Almost Paradise Read online

  Her mother knew it before she did. Her father beat her and almost choked her and her mother dragged her to a lady on Rivington Street with four long hairs growing out of her chin who made her drink something that was warm and smelled like urine. Still, the baby would not go away. Then they beat her with a hem marker until she told them Yussel’s name. But by that time she hadn’t shown up behind the stairs for two nights and Yussel—no stupnagel—must have known the jig was up. He ran away from home and got a job taking tickets at the Belzer movie house on Twenty-eighth Street, but then he had to skip town because within three months he had impregnated Pearl Belzer, the boss’s daughter.

  Two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, Rivka Taubman gave birth on her mother’s kitchen table. The baby wasn’t born dead the way its grandparents had prayed. It was a beautiful, sturdy girl, and Rivka named her Sarah.

  But her parents wouldn’t let Rivka keep the baby. Her mother had heard about the Rose Stern Hoffman Home where they took Jewish babies and gave them away for adoption, so when the little girl was a week old, Rivka’s father wrapped Sarah in a fabric remnant, smacked Rivka across the jaw to stop her screaming, and went all the way to the Upper West Side. A sign nailed to the door explained the Rose Stern Hoffman Home was closed until February fifteenth for refurbishment, but he couldn’t read English so he brought the baby back with him.

  Unlike her mother, Sarah grew up with keen vision and a quick mind. Although the child couldn’t put it into words, by age six she recognized that there were two types of people who dwell in the slums: those with hope and those, like her family, without. She visited other girls’ apartments and saw parents cuddling children, pinching cheeks, stuffing little mouths with too many sweets, thrusting books into pudgy little hands. These parents knew their children’s lives would be better than their own. Her family had no such ambition, Sarah was their shame. All hope had died at her conception.

  She shared a bed with her mother, but Rivka never cuddled her, although now and then she smiled and every day plaited Sarah’s shiny black hair into a long braid and tied it with a piece of bias tape. But that was the only tenderness Sarah was ever shown.

  By age nine, Sarah realized she wasn’t doomed. She was a leader of the neighborhood children, who admired her ability to whistle and play potsy. Her teachers were fond of her. Impressed by her intelligence, they encouraged her reading and corrected her pronunciation. “The word is ‘song,’ Sarah, not ‘sonk.’” Mrs. Pierce took her to the library and told her she might be a credit to her people some day. Miss McNulty kept her after school and allowed her to grade the other students’ papers and erase the blackboard. She told Sarah about high school and even mentioned college. Before they left for the afternoon, Miss McNulty would go to wash her hands. Sarah would pitter-pat across the empty classroom, open the door to the closet where Miss McNulty hung her fur-collared coat, and steal a few pennies or a nickel from her teacher’s handbag. At first she spent the money on licorice or sour pickles, but soon she discovered vaudeville.

  Sarah saved Miss McNulty’s pennies for admission to the Goldfarb-Buckingham. For ten cents she sat through a one-reel slapstick comedy in which she had little interest; if someone had said, “Sarah, believe it or not, you will have a daughter, and she will marry a man who will be a world-famous movie star,” she would have said “Big deal.” Her world was the stage. After the movie, the Goldfarb-Buckingham presented the newest—or the shakiest—acts in vaudeville; Sarah leaned forward in her wooden chair. Ludwig and Schuller did their dumb-Dutch routine. “Hey, stupid, vot’s dot boil on your neck?”“Dot’s not a boil. Dot’s mein head!” Sarah howled out loud, enormous hoo-hoo-hoos, something she never did at home. And her feet copied the movements of Brian O’Brien, the world’s thinnest dancer, as he soft-shoed across the stage. She knew she could dance. She could be up there in a red flounce dress and black shoes with bows and slide and shuffle her way to fame.

  But her favorites were the singers, Doris LaFlor and Mary Heckman and Leona Welles. Leona Welles was her favorite; Sarah could sing “My Heart Is a Rose” as well as Leona. “Like the pink bud kissed with dew,” she would warble. Her soprano was even thinner and less distinguished than Leona’s, but Sarah didn’t know it. She throbbed with unsung melodies and believed that when she opened her mouth, magic occurred. When she was ten, the ticket seller heard her sing a few measures of “My Son, My Son” and said “Very nice, girlie.” Sarah took this as an omen; she would be a star.

