Inside, Outside, page 43
“Don Quixote?” I ventured.
“One joke,” he said. “An old lunatic getting his bones broken because he thinks he’s a knight, for a thousand pages. Great, but tiresome.”
“Gargantua and Pantagruel?”
“A museum piece.”
“I think Tristram Shandy is the funniest work in all literature,” spoke up the boy in the baseball suit.
Goldhandler turned on him, growling, “You do? How much Molière have you read?”
“You mean in French, Father?”
“What else, you little shit? In Sanskrit?”
“In French, only Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Misanthrope,” Sigmund replied, turning pink. “I’ve read most of the rest in English.”
“You’ll read every play of Molière in French this summer, and report to me after each play.”
Sigmund glared straight ahead. “Yes, Father.”
“Who is the funniest character in Shakespeare?” Goldhandler shot at me.
Across the table from me, Karl’s mouth silently formed “Falstaff.” I was going to say that anyway, so I did.
“Falstaff? Why, what the hell is funny about Falstaff?” Goldhandler demanded, with an amused sidewise glance out of those puffy deepset eyes. “What is Falstaff but a lazy fat old purse-snatcher and coward? A liar, a glutton, a drunk, a layabout, a whoremaster, a braggart, a bully, a cheat, a corrupter of the young? Is there a vice he doesn’t have? Is there a virtue he does have? What is Falstaff but a useless, worthless, contemptible, repulsive nobody? What’s funny about Falstaff?”
I had the sense to keep quiet. All the others were looking expectantly not at me, but at Goldhandler. Clearly this was how he enjoyed his meals, playing to his private audience.
“Well, it’s one of the great topics of Shakespearean criticism, and of course you’re right,” he said. “To begin with, Falstaff is a man of powerful, elemental appetites. Of zest?” He struck the table with a fist. “Fat, old, worthless, on the brink of the grave, he loves life. And we love him, because we recognize ourselves in him. We love life as he does. We only wish we had the honesty to live it as he does. If we only dared to be truly ourselves—as he does—we’d all be gluttons, layabouts, drunks, cheats, screwing whores and not paying them, running away from fights and lying about winning them. Falstaff is earthy human nature, far more than Sancho Panza. He is us. And it hurts so much to see ourselves in that bulging fun-house mirror, distorted and yet our true secret selves, that we laugh so as not to cry.”
While delivering this harangue, he finished the matzoh and sausages. I was nervously nibbling the filet mignon. I had little appetite. Nobody said a word in Goldhandler’s pauses to eat. Boyd leaped to a sideboard when Goldhandler finished his food, and brought him a box of enormous cigars. As he carefully selected one, smelled it, and rolled it at his ear, he went on, “Now in writing radio comedy for the masses, you have to reach for just such elemental values, for those few things the entire American public, coast to coast, will understand, and recognize in themselves. There are therefore only three proper topics for radio comedy. They are pissing, shitting, and fucking.”
With that, he struck three wooden matches at once, from a box Boyd offered him, and lit the cigar like a torch, in bursts of yellow flame and blue smoke.
“You write a joke on any other subject when you work for me, and I’ll throw you out of a window. But of course, I forgot, you’re going to law school, aren’t you?”
He glared at me, as Sigmund had glared after his reproof. All the others were now laughing. I was so flustered that I drank milk by way of stalling. It may have been the first time I ever drank milk with meat. Though I had gotten careless about the food rules, milk and meat together still put me off, and in fact through all the free April House years I never did indulge in that specific abomination.
Goldhandler pushed himself out of his chair, “Boyd, show him around the place. Peter, come with me. That Penner script needs jokes.”
***
I followed Boyd up the stairs. “Boys’ bedroom. Liza’s room. Master bedroom,” he said on the first landing, like a tour guide. Through the half-open door of the master bedroom I saw a marble fireplace and a four-poster bed with blue silk curtains. The office on the next floor also stretched across the tower. The largest desk I had ever seen stood in one corner, an antique topped in green leather. There were steel filing cabinets all along the walls, two other desks, two typewriters on stands, a switchboard, and a very long green sofa.
