“I must say, you don’t seem terribly surprised,” he said, looking miffed. “I thought I’d nail you in your tracks when you walked in.”
“Damned clever, these Chinese.”
He grinned that lopsided, jack-o’-lantern grin of his. “I suppose you must be wondering why I’ve asked you here tonight.” He delivered the line and laughed.
I had to admit, it was funny. I’m not sure if I mean funny ha-ha or funny finger-down-the-throat, but it was funny. Maybe you had to be there. I was there, trying to take it all in my stride.
“Well. Is this a bitch or isn’t it?” Dore asked, a bit sheepishly, I thought.
I agreed that yes, it was a bitch. I’d been set up, and what a set-up. I seemed to regard him as though through the long end of the telescope, a far distance down a long tunnel of years—nearly a quarter of a century of offbeat, crazy recollections. I knew I’d been had at Torreon, and God knew elsewhere, him and his Aunt Bob)—I knew Aunt Bob had to be in on this—him with his fried catfish and his cowboy horsebacking. My mind seethed with questions, the most burning of which was When. When had it begun? For how long was Dore Skirball Babe Austrian, or, more to the point, how long was Babe Austrian Dore Skirball? What was behind it all? The questions were endless; I wanted the answers, but somehow this didn’t seem just the right moment.
One look had told me he was sick, sicker than he wanted me to know, or perhaps knew himself. If he wasn’t precisely at death’s door he was certainly in the neighborhood.
“How are you, really?” I asked.
“Not top of the heap, as any fool can plainly see. I’ve got the heartbreak of psoriasis, ducks, I think I’m going to pop off.” He saw my look. “No, not today, Chazz. I’m likely to be around a bit longer. But I had something on my mind, something I wanted to consult with you about. Anyway, I thought it was time to straighten out one or two small details before I do pop.”
There was a sudden wriggling under the covers, and a small head appeared: Tiny, the Chihuahua of recent fame; then she sprang altogether into sight, flew across the bed, tail wagging, and plopped in my lap, where she began jumping up, trying to lick my face, as though to thank me for reviving her in the Chicago fire.
Dore patted his thigh. “Tiny, do stop.” The sound of his own, real voice recalled many scenes from earlier times, and I was happy to be hearing it. But I wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily.
“I know one thing,” I said. “I know how Miss Italy’s going to die.”
“Angie? How, love?”
“By my hand. I’m going to murder her for this.”
Dore wagged his head. “I really don’t think so, ducks,” he said.
“Are you going to tell me she isn’t in on this whole thing?”
“No, I’m not, but it’s not her doing really. She’s only involved because someone had to be, after Frankie went. I couldn’t do it all alone, you know.”
I was at my most sarcastic. “I suppose not. After Frankie got shot. And while we’re on the subject, just what does Frank Adonis have to do with this?”
“As it happens, it was all his idea.”
“Come on, Eve, this is Addison, remember?” No one was going to convince me of that. A hoax on this grand a scale? It wasn’t Frank’s style.
Dore was bristling. “If you don’t want to believe me, okay, you can get the whole story from Madame La Zonga.” He shouted through cupped hands. “Miss Italy, get your ass in here.”
I was totally confused as the door opened and Angie Brown appeared on the threshold.
“What the hell’s going on around here?” I demanded. “You were supposed to be playing tennis in the desert.”
I heard that delicious laugh as she hurried to kiss me. “You darling,” she said, her arms still around me in a bear hug. “Fancy seeing you like this.”
I held her away from me and looked at her. “What’s going on here anyway?”
She played the innocent. “I don’t know what you mean, Chazz. Nothing’s going on, that I know of. Oh—you must mean our little masquerade; is that what he means, Dore dear?”
“You’d better tell him. About Frank. He doesn’t believe me.
“I don’t know what to believe. I wish somebody would explain.”
I sat down and Angie perched on the other corner of the bed. “Dore wasn’t kidding, Chazz; it was Frank’s idea. His and no one else’s. He had to do it; otherwise he would have ended up with his head in a bucket of cement.”
“But why?”