  She confided in no one. Her teacher, Miss Driscoll, suggested she consider teaching as a career. Sarah said, “Oh, there is nothing I would love more,” and Miss Driscoll allowed Sarah to help the slower children with their reading. At the end of the day Sarah would smile and say, “Thank you so much for letting me assist you, Miss Driscoll,” and her teacher would reply, “You are certainly welcome,” and then correct Sarah’s dentalized t’s.

  The coaching helped. By 1920, when she was fourteen, Sarah left the Lower East Side and its accents behind. The year had begun poorly. Years of close work had strained Rivka’s already limited sight, and Sarah was forced to leave school and take over her mother’s role as family button-sewer. The greasy tenement air was charged; at this age, her own mother had gotten pregnant, and Sarah’s family peered over their sewing and watched her with fatalism and grim hostility. She had grown quite lovely, with lustrous hair and sparkling black eyes and—her only inheritance from Yussel—smooth dark skin, soft brown tinged with the gold of the Orient.

  Although quite short, she was no longer a girl. Her breasts grew so fast and so large that her middy blouse strained at the seams. Her hips flared from a dainty waist, and her stick legs softened at the calves and thighs. Her grandfather averted his eyes as this lush child walked about the apartment. Her grandmother must have seen this because she became harsher with Sarah, criticizing her button-sewing, mimicking her soft singing by shrieking la-la-la, and saying “Oh, pardon me, Miss Lillian Russell,” when Sarah cried. One night in bed Rivka began to weep but shook off the child’s attempt to console her. “Leave me be,” she said to Sarah.

  So two days later, in an August heat wave so intense that fruit on the pushcarts rotted by midday, Sarah trudged four miles uptown to Abramowitz’s Rooming House and, before she fainted in his arms, told Nat Fields she would marry him.

  She had met Nat four months before as she waited outside the stage door of the Heritage Theater, praying for a glimpse of her latest idol, the chanteuse Marie Minette. Instead, Nat Fields, a young blackface singer, sauntered out—without makeup. “Hiya, toots,” he said, and winked.

  “Excuse me,” Sarah said and turned her back. “You must have the wrong party.”

  Nat must have preferred the front view because he scampered around, got down on his knee, and crooned, “‘An’ tho’ the sweet magnolia die, I gwine to see my mammy by an’ by.’”

  “You’re—” Words deserted Sarah.

  “Nat Fields, in person.” He leaped off his knee to his full five feet six inches. “And who do I have the honor of addressing?”

  “Me?”

  “No one but you, lovely lady.”

  “Oh,” said Sarah Taubman, “I’m Sally Tompkins.”

  She managed to see Nat a few times each week. Eventually he introduced her to Paulie, the stage manager, as “my girl” and she was allowed into the theater for free. She watched all the new acts rehearse—all of them, even the trained snakes. Sometimes Nat would sit beside her and grab a handful of the glorious fourteen-year-old body he thought was eighteen. But he didn’t get it all. “Please, Nat,” Sally would say, her dark eyes flooded with sadness at having to deny him herself. Naturally, Nat fell in love.

  They were married by a clerk in City Hall. Sally said her birth certificate had been lost, so she borrowed one from an acrobatic dancer; a marriage license was issued to Nathan Finkelstein (Nat’s real name) and Hannah May Essmuller. On their wedding night, Sally proved to Nat that her virginity was no act. He was blissfull
y satisfied.

  Sally was his lucky charm. Two months after their wedding, Nat auditioned for Messrs. Bixby and Putzel of the Bixby Lyric Circuit. Two weeks after that they went to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. For the first time in her life, Sally left Manhattan Island.

  The marriage lasted three years. In that time, Sally visited fifty-three cities in nineteen states, had one abortion, and made her theatrical debut. That happened in Wilmington, in classic show business fashion. In the ten-girl chorus surrounding romantic song stylist Mina Hawthorne, two girls were felled by influenza (one would die) and another ran off with a cad who claimed he was a du Pont. The theater manager, dramatically, was tearing his hair and wailing when Sally piped up. “I know the routines, Mr. Prosnitz.” Nat and Louis Prosnitz stared at her in disbelief, but she dashed up on stage, tucked her dress into her garters to show off her dark, curvaceous legs, and danced and sang, a cappella, the chorus of “(Don’t Tease Me) I’m Just a Co-ed.”

