Inside, Outside, page 48
I made the date for a Friday night, when I usually had dinner at home. I figured that I could readily consummate my manhood with the understanding woman after dinner, and still get back to work in plenty of time for our all-night session on the Lou Blue show. I did not foresee that Uncle Yehuda would come to dinner, so that Mom would make a big stuffed veal roast; nor that the dinner would get into such a long discussion of Uncle Velvel and shittim wood.
I suppose I had better explain that. To everyone’s amazement in the family, Uncle Velvel had prevailed over that soft-drink company; that is, the company had settled the nuisance suit out of court and had carted away the mountains of soda bottles from his premises. So Uncle Velvel was flush, and he had plunged the proceeds into a new venture: exporting religious books bound in shittim wood. Shittim wood is what went into the tabernacle and ark in the desert. Palestine bookstores sold Hebrew holy books bound in that biblical wood; my sister Lee had brought back such a prayer book for Pop. A wood-bound book is an unhandy thing, so he admired it but never used it.
Well, Uncle Velvel had bought up a whole lumberyard full of shittim wood real cheap, the owners having gone bankrupt or something. His idea was to bind Christian books in shittim wood: New Testaments, hymnals, psalters, and what have you. He had already ordered a large stock of these from a local bookbinder, so all his soda-bottle windfall was committed. He had written to Uncle Yehuda, and persuaded him to go into business importing these books. Uncle Yehuda thought it was the greatest idea since the electric lamp. Look at all the Christians there were! Hundreds of millions! If selling shittim wood books to Jews was a good business—and obviously it was, it had been going on in Palestine for years—then the Christian market had to be an absolute bonanza.
Uncle Yehuda took a long time to get to the point, meantime putting away a lot of stuffed veal. At last he said that, though one shouldn’t talk about money on the Sabbath, he required a bank loan of two thousand dollars at once, and simply wanted Pop to guarantee it.
“But with promissory notes this time,” said Uncle Yehuda in a new grandly businesslike way. “I’ll sign any promissory notes the bank wants or that you want, Alex. Who cares about promissory notes? I’ll pay them all off with the profits from Velvel’s first shipment.”
He was approaching Pop at the wrong time. My parents had just signed a lease for a smaller apartment off Riverside Drive. Lee was all set with her pediatrician, so the move to Manhattan had worked, and it was high time to retrench. The wedding would be costly, and Bernie had to be set up in his own office, too. I was contributing twenty dollars a month to the rent, but it had hurt Pop to agree to it. If I went back to law school, he said, every penny I had paid would be at my disposal. He was keeping an account.
So Pop equivocated; what did Yehuda really know, he inquired, about shittim wood? At once Yehuda flew into one of his old-time touchy rages. What? Shittim wood? Was there a six-year-old Jewish schoolboy who didn’t know what shittim wood was? Noah’s ark! The tabernacle! But—Pop mildly persisted—he was asking about shittim wood as a modern commercial material. Was it durable? Would it stand the damp of shipment by sea? Was the price stable? Was there a reliable supply? At that Uncle Yehuda really saw red. Supply? Shittim wood grew all over Palestine! You couldn’t walk under a tree that wasn’t a shittim tree! Price? Velvel had bought enough shittim wood to last them ten years. Stand the damp? What about Noah’s ark? Had that stood the damp, or hadn’t it? Would God have entrusted Noah and the animals to wood that wasn’t durable?
I interposed that Noah’s ark was gopher, not shittim. The ark in the tabernacle had been shittim wood.
“Gopher, shittim, so what?” snapped Uncle Yehuda. “Bible wood is Bible wood, and an ark is an ark.”
Lee went and hunted Up the prayer book she had bought for Pop. The wood binding was already warped and cracking. “I think maybe it isn’t practical, Uncle,” Lee said, trying to help out Pop. “It’s just a tourist thing. Anyway, what do Christians know about shittim wood? It’s a Hebrew word.” She squinted at an old label inside the cover. “Yes. It means acacia.”
His white beard quivering in triumph, Uncle Yehuda produced a gilt-edged Bible with a big cross on the soft black leather cover. He opened it to a bent-down page and read in his thick accent, “‘Und de Lord spake unto Moses, and dey shall make un ark of SHEETIM VOOD’! You hear dot? SHEETIM VOOD!” He slammed the Bible shut, pointed to the cross, and brandished it under poor Lee’s nose, like a priest in a movie exorcising Satan. “A Christian Bible! You see? Vit a cross! Vit de Gospels! Vit everyting! Und it says SHEETIM VOOD!”
