My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online

stage singing “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” The number girl was Mary Joyce, a nice blonde with a nice voice, and when she knocked off, the curtains opened and the stage was crowded with girls. The chorus danced out toward the customers and then danced back in, gently bobbing the transparent bibs over their breasts. The haughty showgirlsparaded. Then the toe-line, a chorus of ballet girls from the Fokine school, an innovation in burlesque, tiptoed out.
    “Let’s catch this toe number,” said Emmett Callahan, managing director of the Apollo, who was backstage for a few minutes.
    He got out of his chair beneath the call board, and pushed his way into the wings. The pert little girls in the ballet tiptoed this way and that. They made a sudden dip in unison and their short, starched skirts billowed out. Mr. Callahan watched them with approval, smiling at the leader as she danced into the wings.
    Mr. Callahan is one of burlesque’s bright boys. He came from Toledo, where Joe E. Brown was in his class in public school. He used to work in vaudeville—“Midgie Miller & The Callahan Brothers.” He has been in the show business twenty-six years, mostly around New York, and now, even including the Minskys, he is probably the most important burlesque impresario.
    He is the husband of Ann Corio, by far the most popular stripper, the girl who once drew down $1,900 for a week in Cleveland, topping Gypsy Rose Lee by hundreds and hundreds of dollars. She works on a percentage basis, taking a big cut of the profits. Mr. Callahan calls her “Annie.”
    “Classy little shrimps,” said Mr. Callahan, surveying his ballet.
    When the ballet finished up, three Negro tap-dancers in fancy brown tuxedos clattered out. Mr. Callahan, uninterested, left the wings and went back to his chair. Unclothed girls stood all around him, but he did not notice them. When one girl passed he nodded when she spoke, and said, “How’s your cough, Mary?” The little girl said, “Oh, I’m O.K., Mr. Callahan.”
    A cough is unusual in a burlesque company, and colds are practically unknown. The hardihood of the overworked and underpaid burlesque girls is amazing. They work naked, sometimes in drafty houses, and they make quick changes in overheated dressing rooms and then run down cold stairways, but they are rarely under the weather. Mr. Callahan said the exercise they get makes them robust; stomping their way through four or five shows a day the girls get more exercise than a fighter in a training camp.
    The conduct of the girls backstage is always disappointing to reformers. Out on the stage they will work naked and feel no embarrassment, but when they run backstage and climb the stairs to their dressing rooms they try to cover themselves up.
    Conversation between the girls and the men in the stage crew is forbidden. The boyfriends of thegirls are not allowed to come backstage. As a matter of fact, it is hard for any outsider to get permission to go backstage in a burlesque theater in this city. The days when Billy Minsky used to permit gents from the Racquet and Tennis Club to stand in the wings are gone with Billy.
    Each chorus has a captain, a girl with a sense of responsibility, who can impose fines on her colleagues if, for example, she catches them chewing gum on the stage. If a girl sits down on a dusty backstage bench, getting her costume dirty, the chorus captain says, “Stand up.” If the girls chatter too loud in the wings the captain says, “Dry up, kids.” In the business the girls are always referred to as “the kids.”
    If they show up tipsy, they are tossed out of the show. Even a beer breath warrants a bawling out. Burlesque, of course, is a target for all sorts of reformers. If men were allowed to congregate at the stage door, as they congregate at the stage doors of the $5.50 musical comedies, or if a girl were drunk on the stage, the Women’s League Against Everything would be in the manager’s hair in a few