Vanished on the Vaudeville Circuit

By Carolyn Summer Quinn

It's the 1920s.  Song-and-dance man August La May, formerly known as Avram Landenberg of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, thought he was living a grand life on the Orpheum Circuit in vaudeville, traveling the country with his gal Violetta and daughters April and Florabelle.  Even after Violetta deserted the act and broke his heart, he continued touring with his talented children, still bringing down the house while billed as "The Three La Mays."

 

But four years after Violetta left, all might not be well.  August is sure he sees Violetta on the theater ticket line in Chicago.  Later that day, seven-year-old Florabelle goes missing on the way to the stage from her dressing room.  Is this a coincidence?  Has Violetta really returned for only one of her daughters, or has someone else in vaudeville taken the talented child?   Who, among the many rather irregular  folks in show business, might have done this?  August and his other daughter, savvy little April, keep touring the theaters of America, determined to find out.  Where then, in the space of the entire country, could Florabelle possibly be? 

 

Vanished on the Vaudeville Circuit was named the Best Historical Mystery of 2023 by the Australian Chrysalis BREW (Books, Reviews and Everything Written) Project and also won a Literary Titan Silver Book Award.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Topaz Ocean Enterprises
• Release date: Jun 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223174097

Carolyn Summer Quinn

CAROLYN SUMMER QUINN, Author and Fine Art Photographer, grew up singing show tunes in Roselle and Scotch Plains, NJ, a member of an outrageous and rollicking extended family.  She has a B.A. in English and Theater/Media from Kean University and now delights in living in New York City.  She is the Author of 10 books (so far!) and they've garnered 17 writing awards!

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Startling Sighting

February 1925

I STOOD IN THE WINGS of Chicago’s Majestic Theater, scanning the backstage area to find the peephole performers used to take a peek at the audience.  Where was it?  This was one matinee when I desperately needed to use it.  Meanwhile I watched my older daughter, April, get out front and sell her favorite song to the whole smitten audience.

They call me Rose

Of Washington Square

I’m withering there

In basement air I’m fading...

April was costumed in a bright yellow short sleeveless flapper dress with rows and rows of fringe and topped by a white feather boa.  She wore a matching yellow feather on a headband and her chestnut brown hair was cut in a stylish bob.  April put on a miserable expression when she got to the lyric withering.

Pose in plain or fancy clothes

They say my Roman nose

Appeals to those artistic people...

April didn’t have a Roman nose.  She hadn’t inherited mine which I would say was definitely to her benefit.  Hers was more like a cute little button.  So she paused with a grin before saying Roman, so the audience would know it was poppycock. 

They got it.  They laughed.

Normally I didn’t wait in the wings as either one of my daughters performed in the spotlight and in front of the footlights.  They could hold their own on the stage and always had, since both had been born in a trunk, as the saying goes, on the road as their mother and I toured the country, but that wasn’t why I was back there, watching April that day like a hawk.  I was there, after changing my costume in record time, because I thought I had seen what I believed was a potential problem lurking about, and not with April. 

As it turned out, I was right on target there, but I didn’t know it yet.  Not for certain.

Still...

Where was that peephole?

April came to the end of the song and had that audience eating out of the palm of her hand.

I’ve got those Broadway vampires

Lashed to the mast,

I’ve got no future, but oh! 

What a past,

I’m Rose of Washington Square!

A little girl like April, dealing with Broadway vampires and a past?  The audience roared and loved her almost as much as I did.  Of course they did.  April, who was putting across a song about a disgruntled adult model with her great big voice and what was considered a very risqué outfit for a child, was actually eleven years old, going on twelve.  This number, in April’s hands, was more of a comic sight gag than anything else, but she could belt out a song like the best of them, including the legendary Sophie Tucker.  Audiences always adored my daughter.  She was the cat’s pajamas.

April, my other daughter Florabelle, and I made up the act The Three Fabulous La Mays.  I was August La May, their father.  And no, in case you were wondering, that wasn’t exactly the name that was on my birth certificate, but when you’re a vaudeville performer, who cares?  Otherwise official details like that go flying right out the window in show business so long as you let them.  You could be whoever the hell you wanted to be on the road, even a song and dance man. 

Even if your real name was Avram Landenberg and you hailed from Manhattan’s overcrowded Lower East Side.

Yet that day I had seen someone whose presence had chilled me to the bone.  Somebody who had been on the ticket line to get into the theater as I’d been walking over there from the theatrical boarding house where April, Florabelle and I had been staying.  My girls had been right alongside of me when the startling sighting occurred, too, but luckily, they didn’t notice her. 

I, unfortunately, did.

One look at the creature standing on the line and I immediately urged my daughters to run along ahead of me to the stage door of the theater where we were appearing that week, urging them to get in out of the Chicago cold as quickly as possible, but actually that had nothing to do with it.  Outside it wasn’t just freezing, it had started to snow, so they didn’t hesitate, nor did they think twice about why I was telling them both to make haste, thank goodness. 

