Show Business is Murder

Small Time in His Heart by CAROLYN WHEAT

T HEATRE 80 S T . M ARK ’ S

The Movie Musical Theatre

Screening Schedule, September-October 1972

SUN-THURS:

Girl Crazy

11 AM, 3:30 PM, 8 PM

Mickey and Judy put on another show, this time at a Western college. Great Gershwin songs stitch together a paper-thin plot; Judy shines as always.

For Me and My Gal

1 PM, 6:15 PM, 10:15 PM

Gene Kelly’s first feature for MGM has him high-stepping with Judy and then breaking her heart by dodging WWI draft (ahead of his time?). Great period fun.

Birch Tate, 1972

WALKING ALONG EIGHTH Street from the Village, you first crossed Sixth Avenue, under the benevolent eye of the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library. With its turrets and narrow leaded windows, it looked like a fairy-tale castle. You could picture Rapunzel letting down her long thick hair, which made Scotty laugh when Birch said it, because Scotty remembered when the old Women’s House of Detention was there and prisoners leaned out of barred windows, yelling at boyfriends and girlfriends on the street below.

Rapunzel, Scotty said again, and laughed.

If there was one thing Birch was getting tired of, it was being young. Too young to remember the Women’s House of D. Too young to remember Busby Berkeley. Too young to care much about seeing Judy Garland in a movie; to her, Garland was a boozy concert singer with a drug problem and a ruined voice. Which was cool when it was Joplin, but Judy Garland was old.

She was not, Scotty had decided, going to spend one more day in this abysmally ignorant state. Theatre 80 St. Mark’s in the East Village was running a Garland double feature and Birch was, by God, going to know by the end of this afternoon precisely why Judy Garland was the greatest star Hollywood ever produced.

They passed Orange Julius and the wedding-ring store, pushed through the crowd at Macdougal, and met the boys on the corner of Sullivan. Patrick and Stanley were even crazier than Scotty when it came to old movies. Patrick liked to say he was the reincarnation of Ann Miller, which was supposed to be funny because Ann Miller wasn’t dead. Stanley preferred somebody called Lubitsch whom Birch had never heard of, and then Scotty said, “But he didn’t do musicals,” and Stanley arched his eyebrow and asked, “What about The Merry Widow?” and Scotty said, “Oh, you mean that blatant ripoff of Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight?”

Who cares? was what Birch thought, and wondered how long she could stay with Scotty if all they were going to do was spend blue-sky Sunday afternoons watching old movies with a couple of-

Queers.

The word popped into her mind before she could stop herself. It wasn’t a nice word, and it was especially not nice because what were she and Scotty? But somehow it was different when it was boys.

The trouble was, she was new at this. She’d “come out”-and in her mind the words were always in quotes-only a few months earlier, and not by choice. She wasn’t even sure she really was one, except for one thing: there had never been a boy or a man, in the movies or in real life, who made her feel the way certain girls did. First Enid and now Scotty. She felt a stirring in her jeans just looking at Scotty-her elegant short hair with its slight curl, her long legs in those tight jeans, the silk shirt, the studded belt, the Frye boots-Birch looked down at her own feet, clad in moccasins, peeking out from under frayed bell-bottoms and wondered for the fiftieth time what a really cool chick like Scotty saw in her.

“My baby dyke,” Scotty called her. “My little tomboy from the Catskills.”

Birch didn’t mind being called a tomboy; she’d spent her entire seventeen years of life answering to that description. But “dyke” sounded so ugly. It had sounded especially ugly in the mouths of kids she’d known since kindergarten. When some of her former friends caught her holding hands with Enid at the Tinker Street Cinema last summer, they’d thrown stones at her, called her dyke. Now Scotty used the word with amused affection, as if it could never hurt.

Scotty, present

“ALL SINGING, ALL dancing” it said on the long red awning that stretched from Theatre 80’s double doors to the curb. You could see that awning from as far away as the Bowery, and you walked toward it with heart high, knowing that no matter how dreary the day or how low your spirits, the double feature at the end of your trek would change your mood more rapidly and surely than any of the illegal substances being thrust at you along the way. Who needed grass when you had Busby Berkeley? Who needed uppers when Fred and Ginger were dancing cheek to cheek?

Patrick I still miss every day. He was the brother I never had, and yes, I’m well aware that I have three brothers, thank you very much. Three brothers who hate me for three different reasons: Brian because he’s a Christian now and I’m going to hell, Ian because he’s a stuffy old fart and I embarrass him, and Colin because I had the nerve to be born at all. The only saving grace to Colin is that he’d feel that way even if I liked men.

So Patrick was my soul-friend, the girl I should have been.

Birch, 1972

“LIKE THAT PLACE in Hollywood,” Birch said, and Patrick rolled his eyes. Usually she liked Patrick, but she could tell she was about to get another lesson in how little she knew.

“That one’s Joan Blondell.” He pointed to the square of sidewalk with handprints and a scrawled signature. As if she couldn’t read. Of course, who Joan Blondell was and why her handprints belonged in cement outside the theater was unclear; still, she thought she recognized the name Ruby Keeler.

