The Private Life of a Strip-Tease Artist by Morton Cooper - Part of Chapter 01

1962 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Burlesque Stripper

The Secrets of Julie Barrett

★ She was a debutante and a Hollywood star.

★ They said she'd been a stag-movie actress, a burlesque bump-and-grinder, a small-time call-girl.

★ They said she'd had three husbands, driven another woman's husband to suicide, and couldn't ever be happy with a man for more than one night.

Everything they said was true... and there was a good deal more they didn't know.

What was the real story of Julie Barrett?

CHAPTER ONE

The pretty girl in the tight olive green dress walked from one room to another in the large apartment as if she owned the only breasts in the world. No one had invited her to the big party, which had been taken suddenly drunk within the past hour, but that didn't matter. Now, at a quarter of three on Sunday morning in John Church Ramsay's house, everyone was too busy to ask for credentials.

This was the first big celebrity party the pretty girl had attended. She'd left Akron, Ohio, a month before as Elaine Rothstein and had come to New York as Helene DuMaurier. She was nineteen years old, technically a virgin, and she told anyone who asked her that she hoped to go on the stage. An hour or so ago, before he'd begun to drink so fast, John Church Ramsay had caught her eye.

He'd excused himself from a cluster of guests and moved in her direction, terrifying her because she'd been sure he would want to know who had invited her. She never lied well, or thought up fake names quickly, and she had been afraid there would be a scene.

But Mr. Ramsay, who'd once been the wealthiest and best known playwright in the country, had smiled and merely asked if she was having a good time. He had been a host, a kindly and solicitous host, and nothing more.

Helene DuMaurier had sensed this was her golden chance to get John Church Ramsay interested in her; it was the kind of once in a lifetime chance she'd seen happen in the movies, and she'd dreamed of having such a chance.

His presence had made her tongue-tied. Her ginger ale had sloshed over the rim of her glass, barely missing his jacket, and, answering his perfectly straightforward questions like a moron, she'd prayed he would go away and leave her alone to collect herself for just a minute. In a minute she would be fine. Somebody then called out, "Hey, Jacki" from across the smokey room and he'd bowed slightly, touched her elbow, and said, "Pardon me, my dear. Have fun."

He didn't come back, although she had worked out in her mind a set of answers which she was fairly certain would have dazzled him. From time to time she saw him through the crowds of guests, but gradually he had become tight, and then so loudly, merrily drunk that she was convinced her opportunity was irretrievably lost; it would look foolish now to seek him out.

As the party seemed to build, and as more and more guests seemed to flood into this one central room, Helene DuMaurier allowed a beefy man—who called himself Chick to freshen her drink of ginger ale, assuming and hoping that Chick was a celebrity of some kind and could do her some good in the theater. She looked around her and decided that she was the only one among the hundreds of others here who had crashed the party. The others looked so solvent, so well-to-do, so celebrated.

When Chick came back, he gave her her glass and beamed, "This is good for what ails you, chile. Drink hearty and tell me what hurts."

"Hurts?"

"Something hurts, doesn't it? Something always hurts.

Come on. Let's march through Pretoria and find a quiet spot. Then you tell Uncle Chick what hurts."

They threaded through the huge front rooms and located a smaller one. The room was empty. Helene DuMaurier detected a daybed at the far end. She would spend a little time with him, humor him if he needed humoring. If he tried anything funny, as she rather expected he would, she would find a way to send him on his trail and still not make him angry with her.

Chick started to close the door, but she told him she didn't think that was a very good idea. He chuckled, nodded, and lumbered to her. They sat on the daybed and lifted their glasses in a toast.

"Here's to you, chile," Chick grinned. ''You fell into Uncle Chick's Gorkian life at the just-right time. I'm gonna bow eastward gratefully all night long."

She smelled her drink as she raised it to her lips and knew he had doctored it with alcohol, but she wasn't surprised or especially disappointed. She disliked whiskey as she disliked anything she distrusted, and she had been tipsy only two or three times in her life, but this was hardly the time or place to make speeches against drinking.

Her roommate Maxine, who had been in New York for nearly ten years and who had even acted on Broadway in a play had advised her, "Don't ever hand out those WCTU tracts at theater parties, particularly if there's a lot of liquor around. What do you think theatrical people drink, Cocoa Marsh? Relax and enjoy it."

"Who's-ah-guest are you?" asked Helene DuMaurier. "Mr. Ramsay's or Julie Barrett's? Or both?"