Normally I don’t make a habit of giving my children orders like that.  I like them too much to act like a mad monarch, as some parents did, such as the mother of a child performer called Baby Laura Lee Lamoureaux, who, by the way, was no longer  a baby.  But the person I’d seen on that ticket line made me change my tactics.

April took her bows on the stage.  She went off, stage left, which was where I was standing, already dressed in my finale costume, a sequined royal blue tuxedo jacket over matching but un-sequined blue pants. It wasn’t yet time for our act’s finale.  My other enchanting daughter came on next.

Florabelle entered as April exited.  She was seven years old, a few months shy of eight, but small for seven.  She had a lighter reddish-blonde version of her mother’s auburn hair, my green eyes, and a cupid’s bow mouth.  Florabelle was an imp.  She looked about five, which was good for the act since it made her seem even more precocious than she was already.  Florabelle had as terrific a sense of comic timing as her sister, which I hoped they’d both gotten from me.  She was in a similar flapper costume to April’s, only it was pink, had a purple feather boa around her neck, and was even carrying a long cigarette holder, complete with a cigarette in it, unlit, of course.  She was the bee’s knees, all right.  She swung into a snappy number a lot more appropriate for an adult woman, There’ll Be Some Changes Made.

There’ll be a change in the weather,

A change in the sea,

From now on there’ll be a change in me...

Florabelle swayed her hips this way and that, aping the actions of a very determined older woman ready to turn over a new leaf. The audience was already roaring.

For nobody wants you when you’re old and gray,

There’ll be some changes made today...

Tiny Flora smiled adorably as she sang it, obviously the cutest thing on the bill that day. Then again, the bill at the theater during that particular week also contained Bonzairo, an old magician, a trio of unrelated gals of alleged ill repute who hailed from Louisiana called The Magnolia Sisters, a ventriloquist with a dummy, a female impersonator called Monsieur-Madame who thought he was divinely feminine but actually couldn’t quite pull it off, and a chimpanzee act.  I had to say that my girls really and truly were the best looking performers up there.

Florabelle also brought down the house, just as April had, but I paid little attention to her.  She always knew how to work an audience so I didn’t have to anyway.

At that point I finally spotted where the peephole was in the wings, the one that performers used to scan the audience.  I put my eye to it and focused, instead, on who was out front in that audience.

Where was she sitting?

I knew I had seen her on the ticket line.  At least, I thought it was her.  But was it?  Couldn’t there be two women like her with her auburn hair, her startling sky blue eyes, cleft chin, and her porcelain doll face?

The house lights weren’t on while my child was in the spotlight.  I could only see the first two rows of audience members, and not even clearly, but I had to take a look.

She wasn’t there.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t someplace else in this vast theater.  There were orchestra seats, a mezzanine and a balcony.  It was horrid to think how many more seats there were in this venue where she might just be, invisible to me at the moment.

The woman I had seen was the right height.  She had exactly the same coloring.  She was wearing an expensive-looking coat in the identical vivid shade of bright blue that I’d once seen on the feathers of a strutting peacock at a zoo I’d taken my daughters to visit.  She wore a cloche hat in the same dazzling shade and navy blue high heeled shoes with a T-strap. 

The shoes were what initially caused me to notice her.  It had begun to snow, and those type of shoes had no traction on them whatsoever, causing her to slip on the sidewalk.  Then for some reason I had looked twice at the woman above the shoes and received a shock strong enough to make me wish I could head straight the hell up the state of Illinois and right over the border into Canada.

I was sure it was her.

Violetta. 

The enemy.

Also known as my former wife.

Just what was that creature doing here?

She’d been my wife who hadn’t really been my wife, actually, since for some reason we had never formally bothered to tie the knot, although she’d called herself Violetta La May while we were together.  That sort of thing, marriage, was for civilians, we felt, not untraditional vaudeville folk, though we’d put ourselves across as man and wife for years. 

Violetta was the mother of my girls.

Vee-oh-let-tah, she had always pronounced it.  Not vye.  Vee.  In any other business than this one, she would have probably been labeled pretentious.

Maybe that should have been my first clue about her character, I suddenly thought.  But it hadn’t been at the time.

And she had never, in the entire fourteen years I had known her, worn a staid, quiet color if she could help it.  Violetta was always in the brightest outfit of anyone else in any room she ever entered.  That blue coat and hat worn by the woman on the line was loud enough to look like they’d been lit from within by a lightbulb.

I had ducked my head and hastened past her with so much speed it felt as if I wasn’t walking but flying, hoping whoever she was, if there was any chance it was her, she would not notice me.

