Authors: Thomas Tryon
With Babe were her pianist, Waldo Dacey, who was to remain with her for the rest of her career, along with Pepe Ventura, her new manager-
cum
-hair-stylist, part Mexican, part Arapaho Indian, who would also be at her side as long as she appeared in public—and after. These days she was rehearsing long hours for her club opening, but Frankie let it be known that on one or two occasions she would be on hand to reply to questions from the audience. Since the Maiden Lane was now on its last legs, having suffered considerable damage during the war from a buzz bomb, Frankie brought together a group of preservationists who formally declared the building a historic landmark. He plastered its front with the most garish display of Babe hoopla, including a ten-foot replica of the star in her costume from
The Sheik of Araby
, whose form both undulated and spoke in those inimitable accents. Londoners went wild.
Next Frank got her on the BBC. Staid old British Broadcasting played host for
Everybody’s Babe
, she was interviewed for all to see, and the Queen Mum was quoted as saying, “She seems quite a sweet old dear to me.” Babe herself cut the piece out of the paper and stuck it to her dressing-room mirror.
Jenny and I went to the opening as Frank’s guests. We even sat at his table with Frances, who’d flown over for the event. Among other ringsiders we spotted the Snowdons, Charlie and Oona Chaplin, Josephine Baker, in from Paris, Grace Kelly there with the Prince, Liz and Burton, the Duke de Vedura, the Marquis de Cuevas—name them, they all came. Babe Austrian was hot stuff.
She even got away with that corniest of show-biz tricks, the sing-along. “Come on, louder, you guys, I can’t hear you!” She had them in a frenzy. Later, in the Green Room, the line waiting to pay their respects to her was as star-studded as the ringside had been. Everyone wanted to have a word with her, and the social invitations came fast and furious. Frankie was on hand, making sure the right photographs were taken of Babe with all the right people, celebrities and royals alike. It was a night of nights.
It was the same thing all over again when she got to Paris months later. Wisely, Frankie had booked the Trocadéro well in advance, the best room Paris had to offer; and, equally wisely, Babe had been boning up on her French, and the place was flabbergasted when she waltzed out and began with her Mademoiselle de Paree brand of
parlez-vous.
Everything fit together now—it was all gravy, there for the lapping up. But, as so often happens in the best of times, it was just here that fate chose to play the lousy trick she’d been saving up for so long, the blow that was designed to knock Babe Austrian back on her uppers. Everyone remembers that terrible accident.
Taking his cue from the reception at the Command Performance, when Babe had created such a sensation on the ramp, Frankie had worked out more or less the same staging for Paris. There was a pozzarella, or horseshoe ramp, built out into the audience, where she could really get close to the paying customers. She always loved working the pozzarella with its twin rows of bulb lights, and it was here that she met disaster. Her habit was to move out and around the ramp, accepting the flowers and tributes that enthusiastic fans and patrons thrust at her, leaning down to touch their outstretched hands, returning the flow of love and affection she received from them. Nightly it was her great moment and she always made the most of it.
One night, a Saturday, there was a man in the audience, a beefy cheese salesman from Düsseldorf who’d had a bit too much schnapps, and when he put his big mitt out to her she accepted it as she usually did. He took her hand in his and held on tight, until she felt herself being pulled off balance; he went on pulling, and a cry of surprise and alarm filled the room as she fell forward and landed with a crash in the pit.
Screams rang against the ceiling; the audience jumped to its feet and began to mill, and for a moment it looked as if there might be a panic and stampede. Frankie savagely pushed his way to the spot where she lay with her injured back, knocking aside one helpful man who was trying to lift her, shouting, “Don’t move her! Don’t move her!” She lay there on the floor until the house was emptied, when she could be safely moved out on a stretcher. She couldn’t talk, the pain was so great, and the doctor gave her shots to knock her out. Next morning the disheartening word flashed round the world—Babe Austrian had suffered a broken back. Her performing days were now over, she was finished. That’s what they said: show biz had seen the last of Babe Austrian, and she of it.
