to make a speech. He discovered that the I key on the typewriter had gone blooey from overwork, rendering him mute. The food came and he sat on the bed to eat it. There was a knock at the door and in scampered a chambermaid not a day over fifty.
“Are you sick?” she said.
“No,” said Booth. “Why?”
“Well,” said the chambermaid, “there was a woman sick in this room a couple of weeks ago and I thought maybe she was still here.”
“You’re the only woman in this room,” said Booth, “and I hope you’re not too sick to leave.”
“It’s a funny thing,” said the chambermaid, “but I came in a room along this hall one time, it must have been last spring, and there was a man and a woman both in there, both sick. And they knew me because I worked in a hospital once and they were both there, too.”
“Marriage might regain something of its former sanctity,” observed Booth, “if husbands and wives were always both sick together.”
“I’ll just turn down your bed.”
“No. Let it alone. I’ll fix it when I get ready.”
“Well, I wouldn’t sit around like that or you’ll catch cold.”
“Good night.”
Booth finished eating and looked around the room for reading matter.
There were three books—Heart Throbs, a collection, by Joe Mitchell Chapple of Boston, of favorite bits of verse or prose of well-known Americans; Holy Bible, anonymous, but a palpable steal of Gideon’s novel of the same name, and the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer. Booth had seen them on the desk all summer, but had been too busy to read when the I key was working.
He took another powder and started in on the insidious Chink, but the author’s quaint method of handling direct discourse (“Too small by inches!” he jerked; “The pigtail again!” rapped Weymouth; “Is ‘Parson Dan’?” rapped Smith; “But,” rapped Smith; “Got any theory?” he jerked) was a little too much for frayed nerves. “It is all right,” he rapped to himself, “for a guest to bring a book like this with him, but there certainly ought to be a penalty for leaving it in the room.”
Inspiration from the Muse
Holy Bible began too slow and after another powder Booth dived into Heart Throbs, only to be confronted by the complete text of “Home, Sweet Home.” Now out in the town where Booth’s family was spending the summer the natives had pointed with pride to the house where Mr. Payne, who wrote this famous lyric, used to live. If the natives had ever read the whole thing, they probably would have burned the house instead of pointing to it.
Turning over a few pages, however, Booth came across a poem that soon had him fighting to keep back the tears. It told about a mother who often cried at the memory of the good times she used to have, before she was married and gave birth to a little one, but who felt all right again when the little one reminded her of her present blessings by climbing on her knee—
And she says and twists a curl:
“I am Mamma’s baby dirl!”
And the while I bless my lot
Whispers: “Mamma had fordot!”
And another whose first stanza ran:
When you see a man in woe,
Walk right up and say, “Hello!”
Say, “Hello!” and “How d’ye do?
How’s the world been using you?”
Slap the fellow on his back,
Bring your hand down with a whack;
Waltz straight up and don’t go slow,
Shake his hand and say, “Hullo!”
For a brief moment Booth considered dressing again, engaging a taxi, driving to Chambers’ house, waltzing straight up to Chambers’ room, bringing his hand down with a whack on Chambers’ shoulder and saying, “Hullo, and how d’ye do, and how’s your second-act curtain?” But he hadn’t had enough powders.
While the waiter was removing the tray, he took another one and looked across at the opposite room. Strangely, the shade was down.
Booth lay on his bed, with glass and bottle beside him, for half an hour. Inspiration came to him. The second act should end with a song. But he’d better call up Chambers and get his approval.
“It’s Got to Be Funny”
“Why, sure,” said Chambers. “Only it’s got to be damn funny.”
“Have you had any ideas yourself?”
“Not yet. I’ve been reading. You realize, of course, that a line or a piece of business would be better than a song unless the song’s damn funny.”
“But I can’t think of a line or a piece of business.”
“Then go ahead with your song, and be sure it’s damn funny.”
Booth hung up and took a drink. In a room devoid of musical instruments he had to compose a song that would be a curtain, would make an audience laugh, would be damn funny.
He looked across the court and saw the light in the girl’s room flash on and then off.
He pictured her as a buyer from St. Louis or Cincinnati. She worked hard all day while he attended rehearsals, or while he sat there in his own room and attempted to think up lines dumb audiences would laugh at, as substitutes for lines that they wouldn’t. He wondered whether she was dumb.
In the evening she came back to her $4.00 cell, and perhaps changed her clothes and went to a picture, or sat in the grill or on the roof and dined alone and wished there were someone for her to dance with when the orchestra played “Here Am I.”