“I was here when she came,” Patrick said with a rapturous sigh. “Oh, she’s put on weight and her hair can’t possibly be that color in real life, but just to see her, to stand next to her-it was a dream come true.”

Scotty came back with the tickets and they walked through the double doors into the narrow hallway that led to the seats. The white walls were covered with posters and black-and-white glossies signed by the stars personally to the theater’s owner, Howard Otway. Patrick always made a point of blowing kisses at his favorites as they made their way to the coffee bar, a little black-painted cubbyhole just off the screening room.

No popcorn, just movie candy and tiny little cups of very black, very strong coffee. Everyone but Birch bought a cup; she decided on Milk Duds because they lasted nice and long. She suppressed a sigh. The little theatre reminded her of the Tinker Street Cinema back home, where she’d spent so many happy hours-until last summer.

Scotty, present

WHAT WE DID at Theatre 80 was buy our coffee in the anteroom, push aside the heavy red velvet curtain, and walk across the stage to our seats. Theatre 80 hadn’t started life as a movie theater. It was a legitimate stage once home to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

This meant that not only did the theater have a little foot-high stage, but the seats were nice and plushy, set wider apart than usual. There was also a real curtain that opened and closed, giving the showings a special touch you just couldn’t get at the Quad or even the Regency uptown.

The regulars were there: three old ladies I privately thought of as the weird sisters, a little matched set that reminded me of salt shakers. The old man with the liver spots and the burgundy-colored beret who sat by himself in the fourth row. Groups of gay men wearing sheepskin coats and laughing loudly. Black-clad film students from NYU, who discussed the social implications of the musical in not-hushed-enough voices. Patrick made it a point to steer us to seats as far away from them as possible.

We loved each other very much, Patrick and I, but we never actually sat together during a movie. He favored the center seats, and I had to have an aisle. No idea why, just an overwhelming need to know I could get up and run out if I had to-not that I ever did. It was just that the thought of being trapped in the center brought on a panic I couldn’t control. So I led Birch toward the extreme right side of the theater and found us two seats in the seventh row while the boys edged past a plus-sized couple who glared at them.

The lights dimmed and then darkened, the red curtain was pulled back, the projector began to whir, and a thin blue vapor emanated from a tiny window in the back, projecting an image onto the screen.

And not just any image: The MGM lion roared, and the audience clapped. We were notorious for applause. First the stars received their due (Judy most of all), and then the director got a hand, and the choreographer, and, from the gay men especially, the costume designer.

For Me and My Gal contains one of the great movie lines of all time. Judy and Gene play vaudevillians in 1917 or so. Just as they get the booking to play the Palace-that ultimate cliché of vaudeville musicals-Gene gets his draft notice to fight in World War One. He injures himself to beat the draft, and Judy, whose brother has just died in battle, catches him at it. She turns to him and in a voice dripping with contempt, says: “You’ll never be big time because you’re small time in your heart.”

Patrick and I loved this line. We repeated it often, cracking each other up every time. Of Richard Nixon the unspeakable, we said only, “He’s small time in his heart.”

So of course at intermission, when we met for a shot-glass-size cardboard espresso, we said the line in unison and laughed. Next to us, the weird sister with the whitest hair turned to her companion and said, “I remember the war. I was in high school. We were supposed to knit socks for the soldiers.”

“I knitted three pair,” the other said with pride. “My brother was a doughboy.”

“I only finished one sock,” white hair admitted. “And then the war was over.”

The little old man with the burgundy beret stepped into the room on light, dancer’s feet. When he saw me looking at him, he winked and did a little dance, humming “For Me and My Gal” under his breath.

He did a nice soft shoe, his leather soles gliding across the floor, no taps, just thumps of emphasis with the heel. His lithe body was perfect for the moves and the twinkle in his eye told me he was enjoying the little burst of applause that greeted his impromptu performance.

When he was finished, he bowed low and removed his beret. Long wisps of yellow-gray hair barely covered a scalp dotted with liver spots. He stepped to the counter next to me and ordered a double espresso.

Blinking lights in the lobby signaled the end of intermission and the start of the second feature. We made our way back to our seats, but the conversation, and the old man, was not forgotten.

Birch, 1972

GIRL CRAZYHAD maybe the dippiest plotline of any movie Birch Tate had ever seen. This playboy from the East, Mickey Rooney, gets sent to a Western college so he’ll shape up. Judy Garland works there because her grandfather owns the place or something, and she falls in love with Mickey even though he’s the biggest goofball on the planet. Mickey and Judy decide they need to put on a big show to make money for the college, only Mickey has no idea that Judy loves him, so he’s always making out with some blonde or other. It was really stupid, and Mickey Rooney struck her as a guy even straight girls would have a hard time finding sexy, but Judy Garland-well, Scotty was right. Judy was amazing.

There was that incredible voice, for one thing, and the big brown eyes and the way her face changed to show exactly what she was thinking all the time. When she sang “They’re writing songs of love, but not for me,” Birch found tears on her cheeks. The plot, Mickey Rooney, none of it mattered when Judy sang. The song went clear out of the stupid movie and into a whole world of its own, a world of love and pain and compassion, a world of someone who’d longed for love and wondered if she’d ever find it.