"Oh, I'm the old family retainer. I've known 'em both since the day they were married. Which is how long now, let's see ... Eleven years, or is it twelve?"

"Twelve."

He grinned. "It's three, chile. I was Jack Ramsay's best man. You're just in off the bus, aren't you? You crashed this shindig."

"If I thought I was being brought in here to be tested-"

"You were brought in here for something far better than that."

"I'd better find my coat."

"Don't be a dope," he said, staying her, gently but with a quiet firmness which impressed her. "So you crashed.

Who the hell cares? You're just in off the bus from Davenport or wherever, I'd guess something like Skokie, Illinois, and you're in an Off Broadway play. Where? Bleecker Street? Circle-in-the-Square? You want to grow up to be Geraldine Page and Helen Hayes both, and one way to make it happen is to come to a party thrown by Jack Ramsay and Julie. Right so far?"

"Please don't tell them."

"Don't tell 'em what, chile?"

"I didn't mean to do anything wrong or out of place.

I'm not one of those 'All About Eve' types. It's just that I've been in town all this time without the slightest kind of break, and then today I overheard that Mr. Ramsay was going to give this birthday party for Julie Barrett—she's about the most gorgeous woman that ever lived—and, well, I thought It wouldn't hurt anything if I sort of broke in, and if I met someone in show business."

"You're showing true initiative, chile. Now I can't go on calling you chile, can I? What's your name? Even party crashers have names."

"Helene DuMaurier."

"I asked your name, not your goddamn blood type."

"I told you!"

"Somebody out in Keokuk honest to God named you Helene DuMaurier?"

"Isn't it a good name?"

"Come on. What is it?"

"Elaine Rothstein."

Chick guffawed. "Now we're getting somewhere. Elaine Rothstein. Mixing memory with desire."

"I don't quite understand you, Mr.—do you have a name?"

"The Times and Trib critics don't appear to think so, but I insist I have. Charles Keating."

"Oh yes," she nodded.

" 'Oh, yes' what?" he baited.

"It's a very familiar name."

He blinked at her. "Awright, Miss Kilgallen, for the sponsor's products: What's My Line?"

From another room came a woman's piercing giggle, the embarrassed and delighted kind that intimated she'd just been pinched. The hi-fi music from the front room trailed after the giggle, strident yet decent music, unmistakably a Beiderbecke.

"You're a playwright," she announced.

"You're fired, Miss Kilgallen. I'm a novelist."

"I meant to say."

"Don't turn rigid and suppress a yawn, pretty Elaine Rothstein with the lovely cantaloupe breasts. What's wrong with a novelist?"

"Look, if you're going to talk dirty—"

"Before you make a sprint for the door because I talk dirty or because I'm ineffectual quarry for the night, let me hasten to reassure you. My last novel sold to Metro yesterday morning, for an effectual $150,000. I've been signed to work on the screenplay. I'm flying to Culver City in two weeks, two weeks from tomorrow. Am I still talking dirty?"

"You're a strange man," she said and looked squarely at him. Maxine, back at the rooming house, had given her the line several weeks before: "If a cat confuses you, no matter how, and you don't know how to wrench loose, there's one sure-fire pitch to throw him. Look at him full in the face and say, 'You're a strange man.' It never fails."

His guffaw returned. "I'm a little drunko, too."

"Why? If you've been so successful, why would you drink?"

"Well, among other things, there's this new novel of mine that's more than a month overdue, Eleanor."

"Elaine. Helene," she amended.

"Yeah. The publisher phoned me this afternoon, Saturday, everybody's day off. 'Where's the manuscript?' he wants to know. I hadn't even begun it. But you know what I told him, Eleanor?"

"What?"

"I told him, this is what I said, 'Archie, I started the book seven months ago with this sentence: Because her mustache was green, she felt great pain when Sir Stafford Cripps snapped her garter and called her a member of the Wobblies.' I told him I was stuck with that sentence, and he asked me why I didn't scrap it and start all over again.

And you know what I answered him, Eleanor?"

"What?"

"Oh, it was a marvelous line. I said, 'Listen, mister, .for the lousy dough you're paying me, I should rewrite?' "

Helene DuMaurier failed to understand his laughter;

but she did her best to smile and then to join in.

"Isn't that a riot, lovely cantaloupe breasts?" he cried and brought her into his arms.

"You're just teasing when you say lovely," she said, snuggling, and her voice was carved out of chocolate.

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