Read Online Getting Garbo by Jerry Ludwig - Free Book Online Page B

don’t get her started on the subject of Roy. Did I mention that Mother became an astrology nut, really studied up on the stuff, worked out these involved mathematical charts where Cancer afflicts Aries and Mars is stepping on Venus with things ascending and descending all over the place. She got hold of Roy’s sun sign and even his exact time of birth from an astrology magazine and she ran a comparative chart on me, and then she points at this mumbo-jumbo and says it’s proof positive that Roy’s very bad for me. On a permanent, long-term basis.
    â€œHe represents great peril, you must stay as far away from him as possible,” she says, as if I don’t get the idea that she’s stacked the deck to make it come out the way she wants: quit collecting. I hate being manipulated.
    Surrounding the framed glossy of Roy on my bookshelf is a series of smaller candid snapshots of me and Roy smiling together in front of various celebrated New York and Hollywood watering holes. In winter snows and sweltering heat waves. Rain and shine. Point being that us collectors, we’re the way the Pony Express used to be, like the U.S. Post Office used to claim to be, like nothing could stop us.
    Anyhow, that’s how the Secret Six were back in New York.
    â€¢ • •
    I was the youngest member of the Group (that’s what the Secret Six called ourselves), but I was used to that. I was always the youngest and smallest in any group I belonged to. The last to be chosen for any team, the last girl in my junior high school class who still hadn’t gotten her period. You get the idea. But at least I was smart and proved my worth to the Secret Six by solving the problem of how to get into radio shows whenever we wanted to.
    Back then there were a lot of star-studded radio shows emanating from New York that had audiences, The Fred Allen Show, Cavalcade of America, Kraft Music Hall, The Kate Smith Show and Theater Guild of the Air, not to mention the start of “live” TV shows like Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater. You needed tickets to get in, of course, and the collectors used to canvass the line before the show and ask if anybody had extra tickets, but that was uncertain and a bother.
    What I realized was that while the tickets were different colors from week to week, there weren’t that many different colors, and by checking the trash barrels behind the studios we could find used discards and soon we all carried a rainbow of CBS and NBC tickets in our pockets. Whatever color they were looking for, we had. We’d get in line with everybody else and when they finally let in the crowd it was always a last minute rush so when you reached the usher at the door who was collecting the tickets, you’d just give him the right color ticket and he never had time or inclination to read it. You’re probably thinking that’s what got me into the Secret Six, but actually I came up with that innovation after I was already a member.
    Want to hear about the way I got to join? It’s kind of an interesting story. One Saturday afternoon on one of those sticky hot summer days, I’d been waiting with the hordes at the stage entrance to the Roxy Theater for Abbott & Costello, who were appearing on stage in person. They never came out, but a flunky emerged to collect autograph books so the comedians could sign them inside. None of the Secret Six were there; you wouldn’t catch them at a mob scene like that. But from eavesdropping on their conversations outside Sardi’s and “21,” I was already aware of their rule that you have to see ’em sign for it to count, and I also was scared to let my shiny new autograph book out of my hands because I might not get it back. So I didn’t toss my book in with the others going inside and I walked off instead. It was almost time for the end of the matinee performance of Streetcar and I was only a few blocks away. The guy Roy