Queenie
A Short Story
The Regent Theater was on Queen Street--and still is. It was regal. Its curlicues painted antique gold, it had dark red carpet lining the foyer and the wide staircase.
Nana, raised on the gold fields and orphaned early, belonged in the arts and was a theater girl at heart. She painted, played the piano by ear and by vamping (she hand colored her own vamp card); she used to accompany my Russian grandfather on the his mandolin and balalaika until my mother grew old enough to do it; she made all my mother’s classical and modern dance costumes; and she took my mother and me to almost every performance that came to the Regent.
Brisbane was not a raging metropolis then. It was a large country town. So we experienced a range of performances, all of which had the same effect on me because, unless told, I was impressed by anyone who stood in the stage lights.
My grandfather, having died unexpectedly early, left my grandmother even more comfortably off than they had been, so going to the theater was done in quiet style. We went to matinees on Saturdays. Nana, living a little further out than we did, would pick us up in a Black and White taxi. She would be wearing the best of everything that Brisbane or the South, where her sisters lived in Melbourne and Sydney, had to offer: soft leather handbags, fine gloves, a fur and suit in winter, and a matched feather creations handmade to fit her hairstyle worn in a thirties roll for many years until a new hair dresser brought her into the sixties.
Nana was beautiful and pretty--not a frequent combination. She wore them well. Having grown up during the Victorian era on the southern gold fields, she had a Victorian’s antipathy to the sun. She always carried and used an umbrella in sun and rain. Her skin, even into her nineties, was unblemished, soft, and fair. She also carried an elegant black stick and had handmade black shoes for her misshapen feet, contorted from wearing boots that were, in the fashion of the day, one size too small for her when she was a young woman. I remember helping her into her shoes, getting the soft stretched leather over her bunions as she sucked her breath in. Her feet and shoes were an physiological and aesthetic trial to her, about which she spoke rarely although II always knew when her feet were hurting because she would lean more heavily on my arm as we walked at a pace that made me ache with its slowness.
Her first comment when my mother and I hopped into the taxi (all in the back seat because it was too casual to sit in the front with the driver) was to tell my mother to put more powder on her nose. Nana didn’t like shiny noses. I would be wearing an expensive often imported and always-simple creation usually bought by Nana, together with white socks, black patent leather shoes, white gloves, and sometimes a hair band. The photographs show me as an awkward prepubescent girl with wavy hair, large batwing glasses, and bands on my teeth. My mother would wear a dress by one of the high-end dressmakers in town with coordinated accessories in the spirit of the fifties.
My grandmother, being tyrannized by and tyrannical about beauty, must have been disturbed by my body’s uncoordinated developments. The surviving photographs taken by the obsequious man in the foyer were each carefully “improved” by my grandmother’s increasingly unsteady painter’s hand. She loved to hand color studio photographs. Photographs of one of us, two of us, or three of us, variously show my hair lengthened, my eyes brightened behind the glasses, my hips thinned, my mother’s hair heightened, her hat narrowed, and her shoes dissolving into the red carpet, which showed as black as her shoes in the photographs. She was a slave for proportion as well as beauty. My mother and I inherited the same intolerance.
When we arrived at the Regent, we would make slow progress into the foyer where we would line up in the program line. Only people with more money lined up in the program line. The same woman with the blonded hair and nasal tone was always calling out “Programs two and six pence programs two and six.” We would inch forward, feeling the excitement as we grew closer to her and as groups milling further in the foyer began to take their seats. Those with some money bought one program for their group. Nana bought one each for us. I felt very special when she did that although those photographs reflect more of my awkwardness than my feeling of glamour.
After we had numerous photographs taken by the photographer assigned to the program line, we would also take our seat, which were always front row center.
Nana would be upset to know that many of the performances over many years blend into one experience after forty years. The russian folk dancers who never moved a muscle and moved around on their feet looking as though they were on skates blended with the musical after musical we saw. I knew all the songs.
Two performances that stand out for me, however, were one by Queenie John and one by Marlene Dietrich. I put them in that order because I made little distinction between the two women although I had been told that one was famous and the other was really famous. They both performed on the stage of the Regent Theater on a Saturday afternoon with me in the front row and that made them pretty much the same for me. Looking back on it, by the time Marlene Dietrich was performing on the stage of the Regent Theater, she might have been on a par with Queenie John.
Marlene Dietrich was in her seventies at least when I saw her and she performed in her late life see through dress that became iconographic. As both of my grandmothers were well into their seventies by this stage, it was a puzzlement to me that Dietrich did not look as though she were in her seventies. I thought that all older women had bad feet, large bosoms, corseted thick waists and hips, had false teeth and glasses, and were deaf. Marlene Dietrich did not seem to be any of these and she leaned against something and sang in a husky voice as she stood riveted to the spot by the shining dress, “Falling in love again.” The audience went wild. Later, I went behind stage and submitted my program for signing. It was brought out signed in a scrawl across her photograph. Nana was impressed.
Queenie John was, according to my grandmother and the program notes, a vaudeville singer who had been on the Australian circuit for a million years. I remember only her large size and her very blonde hair, which was what made me recognize her on Queen Street one day when I was in town shopping with my mother.
I jabbed my mother and whispered loudly, “That’s the woman from that show we saw!”
My mother looked over, “You’re right. That’s Queenie John.”
“I wonder if I could get her signature for my autograph book.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Queenie John was walking slowly along Queen Street. As she had been so sparkling on stage, I was puzzled by how slowly she walked along the street, her large body moving from side to side in her fuchsia dress. She seemed lonely, which I was sure she couldn’t be, given that she was famous.
“I couldn’t” I replied. “I’d be scared. And I’d interrupt her.”
“You’d probably please her if you did ask, darling. It’s all right. Performers are used to this kind of thing. You know the way people come up to me sometimes and ask for my autograph on my music. It’s just customary.”
I edged my way up to her. By the time, she had stopped just at the entrance to Finney’s. Everything happened at Finney’s. She was just taking out her cigarettes to light one up when I approached her.
“Excuse me,” I said in my best manners. “But I think you’re Queenie John and my grandmother and mother and I saw you in your show. I wonder if you would mind signing my autograph book.”
There. It was done. I had brazened my way into a famous person’s life. I waited.
Queenie looked down. I noticed that her hair was gray at the roots and that her face had a lot more lines in it than I could see even from the front row.
“I’d be happy to, duckie,” she answered. Do you have a pen?”
I was surprised that she didn’t have a pen. Surely all famous people had a pen to sign autograph books. I ran back to my mother, who produced a pen. I ran back to her and handed it up to her.
She took my White leather autograph book with its alternating pale pink and pale green and pale yellow pages. Thus far, I had obtained the signatures of my grandmother, my mother, my father, my grandmother, three school friends, and an honorary aunt. Queenie looked through for a spare page, found one, and then, with a slow script, holding the small book with one hand and writing with the other, wrote her name. I have forgotten her performance but I remember the signature: she made the Q with an internally spiraling Q. The last part of the line faded off with a flourish. It took her a long time to make that Q.
I thanked her politely. She drew her shoulders back, shook my hand, and moved on slowly.
I looked at her blonded hair backlit as she walked down Queen Street and decided that Queenie John was a nicer famous person than Marlene Dietrich.