Birch knew that feeling. Back in her freshman year, she and her dad agreed that it was no big deal that nobody asked her to the school dance. She was only fourteen, and there was plenty of time to outgrow her tomboy stage. They both kept saying it as dance after dance came and went without anyone asking Birch (which was not her name back then but the name she took for herself when she realized she had to bend or she would break).

The junior prom was the first one that hurt. Not only had nobody asked her, but the boys she asked turned her down flat. Boys she’d known for years, gone hiking with, played baseball with, told her they wanted to ask other girls instead of her.

Then she took the dainty little watch with the real diamond chips her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen and exchanged it for a waterproof sports watch. For the first time in his life, Sam Tate allowed himself to say what Birch guessed he’d been thinking for a long time: Did she want everyone in Woodstock to think she was a lesbian, for God’s sake?

She wasn’t exactly sure what a lesbian was, but she knew it wasn’t good and it meant no boys asked you to dances.

Then she met Enid and the truth dawned. They were writing songs of love, but not for her, because nobody wrote songs of love for two girls.

So that was why the tears were there, not because Judy couldn’t get a stupid twit like Mickey Rooney to look twice at her.

FRI-TUES

Golddiggers of 1933

12:30 PM, 5:00 PM, 9:30 PM

Remember your Forgotten Man at this Depression-era classic. Powell and Keeler, Blondell and McMahon-can musicals get better than this?

Golddiggers of 1935

2:45 PM, 7:15 PM, 11 PM

Lullaby of Broadway” makes this the only noir musical in Hollywood history. Do boo Adolphe Menjou, but not during the movie, please.

Birch, 1972

THEY DID BOO Adolphe Menjou, first when his name came up on the credits, and again when he appeared in the movie. The booing was loud, long, and enthusiastic, and Birch was determined not to ask why.

The little man in the wine-colored beret who looked like a garden gnome gave a Bronx cheer when the dapper actor came on the screen. “Right on, Pop,” someone else yelled.

Birch remembered his cheerful tap-dance in the coffee room the last time she was at Theatre 80 and wondered what would make a nice old man behave like that.

When the double feature was over and she and Scotty rejoined Patrick in the lobby, he and the little man were deep in conversation.

“Busby Berkley was a tightass little shit,” the old man said, spittle gathering at the ends of his lips. “Little tin god-the way he treated Judy was a sin and a disgrace. And no,” he added, turning to Patrick, “he wasn’t one a youse, boyo. He liked girls all right-except when they were dancing.”

Birch didn’t wonder how the old man knew Patrick was gay. Everything about Patrick, from the open way he laughed, to the theatrical gestures, to his graceful walk, to the color-coordinated scarf he so carefully arranged around his neck, to his candid, flirty blue eyes told the world who he was. Birch admired that about Patrick; he never seemed to pretend or to feel ashamed.

“Remember that number in Golddiggers of ’38?” Patrick turned toward Scotty with a nod, inviting her into the discussion.

“ ‘I didn’t raise my daughter to be a human harp!’ ” Scotty quoted and both broke up laughing, neither bothering to explain the joke to Birch.

“Which was the one where Ruby Keeler danced on the giant typewriter?”

“Ready, Willing, and Able. Ruby’s last Warner’s musical.”

Birch turned to the old man and asked, “Were you in the movies?”

“Girlie,” the old man replied, “I started at Metro when its mascot was a parrot. The lion came later, after Sam Goldfish took over.”

Patrick’s face lit up with a combination of awe and amusement. “That’s Samuel Goldwyn to you and me,” he explained to Birch. Scotty just nodded; of course, she’d already known that.

“So you were in the Freed Unit,” Patrick said in a breathy voice. “You knew Arthur Freed? And Gene Kelly? And Vincente Minelli?”

“Freed Unit.” The old man shook his head. “There was no goddamn Freed Unit. That’s all made up by a bunch a people want to think the musical was more than it really was. Freed was a producer like all the rest, nothing special.”

The man in the beret might as well have tried to convince Patrick that Cary Grant wasn’t gay.

“Can we buy you a coffee?” Patrick asked. “We usually go to Ratner’s after the movie, and we’d be delighted if you’d-“

“Sure,” the little man replied. “My name’s Mendy, by the way.” His accent was deepest Bronx and his breath smelled of pipe tobacco. “Short for Mendelson.” He laughed without humor. “Of course, it was changed for the movies. Too long for the marquee, they said. Too Jewish for the marquee, they meant.”

Once inside the steamy dairy restaurant, he ordered borscht and when it came, sipped it loudly, smacking his lips in obvious appreciation, dunking hard pumpernickel rolls into it until they softened into an orange-colored mass.

Now Birch, her mouth nicely puckered from juicy dill tomato, asked the question she’d been trying to avoid. “Why did they boo that man? I thought he was okay in the movie.”

The old man’s answering smile was as tart as the dill tomato. “He was a Friendly.”

“Yeah,” Patrick said, his lips white with powdered sugar from his blintz. “He ratted on people he thought were Communists.”

“Only most of them weren’t,” Scotty added. “And even the ones who were-I mean, being a Communist wasn’t illegal when they joined the party back in the thirties.”

