Buster Midnight's Cafe (11 page)

“Right out of the frying pan into the fire,” Toney said. “That’s the dumbest idea I ever heard.”

Pink didn’t like Toney saying that. “You shut your mouth. Don’t you talk like that to Effa Commander,” he said.

“Sorry, Effa Commander. I didn’t mean it. I know you’re trying to help. It’s just that I see Buster’s whole career falling down a glory hole.” I bet he was thinking about his own career taking a dive down a glory hole, too.

“So take him where there aren’t any glory holes. Take him to New York,” I told Toney.

He put out his Old Gold in the spaghetti and thought for a long time. “Just maybe I will,” he said finally.

Buster didn’t think much of the idea. When he showed up later, Toney was all excited, telling Buster he was wasting himself on a bunch of burgs when what he really needed was a shot at the big time. “Hey, Kid Midnight. It’s city lights for us. Me and you is moving up in the world. I’ll get you fights in New York and Chicago and all the big cities. Next time you see Butte, you’ll be head of a parade.”

“Naw. I been thinking about trying to get on at the Badger. They’re hiring.”

That was the worst thing Buster could say. It made us all feel miserable. It was OK for Buster to work in the mines when he was on his way up, but he quit mining to work full-time as a fighter. Going back meant Buster was giving up.

“Oh, come on, kid. We’ll have a hell of a time.” Toney slapped him on the back.

“No, Tone. I’m sorry to let you down. That’s the way it is now.”

They argued back and forth like that. Buster wouldn’t budge. We figured Toney would get him to come around, and we were right. He never did start at the Badger. In about a week, Buster and Toney were on their way. Pink asked him why he’d changed his mind, and Buster said he’d gotten a telegram from May Anna, though he never told Pink what it said. Me and Whippy Bird were surprised because May Anna never mentioned anything in any of her letters about sending Buster a wire. Whippy Bird says you’re batty, Effa Commander, if you still think May Anna sent that telegram.

So Buster and Toney were on their way but not to New York and not with any style. They didn’t have any money since Toney couldn’t bootleg with liquor legal again, so they decided to ride the rods. Now any kid who grew up in Butte knew how to hop a ride on the cowcatcher or the death woods under the boxcars. That was the way you got from Butte to the smelter at Anaconda. Toney figured with them being broke they would hitch a ride to Chicago to look things over then go on to New York.

But Toney never rode the bottom of a train before, and from the bottom of a transcontinental railroad car, he couldn’t tell what direction they were headed. That’s why he and Buster wound up in Salt Lake City, Utah, instead of Chicago. They rode all the way on the steel rods beneath a Pullman car, and Buster said he never would do that again even if he had to walk. They had to tell stories all night to stay awake because if you fell asleep on the underside of a freight car, which was only a few inches above the track, you were dead. Toney was all for keeping on to Kansas City, but Buster said no. Besides, a hobo traveling alongside them said Salt Lake was a prosperous town because the cigarette butts around the tracks were only half-smoked.

So Toney went around and got Buster a fight in an old gym where there were pictures of Jack Dempsey. It wasn’t a big fight because Buster didn’t look like much of a fighter with a couple days growth of beard and an inch of railroad dust on his clothes. The promoter figured he was just a bum who was willing to get beat up for a few bucks. Still, he signed him up. Then Buster won. Toney said Buster didn’t just win. He won by a knockout in the second round, bringing them twenty bucks. The promoter wanted to sign Buster on for more fights. Toney wasn’t Buster’s manager for nothing. The price went up, and two weeks later, they had enough money to afford tickets to ride inside the Pullman instead of under it. You’d think they’d ride coach and save the money, but not Toney and Buster. When they had it, they spent it.

