Between us we had two thousand dollars and a dream of making a fortune; we planned to buy land for fifty cents an acre in Arkansas, two thousand acres to start with, and spend the rest buying hogs and improving the land. If all went well, we had it figured out that with the compound birth of hogs, averaging a litter of five a year, we could in five years make a hundred thousand dollars apiece.
Travelling on the train, we would look out of the window and see hog farms and go into paroxysms of excitement. We ate, slept and dreamed hogs. But for buying a book on scientific hog-raising I might have given up show business and become a hog-farmer, but that book, which graphically described the technique of castrating hogs, cooled my ardour and I soon forgot the enterprise.
On this tour I carried my violin and ’cello. Since the age of sixteen I had practised from four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left-handed with the bass bar and sounding post reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on I realized that I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.
In 1910 Chicago was attractive in its ugliness, grim and begrimed, a city that still had the spirit of frontier days, a thriving, heroic metropolis of ‘smoke and steel’, as Carl Sandburg says. The vast flat plains approaching it are, I imagine, similar to the Russian steppes. It had a fierce pioneer gaiety that enlivened the senses, yet underlying it throbbed masculine loneliness. Counteracting this somatic ailment was a national distraction known as the burlesque show, consisting of a coterie of rough-and-tumble comedians supported by twenty or more chorus girls. Some were pretty, others shopworn. Some of the comedians were funny, most of the shows were smutty harem comedies – coarse and cynical affairs. The atmosphere was ‘he-man’, charged with profane sex antagonism which, paradoxically, insulated the audience from any normal sex desire – their reaction was to snivel at it. Chicago was full of these shows; one called Watson’s Beef Trust had twenty enormously fat, middle-aged women displaying themselves in tights. Their combined weight went into tons, so it was advertised. Their photographs outside the theatre, showing them posing coyly, were sad and depressing.
In Chicago we lived up-town on Wabash Avenue in a small hotel; although grim and seedy, it had a romantic appeal, for most of the burlesque girls lived there. In each town we always made a bee-line for the hotel where the show girls stayed, with a libidinous hope that never materialized. The elevated trains swept by at night and flickered on my bedroom wall like an old-fashioned bioscope. Yet I loved that hotel, though nothing adventurous ever happened there.
One young girl, quiet and pretty, was for some reason always alone and walked with a self-conscious air. Occasionally I would pass her going in and out of the hotel lobby, but I never had the temerity to get acquainted, and I must say she gave me little encouragement.
When we left Chicago for the coast she was on the same train; burlesque companies going west usually toured the same route we were travelling and played in the same towns. Passing through the train, I saw her talking to a member of our company. Later he came and took his seat beside me. ‘What sort of a girl is she?’ I asked.
‘Very sweet. Poor kid, I’m sorry for her.’
‘Why?’
He leaned closer. ‘Remember the rumour going around that one of the girls in the show had syphilis? Well, that’s the one.’
In Seattle she was obliged to leave the company and enter a hospital. We made a collection for her, all the travelling companies contributing. Poor girl, everyone knew what was the matter with her. Nevertheless, she was thankful and later rejoined her company, cured by injections of Salvarsan, a new drug at that time.
In those days the red-light districts were rampant throughout America. Chicago was especially noted for the House of All Nations, run by the Everly sisters, two middle-aged spinsters; it was notorious for having women of every nationality. Rooms were furnished in every style and décor: Turkish, Japanese, Louis XVI, even an Arab tent. It was the most elaborate establishment in the world, and the most expensive. Millionaires, industrial tycoons, cabinet ministers, senators and judges alike were its customers. Members of a convention usually terminated their concord by taking over the whole establishment for the evening. One wealthy sybarite was known to take up his abode there for three weeks without seeing daylight.
The further west we went the better I liked it. Looking out of the train at the vast stretches of wild land, though it was drear and sombre, filled me with promise. Space is good for the soul. It is broadening. My outlook was larger. Such cities as Cleveland, St Louis, Minneapolis, St Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, throbbed with the dynamism of the future, and I was imbued with it.
We made many friends with the members of other vaudeville companies. In each town we would get together in the