My stomach full of veal, and my mind of forebodings about this shittim-wood business, I set out for Mrs. Ellenbogen’s apartment. Uncle Velvel and Uncle Yehuda had been burdens to Pop over the years, but he had handled them separately. Operating in tandem, Uncle Velvel and Uncle Yehuda could bankrupt a Rothschild, for sure. Yet I knew Pop would guarantee that loan. And another worry: it was already time for me to be back at work. Altogether, the assignation was proving inconvenient, but I was not about to pass it up, not in my libidinous state. Veal, Goldhandler, uncles, shittim wood notwithstanding, the fire burned on, unsmotherable. Truth to tell, I had spent most of the dinner fantasizing about Mrs. Ellenbogen, and what I would do with her.
The children were far from asleep. That was the first jolt. Three of them were milling around the dingy apartment eating jam-smeared bread, and one of them was a large girl with a bosom, perhaps fourteen. Mrs. Ellenbogen shooed them into the back of the flat. She received me in an orange kimono very like one my mother wore, and she decidedly did not look like a lady of easy virtue; more than anything, with her plump Slavic face, square-cut black hair, and billowy proportions, she looked like an aunt of Boris’s from Worcester, Massachusetts, the one who always came late to family affairs. I could not tell whether she was Jewish. There were no candles, or mezuzas, or other clues. In the kitchen where we sat down to get acquainted, I saw cans of pork and beans and a canned ham.
She offered me tea or coffee, and I asked for tea. “Have it first, or later?” she wanted to know, setting a kettle on the boil.
“Ah, oh, first, I guess.” I was very nervous, and I could hear her children off in the back, making a lively racket.
“And how is Merle Bickstein?” she inquired.
“Earl Eckstein? He’s fine.”
“He’s the redheaded one, isn’t he?”
“No, ma’am. I think he plays handball, maybe, with the redheaded one.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Earl is the round-shouldered one.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, “exactly! Earl is the round-shouldered one.”
She served me tea and a slice of store cake, and had some herself, chatting the while about her husband. They were divorced, and he was off somewhere in California; a nice man, but a drinker.
“Well!” she said, after all this, in a no-nonsense tone. She crossed her legs so that the kimono fell away, clear to her hips. I was looking at a pair of fat flabby yellow thighs and a very tightly stuffed, bulging pink girdle. Lusty lad that I was, I felt only dismay, as though I had barged into a women’s John by mistake. The kitchen clock read twenty minutes past eleven. I was overdue at the penthouse.
“Mrs. Ellenbogen—”
“Oh, call me Gertie, dearie,” she said in a Mae West tone, with a leer. The leer was clearly intended to drive me over the edge with desire, but it did not come off. Boris’s aunt from Worcester was just making a funny face. I could still hear the children quarrelling in the back. I mentioned this.
For a moment, her voice hardened and saddened. “Don’t worry about them. They know better than to come out. Shall we go to my room?” She stood up, slipping off the kimono. Her figure was very like Mom’s; in fact Mom’s was less lumpy. I don’t remember what feeble excuse I made. I only know that in no time I was out on Broadway hailing a cab, having left my sweaty rumpled five-dollar bill under her telephone. A lot of money for tea and store cake; but driven though I was, there was no way I could consummate my manhood with Boris’s aunt from Worcester. I had learned something for my five dollars: no understanding women for me.
***
Well, then, what? A lady of easy virtue, after all?
Now I had heard that one dead-sure way to pick up a lady of easy virtue was to cruise around at night in a snazzy car. So I borrowed the shiny Buick in which Lee chauffeured Pop; and very late one night, after finishing up at the penthouse, I went cruising. I hadn’t driven along Broadway for more than a few minutes when I spotted her, dead ahead on the deserted dark sidewalk. She was waggling along swinging a shiny oversize purse, in a bright baby-blue hat with two long dangling ribbons. The hat clinched it, as antlers in the bracken betray the quarry. At last, at last! I stopped the car and leaned over to roll down the window and commence negotiations. She beat me to it, pulling the door open. “Fi’dollizz,” she said, poking in the blue hat, ribbons and all, and a heavily painted puttylike face.