Birch spent the next five minutes being lectured to about the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, the graylist, Red Channels, a man named Dalton Trumbo, another man named Walter Winchell, and a lot of other ancient history that meant absolutely nothing to her.

Mendy sipped his black coffee, grimaced, and reached into his pocket for a tiny pillbox. With yellowed smoker’s fingers, he lifted the lid, took out a small white tablet, and slipped it into his coffee. He stirred, drank again, and smiled at Birch, who was watching the operation closely.

“My grandfather had nitroglycerin pills for his heart,” she said in a low voice. “But his doctor wouldn’t let him drink coffee.”

“These aren’t nitro, kid,” the old man replied. “Just saccharin. I’m a diabetic, gotta watch my sugar.”

“Ginger Rogers, too,” Patrick said. “Wasn’t she a Friendly?”

“No,” Mendy said, his sharp eyes narrowing with bad memories, “that was her ma.” He shook his head. “Poisonous woman. Had a tongue on her so sharp it’s a wonder she still had lips.”

“I always liked that Gene Kelly tried to fight the blacklist,” Scotty said. “Him and Bogie and Bacall.”

“Don’t forget the divine John Garfield,” added Patrick. “They all went to Washington to protest the Committee. But then the studios cracked down and they all folded.”

“The whole thing scared the hell out of Kelly,” Mendy agreed. “The First Amendment committee, Bogie, Bacall, Eddie Robinson. They make their big statement and then come back to Hollywood and find out they’ll be fired unless they tell the world they were duped by the evil Commies. It killed Garfield, the whole mess. Friends on one side, friends on the other, people going to jail-it ate him up inside, and one day he just died.”

Patrick asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Did you get called before the Committee, Mendy?”

“Believe it or not, I did. Went to a couple meetings, next thing I know I’m Public Enemy Number One. They hauled me up there, wanted me to name names. I said, hell no, I wasn’t gonna rat out my friends. Never worked again in the Industry. Not one day’s shooting did I get after that.”

“Wow,” Birch said, impressed. “But why didn’t you just tell them you were a Communist for a while but you didn’t want to name anybody else?” For some reason, she didn’t mind showing her ignorance before the old man. It was okay to know less than a guy who must be eighty years old.

“What you have to understand,” Mendy said, “is that you couldn’t do that. Once you answered one question, you had to answer them all. That’s why the Ten took the Fifth.”

Birch nodded as if this made sense. She supposed she knew what taking the Fifth meant, but who were the Ten?

“The Hollywood Ten,” Patrick whispered into her ear. “A bunch of writers. They refused to answer and they went to jail.”

“So if I’d gone in there and said, hell, yeah, I was a Commie and proud of it, or if I’d even said, I was a Commie and I’m ashamed of it now, they’d have asked me for the names of all the people I’d seen at meetings. Everybody I’d ever known in the old days would have been in trouble on account of me.”

“So you were blacklisted?”

“Made no sense to me. I mean, sure, some of the writers tried sneaking pinko lines into their movies, but I was a hoofer, for Chrissakes. What was I gonna do, tap Marxist slogans into my scenes?”

“How did you feel about that?” Birch thought the question was stupid; how would anybody feel about that? But then she realized Patrick already knew the answer, wanted the emotion, not the facts.

“Kid, what do you love more than anything in the world? How would you feel if you had that taken away from you for no good reason? Like they passed a law saying you’d go to jail if you-”

Patrick’s blue eyes glinted. “Honey, they did pass a law. I don’t need a blacklist to feel like a second-class citizen-I’m a faggot.”

Mendy lowered his eyes. “Sorry, kid. I kind of forgot.”

“That reminds me,” Patrick said with a snap of his slender fingers. “Did you know a dancer named Paul Dixon? He came out to Hollywood from Broadway, they wanted to make him a big star. He started rehearsals for, I think it was-”

“Summer Stock with Judy Garland,” Mendy replied. “Yeah, I knew him a little. In fact, he and I were up for a couple of the same roles.”

“Wasn’t there a rumor that he-” Patrick began.

Mendy nodded. “Yeah, that was almost worse than the blacklist, the way it killed his career. He coulda maybe beaten the Commie rap, but the other-that killed him dead.”

“What happened?” Scotty asked the question, which meant Birch didn’t have to.

“Westbrook Pegler-big columnist back then, not as big as Winchell, but big enough, writes a column calling Dixon ‘a mincing twerp with twittering toes.’ ” Mendy raised a bushy gray eyebrow. “I bet you can guess what he meant by that crack.”

“I could maybe think of something,” Patrick replied, his lips in a thin smile. “It’s one way of saying ‘swishy.’ ”

“I’m not saying that was the end of his career,” Mendy said, “but it was the end of any talk of leading roles. Your Astaires, your Kellys, your Donald O’Connors-they were all straight boys. You kept the swishers in the chorus, you didn’t team them with Rita Hayworth or Judy Garland.”

“So we never got to see Paul Dixon show what he could do,” Patrick said wistfully. “Tragic. Really tragic.”

WED-SAT

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

1 PM, 5:30 PM, 9:30 PM

Fun with Kelly and Sinatra as baseball player vaudevillians. Berkeley directs; Esther Williams stays dry; Betty Garrett and Jules Munshin get the laughs.

