Inside, Outside, page 46
SHE: Where did you learn to kiss like that?
HE: I used to play the tuba.
HE: Marry me, darling. If we make a mistake, we’ll separate.
SHE: Yes, but what’ll we do with the mistake?
Et cetera.
Poking in the closet, I came upon a pile of an extinct magazine called Truth, dating back to the turn of the century. The brown brittle pages, crumbling in my hand as I turned them, were fascinating for their illustrations of women in hobble skirts and bustles, men in boaters’ and pipestem trousers, and the preposterous advertisements for cure-all medicines. I started moiling through Truth just for the fun of it. I remember the first nugget I came upon, because Goldhandler used it. The illustration showed a Gibson girl with her straw-hatted swain in a rowboat; he giving her a lovesick look, she very bored.
MARMADUKE: Alas, Gwendolyn, I fear you regard me as a perfect simpleton.
GWENDOLYN: Oh, no, Marmaduke. Among us poor mortals, perfection is so seldom to be found!
This clearly needed updating. I typed it out so on the card:
INSULTS
HE: I suppose you think I’m a perfect idiot.
SHE: Oh, no, nobody’s perfect.
I must have gone through forty issues of Truth to cull a dozen such jewels. Peter left. Boyd and I had dinner with the family, and went back upstairs to work. About eleven at night Goldhandler staggered wearily in, chewing on a cigar. He slumped into his swivel chair, and began to look over my cards. “Boyd,” he said. Boyd padded to the desk. Goldhandler gave him the cards. Boyd shuffled through them and looked strangely at me.
“Where’d you dig these?” Goldhandler demanded. I pointed to the magazines piled beside my chair. “What? Truth? Cut the shit.”
“Well, I did shorten them, sir. That old style tends to be periphrastic.”
Goldhandler and Boyd exchanged a glance. “Tired?” he asked me.
“I’ve been at it a while.”
“Go on home.”
I gratefully put on my shoes, tie, and jacket. “What time do I come back to work tomorrow?” I asked Boyd.
“Whenever you want to,” said Boyd.
That joke from Truth made its way into Marlene Dietrich’s skit on the Rudy Vallee show. When Dietrich said in that husky, sugary Teutonic drawl, “No, Rudy, nobody’s perfect,” the audience bellowed and broke into applause; and I was almost as proud as if I had written Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Riffling through the cards day by day, I kept coming on familiar old dirty jokes, laundered to innocuousness, much less funny, but there they were. “Oh yes,” said Boyd, when I pointed this out, “by all means, whatever you can think of. Just make it with kissing.” I was then a walking bank of dirty jokes. My Talmudic memory, idling without that ancient learning to soak up, had absorbed scores of them at Columbia, and I was the life of any all-male party. So when the digging did not go well, I would fatten up my card stack by recalling a few of these and making them with kissing. Goldhandler used some of them, too.
I had been there about a week, and was digging away late one night while Goldhandler, Peter, and Boyd rewrote a script for Kate Smith (older readers will know the name), a burlesque of the opera Aïda. The singer had said there weren’t enough jokes, and they were pumping in anything from the files that seemed to fit.
“Maybe you could do something about that name, Aïda,” I ventured.
Testy and worn down, Goldhandler snapped, “Like what?”
“Well, since she’s so fat, she could say, ‘I am a princess of the royal house of Norfallot.’”
Boyd played a perfect straight to me, wrinkling up his sad white face. “Norfallot?”
“Sure. Aïda Norfallot.”
Nobody laughed. Boyd, Peter, and Goldhandler looked at each other, nodding.
“It’s in,” said Goldhandler.
Next day I heard from Boyd that, though Kate Smith usually hated fat jokes, she had burst out laughing at Aïda Norfallot. For a year after that, whenever we ran into a block on a script, Goldhandler would turn to me and say, “Finkelstein, let’s have another Aïda Norfallot.” He called all of us Finkelstein, except when he called us Liebowitz.
What endeared me most to Harry Goldhandler, I believe, was the following. Drudging through old vaudeville booklets, I came on this gem and typed it up:
INSULT
PAT: Here’s a picture of me, taken with a herd of pigs.
MIKE: I see. Sure, and you’re the one with the hat on.
