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I used to know Tony…Antoinette Perry. They’re named after her. She was very rich. That wasn’t
her real name. She wanted to be an actress, so she thought, Antoinette Perry. She was
a Freeoff. She got her money from Detroit…the Freeoff trucks, you know. And her mother was
a DeSoto. They made fortunes. Tony, herself, was a nut. I wouldn’t dare tell anybody.
I became, at 19, her kind of ***. They were a lot of rich women in New York who needed
a young man to take them around. She used to feed me and take me to the theater. I remember
she took me to lunch at Sardis once. She was very large, she was very ample. She was always
dusting imaginary crumbs off her. She never had any crumbs…diamonds and pearls, you
know. She says to me, “Oh, Pat, I’m getting so heavy.” I wanted to say something nice
to earn my lunch, so I said, “Oh, Tony, you’re not…you’re pleasingly plump.”
She drew herself up and said, “I was speaking intellectually.” So, what could I say? I
couldn’t recover from that.