Her career had been built on her ability to twist and contort her body. Angular, comical, absurd shapes. Whimsical poses. Good posture could not be abided if there was an opportunity to draw a laugh. She was an exuberant clown in an evening gown. She’d twist and turn, pop a heel up on a grand staircase while leaving the other half of her stuck to the landing. Decked out in elegant evening gowns, she’d stretch her long limbs out like silly putty. With a sloped back, sucked in stomach and a wide, elbow- spangled stance, she’d pull a grin. Her true skill was in making an entrance, and this particular one she was in the midst of right now — wreathed in a disco ball of exploding glass — was no exception.

The toothsome smile was something she’d learned in grammar school. Her prominent teeth elicited cruel nicknames and taunts from her classmates: bucky, chompers, and sometimes fang face. One day she came home red-faced and sobbing. At first, her mother listened patiently, but then scolded her. Catherine! Why are you wasting your time listening to those nincompoops? Your life is going to be filled to the gills with flap-jawed dimwits like them. You’ll never get anywhere if you’re going to let eight year old dummies get you down. God must have given you those choppers for a reason, and it’s not to chew gristle!

Chewing gristle was her mother’s euphemism for complaining. Gnawing on gristle didn’t produce any flavor, only made the meat tougher, and then you had to spit it out, only after making your jaw sore. So why bother? Cass took the note. The next day at school, during attendance, she curled her lips back into a demonic smile and protruded her teeth even further. The children roared in laughter, while the teacher glared.

Catherine Daily got her first taste of celebrity, and liked it. It wasn’t much of a stretch then, for Catherine to become a lunch hour comedienne at her first job. All the other employees at the hosiery mill huddled around her in the lunchroom as she expertly impersonated her boss. Later, she’d joke that her biggest career break came as a result of getting fired.

It was smack in the middle of the Great Depression. At the time, she was lucky to find work as a “hat check and cigarettes” girl at a club, enjoying the irony of wearing the stockings she’d once helped to produce at the mill. One night, the other girls dared her to take her antics onstage. She’d long ago learned that it was far better to dictate the circumstances of one’s own embarrassment, rather than have someone else determine it. So, she got right up on that stage and sang. This time, her chutzpah won her a husband and a manager (one and the same).

She made her debut into show business as Cass Daley. Radio treated her well because men were attracted to her voice. People found her quite appealing — until they saw her face. It wasn’t that Cass wasn’t pretty, just that no one considered her a beauty.

Anyway, by then she had made a career out of being an ugly duckling. The faux buck teeth, the bulging eyes, the over-exaggerated facial expression — this was her calling card. It was war time and both the troops and the people back home just wanted to laugh.

There’s nothing funnier than someone falling. Cass knew that well. She had a flair for dramatic faux falls, arcing her back into a stunning swan dive, just like she was doing now in her living room. Her career had been built on her penchant for pratfalls. Always going for the laughs! But who was here to laugh at her now?

What had she tripped on? Normally, she was a very tidy person and so the question nagged at her. A lifetime of chasing money had taught her not to collect many things — you never knew when you’d have to uproot your life for a gig. Sure, radio had died, and it had seemed like a good time to give it all up and make this home and raise her son, Dale. For the first years of his life, she sat on the carpet next to him, with one eye trained on the phone that didn’t ring and the other watching this little human learn how to toddle and turn. What a marvel! Maybe he could give her a few new moves.

Sweet Dale, who had almost been taken from her at age three. She and her then- husband never spoke of that; the newspapers had written enough. But at night, caught between sleep and consciousness, she often replayed the tragic moment. She had just parked the family car and when she turned around, she saw it rolling, inexplicably, back down the driveway. In the dream, as in life, she could only watch, mutely, as his nurse, Mary, dove as if doing a sidestroke in their backyard pool. Her outstretched arm pushed the toddler, but not herself, out of the way. Cass marveled at how elegantly the older woman had craned. Had Mary been studying her employer’s poses? Cass had been making a career out of them, while Mary had saved a life.

Trading Hollywood in for motherhood had been a mistake, an awful mistake and Cass had said as much, in print no less. Once you got into this business, you never really got it out of you. What else could she possibly do? She had once been in demand. Now, it was 1975 and after a quarter century away from the stage, she was trying to make a comeback.

An entrance should be confident. An entrance should never falter. But somehow, this particular entrance into the living room had taken a strange tumble. Had her toe caught on the carpet? There was a jerking halt to her forward movement while the rest of her lurched ahead, gaining momentum. The bangles on her wrists jangled in a jaunty theme song as she tumbled. With impressive speed, her forehead crashed through the glass coffee table. It burst into a shower of glittering shards. They were prismatic in the California sun. Breathtaking.

Improbably, one of these shards lodged itself into her throat, the jugular vein to be precise — Cass had always valued precision. Blood quickly relocated itself outside of her body and onto the carpet. She was like one of those collapsable dolls, a push-puppet going slack with the push of a thumb. Leave it to Cass to go out like a whizz bang in a pool of red, a perverse smile on her face.

This was an exit to remember.

In Memory of Cass Daley (1915 – 1975)