Goldhandler pounced on it and put it straight into a script. “Big joke, Finkelstein,” he commented. Evidently, then, to imply that a man was an animal constituted a big joke. It did not seem too recondite an art form. I spent hours thinking up a few of these. To wit:
How many toes does a monkey have?
Take off your shoes and let’s see.
How many ribs are there on a jackass?
Open your coat and we’ll find out.
How many hairs are there on a pig’s face?
The next time you shave, count them.
When Goldhandler shuffled through my cards that night, with me at his elbow, his heavy eyebrows went up, and he gravely nodded, pulling out the animal insults one by one. “Big jokes, Liebowitz. Where from?”
“I made those up,” I said. “Variations on a theme.”
Half-shut eyes appraised me through a veil of cigar smoke. Selecting the one about the pig’s face, Goldhandler carefully laid it among cards spread on his desk for an all-night writing session. “Go home. Take a good rest.”
Among the office chores that fell to me from the start was indexing the joke files, using little green celluloid tabs. Peter had done it for a while, and had got about as far as GIRLS, GOUT, and GUNS. Each category had to be typed on a tiny white slip that was inserted behind the green celluloid window, which, however, was so dark you could hardly read the typing through it. I was inspired—don’t ask me how—to try an experiment. I typed MOTHER-IN-LAW in red, and slipped it under the small green tab. Magic! MOTHER-IN-LAW stood out bold and black and clear! Consult your neighborhood Nobel physicist for the basis of this marvel of optics. All I know is, it worked. Peter Quat was the first to remark on how readable my index tabs were.
“Slide out the label,” I said.
He did. Exclaiming that he would be damned, he showed it to Boyd. Boyd gave me a stupefied stare. Goldhandler came into the office about then, and Boyd showed him how my wonderful red labels worked. Goldhandler summoned his wife and children to see the thing. Mrs. Goldhandler’s parents came straggling along. So did the two maids and the cook, a very large fat black woman named Sardinia. The old folks chattered excitedly about it in Yiddish, and Sardinia and the maids, rolling their eyes at me and shaking their heads in amazement, chuckled and gabbled in black talk. Even Sigmund and Karl regarded me with new respect. They had been crushing me at chess and Ping-Pong, and had me sized up as a poor specimen; but here I had done something like inventing the wheel or discovering the fourth dimension. My trial period then and there was over. I belonged in the Goldhandler madhouse. I seemed born for it.
That same night—it must have been after one A.M., because we were about to go out to eat—Boyd took me aside. “The boss wants to talk to you. He’s shaving.”
Hesitantly I entered the huge sumptuous master bedroom. Mrs. Goldhandler was on a chaise longue in a negligee, a book to her nose. Goldhandler, stripped to the waist, his face thick with shaving cream, beckoned through the open bathroom door with his razor. “Well, Finkelstein, you want to work with us?”
“You want to hire me?”
Goldhandler reached out a thick naked hairy arm, and his brief powerful hug sent a wave of happy warmth through me.
The next day was my very last for registering at the law school. I woke around noon and walked up to the Columbia campus in warm September sunshine. My pre-law classmates were passing in and out of Avery Hall, loaded down with thick tomes. I sat on a stone bench in the shade, watching them come and go. I must have sat there for an hour. Then I returned home, ate something, and slept until dinner time.
“I’m going to work for Harry Goldhandler,” I announced at the table. “Even if I enter law school next year, I’ll be younger than the others in my class. I’m starting at twenty dollars a week.”
Boyd had mentioned that figure to me in a near-whisper, just before I had left the penthouse at dawn.
Pop wrinkled his mouth and nodded. Nothing more.
“Well, maybe it’s a good thing for you to grow up a little,” said Mom, “before you start something serious like law school. Twenty a week isn’t bad, only maybe you ought to do the advertising for the laundry, too. Pop spends a fortune on it, and it’s no good.”
“I told Bernie what you’re doing,” said Lee. Bernie was her pediatrician cavalier. “Bernie thinks you’re a fool to take up something fly-by-night like gagwriting instead of a profession. Maybe you should talk to Bernie. Bernie has a head on his shoulders.”
I let that pass. Bernie was not a bad fellow, as Lee’s shleck went. (Shleck is the plural of shlock; which means misfortune, and by extension, as used by Zaideh, all of Lee’s and Faiga’s boy friends. I would have included Bernie, then; but he made Lee a fine husband, he was no shlock, and may he rest in peace.)
