All That Glitters (17 page)

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 mental 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.

Now a party to this outrageous secret, I undertook to get to know him better, this masquerader, Dore Skirball. Yet, looking back, I find I never really got to know him at all, and I wonder if he wasn’t unknowable to everyone, friends and strangers alike. I realize he was of a far more serious makeup than I recalled his being back in the zany days of the Petit Trianon, but, then, as we grow older we all find out how much more serious life is, or we should. If he’d once been a gay spirit, in the true sense of that word, he’d become a sober citizen in the years that had intervened. Funny, yes, witty, outrageous, yes, all those, but he’d seen enough of life to know just how earnest a proposition it really was.

Now, having lived the life of Babe Austrian, he was faced with dying his own death, the death of Dore Skirball. And though he appeared to be facing it with equanimity, I had doubts. Equanimity and mortality seldom go hand in hand; rather, they’re mutually exclusive. However serene one may appear to be on the surface, there must be inner turmoil, regret, remorse, the deadening realization of things left unfinished or never begun, all skillfully hidden.

Still, Dore presented an admirable façade—if that’s what it was. He seldom spoke of his wasting disease; he tried as best he could to behave as if it weren’t wearing him down, even though his deterioration was perfectly obvious to all of us.

His secret remained a well-kept one. Of the living, only Aunt Bob, Angie, Sluggo, Pepe, Waldo, and myself were aware that the entity who inhabited the penthouse premises in the Sunset Towers was not that legendary show-business personality and star, Miss Babe Austrian, but, rather, the former chair upholsterer, female impersonator, and all-round Krazy Kat. That’s how it was, and nothing was going to change that, not while Dore Skirball lived.

In the weeks that followed, I never heard him complain. He maintained a steadfast air of muted resignation, as if he’d had his fun and regretted none of it. Now time was running out and he would go gently into that good night. But afterward? What was to happen then? Was his outrageous secret to be carried with him to the grave? Would the world never learn that someone else, a male, had inhabited the person of the great star whom the public had known for fifty years as Babe Austrian?

I went back to the Towers and joined Angie in trying to convince him that there was nothing wrong in his accepting the award. I knew how important it was to him, but he had developed a bad case of nerves, as if he thought that to appear again as Babe in front of an audience might somehow expose the masquerade and hold him up to public ridicule. Because of his illness, to get up and be Babe again was going to drain him, and he was terrified of failing. His anguished expression was terrible to see. “But how?” he moaned. “How?”

“How what?” I returned with a studied show of nonchalance.

“How can I? Go? To the thing? How?”

“That’s what Cinderella asked,” Angie said.

“I know, fairy godmother, very funny.”

“I’ll tell you how,” I said, deciding to talk turkey. “You get your ass out of that gauze cocoon you’re lying in and you put on your drag—no, not just any old drag, I mean your highest drag, the very tip-top beaded drag, you put on your Tina Louise shoes and your Marie Windsor fall and your Grace Kelly gloves and all your diamantés, and you get yourself all cranked up—you take a deep breath and you simply go, that’s how.”