An American in Paris

3:15 PM, 7:15 PM

The Oscar-winning, best musical of all time! Gershwin music, glorious dances, and Minnelli’s amazing color palette make this a feast for eyes as well as ears.

Scotty, present

“IF I WERE going to die in a movie,” Patrick said as we passed Second Avenue and the former Fillmore East, “I think I’d want it to be An American in Paris. Doubled with Footlight Parade: Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell. I love the energy of that movie, the complete conviction that putting on a show, anywhere, anytime, anyplace is just about the best thing anyone can do.”

It was a measure of our madness in those days that nobody said, “What a sick idea.” We all gave the question serious thought.

Stanley, Patrick’s on-again-off-again romance, opted for Pal Joey. He had a thing for Kim Novak, whom he declared the closest thing to a transvestite he’d ever seen on the screen.

“The Bandwagon,” I said without even thinking twice. “Doubled with It’s Always Fair Weather.

“I want Peter Pan,” Birch said, a dreamy look in her eyes. “I always wanted to be able to fly.”

“My dear child,” Patrick said in his archest, most condescending tone, “you are speaking of cartoons, which, no matter how much music they contain, will never be taken seriously as musicals.”

Birch thrust out her chin and said, “What about when Gene dances with Jerry the mouse in Anchors Aweigh?”

Patrick threw back his head and laughed. “You’ve been teaching her at home, Scotty. Point taken. If the great Gene thinks cartoons belong in musicals, then you shall have Peter Pan if he makes you happy. After all,” he said, throwing out his arms in a campy, graceful dancer’s arc, “that’s what musicals are about: happiness.”

Birch, 1972

THE BASEBALL MOVIE was corny, although Birch had liked Betty Garrett, the lady with the husky voice who chased after Frank Sinatra the same way she’d chased after Enid the summer before. It made her blush to think of how young she’d been then, what a fool she’d made of herself. Frank Sinatra looked so different, young and skinny and kind of innocent and sweet, not like he was today, all tough-guy.

In the intermission she waved at Mendy, who raised his espresso to her. It was too crowded to get to him so she mouthed “Ratner’s” at him several times. He gave a vigorous nod and she turned away, satisfied.

She hoped it would be okay with the others that she invited him, and then decided, hell, she was as much a part of the group as they were and she could invite whoever she wanted. And besides, they liked hearing his stories, so what was the harm?

Scotty, present

THE OLD MAN stood out the first time I noticed him. Not that being old called my attention to him; many old people loved Theatre 80 for taking them back to a time they’d been young and in love.

But that was what set him apart: He didn’t look happy to be there. He looked grumpy, as if his wife had dragged him to see a musical and he’d grumbled all the way, telling her he couldn’t understand what she saw in a lightweight like Gene Kelly, not a real man like John Wayne or Kirk Douglas.

I had the whole dialogue worked out in my head. I knew this guy; he was my father, a man who never admitted enjoying anything if he could help it.

Funny part was, no wife ever showed up to sit next to him.

When the twenty-minute ballet that closed American in Paris ended, there was silence for a solid minute, and then the theater erupted in loud, sustained applause.

All except for the man in the last row. He sat stolid, his face a mask of indifference.

So why had he paid three-fifty for a seat? If he only wanted to warm up, the subway was seventy-five cents.

Then I noticed something else. His eyes were fixed, not on the screen, but on a man who sat three rows in front of him.

Mendy. The man’s attention was wholly occupied in watching Mendy, who clapped with apparent enjoyment, oblivious to the fact that he was being stared at so persistently.

The curtain’s close had us racing for the lobby, hoping to beat the crowd. The boys were already there, putting on leather jackets and wrapping scarves around necks in preparation for the cold October evening. Patrick was gesticulating, showing Stanley something he’d noticed in Gene’s dancing. Unusually clumsy in his exuberance, Patrick bumped into the man who had stared, and received an unusually harsh epithet in return.

“Pardon me, Mary,” he said with an archness I would have advised against.

The old man glared and replied, “You stupid fool. You made me-” He broke off, and I realized with a shock what he’d been about to say: “You made me lose the man I was following.”

It was true. Mendy, easily visible earlier in his wine-colored beret, had disappeared. I’d had my eye on him, hoping he’d come out with us again for coffee, but he was gone. Had he slipped out to avoid the man who was following him?

And why would anyone follow him?

Roberta

TUES-FRI 11 AM, 3:30 PM, 8 PM

“Smoke gets in your eyes” when Fred and Irene Dunne run a dress shop in Paris. Ginger’s “hard to handle,” but oh, so much fun to watch.

Funny Face

1:15 PM, 6:15 PM, 10:15 PM

Yes, Fred’s too old for her, but Audrey Hepburn makes us believe. The real gem is the elegantly butch Kay Thompson and the Gershwin score.

Scotty, present

WHAT WAS IT about musicals that grabbed me so in those days?

The boys-well, the boys loved the fashions, the campy lines, the red lipstick, even though neither was a cross-dresser. They loved the romance, too, and so did I in spite of myself. I might identify more with Fred the wooer than with Ginger the wooed, but still, the act of wooing, of loving so completely at first dance, had me in its thrall. I was, after all, a child of the fifties, of Loretta Young and her swirling skirt.