“Stinks in here,” said Boyd. It did, mainly of the dead cigars jammed into Perrier bottles on the big desk. “We worked all night, then kept going and quit about two hours ago. Well, there’s one more floor.” We climbed a steep winding stairway to a square unfurnished room with three sides of tall glass windows, one of rough masonry, and an arched, rough-plastered ceiling. The floor, carpeted wall to wall in thick soft white, was littered with old books and bundles of magazines. “They haven’t decided just what to do with this room,” said Boyd, over the wind roar. It was gusting strongly, and one casement window, not quite fastened shut, was wailing, Waa—oo! Whoo!
The solid wall blocked off uptown. Through the glass one looked out at the park, at downtown Manhattan with its skyscrapers, bridges, and wharfs, at the East River and Brooklyn, at the Hudson River, and the blue glittery New York Bay; and beyond the Palisades, New Jersey stretching green to a far hazy horizon. Close by, much closer than I had ever seen it, and just about at eye level, was the APRIL HOUSE sign, big neon tubes in metal casings on a massive rusty frame. “They’ll probably make a kind of music room and library out of it,” Boyd yelled, “a quiet retreat where he can think. But they’ll have to do something about the wind.”
Back in the office, he rolled open drawer after drawer of file cards. “The jokes,” he said, waving at the entire wall. Ye gods, I thought, they have thousands and thousands! Along another wall he pulled out drawers crammed with mimeographed scripts. “The Henny Holtz show. The Joe Penner show. The Russ Columbo show. Every show he has ever written. I’m supposed to be indexing them. They accumulate faster than I can index.”
“What would my job here be?”
“Digging jokes.” He threw open a closet door. Old comic magazines were stacked inside waist-high: Judge, Life, College Humor, Screen Gems, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang; also paper-covered joke books, hundreds of them, piled up and tied with string. “You dig through these, and the stuff upstairs. Any joke that looks usable, you type on a card, classify it, and file it.”
“How, classify?”
“Well, you know, alphabetically. Animal jokes, baby jokes, cheap jokes, doctor jokes, and so on. About forty categories. Kissing jokes, insult jokes, undertaker jokes. Any funny topic.”
I stared at the heaped-up magazines. The closet smelled of old disintegrating paper. “Wouldn’t I do any writing?”
“Oh, sure. Peter dug jokes for a while. Now he writes drafts.” Boyd smiled at me in a soft wistful way. I had never met such a soft-seeming man—soft white jowls, soft white hands, soft gestures, a soft slumped posture. “The boss will give you a quick two-week trial. Fifteen dollars a week.”
“When would I start?”
“Now.”
“Boyd, I have a job. It won’t end until September first.”
“Then, I’ll have to telephone somebody else.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Take your time.”
He left me alone. I stood at a window, staring out at the April House sign. Two weeks, thirty dollars, and my summer salary would go down the drain. “Digging jokes” out of the piled rubbish in the closet was a stupid prospect. Still, I had never been in an apartment like this, or met a man like Goldhandler, or such a family. I had been figuring I had nothing to lose. Now I stood to lose two hundred dollars.
Well, then, what to do? My fit over the Pelkowitz news had been mostly chagrin at the Bibermans’ pleasure in my decapitation. Dorsi was gone. The Vicomte de Brag was dead. Dorsi had to marry some man, and why not Morris, the banker’s son? To change my life’s direction in a spasm of petulance would be childish. I had no deep-down impulse to write radio jokes.
Peter Quat now rushed into the room, exclaiming, “Shit.” He went riffling through the gag files, snatching out a card here and a card there. I said, “Peter, this job is not for me.”
“Of course it is. You made a great impression on him.” He pushed a chair and a typewriter beside the green desk, spread out the jokes, and rolled paper into the typewriter. “You only got a taste of the Falstaff routine. He can go on for an hour about Falstaff. And Molière. And Shaw. And Freud. And Marx. Karl and Sigmund are named after Freud and Marx, I guess you spotted that.” (I had not.) “He’s an extraordinary bastard.”
“Why does he do this crap?”
“Ever hear of money?” Peter began typing frantically with two fingers.
I went downstairs to decline the job and exit from this seductive phantasmagoria. It would take me three months of work here just to make up my loss; even assuming that I wanted to give up law school to “dig jokes,” which I did not.
