Legs (41 page)

The girls both played the same big towns, and both
scandalized the smaller ones, Alice barred from Paterson, Kiki
hustled out of Allentown, Alice presuming to teach a moral lesson
with her act, Kiki the successful sinner against holy matrimony. Who
drew the crowds? Ah.

By spring Kiki was still traveling, but Alice was no
longer a serious road attraction. Alice and I talked a few times
because she was having money problems, worried about the mortgage on
the Acra house. She said then she was going to open at Coney Island
and she chided me for never seeing her perform. So I said I'd come
and catch her opener.

There is a photograph of her as she looked on the day
her show opened on the boardwalk. I was standing behind the news
cameraman as he caught her by surprise, and I remember her face
before, during, and after the click: the change from uncertainty to
hostility to a smile at me. Her hair is parted and wavy, falling over
her forehead and covering her ears. A poster behind her advertises
Siamese twins joined at the shoulder blades, and there is a girl
outlined by a dozen long-bladed knives. A midget is in the photo,
being held aloft by a man with dark, oily hair and a pencil-thin
mustache. The sign says SIDE SHOW in large letters and to the right:
BEAUTIFUL MRS. JACK LEGS DIAMOND IN PERSON.

The weather was unseasonably warm that afternoon,
mobs on the boardwalk in shirtsleeves and unnecessary furs, camp
chairs on the sand, and young girls blooming in summer dresses as
Beautiful Mrs. Jack walked onto the simple unpainted board stage.

From the other direction came the tuxedo man with the
little mustache. He introduced Alice, then asked if she wanted to say
anything at the start.

"Mr. Diamond was a loving and devoted husband,"
she said. "Much that was stated and printed about him was
untrue."
"People find it difficult
to understand why a woman would stay married to a gangster,"
said the tuxedo man.
"Mr. Diamond was no
gangster. He wouldn't have known how to be a gangster."
"It's been said he was a sadistic killer."
"He was a man in love with all of nature, and
he celebrated life. I never saw him kill even a fly."
"How, then, would you say he got the reputation
for being a gangster and a killer ?"
"He
did some very foolish things when he was young, but he regretted them
later in life."

So it went. The sixteen customers paid ten cents each
to enter, and after the show Alice also sold four photos of herself
and Jack, the one with "my hero" written on the clipping
found in her apartment a year later when they put a bullet in her
temple. The photos also sold for a dime, which brought the gross for
the first performance to two dollars. "Not much of a crowd,"
she said to me when she came off the stage. Her eyes were heavy and
she couldn't manage a smile.

"You'll do better when the hot days come along."

"The hot days are all over with, Marcus."

"Hey, that's kind of maudlin."

"No, just honest. Nothing's like it used to be.
Nothing."

"You look as good as ever. You're not going
under, I can see that."

"No, I don't go under. But I'm all hollow
inside. If I went in for a swim I'd float away like an old bottle."

"Come on, I'll buy you a drink."

She knew a speakeasy a few blocks off the boardwalk,
upstairs over a hot dog stand, and we settled into a corner and
talked over her travels, and her fulfilling of her own fragment of
Lew Edwards' dream: John the Priest on the boards of America. He was
there. The presence within Alice.

"Are you staying alive on this spiel?" I
asked her.

"You mean money? No, not anymore. But I've got a
little coming in from a dock union John did some favors for. One of
his little legacies to me was how and why he did the favors, and who
paid off. And when I told them what I had, they kept up the
payments."

"Amazing."

"What?"

"That he's still taking care of you. "

"But she's living off him, too. That's what
galls me."

"I know. I read the papers. Did you ever catch
her act?"

"Are you serious? I wouldn't go within three
miles of her footprints."

"She stopped by to see me when she played a club
in Troy. She spoke well of you, I must say. 'The old war-horse,' she
said to me, 'they can't beat her.' "

Alice laughed, tossed her hair, which was back to its
natural color—a deep chestnut—but still a false color, for after
Jack died, her roots went white in two days. But it looked right,
now. Authentic Alice. She tossed that authentic hair in triumph, then
tossed off a shot of straight gm.

"She meant she couldn't beat me."

"Maybe that's what she meant. I only agreed with
her."

"She never knew John, not till near the end.
When she moved into Acra she thought she had him. Then, when I walked
out of the Kenmore she thought she had him again. But she didn't know
him."

"I thought she left the Kenmore."

"She did. The police came looking and John put
her in a rooming house in Watervliet, then one in Troy. He moved her
around, but he kept bringing her back to the Rain-Bo room and I
refused to take it. I told John that the day I left. I wasn't gone
three days when he called me to come back up and set up a house or an
apartment. But I didn't want Albany anymore, so he came to New York
when he wanted to see me. It must've killed her."

I remember Jack telling a story twice in my presence
about how he met Alice. "I pulled up to a red light at
Fifty-ninth Street and she jumped in and I couldn't get her out."

In its way it was a true story. Jack couldn't kick
her out of his life; Alice couldn't leave. Her wish was to be buried
on top of him, but she didn't get that wish either. She had to settle
for a spot alongside; and buried, like Jack, without benefit of the
religion she loved so well. Her murderers took her future away from
her, and that, too, was related to Jack. She was about to open a
tearoom on Jones' Walk at Coney, which would have been a speakeasy
within hours, and was also lending her name to a sheet to be called
Diamond Wid0w's Racing Form. She'd gotten the reputation of being a
crack shot from practicing at the Coney shooting galleries and
practicing in her backyard with a pistol too, so went the story. And
in certain Coney and Brooklyn bars, when she was escorted by
gangsters who found her company improved their social status, she
would announce with alcoholic belligerence that she could whip any
man in the house in a fight. They also said she was threatening to
reveal who killed Jack, but I never believed that. I don't think she
knew any more than the rest of us. We all had our theories.