Wow! Fi’dollizz! And smell that perfume! Attar of Woolworth’s! The real thing! No understanding woman, this; a lady of easy virtue, no contest. I nodded, and she climbed in. “Turn right on Eighty-third Street,” she twanged. Terrific! Actresses who played whores in Eugene O’Neill plays always twanged just like that.
“Park here.”
I stopped the Buick at an old brownstone, and followed her through a door below the street level into a small cellar room with a dingy bed.
“Fi’dollizz.” She held out her hand.
I gave her a creased fiver. She took off the blue hat, hoisted her skirt, and whipped off pink cotton underpants, all in one fluid set of motions. She had clearly done this before. She sat on the bed, skirt up around her waist, and lay back.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
“Right, right.”
Fumbling interval.
“What’s your problem?” she inquired after a while.
“No problem, no problem,” I said irritably.
She raised up on an elbow. “Say, have you ever done it before?”
“Well, to tell the truth, no. But—”
“Shit, boy! I’m not supposed to teach you how to get laid. I’m busy.” Off the bed, on with the underpants and the blue-ribboned hat. “I have to go back out now.”
And there we were on the street once more. “Give me a lift to the corner of Broadway,” she said, and of course I did. Off she went down the sidewalk, swinging the purse. The whole episode could not have taken five minutes.
End of my quest for a lady of easy virtue.
62
Goldhandler in Hollywood
“Hollywood!” exclaimed Zaideh. “Yisroelke, you’re going to a saloon.”
“I’m not much of a drinker, Zaideh.”
I had come to say goodbye. He laughed uncertainly. We studied a patch of Leviticus with commentaries—we always studied something when I visited him—and I was off to the saloon. Observe that Zaideh did not call Hollywood Gehenna, or Sodom, but a saloon, a “shenk”: the ultimate unthinkable place for a good Jew to be found.
Goldhandler was going out there to write a movie called Earl Carroll’s Vanities. He had contributed a few skits to this Broadway girlie revue. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had bought the title, and the film needed a story. When an MGM producer came to the penthouse to discuss it, Goldhandler soared off on an improvisation about a millionaire backer for the Vanities and a Bowery derelict who by chance was his double. He rang changes on this ancient joke of identical twins, with much popping in and out of showgirls’ dressing rooms, and mistaken identities in bed, that had us all guffawing, the producer more than anybody. As soon as Goldhandler finished, the producer jumped up and shook his hand, saying that was the exact story he wanted, and Goldhandler could name his terms to come out to the West Coast and write it. Goldhandler closed the office door on the departing producer, and whirled on us in a conspiratorial crouch. “We are in the ground, boys,” he stage-whispered. “We got nothing.”
“Why, it’s great stuff,” Boyd said.
“Really? Write it down, Boyd. I have no idea what the fuck I said.” It might have been almost true. Goldhandler could spin these wildly entertaining ad libs, airy as cotton candy, but once hired, he would usually write something else, turning off the wistful inquiries about “that funny thing you told us” with some offhand dodge.
By Goldhandler’s terms, we were all going out in a body at MGM’s expense: Boyd, Peter, myself, Sardinia, the two maids, and the whole family except the old folks. Boyd told us that Goldhandler’s starting salary was something unbelievable, and if the Vanities job went well, he might even consider moving for good to Hollywood, family, staff, and all; for the big money obviously was in pictures. It was July, and we had only one modest summer program going, a Greek dialect comedian who called himself Nicholas Panilas (penniless, if you don’t get it). I think his name was Ginsberg. Panilas was on “sustaining”; that is, he had no sponsor, and was hoping to attract one. Pretty small stuff, and Quat and I were drafting the Panilas scripts, using files of a German dialect program Goldhandler had written years ago. Our task was to switch the dialect to Greek and update the topical lines. This may strike the severe reader as sharp practice, but the Greek was enchanted with the scripts, the trade papers gave him good reviews, and nobody remembered the German comedian, who was dead. What else mattered?