Everyone believed it; everyone except Babe, that is, and the astonishing fact is that exactly nine weeks later to the day, Babe Austrian again appeared before another select audience at the same Trocadéro. She played the show in a plaster cast, starting at her neck and going clear to the base of her spine, and when she came onstage in the wheeled contraption Frankie had had constructed, she delivered the wisecrack that was to follow her the rest of her life. Slapping her hands on her hips and giving the audience a wink, she said, “Well, ya can’t say I didn’t fall for ya.” The place went wild. Josephine,
La Bakair
, was again in the audience and she stood up from her seat to pay Babe the tribute that by now is an old story. Paris took her to its Gallic heart, and she ran at the Troc for a total of one hundred and forty-five consecutive performances.
It took another seven months for her injury to mend, yet she never missed a performance that whole summer. And when it came time to tape the show, as had been arranged by Frank for Euro-Television, she performed without a hitch. When it was over, she collapsed in her dressing room and Frankie sent her down to Lausanne to have the rest she deserved. And when she finally returned to the U.S.A. a year later, and put her little size sixes down on American soil, she grinned at the battery of TV cameras and said, “Find me a place to lay my head, boys,” show business was changed, too.
“I’ve come back to separate the men from the boys and the sheep from the wolves,” she kidded. It was not merely the catch-phrase of twenty years ago, but a political referendum. Cleopatra’s triumphal entry into Rome was no more rousing an event than Babe’s reappearance in New York City on that warm spring day in 1965. And as Julius Caesar himself had engineered the one, Frank Adonis had brought off the other; it’s no secret that he was the moving force behind the wild and frantic tribute New York paid to Babe after all her years away. If people thought that Frank had lost his knack, that he didn’t have the know-how anymore, they needed only to observe the frenzy that was whipped up in the streets of Manhattan for the granddaughter of an Alsatian immigrant and a Norwegian milkmaid.
Babe arrived in New York on May 10, 1965, when the
France
steamed up the Hudson and docked at the old
Normandie
berth, and Babe was swung from “A” Deck in a floral-decorated breeches buoy, to be deposited on the pier, where Mayor Lindsay presented her with the traditional welcoming Key to the City. “Look out, boys, Babe’s back in town,” she said, brandishing the giant beribboned key for the newsreels. “With this thing I guess I can open any door in Manhattan.”
And she was, for a certainty, back in town. Now the lady had come home to reclaim what was rightfully hers, the hurrahs of her fans of almost forty years. The reporters were fascinated and full of their typically “of interest to our readers” questions.
“Hey, Babe, how long have you been abroad, anyway?”
“All my life, sonny, all my life.”
“Just how old are you, Babe?”
“Old enough to know better and young enough to enjoy it.”
“Are you home for good?”
“Good or bad, whichever turns up first.”
Babe had arrived in New York to find
Camellia
playing all over town. The enormous success of the revival of this film could only have delighted her, and the movie box-office lines worked in concert with her new Broadway show, one of Frank’s devising, that incredibly successful one-woman evening called
My Head on a Silver Platter
, that opened at the Booth Theatre, the same house that had presented Bea Lillie in her famous solo run.
Meanwhile, it got in the columns that she’d had her face done; I decided the rumors must be correct, because the next time I saw her she certainly had a new look. This was a year or so later, when she went on
The Ed Sullivan Show
for the first time, plugging her show. She looked great, had lost weight, which Frank was always trying to get her to do, her cheeks had taken on a sculptured look, her hair was better dressed, and she belted out her numbers with obvious relish. Ed himself seemed awed by her—the Babe legend was hard at work even on the Great Stone Face—and he stumbled around more than usual as he ad-libbed with her. “A ver’ great performer, ver’ ver’ great. Thank you, Babe Osterreich,” forgetting she hadn’t been that for decades. That was Ed all over.
In this, her first nationally televised appearance, she sang two numbers, “The ABC’s of Love” and “The Windy City Blues,” and engaged in the notorious Scheherazade sketch, a naughty parody that started all the trouble with Cardinal Spellman and nearly got Ed, a staunch Catholic, taken off the air.
That she should be censured for so mild a form of humor both irked and amused Babe, and she willingly entered into a joust with the eminent prelate, whom she and others affectionately called “Sally.” When asked by reporters why she thought the Cardinal was mad at her, she replied, “Aw heck, fellas, if the Cardinal was holdin’ anything against me, I guess I’d feel it, wouldn’t I?” And “The reason His Eminence is studyin’ my act so careful is, he wants to do me on TV. I don’t mind, honest, I been doin’ him for years.” “Sally” Spellman didn’t dignify such quips with a public reply, though it was known that in private he fumed and wanted to have the woman excommunicated until it was discovered that she’d been baptized a Lutheran.