I remember her sitting at that Coney table, head
back, laughing that triumphant laugh of power. I never saw her again.
I talked to her by phone some months later when she was trying to
save Acra from foreclosure and she was even talking of getting a few
boys together again to hustle some drink among the summer tourists.
But she just couldn't put that much money together (sixty-five
hundred dollars was due) and she lost the house. I did what I could,
which was to delay the finale. She wrote me a thanks-for-everything
note, which was our last communication. Here's the last paragraph of
that letter:

Jack once told me when he was tipsy that "If
you can't make 'em laugh, don't make 'em cry." I don't know what
in hell he meant by that, do you? It sounds like a sappy line he
heard from some sentimental old vaudevillian. But he said it to me
and he did mean something by it, and I've been trying to figure it
out ever since. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe he
thought of himself as some kind of entertainer and, in a way, that's
pretty true. He sure gave me a good time. And other people I won't
name. God I miss him.

She signed it "love and a smooch, just 0ne."
She was dead a month later, sixty-four dollars behind in her
thirty-two-dollar-a-month rent for the Brooklyn apartment. Her legacy
was that trunkful of photographs and clippings, the two Brussels
griffons she always thought Jack bought in Europe, and a dinner ring,
a wedding ring, and a brooch, all set with diamonds.

She was a diamond, of course.

They never found her
killers either.

* * *

I saw Marion for the last time in l936 at the old
Howard Theater in Boston, another backstage encounter. But then again
why not? Maybe Jack hit the real truth with that line of his. The
lives of Kiki and Alice were both theatrical productions; both were
superb in their roles as temptress and loyal wife, and as leading
ladies of underworld drama. Marion was headlining a burlesque
extravaganza called
The Pepper Pot Revue
when I read the item in the Globe about her being robbed, and I went
downtown and saw her, just before her seven o'clock show.

She was sitting in one of the Howard's large dressing
rooms, listening to Bing Crosby on the radio crooning a slow-tempo
version of "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

She wore a fading orchid robe of silk over her
costume, wore it loosely, permitting me a glimpse of the
flesh-colored patches which made scant effort to cover her
attractions. She worked on her toes with two ostrich-feather fans,
one of which would fall away by number's end, revealing unclothed
expanses of the whitest of white American beauty flesh. She billed
herself out front as "Jack (Legs) Diamond's Lovely Light
o'Love," a phrase first applied to her after the Monticello
shooting by a romantic caption writer. Her semipro toe dance, four a
day, five on Saturday, was an improvement over her tippy-tap-toe
routine, for the flesh was where her talent lay. "You're still
making the headlines," I told her when the stage doorman showed
me where she was.

Her robe flowed open, and she gave me a superb hug,
my first full-length, unencumbered encounter with all that sensual
resilience, and after the preliminaries were done with, she reached
in a drawer, put a finger through an aperture in a pair of yellow
silk panties with a border of small white flowers and dangled them in
front of me.

"That's the item?"

"That's them. Isn't it ridiculous?"

"The publicity wasn't bad, good for the show."

"But it's so . . . so cheap and awful." She
broke down, mopped her eyes with the panties that an MIT student had
stolen from her as a fraternity initiation prank. He left an
ignominious fifty-cent piece in their place, saying, when they nabbed
him at the stage door with the hot garment in his pants pocket, "I
would've left more, only I didn't have change."

I was baffled by her tears, which were flowing not
from the cheapness of the deed, for she was beyond that, inured. I
then considered that maybe the fifty cents was not enough. But would
five or fifty dollars have been enough for the girl who once wore a
five-hundred-dollar negotiable hymen inside another such garment? No,
she was crying because I was witness to both past and present in this
actual moment, and she hadn't been prepared to go over it all again
on such short notice. She knew I remembered Ziegfeld and all her
promise of greater Broadway glory, plus a Hollywood future. But
Ziegfeld turned her down after Jack died, and Will Hays wouldn't let
her get a foothold in Hollywood: No molls need apply. And finally, as
we talked, she brought it out, tears gone, panties there to haunt
both of us (I remembered the vision at the miniature golf course, in
her Monticello room, and I thought, Pursue it now; nothing bars the
way now; no fear, no betrayal intervening between you and that
bound-to-be-lovely by-way), and she said: "It's so shitty,
Marcus. It seems once fate puts the finger on you, you're through."

"You're still in the paper, kiddo; you're in big
letters out front, and you look like seven or eight million dollars.
Eight. I know a few young ladies with less to point to."

"You were always nice, Marcus. But you know I
still miss Jack. Miss him. After all these years."

Would the maudlin time never end?

"You're keeping him alive," I said. "Look
at it that way. He's on the signs out front, too."

"He wouldn't like his name there."

"Sure he would, as long as you were tied to it."

"No, not Jack. He liked it respectable, the
two-faced son of a bitch. He left me that night to go home to bed so
Alice wouldn't come find him, so he could be there in bed ahead of
her. Imagine a man like him thinking like that?"

"Who said he did that?"

"Frankie Teller told me. Jack mumbled it in the
cab when they left my place."

She let the old memories run by in silence, then she
said, :But I was the last one to see him," and she meant, to
make love to him. "He always left Old Lady Prune to come to me.
I don't think she had a crotch." And then Kiki laughed and
laughed. as triumphantly as Alice had in the Coney speakeasy.

I bought her a sandwich between shows, then took her
back to the theater. I kissed her good-bye on the cheek, but she
turned and gave me her mouth as I was leaving, a gift. But she didn't
linger over it.