  “You can’t do it!” Nat shouted. Sally sat on the bed in their room holding a kelly green satin costume. She was letting out darts under the bust. She mumbled a response that Nat couldn’t hear because her mouth was full of pins. “What? What? Talk, for chrissake.”

  She jumped up and spat the pins near his feet, “I said, I’m sick and tired of sitting on my ass and watching you do five shows a day and me doing a big fat zero. This is my big chance.”

  “You crazy? Since when do you have talent? Now listen, Sally, we’re leaving for Baltimore tomorrow night.”

  Nat went to Baltimore alone. Sally swore she’d meet him in Trenton two weeks later, but she never showed.

  They ran into each other ten years later in Chicago, and by then their marriage was a hazy memory for them both. Nat was out of blackface and into tuxedos, singing romantic duets with his wife, Edna Jones. They called themselves Giovanni and Flora, and they were strictly small time.

  So was Sally. The year before, in 1932, she had arrived in St. Louis, part of the troupe called Louisa Whyte and her Golden Girls, and found the theater in which they were to have appeared had collapsed the night before. Louisa and the three other Girls had enough money to move on to Wichita; Sally did not. She had fourteen dollars and a suitcase full of lavender dresses and two blond wigs.

  Sally was alone and broke in a strange city in the middle of the Great Depression. She lay in her lumpy bed in the Red Bud Rooming House, swaddled in an itchy wool blanket, but she shivered and her toes were so cold they hurt. Frigid, damp air blew off the Mississippi and crept beneath the covers. Her last meal had been the day before: an orange and a glass of water. For the first time, Sally had regrets.

  At twenty-six she was an experienced enough trouper to realize she would never return to Ludlow Street in a chauffeur-driven Packard. She had dreamed it so often: the big black car gliding almost noiselessly through the Lower East Side, the children following it screeching “Sally Tompkins! Sally Tompkins!” and her grandparents sticking their heads out the window—no, then they couldn’t see her—walking home from buying herring, peering in the car and seeing this star, and realizing who it was. And she’d take handfuls of hundred-dollar bills and toss them in their faces and then, gracefully, with everybody watching, walk up the five flights of stairs and take her mother away and set her up real nice in a beautiful apartment somewhere.

  But Sally was a realist. In a profession where the highest-paid chorus girls were Amazonian, she was four feet eleven inches tall. Her voice lacked luster. She danced well, kicking high and strutting boldly, but at least five thousand women in America danced better. Her assets were three: a quick mind and two beautiful breasts.

  Sally left her bed. No one in St. Louis needed a chorus girl. But Mrs. Barrows, the owner of the Red Bud, said, “Honey-pie, you got two choices. No, three. One, find some chucklehead and marry ’im. Two, get on your back—but not here at the Red Bud; I don’t have none of that. And three. What’s three again? Oh, try Mr. Reeves at the Gayety. Sure, it’s burlesque, but I don’t see no one busting down your door. Don’t take that personal, sweetie. Lots of other girls in the same boat these days. It’s bad times.”

  So like hundreds of marginal entertainers, Sally made the painful decline from vaudeville to burlesque. She was no longer family entertainment, but at least she made a living. And at last she got her own act.

  “Ladies and gents, the Gayety Theater”—or the Republic or the Royale or the Mayfair—“proudly presents, all the way from sunny Spain, Señorita Rosita Carita!”

  The band—at some theaters just a piano—would play pulsating flamenco music and Sally would march to center stage, head held proud, dressed in high-heeled shoes, a flouncy flamenco skirt, and a red and black sequined brassiere. Da-da-DA, da-da-DA, the music went, and Sally would shake her shoulders to its passionate rhythm. DA-DA-DA—and she shimmied so fervently the combs fell from her hair and her black tresses cascaded over her shoulders. The tempo grew faster. Sally shook and writhed, a slave to the music, wild, abandoned. And just as her ecstasy reached its peak, her breasts shook out of the sequined modesty of her brassiere and half the audience went crazy.

  That was the trouble. Sally was so short that from the loge and balcony she appeared a little odd, almost deformed. “Tits on legs,” as one theater manager tried to explain. She would never appeal to a full house, so she never became a featured act. But she kept at it, following Miss Lydia and her Dainties or Irene LaPointe in stock burlesque houses around the country.

