TWO
Anyway, I arrived in New York City safely—a girl so freshly hatched that there was practically yolk in my hair.
Aunt Peg was supposed to meet me at Grand Central. My parents had informed me of this fact as I’d gotten on the train in Utica that morning, but nobody had mentioned any particular plan. I’d not been told exactly where I was supposed to wait for her. Also, I’d been given no phone number to call in case of an emergency, and no address to go to should I find myself alone. I was just supposed to “meet Aunt Peg at Grand Central,” and that was that.
Well, Grand Central Station was grand, just as advertised, but it was also a great place for not finding someone, so it’s no surprise that I couldn’t locate Aunt Peg when I arrived. I stood there on the platform for the longest time with my piles of luggage, watching the station teeming with souls, but nobody resembled Peg.
It’s not that I didn’t know what Peg looked like. I’d met my aunt a few times before then, even though she and my father weren’t close. (This may be an understatement. My father didn’t approve of his sister Peg any more than he’d approved of their mother. Whenever Peg’s name came up at the dinner table, my father would snort through his nose and say, “Must be nice—gallivanting about the world, living in the land of make-believe, and spending it by the hundreds!” And I would think: That does sound nice. . . .)
Peg had come to a few family Christmases when I was young—but not many, because she was always on the road with her theatrical touring company. My strongest memory of Peg was from when I’d come to New York City for a day trip at age eleven, accompanying my father on a business venture. Peg had taken me to skate in Central Park. She’d brought me to visit Santa Claus. (Although we both agreed I was far too old for Santa Claus, I would not have missed it for the world, and was secretly thrilled to meet him.) She and I had also eaten a smorgasbord lunch together. It was one of the more delightful days of my life. My father and I hadn’t stayed overnight in the city because Dad hated and distrusted New York, but it had been one glorious day, I can assure you. I thought my aunt was terrific. She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.
More recently, Aunt Peg had come back home to my hometown of Clinton in order to attend the funeral of Grandmother Morris, her mother. She’d sat next to me during the service and held my hand in her big, capable paw. This gesture had both comforted and surprised me (my family were not predisposed toward hand-holding, you may be shocked to learn). After the funeral, Peg had embraced me with the strength of a lumberman, and I’d dissolved into her arms, spewing out a Niagara of tears. She’d smelled of lavender soap, cigarettes, and gin. I’d clung to her like a tragic little koala. But I hadn’t been able to spend much time with her after the funeral. She needed to leave town right away, because she had a show to produce back in the city. I felt that I’d embarrassed myself by falling to bits in her arms, comforting though she had been.
I barely knew her, after all.
—
In fact, what follows is the sum total of everything I knew about my Aunt Peg, upon my arrival in New York City at the age of nineteen:
I knew that Peg owned a theater called the Lily Playhouse, located somewhere in midtown Manhattan.
I knew that she had not set out for a career in the theater, but had come by her work in a rather random way.
I knew that Peg had trained as a Red Cross nurse, curiously enough, and had been stationed in France during World War I.
I knew that, somewhere along the way, Peg had discovered that she was more talented at organizing entertainments for the injured soldiers than she was at tending to their wounds. She had a knack, she found, for turning out shows in field hospitals and barracks that were cheap, quick, gaudy, and comic. War is a dreadful business, but it teaches everyone something; this particular war taught my Aunt Peg how to put on a show.
I knew that Peg had stayed in London for a good long while after the war, working in the theater there. She was producing a revue in the West End when she met her future husband, Billy Buell—a handsome and dashing American military officer who had also decided to stay in London after the war to pursue a career in the theater. Like Peg, Billy came from “people.” Grandmother Morris used to describe the Buell family as “sickeningly wealthy.” (For years, I wondered what that term meant, exactly. My grandmother revered wealth; how much more of it would qualify as “sickening”? One day I finally asked her this question, and she answered, as if it explained everything: “They’re Newport, darling.”) But Billy Buell, Newport though he may have been, was similar to Peg in that he shunned the cultured class into which he had been born. He preferred the grit and glitter of the theater world to the polish and repression of café society. Also, he was a playboy. He liked to “make fun,” Grandmother Morris said, which was her polite code for “drinking, spending money, and chasing women.”
Upon their marriage, Billy and Peg Buell returned to America. Together, they created a theatrical touring company. They spent the better part of the 1920s on the road with a small cadre of troupers, barnstorming towns all across the country. Billy wrote and starred in the revues; Peg produced and directed them. The couple never had any highfalutin ambitions. They were just having a good time and avoiding more typical adult responsibilities. But despite all the effort they made not to be successful, success accidentally hunted them down and captured them anyhow.
In 1930—with the Depression deepening and the nation tremulous and afraid—my aunt and her husband accidentally created a hit. Billy wrote a play called Her Jolly Affair, which was so joyful and fun that people just ate it up. Her Jolly Affair was a musical farce about an aristocratic British heiress who falls in love with an American playboy (portrayed by Billy Buell, naturally). It was a light bit of fluff, like everything else they’d ever plunked down on the boards, but it was a riotous success. All across America, pleasure-starved mine workers and farmers shook out the last bits of loose change from their pockets in order to see Her Jolly Affair, making this simple, brainless play into a profitable triumph. The play picked up so much steam, in fact, and garnered such bountiful praise in the local papers, that in 1931, Billy and Peg brought it to New York City, where it ran for a year in a prominent Broadway theater.
In 1932, MGM made a movie version of Her Jolly Affair—which Billy wrote but did not star in. (William Powell did the acting job instead. Billy had decided by this point that a writer’s life was easier than an actor’s life. Writers get to set their own hours, they aren’t at the mercy of an audience, and there’s no director telling them what to do.) The success of Her Jolly Affair spawned a series of lucrative motion picture sequels (Her Jolly Divorce, Her Jolly Baby, Her Jolly Safari), which Hollywood churned out for a few years like sausages from a hopper. The whole Jolly enterprise made quite a pile of money for Billy and Peg, but it also signaled the end of their marriage. Having fallen in love with Hollywood, Billy never came back. As for Peg, she decided to close the touring company and use her half of the Jolly royalties to buy herself a big, old, run-down New York City theater of her very own: the Lily Playhouse.