Inside, Outside, page 47
Chicken salad on his lap, Harold, or Harley, ate in silence until the next commercial. Then he asked me in a confidential man-to-man tone, “Say, Dave, have you ever screwed a chorus girl?”
“No, Harold. In fact, I haven’t screwed anybody.”
“Dave, I’m surprised. Not yet? Don’t you know any girls?”
“I know lots of them.”
“Well, why don’t you screw them?”
“They won’t let me.”
“I never heard of anything so ridiculous. You just have to be firm, and screw them anyway.”
“Even if they say no?”
“Especially if they say no. They always mean yes.”
Henny Holtz came back on, and Cousin Harold went out, shaking his head. He had been wasting his good counsel on me since we were fifteen. Then Zaideh himself came in, all in a glow. Faiga’s first! A boy! And Marx or no Marx, brought into the Jewish fold according to law and rite! Holtz was joking with a girl singer, and the audience was in a roar.
“Nu! I thought you were sitting in here and learning.”
“Zaideh, excuse me, I have to listen to this.”
“What are they saying? What are they laughing at? Translate it for me,” said Zaideh.
It was a card from the files:
GIRL: Henny Holtz, I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.
HENNY HOLTZ: Of course not. You’d be killed in the rush.
I translated. Zaideh wrinkled his broad peasant nose at me, with a wry sad smile. “That’s how you make your living? A Yisroelke thrown away.” He went out, shaking his head like Cousin Harold.
When I got back to the penthouse, they were still sitting around the radio in the living room. Goldhandler, who was lighting up a long Belinda, malevolently grinned. “Did you hear it?”
“I did.”
“What did you think?” Mrs. Goldhandler shot at me.
All eyes were on me: the Goldhandlers, the sons, the old parents, Boyd, Peter Quat, who was making a hideous face, and even the little daughter.
“A light fart,” I said.
“A light fart?” thundered Goldhandler. “It was the bagel of the ages! The entire nation rose up as one man, from coast to coast, and shit on their radios! Except the constipated ones, who puked.”
“It wasn’t very good,” I said. I went upstairs to dig jokes. We needed freshies.
***
We always needed freshies, to keep that money cascading in at two thousand a week. You may wonder how the son of Solly the Atheist had come to stake out this goofy Klondike. I did at first, too. Boyd gradually told me the main facts.
Harry Goldhandler’s college graduation picture, which hung in our office, showed a slim dark-haired intense Jewish youth, sporting a Phi Bete key. In a photo on the book jacket of his early short stories, published not long after he graduated, you saw the same Byronic young fellow. That our rotund, balding, cigar-chewing, ribald boss had metamorphosed from this young litterateur passed belief. Yet so it was, and this was the story.
Henny Holtz, a Lower East Side boy, was an admirer of Solly the Atheist. When he was starting in radio and needed a writer, Solly recommended his son, then living on poverty’s edge selling magazine stories. Harry Goldhandler got the job. To feed Holtz with surefire laughs he started to keep the joke files. When Holtz made a hit, other comedians came to Goldhandler for scripts. Eddie Conn, a veteran writer of vaudeville acts, joined him, and the big money began to roll in. They took on program after program, and hired full-time joke diggers. Boyd was the first. Thereafter, desperate work under multiple deadlines, snatched sleep and rich feeding at odd hours, continuous smoking of Havana cigars, and constant juggling and coddling of several comedians at once, had transmogrified the slim sensitive writer in a few years to the weary heavy gagman.
Henny Holtz had put his foot down, however, about their writing for a comic named Lou Blue, who blatantly imitated Holtz. To be sure, Holtz himself blatantly imitated Al Jolson, but that was another matter. Goldhandler defied Holtz and took the Lou Blue job. Blue’s sponsor was Ex-Lax, it was the first time a laxative was going on the air, and the money was enormous. Goldhandler figured that Holtz must be bluffing. Who else could write Holtz programs?
Next thing he knew, Eddie Conn failed to show up at the penthouse, and did not return any telephone calls. It was on the third day of Conn’s defection that Peter Quat had telephoned me. Of course Conn had gone to work for Henny Holtz. That Holtz was an ingrate, and Eddie Conn a Judas, were now articles of the Goldhandler loyalty oath. Peter Quat snickered at all that, and sympathized with Eddie Conn for quitting. Conn was now getting all the Holtz money, and no longer had to keep up the insane Goldhandler pace. More power to him!