I heard uproarious laughter in the living room. From the stairway I could see Goldhandler sitting in a suit and tie, shaved and well groomed, reading from a script. He noticed me, and waved to me to come in. “Here’s a young fellow who’s trying to decide whether to be a lawyer or a writer,” he said.
Two people, a mustached man and a woman with beautiful crossed legs, sat opposite him on a sofa, still laughing. “Maybe you can help him,” he added to the man with a grin.
My knees knocked and my mouth went dry. The man was Ernest Hemingway, and the “frog-voiced cunt” was Marlene Dietrich. The two ad men sat at some distance, frozen with awe.
“Do you think you can write?” Ernest Hemingway asked me.
“Not like you,” I gasped. “Never like you.”
“You have to find that out,” he said gently. “Hammering out a style takes work.”
Marlene Dietrich said to Goldhandler, in a voice that seemed to be issuing from a cinema screen, so moviesque and Dietrich-esque did it sound, “It’s an awfully amusing skit, Mr. Goldhandler.” She turned to Hemingway. “Don’t you think so?”
“Perfect for you,” replied Hemingway.
“Well, I’ll do it,” she said to Goldhandler.
The two ad men jumped up and ran to Goldhandler, stammering congratulations. Nobody paid me any further attention. I walked out and went back up the stairs. Karl and Sigmund came gambolling out of their room stark naked, snapping towels at each other. “Oh, hi there,” said Sigmund. As I slipped by them they went right on with their towel fight, snap snap snap, raising red welts on each other’s bodies. In the office Peter was typing away, and Boyd lay on the sofa, a cigarette drooping from his mouth.
“I guess I’ll try it,” I said.
Peter shot me a smile, not pausing in his work. Boyd waved a languid hand at the closet. “Start digging. We need fresh jokes.”
I hung my jacket and tie on a hook in the closet, took off my shoes—since that seemed to be the custom—and dragged out a bundle of College Humor. I was not sure I could do any work. I was still numb, and not only from the encounter with Hemingway and Dietrich. Coming on the two Goldhandler boys naked had shaken me up almost as much. They were the only uncircumcised Jews I had ever seen.
PART III
April House
57
Jazz Jacobson
Friday, September 14, 1973
I sit in an armchair in a suite on the eighteenth floor of the Sheraton April House, a yellow pad on my lap. Yesterday afternoon I saw Jan off to Israel.
Sandra telephoned us a couple of nights ago, startling us out of sleep about one A.M., to let us know that she has decided to stay in Israel, become an Israeli, and join the army at once to get her draft service over with. We induced her not to commit herself until one of us could come over to discuss it. “Not that it’ll make any difference,” she finally said. “Come if you like, but you’ll be wasting your time.” I couldn’t leave my job so soon for another trip to Israel, so Jan threw together a travelling bag, and I told my secretary to reserve our usual suite at the St. Regis. I have never stayed in April House since, three days after Pearl Harbor, I walked out through its revolving door into a snowstorm. But it turned out that an auto dealers’ convention had jammed the Manhattan hotels, so we landed in this haunted place. I spent the night here with my wife and sundry ghosts, and yesterday I took her to the airport.
Everything in April House has changed. In the lobby the carpets and wallpaper are all different. The style is obliterated. The magic odor of opulence, achievement, and romance is gone. Nothing is recognizable when you come in except the brass art-deco elevator doors, through which people like Max Schmeling and Claudette Colbert used to emerge. Yet by a morbid long-shot coincidence I find myself in the very suite Peter Quat and I occupied, and I can recognize it, though all has been thoroughly Sheratonized and nothing is the same.
Outside the bedroom window, you see, is a broken brick, which Bobbie Webb once named Peeping Tom, claiming it looked like the profile of a little man peering in at us. We had months of pillow-talk jokes about Peeping Tom, better imagined than resurrected. It’s just a broken brick, of course. It doesn’t look like a little man. Never did. Well, was I ever startled yesterday morning when I drew the curtain and saw that brick! It was Peeping Tom, not a doubt in the world of it, still there outside the bedroom where I first found out what love was, and what a woman was—a long chalk, may I say, from Dorsi Sabin. Jan lay there in the bed grumbling and moaning as is her wont before getting up, while remembrance flooded in on me with the gray rainy daylight.