I’d always pictured my ideal lover wearing that skirt, a little Kim Novak evening sweater over her creamy shoulders, hair piled into an elegant French twist.

Instead, I had Birch, whose knees had barely healed from childhood skinnings, whose frayed bell-bottoms picked up the dirt of Manhattan streets, whose sad eyes reminded me that she’d lost everything dear to her when she came out: home and father, friends and family, everything she’d ever known. It was up to me to fill all her empty places, to show her a new life beyond the village of Woodstock, to buy her egg creams at Gem Spa and introduce her to Twyla Tharp’s dance company.

There were times I wondered if I’d taken on too much.

Birch, 1972

BIRCH HAD MISSED Mendy at Ratner’s the time before. With Stanley along, Patrick and Scotty had really done a number, remembering old movies Birch had never heard of, talking about favorite scenes, quoting lines, arguing about which studios had the best stock companies. Birch had gazed out the window into the crisp fall night, watching people walk past Kamenstein’s hardware store across the street, wondering what the hell she was doing here with these people.

She didn’t belong with Scotty and never would. She was only staying with her because she had no place else to go, nobody else to turn to. Scotty didn’t love her and never would. She was only being nice to a waif from the country.

The mood passed as soon as they left the dairy restaurant; Scotty took her hand as they walked home along Bleecker Street, past the welfare hotels and jazz joints, and Birch felt okay again.

But still, she was pleased to see that tonight Mendy was in his accustomed seat in the fourth row right, two rows down from where she and Scotty sat.

Scotty, present

THE SONG I love from Roberta is “Yesterdays.” It’s a wonderful Jerome Kern ballad, filled with a very Russian sense of longing for the past, and it’s sung by Irene Dunne just as her mentor, played by Helen Westleigh, lies on a couch dying one of those picturesque Hollywood movie deaths.

And perhaps Mendy died while that number played on the screen. I don’t know. All I do know is that when the curtain closed and Birch and I went over to him, he was no longer alive.

I’d shaken his shoulder after saying his name brought no response. He was slumped as if in sleep, but too still, too eerily silent, for death’s younger brother.

“He must have had a heart attack,” Patrick said, no trace of campy playfulness in his reedy voice.

We hung around the corridor, oddly reluctant to leave, yet having no real reason to be there. Sure, we’d known Mendy, shared food and stories of Hollywood, but we weren’t really friends. Still, leaving wasn’t an option any of us considered, at least not out loud.

The police arrived after the ambulance. I waited to be questioned, wondering whether I should tell them about the mystery man who’d followed Mendy.

But what did it matter who was following him if Mendy died of a heart attack?

The words “bitter almonds” caught my ear, reminding me of English murder mysteries set in enormous country houses. What did bitter almonds smell like, anyway, and how were they different from ordinary almonds? For a wild second, I wanted to ask the nearest cop if I could go in and sniff Mendy’s breath so I’d know for good and all.

I restrained myself. This wasn’t a Dame Agatha story; it was the real death of a real man I’d known and liked.

Correction: it was the real murder of a man I’d known and liked.

Because Mendy wasn’t a suicide. This I knew. He’d been wholly alive, not a thought of death in his head. He’d reveled in the discovery that there were people like us out there, people who wanted to hear his stories and relive his Hollywood glory days. People to whom the blacklist was an outrage and he a hero for enduring it.

Next question: How did you get cyanide-because that was the poison that smelled like bitter almonds-into someone’s coffee? Had Mendy put his cup down somewhere, just long enough for the killer to slip in the poison? Was it liquid or solid? Mrs. Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide made it sound liquid, which would be easier to administer-but wouldn’t it make the coffee taste bad?

The biggest question of all was why. Why was someone following Mendy? Why would anyone want him dead?

I went over to one of the cops and told him what I’d seen. The response I got was less than satisfactory.

How did I know it was Mendy he was following? How did I know he was following anybody at all? Couldn’t he have just been annoyed that Patrick bumped into him?

It wasn’t just that the police weren’t listening, I realized after a few minutes. They weren’t listening because of who we were. One cop kept looking at Patrick as if viewing a giant cockroach, and his partner asked me several times just how old Birch was. I had a sudden realization that in the eyes of the law, I was taking advantage of a minor.

I wound up the conversation quickly, leaving the theater dejected because of Mendy’s passing, but also frustrated that the police were going to call it suicide.

But what could I do about it?

Birch, 1972

GOING TO RATNER’s was like holding a wake for Mendy. At least, that was how Birch Tate saw it. They were eating Jewish food and talking about the old man and how much they’d liked him and how his death wasn’t suicide, and that was as close to a memorial as they were ever going to get.

Scotty and Patrick were deep in discussion about how somebody could have slipped poison into Mendy’s coffee when the guy at the counter took out a little pillbox and popped a tiny white pill into his coffee and then stirred. Funny way to take a pill, Birch thought and then realized: saccharin. People put saccharin in coffee when they wanted to lose weight or if they were diabetics or-

“That’s it,” she said, so loudly that even the man at the counter turned around. “Because you would,” she added, turning to Scotty.