“Yisroelke is grown up,” Pop said to Mom. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Pop ate nothing of the lamb stew that night, though it was a favorite dish of his. He said it was too hot for stew.
When I walked into Goldhandler’s office at about nine that night, Boyd and Peter Quat were furiously typing, and Goldhandler was just stretching out on the sofa, with a piteous groan. “Hi, Finkelstein,” he said in a faded faint voice. “We need freshies. Get to work. Boyd, wake me in fifteen minutes. We have to do that Penner thing before we go out for coffee.”
He was snoring before I had my jacket and tie off. Peter Quat made one of his most distorted faces at me. “Welcome to the pirate crew, Finkelstein.”
60
The Pirate King
I had been on the Goldhandler merry-go-round for a month or so when Aunt Faiga produced a boy. Mom and Pop pleaded with me to come to the bris, the circumcision, at Zaideh’s Bronx flat, so I broached the subject at the Goldhandler dinner table. “But surely you don’t want to watch the savage mutilation of a helpless infant,” said Mrs. Goldhandler. Her figure was now fetchingly slim. She too had had a boy, Charles Darwin Goldhandler, whose foreskin was quite as intact as Sigmund’s and Karl’s and likely to remain so. “It’s so barbarous, so primitive.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “this kid’s parents are very up-to-date. They’re both Communists.”
Mrs. Goldhandler frequently declared that she was a Communist, so I hoped this might mitigate my relatives’ backwardness.
“Parlor pinks,” she sniffed.
“Oh, no,” I persisted. “My Aunt Faiga was jailed for cold-cocking a cop in a Union Square riot. She’s the real thing.”
The moment had come to point with pride to this bit of family history. You never know.
Mrs. Goldhandler frowned at me, possibly because I said “cold-cock.” It was a curious convention that only the master could talk rough at the table. Nobody else ever said as much as “hell” or “damn”; not Mrs. Goldhandler, not her children, and not the staff. Up in the office we talked as we pleased, and Peter Quat pleased to talk most of the time like a bilked whore. Boyd and I were milder.
Goldhandler said, “Look, go ahead to the bris, Liebowitz. Just make sure they haven’t hired a nearsighted rabbi. He might cut off the rest of your cock. You might want it some day, though you wouldn’t understand why.”
Goldhandler knew that rabbis don’t perform circumcisions, that was just his joke. He spoke a flawless colorful Yiddish, in which he told paralyzingly funny dirty stories about rabbis, Jewish observances, and Bible figures, often with Talmudic nuances. His late father had contributed to a Yiddish socialist newspaper under the pen name Shloimkeh Apikayress, that is, Solly the Atheist. Pop had been much impressed to learn who Harry Goldhandler’s father had been.
“Solly the Atheist, eh? A very clever writer. So! No wonder Mr. Goldhandler is a success. The son of Solly the Atheist! Went a little bit too far, Solly, but the public licked their fingers.”
I knew it would upset Zaideh if I didn’t show up at the bris. On the other hand, it was happening on Sunday, and listening to Henny Holtz on Sunday night was a Goldhandler must. Afterward we would dissect the program, and you never heard so many synonyms for failure. It was an education of a sort, an alphabet of epithets with few gaps from A to Z. Every Henny Holtz program was one or more of the following:
an Abortion, a Bagel, a Bomb, a Botch, a Catastrophe, a Clunker, a Debacle, a Disaster, a Dog, an Emetic, an Enema, a Fiasco, a Fizzle, a Flop, a Hash, a Hodgepodge, a Jumble, a Lemon, a Louse, a Mess, a Nothing, a Pancake, a Stinker, a Turd, a Turkey, a Washout, a Zero, a Zilch
…or a Light Fart. This was Goldhandler’s own coinage, a light fart, and it was his favorite dismissive term. Whatever else a Holtz broadcast was, it was invariably a light fart.