“Because of Babe. The real Babe.”
“And the real Babe? Suppose we agree on where she’s at these days.”
“Dead,” they said in unison.
I could see how eager he was to tell me the whole story, but I could also see that he was exhausted and that my being there was a strain on him. I decided to let explanations wait and get to the reason for my being summoned in the first place. Suddenly he seemed to shrink in the bed, and I could see he was deeply distressed by something, something more than the state of his health.
“What is it? Something to do with Babe?” I asked.
He nodded, but warily. “Maybe—maybe we better save it for later. Better yet, let Angie tell you.”
I could see he was tired, so I sat back and listened to Angie explaining how the back tenant at North Cadman Terrace had turned himself into one of the greatest female performers of all time.
She really had died in Mexico, Babe: at Rosarita Beach, aboard the Black Star. There’d been a drunken argument between Ears Satriano and Al “Vegas” da Prima. Trying to intervene, Babe had got herself caught by a bullet. “They dumped the body overboard and lit out for calmer waters. Frank flew down to identify the corpse. The minute he saw that it was Babe, he knew he was in hot water. The idea came to him all at once. Luckily there was Patsy. Patsy Doyle was the answer, and he saw how to pull the whole thing off.”
“But why did he identify her as Patsy?”
“Because,” Angie replied, “if he’d said it really was Babe, he was in trouble with some very nasty characters. Between them they’d put over a million bucks into a movie, Camellia. If Babe didn’t do the picture, Frank was a dead duck. It was up to him to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. So he did.”
“Good old Frank. But who’s ‘they’?”
“The boys, darling. The Vegas gang, friends of Bugsy’s. They’d rubbed him out, they could do the same with Frank. Dore was the way out. So Frank got Patsy to lie low, then he dug up Patsy’s husband—Snake-Hips—paid him to say the body was Patsy’s and do a big number about avenging her death.”
“Yeah, but what about Patsy? What became of her?”
“She took the money and ran. Quite a chunk, as a matter of fact; she and Snake really put the screws to Frankie. He was in hock to the banks for that one. But he made it up on Dore. Anyway, Snake got a job at a dog track in Miami, Patsy bought herself a beauty parlor, and they settled down.”
I blinked. This was all so neatly carpentered, I couldn’t believe it. Yet I had to. This was no time for lies; I knew I was getting the real feed. Angie went on: “And when everything was tied up neatly in Mexico, he flew straight over to Yuma and Torreon, where he met with Dore and persuaded him to try the stunt on.”
“Some stunt,” I said.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Angie said. “He brought it off—they both did.”
“But how?”
“Well, the first thing to do was to let everybody see Babe—Frankie’s Babe. Right away, pictures had to be in the paper. So he called me to help Dore put a wardrobe together. He needed the wigs, the shoes, padding, the works.”
“You did all that?”
Angie grinned. “Why not? For Frank I’d have played Babe.”
“Dore’s better,” I said.
“Isn’t he! He was fabulous, right from the start!”
Clever Frank, he hadn’t let Dore show his face anywhere close to home, where discrepancies might have been noted by the ultra-keen. Frank
got the idea of sending him as far away as they could manage. As soon as Dore showed up in Buenos Aires, he checked in at the Plaza—checked in as himself, but checked out as Babe Austrian. “And in the meantime,” Dore said, sitting up in bed, “there was Rollo.”
“Yeah, what about that number? Rollo of Argentina? The Tin King?”
“He wasn’t any kind of king,” Dore went on. Clearly, he was enjoying himself. “There wasn’t any real Rollo. Rollo was just one more impostor in the game, some joker who owed Frank a favor and worked it off by playing Rollo. Paid to chase Babe and create those screwball scenes to keep my picture in the papers. Then, when he wasn’t needed anymore, Rollo got sent home to show off his mustache and spats.”
“Then what?”
“Frank got the biggest theatrical bookers in South America to book me on a tour,” Dore said. “Babe’s ‘comeback,’ as they called it. I played my way up to Rio, then to Mexico City, but no closer to home. Frank wouldn’t let me come back to L.A.”
