The Ripper's Wife(102)
Suffice it to say, it was all bound to fizzle. The only surprising thing is that it lasted as long as it did, almost five years, thanks to Mama and Mr. Wagner working so relentlessly to prolong my popularity. The best I can really say about my stint on the lecture circuit is that I got paid fifty dollars every time I stepped in front of an audience and I wore some very fetching frocks, smart suits, stupid hats, and shirtwaists with cameo brooches, flowing lace jabots, and pouter pigeon b-reasts.
Ultimately Mama decided I should marry a Texas cattle baron, a big, beefy, barrel-round, pink-faced man with buck teeth and bushy white hair and surprisingly small feet crammed into ornate silver-tooled black leather boots whose silver spurs jingle-jangled everywhere he went. He was given to whooping ecstatically at the least provocation and danced a little jig whenever he was happy and sometimes, in particularly exuberant moments, discharged his pistols into the air, then casually doled out hundred-dollar bills to pay for any damage he had caused to chandeliers and ceilings. One evening when he came to my hotel room, to dine and afterward take me to the opera, he told me I was the calf he had set his heart on roping and he wasn’t about to take no for an answer, whereupon he wrestled me onto the bed and had my drawers off so fast I wasn’t at all surprised that he had won so many awards for speed in hogtying and calf-roping contests.
I tried to be sensible and think of my future like Mama said. I was no longer young and beautiful, and marriage really was the easiest route for a woman in my predicament. I had no practical accomplishments to fall back on that could guarantee me a living. God never intended me to be a seamstress or typewriter girl.... So I lay back, looking forward, listening to his spurs jingle-jangle as he mounted me—he kept his boots on, to give him traction, he said, and his big ten-gallon Stetson hat too, though for that he gave no reason. But he weighed so heavily upon me, crushing me like a great big writhing and snorting pink hippopotamus trying to attempt coitus with me, and it had been so long since any man had touched me that my body had forgotten how to give and receive pleasure. I was tight as a virgin down there, and it hurt so much, I just wanted him to stop. I kept telling him he was hurting me, begging him to stop—“Please!” I kept screaming and pounding his back with my fists and when that didn’t work planting my palms on his chest and trying to push him away. “Please!” My tear-filled eyes kept turning desperately to the vase of roses on the bedside table. I wanted to grab it and smash it over his head, but each time I saw terrifyingly vivid visions of him lying there dead and bleeding on the floor, policemen pouring in, handcuffing me, and dragging me downstairs crying and pleading every step of the way, and pushing me into the Black Maria, to await a second trial and condemnation, and I just knew that if that happened there would not be a second reprieve. If I went back to prison again I’d never leave it alive.
Later, when I was perfumed and presentable again in café au lait satin overlaid with black diamond-dusted Alen?on lace, naked neck and wrists weighed down with diamonds and pearls, my big braided bun of a hairpiece straightened and secured again with diamond-tipped pins, and a rag stuffed in my drawers to sop up the bleeding, he sat me down to a gargantuan steak and lobster dinner, with potatoes bigger than my shoe, and opened a red velvet–lined box, flashing a diamond ring as bright as the stars at me. When I saw that it was shaped like a horseshoe, I blanched; I just knew it was a bad omen.
My mind flooded with pictures of Jim, remembering all the times we had both stroked the diamond horseshoe he always wore in his tie, caressing it like a pet; it had even been, at his request, buried with him when he died. I sat there like one lost in a trance, remembering all the good times, the smiles and laughter, excitement, dances, champagne, wagers, and nights of love we had shared with that horseshoe sparkling all the time, like the sparks of exploding diamond-white fireworks raining good luck down on us as we danced through life together. And I just couldn’t do it. I closed the lid on that great big gaudy sparkler and got up from the table without a word and walked out of my own room and just kept walking, on and on, wearing holes in the fragile soles of my black satin French heels, with the ghost of Jim always on my mind. In the darkness before dawn I found myself standing, shivering bare shouldered and bare armed without my fur, and staring down into the black river. I didn’t throw myself in; I didn’t even think of it. Instead, it was the chance the cattle baron was offering me, to again live a life of luxury and ease ensconced like a queen within the respectable and secure embrasure of marriage, that I threw away.
In 1908, when attendance at my lectures was growing alarmingly sparse and the booking bureaus were starting to look upon me as the Typhoid Mary of the lecture circuit, Mama and Mr. Wagner decided motion pictures were the answer. The flickers were so popular that if a photoplay was made of my story it would surely boost attendance to standing room only, my bookings would soar, as would my price—Mama and Mr. Wagner would see to that!—and I would soon be the darling of the lecture circuit again.
They made an appointment with the top man—“we don’t deal with underlings,” Mama said scathingly, and Mr. Wagner agreed—at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company on East 14th Street and Mama and I duly arrived decked out in big hats and feather boas, with Mama carrying Napoleon, her fat and ornery Pekingese, and wearing enough jewelry to stock the front window of Tiffany’s.
“If we look like we don’t need it, they’re more likely to give it to us,” Mama said shrewdly. “An’ remember, Florie, mention our cousins the Vanderbilts ev’ry chance you get; nothing impresses these movie people more than knowing you are intimately related to someone rich enough to use dollar bills for matches. They will feel privileged that you are willing to consider lettin’ them make a photoplay o’ your life. Remember, it’s you doin’ them a favor, darlin’, not the other way around, even if the idea originally came from us!” Then she looked me over good in my new lemon linen suit trimmed with bright green silk braid and fancy frogging fastening the front of the jacket and adorning the skirt and decided that I would do.