Caught once again between the Inside and the Outside—as with exams on Shavuos, and the Varsity Show on Passover—I decided to go to the bris, leave at the knife slash, and speed back downtown. It did not work out that way. Our entire Mishpokha, and Boris’s too, jammed Zaideh’s flat to see a child of two Marxists enter the covenant of Abraham. “A generation goes, a generation comes,” Pop happily quoted in Hebrew from Ecclesiastes, as we pushed our way into this boil of our family and of Boris’s outnumbered but fleshy relatives, who took up about the same cubic volume as our crowd did. Zaideh’s flat reminded me of the famous Marx Brothers’ stateroom scene, except that people weren’t squirming and stepping on each other’s faces. It was all very merry and good-tempered. Once in, I had little chance of getting out fast. Zaideh made it impossible by awarding me the honor called kvatter. I protested that I had never carried a baby and might drop him, but I was laughed down. Actually there was no way that baby could have hit the floor. If I had let go of him, he would just have levitated on relatives until rescued.
So I went to get the baby from Aunt Faiga, who sat with him in the kitchen. Very plump and womanly, little resembling the fire-brand in a Lenin cap who had cold-cocked a policeman, she handed over the infant with a worried maternal sigh. I worked my way with him through the kinfolk to Zaideh’s bedroom. The swaddled infant lay very calmly in Zaideh’s lap, blinking big blue eyes at the mohel, a bearded little man in a white medical smock, with a gauze mask over his mouth and nose.
And that was how I got my first look at a circumcision. I have since seen several, including my own two sons’. I do not recommend it as light entertainment. Nor am I about to regale the reader with a description. But maybe I should mention that the circumcision scene in Deflowering Sarah is one of Peter Quat’s crazier inventions. What happens is about as likely as that a surgeon would leave his umbrella in an appendix incision. I suppose the drunken circumciser with the shakes is sort of funny, also the mother who faints when she sees ketchup spilled all over the rug, but as to the Jewish content, it is just pure Quat. Peter has never seen a circumcision, any more than he has seen the dark side of the moon.
After much ado with surgical instruments and antiseptics, and a lot of Hebrew chanting, the mohel all at once just went and did it, whiz! There was very little blood. The boy—then and there given the inside name Yitzhak, outside name Ivan—uttered one sharp yip, subsiding at once when the mohel put a wine-dipped cloth to his lips. Boris carried him off, the family broke into a joyous tumult, and my plan to rush off was kaput. I had to sing and drink with the rest. Fortunately, in Zaideh’s book-crammed study, which was closed off from the party, a very ancient radio gathered dust. With some squeals and whistles, it still worked. I slipped in there to catch the Holtz show, while the relatives were falling to on the food.
How many hundreds of hours I had spent in this musty room, studying the Talmud with Zaideh! It occurred to me that Harry Goldhandler’s irreverent jokes, no doubt learned from Solly the Atheist, must be the bitter lore of old-country yeshiva boys chafing at their bonds: a mordant inside-out tradition, handed down in parallel to the Talmud. I was the only one in the penthouse who could laugh at those jokes. Boyd and Peter knew no Yiddish. Mrs. Goldhandler and her parents knew no Talmud. As for Sigmund and Karl, they would never have an inkling of what that luxuriant acid humor was all about. The parallel lines seemed to meet, and both traditions to come to an end, in the former Minsker Godol, the unbelieving joke-digger, Finkelstein.
On came the familiar brassy voice, full of overwrought pep:
Keep your Henny side up, up,
Here comes Henny to you.
If you’re feeling dismal and low
I’ve got lots of jokes on my show!
So keep your Henny side up, up,
Let the laughter come through.
Be like frisky colts
Laugh with Henny Holtz—
And keep your Henny side up!
Well, I must say, away from the Goldhandlers, the program sounded like any other Henny Holtz shows I had heard down the years, the same old frenetic foolery; not a lemon, a turd, a bust, a pancake, or a bomb, but the familiar mélange of songs and jokes. Eddie Conn was doing a perfectly good job. So I was thinking, when Cousin Harold came in with a plate of chicken salad.
Cousin Harold was now definitely applying to medical school in Switzerland. To increase his chances of admittance, he had changed his name. We still all called him Harold, but he was legally Mr. Harley Granville. Later on, by the by, since the fashionable thing for psychiatrists was to be Jewish, he changed it back. In fact, today Cousin Harold is Dr. Chaim Goodkind. Anyway, we were keeping up a desultory correspondence, and his letters, of course, were about his various fornications. My sex life being a zero, I wrote about my entry into show business via Harry Goldhandler.
