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rehearse a few steps with Irene’s husband and dancing partner, Vernon Castle, while Berlin accompanied them on a piano.
    She was a sensation. The
New York Times
reported that she made “a decidedhit and received round after round of applause.” Vernon Castle told her, “It’s all for you, Butterfly,” and dragged her out on stage to take a bow. “Vernon and I formed an unbreakable bond during that exciting, hectic, never-to-be-forgotten night,” Mae recalled. “It was the bond of rhythm lovers.” (Irene Castle, it has to be said, never really warmed to Mae. Not that Mae minded.) She took a cold shower and a quick supper, then raced back to the San Souci so she could perform there. After her number she received her second standing ovation of the night, the applause ringing on long after her encore. She slipped backstage to change into a long white gown, then stepped out into the club. She accepted a white gardenia, refused a glass of champagne, and fell into conversation with a man named Jack de Saulles.
    De Saulles was thirty-seven, a real estate broker. He had been a star quarterback at Yale back in 1901, and was named that year in the
New York Post
’s All-American Team. He swept his arm around Mae’s shoulders.
    And then she saw him, walking toward her from across the room. “A striking man, about 36, with dark, svelte hair, dark eyes, very well-groomed. He looked as if he had just been released by his valet. His white dress shirt gleamed with pink pearl studs.” Jay O’Brien. Mae couldn’t take her eyes off him.
    Jay explained that he had been at the New Amsterdam Theatre that night and had watched her dance with Vernon Castle. And though she thought him fresh, she found she was “strangely grateful” for his praise. At that moment, she said, it felt “as though there were only two of us in the room.” De Saulles, understandably, seemed displeased with the interruption. Mae, who could surely have made a living writing penny romances if she hadn’t been blessed with so many other talents, remembered that she looked into Jay’s eyes and thought how “lustrous and dark they were,” then wondered to herself, “What is he like behind that white-white shirt, behind those pearls?”
    De Saulles moved to turn her toward the dance floor, but Jay took de Saulles’s arm, lifted it from her shoulders, and slipped his own around her waist. “I bet I would dance with her tonight,” he told de Saulles as he led her out into the crowd. She assumed he was joking. He wasn’t. Later de Saulles, whose young Chilean wife was also there that evening, tried to persuade Mae to let him take her home. She refused, and he explained to her, “Look, Jay and I have a bet on. He’s already won once from me tonight. Now you help me win over him.” He and Jay were pals; but then, as he commented to Mae a little later, “no men are friends where a woman is concerned.”
    Jay was, Mae said, a glorious mover. “Our timing was so perfect that I couldnot speak,” she gushed. “I closed my eyes and wondered if all this night had been a dream.” Some of it might have been. “I looked up into his immobile, finely chiseled face and saw it registered no expression. It had the perfect proportions and even features of a statue. The only difference, I thought, was that I could see a muscle throb in his right jaw.” She gasped. Her heart skipped a beat. “Although this man was many years older than me”—all of two years, to be precise—“the attraction was undeniable.” As they turned across the floor, stepping together in time to the band, Jay, one eye on his bet with de Saulles, told her, “Don’t go away from me, because I tell you I am going to take you home.”
    It wouldn’t quite be right to say that Mae fell for Jay that night. She said she found herself both