on every day and nobody ever jumped out of a thing.
By this time Pietro was the maitre dâ at a Hollywood nightclub on the Sunset Strip where he worked till dawn trying to get rid of the drunken movie stars and set the tables up for the next nightâs dinner. And he didnât want Eugenia to work anymore but rather insisted she come with him instead. Since her job hadnât ended too well.
It was at this time that Eugenia and Billie began to see each other again every day. Billie had divorced Alphonso and moved to a little rented cottage on Clark Street just off the Sunset Strip not far from Pietroâs nightclub. The little cottage was right down the street from the place where everybody working as a studio musician in Hollywood went to pick up girls, and it was here that my father picked up Billie and made a date to meet her the next day and go have Chinese food for dinner.
Both my mother, Eugenia, and my father, Mort, went to Billieâs the next day at five to meet her for dinner (Billie wasvery mixed up about dinner) and Billie wasnât home. Both of them waited on the front porch and talked for an hour but Billie still wasnât home.
By this time Eugenia was no longer a hick in a blue dress, and she no longer had even a trace of the South in her voice except that she spoke softly (though she did carry a big stick like Roosevelt which no one ever knew until she got mad). She wore her hair parted at one side and curled in honey curls and she wore rayon stockings that were always bagging, running, and having to be mended, and needed endless rearranging with the garter belt buckles before both the seams were straight at once. Rayon, though it was okay for stockings, was not what Eugenia wore otherwise and all her clothes were either pure cotton or pure silk with Mediterranean prints on them like Lartigue photos.
Mort looked like a dark Leslie Howard and dressed in the same kind of casual style which went with his black mustache and the intense blue-blackness of his wavy too-long hair.
No girl stood a chance if she liked that sort of thing and although Eugenia had no idea what a Jew was before she came to Hollywood, by the time she found out it was too late for she was married to an Italian instead.
On their first date they both went their separate ways, he to a Chinese restaurant and she to Barneyâs for chili where he met her afterwards for coffee and a cigarette. Even he, in those days, smoked like a normal person did back then.
Of course, having spent the last two years of his life trying to recover from the wrong wife heâd divorced before it was too late, when he clapped eyes on Eugenia who was to be the only woman for him ever again, he set about systematically to pry her loose from her Italian until finally he at least was able to get her to have lunch with him in the same restaurant.
âI was already married,â my mother says, âwhat did I want with two husbands?â
The trouble with Pietro was his job. He worked all night and left Eugenia to herself at home finally, not being able to trust drunken movie stars around anyone as beautiful as she was beginning to becomeâespecially after she met my father, Mort.
So Mort had a free hand to convince Eugenia a second husband was the very thing. He found himself a respectable job as a studio musician working for a radio orchestra instead of free-lance, thus providing her with a prospective husband who hardly ever worked past dinnertime. And he found a small little stucco cottage covered with bougainvillea and morning glories with an apricot tree out front and a lawn and she moved in finally and filed for divorce. Pietro did not want to divorce Eugenia but it was too late, she was already pregnant or said she was and by the time she and Mort were married, she was five months pregnant and about to convert to Judaism.
For their honeymoon, they hitchhiked to San Francisco to visit Lola and Sam. Mort had a wonderful time
By this time Pietro was the maitre dâ at a Hollywood nightclub on the Sunset Strip where he worked till dawn trying to get rid of the drunken movie stars and set the tables up for the next nightâs dinner. And he didnât want Eugenia to work anymore but rather insisted she come with him instead. Since her job hadnât ended too well.
It was at this time that Eugenia and Billie began to see each other again every day. Billie had divorced Alphonso and moved to a little rented cottage on Clark Street just off the Sunset Strip not far from Pietroâs nightclub. The little cottage was right down the street from the place where everybody working as a studio musician in Hollywood went to pick up girls, and it was here that my father picked up Billie and made a date to meet her the next day and go have Chinese food for dinner.
Both my mother, Eugenia, and my father, Mort, went to Billieâs the next day at five to meet her for dinner (Billie wasvery mixed up about dinner) and Billie wasnât home. Both of them waited on the front porch and talked for an hour but Billie still wasnât home.
By this time Eugenia was no longer a hick in a blue dress, and she no longer had even a trace of the South in her voice except that she spoke softly (though she did carry a big stick like Roosevelt which no one ever knew until she got mad). She wore her hair parted at one side and curled in honey curls and she wore rayon stockings that were always bagging, running, and having to be mended, and needed endless rearranging with the garter belt buckles before both the seams were straight at once. Rayon, though it was okay for stockings, was not what Eugenia wore otherwise and all her clothes were either pure cotton or pure silk with Mediterranean prints on them like Lartigue photos.
Mort looked like a dark Leslie Howard and dressed in the same kind of casual style which went with his black mustache and the intense blue-blackness of his wavy too-long hair.
No girl stood a chance if she liked that sort of thing and although Eugenia had no idea what a Jew was before she came to Hollywood, by the time she found out it was too late for she was married to an Italian instead.
On their first date they both went their separate ways, he to a Chinese restaurant and she to Barneyâs for chili where he met her afterwards for coffee and a cigarette. Even he, in those days, smoked like a normal person did back then.
Of course, having spent the last two years of his life trying to recover from the wrong wife heâd divorced before it was too late, when he clapped eyes on Eugenia who was to be the only woman for him ever again, he set about systematically to pry her loose from her Italian until finally he at least was able to get her to have lunch with him in the same restaurant.
âI was already married,â my mother says, âwhat did I want with two husbands?â
The trouble with Pietro was his job. He worked all night and left Eugenia to herself at home finally, not being able to trust drunken movie stars around anyone as beautiful as she was beginning to becomeâespecially after she met my father, Mort.
So Mort had a free hand to convince Eugenia a second husband was the very thing. He found himself a respectable job as a studio musician working for a radio orchestra instead of free-lance, thus providing her with a prospective husband who hardly ever worked past dinnertime. And he found a small little stucco cottage covered with bougainvillea and morning glories with an apricot tree out front and a lawn and she moved in finally and filed for divorce. Pietro did not want to divorce Eugenia but it was too late, she was already pregnant or said she was and by the time she and Mort were married, she was five months pregnant and about to convert to Judaism.
For their honeymoon, they hitchhiked to San Francisco to visit Lola and Sam. Mort had a wonderful time
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