and divorcing him. She wanted to “be discreet” in the way she left both her “elegant husband” and the Florentine, which she considered “her second home.”160 She would tell no one about Miles Ingalls.
Was Dick surprised? When Lili turned off to someone it was obvious and uncomfortable. Maybe he thought his wife sheltered, too immature, a pretty young girl looking for a bigger fish that could make her career. All things that were true. Hubert didn’t fight her decision and that was the end of marriage number two.
Lili made a clean break. She headed for the cool air of San Francisco.
Lili at the Florentine—easy to see what Miles Ingalls saw
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1987
The Whittier earthquake had shaken the ground in October. Unsettling to have the terra firma not so firm under one’s feet. She was alone with her thoughts. The fact the holidays were approaching didn’t help. Her mind was filled with memory. The Duncan Sisters. The Music Box. A gorgeous club. The most beautiful one she had ever worked.
Writing to fans kept her thoughts in the past. Visions of faces she hadn’t seen or thought of in ages. It was a different world.161 Oh, how her world was different now.
She had been uprooted in December, the landlord kicking everyone out to tent the building. So inconvenient to move out, holing up in a hotel with Lorenzo, having to vacate every day to let someone clean. Scoring difficult.
She was glad to be back home. Lorenzo was in the bedroom with his memories while she watched the smoke from her incense pirouette toward the beams above her head. Wasting time.
She wrote a fan, apologizing for being out of touch. The lined yellow pad she used to keep track of her money showed a small amount from Armando.
Armando, tall and elegant like Dick, husband number two. Was Armando still handsome? Above her head the sound of feet shuffling, chairs scraping. The lack of privacy pricked at her.
The bustle of the Florentine Gardens, the smell of perfume and flowers and smoke. Days when she had been young and eager. Those big headpieces. She’d been a giant onstage. So much laughter backstage with Barbara and the other girls. Parading across the stage, pasties on. Oh, how they hurt if the glue was on too thick.
Picking up an old photo she saw what Dardy marveled at, her “pigeon breast.”162 A jutting chest and a narrow waist. So slim. Once. Long ago. Now she was bloated. Stiff. And depressed. She stuffed a couple of extra photos from Santa for her friend in Maryland. It’s so beautiful there this time of year.
To another she started the letter as she always did: Thanks so much for getting in touch—it’s nice to be remembered . . .
Was she remembered now? As what? Dancer. Arrests. Slut. Too many men. Never enough of that for her. Lovers slipped through her fingers like jewels. The eyes she had gazed into.
Need roared over her. Anxiety pinged. Time was warped inside her brain. Were her pupils horribly retracted? “Pinned” they called it. Tiny black dots in the middle of her fading blue orbs that saw so little. Her throat was sore, as it often was as the drug wore off.
From Lorenzo she would need relief. The weather had turned cool, bringing rain. She longed for a fireplace; she wrote a fan. She must have meant a working one because there was a fireplace in her front room. But she had always liked the sympathy of others.
It wasn’t like before when she could wrap herself in fur in front of a fireplace on Canyon Drive and listen to the crackle of a roaring fire.
SHE HAD DISCARDED PEOPLE EASILY. FAMILY. HUSBANDS. NOW SHE WAS saddled with Lorenzo for as long as he, or she, remained alive. There are strange turns in this road of life.
Independence and privacy is not all that bad! was her motto, a joke now. She had neither.
Her obligation was Lorenzo. She had to make sure the rent, the gas, and phone bills were paid. He just had to keep them supplied with juice, drugs, escape.
The past.
Impossible for people to understand her gowns onstage had been by the best designers in her day. “As a schoolgirl I wanted to become a designer. Ironic that I should become a strip tease queen with a career taking off my clothes.”163 Now she—the queen—was dressed simply. She hated that term “burlesque queen.” Some “queen.” In need of a carriage. Her neighbor still drove her to get groceries, the odd errand. Foolish young man had tried to flirt with her—actually flirt with her—she’d been courted by the best bullshitters, Paul, Ted, Jimmy even. What did this young kid think? Her head would be turned by his smooth lines? “No, I never really danced much,” she had told him.
She had a package of bills she needed to get to Dardy to pay. Good old reliable Teedle Dee.
A phone call from a fan. A welcome respite in her day. This one usually called late afternoon or early evening. To check in on her. She asked him about the “dot coms” that were mentioned on TV. Interesting. She told him she thought the advertising aspect of it brilliant.
There were marvels still to discover. She heard about bifocal contact lenses. And Apple computers? Imagine. She didn’t understand how—essentially—a TV had information in it and spewed it out. In just a year she would learn about the new wonder drug Prozac.
Yes, she could still marvel at things. She liked learning things. She had a long conversation with Pat until “the light bulb . . . is getting hot,” so it was time to hang up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It cost 25 cents to cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco in 1941, the year Lili arrived alone in November. She found a room in a boarding house that looked clean and decent. Before she even undressed she perused the phone book for local theatrical agents. She found one not far away and set out to conquer San Francisco.
Showing up unannounced she threw her nude picture on the desk and told him she was a dancer from the world-famous Florentine Gardens and she would soon be working with Lou Walters, but . . . she needed work now.
The woman standing before the agent was stunning, with a wide smile, a face that could stop traffic, slim, seemingly as tall as the tallest building. He called the Music Box and sent his new client over for an interview.
Twenty-three-year-old Lili got the job.
The Music Box Theatre was the most dazzling theatre Lili had ever seen. It would remain a loving memory for her among dozens of venues. Smaller than the Florentine, it had a capacity for only six hundred on its two tiers. There were three bars painted blue and gold with a band at one end and a dance floor in the middle of the ground floor. Tall marble columns held a balcony that wrapped around the second floor. To Lili it was like pictures she had seen of European opera houses. It was a luxurious, bejeweled candy box.
The burlesque theatre located at 859 O’Farrell Street was not an “ideal location for a club.”164 It had opened in October 16, 1940, backed by Frank and Clarence Herman. After a year it shuttered while the Duncan Sisters, who took over management, ran