  She missed the camaraderie of vaudeville days, when after the last show the performers and their families would crowd into someone’s room and drink beer and gossip and wander off for side talks, private confidences. People there cared about Captain Tompkins, her father, lost at sea; about her mother, the beautiful doomed Dolores, a Spanish ballerina. Sally had created an autobiography so poignant that the men she went with often asked for more details before taking her to bed.

  But the men around the burlesque circuit weren’t interested in her history. They didn’t care how Sally Inez Alicia Tompkins had, in spite of her marvelously exotic background, grown up to be the all-American girl, how she had been offered a full scholarship to Vassar College, how her brilliant mother taught her to pirouette. These men just wanted to squeeze her boobs and bang her.

  In 1936, when she was thirty, she thought she had finally found happiness. A fan dancer, one of the elite of burlesque, a tall broad-shouldered redhead named Katy Swift, invited Sally up to her room in their Port Huron, Michigan, boardinghouse to make fudge. While the hot plate was heating up she kissed Sally on the lips. Sally was shocked but didn’t want to make a fuss and allowed Katy to put her tongue in her mouth. After a minute or two she realized she wanted more. They became lovers. But even though Katy would hold her tight every night and stroke her thighs and whisper she’d never let Sally go, their love did not last forever. Eight months later, in Bristol, Tennessee, Sally opened the door to their hotel room and found Katy in bed with Rimba the Jungle Girl, a shrill, hairy woman she and Katy had often laughed about.

  By 1939, Sally felt tired and old. She was thirty-three, and although her dark skin was smooth and her body beautiful and supple from six shows’ worth of shimmying a day, she knew she couldn’t last much longer in the business. Her arms and shoulders were sore most of the time, and her head ached from shaking it to loosen the combs in her hair.

  The headaches were knives slicing through her brain, and they were coming two or three times a week. So when she got to Cincinnati she asked the drummer for the name of a doctor, and it was there, sitting in Dr. Neumann’s waiting room, fanning herself with an old issue of Life, that she looked up and stared right into the eyes of her future husband, Richard Heissenhuber.

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  MALE VOICE: We are trying to get some comment from Mr. Richard Heissenhuber as to the condition of his daughter, Cincinnati’s own Jane Cobleigh. Is she in serious or even critical condition, as has been reported? So far, Mr. Heissenhuber, from his home in Edgemon
t, has not been available for comment. Meanwhile, we have reporter Sandra Saperstein in the studio. Sandra, you went to Woodward High School with the girl who was then Jane Heissenhuber. Tell us a little about her. FEMALE VOICE: Thank you, Ken. Jane Heissenhuber. Woodward, Class of ’57. Perhaps even then she knew show business would beckon….

  —WCKY All-News Radio, Cincinnati

  Richard thought the woman sitting across from him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Beautiful wasn’t even the right word, because since college he had been going with Patsy Dickens and everyone—including him—said Patsy was just beautiful. And she was. Patsy had huge blue eyes and soft blond hair and a tinkly laugh everyone said was infectious or contagious. Patsy was everything a man could want: good-natured, sharp as a tack, and beautiful.

  But this woman was something more—gorgeous. Her jet black hair and dark eyes seemed to suck up all the light in the waiting room, so that everything except her own exotic loveliness seemed dim. Her skin, he thought, was the rich color of honey, and he began to imagine kissing her on her neck, the sweetness of honey filling his senses. He could see her skin was smooth, not grainy like most dark-skinned people. And he imagined more about honey, about its sticky wetness, and that made him remember a book he’d read that a fraternity brother at UC had passed around, where it described what a woman was like down below, and one of the expressions in the book for it was “honey pot.”

  Richard lowered his head to hide the flush that was creeping across his face. It was wrong for him to think of the woman like this. She was obviously a serious person. Her hair was pulled back tight, off her face, and knotted into a bun like a schoolteacher. He raised his eyes for an instant; he couldn’t help it, he was so drawn to her. And she was looking right at him, and then she smiled. He was nervous but he smiled back and prayed Dr. Neumann’s nurse wouldn’t call him into the office until—he felt so embarrassed. Like a fifteen-year-old kid who couldn’t control himself. He didn’t know what to do next, so he peered at his watch. It was nearly eleven.