1 [The Break of a Lifetime] 1 2 [Katherine Nelson] 16 3 [The Inner Sanctum] 30 4 [“Innocent Laughter”] 41 5 [Tryouts] 52 6 [“Why Don’t You Quit?”] 66 7 [Peggy Turns Detective] 76 8 [The Search] 86 9 [The One-Eyed Giant] 103 10 [Tom Agate] 114 11 [A Star Comes Back] 125 12 [Tom’s Tryout] 139 13 [The Ordeal] 148 14 [The Secret] 157 15 [“Curtain Going Up!”] 170
PEGGY ON THE ROAD
I
The Break of a Lifetime
With a grateful sigh Peggy Lane lowered her aching feet into the delicious warmth of a dishpan filled with hot water, bath crystals, and Epsom salts. In other rooms exactly like hers throughout the big brownstone house near New York’s Gramercy Park, half a dozen hopeful, equally tired, but determined young girls about Peggy’s age were doing the same thing.
At the Gramercy Arms, a rooming house for young actresses in the middle of Manhattan, this was a daily ritual known lightheartedly as the “cocktail hour.”
Peggy sighed a second time, wiggled her toes in the steamy water, and flopped back on the studio couch.
“What a life,” she murmured darkly.
As if in answer to her complaint, the lights of New York began coming on. One by one, they twinkled through her window, throwing a spangle of diamonds across her dressing-table mirror.
New York had been home for a year now, but the big city never failed to thrill her—especially at dusk. Without taking her feet from the water, Peggy turned to one side and gazed at a few faint tinges of red in the west where the sunset was fighting a losing battle with the fabulous illumination of the New York skyline.
Propping a meditative chin in her hand, Peggy watched the magic spectacle of Manhattan change gradually from a bustling city of towering gray buildings and concrete canyons into the jeweled finery of a million lights. It was like the shimmering moment in the fairy tale when the drab little kitchen maid turns into a beautiful princess. Or at least that was the way Peggy always thought of it.