“For God’s sake, bring that idiot home,” were my parting words at the airport, as she went off through the metal-detector hoop, “or else stay there.”
“Who knows?” Jan returned over her shoulder. “If she makes sense, I may stay and join the Israeli army myself.”
She is a small woman who wears big hats, quite visible in a crowd. As she went off amid a throng of jocund Jews, she glanced back and blew a kiss, and I had a flash of poignant love for her. Now I am waiting for two telephone calls: one from her in Israel, and one from an alien life form named Jazz Jacobson.
Everybody has read about Jazz Jacobson, the Hollywood wonder man, but few have had a close encounter with him. It is five P.M. in Israel, eleven in the morning here. Jan can still ring me before the Sabbath, if she has anything to report. I swear, I thought when I passed fifty that I was falling into the sere, the yellow leaf, but lately life seems to be breaking open faster than I can handle it.
***
On my way back from Kennedy Airport yesterday, Lee and I met at Pop’s grave. Her husband, Bernie, is buried in that same Jewish cemetery, out near the racetrack. Yesterday was Bernie’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death. Lee asked me when he died to observe kaddish for Bernie; so I do, since her sons are not interested. I said the graveside prayers for Pop and for Bernie, and we drove back into Manhattan so that I could recite Bernie’s kaddish at Chopsuey.
Alas, Chopsuey no longer exists! Finished. The Chinese restaurant has become a cheap dry-goods store. The stairway is dusty and full of litter. The loft is dark. So we went to another synagogue, and then Lee and I had dinner at April House.
I told her I was writing about the West End Avenue days, and she came up with surprising things. She had no recollection, for instance, of the way she saved the situation at Faiga’s wedding; and as she remembers it, Peter Quat was warm and gracious, a perfect gentleman; danced with her, and made a hit with everyone. Moreover, she thinks the wedding in Onan’s Way is “a scream.” Of course, Lee dines out on the Peter Quat connection. It impresses her suburban Jewish friends much more than my White House job. She and her friends cluck over Peter’s books, their rabbis denounce them one by one as they’re published, and everybody reads them. “Oh, sure, he’s a swine,” she once said, “but he’s so clever!” She is agog about the new book, and says she can’t wait to read it, though she’s sure it’s awful.
At one point I asked Lee how she had met Bernie. She peered at me incredulously. “But don’t you know? I met Bernie at the temple. A men’s club dance.”
“You did? But how come? You wouldn’t set foot in the temple, once you brushed off E. F. Kadane and Holy Joe.”
“It was when I first came home. Remember? Holy Joe invited me. Just to snub old E. F., I said I’d go. Bernie never went to temple dances, either. It’s a long story how he happened to be there, but anyway, that’s how I met him.”
“At the temple, then!”
“Oh, yes, at the temple.”
“And through Holy Joe.”
“Definitely, through Holy Joe.”
“Then the move to West End Avenue worked, Lee. You owe your married life, and your three sons, to Holy Joe Geiger.”
“I owe them to Pop. Pop killed himself, but he got me a nice Manhattan Jewish doctor.”
“Don’t say that. He lived for years after you married, his happiest years.”
“He killed himself to get Bernie for me,” Lee said sharply.
“Also, Lee, to give Mom the ploika.”
Lee’s mouth wrinkled in a sour smile. “Ah yes, the ploika. There you’re wrong. Mama never got the ploika. She’s still looking for it, over there in Jerusalem.”
Then she told me about Moshe Lev…. But there’s my phone call, one of them….
***
Okay, that was Jazz Jacobson. I’ll have to stay here another night, instead of returning to Washington. Imperative Hollywood interest in Peter Quat’s new book, to my utter amazement. I considered it unfilmable, and still do.
When Peter Quat’s agent told me that even the title of the new book would “knock my tits off,” he was scarcely exaggerating. The title obviously cannot be put even on an X-rated movie. Yet Jazz Jacobson says he has an idea of how to handle it; also that his star, Mort Oshins, loves the book, and wants to make a film of it. Maybe it is true. Jack Warner was ready to do The Smelly Melamed. Those Hollywood people jump off in unpredictable directions, like fleas.