Toward our boss, Peter Quat was altogether ambivalent. Goldhandler’s Rabelaisian roarings could convulse him, and the celebrities who visited the penthouse awed him. At parties Peter would fascinate our college friends with tales of the colorful joke czar, well salted with casually dropped star names. Peter had another social life in cafés and automats, where he would talk literature with other aspiring writers. Once or twice I went along. In such company Peter would sneer at gagwriting as mere thievery, and at Goldhandler as a sellout and a barbarous kike. In the office a favored contemptuous gesture of Peter’s was to shut joke-file drawers with his behind, and he liked to go around whistling “For I Am a Pirate King.”
Peter had his future all planned. He would allow himself one more year of this prostitution. If by then he had not sold any stories he would go back to a university, get a doctorate in English, and teach until he made it as a writer. Goldhandler saw through Peter Quat, of course. He put up with him because Peter did honest work, but he rode Peter hard about his pretensions. “Finkelstein here”—he would wave his cigar at Quat—“has a picture of William Faulkner’s ass in his room. Every time he walks past it, he kisses it like a mezuza.”
Peter laughed off this kidding, but on one weak point he proved touchy. He would glower when I laughed at the boss’s Yiddish jokes. “What? What’s the point of that one?” he would exclaim. “I thought I was following it. What was the punch line?” He liked to use show-business Yiddishisms, but he usually got them wrong. I’ve mentioned that English has no sound like the Indian’s “ugh.” That guttural runs through Yiddish, and Peter couldn’t pronounce it. Take “tugh-ess,” meaning posterior, rump, or ass, as you please. It would come out “toke-us” as Peter said it, and he said it often. When Goldhandler thought Peter was being slow or dense, he would call him “Mister Tokus.”
Meaning no harm, I once mentioned as we were eating in a Chinese restaurant, about two in the morning, the great Yiddish writer in Peter’s family tree.
“You’re kidding!” Goldhandler exclaimed. “That’s impossible. Mendele Moykher S’forim?” He turned on Peter Quat. “Your grandfather? Liebowitz is full of shit, isn’t he?”
“What’s the difference?” Peter said.
“But is it true? You’re related to Mendele?”
“Oh, he was my great-granduncle or something. I don’t know. I don’t care.” It was a surly response, and Peter was making a dangerous face, his mouth all twisted up on one side.
“For Christ’s sake, Mister Tokus! You are related to Mendele Moykher S’forim, and you can’t even say a Yiddish word! What’s with you, anyway?”
“Nothing’s with me, and fuck Mandalay Mohair Serafin,” snarled Peter, looking Goldhandler straight in the eye, “and fuck you, too!” His face crazily distorted, he slammed his napkin on the table and stalked out of the restaurant.
Goldhandler was baffled. “What’s eating Finkelstein?” he asked me.
Peter showed up at work the next day as though nothing had happened. Nobody referred to Mendele Moykher S’forim again. Goldhandler joshed him no more in that vein, nor ever called him Mister Tokus after that. Peter went on using Yiddishisms and mispronouncing them.
***
I did not share Peter Quat’s disdain for our outlandish employment. To me it was rare fun in a dream world. George and Ira Gershwin came to the penthouse, for instance, to talk over an idea for a musical show. Goldhandler ordered a vast platter of delicatessen sent in from Lindy’s. The Gershwins smiled at us as we came trooping down the stairs behind Goldhandler. “The rebbe and his Hassidim,” George Gershwin said, and there we were, lunching with the great Gershwins! Goldhandler knew publishers and editors, for besides his own short stories he had ghostwritten Henny Holtz’s best-selling humorous books. He knew bankers, novelists, playwrights, and opera stars. They all came there just to listen to his rough fantastic humor. He never used old jokes in conversation. His talk was all original. He would stand in front of the mantelpiece and hold forth on the Broadway shows, or the new movies, or literature, or the radio business, or politics. The visitors would prod him with a question or two, and he would soar off in a brilliant tirade, jamming the huge cigar into his mouth while his listeners guffawed at his sallies.