Violetta had deserted us, and fled from the act, four full years earlier when we had been playing at a theater in Omaha, Nebraska.  I believed she had gotten involved with a trombone player in that particular theater’s orchestra, but who could know for sure?  One day she was my loving partner, or so it had seemed, Violetta La May, happy and content, the same as always and ever.  Or as satisfied with her life as I had always thought.

The next?  She was gone faster than a candy wrapper in front of an electric fan.

Violetta had left no note when she’d left us.  Had given me no explanation before vanishing.  Hadn’t even bothered to leave any forwarding address. 

All of that was bad enough, but what was even worse had been that she’d never said one word of farewell to our girls.  She hadn’t told them she was leaving or even bothered to say goodbye.  She just left us flat.

But she had taken off with a suitcase containing her best street clothes.  She’d left her lovely vaudeville costumes behind.  Her purse was gone, and so was the money that she’d stored in a secret compartment of her costume trunk.  She’d taken only what she wanted to take with her and had left April, Florabelle and me far behind. 

And what could I do?  It wasn’t as if she was my runaway wife.  She was, according to the law, just my girlfriend, nothing more, or at least, not officially.  She had abandoned us, yes, but she had not stolen anything of ours or committed any kind of a crime, so there was no way to really charge her.  She had only grabbed her own things and fled, and the police probably wouldn’t have been able to find her anyway.

This isn’t illegal, what she’s done, the detective in Omaha had told me when I tried reporting her desertion.  She’s not married to you?  Then she’s allowed to leave.

So that was that.

The end of it.

Or so I thought.

Until there she was on the ticket line at the very theater where my daughters and I were on the bill.

And it gave me a really bad feeling, one that, as it turned out, was right on target.

Chapter 2

No Sign of Her

THE FINALE OF OUR ACT was another song number.  It wasn’t a new song but an old favorite, and audiences loved to hear it.

Won’t you come home Bill Bailey

Won’t you come home?

She moans the whole day long...

The girls sang it alone onstage first, looking around as if waiting for me.

I came in at the end.

I know I’m to blame,

Well ain’t that a shame?

And together we sang,

Bill Bailey won’t you please come home?

Any other day it was just our closing number, a crowd-pleaser.  The girls and I danced and mugged and clowned our way through it.

But today it hit me that if that really was the former love of my life, Violetta, that I’d seen outside, and if she was out there somewhere in this matinee audience, she might think the song was related to or directed at her.  That maybe we were up there hoping she’d come home, even though if she did at this point, I’d pick her up and toss her out the door, faster than lightning.  

Never mind if this song was all about some guy called Bill Bailey.  I had been in this business long enough to know that people in the audience often heard whatever they wanted to hear.  So I didn’t like it that Violetta was almost certainly sitting in that theater, but if she had any silly hopes of returning to us, it wasn’t going to happen.

And why this theater, I wondered as I strutted along the stage with my two girls?  She’d left us in Nebraska.  This was Illinois.  I'd always thought she'd taken up with that damn trombone player who had been in the orchestra at the theater where we’d appeared in Omaha.  What was she doing here?

That’s if it really was her, came a little thought into my head, like the voice of reason. If.  You don’t know whether that really was Violetta or not.

I was finishing up our act, doing a time step along with April and Florabelle, but thinking, or rather hoping, maybe it hadn’t been Violetta out there at all.  Maybe I was making too much out of seeing the woman on the line.  Perhaps she was just a similar type, a lookalike, or something.  Anyone, anything, except Violetta.

Yeah, sure, I thought as the girls made their final curtsies to the audience and I took my big bow.  And maybe if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a pushcart.

The act over, we raced off the stage, into the wings, and ran down a grungy stairway to get to the basement dressing rooms.  The girls shared one with Zahra, who was Bonzairo the old magician’s female assistant, and the Magnolia Sisters, a singing  act featuring three gals who had a sideline as honest-to-goodness hookers.  I had to share mine with Bonzairo the Great, who had the stickiest fingers in show business, and verkakte Happy Harry Hanson, the ventriloquist, who of course came as a package deal with his dummy, Charley Varley. Both rooms were a crowded mess, and I especially hated that in mine, that dummy had his own place of honor on a chair, as if he was real, for God’s sake.  That Happy Harry lunatic had insisted the stage manager, Barney, provide a chair for the dummy.

The front houses of theaters were almost always decorated like ornate gilded palaces.  The backstage areas weren’t.  As we flew from the grimy backstage stairs to the equally abysmal hallway where the dressing rooms were located, I told the girls, Get out of your costumes, kids.  We’re going out for hot dogs and ice cream sundaes.

Hot dogs and ice cream sundaes!  Both girls squealed in unison.  They loved them.  All week we’d been going to a conveniently located Chinese restaurant that was right across from the main entrance to the theater.  The place for hot dogs and ice cream was a few blocks further away, and it didn’t have a big picture window in front, either, like the Chinese eatery did.  There would be less of a chance of Violetta walking by and seeing us sitting there.  That was all to the good.

"Meet me right out here