“And Camellia?”
“That was a pretty sticky wicket. I wasn’t ready to put my face on the silver screen. But Camellia went before the cameras, right on schedule.”
“But wasn’t that just what you feared? Closeups?”
“There weren’t any closeups. If you look hard, you’ll notice that the closeups on Babe come only when she’s playing Madame La Zonga, the fortuneteller.”
How many times had I seen Camellia over the years since it was made? Babe Austrian’s “perfect” farce? But not Babe—Babe hadn’t been within a country mile of that film. It was Dore’s, all Dore’s. Dore Skirball gave good Babe.
“He worked so hard,” Angie said. “No one knows how hard he sweated.”
I could imagine. Such a metamorphosis couldn’t come about with a mere snap of the fingers. But what daring, what foolhardiness—and what an accomplishment.
“It’s true,” Dore said. “Every word.”
“Just where did your Aunt Bob come in?”
“She refitted all of Babe’s wardrobe for Dore,” Angie said.
“So what about that deal in Torreon?”
Angie looked at Dore, then at me. “You can blame me for that. When you mentioned you wanted to go catch Dore’s down-on-the-farm act I panicked. I thought sure we’d blow it. We had to make it look like he’d been living there for years.”
“What about all that business of the bedroom? All the books and stuff.”
“That wasn’t my room,” Dore said. “It was Bobbie’s sewing room, I hadn’t been there for ages. When Angie said you were coming, we got together a lot of stuff to make it look as if Dore might live there. Not very convincing, I’m afraid.”
“You had me fooled. What I don’t understand is—why did you go to all the trouble? Frank knew, Angie knew, why not me, too?”
Angie shook her head. “No. Sorry, Chazz, but Frank wanted it kept secret. He made us promise. Nobody was to know, not even you. Don’t take it personally—the more who were in on the gag, the more chance of its getting out. And if it did, Frank would pay the price.”
“You really loved him, didn’t you?”
She smiled, and let it pass. “Now we’re going to leave you, Dore.” She got up and held out her hand to me. “Come on. We’ll let Hot Stuff here get his rest like the doctor ordered. You’ll see Chazz again,” she told him and took me out. When she closed the door she sighed and leaned wearily against the wall. “Well, that wasn’t as tough sledding as I’d feared. He’s been awfully upset—having to tell you. None of this is easy on him.”
“What is it? How sick is he?” I asked as we went along the hall.
“He puts on a good show, but”—she shrugged helplessly—“he’s chuckablock with cancer.”
“Isn’t there anything to be done?”
“Nope.”
Poor Dore. When I looked at my watch and mentioned that I was now three-quarters of an hour late for my lunch date, Angie grabbed my arm. “No, wait, you can’t go yet. You still don’t know why he wanted to talk to you.”
She looked through some papers on a table and handed me a fancily engraved envelope.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s a letter from the Board of Governors of the Comedy Hall of Fame, stating that it’s been their unanimous decision to present Babe Austrian with its annual award. They want to induct her into the Hall of Fame.”
“But that’s wonderful!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, it’s a real coup for him. But there’s a hitch. They expect him to appear. In person. On television.”
“Can’t someone accept for him?”
“Of course. But he really wants to appear, only he’s afraid to. He thinks it wouldn’t be morally right. It’s a question of ethics. He thinks if he just stalls it, he’ll—”
“Have it awarded it posthumously?”
“Something like that.” She held the kitchen door for me and I passed through, only to get clobbered by another shock. Sitting at the table were Pepe, Sluggo McGurk, a man I recognized as Waldo Dacey, Babe’s long-time accompanist, and a fourth individual, a woman. She turned round in her chair and I was looking at Dore’s Aunt Bob. She jumped up and gave me a big hug and kiss.
“Many’s the time I’ve hoped to see you again, Chazz, but not like this. Well, you’ve had the whole story by now. What do you think?”
I hardly knew what to say. Aunt Bob had been in the city since the arrival of the award announcement, and along with the rest of Dore’s cronies had been trying to persuade him to accept it.
“Don’t you think he should?” she asked.