After he won a few fights, Buster started to get his confidence back. It didn’t hurt that Toney called May Anna long-distance and told her she owed it to Buster to write him a letter every now and then. So she started writing Buster letters of his own instead of telling me and Whippy Bird to say hello to him for her. Toney didn’t want him to go into another slump, so he decided to skip the big cities where he might get beat and book fights for Buster in places like Denver and Kansas City. Toney worked out a regular itinerary of Buster Midnight fights, and Buster won them all. Most of them with knockouts. He fought for a couple of months then came home to Butte to rest, knocking off a few bouts at the Centerville Gym and the Knights of Columbus for the hometown folks. Then he headed out on the circuit again. Pretty soon, Toney was talking about Buster being a champ again. The old Buster Midnight was back.

He surely was a more serious Buster Midnight, though. Toney didn’t have to tell him to work out. That’s all Buster did. What was driving Buster, Whippy Bird said, was the need to prove he was good enough for May Anna, now that the two of them were back together’by letter anyway. The only way he could do that was to be a champ. As usual, Whippy Bird was right.

Now I’m going to tell you about what happened to Whippy Bird. She and Chick got married, though they took the longest time to make up their minds. Whippy Bird says to say she didn’t have to, but that was just luck. Luck and three days because Fred Commander O’Reilly was born nine months and three days after the wedding. We called him “Moon” because when May Anna saw his picture she said he looked just like Moon Mullins in the funny papers.

If you didn’t know, it would be hard to tell who Moon’s parents were because me and Pink cared about that baby just as much as Whippy Bird and Chick. I still do. Moon once said to me, “I sure was lucky, Aunt Efra Commander, that God gave me two mothers.” He has never once missed sending me a card on Mother’s Day, though when he was little, I know it was Whippy Bird who bought them for him to give me.

The four of us took little Moon everywhere. Chick finished making the cradle he had started for our baby and put it up in our living room so Moon could sleep there. I never saw Pink get excited the way he did the Christmas we gave Moon a scooter. Of course, it took him a while before he could use it, since he was only six months old.

We were all together with Moon when we heard May Anna on the radio the first time. We caught the show by accident.

Me and Pink were eating at Whippy Bird’s house, and we were right in the middle of Radio Pudding, which is the worst dessert that was ever invented, when
The Jack Benny Program
came on the radio. We had been kidding Whippy Bird about how she forgot to bake the Radio Pudding and that we were going to get heartburn because it was so heavy. That made Whippy Bird laugh because she knew she was no cook. She was laughing harder than any of us when the announcer said, “Why here’s one of Hollywood’s brightest stars.”

We didn’t pay any attention to Jack Benny until we heard May Anna’s voice say, “Why, hello there, Mr. Benny.” Hearing May Anna say “Why, hello there” sounded so natural that Pink turned around to see if May Anna was at the door before he caught himself and realized her voice was coming from the radio. Me and Whippy Bird sat there with our mouths open while Pink and Chick poked each other, swelling up like they were part of the show.

Mr. Benny and May Anna did a skit where May Anna purred and talked sexy. When he asked if she’d like to go to the movies, she said she’d bring her mother along.

“As a chaperone?” he asked.

“No, as your date,” May Anna told him. “I’d ask my grandmother, but she’s busy.”

She surely was good. When the skit was over, Jack Benny thanked May Anna for coming to the show and said to be sure and see her in
Mobster Madness.
Everybody clapped, including us. Then at the end of the show, the announcer read her name again, and we cheered.

“You hear that, Moon?” Whippy Bird said to little Moon, who was clapping, too. “Your Aunt May Anna-Marion Street is going to be a rich actress and send you to college,” and we laughed, though we did not know then what a true thing she said.

After that, we heard May Anna on the radio all the time. She played the same part over and over—the Visiting Starlet Marion Street. In its “Radio Section,”
Time
magazine talked about how May Anna was becoming a popular radio guest, calling her the “purr-feet cinemactress Marion Street.”

After I told Buster about listening to May Anna on Jack Benny, he went to the furniture store and bought the biggest Emerson radio they had. When May Anna was on the radio, Buster turned the Emerson up so loud you could hear it all across Centerville. Later on, Buster gave me that radio, and I still have it to listen to the Oakie O’Connor show, live from Butte, Montana.