After her solitary dinner or the pictures, she probably went to bed and read the confessions of John Gilbert and Rudy Vallée until she fell asleep.
It was a shame, thought Booth, that the conventions and his arduous work kept him from calling her up and perhaps taking her to dinner or a show, or merely carrying on friendly conversations with her so she would not be quite so homesick.
Wasted Sympathy
He fell asleep and was awakened by the telephone at half past two.
“Listen,” said the voice of Mr. Rose, “we’ve got a show if we find a curtain for that second act. They liked everything but that tonight. You fellas have got to dig up a curtain by tomorrow.”
“I think I’ve got an idea.”
“Well, I hope it’s good.”
Booth began to hum different people’s tunes to himself. Tunes lots of times suggest words; it’s customary and much more satisfactory to get the tune first—
He looked across the court once more. The lights were on, only the thin shade was down, and he could see a man in shirt sleeves standing in the middle of the room.
“Well,” thought Booth, “she’s married and I’ve been wasting all my sympathy. A girl that’s married may not be having a good time, but at least she isn’t alone.”
For some reason, however, he felt resentful and the drink he took was three times as big as its predecessors. So, she was married—
Suddenly there flashed into his head one of the prettiest tunes he had ever heard. He grabbed a piece of music manuscript paper and wrote a lead sheet of half the refrain.
“It will be all the better,” he thought, “if I can get some silly, incongruous words to such a pretty melody as this.”
He set down what he considered an amusing line and was at work on a second when the telephone rang again.
“This is Rose. I was thinking maybe you’d better tell me something about your idea for a curtain.”
“It’s a song. I’ve got it half done.”
“You might just as well quit working on it. We can’t drop on a song. It’s got to be a gag.”
“But suppose the song is a gag—”
“No, I tell you we can’t ring down on a song. We’ve got too many of them. This is no musical. Just forget that idea and work on another.”
Booth tried to answer, but Mr. Rose had hung up.
“Whether we ring down on it or not,” Booth said to the bottle, “we can use it somewhere.”
But in the middle of the third line of the lyric a terrible hunch came to him. He had heard the tune before. Where? Why, back at home in the Episcopal church choir. Only there it had been in nine-eight or something, and now it was four-four. “The strife is o’er, the battle done.”
“I won’t give up till I’m sure,” he said to himself.
There was one composer in town who, chances were, would be up at this time of night, five or ten minutes past three. It was quite a job to grab hold of the telephone, but Booth finally managed it.
“Well, whistle it or hum it, but do it quick because I’m working,” said Mr. Youmans.
Booth whistled the refrain, though whistling was difficult.
“I like it very much,” said Mr. Youmans.
“But isn’t it a hymn? I seem to have heard it in church.”
“It’s a hymn all right,” said Mr. Youmans, “but I don’t think you heard it in church. I’m sure I never did.”
“No. I can imagine that.”
“But I can tell you where you did hear it.”
“Where?”
“Do you remember the morning you came to my Great Day rehearsal? That’s where you heard it. It’s the Negroes’ hymn that opens the second act.”
Booth tore up his sheet of music paper and looked across the court. Clearly visible was the silhouette of the gentleman putting on his coat and hat.
Booth lunged for the telephone again.
“I’ll call her up,” he thought. “I’ll tell her I’m sorry her husband has to go to work so early.”
The operator answered in a voice as thick and sleepy as his own.
“Listen,” he said, “what’s the number of the room right across the court from me?”
“I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”
“But I’ve got something important to say.”
“You sound like it. Anyway, you tell it to me and I’ll deliver the message.”
“All right,” said Booth. “You tell her I’ve been in my room alone all evening, trying to think up a second-act curtain. And I can’t think of one.”
At seven in the morning he was aroused by strange noises that issued forth from the telephone receiver, which was off the hook, and the cord of which was looped around his neck.
Detected!
“Will you please hang up your receiver?” said the operator.
“I will if you’ll send me the house detective.”
“All right.”
A house detective appeared before Booth had a chance to get back to sleep.
“Officer,” said the latter, “there was somebody in this room last night.”
“It looks it.”
“When I came in, I brought a full bottle of pretty good stuff. I had my dinner, I worked a little and read a little, and then I went to sleep. Ten minutes ago I woke up to find the bottle empty and the telephone cord twisted around my neck as if someone had tried to strangle me.”
“Go back to sleep,” said the detective, “and give me time to run down clues. I think we will find that both crimes—the emptying of the bottle and the displacement of the telephone receiver—were the work of one man.”