Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/173

 around, and sang one song in the second act. . . . In the spring I married the leading man." She mentioned a famous footlight name. "I don't know why. I didn't even like him. But he made a huge salary. . . . Gold-digger, you see. That's all I am. Or was," she added on a quiet breath.

"We lived together seven months in an apartment on Central Park West, and kept open house. He used to pick up the queerest people—I don't know yet where he found them all. There were a lot of show people, of course, and prize-fighters, and gamblers, and Greenwich village poets, and 'ladies with no destination,' as Kipling calls them, and flotsam and jetsam. We had parties all the time, night and day. Just drunken brawls. I was forever helping people to bed. Even now, when I think about that apartment, I can only see it as it used to look every morning before the maids got to work on it. Bottles, and siphons, and cigarette butts, and broken glasses, and stale, sickening air. I suppose that's what made me hate liquor the way I do. . . . I used to have an awful time, trying to get him straightened up before the performance. You never saw anybody become so drunk so often. And then one night he struck me across the face, and that was the end. I left him, and got a divorce—oh, I had plenty of grounds, even in New York.

"There was a lot more publicity connected with that, because he was so well known, and when it was over I wrote a story for a newspaper syndicate—or rather, some man wrote it, and I signed my name and got a sizable check. The thing was called, 'Why I'm Through With Matrimony,' and it ran in four installments in Sunday supplements all over the country. It was mostly bunk, of course, and very lurid. Pictures of me splashed all over the pages. I got a lot of letters about