May Anna was like a shooting star. She went from “no, no, aahhhhh” parts to speaking words you could understand like “Honey, let me fix you something to eat?” Then she became what they call a supporting actress. Mostly she was in gangster pictures, but that was all right because we liked them, and so did most other moviegoers. You could slaughter dozens of people in the movies back then, killing them right and left with machine guns and car accidents, and nobody minded. People didn’t worry about little kids going bad from watching movies the way they do now. Me and Whippy Bird always took Moon to gangster movies, and he didn’t grow up to be an axe murderer.

It was no surprise that May Anna’s looks were the reason for her success at first, though she had talent, too. She was so pretty and vulnerable up there on the screen people just naturally liked her. She made them laugh, and she made them sad. One night, me and Whippy Bird went to the Montana Theater to watch her in
Death Mob,
the movie where she went off the cliff in the car, when we heard a lady behind us crying. We looked at her, then me and Whippy Bird looked at each other, and it hit us. She wasn’t watching May Anna like we were. She wasn’t seeing somebody she knew playacting. She was watching a poor dumb blonde she felt sorry for go over the edge and die.

May Anna had a few other things going for her besides her looks and her acting ability.
Photoplay
said she had a photographic memory. She read her lines once, and she knew them. That’s all it took. You heard about your movie stars holding up shooting schedules and costing studios lots of money because they didn’t know their part, but you never heard that about Marion Street. She was a professional. Maybe that came from her training as a hooker. Whippy Bird says memorizing was not what May Anna learned being a hooker.

May Anna was in a lot of movies then because Hollywood turned out a lot of pictures. Everybody we knew went to the movies once or twice a week, and it was always a double bill. The studios filmed a B movie in about a week. That meant you couldn’t make many mistakes—and May Anna with her good memory didn’t—because they liked to get things done in one take. The studios also made movies cheap. There wasn’t much scenery, and they never went on location the way they do now.

May Anna wasn’t supposed to play Stella, the lead, in
Mobster Moll.
She had the part of the younger sister who got electrocuted. But the actress who was picked to play Stella—me and Whippy Bird don’t think it’s right to tell you her name though you probably know anyway—was doped up that week and hadn’t learned her lines. May Anna knew them, though. By the time that actress had her head cleared up, the movie was in the can, which is the way they say it in Hollywood, and she was canned, which is what we say in Butte. And May Anna was a star. When we saw
All About Eve,
Whippy Bird said do you think they used May Anna as the model for Eve?

It didn’t matter to me and Whippy Bird how May Anna got the part. We just cared that she did.
Mobster Moll
wasn’t such a great movie, but people in Hollywood go to your B movies to look for talent, and John Elmoor, the famous director, spotted May Anna, which is how she got to play in
Evil City
with Arthur Lowe. Before he offered her the part, though, Mr. Elmoor went back and watched some of May Anna’s other movies, and he told her she died better than anybody in Hollywood, which was one of the nicest compliments May Anna ever got up to that time.

That’s why he gave her the part. He was a good director, and May Anna’s best death scene of her career was the one with Mr. Lowe. You could just see the tears in his eyes when May Anna forgave him for shooting her by accident.

Evil City
was a big hit. Of course, most people went to see it because of Arthur Lowe, but May Anna got her share of publicity. She was on the cover of
Modern Screen,
and there were articles about her in all the other movie magazines. They weren’t just pictures of May Anna taken at a party, but real articles about her. That was when me and Whippy Bird learned you can’t believe everything you read. There were stories about May Anna’s happy childhood in Butte and about her being discovered by a news crew on Broadway in front of the Finlen when she was a high school girl planning to go to college. One article said that May Anna hoped to retire from the screen some day and go back to Montana and live on a ranch and have a family, which is about as false as anything ever written about May Anna.

