What Nobody Says When They Tell You To Follow Your Heart

I sat down once with Nora Bayes to have a conversation and this is what she told me. It was 1920. She was 40, the age I am now. The war had just ended which had made her tremendously popular as her song “Over There” had made up the soundtrack for the troops fighting, dying and surviving in Europe.

She said,

“I love singing and dancing. Even as a little girl in Chicago. My father would come out of the brick factory that he ran. Rather he’d be in the office, and as the workers came out, I would be on the street corner tap dancing. One would pull a dandelion out of the sidewalk and hand it to me. I just wanted to be a star, you know.

I grew up in a townhouse in Chicago. We had a piano in the front room. The Christmas tree always got in the way during the holidays. I’d go to my room to sing and dance and my father would yell from the bottom of the stairs for me to stop. I didn’t pay attention to much other than who was paying attention to me.

My father was furious when I ran away with a vaudeville troupe. There was a theater district my friends and I would sneak out to. I’d put on my nice shoes. We’d dress up like ladies of fashion, with the hair brooches of the day we’d steal from our mothers’ jewelry box. I think my mother had a bit of a show girl in her because she always dressed in plain cotton, but secretly in her vanity she kept brooches and necklaces and the things that society women wore back then. She really treasured those pieces.

Me, I’ve always let them come and go. Traveling and living in costume closets all the time teaches you to use what’s at hand, but my mother really held on to that, those private possessions which were like keys to a fantasy life.

She was more ambivalent about my going into vaudeville. She couldn’t outwardly show pleasure of course. And I think she was happy for me. But I think she was envious too. I was her dream that she missed by having me. I think that made her happy and sad at the same time, and she never really resolved it.

Which way do you choose to go in life? My parents always looked to the past. They preferred quiet parlor songs because that’s what their parents did. Vaudeville was a circus. I once saw Harry Houdini bring an elephant out on stage. It was all so bizarre. The freaks, the variety, the fanfare. It was like a magic garden of delights.

I love the rush. The lights, the motion of the crowd, one giant body breathing you in. I love the feeling of my heart beat and the sweat of my skin. It’s better than sex.

I caught a vaudeville train, almost like a hobo, out of Chicago, destined for San Francisco — this was in 1898 — and never looked back.

I went out to the show one night as usual, after a fight with my father. He wanted me to spend less time in those “rambunctious carnivals” as he called them. I met up with friends, still perturbed, so as an act of defiance, I started singing, arm in arm with my girls, all of us skipping down the street.

We came down the sidewalk skipping and singing. We came from the back where the theater door was. Mr. Houdini just happened to be entering as we passed by. I yelled out ‘Mr. Houdini! Make me disappear in one of your boxes!’ He tipped his hat and went in.

During the show, we were close to the stage. It was a raucous good time. One act of acrobats had just finished when Mr. Houdini came on stage in manacles. He said he needed help from a volunteer, and picked a young woman at the other end of the stage.

Impetuous and not to be outdone, I ran up on stage and now with two volunteers, the audience was yelling at me to sit down. So I did what I always do and began to sing and dance. As the number went on, the boos turned into cheers and the other woman eventually slinked off the stage. I became an unplanned number right there. Of course, I embellished every directive Mr. Houdini gave me and at the end of his act, I don’t know if the crowd was cheering more for him or for me. It was the greatest rush of my life.

He brought me backstage with him where I saw all the machinery that put the show on. In the tempest I was in, they were asking me if I would come with them to San Francisco and I was saying ‘Yes, I’ll go get my trunk right now!’

Well, sneaking home and packing was another matter. As an escape artist, I asked Mr. Houdini if he would come help me, to which he agreed. The train was leaving that night so there wasn’t a moment to lose. We walked back to my parents’ townhome, he telling me grand stories of where he’d been, I telling him grand dreams of where I was going.

At the house, he asked me to point out which room I was in. I shared it with my sister, so we’d have to be careful. I went in, greeted my family, ran upstairs, turned on a lamp, opened the window, then ran downstairs in a gay mood and asked who’d like a song. I played a song, said I needed some flourish; so I ran back upstairs, showed Mr. Houdini the trunk, threw my best clothes in it, put on a shawl and ran back downstairs. I played another song and my father, I noted, was in a good mood from all this, which I felt bad about knowing what was about to happen. After this song, I said I needed some air.

I went out to find Mr. Houdini had gotten the trunk out the window and on the ground. I couldn’t understand how he did it nor would he tell me. Nor to this day has he told me.

We carried the trunk the two of us back to the theater and I was on the train to San Francisco with the troupe that night. I wired a message from Minneapolis. I heard my father had had a stroke and that I needed to come back home.

That was the hardest decision I ever had to make. It was his life or mine. And the whole train ride to San Francisco I wondered if I was making the biggest mistake of my life. But the more I saw of the Rocky Mountains and Montana and the west — imagine a city girl out in the sprawling wilderness of the west — and all the misfits from the vaudeville company that I saw everyday; well, I knew it was destiny.

So I kept going, all the way to the San Francisco Bay, and the wharf, and the trolley and all that. We sang and danced and lived by lamp light at night. I’ll never forget that first trip to San Francisco. It felt like I had come home.

After that we took the long journey back to New York. I got a tenement in Manhattan, got into a show on Broadway and made some phonograph recordings. I sent one home. I wasn’t able to see my father again. He passed away from complications of his stroke. So, obviously I can’t deny I was the death of him.

Do I regret that? I am sad we couldn’t end it better. But I can’t regret destiny. I mean, think of all the boys in Europe who sang along with me in their darkest days on earth. Some things in life will just never be resolved I guess. A life for a life, yea?”