“Would what?”

“Take a saccharin tablet if somebody offered it to you. Just like you’d take a joint. You wouldn’t say, no thanks, and take out your own because that would be rude. Mendy was a diabetic, remember?” Now Birch had Scotty’s attention, and Patrick’s too. “He put saccharin in his coffee the night we talked to him.”

“That is sheer brilliance,” Patrick said, and Birch blushed.

“That means the killer was in the theater,” Scotty pointed out. “Mendy always had espresso from the coffee bar.”

“Yeah, somebody walked up to him, opened his little pillbox first and offered him one and he said, sure, thanks, and didn’t think twice.”

“Which means one more thing,” Patrick said, his blue eyes alight. “The killer was somebody Mendy trusted. Or, no, maybe not trusted exactly, but not somebody he didn’t trust. Does that make sense?”

“I think so, Watson,” Scotty replied thoughtfully, her chin resting on steepled fingers.

“Why do I have to be Watson?” Patrick said, polishing off the last of his potato pierogies with onions. “What makes you think I’m not Holmes?”

“What makes you think I’m not Holmes?” Birch cut in, surprising herself at her own boldness. “I thought of the saccharin thing.”

“If you’re Holmes, then explain what Patrick just said.”

“It’s like the dog in the night-time,” Birch began.

“My God, you’re a Sherlockian!” Scotty reached over and took Birch’s powdered-sugary hand, lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

“If you mean, have I read the Canon, then I guess I am,” Birch replied, deliberately (and for the first time) using the term she’d read in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

“It’s love, folks,” Patrick said with a wide smile. “Birch, honey, Scotty here has been looking for you all her life. A girl who gets Sherlock. When’s the wedding?”

The warm feeling coursing through Birch like heated maple syrup wasn’t a bit dimmed by the dirty looks she received from two old ladies at the next table. Who cared what anybody thought about her and Scotty being together? Who cared whether or not some guy named Gershwin was writing songs of love for two girls-what mattered was the love itself. And this, thanks to Sherlock Holmes, she had.

“Right now, I think I’d rather come up with Mendy’s killer,” Scotty said, releasing Birch’s hand. “And I suspect we’ve all hit the same mental obstacle. If the killer is someone from Mendy’s blacklist days out to avenge an old wrong, why would Mendy take a saccharin tablet from him?”

“Exactly.” Birch leaned back in the booth with a satisfied expression on her face. “Just like the dog not barking. If Mendy didn’t recognize the guy who gave him the poison, it couldn’t have been an old enemy.”

“Unless Mendy didn’t realize the guy was an enemy.” Patrick’s voice was thoughtful and he gazed into the distance. “There were people who testified in executive session, secretly naming names and never getting the rap as informers. Poor Larry Parks, the guy married to Betty Garrett, had to do that.”

“But Mendy didn’t name names,” Birch objected. “He was a victim of the blacklist, so why would someone want to kill him?”

“You’re supposing he told us the truth,” Scotty said. She reached for a cigarette and Birch wrinkled her nose. Smoking was one of the few things about Scotty she genuinely disliked.

“What if he lied to us?” Scotty blew smoke into the air and waved out her match. “What if he did name names and somebody he named killed him out of revenge?”

“We’re back to the old problem,” Patrick said, irritation wrinkling his smooth forehead. “If Mendy ruined some guy’s life by giving him up to the Committee, why would he accept a pill from the guy?”

“Who expects somebody to poison you, for God’s sake?” Birch wasn’t sure why she’d decided to become devil’s advocate. “Maybe Mendy recognized the guy but thought bygones were bygones.”

“Not those people, honey.” Patrick shook his head and his long blond hair fell into his eyes. “Elia Kazan, to name just one, will never be forgiven for naming names. People who lived through the blacklist have long memories and there are no buried hatchets that I know about.”

“What if Mendy didn’t recognize the guy? It was a long time ago, and frankly, one old guy kind of looks like the next to me.”

“Wow.” Patrick gave a long low whistle. “Imagine. Ruining somebody’s life and then adding insult to injury by forgetting you’d ever done it. Heavy.”

“Heavy indeed,” said another, deeper, voice.

It was the man Scotty said had followed Mendy out of the theatre. Birch might never have recognized him out of context, but in Ratner’s, while they were talking of Mendy, he was in context.

“Sit,” Scotty said, moving over in the booth. “Sit and explain.”

“You can’t think he’s going to confess?”

Patrick looked at the old man and his blue eyes widened. “Are you who I think you are?”

“Paul Dixon. The former Paul Dixon. The present Paul Damrosch, not that it matters. I can’t keep a job under any name.”

“You blame Mendy for that?”

“He wrote the letter.” The little old man’s breathy voice held a world of sadness. “My best friend, and he goes into executive testimony, talks just to the committee, no publicity, names names, and my name leads all the rest. Then he plants that phony story with Pegler, calls me a faggot. Makes sure I’ll never work again. To this day, to this goddamn day I got FBI guys following me around.”

“How do you know it was Mendy?” Scotty’s voice held a note of pleading. “Couldn’t it have been somebody else?”