The one that made me and Whippy Bird laugh out loud was a story about how May Anna loved to cook. There was a picture of May Anna all made up and wearing high heels and a strapless cocktail dress covered by a little organdy apron, standing in front of the stove with an eggbeater in her hand. Me and Whippy Bird wondered how she knew which end to hold on to. The only thing May Anna could operate in the kitchen was a can opener. The other pictures showed her stirring batter in a big bowl and taking a pan out of the oven, and finally there was one of May Anna sitting down to eat what she’d cooked. There was even a recipe for Marion Street’s Nut Loaf, but it wasn’t May Anna’s recipe. It was mine. May Anna called me long-distance and asked me to send a recipe quick because she had promised to write down one for her fans. She promised to tell them it came from me, but that didn’t get printed. The only thing May Anna ever cooked was Campbell’s Pork & Beans. Whippy Bird says one of the attractions of working in a hookhouse for May Anna was that the meals came with.

When Pink saw that recipe in the movie magazine, he said he bet May Anna never knew you could break up nuts and put them into a loaf of bread, ha ha. But I was proud. One of the pictures showed May Anna feeding a piece of my nut loaf to Donald O’Connor, and I got a swelled head because May Anna told me after they finished taking the pictures, Mr. O’Connor asked her could he have another piece.

Because of
Mobster Moll
and
Evil City,
May Anna got a contract with Warner Bros. They planned to develop her into a blond Bette Davis and star her in what May Anna called weepers. May Anna wrote us that one of the Mr. Warners called her the broad with the platinum blond halo. They also gave her a nice salary so she could move out of the hotel where she lived into a deluxe apartment that she shared with another Warner Bros, movie starlet, Anne Bates. Me and Whippy Bird see Anne Bates on the television today selling diapers for senior citizens.

May Anna wrote us that the two of them had twin beds, which made her the first person we ever knew who slept in a twin bed. They also had a blond dressing table with a big round mirror, which we thought was swell. I wanted a blond bedroom suite in the worst way after that, but me and Pink never could afford it. He surely would have bought it for me if he had the money, because that man never denied me a thing. May Anna may have had millions of men falling at her feet, but I had Pink Varscoe. Whippy Bird says Pink never would have bought me twin beds though. I guess you can tell why without me explaining.

It was the Warner Bros. publicity department that brought May Anna and Buster back together after Buster went to New York and became famous.

Buster had been doing just fine himself. He was on his way. People knew about him, and a Buster Midnight fight drew a big crowd from as far away as St. Louis.

That year Buster fought Killer McGillis in Spokane just before election day. As the two of them slugged away, somebody yelled, “Kill the Democrat son of a bitch!”

Then another fan yelled, “Clobber the Republican bastard!”

Before you knew it, everybody in the audience took sides and yelled for the Democrats or the Republicans and slugged it out with each other, too. The only thing was, nobody knew which one of the fighters was the Republican or the Democrat’or whether they belonged to the same party. That didn’t matter. When Buster won, both sides claimed him. For the record, as the fellow says, Buster was a Democrat.

That was also the fight where Toney sold about twice as many tickets as there were seats, and the men who didn’t get in talked mean. After that, Toney decided it was time to take Buster to New York. He was talking Madison Square Garden. And this time Toney and Buster got on the right train.

We went to see them off, and so did some of the local fight fans and a couple of newspaper reporters and a bunch of girls that you always see hanging around prize-fighters. Toney knew it was important to get publicity, so he was in good with the writers and photographers. They took pictures of Buster mugging with the girls and another with his mits up like he was getting ready to fight. The one the
Montana Standard
printed, however, was Buster giving me a good-bye kiss. The caption read: BUSTER BUSSES HOMETOWN GIRL BEFORE MONTANA PUGILIST HEADS FOR BIG TIME.

We all laughed at that when it appeared in the paper. Chick and Whippy Bird joked with Pink that his marriage was on the rocks. “Didn’t I see you in Venus Alley?” Chick kidded me. Pink didn’t care. He thought it was a big joke on me, and he even went down to the
Standard
and got a copy of that picture and gave it to me, framed, on my birthday. It still sits on my living room mantel today though I recently got a new frame for it. I picked the frame that had a picture of Glenn Ford in it because he was a friend of May Anna’s.

Whippy Bird sent a copy of the
Montana Standard
picture to May Anna with a letter saying Buster was two-timing her with me. May Anna sent me a telegram back that said: ANYTHING MINE BELONGS UNHOLY THREE STOP LOVEANDKISSES MAYANNA.