Peter used to growl, “If only he’d get it down on paper!”
At Lindy’s, the all-night Broadway delicatessen restaurant, Goldhandler held court. We would march in at one and two in the morning to eat garlic steaks, or thick corned beef sandwiches, or heavy cream pies, whatever we desired. Goldhandler paid for everything. We ate and drank much more each week than our salaries would have bought. Show business is abuzz at that hour, and Goldhandler’s table was the center of attention as though he were the mayor of New York; possibly more so, because he was funny, and people always want a good laugh.
I know I loved the man, and I felt at home with the Goldhandlers. After all, the boss and I were both atheists who revelled in Yiddish. Mrs. Goldhandler was a sort of plutocratic Aunt Faiga. Her parents were like Boris’s relatives, totally Jewish and totally irreligious. Sigmund and Karl were freakish prodigies, zestful and funny like their father. Maybe the heart of the matter was that, unlike Peter Quat, I didn’t take myself seriously as a writer. I was quite willing to be an apprentice or a Hassid to this gagwriting Gargantua for a year or so. Deep down, I had a sense that it was all a fantastic interlude, before I returned to the law.
And anyway, at the time neither writing nor law were on my mind as much as something else, to use Mama’s words; and to use Goldhandler’s word, something mighty elemental.
61
An Understanding Woman
One day a Broadway producer named Billy Rose was having lunch in the penthouse with Goldhandler and his Hassidim, to discuss the skits for a revue. Mrs. Goldhandler looked in to say that a young woman was down in the lobby, asking to see Mr. Rose. He glanced at his watch.
“Oh, yes. Tell her to come up.” And to Goldhandler, “This won’t take a minute.”
In walked a tall redhead in a tailored gray suit, with a magazine-cover face and a voluptuously curved figure. Eyes wide and shining, she answered with anxious eagerness Rose’s questions about her experience in the musical theatre, staring at him as though he held life and death in his hands.
“All right, dear,” he said. “Let’s see your legs.”
“Yes, Mr. Rose.”
With both hands the girl slid her gray skirt and lace-edged white slip up and up, above her knees, above her stocking tops, above white-gartered pink thighs to the lacy edge of peach-colored silk panties. And so she stood, waiting. I thought my heart would stop at the sight, so hard and painfully did it thump against my ribs.
“Okay, thank you,” said Rose. Down came the skirt. The girl peered at him with a piteous desperate smile.
“Very nice, dear,” said Rose. “Report back to Lenny. I’ll talk to him.”
“Oh, Mr. Rose, thank you. Thank you.”
As she joyfully rushed out, he picked up a telephone on a side table. Through my thunderstruck daze I heard him say, “Hello, Lenny? Grade B showgirl. Tell Al I saw her. If you’ve got room for her in the second row, take her on.”
Back in the office, Boyd and Peter said nothing about it. Boyd never showed any interest in sex that I can recall, or in anything or anybody but Harry Goldhandler; slavish devotion to that magnetic man was his life. As for Peter Quat, he was having a plodding affair with his father’s receptionist, a scared mousy little woman I met once. They would rendezvous at the office when the doctor was out, and on the waiting-room couch, under a large disapproving portrait of Dr. Quat, they would bang away. I guess that getting it regular, or irregular, dulled for Peter Quat the incandescence of the showgirl’s uncovering, as unforgettable a sight to me as a total eclipse of the sun. I have seen three total eclipses in my life. I remember them all well. I have uncovered more female thighs than you are going to read about in these pages. But that glimpse stays with me as the triggering of my young manhood. From that moment I was on the prowl for a woman.
But how to go about it? Inept though I was, I had already been on the verge with one or another of the girls I had trifled with. I have decided not to tell you about a dozen such episodes. Reread Deflowering Sarah, if such stuff amuses you. Eleanor Kraft was probably available at a push, but I hesitated at such an entanglement, despite the bubbling of my blood. Why, when we were having our brief fling, she took to telephoning me, reproaching me for not calling her, complaining that she was hot, or cold, or bored, or lonesome, suggesting that we do peculiar things like go to the zoo, or ghastly things like hear Earl Browder lecture. And mind you, the only claim that girl ever had on me was that I had pawed the bumps of her sweater, or in a fit of mad carnality reached inside her blouse. The prospect of giving a girl like Eleanor Kraft the righteous plaint of having yielded me her virtue appalled me. What a loss of freedom, what chains! Even Peter Quat had trouble with his receptionist. Meek mouse that she was, she still got on the phone to him, complaining in a squeaky voice, and he would say soothing things like, “Yes, dear, maybe tomorrow,” and “I’ll try my best, dear,” rolling his eyes in exasperation.