“You ever hear of the Freedom of Information Act?” Dixon looked around the group. Patrick nodded and Scotty started to speak, then closed her mouth.

“I got my files. I looked close, and even though they put black ink over all the names, I thought about where I was when, who I was with. Who took me to those so-called Communist meetings. I took out my old diaries I used to keep when I first got to Hollywood. Kept them so I could write home to my mother, tell her all the glamorous people I was meeting.”

“And you figured out that Mendy ratted on you,” Scotty said. A long blue cloud of smoke emanated from her lips; she crushed the butt into an ashtray. “He destroyed your career-but is that a good enough reason to kill somebody?”

“My wife couldn’t stand it. She was high-strung when we married, I knew that. But when we sold the house in the hills and moved to Compton, when I couldn’t even hold a job in a bakery, when she started seeing guys in black cars everywhere she went, she lost control. One night she took too many pills and died in her sleep and I will never, so long as the sun sets in the West, forgive Mendelson for that. He killed her with his big mouth.”

“If you were married, how could anybody believe you were gay?” Birch thought it was a good question, but Patrick rolled his eyes and Dixon gave a short, mirthless laugh.

“Kid,” the old man replied, “Rock Hudson was married. Every faggot in Hollywood-” he gave a brief, apologetic nod in Patrick’s direction-” pardon my French, makes damn sure to get married.”

When Birch blurted, “Rock Hudson is gay?” Patrick almost fell out of the booth laughing.

Scotty brought them back to the matter at hand. “Maybe he was just trying to save himself. Maybe he named you thinking the Committee already had your name.”

“That doesn’t excuse the call to Pegler,” the old man replied. “Mendy was jealous-he wanted the breaks I was getting and he thought if I was out of the way, he’d be cast in the roles I was up for. Happiest day of my life was when Gene Kelly said yes to Summer Stock, because that meant Mendy was screwed.”

“We figured out that you offered Mendy a saccharin tablet and he took it,” Patrick said. “Do you mean to tell us he didn’t recognize you?”

A slow, sweet smile crossed the wizened face. “Oh, he recognized me, all right. That’s why I’m not afraid you’ll tell the cops what I’m telling you. He recognized me and he knew he had two choices: take the pill and go quietly or let me tell my story. One thing about the old ham: he really liked putting on that ‘I was a victim of the blacklist’ crap, and he didn’t want anybody knowing him for the rat he was. I expected him to take the poison, the dirty coward. At least now I can go tell my Stella the bastard is dead.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah. She’s buried out in Woodlawn; I brought her home to be with her family. So I’ll take her a bouquet tomorrow and tell her that Mendy’s gone and she’ll maybe forgive me for going to those stupid meetings and screwing up my life.”

Scotty, present

THE COPS HAD Mendy’s death down as a suicide, and now it looked as if it really might have been one. There was nothing for us to do but drift home and make a date to see another double feature next week.

The newspapers reported the death of Paul Dixon, blacklisted “onetime movie hopeful,” about four months later. I figured he’d already been diagnosed with the emphysema that killed him; one more reason he wasn’t afraid of jail.

There’s a strange undercurrent of sadness in movie musicals. Judy’s addictions, Mickey’s pathetic eagerness to please, the frenetic tone of thirties musicals, the ones that packed as many chorus girls onto the screen as possible, perhaps just to keep them eating during the Depression. And what the blacklist did to a couple of young hoofers.

I once went to a church basement with an old friend and her deaf sister to see a silent movie. Before the film, a man made a speech in sign language, which Beth kindly interpreted for me, saying that the great days of silent film were still alive in the church basements and libraries where, as he put it, “The lights are turned down, the projector is turned on, and the deaf watch.”

It was a strangely moving experience, seeing Lillian Gish and John Gilbert with people who saw their movies as whole, not soundless. I think of that when I recall the days and nights we spent at Theatre 80. The movie musicals were made for Main Street, for families and “kids of all ages.” Old people and gay people bought the tickets at Theatre 80. We were an audience not planned for, but perhaps especially sweet because unexpected. We kept the musical alive in those lean years between Brigadoon and Saturday Night Fever-not that even Patrick, with his huge crush on Travolta, ever accepted Fever as a true musical.

Patrick died a year ago today. He was our cruise director, our emcee, our encylopedia of all things Hollywood. Gay Hollywood was his specialty, and like so many of us, he took great pleasure in claiming the brightest, most incandescent stars for “our side.” As if straight America would come to tolerate us if they learned that some of their favorite stars were “that way.”

Oh, Patrick, I do miss you!

My life back then had more Patrick in it than I knew. I breathed him like air, and it never occurred to me that one day he would cease to exist, like the musical itself.

No, not AIDS; he hated clichés, except when they were lines from old movies. Plain, ordinary, vanilla cancer, the kind straight people get, too. And, yes, I brought a VCR to the hospital so he could watch all the musicals his heart desired and I think, I hope, Footlight Parade was the last one he saw.

So tonight Birch and I will gather together all the people who loved him. We’ll make buttered popcorn, toast him with champagne, and celebrate the life of a man who was completely and totally big time in his heart.

And perhaps we’ll raise one of those glasses to the late, never-great Paul Dixon.