All That Glitters Read Online Free

my education, but in my life. Later, Dad was heard to bemoan the fact that it was Babe Austrian who’d come to town and not Maude Antrim. (They said, untruthfully, that I’d assaulted her and shouldn’t be let loose on the community without a collar and leash. Not true.)
    It had recently become the weekly parental practice to dispatch my older brother and me to art classes at the Hartford Atheneum, where each Saturday morning, in company with twenty-five or thirty other students, we would perch on stools with charcoal stubs, sketching from the “undraped” form. Undraped plaster form. The Atheneum was a good (bad?) example of the dolorous Gothic style that was in flower when the building had been erected over a century earlier, with ivy-covered stone and mullioned windows, but it was nevertheless just there that I had my first live sight of the Babe. And it was at this point that I discovered to my amazement that even the Babe Austrians of the world had their woes. It was along about this time, the spring of 1938, that Babe’s name made that notorious list put out by the motion-picture theatre owners of the country and published in Variety , the so-called Box Office Poison list, which should have written finis to her movie career. Truth to tell, it did her no end of harm, even though she had plenty of elite company—Dietrich was on that same list, so were Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire, as well as Claire Regrett. Garbo would probably have been eligible, except she had Camille in second runs around the country and Camille was doing well. ( Camellia , Babe’s famous parody, would do even better, but that came much later on.)
    But if you ever knew Babe, you knew she wasn’t about to be flattened by a bunch of cigar-chomping, pot-bellied Kiwanis chiefs from Terre Haute and points west. When her latest picture, The Girl from Windy City , went into release, to sorry reviews and sorrier box-office receipts, she simply faced the music—and in the most literal sense. Against his better judgment, she persuaded Frankie Adano to book her into whatever vaudeville houses survived in that mid-Depression era of radio’s Jack Benny and Amos ’n’ Andy. And, of all things, she took up playing the trap drums. No kidding, you can check the newspaper files in any large city around the country and you’ll see that in the year 1938 Babe Austrian was indeed playing a new live act, seated up on a platform with that peroxided hair, beating out double paradiddles, and chewing hell out of her trademark bubble gum while she flashed her teeth, beat the dumbo with her foot, and rolled the sticks between her fingers. Oh yeah !
    And she sang her famous “Windy City Blues”:
    “ Oh I got those Windy City blues ,
    They send a chill right down my spine ,
    Oh I got those Windy City blues ,
    ’Cause I lost that man of mine ….”
    As it happened, a bunch of us went to see Windy City on the afternoon of the day it opened, and you could have shot moose in the theatre and never hit an antler. The place was plenty empty, and we saw the theatre manager gnashing his teeth when we came out into the lobby after the Coming Attractions. He did his gnashing with good reason, too; the picture really stank, one of the worst Babe ever made. But there she was, big and brassy as ever, in the “My Idea of Heaven” number, sashaying about a celluloid paradise, switching those hips and tossing one-liners at the colored actors, who wore big white wings and played golden harps while a celestial choir kept going “ Yeah Babe, oh Babe.”
    By now everyone in the Greater Metropolitan Area was more or less aware not only that this turkey was limping along at the local theatre but that Babe herself was also set to appear “In Person” at the State Theatre up on North Main. To promote both the movie and her live stage appearance, she was scheduled to arrive on Saturday morning at the municipal train station, where she would be met by the Mayor, who’d present