There was a personal encounter of sorts, cleverly staged by Babe herself. Upon learning that a prominent public figure was having his son and heir baptized at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Babe called in a favor and wangled an invitation. She arrived early, in a big hat with plumes—you couldn’t have missed her in a crowd of ten million—and when His Eminence got a load of her, he reddened with anger.
“How’m a doin’, guy?” came her question as she slipped him a wink. Her question elicited no reply from His Eminence, but Babe had made her point, and the incident made the afternoon editions. Later she reported that she thought the Cardinal looked great and that he had “a real swell place there. And we were all crazy about his hat.”
Head on a Silver Platter
copped a Tony that year, so did Babe, which seemed to surprise nobody but herself. Everybody else took it as a foregone conclusion that she would win. She donned a man’s black tuxedo for her appearance—nothing new in that, Dietrich had been doing it for years—but when she came out from the wings, cleverly disguising the slight limp she still had after her Paris fall, her reception was tremendous. It was as if the New Yorkers, those hard-nosed, jaded denizens of Broadway, had been too long denied the opportunity of applauding her. Her thank-you speech got an undeniable quota of laughs, to wit:
“Gee, I don’t know what to say. In fact I’m nonplussed. Honest, I’ve been plussed by a lot of guys but tonight I’m really nonplussed.”
Further words followed in which she offered heartfelt tribute to Frankie:
“All I am I owe to Frank. Frank Adonis made me—and don’t one of you crack a smile.”
The public gratitude she paid Frankie was generous and well deserved, so filled with good humor and honest affection that it stole the show, and people spoke of it feelingly for long afterward. All she was she owed to herself and the God-given talent that had kept her a star for forty years, but without Frank, where would she have been? Frank knew better than anyone what he had wrought, the jewel he had polished, and just what it had taken to keep her name up there in lights.
With the huge success of
Head on a Silver Platter
, plus a newly recorded album, and the bounty of free publicity given her by the Cardinal, Frankie now sent the Babe off on what became the first of three highly successful tours, reminiscent of her vaudeville beginnings and was as carefully plotted and executed as the road tours of such self-managing attractions as Katharine Cornell and the Lunts—and every bit as triumphant.
When her show reached Los Angeles, Jenny and I were again in attendance. You never got tired of seeing it; it was that kind of evening. In New York she’d had Reggie Gardiner to bring her on and compère the show, but Reggie hadn’t wanted to tour, and Cyril Ritchard had gone in before she opened in Atlantic City. Opening night at the Los Angeles Biltmore was one more triumph in a parade of triumphs, this an especially piquant one in the wake of being labeled a has-been, and Louella’s Open Letter. If Lolly ever wanted to know what
had
happened to Babe Austrian, here was her answer: packed houses, sensational reviews, and as warm a welcome as she’d had in New York. And she deserved every bit of it. Babe was still big-time all the way.
Since her fall in Paris she’d never again used a pozzarella, but remained safely behind the proscenium arch. By the same token, she’d kept aloof from her fans, terrified that a similar mishap might occur. Still, I thought it would be okay to stop back and say hello to her, but when we arrived, her manager, Pepe Ventura, refused us entry to the dressing room. “Miss A is not receiving visitors this evening,” he informed us grandly; “she’s going directly to her apartment. She’s very tired.” If I found this behavior odd, Jen shrugged it off as mere temperament. “After all, she
is
getting on, isn’t she?” So much for old friendships, I thought.
She played a full eight weeks in L.A., then went up to San Francisco for another six, and closed in Seattle at Christmas. After that Frank got her to lay off. But not for long…
At some point during these various comings and goings, Jenny and I had begun experiencing domestic troubles. Nothing really earth-shattering, but not just spats, either. Having decided she wasn’t in love with the idea of acting but was interested in other aspects of the movies, she’d got a job assisting an important costume designer and she was working on a western shooting up in Kanab. After I’d put her on the plane to the location, I came back to our house on Sunset Plaza (which we lovingly called “Sunset Placid” because our life had been so tranquil there) and our German shepherd, Bones, who whimpered for days after his mistress flew away.