Goldhandler was also bringing along at MGM expense one Morrie Abbott. This was the first time Goldhandler was travelling west of Newark, and he had Abbott along as a sort of Hollywood consultant and guide. Morrie Abbott was a slight gingery little man with curly reddish hair, and a bouncy way of walking and talking. Morrie had a brother I knew, an Orthodox rabbi named Applebaum, but Morrie had shucked his Jewishness. He liked to throw a Talmudic phrase at me now and then by way of persiflage, but Morrie was pure showbiz, nothing else. He had done a little sketch-writing, a little directing; and having recently married, he had subleased his small April House flat to the famous Skip Lasser. Most of his work had been done on some Lasser movie or Broadway musical. Aside from Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, few men were bigger in the musical field than Skip Lasser, and Morrie was more or less a hanger-on of his.
Morrie Abbott became mentor to Peter and me as we went rattling westward, ho, on the Superchief. Savoir faire was Morrie’s thing. It was he who ordered the Kansas City steaks, the Denver beer, the Taittinger champagne, the Rocky Mountain trout, and the fresh celery. He knew where to get off to buy Indian blankets and jewelry, and how to haggle with the Indians, and how much to tip waiters and porters. And he knew all the variations of poker, and had read all the new books and seen all the new plays, and had authoritative views on these. And as for screwing showgirls, if one believed Morrie Abbott, he had left few unscrewed in Broadway or Hollywood. Making poor Peter and me slaver over his tales of showgirl conquests was Morrie’s favorite late-night amusement, once the poker was over.
On the whole, I would say that Morrie Abbott was more full of shit than anyone I have ever met. Since I have worked in show business, the law, and the literary world, that is no small distinction. An instance: the three of us went together once to a preview of Gone with the Wind. When we came out, Morrie said oracularly, “They should have made it two hours long, and shot it in black and white. It won’t go.” That is a fair sample of Morrie’s expertise. Peter and I were young, though, and he impressed us.
Morrie did know his Hollywood. He rented a house in Beverly Hills for the Goldhandlers with the obligatory giant swimming pool, also two tennis courts, a billiard room, a library that turned into a screening room; also sitting rooms, patios, dens, open porches, glassed-in porches, and gardens and lawns splashed with flowers, and shaded by high palm trees. Soon Karl and Sigmund, as to the manor born, were playing fierce tennis, or frolicking in the pool, or intently becoming billiard sharks, practicing by the hour. We checked in with Morrie to The Garden of Allah, an array of villas around a big pool where one saw people like Somerset Maugham, Gene Fowler, and Skip Lasser lounging in the sun. Lasser came out later; he was then in New York, working on a musical adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik.
***
Well, Harry Goldhandler entered Hollywood like a lion. At their first dinner party in the fancy house, to which we were not asked, the guests were the Gershwins, Aldous Huxley, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, and Marlene Dietrich. “The gag czar” was an exciting novelty. He had written radio spots for many film stars, and had an advance reputation as a brilliant original. We saw little of him or Boyd. Morrie, who was advising Goldhandler on the Vanities screenplay, reported that the studio was ecstatic over the start of the script. The Panilas show was catching on, and that money kept sluicing in. The Goldhandlers were riding a crest. They swam, and played billiards, and went to dinner parties and the races, and were made much of. Mrs. Goldhandler hit it off so well with Joan Crawford that, according to Morrie Abbott, they were even going shopping together.
At The Garden of Allah we too were living the sweet life. Peter and I fell into Morrie Abbott’s routine: breakfast by the pool at ten or so, or else at Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard; a little tennis, a little lunch at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, then out to the horse races, and then some leisurely script work until dinner. “Tonight we eat Chinese,” Morrie Abbott would decree, or, “Let’s try Eaton’s Steak House again,” or, “It’s time we went to Perino’s.” Rarely, he might even say with a giggle, “I feel like eating kosher,” and we would go to a place called Mama Levy’s, which wasn’t kosher, but served things like gefilte fish and chicken soup with matzoh balls.
It goes without saying that Morrie Abbott was a Communist. So was Skip Lasser, Morrie told us. Everybody we met in Hollywood, almost, seemed to be a Communist. But you have to understand about those Hollywood Communists. In those days out there it was like jogging, or group bathing in a redwood hot tub. They would talk revolution around their swimming pools, or while driving to Malibu Beach in white Buick convertibles, or while dining at Chasen’s or Don the Beachcomber’s. They were as politically menacing as butterflies. Not one of them had so much as cold-cocked a policeman.