Clearly, Cousin Harold had figured out an answer to all that. He could not have gone through so many women without a handy solution to the disposal question. I am sure that he just had his will of them, and then told them to bugger off; whereupon, having no real alternative, they buggered off. Most girls could discern in five minutes what sort of fellow Cousin Harold was, and they would either do it with him because they felt like it, or they would refuse him, to avoid being told to bugger off. Simple.
Well, I knew that I was different, that I would be the softest of soft touches for a girl. If even a tough egg like Peter Quat had to put up with telephoned squeaks from his mouse, what would become of me once a girl sank her talons into my conscience? The price would be fearful, because I would feel I had wronged her. Being the son of my father and the grandson of Zaideh, I could not help that.
And yet—that showgirl! Those round perfect thighs! Those long white garters straining over camellia-petal skin, those lacy edges of peach silk! To seek such a showgirl for myself, even a Grade B showgirl, I knew to be utter insanity; and what the hell had Rose meant by “Grade B,” anyway? What on God’s earth then could a Grade A showgirl be like? But since my hormones were boiling me alive, I had to find some female who would let me do it, and yet not go whining and squeaking and dragging me thereafter to Earl Browder lectures, and demanding and demanding and never ceasing to demand, because she was giving me her all. In short, what I wanted was a lady of easy virtue.
Now everybody knows that New York City teems with ladies of easy virtue. There may well be five of them to every taxi driver in Manhattan, especially on a rainy night. I was always reading about big vice raids, and roundups of hundreds of ladies of easy virtue. In college everyone but me seemed to know and visit them. And yet I had no idea of how to scare one up.
I tried walking up and down Broadway at night. None approached me. I tried a taxi-dance hall. One lush blonde in skin-tight red satin did snuggle up to me and strongly hint that she was a lady of mighty easy virtue. Would I meet her after the music stopped and take her home? I blew about twenty dollars on tickets, dancing with her until four A.M. “Meet me outside, honey,” she cooed. “I have to change, won’t be a minute.” I waited in front of that darkened dance hall for an hour, in a cold drizzle. Either the blonde in skin-tight red satin was no lady of easy virtue, after all; or having collected that huge stash of my tickets, she preferred just to go home and get some sleep. But I was as much relieved as annoyed. I was pretty sleepy myself by then, and she had smelled strange.
Well, then I ran into Earl Eckstein at a party. Earl and I had done some pre-law studying together. He was a short sober straight-A grind with thick straight sandy hair, very round-shouldered and humorless. Earl is today one of the richest lawyers in New York; he is bent over like Winston Churchill, and he still has all that sandy hair and no sense of humor. We got to talking, Earl and I, and he cautioned me against ladies of easy virtue: risk of disease, of being mugged or rolled, and such conservative thoughts. He himself, he confided, visited a certain understanding woman two or three times a week. She was not a lady of easy virtue or anything like that, just an understanding woman. For instance, she served coffee and cake, or tea, if you preferred. When he left her apartment he tucked a five-dollar bill under her telephone, but money was never mentioned. He had gotten her name and phone number from a fellow he played handball with. Was I interested?
Yes, thanks, I said, that sounded just perfect. Her name was Mrs. Gertrude Ellenbogen, and she lived on West Ninety-eighth Street, a mere stroll from my home. That same night I telephoned her. “Oh yes, Earl, I know him well. Are you a law student, too?”
“Ah, yes, ma’am.”
“I like law students. They’re sweet, and serious. Come at about half-past ten. By then the children will be asleep.”
Children? I hadn’t pictured children as part of this lewd adventure. It only went to show, on reflection, that Mrs. Ellenbogen wasn’t a lady of easy virtue, but an understanding woman.
