He laughs again, like that was an awful boner. “It’s on the front
page of all the papers,” he says. “But you haven’t missed much. The
Spokesman is a Man who lives in a great white house and He is a Strong
Silent Man and it appears that all Strong Silent Men have to talk a
great deal and this One has got no idea what to say. So I am the man
who tells Him what to say. And twice every week the reporters for all
the newspapers of the whole world gather in a room and listen to Him
say what I have told Him to say and a couple of thousand newspapers
all over the world pay a couple of hundred thousand dollars to have
it telegraphed to them and they print it and I don’t know how many
hundreds of millions of people read it and they all have to think that
it is the Spokesman who spoke it, so you see how important it is that I
should keep hid.”
Well, Mom, by that time I seen what had come to me, and I sat hardly
able to lift my eyelids, to say nothing of my tongue.
“I have got to have a session the day after tomorrow,” the gentleman
goes on, “and I have no idea what I am going to say. How can I pay any
compliments to American institutions that I haven’t paid them twenty
times before? So I’ll give you an address of a little Greek restaurant
that I know and if you’ll meet me there at seven-thirty tomorrow
evening you may be able to give me a few ideas of what the whole world
would like to have said to it the next morning.”
And so then he went out, Mom; and here is your baby Mame sitting in her
six by eight bedroom with the smoke of her pork-chop still in the air
writing to ask you if you have any ideas of what to tell the world for
God’s sake send them quick for I have got my foot on the ladder and
it’s the high altitudes for me. And Mom you dunno how grateful I am to
you for the wise training you give me, I felt his eyes running over me
but I never trembled for I had remembered what you taught me, always
to keep my dressing table by the window and put it on by daylight and
never to use no peroxide at all unless I was going to use it every
night.
Your loving
MAME.
LETTER II
IN WHICH I GO BEHIND THE SCENES
DEAR MOM:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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