Buster loved that trip to New York. He said one of the benefits of being a famous fighter was riding across the country on a streamliner, watching the world go by and eating bread-and-butter pudding in the diner. They rode coach on that trip, but later on, Buster had a private compartment. When he was the champion, he rode in private railroad cars that rich boxing fans loaned him. Buster liked that. They were as sleek as the Jim Hill Cafe. There was always a waiter in a white jacket to fix drinks or broil a steak, and he was allowed to invite all the friends he wanted to come along.

Buster ran with a fast crowd that liked the parties he and Toney threw, which is one more reason the two of them never had much money. When they had it, though, they surely did have a good time. You’d think me and Whippy Bird would have been mad at them for not being sensible about their money, but we weren’t. Maybe that’s because they spent it on us, too. Buster never forgot us during those years. He was just as generous as May Anna. I remember the Christmas when he sent Moon boxing gloves and a punching bag, and me and Whippy Bird got red fox fur wraps. We went to lunch at the Finlen just to wear those furs and never took them off, though they got in our way and we had to eat with our arms out in front of us. Whippy Bird spilled lime Jell-0 salad on hers.

Anyway, there weren’t any reporters and photographers waiting at Grand Central Station in New York when Buster and Toney arrived there the first time. So as soon as they got off the train, the two of them made the rounds of the newspapers. Buster Midnight was a big deal in the West, but not many people cared about him in New York. Toney changed that fast.

People just naturally liked Toney the way they did Buster. He was friendly and generous, and he was good copy, as the reporters say. After he visited the papers they wrote articles about Buster, even using the pictures that Toney brought along that were taken at Buster’s best fights. By handing out the pictures free, the papers didn’t have to bother their own photographers to take snapshots.

Toney also talked to the fight promoters. Now, you might think that Toney, being from Butte, would get taken advantage of, but he was no damn fool. May Anna knew what she was doing when she walked down Broadway in front of a newsreel camera, and Toney knew what he was doing when he lined up fights for Buster in New York City. He wanted exposure, and he knew the exposure that would do Buster the most good was winning fights. After that they’d go back west and develop Buster into a contender, and that’s just what happened. Toney arranged half a dozen fights, and Buster won every one, four with knockouts. Toney made sure the sports reporters were there. They wrote that Buster was a tough fighter from the hard-rock mines of the West, just like Dempsey. There was even a story about Buster swimming across Pipestone Lake in the winter to build up his stamina. Whippy Bird asked me do you suppose Buster swam under or on top of the ice?

When Buster left New York, there was a crowd of reporters and photographers at the station, and the papers all had stories about the new western contender for the heavyweight title. Even the new
Look
magazine mentioned Buster’s name in an article about future sports stars. This was the first time Buster and May Anna were mentioned together in print. It said:

Every kid who grows up in the smelter smoke of Butte dreams of just two things—prize fights and beautiful women. For most, the dreams are as murky as the Copper Town sky. But not for Buster McKnight, a rawbones giant and latter-day Dempsey who fights under the moniker of Buster Midnight. Promoters are betting this cowboy contender will be the next heavyweight champion. And nobody has greater faith in Buster Midnight than his high school sweetheart—who is none other than Warner Bros.’s pure platinum dish, Marion Street, the Butte Bombshell.

Warner Bros. saw that article and called May Anna in and asked was it true she knew Buster Midnight. She said she surely did. The studio had just finished filming a May Anna picture called
Trouble on the Waterfront.
It was about gangsters, of course. May Anna played a school teacher who tried to clean up the waterfront, which was run by criminals. There was a scene in the movie where May Anna talks a washed-up boxer into fighting his best instead of throwing the fight.

When Warner Bros. heard about Buster, they thought it would be swell to refilm that part using Buster. So they called up Toney, but he turned them down. Toney didn’t want anybody to think of Buster as a has-been or to believe Buster would ever throw a fight. Buster was disappointed, though he did what Toney told him to.