“Damn right he should. God knows he deserves it.” It seemed we were all agreed on that.
“And God knows he was much funnier than she ever was,” Waldo said staunchly. “He’s been laying them in the aisles for twenty years. And his audience was a lot bigger than hers.”
“I can vouch for that,” I said, remembering his Chicago appearance when they all but tore the place apart.
“Then you should darn well go tell him,” Aunt Bob said. “Persuade him to do it.”
“Is this what he wanted to talk to me about?” I asked. Angie nodded.
“Only not today,” she said. “He’s exhausted. Come back tomorrow. Talk to him. He’ll listen to you.”
So I left, wishing I was as sure of my powers of persuasion as Angie was. I’d never known Dore Skirball to listen to anybody.
And there you have it. Or, rather, there I had it. In spades. Was ever anything trickier pulled on us, all of us who believed—however little—in the truth of things, in the world’s being round, in water’s being two parts of hydrogen, one of oxygen, in the Trinity, the Seven Seas, Nine Muses, Twelve Apostles, and fifty-four American presidents? And one, count him, one Dore Skirball? Oddball. Screwball, too, don’t forget, a real nut-burger. This clever fellow we’d been cozened and duped by, for how many years? By “we” I mean me and all the millions of others who were taken in by this incredible piece of trickery.
He really made me feel like a jackass. I kept going over all the clues that had lain there but I hadn’t been smart enough to pick up on, all the times he’d deliberately fooled me—like the trip to Torreon and the Cowboy Bill scene.
Yes, we’d been duped, but I decided we’d better make the best of it, because there was nothing that was going to change the facts; and let me state it emphatically, these are the facts. No mistake, not the least possibility of error. And what conclusion is to be drawn from them? What theories to be posited, what to be deduced? This grotesque transfiguration, this Dr. Jekyll into Miss Hyde (she never married, Babe; of course “she” never married). Marvin Breckenridge (Myra to you) had recourse to the scalpel, you’ll remember, but the transformation of Dore Skirball into the fabled Babe Austrian, while less surgical, was far more effective in the long run, a psychological alteration that owed more to art than a snip-snip and some adroit needlework in a high-priced Scandinavian clinic. Physical scars had he none; yet as to the me
ntal variety, I’m not so sure—or, rather, I am most sure; he had them aplenty. Dore Skirball was to all intents and purposes a nonentity, born in the dun countryside of the Texas Panhandle, the dude who emerged not a butterfly, but a moth. Yet talented, so talented. Never had a lesson, never a coach, yet he had created out of that reservoir of talent an extraordinary being; for all that, he was that show-biz oddity, a drag queen. Worse, he had been pleased—almost until the end—to let his incredible masquerade pass unnoted by all but a handful of his fellow beings, and those few pledged to secrecy.
Yes, Dore Skirball had done something no other man had done in the entire history of show business. He had successfully taken the place of a female performer, had impersonated her onstage and off for years, and no one the wiser. I thought how difficult it was for most people to lead just one life with any degree of satisfaction, and then I thought how really difficult it must have been for him to lead two. While he may have enjoyed playing Babe at given times, especially the onstage ones, certainly he couldn’t have wanted to be her all the time. Yet what choice had he? If ever a bed had been made that would have to be slept in, this was it. How taxing, to live day after day, month after month, year after year, under such circumstances. Very wearing, being a full-time Babe.
Plainly, it had been what Dore had wanted going in, but coming out, I’m not so sure. Nobody ought to get the idea that he’d ever become Babe—this wasn’t the old movie gag where the dummy takes over the ventriloquist. Playing Babe had brought him two things, the glory he’d always craved and the opportunity to display his talent, plus enough money to keep himself in the manner to which he’d always wanted to become accustomed.
But in playing Babe, Dore had become a walking, talking self-denial. In acting out that role he had abandoned himself while creating his own myth, and in so doing had become the prisoner of that myth. The Frankenstein doctor’s brainchild had grown into a monster, awesome and grim in its towering force, much more than some Karloffian movie creature with a steel bolt through the neck and a stitched-on forehead.